While she’d been fucking and cleaning up, Willow had been organizing as if to win a leadership prize. She called them to a conference room.
“This is all of you.” Willow spread her arms and slowly circled, indicating the small crowd surrounding her. “You are the ones who are going to find this Big Daddy vehicle. You will, I hope, be the ones to help free us from the Ghoul Lords.
“Tall order,” Cyn whispered.
“Yes,” Rutger agreed, hands clasped before him as if he was penitent and pure. The ripped tone of his arms compelled her to slip her hand over his forearm then up to his biceps.
“Hmmm. What are you doing?” he murmured.
“Shhh. Listening to Willow.”
“This Big Daddy existed before the invasion. It belonged to a company of Dr. Nietz’s, so whatever information it holds, providing it isn’t a burnt-out wreck, it probably won’t be that new. What we can hope for is that we can use it in ways no one could have back then. Because we are no longer simply human.”
That wasn’t impossible, just unlikely.
She didn’t mind the odds. Doing the impossible made her want to crack her knuckles and smile.
“You look happy.” Rutger nudged her with his shoulder.
“I am. I like doing shit. Sitting still bores me.”
“Thisis where the Little Mo robot has mapped, as well as what we of Worshipper Tribe know. I’ve combined the facts.” Willow spread out a large sheet of white paper on the floor and she kneeled beside it. “This is us. This is the bridge to the next quarter. It’s as close to factual as possible, based on communications from other quarters. We have a few cars that’ve been fueled up and a fairly clear roadway to get us to this bridge. Once we traverse that we will aim to drop almost all the way to ground level. There’s no choice, as the next part is mostly destroyed. We detour around this irradiated level where we think a missile exploded five years ago. Then, we go here, the last quarter.” Again she tapped. “We stay low there too, where almost certainly we will encounter nanobeasts, and there we find Big Daddy. If it still exists. Nineteen days was the prediction but with the cars it could be as good as a fifteen-day trip.”
“Yay,” Cyn said quietly, so only Rutger might hear her. “Booooom bada boom.”
“Big bada boom. I see you know yourFifth Element.”
“A favorite of mine. And why can’t we have TV anymore?”
“Well, I know some of the weaponsmiths have resurrected Blu-ray and games machines, linked them to solar power. If we were staying put…” He shrugged. “We aren’t though. So we find Big Daddy, then we find out who we all are, for real. Better than TV?” Rutger found her hand and inveigled his fingers between hers, firmed his grip down until her digits were almost screaming. “Especially for you, Cyn.”
“Yes,” she breathed, bumping into his arm with her body. “Oh yes. Fuck, yes.”
And she was so making it her mission to get one of those resurrected Blu-ray players and a game console. Massive not-online play sessions with this lot? This was her mission from god, she decided, or from whoever was currently watching them from above but seriously slacking off on the job.
They slept through the daylight hours, of course. She was indeed beginning to wonder if they were all vampires. Then their little expedition assembled, packed up food, gear, weapons, car keys, but no sex toys, and they set out to find Big Daddy.
Now she had a chance to find out what and who she was. Her excitement could not get any bigger. Not unless Rutger found that huge dildo she’d imagined.
Or Vargr decided to rejoin them—that too. She missed him, the asshole.
32
The rippers had draggedsomething to the base of his remaining tentacles. It was the remains of his half-self, Hudex—the bits left after it had died. There was no evidence of the human suit left by then, not after it’d fallen miles to the ground, been carried away by scavengers and gnawed on, then hauled up the side of the scraper. This was barely a handful of his real tissue, burned by darkness, spat upon, shot, stabbed—the list went on.
“I will have my vengeance,” Avidex seethed. “I will.”
No matter how he tried to rearrange what there was of him, the thinking power was sadly lacking. With time, and feeding, he would regrow.
Time was not obtainable.
Avidex gazed upon the landscape of the Top story of this world, at the thinning mass of feeder humans. In the distance, the rising mounds of Queen tissue signaled the imminence of the breeding explosion. They would rise to the stars soon but without him, unless he could regrow. He could not. The part he needed to give to the burgeoning Queen had died below. A half of one’s body was the requirement. Without that a Ghoul Lord was not allowed to donate to the Queen process.
She had done this. That human female.
His need for revenge burned within him. The sweetness of added brain power when he’d used the previous human, the skin-suit one, had helped him to think and it had also tasted good to his tentacles. He snared a nearby drooling human, another female.
Would this work again?
