Bring Me the Head of the Buddha

by Bloom, A. D.

  Fritz banged on the door three times. A second later, the number pad over the knob beeped three times and the door shifted slightly, as the bolts holding it in place mysteriously withdrew. Bullets ripped through the door and punched Fritz harmlessly in the chest. Ignoring the small caliber pistol fire, he pulled the yellow duck key chain off the can, and it began to spew yellow gas. Fritz opened the door six inches, threw the gas grenade in, and closed the door again. More bullets came through the door only to drop, smoking and deformed, at Fritz's feet.

  On the other side of the door, Padre Pedro panicked when he saw the can bounce off a dildo equipped mechanical bull near the door and roll right at him. There was no escape from the gas. It filled the storeroom in a matter of seconds, engulfing Padre Pedro, his bodyguard, and Alvin in an opaque, yellow cloud.

  Alvin inhaled a lot of gas and thought it was pretty funny.

  All of a sudden, he thought everything was pretty funny. Significant, too. Yes, significant, he thought, and all the more hilarious because of it. This was, of course, absurd, and the significance of its absurdity was what made it a real side-splitting kinda funny, Alvin noted, as his sides began to ache with convulsions and laughter he was unable to quell.

  The bodyguard got the joke, Alvin observed, as the hardened Morituri killer stared at his pistol shaking his head, laughing at something that Alvin knew the bodyguard now found to be a revelation of great significance and worth a laugh. Then the bodyguard tossed his pistol to the floor and doubled over, shrieking with laughter, until he curled up with a smile and slept.

  “That is significantly funny,” Alvin said watching the killer curl up like a baby and sleep.

  Pedro got it too, Alvin observed. He had to because he was rolling on the floor, holding his stomach, hooting and howling like a hyena, and peeing his pants as he passed out cold, still smirking.

  Alvin thought the sheer absurdity of it all was almost enough to kill a man and he laughed at death, too. He laughed at it hard. Then he rose from the super-silly open bottomed chair, crossed the few feet between himself and the bodyguard's discarded pistol, and picked it up with his bound hands. He turned it to point at his own face, stared down the barrel and thought, now would be a fine time. Yup, now would be okay by me. He tried to get his thumbs around the trigger, but they were a little short, and he was fumbling when all of a sudden Casper was there. He was grinning, too.

  “Casper!” Alvin shouted as he began to cry from an overdose of funny. “Isn't it a fucking laff-riot?” Casper was laughing, but not nearly as hard, and Alvin decided Casper needed a moment for the significance of it all to sink in before he got it. Casper pulled out one of the ridiculously large conical joints Hi-5 had given him in the limousine. He lit it, extended his arm, and offered it to Alvin who happily traded the gun for the joint. Alvin took a long toke, inhaled deeply and fell forward, unconscious and wearing the widest grin Casper had ever seen.

  Casper caught him, lowered him to the floor gently, and shouted over his shoulder, “It's cool y'all! C'mon in! Everything's... cool...” As he began to feel the effects of Shelby's homemade Wacky Gas he added, “Yeah, and...um... it's... it's... it's pretty funny too!”

  It was time to go.

  The first van was trashed. It wouldn't even start, so they'd moved Fritz and the wounded Irving into the third van that blocked the doors and still carried Shelby's 'baby'. It had some webbing they could strap Irving into to keep him from bouncing around too much during what was likely to be a rough ride. Singh and Cheese got Hi-5 off the stage and into the second van without anybody knowing it by using a clever combination of smoke grenades and the last of Shelby's Wacky Gas. The Wacky Gas immobilized half of the crowd, but the other half were still dancing, screwing, and looking for their PornoPop Queen. Pretty soon her admirers would figure out where she'd gone, and then the escaping vans would never be able to get out through the crazed mob of Hi-5's adoring fans.

  Shelby didn't know it, but local law enforcement was too busy responding to twenty-six simultaneously triggered bank vault alarms to respond to the few calls that had been placed since the Dark had arrived at the POP club. She didn't need her bomb, but she wasn't about to drive her baby all the way back to the Hall of Darkness, and she'd been looking forward to this part.

