Take the All-Mart! (9 page)

“Then,” Trip said, “for the love of Shatner can you at least give me a last smoke?”

“Too gods-damn early in the morning for this shit,” a new voice said, echoing through the warehouse. Gruff, with a hint of Louisiana Bayou accent under the half-drunk, half-hung over slur. Trip looked back over his shoulder to see the owner of the voice making his slow way across the warehouse floor, flanked by the two warehouse workers Shemp had sent to go fetch him. He was this little bald Korean guy with a scraggly beard and a milk jug of beer that looked like it was a permanent extension of his hand. He was wrapped inside a dingy, oversized bath robe.

“These the idiots?” the man in the robe asked as he stepped unsteadily up in front of Rudy. Wavering there, he squinted down at Rudy with one clouded eye, while the other, crystal clear but uncontrolled, stared at the wall. “Don’t look like they could steal their own piss if they had a bottle.”

“Oh, hey...” Trip leapt to his feet and put on his friendliest half-smile smirk. “Howdy. I’m Trip. That’s Rudy. The shiny one’s Hunt-R, but he’s a stinkin’ traitor who can be safely ignored for our purposes. And you must be?”

“Morty,” the man growled. “I’m sorta the king here.”

“So I’ve been hearing. And exactly the man I wanted to see.”

“I’ll bet.” Morty brought the milk jug to his face, and in a practiced maneuver, chugged down half of it, then thrust the jug menacingly at Trip. “Your kind makes me sick. You come here and mistake our generosity for naivety. The wasteland breeds a hearty people — just because we like our drink doesn’t mean we’re stupid. We watch what’s ours. Protect it. Share it, yes, but only with our friends.”

“We’re your friends,” Rudy said feebly.

“You took advantage of our hospitality. There’s no greater crime.”

“Crime? What crime?” Trip asked. “Oh! Did I forget to mention we’re freelance security consultants, specializing in surprise testing of security systems to show just how most are extremely vulnerable when targeted by bad people?”

“You expect me to believe that?” Sorta-King Morty asked, that cloudy eye staring up at Trip.

Trip smiled encouragingly. “I’d be extremely grateful if you did.”

“Okay,” Sorta-King Morty said, slugging down the rest of the beer in the jug. He handed the empty jug to one of the workers standing next to him then spun unsteadily around. “I’m going back to bed. String ‘em up on a grain silo as an example.”

“What?” Trip blurted.

Rudy leapt to his feet. “Wait a minute — don’t we even get a trial?”

Sorta-King Morty stopped, almost falling over. One of the workers helped him steady himself. “Trial? You were caught in the act.”

“So?” Trip asked. “We’re still in what used to be America. You have to have a trial.”

Morty shook his head. “Shemp, who’s King here?”

“You sorta are, Morty,” Shemp said. “Ever since you came to town and taught us how to make beer.”

“There you go,” Morty said, smiling at Trip. “No trial needed. We can proceed directly to the fun part.”

Trip smirked. “Fun for you maybe —”

Movement at the other end of the warehouse got his — and everyone else’s — attention. The workers had suddenly stopped stacking kegs and were gathering around the loading bay doors, their conversational din gone dead silent as someone outside banged hard to be let in.

“The wagon from Pittsburgh must be here,” Shemp said.

One of the day-shift workers hit the button and the door slowly rattled open. But it wasn’t a wagon waiting. It was a girl wearing a brimless baseball cap, corset and knee-length leather skirt covered in road dust, straddling a Vincent Black Shadow that was about a foot too tall for her. She was up on tiptoes, struggling to keep it upright. The second the door was open far enough, a couple day-shift workers ducked under it to hold the bike for her. Another helped her off the bike — and to keep standing once she was. The other workers gathered around her as she coughed out a few words, then collectively pointed at Morty.

“Isn’t that?” Rudy asked, squinting.

Trip nodded. “That beer-slinging jailbait, yeah. It’d be wrong to say the whole tattered dust bunny thing is totally doing it for me, wouldn’t it?”

“Way better look than the Lederhosen,” Rudy said, swallowing, “but yeah, very wrong.”

The dayshift workers were escorting Brenda towards the break area now. She was trembling, wild eyed and panting.

“Morty,” one of them said, “she says she needs to speak you.”

“Catch your breath, child.” Sorta-King Morty took her hand and led her to the couch. “You all get back to work,” he told the dayshift workers. “And somebody go get Stan, tell him his girl needs him.”

Brenda plopped down into the couch, shivering. “Fuck that, get me a drink.”

