by Wol-vriey
The adrenalin rush from his struggle with Rachel was however countering the drug’s attempts to cloud his thinking. He fought to clear his mind further.
He glanced at the fallen syringe—still half-full of yellow liquid. He was relieved Rachel hadn’t pumped him with the full dose of whatever that was. Half was bad enough.
He finally looked at Rachel, lying on the floor with the huge red gash in her neck.
Malone hated having to kill her, but it was either his life or hers. And he still wasn’t out of the woods yet.
There was still Frank, Rachel’s besotted partner to contend with.
Frank was out now, once again seeking a kidnappable heiress.
Malone needed to be well away from here before Frank got back. He was in no condition to single-handedly take on Rachel’s co-psychopath.
Ha ha, he thought, I don’t have the stomach . . . no, the liver, for conflict at the moment.
Try as he might, he couldn’t find the joke funny.
Okay, time to go, he thought.
He sat up and cut his feet free, then swung them down onto the floor. He took care not to slip on the blood sloshing out of him like water from an overfilled bathtub.
He had no idea where either his clothes or shoes were.
Fuck ‘em, he thought. My underpants will do. They’re original Yves St. Laurent’s. I’ll never have a better chance to show ‘em off.
He however found a blaster on a side table.
Gun in hand, Malone paused at the lab door and looked back over the room. Rachel lay like a broken red doll, which his addled mind found interesting.
He remembered something.
“Her mother asked me to bring her back,” he said aloud. “But that’s impossible—she’s dead weight, and I can hardly carry myself.”
He decided on a compromise.
Vaguely aware that he was thinking odd and behaving irrationally, Malone nonetheless knelt in the blood pool surrounding Rachel, and used her circular saw to cut off her head.
While dividing flesh from flesh, his thoughts whirred in his head, as blurred as the tool he wielded. His brain seemed itself to be spinning, twisting his perception as it rotated.
Confusion threatened to overwhelm him at any second. His resistance to it pushed him to the limits of his sanity, then temporarily beyond it.
For those moments, the spinning metal saw became his truth, his reality the bits of spine and flesh it splattered his already messy body with.
He took it all in his stride, in this strange place he existed now, his zone of not-quite-insanity.
Rachel’s head separated from her body.
Malone stood, sawn-off-head in hand, staring down at the rest of her.
“Your mum will have to make do with getting just this much of you back,” he told Rachel’s head. “Frank can have the rest.”
He mused a while, then added: “He’s certain to eat your liver in mourning. But he loves you, so maybe—if you’re lucky—he’ll screw your corpse too. Sex after death is better than none at all.”
He had a brief moment of perfect mental clarity.
I’m thinking consolidated nonsense, he thought.
Then the drug haze refilled his brain and nonsense made sense again.
Carrying his gory trophy by its hair, Malone turned and stumbled out of the lab.
***
Emerging, he discovered he’d been incarcerated in one of the warehouse’s upper cabins. Leaving a trail of bloody footprints, he tramped down the metal staircase to the ground level.
Downstairs, another delivery of robots was in progress, with the same pair of Korean delivery men rolling coffin-shaped boxes across the warehouse on hand trucks.
Both men pulled up dead in their tracks when they sighted Malone shuffling towards them.
Malone held up Rachel’s head so they could see it. He waved his gun at them.
The Koreans gaped at him. One of them pointed to his ripped-open abdomen, from which blood still dribbled down into his crotch. “You need a doctor, man.”
“Just don’t fuck with me,” Malone retorted and walked past them.
***
It was about noon.
Malone trudged down Commercial Street, across John Fitzgerald Expressway, and under The Grid. Once under dragon-proof cover again, he set off south.
He was headed for Chinatown Park, to Ma Cure’s place. Ma would be able to fix him up.
With luck, and assuming he didn’t keel over from pure exhaustion, or run mad from the chemicals fighting to subdue his will, he’d get to Ma’s pagoda by nightfall.
His mind was fuzzy, he didn’t trust himself to not crash a car if he hotwired one—assuming he could find one that worked.
Naked except for his briefs, carrying Rachel Fischer’s severed head in plain view, belly yawning open, and so smeared in blood that he looked painted red, Malone shambled through the city.
The few people he encountered got out of his way in a hurry. The few of those that he knew added this current incident to his legend.
***
The blood on Malone attracted a single incident of dino attention.
It happened in Faneuil Hall Marketplace—an area with a profusion of skyscrapers and condos. The buildings had been laid through The Grid, shattering the wiven shield in places, creating too many haphazard spaces for the grid-repair crews to effectively patch.
Past the North Market, a solitary pterodactyl launched itself from atop Quincy Market and swooped at Malone, thinking he was easy pickings.
Malone fried the dino-bird with a blaster bolt.
He ducked. Its burning body flew over him to crash into the road behind.
He looked back disinterestedly. The pterodactyl lay on its back, kicking and flapping in agony as it burnt. Several mangy dogs already waited impatiently for it to finish roasting so they could tuck in.
“Stupid bird.” Malone turned away again.
He lifted Rachel’s head and smiled at it. “I wonder what your super-hot mama’s getting up to now?” he said.