  Shelby's remote detonator had two buttons.

  The bomb was round, only eighteen inches across, and Shelby had affixed eight small, carefully modified, auto-inflating life preservers to the outside. She pushed the first button on her remote detonator. Milliseconds later, the life preservers inflated, and the spherical concussion bomb instantly grew to a yard-wide, slightly irregular, beach ball.

  She opened the rear doors and rolled her baby out the back of the van. It bounced and rolled down the club's entrance ramp taking an irregular course that first bounced to the left and then to the right, but made it down the ramp with ease. It playfully bounced and rolled into the parking lot, traveling down the same wide lane they drove up in their door-ramming club entrance earlier. Shelby grinned, watching it roll and hop irregularly like a toy, until it was a couple hundred feet into the parking lot.

  Then she pushed the second button on her remote. The beach ball burst with a great flat boom and she later swore that she'd been able to clearly see the blast wave of compressed air that traveled along the ground before it struck the parked cars on either side of the parking lot's wide lane.

  The pressure wave lifted the closest cars off the ground by a foot, and as they crashed to earth, every single one of their high-decibel, ear-piercing, anti-theft alarms triggered along with the alarms of every car for fifty yards in every direction. It was a densely packed lot, and at least two-hundred car alarms shrieked and warbled at volumes designed to be impossible to ignore.

  Shelby laughed out loud at the fantastically dissonant automotive chorus as she watched the lights of all the cars flashing and blinking in a truly impressive display of mass automotive panic. The car alarms continued their cacophonous, unsynchronized, caterwaul chorus in celebration of chaos, as she disappeared behind the van's closing double rear doors, complimenting herself, the maestro, on a brilliant concert. She wormed her way by the armored giants in the back of her van, strapped herself in, and threw the van into reverse. Shelby stomped on the van's accelerator, sending the van hurdling backwards into the flashing and wailing ocean of the POP club's parking lot.

  Bonnie decided Casper had gotten a higher dose of the Wacky Gas than he'd let on and that it might be a mistake to let him drive, but there really wasn't time to argue about it.

  Casper saw the front entrance to the club open for him, and he stomped on the accelerator. He grinned like a madman, expecting the crowd, the lights, the spinning holographic cherries in the air, and all of the POP club to blur and fall away behind him.

  But the van's tires spun uselessly in a puddle of spilled lubricant.

  It was all over the tires, and it was designed for some very hot and heavy action. The lube maintained a easy-gliding, frictionless contact between the rear tires and the smooth floor of the club so well that the van remained largely devoid of forward motion until the speedometer read sixty miles per hour. Once the POP club's robust house lubricant reached its mile per minute limit, it lost viscosity. Suddenly, it turned tacky, sticky, and adhesive. It was absolutely perfect for accelerating a delivery van out the front doors of a sex club.

  Casper shot out the doors fast enough to catch significant air before landing near the base of the ramp and careening wildly into the parking lot. Every car alarm in the world was going off. He drove down the same path the bouncing and rolling concussion bomb had taken, and every car around him was blinking and whooping and wailing, and he thought it was hilarious. Reaching the exit, Casper drove through the blinking, reflective, white plastic beam that blocked the van's path. The automatic parking attendant system wanted twenty Amero for the twenty minutes they'd spent in the Power Of Pleasure club, and Casper wasn't about to stop and give it up.

&
nbsp; Shelby was right behind him when the two vans burst out of the lot and on to the Baccha Bay City streets, leaving utter chaos in their wake.

  -29-

  MUNI 5-7 knew the countdown had begun.

  The universe, as expressed through the flow of data, had its own seemingly random, but undeniable order, but MUNI 5-7 could sense a highly improbable regularity that hinted at a presence within the flow. At first, they were nothing more than phantoms, like the shadows of objects, unknown and unseen, that appeared and disappeared, obscuring the peripheries of MUNI 5-7's interface. Now, as the attacks intensified, their intent stood out from the natural order of the data flow like a ruler-drawn line in wind-scattered sands.

  Black Chamber Protocols.

