Take the All-Mart! (17 page)

Bob pushed the passenger seat up with his chest, hesitantly slipped one leg out of the car. “Aren’t you gonna untie me, at least?”

“What am I, your mother?” Trip fished around in an inside-tux pocket until he found the special .85 caliber bullet he was feeling for, the ceramic one with the blinking tip. He slipped the fancy bullet into the pistol and closed the chamber. “Look, the last thing we need is you reverting into a zombie at the most clichéd second possible ‘cause we forgot to zap you in all the excitement. Scoot.” He twisted around, pointed the revolver at Bob’s nose. “Now.”

Bob grunted, and got out of the car. Getting out from under the
Wound
, Rudy stood and watched the zombie walking off and mumbling to himself, then got back into the car.

“How’s it looking?” Trip asked.

“Good thing I checked — had to shore up a tie rod. If that had snapped while we were at speed, goodbye
Wound
.” Rudy noticed Trip’s revolver was out. “Didn’t we just have a conversation about no guns?”

Trip grinned, pointed the revolver out the window and up at the ceiling.

He fired, straight up, then pulled the pistol back in.

Bernice clapped her hands over her ears. “What was that all about?”

Trip holstered the revolver. “It’s for later.”

Rudy gave a slight nod, looked past Trip at Origin city. He frowned. “Assuming there is a later.”

“You’re such a pessimist.”

“I am what a lifetime of your company has made me.” Rudy turned back to check on Bernice. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” she said, nodding like she almost believed it.

“I can spit you up some custom mix.” Rudy tweaked his nipple. “Keep you calm but alert.”

“I’m good.”

“Seriously, it’ll be fine. We do this kind of thing all the time. And we haven’t died yet.” Rudy undid the buckle on his spiked helmet and took it off, handed it to her over the seat. “Just in case.”

She took it and strapped it on, thanking him with a smile that made him melt.

Rudy blushed, fluffed out his squashed fez. He settled it onto his head and turned to Trip. “Well, what you waiting for? Let’s get this over with.”

Trip stared out over the steering wheel, unblinking, his mouth screwed up in a half-smirk. He raised a hand, one finger up. “Shush.”

“What?” Rudy asked.

“Oh... nothing.” Trip pointed the finger at the dashboard GameGear display. “Just, we’ve got company.”

Rudy stared at the display. A little rectangle representing the
Wound
was being surrounded by dozens of blue dots in a slowly tightening ring. 

In the back seat, Bernice gasped. Rudy looked out the open driver’s side window past Trip while reaching blindly for the shotgun on the dash.

The Security zombies were huge, imposing. Eight foot tall, their hardened skin glistening in the fluorescent ceiling light. They weren’t carrying weapons, but it didn’t look like they needed to. Their hands were giant, rough things, like boulders made of blue-green flesh. And there were dozens of them, and more coming up behind them. “Where the Shatner did they all come from?” Rudy asked.

Trip shook his head. “They just popped up on the sensor out of nowhere. — Grab something, we’ll drive our way out of this,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. “Or at least take a few of ‘em out, trying.”

“Yeah, that won’t be necessary, Trip.”

It was a woman’s voice.

Roxanne’s voice.

Coming out of the gnarled lips of the Security zombie gliding up to the driver’s window.

The zombie bent low to look into the
Wound
. “They’re just here to escort you,” Roxanne’s voice continued. “We don’t need a repeat of the Woman’s Casual Wear fiasco, do we?”

CHAPTER 16: ORIGIN

“Well, I’ll be,” Trip said, smile coming to his lips as he twitched the
Wound
into Park and saw Roxanne standing there, arms behind her back and waiting patiently at the base of the Hub. The phalanx of Security zombies that had escorted them through the winding shanty streets of Origin to the bare concrete courtyard surrounding the Hub peeled off and scattered back to their regular patrols.

“Ooh, let me out!” Bernice pushed excitedly on the back of Trip’s seat until he popped the door and leaned forward to let her out.

