by Brian Bakos
“Oh man, Charles would have loved this!” Winston said.
Helmet and blaster sold separately, the box proclaimed, enemies not included.
Star pulled another box from the shelf. This one was a Princess Warrior model scooter – pink with black thunderbolt theme. The illustration portrayed an ecstatic young girl zipping along, hair flying from beneath a horned Viking style helmet.
Be the first girl in your neighborhood to dominate the world! the box read.
“I’m the only girl in the neighborhood,” Star said, “so this will do just fine.”
***
Within twenty minutes, they had the scooters assembled and were rolling around the parking lot. On his way out of the store, Winston had grabbed a roomy new backpack to replace his leather bag. His disassembled spear was lashed to it, ready for quick retrieval.
Star handled her scooter with easy grace, almost as if she were specifically programmed to ride it. Her hair flowed in the breeze as she performed lazy eights.
“I like this!” she said. “Let’s race to the intersection.”
“Perhaps you need more time to practice,” Winston said.
“To heck with that,” Star said.
Star took off.
“Hey!”
Winston poured on the speed. They raced side by side out of the parking lot and onto the road. Winston pulled slightly ahead, Star caught up.
With her superior balance and coordination she would have probably won, but for Winston’s greater experience. He used better timed, more powerful leg thrusts and managed to gain the finish line half a length ahead.
They braked to a halt in the middle of the crossroads.
“That was fun!” Star cried. “Isn’t it great to be a alive – or whatever it is we are?”
“We are certainly in a high performance mode,” Winston said. “I think any objective observer would agree with that assessment.”
“Oh, Winston!” Star wrapped an arm around his neck and kissed his cheek. “I just love it when you talk like that.”
All seemed right with their depopulated world. Sunshine poked through the clouds throwing rays like those Winston had once seen coming through the high windows of a cathedral. The rays illuminated a vast area of brown fields with high, thorny weeds providing an occasional spot of green.
The massive cooling towers of a nuclear power plant hulked near the horizon, like structures dropped to earth from some alien planet. The customary steam cloud was gone from above the structures, but legions of steel electrical towers still marched away from the plant, bearing their power lines.
“I wish we could stay in this moment forever,” Star said.
Something caught Winston’s attention. From the direction of the nuclear towers – in the sky – a dark mass was moving rapidly toward them. His optical sensors gaped wide.
“Winston, what’s wrong?”
He pointed at the approaching menace. Star saw it now[ their glorious moment together poofed out of existence.
“Back to the store!” Winston cried.
36: Inglorious Retreat
The carefree race to the crossroads reversed itself into a wild dash back to the mall. Star surged ahead while Winston dropped behind to cover her retreat. He glanced over his shoulder at the menacing cloud. It was much nearer now, and he could hear its gibbering voice.
Mech bugs!
“Come on, Winston,” Star yelled, “quit the macho routine!”
With a series of powerful kicks, Winston caught up with her. They raced side by side propelled by extreme fear. They were at the halfway point now –
But the cloud was almost directly overhead. It started to lower upon them. An infernal, high-pitched buzz accompanied its gyrating mass.
“Hurry!” Winston shouted.
They gained the mall parking lot – they were half way across it. The doors of Cycho World gaped open for them, offering refuge.
Then the chaos descended. A dark mass of dragonfly type creatures engulfed them, blotting out the world.
“Ahhhh!”
They tumbled off their scooters. Winston’s pack fell away, and pressure sensors all over his body registered multiple sharp imprints. The insectine horrors tangled in Star’s hair and clothes.
“The rain sheet!” Winston cried.
Star yanked off her pack and withdrew the heavy black plastic. They covered themselves with it, screening out the nightmare swirl as much as possible. Attackers still covered their bodies, though. In the reduced light, the eyes of the little creatures glowed hot and feverish.
Winston and Star batted at each other frantically, crushing dozens of assailants. All the while they stumbled toward the open doorway of Cycho World.
“We’re almost there, Star, hang on!”
Vicious little pincers jabbed through the plastic, searching eagerly for victims. Winston and Star flung the rain sheet away and dashed the last few meters into Cycho World. They pulled the doors shut behind them, but not before a mass of the buzzing creatures had already entered.
“Here!”
Star thrust a tennis racquet into Winston’s hands. He swung hard at the enemy.
Bzzzrrrt!
A squadron of broken creatures ricocheted off the strings. Others flew straight at Winston, pincers snapping, making no attempt at evasion. He cut through them with a brutal swat. Star joined in the massacre with her own racquet. Soon, hundreds of attackers lay stricken on the floor ...
Winston and Star stood back to back, weapons raised – but the battle was over. Outside, a legion of dragonflies beat themselves against the glass doors with impotent fury.
“I think we got all the ones in here,” Winston said.
“Good riddance!” Star said.
She picked up one of the creatures. The dying bug trembled in her fingers, but Its jaws continued to snap. She tossed it down and stomped it.
“What are these horrible things?” she said.
“I’ve encountered them before,” Winston said. “On my trip to Mech City.”
He examined a dead specimen.
