Seppukarian_NEW WORLD DISORDER

by George Mahaffey

  BOOM!

  A massive, robotic foot came down, obliterating the scenes of humans getting their asses handed to them by the scuds. The screen went dark, and then two red lights appeared, glowing like a pair of candles at the bottom of a cave. The red lights were the eyes on a hulking construct, a mechanized fighting machine … a mech. I watched in stunned silence as the thing stood to its full and terrible height, pivoting, seeming to stare right through me. What I remember most is how the mech made me feel. It wasn’t one of those shiny, newfangled ‘bots that the high rollers used to spit-shine their mansions and pilot their limos and hoversurfs. Nope, the thing on the link didn’t have a single clean line or polished steel baffle. It was less European sports car and more, throwback muscle machine from the sixties or the seventies or whenever the hell it was that people drove cars with enormous engines that got two miles to the gallon. I could relate to it because it looked like the kind of thing me and my old man might have tinkered on in the backyard shed during a warm summer night (if my father had actually been around all that much when I was a kid). The mech was bulky and rusted and looked a few bubbles off plumb, which, I suppose, was how America was at that point. Soul worn and rough around the edges, but still capable of kicking a little ass.

  The screen lightened to reveal that the mech was emblazoned with the American flag and God help me, as that music boomed again, my nose burned and my eyes got a little misty. Then the mech vanished, replaced with the words: THE MECH COMMAND IS LOOKING FOR A FEW GOOD OPERATORS. WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

  My throat went dry.

  My heart skipped a beat.

  Sitting there, staring at my crappy little wrist PDA, all I could think was hells yes I wanted to know a little more. I wanted to know oodles and oodles more, as much as anyone could possibly tell me about the mysterious Mech Command and the throwback ‘bot that was the star of the site. But before any of that could happen, I had other, more pressing concerns. Like the fact that I was in the process of committing a serious crime.

  2

  I probably neglected to mention it, but at the time in question, I was kind of a crook, although I preferred the phrase “master of the five-fingered arts,” which had a nice ring to it, the kind of thing you might put on a business card for instance. Anyway, I was the getaway driver and de-facto leader of a three-person cell that worked for an underworld honcho named Buddha Blades. For the last two years of the occupation, we’d specialized in ripping off alien warehouses and munitions vaults, although we weren’t above “liberating” supplies from the resistance if the opportunity arose. I guess you could say we were equal opportunity criminals.

  When I received the text on my PDA, I was seated behind the controls of a hoversurf, a bubble-topped three-person motorcycle with wings that was powered by twenty electric rotors (along with a small JATO bottle, a jet-fuel booster, in case we encountered a sticky situation). To my left was a green teddy bear doll named Mr. Berenstain (which once belonged to my younger brother Frank), and to my right was my partner in crime Jezmyn, “Jezzy,” a tomboyish chick dressed in camouflage pants and a tight black T-shirt that read “Talk Nerdy to Me,” who’d kick my ass sideways if she ever heard me refer to her as a tomboyish chick.

  Behind her was my sometimes disheveled and always loyal sidekick Spence, who was long on guts and short on common sense. The kind of guy who’d tell you how to build a clock if you asked him what time it was. We were hovering fifteen feet off the ground near the Port of Baltimore, preparing to deliver a stolen shipment of hafnium batteries to an alien thug named Alpha Timbo. While I was readying the hoversurf to land, Jezzy was pointing out all the ways in which I’d dropped the ball in cutting a deal with our boss.

  “The point is, if I’m risking my ass to go into Timbo’s lair, why shouldn’t I get twenty percent?” she asked, stabbing a finger in the air for emphasis.

  “Because our deal with Buddha was for ten percent,” I answered, which was true. We took ten percent and set aside another ten percent for orphans of the invasion.

  “No, it’s your deal. You’re the one that did it because you always cut the deals, which I find incredibly sexist.”

  “How is believing that men should always make the deals sexist?”

  “That’s the very definition of sexist.”

  “Well, what’s done is done, and the deal applies to both of us, right, Spence?”