Sorta-King Morty nodded at Shemp to do as she asked, then turned back to Brenda. “What happened?”

“It was the All-Mart,” Brenda said, grabbing her knees and hugging them close to her chest. “They were praying to it and all of a sudden it just... grabbed them.”

“What do you mean ‘grabbed them’?” Sorta-King Morty asked.

“Grabbed them,” Brenda chocked out, blankly staring past him. “These huge arms of smoke came out and it pulled everyone inside.”

“Everyone?”

Brenda nodded. “Everyone... all of them... even...” Brenda managed to bring herself to look directly at Sorta-King Morty. “Her too. She yelled at me to run and get help, right before she got swallowed up. I ran, took her bike. — I left them all there... I left her there... I’m so sorry.”

Sorta-King Morty stammered, sagged down onto the couch next to Brenda.

Shemp returned with a jug of beer. He handed it to Brenda, helped her take a sip. “You did the right thing, Brenda,” he said.

“I should have stayed,” Brenda said, taking another sip. “Fought it... somehow...”

“You couldn’t have,” Shemp said to her, then turned to Morty. The Sorta-King’s cloudy eye was staring at nothing, the other one at the ceiling.

Shemp snapped his fingers in front of his face. “Morty, you okay?”

“We have to save her!” Morty blurted, sitting up. “Them. All of them. Sound the alarm! We’re going into the All-Mart to rescue my daughter!”

Nobody moved for the longest moment. Shemp’s fellow nightshift workers were suddenly staring at their boot tops.

“Umm...” Shemp said sheepishly.

Sorta-King Morty’s head snapped around. “What?”

“We’re beer makers, Morty. Not soldiers.” Shemp lifted his P-90. “Hell, these things aren’t even loaded.”

“They’re not?” Trip blurted, then in a whisper: “Vishnu’s herniated septum. Rudy?”

“On it.” Rudy flinched his right wrist rapidly three times, popping the miniature circular saw implant out from under the concealed hold-out skin flap on his right forearm. It immediately spun up to speed with a high-pitched buzz, cutting through his twine and tape binding from the inside.

“You’re cowards!” Sorta-King Morty spat at Shemp. “All of you.”

“It’s the All-Mart, Morty,” Shemp said. “Nobody ever comes back out. It’d be suicide, and I’ve got kids. We all do.”

“So do I.” Sorta-King Morty’s whole body sagging. Brenda offered him the jug of beer. He took it, cradled it. “And that thing has her.”

“I know,” Shemp said. “But besides her, all the sisters are from other towns. Nobody’s going to be willing to risk it. Sorry.”

“We have to do something...” Sorta-King Morty took a long, comforting slug from the jug, then stared into it, his face contorting with resolution. “I’ll rescue Roxanne myself!” He bolted to his feet, unsteadily, and promptly fell over, face down and out cold on the floor at Trip’s feet.

“Roxanne?” Trip said, snapping his fingers. “Oh — that’s where I know him.”

“What?” Rudy asked, his hands free now and stepping behind Trip to start in on his bindings with the tiny buzzing blade.

“Nothing — my clever plan worked, is all,” Trip said, shrugging free of the twine and tape as Rudy cut through it. He immediately went for his tin of cigs and lit up, then smirked at Shemp. “When the Sorta-King wakes up... I’ve got a deal for him.”

CHAPTER 8: ON THE ROAD AGAIN?

By Noon, the
Wound
was speeding away from Shunk, the thrum of her breeder reactor momentarily stopping all work in the barley fields — townsfolk looking up from their weeding to stare as the Dodge whipped by, kicking up clouds of dirt and gravel in her wake.

Relaxed in the front passenger seat, Rudy finished stuffing his calabash and lit it. “So, what you set the timer on Hunt-R’s emergency abandonment protocol to? Three days? Four? He gonna meet us in Atlantic City?” He sat back, looked out the window just as the
Wound
jagged left at a fork in the dirt road. His eyes and pipe pointed back at the fork. “Umm... isn’t A.C. that way?”

Jacked into the
Wound
, Trip shot a caff pill into his mouth from the Bugs Bunny Pez dispenser. “We’re not going to A.C..”

Rudy pursed his lips around the bit of the pipe. “Yeah... you’re probably right. Bounty hunters will expect that. Radiation levels this time a year, the fishing will suck anyway. But if we’re not going to A.C., where’s Hunt-R meeting us, then?”

