John Adams - The Living Dead 2

“Okay. We’re okay?”

“We’re okay.”

“Just…”

“Yeah. Just… yeah. Don’t worry about it.”

“You sure…?”

“Not gonna say a fucking thing, all right? We’re good.”

“Thank you, man.” Ernie exhaled, and chugged antacid. “Stay safe, buddy. We got your back.”

Eagle scooped up and stowed the pizza boxes, pocketed his gun and hopped on his bike as two more remote-controlled workers swept in to scrape up the mess.

Working together, making the world a better place.

The Dungeon Master had just burnt his tongue on the microwaved ricotta in his calzone-at least a three-hit-point wound-when the Love Line rang.

He washed the glutinous lava down with a splash of root beer, checked his hair, and let the phone ring.

For allegedly living humans, the science division sure seemed to enjoy chewing on human asses. When they couldn’t bitch about his kill ratio, they whined that his tactics were overkill; when his meat puppets weren’t lagging and bugging out like an NT server, they were dangerous rabid dogs.

The Love Line blinked faster. His pager trembled and jittered off the edge of the desk into an empty pizza box.

He wondered which of the Brain Trust would be dining on his haunches today. Of the three-headed nerd colossus that ran New San Francisco, he got the least friction from the Livermore geeks. Nasty little crypto-fascist elves, but they made the best toys, and bitched the least about his tactics.

His tongue throbbed and told him everything tasted like sandpaper. Perfect. He might as well throw the rest of the calzone back in the fridge.

Well, he thought, killing his root beer and reaching for another, somebody in the world probably has even worse problems.

He hit the Accept button.

Fuck my eyes, he thought.

Poison Lady.

Sherman sat up in his chair and brushed his oily hair back out of his eyes. “Dr. Childers, you’re looking lovely today.”

Meredith Childers’ gray-green face tightened on the monitor. She wasn’t just the chief researcher on the City’s medical research Brain Trust. She was also their star guinea pig. It was easy to see why the other scientists called her The Hippie. “Sherman… Laliotitis, is it?”

“Round these parts, they call me the Dun-”

“This is not a game, Sherman. You were briefed by your superior about today’s primary objective?”

“To secure the borders of Fortress Frisco against hostile invaders, ma’am. And phase one was a big win.”

“Don’t fuck around with me. You know what we’re doing here. What needs doing.”

Sherman looked around the control room. The Raiders’ POV monitors showed the cleanup crews carting off the last of the bodies. “I, uh… I am sorry if you’re unhappy with my performance, but… you know, capping enemies in the heat of battle isn’t like cutting the heads off guinea pigs in the lab-”

I’ll bet the cultists would’ve done it, he thought. You could’ve paid them in lentils and Bentleys.

The order had come down last night to target all the squatters on the peninsula in a one-day blitz, using all meat-puppet crews. Every squad operator was on duty today or tonight. The machinists pulled double-shifts refitting assault teams and converting run-down workers into walking bombs.

All the targets were armed; most were subhuman freaks, but none of them was an imminent threat to the city. Most of the Green Zone was still half-empty, but they were expanding it again, and the whitecoats always needed more cold bodies to play with.

“I’m just,” he finally said, “trying to do my job, ma’am.”

“If you’re as good as advertised, you should be able to control your team. Do you verbally monitor all of them at once?”

“That’d be impossible. I’m all over them in real-time for the real precise wetwork, but they’re all running a bunch of apps, most of which I wrote myself.”

“You’ve changed their programming for today, though, correct?”

“Well, sure…”

“No more headshots. You will be docked for each non-viable body-”

“Docked?” Sherman sputtered. “How much?”

“How much is a human life worth on the current market? Harden the fuck up and do your job, Sherman.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’ll have no excuses for me next time?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You’re not the only warm body in San Francisco who’s good at videogames, Mr. Laliotitis. But if you’re not the best in town from here on out-or if I hear of any more leaks in your operation-the machinists will help us discover a whole new world of uses for you. Am I clear?”

“Um, yes, ma’am.” Voice choked. His catheter popped out. Cold piss streamed down his leg.

The line went dead. Motherfucker!

Sherman got an aluminum baseball bat and strode out into the hall, away from the mainframe made from 900 chained PS3s and the banks of refrigerated processors running every zombie in the city.

His eyes alit on the vending machine in the hall, but it was the only one in the whole building that worked.

A janitor pushed a floor waxer in loopy circles in front of the elevators.

He didn’t flinch or look up as Sherman ran up on him and smashed his face in.

The janitor wore a cheap motorcycle helmet with an enormous smiley face sticker on the visor. It took four whacks to crack the helmet, but another twenty to kill the fucking thing.

It never raised a hand to block the blows with its nylon idiot mittens. Just kept stumbling back and back as he pummeled it again and again, driving it into the wall and making doorknobs rattle halfway down the hall.

By the time the shrink-wrap snapped and the septic contents exploded outward, he could barely swing the bat. His lungs vapor-locked, knees went wobbly, but he couldn’t stop until the medpak in its skull cracked open, sprayed a little drugstore everywhere, and it finally spasmed and keeled over.

Sherman fell down hard on his hands and knees next to the bloodless corpse, blowing goat cheese in the beyond-septic waft, streaming snot and tears.

The door behind him clicked and hissed open. Wiping his eyes, Sherman saw a very old, very drunk man in a plush bathrobe hanging on the doorknob as he scowled at the mess. “Was ist passiert? Ist alles in Ordnung?”

Why was everything in the real world so fucking hard?

The Black Zone party was down by Golden Gate Park, at the end of Haight. Less than ten minutes out of the Red Zone, as the Eagle flies.

A universe of difference, by any other standard.

But every so often, Pizza Orgasmica would get an urgent call from one of the outlaws who had managed not to melt in the post-human hinterlands, or had snuck back into town after Black Flag Day. There were enclaves dug in all over the City, more than anyone knew. And they loved pizza, too.

These streets were not clear, so Eagle ducked and dodged between the cars: glad the Moots was good on rugged terrain, and thinking about how sweet it was to be seeing some long-lost friends.

If you were a bunch of college dropouts living in an empty metropolis, you would probably think it was the best idea in the world to hole up in the Haight-Ashbury Amoeba Records.

The front windows were boarded up, but a guy waiting on the roof with an M16 shouted, “Pizza man!” and buzzed the front door for him.

Eagle rode into the open floor of the record store. It was an impressive setup. Anywhere else, it might have even had a chance. The front counters were fortified with thick plexiglass from a bank. A portcullis made of wrought-iron spikes was hoisted up to let Eagle in, then dropped behind him.

The ground floor of the record store was still a mess, but someone had been restocking the CDs. Along the far wall, a bunch of young guys and a couple girls sat on stationary bikes wired to car batteries, pedaling and watching cartoons as they kept the lights on and powered the big club soundsystem on a dais in the center of the store, where a pale guy with black dreads and a droopy mustache spun a deepdish dubstep mix. He saluted Eagle as the pizza guy parked and popped the hotbox on the back of his bike. “Hey, Tweak, you got any real music?”