FOX
He sat cross-legged on his cot, his eyes staring at a book he couldn’t seem to focus on. The words just blurred together. It felt comfortable to be holding one of the books from the small collection he kept beneath his cot. The soft edge of the paper touching the palm of his hand. His fingertips against the smoother surface of the paperback’s cover.
He had always been able to read, no matter what else was going on in the world. He could tune out his surroundings any time, even escape his own thoughts and feelings and just get swept up in the story of a book. Virtually any book. Virgil called it Fox’s “magical power.” But not this morning.
Now there was a dull heaviness in his heart that he couldn’t escape, like his insides had been turned to concrete.
He shifted his focus to Virgil sitting in the Fixer’s roost, its screens all aglow with maps and readouts and numbers, like always. Virgil leaned with special interest toward a monitor that depicted in infrared the rumbling stormclouds overhead, scratching his fingers against his white beard and scowling disapprovingly.
“How much do remember about last night?” Fox heard himself saying.
Virgil’s head almost moved in Fox’s direction. Then he wiggled five dismissive fingers vaguely in the air. “I ‘member everything, you know that.”
The old man often insisted he had powers of perfect recall, but Fox knew for an absolute fact that he did not. “I thought, perhaps, not this time,” Fox said cautiously.
“Yeh. Well, this time. Every time. Always. Every word. We better not leave the trailer today. It’s a fuckin’ Glass storm comin’ on.”
“So.” Fox hung his legs off the side of the cot. “In the light of morning, is there anything you’d like to clarify?”
Virgil sighed heavily, shook his head for a moment, then swiveled toward Fox in his tattered captain’s chair. “There somethin’ you wanna say, boy?”
Fox closed his book with a gentle fump and placed it delicately onto the cot. “Did you mean what you said last night?”
The old man squeezed his eyes as though suffering some great pain, and vehemently shook his head no while saying, “I ain’t happy ‘bout the way it come out, but it had’a come out somehow. Any way it did’d cause ya pain.” He mulled something over for a moment, shrugged. “For a regular-blooded person. Not you. Don’t go pretendin’ to be all upset about it. You look like you’re about to bust inta tears. Swear to christ this is the most emotion I’ve ever seen you show. I almost saw your fuckin’ expression change. Too bad it’s fake. And not convincing. Fixers gotta lie better’n that. Demonstratin’ right before your own eyes how you’re not cut out.” He built up steam as he went, by the end sounding almost gleeful at the chance to deal out the pain.
“It doesn’t sound as though you’re unhappy about the way it came out at all, if you don’t mind the observation,” Fox said.
“Let’s just get through the next day, day’n a half. Then you’ll be free a’my crude manners’n rough ways, kid, all right? Your sufferin’ at an end.”
Fox picked up his book, opened it, set it back down again.
“You’re wrong, Virgil. You’re wrong to fuck me over this way, you’re wrong in your assessment of me, you’re wrong in just about every way it’s possible to be wrong. I was born to be a Fixer. I just didn’t know it until I met one.”
“Heard this tale.”
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this entire affair was its puzzling out-of-nowhere-ness. Had he done or said something recently to cause the old man some personal offense? Virgil had never acted this way toward him before. One day he’d been on the path to his dream, the next, this shit. If he could see what it was that his master was so upset about, he might have known how to fix it.
“That’s an expression I do recognize.” Virgil’s hand went to the hip where he kept his well-oiled, well-shined revolver. “You’re startin’ to look fuckin’ murderous.”
“Am I?” Murder was part of a Fixer’s work. You didn’t want to do it, but sometimes a situation demanded it. Sometimes you had to kill a person to solve a particular problem in exactly the way it had to be solved. You did it dispassionately, without malice but also without guilt -- and only if you had to. Fox was merely an apprentice, and had never had to.
Now, though, the old man was making himself into a problem that needed to be solved.
Could he do it, Fox wondered? Could he murder Virgil if that’s what it took to make him a Fixer? And how would that work? Could he work a way to force Virgil to accredit him first? Maybe if he could do that part, then the murder wouldn’t have to happen.
