by Tufo, Mark
“You…” I think our custodian was going to repeat his favorite phrase. Church twisted the box around to get him to shut up.
“There is a city of sorts. They will most likely be there.”
“Bob? Most likely? And will there also be a bunch of custodians there, most likely?” He didn’t answer. “What about whistlers? Will they most likely be there?” I don’t know why I was getting so riled up. I usually bring everyone with me into uncharted territory, thanks to my less-than-well thought out plans. Maybe I was angry it wasn’t me doing the planning, or lack thereof.
“We kill,” Church said tenderly, placing a massive clawed paw upon my shoulder in what was surprisingly a very comforting gesture.
It was impossible to guess the function of the custodians that, at least, Church and I had been given to; they were in outlying areas; they were either this world’s version of wealthy exiles, outcast with servants, or those firmly entrenched in the middle-class, as they had found their way to the suburbs. We flew for a good long while, to the point I almost asked Bob if we were there yet. I figured I’d shut up about it because we weren’t heading to the beach and a day of fun in the suns. Not sure why I’d be in a rush to face the mortality facing me.
“Whoa,” was all I could manage as I saw the twinkling of far off dwellings and buildings; they looked like diamonds in the sky. Maybe the Beatles had it right; now I just needed to find Lucy. My apprehension rose as we flew closer and began to see the hundreds, if not thousands, of crafts much like our own, going about whatever business it was that custodians went about. As a rumored-to-eat-crayons member of the armed forces, I didn’t need much of a brain to figure out where we were going. Smack dab in the middle of this bustling community was a red crystal jewel. My guess was that it had been stained that color with the blood of this world’s enemies. Lord knew they’d made enough of those.
Something was banging a small pot in the back of my mind, attempting to gain my attention. It was having a hard time getting past my images of bikini-wearing women holding out cheeseburgers while they sang the Star-Spangled Banner. ‘Murica. Anything to avoid the dismalness of the day we were about to make for ourselves. The small pot turned into a tambourine, the clacking of the small cymbals threatening to give me a headache. I ratcheted up my distraction; the scantily clad women were now offering apple pies and M-16s, while the Blue Angels flew overhead. “I can do this all day,” I told my psyche. And apparently, it could, too, because the cymbals became a large bass drum. My eyes felt like they bulged out with every heavy beat, and my internal drummer seemed to like Death Metal, meaning, he was playing as fast as his appendages would allow.
“What!” I yelled out.
Bob and Church were looking at me, because, yeah, I was crazy, and that’s what normal people do—they stare at crazy people. It was sort of like what the rest of the United States did to Florida. I cleared away the distractions, my thoughts leading me down the tunnel to the custodian. I knew something about it, something I’d seen in the streaming information system they used. I dove back into the net, desperately looking for what hidden little nugget my mind had deemed vital enough to store away. If it was so fucking important, why was it harboring the secret? I thought I was going to pop a blood vessel in my eye when I came across what I was looking for.
“Stop the car,” I told Bob, pushing away the fog of being immersed in a sea of information.
He did as I asked. His eyes swiveled to look at me.
“We have a problem,” I told him before I’d even wholly grasped at why I thought that.
“Milk?”
“Yeah, even bigger than somehow sneaking into that fortress past an army of whistlers and killing gods.”
“Kill,” Church sighed. He seemed to be thinking on that particular notion as I had been the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition women handing me food.
“They can talk to each other,” I blurted out. I didn’t need him to even say anything to realize how ridiculous that sounded. “No…I mean, yeah, I know they can talk amongst themselves, but it doesn’t need to be verbal. In fact, they prefer it not to be. Lord knows I found their voice grating, I would imagine they do as well.”
“Milk.”
