Take the All-Mart! (2 page)

“Is there a Plan A?”

Trip’s eyes snapped opened. “Grab something.”

Without giving Rudy a chance to actually grab something, Trip sent the
Wound
swerving hard off the old interstate, plunging down an embankment and into what, a century ago, had been fertile farmland but was now nothing but rocky, withered scrubland. With a twitch of his eyebrow the
Wound
’s adaptaplastic tires tightened for off-road and her suspension bucked, the car rising up six inches for better ground clearance as it bumped and jostled over the rough ground.

Rudy popped his head out the window for a quick look behind them. “In case you’re wondering, nope, they didn’t fall for it. And look at that — they can move faster and better on those boards of theirs out here than we can. How could we have possibly guessed that? They’re going to catch us. And eat us. Thanks.”

Trip smirked back at him. “For someone with a THC plant in their belly you worry a hell of a lot.” He snapped his fingers at the
Wound
’s brain, a salvaged, rebuilt, and heavily augmented Sega GameGear, wedged tight into a crude cutout in the center of the dash above the stock AM radio. The game system’s two-inch screen snapped on to show a very low-resolution version of the high-bandwidth, immersive sensor telemetry the
Wound
was feeding Trip through the patch cord mind-machine link. “MODAR’s picked up something a couple miles past this hill. If it’s what I think it is, it could just be our Plan A.”

Rudy squinted at the tiny, 32-color screen. A blip representing the
Wound
headed full-tilt towards a solid line. “What, a cliff we can
Thelma and Louise
off of?”

“You wish.” Trip jogged his chin to point out the windshield just as the
Wound
crested the hill. “Hell... I wish.”

Rudy looked out. Took a few seconds for his eyes to go wide and his jaw slack. “That’s not? It can’t be...”

“It is,” Trip said, swallowing.

A couple miles ahead a jagged, broiling wall of smoke and dust stretched across the valley from mountain to mountain, thirty feet high. Behind that, for something like a couple hundred miles back, was a rooftop pocked with thousands of HVAC units and triangular solar collectors, panels glinting red in the dawn sun.

Trip nudged Rudy with an elbow. “Wake him up.”

Rudy reluctantly tore his attention away and grabbed the stun baton, twisting and reaching into the back seat to poke its non-electric handle end into the Higgins side until the man grunted.

“We’re off-road?” The Higgins stirred, his antenna tips blinking steady red again as he re-established contact with his WOLFpack. “How thoughtful of you. I was afraid we wouldn’t be able to catch up to you on open road...” His voice trailed off as he sat up and saw through the windshield what the
Wound
was speeding towards, and when he spoke again, it was practically a whisper. “By Robin Masters... it’s an All-Mart.”

“Yup,” Rudy said. “And us heading straight for it. Imagine that?”

The Higgins’ voice — and accent — cracked. “You wouldn’t?”

Trip gave the Higgins a sharp, devilish smirk through the rear-view. “Drive straight into it? What a great idea.”

“No, you can’t!” the Higgins yelled, his real accent — a Southern drawl, from around Shreveport — coming through loud and clear. “You know what that is? What happens in there?”

Trip took out a fresh cig and lit it. “Midnight showings of
Rocky Horror
and
Darkstar
?”

“People get turned into zombies!” the Higgins yelled. “Anybody that goes in!”

“The living, shopping nano-dead,” Rudy said with a chuckle. “Or so I hear.”

“Well,” Trip said, “that sounds like something I’d like to see.” He twisted around to point the cig at the Higgins. “Of course, your guys will have to follow us in, right? They can’t get too far away from their hub, and even if you commanded them not to, they’d have to come after you, right into the heart of zombie central. It’s the downer flip-side of the WOLFpack tech. They’ll be compelled to follow you to their deaths. Tragic, really. No wonder the military dumped the tech.” Trip shrugged at Rudy. “Well, what ya gonna do?”

“Stop!” the Higgins shrieked, throwing his body around the backseat in absolute panic. “Turn around!”

“Why?” Trip asked. “Just so you can... why are you chasing us, anyway?”

Realizing he was boxed in, the Higgins gave up throwing his body around and sat back, sweating and panting. “There’s a considerable bounty.”

Trip raised an eyebrow at him. “Bounty?”

“Courtesy of the Warlord Hu.”

Rudy glared accusingly at Trip. “She put a bounty on us?”

