by Jack Quaid
Meat Loaf tightened his grip around his sword.
His eyes closed as he drew in a long, deep breath, and when he opened them again, Meat Loaf looked as if he was ready to go to hell and back.
The T-Rex was so close that one or two more steps and he would be in chomping distance.
Meat Loaf could feel the heat from the robosaur’s artificial breath when suddenly, when he was only inches away from the pop rock star’s face, the T-Rex froze.
Confusion washed over Meat Loaf as he cocked his head at the frozen dinosaur. He then shifted that gaze back at Shelby, and there she was, standing on the front seat of the Chevy with a smirk on her face and the Donkey Kong console in her hand.
“I told you there was nothing to worry about.”
“You could have been a little quicker about it, little lady.”
Shelby shrugged. “But it was far more exciting this way, wasn’t it?”
Thirty-Four
Before the uprising, Chelsea Park was where the residents of Chelsea went to chill out on hot summer days and walk through on cool winter evenings. After the uprising, the ruins of Chelsea Park were used as a makeshift base for Tera Mach’s droid army. It wasn’t a big base by any means. Shelby and Knox had come across bigger bases in Idaho, Kansas City and Jersey where thousands of battle droids mounted their missions. But the situation being what it was in NYC where the droids and the military would fight it out block by block, it simply wasn’t prudent to have a unit, platoon or anything stationary for any prolonged period of time. Things that didn’t move in Manhattan tended to become targets.
Shelby peeked up from behind the shell of an overturned auto-bus and watched as the droids loaded something that looked very much bomb-like into a twenty-six-wheeler Mack auto-truck. “Is that the H2O bomb?”
Knox’s eyes shifted that way. “Looks like it.”
“Why not just detonate it now? Where are they taking it?”
“There’s not that many people around here in the Dead Zone. They must be taking it to a more populated area,” Meat Loaf said.
“We need to stop it.”
Meat Loaf leaned forward. “I might have an idea.”
“Really,” Knox said, sceptical as hell. “You’ve got an idea?”
“Does it involve that sword of yours?” Shelby asked.
Meat Loaf grinned.
“I think I’m going to like this idea,” she said.
Thirty-Five
BD-62524 stood on lookout as the other battle droids loaded the H2O bomb into the back of the truck. It was a suicide mission plain and simple. He knew that, the rest of his unit knew that, and there was nothing BD-62524 or the rest of the droids could do about it. An order was an order, and they were programmed to follow orders. That didn’t mean he had to like it. He knew the moment the bomb detonated, not only would it evaporate every single drop of water in a twenty-mile radius, it would also evaporate the oil in his joints and the coolant in his motherboard.
Yep, it was a suicide mission, all right.
Orders were orders.
It wasn’t easy getting the H2O bomb from their base to Chelsea Park. They had encountered trouble every leg of the way. That last encounter crippled the tank they had been traveling in, so they called for support and a new vehicle. That was how they came to be standing there in Chelsea Park all exposed as they unloaded the bomb from a trashed tank and into an auto-truck that was once owned by Budweiser. It even had the faded logo still painted on the side.
BD-62524 scanned the orange haze but couldn’t see anything, so he switched to thermal, and the instant he did, there was the heat signature of a human coming right for him.
A couple of seconds later, the figure of a big man holding an even bigger sword emerged out of the orange haze. BD-62524’s facial recognition kicked in and quickly placed the sword-wielding man as pop-rock god Meat Loaf.
Meat Loaf took three quick steps and, in one badass swoop, hacked that battle droid’s head clean off. It may have just been a plain old sword, but with Meat Loaf wielding it, that sword would become legend in the years to come and feared across the nation by droids everywhere.
All the droids in Chelsea Park that night were networked, and by the time BD-62524’s robot skull hit the soot-covered ground of the park, the entire unit of battle droids knew he was there, and each and every one of them turned their attention to Meat Loaf.
“You want some Loaf, toasters?” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “Come and get some Loaf!”
Then he took a couple of steps backward and disappeared into the orange haze behind him.
The sound of the Chevy roared to life, and Meat Loaf yelled out one more time. “Come and get it, toasters!”
36
Meat Loaf sped off down the street with half a unit of battle droids hot on his tail. Some were on bikes, others were on foot, but they were all firing their weapons, and even though she couldn’t have been one hundred percent sure, Shelby was pretty sure that she saw Meat Loaf laughing his ass off as he got the hell out of there.
As soon as he was gone with the majority of the battle droids in hot pursuit, Shelby and Knox stepped out from behind the auto-car.
“Odd guy,” Knox said.
“Do you want to know what I think is odd?”
“What?”
“That up until tonight, you had never heard of Meat Loaf.” Shelby pulled her shotgun and racked it. “It’s a disgrace.”
“Can we just focus on saving the city?”
“It’s still a disgrace,” Shelby said as they ran bent at the waist into Chelsea Park.
BD-63528 and BD-767829 stood guard as BD06262 and BD-272900 loaded the H2O bomb into the rear of the truck and buckled it down. After the incident where BD-62524 was beheaded by a sword, all the droids were put on high alert.
