Authors: Victor Gischler
“This is a joke,” I said. “It’s got to be a joke.”
“It is not,” the dog insisted. “I am a sophisticated A.I. I understand humor, but am not programmed to use it. All you need to know is that you must secure her safety until the Reich can come pick her up. Everything depends on it.”
“
Nothing
depends on it.” I spread my hand, indicating the ruined city around me. “There’s nothing left to depend on it. Game over, dog.”
“This is not within your authority to decide.”
I pointed the gun at him. “You’re coming with me, and I’m going to cook you and eat you.”
“That is not possible,” the tiny animal said. “Upon completing my message, I am programmed to self-destruct in three, two—”
“Wait—”
I’d expected an exploding dog to be louder, but it was more of a fuzzy muffled pop. I flinched, bloody chunks and dog fur spattering my shining white pants and striped jacket.
I looked down at the remains of the exploded pooch, tears welling in my eyes. He’d more or less vaporized.
Not a single chunk was big enough to eat.
I
was lost on a boardwalk with carnival games, the booths hollow, tattered banners snapping in the wind. Distorted clown faces on posters, their eyes following me in my drug-induced haze. I wasn’t worried about them. I knew I was at the ragged end of my high. I’d crash soon.
No, I wasn’t worried about the clowns.
It was the others.
They were coming.
The sound of the exploding dog, muffled as it was, must’ve drawn them, some lurking band of scavengers. I hadn’t seen them yet, but I heard the voice shouting as the mob edged closer, searching for me. I ran, clomping the boards down the midway and turned into a dead end. A huge wooden wall signaled the end of the boardwalk—it was painted with an old-timey mural of some historical scene, tanks with swastikas rolling over fleeing and cowardly men in Russian uniforms.
If I’d been thinking clearly, I might have recalled the battle. Instead, when I looked at the mural from the corner of my eye, the faces of the Russian soldiers all looked like the grinning clowns from the poster. When I looked at the mural dead on, the faces were terrified Russians again. I blinked. Shrugged.
Clowns. Russians.
Fuck ’em.
I turned to double back and find a way off the boardwalk, but it was too late. They’d arrived, a dozen of them in tattered clothing, rifles slung across their backs. They spread out to keep me from getting past. Their gaunt faces and wild eyes made them look just as hungry as I was.
“What the hell?” one of them grunted, a buck-toothed pilgrim with a wolf-man beard down his throat. “It’s the ice cream man.”
Even splattered in dog blood, I must have looked like some bright and ridiculous post-apocalyptic harlequin.
“Welcome to the rocky road, you tutti-frutti motherfuckers.” It was something I thought the world’s toughest ice cream man might say.
There was a prolonged tense pause and then, as if some psychic signal went off, they all charged me at once, screaming and drooling, coming for me with bare hands. From deep within the fog of my narcotic-baked brain, the training emerged. I watched one of my feet spring up and crack the buck-toothed bastard in the face with a rapid kick. One of his buck teeth went spinning away as he spit blood and staggered back.
I used the word
training
, but it was
programming
, every bit as much as the A.I. parasite had been programmed to interpret the dog’s sense of smell or use its vocal cords to form speech. I was just a machine that belonged to the Reich, and they were still pressing my buttons back on Gestapo Mars. Instead of circuits and processors, my parts were made of meat and bone.
Oh, sure, I could flip a middle finger to the Reich, say I was my own man, that I’d quit, was out. I could scream it, and yet my feet had turned toward the shore. Find the sea. Find the island.
Find the girl.
As these thoughts rolled around in my head like loose marbles, the programming was still going to town on the scavengers. I spun and shattered a jaw with a backhanded fist. Dropped and swept a leg, upending a man. When I sprang up again, I headbutted another man in the nose, smashing it flat like a rotten tomato, blood and gunk spraying down the front of his camouflage shirt.
“Will somebody fucking grab the guy?” a scavenger yelled.
“We’re trying!” another replied.
A wiry guy with greasy dishwater hair and bad skin moved in with a sloppy punch. I caught it, slipped him into a wristlock, and twisted, grinning when I heard the
snap
. He backpedaled fast, screaming and cradling the broken wrist against his chest, eyes wide like he couldn’t believe he could get so hurt so quickly.