Trip looked over at Rudy and gave him a bemused smirk before lighting a cig and swinging his legs out to stand. He focused on Roxanne. She looked pretty good for someone who’d been abducted by a nanochine-infested department store. Better than good. Dead sexy. As sexy as the last time he’d seen her, watching her walk out of her room. Maybe even sexier, now that he knew she really wasn’t dead — or a zombie. Far as he could tell.

“Rox!” Bernice squealed as she ran up to Roxanne, throwing her arms around her and squeezing hard.

“Bernie!” Roxanne returned the hug. “I’m so sorry for all of this.”

Bernice let her go and stepped back, smiling. “Wasn’t your fault.”

Roxanne grimaced apologetically. “Well, sorta turns out it was.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re okay.” Bernice hugged Roxanne again, giggling before tearing up. “I just wish everybody else —”

Roxanne palmed the tears from Bernice’s cheek. “Everybody else
is
okay, Bernie. The whole coven’s safe and sound. Once I figured out what was going on, I asked the All-Mind to have Security round them up. They’re being escorted to the nearest expansion front right now. When they get there, their zombie nanochines will be deactivated and they’ll be let out of the All-Mart.”

Bernice’s face went all smiles. “That’s...”

Roxanne grinned. “I know.”

Trip cleared his throat as he and Rudy walked up to them. “Ahem.”

Bernice gestured for Rudy to step near, took his hand tight in hers. “Oh, yeah, sorry... this is Rudy.”

“Hey,” Rudy said, smiling goofily and waving with his free hand.

Roxanne waved back. “Odd, but I feel like I already know you.”

“That was probably from the incredible mind-shared sex,” Trip noted, grinning proudly.

Bernice sighed. “...and you know Trip already.”

Trip turned his best crooked charming smirk on Roxanne. “Intimately and repeatedly. Howdy.”

“Howdy yourself.” Roxanne smirked back, took a step closer to him. “You came in after me?”

Trip shrugged. “I’m dashingly heroic like that.”

“Well, that and the reward,” Rudy said.

“What reward?” Roxanne asked.

Trip glared at Rudy then shrugged at Roxanne. “Never mind him. — You okay?”

Roxanne nodded. “The All-Mind’s a pretty decent host, considering it doesn’t get all that many
guests
.”

“The ‘All-Mind’?” Rudy asked.

“The A.I. that supervises this place.” Roxanne tilted her head to show off an odd, pulsing biomass over her cyber-jack. “We’ve been talking.”

Trip swallowed. “Have you now?”

“Yeah.” Behind Roxanne, a section of the Hub’s gnarled skin split open, revealing a waiting elevator. “And it’s really looking forward to seeing you again, Trip.”

Megacorp War II. The last fun war, forty or so years back.

The Americ-Nippon-WallTarg syndicate had developed what they thought was the ultimate weapon in its fight against the Latino-Indus-Applesoft Conglomerate: A store that could build and stock itself using raw materials, and people, from its surroundings. The All-Marts. They were dropped into enemy territory like bombs to spread out and overtake the competition. WallTarg peppered Applesoft territory in Central and South America with the things. Almost won them the fight, too, before the other megacorps realized they were next after Applesoft and ganged up to take WallTarg out.

But sometimes there were accidents transporting the bombs from the manufacturing plant in upstate New York. This one time, a transport plane had trouble with an All-Mart core over Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and instead of waiting for the thing to go unstable and kill them mid-flight, the flight crew just dumped it, right on top of town square. It hadn’t been armed, so it didn’t explode, but it was still dangerous. Too dangerous to try and defuse. So, before they abandoned the town, the townsfolk cordoned it off and kept their fingers crossed that the warnings of instant planetary-level doom they posted around it would be enough to keep some idiot from accidentally setting it off.

And the warnings did exactly that, for about thirty years.

“This isn’t just stupid,” 12-year old Rudy said, stuffing the bowl of his RD-D2 bong with the last of the shake from the dime bag he’d found stashed under their mom’s bed back at the abandoned motel she was using as a wasteland base of operations, “it’s dangerous stupid.”

