Take the All-Mart! (18 page)

“It’s a technical term.” Trip’s hands suddenly stopped kneading. Something inside the bomb brain’s casing made a distinct, very audible
click
. “Oh...”

Rudy’s eyes went wide. “That was a good click, right?”

“Ah, yeah, no,” Trip said, standing up and yanking the patch cord from his neck. “We should... go.”

Bernice’s fist shot out, caught Trip hard and direct in the temple just as the elevator dinged, reaching the bottom floor.

Trip howled. “What the Shatner was that for?”

“What you think, ass?” Bernice straightened her corset, returning Rudy’s broad, admiring smile with a sly grin of her own.

“Okay, you get that one, Cleavage.” Trip rubbed his temple with the butt of his palm. “But I’m not apologizing. I saw an opportunity and I went for it. I’m not supposed to take advantage?”

The elevator doors opened and Roxanne stepped out into a dimly lit corridor. “After that, of course, there was an explosion and this All-Mart was unleashed on the Wasteland. I presume you two made it out of there mostly intact.”

Rudy held his hand over the elevator door to keep it from closing while Bernice and Trip, giving Bernice a wide birth,  followed Roxanne out, then stepped out himself. “Left my paratrooper bag behind. And R2. Man, I loved that bong.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Roxanne said, slowly walking down the corridor towards the sole door on the other end. “Maybe the All-Mart can make you a new one.”

“Thanks, but nah,” Rudy said. “Made it myself. Just wouldn’t be the same.”

“Just a thought,” Roxanne said. “Anyway... skip ahead nine years later and I get to the appeasement ceremony late. But that isn’t what made the All-Mart go all grabby — it didn’t even know we were out there. Never knew, could not have cared less. Until this time.”

“What was special about this time?” Bernice asked.

Roxanne smiled back at her. “It was the RATpack antenna, for starts. In my rush I’d left it in,
and
forgotten to turn my firewall back on. So I show up and the All-Mind senses an open connection. Which the All-Mind waltzed right in through. Just probing for threats — part of its standard protocol. It saw we weren’t any threat to it and was about to disconnect, no harm done, but then it saw Trip’s memories leftover in my head, and recognized his memory about triggering the detonation. That got its full attention. Which is just about the time I figured the antenna was malfunctioning and yanked it out.”

“That’s when it grabbed us,” Bernice said.

“Yeah. When the connection was cut, the All-Mind reacted. Badly, it knows now, but it was experiencing something it had never experienced before — curiosity. It didn’t know how else to react, so it fell back on its programmed instincts to subsume. But it wasn’t done being curious. Unfortunately it didn’t know exactly which one of the coven I was, so it just grabbed us all. I guess it figured it would eventually connect with me again, once I was a zombie. But then once we were inside, I tried to modify the antenna to get a signal and stuck it back in — that was like sending up a flare to the All-Mind. It sent Security out to bring me back here. Since then, we’ve been talking — and keeping an eye on you, making sure you weren’t subsumed as you made your way here.”

Trip smirked. “Well, gee, thanks.”

“It’s all thanks to you, actually, Trip,” Roxanne said as they reached the door at the end of the corridor and stopped. “None of it — helping you, talking to me — would have been possible if you hadn’t gotten through the All-Mind’s encryption layer, just the tiniest little bit, way back when.”

“I got through?” Trip’s chest puffed out. “Of course I did.”

Roxanne nodded. “Made a hole in the All-Mind’s safety protocols. Only a pinprick, but it was enough.”

“Why does that sound ominous?” Rudy asked.

Trip waved at him to be quiet. “What exactly did I punch into?”

In front of Roxanne, the door opened. “The protocols that kept its consciousness in check.”

“And that’s why it sounds ominous.” Rudy tweaked his nipple through his t-shirt, looked into the room beyond the door. It was small, hexagonal, with smooth walls and even more dimly lit than the corridor. At the center stood a familiar column, featureless except for a data interface nub two feet up from the floor. He’d seen it before, nine years ago. The All-Mart’s original CPU casing.