“I’m trying to.” Clarify it, I meant. “It’s sort of like telepathy but not; shit. It’s confusing, but it’s like each of them is a telephone tower and they can microwave a beam to the custodian or custodians they wish to speak with. The range isn’t far, takes a lot of energy to beam it out—I can’t get an exact distance, twenty feet? Fifty feet, if they push out the wattage, like a yell. They generally speak, leaning into each other so as not to exert themselves.” They were still staring at me; I needed to sum up. “We can’t bring him in there. He’ll give us away without us even knowing about it.”
The custodian with us had yellow bolts of light randomly firing across his body. I’d like to think he was glowering at the fact that I’d taken an avenue of escape and revenge away from him, but more likely it was the machine in his back. Tough to tell.
“We cannot enter the city without him,” Bob said.
“Kill?” Church asked. This ended up being a literal translation.
“We cannot. Without his power supply, we will crash, and the three of us attempting to walk into the city would be killed immediately.” Bob’s eyes pulled in deep as he thought about the problem. We were hovering on the periphery of the city, still far enough away that it was likely no one was noticing. Like, maybe we were being safe drivers and had pulled over to talk on our cell phones. We sat in silence for long minutes; I was looking around for a patrol car, something oft practiced in my early years. Sometimes, I felt like the cops had a tracking device on me with the sheer number of times they showed up. It was later in life that I realized that maybe if I hadn’t been doing so much stupid shit, they wouldn’t have had cause to be there in the first place.
“Got a problem.” I was pointing off to the left; another transport was fast approaching on our left-hand side. It didn’t look like it was coming for us, but anything flying too close could be a problem. The custodian shifted in his seat, either to look at what I was, or to get ready to blast out an SOS signal. I wanted to slap my hand over its mouth like I might my sister when we were younger and she was about to rat me out for something. This time would be just as effective as it had been back then, meaning not at all. My sister had been older and thus bigger, and the one time I tried it, she bit my palm. She did get smacked for that when my mother saw the imprint she’d left behind. Then, to make matters worse, my sister had made me pay for a week for that punishment she’d received. Her minute or two of pain had been nearly a week of mildly administered torture to me. A twisted nipple here, a wedgie there, and woe to me if I so much as thought of tattling to my mother. Ah, good times, good times. I ended up getting so much dirt on her as she hit her teenage years, she usually bribed me with candy to keep my mouth shut. Never got another purple nurple.
The transport was going to be close, by air standards anyway, a hundred feet. With the speed it was traveling and the limits I was confident the custodians had in regards to speech, we should be fine. No one likes the word should, when it comes to safety. This rope should hold, the brakes should work, help should be on the way, or my personal favorite from when I was sixteen and at my girlfriend’s house: “My dad should be at work all day.” Dad, in this case, was a biker. What the hell did he even do for work? Fuck “should.” That word has gotten me into so much trouble. Again I was failing to realize it was mostly my fault, but shit, I was sixteen. I don’t even think the male mind is capable of reasonable thought much before twenty-two; even then it’s touch and go.
Bob, Church, and I were very still, and stared straight ahead, like three stoned kids trying to act as normal as possible as a cruiser passed by. If the two custodians in the transport had even taken a moment to look our way, they would have realized something wasn’t quite right. Instead, they zipped on by. The yellow bolts had increased as the others closed the
distance. Our custodian had been trying to scream for help; its cries had gone unheeded. I could only hope it had even the faintest idea of what the rest of the cosmos was going through because of their grand designs, whatever they may be. While the cops weren’t rolling up on us, our problem was still not solved. We could not enter the city like this. It was Church that came up with the idea, and it became my job to figure out how to do it and ultimately Bob to do it.
“Kill signal.” Church was leaning over the seat, looking at Stuckie and the lightning bolts, which were now beginning to fade away.
“Milk?” Bob was asking me if that was possible, if there was some way to disrupt his speech center, to put him on Airplane mode. I had no clue if custodians were manufactured much like whistlers or if they reproduced; either way, there could be communication problems, whether manufacturing defects that resulted in issues or hereditary issues. I searched for the custodians' version of WebMD. It did talk about complications with communication and potential corrections, but this wasn’t a surgeons’ manual, and even if it was, it wasn’t going to tell me how to destroy the function. The best I could really do was get a rough location of where the organ that sent out the signal was located, and this was an approximation, at best. I told Bob in detail all that I’d gleaned, which was something like a five-year-old telling his teacher what the Constitution was about.
