Felis Navidad
Posted: 2007-12-31 12:03pm
It was a cold and snowy day.
Winter in Centauri City, time for that wonderful season of the Yuletide, also known as Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa – whatever the hell Kwanzaa was. All over the streets, children were throwing yellow snow at one another while impoverished hobos turned into living and walking icicles. See, these particular hobos weren’t like the other hobos, snooty elitist bastards who gathered in the soup kitchens and disallowed shmucks who weren’t part of their clique from coming in and getting free soup. As the children played on and wrote their names on the snow, the outcast hobos shed sad crystal tears as they watched their brothers feast on dog-soup within the warm confines of the kitchens.
Then, one of the frolicking children was blinded by a yellow snowball to the face, slid down the slippery pavement, and was almost run over by a truck. The truck skidded to a halt, further congesting the constipated road-traffic and causing angry motorists to blare their car horns and fog horns. The networked AIs of the cars and the traffic-networks’ anti-road rage programming immediately synchronized to make this cacophony of blaring noises sound as much like Christmas music as possible.
It almost sounded like God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman.
Bartholomew Baylor adjusted his kippah, his Jew Hat, and wondered. As a child, when he too was a recipient of yellow snowballs to the face and groin, he always thought that God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen – or at least its opening tunes - sounded like something the Space Nazis (read: the Protectorate) would play. He started humming the tune while tapping his hand against the steering wheel.
Outside, that snow-crashed kid was being ganged on by his playmates – who were kicking him with their ice skates while calling him a stupid shit.
Bartholomew didn’t notice that, too busy humming Christmas carols to hear the little child’s profane pleas. He also didn’t notice one of the ostracized homeless peoples pick up a shotgun and start shooting up the elitist hobos dining in Mrs. Miggins’ Fine Soupery.
The stoplight went green and Bartholomew deftly maneuvered his tiny three-wheeled car-bike between nuclear-powered SUVs and jet-propelled sports cars. As he zipped by a Hover Hummer and a Jet Jaguar, he gave both participants the finger while joyously proclaiming: “Mazel Tov!”
An hour later, he was in a basement parking lot some five hundred meters above the ground. Right then and there, he parked his car on that special parking spot reserved for special people.
The turboliftalator took him three hundred meters upper, into the great lobby of Centauri Citigruppen – the sector’s biggest banking firm, which was run by Germans.
Exactly how great was the lobby? It was a splendorious hall made out of marble imported from New Hellena, adorned with columns on which were the sculpted murals of ancient naked heroes, flanked by great windows of stained glass that glowed with living holo-light – holos that showed everything from commercials of Citigruppen’s latest utopian moon-colony for elitist pricks, to financial news blabbing on about the monetary implications of the Skaaran Spice Skirmishes on opium-addicted chinamen.
Right there at the center of it all was a magnificent monument – a great and mighty erection that blinded Bartholomew in its grandeur. A mighty Christmas tree, one hundred feet of coconut wrapped in shiny smart-tinfoil-things that swayed iridescently while reflecting off the floating holo-lights swimming around it. Around the tree’s base were solid blocks of gold, painted in platinum to look like gift boxes, and at its top was a big star-shaped diamond.
The great lobby of Centauri Citigruppen was so great that it had its own modest monorail station. See, the goddamn building was so huge that it incorporated five other buildings into its fold. Bartholomew’s post wasn’t actually in the super-decadent central station, but in the most peripheral shitty substation – the one that had old farts and pregnant ladies applying for supersaver accounts and free toasters, rather than opulent jewel-encrusted trees.
So what was Bartholomew Baylor doing here? Simple. Parking in a basement parking lot that was five hundred meters above the shitty ghettoes and mutant-infested sewers of Centauri City meant that his meager carcycle was less likely to be jacked and chop-shopped into scrap iron shit to be recycled into some poor shmoe’s kid’s bicycle. Moreover, he really didn’t have to clock in with a punch card or anything like that since the surveillance cams basically noted the employees who came in and out. So even if he was ten miles away from his shitty substation, Citigruppen’s money-grubbing AI had already punched him in, noted his stellar attendance record, and calculated his generous paycheck the second he entered the main lobby (ten miles away from his post).
“Who knows, I might make employee of the month,” Bartholomew said to no one in particular. As he made his way to the monorail station, he took the time to admire the pretty ladies who were his supposed coworkers. Every centimeter of their fine bodies were genetically sculpted for much hotness, all those curves and… “Mmm.”
Too bad Bartholomew’s coworkers in his shitty substation were all either Fat Bald Men or middle-aged women with sagging tits.
Bartholomew passed by an Orthii security contractor, a female space cat-person of much dangerousness hired to keep the place safe. Shyle Kassel.
“Mazel Tov!” Bartholomew greeted.
Shyle smirked. “You know I’m supposed to report employees who bum about, dontcha?”
“Well,” Bartholomew adjusted the waistline of his pants, which went around his gut (not belly, gut). “As a matter of fact, I’m here on official business.”
“Oh?”
Bartholomew raised one of the honey-encrusted bagels he got from…somewhere. In this part of the bank, such stuff was free. “Breakfast, the most important meal of the day.”
Shyle sighed and brushed a lock of hair that obscured one of her yellow-green slit-pupil eyes. “Is your station really shitty, Bart? Do you have to come in two hours late every day of the week?”
“Yes, yes it is that shitty. Last week, I had a leper – an actual factual leper – apply for a junior savings account. If it weren’t for that bulletproof glass separating me from the unclean… I mean, it’s the future and I get a frickin’ leper for Christmas? Besides, today’s a Monday, shittiest day of the week. You’re not gonna report me, are you? Just cut me some slack.” Bartholomew made a face, a puppy dog face that reached into the heart of that cold catwoman. “Come on, Shy, it’s Christmas.”
“You’re Jewish.”
“Not really, I just like the hat,” Bartholomew took a bite off his bagel. “And how do you know what’s a Jew anyway? You’re an alien space cat.”
“You’re unbelievable!” Shy surrendered.
“Merry Christmas,” Bartholomew proclaimed, bagel in mouth. “I’ll get you one of these next time I come by.”
“Baylor, I hope your station gets robbed.”
Bartholomew sighed. “Me too, Shy…me too.”
The substation smelled like old people with that lingering…decaying but not really overtly noticeable scent of human fermentation, the flavor of geriatrics. Baylor sneaked in snake-like, unseen by his supervisor and noticed only by a group of rabbis who were probably going to start a supersaver account for their paleosynagogue or something.
Baylor yawned and positioned himself in his teller’s cubicle-post, behind the bulletproof glass shield that had, just last week, protected him from the unclean.
In the grim darkness of the fortieth millennium, there are no leprosariums.
Oh how Bartholomew wished PEST would make him disappear quietly while he slept. As much as he did though, he tried to keep awake – gazing at one of the omnipresent telescreens, watching some Protectorate man go on about how the guv-ment was afraid that bodily fluids were being impurified by a contaminated water supply.
Bartholomew had all the impurified bodily fluids he needed, and then some.
He got off and made his way to the bathroom. He nodded respectfully to the rabbis, who were discussing the kosherity of eating reprocessed soylent food products and prefabricated embryonics. Then they were talking about Hanukkah and the re-consecration of their synagogue, and one of them loudly wondered what the hell a Kwanzaa was.
There was a sleeping mother whose child was running around. The small child tried to bite Bartholomew and spread the infection but inadvertently slipped on a wet puddle of something unmentionable and landed on her fat ugly face.
She cried.
Baylor laughed.
An Orthii co-worker in a really slick jacket passed Baylor by and both exchanged helloes and some more laughter at the expense of the little girl’s tears. The small child’s cries of anguish grew considerably softer when her mother told her to shut the fuck up.
Relieved that he made it as far as the bathroom, Bartholomew opened the door and was greeted by a sudden resurgence of weeping. Not from the little girl though, as there before him, sobbing over the sink, was yet another one of his co-workers – a ridiculously rotund receptionist with sagging breasts and a centimeter-thick layer of carcinogenic makeup caking her face. Aside from the tears streaming from her eyes, snot was also sniveling out of her nostrils.
By this point Baylor really wanted to start crying himself.
Merry-fucking-Christmas, you dick.
“What the hell is wrong now?!” he couldn’t help but ask out loud. He half expected her to cry some more, maybe collapse onto the piss-smeared floor and roll about like some beached whale, but maybe she didn’t hear him right – she was sobbing aloud like some barnyard animal being butchered, after all – since her response sounded like as if he had asked ‘what’s wrong?’ with concern rather than pure exasperation and loathful contempt.
As she wept, she told him that her son had been run over by a truck.
“My son…he’s been run over by a truck!” she told him as she wept.
Bartholomew felt like quipping about how that traffic collision would’ve indubitably caused a kilometer-long pileup resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people, with her child being a morbidly obese five-hundred-pounder ten-year-old and all. Just how in the first place could her large child, or fat girl, drag herself gasping out into the streets to be turned into an extra-large family-sized serving of street pizza…
“I’m so sorry, Berna…” Bartholomew says instead. “Why don’t you take the day off? I’ll cover for you.”
