57) Super Sunday, 2/19: 4:30
– 4:40 AM – “The Number of the Imp is Seven Hundred Seventy Seven Megaherz!”
Back on the G-P floor, Captain Capps and
Westy dashed into the 007 Club, hastily piling the
remaining hunting knives, ninja stars and canisters of pepper spray into
cardboard boxes, even dumping out smart bush jackets and smarter shoes to have
more available containers. Upon
emerging, they were nearly run down by an increasingly frantic Henry Robot,
whose peripatetic, clockwise circlings of Giga-Plex had grown as increasingly erratic from the bullets
pinging off his exoskeleton as had his insistent monotone:
“Good afternoon. I am Henry, your cybernetic personal
assistant. How may I help you?”
And the mightily-annoyed Capps intercepted Blick,
who had been trailing his charge, frantically pressing buttons on Henry’s
remote applicator in the hope of effecting some cybermiracle…
“What is wrong with that thing?” he asked the robotist, point-blank.
“Henry has, uh…
quasi-military applications…” Blick admitted.
“Crazy?”
“Quasi… meaning
he’s a sort of test model, not a beta-test by any means, further down the scale… a gamma or delta test, maybe…”
“Does he have a
nuclear core?” Westy cut him off.
“What?”
“In the movies,”
Soames explained, “things like Henry always have a nuclear core, ready to go
off…”
“This isn’t a
movie… unfortunately…” Blick despaired. “Fortunately,” he corrected himself. Westy didn’t
despair.
Instead, he
remained alert, sniffing – between the barking dogs and demented, crashing cars
outside, not to mention the sporadic gunfire and indomitable television, the
group facility for hearing within Giga-Plex was, pretty much, nil. “Does anybody smell anything? Smoke…”
Lester Capps
hoisted a box of exotic, probably useless weaponry and pointed to Evan Augsberg, awkwardly removing his trousers on the Dom. “Maybe that fuckin’ thing is finally burning
out!” he said, shoving the weapons of questionable destructive capacity into Westy’s arms. “Take
this shit back to Stu…”
Augsberg was fully naked now and had apparently killed or
converted the cameraman, whose gear, now handheld, portrayed the media icon in
all of his wrinkled glory as he raised his right hand and decreed – as an
electronic Messiah, holding back or releasing the waves, “…a metahysteria, promulgated by those same thirty-seven
deceivers who would force Americans to tattoo the Number of the Imp on their
foreheads… and the Number of the Imp is seven hundred seventy-seven megaherz, which is the number…”
Henry the robot,
trampling CDs, DVDs and the outstretched arm of a zombie corpse, butted up
against a rack of iPods, seemingly grunted, then turned south, making for the henge of televisions, the Dominator, and a furious Leland
Buford Sonnenschein who’d pointed to a crouching
figure high above, straddling the nude commentator’s head as it continued
stereo-pontificating through Tungwa’s
top-of-the-bargain-line forty-two inch LCD, drawing the attention of Mark
Tenison and the Grrrlz...
“Ping!”
“That bastard took a shot
at me!” Big Sonny fumed and pointed.
“Where?” Tenison
looked around
“Up there! Went right back behind that column over that
rack of cables…” Sonny said.
Mark cupped his
hands. “Capps! Captain Capps!…”
Effie Lou, trying
to hide her assets behind a flatscreen, echoed: “Shooting at us…”
Lester looked
away from the berserk robot. “Where!”
Sonny, Effie Lou
and Tenison all pointed upwards. The
zombie, having apparently expended all the ammo in his gun, let go of the tower
stanchion to fumble through his pockets, managing only to spill half a dozen
cartridges that bounced on the floor while Captain Capps shot him in the groin. Screaming and flailing his arms, the invader
seemed to actually dive from his perch, far out onto the floor, towards the
Dominator… as Henry, the robot, accelerated into the Romanian behemoth. The 92” screen, holding its several quarts of
Romanian plasma, stood atop a thin, cheaply molded foundation which buckled
under the impact of robot and descendent – there was a horrid creaking sound
before it began falling like a great redwood in its forest, depriving the
onlookers of the spectacle of the giant Evan Augsberg…
naked, radiating insanity… though not the myriad Little Evans, still declaiming
their prophecies from the smaller units to all sides…
“…in their
groceries. They all have yellow hats and
little mustaches, and all come together, with
plans. We may beg forgiveness, based
on misunderstandings of their Scripture, or we can acknowledge that God does
not love this world; we can repent, apologise until
our lips and limbs turn blue, consign our one-eyed demons to the fires, but,
against the Lamb of Death…”
Big Sonny,
looking the other way, scowled back at the shrieking, pointing subordinates…
and, so, never even knew what killed him.
Only his fingers and one wet shoe… crocodile, as it turned out, not
alligator… protruded from beneath the fallen television… silent at last… having
cracked on impact. Viscous black, bloody
plasma oozed across the floor, crinkling and snapping with electric flashes and
ozone reek, mingling with the blood of Giga’s robbers as Tenison stood
openmouthed, oblivious to the flying bullets… Effie Lou Wilson, on the other
hand, having fainted, dead away. Captain
Capps looked upwards from the shattered television and the oozing remnants of
his crushed patron to the zombies celebrating on the rafters, then down again…
“Aw, shit!” the Screaming Eagle screamed.
¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾ ¾
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