Take the All-Mart!

CHAPTER 5: ROBBERY!





“Right.”

Rudy looked up from his watch, a battered and strapless TAG Heuer Monaco sitting in his palm, just as it ticked over to 1:48. He scanned the square, the tables still jammed with townsfolk, still drinking, still boisterous, and still trying to sing three different songs at once. The only difference between now and two hours ago: The lyrics were a bit more slurred.

There was no sign of Trip. “Of course he’s AWOL,” Rudy said aloud. “Why wouldn’t he be? It’s only his hide if we don’t pull this off.”

Rudy grabbed a beer jug and stood, stuffing the watch away in one of his camo’s thigh pockets. He slipped away from the light and din of the square, sipping beer and grumbling to himself as he walked into the shadows towards the beer warehouse.





In the pitch-black beer warehouse, Willie the 9mm rapid-fire robo-gun turret spun slowly around and around on rusty, grinding tracks, its motion sensors fully alert, feeling for trouble.

Underneath the robo-gun, the Wound sat inactive on standby. But it wasn’t quiet. There had been a steady stream of noise coming from her trunk for half an hour: clicks, beeps, and the more than occasional synthesized four-letter curse.

“How about this one?” the synthesized voice in the trunk asked no one in particular. “Be nice if it would work, it is about the last one.”

A click, a sequence of beeps, and then a clank of an audio pickup being pressed against the inside of the trunk, listening.

Willie kept grinding around and around.

“Shatner damn it.” Another click from inside the trunk. “Okay, this is the last one. I hasten to think of the consequences for you if this does not work. But... you have been warned.”

The trunk emitted a different sequence of beeps. This time, Willie ground to a stop and the warehouse fell silent.

“Gotcha!” the voice in the trunk proclaimed. “I think.”

The trunk of the Wound cracked open the smallest amount.

Nothing opened fire.

“Hey, it worked.” Hunt-R let the trunk open all the way, unfurling himself to stand to his full four feet. Hunt-R was a bipedal robot, with bulky, oversized elbow and knee joints. His composite hard-shell olive skin was dented and dotted with gunshot holes, a natural consequence of years of service to Trip and Rudy. His head was dominated by a glowing, cyclopsian oval of an eye. He titled the oval up at Willie and pounded his chest. “Who’s the robot? I am the robot, in point of fact.”

A knock at the warehouse door shattered the quiet, and sent Hunt-R collapsing back down into the trunk, throwing his arms over his head.

Another knock. More of a pounding this time. “Come on, answer the door already.”

Hunt-R lowered his arms and craned his neck up over the lip of the trunk. His oval eye peered through the darkness, illuminating the warehouse door like a spotlight. “Builder Rudy?”

“Who else is it gonna be?”

“Just a moment, sir.” Hunt-R unfurled and crawled out of the trunk. Three-toed feet clanking with every footstep, he walked across the warehouse to the door and found the door controls. Pressing the big red button, he started the door slowly rising. He bent down to wave at Rudy before the door was fully up. “Hello.”

“Yeah, hello. That machine gun deactivated?” Rudy squinted into the warehouse warily.

“Without encryption it was a simple matter of finding the right frequency on which to transmit the shutdown command.”

“And that worked?” Rudy took a slug from his beer jug.

Hunt-R crossed his arms over his narrow, cylindrical chest. “Since it is motion sensing, and I am standing here, having walked across the warehouse, I think it is safe to say the device is inactive.”

“Don’t get cheeky.” Rudy stepped into the warehouse. He slapped the door controls with his elbow as he did, sending the door rumbling shut behind him. “I’m just double-checking. Been shot at enough today.”

“My apologies.” Hunt-R’s glowing oval stared at the closed warehouse door, then swiveled to look up at Rudy. “Where is Programmer Trip?”

Rudy scowled. “Where you think?”

“Distracted by the local fauna?”

“In his defense, she was insanely distracting.” Rudy finished off the beer jug, flinging it away. He watched it bounce across the warehouse floor. “So, no telling how long he’ll be AWOL.”

Hunt-R gave a patient nod and opened his chest cavity with a double-tap on his belly. A small metal claw clutching a worn leather sack emerged from the cavity. “Pocket Dungeon while we wait?”