Bartholomew Baylor, the dick, can’t believe he said that. That meant more paperwork and more work in general. Was it the Christmas spirit finally seeping in to sap and impurify his precious bodily fluids? More likely it was the fact that he did not want to spend the entire day sitting in an office with a mere cubicle of prefabcrete separating him from a whale of a wretched time.
Ugh, that meant he had to process that bunch of rabbis and that lady and her kid… Some people…just had to be reported to the Protectorate guv-ment for reprocessing.
As Berna sobbed and thanked him and walked out of the room, Bartholomew Baylor decided to do what he was there to do.
He urinated. And forgot to wash his hands.
More people had gathered ‘round the waiting area by now. They’re probably annoyed at the fact that both the fatass receptionist and the fatass teller were spending their sweet time in the bathroom. A young cracker loudly suggested that they were doing the nasty and Baylor just gave him the finger. So much for customer service. The old pensioner man thought it was pretty funny though. He laughed, and then he broke out into asthmatic coughing.
“It better not be Space Ebola…” Baylor muttered underneath his teeth.
“What’s wrong with Berna?” Courth, the Orthii with the slick jacket (who was also the security guard), asked.
“Her kid got ran over by a truck,” Baylor said, sounding like he was giving a weather forecast. Overcast and cloudy with some snow.
“Ouch…and you said she could have the day off, that you’d cover for her?”
“Yeah…”
“Must be the Christmas spirit, eh?”
“I’m Jewish. It’s Hanukkah. You dick.” Baylor growled.
“Yeah right. What’s a Jew anyway?” Courth shrugged as he disappeared into the bathroom.
There was a clicking sound as the lights suddenly blinked on and off, but Bartholomew didn’t notice it one bit as he settled himself on his station – plopping his ass onto the seat and feeling the seat reconfigurate itself to suit the contours of his butt. It was a strange sensation, like getting one’s ass sucked, but it also felt like sitting on a pillow stuffed with the finest of feathers. The seat was defective though, so everyday Baylor had to pry his ass off it with a crowbar when his shift was done.
There was another clicking sound as the lights blinked once again.
Once again, Baylor didn’t notice it as his seat finished sucking his ass in. Oh no, for the moment he also didn’t notice the sensation of ass-sucking either. No, for the moment, his attention was focused solely on the rabbi who was pointing a bi-barreled shotgun with an underslung harpoon gun. At him.
“How can I help you, sir?” Bartholomew began pressing the ‘I’m Being Robbed’ button. Repeatedly. In rapid succession.
“Mazel Tov, Motherfucker!” the rabbi greeted.
The other rabbis rose as one, discarding their fluttering robes but keeping their Jew Hats and Facial Hairs while drawing and unholstering various forms of death-dealing firearms and weaponry.
Baylor pressed the silent alarm button a couple dozen more times, just to be sure.
“Everybody freeze!” roared a rabbi with a revolver, Revolver Rabbi. “No one moves, or else I’ll kosherize your brains!”
There was screaming and all that, old people began crapping their adult diapers while men, women and children began shouting and wailing and crying and pissing themselves. Even with the air processors, the stink of human excrement began wafting through the air.
“Shut up!” the rabbi with the shotgun, Mazel-Tov-Motherfucker, roared. He blasted a shot into the air.
For good measure, Baylor kept on pressing that red button under his desk. Where the hell was security?
“What the hell is going on?!” at last, Courth came out of the bathroom, pulling out his pistol with one hand while keeping his pants up with the other.
Then, like a tank turret, Mazel-Tov-Motherfucker swiveled, his feet planted firmly on the ground but his waist rotating to bring him and his horrendous weapon to bear.
“Courth!” Bartholomew yelled. “No!”
“Motherfucker!” Mazel Tov shouted.
“Shit!” Courth screamed as his hand disintegrated, shotgun slugs pulverizing his paws. He fell on his ass and began weeping. “Fuck!”
“Heh,” Mazel Tov spat. “Motherfucker.”
“My hand! My motherfucking hand!”
“Courth!” with renewed resolve and courage, Baylor continued pressing the alarm button. His ass was still stuck to his sucky chair, he couldn’t move an inch, but no way was he going anywhere. Not with these crazy motherfuckers. The doors were locked, there was bulletproof glass protecting him, he was safe. Not like poor Courth, whose hand had just been disamputated. Not like the rest of those poor shits out there. He was safe. All he had to do was press that button…
“It ain’t gonna work,” Revolver Rabbi said as he spun his gun with one finger. “We’re jamming your alarms. And your security cameras. And your cellphones, pagers, wrist-watches, pacemakers and what have you.”
One of the rabbis, who had a rifle, Rifle Rabbi, calmly walked over towards Baylor’s little stall.
“Well…uhh…” by now Bartholomew had stopped pressing his shitty little button. “You can’t get me out of here, either! And I’m the only one who can open the safe, ha-ha!”
For emphasis, B tapped the bulletproof glass separating him from them.
“Aren’t there supposed to be two tellers for every substation?” Revolver asked, raising a fuzzy eyeball.
“Well, her stupid kid got ran over by a truck so I gave her the day off,” Baylor laughed, and then looked at Mazel Tov. “Motherfucker.”
“Motherfucker.” Mazel Tov growled.
“Besides,” Baylor shrugged. “The bank’s gonna fire me, anyway. When they find out they can’t call me, text me, beep me or radio me or whatnot, they’re gonna get suspicious. They’ll think I’ve gone postal and nuts and held up the place, then they’ll send in security and they’re gonna come in here – from the air and sea - and bomb your ass back to the stone age! Hah, Merry Christmas!”
“So…” Mazel Tov thought it over. “We haven’t got much time?”
“Nnnoooo.”
Revolver snapped his fingers. “Then blast him out of his little cubicle.”
Baylor’s mouth went wide agape. “What?!”
“Right. Getting the explosive,” Rifle Rabbi reported as he rummaged his rucksack for some reactive reagents. “Here we go.”
“Looks like a turd,” Baylor observed keenly.
Rifle Rabbi began smearing the turd over Baylor’s window, then applied the detonator and the cords and tied the cords to the plunger. “On three. One…two…”
Baylor threw himself to the floor, with his ass still kissing his seat.
“Three!”
There was a deafening blast, like some thunderous case of shit-eating explosive diarrhea, but the glass held like some resolute sphincter and so all the concussive shock was directed back outside. Baylor righted himself, albeit awkwardly with his ass attached to his seat, and began laughing out loud at the Rabbis who were covered in dust and shrapnel. The window held.
“The window held!” Baylor declared as he stuck his tongue out.
“Motherfucker!” Mazel Tov roared and, in fury, he punched the window.
The bulletproof glass crumbled into tiny glittering snowflakes and Mazel Tov’s fist made intimate physical contact with Baylor’s still idiotically grinning face. In one swift motion, Mazel Tov squished Baylor’s face, pulled him and his ass-seat out of the cubicle, and threw his ass on the floor like…something.
“Please…don’t hurt me!” Baylor begged.
“Get the safe open,” Revolver said, still spinning his gun. “Now.”
“I can’t…”
“Why not?”
“My ass is stuck to the chair, I can’t walk properly…”
The shotgun blast disintegrated most of the chair, leaving Baylor’s ass connected with only the seat cushion.
“Okay, let’s open that safe, shall we?” Baylor said, getting up and dusting himself before quickly heading for the vault. As he went, he began humming the tunes for God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman. Because.
Because this Christmas was shitty. Shitty-shitty shit-shit. The shittiest Christmas in a long line of succeedingly shittier Christmases for Bartholomew X. Baylor. Shittier than the time a family of five Saint Nicks came at him with switchblades. Or the time dad gave him a turd wrapped in tinfoil – fruitcake, fruit-fucking-cake. Fucking fruitcake. No, this time it wasn’t a family of five knife-wielding Sinterklaases or some raisin-studded piece of shit dug out of some septic tank. No, this time it was an indeterminate number of revolver-shotgun-rifle-wielding rabid rabbis!
“You and Mazel Tov watch him,” Revolver commanded the two, Mazel Tov and Rifle Rabbi. Rifle Rabbi didn’t have a rifle though, he actually had a Tommy Gun. Two, in fact. “I’ll stand guard.”
“Right,” nodded Mazel Tov before pointing his shotgun at Baylor. “Move, motherfucker!”
Rifle Rabbi, who was actually Tommy Gun Torah, grinned at the emasculated banker. It was an evil grin, since Tommy Gun Torah, who was a skinny shit, wore a pair of highly reflective goggles that made him look like some kind of shitty space alien from science fiction – like a grey alien Apexai. Tommy Gun Torah then lit up a fag and started blowing out smoke.
Then the fire alarms started and began spraying synthetic water all over the place.
“Aw shit,” cursed Tommy as Baylor began snickering at him.
“Motherfucker,” Mazel Tov growled. Before punching Baylor in the face. “Open the safe!”
