by J. I. Greco
Flash. They’d merged now. Into this Trip-Roxanne-Cloud avatar thing, all limbs and erogenous zones, heaving and pumping, the mass getting tighter and tighter with each heave and pump, making them fall faster and faster towards a rapidly approaching, glowing accretion disk singularity of climax.
Flash. Trip’s turn. Something fresh. Trip looking out the windshield of the Wound into the churning dust-and-debris expansion front of the All-Mart, just that morning.
“Shit!” Roxanne exclaimed from somewhere very, very far away.
A fritz of deafening and blinding white noise wiped over his consciousness, and Trip was back in Roxanne’s room, on her ratty mattress, Roxanne up on him.
“What?” he said, trying to catch his breath. “What’s the matter? The thumb too much for a first date?”
Roxanne stopped grinding, stared down at him, sweat dripping from her nose and chin onto his chest. “That was the All-Mart, wasn’t it?”
He shrugged, wiped her sweat away with his hand. “Yeah. Ran into it this morning. So?”
She rolled off him. “That’s what I was late for. Mother Superior’s gonna tan my ass red.” She smiled at the prospect as she plucked the miniskirt from the floor and stepped into it.
Trip sat up. “Late for the All-Mart? How can you be late for the All-Mart? You going shopping?”
“No, of course not,” she said, wriggling into her corset. “We do this ceremony every mid-Solstice. ‘Cause it’s like a new god, right? Not a particularly good god, but still, deserves respect.”
While her back was towards him, he quickly snaked out a hand for his tux jacket and reached in to pull out the tin of cigs and his lidless Zippo. “You pray to it?”
She reached behind herself to lace the corset tight. “So it doesn’t roll over us, yeah.”
“You know it’s not a god, right?” He lit up. “It’s just a bunch of nanochines gone wild, building, subsuming, zombie-fying. Or so the rumors go.”
“Yeah, I know.” She spun around and frowned at him, then bent down to snatch the cig from his mouth and dash it out against the wall. She handed the crushed, smoking stub back to him and plopped down on the edge of the mattress, reaching for her stiletto boots. “But Mother Superior takes it seriously. So... we all take it seriously. Or at least humor her. For us it’s really just a chance to hang out, sing a few chants, let our hair down and our tits out.”
“So, this ceremony...” Trip tucked the crumbled cig behind his ear as she zipped up a boot. “Is there gonna be a lesbo orgy after?”
She smiled coyly back at him over her shoulder. “Usually a pretty good one, yeah.”
“Cool. I’ll bring popcorn.”
She shook her head, zipped up the other boot. “Sorry, no men allowed. Sisterhood rule.”
“I never liked organized religion.”
“I’ll be back by noon.” She stretched to pick her habit off the floor. Fitting it on, she stood up, tucked her hair away under it. “Stick around: We’ll re-enact what you missed.”
“Bring friends.”
She grabbed a motorcycle helmet plastered with glow-in-the-dark stickers of stars and moons from the workbench, cradled it under her arm. “Well, duh,” she said, slinging a satchel of a purse under her shoulder and darting out the door.
Trip watched her go, smiling at the way her mini-skirt flipped up to show her naked ass as she bounced down the stairs just outside the door. As soon as she was out of sight, he retrieved the crushed cig from behind his ear, straightened it the best he could, and lit up.
He lay back, still smiling, taking shallow puffs and closing his eyes.
Five minutes later, the cig burnt down to his lips and woke him from the deepest sleep he’d had in months.
“Vishnu’s pancreas!” He sat bolt upright. “There’s robbery to do!”
“What the fuck is this?”
Trip stood in front of the warehouse vault, draped with a netting of explosives so thick he couldn’t see the vault door.
Hunt-R stepped up next to him. “17 sticks of dynamite, 5 pounds of homebrew C-4, 9 shaped concussion charges —”
“I didn’t mean an inventory, robot.”
Rudy lit his calabash. “We didn’t know if you were gonna show.”
“So you decided to string up enough explosives to bring the whole warehouse down on top of you?” Trip glared into Hunt-R’s glowing oval eye. “Clear it away, robot.”
Hunt-R hesitated, tilting his head at Rudy. “Builder Rudy?”