“Not this time.” Rudy squared his shoulders and loped towards the Wound. “This time we’re doing this my way. Grab the goody bag from the trunk — we’re gonna blow some stuff up good.”





One moment Trip and Roxanne’s cartoon cyberspace avatars were falling, endlessly, a fluffy pink-tinged cloud of a bed falling along with them. Not that they minded falling, or even noticed. There was too much other stuff going on. Too much f*cking. Too much... sharing.

The next moment, a flash of nothingness, then a rush of bright lights flooding in from all sides. When the flood passed, a little Korean girl, nine years old and softly weeping for her dead mother, walked hand in hand with her father in his best suit — the one with the zebra skin coat and the purple velvet cowboy hat — away from a fresh grave dug in the middle of a long-abandoned wind farm, a rusted, leaning windmill for a tombstone.

Roxanne’s memory.

Another flash and they were back on the cloud bed. The cloud was getting in on the fun. Puffy tendrils twirled the pair of avatars, nudged their bodies into more interesting inter-twinings and probed unattended and under-served erogenous zones while Trip and Roxanne focused on the major players.

Flash. Trip and Rudy among a group of a thousand other spectators, relaxing on beach chairs, eating popcorn, watching the sky above the corporate-war devastated city of Portland, where armored dirigibles covered with sponsor logos jockeyed for position around a thousand-foot high goal tower, firing screaming rockets at each other. The crowd let out a cheer as one of the dirigibles took a hit amidships and crumbled in on itself, falling on fire from the sky.

Flash. Trip and Roxanne were pretty much inside the cloud, now. So much writhing, prodding, probing... Hard to say where the cloud stopped and they started. It didn’t seem to matter.

Flash. Roxanne, at age thirteen, proudly standing alone in a circle of fire, her fellow sisters smiling lovingly at her over the licks of flame, just having taken the Oath of the Sisterhood. The flames parted and a naked old chick with great tits presented Roxanne with a neatly folded corset and habit.

Flash. They’d merged now. Into this Trip-Roxanne-Cloud avatar thing, all limbs and erogenous zones, heaving and pumping, the mass getting tighter and tighter with each heave and pump, making them fall faster and faster towards a rapidly approaching, glowing accretion disk singularity of climax.

Flash. Trip’s turn. Something fresh. Trip looking out the windshield of the Wound into the churning dust-and-debris expansion front of the All-Mart, just that morning.

“Shit!” Roxanne exclaimed from somewhere very, very far away.

A fritz of deafening and blinding white noise wiped over his consciousness, and Trip was back in Roxanne’s room, on her ratty mattress, Roxanne up on him.

“What?” he said, trying to catch his breath. “What’s the matter? The thumb too much for a first date?”

Roxanne stopped grinding, stared down at him, sweat dripping from her nose and chin onto his chest. “That was the All-Mart, wasn’t it?”

He shrugged, wiped her sweat away with his hand. “Yeah. Ran into it this morning. So?”

She rolled off him. “That’s what I was late for. Mother Superior’s gonna tan my ass red.” She smiled at the prospect as she plucked the miniskirt from the floor and stepped into it.

Trip sat up. “Late for the All-Mart? How can you be late for the All-Mart? You going shopping?”

“No, of course not,” she said, wriggling into her corset. “We do this ceremony every mid-Solstice. ‘Cause it’s like a new god, right? Not a particularly good god, but still, deserves respect.”

While her back was towards him, he quickly snaked out a hand for his tux jacket and reached in to pull out the tin of cigs and his lidless Zippo. “You pray to it?”

She reached behind herself to lace the corset tight. “So it doesn’t roll over us, yeah.”

“You know it’s not a god, right?” He lit up. “It’s just a bunch of nanochines gone wild, building, subsuming, zombie-fying. Or so the rumors go.”

“Yeah, I know.” She spun around and frowned at him, then bent down to snatch the cig from his mouth and dash it out against the wall. She handed the crushed, smoking stub back to him and plopped down on the edge of the mattress, reaching for her stiletto boots. “But Mother Superior takes it seriously. So... we all take it seriously. Or at least humor her. For us it’s really just a chance to hang out, sing a few chants, let our hair down and our tits out.”

“So, this ceremony...” Trip tucked the crumbled cig behind his ear as she zipped up a boot. “Is there gonna be a lesbo orgy after?”

