[Warning: Language]
Buck is high tonight, toked-up, tanked-up, packin' and ready make a bad scene all over Chee-toh and his prickless gang of rent-a-hoods. Two days late with half a payment and Chee-toh is givin' him all this static like he was goin' outta business bullshit but that was a thing of the past. Not gonna pay no -half-, no -whole-, no way. Gotta Glock offa transit cop, Kaiser hooked him up with some fancy ass ammo dum-dum, sugar-coated, two-tone, whackum, whatnot. It ain't goin' down like he thought, it's goin' down Buck-style, as in the Buck stops your fuckin' ass here. Bitch.
Just layin' back enjoying the tunes when the Chee-toh squad grooves up in his black four-by, chassis thrummin' from 14-inch bazooka-tube/backseat-amp action. Marvin Gaye never sounded so good.
Look, here comes Hansel and Gretel, Chee-toh's personal ass-lickers. "Yos'sup ladies?" he says non-chalantly, headphones around his neck blaring _Bone Machine_ And the Earth Died Screaming. Cheap-thread skinhead Stasi-Nazi wannabees.
Hansel shakes his head but oh, you're too cool, too cool my son, in those little rose shades. Condescending prick. I got just two words for you, 'bang' and fuckin' 'bang.' Buck leans forward to snag the Glock under his leg, and gets it almost level before Gretel pops him in the back of the head with .38. Saturday Night Special.
"You, ah... wan' us ta shake the place down a bit?" he asks Chee-toh, smacking his gum. "Make it look like a robbery?"
"It IS a fucking robbery, you pinhead!" retorts Chee-toh. "Get me something valuable! And dump this trash out back," he finishes, kicking the dead man in the face.
Trashman looks at Buck's still steamin' corpse, skull all messed up from some slug. It's worth twenty five, but he'll buy it for eighteen and sell it for thirty. Pretty Boy doesn't have time to dicker, 'cause his boss man's breathin' down his neck; gotta make some fast cash and a clean break. Offload and opt out.
"Give you fifteen."
"Fif-? Oh, come on! This is a -primo- body! Look--look! Strong... smart..." He figures it out all by himself. Frat Boy rolls his eyes. "I mean," says Pretty Boy, "I mean smart enough to, like, take simple commands. What does he need a fucking brain for, anyway?"
"Yo, what the FUCK do I pay you two for? Dump that piece of shit and get your asses over here. Now." Boss man don't like to wait.
"I'll make it easy on you. Roll you eighteen and have a good night. Haman," he snaps, no point in waiting. Close the deal by moving the goods. Zipped up in plastic: convenient, safe, non-toxic, easily cleaned. Very portable. Haman carts him away, Pretty Boy takes the dough and a whack on the ear.
Buck is resold later to a posse of diminutive Benedictine look-alikes. Work for some necromancer chop-shop made-to-order zombie factory. Sew 'em back alive, reek to high heaven. Sell 'em in a roadside stand down by the big cemetery, where the effluence meets the affluence. They don't even bother to patch the skull. What does a zombie need a fucking brain for, anyway?
Buck is looking good, steppin' out. He's outfitted, dapper, smart, sportin' leather and kevlar, flack jacket, shock vest, power pack. Ready to rock the world in a neighborhood near you. This shit weighs a ton. As if Buck could care. Can't use half of it anyway - motor control's gone to hell, reaction time somewhere between stupor and comatose. Just keep going.
"No, no, you point it like this you dumb bitch. Forward. That's the business end. Blow your own fucking arm off." Live people just can't chill.
"All right, sweethearts, here's your one, simple instruction; let's see how badly you can all fuck it up, alright?" Sarg points. Buck stares straight ahead. The half-rotted, recently castigated female starts marching forward. Sarg is livid. "You stupid pile of SHIT!! I haven't -given- the goddam -instruction- yet! How the FUCK do you even know what I want?!" They don't teach ya _that_ in business 101.
Time was, Buck would've sniggered. Thing is, he just doesn't get it anymore. Still waiting for orders. The whole zombie pack lurches forward: unlikely troops, improbable tech, impossible mission. Buck starts to move, too. Can't say why - his mouth is sewn shut.