Trip shot him an unapologetic smirk, then asked the Higgins: “The little minx put a bounty on us?”

The Higgins’s practiced, affected calm returned and he primly smiled at Trip. “The bounty’s on you. Him,” he said, his English accent back, nodding his head at Rudy, “she didn’t mention, so we planned on making a nice summer sausage for the mid-solstice feast.”

“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Rudy asked, turning to glare out the windshield, crossing his arms over his chest.

The broiling wall of the All-Mart’s expansion front was already less than a mile away, slowly and inexorably swallowing and converting everything in its path into raw materials for the massive structure’s slow expansion down the valley, a meter a day.

Trip twitched an eyebrow and the
Wound
sped up. The Higgins let out a whimper.

“For the record, Rudy, I apologize for nothing,” Trip said, taking a long drag off his cig.

Rudy growled. “You know you’re the first person I’m eating after I go zombie, right?”

“I’d be offended if I weren’t,” Trip said. “I hear my inner thighs are particularly tasty. They’d probably go best with a balsamic and red wine reduction.”

“What doesn’t?” Rudy said, tweaking his nipple through his t-shirt for as much THC-analog as his stomach factory would give him.

Trip nodded, blew smoke at the windshield. “True.”

They were close enough now that they could see the tendrils within the All-Mart’s broiling expansion front. Thick, billowing and serpentine, they flicked out, grabbing rocks, shrubs, anything within reach, drawing it all back into the All-Mart for breakdown and repurposing.

“If you’ve got any last words for your WOLFpack,” Trip said to the Higgins, “I’d think them now.”

“Wait!” the Higgins yelled. “What if we forgot we ever caught up with you?”

Trip twitched. Brakes engaged instantly, sending the
Wound
into a controlled fishtail on the loose scrubland dirt. When she finally stopped swinging around, her rear bumper ended up mere inches away from the churning expansion front, a tendril snapping out to snatch away her license plate before Trip hit the gas and had her lurch forward a few feet, out of reach.

The Higgins sagged, relieved. “Robin Masters be praised.”

“You the only team after us?” Trip asked.

“For now,” the Higgins said. “She’ll send someone else, eventually.”

“You’ll stall her.”

“As much as we can. But not for nothing.”

Trip gave a knowing sigh and reached for his wallet. “Cash? Or will Rudy’s left arm do?”

CHAPTER 2: WELCOME TO THE WASTELAND

“You know,” Trip said, flipping through the pages of a dog-eared copy of the January ‘80 issue of Playboy — the one with Steve Martin in diapers on the cover — propped up on the steering wheel while the
Wound
drove herself, “they’re really nice people those Magnums, once you get past the whole them wanting to eat you thing.”

The Higgins and his WOLFpack left behind and the sun fully up, the
Wound
was heading East down a battered and beaten I-80 on cautious auto-pilot. The landscape of the Wasteland outside was parched and burnt-out, only the occasional skeleton of a long collapsed farm house or barn breaking the monotony.

In the passenger seat, Rudy scooped yellow-green reconsti-gruel from a rusty dog bowl into his mouth with two fingers. “You said she wouldn’t send bounty hunters after us.”

“And you believed me?” Trip didn’t look up as he’d gotten to the part with boobs. “I left her at the altar and you stunned her three-legged, one-eyed calico, Mr. Charles Xavier Whimsy, Esquire, while we were making our escape.”

“Little lopsided-faced bastard had it coming for always shoving his ass in my face every time I sat down to eat.”

“You gave him a heart attack.”

“And then I gave him CPR.”

“Kicking is not CPR.”

“Got him breathing again, didn’t it?” Rudy licked the last of the gruel off his fingers. “I’m counting that one.”

“Yes, well, throw all of it into a blender and sure as Shatner of course she was gonna send hunters after us. Why you think I suggested we come out here, of all places?”

“Yeah, that did surprise me.” Rudy haphazardly stuffed the dog bowl into the glove compartment, packed with gruel pouches, crumpled paper bags of random ammo and spent shells waiting to be reloaded, an ancient rolled-up 2004 Rand-McNally Annual, and an assortment of game carts and rolls of duct tape. He had to use his knees to force the glove compartment door shut. “This is the last place I figure you’d want to go.”

“Was kinda hoping she’d think the same. Well, lesson learned.”

“That’s all you have to say for getting us into this mess?”