Then suddenly they all stepped back at once, and I knew that wasn’t good. A shadow appeared at my feet. I turned and looked, trying to move aside at the same time, but I was too slow.
A thick cargo net hit me heavy and hard. I stumbled, but the scavengers saw their chance and dog piled me. I looked up through the netting and saw two more of them straddling the top of the wall. They must have circled around and climbed up there while I was pounding on their pals.
At least the pills were working. Fists rained down on me, over and over, and I didn’t even feel it.
Okay. Maybe I felt it a little.
* * *
Dazed but not out.
I swung in the cargo net like a prize catch, strung between two of the scavengers who carried me as we marched in a line. I drifted in and out, never quite going unconscious.
“Son of a bitch, why didn’t we just shoot the fucker?” one of them asked.
“If he bleeds out, he won’t be fresh, and we got to wait for the boss and the others,” another said. “And anyway, I’m almost out of ammunition.”
“I’m out completely.” A third voice came from behind us.
They grumbled like that as we marched, the day slipping into evening, and the sound of waves lapping against the shore growing louder. Their gait changed and I twisted my head to glance down through the netting, saw that we were marching across sand now, toward a flickering campfire.
The scavengers carrying me exchanged coarse greetings with those at the camp, and I was dumped into a heap on the sand. I kept still, eyes closed, feigning unconsciousness.
Over the next hour, more of them arrived, and the campfire circle took on something of a party vibe, like some kind of post-apocalyptic beach rave. Going just by sound, I estimated maybe two dozen of them. Then I heard soft footfalls in the sand coming toward me and held my breath.
“Right over here, boss,” a familiar voice said. “He’s kind of malnourished, but clean. No diseases or parasites, far as I can tell.”
I felt someone pulling the net away from me, then a hand on my shoulder turning me over. My eyes popped open and I looked up into the face of a maniac.
Gray hair, shaggy, wild, and blowing in the wind. Eyes bloodshot, fat lips smeared with bright red lipstick, a little golden skull hanging from each ear. A necklace of fingers and ears hung around his neck, his flowered shirt unbuttoned and also flapping in the wind. He looked like a cannibal on a tropical vacation.
He reached down, pinched one of my cheeks.
“Oh, yeah, he’ll do,” he said, his voice coarse. “You did right to wait for me. You know how I like to hear them scream when they sizzle.”
Sizzle?
“Get him up!” the wild man shouted. “I want him stripped and salted and peppered in five minutes.”
Then there were many rough hands on my body, jerking me up into a standing position, coat and tie and shirt being ripped away. I got a better look now at the savage faces, hellish in the glow of the campfire. All were snarling and expectant, eager for the carnage to come.
One man stood out among them.
He was huge—tall and fat and nude, and even sitting cross-legged in the sand he was almost as tall as the men standing on either side of him. Skin hairless and rubbery, impossible rolls of flesh in a world without food. At least four hundred pounds. Head like a melon, bald and glistening. His eyes were huge and glassy, firelight reflecting in them. He didn’t seem to see anything or even know what was happening. The behemoth sat unmoving, staring straight ahead. He took no part in the revelry and might as well have been some obscene wax statue.
My eyes shifted to the six and a half foot spit they were erecting over the fire. It had a rotisserie handle on one end to turn the meat slowly so it could cook evenly.
The meat.
Me.
It sank in then and I tried to jerk away from the hands holding me. If I could get loose, make a run for it…
“Shatterstorm!” I shouted. “Shatterstorm!
Shatterstorm!
” Maybe there was a pack of Dobermans nearby with A.I. parasites, dogs that could charge to my rescue. Hell, it was worth a shot.
Then there was a movement so slow and subtle, it stood out amid the swarming savagery. The behemoth’s gleaming bald head turned slowly toward me, enormous eyes blinking once.
Fists slammed into my body. A shot to the gut doubled me over. Someone grabbed a fistful of my hair and jerked my head up. I was looking into the laughing face of the wild man again.
“Struggle all you want,” he said. “It’s part of the show. We don’t get TV anymore.” He turned to one of his minions. “I want a finger and an ear for the necklace, before you put him on the spit. I’m actually getting a pretty good collection and—”
His head exploded.