Virgil rose to a half stand, unfastening his holster with his thumb. “Easy,” he said with some alarm, his hand on the grip of his pistol.
Fox looked down at himself. He looked at his legs, turned his hands over and looked at his hands, his wrists. What was it about his sitting still that caused the old man such alarm? Had he been thinking about murder before the old man reacted this way, or had his reaction caused him to begin to think about it? It felt to Fox like the latter, but it might have been the former. Virgil had always seemed to possess an unnatural capacity for sensing what a person was about to do. It was what made him such a good Fixer. It was what let him stay one step ahead of everyone else.
Fox didn’t have that in him, that nearly psychic sense of other people. It didn’t mean he would be a shitty Fixer; it just meant he would have to rely on the talents and qualities he did possess.
What would he do with Virgil’s body? Leave it in the desert.
How would he gain command of the money, weaponry, and chrome hexcerasaur? He had limited access to all of these things now, but if the old man were gone, he would need access to all of these things on an administrative level. The eye scanner that unlocked the terminal access in the cockpit didn’t just scan your retina, there was also a small light test of your pupillary reflex that could determine that you were A) alive, and B) not under the influence of suggestion chems.
Virgil snapped his hand up and leveled his revolver at Fox. It flashes silver in the sunlight that fell through the window. “A’right now, that’s enough,” Virgil snapped. “You ingrate peckerhead, I ought ta throw you out the back of this trailer and be done.”
Fox raised his eyes from the pistol to Virgil’s face. “You won’t, though.”
“No I prob’ly won’t you sonofabitch but I fuckin’ well should. Stand up. Nice’n easy now, kid. Don’t make me put a hole in ya. Ain’t got no desire to see you dead, ‘spite’a what you must think of me now.”
Fox rose steadily to his feet. “Why are you doing this?”
“You know well. Turn around and gimme them skinny wrists.”
Fox did what he said. Corpses didn’t make good Fixers. And he figured he wanted to be dead even less than Virgil wanted to kill him. There was nothing else to do.
Behind him, a drawer opened. There came the sound of slinking metal and a smell that made him think of old nails and grease. With his hands behind his back, his master’s handcuffs clanked around his wrists, ratcheted tight and hard, pinching the skin.
Fox let out a little grunt of pain and surprise in spite of himself.
“Rough shit,” Virgil said, spinning Fox around to face him again. The old man’s eyes were close. He jammed a barrel of cold steel underneath Fox’s chin. “Some goodbyes go better’n others.”
Fox swallowed. “This one isn’t going very well.”
“No kidding.”
This would have been the perfect moment for his brains to explode all over the camper. The drama of that would have felt right, and the old man had always liked a good moment of drama.
Virgil gave him a rough shove, and he stumbled back against the door with a thin aluminum clatter. The old man shook his head. “You really want ta put me under? My own fuckin’ apprentice.”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody, I just want to be a Fixer.”
Virgil’s voice got low. “Fixers gotta hurt people.”
“Yes, but they don’t have to want to,” Fox shot back. “Specifically I mean I don’t want to hurt you. I have no idea what changed between two days ago and now, but we’ve got to work past it.”
* * *
DAZZY
On the road, the robot dinosaur and the trailer it pulled marched steadily toward the ambush spot. Moving about 20 miles per hour, Dazzy figured.
Tommy held a massive beam-weapon with two hands, its butt resting heavily against the joint of his hip. “Kubby,” he said, “put that fucking radio up near my face and hold the button down.”
Dazzy had to admit the man looked awesome in his tight jeans and black leather vest, both faded with a patina of sand. She liked his tanned, muscular arms, veins popping out of his forearms and branching down to the backs of his hands. She liked his long black hair that somehow always looked smooth and clean.