  Spence, who was busy slurping down a packet of baby food, wiped his mouth, rubbed his generous midsection, and nodded. “That’s right, boss.”

  Jezzy ran a hand through her jagged, coal-black hair and held my look. “So, I want to make a new deal, Daniel.” She did that on purpose by the way. When she was pissed, she liked to call me “Daniel” instead of my preferred “Danny,” which was annoying. Daniel Deus was the name of someone much older than my twenty-three years, and it didn’t have a nice ring like Danny Deus, which everyone always said sounded like a superhero’s name.

  “So, if you want a new deal, go talk to him,” I replied.

  “And what approach do you suggest I take?”

  “Well, for starters, try a little intimidation. Nothing makes a man like Buddha Blades more uneasy than a woman who’s intelligent and hot.”

  “Great.”

  “So, all you need to do is pretend you’re both of those.”

  Her eyes narrowed to slits. “I swear I’m gonna punch you in the throat after this thing is over.”

  “You’ve got serious anger issues.”

  “Screw you.”

  I picked up my teddy bear, Mr. Berenstain, and manipulated his arms while making a reasonable facsimile of a bear’s voice. “Y’know that anger probably comes from repressing your true feelings, Ms. Jezmyn, including the fact that you’re secretly in love with Danny.”

  “I hate both of you,” Jezzy replied, swatting Mr. Berenstain in the head.

  “You’ve got to be super emotionally invested in order to really hate someone. Am I right, or am I right, Spence.”

  Spence nodded. “That’s just science.”

  Jezzy flipped us a middle finger, and I smirked, setting the bear down while thumbing the hoversurf’s joystick controls. The machine quivered and dropped to the ground. We dismounted and surveyed our surroundings, a swampy area fringed with reeds and dense foliage that lay at the edge of the port. In the distance, past a gravel reef and wooden walkway, was a massive collection of shipping containers and beyond that, the rusted carcasses of the marine ships that had been destroyed during the initial alien invasion.

  I whistled to Spence who popped the hoversurf’s trunk. Inside were twenty-four, olive-colored hafnium batteries the size of walkway pavers. The batteries weren’t much to look at, but they packed an incredible amount of energy inside a relatively small package. They were important because even though the aliens had been technically defeated, there were thousands of scuds all around the world who’d refused to surrender and were in hiding or staging hit-and-run attacks. The aliens were running out of ammo and fuel which made the hafnium batteries, the only thing that powered their ships, so valuable. Hafnium-178 is a seriously high-density material. It’s got fifty-thousand times the energy of an equivalent amount of TNT explosive, meaning you only need a little of it produce a lot of power. Basically, it’s the perfect material to make batteries out of. We’d heisted the batteries currently in our possession from a wrecked Syndicate glider five days ago (one that coincidentally belonged to Alpha Timbo), and wiped the tracking numbers off with an acid wash. If we were lucky, we’d be able to sell the batteries back to Timbo and his boys for a nifty little profit.

  Spence loaded the batteries into three rucksacks as I scouted our location. Satisfied that there was nobody lurking about, I pulled out a gunmetal-gray pistol, a hand-cannon I’d recently pried from the fingers of a dead Syndicate officer. It was shaped like an oversized human hand, two feet long, and as many feet wide. It had an unusual, ten-inch barrel and weighed about twelve pounds. I’d never fired the
damned thing, but I thought its sheer size might be enough to intimidate people.

  “What in God’s name is that?” Jezzy asked, pointing at the pistol while stowing two retractable sabers in sheathes strapped high across her back.

  “Sump’n Sump’n,” I answered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard that you can’t get something to work for you unless you give it a name.”

  “So … you’re naming guns now?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What does that name even mean?” she asked.

  “It means if somebody tries to screw with us, I’m gonna be packin’ a little sump’n for ‘em if you know what I’m saying,” I said with a wink, patting the pistol before sliding it into a holster I kept fixed near the small of my back. I’m not a big guy, a little over a buck eighty and two inches shy of six feet tall, so the gun weighed on me. I felt a twinge along my spine but stiffened so that the others wouldn’t think the pistol was making me gimpy. Appearances are everything when you’re a thief, and folks can turn on you in a second if they begin to believe that you’re incapable of carrying out the mission.

