Death From Above! Read online

  Death From Above!

  Scoundrels of the Wasteland #3

  J.I. Greco

  Copyright © 2017 by J.I. Greco

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Chaotic Neutral Media.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  About the Author

  Free Stuff

  Also by J.I. Greco

  Chapter One

  The steam-powered 1976 Volkswagen Beetle skitters across the snow-covered tundra of the Florida panhandle on six piston-driven, snow-shoe footed legs.

  “Nah, no way. How do you even get to there?” Inside the Beetle and bundled up warm in a fur-lined parka, Roxanne is driving from the passenger seat over wireless connection via her cybernetic implant, her belly too big now to fit safely behind the wheel. “Two o’clock,” she says with the slightest jog of her head.

  “On it,” Bernie says from the back seat. She shifts, slowly, trying to keep her own bulky parka from rustling loud enough to wake the three month old Jake asleep in his sling under her left arm or interrupt his twin brother Finn’s second breakfast at her right nipple. She slips the barrel of the pump-action rail-pistol out a window. “You’ve been watching the same episodes I have. How could you not get there? It’s not even subtext. It’s just there. Blatant.” Casually squinting down the short barrel, Bernie lines up her shot and thumbs the trigger. A soft electric ptztzzz, the slightest of oily puffs of aerosolized lubricant sprouting from the barrel tip, and three-hundred meters off to their right, a clean thumb-sized hole appears in the domed head of one of the three-wheeled dronemobiles that have been swarming at them ever since they’d broken through the razor-wire perimeter fence surrounding the compound. Its semi-AI brainpan ruptured, the dronemobile jerks to a sudden halt, faceplanting into a snowbank.

  “I can’t see it.” Her head filled with telemetric ghost-images from the Bug’s sensor array, Roxanne keeps most of her attention on a bump just over the next ridge that could be another dronemobile, hiding in wait. Or maybe it’s just a fallen tree trunk under two feet of blue-white snow. Guess we’re just gonna have to drive over it to find out, Roxanne thinks, twisting around to frown at Bernice. “I mean, it was a different time back then—like, nuns had to swear loyalty to men, you believe that bullshit? Anyway, old people didn’t have sex. They had laws against that sort of thing.”

  Bernice takes a depleted uranium slug from the diaper bag on the floorboard and shoves it into a slot in the side of the rail-pistol’s barrel. “I’m telling you, they were doing it, laws be damned. Like rabbits. Like dirty, octogenarian rabbits.”

  “Sweet little old Mrs. Fletcher and Doc Hazlitt were not fucking.” Roxanne’s nose twitches, sending a signal to the Bug to leap over the ridge and that downed-tree/hiding dronemobile. “Releasing,” she warns as the Bug passes over the lump and her nose twitches again, this time telling the Bug to release a small contact cluster bomb from a compartment in its belly, just in case the bump in the ridge isn’t a downed tree.

  Turns out, it’s not.

  The bomb hits the lump just as the dronemobile emerges from its hiding place and shakes the layer of snow off its dome.

  “They were just old friends,” Roxanne says. “Platonic friends. Besides, when did she ever have time to do it? Everywhere she went another corpse showed up that needed investigating.”

  “During commercial breaks, probably. Bet they even had threesomes with Sheriff Tupper every other Tuesday—” Bernice clamps her hands over Jake’s little ears as the Bug lands deftly on its front feet and behind it the bomb goes BOOM!, throwing up a crown of snow and chunks of dronemobile. At her breast, Finn just keeps sucking. “And at Thanksgiving, all three of them would pass around her nephew Grady and the Turkey basting bulb for a little anal humiliation action.”

  “You are absolutely destroying the rose-colored image I have of our ancestral pre-apocalyptic past, I hope you know.” The Bug idling at the top of the ridge, Roxanne closes her eyes and sweeps the horizon with the car’s sensors. No more autodrone blips, or even the hint of a possible one. “Think that was the last of them,” she says, opening her eyes and prodding the Bug to begin slowly prancing down the hill with a twitch of her nose. “I wish I’d never found those DVD boxed-sets in the landfill.”

  “I’m glad you did,” Bernice says. “I need something to do while these little bastards are sucking me dry, don’t I?”

  “Shatner, they didn’t even bother mining the perimeter,” Roxanne turns to look out the Bug’s front windshield, down at the double-wide mobile home up on cinder blocks at the bottom of the hill. The sensors don’t show her anything buried under the snow around it. No explosives, anyway. Snow drifts are piled up against the northern side, all the way up to the roof. Black smoke pours out of a bent chimney. The windows are taped over with layer on layer of newspaper. The hood of a Dodge Swinger, its heavily armored skin pock-marked with rust and the dents of small, and not so small, arms damage, pokes out from behind the back of the mobile home. And inside the mobile home, ghost images fed to her from the Bug’s sensors shift and shuffle, two people’s worth of heat signature, with a pulsing homing beacon ping emanating from the head of one of them. She smiles wryly. Got ya, ya bastard. “Looks like they’re home.”