Kubby wasn’t quite as impressive. He’d been Fucksleaze muscle, once. A 350-pound bruiser. This year he’d gone to skin and bones like the rest of them. Except Kubby had these wobbles of loose skin hanging off him now in odd-looking places; his upper arms, his neck. Often there was a flat apron of pink skin just falling down over the top of his pants. Back when he’d been himself -- a guy as solid as a tree trunk -- she’d never noticed his weak chin, or the unevenness of his eyes, or the waddling way his feet pointed away from each other when he walked. Like now, as he walked up to Tommy holding out one of the radios.
Tommy leaned into it. “We in position?”
Dazzy couldn’t figure how Tommy remained this glorious physical specimen while the rest of them withered month by month into, like, leathery skeletons. It just felt, she didn’t know, fucking unfair.
“Ready,” she affirmed.
“Ready boss,” Kubby said.
The other 17 people up on the ridge with them were all within earshot, and they all generally agreed that yes, hell yes, they were ready, they were so fucking ready, let’s get this done.
Below them was the road. Hard-packed dirt interspersed here and there with flat shapes of broken asphalt. Off to one side of it stood a small ruin of roofless ur-world houses. These were non-structures of fallen walls, weeds growing through ancient brick piles, and wooden beams that had turned gray and fibrous in however-many decades of sun. There were only six of them -- unless that concrete plat with nothing on it had also been a house once. But six was plenty, since the gang only had three cycle raiders these days.
She lifted her binoculars and spotted Sykky down there, hidden on his solarcycle amid the ruins, his machine gun slung around his back. He looked up to the ridge-top and raised one arm. She gave him a little wave. They’d had their problems, but lately Dazzy and Sykky were getting along. He really was, it turned out, a genuinely sweet person.
He waved back and lifted his radio to his mouth. She heard the response through Tommy’s radio. “We’re all good down here.”
“Kubby,” Tommy said. “Get ready to start the clock.” One of Tommy’s little rituals. He liked to time how long it took the gang to win a battle. So far the record was 23 seconds.
Kubby’s thumb hovered over the GO-button on a handheld stopwatch with a cracked screen.
Tommy hoisted the beam-weapon and stepped toward the edge of the ridge.
* * *
FOX
Virgil shook his head sourly. “Work past it, he says. You wanna know what’s changed? I finally got up the guts to break Fox Cadena’s pumpin’ little heart, that’s what. Skeleton heart. Heart made’a bone. Ta tell ya what I’ve known for a long time. And there ain’t no gettin’ past it. Now I’m gonna give you a choice, ‘n you decide which way it’s ta fuckin’ be. You want to go on ta Camelot and get yer mother’s money in your hand and we part ways amicable? Or you wanna keep plottin’a murder my ass and get thrown out the back’a this here sand sloop? Nothin’ to your name. Glass storm cookin’ might actually reach the ground? Cuffed-up round your back so you can’t even take out yer dick to take a piss. It’ll be one or the other and you tell me. Which one, kid? Which one?”
Fox opened his mouth to speak, but before he could make a sound, a blazing red beam of heat pierced through the wall and sliced upward in a wild scooping motion, shearing off the top-left corner of the trailer and exposing the navy-gray sky. The corner lifted away, toppled over backward, and landed on the desert floor behind them with a thump that it felt very strange to hear so clearly; the protective layer that separated the interior of the trailer from the more dangerous world outside had just been removed.
Sparking electrical wires that had just been cut swung down toward Fox’s face.
“Shit.” He ducked beneath them.
“The hell’s got a striper out here!” Virgil threw his body into the captain’s chair, jammed his pistol back into its holster, and tapped furiously at keys and buttons while a red scroll of code appeared on the hexcerasaur’s control screen.
Fox slumped to the ground with his back against the door, burying his face against his knees, waiting for the next beam to hit. A breeze from outsize blew in and moved his hair.
* * *
DAZZY
The robot dinosaur came to a sudden stop. A decent-sized chunk of the trailer had been cut loose by Tommy’s heat beam and lay on the desert floor, its edges glowing red.
“Nailed the fuckers.” Tommy laughed. “Let’s go!”
