Stuff Comes Around--Big-Time
Chapter Six
They had built a fence all around the town—but it was way too large a perimeter for them to guard properly. In fact, there were any number of hidden entrances used by spies, black marketers, reckless youths and what have you.
Many outsiders had kept a careful watch on the city, and when the leadership of the Resistance more or less fell to me, I had access to much of the hoarded data and I’d studied much of it.
I went in through a faux storm drain. A construction crew had put it in, right in front of God and everyone, even as they built the fence.
The construction workers were all part of a crew that predated the rise of the collective by twenty some-odd years. They weren’t going to narc on whoever had ordered it. Both sidewalk supervisors and unwanted comments and criticism about Petulia’s Public Works was vigorously discouraged…
And so I had a nice entrance all prepared for me.
I’d left Rickman’s Mac 10 behind—though since he’d given it to me, I guess that it was my Mac 10. There’s only so much that one man can carry—especially if he has to move fast.
I had two short-bladed Katanas, mounted for “over-the-shoulder-draw” like some sort of Animae Hero. But a Katana can put someone down fast and silently, if one knows how to use one. This is even truer for someone with over twice the strength of a normal human—no, make that over twice the strength of the very strongest human.
Years ago I read a review of the Ruger AC-556 in “Soldier of Fortune” magazine. It was a Ruger Mini-14 with a 13” Barrel, folding stock and three-shot burst option.
The review said that here was a weapon that a largish man could pretty much conceal under a suit jacket, and that it had the firepower to not only get one into trouble, but to get one back out of trouble.
I’m not at all sure that is true about the 13” Ruger AC-556, but it set me on a decades long search for a weapon that truly fit that description.
The KBP 9A91 came close, but it would have been a Class III Weapon in America, due to the short barrel. Lengthening the Barrel would have watered down it’s appeal—though as an Assault Pistol it wouldn’t have been half bad—three-quarters bad, perhaps, but not half.
The modular close-range Sniper Rifle on the same action—The VSK 94 was also a pretty Gun.
At any rate, I’d built an “Assault Pistol” with a 13” Barrel to take the 7mm BR. It used thirty round AK Magazines cut down to hold twenty-four rounds. Yes, I could have used twenty round AK Magazines, there were a few around, but the twenty-fours were “just right” (like Goldilocks’ middle bed).
After the collapse, I’d fitted it with a folding stock. I’d also replaced the Flash Suppressor with one of Rickman’s state-of-the-art Wet Suppressor—or as I was using it, a Moderator.
It was only about three and a half inches long, and about an inch and a half in diameter—since the Flash Suppressor was almost two inches, it didn’t add much length. It was one of those “Flashlight Battery” Suppressors that the Cognoscenti used to sneer at, when they saw them in films (Though it was a bit bulkier than a “D” Cell.)
That was before new designs and above all, better Wetting Agents truly made “D” Cell Suppressors come into their own. That suppressor would totally muffle a .45 ACP. On a 13” BR, it didn’t even totally eliminate muzzle blast, but it sure lowered the profile greatly…
And if I were still playing the game with human ears, it would have spared them a lot of abuse. My organic hearing was much more resistant to loud noises, but beyond that, it would regenerate.
The electronic hearing running in parallel—though so much more powerful—simply didn’t give a spritz about loud noises. I still hadn’t gotten over cringing a bit at loud noises. I’d been born with extra sensitive ears and loud noises had always hurt.
Think a moment about the 7mm BR—from a long Pistol Barrel, it gives performance in the same general area as the 7x57 Mauser. It is not quite as powerful, of course—but close enough for government work.
I had my two 8 3/8ths Inch S&W .44 Magnums, My Silenced .32 Walther PP, a Scrade “Sharpfinger” for a header, and my Western Bowie. Never go anywhere without a good Bowie.
The streets were largely deserted. There was a curfew, and many Wardens had gone with Petulia’s Expeditionary Force.
There was a catch though. Closed circuit television cameras monitored selected intersections, and other key spots. The Wardens could watch from shelter and strategically intercept curfew breakers.
I knew about the cameras. I also knew that there were twenty or thirty dummy cameras for every real one. And I simply didn’t have the time to be too circumspect.
I moved quickly. I had my ultra-black clothing and I’d donned a long flowing ultra-black cape. I hoped that on a grainy black and white monitor, I might pass for a shadow or a momentary glitch.
My luck held out till I was almost within a stone’s throw of Petulia’s combined home and headquarters—what had once been a grade school, with twenty-four classrooms. The huge rooms and extra-wide halls suited Petulia’s
Notion of her importance.
I heard the squad of Wardens scurrying to set up a hasty ambush. I’d seen blind guys on television echolocating. They can do amazing things, though everyone doesn’t seem able to make the system work.
I’d been struck by the idea how handy such a skill would be, even for a sighted person—coon hunting, groping one’s way down a dark corridor or what have you.