“Have at the filthy rebels!” someone shouted.
They slammed into the scavengers, a platoon of Reich locals, uniforms frayed but as neatly pressed as possible under the circumstances. Nazis always liked to look their best.
The scavengers returned fire. Bodies on both sides fell. I threw myself to the ground. It would have been ridiculous to get killed by a stray bullet, this close to rescue.
From my position in the sand, I could see both sides merge in hand-to-hand combat. Savages clawed at Reich soldiers. Soldiers stabbed at scavengers with bayonets. Blood and screams.
The behemoth sat there untouched as the battle raged around him, as if he were some inanimate monument. He reached behind his back, stood, and in his hands was a gigantic gun. I say gigantic, but in his fat grip it looked like a child’s toy. I knew better. The Mauser-Remington 30mm handheld mini-gun was the perfect weapon for the lone man who needed to kill a lot of foes quickly.
A sweet gun. Seriously.
Shit.
The behemoth thumbed the trigger button, and a storm of lead erupted amid the scream of spinning barrels. Death had arrived, taken a look around and said,
“Let’s make a clean sweep of it, shall we?”
The behemoth wasn’t choosy. He swung the gun in a slow arc, slicing through scavenger and Reich soldier alike. Men climbed over one another to get out of the way, battle cries changing to screams of panic and despair. Limbs tumbled through the air, trailing blood. Heads exploded. A Reich soldier standing over me was cut in half at the waist, a chunk of him falling to one side of me, the other chunk to the other side.
A red mist filled the air, and sprayed over everything. My senses were assaulted by the copper smell of blood, cordite, smoke from the campfire. The screams of the slaughtered and the high-pitched whirr of the spinning barrels. The crackling blur of 30mm death filling the air like angry lead wasps.
Then nothing.
It was so quiet so suddenly that it startled me. Waves lapped against the shore. Eventually a few hopeless groans rose from the heaps of the dead and dying.
I staggered to my feet and appraised the carnage. The behemoth stood amid the human debris, face stoic, smoke rising from his weapon. I took a step, my foot squishing ankle deep into the blood-soaked sand. There was nowhere to walk. The beach all around me was saturated with blood and bile and shit from bowels loosened in the final death throes.
So I stopped, stood where I was. The behemoth and I looked at each other, his glassy eyes huge and unblinking.
I cleared my throat.
“That was some fine shooting.”
A moment’s hesitation.
“Shatterstorm,” he said.
Well, fuck…
That had to sink in a moment before I realized the brute was saying the password back to me. I laughed, a giddy relief flooding through me.
“Yeah, Shatterstorm. Why not? Shatter-fucking-storm, baby.” I bent over, hands resting on knees, laughing and weak, barely able to stand.
The behemoth dropped the mini-gun and stomped toward me, each step making a sucking sound in the blood-muddied sand.
I stopped laughing.
“Hey there, big fella.” I said it the same way you’d talk to a strange dog. A
big
one. “So, what happens next? You call in a Reich ship from orbit, and it evacs us the hell out of here, right?”
He said nothing, didn’t even break stride as he scooped me up and threw me over his shoulder. My bare skin against his naked sweaty body was quite possibly the most appalling tactile experience of my life.
“This isn’t really necessary,” I insisted. “I appreciate the rescue, but I can walk.”
He trudged on without a word. Was it was possible he’d forgotten he was carrying me? I might as well have been a rag doll.
“This
is
a rescue, isn’t it?”
Nothing.
I thought about struggling out of his grip. He was so greasy and sweaty, I thought it likely I could simply squirt away from him like an errant bar of soap in the shower.
Abruptly, we stopped, and he dropped me in the sand. I groaned and rolled over. The drugs had been fending off the pain. No longer. All of my bruises were coming home to roost. Ribs, legs, arms, neck, head. Everything hurt. I’d taken a lot of abuse.
The behemoth had carried me further down the beach. Other than that, I had no idea where I was. Maybe this was the rendezvous point for the rescue ship.
I turned my head just a little more and saw the behemoth heading toward a long metal tube. It was maybe twenty-five feet long, about four feet around, half in and half out of the water. At one end was some kind of housing, like for an engine maybe. A propeller. It looked like some kind of torpedo, but seemed too bulky for such a purpose.