Dazzy held the flare gun high and pulled the trigger. The gun coughed a stream of orange smoke into the air. The signal was up. Gunfire chattered all around her as the Fucksleazes opened fire on the trailer below.
On her left, the twelve year-old Pinny -- newest of the Fucksleazes -- fell back instead of joining the attack with the others. She covered her tear-streaked face with her hands and tripped over her own feet, falling flat onto her back and dropping her pistol onto the ground.
The raiders in the ruined houses gunned their cycles to life and rolled into view.
Pinny was saying, “I can’t … I can’t ...” Which, given the circumstances, was maybe understandable.
She’d be punished harshly for her cowardice but, like, that wasn’t Dazzy’s fucking problem. Or maybe, she thought, she could actually use it. The gang was stressed. The mood had been simmering for weeks. Longer. Primed to pop. If Tommy took his punishment of the girl too far, it could make the group turn on him at last. Half of them already spent their evenings murmuring about how the vivisection of Pinny’s parents had been one step too far, and asking each other if he was beginning to lose his grip.
Dazzy raised her bolt-action sniper and scoped the scene.
The huge reptilian machine was so beautiful and clean it was hard to believe it existed at all. It was even larger than she had originally estimated. What a fortune that thing must be worth. Not that she would sell it, once Tommy was gone and the Fucksleazes were hers. Not that she would dream of it. When she looked at that glorious metal dinosaur she had this sense of destiny burning inside her like, hey, the machine was hers. Meant for her. It was logic like the logic in a dream -- an instantaneous understanding that sprang from no specific thought process or idea. Just a knowing. She had prayed, and God had answered that prayer by putting the robot dinosaur in her path so she could have it.
She knew that these people, whoever they were, had not built the robot. Anyone who could create such a wonder would not be using it to pull a rickety old trailer around the wastes. No, this was found tech.
It --
The fuck?
Every cell of her body sunk into, like, another fucking dimension. She felt sick in her very guts.
The bullets weren’t hitting the camper. Instead, the robot ejected some kind of pulsing wave that shimmered and distorted the air directly in front of it. And the bullets were being caught in the field, little suspended black dots. Useless. Harmless.
“Holy FUCK. OFF.” Tommy screeched. He looked at the scene and just stood there for a helpless moment.
Then he re-hoisted the striper onto his hip and fired the heat beam again. A red line came instantly into existence. There was no sense of an acceleration from one point to another. Tommy pulled the trigger and the beam was simply there, stretching from the end of the weapon into infinity.
He swooped it toward the trailer again, shouting “Motherfuckers get striped!” almost in a hysteria. It was kind of pathetic, but Dazzy understood it. They were all on the edge of a collective panic all the time now. They needed this to go their way. The jokes around the fires at night (“Lizard on a stick?” “Don’t mind if I do.” “Cactus jelly?” “I thought you’d never ask.”) had gotten old.
Through her sniper scope she watched the solarcycle raiders descend toward the robot and the damaged trailer, kicking up massive plumes of dust. They wielded their machine guns in the crooks of their arms like modern-day knights with their lances.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Tommy’s red beam drew a shiny silvery line across the ground, melting sand into silica, then sliced again into the camper. It burned straight across the side and almost reached the giant words painted across the side of the thing -- words that Dazzy now could make out as
I S O L V E
PROBLEMS
Dazzy’s mouth pulled into a tight, dry line. That sounded familiar. There was something about that phrase. She’d heard it before. Something. Something wrong. It was like a warning she’d received a long time ago and couldn’t now remember.
And remember, Danielle, lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub.
Lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub. The cow jumped over the --
What the fuck was it again? Come on, bitch. Remember.
* * *
FOX
Fox’s body jerked in startlement as the beam buzzed into the trailer just a foot or so above his head. It was one thing to know something bad was about to happen, but it was something else to prevent yourself from reacting to it. In fact the anticipation probably made the startle response worse.
It only took a second for Fox to find himself, suck in a breath, and shout “Striper! Defensive measures!” He rattled the handcuffs against the door as loudly as he could. “Throw me the goddamn keys.”
The beam was moving slowly from the rear of the camper to the front, but for now it was still right above him.
Virgil twisted his head around. “I bet you’d like that, wouldn’tcha. Hell no, kid.” He nodded at the beam burning across the interior of the camper as if just acknowledging its existence. Then swiveled back to the monitors. “These bushwhackers gonna be sorry as hell they tried this shit on me,” he muttered. His hands moved across the console.
“You can’t leave me defenseless, here.”
“Ain’t defenseless. I’m defendin’ ya.”
“Let me help you, Virgil. For God’s sake let me get my --”
The beam reached
-- gun.
the tank positioned above Fox’s cot, slashed through it, superheating the water inside. Steam and boiling H20 sprayed across the trailer, sizzled against the metal cabinets, hit the floor and sloshed down the aisle where Fox sat against the door.
He kept his head low as he pushed himself to his feet to avoid it, but the water bubbled around the leather of his boots. The heat seared across his feet. Water splashed up onto his leg, easily penetrating his pants and sticking the denim to his skin.’
Those wires still sparked above his head.
“Virgil!” He shouted it like a child crying out for his daddy, and felt nauseated even as the word burst out of his mouth. There was no one in the world who loved him. It was an awful thing to finally realize in that moment, but there it was. Even the one person he thought he could count on -- Drunk Virgil not withstanding -- had turned out not to give a shit. It was a childish feeling, one he felt embarrassed by, but in that passing nanosecond, with the possibility of his death now seeming very real to him, all he wanted was to curl up in his mother’s arms and feel her warmth pressing all around him.
Wanted to be safe and loved. Stupid. Like a little fucking kid.
He threw himself low beneath the spray of boiling water, landing with a little bounce on his cot, face down, his arms twisted behind him.
The air in the camper was hot and wet now. His next breath felt thick in his throat.
The old man didn’t even glance back. He just kept typing. And that was the right thing, Fox knew. It would have been ridiculous if the old man stopped commanding the chrome hexcerasaur to turn around in the middle of an ambush when Fox was actually fine.
But still.
It hurt.
Didn’t even look.
Fox pressed himself against the wall of the camper to get as far away as he could from the boiling waterfall that fell from the tank. The water supply was directly above his cot, and the ribbon of clear liquid splashed just beyond its outer edge, sealing him in place. From here he could have stuck his arm straight into the flowing water. Or a shoulder, since his arms were cuffed behind his back.
The red beam was shooting into the camper right above his head, still slowly moving forward. He buried his face as deeply into the blanket as he could. He closed his eyes. If that beam changed direction even a little, it could easily cut his head right in half. He exhaled and felt the heat of his breath spread against the blanket and float into his face.
This had been a reflexive move, jumping onto the cot. To avoid the pain of the heat on his feet he’d put himself a lot closer to the shit that was a lot more likely to actually kill him.
He began to think about scooting back off the cot, crouching in the water and just suffering the pain at his feet.
He began to think about the fact that this water going everywhere had gone beneath his cot and most likely damaged his books pretty badly.
He wondered if he could somehow hook his books, maybe with his feet, and slide them into a position where he could stand on them so he could both keep his feet out of the boiling water as well as get himself off this cot.
No, what he had to do, he realized, was get the fuck out of the camper and run.
He heard a sound that was like a creak and a snap combined into one short burst, and the bottom half of the water tank came fully unseparated from the top -- the part that was actually secured to the camper -- and the tank flipped downward and spilled 20 gallons of boiling water directly onto Fox’s back.
There was a moment when he felt its wet weight smashing him downward, but he didn’t feel the heat, nor the pain. And in that brief passing instant he felt relieved. His mind processed that this terrible thing had happened -- the water tank spilling its contents onto him. But there was no pain. He thought the heat beam must not have boiled all the water inside the tank. It must have only been heating the water it came directly into contact with. The rest, the bulk at the bottom of the tank, must have kept its original lukewarm temperature.
But that was wrong.
And when that impossibly short moment passed and his pain receptors caught up to the signals his nerves were sending them, he realized that the water that covered his back, his legs, that trickled around his stomach, slid along the side of his neck -- it was cooking the goddamn flesh right off his body. The pain was a deep white shrieking that exploded every other sensation and thought out of him. There was no escape from it. It was merciless. It was towering. It was the only thing that existed.
He couldn’t even scream.
It was no comfort to him that the beam was deflected away from the camper immediately by Virgil at the controls and the hexcerasaur outside. In his current state, that wasn’t something he could even comprehend.
* * *
DAZZY
The dinosaur robot threw itself in front of the beam. The red line of heat reflected off its mirror-like surface and careened away wildly, causing one of the ruined structures nearby to burst into flames. The bullets suspended in the shimmering fell unceremoniously onto the ground.
Dazzy realized that the gunfire had basically stopped.
She lifted her rifle and fired a bullet at the side of the trailer. “Keep firing!” she commanded. The rest raised their weapons, and the sound of gunfire surrounded her once more.
But again the bullets got suspended in the pulsing field the robot emitted.
Tommy, still firing the beam, screamed in wordless frustration. For a second he caught her eye, and the expression on his face was like, This is your fault, Dazz!
She didn’t know how that tracked, but whatever. (This was your plan, he would say. This went bust because your recon is for shit.)
Only it hadn’t gone bust yet. There was still a way to do this, there had to be. Because fuck these people. Dazzy felt angry that this incredible piece of technology had fallen into the hands of people so stupid as to be using it to pull them through exozones where they should, by rights, have been killed a thousand times over. Lucky, she thought. Lucky stupid assholes, whoever they were. They didn’t deserve to keep the robot. And they wouldn’t. And they didn’t deserve to keep their lives. And they wouldn’t keep those either.
And fuck Tommy for still being so physically perfect. What the hell was he eating? If he made it through this she was going to blow off his head when everybody got busy picking through the booty. Wouldn’t even be a sneak about it. The others wouldn’t like it. They would what-the-fuck-are-you--? They would oh-holy-shit-Dazz-are-you-out-of-your--? Some of them might even cry. But they would fall in line. It was time. Everybody knew it. Tommy probably knew it.
On her right, Kubby was holding his gun out but wasn’t actually shooting it. Instead he was just staring at the stopwatch. Dazzy wondered how much time had passed. 40 seconds?
The raiders on their solarcycles unleashed hell on the trailer, rushing it from three different directions. These bullets hit the fucking mark, punching into it, spraying bullet-holes across its walls.
A cheer went up, and on the ridge they fired with renewed enthusiasm. Uselessly, but with admirable fervor.
“Shoot at the robot?” Tommy proposed. Then, “SHOOT AT THE ROBOT.”
The Fucksleazes did.
Sykky down there on his solarcycle sped past the robot, raising his machine gun into the air in a victory gesture.
A rush of fear hit her. Sykky was about to put himself between the lizard and their bullets. No, she told herself. He’s okay. He’s okay. But the trajectory didn’t work. He was going to cross the line of fire. A friendly-fire accident could be about to take away one of the best people they had. Not only that, he was -- hell, he was Sykky. The guy who turned bad moods into funny, silly ones; who was always ready with a joke and an easy smile; who wasn’t so bad after all.
Unsurprisingly, the bullets had no effect on the lizard. Just like the heat beam, they bounced off, pinged into the dirt. They didn’t even leave a blemish on its gleaming surface.
Then something else hit her. If Sykky died here, rationality would fucking disappear when it came to assigning blame for this. A botched ambush was one thing, but if they actually lost people, and then Tommy pointed the finger at Dazzy? She could forget about taking control. She might have the chance to get rid of Tommy but after that they’d just kill her, too. Goodbye dreams of owning a metal dinosaur.
She still had her voice. “Cease fire! Hold fire! Stop fucking shooting!
For just a few seconds the gunfire stopped. Sykky ripped through the space that had just been filled with bullets, still holding his machine gun over his head. Safe. Sweet God, safe! Probably having no idea the danger he’d just been in.
He began to swoop into a turn around the opposite side of the trailer.
His head jerked to one side. Chips of his helmet sprayed into the air. His limp body fell to one side, and his solarcycle flailed skidding across the ground.
“No!” Dazzy said. It took a split second for her brain to process what she had just seen. He’d been shot by someone inside the camper. “Fuck,” she whispered to herself.
Heart-stomped by God. Fuckfuckfuck.
She felt sick.
Something else was happening now. The robot with a slight movement began to twist its body toward the ridge, reflecting the heat beam Tommy was still firing back up toward Tommy. The reflected red line sizzled up the side of the cliff in a creepily-smooth swing, somehow adjusting for the human imperfections of Tommy’s warbling aim.
She glanced quickly over at Tommy, who saw what was happening -- saw that glowing beam coming right back toward him -- but couldn’t seem to react. There was a stricken, nightmare expression on his face, his eyes bulging, his face slack. And Dazzy thought for fuck’s sake just take your finger off the trigger.
She wondered if her face looked much like his did in this moment. She thought it probably did.
“Tommy!” she yelled an instant before realizing she shouldn’t have said anything at all. She wanted him gone, and it was about to happen without Dazzy having to do it herself and without having to endure getting blamed for Sykky. If the robot took out Tommy now, her succession would happen naturally. The resentments that would come if she took him out personally wouldn’t even be a thing.
Come on, Dazzy.
Tommy looked sideways at her, his mouth open helplessly.
She looked back at him. Said nothing else. She made her face firm. Betray nothing, bitch.
Something hit him from behind, rammed hard into the backs of his knees. It was Pinny. The twelve year-old collapsed face-first at the edge of the ridge after the impact, her tears turning the dirt that puffed into her face to mud.
The beam blinked out, vanished from reality like it had never existed.
Tommy fell forward off the ridge and bounced savagely down the jagged rock formations of the cliff, his body cracking and flopping until he ended up motionless on the hard-packed road below.
The striper he’d been firing humped into the dirt at the rim, slid a few slow feet downward, then stopped, still within arm’s reach of the top.
Pinny pushed herself up onto her knees.
“Did you mean for that to happen?” Dazzy lifted her rifle in Tommy’s direction.
Pinny began to sob loudly as she crawled precariously forward to see over the edge. “Oh, fuck …” she whimpered.
Below, a pool of blood was forming under Tommy’s head. One of the raiders rode up and put the bike between Tommy and the robot to provide some cover.
“Dazz!” somebody else shouted. “What do we do?”
Bail. Run. Pile into the bus and let’s go.
She didn’t say that. She thought about how long it had been since they’d eaten something real, and about how much she wanted that robot, and about how long it had been since she’d just gotten to fucking kill somebody, and she said “Save your bullets. Wait for an opening.”
She glanced down at Sykky’s body. Look, what the hell was God trying to accomplish, here? Was this some kind of “Monkey’s Paw” situation? You’d get what you wanted from God, but He’d make you pay a price you didn’t know about, didn’t agree to, and didn’t like? This wasn’t her fault, she reminded herself. But fuckin’ Sykky. Aw, christ man, did that ever hurt.
The third solarcycle raider had circled around for a second pass and now approached the camper from the rear, firing her machine gun and howling like an animal.
Something mechanical clicked, and the hitch that attached the robot to the trailer unhooked itself with a little pop. It was all she could do to stop herself from moaning aloud. What new horror was the robot about to unleash that it needed to be loose?
The uneasy possibility occurred to her that perhaps she’d been wrong up in the flowglider. Maybe there really was no God. Maybe she’d imagined meaning where none existed. Maybe she was losing her fucking mind.
She stepped over to Kubby and took the radio from him. “Raiders hang back. Hang back. We need to rethink what we’re fuckin’ doing here.”
