Take the All-Mart! (6 page)

“Lie back and enjoy the ride,” she said, her voice becoming distant and soft as she mounted him, her eyelids flickering and her smile going sublime. Pixelated white noise began to fill his head. “Oh, and don’t get freaked out. There’s gonna be memory sharing.”

“Memory what now?”

CHAPTER 5: ROBBERY!

“Right.”

Rudy looked up from his watch, a battered and strapless TAG Heuer Monaco sitting in his palm, just as it ticked over to 1:48. He scanned the square, the tables still jammed with townsfolk, still drinking, still boisterous, and still trying to sing three different songs at once. The only difference between now and two hours ago: The lyrics were a bit more slurred.

There was no sign of Trip. “Of course he’s AWOL,” Rudy said aloud. “Why wouldn’t he be? It’s only his hide if we don’t pull this off.”

Rudy grabbed a beer jug and stood, stuffing the watch away in one of his camo’s thigh pockets. He slipped away from the light and din of the square, sipping beer and grumbling to himself as he walked into the shadows towards the beer warehouse.

In the pitch-black beer warehouse, Willie the 9mm rapid-fire robo-gun turret spun slowly around and around on rusty, grinding tracks, its motion sensors fully alert, feeling for trouble.

Underneath the robo-gun, the
Wound
sat inactive on standby. But it wasn’t quiet. There had been a steady stream of noise coming from her trunk for half an hour: clicks, beeps, and the more than occasional synthesized four-letter curse.

“How about this one?” the synthesized voice in the trunk asked no one in particular. “Be nice if it would work, it is about the last one.”

A click, a sequence of beeps, and then a clank of an audio pickup being pressed against the inside of the trunk, listening.

Willie kept grinding around and around.

“Shatner damn it.” Another click from inside the trunk. “Okay, this is the last one. I hasten to think of the consequences for you if this does not work. But... you have been warned.”

The trunk emitted a different sequence of beeps. This time, Willie ground to a stop and the warehouse fell silent.

“Gotcha!” the voice in the trunk proclaimed. “I think.”

The trunk of the
Wound
cracked open the smallest amount.

Nothing opened fire.

“Hey, it worked.” Hunt-R let the trunk open all the way, unfurling himself to stand to his full four feet. Hunt-R was a bipedal robot, with bulky, oversized elbow and knee joints. His composite hard-shell olive skin was dented and dotted with gunshot holes, a natural consequence of years of service to Trip and Rudy. His head was dominated by a glowing, cyclopsian oval of an eye. He titled the oval up at Willie and pounded his chest. “Who’s the robot?
I
am the robot, in point of fact.”

A knock at the warehouse door shattered the quiet, and sent Hunt-R collapsing back down into the trunk, throwing his arms over his head.

Another knock. More of a pounding this time. “Come on, answer the door already.”

Hunt-R lowered his arms and craned his neck up over the lip of the trunk. His oval eye peered through the darkness, illuminating the warehouse door like a spotlight. “Builder Rudy?”

“Who else is it gonna be?”

“Just a moment, sir.” Hunt-R unfurled and crawled out of the trunk. Three-toed feet clanking with every footstep, he walked across the warehouse to the door and found the door controls. Pressing the big red button, he started the door slowly rising. He bent down to wave at Rudy before the door was fully up. “Hello.”

“Yeah, hello. That machine gun deactivated?” Rudy squinted into the warehouse warily.

“Without encryption it was a simple matter of finding the right frequency on which to transmit the shutdown command.”

“And that worked?” Rudy took a slug from his beer jug.

Hunt-R crossed his arms over his narrow, cylindrical chest. “Since it is motion sensing, and I am standing here, having walked across the warehouse, I think it is safe to say the device is inactive.”

“Don’t get cheeky.” Rudy stepped into the warehouse. He slapped the door controls with his elbow as he did, sending the door rumbling shut behind him. “I’m just double-checking. Been shot at enough today.”

“My apologies.” Hunt-R’s glowing oval stared at the closed warehouse door, then swiveled to look up at Rudy. “Where is Programmer Trip?”

Rudy scowled. “Where you think?”

“Distracted by the local fauna?”

“In his defense, she was insanely distracting.” Rudy finished off the beer jug, flinging it away. He watched it bounce across the warehouse floor. “So, no telling how long he’ll be AWOL.”

Hunt-R gave a patient nod and opened his chest cavity with a double-tap on his belly. A small metal claw clutching a worn leather sack emerged from the cavity. “
Pocket Dungeon
while we wait?”

“Not this time.” Rudy squared his shoulders and loped towards the
Wound
. “This time we’re doing this
my
way. Grab the goody bag from the trunk — we’re gonna blow some stuff up good.”

One moment Trip and Roxanne’s cartoon cyberspace avatars were falling, endlessly, a fluffy pink-tinged cloud of a bed falling along with them. Not that they minded falling, or even noticed. There was too much other stuff going on. Too much fucking. Too much... sharing.

The next moment, a flash of nothingness, then a rush of bright lights flooding in from all sides. When the flood passed, a little Korean girl, nine years old and softly weeping for her dead mother, walked hand in hand with her father in his best suit — the one with the zebra skin coat and the purple velvet cowboy hat — away from a fresh grave dug in the middle of a long-abandoned wind farm, a rusted, leaning windmill for a tombstone. 

