by Jack Quaid
“The droids in there have gone offline. The fallout fried their circuits, and they’ve gone mad,” the old lady said. “Those who go in there, tend to not come out. Those who do, are not the same.”
“Thanks, I think,” Shelby said as she took her first step into the hell version of Manhattan with Knox a couple of steps behind.
It was neither day nor night in the Dead Zone. It was only orange. The fallout of the mini-nuke had left a haze of orange fog so thick that Shelby couldn’t see more than half a block in any direction. The ground was covered in orange dust, the shells of the auto-cars were covered in more dust, and even after walking for only a couple of blocks, both Shelby and Knox were already covered in sweat.
Shelby wiped her brow. “What’s with this heat?”
“It’s from the radiation.”
“It’s probably not going to be good for my skin, is it?”
“Probably not,” Knox said. He stopped in his tracks, heard something and gripped his weapon, ready to blast the hell out of anything that moved.
“What was that?”
“Shh.” Knox’s one eye scanned the area.
They waited, and they listened.
There could have been anything hidden in that orange haze. On their way through Ohio they had seen the effects of mini-nukes. She had seen cows the size of cars. She had seen radioactive crops that glowed green all through the night, and she had seen the effects of radiation on droids, just like the old lady had warned them about, and it wasn’t pretty.
Knox still had his eye wide open and his finger on the trigger.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Shelby said as she unholstered her shotgun.
Out of the haze emerged a droid. It wasn’t a menacing battle droid, it wasn’t even a domestic droid with a makeshift weapon. The droid Shelby was looking at was nothing more than a fast food service droid from McDonald’s, and judging by the scuffed and scratched yellow painted uniform on his body, the war had been tough on the poor guy. When he walked, his joints and gears screeched with rust and decay, and his entire left arm was missing.
“You look like you deserve a break today,” the droid’s corrupted digital voice said. “You must come and dine at McDonald’s.”
Shelby lowered her weapon. He wasn’t a threat. If anything, she felt a little bit sad for him. “Maybe another time, little droid.”
Shelby turned and took a step to continue on down the street, but as soon as her back was turned she heard not one, but two digital voices.
“You look like you deserve a break today. You must come to McDonald’s.”
Shelby looked over her shoulder at the two droids. “No means no, boys.”
Then out of the orange haze, half a dozen or so more McDonald’s droids stood alongside their two buddies. They were a ragtag-looking bunch of droids all beaten and bashed in, and all saying the same phrase. “You look like you deserve a break today. You must come to McDonald’s.”
Shelby cocked her head. “Is it just me or are these guys looking a little aggressive about this whole thing?”
“If I could spare the ammo, I would have blasted them all to hell by now,” Knox said.
“They are making me kinda hungry.”
“You look like you deserve a break today. You must come to McDonald’s,” they all said again.
“Fellas, give it a rest.” Shelby turned her back to the McDonald’s droids to head on back down the street, but when she turned she found herself looking straight at half a dozen or so Burger King droids. As beat up, scratched up, and war torn as the McDonald’s droids looked, the Burger King droids looked just as beat and scratched up.
“Welcome to the home of the Whopper. You must come to Burger King,” all the Burger King droids said in unison.
“What the shit is this?” Knox snapped.
“Back off, Burger King,” the McDonald’s droids all said. “These are our customers!”
“Oh, no,” Shelby said. “They’re competing for customers.”
Knox reaffirmed that grip he had on his weapon. “This is a stupid situation to get into.”
“Nobody wants to eat your burgers!” the Burger King droids yelled.
Which prompted the McDonald’s droids to pull out guns from their aprons and take aim at the Burger King droids, while the Burger King droids did the very same thing, and what we’re looking at is a Mexican standoff with Shelby and Knox sitting right there in between.
“I think it may be time for us to get going now,” Shelby said.
“You must come to Burger King!”
“You must come to McDonald’s!”
Knox gritted his teeth. “This is not going to end well.”