CHAPTER 17
Sara
The humming came again. This was what Sara Fischer really disliked about the Forks—their humming. Most of the time it was subliminal and she could ignore it, but at times like now, when they were feeding? It rose to a crescendo, an orchestra of tuning forks. An irritating atonal wall of sound.
(Though honestly, Sara couldn’t really call it atonal—Forks never hummed in dissonance, it was more a barrage of irreconcilable pleasances.)
And over the humming was the sound of an animal in incredible pain.
Sara grimaced. She’d been napping, but the noise had woken her and would make further sleep impossible.
She got out of bed and walked over to her window to watch the Forks feed.
A solitary terrified tyrannosaur was their lunch. The hapless reptile stood paralyzed by both fear and the Fork’s mental powers while they ate it.
***
Forks were just that. Human-sized kitchen cutlery now blessed/cursed with semi-divine powers. The other name for them was ‘kitchen gods.’
Like ordinary cutlery, Forks came in different compositions, depending on social status. Their aristocracy were gold. Most others were silverware. Then there were the tin and plastic servant categories.
Their normal position was prong-upward, with their ‘handle’ end floating a foot above the floor.
They had no hands or feet or facial/speech organs—their voices resonated from them like sound through water.
While male Forks were totally featureless, female Forks had breasts like human females. These hung in relatively human position, two thirds of the way up their bodies, just below the base of their prongs.
Forks fed by inverting themselves onto meat—’pronging’ it—and then absorbing it into themselves. They were indiscriminate eaters, feeding even on human flesh if there was nothing else available, and not being too particular if the provider was dead or still alive and unwilling to donate
him/herself.
As far as anyone could determine, Forks were indestructible, which, taken with their omnivorousness, made them extremely dangerous. Though they rarely attacked humans unprovoked, everyone generally kept their distance from them.
Most people—Sara included—regarded Forks with concealed disgust.
Forks were generally considered the de-facto rulers of Earth, if only because there was no other species—definitely not man or the dinos, or even the dreaded dragons—capable of mounting any sort of challenge to their powers, such as they’d so far chosen to exhibit.
***
Poised like they were being held by giant hands, the Forks on Sara’s lawn stabbed themselves into the tyrannosaur and dissolved its flesh away, absorbing it as they sank deeper into its body.
Sara counted sixteen Forks pronging the hapless dino.
The creature was mostly a mass of huge craters now.
It shrieked loudly. It realized that it was dying, and also that nothing it could do would alter that fact.
Sara shuddered. It looks like someone’s taking scoops out of it with a monster spoon.
The pronging process was doubly horrible because there was no bleeding—the Forks instantly absorbed all the blood their victim produced.
***
The tyrannosaur gave a piteous shriek and died. Its corpse remained standing, held upright by Fork psychokinesis.
A gold Fork tunneled all the way through its body, leaving a circular tunnel with shreds of meat dangling from its ceiling.
Sara was revolted and horrified. She turned away.
What scared Sara wasn’t the Forks feeding. No, it was the morbid parable that the animal they were eating represented.
T-Rex—the tyrant lizard—was the alpha dino, the creature everyone feared.
Shit, even the fucking dragons treated it with respect. It was a creature that asked no quarter, gave no quarter. Was believed incapable of fear.
If T-Rex, however, shrieked like a whipped puppy from dread of the kitchen gods, what hope did humanity have?
She shut her drapes on the feeding scene, forced her mind onto other thoughts.
How was Malone doing with rescuing Rachel?
There was a knock on the bedroom door.
“Yes?”
“It’s Jeff.”
Sara immediately brightened up. The one good thing that had happened with the kitchen gods arriving at her house was that they’d brought US President Jefferson Lincoln with them.
The knock came again. “Sara, are you in there?”
She quickly checked herself in her wall mirror. She looked okay. Jeff wouldn’t notice anyway.
Her heart beating like a schoolgirl on her first date, Sara let Jeff Lincoln in.
***
Jefferson Meredith Lincoln III was tall and beefy. He was handsome, with bright blue eyes and a face that had aged well. He was sixty-four years old, Sara’s age, and both his hair and mustache were now greyer than their original black.
Jefferson Lincoln, 48th President of the United States of America, was currently a prisoner of the Forks.
Two nights ago, when Sara had arrived home from her abortive attempt to ransom Rachel, she’d found a contingent of Forks waiting in her living room.
Sara had accepted their presence in her home with equanimity. She couldn’t exactly shoo them away. They were simply a fact of modern life.
Sara had been shocked to see Jeff with the Forks. He’d been just as surprised to see her.
The pair had rushed at each other and embraced.
“The President mentioned that he knew you,” Lord Tav said, while they kissed and wept. “We thought you might like to get reacquainted.”
Later, Lord Tav and Lady Yaz—the Fork heads—had told Sara in private why they’d brought the ex-president to her. “He is incredibly depressed. Please try to cheer him up. We’ll be very grateful if you do.”
As Jeff had explained it to Sara. “I’m their symbol that they’re running things now.”