She smiled coyly back at him over her shoulder. “Usually a pretty good one, yeah.”

“Cool. I’ll bring popcorn.”

She shook her head, zipped up the other boot. “Sorry, no men allowed. Sisterhood rule.”

“I never liked organized religion.”

“I’ll be back by noon.” She stretched to pick her habit off the floor. Fitting it on, she stood up, tucked her hair away under it. “Stick around: We’ll re-enact what you missed.”

“Bring friends.”

She grabbed a motorcycle helmet plastered with glow-in-the-dark stickers of stars and moons from the workbench, cradled it under her arm. “Well, duh,” she said, slinging a satchel of a purse under her shoulder and darting out the door.

Trip watched her go, smiling at the way her mini-skirt flipped up to show her naked ass as she bounced down the stairs just outside the door. As soon as she was out of sight, he retrieved the crushed cig from behind his ear, straightened it the best he could, and lit up.

He lay back, still smiling, taking shallow puffs and closing his eyes.

Five minutes later, the cig burnt down to his lips and woke him from the deepest sleep he’d had in months.

“Vishnu’s pancreas!” He sat bolt upright. “There’s robbery to do!”





“What the f*ck is this?”

Trip stood in front of the warehouse vault, draped with a netting of explosives so thick he couldn’t see the vault door.

Hunt-R stepped up next to him. “17 sticks of dynamite, 5 pounds of homebrew C-4, 9 shaped concussion charges —”

“I didn’t mean an inventory, robot.”

Rudy lit his calabash. “We didn’t know if you were gonna show.”

“So you decided to string up enough explosives to bring the whole warehouse down on top of you?” Trip glared into Hunt-R’s glowing oval eye. “Clear it away, robot.”

Hunt-R hesitated, tilting his head at Rudy. “Builder Rudy?”

Trip snorted. “Oh, don’t start up with that not taking orders from me shit again, robot.” He stabbed a finger into Hunt-R’s forehead. “Unless you want a nice frontal lobotomy reprograming.”

Rudy took the calabash out of his mouth and nodded at the robot. “It’s all right, Hunt-R.”

Hunt-R nodded back, started in on dissembling the explosives netting.

With an exasperated jog of his head, Trip motioned for Rudy to follow him and walked back towards the Wound. “Seriously, I’m about ready to just wipe his brain and start over from scratch. With a lot less insubordination this time. I mean, I thought it would be funny, but turns out it’s just annoying.”

“Now you know how I feel.” Rudy loped after him, puffing at his calabash. “He’s just hurt about not being invited to the wedding.”

“We were trying to keep it small.”

“There were over a thousand guests.”

“Delores was worried about him hitting on her bridesmaids. And I didn’t want him snaking all the pigs-in-blankets. You know how he gets — it wouldn’t be so bad if he actually ate them, but just to grind handfuls of them into his chest and crotch, that’s just unsettling.” Trip glanced back over his shoulder. The robot was still working, taking explosives out of the netting and bagging them. All with one hand. The other was giving Trip the finger. Trip grunted. “Anyway... I effectively apologized.”

They reached the Wound. Rudy jumped up to sit on the hood. “You erased the memory from his brain.”

“Well, not all of it, obviously.” Trip leaned back against the hood next to Rudy. He popped a caff pill from the bunny dispenser. “How does he remember, anyway? I went in and cut some pretty big swaths through his memory banks. Shatner, I hope I didn’t accidentally erase his prohibition against killing us. Or at least me.”

“Yeah, about that... So, you know how after the operation, he was feeling glum, had this whole general, unfocused out-of-sorts angry malaise going?”

“Did he?”

“Yeah. He started moping and moaning all the time.”

Trip crunched his eyebrows at Rudy. “Is that what that was? I just thought a horny raccoon had snuck into the trunk with him.”

“No, it was unfocused angry robot malaise.” Rudy guiltily avoided Trip’s eyes and looked up at ol’ Willie hanging from the ceiling, inert. “And it was really bumming me out. So... I told him.”

“You told him?”

Rudy nodded. “It was either that or have him moaning the whole trip out.”

“Yeah, better he make my life a living hell of snipe, sarcasm and back-talk.”

Rudy smiled around the pipe bit. “That’s what I was thinking.”

Trip shook his head and sighed, noticed Hunt-R plucking the last stick of dynamite from the netting.

