by J. I. Greco
“Because you’re a romantic and wanted to drown yourself in it while watching one last sunrise, remember?” Trip said out of the corner of his mouth, then scooted forward on his knees. “Anyway, what could I do? I knew what leaving then meant, and that, since we didn’t have time to leave a note, you would quite naturally enough assume the worst, but he looked so hound-dog, and I knew that someone with your sensitivity would understand that my best chance to save him was to head for the coast, right then and there, and somehow talk him out of suicide during the journey. And you know what–it worked! Well, mostly.”
Rudy nodded. “I barely cry myself to sleep anymore.”
“One day at a time, little buddy, one day at a time,” Trip said. He inched even closer to the table.
Hu jogged her head almost imperceptibly and one of her lieutenants stepped forward. “Míngtiān, zhè lùxiàn,” she said to the lieutenant and swiped a triple-jointed finger through the map, tracing out a glowing red arrow. The lieutenant nodded.
“So, you see,” Trip said, “I had to leave, to save my brother. But now that he’s solidly on the road to recovery, I think we can finally risk getting back to the nuptials.”
“I think I can face it,” Rudy said. “Especially if you can leave Wang off the guest list this time. It’d just be too painful to see him again.”
“There ya go.” Trip put his chin on the tabletop, tilted his head, and batted his eyes up at Hu. “What d’ya say, my little almond-eyed destroyer? Forgive and forget and call the priest?”
Hu flicked a hand at the lieutenant at her shoulder and he stepped back. She drew a deep breath, let it out, and finally looked down at Trip through the shimmering map. Her lips were drawn thin and her dark eyes narrowed, bringing out the faint lines of crow’s feet under heavy crushed-oyster shell concealer. “Is there no place I can go where I won’t run into you?”
“Excuse me?” Trip’s eyebrow went up.
“The world doesn’t entirely revolve around you, Trip.”
“Yeah, I’m not so sure about that. –Enough with the jokes already. You came here for me.”
“No, we’re just passing through.”
“Passing through the Wasteland?”
Hu reached into the map and gave it a pinch. The projection briefly went translucent white, then vanished. “On our way to Nova Scotia. The Mainland has decided it shall be the newest addition to the Great Empire.” She smiled. “I and my troops have been given the great honor of leading the invasion.”
Around the command center, supernumeraries and technicians alike momentarily stopped what they were doing to turn towards her and give a rousing, balled-fist salute and cheer of “Hu!”
“Congrats,” Rudy said.
The Warlord Hu nodded curtly at him. “Xièxiè.” Thank you.
“Wait a second,” Trip said. “So you didn’t come here to execute and or forgive me?”
“I admit, I was hurt when you… left,” Hu said. “But as the days turned into weeks into months, and I had time to reflect, I realized it was for the best. You are not worthy of me, Trip. Either for my bed, or for my vengeance. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve already spent more time on this than it deserves, and I have invasion plans to review. I wish you luck in your future endeavors.” She looked up at the guards standing behind Trip and Rudy and waved a dismissive, triple-knuckled hand back towards the tent’s entrance. “Hùsòng zhèxiē báichī, cóng wǒ de zhènyíng.”
Escort these idiots from my camp.
Trip stood next to the Wound and watched the half-track drive off back towards the mountain. “Do you believe that?”
Rudy rubbed his wrists, red and chafed from the shackles. “No, I pretty much assumed they’d be playing soccer with our severed heads about now.”
“Not that.” Trip gave the cig he’d borrowed from one of Hu’s personal guards during the drive a suck then exhaled twin streams of smoke through his flaring nostrils. “The fucking nerve of that woman.”
Rudy opened the passenger door and slid into the Wound. “Yeah, being all forgiving and not killing us. How dare she? Could have offered us dinner, but I guess that would have been asking just a little too much. I’m just glad it’s over and we can get on with our lives without that hanging over us anymore. Bernie’ll be glad to hear it. She’s been wanting me home more and–”
Trip plopped down in the driver’s seat. “Oh, it’s not over.”
“What? But Hu said–”
“I know exactly what she said.” Trip chewed his lower lip. “‘Not worthy.’ Not worthy? Of all the insults. She’s gonna rue that.” He gripped the steering wheel, twisted it until his knuckles went white. “Rue, I say!”
