by Will Madden
“No, it’s true. I know my aptitude for it is uncanny. Like, move over Max Planck.”
“Absolutely, sir.”
“But ever since Mother died while I was working on the high school science fair . . .”
“Oh, I know, sir!”
“I just couldn’t science fast enough to save her and get the blue ribbon.”
“But you tried!” The skiapod bobbed encouragingly, his eyes enormous and bright. “Curing a genetically-engineered master-virus is a lot to ask of a seventeen-year-old. And please consider: after all these years, there’s still no treatment for it today.”
“Because I stopped doing the work! Anyways, that’s my Achilles heel. I have to rely on you to do science for me, even though you are the housekeeper and an endangered species.”
“Oh, Master Victor, think of me as an asset, not a liability.” Mori laid both hands over his heart. “Since the time of Alexander the Great, my people have been hunted across the globe with extreme prejudice. Murder parties of thousands would venture into a haunted jungle just to track down and slaughter a handful of us. Today, I don’t even know if any others of my kind are left.”
“I could put a research team on it.”
“I’ve done my best not to find out, so I can’t betray them under torture.”
“Oh, I see. Well, as regarding my problem then.”
“What I’m saying is, thirty-five years ago, your father and saintly mother took me in and entrusted me with the great responsibility of doing every last little thing in their vast household.”
“That was pretty nice of them.”
“Yes, it was. I served them over the course of three gang wars, while everyone else was under suspicion of treachery. Think of their faith in me! Instead of being ostracized and humiliated, I was allowed to feel I had value.”
“Father is still kind of a prick, though.”
Mori’s childlike smile appeared. “Your family—you, Master Victor—have permitted me a purpose in a world that rejects me.”
“So, you are saying you do what you do out of gratitude?”
Mori giggled playfully. “Not at all. What I mean is, the moment my ties are severed with the Cumins, I’ll either be executed as a monster or cut up as a science experiment.”
“Experiments? Oh, dear Mori, what would anyone ever want to know about you?”
“As a skiapod, my genetics provide me with only one leg. Which means I don’t have a crotch. Haven’t you ever wondered where I keep my genitals?”
“Just blown. Mind totally blown.”
“My point, sir, is you don’t have to respect me for what I do for you.”
“I just assumed you were just asexual, like a smurf or Santa Claus.”
“Because if the Purple Onion is ever killed in pursuit of his rather dubiously-defined vendetta—”
“God damn it, Mori! I’m the Violet Storm!”
“. . . my options are either a painful death or decades of public degradation as some kind of circus freak. So I literally have no choice but complete dedication to you and the success of whatever off-kilter plans you hatch.”
“Geez, Mori. Knowing that really does put my mind at ease.”
“You are very welcome, Master Victor!”
The Purple Onion fired a finger pistol at Mori’s hologram. “I know that now!”
The two laughed heartily.
EPISODE FIVE: The Keening at Club Towers
THE PESTILENCE TURBO-BOOSTED back into downtown Dodoville. Emergency repairs to Brum’s engine had made his mount battle ready again but not highway reliable, so Heckley, Abhoc, and Bubo towed the giant mare on a flatbed while Brum sat like Napoleon in the saddle. The trailer was decorated with flowers and a banner that read LONG LIVE THE HORSELORDS. The lettering was freehand, and the reverse side promised 10% off any carton of cigarettes with a purchase of a cinnamon broom. The floral arrangement featured rustic wildflowers with muted golds, dark greens, creams, and cerulean blues, all quite tastefully set out.
The Peers of the realm arrived in the Siding, a municipal district nestled inside a meander of the River Dodos. During the mid-twentieth century, it had been home to the local aluminum industry, whose gangland bosses ruled Dodoville with an iron fist—so to speak. Around the time of the Zahzian War, the impresario of the Mountebank Theater, himself a brutal crime lord, drove the metal workers out of the Siding and used the thick-walled buildings to defend his own interests in the city, including venues for the most lavish entertainments in Sporqia.