Bob produced an appendage that, had it been silver in color, would have looked a lot like the T-1000 Terminator in the series of movies of the same name. It was basically a rapier with a super fine point. Bob was planning on driving that into the custodian and severing the connection. The point wasn’t more than an inch away from entering Stuckie.
“Umm, do you think it would be better if we did this on the ground?” I was thinking that if this went sideways and Stuckie died, we would find ourselves plummeting toward the ground in an aircraft that did not look at all capable of gliding very well.
Bob, who appeared confident in nearly everything we did, agreed maybe it was for the best if we landed, and that scared me. Without the custodian, we were on foot, and I think this close to the city, three aliens hiking around, whether heading toward or away, were going to be in some serious trouble. Plus, how long would it take them to backtrack to the disabled vehicle and the dead custodian? Death would be preferable to what they could do to us if we were caught.
So, we set down. I got out of the transport, just to feel ground under my feet again; it had been a long time. After a few laps around, I leaned in to watch Bob at work. If I thought Stuckie looked like he had a stick jammed up his ass previously, now it was along the lines of a tree trunk. He appeared to be frozen in place, whether from Bob’s ministrations, pain, or fear that if he did move in the slightest, Bob would cut something more vital. Could have been all of that. Stuckie was in pain; purples and reds rippled all along the edges of his being, the only part that dared to move. I’m not much into the needless suffering of others, but fuck if he and his kind didn’t have it coming.
The colors became even more vibrant and bright as Bob looked to cut the lines of the transmission link. I turned away; this was a necessary evil, but I’d seen enough field surgery; watching someone getting mutilated without anesthesia was not something I needed to add to my already corrupted memory banks. A couple of transports were high up in the sky and passing by but nothing close. Still didn’t like sitting here like this. All I had was my stapler; what I wouldn’t do for one of those souped-up whistler rifles or even my more familiar M-16.
“Milk!” Bob shouted. I ran back to the transport, expecting to watch as the custodian died along with any chance of fulfilling our mission. Instead, it was so we could get back in the air and on with it. Not going to lie, I had mixed emotions. Getting killed by heading into the city seemed worse than dying by heading away.
“That worked?” I asked once I was in.
A protrusion came out on each side of Bob’s head. It took me a second to realize this was his version of a shrug.
“Fucking kidding me, right?”
He made the gesture again.
“You suck.”
“Ah, kill,” Church sighed as he sat back in his seat. We were once again underway.
The custodian looked like shit, or more like a flashlight bulb on its last legs, flickering bright, then dimming as if the filament was loose and burning out. We should have got the LED model.
We were going slower now, maybe there was a speed limit in the city and we didn’t want to get pulled over, or more likely Bob was as unsure of his handiwork as I was. Or, as the custodian began to die, we were losing power. Good chance he’d check out right in front of the Shimmering City county jail. We were heading straight for the red building, which, as we got closer, began to take on definition. In keeping with the theme of the planet, it was an inverted pyramid, but much more slender than the whistler creation buildings, and the edges were much smoother; it looked more like an ice cream cone. As of yet, we’d still not received any undue attention, but the transports around us were beginning to thicken.
“We should have maybe waited until rush hour was over.” I was doing my best not to look around like I was a guilty party, something that was exceedingly difficult to do. The staying still part, I mean, because I’d been guilty of a great many transgressions. I kept waiting for us to head down to street level, which, in this case, made no sense because they didn’t have any floor entrance levels. We stayed the course, even went up some.
“Bob?”
Never quite seen the jelly man tense, but he was beginning to look like Jell-O that had been placed in the freezer.