Feebly, Baylor did what he was told. His nose was broken – twice – and was fauceting out quite a bit of blood, making him a bloody sniveler, but nonetheless he began the process of opening the vault. He went through the retina-readers, fingerprint-finders, DNA spit-scanners, combination-coders, laser-lockers, vocal-audio auscultators, and…well, everything. All while sniveling and whimpering in womanly fear and trying not to piss his pants.
Then he heard the shots fired and pissed his pants.
“There are firemen!” Revolver shouted as he traded shots with firemen who were armed with nothing but hoses, extinguishers and axes. “They’re coming! You better make it faster, Mazel Tov! Tommy, a little help here! It won’t be long till security arrives!”
“Hyaaaa!” Tommy Gun Torah cried as he drew both his Tommy Guns and charged outside the vault and joined Revolver in mortal kombat. “Hyaaaaa!” he screamed some more, before his voice was drowned by the noise of two submachineguns blasting away at six hundred rounds per minute. “Hyaaaa!”
“Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg…” Mazel Tov began singing as he stuffed $-marked money bags with thousand-paleoeurodollarcredit bills and fistfuls of gold bullion.
“Batman’s gay,” Baylor muttered. Mazel Tov called him a motherfucker and punched him in the face.
“Are we done here?” Revolver Rabbi asked as he slid into the room. Right behind him was Tommy Gun Torah.
Mazel Tov simply responded by lifting up huge Santa Sacks full of innumerable monies.
“This is gonna be great!” Tommy exclaimed. “Happy Holidays!”
Mazel Tov gave him a look.
“I mean…err…Happy Hannukah!”
“What about him, boss?” Mazel Tov gestured to the concussed Baylor.
“He’s seen my face,” spent casings trickled down from Revolver Rabbi’s revolver cylinder and when his gun was empty, he unveiled a single bullet and threw it into the air. It went up high, nearly hitting the ceiling, before falling down – into the Rabbi’s revolver cylinder. He snapped the cylinder back into the gun. “He dies.”
“No one dies today,” someone said from behind the mob of bank robbers. The lithe form of a female Orthii slinked out of the shadows, brandishing a platinum-plated Colt. “I knew this day would come…”
“Shyle…” Baylor muttered incoherently as he tried to crawl up.
“No one dies – ”
In one lightning-quick motion, Revolver Rabbi spun around and turned to face the Orthii security guard. Their eyes met, locked on to one another’s, and then the sound of simultaneous semi-automatics filled the confines of the vault.
The Rabbi’s revolver’s round was solid and, in a miracle that could only happen in the Yuletide, it struck the Colt’s hollowpoint round head-on, obliterating the softer bullet. Course unaltered, it went straight into the Colt, straight through it, and then into Shyle Kassel’s feline forearm.
Revolver Rabbi grinned, brimming with Christmas cheer. Then he said: “Wrong.”
Christmas songs could be heard in the background, along with the noise of police sirens.
The incessant beeping drove Baylor out of bed, causing him to roll off and fall to the floor. He groaned, rubbed the back of his head, cursed something ugly, and got up. As he muttered and mumbled incoherently, he paid the incessant beeping that drove him out of bed no heed and instead went into the bathroom. Ten minutes later, he emerged, squeaky clean, bathed, bladder and colon empty, and dressed in his underwear. Then he went to the table and got breakfast, gobbled up the improbably-advertised cereals (as advertised in the holo on the cereal box) he poured into the moo-moo-milk, finished the glass of OJ Simpson, and went back to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Then, and only then, did he answer his phone.
“Danny Glover here,” Baylor, Danny Glover Baylor, answered the phone. “What? Aw hell no!”
“What is it?” muttered Clarisse, who was lying nekkid on bed, her perfectly sculpted ebony body contrasting against (Danny Glover) Baylor’s recently deloused mattress.
“Work, sweetie-poops.”
“But it’s Kwanzaa! You can’t work in Kwanzaa, The Man can’t make you!”
“Well,” Baylor got his clothes on and pulled his gun from under a flattened pillow. “The shit just got real.”
The SWAT van opened up and a squad of fully decked-out clones marched out, all going ‘hut-hut-hut-hut’. Media crews gathered along with onlookers, PEST observers from the guv-ment and, well, the po-lice.
“What’s the situation?” Sergeant Danny Glover Baylor asked his partner, ED. ED was a 7-foot-tall chrome-domed cybernetic killing machine with a human brain (and a human heart). The fact that ED was a brain in a jar in a half-ton nuclear-powered mechanical killing machine with the strength of a bear that had the strength of five bears did not perturb Danny Glover (Baylor) the slightest.
“We do not know. There is a sensor blockout within the bank, they must have some kind of electronic countermeasure,” the gleaming-steel cyborg said.
“Pretty well equipped,” Baylor commented as he began putting on his SWAT gear, including his riot-suppressing sonic-electronic ball-breakers. “But that still won’t stop us from busting a cap on their asses!”
“Affirmative.”
“No, ED. How many times do I have to tell you?!” Baylor scolded. “You can’t say ‘Affirmative’ or some shit like that. We’re cops, we say shit like ‘Fuck Yeah!’.”
“Negative. Official vocab guidelines explicitly prohibit the usage of obscenities. A deci-credit fine is stipulated for every profanity.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not putting any of my pennies in a swear-jar. No way.”
“The credits are actually auto-subtracted from your salary.”
“Aw hell no!” Baylor sputtered.
“The snipers are now in position,” ED announced. “The operation will commence shortly.”
“Hut-hut-hut-hut-hut!” a bunch of marching SWAT guys replied in unison. “Hut-hut-hut-hut-hut!”
“Alright!” Baylor said, drawing his sidearm. “Let’s blow this joint!”
From behind the teller’s desk, Mazel Tov Motherfucker deactivated the jamming device and pulled out a cellophone, activating the speed dial.
“Yeah?”
“It’s time,” Mazel Tov said. “Merry Christmas, motherfuckers!”
The getaway car was situated behind the po-lice blockade surrounding the bank. A rabbi popped out of the car’s sunroof. The rabbi, named Bethlehem, had a rocket launcher. Bazooka Bethlehem took careful aim and –
“RPG!” someone screamed and the SWAT teams and policemen turned around to see a screaming rocket-missile-warhead coming at them at a hundred meters per second. The warhead zipped over ducking heads and kissed the arms-laden SWAT van.
“Aw hell no!” Baylor gasped.
The SWAT van was exploderized, literally fragmenting into large chunks of flaming police property that shrapnelled all over the place, eviscerating armored SWAT troopers in a spinning storm of steel. Arms and legs and heads rained down like visceral confetti. Then, to spite Baylor, the bank entrance exploded, sending a shower of glass shards and a deafening blastwave that no one heard due to the temporary deafness caused by the previous blast.
From the blasted remains of the bank doors emerged a squadron of rabbis walking tall amidst the dead and the dying and the burning wreckage strewn all over.
Baylor staggered to his feet and pulled out his badge from his pants. He raised it mightily and cried: “Stop! In the name of the law!”
The rabbis looked at him. And then began opening fire on the remaining SWAT and police and, well, everything else that move.
“Get down!” boomed a robotic monotone as Baylor felt a cybernetic grip nearly crushing his shoulders. ED pulled him back and used his chrome-finished hyperalloy body to shield his fleshy buddy-cop from a hail of gunfire.
Baylor gritted his teeth as he felt the thunks and the pings and the zips of bullets hitting ED’s bionic body, either to flatten against the cybersteel or ricochet off it. Then, in a move betraying his clunky robot-body, ED spun around, still protecting Baylor with his hull-body, but bringing himself to bear on the ravageous rabbis.
ED’s arm transformed into a machinegun-cannon and he fired off a warning shot.
“CEASE AND DESIST! YOU HAVE THREE SECONDS TO COMPLY!”
The rabbis continued blasting at him as they took cover behind a ruinated police squad car.
“THREE…”
A rocket-missile zipped past ED and airbursted, sending Baylor to the ground.Baylor spotted a rabbi with a bazooka standing atop a far away car and opened fire with his sidearm, forcing the rocketeering rabbi to take cover.
“TWO…”
The rabbi with a Tommy Gun threw a Nazi stick-grenade at them but Baylor caught it and threw it away. The rabbi with a revolver shot it mid-air and it detonated harmlessly right over the heads of some cowering journalists.
“ONE!”
ED’s autocannon-arm began whirring as slugs and armor-piercing shells and gyrojets and flechettes were rammed into place by auto-loaders as the weapon’s multi-barrels began spinning faster and faster and faster. A second later, the whirring noise was replaced by the deafening roar of gatling-gunning as the machinecannon began spewing rapid-fire micro-bursts of one hundred rounds per second at the rabble of rabbis.
Baylor screamed as the ensuing noise nearly made his ears explode, he tried covering his ears but it wouldn’t stop, he gritted his teeth as his hearing failed him, but it wouldn’t stop, not even when an RPG slammed dead on ED’s chest, leaving behind a tiny scorch mark.
“Motherfucker!” Baylor screamed as his world started spinning and his gun started firing.
“Motherfucker!” Mazel Tov screamed as their cover was obliterated by the hail of gunfire, causing an explosion of sparks.