Trip snorted. “Oh, don’t start up with that not taking orders from me shit again, robot.” He stabbed a finger into Hunt-R’s forehead. “Unless you want a nice frontal lobotomy reprograming.”
Rudy took the calabash out of his mouth and nodded at the robot. “It’s all right, Hunt-R.”
Hunt-R nodded back, started in on dissembling the explosives netting.
With an exasperated jog of his head, Trip motioned for Rudy to follow him and walked back towards the Wound. “Seriously, I’m about ready to just wipe his brain and start over from scratch. With a lot less insubordination this time. I mean, I thought it would be funny, but turns out it’s just annoying.”
“Now you know how I feel.” Rudy loped after him, puffing at his calabash. “He’s just hurt about not being invited to the wedding.”
“We were trying to keep it small.”
“There were over a thousand guests.”
“Delores was worried about him hitting on her bridesmaids. And I didn’t want him snaking all the pigs-in-blankets. You know how he gets — it wouldn’t be so bad if he actually ate them, but just to grind handfuls of them into his chest and crotch, that’s just unsettling.” Trip glanced back over his shoulder. The robot was still working, taking explosives out of the netting and bagging them. All with one hand. The other was giving Trip the finger. Trip grunted. “Anyway... I effectively apologized.”
They reached the Wound. Rudy jumped up to sit on the hood. “You erased the memory from his brain.”
“Well, not all of it, obviously.” Trip leaned back against the hood next to Rudy. He popped a caff pill from the bunny dispenser. “How does he remember, anyway? I went in and cut some pretty big swaths through his memory banks. Shatner, I hope I didn’t accidentally erase his prohibition against killing us. Or at least me.”
“Yeah, about that... So, you know how after the operation, he was feeling glum, had this whole general, unfocused out-of-sorts angry malaise going?”
“Did he?”
“Yeah. He started moping and moaning all the time.”
Trip crunched his eyebrows at Rudy. “Is that what that was? I just thought a horny raccoon had snuck into the trunk with him.”
“No, it was unfocused angry robot malaise.” Rudy guiltily avoided Trip’s eyes and looked up at ol’ Willie hanging from the ceiling, inert. “And it was really bumming me out. So... I told him.”
“You told him?”
Rudy nodded. “It was either that or have him moaning the whole trip out.”
“Yeah, better he make my life a living hell of snipe, sarcasm and back-talk.”
Rudy smiled around the pipe bit. “That’s what I was thinking.”
Trip shook his head and sighed, noticed Hunt-R plucking the last stick of dynamite from the netting.
“Explosives. Really?” Trip asked Rudy, then pushed off the hood and walked back towards the vault.
“What?” Rudy slid off the hood and followed. “They get the job done.”
“There’s a reason we crack safes.” Trip lit a cigarette. “Explosions tend to attract attention.”
“Yeah, but it’s almost three. And you weren’t here...”
“I was getting laid. Very well laid, I might add.”
Rudy huffed. “Glad you enjoyed yourself. But thanks to that we’ve only got a couple of hours ‘till sun-up.”
“So?”
Hunt-R was just taking down the netting as they stepped up to the vault door. Rudy pointed the stem of the calabash at t
he vault’s lock, a slick little number with a hardened keypad and a datajack with a ring of yellow light around it, indicating the jack was protected by heavy encryption. “The lock’s nuerotronic. Military grade.”
Trip sneered. “Again, so?”
“It’s a Mitsubishi 740. Maybe a 750,” Hunt-R said. “You do tend to have troub—”
“I wouldn’t complete that thought if I were you,” Trip warned. “Never met a lock — nuerotronic or otherwise — I couldn’t pick. Ten minutes we’ll be heading west with a trunk full of loot.”
“If you say so.” Hunt-R folded the netting and stuffed it into the canvas goody bag atop the various explosives. “But I shall keep the explosives at the ready just in case.”
Trip frowned. “Seriously, robot, what is your fucking problem?”
Hunt-R’s oval eye pulsed a sad pale yellow. “I rented a suit and everything.”
Trip threw up his hands. “Vishnu’s insecurity disorder, robot. There wasn’t even a wedding!”
“It would have been nice to have been invited none-the-less.”