Trip looked up from the Playboy, his eyebrow cocked in almost sincere offense. “How did I get us into this mess?”

“Are you serious?” Rudy asked, glaring at him. “It was a simple scam. We pass ourselves off as arms merchants, gain the Warlord Hu’s trust with a few staged demonstrations, get her to fork over a huge deposit, and skip out before the crates of wooden sticks with buttons glued on them for triggers showed up at her warehouse. You were just supposed to gain her confidence.”

“Which I did,” Trip said, smiling. “By banging her.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t have to ask her to get married right after.”

“Took her completely off-guard, didn’t it?”

“And why wouldn’t it?”

Trip closed the Playboy, tossed it up on the dash. “Look, stealing a couple thousand scrollars of deposit money was nothing. There was a bigger opportunity. She had money. Power. Not just in Cali but in the Mainland. Plus: Frickin’ army. All waiting for a man to take off her oddly long-fingered hands as Mr. Warlord Hu. It was the perfect con.”

“Bullshit. There was no con. You got carried away by a pretty face and went all stupid. Like always.”

“She did have the most amazing eyes. And she could do this thing with her tonsils that...” Trip’s voice trailed off and he shook himself. “Well, trust me, it was special. She was special.”

“So special you grabbed me ten minutes before the ceremony and initiated Operation I’ve-Made-a-Huge-Mistake?” 

“Well... she wasn’t exactly the perfect woman, you know. She sang Chinese opera in her sleep. And did I mention the extra phalanges in her fingers and toes? And would you believe she actually wanted to honeymoon alone? Without servants? Not even the cute little redhead with the freckles and knockers.”

“The one you were banging on the side.”

“Yeah. What’s her name.” Trip smirked, lit a cigarette. “Anyway, if I’d gotten hitched, where would that have left you? I’d be busy war-lording it up all day and night, wouldn’t have had any time to hit the road with you anymore.”

“I think I could have coped. Thrived, even.”

“What, you were gonna go out adventuring on your own? Come on... we both know I pull most of the weight in this partnership. You’d be lost without me. I couldn’t do that to my own brother.”

Rudy growled out a sigh. “Just once I’d like to pull a job without your dick complicating things, is all I’m saying.”

“You’re just jealous it’s never your dick doing the complicating.”

“Touché. But still... someday the universe is gonna hit you up-side the head with a Karmic two-by-four. I just hope I’m there to see it when it does. I’m gonna sell tickets.”

“As long as I get half the gate.” Trip sat back, let out a good lungful of smoke at the steering wheel. On the other side of the interstate, a forty-man-drawn flatbed stacked high with corn and its horse-mounted and shotgun-toting Amish escort made its four-mile-per-hour way West. “You know, if Delores was already pissed enough to send cannibals after us, once she’s figured out the Magnums double-crossed her, she’s probably gonna finally be angry enough to pay his exorbitant fees and send the Slash.”

Rudy gave an involuntary yelp. “The Slash? She wouldn’t.”

“Surprised she didn’t send him first after what you did to her cat. And him we won’t be able to buy off.”

“I’m not fighting the Slash,” Rudy said, his eyes wide with dread and shaking his head.

“You think I want to fight him? He bit a chunk out of my calf last time we ran into him, and it wasn’t even us he was hunting.”

“So, what we gonna do?”

“So... we take unprecedented action, as it were.”

“Like find the nearest cthulist outpost and convert, spend the rest of our days as genetically-altered tentacle hippy tree-huggers waiting for the ancient aliens who built the pyramids and the Hollywood Bowl to come back?”

“Unprecedented, not stupid,” Trip said. “We’ll pay Delores back, is all.”

Rudy snorted. “I don’t think it’s just the money she’s pissed about.”

“Okay, we pay her back, and I send some flowers. Flowers excuse everything, right?”

“If they come in a vase with your balls wrapped around it in a bow, maybe.”

“Man, you are just obsessing on my unit today, aren’t you?”

Rudy took his calabash from the bandolier and grabbed the oil can full of loose tobacco from under his seat. The can was sealed with a sheet of newspaper held on by a rubber-band. Rudy snapped the rubber-band onto his wrist, set the paper aside, and started filling the pipe. “How are we supposed to pay her back? Thanks to you, we never actually got a deposit to make off with. And we only got six scrent on the scrollar fencing the wedding gifts — which we’ve been spending through fairly recklessly.”