  Bit by bit, they severed his links to the world. Everywhere that MUNI 5-7 felt their touch, the world went dark and numb. MUNI 5-7 couldn't distinguish the Mexico City AI's attacks from those of the Chicago AI or the London AI, but he felt them beginning to succeed, and where his brethren AI succeeded, there was darkness and numbness. When that numbness spread to his interface with the Ziggurat's nuclear reactor, they'd take it back from him, and once that happened, then Delvaux could destroy him without fear.

  But Delvaux didn't dare touch him until then.

  He estimated it would take his brothers less than twenty hours to take back the reactor.

  MUNI 5-7 had a plan, and it required less than sixteen hours.

  -30-

  Bonnie sat across the room, separated from the rest of the celebrating team by several yards. She knew there were a few unresolved issues nobody was talking about, and she didn't want to be in the middle of the group when they came up. Catherine kept close to the laughing, victorious group of celebrants. Bonnie guessed that she sensed the same issues about to surface, but she couldn't wait for the party to go sour. That is one mean lady, Bonnie thought.

  Alvin slumped so far down into the Dark's cracked leather sectional couch, that his position could barely be called sitting. The swelling had receded slightly, and he didn't look like he'd been beaten that badly, but he had the mother of all headaches. His ribs were bruised purple, and it hurt to breathe. It hurt everywhere, but it hurt most when he breathed. He wasn't about to let that stop him from getting high.

  Alvin was surrounded by the Dark, and the lovely Shelby had chosen to sit next to him. He could smell the perfume she'd applied two days ago. He also smelled something he could only define as 'girl'. He liked to think it was estrogen.

  Casper stood next to the couch, and Alvin thought Casper was standing over him like a trophy. It seemed like they were all hovering over him like a trophy and it pissed him off. Alvin had a private theory that he'd never confided in another. He postulated that, because of his size, because it was so easy to see all of him at once, people found it very easy to objectify him. He imagined that if he were too big to see all at once, then people would assume he was mysterious or at least they might imagine there was more to him than they thought they saw.

  He was growing increasingly annoyed by the way they stood around him and over him, passing a conical Hi-5 joint. Ash fell on him from above, and Alvin really wasn't sure if his role was honored guest or trophy decoration. What he really wanted was the numbing anesthesia of liquor. The tone of his voice was mean when he asked, “Don't you freaks got any booze around here?”

  That made Catherine grin. She enjoyed seeing Alvin snap at the kiddies. The White Sunday insurgent, was sitting only a few feet away in a hard chair at a worktable sipping from a coffee mug. Catherine hated coffee, so the mug held two fingers of Serbian plum brandy poured from its canteen shaped bottle. She liked drinking alone, but she decided to share, and she held out her mug full of nearly extinct twentieth-century liquor.

  Alvin summoned the strength to lean forward and take what she offered him. They toasted in the air, and she took a pull from the bottle while Alvin downed the coffee mug's solvent contents in a single mouthful. Suddenly he felt like an asshole for calling them freaks. They had, after all, just pulled his fat from the fire.

  “Sorry,” Alvin said, “I didn't mean to be such an ingrate. Thanks for coming and saving me from Padre Psycho and his rubber dildo torture.” That drew a chuckle from Shelby, and Alvin enjoyed hearing it. Leaning forward to pour Alvin another shot, Catherine didn't miss the opportunity to clarify things a bit.

  “Don't get too mushy about it, Alvin. There was lots and lots of money involved.” The crowd around Alvin still held the smiles on their faces, but they were silent, and perhaps, a tiny bit less proud. Catherine enjoyed the effect that little reminder had on the victory celebration.

  Casper felt a wee bit ashamed because he'd been genuinely enjoying Alvin's gratitude, and now he realized it had been under false pretenses. Casper hadn't yet mentioned the money or the client, and it burned a little, the way Catherine was doing it for him. She really enjoyed peeing on the parade, Casper thought. Big surprise there, he noted. Terrorists aren't the nicest people.

  “I'll admit, I was kinda surprised to see you there, man,” Alvin said, while he looked up at Casper, who was suddenly sobered by the memory of how he'd found Alvin in a yellow cloud of Shelby's Wacky Gas, laughing his gourd off, while staring down the barrel of a pistol. Casper hadn't mentioned that detail to anyone, and he didn't plan to. “Happy,” Alvin said, “just real surprised. Who paid to spring me anyway?”