Roxanne’s memory.

Another flash and they were back on the cloud bed. The cloud was getting in on the fun. Puffy tendrils twirled the pair of avatars, nudged their bodies into more interesting inter-twinings and probed unattended and under-served erogenous zones while Trip and Roxanne focused on the major players.

Flash.
Trip and Rudy among a group of a thousand other spectators, relaxing on beach chairs, eating popcorn, watching the sky above the corporate-war devastated city of Portland, where armored dirigibles covered with sponsor logos jockeyed for position around a thousand-foot high goal tower, firing screaming rockets at each other. The crowd let out a cheer as one of the dirigibles took a hit amidships and crumbled in on itself, falling on fire from the sky.

Flash
. Trip and Roxanne were pretty much inside the cloud, now. So much writhing, prodding, probing... Hard to say where the cloud stopped and they started. It didn’t seem to matter.

Flash
. Roxanne, at age thirteen, proudly standing alone in a circle of fire, her fellow sisters smiling lovingly at her over the licks of flame, just having taken the Oath of the Sisterhood. The flames parted and a naked old chick with great tits presented Roxanne with a neatly folded corset and habit.

Flash
. They’d merged now. Into this Trip-Roxanne-Cloud avatar thing, all limbs and erogenous zones, heaving and pumping, the mass getting tighter and tighter with each heave and pump, making them fall faster and faster towards a rapidly approaching, glowing accretion disk singularity of climax.

Flash
. Trip’s turn. Something fresh. Trip looking out the windshield of the
Wound
into the churning dust-and-debris expansion front of the All-Mart, just that morning.

“Shit!” Roxanne exclaimed from somewhere very, very far away.

A
fritz
of deafening and blinding white noise wiped over his consciousness, and Trip was back in Roxanne’s room, on her ratty mattress, Roxanne up on him.

“What?” he said, trying to catch his breath. “What’s the matter? The thumb too much for a first date?”

Roxanne stopped grinding, stared down at him, sweat dripping from her nose and chin onto his chest. “That was the All-Mart, wasn’t it?”

He shrugged, wiped her sweat away with his hand. “Yeah. Ran into it this morning. So?”

She rolled off him. “That’s what I was late for. Mother Superior’s gonna tan my ass red.” She smiled at the prospect as she plucked the miniskirt from the floor and stepped into it.

Trip sat up. “Late for the All-Mart? How can you be late for the All-Mart? You going shopping?”

“No, of course not,” she said, wriggling into her corset. “We do this ceremony every mid-Solstice. ‘Cause it’s like a new god, right? Not a particularly good god, but still, deserves respect.”

While her back was towards him, he quickly snaked out a hand for his tux jacket and reached in to pull out the tin of cigs and his lidless Zippo. “You pray to it?”

She reached behind herself to lace the corset tight. “So it doesn’t roll over us, yeah.”

“You know it’s not a god, right?” He lit up. “It’s just a bunch of nanochines gone wild, building, subsuming, zombie-fying. Or so the rumors go.”

“Yeah, I know.” She spun around and frowned at him, then bent down to snatch the cig from his mouth and dash it out against the wall. She handed the crushed, smoking stub back to him and plopped down on the edge of the mattress, reaching for her stiletto boots. “But Mother Superior takes it seriously. So... we all take it seriously. Or at least humor her. For us it’s really just a chance to hang out, sing a few chants, let our hair down and our tits out.”

“So, this ceremony...” Trip tucked the crumbled cig behind his ear as she zipped up a boot. “Is there gonna be a lesbo orgy after?”

She smiled coyly back at him over her shoulder. “Usually a pretty good one, yeah.”

“Cool. I’ll bring popcorn.”

She shook her head, zipped up the other boot. “Sorry, no men allowed. Sisterhood rule.”

“I never liked organized religion.”

“I’ll be back by noon.” She stretched to pick her habit off the floor. Fitting it on, she stood up, tucked her hair away under it. “Stick around: We’ll re-enact what you missed.”

“Bring friends.”

She grabbed a motorcycle helmet plastered with glow-in-the-dark stickers of stars and moons from the workbench, cradled it under her arm. “Well, duh,” she said, slinging a satchel of a purse under her shoulder and darting out the door.

Trip watched her go, smiling at the way her mini-skirt flipped up to show her naked ass as she bounced down the stairs just outside the door. As soon as she was out of sight, he retrieved the crushed cig from behind his ear, straightened it the best he could, and lit up.

He lay back, still smiling, taking shallow puffs and closing his eyes.

Five minutes later, the cig burnt down to his lips and woke him from the deepest sleep he’d had in months. 

“Vishnu’s pancreas!” He sat bolt upright. “There’s robbery to do!”

“What the fuck is this?”

Trip stood in front of the warehouse vault, draped with a netting of explosives so thick he couldn’t see the vault door.

Hunt-R stepped up next to him. “17 sticks of dynamite, 5 pounds of homebrew C-4, 9 shaped concussion charges —”