Sarg looks at his adjutant morosely. "What are they doing? Tell me what the fuck they're doing. What's the objective? Where are they going? Who is leading? This isn't an army it's a... a..."
"Marine Corpse?" the adjutant hisses humorlessly. He grins through two rows of stilettos, chomp chomp. Reaching up, he flicks off his AVX and follows the z-pack. It's whole hog mutiny.
Sarg stares slack jawed; give it up, homes - what were you gonna tell 'em anyway? Don't get killed?
Cluster bombs and pinwheels pelt Buck with shrapnel. He takes it stoically, flak and ablat protecting him mostly. Mostly. He just keeps his finger on the trigger of the portable rail gun, spitting out two thousand supersonic chunks of aluminum per second, spraying it in a fan in front of him. Let 'er rip. Oops, he cuts the dead woman in half and plods relentlessly forward.
The smart helm gives him commands, short, to the point. Turn left. Aim for the bunker. Shoot the bunker. Keep shooting. Keep shooting. Keeeep shooting. The bunker wall disintegrates and a half second later erupts into a fireball. Turn right. Move forward. Keeeep shooting.
Eventually his left arm comes off just above the elbow as a pinwheel whips by him, slicing open his ribcage in the process. Ruins the Kevlar on that side, oh well. He steps on a mine, and it blows off his left leg clear up to the hip. Now -that's- gotta hurt. Nope. From his now prone position, Buck's field of fire is limited, but that doesn't stop him from trying. His momma raised him to be an overachiever.
"Look at this one!" he hears a voice not ten minutes later. "Still thinks he's gonna win the war. How much fucking ammo do these things carry?"
"Uhhh...," comes a static filled reply, tinny from a tiny speaker. "twenty minutes of continuous fire, I think." Pop. Crackle. "Cut the steel wire to the backpack."
Number One wastes four rounds until he finally hits the cable housing on the pack. The rail gun whines, but nothing comes out. Kind of like his ex-wife. "What are doing with these things?"
Buzzzz. "Uh...," Number Two never seems to have an answer ready. "Re-purposing them. Just set a beacon, the cleaners will mop 'em up and outfit 'em."
"It's missing some... parts, you know."
Silence. "Yeah, no problem. They make 'em into cyborgs."
Huh. Go figure-third career in three days; talk about a mid-life crisis.
The ground around them shakes once, twice, again. The sun--or whatever is casting the ambient light--disappears as a huge, furry, brown creature at least fifty feet in height stomps past. It looks like-- It IS-- a huge, animated Teddy Bear. It wheels and twirls alarmingly, like some mad thing dancing to music inside its head. But it moves on without incident, crushing only a few bodies in its path.
Buck flops over like a beached trout, waving the wheezing rail gun at the receding pile of shag-bound overstuffed bedtime comfort to no effect.
"What the ffff....," he hears from the now departing soldier recently identified as Number One. The Teddy stomps on, miraculously missing any remaining mines. The defensive bunkers are inexplicably quiet, operators apparently as mystified as the clean-up crew, high-school pot-shooters outside on smoke break.
With a final hip wiggle head tilt, the fuzzy ears disappear over the edge of the corpse laden knoll and Number One shakes his head as if to clear it. Catching a blur of stray cat in his peripheral vision, he flips down the motion tracker and blows it away in a spray of reddened fur.
He doesn't smoke.
Buck is beautiful. Better than bad. Polysteel and titanium, billions of fiberoptic threads skeined throughout his body. Forget resurrection, reincarnation, cycles of birth and death: Buck is re-created.
They fixed him up. They gave him attitude. They gave him what he had always wanted: more.
They patched that *nasty* hole in his skull.
"You belong to us," his generation 5 symbiote brain whispers into the hollow vaults of his mind. "Skin, sinew, bone, steel, circuits, thoughts."
They introduced a designer virus-symbiotic nanomite, grafted electronics, reconstituted endoframe, cleaned him up, and threw in a chemical peel and a new aftershave.