  “That was it?” Bernice asks, peeling Finn off her right nipple. He sucks at air for a moment and just as a scream is forming in his mouth, Bernice flips him around to let him latch onto her other breast. “A shitty fence we knocked down by blowing on it, an ice-moat filled with dead alligators, a dozen lousy drones, and a Floyd tribute laser show. Exactly how was that supposed to keep us from finding them, anyway?”

  “I think we were supposed to get stoned and maybe freeze to death while we watched the show.”

  “Guess that would explain the bong and the pile of snack food they left for us. So lame. The whole thing… I mean, they’ve had a month. Am I wrong to expect a little effort?” Bernice shifts the slowly-waking Jake, his lips puckering, towards her free right nipple.

  At the bottom of the hill the Bug slows to a stop, steam whistling out of its leg pistons as the car settles its belly down to the snow in front of the mobile home.

  “You’re forgetting their inherent laziness,” Roxanne says.

  “Oh, yeah. Why did we want them back, again?”

  “I don’t ask that question anymore. The answer always depresses me.” Roxanne’s nose twitches and her door pops open. “Come on, let’s go remind those two idiots just whose men they are.”

  Chapter Two

  “I knew I never should have let Rudy build Bernice her own car.” Trip stands in the double-wide’s doorway, holding the door open for a scowling Roxanne. He gives
her a lopsided half-smile, half-smirk around the foot-long cigarette holder clenched in his teeth. The holder doesn’t have a cigarette in it.

  “Hello to you, too.” Roxanne walks up the molded concrete front steps and stops to take in Trip’s ratty, faded smoking jacket, the extension cord belt tied tight around his narrow waist, the pink bunny slippers a size too small for his bare size thirteen feet, his unshaven chin, and his unwashed, unkempt hair. She sighs. “Well, on second thought, I probably should be going.”

  “How’d you find me?” Trip steps back as Roxanne pushes her way past him. “No, wait, let me guess…”

  “Tracking pulse from your implant,” Roxanne says, unzipping her parka. She rests her hands on her bulging belly. “I put it in when I converted it to wireless. Automatically turns itself on if it’s more than a hundred meters from my implant for more than a day.”

  “Of course it does.” Trip watches her hesitantly step into the living room, gingerly looking for clean-ish spots on the floor to put her stiletto-heeled boots. “For the record, I did not run away because you were pregnant,” he says, starting to shut the front door. “I merely had to rescue my dear brother from being turned into mush by the pressures of raising twins who are clearly not his own.”

  Something stops the door from closing. Trip glances back just as Bernice forces her way in, a curly black-haired infant under each arm, sucking madly away at her heavy-with-milk breasts. Trip’s eyes linger on her naked boobs.

  Bernice snarls at him. “And where is my idiot husband, exactly?” She peers around him into the dark shadows of the cabin.

  “In the back playing X-box.” Trip snaps the cigarette holder’s tip around in his mouth to point down the hallway.

  Bernice heads in that direction. “Dear gods, I hope that’s not a euphemism.”

  Roxanne stands in the kitchenette, staring at the sink full of dishes and pots, pans, and outright garbage. “You’re living the high life, I see.”

  Trip stays close to the door, his fingertips brushing the handle. “Haven’t had time for the merely physical things. I’ve been getting to know myself.”

  “Dear gods I hope that’s not a euphemism, either,” Roxanne says.

  “Not at all. I’ve taken up meditation. It’s so peaceful out here, aside from the roving bands of howler rabbits. Made some startling discoveries.”

  Roxanne crosses her arms over her chest. “Like how you’re an asshole.”

  “Already established that, I thought. No, I meant new discoveries.” Trip taps the nub at the base of his neck, just behind his ear. “About my implant. It’s got memory banks, apparently.”

  “Yeah, saw those when I was in tinkering,” Roxanne shrugs. “Wultr bio-bubble memory. So what? We gonna talk about you running off?”

  “So what? They’re not just normal memory banks. They’ve got memory banks nested within memory banks inside, all hidden away under layers of crypt. I’ve been deep meditating, really learning how to probe the things. I can feel them there, but I still can’t access what’s inside.”

  “How thrilling for you.”

  “Vishnu’s nipples, that’s the understatement of the post-apocalypse.” Trip edges even closer to the door. “The implant’s been passed down generation through generation in my family. The blocked banks could have memories from my mom, or her dad, or his dad, or his aunt… well, you get the idea. And who knows what they thought important enough to lock away?”

  “That’s awful sentimental of you.”

  Trip does his crooked half-smile thing. “I’m assuming it’s a treasure map or a list of never-fail pick-up lines. You know, something important. Something valuable.”

  “Ah-hah, there we go.”

  “Yeah, so, you can see why I have to stick at it. I owe it to future generations to unlock the knowledge.”

  “Staying here, then?”