The great metal lizard flashed forward with startling speed, came around and met the third raider as she steered around the opposite end of the camper. All Dazzy could do was helplessly watch as another Fucksleaze got erased. This one rammed by the robot, who butted the flat of its spline-spiked head into the side of the solarcycle. The cycle skidded off to the side of the road, but its rider didn’t go with it. She’d been cut in half by the dinosaur’s spikes. With a little toss of its head it threw the upper part of her body soaring thirty feet into the air, a pinwheel of blood and entrails flipping end over end until the force of the throw began to visibly pull out her organs. Her helmet fell off, revealing the contorted expression of surprise on her dead face.
Down below, Tommy moved. He raised himself onto his knees, and Kappy, the last surviving raider, knelt down and tried to help him up. Dazzy could see that they were talking to each other. It looked like Tommy tried to gesture up to the top of the ridge, but suddenly twisted in pain. Broken arm? Broken ribs? And Kappy was moving his hands like, Tommy? Get onto the back of this fucking solarcycle right fucking now.
Neither of them seemed to notice the robot walking slowly toward their position.
The raider held his hands against Tommy’s head. Trying to stop the flow of blood, Dazzy figured.
Dazzy raised her fist to get everyone’s attention. “Ready,” she whisper-shouted. She had the feeling that if she had really shouted it, the robot would have heard her somehow. And would have moved itself back into a proper defensive position.
It seemed like the angle was important for the robot’s shimmering suspension field to work. It couldn’t exist everywhere at once. When it was blocking the attack from the ridge-top a few moments earlier, the raiders coming from different directions got past the defenses and riddled the camper with bullets.
If she was right, now that the robot had left its previous position to take out Helly on her cycle, and then started moving toward Tommy and Kappy, the trailer should be vulnerable again.
“Fire!” Dazzy hissed.
She directed her aim on the front right corner of the trailer. On the spot where the bullet had come from that had taken Sykky down. Had to be that spot. That had been the bullet’s trajectory. No way to tell if somebody was still in that spot, but somebody had been about 20 seconds earlier. So it was a good place to start.
She fired. The other Fucksleazes followed. This time their bullets peppered and rocked the trailer violently back and forth.
God. Finally. Raining hell on those lucky assholes with full-scale bullet-storm felt so incredibly satisfying. She imagined bodies inside. Let’s say four. Let’s say a mom and dad and a little miss and a little junior. Let’s say eight years old. Twins, why not? She imagined those bodies being shredded to pieces by little pieces of metal moving at 2500 feet per second. That made her smile.
She bolted another shot into that corner.
Then another.
She began to laugh. When they were gone, the robot would stop. Somebody was controlling it. It’s not like it was alive. It wasn’t even automated, its behavior was too sophisticated for that. This was no automaton performing simple tasks. And when everybody in that trailer was dead she’d enter that piece of shit box of metal and start figuring out how to control that spectacular piece of supermachinery for herself.
The robot suddenly changed direction. Leaped against the rocks, came up the side of the cliff with absurd speed.
“Fuck! Off!” Dazzy shouted in surprise, mimicking Tommy’s outburst from earlier.
How fast was this thing moving? 60 miles an hour? 70? Up the side of the fucking rock cliff!
Then it was among them. It curled over the top of the ridge like some kind of maniac animal God. Sunlight reflected off its burnished chrome surface and flared into her eyes, leaving her momentarily blinded. Some of the other Fucksleazes were screaming. Some ran.
At 15 feet tall it towered over them. It had Pinny Fucksleaze trapped beneath one claw. She kicked her legs and squirmed her back against the dirt, trying to squeeze free.
Then it began to speak. There was no mouth on its pointed, featureless face, but a great rumble issued from it anyway, sounding simultaneously baritone-deep and hideously screeching, like two huge slabs of steel being scraped against each other with incredible force. The words boomed into her. “Y’all bushwhackin’ fuckdummies really loused this venture, didn’tcha?”