“Fine. Tell you what, I’ll use whatever loot we find in this thing to build a Wayback machine, set it to the day before the wedding, hop into it, pop out, double team Delores with myself, hi-five the accomplishment, and then find you so I can invite you, on bended knee, to the wedding that will never happen. Will that make it all better?”
“Oh, like the entire concept of a Wayback machine doesn’t violate causality.” Hunt-R swung the goody bag up over his shoulder and clanked off towards the Wound. “But I do appreciate the thought.”
Rudy chuckled.
Trip sighed. “Let me at the lock.”
“We tried the basics,” Rudy said.
“Ahh, good old 0,0,0,0 and 1,2,3,4.”
“Yeah. And 9,9,9,9. No luck.”
“Any other town I would be surprised if those had worked. But here, surprised they didn’t.” Trip crouched in front of the lock. He licked his thumb and rubbed it against the grimy keypad bevel, revealing a model number. “It’s a 750, all right. The keypad’s just for authenticating the access code for the datajack.”
“So you’ve got to crack two codes? One just to get at the lock?” Rudy’s shoulders sagged. “Great.”
Trip sank his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a short patch cord. “Relax. I do this sort of thing for a living, remember?”
“Which is why we’re always broke.”
Trip growled. “Ten minutes”
“Right.”
Trip went to plug the patch cord into his neck but found something already plugged in. The RATpack antenna. He’d forgotten about it, never taken it out. Grinning at the fresh memory, he popped it out, slipped it gently away in a pocket, and snicked the patch cord jack into its place behind his ear. Then he snapped the other end of the patch cord into the lock’s jack. The ring around it went bright red.
“Okay.” Trip blinked. “That’s interesting.”
“What?” Rudy stepped up behind him.
“The damn thing blinded me.”
“Like blind blind?”
“Yeah, lights out.” Trip waved a hand in front of his own face, his eyes darting randomly. “Forgot my firewall was down. Rookie mistake.”
“Why the hell was your firewall down?”
“The lady likes it bareback.” Trip twitched, his eyes rolling to white as his firewall came back on. “Here’s hoping I get my sight back at some point.”
“If you don’t, can I dress you funny, dye your hair blue, and tattoo your face?”
“Only if it’s a rainbow unicorn. Now, shush, the lock’s trying to tell me what protocol I need to use to talk to it.” Trip’s eyebrow twitched. “Okay, we can talk now. Now I just have to convince it to let me in.” His hand blindly felt for the keypad, his fingers tapping out a sequence. The glow around the ring stayed red. “Okay... this may take more than ten minutes. Maybe twenty. Or thirty, at the most. — Somebody want to find me something to sit on?”
CHAPTER 6: BREAKFAST WITH THE NEW GOD
The bloated orange sun was already rising over the hilltop when Roxanne skidded her Vincent Black Shadow to a stop between the Mother Superior’s hard-top Jeep and the coven’s beer-powered school bus, both parked at the top of the hill.
She lowered the kickstand, took off her star-and-moon stickered helmet, and glowered up at the sun. “So you beat me here. Big deal. Bastard.”
She hung the helmet on the bike’s handlebar and reached behind her into the saddlebag, rooting around in it until she found her ceremonial medallion, a golden pair of phalluses intertwined in a double-helix on a braided leather rope. Slipping off the bike, she put the medallion around her neck and headed down the hill, going as fast as dignity and her stilettos would allow on the dry and dead soil.
The coven was lined up thirty feet in front of the All-Mart’s broiling, uneven expansion front. The sacrifices — buckets of cell phone innards, milk jugs of beer, construction riff-raff and spare tires — were piled up a foot away from the broiling wall, directly in its meter-a-day path.
Mother Superior — tall, silver-haired and buxom — was in her official-occasion sequined, cup-less corset. Her phallus-double helix was twice as large as Roxanne’s and lay on her bare chest, glinting in the dawn sun. She stood with her arms and face raised to the sky, her eyes closed, her lips moving in a silent body- and mind-cleansing chant. The rest of the coven — nine women, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-five — stood flanking Mother Superior, patiently and quietly chit-chatting among themselves while they waited for her to begin the ceremony.
