Soft Apocalypses (18 page)

“Johnny?” asked Strass.

“Johnny,” agreed Diamante. “Let’s get our man.”

The lizard slithered them from highway to hills, and around midnight they crept up to the edge of a vast, fog-filled amphitheatre that Swarovski’s legion of acolytes had dug in the blood-black earth with their own hands. The stink of narcotic incense and alcohol and sweating flesh was nearly overpowering.

“It’s like the bowl of the bong of the gods.” Strass pulled her bandanna up over her nose and mouth.

The Reverend Dr. Swarovski stood in the center of the amphitheatre on a bare dirt stage, barefoot in a gold lamé robe, speaking in tongues into a microphone. He was ringed by his thousands upon thousands of dancing, ululating worshippers who were pounding away on improvised instruments: toxic waste barrel drums, AK-47s fashioned into electric basses, whistles made from sniper rifle cartridges. Only a few of his celebrants appeared to be human.

Swarovski waved a golden aspergillum like a wand and flicked glittering silver fluid onto the soil. The mud foamed, writhed, swelled into a huge membranous bubble that burst, spilling forth a naked purple minotaur, six feet tall and fully formed.

“My priestly beast!” Swarovski declared. “As I am the god, and the dog, my body the one true temple, I declare you join your brothers and sisters in holy riot! Soon, we shall spread our message to the world!”

The inhuman crowd roared in joy and swept up the confused newborn. Swarovski set to wetting the dirt once again. Strass and Diamante watched creature after strange creature birthed from the earth and his secret formula.

“He’s got a real front line assembly down there.” Diamante frowned. “We should have brought more ammo.”

“We need a diversion.” Strass fingered her grenades.

At that moment, a raid siren blared, and three dozen Valkyrie figures rappelled down from a vast invisible dirigible lurking in the sky. They wore supple silver armor and purple berets and propelled themselves on wicked plasma skates that vaporized flesh and bone and burned the dirt to slag.

The Raspberry Berets zoomed round and round the amphitheatre, annihilating anyone they could throw beneath their glowing skates, a fist-pumping derby of death with Johnny Swarovski howling impotently in the eye of their storm. His acolytes were running and flapping and flopping from the amphitheatre, trampling each other, shrieking in unimaginable terror. In moments the Reverend Doctor would be the Berets’ minionless prey.

“No way,” Diamante vowed.

She drew her St. Vitus Dance and thumbed off the safety. The weapon hummed to life in her hand and spat jacketed lead at the invaders. A dozen heads exploded into red glitter before the others twigged to the threat above them.

The Berets scattered, reformed in smaller attack units, a military metastasis. Diamante picked them off with relentless precision. Strass stepped in when Diamante had to reload, hurling knuckleball grenades from each fist. Each bomblet went off with a sunburst flash and bone-pulping boom. The air filled with the stink of phosphorous and scorched hair.

The Berets’ squad leader screamed down on them, one skate rising for a lethal roundhouse kick. Diamante cut her in half with a chainsaw barrage of bullets.

When the red mist cleared, Diamante and Strass were the only ones left standing amidst the amphitheatre carnage.

Just them … and the Reverend Dr. Johnny Swarovski.

He turned toward them slowly, giving them a dazzling rockstar smile, letting his golden robe slowly fall open to reveal a perfect chest and promising package. “You girls are surely both my saviors. How can I ever repay you?”

Diamante pointed the Dance at his heart. “Get down on your knees and pray ....”

The Queen’s secret service ambushed the girls the moment they tethered their lizard outside the palace.

“Hey now, hey now,” Diamante complained as the guards frog-marched her and Strass into the throne room and forced them down on their knees. “What’s this corrosion? We had a deal!”

“
Had
. Past tense.” The Queen looked to the captain of her guard. “Have you the box? And the weapon?”