Rudy shut his door, shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Oh, what now?”
Trip glared out the windshield and twitched the Wound’s engine into a pent-up roar. “Now, Rudy… we’re going to war. For real this time.”
Rudy reached for his nipple.
14
The Threat?
“Can we get on with this so I can go back to bed?”
Sorta-King Morty plopped down on the high-backed faux-leather vinyl Lay-Z-Boy in the corner of his living room. He jerked the handle on the side to raise the foot rest half-way up, as far as it would go. He put his bare feet up and his tattered, stained bath robe fell open. He wasn’t wearing underwear.
Wedged on the couch against the back wall between Lock and Roxanne, Trip averted his eyes. He leaned forward and dashed his cig out on the cat-chasing-dog ceramic ashtray on the coffee table. “It’s three in the afternoon, Morty.”
Morty yawned. “Yeah, so get on with it already.”
“Getting on with it,” Trip said, and got up from the couch. Lock, flipping a Chinese one scrollar coin back and forth over her knuckles, stared coldly across the gap at Roxanne. Roxanne, legs crossed and arms over her chest, idly examined her shiny red nails. Standing next to her beside the couch, Bernie glared at Lock. Standing opposite her beside Lock, Brenda stared at her own feet.
Trip walked around the coffee table to the center of the living room. “Honored ladies and gentlemen of the Sorta-Council.” He bowed his head and clicked his sneaker heels together at the three scraggly men and four scragglier women sitting on folding chairs under the wide archway between the living room and the kitchen, and then turned sharply towards Morty, his tux tails flicking out behind him. “My Sorta-Liege, as your Sorta-Minister of Defense and Morale, it is my distinct displeasure to inform you the Wasteland is being invaded.”
“Is this about the Cthulists again?” Morty asked.
Trip’s eyebrow went up. “The Cthulists? Why would it have anything to do with them?”
“I dunno.” Morty clapped his hands twice and WB-5 clanked out of the kitchen. “You only went off and had a war with them.”
“Did I?” Trip asked, all innocent.
Morty laced his fingers together over his round, exposed belly. “You did.”
“Well, I’ve got my dick in a lot of pies…” Trip stepped aside to let WB-5 walk past. “I can’t be expected to keep track of all of them.”
WB-5 stepped up to Morty’s chair and opened his stomach door. The Sorta-King reached inside and took out two gallon jugs of beer. WB-5 shut his stomach and stepped back to stand against the wall. Morty set one of the jugs on his lap and brought the other up to his lips. “You never told me how it went.”
Trip shrugged. “It was nice. There were gift bags. Everybody got certificates of participation.”
Morty chugged down half the gallon. “Yes,” he asked, spilling beer on the collar of his robe, “but did we win?”
“Look, that’s not important right now.” Trip snapped his fingers over his shoulder. “–Rudy, lights.”
Rudy, a forest green ascot loosely knotted around his neck, drew the curtain over the room’s single window, a glassless, irregular rectangular hole cut directly into the corrugated metal wall, plunging the living room into dimness.
“This, this is what’s important.”
Trip nodded back at Hunt-R, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor.
Hunt-R swiveled his cylindrical head around to point his single eye at the gray bedsheet pinned to the wall over the couch. Everyone in the room turned to look. Lock and Roxanne both squirmed against their respective armrests and craned their necks around and up. Rudy stepped behind Hunt-R, tapping him on the shoulder, then started chewing at his thumbnail cuticle as Hunt-R’s eye projected an image captured by the robot through his eyeball camera–a hairy-knuckled hand unsteadily holding a placard with the hand-drawn words:
THE REALLY BIG BAD THREAT AND THE ONE SORTA-KING COURAGEOUS ENOUGH TO FACE IT
A Rudy Joint
(A Co-Production of TripCo Industries)
Trip snapped his fingers and Hunt-R slapped his palm against the nub on the top of his head to project the next image with a cah-click.