“Explosives. Really?” Trip asked Rudy, then pushed off the hood and walked back towards the vault.

“What?” Rudy slid off the hood and followed. “They get the job done.”

“There’s a reason we crack safes.” Trip lit a cigarette. “Explosions tend to attract attention.”

“Yeah, but it’s almost three. And you weren’t here...”

“I was getting laid. Very well laid, I might add.”

Rudy huffed. “Glad you enjoyed yourself. But thanks to that we’ve only got a couple of hours ‘till sun-up.”

“So?”

Hunt-R was just taking down the netting as they stepped up to the vault door. Rudy pointed the stem of the calabash at the vault’s lock, a slick little number with a hardened keypad and a datajack with a ring of yellow light around it, indicating the jack was protected by heavy encryption. “The lock’s nuerotronic. Military grade.”

Trip sneered. “Again, so?”

“It’s a Mitsubishi 740. Maybe a 750,” Hunt-R said. “You do tend to have troub—”

“I wouldn’t complete that thought if I were you,” Trip warned. “Never met a lock — nuerotronic or otherwise — I couldn’t pick. Ten minutes we’ll be heading west with a trunk full of loot.”

“If you say so.” Hunt-R folded the netting and stuffed it into the canvas goody bag atop the various explosives. “But I shall keep the explosives at the ready just in case.”

Trip frowned. “Seriously, robot, what is your f*cking problem?”

Hunt-R’s oval eye pulsed a sad pale yellow. “I rented a suit and everything.”

Trip threw up his hands. “Vishnu’s insecurity disorder, robot. There wasn’t even a wedding!”

“It would have been nice to have been invited none-the-less.”

“Fine. Tell you what, I’ll use whatever loot we find in this thing to build a Wayback machine, set it to the day before the wedding, hop into it, pop out, double team Delores with myself, hi-five the accomplishment, and then find you so I can invite you, on bended knee, to the wedding that will never happen. Will that make it all better?”

“Oh, like the entire concept of a Wayback machine doesn’t violate causality.” Hunt-R swung the goody bag up over his shoulder and clanked off towards the Wound. “But I do appreciate the thought.”

Rudy chuckled.

Trip sighed. “Let me at the lock.”

“We tried the basics,” Rudy said.

“Ahh, good old 0,0,0,0 and 1,2,3,4.”

“Yeah. And 9,9,9,9. No luck.”

“Any other town I would be surprised if those had worked. But here, surprised they didn’t.” Trip crouched in front of the lock. He licked his thumb and rubbed it against the grimy keypad bevel, revealing a model number. “It’s a 750, all right. The keypad’s just for authenticating the access code for the datajack.”

“So you’ve got to crack two codes? One just to get at the lock?” Rudy’s shoulders sagged. “Great.”

Trip sank his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out a short patch cord. “Relax. I do this sort of thing for a living, remember?”

“Which is why we’re always broke.”

Trip growled. “Ten minutes”

“Right.”

Trip went to plug the patch cord into his neck but found something already plugged in. The RATpack antenna. He’d forgotten about it, never taken it out. Grinning at the fresh memory, he popped it out, slipped it gently away in a pocket, and snicked the patch cord jack into its place behind his ear. Then he snapped the other end of the patch cord into the lock’s jack. The ring around it went bright red.

“Okay.” Trip blinked. “That’s interesting.”

“What?” Rudy stepped up behind him.

“The damn thing blinded me.”

“Like blind blind?”

“Yeah, lights out.” Trip waved a hand in front of his own face, his eyes darting randomly. “Forgot my firewall was down. Rookie mistake.”

“Why the hell was your firewall down?”

“The lady likes it bareback.” Trip twitched, his eyes rolling to white as his firewall came back on. “Here’s hoping I get my sight back at some point.”

“If you don’t, can I dress you funny, dye your hair blue, and tattoo your face?”

“Only if it’s a rainbow unicorn. Now, shush, the lock’s trying to tell me what protocol I need to use to talk to it.” Trip’s eyebrow twitched. “Okay, we can talk now. Now I just have to convince it to let me in.” His hand blindly felt for the keypad, his fingers tapping out a sequence. The glow around the ring stayed red. “Okay... this may take more than ten minutes. Maybe twenty. Or thirty, at the most. — Somebody want to find me something to sit on?”