Today, Club Towers was the last remnant of either empire. (And it was only one building: that thing across the street was a parking garage.) Ostensibly built as a storage silo, it had stood sentinel in the gang wars over a choke point along the river. Now it simply housed nine dance clubs stacked one atop the other.
Its most conspicuous feature was a ramp that wound around the outside of the building like a barber’s pole. At the start of the evening, you rode a crystal elevator to the top and worked your way down, or if you tended to gain energy as the night progressed, you started at the bottom and partied your way up. Halfway along your journey, you’d meet your soulmate and fall in love. Soon you’d learn you were traveling in opposite directions and never see each other again. At any point in this divine comedy, you could vomit off over the side of the ramp into the moat below.
“Admit four, please,” said Abhoc at the gate. Here in the club lighting, the metal cone on his neck looked like a popped polo collar.
“Appropriate attire only,” said the bouncer.
“We’re wearing nothing but leather pants and riding boots,” said Abhoc. “This is exactly appropriate.”
The bouncer pointed behind them. “I’m talking about your companions. No one is allowed in here wearing a bit and bridle. Otherwise, we get perverts.”
“This is a war hammer,” Heckley explained, raising his weapon.
“And that meets dress code. But the practice of bondage is illegal in Dodoville where alcohol is sold. I don’t make the rules, I enforce them.”
The riders glanced at each other. Brum nodded.
“I think we’ll just admit ourselves,” said Abhoc.
The bouncer sighed. “Suit yourself.” He pushed a button on his wristband. The steel portcullis behind him slammed shut, and a two hundred pound bar of solid oak slid into place to shore up the inside. “Now are you gonna go quiet, or do I have to call upstairs for them to start boiling the oil?”
The Pestilence huddled.
“Suggestions?” asked Brum.
“Seige Warfare 101,” said Abhoc. “We hew down that statue over there with our laser-axes, then we can load it on the flatbed and use it as a battering ram.”
“Too many steps,” said Heckley. “Let’s just harpoon that oak bar with our rope guns, then pull out the gate with our turbo thrusters.”
“That moat is like three-quarters puke,” Abhoc observed. “Why don’t we fill it into balloons and lob them over the walls? Eventually, the smell will make them open up from the inside.”
“These are all great ideas,” said Bubo softly, “but I have a better way. Ker-poo-to-tweet!”
Mandi Dugin got off the trolley outside Club Towers, the Babylonian edifice that rose like a vulgar gesture toward heaven. At the base, the moat churned with discarded cocktails, broken glass, torn clothes, heelless pumps, even an ear or two. Here in Dodoville, this is where you came to dance, to drift through the scent of cologne tinged with fresh perspiration, to reunite with friends and forget yourself in the close press of strangers.
It had been a year since Mandi had gone out on the town. A year since the Archivists made their unexpected stop at her apartment. She and her boyfriend, Sven, had been making dinner when she ran out to the grocery for some garlic. On her return, the shopkeeper downstairs said he’d seen the strange men in monks’ robes making the climb up to her floor.
“I dunno if they took anything,” he’d said. “I know better than to let them see me twice.”
Her first thought: they had requisitioned her grandmother’s antique rice cooker. It looked like an enormous alien saucership that might spin up into the sky at any moment and communicate across galaxies with flashing neon. Mandi might not have missed the cooker—for good reason, no one built them like that anymore—except it was all she had left of the plucky old woman who had raised her after her parents were killed in the gang wars.
During Botanicist Era of the ‘90s, the bloom of Dodoville’s culture attracted the attention of international collectors, for whom the relics of its long, eclectic history made excellent conversation pieces. When the Consortium of Tchotchke Merchants was formed, it promised to sell the city’s innumerable material oddities abroad to help fund exciting new municipal projects. But to do that, it had to catalog whatever treasures citizens had stashed away. It had to build an Archive. So if you were Dodovillean, you lent the Consortium access to your junk. To your history and your memories. To your privacy. To your entire sense of self.
In exchange, you might get a sports stadium.
Whoooo, go Pharaohs!
