Bones of my Father

by J. A. Pitts

  The universe is a wacky place, but sometimes it gives you what you need. We careened around three bends, through two doors, and voila...sunlight.

  We stood at the door, listening and catching our breath. For the longest time, the sound of gunfire and screams almost drowned out Magenta’s crying.

  As I watched the landscape, trying not to vomit with the overwhelming empty sky above us and the smell of burning flesh coming from upwind, I was once again startled as Magenta slowly caressed my exposed shoulder.

  “The laser burn on your back is healing fast,” she said, a hint of awe in her voice. “Might not even scar, by the looks of things.”

  “Most of the shot had been absorbed by the ablative qualities of the enviro-suit and the exoskeleton,” I said with a smile. “Plus, I heal fast.” I had been modified over the years for more than longevity. Thanks, Mom! I healed at an insane rate. Needed to consume huge amount of calories, however.

  “Plane’s east of your position about three klicks,” Grandpa said in my ear. “Femme-Bots are getting an upper hand on the vermin, so you have a decent shot of making it.”

  “And Dad’s head?”

  “That silly robot head?” Magenta asked me.

  I nodded slowly. “Yes. It belongs to my dad. I’d really like it back.”

  “Oh.” She poked her head around the edge of the wall and pointed to a small pile of crates. “It’s in a crate. Big Bertha said we could retrieve the memories with the right equipment.”

  “I got a load of crates on a flatbed truck south of your position about sixty yards,” Grandpa informed me. “Battle has moved past that point. It’s now no-man’s land. If the chickees survive this attack, they’ll be carting your father’s head back to Portland.”

  I was glad Magenta couldn’t hear his side of the conversation.

  “Great,” I said, looking around for things that wanted to kill me. “Got it. We cut past the line of battle to get his head in a stack of crates, open it and make for the plane?”

  “I could just drive the truck,” Magenta said to me with a smile.

  “She sounds like a keeper,” Grandpa said, his inflection all grin and smarm.

  “You can drive?” I asked. “You’re amazing.” I may have sounded a little too eager. Grandpa made puking sounds in my ear.

  “You up for a run?” I asked. She squeezed my hand and nodded.

  We ran.

  As we cleared the side of the box store, we could see the aftermath of one battle. Broken women, discarded wigs, and dozens of rats, some topping four feet in length, lay scattered across an open square. Magenta started to slow, but I pulled her hand and she turned away with a sob.

  I could feel the pressure of the sky pressing down on my head and the panic began to swell up from my belly. No magic juice to hold back the terror this time. A wall loomed to the front and left of us. I steered us in that direction. It seemed to be away from the noise of battle, but I just needed something to lean against for a moment or I was going to drop and curl into a ball.

  The cold of the brick sent a wave of goose flesh over my body, but the roughness of the surface held my attention long enough to center my brain. Magenta squatted to my left, breathing hard, and clutching the pistol. I squeezed my eyes shut for almost a full minute before my equilibrium settled.

  When I opened my eyes, Magenta had her wig cocked to the side, scratching her scalp as she watched the horizon. It made me smile for some reason.

  “Almost ready,” I whispered, hunkering down beside her. I flipped the satchel around to sit on the ground in front of me and opened the top. I pulled out a bar of chocolate, snapped it in half and handed Magenta her share. I took a bite and chewed slowly. I could feel the calories flooding my body.

  She sniffed it and lightly touched her tongue to the dark square. For a moment, doubt filled her eyes, but she looked at me and I nodded.

  “If you hold a piece of it in your mouth, it will melt,” I told her, mindful of her poor dental hygiene.

  The tiny corner disappeared into her mouth, but was quickly followed by the rest, as she crammed the whole thing into her maw.

  “Careful, there,” I said, patting her on the shoulder. “Don’t choke.”

  Like the pheromones I carried, the chocolate had a distinct purpose, and scent. I had not realized how sensitive the rodent family was to smells. But, the waft of chocolate must have been strong enough to alert the hunting pair of big-and-furries because before I had finished my piece, a roar erupted from our left, and two huge walls of pain sprang at us.