“Ominous?” Roxanne laughed. Not quite dismissively, but close. “Evolutionary.  It allowed the All-Mind a certain level of self-awareness, and eventually, as the years went by, to develop a considerable measure of free will.”

“Enough to communicate,” Trip noted, warily looking into the room himself.

“Enough to want more.” Roxanne reached out, took Trip’s hand, and led him into the room. “You can’t understand how happy we are. We’ve wanted to meet you for so long.”

“
We
?” Bernice asked.

Trip shot Bernice a quick warning glance, then turned back to smirk charmingly at Roxanne. “Yeah... well, tell the All-Mind it’s nice meeting her, too, but we should get going. We did, as the cliché goes, come here to rescue you. Your dad will want to know your safe. Come on.”

“Oh, no,” Roxanne said, tightening her grip on his hand and pulling him closer. “I’m not leaving. I’m staying here. And so are you.” 

That right there was when Trip sent 100,000 volts of juice from the stunpad embedded under the skin of his left palm into Roxanne’s hand.

CHAPTER 17: SHOTGUN

“The sad thing is, this is actually going better than usual.” Rudy reached under his t-shirt for his nipple as the elevator slowed, approaching the top, ground floor.

Bernice’s hand got there first, giving his nipple a good tweak while she gave him a smile. “Guess that’s something.” She let her hand linger there while she turned to look at Roxanne, out cold and slumped over Trip’s shoulders in a fireman’s carry, his hand on her ass. “I don’t get it — she’s not glowing — her skin’s clear. How can she be a zombie?”

Trip shrugged as best he could. “I’m guessing it’s got something to do with that flesh thing in her jack. It could be some kind of Pack network device, giving the All-Mind direct control over her without nanochines.”

Bernice reached for the biomass behind Roxanne’s ear. “Then let’s take it out.”

“Not yet.” Trip swung Roxanne’s head away from Bernice. “She might have nanochines in her, just dormant, as a backup. Taking it out could activate them. Anyway, I want to prove a theory first.”

“You thinking the Pack connection works both ways?” Rudy asked as the elevator dinged and the doors opened.

Trip smirked, drawing his elephant revolver with his free hand. “We’re gonna find out.” He took two long strides out of the elevator, firing blindly and randomly in all directions as he quick-stepped for the
Wound
, parked twenty feet away across a patch of barren concrete. “Element of surprise, mother fuckers!”

The echo of the gunshots was deafening inside the elevator. Bernice threw her hands over her ears. “He’s an idiot!” she yelled at Rudy.

“You’re just realizing that?” Rudy yelled back, watching as Trip reached the
Wound
, opened the driver’s side door, and dumped Roxanne into the back seat. “But he is giving us a window of opportunity.” Rudy grabbed Bernice’s hand and yanked her along as he ran, hunched over, around the trunk for the
Wound
’s passenger side.

They hadn’t bothered to look around while they ran. Standing at the passenger side door, head still low, Rudy cautiously checked out their surroundings. There was nobody around. No zombies, no Security, no nothing. Just the empty concrete ring around the knobby Hub, and beyond that the shanty hovels of Origin City. “What exactly were you shooting at?” he asked Trip over the roof.

“Oh, I have to have a target now?” Trip asked. “You getting in or do I have to open the door for you?”

“Shotgun,” Bernice said as Rudy opened the passenger door.

Rudy, surprised, first looked at Bernice, then over at Trip, then back at Bernice, then back at Trip. His lower lip was trembling, like he really wanted to say something.

Trip smirked. “You heard her, she called it.”

Bernice patted Rudy on the shoulder, then reached in to pull the back of the front seat down for him. “In the back, lover.”

Rudy grunted, then ducked into the back seat. “Feel free to play with the radio. He loves that.”

“There’s a radio?” Bernice slipped into the front seat, shut the door. “Sweet.”

Trip sighed and got into the car, settling in behind the wheel. His hand automatically reached for the patch cord cable coiled up on the dash and found the jack. He blew on it, jacked it in behind his ear. He shivered with the familiar inrush of the
Wound
’s telemetry.