“The Wasteland,” Trip said, gesturing at the bedsheet screen and the projected snapshot of WB–6 holding a dog-eared Rand-McNally road atlas, open to a map of Pennsylvania. “A vast expanse of once prime real estate, stretching from New England to South Carolina, from the Atlantic shore to the Mississippi. Battered time and time again by countless cycles of human self-destruction and resource wars into a fine pulp of depleted farmland, broken cities, crumbled infrastructure, and endless stretches of arid nothingness. For nearly one hundred and fifty years the Wasteland has been exactly that, a wasteland. Worthless. Barely fit for human habitation. Containing nothing anyone could possibly want. And that’s exactly the way we like it.”
“Hold up there,” Roxanne said. “For six months you’ve been bitching at me at every opportunity about how the Wasteland needs civilized. Now you’re saying you like it how it is?”
“If you could hold all questions until the end of the presentation, please,” Trip said, and snapped his fingers. Hunt-R slapped the top of his head. A shot of the bent and bowed wheat fields outside of Shunk appeared on the bedsheet with a cah-click. “To continue: After all this time, all that pounding, all that crumbling, the Wasteland is finally what it was meant to be. A safe haven in a sea of chaos. An island of stability in a world at war with itself. As humanity continues to fight itself over ever-dwindling resources, the Wasteland remains safe, its inhabitants–unwashed, uneducated, and proudly uncivilized–living in peace, secure in the knowledge that they inhabit the one place left on Earth no else could possibly want.”
Snap. Slap. Cah-click. A shot of the new town settled by ex-All-Mart zombies down the road popped onto the bedsheet. The town wasn’t much more than a vast plain of cardboard and blanket shacks, surrounded by a wall of garbage–a slightly more decrepit version of Origin, the city within the All-Mart they’d called home in their previous nano-zombie life.
Everyone in the room looked accusingly at Lock. She sneered back at them. “What, you would have preferred they move here with me?”
Trip cleared his throat. “And with places like this here, who would want the Wasteland? There’s nothing here. Nothing to attract the attention, to stir the envy, to tingle the genitals. Yet this vast expanse of unwanted planetary blight we call home is now under threat. A threat to its very existence, to our very way of life.”
Snap. Slap. Cah-click. A shot of Hu’s army marching through a valley, as seen from a glass-walled clifftop.
“This is the army of the Red Chinese. Slowly expanding their evil socio-capitalist engine of civilization to every corner of the globe. Relentless, insidious, inscrutable, and already here on our doorstep.”
Snap. Slap. Cah-click. A shot of the beer warehouse’s loading dock doors. Rudy knocked on the back of Hunt-R’s head.
The Sorta-Council gasped. Roxanne rolled her eyes at Trip and the cheap trick.
Trip gave her a proud smirk and continued. “But what does one of the most powerful poli-eco-mili bloc left on the planet want with the Wasteland? Certainly not the resources, of which there are none. And certainly not the unskilled, unkempt, primarily drunk and lazy people. The Red Chinese got enough of those when they took over Seattle. –No, the Red Chinese, they unfortunately have loftier and more noble goals than mere conquest. For you see, they’re do-gooders. Commie pinko do-gooders.”
Snap. Slap. Cah-click. A posed shot of the warbots, dressed in drab mock Chinese infantry uniforms, handing out flowers and shotguns to the bewildered children of Shunk.
“They’re civilizers,” Trip said. “Dirty stinking civilizers. Striving collectively to return humanity to the path of progress, for the good of all. And they plan to re-civilize not just the parts of the planet that are worth re-civilizing, but the whole damn planet. Whether the whole damn planet wants it or not.”
“What’s so wrong with that?” Morty asked over the lip of a beer jug. Three empty jugs were piled on his lap. “Let ‘em. No skin off my nose. This place could use some civilizing.”
“Oh, Morty… Morty, Morty, Morty. If only you were sober enough to fully grasp the implications of your drunken complacency. Allow me to show you the future of the Wasteland, if we let the Red Chinese sow their seeds of rebirth and renaissance.”
Snap. Slap. Cah-click. A shot of a glittering four hundred-mile long city spread out along the jagged coast of North and Central America, taken from a low-orbit dirigible by Hunt-R looking through a porthole over Trip and Rudy’s shoulders.
