leaving without checking out the van. I knew I couldn’t race out of the garage without the rods crunching around— which would be even worse than anything the pukers could do—so I was going to have to take care of the guys or get shot trying.
I sat tight, slumped down in the van, sweat pouring out of my arm pits. While they were looking away, I slowly opened up the side vent on the van, waited, and prayed my “please God, just this once” prayer asking that they would walk over where I could get a clear shot at them.
They took their time and didn’t cooperate at all with my brilliant tactic.
After an eternity, they finally headed toward the front of the van, walked past (
That also lined them up with my open window vent. Ever so quietly and carefully, I brought my Beretta up to the window and tried to aim at the one carrying the rail gun. (I am here to tell you that aiming is not easy when your hand is doing a little jig out on the end of your arm.) I jerked the trigger and down went one while I screamed from the painfully loud report of the pistol—magnified inside the van.
Fortunately, the remaining puker wasn’t too bright. Or maybe he just hadn’t watched the right 3V ads. At any rate, the one left turned and brought up his rifle and proceeded to spray the van’s windshield with automatic fire.
Like most other folks who can afford it, I had gotten a van with carbopolythene glass. It’s just as tough as the ads say and—as proved by my independent, highly personal, puker tests—bullet proof. If the puker had fired through the door or side windows, I would have been dead meat. But instead he only fired directly at me, sending a spray of bullets careening off the windshield.
After a few noisy moments of full auto fire, he was standing there with an empty rifle, his mouth hanging open and I sat in the van with my jaw clenched shut. Suddenly we were in a race.
He went for his partner’s weapon and I fumbled with the vent window, finally got it open, and fired three times.
The puker crumpled.
The spectacle over, I carefully got out of the van and enjoyed the dry heaves while my ear rang.
Of course most people would tell you I’d made the world a better place since two pukers were dead. But I would not be truthful if I didn’t tell you that I was more than a little upset; this was the first time I’d actually had to defend myself and I didn’t relish it.
Sure, legally you can kill anyone that’s in your house uninvited. At least you can in our region. Also, using an unregistered weapon to do it is not too big of a deal as far as the police are concerned when the end result is two dead pukers and a little bribe on the side.
But I also had a load of stolen rods and equipment. And I really couldn’t afford to take the next few days filling out forms, telling compupolice my life story, and maybe even feeling the wrath of other pukers should they find out what I’d done.
So I calmly got two body bags out of the locker in the garage and filled them up.
Maybe you’re wondering why I happened to have two body bags.
I traded for them on the black market after I’d talked to a friend who had reported a killing to the police. I didn’t care to go through the ordeal myself after hearing of the hassle. Life is just too short and the government already does its part to make it as tense as possible.
At the same time, don’t think I was callous about this. I still had a bad case of the shakes and these were the first dead bodies I’d ever had the pleasure of working with and at the time hoped they would be the last as well, thank you very much.
I finally got the guys zipped up and—with a lot of straining on my part—pulled the two bags into the corner of the garage for the time being. That done, I turned off the alarm and enjoyed another bought of the dry heaves.
That ordeal once again over, I opened the van and could have kicked myself for straining with the bags—the labbot was sitting right there waiting to move at my beck and call. Some days I could give absent-minded scientists a bad name.
“Labbot 3 on,” I told the bot. It perked right up and swiveled its camera to look at me. With the tedious instructions needed to control a bot, I got it to do what I wanted, and we managed to move the rods out of the van and fastened them to the side of the garage. Provided we didn’t have an earthquake, I figured they’d be pretty safe there for a while.
We—I seem to think of labbots as living entities so I say “we'—unloaded the equipment, and the labbot stuffed the two corpses into the van. I closed and locked it and then had the bot stand in the corner where I covered it with a drop cloth.
I went inside for a quick, hour-long nap but slept for the next eight hours instead.
Chapter 4
My head felt three times its normal fat size. Guess I must have slept on my face or something.
Anyway, when I woke up, I felt awful. It was still gloomy out so I checked my thumbnail watch through blurry eyes; it was
And the smell was awful. My clothes seemed to have taken on a life of their own—an existence that, judging from their odor, would have fit right into an organic barn yard somewhere.
So the first order of business was a hot shower followed by two aspers, and some clean clothes.
One hot mug of caffinex later, I felt like—if not a new person—a reasonable facsimile thereof.
I decided to skip shaving and headed for the garage.
As I stepped into the garage, I tried to figure out what I had done to myself the day before. I now:
1) Had two ripening bodies in the back of my van,
2) Was responsible for the theft of a small fortune in equipment, 3) Owned a total of three illegal weapons (including the two pukers’), and
4) Was the owner of the one hundred three stolen anti-gravity rods.
I felt like going back to bed. But it was early morning. That was something I needed to take advantage of since that’s when the roads are least traveled.
Shortly, I was moving down the street in front of my dome. Driving carefully so that I wouldn’t get stopped by a random spot check (no drugs, officers, just two bodies…), I headed out of the city with its traffic eyes and got onto the interstate.
Two hours later, the body bags were dumped at an all but abandoned rest stop whose spy cameras had long ago been dismantled by the electro-renegades in the area. I hightailed it back to my house, feeling like a great weight had been taken off my shoulders. I was once again a free man. It is amazing how much pressure was removed when I kicked those two thugs out of the back of my van and returned home without getting stopped.
The alarm was silent when I got back: A welcome change.
After another cup of caffinex and a good-sized meal from the instawarm, it was—finally—time to get down to some worth-while work.
The first project would be creating my own power company. Don’t laugh. I told you these rods had potential. The work I had in mind later was going to take a lot of electrical power and I was already paying an arm, leg, and some other major body parts just to keep the light, 3V, instawarm and van recharger going. An electrical generator made a lot of sense.
As I soon found out, it would have been easier to have left the electric engine in the van.
Instead, acting rashly, I had the labbot jerk the engine out of the van; only after it was out did I realize that it would be hard to get it back in. Too, I should have experimented with an old motor-
-if I’d failed at my task, I would have ruined a perfectly good van. But by now, caution had been thrown to the wind. I wanted to get to the nitty-gritty of practical use of the rods. I dived into the job knowing that failure was not an option, unless I wanted to get another job and save up for a new van. Which I did not.
After the bot had placed the van’s engine on the concrete floor, we went to the corner where the rods were, anchored them more securely in place, removed one, and clamped it on its side to the vise on the work bench.