  Jezzy cast a wary look in my direction. “When Timbo finds out that we’re selling his batteries back to him, there won’t be enough bullets to shoot our way to safety.”

  “Relax,” I said, grabbing one of the other rucksacks. “He’ll never know. There aren’t any markings on the batteries so they can’t be traced. Right, Spence?”

  Spence grinned and nodded. Jezzy hoisted the last rucksack, and I tapped a key on the fob that remotely controlled the hoversurf. The machine rose up into the air, and I pressed the red button for conceal and recall. One tap commanded the hoversurf to locate a safe location and wait for a further command. Two taps meant we were in deep shit and would recall the craft which would use a tracking chip in the fob to come looking for us. It was a sweet little backup device that I had Buddha install when I bought the machine from him ten months before.

  Turning, we struck off across the gravel and were soon traversing the wooden walkway. We moved through a path in the cargo containers and between the skeletons of the colossal ships, hopping around unexploded alien ordnance. I danced between several of the bombs and came to a stop. “Guys, I was gonna wait to tell you this, but I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching lately.”

  “Since when did you get a soul?” Jezzy asked.

  Ignoring this, I continued. “And I’ve decided that I need to make some radical changes. First of all, I’ve decided to leave behind my life of crime.”

  Jezzy pointed at my rucksack. “You do know that you’re carrying stolen property—”

  “Soy consciente,” I replied. “I am aware.”

  “And that you’re literally going to a meeting to commit another crime, the sale of said stolen property,” she added.

  “Yeah, well, what I meant was I was gonna leave my life of crime behind after this next crime.”

  “You’re such an idiot,” Jezzy said.

  “Why can’t you ever be happy for me?”

  Jezzy put her hands on her hips. “For starters, you’re super annoying. And besides, my gut tells me this has something to do with that weirdo text that’s allegedly from Vidmark. Am I right?”

  I had no idea that she’d received it and smiled, nodding. “I’ve made an important career decision, boys, and girls. I’m going to join the Mech Command.”

  Jezzy and Spence threw back their heads and laughed.

  “Dude, that text is totally fake news,” Jezzy said. “Vidmark’s dead.”

  “No, he’s not! He’s alive and well and starting up a Top Gun for mechs!” I said, referencing an old movie my dad used to dig.

  Spence shook his head. “Pretty sure he’s dead, boss.”

  “Then who sent the text and set up the web page?”

  “Some five-hundred-pound hacker in what’s left of New Jersey, that’s who,” Jezzy said. “Either that or a government flunky who’s part of a team working right this very moment to track down and arrest people like you and me.”

  She had a point. The government and the military were slowly being reconstituted and people were even talking about a new presidential election. Law and order were being reestablished, and the feds had made it known that they were gonna crack down hard on collaborators, enemy combatants, scavengers, and thieves. Y’know, people like us, everyone who’d done what they had to do to survive after the feds had let us down seven years before. An amnesty period had been mentioned a while back by some newly appointed law enforcement viceroy, but nobody knew whether it was still in play.

  “Whatever,” I said, doubt weighing on me along with the pistol and rucksack. Annoyed at the thought that the text from Vidmark might be a fake, I smacked my hands together. “Let’s get this over with.”

  3

  Alpha Timbo’s lair occupied the middle portion of a cargo container ship that had been blasted apart by the scuds during one of many attacks on Baltimore. The ship was three football fields in length, and its sides had been caved in by explosions to create a kind of dimly lit tunnel that stretched from stern to bow.

  We stomped through the tunnel, the ground underfoot slippery from the waste produced by thousands of birds that roosted in the many holes in the boat’s superstructure. I’d been there a few times before, but that was the first visit for Jezzy and Spence who looked around nervously. Jezzy wiped bird poop from her boots and shot me an icy look “Tell me again why we agreed to do the deal in this hellhole?”

  “Because Timbo asked me to,” I answered.