  Casper could only say, “the client”, like everybody else did.

  Alvin asked, “And who's that, exactly?”

  Catherine declared plainly, “He doesn't know.” Alvin stared at her, expecting her to reveal the client's identity.

  “Oh, I don't know either,” she admitted. “Nobody does except Carlos.”

  “So...” Alvin inquired with raised eyebrows, “what would you guys have done if the mysterious, unnamed client that paid for my rescue had, say, asked you to kill me?”

  Good question, Bonnie thought.

  Catherine laughed because she knew the answer to that one, and she was pretty sure the little, four-foot-tall Buddha did, too.

  Bonnie shook her head. Fucking Mercs...no goddamn loyalty at all. Bonnie had some plans for Alvin that he wouldn't be too happy about, but she thought that somehow doing what she planned because she was ordered to was better than doing it for money. She tried not to think about how Alvin might see it.

  Casper made a thinly veiled attempt to change the subject. “Hey where the fuck is Carlos, anyway?”

  -31-

  Carlos was at a meeting deep inside a basement room four stories below the sex-workers, the sewers, and the underground power conduits. He was four stories beneath the food vendors, and exotic vapor bars of the Free Economic Zone, with twenty one men and two women who sat in an EM shielded room, around a transparent, molded plastic table on transparent, molded plastic chairs.

  The people sitting around the table were representatives from the many insurgent groups operating in Baccha Bay City. Members of the Morituri, White Sunday, Angry Angels, Sons of Abraham, Sons of Samson, Angels of Badur, Eastern Front, Korean Christian Militia, Protestant National Militia, Chinese Christians, Shiva's Wrath, The Word, and others sat around the table. The room was filled with religious fundamentalists, fanatics, criminals, homicidal lunatics, and a difficult to define, hybridized combination of the above that was rarely seen before the G.S.A.'s criminalization of religion.

  A well-known, borrowed saying went, “When religion is criminalized, only criminals will have religion.” Two decades of repression had weeded out the moderate thinkers. The moderates hid or were 'reeducated' and publicly recanted. The rest became radicalized. The faithful of Baccha Bay City were not all murderers and terrorists, but many of their militants, leaders, and representatives were. These were the people that conducted the ongoing insurgent war with the Global Secular Alliance, and they were a bloody-minded lot.

  At the request of his client, Carlos brought two things to the underground meeting. The first was a live, but humiliated
Padre Pedro, both as a show of his client's good faith, and also to trade with the Morituri for a promise to no longer pursue the Buddha. The second thing Carlos brought with him was a holographic recording of a three-foot-tall, highly anthropomorphised Chinese Monkey.

  It carried a staff, wore monk's robes, and a gold band around its head. As it walked about the center of the oval table, waves of static and gaussian noise passed over it every few seconds. Many times it invoked the name of a place that did not yet exist, but brought glorious visions to the minds of the insurgent leaders who listened with rapt attention. “New Jerusalem,” the Monkey said, “will be built here.”

  The major military action proposed by the simian promised the realization of a dream they all shared – driving Global Secular Alliance forces from Baccha Bay City.

  What the Monkey proposed would require a cooperation they'd never even attempted, and it was risky, but the reward was inspiring – a cathedral, a temple, a mosque, a grand unified fortress of belief they would keep as their own and call New Jerusalem.

  The Monkey promised them the Ziggurat.

  The price was high and it would be paid in blood, but if the battle were won, then nobody wanted to be the group that was left outside the Ziggurat's smoky-pink, transparent walls without a claim to any part of it. Nobody could risk being left outside the walls of New Jerusalem, even if it required them to ally themselves with those whose beliefs were, by their very existence, an affront to their own.

  None of them thought the Ziggurat could ever be shared among the different groups of believers, and most of the group's leaders were already planning to slaughter the others after the battle had been won. If the G.S.A. were defeated, then a dozen smaller battles would ensue, each group attempting to take the prize for their own.