Trip slipped the dispenser away into a tux inner pocket, took out a cig. He pushed the dash lighter in with his thumb. “Robot’s staying put in Shunk. That was the deal with the Sorta-King. He keeps Hunt-R as collateral —”

Rudy shrugged. “He will be missed. But... it just so happens I’ve got this design for a new model I’ve been itching to try out.” Rudy fished around behind him in the seat crack until he pulled out a wadded piece of paper. He un-crumpled it, and smiling proudly held the drawing on it up for Trip to see. It was a rough mechanical sketch of a sphere with short stubby legs and arms and a Cyclops-eye dome of a head. “I call him Gonz-O. He’ll be a workhorse. Plenty of gadgets in him. I can start building his central core now, you pull over a sec and let me grab my tools and that Cray we salvaged in Albuquerque from the trunk.”

The lighter popped and Trip lit his cig. “Will he be less mouthy?”

“That’s up to you, isn’t it?”

“I guess.” Trip shrugged. “But it doesn’t matter. We don’t need a new robot. We’ll get that old bastard junk pile of circuits back once we rescue Roxanne.”

“Sure,” Rudy said, folding the paper and stuffing it back into the seat crack. “But that was just bullshit to get us out of there. Like you telling Morty you’re in love with Roxanne — that was a little cruel, by the way, but guess I can’t complain: I’m not swinging off the side of a grain silo.”

“Yeah...” Trip blew smoke out the open driver’s window and watched the barley fields giving way back to scrubland. “Bullshit. Except, it’s possibly not.”

“Of course,” Rudy sighed, putting his calabash in the ash tray and reaching for the shotgun on the dash.

Trip scowled at him. “What are you doing now?”

Rudy was trying to get his mouth around the shotgun barrels. He gave up and simply put them flat against his forehead. “Pull over so I can get a clean shot. I don’t wanna get brains all over my t-shirt-shirt. I would like an open casket — I promised mom.”

Trip rolled his eyes. “Stop being a cartoon.”

“Stop being insane,” Rudy said, spinning the shotgun around to point both barrels right at Trip’s long nose. “You are not in love.”

Trip gently pushed the shotgun out of his face. “I could be, you don’t know.”

“No, I
do
know.” Rudy tossed the shotgun into the back seat. “You’re not. You never are. Infatuated, yes... all the fucking time. But never in love. Not for real.”

“But what if she’s the one this time? Huh, you think about that? There she is, the potential love of my life, trapped in the All-Mart. I’m all for long-distance relationships, but that’d be a stretch.”

With one hand, Rudy tweaked his nipple while the other retrieved the calabash. “She’s not the one.”

“How do you know?” Trip indignantly dashed out his cig, half-smoked. “You never even met her.”

“Doesn’t matter. They’re never the one. Because you don’t have a ‘one’. Except yourself.”

“I am rather fetching, aren’t I?” Trip leaned to check his hair in the rear-view. He flicked at it until the curl was just perfect. “But Roxanne’s no slouch. She’s got a brain. And perfect eyes... perfect smile... more than perfect ass. Special, even, that ass. The things she can do with that ass...”

“Will you listen to yourself? Why do you keep doing this? We’re free and clear here. The king was drunk enough to let us go, we should take advantage of the good luck. Hell, nobody’s gonna come after us if we just blow him off. You’ll forget her in a week.”

Trip glared at him. “Dude, she doesn’t wear underwear.”

Rudy’s eyebrow went up. “Okay, two weeks. Tops.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Definitely.”

“But how will I know until we’ve had that crucial second date? You know, the awkward one where you actually go out to dinner and have to make small talk over breadsticks? Anyway, there’s still the little matter of having to pay back the Warlord Hu.”

“And how is going into a zombie-infested department store for a chick you barely know gonna help with that?”

“The reward!”

“What reward?”

“Think about it.” Trip thumbed the dash lighter in, took a fresh cig out of the tin. “We bring Roxanne back, daddy Sorta-King’s gonna be happy. Happy enough to open the town vault —”

“Would that be the vault you couldn’t crack?” Rudy interrupted, chuckling.

Trip scowled at him and continued, “— and throw enough money at Hu to get her to forget all about us.”

“Forget all about you, you mean. She’s already forgotten about me. You heard the Higgins — you’re the one with the bounty on his head. Hell, I could probably make all this go away if I just turned you over to her. Collect myself a nice bounty while I’m at it and retire to some quiet beach in Colorado.”

“Don’t get any ideas.” Trip’s hand hovered impatiently over the dash lighter until it popped. He grabbed it, lit his cig, then jammed the lighter away. “Turn me in, I’ll remind her how you treated Mr. Charles Xavier Whimsy, Esquire. Bet he walks with a limp now. All spastic and pathetic.”