With relief, Mandi saw the cooker still bubbling away on the stove.
Then she found the receipt on the kitchen counter.
1 Nordic, 1.8m, 12.9 st, make of Brundtland era (II), v. good condition.
The monospaced font of a portable typewriter. The blotchy blue ink of carbon duplicate. Stamped with the seal of the Archive’s department of acquisitions.
1 Nordic . Sven.
She staggered over to the kitchen stool.
V. good in the trading card sense, i.e. not good, i.e. creases, discoloration, and some wear.
To which she thought “Fuck you, the Archive,” but also “Goddamn it, some crunches wouldn’t have killed you.”
But also: “How can Sven be a Dodovillean relic? He wasn’t even Dodovillean.”
Despite having slumped down upon the stool, she found herself strewn across the floor. Her body was emitting an awful braying sound she hadn’t been aware the human organism could make. She listened to it for a while.
And also: “Well, of course, a ganglord comes into your house and steals your property—what else is government for?—but not your people. Sven was people!”
Then also: “The past tense. Why am I using the past tense?”
The obnoxious noise, originating from somewhere between her ears, did not abate. If anything, it was getting louder.
Sven had left Trondheim in disgrace after getting caught corrupting the results of an important study on Picea abeis, the Norway spruce. Ever since the gangland regime of U Dodo’s Department of Botany was toppled, Dodoville had become the one place on earth where nobody batted an eye at someone being both a botanist and a retired criminal. For gang operatives, anyone who managed to stay alive till the dust settled had earned the right to rebuild their lives in peace.
Rebuilding is what he and Mandi had done. Something very close to a life together.
But why did the Consortium take him? What buyer would want a researcher who produced bad data? It didn’t make any sense.
For many months after the disappearance, Mandi could barely force herself to go outside, for fear the Archive might requisition something else while she was gone. (Although what was left to lose?)
But then the Purple Onion had begun his war on the Consortium and its Archive. On YouTube, she had seen the battered faces in dun-colored robes dripping hot tears on the doorsteps of the homes they had violated.
Once upon a time, you could not touch an Archivist on pain of death. Now someone was touching them. With a fist!
As the Archivists became less bold, ordinary people like Mandi were finding the nerve to look them in the eye.
What more defiant gesture to make against the Archive than to express joy again in public? To wear her slinkiest dress and dance in the company of others? Soon evil would be afraid to show its face in the light.
Did Mandi believe that? No. But it would be a pleasure to behave as if that day was coming.
For her, joy was an act of courage. Tonight she was taking back her life.
The Storm Cycle turned onto the streets of the Siding, the engine hammering like a hot summer rain on a corrugated metal roof. Over his spider silk bodysuit, Victor Cumin had donned purple riding leather with mint green and atomic tangerine trim. Running lights crisscrossed the chassis of his bike like a network of veins, and their hazy glow wrapped it in a luminous cloud that seemed to carry him over the asphalt.
As he passed, a raver whispered to his date: “Look, hon, it’s the Onion Chopper!”
As Victor pulled up to Club Towers, he could see the Pestilence was already inside: the flash of the turbo thrusters appeared like the light of the will o’ wisp as it circled one of the upper floors where shrieks and screams emanated.
Someone was probably serving free jello shots.
“ID please,” said the bouncer at the door.
“I’m the Violet Storm,” said the Purple Onion.
“I need some ID.”
Victor unzipped his motorcycle jacket to show the insignia on his chest.
“That is not a valid form of identification.” The beefy doorman stared off at nothing, chewing on a toothpick.
“You let the Pestilence in.”
“Who’s he.”
“Four men dressed like Vikings mounted on hooved quadrupeds. You can’t have missed them.”
The bouncer crossed his arms adversarially. “Which four?” he asked.
“They were the only ones.” Victor’s digital voice shook with extra reverb. “Don’t tell me I don’t know a thing I know!”
“They had ID.”
“They are a horde of anti-government guerrillas on jetpack horses. You’re saying they revealed their identities to you?”