Buck's recollection of his day as a zombie is dim; he muses over the last moments of his human life with detachment, then discards the memory; he may need that space later for something important.
"She one fi-bu nine. Most ad-ubance combination foam. Generation fi-bu brain!"
Soft Russian dude looks nonplussed; too much caviar or fermented potato juice.
GI Joe translates, without batting an eye. "C-one fifty-nine is an advanced re-combo. It's got gen-five neuromatrix, jacked, loaded. Top of the line, all the best stuff."
"Oh?" Who's gonna translate -that- technobabble?
"Only about 3 percent of the populace can sustain the process. This one," (tap tap on chest
~do that again motherfucker and I'll rip your arm off~
*shhhhhh...you belong to ussssss*)
"has an interesting history; it was alive a couple days ago, was killed in some kind of firefight, and then spent a day as a zombie. Go figure."
"Da, let's see! It can do?"
Nod nod. Sidearm up, meets the smartlink in his palm and lights up like a beer sign. Into his comm: "Clear area ten for demo."
Moments later the PA repeats his request "Clear area ten for demo." The Japanese tech retires in a flurry of white lab coat. Four green lights above iris valves suddenly turn red while low but insistent alarms buzz with annoying frequency. Smirnov starts looking around like he's in bad need of a urinal. GI Joe steps back from the ready line, still armed for action, motion tracker on.
"How... how does it mean?" he stammers, but Buck isn't paying any attention because his cyborg mind is talking to him, giving him distances, temperatures, densities, cataloging movement. "Smirnov must be protected."
A pneumatic sigh primes the air, irises dial open, and four undulating biomachines surge forth like torpedoes. Smirnov screams. Buck catalogs the new smell; too late to find that head.
His war book flips through hundreds of signatures in a split second. "AwareWolves," he hears in his head, not neglecting the trademarked name or patented phero-homing system. Time to work.
The four split and mix, crisscross to confuse, slavering and snarling through steel canines designed to shred body armor like cheap cheesecloth.
The Buckster steps to intercept with the righteousness of the just between the pack and the pudgy, earnestly nervous Russian politician.
They rocket in from 8 to 4, leaping to lay it on up close and personal, but Buck is not there, for he has risen; in his place, a steel lined boot sole pile drives smashmouth: "Heel, boy" he grunts mirthlessly. His hands grasp a head mid leap, twist and sweep, a satisfying snap followed by the slap of two more bodies knocked from the air.
GI Joe cracks a gruesome grin. -His- reflexes, -his- training mapped onto an impossibly fast and strong biomachine openin' up a can of whup-ass. It's all he can do to keep his gun up in self-restraint. Each of these little devils costs 3.5 million California Dollars - the price of a new sports car. And they're all female.
Buck doesn't share his fiscal prudence. Two ceramic holdouts appear in his hands as if conjured from MC's evidence room. Crossed arms double-tap two in the chest. Trade secret: they're refurbished, anyway. They go down with yelps.
He scissor kicks the remaining one in the ribcage as it leaps again; it tumbles, flips, twists, and lunges right back at him like a crazed Weeble. Ceramic muzzles flick skyward as Buck's thumbs set the blowback pins for full automatic, then level out. Two burps of half a dozen slugs each send the AwareWolf back ten meters in a mass of blood, oil, and sparking wires.
Buck gets a quick flash of beer-can target practice in Jimmy D's basement. But the memory doesn't get any processor time; he's programmed to compartmentalize.
Turning to Smirnov, he throws his head back and gives two yips and a ululating wolf-howl, finishing up with a pant in mime mimicking Gene Simmons on Kennelration. Smirnov pukes like a puppy. Eloquent.
GI Joe, note to self: lock down that boys' school dropout humor; we'll never get him sold that way.
They do the programmatic equivalent of ramming an air hammer up his ass and gunscrewing his colon to his brainpan. All he can do is 'yessir' and 'yessum.' Pawned 'im off to some rich bitch daddy's a megacorp CEO no-time-to-golf sorority sister. Total shark bait. He's busted down to babysitter and fake-id drink fetch-boy. Bull-fucking-shit.
