Born Hard Again: Book Three of the Future Remembered Chronicles (17 page)

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the nurse who had burst in on us was trying to cautiously escape our presence by slinking out of the room as she had entered.

"Whoa, hold on a minute!" I snapped my head around toward her.

"Eep!" she uttered at being caught and turned to run.

Bronson shot out and easily closed the distance between myself and the escaping woman.  She screamed furiously as the long arm of my dick wrapped around her feet and yanked them out from under her.

"No!  Let me go!" she protested and slapped inefficaciously at my fleshy member.  Without conscious direction from me, it was encircling her ankles, like a boa constrictor.

"Damn, P!  You always up ta some kinda trouble," Koochy was still smacking his compute-pad into his other hand, as if that would somehow shorten the update cycle.  "Who dis bitch?"

I shrugged.  "Unlucky?" I proffered in return.

"Please!" my trapped victim pleaded.  "Please, let me go!  I won't tell anyone I saw you in here.  I... I don't even know where Dr. Franz is.  Please, I have a family!"

"Look, we're not going to hurt you," I try to comfort her by retracting Bronson, which turned to be more challenging that I expected.  Bronson was not listening to me.

Koochy laughed.

"Our track record fo' not hurtin' foo's ain't dat great, yo," he explained.  "How you goan tell dis girl yo ass ain't dangerous when you got a damn tentacle dick runnin' up her legs?"

"Shut up, Koochy," I tried to use my other two hands to reel Bronson back in without looking like I wasn't in control.

This interaction did nothing to calm the nurse, who realized I was in the process of letting her go and began to thrash frantically in an effort to free herself.  Our posse had almost recovered itself to the point of being able to go rescue TK!  I was loathe to backslide into medical necessity right away thanks to a firefight or a deadly dance off with the hospital guards she would summon if allowed to leave. 

"Here," I had an idea.  Instead of pulling Bronson away from her, I willed him to tighten his grasp on her limbs.  Deftly, I swept her up off of the ground and, like a crane, used my dexterous dong to deposit her into the surgipod that Koochy had just vacated.  "Let's put her in here for now."  The heavy top to the device began to automatically seal her inside.

Koochy grinned, connivingly.

"Ay, we sorry, girl," he called to her through the thick glass that windowed the medical pod.  "Don't worry doh, Big Kooch gonna make it right.  Unnnnghh!"  He pocketed his useless compute-pad and let his fingers dance over the surgipod's control panel.

"What?" I was concerned by this.  I already felt bad about having to ruin the nurse's day thanks to her chance encounter with us.  The terribleness of merely a moment with us was more than sufficient to spoil years of her life.  "What are you doing?"

"Brangin' dat booty back!"  Koochy joyfully told me.  "Bubba bubba bubba bubba bubba butt!"

"Uh, come on, man, leave that poor girl alone," I tried to dissuade him from hacking her rear.

Before Koochy could respond, Alphonso's surgical unit unsealed itself with a
wooooosh
.  Simultaneously, we both turned our heads to see him emerge.

"Wha tha FUCK?!" Koochy yelled, furiously.

I gasped.

Alphonso had apparently reprogrammed his surgipod not just to heal him, but to make him better.  Or at least turn him into Alphonso's idea of better.  What strutted out of the surgipod was barely recognizable as Alphonso.

He had replaced his burnt and blistered skin, of course.  Now he was a golden-brown tan from head to toe, smooth and hairless except for a rugged five-o'-clock shadow.

He'd also given himself a physique that Adonis himself would have been envious of.  Muscles bulged from his arms and shoulders.  I took a closer look though and saw that the muscles were often not even attached to anything.  Alphonso had created a caricature of what a human should look like.  His lower body was practically unchanged and looked atrophied in comparison.

"Yo' 'bro', you skip leg day?  Haaaah!" Koochy mocked.

"Hi guys!" Alphonso greeted us.  "Aww, Koochy, you're just jealous, aren't you?  That's okay, one day you'll grow up to be a real man like me."  Alphonso turned to flex his biceps in a weak imitation of a bodybuilding pose and the swollen mass of muscle tissue drooped off to one side.