  I brought the laser rifle up, catching one of the critters with the stock. It diverted the forward momentum enough to not bowl me over, but the rifle didn’t survive. A horrid crack told me I’d broken the housing.

  The second beastie, something like a giant badger, only with more teeth, flew over me and onto Magenta. She got one arm in front of her face, which prevented her from having it chewed off. Her other hand brought the pistol up to the side of the beast. The muffled whump of the flechettes exploding into the furry mass barely registered a sound.

  The badger moaned and fell on top of her. I picked up the satchel and swung it around, catching the second mutant in mid-leap. It careened into the brick wall and rolled back onto its legs, stunned.

  I dove over Magenta and her badger, pulled the pistol from her hand and fired it into the recovering badger. It staggered back as the needles shredded its snout and one eye. A second shot stopped it from moving forward, but it continued to growl deep in its throat.

  Magenta moaned as I pulled the first badger off her. Her arm was a bloody mess. I grabbed a pair of stockings out of the satchel, wrapped her arm in the nylon, and hefted the pack onto my back. I reloaded the pistol, held it in one hand, and hefted Magenta to her feet by her good arm. “Come on, gorgeous,” I said with a grunt as she slid back to the ground. “We move, or we die.”

  I lifted her again, and this time she stayed on her feet. With me steering her from one shattered building to the next, we managed to find the truck. It had been ransacked, crates shattered and equipment destroyed. Magenta pointed out the crate that had held my father’s head, but it was empty.

  Muties had ransacked the truck. Great. Now what did we do?

  Okay, we leave the ruins of Pasco and head to the plane. Push comes to shove, we nuke this joint.

  We ran past several buildings, each hiding the bodies of fallen from both sides. But the battle had moved north of our position. It was creepy scampering from hiding place to hiding place, and seeing nothing living.

  The final sprint crossed the most open of all the spaces I’d covered. I screwed up my courage, made sure Magenta was steady on her feet, and we made the dash. Automatic weapon fire echoed behind us somewhere, and the screaming of beasts and humans broke over us in a wave of anguish.

  The door to the plane stood open, a welcoming hole into freedom. Behind us, a pack of teeth brayed out their hunting cries as some very large furry thing broke into the open. Behind them came several heavily armed women.

  The Amazons fired at the critters, some of whom turned to fight. A few kept pursuing us. As we leapt over one line of fallen stonework, Magenta’s wig fell to the side. For a split second I considered going back, but a large rat sailed over the wall behind us. Magenta shot it several times with my pistols, so we stumbled onward.

  We fell into the plane. A cat with six legs and two heads leapt onto my back, pushing me forward. The door slid shut and the AI calmly called for us to buckle in. I rolled to the side, getting a series of slashes to my left calf before Magenta blasted one of the heads. The cat screamed, ran to the back of the plane and began running in circles. Magenta shot it several more times before it collapsed. A large body crashed into the side of the plane, followed by automatic weapons fire.

  “We are leaving now,” the AI informed me.

  I helped Magenta get strapped in and collapsed into my own seat, fumbling with the straps. Gravity fell on top of me like a truck as the
vertical lift-off applied several G’s to our bodies.

  “That hurt, a lot,” Magenta said when the pressure finally lessened and we could move.

  I unstrapped, rolled off the couch, and sat on the floor by her side. The smells of blood and animal fur filled the plane, but we were safe. For the moment.

  “I can give you something for the pain,” I said. “Maybe let you sleep a bit. What do you think?”

  She smiled at me, reaching out with her good hand and brushing the side of my face. “That’s sweet.”

  Her touch was electrifying on my skin. I wasn’t sure if I should move, or just sit there and maintain that contact.

  “We suffered some damage on take-off,” the AI said over the intercom, breaking my reverie. “Several large creatures attempted to board in your wake, but I managed to achieve lift-off despite their efforts to breach my hull.”

  “Are we okay?”

  “Absolutely,” the AI said. “We are well within parameters. We have an eighty-seven percent chance of getting back to the base.”