And then the McDonald’s droids started chanting. “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.”
They chanted it over and over again like a war cry.
Knowing they had only seconds at best before the whole situation went to hell, Shelby panned her shotgun across the McDonald’s droids while Knox did the same with the Burger King droids.
“There’s too many of them,” Shelby said. “We’re not going to be able to take them all out.”
“I know.”
While they were sizing up their rapidly deteriorating position, the chants grew louder.
“Got any ideas, Shelby?”
She was shit out of ideas, and there was a very high chance that the story could end right here and now, until Shelby saw an old Chevy speed out of the orange haze and barrel down the road, coming right for them.
“Hey, Knox,” Shelby said. “I might have an idea.”
“What’s that?”
“Duck!”
The driver of the Chevy hit the brakes, and that car came to a sliding sideways stop right behind the McDonald’s droids.
Mounted on the back of that Chevy was a machine gun.
“Duck” was the appropriate word of advice, and that’s just what Shelby and Knox did.
They both hit the ground just as the machine gun opened fire with a barrage of EMP rounds that mowed down both sides of the fast food war.
When the bullets stopped firing and the dust settled, Shelby climbed to her feet and holstered her weapon. Then she cocked her head to get a look at the man behind the wheel of the Chevy.
“Holy shit,” she said. “You’re Meat Loaf.”
Yep, that gorgeous, big man of rock opera was Meat Loaf.
“That’s right, little lady,” he said.
“What Loaf?” Knox asked.
“Meat Loaf!” Shelby snapped.
Knox shrugged. “Never heard of him.”
“You’ve never heard of Bat Outta Hell? Hot Summer Night? I’d Do Anything for Love.”
He shook his head. “Nah.”
Knox was bored, and Shelby was disgusted.
“You’re a disgrace,” she said as she made her way over to Meat Loaf and his Chevy. “Mr. Meat Loaf, I just want to say I’m such a big fan. You Took the Words Right Out of my Mouth is my number-one karaoke song. Thank you for saving us from these droids.”
“Not a problem,” Meat Loaf said. “What are you guys doing all the way out here in the Dead Zone?”
“The droids have got an H2O bomb, and they’re going to detonate it in less than an hour, and Knox and I are going to stop them and save Manhattan.”
“Sound like you folks have yourselves a busy hour coming up,” Meat Loaf said. “I tell you what, I don’t know what an H2O bomb is, but the Dead Zone is a dangerous place. Need a lift?”
Shelby smiled. “Absolutely.”
Thirty-Three
Meat Loaf sped the Chevy through the ruins of a nuclear, bomb-riddled Manhattan, dodging the burnt-out shells of auto-cars and fallen buildings.
Shelby was starstruck, and she wasn’t afraid to admit it either. Over the years, she had met all kinds of famous people, and some would say that
with her previous career of being a supermodel, she was somewhat famous herself. But this was Meat Loaf we’re talking about here. Meat Loaf! Growing up in the early 80s, all her friends had posters of Lionel Ritchie, Queen and Wham! on the walls of their bedrooms, and Shelby thought that those guys were all right, but they weren’t Meat Loaf. Nobody was Meat Loaf! She must have listened to Bat Out of Hell a million times, and if she could get into a time machine, go back in time and tell her fifteen-year-old self that one day she’d be driving through the streets of New York in a vintage Chevy, sitting alongside of Meat Loaf, she probably would have screamed with excitement for a week. New York was in ruins, and there were killer robots everywhere trying to kill them, but it was still cool.
“Well, sweetie, it’s been one hell of a wild ride for ol’ Meat Loaf. I’ve been here in the Big Apple ever since the beginning of this robotic nightmare. I was playing Times Square when at the stroke of midnight all hell just broke loose.”
“I know,” she said. “I saw it all on the TV.”