“They are robotic insect hunters,” he said. “They were used to control agricultural pests like potato beetles and such. They were touted as the ‘environmentally responsible’ alternative to chemical insecticides.”
“Well, I’m no potato beetle,” Star said. “Why did they come after us.”
“They must have gone mad,” Winston said, “ordinarily they pose a danger only to the insect life forms they are programmed to exterminate.”
“Ugh!”
Star shook a crushed mech bug from her hair.
“The way they came straight at us just now,” Winston said, “it’s almost like they wanted to be destroyed.”
“Maybe it’s their version of jumping out a window,” Star said.
Winston nodded. “But why are there so many massed together? This group must have originally been spread over a large area.”
“Misery loves company,” Star said.
She brushed her hands over her blouse. “Will you look at this? My favorite blouse is ruined!”
She stripped off the garment, exposing her perfectly formed breasts. Winston could not tear his eyes off them.
“It’s got more holes than a sieve now.” Star poked a finger through a particularly severe rip. “See?”
“Y-yeah,” Winston said.
Star looked up from her perforated blouse, and a wicked little smile moved across her face.
“Why, Winston, haven’t you ever seen a lady disrobe before?”
“No,” Winston said.
She turned fully toward him; her nipples had firmed to erect points.
“Do you like them?” she said.
“Uh ... sure,” Winston said. “What’s there not to like?”
Star laughed and took a step forward.
“Go ahead, Winston, I know you want to touch them. Enjoy.”
Winston felt his circuits overheating.
“Uh, ma
ybe some other time.” He retreated toward the windows. “Right now, we’d better decide how we’re going to get out of this place.”
“Suit yourself,” Star said.
She put the ragged garment back on and started buttoning it.
“You can admit it or not, Winston, but you’re thinking more like a human male all the time.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Winston said. “How could that be?”
Star finished dressing, then slinked across the store to join him at the windows.
“How could it be otherwise?” she said. “Didn’t the humans create us in their own image?”
“Well, yes, in a manner of speaking,” Winston said.
“Then it only stands to reason that we will become more like them over time,” Star said. “Call it evolution, if you prefer.”
She was pressing against him now and had placed an arm around his waist. The situation was making Winston distinctly uncomfortable. He groped for a change of subject and found a disturbing one in Star’s face.
“You’ve been injured,” he said.
He indicated her cheek which bore numerous small gouges from the pincers.
“My epidermal composites are self-sealing,” Star said. “They’ll heal up pretty quick.”
“Glad to hear that.” Winston held up his arm. “Look, I’ve got scratches all over me.”
“Not bad,” Star said. “They give you that tough, macho aspect.”
Winston brushed his fingers over her cheek. “Does it hurt, Star?”
“No ... my nerve sensors convey pleasure input only.”
She’d closed her eyes. Her lips parted slightly to reveal perfect teeth, and her simulated breath quickened.
Oh man, Winston thought desperately, I’m way outside my design parameters here!
He turned his gaze toward the windows, seeking any diversion. Outside, the insect hunters had stopped beating themselves against the glass and were now swooping around the parking lot in a dark, chattering whirlpool.
“Looks like they’re giving up,” he said.
Star opened her eyes. Disappointment flashed across her face, soon displaced by a look of amused acceptance.
“When can we go outside again?” she said.
“I’m thinking that the insect hunters operate on solar energy with only limited power storage capacity,” Winston said. “The sunshine brought them out.”
“Then we have to wait for night?” Star asked.
“I think that would be their period of minimum activity,” Winston said.
Star took his hand. “Then it’s just the two of us, and our friend over there.”
She indicated the covered body by the golf clubs.
“Yes.”
***
An hour after sunset, they left Cycho World and moved cautiously out into the parking lot. They had wrapped themselves in heavy tarps and carried tennis racquets. Torches set to low beam illuminated their way.
“Oh no,” Star said.
The parking lot surface was covered with masses of inert mech bugs. Those touched by the torch beams began to stir, as if a breeze had passed over a still pond.
“We’d better shut them off,” Winston said.
The lot went dark, except for some pale moonlight filtering through the clouds. They picked their way through the patchwork of insect bodies, trying to keep to the bare spots of pavement.
Crunch!
Winston’s foot crushed a bug. A swirl of dragonflies blew up, like a living dust devil. Winston and Star remained frozen in the center. After a minute, the dragonflies settled down again.
A bug dropped off a lamp post into Star’s hair.
“A ...!” She stifled a cry.
A ripple moved through the bug carpet, then subsided. Winston snatched the insect out of Star’s hair and crushed it.
They walked in agonized slow motion as if they were wading through deep water. The parking lot seemed as huge as the surface of the distant moon.
Finally, they gained the nether regions where the bugs had thinned out, where their scooters and backpacks lay.
They retrieved their equipment and took off.
37: King Vicente Towne
Five days of intense walking and scootering passed, each one blending with the next into a mind-numbing blur. As they moved through the abandoned wilderness, Winston traced their progress along the spidery lines on the atlas pages.