Undercover looks him over, "You drinkin' dat?" he asks, nodding at Buck's fifth martini in fifteen minutes.
"Nossuh."
"Uh-huh."
I didn't -think- so. Undercover goes back to frisking chicks. He's got a method: feel 'em up and let 'em drink. He's checked the blond booze bomb's boobs three times already; s'okay with her, she's used to it.
"-so, like, he's kind of a dork, but--oops, sorry, Buck. But you know, you could try something a *lit-tle* more stylin' than that-that-," Bambi trails off.
One of Timmy 2-Ton's boys comes groovin' up just then; Buck knows him from the Program days, in for dope and pimping. Everyone called him Twinky. He was never sure why. Twinky is the kind of guy who always walks around with a silver .45 jammed in his waistband and can't keep from fingering the butt. Thinks it makes him look sexy.
Threat assessment:
Risk to client - negligible.
Risk to self - would require divine intervention.
Risk of boredom - unacceptably high.
Solution - I shall smite him.
"Hey, baby. You know what I mean?" asks Twinky pointlessly.
"Get lost," she retorts, turning aside.
"Whoo-ho-hoooo," lookin' around for material witnesses. "You see that? Wow. Now -that- is just cruel."
"Tell him to get lost."
"Get lost."
"So now the talkin' toaster's opening his hole? Here, I got somethin' for you to suck on." His hand wraps around the protruding piece.
Bambi winces, looking away. "Just-just-get *RID* of him."
"Oh, sure jus' like that. Mr. fu-u-" A hand flicks out like a bullwhip, driving a rib-end through several key abdominal organs. Twinky coughs blood and drops like bad habit.
"Ohmygod, ohmygod!" Bambi spooks. "What did you do? What did you -just-fucking-do-?!"
Buck peers down critically at the twitching Twinky. "Terminated." He saw that in a movie once.
Music crashing, lights flashing, bodies twisting with abandon. "Drink up," he says. "Time to go."
Big mouth for a skin job walks up, sucking on a cigarette like she ain't gotten any. Muscles like a Mac truck, fed by a 100K juice jump-up kinda chem system installed in the back of her neck. The way she rubs her nose, you _know_ this gene splicer's got a habit, monkey riding her back with its claws wrapped around her skull.
"Where ya goin', sugar hips?" she purrs, and puts the cigarette out on the blonde's cheek, ignoring the noise coming outta her mouth. A smack upside the back of a dye-bottle head, and the noise stops as the pretty curves of her head crumple inward.
Buck observes his late charge do a face plant on the designer bar, scattering plastic stir sticks and a bowl of lime wedges. This doll was fast. He hoped -real- fast. "DAMN it," he curses without conviction. "Now I'm unemployed."
A punk-wannabe bar back drops his ice tray in shock. Without a backward glance, Buck plants a ceramic barrel dead center in his forhead. "Fuck off," he says mechanically, and the back acquiesces, fainting in a shower of tumbling bottles. Buck's groping eyes never leave the newcomer.
But this bitch has more to say on the subject, eyeing Buck like the fine grade piece of technomancy he is. "We've been lookin' for one of _you_ for while," she adds, her smackhead sniffle a grating couterpart. Her smile reveals a mouth fulla gums and snake fangs, and she's gotta be the latest model of flesh puppet with all the extras-poison sacs, pain resistance, and torqued up brain function. Her eyes jitter a million miles a minute, junkie's orbs sizing up the scene.
Undercover is stumbling through an alcoholic haze yelling something unintelligible into a cellphone. Patrons down drinks and find somewhere else to be; nice to see they have their priorities straight. The evening is looking up.
"I think you should come with me, considering you just flunked outta your last job, Clementine."
Buck smiles. "You after my size nine, doll?"
She smiles back. "Well, maybe you ain't the latest model if all you got is a size nine," she insinuates, words snaking from her mouth like a bad case of jungle rot. She allows one eye to slink over to the pig with the phone.