“Yes, Mum.” He pushed his cape aside to reveal the St. Vitus Dance deactivated and holstered at his side, and then he gestured for his men to bring forth the medical stasis box. Johnny Swarovski stared at them balefully from behind the Plexiglas pane and mouthed silent obscenities.

“What about our promised payment?” Strass demanded. “We lost our bikes out there. We had
expenses
.”

“Leaving here with your lives should be payment enough,” the Queen replied haughtily. “My advisors think I should simply have you both killed.”

“That’s a dirty deed!” Diamante fought against the men restraining her.

“Dirt cheap, too.” Strass was very still.

“I am being most generous. Begone with you.” The Queen waved her hand, and the guards hauled them back out to their giant lizard. A heavily armed squad escorted them to the city limits.

“Get out and don’t come back!” the squad leader ordered. “You’ll be shot on sight.”

Diamante and Strass rode their lizard to the top of a nearby low mountain and stared out at the glittering spire of the castle. They could just barely make out the huge bulletproof picture window of the Queen’s boudoir, where no doubt at that very minute Johnny’s head was being put to salacious uses.

“What should we do?” asked Strass.

Diamante tipped her steely hat back and wiped her brow. “I reckon we go to Plan B.”

Strass squinted at her. “You sure?”

“She’s got it coming. And I expect Johnny’ll prefer it this way.”

Strass shrugged, dug in her jeans and pulled out a tiny black remote. Pressed the button. The boudoir window shattered outward as the microscopic, scanner-proof fusion device Strass had planted in Swarovski’s neck stump exploded. Confetti of glass and steel sparkled in the midday sun as it rained down on the castle courtyard.

They watched the green smoke trailing up from the exploded window for a few moments before Strass spoke again: “Okay, so what now?”

“Wanna to go back to Cali?”

“Nah. Don’t think so.”

“How ‘bout Kathmandu?”

Strass’ face lit up. “You know? I’ve always wanted to!”

Tiger Girls vs. the Zombies

Eight months into the Apocalypse and we were all transformed: the living kept dying and the dead got no rest. The America of sitcoms and white-collar cubicles and Happy Meals had burned up like Los Angeles when the wildfires tore down from the hills. It burned up like my momma’s brain after she caught the fever. It burned like the clove cigarettes we found in the pockets of the biker death cultists who tried to murder us in Reno.

Being good was the same as being dead. We were all gonna burn, either in this life or the next. But Tura? She knew how to live on fire.

Just a year ago, she was a researcher at UCLA, doing capital-ess Science by day and running triathlons on the weekends, casually busting down barriers just by living her life. I never had a chance to meet her there—I went to the university on a judo scholarship and meant to get a degree in nutrition. But I dropped out after two semesters when a guy at my gym recruited me for MMA. I couldn’t turn down what seemed like an easy way to make some cash and get myself on TV. I can’t kick worth a damn, but I’m good on the mat, and I won my share of prize money de-prettifying other girls’ faces with your classic ground-and-pound. I always felt bad about that, afterward, and wondered what my life would have been like if I’d chosen brains over brawn. Heck, the zombie outbreak might have saved me; if I’d stayed in the game, sooner or later someone was gonna mess me up bad. And even if I didn’t get my brain pulped in the ring, what would it look like at 40?

When I first laid eyes on Tura at the refugee camp, I thought she was a fighter like me. She had a warrior’s walk and wary eyes. When I found out who she really was, I knew she’d been a great role-model. Way better than someone like me. Most any girl would see her and want to be her. Girls would want to be like her so bad that they’d stand up and blow off all the jerks who said girls couldn’t do the math, couldn’t crack the code, couldn’t get strong, couldn’t be people who mattered in the world.

I hoped some of those girls she’d inspired were still alive, and the jerks weren’t. But like my daddy said: hope in one hand and spit in the other, and see which one gets wet first.

Now Tura was standing at the side of the road, staring out at the Rocky Mountains across the plain, dressed in oil-stained roughneck jeans and grimy boybeater and a pair of black leather chaps she’d taken off the skinniest dead guy in the Reno cult. Hands that used to carefully dissect brain tumors were now rough, calloused, her knuckles scarred like she’d been in more matches than I had. She kept our hair short with a gambler’s straight razor. Months of hauling bodies and engines and fighting for our lives in the hard sun had given her a pair of guns she’d have never gotten on a Nautilus machine.

“You don’t need him,” I said.

She turned her hundred-mile stare on me. I could see her intellect like a vast, hot desert behind her stone-gray eyes. But not so much as a shadow of sanity seemed to soften her obsession.

She grinned at me, fresh bleeding cracks opening in her chapped lips. “I don’t
need
him. That’s a dead-cat fact, Johnnie. But I want that man so bad I can’t think of anything else.”

I squinted at her. “You figure he’s really still alive?”

She pulled her satellite smartphone out of her pocket and brought up a text message:
OK 4 now. Nbdy hurt. Soldrs fled. Trapt at mtn lab. 2 mnths of food lft.

“You sure that’s Mickey?” I pressed.

She nodded. “I’m certain. He and his labmates are surrounded by zombies. He thinks maybe a hundred shamblers, a few dozen runners. He got his family in there before the soldiers who were supposed to protect them abandoned the place. They took all their weapons but a couple of .45s.”

I sighed. We were supposed to be getting
away
from the damned undead, not heading straight for them. If I had any sense I’d have left right then, grabbed my bike and my half of the food we looted from the Safeway and kept on heading East.

The truth was, I needed Tura. She’d saved my butt more times than I could count. I’d only been able to repay the favor twice, and the idea of leaving our equation unbalanced like that just didn’t sit right.

And, if you scratched past that skin, the bigger truth of it was that I loved her like she was family. More, maybe; I never got the feeling I was what my momma was hoping for when she birthed a girl. I never had a sister or a best friend growing up but I dreamed about that plenty. Never had much use for makeup or shopping or all that other girly stuff but it would have been nice to have someone to run around with. Someone to share my secrets with. Someone who made me feel like I belonged in the world.

When you spend your whole life out in the cold and finally find a nice warm fire, you want to stay near it, even if it stands a good chance of burning you.

“You in, Johnnie?” she drawled.

“You got a plan?” I replied.

She laughed that amazing cool laugh of hers. “Of course I have a plan, girl!”

Of
course
she did. And once she told me about it, I knew I’d be all in.

We zig-zagged across the landscape, gathering supplies and equipment, guided by the information she was able to pull down from the satellites that floated above all the dirtbound death and chaos like titanium angels.

Her plan started to go off the rails at a National Guard armory hidden up in the hills. The place was locked up tight, but once we broke in, we found the soldiers had stripped the place clean before they bugged out. Not so much as a shotgun to be found, much less the grenade launchers or M230 chain guns we’d been counting on scoring.

“Is there another place we can go for weapons?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “The talk on SurvivorNet is that all the other armories and bases in this half of the country have been looted. We’d have to steal weapons from a gang or militia, and I don’t like our chances.”

She thumbed through web pages on her phone, scowling. Then her frown changed to a look of intense calculation; it was an expression that simultaneously filled me with hope and worry.

“What is it?” I asked.

“There’s something else we can try. It worked in Texas, and if those crazy rednecks pulled it off, I think we can, too.”

Our first stop was a hardware store, where she loaded us up on rope, duct tape, sturdy canvas drop cloths and a couple of extra utility knives. Then we back-tracked to a Microcenter we’d passed in another town. The front windows had all been busted and the aisles were completely trashed. Unfazed, Tura grabbed her crowbar and headed straight to the back storeroom and started scanning the place with her flashlight.

“They usually keep the really good stuff locked up someplace secret.” Her light lingered on what looked like nothing more than a custodian’s closet. She stepped forward, tried the knob, discovered it was locked.