“Entrance is on top.” His response was clipped. If he had teeth, they’d have been clenched, hell, mine were. We were a couple of miles out from our goal. We’d been level with the roof, but were now climbing. It wasn’t much of a climb at first, but soon, it was nearly vertical. My entire weight was pressed into the seat as we picked up speed and altitude. I had all sorts of questions, each of which I was way too scared to hear the answers to. We were still climbing, and somehow still picking up speed. I felt like my eyeballs were being pulled into my skull. I spared the briefest of glances at Stuckie. I don’t know what Bob was doing to goose more power out of the custodian, but he was paying for it. The color along his ridges was vibrating in a wild display of pyrotechnics, while the core of him began to blotch with dull browns and grays. No doubt about it; he was dying.
Our strange maneuver had attracted attention; this I noted when I looked out the viewing port to my left. At least a half dozen of the transports had stopped and were watching, none, as of yet, had decided to join us on our star-gazing trip. My hands had a death grip on whatever they could grasp. It’s funny when you’re going through something, and you think it’s the worst possible thing that can happen, then suddenly it gets worse. This was like that. Like a plane that had stalled on an aerial acrobatic trick, our nose dipped down just as the blotches on Stuckie spread out, the browns turning to black. Our power cell was dead, and I had a feeling Triple-A wasn’t going to get here in time for a jump.
My stomach lurched as we went from crazy climb to free fall. The half dozen transports were now closer to a dozen, and a few of them were coming up to greet us. I had my arms locked and my hands against the dashboard, my legs holding the bulk of me into the seat as I pressed against the floorboard.
“What the fuck, Bob!” We were on an express route down, picking up speed at a physics-defying pace. I saw small glints rocketing up toward us. Had no idea what it was until one of the projectiles ripped a groove down the entire length of our ride. We were being shot at.
“Just fucking great.” I was convinced that Bob’s plan revolved around us becoming Kamikazes; we were going to take out the creators by dying, or more likely, die trying. I went for some praying; got as far as the shadow of death part before I started telling my wife and kids how much I loved them and was going to miss them. As a mortal, you sometimes imagine the ways you might check
out; I could safely say this one wouldn’t crack the top ten of previously thought of ways. Everything was simultaneously moving faster and slower. My mind was somehow able to pick up the duality of events playing out. The red roof was approaching at a speed I could barely comprehend, the bullets being shot from the mounted guns were slowed to the point I could pick them out individually as they streaked toward us, more times than not sparks flying as they struck.
Our transport was continually being rocked as we were hit. Bob was doing his best to adjust the course of our barreling beast. Might as well have been a brick dropped off a cliff. The wind began to buffet our ride to the point I was hardly able to keep focused on our impending demise. I was, not surprisingly, all right with this new development. Much better not to see the thing that signals your doom as you are smashed into microscopic droplets and scattered across an alien terrain. I wondered if we might burn up upon reentry.
Church was yelling; I didn’t know if it was his war cry or one for his momma. He was planning on meeting his maker with as grim a face as possible. His lips pulled back and his impressive array of teeth were on display. I, on the other hand, had the feeling I looked like a seven-year-old that had been caught shoplifting. A couple of the transports trying to stop our descent had rocketed past. Though I couldn’t see it, my guess was they were going to get into position behind us to start firing. I didn’t like their odds to be able to do it in time before we made our corporate building merger. I was sort of wrong; as bullets whizzed past us I could only hope that they’d hit the shooters below.
“Ah!” I gritted my teeth as we dove our final few thousand feet. Instinct dictated I cross my arms over my head in a crash scenario, but if I moved them, I would have smacked off the windshield, seriously—not that it would matter in the least, either way. Nothing was going to save me, even industrial-strength airbags, if these things did happen to be equipped with them. Then, because why not, vehicles below us began to move in around the building, creating a roadblock of sorts. This was instant suicide on their parts, as this wasn’t some Dukes of Hazzard chase scene; we couldn’t take a strangely placed ramp and jump over them. As it was, I didn’t even know if Bob was controlling the transport or only pretending to.