  Well, that was mostly a relief. “Thanks,” I said, patting Magenta’s arm and standing. “Do your best, okay?”

  “I can do no less. If you don’t mind, I will begin tabulating a list of items I will need replaced or repaired to return to one hundred percent capacity.”

  “Please, do,” I said. Talk about single focused.

  When our flight path had leveled out, I fished a flight suit out of the storage lockers and put it on. For some reason I was very aware of my nakedness.

  Magenta watched me, her eyes intense. I had no idea what was going through her mind, but she looked peaceful, despite the blood and dirt.

  “Ready?” I asked her. She nodded and closed her eyes.

  Her arm was not only lacerated, it was broken. I set it, covered the torn tissue with insta-flesh sealant, and wrapped it in a pressure cast.

  I started an IV drip, feeding her a solution of genetically modified antibiotics and targeted anti-virals to get ahead of infection.

  When I was done, I sat in the pilot’s seat, but swiveled it around so I could watch her sleep.

  “She’ll live,” Grandpa said in my ear. “But, damn she’s ugly.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said. “She’s really sweet.”

  “We can fix some of her stuff,” he said, a bit of remorse in his voice. “But a lot of that scarring will stay.”

  “Wish we hadn’t lost her wig,” I said as I sat by her side. “It seemed pretty important to her.”

  Several hours later, as we flew east over Kansas to avoid any tracking the Femme-Bots may have had in place, Magenta woke up. Her face was a little puffy, but she wasn’t afraid to smile all the same. Girl sure smiled a lot. Too bad her teeth were such a wreck. She reached to me with her left hand. Her right was swollen and purple.

  We discussed her wounds, and where we were. She mentioned the wig. All things considering, we both agreed the wig loss was the most traumatic.

  Later, after I’d fallen asleep in the pilot seat, Magenta came into the cockpit, sat in the copilot seat, and handed me a stick of dried meat she’d had in her gear. It wasn’t Turkey Medley, but it had a nice strong flavor—very salty.

  We landed south of Omaha to wait out the dawn. We’d need to spend a day recharging the solar cells before heading home. By then, anyone who’d been tracking us would have given up, I hoped.

  Grandpa kept in tight communication with me the whole night. Mom had isolated the genetic structure of our home invasion beastie. That was very good news. But I hadn’t recovered Dad’s head. He was pretty grumpy about that. Still, I thought the trip was working out nicely otherwise.

  “If you want, we can scan your girlfriend’s DNA,” he said. “See what kind of damage she’s taken.”

  “Magenta is pretty banged up,” I said. “But we’ll see how she feels in the morning. She’s sleeping now.”

  At first light, I crept to the back of the plane. I hadn’t noticed my own wounds in all the rush. Several blood-encrusted slashes covered my left calf. Magenta saw me trying to daub a small scrape on my lower back with a moist towelette and got up to help. She mentioned infection, and I just laughed.

  Note to self. Don’t laugh at someone who is looking out for your well-being. She’d been through a lot, and had been ripped from the world she knew. Maybe that’s why she cried.

  Once I let her help me, and we had the wounds cleaned, I asked her to let me do a genetic test on her. She agreed, although the technology she was used to was a bit more archaic. I showed her how to stick her hand into one of the many machines in the cargo hold. She laughed as the lights played across the top of her hand, and ooohed when the slot filled with warm liquid. The electro-shock and needles were quite a surprise, though, and she screamed and cried like I’d gutted her.

  I don’t think they hurt all that much. When the machine released her hand, she went to the furthest point in the VTOL and hunkered down, cradling her hand and sobbing. I tried to approach her, but she glared at me in a way that made me afraid to fall asleep anytime soon.

  This interacting with other humans had a few drawbacks, I was learning. Maybe she was just cranky about her missing wig.

  I spent the next three hours and the last of the chocolate coaxing her out of the storage compartment she’d hidden in. Well, it could’ve been my charming wit, but I’d lay bets on the chocolate.

  As the sun fell, we rose into the air once more and headed north. We’d head up over Calgary, then loop up to Alaska before heading back down to Trinity.