“It was wild. Really wild. But lucky old Meat Loaf had packed his trusty .357 Magnum.” He pulled back his leather duster to reveal the hand cannon on his hip. “Now, as I later learnt, no matter how powerful the .357 may be, it will not, and I don’t care how many times you pull the trigger, it will not take out a battle droid.”
“Yep,” Shelby said, looking back at Knox in the back seat. “We found that out as well.”
Knox really didn’t give a shit.
“But the .357 will put down a domestic with a headshot,” Meat Loaf continued. “So like I was saying, you know, Meat Loaf had to blast his way out of Rockefeller Center and onto 49th. Auto-cars were going wild, droids were hunting down humans, and drones soared through the skies. I was just trying to get back up to my hotel to my special lady friend, and that’s when the bomb went off.”
“The mini-nuke?”
“It decimated almost a quarter of the city.” He motioned around at the wasteland they were cruising through. “Now known as the Dead Zone.”
“Did you ever get back to your lady friend?”
“Not yet,” he said. “But she’s here, somewhere. I’ll find her.”
She looked over and saw that there was a single tear rolling down his face. “I hope so, Meat Loaf,” Shelby said. “I hope you find her.”
He wiped the tear from his cheek. “Enough talking about sad old Meat Loaf. You guys have really got some guts coming into the Dead Zone like this. There’s madness here. Those droids back there, they’re just the beginning of it. You could get yourselves into some real trouble in the Dead Zone if you don’t know where you’re going.”
“We don’t really have much of a choice.”
“What happens when you find this bomb?”
“I don’t really know. We run kind of a ‘make it up as you go’ kind of operation here.”
“Well, Meat Loaf can get you where you’re going, that’s if, you know, anything doesn’t happen first.”
“What do you mean ‘anything’?”
“The Dead Zone is a wild and vast hell hole of surprise and heartache. If something could go wrong in the Dead Zone, it most likely will.”
“We’ve been through hell to get here. I’m sure we’ll be…" Shelby threw a look back to Knox, and whatever words she was saying faded from her lips as her attention shifted from Knox to what was behind him.
At first she couldn’t quite make it out. She only saw it in quick flashes poking out of the orange haze. It was just a snippet of something here, and a snippet of something there. Maybe something to worry about, maybe not. Nevertheless, Shelby sat up straighter in her seat and peered forward. She watched the orange haze behind them for half a block, and just as she was about to turn back around and forget about the whole thing, a Tyrannosaurus Rex punched out of the haze and thumped down the street behind them.
“Um, Meat Loaf?” Shelby said.
“Yes, little lady?”
“You know how you said that anything could happen in the Dead Zone?”
“Yes, I do remember saying something like that just a couple of minutes ago.”
“Did that include getting chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex?”
Both Knox and Meat Loaf snapped their heads back and saw the gigantic dinosaur chasing them down 9th Avenue.
“Oh, man, he’s back,” Meat Loaf said.
“Back? What do you mean back?”
“When Y2K hit, there was a dinosaur show in town. At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, all those dinosaurs broke their programming and escaped. There’s a bunch of them that have been rampaging through the city ever since. It’s okay, they’re robotic.”
Shelby went white. “That doesn’t make it okay.”
Knox racked his shotgun. “Goddamn it! I knew we shouldn’t have gone with Sugar Loaf here.”
“It’s Meat Loaf!” Shelby snapped. “And this is not a problem. We’ll work through this.”
“Not a problem!” Knox snapped. “How is a giant robotic dinosaur chasing us not a problem? That’s pretty damn close to the literal definition of a problem.”
Shelby pointed to the mounted machine gun on the back of Meat Loaf’s Chevy. “Get on that thing and start putting rounds in Robosaur back there.”
Meat Loaf threw a look at Knox in the rearview mirror. “You can try, big buddy, and many have, but those EMP rounds are way too weak to have any effect on T-Rex back there.”
“You’re not really leaving us with many options here, Meat Loaf,” Shelby said.
“As I said, little lady, the Dead Zone is a—”
“I know, a real son of a bitch.”
