He smiled wickedly. Wouldn’t be a bad idea for them to keep thinking that!
Fuck them. What did their sorry asses know? It was his money and his pulse cannons. If they didn’t like it, they could move back down into town with the blacks, the greasers, and the ball-scratching, snuff-dipping white trash dullards. Let those nasty jigs and spics and sister-fuckers be all up in their daughters’ pretty silk panties!
Block Captain, Neighborhood Watch … Tiger Thomas’ Pegasus or not … it didn’t really matter. Whoever was coming at him was soon going to be violating Society airspace. He knew the proper thing to do would be to call the Zone Police and let them handle it … but by the time they got out of the donut shop and got airborne, the trespasser would be long gone. Another violation unpunished!
It’s way past time to make an example out of somebody.
Maybe, just maybe, he was going to be able to vent his frustration and get a little payback tonight. He’d been dreaming of a moment such as this. He swore he’d be ready if he got the chance, and by God, he was! It had cost him millions of points in equipment, installation, training, and software, not counting all the target practice spent on the drones. But if that Pegasus kept on course, it would be worth every point spent.
He ran into the bedroom and flung the closet doors open. His wife Beatrice, could only look on, slack-jawed, as she heard items being pushed off shelves and falling haphazardly to the floor.
“Ollie, what in the name of Grandpa’s Go—”
“Aha! I found it!” She was cut off abruptly by his sudden cry of discovery. “Oh, hell yes!”
When he sauntered back out of the closet a few minutes later, it was all she could do to stifle a hysterical laugh. Her husband now stood before her wearing his great-grandfather’s old Kevlar army helmet, the attached night vision goggles turned down, covering his eyes. In his satin, paisley housecoat and slippers, he looked like some perverted mad scientist preparing to either blow up the world or watch some young girl through her bedroom window under the cover of darkness.
“Have … you …” She choked back a snicker. “Lost … your … mind?” She could hold it no longer, and with a convulsive snort, the laughter burst forth like floodwaters through a broken dam.
“Go ahead and laugh, you useless waste of a human life!” He sneered derisively at her. But the sight of that bushy walrus mustache bobbing up and down under those long, tubular, ocular contraptions only made her guffaw even louder. The goggles hid the contempt in his eyes. “Have your fun now. I’m going to have the last laugh before this night’s over!”
“Seriously, Ollie,” Beatrice wiped tears from her eyes. “Why don’t you give this silliness up? You’re great-granddad was a real soldier. You couldn’t even make it through Kid Scouts! You’re a spoiled rich kid who has trouble keeping the paper products business you inherited afloat.” She threw up her hands in exasperation. “It’s toilet paper, for God’s sake! How can you fail in the toilet paper business?”
“It’s very competitive!” he roared, before calming himself down. He didn’t have time to let that lazy bitch get under his skin.
Focus! He had to focus! Grabbing up the controller, he activated the System, smiling as he watched each component come online. It was really happening. He was really going to do it!
Time to kick some perp ass!
Beatrice watched him bustle out of the room, shaking her head at the absurdity of it. Thank God! I thought he’d never leave. What in the world was I thinking when I married this fool? Was it really just all about the money? She tried to think back, to remember when she’d actually loved the idiot. She was certain that somewhere in the past she probably had. She just couldn’t recall it now. It’d been too long ago. She would ponder it another time. She had other things that needed attending to.
She picked up her PDC and began reading again. She had been right in the middle of a particularly steamy part when he’d burst in like a scarecrow with his ass on fire. Reaching under the bedsheet, she pushed the ‘power’ button on the new ‘toy’ nestled between her legs. There was a faint, muffled hum as it started up.
“Oh-h-h-h- y-y-y-e-a-h!” she stuttered the powerful contraption causing her whole body to vibrate, her eyes crossing with the intensity of the sensation. She closed her eyes and laid back on her pillow. The Mid-Nyte Ryder was everything she’d heard it was. Money well spent! “That’s my good boy! Make Mommy purrrrrrrr!”
***
As the Pegasus limped eastward through the night sky, with Tiger coaxing all he could out of the wounded machine, the city below Tiger was a maze of lights. It was as if God had thrown a blanket of stars over the ground just below, hugging the north bank of the mighty Tennessee. Between him and terra firma, a hundred feet or so above the surface, hundreds of hovercars sped along the crowded skyways, moving ribbons of white, yellow, and red luminescence, crisscrossing each other at various intervals, a glowing latticework tying the whole metropolis together.
Tiger wished he were simply out on a romantic jaunt, it was a beautiful night for it. And despite the wild, passionate encounter just minutes earlier, he had to admit, his mind now wandered elsewhere. With the powerful pheromones wearing off and the heat of the moment now cooling, he felt guilt and regret seeping in to sour the fuzzy little feeling. In spite of everything