BD-63528 peered forward into the haze. “Did you hear that?” he asked BD-767829.
“Hear what?”
But it was too late.
Out of the haze came two EMP shotgun blasts. The first one hit BD-63528 in the chest, and the second was a headshot on BD-767829.
The droids glitched and froze exactly where they were standing, and just as the other two battle droids stepped down from the back of the truck to figure out what the hell was going on, there Shelby and Knox were with their weapons in their hands, their fingers around the triggers and those two battle droids in their sights.
Neither Shelby or Knox gave the situation so much as a second thought and opened fire.
They didn’t stand a chance. The droids glitched up just like the other two for a couple of seconds before freezing altogether.
Shelby gave Knox a congratulatory nod. “We’re so lucky Meat Loaf got rid of all those droids, huh?”
Then just as those words left her lips, a gust of hot air blew away the orange haze behind them, and standing right there was Meat Loaf and every single battle droid that sped off to catch him.
Knox was the first to look over his shoulder and notice them. He let out an exhausted sigh. “Shelby,” he said, trying to get her attention.
“Like, can you imagine if this place was crawling with all those droids?” she continued.
“Shelby.”
“We would be like dead meat. Absolutely, positively dead meat. Do you remember that movie Dead Meat? We’d be totally deader than that.”
“Shelby!”
“What?”
He thumbed a big scarred hand behind him. “I think we’re dead meat.”
Shelby looked over her shoulder at all the battle droids. “This totally sucks.”
Thirty-Six
Shelby watched the twenty-six-wheel Mack auto-truck’s doors slam closed with the H2O bomb inside and drive off down the street.
Shelby was on her knees. Knox was on one side of her, Meat Loaf was on the other, while battle droids surrounded them all. They had their weapons up, and the situation they were in would best be described as a good old-fashioned execution.
“This is no
t how I thought things would end up,” she said.
“Funny,” Knox said. “This is exactly how I thought this was going to end up.”
The truck disappeared into the orange haze, and a couple of moments after that, the sound of the engines faded out as well.
Shelby closed her eyes, let out a sigh, and when she reopened them again, there was a skin job standing right there. He looked like the typical white American male model, most likely built for some service industry like hospitality or customer service. He was handsome but not too handsome, and whatever had happened to him since the uprising had taken its toll. His artificial flesh on his entire right arm had been burnt off, leaving nothing but his metal skeleton, while small cuts and nicks were taken out of his face from various fights, battles and shrapnel. His name was Connolly, and he was obviously the man in charge of this operation.
“Do you know what I hate most about your species?”
“Is it I Will Walk 500 Hundred Miles by the Proclaimers?” Shelby asked.
“No.”
“Hanson’s Mmmm Bop?”
“No.”
“All seven Police Academy movies.”
“No! What I hate most about your species is your blatant disregard for, well, everything.”
“That must get pretty annoying.”
“You had the technology to create artificial life, but you never asked yourself that just because you could, doesn’t mean that you should.”
“For the record,” Shelby said, “I personally was doing other things when you were created. But I totally get your point.” She threw an eye over the battle droids surrounding them. “So is this it? The end of the line. The big sleep. Time to kick the bucket.”
“Kick the bucket?” Connolly said.
“Yeah, kick the bucket. It’s a thing.”
“I’ve never heard that before.”
“You’ve never heard kick the bucket?”
“No.”
“It’s a thing.”
“What does it mean?”
“To kick the bucket?”
“But where does the saying come from?”
Shelby shrugged—she had no idea.
“It’s a suicide thing, darlin’,” Meat Loaf added. “You put that noose around your neck, you kick the bucket and hang.”
“See,” Shelby said. “It’s a thing.”
Connolly shook his head. “Then no. It’s not time to kick the bucket. This is not suicide. This is murder.”
“Well, excuse me all to hell,” Shelby said. “I didn’t know we were dealing with a thesaurus over here.”
“That wouldn’t even be in a thesaurus.”
“Whatever,” Shelby mumbled.
“Is this seriously the last conversation I’m ever going to hear?” Knox said.
“No, Knox,” Shelby said in a tone that indicated that she was totally up to something. “I don’t think it is.” And with that her eyes looked down and over the back of her shoulder.
Knox followed that gaze and saw that in Shelby’s hands behind her back was the Donkey Kong handheld console. It took a moment to put two and two together, but as soon as he heard the distant sounds of a murderous robotic Tyrannosaurus Rex thumping down the street, he did the math and worked out what the hell she’d done.
“This is either the very best idea you’ve ever had, or the very worst,” Knox said.
“I know,” Shelby replied. “It’s so hard to tell.”
A moment later, Connolly looked over his shoulder in the direction of the thumps, but through the orange haze it was impossible to see anything. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you, Miss Shelby?”
“Maybe a little,” she said with a grin.
Then out of that orange haze busted that robotic T-Rex, which halted at the sight of the whole scene and let loose a massive roar that left Shelby’s ears ringing for a couple of seconds after it finally stopped.
“Oh, no,” Connolly said.
Oh, no indeed.