With every thumping step, the T-Rex got closer and closer to the Chevy, and it was only going to be a matter of seconds until he was right on top of them.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Shelby said, pointing to Meat Loaf. “You’re going to put pedal to the metal and keep us in front of that thing.”
“No problemo,” he said.
And she pointed to Knox. “And you’re going to keep that shotgun of yours locked and loaded and, as soon as he’s in range, start plugging shells into him.”
Knox racked a shell into his shotgun. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to find my thing,” Shelby said as she shoved her fingers into her shoulder bag and searched around for something.
“What thing?”
“The thing? My thing? You know, that thing Sue gave me?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s a thing! Sue gave it to me, and you can use it to hack some of the weaker AIs and control them.”
Meat Loaf sped the Chevy around a tight corner. “You can hack a droid?”
“Only the dumb ones. It works on simple operating systems. Nothing as complex as a skin job or battle droid, but some circus animal dressed up as a dinosaur? It might just work.”
She pulled out the small device—a reappropriated handheld Donkey Kong console. “Bingo! Sue put this together just before we left him in Chicago.”
“Have you ever used it?” Knox asked.
“Um… you could say it’s rather experimental.”
“So is it going to work or not?”
The T-Rex hammered straight after them, and anything in his path he just crushed with his massive feet.
“I hope so,” Shelby said as she started tapping away furiously at the buttons on the Donkey Kong console.
That T-Rex wasn’t messing about. He had the Chevy in his sights, and he looked like he wanted it bad. The closer he got, the more he started to roar and the more nervous Knox started to look.
“How long is this going to take?” Knox snapped.
“Not long?”
“How long is not long?”
She didn’t look up. “Not long, all right!”
Meat Loaf yanked the wheel and sent that old-school Chevy sideways around the corner and into 57th—or what used to be 57th anyway. Instead of a clear, wide-op
en street to speed away from a T-Rex on, what the Chevy was speeding toward was a dead end. Because at the end of that street, a building had crumbled and fallen, blocking their only escape route.
“I hate to break it to you, little lady, but that timeframe for hacking into that T-Rex just got a little bit shorter,” Meat Loaf said.
Shelby looked up. “Ah, goddamn it!” she snapped.
“Alright, enough of this shit,” Knox said as he climbed onto the back of the Chevy and wrapped his fingers around the dual triggers of the machine gun.
He pushed his eye to the scope and aimed it toward the thumping T-Rex, just waiting for his moment. That very moment when the big mechanical bastard was going to be in range and in sight.
“Come on, come on, come on.”
The T-Rex bobbed in and out of the crosshairs.
Knox had him in his sights!
He hammered down hard on the triggers, but instead of a barrage of machine gunfire, all Knox heard was the click, click, click of a machine gun out of ammunition.
“Loaf!” he yelled. “You’re out of ammo.”
Meat Loaf threw a quick look back over his shoulder. “Yeah, that ain’t good.”
“No shit, Loaf!” He shifted to Shelby. “Can you hack this big bastard or what?”
“I’m working on it.”
Meat Loaf slammed on the brakes, bringing that Chevy to a sliding stop right in front of the debris on the road that was once a skyscraper. “End of the road, folks.”
“I need a minute,” Shelby said.
The T-Rex was almost on top of them.
“There are no more minutes,” Knox said.
“I’ll take care of this,” Meat Loaf said, and as he climbed out of the car, he did so with a gigantic Conan the Barbarian type of sword in his hand that had been sheathed at his hip. Meat Loaf walked out into the middle of the road right behind the Chevy and held it up as if he were ready to slay a dragon.
Meat Loaf and his Conan the Barbarian sword were the only things standing in the way of the T-Rex.
When Shelby looked up and saw what was going on, her jaw dropped. “Meat Loaf is a badass.”
“Meat Loaf is an idiot,” Knox replied.
The T-Rex wasn’t showing any signs of slowing down—he was seconds away at best.