“Motherfucker!” Bazooka Bethlehem screamed as he fired off another rocket-missile while bullets tore through his chest.
“Motherfucker!” Tommy Gun Torah screamed as he threw another bunch of Nazi stick-grenades.
“MOTHERFUCKER!” everyone screamed!
“Baylor!” ED scolded just as the fifth-RPG to exploderize on him finally sent him falling on his shiny metal ass. “Delete those expletives!”
Danny Glover Baylor groaned as the rabbis made their getaway. “I’m too old for this shit.”
Back in the bank, Bartholomew Baylor sat on the floor beside his two remaining buddies who were still alive. He leaned his head against the wall and proclaimed: “I need a vacation.”
Courth mewed incoherently, holding his stump-hand with his other hand.
“Yeah…” Shyle replied in agreement as she tightened the bandages on her shot arm. “By the way… Baylor, you’re fired.”
“Fuck that,” Baylor cursed. “I quit.”
Courth began blubbering.
“Me three,” Shyle agreed. Together, the three of them surveyed the remaining monies of the half-cleaned vault. “Let’s get our severance pay.”
[To Be Continued…]
[…Immediately]
A kilometer below the ‘surface’, deep in the dark and frostbitten rectal recesses of Centauri City, were the ghettoes, the armaghettoes, places untouched by sunlight, where the poor and the downtrodden and the dispossessed accumulated like mildew and fungus in the crevices of a piss-stained bathroom. Inhabited solely by untouchables, proles and scum alike, the Centauri Underground was a place of neglect – not even the guv-ment, the PEST, really cared for what went on so long as the world above was uncontaminated. That meant the guv-ment only sent people in to repair the processors, great and old and half-rusted machines that kept everything in living order, that kept those over at topside from freezing when winter came. They repaired the heaters, but half-assedly, so that the topside got their heat and the Underground got periodic rainfall in the form of leaking antifreeze.
Aside from this, other public services included dumping thousand tons of waste into the Underground, from the sewage plans and from the great garbage collector ships. The Underground was a sewer and a landfill, but disrepaired recyclers fixed all that and sent it back up – all clean and shiny and potable and drinkable. The denizens of the Underground got the solemn consolation of placing whatever secretions they wanted into the stuff that came back up. Those at the topside would be surprised to know what was in their drinking water. It wasn’t fluoride, but…precious bodily fluids indeed.
The soup kitchen was a hermetically sealed environment, a refuge for the mongrels seeking solace for the frostbitten holidays. Children, goddamn orphans, whores, hobos and other forms and species of shitpieces abound.
One particular shitpiece was a brooding and dark fellow who wanted to be just left alone and he was left alone. There he was, hunched over a table, licking the contents of a tin bowl – drinking milk soup. It was warm and that was good, all he could ask for, really.
The doors hissed open and the smell of shit wafted into the air. There, three guys came in, dragging a fourth one who was bleeding like he was pissing. The guys had stupid hats and beards and were obviously packing heat.
“That negro copper!” the bleeding man said. “He shot me! He fucking shot me! I’m gonna die!”
“Motherfucker!” the big one with the shotgun cursed.
“What’re we gonna do, boss?” the one with the Thompson cried out.
“Move aside!” the boss with the sixshooters, shooting irons, shoved the brooding shitpiece aside. Together, the arranged folks hefted their bleeding buddy and slammed them onto the darkly brooding Orthii drinker’s table.
Tourff’s table.
Risto’s table.
Tourff Risto’s table.
Spilling milk.
His milk.
They were rabbis.
Rabbis with a deathwish.
“Just give the money….” the bleeder sputtered, mere seconds before death. “To my wife and kids.”
And then he died.
Money?
“Motherfucker!” wept the big one with the shotgun. Mazel Tov Motherfucker.
“Fuck! Where’s the money?!” Tommy Gun Torah asked, looking around rapidly.
“What the-?!” Revolver Rabbi drew his pistol and pointed it to the little one-legged orphan who was peeking at the big sack these bearded old men were bringing along, probably thinking they was Santa. Revolver Rabbi squeezed the trigger and shot the kid, blowing his offending hand to pieces and sending his fingers flying everywhere. “Nobody move! The cops will be coming soon, so no bullshit! And nobody touch the money!”
Tourff Risto had enough of this bullshit.
He got off his chair and pulled out his Ocelot, his Colt .545 Ocelot Single-Action Revolver. He pulled the hammer back.
“MOTHERFUCKER!” Mazel Tov Motherfucker roared as he saw the Orthii get ready to rumble. Like a cannon, he brought his autoshotgun to bear and –
With a hard kick, Tourff sent the table and the dead corpse of Bazooka Bethlehem (with his bazooka still on) flying. Mazel Tov’s shotgun blast struck the airborne Bethlehem dead center in the chest, sending Bethlehem flying ass-backwards and hitting the wall. Then and there, Bazooka Bethlehem then exploded, probably because of his armed bazooka, or maybe because kicked-then-shotgunned corpses liked to explode. The soup kitchen earthquaked and glass exploded, breaking the hermetic seal, resulting pressure differentials sucking the air out of the interior – equalizing the atmosphere of the in and the out and thus allowing poison air in.
Smoke was quickly dissipated and the remaining rabbis were quick to their feet, searching for the offending Orthii who had vanished without a trace, becoming one with the mob of corpses and scared proles scattered all over the place.
Revolver Rabbi stalked with a cat’s eye, a slight movement caught his notice and he was quick to draw in an instant. Both revolvers discharged instantly, bright muzzle flash followed by a double-pop, and two bullets ricocheting off each other.
Tommy Gun Torah was quick on the uptake too as he pulled out both his Thompsons and let out a mighty warcry and began blasting all ‘round, punching holes in the remaining walls, riddling a few survivors who were struggling to get up and get the fuck out, the report of the submachinegun blending with the screams of bloodied shrapnel-studded orphans.
“HAHA-!” Tommy Gun Torah laughed. Before the back of his head was blown off.
“Ha.” Risto spat out as he ran to dodge Mazel Tov Motherfucker’s shotgun’s aim.
“MOTHERFUCKER!” Mazel Tov Motherfucker motherfuckered. He let out a shot while moving in such a way that his weapon was trained at his mark at all times, pivoting his waist like some tank turret, but Risto had maneuvered in such a way that Tommy Gun Torah’s still-standing corpse was between them. Mazel Tov Motherfucker nonetheless let out a shot.
Torah’s body was hit and sent flying at Risto, but Risto did the contrary and leapt right at Torah’s flying cadaver, giving it a flying kick and riding it down like a surfboard. The body slammed back to the ground and Risto used the crazy momentum to roll on the floor before lunging forward and leaping and then kicking off a wall and backflipping while blasting his Ocelot at a near-automatic rate, working his thumb like the internal components of a machinegun. All while everything around him was disintegrated by an automatic fusillade of DU buckshots.
Mazel Tov Motherfucker got motherfuckered.
“Mother…fucker…” were his last words.
Before Risto could catch a breath though, the last of the rabbi, Revolver Rabbi, was on him. Risto sidestepped as a round nearly tore off his pretty little cat ears and fired a shot, which the Rabbi deflected with his own before sidestepping Risto’s next shot before it was even fired. The Rabbi leapt on a still-standing table and fired while walking and jumping on other still-standing wreckages, forcing Risto to slide down the wet floor.
The Rabbi had the advantage, Risto had expended more ammo in killing everyone else, thus the Rabbi had more ammo left in his cylinder. Risto had less, so he popped it open and excavated the spent shells before grabbing a fistful of fresh lead and shoving it –
“Happy Hanukah!” Revolver Rabbi hissed as he fired his second-to-the-last shot. The bullet went through the palm of Risto’s hand and he screamed in agony while his fistful of fresh bullets were sent flying all over. Then the Rabbi ripped off his fake beard, removed his hat, and took careful aim. “Merry Christmas!”
Risto, with his face transmogrifying from a look of steely but calm resolve into a mask of horrid pain, did not accept defeat, however. With a sleight of hand, he flicked his wrist, the wrist of the hand that held the Ocelot, snapping the cylinder back right after one of the flying bullets slid in suggestively. Then he shot the Revolver Rabbi in the mouth, in such a way that his lower jaw exploded in a shower of blood, bone and teeth, while leaving the unharmed tongue to hang out under the remains of the Rabbi’s rather surprised face. The Revolver Rabbi keeled over.
“Happy Holidays,” Tourff Risto growled.
The rabbis had a sack of money and gold bullion with them and Risto searched for it amidst the ruinated wreckage and corpses of the soup kitchen, searched high and low, in and out, left and right and up and down. He didn’t find it and was surprised, so surprised that he didn’t notice the fact that the surviving orphans and whores had disappeared into thin air. Eventually, he did notice that fact, that they had the money. They probably needed it more than him, he realized in a serendipitous epiphany befitting the Yuletide season.
Then he heard the sound of distant Christmas Carols. But those weren’t really Christmas Carols, they were actually police sirens blaring atop police cars driven by cops out to bust some skulls open. So Tourff Risto, not wanting to spend Christmas in prison like Hitler, decided to get the fuck outta there, stat.