Over a third of the brain is devoted to sight. When someone is blind for a while, all that idle processing power goes to processing other sensory inputs—largely auditory. It doesn’t handle auditory cues nearly as well as it would if it were designed for that—but it is something.
That’s one reason that simply closing one’s eyes or even living with a blindfold for a few days doesn’t necessarily show one a blind person’s World.
Building up a reasonable map of the outside World with sonar is more data-processing intensive than doing the same things with light impulses—that’s one big reason that Dolphins have such surprisingly large brains.
Now sometimes parts of the brain can learn more than one task. I can’t categorically say that no sighted human could ever truly master echolocation. I never did though…
And get right down to it—although the echolocating blind perform prodigious feats, for blind people—the World map they work with is rather grainy.
I had 7.5x the volume sensitivity of a normal human, over 4x the tone discrimination and varying degrees of sensitivity to sound frequencies too high and too low for human ears. Beyond that, I had a small network of tiny computer chips woven through the auditory potion of my brain, interconnected to billions of neurons that gave me sonar-processing power that a Sperm Whale would envy.
Even my body’s sensitivity to vibrations, many at far too low a frequency even for my augmented hearing, was grist for the auditory processing center.
But nonetheless, that was the very first time that I “saw” with my ears.
I had a three-dimensional map of the Wardens up ahead. It’s impossible to describe. I could sense their major bones, the hollow where the lungs were. I sensed their weapons as big solid silhouettes. I could feel their breathing and their pounding hearts.
As I stepped into the killing zone, I already had a plan. I already knew where each Warden was. It was like shooting a match course that one has practiced many times.
They were only many—seven to be exact—while I was one. I had shot all of them at least once with my 7mm BR Carbine. It was the strangest thing seeing the whiteout each shot caused in my sonar World. Each whiteout followed by an extremely detailed picture that followed in the wake of each shot.
Five of the Wardens were greedy enough to be satisfied with one center torso shot. A couple of Warden’s weren’t as greedy and needed at least two—though at that point, I double tapped each of them, so they ended up with three. My sonar warned me which two were frugal long before an ordinary human would have known…
And even so, I was shot twice by one of the frugal Wardens. The shot in my right deltoid was through-and-through, inconvenient, but nothing but. The one through my lower right gut was more problematic.
I couldn’t have moved at all well with a vest resistant to Rifle bullets, they’re way too heavy and stiff—but I had a IIA vest on. I’d always figured that the energy lost, when a Rifle bullet penetrates a Pistol-Proof vest is all Protein for me—but I can’t prove it.
The .223 bullet that went through my IIA vest hadn’t exited. That was good at the moment, however much probing and poking that it might occasion in the future—should I survive. Only having one hole for my rose water fluids to drain out of made my tactical position somewhat better.
I knew that I could only afford to lose so much of my rose water fluids before I became ineffective. My blood only clotted a few percentage points faster—ten or fifteen percent faster—than a human’s.
I put on a hasty pressure bandage and gave myself a combined painkiller and stimulant in a quick IV Injection.
My ears told me that there was another squad of Wardens waiting for me, should I turn left. There were none to my right. I turned right.
The ground floor windows were all barred. But I had climbing ability to make a Ninja or a Master of Parkour jealous. I was up and in a second story window faster than it takes to tell.
Can’t tell you if it caused my wounds to ache. The Serum had cut my pain sensitivity in half. Then I was focused, full of Adrenaline and Morphine and Amphetamine—and I was still chewing a mouthful of Coffee beans, like some folks chew snuff.
I was halfway down the hallway, when I met two guards. I knew they were coming before they rounded the corner of the hallway. I met them with a sword in each hand. I gave them a quick “one-two” and two heads fell to the floor before they could shoot or even shout.
I sheathed my right-hand sword and continued down the hallway.
Petulia’s headquarters weren’t that heavily guarded. She relied on fences, gates, a few armed guards and the conviction that it was highly unlikely anyone would dare.
I dared much.
I slipped into Petulia’s bedroom/command center. It had been the School’s auditorium. It was old and small enough not to have stadium style seats. The seating area was flat and that’s where Petulia kept her main court.
The stage was surprisingly large—it had doubled as a basketball court at one time—as had the seating area. The stage was the Girl’s Gym and the Seating area had been the Boys.
An addition had added a less makeshift Gymnasium, along with a Shop, Science and Home Economics Room, shortly before the school had been moved elsewhere. The building had been more or less empty for thirty years—though being almost centrally located in the town. That is, until Petulia took it over.
I slipped into the darkened room, keeping to the shadows. Petulia sat staring at a row of computer monitors and chain-smoking. That is a factoid about Petulia that never got out. I never dreamed that she was a smoker—what with all her high-minded reformism.
Either quite a few of her minions also smoked or Petulia was exceptionally diligent with her meditations. I have never smelled such a heavy reek of tobacco smoke, either before or since.