He’d long since memorized the route, but the atlas kept him grounded in reality. Without its objective report, the journey would have seemed endless. They dared not leave the main highways, and whenever the sun popped out, they scanned their environs with especial care, tennis racquets and tarps at the ready.
At night, one of them stood guard while the other switched to inactive mode. It was during his times on watch that Winston suffered his worst insecurities. A single question constantly tormented him:
What’s waiting for us out there?
Amid the endless darkness, with Star lying inactive under her tarp, frightening dramas played out in Winston’s mind. He saw a formless evil haunting the mountains like a toxic vapor. Squadrons of killer birds, a thousand times worse than the mech bugs, lurked among the peaks, awaiting decapitation orders from their master.
His imagination conjured up a hoard of greenish, demented plague survivors prowling the slopes and lusting for victims – robotic victims. And when the moon poked through the clouds, he saw a terrified face on its surface screaming out warnings.
And they were rushing out to meet these horrors?
Then the little “dreams,” if that was the proper term, accompanied him into his periods of inactive mode. Always before, inactive mode entailed a complete mental blackout, a sort of timed deactivation, but now he perceived brief visual snippets during his rest periods.
These images were usually quite disturbing – the mist, the green men, the butcher birds – but sometimes he’d catch a glimpse of himself and Star walking hand in hand into a glorious sunset, free of all care.
One morning he asked her: “Do you have dreams during inactive mode?”
“No,” she said, “but maybe I’ll evolve into that. What about you?”
“I don’t know if they’re dreams, exactly,” Winston said, “just little flashes of pictures and stuff.”
“Am I in them?”
“Sometimes.”
Star gave her coy little smile, the one that frazzled Winston’s circuits.
“Well, that’s progress, isn’t it?” she said.
***
Their destination drew inexorably nearer until a collapsed highway bridge brought them to an abrupt halt. They cautiously approached the high, ragged edge of broken concrete with rods thrusting out of it like fractured bones.
“Well, doesn’t this suck?” Winston said.
They peered down at the river far below. Great chunks of debris lay piled within it, water surging around them in foamy rapids. Vertigo assailed Winston, and he retreated from the precipice.
Star seemed much less bothered by the height. She remained coolly observant, hands on hips.
“My gosh, what caused this?” she said.
“Maybe it just crashed down on its own,” Winston said, “or maybe somebody bombed it so as to stop the traffic.”
“Well, it stopped us, sure enough.”
“I wish Jimmy were here,” Winston said, “he’d know what happened.”
“Yeah ...”
Mention of their former colleague and friend put them both in a reflective mood. Winston went back in his memory to the time when he’d first opened his door to Jimmy’s cheerful, ‘Good morning Boss!’
It seemed as if years had passed since then. In Winston’s recollections, the prosaic construction specialist took on dramatic proportions, like the lead tenor from one of the old operas.
“You know,” Star said, “I never thought I’d miss Mech City, but now I’d really like to see the place again.”
“We wil
l see it again,” Winston said, “and Fascista Ultimo won’t be in charge anymore. Count on it.”
He’d tried to sound confident, but his words simply drifted away in the misty air. To heighten his sense of impotence, he’d even used Fascista’s pet phrase. He looked back out over the ruined bridge. Some orphaned pillars were all that remained of the center section.
Upstream stood a large expanse of moribund forest, while downstream, a small town clung to the riverbank. The river was fairly wide here, by the bridge, but it narrowed a few kilometers downstream beyond the town and a dam. No other bridges crossed the river anywhere within sight.
Winston gazed back the way they’d come. “We’ll have to return to the last exit and look for an alternate route.”
“Maybe we can find a boat,” Star said.
“Uh ... yeah, maybe.”
Winston kicked off on his scooter. The route back to the previous exit was a gentle, downhill slope, and his momentum built up pleasantly. Breeze cooled his temperature sensors.
In other circumstances, he might have enjoyed the ride, but now a corrosive feeling of uncertainty was creeping over him. Star rushed past on her scooter. She apparently did not share his sense of foreboding.
“Wheee!”
She zipped through the exit ramp well ahead of him and came to a stop in front of a large metal sign.
“Come on, Winston, times a wasting!” she called.
Winston began his descent on the curving exit ramp – tapping his brakes, exercising great care so that he did not tumble over. Fortunately, Star had turned her attention to the sign and was not observing his awkward progress. He ground to a halt beside her.
“Look at this.” Star pointed up toward the sign:
Welcome to
KING VICENTE TOWNE
Population: Growing
“That’s rather peculiar,” Winston said.
Only part of the text was original: Welcome to and Population. The other words were crudely lettered over a whitewashed background.
“I wonder who this ‘King Vicente’ was,” Star said.
“Some local nut job, most likely,” Winston said. “He thought the place would sound better named after himself. He threw a promotion into the deal, as well – made himself a king.”
“What about that ‘Population Growing’ part?” Star asked.
“Delusions of grandeur,” Winston said, “humans were good at that.”
The explanations sounded overly glib to him, somehow, but Star seemed to be impressed. Winston liked impressing her with his intelligence, since he sure couldn’t do so with his physical abilities. Another, smaller sign caught their attention:
