Tough Rabbit of the Prairie
----------------------------------------
A meager ray of light pierced the plastic shutters and made the Forlorn pilot squint, his body burrito-tucked within a snug comforter. He tried to straighten. His hand wandered over the pedestal table near the sofa. Looking for the switch, he only found a spilled brick of gin. Dropping his head against the backrest raised a cloud of dust.
White-hot fingers clutched Miles’ heart. Another coughing fit made him giddy. Blood tainted his shady palm. The foul smell added to the menthol cigarette smoke made him feel nauseous.
The quilt slid over his shoulders and hips, he managed to stand up. He was naked like the woman sleeping on his bed—an extinguished cigarette at the edges of her lips and a magnum of soju as a stuffed bear. With a heavy step, he walked to the bathroom. The dim lights surrounding the circular mirror turned him into a ghost; the blood on his chin, an undead. He was surprised to see his reflection because the combination turned him into an appalling homovorus.
“A vampire in Nouvelle Patrie? What a silly idea…”
Miles felt the scars running from his neck to his forearms. The same rosy gashes stripped his entire thoracic cage, following his bones and muscles within once top of the art implants were grafted.
His gaze shifted to the black box wired to his sternum. The size of a flask, with transparent tubes linking its base to between each intercostal space, the life support weakly beeped. Several telltales lit up above the microcomputer on the front panel. On the small analog screen, a Wiggers diagram flashed red as an intense pain seized his chest. It traveled up his windpipe, and felt like vomiting a whole jar of acid.
Dizzy, Miles opened his swan-shaped medicine box to find it empty. The opiates he snatched on Old Dodge were gone. So did his box’s refill ampoules. The medi-shot, however, was lying on the floor and in the bathtub.
Behind, the blue-haired woman on the bed moaned. Miles turned around. Round marks dotted her tattooed thighs. “Always contestin’ for the greatest mess in the room, ain’t you, Jess?”
Miles came to his senses after a splash of cold water. He put on his washed-out jeans and his much too big yellow sweater, then left the suite. Going down the stairs allowed him to breathe cleaner air. The green Victorian wallpapers made him realize he was in his usual hotel on Bourbon Avenue. Used by the Auxiliaries, the bed and breakfast was also his personal spot for the time he wandered freely amid the Rings.
From the time before the scars.
When Miles stumbled in the lobby, dodging the faux marble pillars stained by the cigarette smoke, he was delighted to run into a familiar “face”.
“Top of the morning to you, Belvedere!”
Mr. Belvedere—a tall and strange robot-concierge with no head but a jar of yellow vinegar housing three Brussels sprouts used as makeshift batteries—came to meet him with a note printed on perforated paper. He greeted his patron with the worst Belgian accent of the Outer Worlds: “Good afternoon, Monsieur. From the Alliance, Monsieur. It’s wonderful to see you back after three years.” He then inspected him from top to bottom. Judgment could be guessed by the wired sprouts’ twirling dance.
“Spare me that posh look of yours…” Miles replied, grabbing the memo where the large characters kept fleeing the two dimensions imprisoning them on the document.
“Allow me, Monsieur…” Belvedere interjected before Miles, queasy, gave back the creased paper with a shaky hand. The voice came from a hole in the robot’s throat: “Let me see… The note suggests that your ship, the… Forlorn Hope, is to be grounded for several weeks.”
Miles only managed to gag. A discomfort made him reach for his chest-box.
“Monsieur should get some rest rather than Miss Webber’s company. Monsieur should also know that Monsieur is free to use a more comfortable suite. The one Monsieur used to book when Monsieur’s life wasn’t a cattywampus.”
“Belvedere…” Miles coughed.
“Oui?”
“That’s a lot of ‘Monsieur’ before brunch…”
Seeing his guest indisposed, the concierge cut the conversation short. The Brussels sprouts shivered, and he bowed. With a wave of his plastic hand, he then ordered a cleaning robot-maid to bolt upstairs.
Outside the hotel, the halogen spotlights overlooking Bourbon Avenue and its wrought-iron terraces had just switched to the evening hour. On this artificial spring day, the main avenue of the walled city was bustling with life. Sitting at the patios of the cafes, the bourgeois—with their floppy hats long out of fashion on Mars—were discussing the conflict’s latest news.
The former militia, henceforth wearing the gray uniforms and steel armor of the Freedom League, patrolled the streets or loaded the last stocks of food and equipment that merchants were forced to make available to the war effort. Robots included.
The robotic question remained delicate in the Rings. On Mars and the other moons before Jupiter, the androids and other AIs of the net, were considered consumer-citizens when they met certain conditions of autonomy. Alas, the economic viability of the protein and tholin agricultural production, as well as the petrochemical industry, relied on robotic enslavement. The Rings had preferred to go to war than to be ruined.
But the state of the Techno-Union wasn’t ticking over Miles’ mind this evening. Because if he didn’t refill his synthetic heart within an hour, he’d probably die in a short and gruesome way. Fortunately, a pharmacy was just around the corner between a Chinese laundry and a Black Eye Specialist barber shop.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Edith?”
Miles entered the white-fronted drugstore covered with a mutant ivy whose leaves turned blue as the stems climbed towards the suspended balcony.
As he closed the door, the little bell rang again, and an old lady with large glasses emerged from a botanical wall wrapping her counter. “Miles. Miles Villanueva…” she croaked, adjusting the gold-rimmed frame far too heavy for her flattened nose. She looked like a half-asleep tarsier in the foliage of a tropical forest. “Glad to see you in person again after all those years sending you food packages with no Return to Sender. How are you, pumpkin?”
“As bad as ever,” Miles replied as he strode through the shelves once filled with Concentrate cereals, Koogle jars and Pizza Spins.
The pharmacist grunted and disappeared behind her green counter for a moment. A drawer slammed. Miles heard her painfully push the door separating her from the store. Hunchbacked and curled up like a dried old petal, Edith LaFleur limped more than she walked. The blue vial she held firmly in her hand nearly jumped to the ground several times.
“In that case I have bad news for you: I don’t have any more analgesics. Those sons of a bee sting—I mean, those ‘good soldiers’ of the Cause—they requisitioned everything—I got nothing left! Nothing but a last light bulb for your chest-box.” She pointed to a chair by the window. “Sit and lift your pullover, pumpkin.” Miles sat down in the creaking stool and lifted his sweater, revealing the black box grafted onto his sternum to the grimacing pharmacist. “This looks nastier than I thought.”
“They were kind enough to put it there—ouch!”
Uncapping the tank valve, one of Edith’s dozens of multicolored stone rings caused a static discharge that cut off Miles’s breath.
“Don’t be a weenie,” the gnome said, opening the canister with her teeth. “It repels the plastic and metal parts clogging your arteries. Without it—and me, you’d be dead.”
“That’d be a relief.”
“Not on my watch! By the way, you should eat a little more—something other than your jerky crap and coffee. My friend Donnie says coffee doesn’t feed. He’s right. Look at you! You look like a baby bird. A very gnarly baby bird!”
“Pot, meet kettle…”
“Insolent!” She closed the life assistant’s flap so violently that Miles retched. “I ain’t Cheryl Ladd but at least I don’t smell like menthol cigarettes, gin, and sadness,” croaked Edith as she tapped on the box.
The latter beeped and the buzzing of a filter was heard. Miles always compared his life assistant to a coffee machine during this crucial step. It helped him to handle the tremendous pain occurring when his blood stream around his lungs and heart welcomed the icy mixture.
“The Rings smell alike,” he coughed, and nearly collapsed if the pharmacist didn’t stay close to catch him.
Edith helped him put his sweater back on, then patted him on the shoulder. “The Rings reek like oil, powder, and stupidity.”