"Look, peaches, we're going to have some very boring company in a few... you've got two scrumptious choices." Her greyish tongue flicks along her lower lip, leaving her twitching lips shiny as an oil slick. "One, you come with me. Two," and here she rolls her head bonelessly, loosening her shoulders with a few bright cracks, "...we dance."
She leans forward conspiratorially, "Either way, I win. You come in, boss is happy. You don't, I get one wild ride that's better than a Chinaman's fuck. How you want to play it, big boy?"
She's a no-prisoners kinda nonstop-come-on total vamp-tramp that's too good to resist even if Maximum Flop weren't mowing down pedestrians to get in on some no-consequences use of excessive force. He'd like to stay and blow a few away, but that kinda heat ain't necessary, not yet, not tonight, things are already cookin' over here.
"OK, Wild Thing, reel me in. I promise you," he warns her pulling shades out of pocket, "you fuck me, I will seriously fuck you." He smiles, puts them on. "But that *was* what you had in mind, right?"
"Something like, sugar hips, something like."
The pandemonium splits wide open--screeching tires and pounding sirens; red and blue strobe the windows as shattered glass explodes over patrons, sending half scrambling for creative exits, into the welcoming arms of Containment. Rocket trails streak overhead, dozens of Star Cores blind the optically dependent.
Buck switches to topographics, unfazed. Typical MC: sound and fury signifying nothing. They're oozing in through the cracks, a matte-black army of currying, riot-geared stim-junkies, stun-guns pumping. They get overtime, double-time, hazard pay, hardship pay, holiday bonus, and kickbacks, plus all the synthetic endorphins they can take: the job's like a permanent hard-on.
Timmy 2-Ton has no clue why MC is riding him tonight, but he can't afford to get shaken down with a ki-and-a-half of SluiceJuice pre-packaged for individual sale in his camel pack. He and the boys hole up on the loft using DJ SlamBang's equalizer as a makeshift shield and start to do some methodical interior decorating.
MC just eats it up: authorization to escalate is granted before you can radio "resisting arrest."
Things are starting to get ugly; pretty soon they're going to turn personal. Seems like a good time to make an inconspicuous exit. 'Sides, it's only a matter of time until someone talks to the undercover and figures out why they're really here.
Buck hops the bar and scrapes the unconscious back aside with a boot. Dropping to one knee, he punches through the floor, seizes the steel truss, and wrenches it up and to the side, following it up with a kick through the drop ceiling below that clears a meter-wide orifice into the back office of Messrs. Rory & Rory, attorneys at law.
He stands and clears his throat. "After you."
She taskes two seconds to flash that serpent's grin before leaping into the new trap door, landing lightly in a kitty cat crouch. She glances up to make sure her new prize is following before scanning the room for live ones. Seeing nothing, she uses the darkened, bulletproof glass door for what God intended, kicking it in with a delightful clash of boot heel and wire mesh. Clearing the way, she ducks out into a dim hallway, and picks up the pace, jogging through endless urban blight in the form of cubicles.
The door to the echoing flight of stairs is quickly breached, revealing the booming voices of MC a few flights down.
"Looks like I get a dance after all," Little Miss Jacked-Up laughs, and with a quick pat to the back of her neck, sends her body into overdrive. Muscles jump and jitter under her skin as a few thousand volts of get-your-ass-in-gear make their rounds through her blood stream, and she vaults the railing with a visual fluidity that would make gun trauma back spatter jealous.
Two floors free fall, and she catches herself on a handy piece of steel, swinging her boot into the shocked face plate of an MC grunt, hissing joyfully at the wet crunch his nose makes. She jukes and jives through her three unlucky partners, flesh poetry singing her praises with meaty thwacks and muffled cracks of bone. The rifled cracks of gun fire seem anticlimatic as she beats the last man into bloody submission.
Buck follows her over, rebounding from rail to rail like a ropeless rapeller, and lands next to her, side-stepping the insensate body of her last victim.