"Alphonso, um," I started, "why do you have six-pack abs on your forehead?"

"Just because you haven't put in the work to get the body I have, doesn't mean you should criticize me!" Alphonso shouted back defensively.  "And now you're worried I'm going to get all the girls!"

Alphonso looked around for a girl and saw the nurse trapped in the surgipod, still scared witless.

"Um.  'Ay!'  Yeah.  Ay girl!" Alphonso tried to spit game.  "You like this, huh?  Like when I talk dirty with my pussy?  Uhh, I mean, no, wait!"

"C'mon Alphonso, you went zero to a hundred there," I said.  The nurse looked like she was about to vomit in the tight confines of the medical enclosure.  I thought I was bad at dealing with women, but Alphonso was bad at everything.

"Don't mess with me, Preston!  I know you guys are just jelly," Alphonso pushed me away and began pressing buttons on the surgipod interface.

"What are you doing?" I was pretty sure Alphonso had no idea how anything worked, other than a Good Man Ship. 

"I'm helping this little beautiful baby," he responded as if I was annoying him with my inquiry. 

I shot a glance at Marcus who had an "oh shit, this is about to be funny," expression on his face. He looked hilarious when he tried to hold back his raucous, guffawing laughter and I was the one who ended up laughing in response to his visible effort.

"Come on, Alphonso," I grabbed his arm and pulled him away from the surgipod. 

"No, Preston!  Guys!  Come on," he allowed me to drag him towards the door, although not without protest.  "I'm just about to score here!  Come on!"

I rolled my eyes.  "Jesus, Alphonso.  Did that thing spike your testosterone?  There's no time for her!  We have to get to TK, remember?"

"Call me!  Call me, baby!" Alphonso mimed use of a compute-pad to the trapped nurse as we exited the surgery room. 

"Damn, 'phonso," Koochy chided him.  "You like some kinda frat dude.  I usually be thankin' a you like 'dere's 'phonso, dat fuckin' pussy.'  But now I be all like 'damn, dat dudes a dick.'  'sup den, bro-man?"

Broman!  I was reminded of Limbozer's body guard in the subterranean sorority we had started with.  Had he shared a similar genesis?  I didn't remember his muscles looking all retarded like Alphonso's did.

"Why do you think you have three biceps?" I noticed the extra lumps rippling under Alphono's skin.

"Bro, do you even lift?" Alphonso snarked.  The machine seemed to have healed his sense of humor, which had obviously been defective since birth.

"Dat foo' stupid," Koochy waved his hand in dismissal.  "Reason yo' muscles got muscles is cause you got on dat beta, sucka!"

"What?"

"Oh, he's talking about the surgipod," muscular Alphonso explained.  "The surgipod let me sign up for beta features right from the control panel!  Technology is so cool.  I tried this sweet healing mode called
FeelTheGAINZ! BulkUP Pro (Beta).
"

"Yeah, you know why it a beta?" Koochy asked him.  "'cause dat shit ain't ready yet!"

Alphonso held up and waved his index finger, knowingly.  I saw that he had a bonus set of triceps in the back of his hand.

"You can't hurt me with your words, Koochy," Alphonso said, pleased with himself.  "I'm finally confident in my looks. 
And
I'm a Vice-Admiral.  I'm done being the side-kick in the group.  I want, no, I
demand
the respect I deserve!"

I sighed.  A self-righteous, over-confident Alphonso was not going to be a boon to my rescue mission.

"Look, we'll sort out our friendship hierarchy after we get TK back.  She's been down there way too long!  Come on," I urged us on.

The hospital hallway was still empty.  Unlike the possible musical future I had foreseen, no dancing nurses or any blaring hip hop music was present.  We walked shoulder to shoulder down the vacant hospital corridor; a nightmarish trio, the sight of which would shake the sanity of any who encountered us. 

"TK," I pledged an oath to the cerulean morning.  "I'm coming to get you."

We boarded the GMS-KJH86 and took to the sky, with murder on our minds. 

End of Prologue

"Where the heck is this place?  Are you sure this is the right lake?" Alphonso whined after several hours of circling the great ice sheet of old lake Erie.  "I don't see any tracks in the snow or ice."

"You can't read heat signals or anything beneath the ice?" I asked incredulously as I looked over the vast array of high tech sensors and doo-dads decorating the GMS' cockpit.

Alphonso flexed various muscles on his arms and hands that should not have existed as he interfaced with the warship he was piloting.  He shook his head.

"Either there's nothing there, or there's some kind of interference," he told me.  "I can't see anything.  I can't even see the big robot monster we fought.  It doesn't make sense."

I shrugged and scratched my head with Bronson.  Nothing in my life made sense. 

"TK!" I finally worked up the nerve to reach out to her telepathically.  I braced myself for what I might receive in return.  More than a full day had passed since I last talked to her.  Twenty four hours of being trapped in that cave with the crowd of naked, hairy, middle-aged men.  I had not slept since we had last interacted.  I wondered if the same was true for her.

"P-Preston," TK's tired and weak mental voice reached back to me.  She sounded very far away.  "Oh, Preston.  Is it really you?"

I felt terrible.  How could I have allowed TK to suffer even a moment longer than she absolutely must?  Why had I made her wait while Alphonso surgically enhanced himself? 

"We're here, TK!  Marcus is all fixed up.  Alphonso is... well, different.  We have guns and a spaceship!" I thought to her, excitedly.

"Why... why are you telling me this?  Why don't I see you?" TK quizzed me.  "Where... are you?"

"We, uh... we can't find you," I admitted sheepishly. 

"What?!" TK shot back.  "Preston Chesticles!" 

Suddenly, inspiration struck.  "I have an idea," I thought to her.

"Alphonso," I enlisted the help of the Vice-Admiral.  "Shoot the ice."

"Huh?  Why?" Alphonso asked.  "Where should I shoot it?"

"Just shoot anywhere.  So I can ask TK if she can hear it.  If we're close, she should be able to hear the blast," I smugly explained my logic.

"Wow, Preston.  That's pretty smart!" Alphonso was clearly impressed.  "Okay, here, I'll do it!"

Unceremoniously, Alphonso grasped at a small joystick by his right leg and fired off a missile towards the surface of the ice.  A single, long plume of white smoke spoke to the trajectory of the projectile as it zipped into the thick ice shelf.  While the rocket itself was small, the explosion it created was very large. 

"Ahhhhh!" TK mentally screamed.

"What?  What happened?  Are you okay?" I thought back.

"The whole room just blew up, Preston!  It's caving in down here!  Help!" she cried out to me.

"Fuck," I thought to myself.  So much for my brilliant idea.

"Are we close?" Alphonso asked me.  "Did she hear it?"

"Uh, yeah," I nodded.  "We're close."

From the window of the cockpit, I could see the surface of the ice was fracturing and collapsing.  Deep fissures opened up and spider-webbed out from the small crater that the missile had created upon impact.  Big chunks of ice fell from sight, leaving dark pockmarks in the otherwise flawless surface of the great white sheet.  I knew TK was somewhere down there.

"Take us down," I instructed the shapely Vice-Admiral. 

"Where?  The whole ground is disappearing," Alphonso correctly pointed out.  I had to admit, I didn't see anywhere safe to land.

"Ahhhhh!  Preston!  Help me!" TK screeched in my brain.

"Fuck this," I plainly stated.

I threw open the door to the ship and flung myself towards the quaking tundra.  Sure, it was a thousand feet or so to the ground, but I figured, what the hell.  I had survived worse.  Plus, with the power of the future remembered, I had a pretty good chance of escaping whatever horrible fate might possibly lie in store for me.

Much to my surprise, no vision occurred to me.  The ground grew closer and closer at an increasing rate.

"Oh shit, ohshitoshit!" I became more desperate as my impact became more imminent.  I failed to think of anything useful.  In fact, I did nothing of note and continued to practice my
oh-shit
s. 

Abruptly, I came to a halt in mid air.  Only thirty feet remained between my feet and the ground.  I remained there, levitating, while I scanned around seeking some clue to explain my sudden arrest.  In retrospect, I wondered why I didn't think to call upon my holy name.

"Ay, son," Koochy's voice blared out from the ship, which was closer to me than I had expected.  "Slow yo' ass down!  You lookin' ta die again already?"

"How did you stop me?" I asked with no idea whether he could hear me or not.  Of course, he could.

"Ooh, I know.  I know!  Hey, let me talk to him," I could hear Alphonso attempting to interrupt our conversation.  "Hey Preston, it's me.  You know, Alphonso?" he asked rhetorically, then waited for an answer.  When none came, he continued.  "It's a gravity ray!  It's standard issue on these little dingys.  Its uses are: freight loading and unloading, light brush clearing for, you know, landing and stuff, anchorin-"

"Mane, you fo' rea' right now?" Koochy's voice overpowered Alphonso's.  "Sit yo' ass down!  You scraight foolish!"

"Preston!  Eeeeeee!  I'm crushed!  Gasp!"  TK's telepathic tone reeked of despair.  "The ceiling fell in and killed everyone!  My legs are broken and trapped beneath heavy rocks!  It hurts... so... much, Preston!"

"I'm coming, TK!" I reassured her mentally.  Then, turning my head back to Koochy and Alphonso in the ship, I shouted, "Put me the fuck down!  Now!"

"Oh, right!  Sure thing, Preston!" Alphonso acknowledged my request.

The next moment, I was free falling again.  Thirty feet later, I smacked into the mountain of rock, ice slabs and debris that had caved in and filled the underground chambers we had been looking for.  It hurt, sure; but I would be able to walk it off. 

"TK!" I called out as I surveyed the vast amount of rubble surrounding me.  "TKaaaaayyyyyy!"

"Preston!  I can hear you!" TK thought to me.  "You sound so far away, though, baby.  You sound, like, a million miles away!"

"Arrghh," I was frustrated. 

"'Sup, kid."  Marcus was now standing beside me.  I had been so absorbed in my frustration that I had not heard Alphonso land nearby.

"She's under there, somewhere," I gestured widely, implicating all of the crumbled terrain before us.  "I wish we could just zap this rock out of here!"

"Damn, son!  Shit ain't hard!" Koochy grinned.  He whipped out his compute-pad and began working on it.  "Hey, Alphonso!  Let's put dat skinny bitch back in da sky, son!  C'mon, P!"

"What?"  I didn't understand his plan.  Getting back into the ship didn't seem to be the most direct route to TK.

"Mane,
trust
me.  It's me, Big Kooch!  We been down since like wha'," Koochy attempted to convince me with fingers contorted into convivial gang signs. 

Sighing, I followed my friend back into the ship I had just leaped out of so dramatically.  Had that whole episode been unnecessary?  I recalled my mother's scathingly maternal chastisement:
"You always have to do everything the hard way, Preston!" 
Well, at least I hadn't been run over by a car yet.

"A'ight, take us up," he instructed Alphonso after we all packed into the cockpit.  "See, I done reprogrammed dis hea' grav'ty ray shizz.  Dat shit fuckin O.P. son, fo' rea'!  All you gotsta do is turn dat bitch on and rocks goan be flyin'!  Ain't no mufu'n joke, boy!  Droppin' science on yo head, you be like
'whaaaaa?'
"

I smiled.  Marcus had come through for me once again. 

"Come on, Alphonso!" I smacked him on the misplaced gluteus muscle on the back of his head.  "TK's crushed down there!  Let's do this!"

"Hey, stop!  Geez, Preston!  You don't have to hit me," he complained.  "Okay, here we go."

Alphonso kept the war craft low and engaged the gravity ray he had so recently used to save my ass.  The effect was astonishing.  A beam of high intensity gravity waves emanated from the underside of our ship and tore a wide swath through the debris beneath us.  No matter how large the rock or ice block, as our gravity ray touched it, it was wrenched from its place of rest and chucked into the air.  We hummed along slowly, giving the beam time to dig deep and wide.  I saw that occasionally people, or at least bodies, were mixed in with the rubble we were so recklessly flinging.  

"TK!  Can you hear or see anything?  We should be getting closer to you!" I thought to her from within the GMS-KJH86.

"I... I see light!" TK rejoiced.  "I see light, oh my god!  It's getting brighter!"