Roxanne reached the bottom of the hill. Brenda was sitting there, crossed-legged with her chin in her hands, obviously bored to tears. She was an acolyte, not yet having earned the right to take the trials and oaths to become a full Sister. Her outfit reflected both her status and her age: instead of a habit she wore a brim-less baseball cap, and her miniskirt was downright dowdy — it reached all the way down to her knees. She looked up and smiled at Roxanne, then raised her wrist and tapped it.
Roxanne mouthed “I know” and plunged her hand into her purse, pulling out a dog-eared and beat-up copy of Vampire Hunter D Vol. 3 she’d found during a scavenger outing to the Three Mile Island land-fill a month back. She tossed it to Brenda. Brenda scrambled to catch it, her face lighting up as she read the cover. She tapped two fingers against her chest, pointed them at Roxanne, then dove in to the manga.
Roxanne chuckled to herself, then spotted Bernice, standing at the end of the line. Practically tip-toeing to avoid calling further attention to her tardiness from the rest of the coven, she slipped into line next to Bernice.
“Nice of you to show,” Bernice whispered. Bernice was freckled, a year younger than Roxanne. Shorter and broader, too — but it worked for her. Her strawberry-blonde hair was braided into pigtails that sprouted out from beneath her habit all the way down to the small of her back. “Hope he was worth it.”
“How’d you...?”
“You smell like cigarettes and sweat.” Bernice’s upturned nose twitched. “And you’ve got that same overly content dopey grin going that you usually get after an orgy. That and there’s that antenna-thingee sticking out of your neck, and you said you weren’t gonna use it ‘till you met a cute guy. Shall I go on?”
Roxanne grinned sheepishly, then glanced over Bernice’s head down the line. “Mother Su say anything?”
“About you? You kidding? She wouldn’t dare.” Bernice slipped a hand-rolled ceremonial joint into a long black cigarette holder and lit it with a lighter shaped like a panther, pulling back the ears to make flame shoot out from its mouth. “But she did say she could only hope the delay in the ceremony doesn’t piss off the New God too terribly.”
Roxanne turned to look deep into the broiling expansion front. Along its base, small tendrils of nanomachine smoke stabbed out at the bare earth, snatching up bits of shrub and rock to pull them in for disassembly into their constituent, raw mat
erial molecules. “Like it even notices we’re here.”
Bernice drew in a long drag and held it for a count of three, letting it out in a single puff. “It might, you don’t know.”
“We’ve been doing this for how long?” Roxanne waived the heady smoke away from her face. “Three years since it got close. Twice a year. And not so much as a thank you card.”
Bernice took another hit. “It hasn’t rolled over Shunk, has it?”
“Only cause we’re in a whole different valley. It’d have to climb the mount—”
“May we have respectful quiet while I prepare, please?” Mother Superior interrupted, clearing her throat and shooting death-ray eyes at Roxanne.
“Yes, Mother,” Roxanne said, blushing, and raising her hands in front of her apologetically.
Mother Superior growled and went back to chanting silently at the sky.
Bernice grinned, lowered her voice. “Yeah, never mind the All-Mart — she’s pissed.”
“Damn it. You know what that means?” Roxanne asked. “Nothing but sloppy seconds all morning.”
Bernice rolled her eyes. “Somehow I can’t really work up the sorry for you.”
“Here we go again,” Roxanne said. “There’s nothing stopping you from getting laid, you know. I keep telling you, you’ve got a killer bod. Great rack. And the freckles — guys love the freckles. You just need to get yourself out there. Be aggressive.”
Bernice furrowed her brow. “I’m pretty aggressive.”
“With guys.”
“Oh, yeah.” Bernice took a long, thoughtful drag. “How? I’m not you, Rox. I just can’t go up to a guy and boom we’re doing it. I wouldn’t know... How would I even broach the subject? No... it’s not... proper. I should be wooed. I deserve to be wooed.”
“Life’s too short, girl.” Roxanne crossed her arms over her chest. “Sure, you can wait around for some evolutionary throwback of a guy to send you flowers and engraved notes, but the best guys aren’t always gonna be the aggressive ones. Sometimes you’ve got to do the hunting.”
“How about this new guy of yours? You have to hunt him?”