Her short, spiky hair glistening with ruby berries of blood she cocks her head, and throws out at Buck, "Four, maybe five more at the bottom of the stairs. You want 'em, or do I get to play some more? Or do you want to do-si-do together, Mr. Cocked-and-Loaded?"
"Last one down's a rotten egg," he grins, rolls over the rail. The rear man cushions his fall: boots planted firmly on armored shoulders, he crumples like an accordion. Four more on their way up turn with surprise, weapons to bear, but Buck clears left to make way for his companion.
They track him, firing wildly.
She follows him, like some jack-up Jane of the Jungle, swinging from bannister to bannister. She stops herself one floor short of Buck's would-be assailants, then flips over the railing, and in their midst like a bowling ball in an alley of porcelain pins.
"Snap, crackle, pop!" she sings madly as she spins through them, leaving two to pick their targets, between this wildly gyrating flesh puppet, and the shiny-pretty metal doll at the farther distance.
Distracted by the impromptu appearance of his associate, Buck pulls the last two over the rail and down below the first flight of stairs. Muffled collisions speak with finality.
Above, the sound of ordnance: MC is bringing down the house. Show-stopper. Buck crumples the steel fire door with a punch, garage level sub 6 peeks in between the jamb and the no longer weather-proofed fit. He peels the portal back with a heavy-metal shriek that would do Priest proud.
"You got wheels?" he tosses back, eye on a refurbished blue-and-silver '23 Raida Motion 750-Burner chopped, channeled and lowered, 450 AfterStream Power Plant block bored out to take the 750 cells. "If not, I brought my can opener."
Her head dances at the booming sounds of impromptu justice, and she considers for a whole half second. "My ride is two blocks down and I'm gunning for the here and now. Open Sez Me," she gestures for Buck to do his thing on the riced-up street rod. She scans the exit ramps as she trusts her new best friend and pay check to do his thing.
Buck is on the roof of the roadster in a thought, matte-black hollow CarboLite blade materialized in hand. Light as a feather, stiff as a board. The molecule-wide edge of an optically grown single carbon crystal creates a smooth semicircle thought the street-grade Kevlar. Two hands punch in the improvised moon-roof, head and shoulders follow eel-like into the interior as Buck's head and arms disappear under the dash. A spidery internal organ is ejected, silencing the motion alarms with an urk.
Upon entry in the now pop top mobile can, she turns and grins. "Whyncha let me drive," she says, sliding smoothly behind the wheel. "I got some clue as to where we're heading." She jaunts out a small cannister from a pocket, and sprays it neatly into the mag senser in the wheel. The plesant purr from the hood elicits a sharky grin from the musclebound broad.
Glass packs in the dual-piped twin exhaust rattle thunderously.
"They jacked the fucker up to sound noisy...my kinda ride. Hop in, lover," as she guns the engine joyfully. She doesn't hit the brakes until they're at the end of the row, then slams into a neat bootlegger turn, heading them up the ramp six floor, and out into a rain of light and fire. She whistles appreciatively as she floors it past a nasty MC paddy wagon, skidding out into an open street and heading for the sunset. Sunset Towers, that is, one of the mega miltary-entertainment industrial complexes that keeps this city in booze and women.
"So tell me, sweet meat, what'd you do to deserve a body like that?"
"Kept fucking up," he replies laconically. "Who sez crime don't pay?"
"Mmmm... pays real well my side a' the street," she comments laciviously as she injects into the parking garage of the Sunset Towers slicker than an eager 15-year-old. Parking is a matter of crashing the car into the bank of elevators at the far end, leaving only two intact.
"Whoops," the now-climbing-smoothly-through-the-hole-in-the-top-of-the-car woman comments carelessly, beckoning for Buck to follow her... not to the surviving elevator cars, but to the fire stairs.
"Nice landing," he comments, vaulting out of the passenger seat.
Three flights down, through a featureless hall, a small door, then into a blank room. Katy Cuts-Me-Up turns, smiles at Buck, a sort of blissfully blank expression. "We gotte travel the dreamlines to get where we're wanted... you game?"
He smiles in return. "Sounds like a good time to me..."
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