"Hey guys, hey guys!" I waved at Alphonso and Marcus.  "Slow down, we're getting really close to her now."

"Preston!  It's right on top of me!" TK shrieked in my head.  "It's so bright!  Ahhahhahhhheheee-eeeeeheeeeeeEEEEE!"

I watched in horror was TK's body was sucked up from beneath us and tossed hundreds of feet into the distance. 

"TK!" I shouted.  "I'm going to get her!"

I threw open the ship's hatch and fearlessly jumped out.  This time I was less than one hundred feet in the air.  The impact with the unforgiving ice was painful and I felt stress fractures creak in my ankles and shins.  Overall, it did not slow me down one bit.  I beat a path to TK's crumpled form, which was lying flat and lifeless on the cold ground.

Alphonso landed the ship seconds later and he and Marcus ran over to join me.

"Man, P, why you always jumpin' out a air planes?" Koochy grilled me.

Ignoring him, I begged.  "Help me get her back to the ship."

Between the three of us, we managed to muscle her shattered body back into our stolen warship.  Her physique had lost most of its natural shape; it was a fleshy sack of fragmented osseous matter and bruised organs.  No signs of life were shown as we pulled her in and dropped her dead weight in the soldiers' seating area in the ship.

"Hey!" I called out as Koochy let go of his hold a little too carelessly.

"Droppin' bitches like da temper-ture, what?!" Koochy justified his actions.  "Ho, shit, P!  What da fuck is dat?"

Following the direction of his raised index finger, I looked out the cockpit window of our ship and saw what he had seen.  Emerging from one of the numerous caverns which had been excavated by our enhanced gravity ray was a small cabal of sinister-looking robed figures.  There were six of them, tall and completely shrouded in their black vestments.  They were surrounding and equidistant from a larger, mechanized unit of some sort.  I couldn't tell what it was from this distance.

"What the hell is that?" I asked no one, as I laid TK's dented skull to rest gently on a makeshift pillow I had pulled together from surplus uniforms lying about within the ship's cabin.

"Mothafuckin' sarcophagus, son!  Ain't you be knowin' sheit, P?"  Koochy was a few steps ahead of me, as usual.  "Da rea' Q be: who inside dat thang, playa?  Mothafuckin' big wig, fo' sho!  Unnnghhh!"

The mysterious group were clearly making their way straight to us.  Other survivors were starting to extract themselves from the wreckage and stagger around, dazed.  I saw such a diversity of denizens.  There were the beautiful and rhythmic sorority girls that had witnessed me face Limbozer.  There were several chubby, unassuming middle-aged white guys walking around naked and looking confused.  I assumed these were the remnants of TK's captors.

"What happened to you in there?" I asked no one about TK, while still taking in the cast of characters popping out of the ground for miles around us.

There were people of all different colors and creeds.  Some appeared tribal, with bright markings all over their faces and bodies.  These emerged from the demolished ice sheet and quickly sought out each other.  They were speedily becoming the largest recognizable group of survivors.

However, they weren't the only cluster developing.  As minutes ticked by, I watched several small bunches of staggering individuals swell in number until there were twelve or so very large congregations of like-looking people standing in array around the GMS-KJH86.

The shrouded-in-black group which had first caught Marcus' eye was closest to our ship and stood separately from the rest of the large assemblies.

"Are they seriously coming at us?" Alphonso asked me.

He touched a few controls on the pilot's dashboard and I heard the ship's front guns whirr into position.  Alphonso flipped on the external intercom.

"This is Vice-Admiral Alphonso Roy speaking," he introduced himself before continuing.  "Stop where you are or we shall be forced to use force!"

"Damn, 'phonso," Koochy derided.  "Yo' ass suck at threatenin' people.  You had ta live on dat grind, bet yo' ass be starvin' an' shit!"

"I'll show them I mean business!" Alphonso resolutely announced. 

Another few button depresses and a sharp, constrained explosion sounded as large caliber rounds left the barrel of the ship's cannon in what I assumed was a warning shot.  Instead of striking the ground harmlessly, one of the robed figures on the right lost a substantial chunk of its midsection.  Blood, innards and shreds of black garment blew out of the figure's backside and stained the snow behind it.