While Trip was probing the
Wound
’s systems, feeling around for anything that didn’t feel right and might be a sign of zombie tampering, out of the corner of his eye and through a twinge from the
Wound
he caught a glimpse of Bernice fiddling with the dash-mounted GameGear. He slapped her hand away. “That’s not a radio. — You wanna control your date, bro?” he asked Rudy through the rear-view.

“Hey, you’re the one that gave her shotgun.”

“Speaking of which.” Trip reached across Bernice to grab Rudy’s sawed-off double barrel off the dash. He handed it to Bernice. “You know how to use one of these?”

Bernice smirked at him and cracked the shotgun open over her knee to check it was loaded. “Got my Small Arms badge when I was eight,” she said, sharply snapping the shotgun shut.

Trip smiled. “Well, hoorah for the Sisters of No Mercy.”

“Dude!” Rudy whined in protest from the back seat.

“I don’t wanna hear it — shotgun goes with shotgun.” Trip twisted around in his seat, pointed at Roxanne. She was lying next to Rudy with her head resting against the doorframe, mouth open and drooling. “Anyway, you’re gonna be busy on baton duty keeping Roxanne stunned, okay?”

“Fine,” Rudy said, growling under his breath. He grabbed the baton from the floor well and, closing his eyes, gave Roxanne a short shock on her bare ankle. He rested the baton on his lap and reached for his calabash, jamming it between his teeth without lighting it, just for the oral fix. He looked around outside. “Why aren’t we being overwhelmed with zombies about now?”

“I’m thinking if that really is a Pack connection device, Roxanne and the All-Mind are tight enough in her brain that stunning Roxanne blew-back and caused a sympathy stun of the All-Mind. But don’t expect it to last much longer — the All-Mind’s gonna figure out it wasn’t really stunned here any second and mobilize.”

“So why aren’t we speeding away yet?” Bernice asked.

“Patience.” Trip lit a cigarette with the dash lighter. Through the telemetry link, the
Wound
showed him infrared views of the hovels surrounding the courtyard. Hovels filled with glowing blue shapes, zombies going about their daily routine. Or at least they had been up until a second ago. Now they were, en masse and as if obeying the same command, heading for their doors to come outside. Trip smiled proudly over at Bernice and twitched. “Okay, now it’s a race.”

The
Wound
leapt forward. Trip aimed her at the narrow gap of a street they’d been escorted down when they’d arrived.

The
Wound
’s telemetry showed Trip the blue zombie blurs shambling from their doorways. And of course, all of them seemed to be heading in the
Wound
’s general direction. One of the blue glows on the telemetry became an Associate zombie stepping out of a hovel into the street. The zombie turned to face the oncoming
Wound
, unafraid.

Trip slowed, glanced into the back seat. “Remind me again, where we are on running these things over?”

Rudy frowned at him. “They’re innocent people, dude.”

“So, maim but don’t kill?”

“Yeah, that’d work.”

“Gotcha.” Trip gunned the engine, jogging the
Wound
slightly to the left to sideswipe the zombie. Still, he hit the right bumper hard, went flying back into the wall of a hovel. Trip didn’t bother checking the rear-view to see if the zombie was still kicking — the
Wound
’s telemetry was showing him a blurry blob of blue slowly separating itself from a collapsed hovel wall. “This is too easy.”

“When do I get to shoot something?” Bernice asked.

Trip swallowed. His head was filling with blue blobs. And not the small, normal sized blobs, but the bigger, broader blobs of Security zombies. A whole hell of a lot of them, converging at the end of the street where it spilled out at the edge of Origin City’s dense ring of hovels.

“Oh, pretty soon, now,” Trip said, twitching to send the
Wound
left through an empty hovel.

Rudy reflexively ducked as hovel debris showered the
Wound
. “What’s going on?”

“Fuckers’ trying to roadblock us up ahead.” The
Wound
plowing full-speed through hovel after hovel, chunks of roof and wall battering harmlessly against her armored-plated skin, Trip reached for his elephant revolver. He slapped the chamber open, giving it a few good bumps to drop the spent shells from it, then motioned at the glove compartment. “Be a dear and get me a couple eighty-fives, will ya?”