  Trip nods. “And if you could do me a huge favor and take Rudy with you, it should only take a couple more months of complete isolation. No longer than a year. Maybe five if I have to travel to Tibet to pick up some hard-core meditation techniques from the ubermonks. You know what?” Trip begins to turn the door handle. “I should just head for Tibet now. You know how those ubermonks can get. I’ll probably have to fight a succession of acolytes hand-to-hand before they even let me in the Grand Temple.” His left eyebrow twitches and outside, the Wound’s engine roars on, like some dying bull elephant. “I’ll look you and the kid up when I get back, I swear. Ten years, max.”

  Trip’s halfway out the door when the pair of three-inch long needles strike his back and sink right through the smoking jacket and into his shoulder blades. A half second later, 10,000 volts at 600 milliamperes spark down the wires from the stunner Roxanne’s pointing at him.

  A confused grimace on his long face, Trip convulses and slumps down the concrete block stairs all rag-doll to the hard, frozen ground.

  Chapter Three

  “Suppose you think that was funny, shooting me.”

  Trip opens his eyes and stares up at the duct-taped patched roof of the back seat of the Festering Wound. He sits up, and there’s Roxanne in the passenger seat up front, her stiletto boots up on the driver’s seat — his driver’s seat. In front of the empty driver’s seat the steering wheel makes micro-tracking adjustments, twisting an inch left and a centimeter right at a time. The tip of the antenna behind Roxanne’s ear blinks green with each jog of the wheel.

  Roxanne glances back at him. “Would explain why I haven’t been able to wipe this off my face, yeah,” she says, pointing at her mouth, all smiles. “Thinking about making it a regular thing, shooting you.”

  “No snow.” Trip looks out the window and lights a hand-rolled cig. The landscape is bleak, scraggly nuke-polluted scrubland dotted with patches of yellow and brown weeds under a dour, hazy sun. The Wasteland. “How long have I been out?”

  Roxanne swings her legs off the driver’s seat and faces forward, gently rubbing her distended stomach. “About a thousand miles. We’re almost home.”

  “A thousand miles?” Trip heaves himself over the back of the front seat and settles in behind the steering wheel. “How did that little stunner of yours keep me out for that long? Its capacitor doesn’t even hold enough juice to fricassee a rabbit, and believe me, I’ve tried.”

  Roxanne plucks the cig from between Trip’s lips and flicks it across his chest and out the open driver’s window. “Well, it knocked you flat. After that, I might have kicked you into unconsciousness.”

  Trip taps the over-ride sequence into the repurposed Sega GameGear jammed haphazardly into a cut-out on the dashboard, the Wound’s brain box. The tiny 16-bit screen flashes red, the tip of Rozanne’s wireless antenna goes yellow, then out.

  The Dodge immediately begins drifting off the lonely stretch of battered 81 North, at ninety miles per.

  “You kicked me?” Trip quickly punches in another code. The GameGear screen flashes yellow, and then there in his head is the old familiar presence, the puppy-dog AI of the Wound’s brain announcing its reconnection with him, like a big sloppy virtual face licking.

  Trip twitches his right eyebrow and the Wound swerves back into the middle of the road.

  “Well, Bernice helped,” Roxanne says. “She’s a real artist with a cast-iron skillet.”

  “Explains this, I guess.” Trip touches a pair of fingertips against the welt on the back of his head. He winces while he gingerly probes the massive bump. “Wait a minute… I’ve been unconscious for the better part of a day. Isn’t that, you know, dangerous?”

  “Life threatening, even.”

  “I could have permanent damage, here.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Point.”

  “So.” Roxanne’s hand comes to rest on the stun pistol holstered to her hip. “You going to try and run off again?”

  “Not if I get naming rights.”

  “You’re not naming our child The Soulful Jazz Stylings of Groucho Underpants.”
/>   “Not if he’s a boy, no.”

  Up ahead, a cluster of people on foot make their slow way up the road. Trip’s eyebrow twitches and the Wound jogs to the right, skirting around them. The procession goes on for a half-mile, men and women and children, overstuffed sacks and packs on their backs, wary and hungry expressions on their faces.

  “Woah,” Trip says, “what’s up with all the ped traffic?”

  “Refugees.” Roxanne touches the platinum double-helix phallus hanging around her neck. New Gods, I know you probably don’t give a shit, nor should you, really, but just in case, watch over us poor bastards, she mouths in silent prayer.

  Trip’s eyebrow twitches and the Wound speeds up another ten miler per, leaving the procession far behind, covered in the dust kicked up by the car’s adaptive tires. “Refugees?”

  “Yeah, they’ve been flooding the Wasteland since the war started. Really stressing the city-states.”

  “What war?”

  “You know very well what war. The war you started before you ran for the hills. You know, between the Chinese and the Cthulists.”

  “Oh, that one,” Trip says with a wry smile. “But I didn’t start it. Not technically. I just kinda set circumstances in motion. With extreme and rather clever prejudice, if I do say so myself.”

  “You started it. And it’s turning out to be quite the big one. The Chinese are trying to occupy the whole continent instead of just the West Coast as the next step in conquering the world, and the Cthulists are trying to forcibly convert us all into squids like them so we won’t mind committing ritual suicide to usher in the return of their fictional gods.”