“This is Cali,” Trip said with an exaggerated shudder. “Just horrible, isn’t it?”
Morty’s one good eye focused on the image. “I dunno. Looks kinda nice.”
“Nice? Once it was just like Shunk. A ramshackle anarchist state built on the ruined salvage of past greatness, where free spirits were free to roam, unfettered by the strictures of a bygone colonial-imperialist era and traffic laws. But after just five years of Red Chinese occupation, where is that freedom now? Swept away unceremoniously in favor of paved streets. Properly maintained and running sewers. A police force. Building codes. A functioning educational system. Cheap Internet access. Pooper-scooper laws. Universal health care. Trains running on time. McStarbuck’s on every street corner. How is that nice?”
“Really, none of that sounds bad at all. It’s a hard life we lead,” Morty said, and took a slug beer.
Snap. Slap. Cah-click. Another shot of the beer warehouse’s loading dock doors, only with “Out of Business” painted across them.
Trip smirked. “Did I also mention the beer taxes?”
The Sorta-Council gasped again. Morty spat beer and sat up, sending the empty beer jugs on his lap flying. “We must resist!”
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” Trip said.
“But how?” asked one of the Sorta-Council members–a fat, wild-haired man in a skin-tight scuba suit with the sleeves cut off. “That’s was an awful big army you showed us, sonny.”
“Hattie’s got a point, there,” Morty said. “We don’t have those kind of resources. Or were you thinking about pulling a couple thousand robots out of your ass?”
“The thought had occurred,” Trip said, “but I just got it bleached and it’s a bit tender at the moment. No, confident in my mighty robot army as I am, this fight isn’t one we alone can hope to win. It calls for the kind of broad cooperation the likes of which the Wasteland has never seen.”
“You mean to get the other city states involved?” Hattie asked.
“Recruit them, yes.”
“Never happen,” Morty said.
“I can be very convincing,” Trip said, winking at Roxanne before turning to smile his confident half smile at Morty. “By the time I’m done explaining things to them and how we’re all in this together, they’ll be volunteering their unborn grandchildren to the cause.”
“A coalition of the willing?” Hattie suggested.
Trip lit a cig and smiled his half smile. “Or at least a coalition of the gullible.”
15
I Am Assassin, Hear Me Roar
Someone cleared their throat and Roxanne’s eyes popped open from a deep sleep.
�
�Oh, good, you’re awake.” Lock sat on the edge of Roxanne’s mattress, hands folded over a chef’s knife on her lap. “No, don’t try to move, because, you know, you can’t, and you trying will just make me sad for you, what with the desperate struggling and pathetic straining.”
“Lock? What are you…” Roxanne tried to sit up. Her muscles wouldn’t cooperate. She lay immobile, tangled naked in her sheets. “What’s going…” She looked past Lock and her own feet and saw her coven standing over her–Bernice, Xanadu, Yolanda, all of them except Brenda–their bodies stiff, their black eyes looking straight out at the wall above her head. “They’re…”
“Yes, they are. Zombies, one and all.” Lock glanced back at them. She raised her hand and flitted her fingers in the air. As one, the sisters raised their hands and waved at Roxanne. Lock lowered her hand and smiled at Roxanne. “Nice concept, getting the coven to stand guard outside your place. And convenient for me–I didn’t have to round them up. I wanted them here, anyway, you see. This way they’ll know who’s in charge. Wouldn’t do to have any questions muddling the line of ascension. –Brenda tip you off?”
Roxanne didn’t reply. From his room next door, Morty’s snoring was loud and raspy.
“Of course she did,” Lock said. “Explains why I couldn’t find her. Must be hiding. But she didn’t have to. I’m not angry with her. She’s a sweet kid. Good to see I’m not a totally bad influence on her. That honest, well-meaning streak of hers will make her a perfect Sergeant at Arms, don’t you think?”
“How did you…” Roxanne stared at the sisters. “The cookies…”
Lock nodded. “The cookies. The yummy, yummy cookies you couldn’t get enough of. Enriched with ten essential vitamins and nanochines. Granted, I don’t have enough nanochines to spare for full body and mind control anymore, but control the body and the mind will follow. Whether it wants to or not.”
“Why, you…”