The bouncer shrugged. “They said they’re not afraid anymore.”
Horace Brumfield. Martial Heckford. Bob Schyman. Only Abhoc used a true pseudonym. Even still . . .
“You sure they weren’t fakes?”
“I’ve been a bouncer a long time. I know all the tricks.”
Victor pulled something out of his chopper’s top box. “Here’s my ID.”
The bouncer squinted at him and shined a flashlight down at the card. He studied it forever.
“This is the photo of a man who has had plastic surgery to look like you, Mister . . . Vargas.”
“That is literally insane,” said Victor.
“Don’t tell me I don’t know a thing I know.”
No lie. The bouncer knew all the tricks.
Victor surveyed the tower. Even if he took out the bouncer, he’d never get past the portcullis: that thing had withstood battering rams during the Aluminum Age. He could rope gun up to one of the ramps, but then he’d have to face turbo horses without the Storm Cycle. Plus, he really didn’t want to sneak in. In fights like this, it almost doesn’t matter what happens, all anyone will remember tomorrow is your entrance.
What was the coolest entrance anyone ever made on a motorcycle?
He looked up into the sky.
Hagrid. The answer is Hagrid, right?
“Mori?”
“Yes, sir.” A staticky voice on his wrist comm.
“Fire up the Storm Fighter. I’m going to need your help.”
The Pestilence ascended the ramp around Club Towers at a walk, horses in a synchronized four-beat gait, heavy heads bobbing in half time inside their terrifying skull masks. The party-goers slunk aside to let them pass, their boisterous conversation falling silent in awe of the demons that had appeared unsummoned in their midst.
For almost a century horses had been banned within Dodoville. Over that time, stories were told and retold how in the ancient past, the horse had been an instrument of fright and terror. It had borne fire and sword to burn houses, slaughter children and livestock, steal wealth, and trample the holy images. Tonight, these towering and robust specimens of mythical monsters had leaped from the tousled dreams of the tip
sy revelers. Skintight silk armor wrapped the powerful limbs, and the musculature rippled beneath.
The knights rode high in the saddle, reins slack and faces straight ahead, so their dark countenance would not discourage curious on-lookers from their fill of the spectacle. A reckless few even stretched out a hand to feel the hot air snorted from the nostrils, to touch the coarse hair of the tail before it flicked away in annoyance.
“Okay,” whispered Abhoc into his headset, “I understand beating up the cops. I understand smoking out those rich pricks in the suburbs. I guess people on the train make sense too, on account they ain’t making the commute on horseback as is gentlemanly. But why are we terrorizing people out just having a good time?”
“Just a good time?” spake Lord Brum. “Any joy that giveth not strength to resurgent Camelot striketh a blow ‘cross the equine jaw of the ‘Folk. For anyone who releaseth an endorphin into him’es system without rage in him’es heart, whosoever take-parteth in youth culture not in service to an uberlord but frolicke him a-mit theym who singen without frivol and squander him’es movement onto no profit: why, these be our most dangerful foe-ems.”
“I agree, m’Lord,” said Heckley. “Sack, sword, and saddle! But also, how so?”
“Do you think the Lord Harthur had time to enjoy himself when the evil wizard Symerlus stole the Sacred Grobbet from him’es table? Or when he challenged Sir Pontius to the joust at Gethsema Crossing? Or when Galahad fell ill with trolleprosy, and Lord Harthur reached out his holy hand to restore him’es virginity, bidding him whore no more?”
“Not during these times, Knight Commander,” said Abhoc, “but maybe after. Or before?”
Brum reined his horse so fierce, it whinnied as it came round. He glowered back at his men, the lines in his forehead reading like a prophecy of doom.
“Then for the mighty deeds God hath fulfilled through ye by sun’s witness, pay back to heaven with merriment ‘neath sign of the moon. Enjoy yourselves! That’s an order.” Here Brum smiled. “And by Christ’s spurs, hurt no one!”
“By bright Signo,” swore Heckley.
“By the sweet sands of Camelot,” cried Abhoc.