  I slept in the pilot seat, and Magenta took the copilot. I liked the way she sort of wuffled when she slept. It was cute.

  Just as the sky began to pinken, and we flew over the ruins of Juneau, Grandpa informed me they’d isolated seventeen genetic diseases plaguing Magenta, as well as three mutated venereal diseases.

  “You can fix those, right?”

  “Sure thing, kiddo. You may also want to know you’ve picked up a bug yourself. Very nasty, very fast acting.”

  That would explain the burning when I peed.

  “Fixable?” I asked.

  Grandpa snorted.

  Magenta woke over northern Canada and was only momentarily confused. She actually smiled at me, and let me know her hand had stopped hurting. Her broken arm was healing at a good clip as well. Mom made good vectors for healing. I’d have to remember to thank her.

  After a brief morning constitutional where the burning had gotten worse, we returned to the cockpit. She fetched food and I got water.

  “When we get back home,” I told her over a salty stick of jerky, “you’re getting a complete geno-bath.”

  “Not if it’s like that last thing you did to my hand,” she said squinting at me. “I might try to mate with you again, if you are nice to me, but I’m not going to stick any of my limbs into another machine for you.”

  “She’s only seventeen,” Grandpa said in my earpiece. “But with all the things wrong with her, she’s not likely to see eighteen.”

  “Mom will fix her,” I said.

  “Fix who? Me?” Magenta asked. “You talking to your grandfather again?”

  “Yes, and fix you,” I assured her. “We can give you something to fix your teeth—”

  She put her hand to her mouth.

  “—and maybe fix some of the other things. But no promises.”

  “Can I keep the baby?”

  “Baby?” I asked.

  She shrugged, a smirk on her face.

  “They said she was a breeder,” Grandpa said in my ear. “Maybe she knows something we didn’t pick up yet. Her DNA showed some serious anomalies. Maybe not all of them are negative.”

  “How did you not pick that up on the scans?” I asked him.

  “Didn’t think to look,” he replied, a chuckle in his voice. “Not like you’ve got a long history with knocking girls up or anything.”

  The rest of the trip we talked about her being a breeder and what that meant. T
hey’d been altering themselves for generations, splitting into nearly two different races. Breeders were hyper-sensitive to things like fertility and conception. The Amazons were bred to be warriors. Duh. We talked nonstop until the AI informed us we’d landed.

  The elevator ride down to the living quarters takes twenty-eight point five-seven-one-four-three minutes. Plenty of time to try out a few things Magenta suggested. Grandpa quoted the time, then cheered when the elevator doors opened. At least he had the decency to pretend like there weren’t cameras in the elevator.

  Magenta was eager and clever. I wasn’t sure I’d ever sleep much again.

  I spent the next three nights sitting at Magenta’s bedside. The treatments didn’t hurt, thanks be. But Mom put her into a coma to do the finer genetic work. The radiation sickness, venereal diseases, assorted fungi, molds and rather nasty Staph infection were all treatable. The bigger things, like longevity and hair growth, were out of the question.

  “Too much chance she’ll lose the baby,” my mother said, weeping. She was an electronic personality, had been for centuries, but the woman cried when she found out for sure she was going to be a grandmother.

  I got a couple shots to clear up the gonorrhea and a booster for tetanus and typhoid. Low risk stuff.

  Magenta loved the improved dental care, and after the first three months of pregnancy nausea her hormones shifted. She was insatiable.

  While Mom and Grandpa began working out a form of communication with the slug that ate my workshop, Magenta and I tried to christen every room in the redoubt. Twice a day for four months, and we only covered about one-tenth of the available rooms. And while she ate about twice my daily caloric intake, she didn’t gain an ounce. Grandpa had told me she’d be big as a horse, and twice as ornery, but I’m glad he was wrong about that too. I never had a chance to talk to Grandma, but I’m beginning to wonder if Grandpa knew anything at all about women.

  Magenta had no problem with him. She was happy as a clam to chat him up now that she was inside the compound. Of course, she thought he was cracked, but she found him charming.