He’d shrugged. “It’s a challenge too. Like, if they’re not in charge, whoever is should come rescue me.”
CHAPTER 18
Jeff
Forty years ago, Jefferson Lincoln and Sara Goldman had been college sweethearts.
Both political science majors, they’d planned to get married after graduation.
But then, Jeff, who’d graduated first, had joined the army and had been shipped to a base in Okinawa, Japan. Sara, still with two years of school to go, hadn’t been able to follow him.
Those two years had been long enough for her to meet and marry David Fischer.
Jeff had taken Sara’s dumping him badly. After two suicide attempts (which his parents hushed up), he received a honorable discharge from the army.
Jeff was however still emotionally traumatized.
His parents immediately rushed into looking for a woman to replace Sara in his affections. They hosted an endless series of parties, inviting all their friends’ daughters.
They were relieved when their son fell for Stacy Levin, daughter of Senior Senator from Michigan Martin Levin.
Immediately after the wedding, Senator Levin hired Jeff as his re-election campaign manager.
Jeff, reinvigorated by his new wife, put all his energy into the election fight. His father-in-law was re-elected by a landslide.
When Senator Levin returned to Washington, he took Jeff with him.
That was Jeff’s start in politics.
By putting one careful foot after another, thirty-four years later Jeff was sworn in as president of the USA.
Washington Burning. July31st, 2026 AD
Jeff had lost his entire family in the attacks that had destroyed civilization.
He still had nightmares in which he saw his daughter Chelsea (who’d been visiting Washington then), reaching out a bloody hand towards him, her body crushed under a collapsed East Wing wall. “Dad, promise me you’ll look after Derek and Jason for me.”
Jeff, his world reeling around him, had promised.
Then a dragon had smashed through the adjacent wall. Jeff’s bodyguards had rushed him out of the room just as falling masonry totally obliterated his daughter from view.
Jeff had never found his grandchildren.
Seared into his mind was his vision—as the helicopter conveyed him and his wife, First Lady Stacy Lincoln, to safety—of the White House imploding in on itself as a horde of fiberglass reptiles bathed it in flame and rammed their bulks against its stone.
What remained there now looked like Stonehenge.
***
They’d flown to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, through a world gone mad. The sky was filled with living, solid rainbows spurting fire and eating roast corpses. Down in the streets, extinct reptiles smashed into houses and pulled out people for food.
And those starship-sized black things overhead; were they really beetles?
Jeff’s plan was to get airborne in Air Force One, establish communications with military bases around the country, and mount a counterattack against the reptile invasion.
They met Andrews Air Force base demolished on their arrival. Everywhere lay the half-eaten corpses of pilots and ground crew, strewn between dead dinosaurs and the wreckage of F-16 fighter jets and choppers destroyed before takeoff.
Attacked by a spinosaurus, a taxiing C12 Huron had veered off the runway and crashed into the first of three parked Stratotankers. Both dinosaur and refueling aircraft had erupted into a humongous blaze that engulfed the base’s administrative buildings. The raging inferno turned nighttime to day, leaping be-tween buildings like it was alive.
Allosaurs and raptors stalked the carnage like marines seeking enemy troops. Most had blood-dripping human parts in their mouths.
Jeff surveyed the destruction in disbelief. To their right as they landed was an upside-down Bell Twin Huey helicopter. Balanced on its propeller, it looked like a one-legged metal chicken. Black smoke streamed from its inverted underbelly.
<
br /> The Huey’s dead crew hung out of its sides. Two still-living passengers screamed as a mob of raptors ripped them apart.
Heart in mouth, Jeff’s eyes scanned the base for the pair of presidential jets.
He saw them—neither would ever fly again.
One Air Force One lay on its back, wheels up in the air. The rear half of its fuselage was a melted silver puddle. The second Boeing VC-25 was burning fiercely. It exploded as the choppers landed.
Whilst refueling, they were attacked by tyrannosaurs.
Six of their eight choppers were destroyed.
Jeff’s and one other helicopter—that ferrying Secretary of State Isabel Harris—had managed to take off.
The sky around them as they fled the airbase was full of pterodactyls.
With ravenous pterodactyls hot in pursuit, they headed south, to Langley Air Base in Hampton, Virginia.
“It’s like a dinosaur version of Armageddon,” Stacy whispered in horror, as their pilot swooped the helicopter between the pursuing, harrying swarms of reptile birds, “Where did they all come from?”
Tears filled her green eyes, eyes evocative of the skin color of the reptiles milling around them. Her previously impeccable mascara was dissolved into black streaks on her cheeks. Her silver hair was a total mess.
Jeff was extremely worried about his wife. She had a weak heart, had just recently had open heart surgery. This was stress she didn’t need.
Thirty miles south of D.C., flying over Gilbert Run Regional Park, both helicopters were finally caught in a pterodactyl ambush.
Isabel Harris’s chopper plummeted like a bomb when several dino-birds got wedged into the propeller assemblage and jammed it.
As her helicopter fell, Jeff saw Isabel staring up at him, her disbelief paralyzing her ability to scream. Then the helicopter was obliterated from view by the sheer number of reptiles dive-bombing after it.