Take the All-Mart!

CHAPTER 8: ON THE ROAD AGAIN?





By Noon, the Wound was speeding away from Shunk, the thrum of her breeder reactor momentarily stopping all work in the barley fields — townsfolk looking up from their weeding to stare as the Dodge whipped by, kicking up clouds of dirt and gravel in her wake.

Relaxed in the front passenger seat, Rudy finished stuffing his calabash and lit it. “So, what you set the timer on Hunt-R’s emergency abandonment protocol to? Three days? Four? He gonna meet us in Atlantic City?” He sat back, looked out the window just as the Wound jagged left at a fork in the dirt road. His eyes and pipe pointed back at the fork. “Umm... isn’t A.C. that way?”

Jacked into the Wound, Trip shot a caff pill into his mouth from the Bugs Bunny Pez dispenser. “We’re not going to A.C..”

Rudy pursed his lips around the bit of the pipe. “Yeah... you’re probably right. Bounty hunters will expect that. Radiation levels this time a year, the fishing will suck anyway. But if we’re not going to A.C., where’s Hunt-R meeting us, then?”

Trip slipped the dispenser away into a tux inner pocket, took out a cig. He pushed the dash lighter in with his thumb. “Robot’s staying put in Shunk. That was the deal with the Sorta-King. He keeps Hunt-R as collateral —”

Rudy shrugged. “He will be missed. But... it just so happens I’ve got this design for a new model I’ve been itching to try out.” Rudy fished around behind him in the seat crack until he pulled out a wadded piece of paper. He un-crumpled it, and smiling proudly held the drawing on it up for Trip to see. It was a rough mechanical sketch of a sphere with short stubby legs and arms and a Cyclops-eye dome of a head. “I call him Gonz-O. He’ll be a workhorse. Plenty of gadgets in him. I can start building his central core now, you pull over a sec and let me grab my tools and that Cray we salvaged in Albuquerque from the trunk.”

The lighter popped and Trip lit his cig. “Will he be less mouthy?”

“That’s up to you, isn’t it?”

“I guess.” Trip shrugged. “But it doesn’t matter. We don’t need a new robot. We’ll get that old bastard junk pile of circuits back once we rescue Roxanne.”

“Sure,” Rudy said, folding the paper and stuffing it back into the seat crack. “But that was just bullshit to get us out of there. Like you telling Morty you’re in love with Roxanne — that was a little cruel, by the way, but guess I can’t complain: I’m not swinging off the side of a grain silo.”

“Yeah...” Trip blew smoke out the open driver’s window and watched the barley fields giving way back to scrubland. “Bullshit. Except, it’s possibly not.”

“Of course,” Rudy sighed, putting his calabash in the ash tray and reaching for the shotgun on the dash.

Trip scowled at him. “What are you doing now?”

Rudy was trying to get his mouth around the shotgun barrels. He gave up and simply put them flat against his forehead. “Pull over so I can get a clean shot. I don’t wanna get brains all over my t-shirt-shirt. I would like an open casket — I promised mom.”

Trip rolled his eyes. “Stop being a cartoon.”

“Stop being insane,” Rudy said, spinning the shotgun around to point both barrels right at Trip’s long nose. “You are not in love.”

Trip gently pushed the shotgun out of his face. “I could be, you don’t know.”

“No, I do know.” Rudy tossed the shotgun into the back seat. “You’re not. You never are. Infatuated, yes... all the f*cking time. But never in love. Not for real.”

“But what if she’s the one this time? Huh, you think about that? There she is, the potential love of my life, trapped in the All-Mart. I’m all for long-distance relationships, but that’d be a stretch.”

With one hand, Rudy tweaked his nipple while the other retrieved the calabash. “She’s not the one.”

“How do you know?” Trip indignantly dashed out his cig, half-smoked. “You never even met her.”

“Doesn’t matter. They’re never the one. Because you don’t have a ‘one’. Except yourself.”

“I am rather fetching, aren’t I?” Trip leaned to check his hair in the rear-view. He flicked at it until the curl was just perfect. “But Roxanne’s no slouch. She’s got a brain. And perfect eyes... perfect smile... more than perfect ass. Special, even, that ass. The things she can do with that ass...”

“Will you listen to yourself? Why do you keep doing this? We’re free and clear here. The king was drunk enough to let us go, we should take advantage of the good luck. Hell, nobody’s gonna come after us if we just blow him off. You’ll forget her in a week.”

Trip glared at him. “Dude, she doesn’t wear underwear.”

Rudy’s eyebrow went up. “Okay, two weeks. Tops.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Definitely.”

“But how will I know until we’ve had that crucial second date? You know, the awkward one where you actually go out to dinner and have to make small talk over breadsticks? Anyway, there’s still the little matter of having to pay back the Warlord Hu.”

“And how is going into a zombie-infested department store for a chick you barely know gonna help with that?”

“The reward!”

“What reward?”

“Think about it.” Trip thumbed the dash lighter in, took a fresh cig out of the tin. “We bring Roxanne back, daddy Sorta-King’s gonna be happy. Happy enough to open the town vault —”

“Would that be the vault you couldn’t crack?” Rudy interrupted, chuckling.

Trip scowled at him and continued, “— and throw enough money at Hu to get her to forget all about us.”

“Forget all about you, you mean. She’s already forgotten about me. You heard the Higgins — you’re the one with the bounty on his head. Hell, I could probably make all this go away if I just turned you over to her. Collect myself a nice bounty while I’m at it and retire to some quiet beach in Colorado.”

“Don’t get any ideas.” Trip’s hand hovered impatiently over the dash lighter until it popped. He grabbed it, lit his cig, then jammed the lighter away. “Turn me in, I’ll remind her how you treated Mr. Charles Xavier Whimsy, Esquire. Bet he walks with a limp now. All spastic and pathetic.”

Rudy swallowed. “Yeah, okay... But nobody said anything about a reward when we were cutting the deal with the king. The deal was we get Roxanne back, we get to live. And get Hunt-R back. That was it.”

“Talking money didn’t seem appropriate at the time. The guy is having a hell of a enough of a bad day as it is. Would’a been gauche.”

“Would’a been nice to have negotiated it before we took the suicide mission.”

“It’ll work out. Somehow. Always does.”

“Right,” Rudy said, resigned. He looked out the window, gnawing on his thumbnail nervously. “So, you got an actual plan or we just doing the usual headlong and heedless full-frontal assault?”

Trip gave him a sideways smirk and twitched to send the Wound swerving onto the weed-overgrown ramp to I-80. “What kind of asinine question is that?”