He was leaned back against the central support column that also housed the All-Mart bomb’s CPU, knees crunched up against his chest. Sitting crossed legged on the slanting floor next to him, 13-year old Trip was jacked into the CPU by way of a patch cord spliced with a car jumper, the lead pinched around the CPU’s military-grade data interface knob.

Trip’s hands moved in the air in front of him, mimicking the manipulations his virtual hands were making inside the bomb’s brain. The only light in the cramped interior of the bomb was from the hole in its roof where Trip had nicked a knuckle prying off a panel to gain access to the trailer-home-sized bomb.

“That’s the best kind of stupid,” Trip said, cigarette dangling from his lips.

Rudy flicked Trip’s lidless Zippo on over the bong’s bowl. “Come on — if we don’t get the car back before sundown, mom’s gonna be pissed. She’s got a job.”

Trip shook his head, opening his eyes and smirking at Rudy. “No, that’s just what she told you, ‘cause you get all jealous. It’s a date.”

Rudy lowered the Zippo. “A date?”

“Yeah.” Trip closed his eyes and went back to waving his hands around. “Some guy she met tracking her last contract. You know, the usual.”

Rudy harrumphed. “I don’t get jealous. I just don’t think anybody’s good enough for her. Well... she’ll probably end up shooting him anyway.”

“Like she did dad.”

“He had it coming.”

“He cheats one time and there goes dad. Hardly seems fair.”

“He cheated more than once, dude.”

“Yeah, but never with the same chick more than once, until the last one. So they don’t count.”

Rudy raised the Zippo, lit the bowl, sucking hard on the tube connected to the little droid’s rear gas vent. Held it for a long count, then let out his breath with a grin, intensely watching the heady smoke disperse in front of his face. “But I’m serious. Let’s just forget about this, okay? These things took out a good chunk of the southwestern hemisphere before they figured out they were only vulnerable to nuclear bombs.”

“What isn’t vulnerable to a nuke? All I need to do is crack the A.I.’s safeties and I’ll be able to convince it to disarm the bomb. No big deal.”

Rudy scratched at his cheek and its five-o’clock shadow. “My point being... we don’t got a nuke.”

“With what we’re gonna make selling the nano-factory in this thing to the cthulists, we’ll be able to buy one. Maybe two. And a second car.” Trip opened his eyes, thumbed behind him. “One just for us. One that isn’t a turd-brown hundred-year old, no air-condition festering wound.”

“You know, had some ideas there,” Rudy said with a cough as he sucked the shake down to ashes. “All she needs is some structural reinforcement here and there and some armor plating and she could be one bitchin’ ride. I mean, her engine’s in good shape. Classic Slant Six, can’t be beat. But it can be improved. Maybe convert it into a high-yield breeder. Wouldn’t need gas anymore.”

“A breeder?” Trip scoffed. “What would we ever need that much power for?”

“Duh: Weapon systems. Defense systems. Computer system to control all of it. Plus, maybe a limited A.I. to do the —”

Trip shook his head. “No way am I letting a computer drive the car. It’d take all the fun out of it.”

Rudy cleaned the bong’s bowl out with a swipe of his thumb, then licked his thumb clean. “What about if you drove with your mind?”

Trip’s eyebrow went up. “You could rig that?”

“I installed your interface, didn’t I?” Rudy stuffed the bong away in a Ivory Coast knock-off of an Israeli paratrooper shoulder satchel.

“Yeah, and it still hurts when I pee.”

“Yeah, I don’t think any of that’s the interface’s fault.” Rudy chuckled. “Maybe I should go grab the cattle prod from the car...”

“Wouldn’t do any good. The thing’s hardened against EMP and other counter measures to protect the juicy bits inside. That prod wouldn’t even tickle it.”

“Yeah, but it sure would knock you out cold and end this madness.”

“Stay put, I think I’m on to something.” Trip’s hands made quick zigzags. “There we go. Just needed massaged. I’m almost through the first layer. Just have to whack at some stuff, make a large enough hole in the weave for me to slip in and convince the A.I. to disarm the bomb. Then we’re home free.”

“
Whack at some stuff
?” Rudy twisted around to watch Trip’s hands work in the air. It looked like he was kneading dough.