“Speaking of gunpowder, a crowd is getting hot under the collar outside.”
A posse had gathered at the tram stop in front of the drugstore. Dozens of men, mostly laborers and onlookers, had formed a troop around a small figure no bigger than a child who was backing up to Edith’s window.
“Really?” Grabbing a handful of Old Trapper Beef & Cheese and a licorice stick from an adjacent dresser drawer, the old pharmacist grunted. “Oh! They finally got to her. The dagnabbit devil…”
Miles straightened up. “Her?” he asked as he let the apothecary fill his back pockets with carcinogenic snacks.
“The Freak.”
“A Freak?” Miles stuck his nose to the glass. Outside, three freighter pilots were taking on a mutant from Amalthea. Her duster floating in the ill wind, the giant Dutch rabbit kept her cool, refusing to reach for her gun. Any sudden move would result in her being crucified against Edith’s ivy.
“They’re gonna lynch her…” the pharmacist prophesied through her licorice stick.
“I’d put my Martian dollar-credits on the March Hare,” Miles replied, turning his gaze to the Smith & Wesson Model 459 still in the Freak’s holster. “I ain’t no expert but this looks like a Techno-police weapon. Saw the ad in a babes’ magazine.”
“I don’t want your Monopoly money—but, I’ll leave you some sweet potatoes for free…” Edith concluded, crossing her arms.
“Deal.”
“She’s knee-high to a grasshopper. Civet’s back on the menu tonight.”
“Wait for it…”
Miles didn’t have to wait too long. Far too slow, the pilots appeared to be no match for a federally trained Freak-Bunny. The first of the three bullies hadn’t raised his shotgun that they all twirled around before collapsing backwards onto the tram stop’s boards.
“Smoothly handed…”
The crowd immediately fell silent as the deadly Techno-Cop, gun in hand, glared at those who hadn’t already made a run for it.
“I guess you were right. Those people should stop dipping in her Kool-Aid…” Edith growled, pointing with her chin at the mob that was gathering again. “But I tell you, without help, she will swing around a lampoon soon enough!”
“Here we go again…” Miles sighed before grabbing a jerky stick in his back pocket, where the pachinko ball still slept. Unwrapping it, he took the direction of the door.
“Good boy…” Edith whispered.
Outside, jeers rose from the crowd attracting the attention of soldiers. The Freak had pressed herself against the wall of the pharmacy and tried to hold at bay the most vehement individuals. But the latter came closer every second, weapon in hand too. In spite of her shooting skills, she wouldn’t stand a chance against so much hatred.
Lying with his arms crossed against the doorpost of the drugstore, Miles whistled. All eyes turned to him, and soon a murmur ran through the crowd. The less alcoholic of the townspeople seemed to recognize him and spread the word to the troublemakers. In less than a minute the horde silently dispersed, turning their back on their way like they just saw a ghost.
“You made them eat their birth certificate…” The Forlorn pilot bit into his beef jerky before jamming it into the corner of his lips. Chomping, he turned to the mutant: “Bad time for Techno-Cops in the Rings. Even the Marshalls all quit to join the Cause.”
“Pinkerton,” the Freak rectified as she sheathed her gun after putting back the safety.
“Yet your iron screams ‘Federal Police’.”
Wiggling her pink nose, the young Freak approached Miles. Almathean mutants were often described by travelers as malformed and covered with sores from their mutations. This short lady, on the other hand, appeared to be the cutest anthropomorphic rabbit Solaris ever gave birth to; her silvery weapon and suspicious look aside.
That same look stepped upon Miles’ face. “Tarnation!” she said, her eyes wide open. “A lot of people thought you were pushing up daisies. Including myself.”
“Guess y’all wrong.”
The Freak finally introduced herself, holding out her hairy hand: “Clover. Clover Watercress. It’s an honor meeting you, Red Swan.”