Connolly tried to run. He turned on his heels and aimed himself in the complete opposite direction of the robosaur, but he didn’t get far. The T-Rex took a couple of steps, bent down and chomped on him. Like a dog with a rag doll, he slung his head left to right so hard and fast that the droid’s body broke in two with his legs flying off in one direction and the other being chewed between the metal teeth of the robosaur.
After trying to compute the very thing they were seeing, the battle droids reassessed the threat, and by the look at the shift in their attention, Shelby, Knox and Meat Loaf were no longer the bigger of the two.
The droids opened up fire on the T-Rex, but their bullets had little effect. They were all on target, and they were all hitting, but it was going to take a hell of a lot more firepower to take him down.
“It’s probably time to go,” Shelby yelled over the noise and mayhem. “Meat Loaf, where’s your Chevy?”
He climbed to his feet. “This way.”
They grabbed their weapons and got the hell out of there in a hurry and ran down the street.
They didn’t slow until they were at the car two blocks away, and in that entire run she didn’t even look back. But she really didn’t have to. She could hear the carnage she’d left in her wake.
Shelby skidded to a stop at the Chevy.
The car was covered in bullet holes, and when the droids rammed it off the road, they rammed it into a Starbucks. “Will it start?”
“Only one way to find out,” Meat Loaf said, jumping in behind the wheel.
He turned the key. The engine struggled to turn over, but after a couple of tries and with Meat Loaf pumping the gas, the big V8 engine roared to life.
Knox climbed into the Chevy. “What’s the plan?”
“We catch up to the truck, jump on board, shoot all of the droids, disarm the bomb and save Manhattan.”
“And you think that’s going to work?”
“My plans always work.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Not with an attitude like that, they won’t.”
Thirty-Seven
The Mack truck sped down what was left of 12th. There was debris and rubbish all over the road, but the two droids sitting in the front seats couldn’t care less about that and ploughed right through them. Up ahead there was a small bridge over the road that connected the Nintendo building with the Rockstar building, and the bridge served as a walkway for people going from one to the other.
What those two droids in the front seat of the truck didn’t know was at that very moment there were three people on that bridge. And of course those three people were Shelby, Knox and Meat Loaf.
Knox looked over the edge of the bridge at the fall below and then shifted that look to the truck speeding their way. “I’m just going to come out and say it. This isn’t one of your better ideas.”
Shelby looked over the edge at the daunting drop. “Agreed.” She made one final check of her weapons just to make sure they were locked ‘n’ loaded, then she looked back at Meat Loaf. “It’s been an absolute pleasure meeting you, and I can truly say you’ve lived up to all of my expectations.”
“Glad to be of assistance, little lady.”
“And I hope you find you’re special lady friend.”
He gave her a little nod. That nod had a little bit of sadness in there. Almost as if Meat Loaf knew deep down that she was gone, but the only thing he had left in his life was the search for her. Shelby could relate, and she started thinking of Isaac…
“Hey,” Knox yelled. “Snap out of it and get ready.”
The truck was half a block away, within seconds it would be passing right underneath them, and both Shelby and Knox would have to make the jump. Now, Shelby had never jumped from a bridge onto a speeding truck before, and although she was nervous, she took some comfort in knowing that she was doing it alongside somebody who could be best described as almost a damn expert in jumping off bridges onto speeding things.
“What should I
expect?”
“What?”
“You’ve done this before.”
“What the hell are you talking about.”
“In Lone Wolf Comes to Town, you jumped from a bridge onto a speeding truck.”
“That was a movie!”
“I thought you did all your own stunts?”
“Nobody is stupid enough to do that.”
Shelby tried to swallow, but her throat was dry. The truck was seconds away. It was now or never time. “I guess we are.”
Shelby didn’t have time to think, second guess or do anything else for that matter.
She just jumped over the railing and slammed down hard onto the roof of the truck. There was something about the speed of the truck and the height from which they jumped that caused them both to tumble across the top of the truck and almost right over the edge. And if it wasn’t for Knox grabbing a hold of Shelby, right over the edge was exactly where she would have gone.
He pulled her up, and they both lay on their backs, catching their breaths.
“You’re right,” Shelby said.
“About what?”
“This really wasn’t one of my better plans.”
The truck itself was just a run-of-the-mill, regular Mack truck with a cabin incorporated into the cargo bay. They were built for long hauls and could automatically drive from one side of the country to the other nonstop, no need to refuel or stop.
Now generally Shelby and Knox would have tossed in a couple of EMP grenades and gone in the easy way. Not knowing what effects an EMP grenade would have on an H2O bomb, they figured it was probably best for them to go in the hard way.
There was a hatch on the top of the truck, and it only took Shelby a minute or so to use the Donkey Kong console to hack the lock.
She was the first to jump down into the hatch, and by the time her feet hit the floor she already had the shotgun in her hand.
There were four battle droids down the back of the truck, standing guard around the H2O bomb. She retaliated first and blasted all four of them to mecha heaven within a matter of seconds. Then she swung that shotgun around to the front of the truck just in time to see that Knox had done the same to the two battle droids up there.