Refraction | Part 1 | Darwin's Steroids
7) Chuck Kills Some Attackers
I wake up in the back of the FU, but I am clearly no longer at the hospital. I lift my head up to get a peek and it feels like I have an anvil loose inside my head rattling around. I've obviously been drugged and shanghaied, but by who, why, and where I have ended up all remains to be fucking seen. I lay quiet for a while waiting for my head to split open and spill my fucking brains out, but it doesn't happen, and after a little while it just feels like a bowling ball rolling back and forth, so I decide to shake it the fuck off and figure some shit out.
I sit up and look around. I am surrounded by the rusting shells of thousands of cars, old refrigerators, broken box spring mattresses, and suspicious looking 50 gallon barrels. A junkyard. Somebody towed my ass to a junkyard while I was knocked out. I try to clear my head, and the image of a laughing old man, a bum type with lousy chompers swims across my mind. The thunderbird wine! I shoulda punched the shit out of the fucker. But who is he working for and why? Why knock me out and tow me away? What the fuck?
Suddenly the world explodes with sound and the roof of the FU mobile drops like 6 inches. Then the whole thing heaves up off the ground. I poke my head out the window. A huge electromagnet has glommed onto the fucking roof and is picking the FU out of the surrounding rubble, swinging it high up and over the piles of busted washing machines, bent framed bicycles and kicked in T.V.s. Some fuck face is clearly trying to kill my ass. I kick out the back passenger window and squirm out the hole. As I'm lowering my self down to hang and drop, the metal next to my head goes pop, pop, pop and three glowing holes as big as my fist appear, hot, white smoke curling up out of them. Fucking Depleted Uranium? I twist around as I jump to the ground to try and get a fix on my assailant. I see the asshole bent over a small metal suitcase with a long flexible tube coming out of it. He is pissed off and stabbing furiously with his index fingers at a keyboard inside the suitcase. I hit the ground and move to flank him by cutting around a huge pile of forgotten, headless Barbie dolls and GI Joe action figures burnt beyond recognition by boys with too much time and handy access to fireworks.
I can hear him shouting and pick out two distinct voices that answer him. I peek out and DU fucker is pointing wildly and yelling his head off. Two more cats are ducking in and out of the piles of twisted, rusty metal, both carrying the small hand held lasers that the Isreali Mossad recently developed. The dude running the electromag is not paying the attention to the situation that he should, so I decide he will go first. I pick up a chipped glass paperweight with a cicada eternally frozen inside and chuck it at crane boy. It hits him square in the temple and he slumps over the controls, causing the FU to begin swinging wildly back and forth at the end of the long chain. DU fucker finally has his shit together and is firing glowing streams of the pin sized uranium flechettes randomly around him. He ducks as the FU swings by and I run silently up behind him, crack him on his neck just between the C4 and C5 vertebrae with a lightening knife palm. He crumples to the ground, squeezing tight to the trigger of the DU gun, his muscles spasming with the last messages they will ever receive from his nervous system. Take that fucker. As DU folds up one of his buddies rounds a corner just in time to walk directly into the stream of radioactive death that is hosing out of the tube in DU's now frozen hands.
I have seen some fucked up shit in my day, but nothing like what that gun does to him. The tiny, deadly arrows catch him in the crotch and cut upwards, literally vaporizing his body. Boom, in less than a second his trunk and head have become clouds of pink mist. His arms seem to float there for a second, before dropping to the ground on either side of legs that no longer support anything. One of the legs flops over and the other just stands there, perfectly balanced, as the mist lands around it. A bright red circle 12 feet in diameter.
I consider taking the DU gun with me, but figure somewhere in it's software there must be a tracker, so instead I pry the tube out of the fucker's hands and turn it on the metal suitcase. It jumps and buckles, within a millisecond is an unrecognizable chunk of smoking metal. None for me, none for you, you fucking rotten, kidnapping, attempted murdering mother fuck faces.
I smell burning meat, and look around for the source, before realizing that it is my left fore arm, which now has a perfectly circular, penny-sized hole in it, just between the radius and ulna. The flesh is cauterized and a thin wisp of smoke twists up out of it. I dive to the right just in time for the second blast to miss cutting me in half, and roll behind the crane that is still spinning in circles with the FU hanging from it. Red fingers of light begin pushing into the metal near me, if I don't keep moving I'm fucked. I swing up onto the crane and climb in over the unconscious body of the operator. The son of a bitch with the laser is still laying on the heat down below, slowly working his way around to cut off the spot where I am no longer hiding. I wait for it, the FU cruising around in a wide arc right towards him. Then I deactivate the electromagnet and let Physics do the rest. A ton and a half of steel, plastic and glass smashes down on him, pulping his body like a sledgehammer would a watermelon.
I wait in the silence that follows to see if anyone else pops up with some other extremely high-tech weapon to blow my head off. Five minutes pass, then ten. I climb down out of the crane and start making my way as carefully as possible toward the front of the yard. When I get there the sign tells me I am in Carl's Junk Lot, Lost Fork Nevada. A good thousand miles where I started from. I walk out onto the road, and stick out my thumb.
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