THE END
Winter in Centauri City, time for that wonderful season of the Yuletide, also known as Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa – whatever the hell Kwanzaa was. All over the streets, children were throwing yellow snow at one another while impoverished hobos turned into living and walking icicles. See, these particular hobos weren’t like the other hobos, snooty elitist bastards who gathered in the soup kitchens and disallowed shmucks who weren’t part of their clique from coming in and getting free soup. As the children played on and wrote their names on the snow, the outcast hobos shed sad crystal tears as they watched their brothers feast on dog-soup within the warm confines of the kitchens.
Then, one of the frolicking children was blinded by a yellow snowball to the face, slid down the slippery pavement, and was almost run over by a truck. The truck skidded to a halt, further congesting the constipated road-traffic and causing angry motorists to blare their car horns and fog horns. The networked AIs of the cars and the traffic-networks’ anti-road rage programming immediately synchronized to make this cacophony of blaring noises sound as much like Christmas music as possible.
It almost sounded like God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman.
Bartholomew Baylor adjusted his kippah, his Jew Hat, and wondered. As a child, when he too was a recipient of yellow snowballs to the face and groin, he always thought that God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen – or at least its opening tunes - sounded like something the Space Nazis (read: the Protectorate) would play. He started humming the tune while tapping his hand against the steering wheel.
Outside, that snow-crashed kid was being ganged on by his playmates – who were kicking him with their ice skates while calling him a stupid shit.
Bartholomew didn’t notice that, too busy humming Christmas carols to hear the little child’s profane pleas. He also didn’t notice one of the ostracized homeless peoples pick up a shotgun and start shooting up the elitist hobos dining in Mrs. Miggins’ Fine Soupery.
The stoplight went green and Bartholomew deftly maneuvered his tiny three-wheeled car-bike between nuclear-powered SUVs and jet-propelled sports cars. As he zipped by a Hover Hummer and a Jet Jaguar, he gave both participants the finger while joyously proclaiming: “Mazel Tov!”
An hour later, he was in a basement parking lot some five hundred meters above the ground. Right then and there, he parked his car on that special parking spot reserved for special people.
The turboliftalator took him three hundred meters upper, into the great lobby of Centauri Citigruppen – the sector’s biggest banking firm, which was run by Germans.
Exactly how great was the lobby? It was a splendorious hall made out of marble imported from New Hellena, adorned with columns on which were the sculpted murals of ancient naked heroes, flanked by great windows of stained glass that glowed with living holo-light – holos that showed everything from commercials of Citigruppen’s latest utopian moon-colony for elitist pricks, to financial news blabbing on about the monetary implications of the Skaaran Spice Skirmishes on opium-addicted chinamen.
Right there at the center of it all was a magnificent monument – a great and mighty erection that blinded Bartholomew in its grandeur. A mighty Christmas tree, one hundred feet of coconut wrapped in shiny smart-tinfoil-things that swayed iridescently while reflecting off the floating holo-lights swimming around it. Around the tree’s base were solid blocks of gold, painted in platinum to look like gift boxes, and at its top was a big star-shaped diamond.
The great lobby of Centauri Citigruppen was so great that it had its own modest monorail station. See, the goddamn building was so huge that it incorporated five other buildings into its fold. Bartholomew’s post wasn’t actually in the super-decadent central station, but in the most peripheral shitty substation – the one that had old farts and pregnant ladies applying for supersaver accounts and free toasters, rather than opulent jewel-encrusted trees.
So what was Bartholomew Baylor doing here? Simple. Parking in a basement parking lot that was five hundred meters above the shitty ghettoes and mutant-infested sewers of Centauri City meant that his meager carcycle was less likely to be jacked and chop-shopped into scrap iron shit to be recycled into some poor shmoe’s kid’s bicycle. Moreover, he really didn’t have to clock in with a punch card or anything like that since the surveillance cams basically noted the employees who came in and out. So even if he was ten miles away from his shitty substation, Citigruppen’s money-grubbing AI had already punched him in, noted his stellar attendance record, and calculated his generous paycheck the second he entered the main lobby (ten miles away from his post).
“Who knows, I might make employee of the month,” Bartholomew said to no one in particular. As he made his way to the monorail station, he took the time to admire the pretty ladies who were his supposed coworkers. Every centimeter of their fine bodies were genetically sculpted for much hotness, all those curves and… “Mmm.”
Too bad Bartholomew’s coworkers in his shitty substation were all either Fat Bald Men or middle-aged women with sagging tits.
Bartholomew passed by an Orthii security contractor, a female space cat-person of much dangerousness hired to keep the place safe. Shyle Kassel.
“Mazel Tov!” Bartholomew greeted.
Shyle smirked. “You know I’m supposed to report employees who bum about, dontcha?”
“Well,” Bartholomew adjusted the waistline of his pants, which went around his gut (not belly, gut). “As a matter of fact, I’m here on official business.”
“Oh?”
Bartholomew raised one of the honey-encrusted bagels he got from…somewhere. In this part of the bank, such stuff was free. “Breakfast, the most important meal of the day.”
Shyle sighed and brushed a lock of hair that obscured one of her yellow-green slit-pupil eyes. “Is your station really shitty, Bart? Do you have to come in two hours late every day of the week?”
“Yes, yes it is that shitty. Last week, I had a leper – an actual factual leper – apply for a junior savings account. If it weren’t for that bulletproof glass separating me from the unclean… I mean, it’s the future and I get a frickin’ leper for Christmas? Besides, today’s a Monday, shittiest day of the week. You’re not gonna report me, are you? Just cut me some slack.” Bartholomew made a face, a puppy dog face that reached into the heart of that cold catwoman. “Come on, Shy, it’s Christmas.”
“You’re Jewish.”
“Not really, I just like the hat,” Bartholomew took a bite off his bagel. “And how do you know what’s a Jew anyway? You’re an alien space cat.”
“You’re unbelievable!” Shy surrendered.
“Merry Christmas,” Bartholomew proclaimed, bagel in mouth. “I’ll get you one of these next time I come by.”
“Baylor, I hope your station gets robbed.”
Bartholomew sighed. “Me too, Shy…me too.”
The substation smelled like old people with that lingering…decaying but not really overtly noticeable scent of human fermentation, the flavor of geriatrics. Baylor sneaked in snake-like, unseen by his supervisor and noticed only by a group of rabbis who were probably going to start a supersaver account for their paleosynagogue or something.
Baylor yawned and positioned himself in his teller’s cubicle-post, behind the bulletproof glass shield that had, just last week, protected him from the unclean.
In the grim darkness of the fortieth millennium, there are no leprosariums.
Oh how Bartholomew wished PEST would make him disappear quietly while he slept. As much as he did though, he tried to keep awake – gazing at one of the omnipresent telescreens, watching some Protectorate man go on about how the guv-ment was afraid that bodily fluids were being impurified by a contaminated water supply.
Bartholomew had all the impurified bodily fluids he needed, and then some.
He got off and made his way to the bathroom. He nodded respectfully to the rabbis, who were discussing the kosherity of eating reprocessed soylent food products and prefabricated embryonics. Then they were talking about Hanukkah and the re-consecration of their synagogue, and one of them loudly wondered what the hell a Kwanzaa was.
There was a sleeping mother whose child was running around. The small child tried to bite Bartholomew and spread the infection but inadvertently slipped on a wet puddle of something unmentionable and landed on her fat ugly face.
She cried.
Baylor laughed.
An Orthii co-worker in a really slick jacket passed Baylor by and both exchanged helloes and some more laughter at the expense of the little girl’s tears. The small child’s cries of anguish grew considerably softer when her mother told her to shut the fuck up.
Relieved that he made it as far as the bathroom, Bartholomew opened the door and was greeted by a sudden resurgence of weeping. Not from the little girl though, as there before him, sobbing over the sink, was yet another one of his co-workers – a ridiculously rotund receptionist with sagging breasts and a centimeter-thick layer of carcinogenic makeup caking her face. Aside from the tears streaming from her eyes, snot was also sniveling out of her nostrils.
By this point Baylor really wanted to start crying himself.
Merry-fucking-Christmas, you dick.
“What the hell is wrong now?!” he couldn’t help but ask out loud. He half expected her to cry some more, maybe collapse onto the piss-smeared floor and roll about like some beached whale, but maybe she didn’t hear him right – she was sobbing aloud like some barnyard animal being butchered, after all – since her response sounded like as if he had asked ‘what’s wrong?’ with concern rather than pure exasperation and loathful contempt.
As she wept, she told him that her son had been run over by a truck.
“My son…he’s been run over by a truck!” she told him as she wept.
Bartholomew felt like quipping about how that traffic collision would’ve indubitably caused a kilometer-long pileup resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people, with her child being a morbidly obese five-hundred-pounder ten-year-old and all. Just how in the first place could her large child, or fat girl, drag herself gasping out into the streets to be turned into an extra-large family-sized serving of street pizza…
“I’m so sorry, Berna…” Bartholomew says instead. “Why don’t you take the day off? I’ll cover for you.”
