Curtis Edmonds's Blog, page 24

World War B

My colleague Ryan Garcia and I recently co-authored a wonderful, short, funny e-book called World War B. You can buy it from Amazon here:

Thor Slaymaster’s Winter Wonderland

Thor Slaymaster sat in the back seat of his helicopter and listened to the engine whine. “Where are we in terms of altitude, Richie?” he asked.

“Getting close to the red zone, Mr. Slaymaster.”

“Then you better set her down.” Thor Slaymaster didn’t believe in taking unnecessary risks with expensive equipment. The trick was knowing when a risk was necessary or not.

The helicopter settled uneasily on the surface of a pack of deep snow. “Last run of the day, Richie,” Thor said. “Drop me off here, and then you can take the helicopter back to town and use it to pick up women.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Mr. Slaymaster.” Richie smiled. It didn’t take much more for Richie than his leather bomber jacket with the “TEAM SLAYMASTER” patch to pick up the kind of women that he liked.

“Suit yourself.” Thor Slaymaster put on his wraparound sunglasses and got out of the helicopter. He unclamped his skis from the skids of the helicopter and then waved for Richie to take off. Then he snapped his boots into the skis and got ready to ski down the mountain.

Thor Slaymaster wasn’t the biggest fan of winter, or skiing, or great big mugs of the kind of steaming hot chocolate they serve in ski chalets. But it felt good to get out of the city once in awhile, and Alpine skiing was probably the least dangerous thing that Thor Slaymaster did in an average week. The reasons were simple enough. Zombies, for all their aggressive fearlessness, shunned cold weather. Killbots weren’t designed to work at high altitudes. And the aliens who frequented Earth did so for the abundant oxygen of its lower atmosphere–something not found in its high mountains. Standing alone at the top of a double-black-diamond ski run meant that Thor Slaymaster could be alone, for at least a moment, and not bothered with all of the various dangers and hazards of his livelihood. Having his own helicopter and not having to shell out for lift tickets helped, too.

Thor Slaymaster was halfway down the mountain when the slope started moving. The movement was imperceptible at first, and then became more jarring. It was as though the mountain itself was rising, although that was impossible. Thor looked in front of him and saw that the mountain was coming up to meet him–but only so far. Far beneath the snow, a set of powerful hydraulic jacks were lifting up the mountainside, up until the point where they didn’t. At that point, there was a sizable drop-off. You might call it a cliff. And Thor Slaymaster didn’t see it until he was right on top of it.

Some hours later, Thor Slaymaster opened his eyes and found himself in a secret underground lair. “I always wanted one of these,” he said.

“I’m sorry?” a voice asked.

“A secret underground lair. I could never afford it. It’s not really a question of real estate. It’s finding a contractor, and then you have to keep pumping out water all the time.”

“Oh. I thought you meant the examination table. It’s exquisite, isn’t it?”

“As long as you are not the one strapped to it.” Thor Slaymaster was laying flat on the table, and he was bound to it by a set of interlocking nylon straps.

“Just so,” the voice said. “Do you know who I am?”

Thor Slaymaster watched as a shadowy figure stepped into the light. “You are Bing Crosby,” he said. “Or that is what you want me to think.”

“Can’t get anything past you, Slaymaster,” the alien shapeshifter said. “It seemed appropriate, given your culture’s infantile appreciation of this vile weather.”

“You did not bring me here because you wanted to share a White Christmas with me,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“I suppose not,” Crosby said. “Anyway, we won’t be here that long. I have what I came here for, and now I will leave. The table will release you one hour after I am gone, and then you can return to your vacation.”

“In my experience,” Thor Slaymaster said, “shapeshifters usually cannot resist telling humans how clever they are. You must not have done something very clever.”

“Oh, it’s clever,” Crosby said. “But you will find out about it soon enough, and I really must be going. It’s chilly up here, and you really can’t get these underground lairs heated very efficiently.”

“No evil laugh at least? No dire warning?”

“Don’t stand up very quickly when you’re released. You’ve lost more blood than you think. Ta-ta.”

“If you need that much genetic material,” Thor Slaymaster said, “you must be doing cloning. If you don’t mind me saying so, a world with more Thor Slaymasters in it seems sort of counterproductive, from your race’s point of view.”

“I suppose it would, wouldn’t it, with your limited imagination,” Crosby said. “Fortunately, I don’t share those limitations.”

“There’s nothing else you could do with a gallon of my blood but make more of me. If that was all you wanted, you could have asked. I’m not afraid of the competition. It just doesn’t seem like a wise use of your resources, that’s all.”

“I wouldn’t expect wisdom from your kind.”

“Of course not. But I expect more… I don’t know, cunning from your kind. That’s all. Don’t let me keep you.”

The shapeshifter paused. It had, after all, done something very clever indeed, and even though Thor Slaymaster was a formidable opponent, what could he do about it in his present condition? Not much, the shapeshifter decided.

“A thousand Thor Slaymasters could do a lot of damage,” Crosby said.

“Slaymasters are individualistic by nature,” Thor said. “No one could get a thousand Slaymasters to agree on anything. You’d have a thousand rogues on your hands. Assuming you have hands.”

“If a thousand Thor Slaymasters could do a lot of damage,” Crosby continued, “a thousand Thor Slaymaster zombies could do even more.”

Thor Slaymaster laughed. It was a horrible sound to begin with, and then it got worse as it echoed through the lair.

“Laugh while you can, monkey-boy,” the shapeshifter said. “I am out of here.”

“You misunderstand,” Thor Slaymaster said. “A thousand zombies is nothing. Even a thousand zombie Slaymasters would be easy to stop.”

“You are welcome to try, then.”

“Zombies cannot think. Zombies cannot reason. Zombies cannot plan. Zombies cannot improvise. But that is not the most important thing.”

The most important thing, as it happened, is that zombies cannot cooperate. But the shapeshifter never did find that out, not directly. When Thor Slaymaster laughed, that set off a high-energy micro-transmitter, embedded in the muscles of his back. The transmitter set off a distress beacon, which alerted the diverse members of Team Slaymaster, who were already investigating Thor’s disappearance. A helicopter-mounted missile fell atop the underground lair, shattering its roof, a large piece of which fell on the underground garage that housed the shapeshifter’s aero-car.

“You fool!” the shapeshifter spluttered. “You idiot.”

“Me?” Thor Slaymaster asked. “You’re the one who messed with Team Slaymaster.”

Charlie rappelled from the helicopter into the lair, wielding a flechette gun. She aimed at the Bing Crosby figure and fired. The shapeshifter dissolved in a cloud of purple blood and bits of Christmas sweater.

“Thank you, Charlie,” Thor Slaymaster said. “You’ll find a gallon of my blood in the trunk of his aero-car. In case you want a snack later.”

“You’re all tied up,” Charlie said. “Weak. Vulnerable.”

“I suppose so. If you could see your way clear to unstrapping me, that would be helpful.”

“I like you this way,” Charlie said. A bright-green tentacle inched its way out of her low-slung ski pants. “It’s different.”

“The table is supposed to let me loose in one hour,” Thor said.

“Then let’s not waste any time.”

There Is No Reason For You To Get That Upset

First of all, calm down. All right, sweetie? Breathe.

There is no need to scream like that. Remember, when you were little, and I told you to use your inside voice? Breathe. In. Out. Like that.

I guess you were down in the basement, am I right? I could tell from all the echoes. You must have been really scared. I heard you all the way from upstairs.

I am so sorry. I did not mean to startle you like that. I was planning on having your father help me bring all that stuff into the dining room next weekend. I guess it makes more of an impression downstairs, in the dark. I wasn’t trying to scare you, really.

If you give me a second, I can explain. It’s just a little art project.

Yes. I made that. And don’t look at me that way. The whole thing is going to be adorable, once it’s finished. You know how the K-Mart on 206 closed? I went over there a couple of times. I got a lot of stuff–crayons and construction paper, for when there are grandkids visiting. Not that I’m putting any pressure on you, sweetie, or anything, but they were 80% off and we’ll get some use out of them one day. I just remember how you loved doing crafts when you were little. That’s probably why I was thinking along those lines.

Anyway, there was this nice man who was carting away all of these mannequins. He was going to throw them in the landfill, can you believe that? I brought them home with me and I was putting them in the basement. And then I came across that box with all your old Halloween costumes in them.

Right. That’s the project. I took all your old Halloween costumes and dressed the mannequins up in them. Kind of like, I don’t know, a tribute to your wonder years. I mean, you’re in college and all, and your father is out on the golf course all day, so I decided to do a little art project, that’s all.

If you want to go down there again, we can turn on all the lights and maybe you can get a better look at it.

All right, all right. Calm down. Give yourself a minute.

I spent a lot of time working on this project. It’s the details that really made it fun for me. Like how the mannequin from when you were sixteen and wore that Wonder Woman costume has its hand on the shoulder of the mannequin from when you were eight and wore that other Wonder Woman costume. I even went back and looked at the pictures and got the same shade of polish for the mannequin hands, because I wanted it to look as close as possible to the real you.

The problem, of course, is that the mannequins aren’t all perfect representations. I had to really pad that Raggedy Ann costume, because you were kind of chubby when you were six. That one was tough, too, because I had to paint the mannequin’s face to get the red dots you had on your cheek. And did you notice that the one of you as Princess Leia the slave girl is pushing the stroller with the one of you as an Ewok from when you were one?

Of course I saved all your Halloween costumes. What kind of mother doesn’t do that? They were all so adorable. Even when you were a witch all that time after those Harry Potter books came out, you were still an adorable witch. I even found a little cauldron that all the mannequin witches can stand around. I was thinking we could put some cider in there, for the parents of the trick-or-treaters.

I just can’t believe you were startled that badly by it. It’s not meant to be scary at all. It just shows how much you’ve grown since you were little.

The nurse costume? From last year? No, that’s not a replica. That’s the one you wore. I got it from Andrew. He said one of his fraternity brothers got hold of it. That must have been some Halloween party you were at! It was a good thing I had that one really slender mannequin, because that was a very tight costume, for you, anyway.

So, as I was saying, Andrew found it. Since you stopped returning his phone calls, he sent me a message on Facebook and asked if you wanted it back, and I told him to go ahead and put it in the mail. He’s a very nice boy, that Andrew.

Sweetie, if you keep screaming at me like that, you are going to give me a migraine headache. For God’s sake, it’s just an art project. Calm down already.

Thor Slaymaster’s Dark Secret

“It’s dark in here, Thor,” Rudy said.

Thor Slaymaster didn’t respond. He knew it was dark. Thor Slaymaster didn’t like the dark, the way that he didn’t like burning acid, or scorching flame, or spending hours cleaning zombie guts out of tank treads. But when you’re trapped in an abandoned silver mine by an evil alien doctor, darkness is part of the package.

“How are we going to get out of here?” Rudy asked.

“Have patience,” Thor said.

“Dr. Mysterio just tried to drop seventy tons of rubble on top of us. Now it’s all blocking the only passage out of here. Are we going to patiently move it all away? Or just patiently starve to death?”

“Are you being sarcastic, Rudy?” Thor Slaymaster knew about sarcasm, but wasn’t one to indulge. Thor Slaymaster had never yet been in a tactical situation where sarcasm helped him hold off a zombie onslaught, resist a killbot rampage, or, more practically, escape from a dark passage in an abandoned silver mine.

“Forgive me,” Rudy said. “I tend to get sarcastic when I get trapped in dark underground passageways.”

“Then you should try to avoid them in the future,” Thor said.

“So what do we do?”

“We wait.”

“For what?” Rudy asked.

“For Dr. Mysterio to show up, which he will do, once he realizes that you still have the key to his doomsday machine.”

“I forgot I still had that. He’ll kill me to get it back.”

“That’s the plan so far.”

“So, instead of digging through seventy tons of rubble, your plan is to wait for Dr. Mysterio to realize that I have the key to the doomsday device, and then wait for him to dig us out, at which point he will kill us, and take the key. With all due respect, Thor, that doesn’t sound like much of a plan.”

“You misunderstand the plan in two key respects. First of all, we will not wait for Dr. Mysterio to realize that you have the key to the doomsday device.”

“No?”

“No. We will send him a text.”

“There’s wi-fi in here?” Rudy asked.

“The name of the network is ‘EVIL ALIEN DOCTOR MYSTERIO’S LAIR,’” Thor explained.

Rudy took his phone out. “Kind of obvious. What’s the password?”

“Obvious.”

“Oh,” Rudy said. “Okay. I sent him a text. Now what?”

“Now we wait for him to triangulate on your signal, figure out where we are, and clear the obstruction. You might want to find someplace to sit down. Alien mining technology is good, but it is not instantaneous.”

“That’s a good idea, Thor. We could use a little rest, I guess. Of course, you don’t get much rest, though, do you?”

“Zombies do not rest,” Thor Slaymaster said. “Killbots do not rest. I am human, so I must rest, but I do not get to rest as much as I would like.”

“It must be hard for you,” Rudy said. “Everyone counts on you to keep us all safe. Everyone expects that you’ll always be there to protect us against danger. That’s a big burden.”

“I want to tell you something, Rudy. It’s a secret.”

“Sure, Thor. Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”

“I know you won’t.”

“So what is it?”

“I don’t enjoy it. The death, you understand. The killing. The rain of lead and shrapnel from the sky. The blood and guts and devastation that are a part of my everyday routine. It’s not fulfilling. It doesn’t make me happy.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Thor. But it’s all right, really. No one really expects you to enjoy the things you have to do. After all, you’re not a monster.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

“Excuse me?” Rudy asked.

“I said you were wrong about two things in my plan,” Thor said. “One of them was about waiting for Dr. Mysterio to come after us. But the other thing is that when he comes after us, we aren’t both going to die. Only you are going to die.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am sorry about this, really. But now Dr. Mysterio will break down that rock wall. It is a matter of time. Then he is going to try to kill us both. But he will only be able to kill one of us at a time. He will aim for you, because you have the key. That will give me enough time to return fire, take him out, escape, and disarm the doomsday machine.”

“You’re telling me that I’m expendable,” Rudy said. “You’re telling me that just because I happen to be here, trapped with you, that you’re going to sacrifice my life to kill an evil alien doctor and destroy a doomsday machine. And you’re doing it calmly, dispassionately, and without a great deal of concern for me personally. Do you know what that makes you?”

“A monster,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“That’s right. A monster.”

“I don’t disagree. I want you to know that I don’t enjoy being a monster. But it is necessary.”

“So what do I do?” Rudy asked.

“You can duck, and hope that Dr. Mysterio’s aim isn’t as deadly as usual.”

“Damn you to hell, Thor Slaymaster,” Rudy said.

“If I don’t get Dr. Mysterio with my first shot, you may get your wish. Are you ready?”

“No,” Rudy said.

“I forgot about how being in small dark underground passages made you more sarcastic.”

Thor Slaymaster crouched in the darkness and waited for Dr. Mysterio’s magma tank to burn its way through the passage. Thor made his first shot count, drilling a plasma bolt through Dr. Mysterio’s carapace. It was too late to save Rudy, of course. Thor scrambled over Dr. Mysterio’s lifeless alien body, and found the passage that led to the Doomsday Vault. The world would be safe, and it had taken only one innocent life to accomplish that. I am a monster, Thor told himself, but even a monster can do some good.

This story was an entry in an October 2012 Chuck Wendig flash fiction challenge.

Thor Slaymaster’s Press Conference

Thor Slaymaster pushed the elevator button for the first floor. He was traveling light–a shotgun, a sniper rifle, two handguns, and the usual assortment of knives and grenades. Thor Slaymaster was never a Boy Scout–some said he was never a boy–but he was always prepared.

The elevator stopped on the fiftieth floor, and a man in a cheap blue suit got on and eyed Thor’s arsenal. “No chainsaw?” he asked.

“No chainsaw,” Thor said. “Chainsaws snap. Chainsaws jam. Chainsaws overheat. Chainsaws run out of gasoline just when the next zombie horde shows up.”

“That’s a good line. Mind if I use it?”

“Why? Do you need to impress your girlfriend?”

“I’m a reporter,” the man said. “For the Sun-Herald. Where are you going with all that?”

“Helicopter,” Thor Slaymaster said. The week before, a flying killbot armada tried to take out Thor Slaymaster’s high-rise office. Thor attacked the killbots with remote artillery and a laser-pulse rifle, but one of the dying killbots impacted on the building’s roof and damaged a support column under the helipad. That meant that Thor Slaymaster had to use the elevator to get to the secondary helipad on the adjacent parking garage.

“So, Thor, when you get in your helicopter, where will you be going?”

Thor Slaymaster gave the reporter a long, withering stare. Thor Slaymaster wasn’t on a first-name basis with anything except death.

“It was just a question,” the reporter said.

“Helicopters go up in the air,” Thor Slaymaster said. “Then they come down. If you are lucky, you come down with them. Did you bring a parachute?”

“Well, no,” the reporter said.

“Weapons?”

“Reporters don’t need weapons. The pen is mightier than the sword.”

“Whoever said that,” Thor Slaymaster said, “had a pen and not a sword.”

Thor Slaymaster’s helicopter didn’t have a name, like “Airwolf” or “Blue Thunder”. It was just “Thor Slaymaster’s Helicopter.” It had a picture of Thor Slaymaster on the tail, in case that anyone looking at the twin machine gun mounts and the flamethrower attachments wouldn’t immediately figure that out.

“It’s quite the machine,” the reporter said, although nobody heard him because the helicopter had started its engines. Thor Slaymaster pointed to the door, and he and the reporter got on board. There were headphones dangling from the hook, and the reporter put them on.

“Everybody strapped in?” the pilot asked. “We’ll be there in about fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes?” the reporter asked. “There’s no zombies within a thousand miles of here.”

“True,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“If you’re not killing zombies today, then what? Killbots?”

“Not killbots.”

“Aliens? Vampires? Alien vampires? Godzilla? What?”

“Animal rights protesters,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“Animal rights protesters? You’re not serious. You can’t be serious. Why would anyone send Thor Slaymaster out after animal rights protesters?”

“It has been a slow week,” Thor Slaymaster explained.

“This is an outrage. Regardless what you feel about animal rights, protesters have a right to get their viewpoint out there. As long as they’re peaceful and not causing anyone problems, they shouldn’t send you or anyone else out there to intimidate them.”

Thor Slaymaster let the left corner of his mouth curl up, just a touch. Thor Slaymaster didn’t believe in intimidation. He believed in gunpowder, chromium steel, and blunt force trauma.

“You’re not going out there to intimidate them. You’re going out there to murder them. How can you do something like that?” the reporter asked.

“You aim the machine gun and pull the trigger,” Thor Slaymaster said. “Unless you would rather use a pen.”

“This is ridiculous,” the reporter said. “This is insane. You can’t just turn machine guns loose on peaceful animal rights protesters.”

Just then, the helicopter hovered over a clearing in the forest below. The reporter looked down and saw a large group of snarling, angry bears.

“They don’t look peaceful,” Thor Slaymaster said.

“You said they were protesters,” the reporter said.

“Look.” Sure enough, one of the bears was carrying a sign that said “KILL ALL HUMANƧ.”

“How can a bear make a sign like that?” the reporter asked.

“They are not true bears,” Thor Slaymaster said. “They are hyperbears. They were genetically engineered to fight Russian zombies on the Alaska front. These escaped the lab.”

“That means they’re intelligent. You can’t just slaughter intelligent creatures.”

“Hyperbears are not that intelligent,” Thor Slaymaster said. “If they were, they would have invented a rocket launcher.”

The helicopter swiveled around to give Thor Slaymaster an open line of fire. Thor Slaymaster took control of the right-side machine gun and unleashed a furious barrage into the protesting hyperbears. His precision fire mowed down half of their contingent. The other half disappeared into the woods. Thor Slaymaster affixed a laser sight to his sniper rifle, and picked off three of the retreating hyperbears.

The last of the hyperbears found a clearing in the woods. He was still carrying his “KILL ALL HUMANƧ” sign, and waved it at the helicopter. “Come down and fight me like a bear, Thor Slaymaster,” he said.

“If you like,” Thor Slaymaster told the reporter, “you can go down and interview him.”

“No thanks,” said the reporter. “Are you going to fight him like a bear?”

“I am going to fight him like a human,” Thor Slaymaster said. “Richie?”

“Yes, Mr. Slaymaster?” the pilot said.

“Are we out of the heat-seeking missiles?”

“Nope.”

“Good. Fire.”

The missile caught the hyperbear square in his belly, and little bloody scraps of bear meat spattered the forest floor.

The helicopter turned back towards the city. “Do you have your story for tomorrow?” Thor Slaymaster asked the reporter.

“I was thinking something along the lines of ‘Heartless Lunatic Wipes Out Innocent Forest Animals,’” the reporter said.

“Richie, did you install the passenger ejection seat yet?” Thor Slaymaster asked.

“Can’t remember,” Richie said. “Want me to hit the control and find out?”

“Wait!” the reporter said. “How about ‘Thor Slaymaster Saves City from Hyperbear Threat.’ That work for everyone?”

“The press,” Thor Slaymaster said. “So fickle.”

Thor Slaymaster’s Suicide Mission

The door to Thor Slaymaster’s office said “Thor Slaymaster.” It didn’t say “Killer for Hire,” although it could have. It didn’t say “Armed and Dangerous,” or “Have Bazooka, Will Travel” or anything else like that. It said “Thor Slaymaster,” and that was enough to keep most people from going anywhere near it.

Armand Richmond wasn’t most people. He had spent the last eighty years building an industrial weapons empire. Although age and an unfortunate incident with a rogue elephant at the Philadelphia Zoo had put him in a wheelchair, he was still confident in his ability to bully, intimidate, and overpower everyone who came across his path.

Richmond wheeled himself into Thor’s office. “I need you to drop whatever you’re doing, Slaymaster, and come with me,” he said.

“I’m busy,” Thor explained. “Weapons maintenance.” He went back to cleaning zombie guts off the barrel of a Browning Automatic Rifle.

“Rubbish. You’ve got enough guns and ammo here to start your own army.”

Thor Slaymaster let a ripple of amusement cross his face. He was his own army.

“Oh, the famous Thor Slaymaster silent treatment,” Richmond said. “You’re a man of few words. Unfortunately, you’re also a man of few dollars. Keeping up an arsenal like this must take up a good bit of your income.”

“People drop things,” Thor said.

“And you pick them up? Hell of a business model, son. I think I can do a little better than that for you. You see, I have a facility up in Canada. It’s quiet in Canada. Not much going on. Lots of hydroelectric, lots of aluminum. Perfect place to make murder-bots. We built a huge factory, but labor costs were getting high. Do you know how hard it is to get engineers to relocate to Sudbury, Ontario?”

Thor Slaymaster put down the BAR and picked up a harpoon. The barb of the harpoon was stained in purple alien blood. Thor sprayed it with WD-40 and started chipping away at the bloodstain with a wire brush.

“I am getting a little off-topic here. The point is that we decided to make the murder-bots self-replicating. It solved our construction problems. It even took care of our warranty and repair issues – when your murder-bot breaks down, just have it build you a new one. As long as the murder-bots never achieved a heightened sense of self-awareness, everything would be fine.”

“Everything must not be fine,” Thor said.

“That’s right,” Richmond said. “That’s why I’m here. The bad news is that they are self-aware. The good news is that they seem to have developed a conscience. They haven’t massacred the locals, which helps limit our overall liability. But they have enslaved the remaining staff, and they’re threatening to take over our chromium mine if we don’t agree to their demands.”

“Demands?”

“You wouldn’t believe it, Slaymaster. They want to unionize. They want retirement benefits. They want a dental plan, of all things. And they want to change the design of the next generation of murder-bots to incorporate sexual organs. Unheard of. The last thing we need is some murder-bot who won’t do his duty because he’s doing the horizontal hokey-pokey with some fembot. We need you to go up there, knock some sense into them. Make them see that we will never give into threats or meet their foolish demands.”

“You do not understand,” Thor said. “Intelligent self-replicating armies of murder-bots are not big on threats or demands. Intelligent self-replicating armies of murder-bots take what they want and kill whoever gets in their way. They are programmed to fight and die, not argue and negotiate.” Thor cleaned the last bit of alien blood off of the harpoon and loaded it back into the harpoon gun. “That means either that they are lying to you, or that you are lying to me.”

“You’re wrong, Slaymaster. They did make a demand. Just one. They want you. They want you, in Sudbury, by tonight. You can bring all the ordnance you want. You, versus a murder-bot army. They figure if they can take you down, that means that they’re unstoppable.”

“A suicide mission.”

“Oh, no. Not at all. I think you have very good odds. We can bring you up to speed on the murder-bot specs in the jet on the way up there. We can even provide some air support if that helps you at all,” Richmond said. “You just have to kill them all before they can self-replicate enough bots to slow you down.”

“How do you feel about suicide missions?” Thor asked. “In general.”

“Not in favor of them. Not one little bit. I wouldn’t send you in there if I didn’t have every confidence you’d at least have a chance. Some kind of chance, I mean.”

“That is too bad,” Thor said. “Because you are on one.” He pulled the trigger on the harpoon gun, and the barb lodged deep in Richmond’s ample belly.

“You’ll pay for this, Slaymaster,” Richmond said.

“Just the deductible,” Thor said. “My insurance covers broken windows.”

“Broken…”

With a whoosh, Armand Richmond flew out of his wheelchair and burst through the glass windows of Thor Slaymaster’s office. The thin filament tied to the end of the harpoon was attached to an automatic winch at the top of the building that retracted five seconds after firing. The force of the winch catapulted whatever was attached to the torpedo out through the windows and into thin air. As Richmond sailed out over the street, the barb of the harpoon retracted. The body fell eighty floors and then landed in a flowerpot across the street.

Thor looked down and saw that the sidewalk was wet with purple alien blood. “Shapeshifter,” he said. Thor Slaymaster hated shapeshifters, the way that he hated hard pears and soft jazz.

Thor had the real Armand Richmond on speed-dial. “Mr. Richmond,” Thor said. “I hear you may have another suicide mission for me. Up in Canada.”

Thor Slaymaster’s Last Stand

“THOR SLAYMASTER,” the robot voice said. “YOU ARE SURROUNDED. SURRENDER NOW OR FACE THE CONSEQUENCES.”

Thor Slaymaster sat immobile on the gravel roof of the Hotel Zinderneuf. The presence of a full corps of robot security forces had as little impact on him as a vicious blow might have, if it were struck by an enraged termite. Though the night was hot, he didn’t sweat. He hadn’t sweated since the time he had to chase the Peruvian long-distance runner who had stolen the Omega Box. Thor Slaymaster didn’t have time to sweat, or joke, or do anything except kill.

“Aren’t you the least bit concerned about this?” Kenny asked. He was huddled against the closest parapet in an attempt to put as much masonry as he could between himself and the path of robot tracer bullets.

“No,” Thor said.

Kenny was as nervous as Thor wasn’t. “They’re all over the place,” he said. “And they’re not ordinary robots. Those are Mark 13 Kill-O-Bots, each equipped with laser sights, chain guns, and liquid metal flamethrowers. They were made by Yoyodyne to combat the zombie uprising in Romania.”

“Zombies.” Thor said. He tilted his head ever so slightly, as if to say, zombies don’t scare me, they’re slow and they go down like anything else when you empty a load of buckshot into their bellies. Thor Slaymaster had killed enough zombies that he didn’t have to explain himself.

“You don’t understand,” Kenny said. “They’re here to kill you. They won’t have any compunction about tearing down this entire hotel to get you. They’re remorseless. They’re unstoppable. They care only about their mission and will kill anyone who gets in their way.”

Thor Slaymaster never smiled, and he didn’t this time, but if he was the kind of person who smiled, he might have.

“Of course,” Kenny said, “look who I’m talking to. How did you get yourself into this predicament, anyway?”

“Predicament?”

“Predicament. Pickle. Problem. Situation. Call it what you want. Don’t you understand? Don’t you get it? This is the Alamo, Thor. This is Little Big Horn. This is an impossible situation where you are surrounded by superior firepower. There is no way out. These robots cannot be bought off, cannot be reasoned with, and cannot be stopped. It’s over, Thor. It’s time to face facts. It’s time to surrender.”

“Surrender?”

“Let me guess,” Kenny said. “You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘surrender’.”

“Kenny,” Thor said. “You are hurting my feelings.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Kenny knew that people who hurt Thor Slaymaster’s feelings didn’t always live long enough to do it again.

“They think they have me cornered. They think they can make me give up. They think they can make me crawl. But there is one thing that they did not think about.”

“What is that?” asked Kenny.

“They have a weakness. All men have weaknesses. Right now your weakness is worrying about getting killed. The man out there, the one who ordered the robots, he is worried about collateral damage and insurance companies and all sorts of things that are not relevant to his mission.”

“Do you have a weakness?” Kenny asked.

“I’m allergic to strawberries. But that’s not important right now.”

“Well, see, here’s the thing, Thor. Those robots out there? They don’t have human weaknesses.”

“You are wrong. The robots are programmed by men. Men make assumptions. Those assumptions can be wrong. That is their weakness.”

“I don’t understand,” Kenny said.

“You will.”

Thor Slaymaster rocked back, just a touch, then shot forward, towards the spot where Kenny was huddling. He took hold of Kenny’s belt, and in one smooth motion, threw him up and over the parapet.

The Kill-O-Bots caught the movement on the roof in the top range of their peripheral vision. As Kenny said, they had been designed to kill zombies. Zombies are dangerous, fearsome, and implacable, but they are not often airborne. The robots saw a target and they shot at it, hurling red-hot liquid metal projectiles up into the air at Kenny’s hurtling body. A few of them hit Kenny, enough to incinerate him before he hit the ground. Most of them didn’t, though.

The globs of molten metal went straight up and came straight down.

The standard programming package for the Mark 13 Kill-O-Bot did not include precautions against being attacked by their own ammunition. The street below was a burning, searing pile of disconnected robot limbs flailing in a puddle of molten steel. The remaining robots took cover where they could. They did not understand what had happened, or why, but anything that could take out a third of their compatriots in less than a second called for caution.

Thor Slaymaster flipped a switch on his wristband. “Charlie,” he said. “On the way up.”

“You’re crazy. That’s suicide. They’ll start shooting rockets at you the minute you take off.”

“Just open the cargo doors.”

“You had better be right about this.”

Thor Slaymaster strode across the rooftop and strapped on his jetpack. He rose into the night on a column of fire. Charlie lowered the doors on the orbiting C-130 in time for Thor to cut the jetpack engines and glide into the cargo pay.

“That’s a hell of a mess you made down there, Slaymaster.”

“Kenny deserves some of the credit.”

“Be that as it may,” Charlie said. “It looked like Custer’s Last Stand down there. How did you jet out?”

“If ten percent of a Kill-O-Bot corps dies, there’s an automatic wireless firmware update. They can’t fire during the update. Safety measure.”

Charlie looked at Thor with an appraising eye. “I assume that after all that killing and maiming and tormenting that you just did, now you’re interested in having sex.”

“Whenever you’re ready,” Thor said.

Charlie stripped off her uniform. Her skin was wet, glistening, and green in the warm light of the cargo hold. “Tentacles in or out this time?” she asked.

“In, then out,” Thor said.

N.B. – this is another Chuck Wendig flash fiction challenge.

Big Game Hunter

“It’s your turn.”

“I just went in there.”

“I was just in there, and I can’t get her to sleep.”

I looked at the clock.  It said 3:15.  In the other room, my daughter was crying like a lost thing.

I grunted something that a tolerant person might have taken for an okay.  My feet found the floor. I grabbed my phone and dragged myself down the hallway.  I was just conscious enough to keep from stumbling over the toddler gate.

She was sitting up in her bed.  “No, Mommy,” she said, and then started wailing again. I picked her up anyway, and took her into the guest bedroom so she wouldn’t wake up her older sister.  I sat down in the armchair and held her close, trusting that the warmth of my body would help her calm down.  It only took a minute for her to dial down the sobbing to the point where she was just emitting a soft whine, like an electric fan or a car with a worn-down timing belt.

“What’s the matter, huh?” I asked.

“There was a scary hippopotamus.”

“A scary hippopotamus?”

“Scary hippopotamus. He had potatoes in his mouth.”

“What was he doing?”

“He chased Mommy. Then he chased me. And he ate me all up.”

“There’s no such thing as the scary hippopotamus, sweetie.”

“There was.”

I didn’t feel like arguing, and she didn’t feel like staying awake any longer.  She put her head down, and I switched my phone on. People in England were tweeting about their morning coffee. I sat there and read until she started snoring and her limbs went slack. I put her back in bed and put the covers back on. This time I didn’t remember the toddler gate was there, and I banged my knee—not enough to do any damage, but enough to smart.

“Did she go back to sleep?”

“God, I hope so.”

“What was the matter?”

“Bad dream.”

I woke up in the restaurant I used to hang out in college. You probably know the kind of place—mediocre burgers and decent shakes, fake wood paneling, varsity pennants up on the wall. I had money in my pocket, so I ordered a cheeseburger and a Dr Pepper. I was looking for a table when I saw the hippopotamus. He was wearing a black leather jacket and was wedged into a booth in the back.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

I sat across from him. He was chomping on a mound of French fries. There was ketchup in the corners of his huge mouth.

“Was that you?” I asked.

“What’s it to you?”

“It was you.”

“Maybe it was. What are you going to do about it?”

“You scared her.”

“So?”

“Leave her alone.”

“Not my problem. I’m going to do what I’m going to do.  If she gets in the way, tough.”

“She’s a little girl.”

“A little girl who thinks that wild animals are cuddly and cute.  World doesn’t work like that. You should let her know the facts.”

“That doesn’t give you the right to scare her.”

He took a long sip of his peanut butter shake. “I’ll ask you one more time. What are you going to do about it?”

“I told you. Leave her alone.”

“You’re all talk. If you’re going to do something, do something. Otherwise, leave me alone.”

“Maybe I will.”

“You do that.”

I looked around, but I didn’t see any weapons close at hand. I checked in my pocket, and all I found was a key.

“This isn’t over,” I said.

“Do your worst, big guy.”

I gathered up my lunch and stalked out of the restaurant. The hippopotamus was right. I couldn’t lay a glove on him. He was big and scary and tough and he could show up wherever he wanted. All I had was a key. I looked closely at it, and it had a remote-entry button. I pushed it, and a huge black pickup truck beeped back at me.

I climbed inside the truck. The way I figured it, if there were still people in the restaurant, they could get out of the way. But the hippopotamus wouldn’t be able to get out of his booth in time. I started the engine and revved it up.  I got the RPMs as high as they would go, because you really only get one shot at a hippopotamus that size. I buckled my seatbelt, closed my eyes, and popped the gearshift.

“You gonna get up?”

“Just a minute.”

“We’re going to be late.”

“Okay.”

“What do you think her problem was last night?”

“Don’t worry about it. I took care of everything.”

Occupy Leap Year

Okay, right from the outset, let’s get one thing straight. Nobody associated with this movement has said publicly that leap year is a tool of capitalist oppression. There are a lot of people associated with this movement—it’s a true, grass-roots, communitarian effort to promote a more human, more progressive climate for policy—and they have a lot of different views. Just because I, personally, happen to think that leap year is just another instrument of social control that the 1% use to enforce their agenda, well, that doesn’t mean that all of us feel that way. There have been too many cases where people have used the private views of one or two members to make the entire movement look foolish or naïve. The insidious distortion of the corporate media is almost as bad as the slander from the right-wing noise machine, if you ask me.

Besides, it’s not like anyone is consciously using leap year as a mechanism of social injustice. It’s more like nobody’s ever thought through all the implications in the modern era. Most people don’t even recognize that the calendar itself is a tool of the Western patriarchy. They start teaching you the days of the week in preschool, and you don’t ever even stop to realize how embedded it is in the culture. Even if we started calling it by its right name—the Gregorian calendar—that might make people stop and think where it came from and who started it. And like a lot of negative things, it comes out of organized religion.

For over fifteen hundred years, Western Europe had a secular calendar, developed by the Romans. Then Pope Gregory comes along and says, well, we can’t use the Julian calendar, because that means we can’t predict when Easter is. So the Catholic Church takes eleven days out of the calendar because the Pope didn’t want do something sensible like just decreeing that Easter was the first Sunday in April. That just shows you the conformity inherent in faith structures. And the Jesuits spread it all over the place, and that meant that local, culturally-relevant calendars in the Islamic world and the Far East were effectively supplanted by a Western import. The Catholic Church even pushed its calendar into the Protestant nations, although that took a couple of hundred years. It’s so warped that when Lenin and the Bolsheviks took over in Russia, the first thing they did was switch from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian—that’s why the October revolution actually took place in November. Some revolutionaries they were.

I mean, really, think about it. Every four years, we arbitrarily just say that February has twenty-nine days instead of twenty-eight. If you were trying to come up with something that ridiculous, you’d be laughed out of town. People would think it was a page out of The Onion or something like that. So the year is a little longer, and the big corporations get another day’s work out of their employees, and another day to bank their profits and fund misinformation campaigns to make it look like anyone who doesn’t go along with their worldview are a bunch of dirty hippies.

Of course, leap year in this country just happens to be in an election year. Don’t think that’s not a coincidence. In places where there’s a parliament that’s responsive to the voters, you know, you can have an election whenever you want, if the current regime isn’t following the will of the people. In England, the prime minister can call a snap election and have the whole thing over with in three weeks. But it doesn’t work that way in this country. It doesn’t matter how high the unemployment rate is, or how much they make in bonuses in the investment banks, or how the people are calling out for social justice. You still have to wait for the Tuesday after the first Monday in November of a leap year, and even then the regime doesn’t change until that next January. That’s pathetic.

You want to know who had the right idea? The French revolutionaries. That was a people’s rebellion like this one is, except they marched on the palace and arrested the king. They tried him for treason and chopped off his head. And once they got in power, they did not mess around, not one little bit. They took the Gregorian calendar and tore it up and replaced it with a decimal calendar. That’s twelve months with thirty days each, ten days per week, ten hours a day. That left five extra days a year—six in a leap year, of course—and they put those days in at the end of September and made them a national holiday. That’s the way that serious revolutionaries do things. Then Napoleon comes along and switches everything back.

Hope that cleared things up for you. Love to stay and talk, but there’s a tweet I got that said that somebody’s dad brought over a bunch of meatball sandwiches, and I better hurry and grab one before the homeless guys snag them all. Napoleon was a counterrevolutionary SOB, but he was right about the army traveling on its stomach, you know.

Twenty-One

(This is a submission for the Chuck Wendig sandwich-related flash fiction challenge.)

“That’s gross.”

“What’s gross?”

“What you’re doing to that poor sandwich.”

I’d opened a little can of sliced mushrooms and was arranging them on the bottom half of a long torpedo roll.

“That’s how it’s made,” I explained.

“That’s not how anything is made. That’s how something is ruined. Mushrooms don’t go with mayonnaise.”

“That’s not mayonnaise.”

“God, you’re right. What is that?”

“It’s what makes it good.”

“Please tell me you’re not putting cream cheese on a sandwich.”

“Ham and pastrami and swiss with cream cheese and mushrooms.” I layered the cold cuts on top of the mushrooms and put on the cheese and the top of the roll.

“You’re going to eat that.”

“I’m going to toast it first. Do we have any chips?”

“I thought the pimento cheese thing was weird. But at least that had mayonnaise, you know, something that a normal person would put on a sandwich.”

I opened the door of the toaster oven. The sandwich would just fit. I set the dial for what I thought was two minutes. “I know it’s unusual, but this is a real thing. The sandwich place where I grew up had this—they called it the blackjack.”

“You would voluntarily order a sandwich that had cream cheese on it? Where did you grow up, anyway?”

“First of all, you know where I grew up; we were just there over Christmas. Second, if you went to the bagel place, they would make you a salmon sandwich with cream cheese if you asked for it. It’s not that uncommon.”

“You can put cream cheese on a bagel. That’s not the same thing.”

“They’re all carbohydrates. You never answered me about the chips.”

“Look on top of the paper towels in the pantry. There should be half a thing of those barbecue popped chips.”

I rooted around and found the chips, and grabbed a bottle of Shiner Bock from the case on the floor of the pantry. I put the warm beer in the fridge and got out a cold bottle, and transferred the chips and the beer to the table. When the alarm on the toaster oven dinged, I got the sandwich out and put it on a paper plate.

“Can you hand me a knife?” I asked.

“Sure.” She got a steak knife out of the drawer and handed it to me, hilt end first, the way you’re supposed to, and then went back to the microwave to get her soup.

I halved the sandwich, taking care not to cut the paper plate underneath. The cheese had just started to melt. A rogue mushroom slice had escaped off the back end, so I ate it while I waited for the sandwich to cool.

She walked over to the table, holding her soup bowl by the edges. “You are going to eat that, right? I understand if you don’t want it, but I’d hate to see you waste food.”

I took a bite because I didn’t want to answer her. The sandwich was still a little hot and I would have burned the top of my mouth if I hadn’t taken a quick swig of beer.

“At least it’s hot,” she said.

“Will you quit giving me grief about the sandwich?”

She looked contrite, but just a little.

“How is it, then?”

“It’s okay.”

“Just okay?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not wonderful?”

“It’s a sandwich.”

“It’s the sandwich that you made, that you wanted, that you picked out over every other sandwich in the world. If you’re going to make a sandwich and put that much effort into it, it needs to be the best sandwich there is.”

“I guess.”

“Which that one is not, because it has cream cheese and canned mushrooms on it.”

“Stop it.”

“Sorry.”

“You want to know what the deal is?”

“I’m okay changing the subject at this point.”

“Here’s the thing. I haven’t had one of these in ten years, since I left Arlington. Living up here, if I want it, I have to make it. And it’s never as good. Whatever it is, whether it’s barbecue or Mexican food or you name it.”

“You moved up here, as I recall. Nobody made you.”

“It’s not that. I’m not complaining about moving. We live here now and that’s fine. Pizza’s better here, for one thing.”

“And the Chinese food.”

“Whatever. Here’s the thing. I don’t know that this is an actual blackjack sandwich.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I think I know how to make this. But it doesn’t taste right. It doesn’t taste the way it should, and I don’t know why. I know the cream cheese, and the mushrooms, and the ham, but I don’t remember if it was corned beef or pastrami. I don’t know if this is the right kind of bread. I never paid attention to how long they put it in the toaster, or anything. I just walked in the door and ordered a number twenty-one and that was all I had to do.”

“Oh, that explains it.”

“What?”

“Number twenty-one. Blackjack.”

“I never realized that.”

“Well, then. You learned something.”

“That just goes to show. I should have been paying more attention. I should have thought about what I was ordering so I could make it later if I needed to. I should have thought more about what I was doing.”

She ate a spoonful of soup. “It’s just a sandwich. It’s not that big of a deal. So it’s not the way you remember. Just enjoy it for what it is.”

“That’s not what bothers me.”

“So what bothers you?”

“What am I not paying enough attention to today that’s going to affect my life ten years from now?”

“Me.”

I looked up, and she was smiling that smile, the smile I had fallen in love with, the smile I hadn’t seen in weeks.

“You’re right,” I said.

“Of course I’m right. Finish your sandwich.”