  “You can’t possibly be that stupid,” she groaned.

  “Now you sound like my mom.”

  “Everyone knows you reject the first location offered by an opposing party to do a deal.”

  “I’ll remember that for next time.”

  “Pray there’s a next time,” she said, turning, moving out ahead of me.

  I looked over at Spence who was sweating profusely. “You really need to start working out, amigo,” I said.

  “I’m totally in shape.”

  “Since when?”

  He grinned. “Since round is a shape.”

  I smiled and high-fived him, and we hustled after Jezzy. Soon the light grew, and we’d emerged from the tunnel into a circular area in the middle of the ship. Hundreds of chem light sticks dangled from wires at the perimeter of the space which was peopled with Syndicate soldiers (some still wearing the blood red armor of the empire), human scavengers, gnarly-looking bounty hunters in black compression gear, and a mishmash of itinerant degenerates who’d come here to make a quick buck or a name for themselves. We stood at a distance from everyone, taking the temperature of the room, searching for Timbo’s lieutenant (and my contact), an alien whose named translated to Carpe Kenyatta.

  “Jabba’s palace,” Spence whispered.

  I looked over, and he smiled. “This place sorta looks like Jabba the Hut’s palace in ‘Return of the Jedi.’”

  Like I hinted at before, my dad was a big-time movie junkie, so I remember watching the flick when I was a kid. Hell, that’s pretty much all I did between the ages of ten and sixteen. Sit in the basement of our aging townhouse in Maryland and watch movies with my kid brother Frank. I glanced at Jezzy. “If we’re in Jabba’s palace that means you’re Princess Leia, girlie.”

  She yawned. “So, what?”

  “So, you’re gonna have to wear a gold bikini.”

  “I could totally rock a gold bikini, but you’re never gonna find out,” she replied, sticking her tongue out at me.

  A clucking sound filled the air, a note made by the aliens when they communicated amongst themselves. Looking back, I spotted Carpe Kenyatta emerging from a side door. The thing you have to remember is that the Syndicate army was actually composed, in part, of humans, including collaborators (scabs) and those forced into service, along with assorted aliens such as Kenyatta. Kenyatta was a Xhosa, a four-foot tall, blue-skinned ex
tra-terrestrial with three eyes, a single arm like an elephant’s trunk, and a zippered mouth. Not having the proper frame for combat, the Xhosa were known to have run most of the administrative operations for the Syndicate while they were still in power. Basically, they functioned as alien bureaucrats.

  Kenyatta’s mouth peeled back in a crooked smile. “Greetings, Honorable Deus,” he said. “Master Timbo is waiting for you.”

  I paused for two reasons. One, that was the first time in my life anyone had referred to me as honorable, and two, I was having a conversation with a friggin’ alien! The very idea would have been unimaginable only a few years before, but the invasion and occupation had altered reality for the survivors. The impossible had become routine.

  Anyway, I smiled at the little blue bastard and his trunk-like arm swung to the left, pointing toward a hole in the wall that was lit by an eerie green light. I exchanged expectant looks with Jezzy and Spence, and then we ambled forward, bathed in the glow of the emerald light.

  4

  We moved single-file down a corridor, following Kenyatta whose arm swung hypnotically from left to right.

  “You have the hafnium for Master Timbo?” Kenyatta asked.

  “Yes, indeed,” I replied.

  “That is very good. The master will be well-pleased.”

  “And so will we as long as he’s got the payment.”

  “Two-hundred pounds of green paper,” Kenyatta replied, nodding. When the invasion occurred, paper money became worthless and was replaced with barter or gold and silver coins and ingots, both of which were increasingly hard to find. It was well-known that Timbo had hoarded stacks of greenbacks he’d stolen from a Federal Reserve building. Figuring that paper money would soon be in circulation again, I cut a deal with him: two-hundred pounds of hundred-dollar bills in return for the batteries. Not too shabby.

  We plodded forward, and Jezzy grabbed the cuff of my thin jacket, an old-school flak vest lined with ballistic nylon that I liked to wear when I went into the field. “You were joking before, right?”