Bartholomew Baylor, the dick, can’t believe he said that. That meant more paperwork and more work in general. Was it the Christmas spirit finally seeping in to sap and impurify his precious bodily fluids? More likely it was the fact that he did not want to spend the entire day sitting in an office with a mere cubicle of prefabcrete separating him from a whale of a wretched time.
Ugh, that meant he had to process that bunch of rabbis and that lady and her kid… Some people…just had to be reported to the Protectorate guv-ment for reprocessing.
As Berna sobbed and thanked him and walked out of the room, Bartholomew Baylor decided to do what he was there to do.
He urinated. And forgot to wash his hands.
More people had gathered ‘round the waiting area by now. They’re probably annoyed at the fact that both the fatass receptionist and the fatass teller were spending their sweet time in the bathroom. A young cracker loudly suggested that they were doing the nasty and Baylor just gave him the finger. So much for customer service. The old pensioner man thought it was pretty funny though. He laughed, and then he broke out into asthmatic coughing.
“It better not be Space Ebola…” Baylor muttered underneath his teeth.
“What’s wrong with Berna?” Courth, the Orthii with the slick jacket (who was also the security guard), asked.
“Her kid got ran over by a truck,” Baylor said, sounding like he was giving a weather forecast. Overcast and cloudy with some snow.
“Ouch…and you said she could have the day off, that you’d cover for her?”
“Yeah…”
“Must be the Christmas spirit, eh?”
“I’m Jewish. It’s Hanukkah. You dick.” Baylor growled.
“Yeah right. What’s a Jew anyway?” Courth shrugged as he disappeared into the bathroom.
There was a clicking sound as the lights suddenly blinked on and off, but Bartholomew didn’t notice it one bit as he settled himself on his station – plopping his ass onto the seat and feeling the seat reconfigurate itself to suit the contours of his butt. It was a strange sensation, like getting one’s ass sucked, but it also felt like sitting on a pillow stuffed with the finest of feathers. The seat was defective though, so everyday Baylor had to pry his ass off it with a crowbar when his shift was done.
There was another clicking sound as the lights blinked once again.
Once again, Baylor didn’t notice it as his seat finished sucking his ass in. Oh no, for the moment he also didn’t notice the sensation of ass-sucking either. No, for the moment, his attention was focused solely on the rabbi who was pointing a bi-barreled shotgun with an underslung harpoon gun. At him.
“How can I help you, sir?” Bartholomew began pressing the ‘I’m Being Robbed’ button. Repeatedly. In rapid succession.
“Mazel Tov, Motherfucker!” the rabbi greeted.
The other rabbis rose as one, discarding their fluttering robes but keeping their Jew Hats and Facial Hairs while drawing and unholstering various forms of death-dealing firearms and weaponry.
Baylor pressed the silent alarm button a couple dozen more times, just to be sure.
“Everybody freeze!” roared a rabbi with a revolver, Revolver Rabbi. “No one moves, or else I’ll kosherize your brains!”
There was screaming and all that, old people began crapping their adult diapers while men, women and children began shouting and wailing and crying and pissing themselves. Even with the air processors, the stink of human excrement began wafting through the air.
“Shut up!” the rabbi with the shotgun, Mazel-Tov-Motherfucker, roared. He blasted a shot into the air.
For good measure, Baylor kept on pressing that red button under his desk. Where the hell was security?
“What the hell is going on?!” at last, Courth came out of the bathroom, pulling out his pistol with one hand while keeping his pants up with the other.
Then, like a tank turret, Mazel-Tov-Motherfucker swiveled, his feet planted firmly on the ground but his waist rotating to bring him and his horrendous weapon to bear.
“Courth!” Bartholomew yelled. “No!”
“Motherfucker!” Mazel Tov shouted.
“Shit!” Courth screamed as his hand disintegrated, shotgun slugs pulverizing his paws. He fell on his ass and began weeping. “Fuck!”
“Heh,” Mazel Tov spat. “Motherfucker.”
“My hand! My motherfucking hand!”
“Courth!” with renewed resolve and courage, Baylor continued pressing the alarm button. His ass was still stuck to his sucky chair, he couldn’t move an inch, but no way was he going anywhere. Not with these crazy motherfuckers. The doors were locked, there was bulletproof glass protecting him, he was safe. Not like poor Courth, whose hand had just been disamputated. Not like the rest of those poor shits out there. He was safe. All he had to do was press that button…
“It ain’t gonna work,” Revolver Rabbi said as he spun his gun with one finger. “We’re jamming your alarms. And your security cameras. And your cellphones, pagers, wrist-watches, pacemakers and what have you.”
One of the rabbis, who had a rifle, Rifle Rabbi, calmly walked over towards Baylor’s little stall.
“Well…uhh…” by now Bartholomew had stopped pressing his shitty little button. “You can’t get me out of here, either! And I’m the only one who can open the safe, ha-ha!”
For emphasis, B tapped the bulletproof glass separating him from them.
“Aren’t there supposed to be two tellers for every substation?” Revolver asked, raising a fuzzy eyeball.
“Well, her stupid kid got ran over by a truck so I gave her the day off,” Baylor laughed, and then looked at Mazel Tov. “Motherfucker.”
“Motherfucker.” Mazel Tov growled.
“Besides,” Baylor shrugged. “The bank’s gonna fire me, anyway. When they find out they can’t call me, text me, beep me or radio me or whatnot, they’re gonna get suspicious. They’ll think I’ve gone postal and nuts and held up the place, then they’ll send in security and they’re gonna come in here – from the air and sea - and bomb your ass back to the stone age! Hah, Merry Christmas!”
“So…” Mazel Tov thought it over. “We haven’t got much time?”
“Nnnoooo.”
Revolver snapped his fingers. “Then blast him out of his little cubicle.”
Baylor’s mouth went wide agape. “What?!”
“Right. Getting the explosive,” Rifle Rabbi reported as he rummaged his rucksack for some reactive reagents. “Here we go.”
“Looks like a turd,” Baylor observed keenly.
Rifle Rabbi began smearing the turd over Baylor’s window, then applied the detonator and the cords and tied the cords to the plunger. “On three. One…two…”
Baylor threw himself to the floor, with his ass still kissing his seat.
“Three!”
There was a deafening blast, like some thunderous case of shit-eating explosive diarrhea, but the glass held like some resolute sphincter and so all the concussive shock was directed back outside. Baylor righted himself, albeit awkwardly with his ass attached to his seat, and began laughing out loud at the Rabbis who were covered in dust and shrapnel. The window held.
“The window held!” Baylor declared as he stuck his tongue out.
“Motherfucker!” Mazel Tov roared and, in fury, he punched the window.
The bulletproof glass crumbled into tiny glittering snowflakes and Mazel Tov’s fist made intimate physical contact with Baylor’s still idiotically grinning face. In one swift motion, Mazel Tov squished Baylor’s face, pulled him and his ass-seat out of the cubicle, and threw his ass on the floor like…something.
“Please…don’t hurt me!” Baylor begged.
“Get the safe open,” Revolver said, still spinning his gun. “Now.”
“I can’t…”
“Why not?”
“My ass is stuck to the chair, I can’t walk properly…”
The shotgun blast disintegrated most of the chair, leaving Baylor’s ass connected with only the seat cushion.
“Okay, let’s open that safe, shall we?” Baylor said, getting up and dusting himself before quickly heading for the vault. As he went, he began humming the tunes for God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman. Because.
Because this Christmas was shitty. Shitty-shitty shit-shit. The shittiest Christmas in a long line of succeedingly shittier Christmases for Bartholomew X. Baylor. Shittier than the time a family of five Saint Nicks came at him with switchblades. Or the time dad gave him a turd wrapped in tinfoil – fruitcake, fruit-fucking-cake. Fucking fruitcake. No, this time it wasn’t a family of five knife-wielding Sinterklaases or some raisin-studded piece of shit dug out of some septic tank. No, this time it was an indeterminate number of revolver-shotgun-rifle-wielding rabid rabbis!
“You and Mazel Tov watch him,” Revolver commanded the two, Mazel Tov and Rifle Rabbi. Rifle Rabbi didn’t have a rifle though, he actually had a Tommy Gun. Two, in fact. “I’ll stand guard.”
“Right,” nodded Mazel Tov before pointing his shotgun at Baylor. “Move, motherfucker!”
Rifle Rabbi, who was actually Tommy Gun Torah, grinned at the emasculated banker. It was an evil grin, since Tommy Gun Torah, who was a skinny shit, wore a pair of highly reflective goggles that made him look like some kind of shitty space alien from science fiction – like a grey alien Apexai. Tommy Gun Torah then lit up a fag and started blowing out smoke.
Then the fire alarms started and began spraying synthetic water all over the place.
“Aw shit,” cursed Tommy as Baylor began snickering at him.
“Motherfucker,” Mazel Tov growled. Before punching Baylor in the face. “Open the safe!”
Feebly, Baylor did what he was told. His nose was broken – twice – and was fauceting out quite a bit of blood, making him a bloody sniveler, but nonetheless he began the process of opening the vault. He went through the retina-readers, fingerprint-finders, DNA spit-scanners, combination-coders, laser-lockers, vocal-audio auscultators, and…well, everything. All while sniveling and whimpering in womanly fear and trying not to piss his pants.
Then he heard the shots fired and pissed his pants.
“There are firemen!” Revolver shouted as he traded shots with firemen who were armed with nothing but hoses, extinguishers and axes. “They’re coming! You better make it faster, Mazel Tov! Tommy, a little help here! It won’t be long till security arrives!”
“Hyaaaa!” Tommy Gun Torah cried as he drew both his Tommy Guns and charged outside the vault and joined Revolver in mortal kombat. “Hyaaaaa!” he screamed some more, before his voice was drowned by the noise of two submachineguns blasting away at six hundred rounds per minute. “Hyaaaa!”
“Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg…” Mazel Tov began singing as he stuffed $-marked money bags with thousand-paleoeurodollarcredit bills and fistfuls of gold bullion.
“Batman’s gay,” Baylor muttered. Mazel Tov called him a motherfucker and punched him in the face.
“Are we done here?” Revolver Rabbi asked as he slid into the room. Right behind him was Tommy Gun Torah.
Mazel Tov simply responded by lifting up huge Santa Sacks full of innumerable monies.
“This is gonna be great!” Tommy exclaimed. “Happy Holidays!”
Mazel Tov gave him a look.
“I mean…err…Happy Hannukah!”
“What about him, boss?” Mazel Tov gestured to the concussed Baylor.
“He’s seen my face,” spent casings trickled down from Revolver Rabbi’s revolver cylinder and when his gun was empty, he unveiled a single bullet and threw it into the air. It went up high, nearly hitting the ceiling, before falling down – into the Rabbi’s revolver cylinder. He snapped the cylinder back into the gun. “He dies.”
“No one dies today,” someone said from behind the mob of bank robbers. The lithe form of a female Orthii slinked out of the shadows, brandishing a platinum-plated Colt. “I knew this day would come…”
“Shyle…” Baylor muttered incoherently as he tried to crawl up.
“No one dies – ”
In one lightning-quick motion, Revolver Rabbi spun around and turned to face the Orthii security guard. Their eyes met, locked on to one another’s, and then the sound of simultaneous semi-automatics filled the confines of the vault.
The Rabbi’s revolver’s round was solid and, in a miracle that could only happen in the Yuletide, it struck the Colt’s hollowpoint round head-on, obliterating the softer bullet. Course unaltered, it went straight into the Colt, straight through it, and then into Shyle Kassel’s feline forearm.
Revolver Rabbi grinned, brimming with Christmas cheer. Then he said: “Wrong.”
Christmas songs could be heard in the background, along with the noise of police sirens.
The incessant beeping drove Baylor out of bed, causing him to roll off and fall to the floor. He groaned, rubbed the back of his head, cursed something ugly, and got up. As he muttered and mumbled incoherently, he paid the incessant beeping that drove him out of bed no heed and instead went into the bathroom. Ten minutes later, he emerged, squeaky clean, bathed, bladder and colon empty, and dressed in his underwear. Then he went to the table and got breakfast, gobbled up the improbably-advertised cereals (as advertised in the holo on the cereal box) he poured into the moo-moo-milk, finished the glass of OJ Simpson, and went back to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Then, and only then, did he answer his phone.
“Danny Glover here,” Baylor, Danny Glover Baylor, answered the phone. “What? Aw hell no!”
“What is it?” muttered Clarisse, who was lying nekkid on bed, her perfectly sculpted ebony body contrasting against (Danny Glover) Baylor’s recently deloused mattress.
“Work, sweetie-poops.”
“But it’s Kwanzaa! You can’t work in Kwanzaa, The Man can’t make you!”
“Well,” Baylor got his clothes on and pulled his gun from under a flattened pillow. “The shit just got real.”
The SWAT van opened up and a squad of fully decked-out clones marched out, all going ‘hut-hut-hut-hut’. Media crews gathered along with onlookers, PEST observers from the guv-ment and, well, the po-lice.
“What’s the situation?” Sergeant Danny Glover Baylor asked his partner, ED. ED was a 7-foot-tall chrome-domed cybernetic killing machine with a human brain (and a human heart). The fact that ED was a brain in a jar in a half-ton nuclear-powered mechanical killing machine with the strength of a bear that had the strength of five bears did not perturb Danny Glover (Baylor) the slightest.
“We do not know. There is a sensor blockout within the bank, they must have some kind of electronic countermeasure,” the gleaming-steel cyborg said.
“Pretty well equipped,” Baylor commented as he began putting on his SWAT gear, including his riot-suppressing sonic-electronic ball-breakers. “But that still won’t stop us from busting a cap on their asses!”
“Affirmative.”
“No, ED. How many times do I have to tell you?!” Baylor scolded. “You can’t say ‘Affirmative’ or some shit like that. We’re cops, we say shit like ‘Fuck Yeah!’.”
“Negative. Official vocab guidelines explicitly prohibit the usage of obscenities. A deci-credit fine is stipulated for every profanity.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not putting any of my pennies in a swear-jar. No way.”
“The credits are actually auto-subtracted from your salary.”
“Aw hell no!” Baylor sputtered.
“The snipers are now in position,” ED announced. “The operation will commence shortly.”
“Hut-hut-hut-hut-hut!” a bunch of marching SWAT guys replied in unison. “Hut-hut-hut-hut-hut!”
“Alright!” Baylor said, drawing his sidearm. “Let’s blow this joint!”
From behind the teller’s desk, Mazel Tov Motherfucker deactivated the jamming device and pulled out a cellophone, activating the speed dial.
“Yeah?”
“It’s time,” Mazel Tov said. “Merry Christmas, motherfuckers!”
The getaway car was situated behind the po-lice blockade surrounding the bank. A rabbi popped out of the car’s sunroof. The rabbi, named Bethlehem, had a rocket launcher. Bazooka Bethlehem took careful aim and –
“RPG!” someone screamed and the SWAT teams and policemen turned around to see a screaming rocket-missile-warhead coming at them at a hundred meters per second. The warhead zipped over ducking heads and kissed the arms-laden SWAT van.
“Aw hell no!” Baylor gasped.
The SWAT van was exploderized, literally fragmenting into large chunks of flaming police property that shrapnelled all over the place, eviscerating armored SWAT troopers in a spinning storm of steel. Arms and legs and heads rained down like visceral confetti. Then, to spite Baylor, the bank entrance exploded, sending a shower of glass shards and a deafening blastwave that no one heard due to the temporary deafness caused by the previous blast.
From the blasted remains of the bank doors emerged a squadron of rabbis walking tall amidst the dead and the dying and the burning wreckage strewn all over.
Baylor staggered to his feet and pulled out his badge from his pants. He raised it mightily and cried: “Stop! In the name of the law!”
The rabbis looked at him. And then began opening fire on the remaining SWAT and police and, well, everything else that move.
“Get down!” boomed a robotic monotone as Baylor felt a cybernetic grip nearly crushing his shoulders. ED pulled him back and used his chrome-finished hyperalloy body to shield his fleshy buddy-cop from a hail of gunfire.
Baylor gritted his teeth as he felt the thunks and the pings and the zips of bullets hitting ED’s bionic body, either to flatten against the cybersteel or ricochet off it. Then, in a move betraying his clunky robot-body, ED spun around, still protecting Baylor with his hull-body, but bringing himself to bear on the ravageous rabbis.
ED’s arm transformed into a machinegun-cannon and he fired off a warning shot.
“CEASE AND DESIST! YOU HAVE THREE SECONDS TO COMPLY!”
The rabbis continued blasting at him as they took cover behind a ruinated police squad car.
“THREE…”
A rocket-missile zipped past ED and airbursted, sending Baylor to the ground.Baylor spotted a rabbi with a bazooka standing atop a far away car and opened fire with his sidearm, forcing the rocketeering rabbi to take cover.
“TWO…”
The rabbi with a Tommy Gun threw a Nazi stick-grenade at them but Baylor caught it and threw it away. The rabbi with a revolver shot it mid-air and it detonated harmlessly right over the heads of some cowering journalists.
“ONE!”
ED’s autocannon-arm began whirring as slugs and armor-piercing shells and gyrojets and flechettes were rammed into place by auto-loaders as the weapon’s multi-barrels began spinning faster and faster and faster. A second later, the whirring noise was replaced by the deafening roar of gatling-gunning as the machinecannon began spewing rapid-fire micro-bursts of one hundred rounds per second at the rabble of rabbis.
Baylor screamed as the ensuing noise nearly made his ears explode, he tried covering his ears but it wouldn’t stop, he gritted his teeth as his hearing failed him, but it wouldn’t stop, not even when an RPG slammed dead on ED’s chest, leaving behind a tiny scorch mark.
“Motherfucker!” Baylor screamed as his world started spinning and his gun started firing.
“Motherfucker!” Mazel Tov screamed as their cover was obliterated by the hail of gunfire, causing an explosion of sparks.
“Motherfucker!” Bazooka Bethlehem screamed as he fired off another rocket-missile while bullets tore through his chest.
“Motherfucker!” Tommy Gun Torah screamed as he threw another bunch of Nazi stick-grenades.
“MOTHERFUCKER!” everyone screamed!
“Baylor!” ED scolded just as the fifth-RPG to exploderize on him finally sent him falling on his shiny metal ass. “Delete those expletives!”
Danny Glover Baylor groaned as the rabbis made their getaway. “I’m too old for this shit.”
Back in the bank, Bartholomew Baylor sat on the floor beside his two remaining buddies who were still alive. He leaned his head against the wall and proclaimed: “I need a vacation.”
Courth mewed incoherently, holding his stump-hand with his other hand.
“Yeah…” Shyle replied in agreement as she tightened the bandages on her shot arm. “By the way… Baylor, you’re fired.”
“Fuck that,” Baylor cursed. “I quit.”
Courth began blubbering.
“Me three,” Shyle agreed. Together, the three of them surveyed the remaining monies of the half-cleaned vault. “Let’s get our severance pay.”
[To Be Continued…]
[…Immediately]
A kilometer below the ‘surface’, deep in the dark and frostbitten rectal recesses of Centauri City, were the ghettoes, the armaghettoes, places untouched by sunlight, where the poor and the downtrodden and the dispossessed accumulated like mildew and fungus in the crevices of a piss-stained bathroom. Inhabited solely by untouchables, proles and scum alike, the Centauri Underground was a place of neglect – not even the guv-ment, the PEST, really cared for what went on so long as the world above was uncontaminated. That meant the guv-ment only sent people in to repair the processors, great and old and half-rusted machines that kept everything in living order, that kept those over at topside from freezing when winter came. They repaired the heaters, but half-assedly, so that the topside got their heat and the Underground got periodic rainfall in the form of leaking antifreeze.
Aside from this, other public services included dumping thousand tons of waste into the Underground, from the sewage plans and from the great garbage collector ships. The Underground was a sewer and a landfill, but disrepaired recyclers fixed all that and sent it back up – all clean and shiny and potable and drinkable. The denizens of the Underground got the solemn consolation of placing whatever secretions they wanted into the stuff that came back up. Those at the topside would be surprised to know what was in their drinking water. It wasn’t fluoride, but…precious bodily fluids indeed.
The soup kitchen was a hermetically sealed environment, a refuge for the mongrels seeking solace for the frostbitten holidays. Children, goddamn orphans, whores, hobos and other forms and species of shitpieces abound.
One particular shitpiece was a brooding and dark fellow who wanted to be just left alone and he was left alone. There he was, hunched over a table, licking the contents of a tin bowl – drinking milk soup. It was warm and that was good, all he could ask for, really.
The doors hissed open and the smell of shit wafted into the air. There, three guys came in, dragging a fourth one who was bleeding like he was pissing. The guys had stupid hats and beards and were obviously packing heat.
“That negro copper!” the bleeding man said. “He shot me! He fucking shot me! I’m gonna die!”
“Motherfucker!” the big one with the shotgun cursed.
“What’re we gonna do, boss?” the one with the Thompson cried out.
“Move aside!” the boss with the sixshooters, shooting irons, shoved the brooding shitpiece aside. Together, the arranged folks hefted their bleeding buddy and slammed them onto the darkly brooding Orthii drinker’s table.
Tourff’s table.
Risto’s table.
Tourff Risto’s table.
Spilling milk.
His milk.
They were rabbis.
Rabbis with a deathwish.
“Just give the money….” the bleeder sputtered, mere seconds before death. “To my wife and kids.”
And then he died.
Money?
“Motherfucker!” wept the big one with the shotgun. Mazel Tov Motherfucker.
“Fuck! Where’s the money?!” Tommy Gun Torah asked, looking around rapidly.
“What the-?!” Revolver Rabbi drew his pistol and pointed it to the little one-legged orphan who was peeking at the big sack these bearded old men were bringing along, probably thinking they was Santa. Revolver Rabbi squeezed the trigger and shot the kid, blowing his offending hand to pieces and sending his fingers flying everywhere. “Nobody move! The cops will be coming soon, so no bullshit! And nobody touch the money!”
Tourff Risto had enough of this bullshit.
He got off his chair and pulled out his Ocelot, his Colt .545 Ocelot Single-Action Revolver. He pulled the hammer back.
“MOTHERFUCKER!” Mazel Tov Motherfucker roared as he saw the Orthii get ready to rumble. Like a cannon, he brought his autoshotgun to bear and –
With a hard kick, Tourff sent the table and the dead corpse of Bazooka Bethlehem (with his bazooka still on) flying. Mazel Tov’s shotgun blast struck the airborne Bethlehem dead center in the chest, sending Bethlehem flying ass-backwards and hitting the wall. Then and there, Bazooka Bethlehem then exploded, probably because of his armed bazooka, or maybe because kicked-then-shotgunned corpses liked to explode. The soup kitchen earthquaked and glass exploded, breaking the hermetic seal, resulting pressure differentials sucking the air out of the interior – equalizing the atmosphere of the in and the out and thus allowing poison air in.
Smoke was quickly dissipated and the remaining rabbis were quick to their feet, searching for the offending Orthii who had vanished without a trace, becoming one with the mob of corpses and scared proles scattered all over the place.
Revolver Rabbi stalked with a cat’s eye, a slight movement caught his notice and he was quick to draw in an instant. Both revolvers discharged instantly, bright muzzle flash followed by a double-pop, and two bullets ricocheting off each other.
Tommy Gun Torah was quick on the uptake too as he pulled out both his Thompsons and let out a mighty warcry and began blasting all ‘round, punching holes in the remaining walls, riddling a few survivors who were struggling to get up and get the fuck out, the report of the submachinegun blending with the screams of bloodied shrapnel-studded orphans.
“HAHA-!” Tommy Gun Torah laughed. Before the back of his head was blown off.
“Ha.” Risto spat out as he ran to dodge Mazel Tov Motherfucker’s shotgun’s aim.
“MOTHERFUCKER!” Mazel Tov Motherfucker motherfuckered. He let out a shot while moving in such a way that his weapon was trained at his mark at all times, pivoting his waist like some tank turret, but Risto had maneuvered in such a way that Tommy Gun Torah’s still-standing corpse was between them. Mazel Tov Motherfucker nonetheless let out a shot.
Torah’s body was hit and sent flying at Risto, but Risto did the contrary and leapt right at Torah’s flying cadaver, giving it a flying kick and riding it down like a surfboard. The body slammed back to the ground and Risto used the crazy momentum to roll on the floor before lunging forward and leaping and then kicking off a wall and backflipping while blasting his Ocelot at a near-automatic rate, working his thumb like the internal components of a machinegun. All while everything around him was disintegrated by an automatic fusillade of DU buckshots.
Mazel Tov Motherfucker got motherfuckered.
“Mother…fucker…” were his last words.
Before Risto could catch a breath though, the last of the rabbi, Revolver Rabbi, was on him. Risto sidestepped as a round nearly tore off his pretty little cat ears and fired a shot, which the Rabbi deflected with his own before sidestepping Risto’s next shot before it was even fired. The Rabbi leapt on a still-standing table and fired while walking and jumping on other still-standing wreckages, forcing Risto to slide down the wet floor.
The Rabbi had the advantage, Risto had expended more ammo in killing everyone else, thus the Rabbi had more ammo left in his cylinder. Risto had less, so he popped it open and excavated the spent shells before grabbing a fistful of fresh lead and shoving it –
“Happy Hanukah!” Revolver Rabbi hissed as he fired his second-to-the-last shot. The bullet went through the palm of Risto’s hand and he screamed in agony while his fistful of fresh bullets were sent flying all over. Then the Rabbi ripped off his fake beard, removed his hat, and took careful aim. “Merry Christmas!”
Risto, with his face transmogrifying from a look of steely but calm resolve into a mask of horrid pain, did not accept defeat, however. With a sleight of hand, he flicked his wrist, the wrist of the hand that held the Ocelot, snapping the cylinder back right after one of the flying bullets slid in suggestively. Then he shot the Revolver Rabbi in the mouth, in such a way that his lower jaw exploded in a shower of blood, bone and teeth, while leaving the unharmed tongue to hang out under the remains of the Rabbi’s rather surprised face. The Revolver Rabbi keeled over.
“Happy Holidays,” Tourff Risto growled.
The rabbis had a sack of money and gold bullion with them and Risto searched for it amidst the ruinated wreckage and corpses of the soup kitchen, searched high and low, in and out, left and right and up and down. He didn’t find it and was surprised, so surprised that he didn’t notice the fact that the surviving orphans and whores had disappeared into thin air. Eventually, he did notice that fact, that they had the money. They probably needed it more than him, he realized in a serendipitous epiphany befitting the Yuletide season.
Then he heard the sound of distant Christmas Carols. But those weren’t really Christmas Carols, they were actually police sirens blaring atop police cars driven by cops out to bust some skulls open. So Tourff Risto, not wanting to spend Christmas in prison like Hitler, decided to get the fuck outta there, stat.
THE END
Insanity is always fun when it's onscreen.