I’d seen pictures, but I’d never seen Petulia in the flesh. She was in her early sixties, fairly well preserved, just a little plump and very busty. She wore a great deal of make-up and a pink dress that reached to her mid-thigh.
She turned her eyes upon me. They absolutely danced with furious insanity.
“So you’re Wayside, “ She said. “You think that you’re so bad, because you’ve been injected with the Serum.”
She hawked and spat a big ball of green phlegm on the floor.
“You aren’t the only one to be injected,” She hissed in rage.
I didn’t know how she knew that I was a “Super Soldier”. Though if she’d met up with someone who’d given her a shot, then that explained much.
She obviously hadn’t been injected for very long, or she wouldn’t look so long and shop-worn. Once the Serum had totally transformed her, she could probably chain-smoke every waking moment without having the telltale phlegm problem.
She grabbed up a long Foil type sword—a real weapon, not a Fencing Iron, and a matching dagger. I’d heard that she had a strong aversion to Guns—guess that didn’t apply to weapons in general.
At that moment, I was dead tired. My body might be augmented beyond easy belief, but I still felt my years deep down somewhere. As I say, Petulia couldn’t have been metamorphosing long…
But right then I wouldn’t have cared if she’d had tree times the strength of a male Gorilla and the speed of a striking Cobra. I just wanted to end this tedious affair quickly.
I batted her Foil out of her hand contemptuously with my Katana. Then I dropped my Katana and stepped in close. I got a good arm bar on her left hand and took her dagger from her.
I pulled her close, as if to kiss her, and ran her own dagger deep into her lower bowels. I watched her face. There was absolute total surprise at first—then pain, extreme pain.
I twisted and turned the dagger, still in her bowels, viciously and she cried out.
“How do you like that?” I asked her contemptuously. “It hurts, doesn’t it? Maybe you should have been nicer to folks. I could have taken your head off easy enough with my Katana, but I wanted to share this with you. Think of it as a prelude to hell.”
I gave the dagger one more twist and the after a few seconds, her eyes glazed over with death.
There was no real reason to, but I cast her dagger across the room where it stuck into the wall. I took my Scrade and took her head. Just as I stood up with Petulia’s head, the curtain separating the stage bedroom from the command post seating section flew open.
A naked woman with a Ruger Super Blackhawk confronted me.
“You killed Me-me, “ she screamed.
Fortunately for me, she was either a rather good shot or lucky. At a distance of about twenty-five feet, she shot me three times right in my IIA bulletproof vest. If she’d hit me in my head, in a leg or even in an arm with a .44 Magnum, I might have died right there and my saga ended.
Instead I drew my own .44 Magnum and put a round right through her cranium.
A second woman came out of the bed, this one a mere teenager and still wearing a bra and panties.
“What is this, a freaking Clown-Car?” I had time to asked myself before she started begging.
She had both arms over her head.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! I’m not armed, “ she wailed.
By this time, my patience was nonexistent.
“Do you know what I call an unarmed enemy?” I asked her.
She wrinkled her brow in deep thought, frantically searching for an answer that might spare her.
I thought of Dale Solomon giving me a thumbs-up as he lay dying. I thought about Diane lying dead and Marcus and Boaz and Fa-La left to carry on in spite of their grief. I thought about all the brave defenders most of them still alive, but too many dead.
“I call them ‘Easy Targets’,” I told her.
Then I shot her right through her sternum, centering her bra strap. I only shot her once. If she could survive that somehow, she was welcome to.
I recovered my Katana and Petulia’s head. I broke off an old wooden flagpole and mounted Petulia’s head on it.
I was too tired to fight anymore. Everywhere I went though, Petulia’s minions parted like the Red Sea and let me through without violence. They opened the main gate for me and let me pass.
I was maybe two miles farther down the road, stumbling from the loss of Rose Water Fluids, but unwilling to abandon my trophy…
Some of my people picked me in a small truck and drove me the rest of the way. Someone—whether friend or erstwhile foe—had gotten on the radio and told my people of my situation.
I reluctantly surrendered Petulia’s head and the flagpole to Rickman, though I insisted that it was only a loan. Then I passed out and it was time for some surgery and a few pints of blood transfusion.
Rickman took Petulia’s head and went out to talk to the Equality Army under a flag of truce. None of them were all that enthusiastic about attacking my compound anyway and with Petulia out of the picture they simply faded away.
I’m supposed to heal over five times as fast as a human—but all the transfusions of human blood, while it saved my life—interfered with my superior healing.
My healing rate wasn’t even quite three times normal until my body had fully replaced the human blood with my own super blood. In my weakened condition, that took awhile. The upshot was that I was bedfast for over a month—and in the meantime Fa-La had been through some of the worst and most painful of the transformations with no one to encourage her.
{I had little pain or depression, but many do.}
I’ve often wondered how that altered all of our fates.
.....RVM45 :cool::sht::cool: