11
The F-15 was no more; bits and pieces of jet were strewn across the desert's shifting sands like rocks. The warm, sandy colors of the plane were smoked to a crispy brown, a charred black almost. He could barely make out the points of the blue star, scorched considerably beyond recognition. Vapors of whatnot steamed into the blue sky in a tower of black, pluming smoke; the sun itself moving and shifting through the heated, smoky veil in an angry red.
*Amazing what a SAM can do! *
Shia was in awe at the sheer destruction that had befallen the plane, the very destruction he had ensued personally. He could still see wisps of the vapor trail the missile had left. Over a 30-million dollar plane, which took months to build was gone--charred toast in an instant. The low flyer came at the convoy, easing its speed off a tic as if to drop a payload. But a fiery explosion quickly burst from the afterburners, small at first, before the swirling, burning clouds overtook the jet completely, all at the simple twist of the key and a push of a button.
"Sergeant!" he called out loudly. The man jogged over to him with a wave of his hand, jumping the twisted hurdles of scrap on his way. A small cloud of dust kicked up, quickly dissipating into the warm air in a plume. "What have we got here?"
"An F-15, Sir!" the man quickly said. "One of the IAF fighters, if I'm not mistaken."
"I can see that." He rolled his eyes. "But what's it doing out in the Negev? A bombing run?"
"Couldn't tell you, Sir." The soldier shook his head. "Possibly reconnaissance, since we can't find much ordinance anywhere. But even that's speculation."
"No matter." He nodded. "I'm calling headquarters, and asking for assistance. I want every piece of this plane brought to the Organ Grinder facility, every scrap that's salvageable. No one goes near it unless I say."
"What about Commander Drazen?" the soldier asked.
"I'll talk to him myself," he replied, "now get moving. I want our convoy back at the base by sunset!"
"Sir!"
Sand and pebble ground together as the man took off for the larger scraps of the plane, but he turned his head away at a gentle vibration at his pocket. The vibration found a voice, a sweet melodic digitized voice as he wrenched out his cell phone from his vest. The desert breeze hushed the music as his thumb pushed at the button.
"This is Bonnet." He pressed the thin device to his ear.
"Shia?" that quite, warming voice of his beloved whispered into his head. A voice he thought had long departed him ever since he left for the old coot's island villa. "Is that really you, or your troublesome employer?"
"Aw Robin," a warm, gentle smile stretched across his face, "I told you not to call me on the job. And besides which, don't let the Major catch you calling him that. I don't think you'll survive the meeting."
"Bah!" she dismissed. "I'll take my chances with that nut. But are you coming home tonight?"
"I don't really know right now." His smile dropped to a flat line. "Something big just happened, and I don't know what the heck Uzi's going to have the outfit do about it."
"You could always just blow him off, dear." She said simply. "Come on, now. I'll make us a nice dinner.!"
"What are you making?" his lips pulled into a smile again.
"A nice. juicy. steak." She said playfully, egging his belly to disobey. "Kosher meat, of course."
"Can't have blood, can we?"
"No sir." She agreed. "Just like the Torah said. But do you think you can make it home tonight?"
"I don't know yet." He ground the toe of his boot in the dirt, twisting back and forth at the ankle. "But I'll see if we can work something out."
"O.k" her sighing breath sounded like flurry of static in the earpiece. "Just promise me you'll be back sometime this week? I miss you."
"I've been gone for less than two weeks, Rob." He noted casually.
"Hmm.!" her voice was an annoyed growl for a split-second. "That's not my point, is it?"
"Nope." He touched a hand to the belly of his vest, lips pressing tightly together as a sudden pain sharply poked at him. "Hmm--sure isn't! But I got to go now, okay?"
"Okay." She said. "Talk to you later, sweetie. And be careful."
"I will." he coughed. "Take care!"
"Bye." There was a small *click* in his ear, and the phone went silent. He thumbed the button blindly, and he stuffed it into his pocket habitually as he scrambled for his medicine. The ulcer, the bane of his life was always egging him, poking at him at inopportune moments of his day, which the body nearly keeled over from every time.
*The bullet.! Uzi.! One of them will be the end of me, I swear! *
***
Something was up with Ron. Just they way he sat in the passenger seat, his back completely flat against the seat with his legs pressed together and his arms folded tightly across his chest. He hadn't spoken a word since sunrise--a breathtaking spectacle, with creamy peach crawling across the sky as the orange ball crept over the arid, undulating horizon-- and he hadn't complained about his black hole for a stomach since they left the Nile Delta.
"So there I was," Sadie, the team chatterbox, continued with her tall tales of her exploits and journeys, "in the Detroit Auto Show, sitting in my booth, looking pretty while Freeman lived up the fame and glory--*as* usual! Did anyone pay attention to me--the whole reason why we were there-- even for a split-second? I think not!"
"That sounds like it sucks." She replied, but she never took her eyes of Ron. They way he sat like a stone, quiet and unmoving; it really unnerved her.
"I guess it wasn't too bad." The AI continued. "I did happen to meet this really nice car named KITT, sitting in the next booth. He might have been a Pontiac or a Honda, but I couldn't tell from the angle I was parked in. But boy--let me tell you, that posh New York accent of his could really put my RPM on cloud 9000."
"Does Sadie have a crush?" she smirked.
"Hey--he--hey!" Rufus' bucked teeth shined brightly in the mid- morning sun, doing a little dance on the center armrest. "Sadie got a boyfriend--Sadie got a boyfriend! Yep--yep!"
"Watch it, pipsqueak!" the bars on the readout's equalizers reached their peaks. "You could throw my transmission out of gear!"
"Hmm!!" The rodent stuck his whiskers in the air, twitching them haughtily over his frowning lips.
"Sensitive aren't we?" she smirked.
"." The bars flat-lined.
"I'll take that as a yes."
"I'm not in real love, Kim." The car spoke. "Nor could I experience it for myself."
"That's how it works for you, doesn't it?" she slouched. "Sad, isn't it?"
"I wouldn't know sad, even if I was." The AI explained. "The infatuation I experience is nothing more than fluctuations in my Neural Processing Unit. Nothing more than an anomaly in otherwise a mathematical harmony and procession, triggering the onset of an emotion just like would the chemical precursors in your brain."
".Tragic."
"I'll take your word for it, Kim."
*BEEP--BEEP--BEEP--EEP. *
"Hold on a sec." she made a sharp sigh as she reached for the Kimmunicator, rattling carelessly in the driver's side cup holder with that ZIP disk she found in Prague. "Wade-master calling."
"That's okay." The vehicle said. "Just don't drop it on the floor. Doc had the rugs cleaned recently."
"Right." Her screen flicked on in a veil of static instantly. The snow flashed and flickered, disappearing into a blue-gray painted room with more monitors than she could have counted. "What you got, Wade?"
"Nothing much." The portly kid smiled. "I just got the Kimmunicator satellite in Israeli airspace, with a little help from Barbie-doll of course."
"Of course." she rolled her eyes. "Can live with her, can't kill her either."
"I know." The boy nodded. "But my hands are still tied over here, courtesy of our 'friends' at the State Department. So essentially, I'm here for morale support."
"Anything else you *can* do?" she asked.
"Well." the boy scratched his double chin, "anything you'd like me to run on Google?"
"Oh please!" the vehicle exclaimed. "Google!? Don't make my gas flow back up!"
"I see you made it to your dead drop without incident." The Webmaster yawned.
"Yeah." She nodded. "We're a few good hours away from the border at the Gaza Strip."
"Good." He nodded. "And you should know that you now have a direct link-up with Yune's laptop computer at the Tel Aviv hotel, via the Kimmunicator. Feel free to contact him anytime, and vise-versa, as long as you have the PDA with you at all times."
"How'd they get past our encryptions?"
"It's all in the card." A tired frown pulled his thin lips. "And Kim?"
"Yeah Wade?"
"Tell Barbie-doll to pull her hackers off my network!" he yelled.
"Oh." she glanced away, "eh--yeah!"
"Good." He yawned. "Call me back later. when the sun shows its face around these parts."
"Gotcha." She thumbed the button--and Wade disappeared in a veil of flickering snow, just before the tiny LCD went black. The PDA danced its jerky, rattling tango with the disk as she dropped it back in the cup holder. "Man--I hate time differences."
"Kim," the vehicle said calmly, "there's something I've got to tell you about."
"Go ahead." Leather squelched beneath as she sat back up. "I'm used to things going wrong."
"A few months prior to this, some hacker creep broke into our computer systems and stole the blueprints for the SADI system." The SUV explained. "We didn't think too much of it when we called the cops, but there's been rumors circulating around the Middle East over a SADI knockoff."
"And given our situation," she smirked, "this was perfect timing."
"Exactly!" the SUV replied. "Mutually Beneficial. I'll help you with your transportation problems, and you can help me search for my little black market item."
"Deal." She nodded.
"All right." Through the bright sun, Kim could see the every inch of the 4X4 resonate that shifting, pale glow. "Look like you're busy, Kim. I'm shifting paintjobs for something more appropriate."
Her fingers wrapped around the glowing steering wheel at three-and- nine, and she felt the sole of her shoe touch on the floor-mounted pedal.
"Right." Her arms moved easily to the vehicle's movements.
"Buckle up, you two." Sadie warned firmly. "Because this is going to be a bumpy ride."
***
The empty bottle of scopolamine hydrobromide let out a hollow clatter on the floor, rolling in a skewed semi-circle before the bottle came to a halt. Uzi felt like his head was swimming again, and the tablets he downed didn't seem to be acting at all. The Grinder's medical staff was fresh out of motion sickness medication. And the recent news of his brother's passing didn't help his mood either.
"I don't understand." the stainless steel walls of his quarters were moving and shifting oddly all around, the light playing off them in strange reflections, "he was doing so well. *uh*. in recovery! What the fuck went wrong!?"
The stubble scraped at the pads of his fingertips, as they ran slickly across the smoothed shrapnel stuck in his head. The construction of the medical wing had just been underway a few hours ago, and a faint smirk crawled across his gullied face as he had the machinists sharpen his brand new weapon.
--The multi-line phone let out a piercing bleat, its inner workings clicking and clacking. There was a quiet whir and small crackle of static, as if a thin piece of tape was being drawn over a roller of some kind during a recording.
"I know you're there, Uzi.!" a voice spoke in his native language, a familiar voice like his own, yet with a strange *machine*-like quality. "I think those quarters of yours are oh-so stylish, and I think your head will look really good impaled upon that ceiling fan you've got!"
His heart quickened in record time, and he felt like his breakfast was working up his neck all on its own.
"Oh." he groaned. "Who--who is this?"
"Do you like robots, U?" he heard fluctuations in the static, as if the man was snickering at the other end. "I know you love robots! Especially how one nearly took your guts out and draped them on curtain rods like."
The spinning world took its time as his eyes took a lap in his head. "Curtains.?" he yawned.
"Uh. yeah!" the machine agreed--and the phone clicked, and the dial tone hummed like a flat line on an EKG.
He stumbled to his wobbly feet, nearly kissing the hard carpet as his head warbled back on his shoulders. Slowly, he reached for the phone on his end table, fingers stumbling on the case in a dizzied stupor. The hand fell on its thumb side, crushing the call-return button into the case--
--And there was pulsating beeping from the other side of his door, a pulsating bleat that lasted approximately two seconds before a steady pause. And then it bleated again. and again.
*Like the POS is right at my door! *
The end table's drawer scraped open, and his hand tumbled off of the tabletop and into the drawer. Faintly, he could feel the firm, plastic grip of his Desert Eagle underneath his shaky hand. His thumb pried under the gun, inclining it up, the web at his saddle joint pressing against the back as his fingers weakly wrapped around the grip at the front.
The drawer banged and rattled on the floor as he wrenched his hand away from the table, and he limped for the door on wobbly legs. The muzzle bobbed and weaved in his grasp, as the door steadied in his sight. His neck firmed, and he pushed his creeping breakfast back down as he reached from the door, metal fingers gracing the shiny knob--
--*Bang! *--
--And his butt met the cold floor as the door smacked him silly on its arc. His pistol skittered away, rubbing the fibers of the carpet the wrong way as it scraped out of his reach. The door let out another *bang* when it met the adjacent wall, and towering before him stood a creature the likes he had never seen.
His face! The creature had *his* face--a burnt, scarred face that made his own visage look like paper cuts. The jaw was not his own, but a squared piece of metal, flared at the edges, fashioned to resemble one yet with a tempering line right where the metal angled toward its toothy mouth. The horrible, scarred body had no arm on the right of flesh, but of metal. It was like a claw he had seen in the scrap yards, smaller, and welded straight onto the shoulder. And wheels! As YHWH as his witness, the thing had wheels--tank tracks at the very bottom of his waist!
For one of the few times in his life, he screamed!
And the creature let out a scream, bellowing over his own in a terrible, blaring yelp. That tongue was pinned down set in the jaw, flailing and thrashing at him pointedly, the screws--*screws* keeping it in place. Saliva pooled and sloshed around uncontrollably like tidal waves on the shoreline.
He screamed louder!
And it screamed louder, and the tracks creaked sharply as it wheeled itself inside!
"Cripes, Bro!" the being said in that machine like voice, and its hazel eyes lit up with subtle glee. "You're *so* JUMPY!"
"Galil.?" he caught his breath, breathing it in deeply and letting it sit in his lungs for a bit. "What. the hell man!? The guys told me you died!"
"Don't you just *LOVE* a good practical joke, Bro?" the mangled man said rhetorically. "It just makes your day so much more. better! I don't know how else to describe it!"
"You call that torture a JOKE?" he yelled. "You nearly gave me a heart attack!"
"Ah." the thing combed its flesh hand through the thin strands of long hair- the mere testimony of that full, dark mullet he and the rest of the crew once knew--proudly, "my work here is done."
"What the hell happened to you, anyway?" he shook his head vigorously, briefly. "An arson disaster at a Skynyrd concert? Or maybe you just got a little too happy with a bottle of kerosene?"
"I don't know." Galil's yawn was like a digitized screech from a strangled raven.
"Ugh.!" he blinked. "Some yawn you got there."
"It's the voice actuator." The brother said. "Sometimes it can't get the voice right."
"Not that it means a whole lot." He smirked. "People don't really want to know someone that looks like Aqua-man, sweltering on Acid for six months."
The shadow of his brother cocked an eyebrow, what was salvageable of it. Fine whiskers moved up and down, waving gently in the still air at the whim of the gnarled brow.
"I think I should call you Arthur from now on." He laughed.
"What did you expect?" the claw angled a bit as the thing shrugged. "The quacks you got only had a damn robot to work with! Which reminds me.!"
"Shia?"
"Exactly!"
"He should be back in a few minutes with that scrap metal I told him to get." He yawned--and his brother shrank by a couple of feet as he pushed himself back on firm legs. His bones moved back into place as he stretched completely out. "And pieces of downed plane. It's good to have you back, man. what's left of you, anyway."
"Feeling's mutual." The short man yawned. "And just call me the 'tank-man' if you want."
"Of course." He shrugged, and he glanced at hands the watch fastened to his wrist. "And by my watch, Shia should just be arriving with that scrap."
The brother smiled with a prankster's joy. "Goodie-goodie." his twisted features pulled into a smirk. "All the better for me!"
"Indeed."
A pair of the four tank tracks creaked their bands backwards, the hum of the motors echoing loudly in his tiny room as Galil turned around. All four bands rolled toward him as the brother barely wheeled himself through the doorway, the carriage for his waist clanging and clattering over the door's stripping as if it were a speed bump. Carefully the mangled man turned the corner--but the sounds of his motors hummed a different tune as he unexpectedly backed up, just barely in sight through the doorway.
"And Aqua-man is the worst superhero ever!" the 'tank-man' retorted, and treated him to the sound of his motors, whirring faintly down the corridor.
Uzi shook his head. "*Shmuck*!" he yawned.
***
"Benjamin Cross!" the scarred man with his olive-clad back towards him called. The holler seemed to have resounded from every which direction in the open, cavernous room. "Welcome to the VSA headquarters: The Organ Grinder!"
The grated catwalk nosily clanked underfoot as the scarred man took his first steps on, climbing up a small flight of diamond-sheet steps with large poles for banisters. Ben gazed slowly around the bright, dank grotto, with nothing to see but an array of wide, slatted catwalks that the fumes of the huge oil vats below flowed through like water. Stagnant water, it smelled like, a bittersweet stench that made him want to loose his early lunch.
"Like the smell?" the scarred man's flat, dull voice numbed his ears from all around. "You'll get used to it. sometime."
"Ugh.!" he coughed. "This is the whole damn facility? It looks more like a refinery!"
"Because this is a refinery." The man walked on, gesturing half heartedly here and there for simple formality. "The crude oil we tap into comes into these vats, where the various oil derivatives are extracted in our own little refinery a level below. This section of the facility is the lifeblood of our force. If we didn't have it, we were pretty much finished from the get-go."
"When did you get this stuff?" he asked.
"A few days ago." he yawned. "When we put our newfound funds and *income* to good use. And we're currently stockpiling some ground equipment, and a whole lot of scrap material."
His brow perked with interest. "Scrap metal?" he said. "What for?"
"Couldn't tell you." The man shrugged. "But the Major's been stockpiling on the stuff since we got our first deposit. Word has it that he's got some new fangled project in the works, when he isn't focused on getting this base up and running."
"Right." He nodded.
The scarred man came to a large, heavy door, bolted to the wall by some heavy-duty hinges with a thick window the size of a small plank. A door, he typically saw, that housed such equipment ranging from small arms to chemical weapons. Not that he saw them on an everyday basis, just seen them pictured on the big screen in a movie theater. To the left, no more than an inch away from the handle, was a scanner.
The man's boots clanked no more as he stepped onto hard cement, slick with some kind of dew. The boots' soles glimmered in the bright halogen lights as the liquid ran while the guy walked for the scanner. His head dipped at the neck, and the large, black rests nearly swallowed his head as the machine chirped and bleated--
--And something clunked, something large and heavy, that caused the impassive door to jerk a bit loose.
"Access granted," the neck made a little *pop* as the olive man angled it a bit, "as usual. Follow me please, and stick close."
He held his SMG close to his side at the ready, and he pushed a lump back down his neck as he followed the man through.
"What happens if I don't?" he asked--and two men, very *large* men swooped in on him from the flanks. The tanned, brushy faces were expressionless, and the jaw on the left one moved in a circular fashion, a cross-bite like a cow munching on its own cud.
"That happens." The scarred man turned his head a bit to the back, and he could barely make out a sliver of scar tissue that gnarled the outskirts of his cheek.
The cud-chewing thug held out his hand expectantly, like a schoolyard bully awaiting his money.
"Gun, please." The chewer mumbled--nearly moaning it out.
"Do what he says." The other joined in. "New recruits can't be armed in here."
"Uh. right." He pushed the sling up and over his head, and it slid down to the crook of his arm as the UZI tapped onto the hard floor. The chewer squeezed the sling tightly in his large hand, and he worked it over his head.
"Don't worry." The scarred man said flatly, as reassuring as it got. "You'll get it back."
The men moved back, into their foldout chairs that flanked the door, their bull-pup rifles at a lax ready on their forearms. The man walked on leisurely on as Ben had just been able to move his legs again.
"Man.!" his exhale was like a breeze. "With this entourage, you guys look like you're preparing for war."
The man brought his boots together, tightly together as he turned his head back a bit.
"What did you say?" his voice dropped to a bulldog's growl.
His eyes glanced nervously around the corridor, "War.?"
The back of the man's dark head became a blur, his boots screeching on the moist pavement as he spun quickly around--and Ben's blood dropped a few degrees as his eyes ran over that scar. The gnarled mounds of tightly wrinkled flesh consumed half of his face, his lips, nose and brow. Yet the dark, unmoving eyes were untouched by the flames, beaming the dark emptiness of the darkened heart with such power that made his nearly stop.
"Say that one more time, son." The man's twisted lips twitched.
"War." he swallowed.
"For well over two thousand years, we have been at war." The man leaned into his face, and he could feel the hot, angered breath wisp over his features. "We've been hated, murdered, butchered, toasted, gassed, and nearly have been slaughtered five different times since '48! And I don't know what planet you, or the rest of those good-for-nothing hypocrites have been on, but we're still at war!"
"But--I wouldn't go that far--!" he leaned back and away.
"I used to think that same way too." His cold, dead eyes narrowed. "I thought that dialogue and diplomacy could solve anything. I even made friends with one litter of them. But look where that got me. and my friends."
That scar was like a memorial to the man, he thought, to all the men and women lost in the on-going war that had been raging in his head since that mine skidded under his convoy. There was no solace, no closure for them; they who are about to die.
"Our way of life has been fighting since YHWH had given us this slab of dirt, Ben." The man mumbled. "So don't lecture anyone here on war. Got it?"
"Uh." he blinked before he found his neck muscles for a nod. "Yes sir!"
"Good." The man angled his neck condescendingly. "Now. be a good soldier, and let's continue our tour, shall we?"
His back went stiffer than a board as he stood up straight. "Yes sir!"
"Good." The man shunned him, his back facing him again. "Let's go."
***
Shia let out a deep sigh of relief, and the gentle cold soaked through his BDU as he laid his back against the Hummer. Somehow, he had finally lost that freak of nature somewhere in networked maze of corridors and tunnels, leaving its giant claw snatching at his dust as it wheeled for him on its tracks. The screaming--oh how it made his very balls recede into his body, inch by inch at the sound of squawking, rabid penguin.
"Watch the paintjob!" A gruff, growling voice barked. "The guys slapped it on yesterday."
"Oh--!" with a grunt, he sat up, feeling his backbones bend at the disks into a hunch. "Sorry about that, Matt."
"Can you blame me?" Matt said rhetorically. "Not my fault I want to cruise around with a perfect shine, and not with this huge raw spot where the monogram should be."
"Of course." He closed his eyes, and his eyes moved a back into the sockets a little as his fingers drew over his eyelids. "The logo is everything."
"Don't say, 'of course'!" the voice sternly said. "Say, 'you're damn right'."
"You're damn right." he yawned, and he buried his crown into the palm of his hands.
"What's up with you, all of the sudden?" Matt asked. "Not your usual, upbeat self today. That bullet giving you trouble again?"
"Nah." he shook his head. "Not much trouble. I'm a little bummed."
"From what?"
"The fact that the Major's having everyone pulling the graveyard shift tonight." He weakly explained. "Over that stupid plane I shot down. Our teams discovered some kind of payload while we were salvaging for parts, and Uzi's worried about retaliation for the missile attack."
"Anything in particular?" Matt asked.
"Every available person manning the flak guns and the new missile batteries, making sure that the military doesn't try anything else." He mumbled grudgingly. "Killing my dinner plans in the frigging process!"
"Robin?"
"Yep." He frowned. "Going to have special night too. No work, no band practices! It's just her and me for the whole night. Even my band got a gig at a swank hotel up in Tel Aviv this evening. But can I play my hunk of brass? No--*hell* no!"
"Charming." Matt affirmed. "Kind of like me Sadie. sometime."
A teasing smirk slowly crawled across his lips. He nearly found himself flat on the floor, chin first as he turned around and pushed himself to his feet simultaneously. He pushed his arms through the sheathed window, letting them drape inside the cabin by the elbow as he tiredly gazed at the bright green light in the center console.
"What are talking about?" he smirked weakly. "You never even met the thing! I don't think it even knows you exist."
"I put the word on the street!" the bars and lines on the readout fluctuated, jerking erratically at the sound of a stressed syllable and word. "There's a new hotrod on the road, and it's looking for love!"
"More like your sister." he looked away in thought, "brother. counterpart--whatever you call it. You two are basically the same design-- "
"What's my name, Shia?" the speakers vibrated with such frequency as the voice growled.
"Is this a trick question?" his brow perked.
"Its MAT--Shia--MAT!" the bars reached their glass ceiling, and the acute angles took the lines to the highest peaks on the readout. "Mobile Automated Turret! MAT!"
"But can the rest of us call you Sadie?" his lips pressed together, and his cheeks bulged with small pockets of air as he bit back a chuckle.
"Just because you guys were too damn lazy to rewrite the source codes and slapped another voice on me, doesn't make her and I the same damn thing!" Matt exclaimed. "I'm a lover; not just a wheelman!"
"Not from what I understand." He shook his head. "Since you both came from the same damn codes."
"Pf." Matt dismissed. "Sadie can't live like I can! She can't see past even the simplest of strange operations, just sees them as bugs or glitches in her processing power that her programmer needs to tackle. Not me--*oh* no! I embrace the fluctuations my NPU can't compute. I don't just know about them--I live them! Shall I even say. *love* them?"
"Well." the curly hair atop his head shifted as he angled his head, shrugging all the while, "you just did, technically."
"Well. yeah!" the Hummer agreed. "If you want to get all technical about it."
"Technically," his arms dropped back onto the tip of the sheathed window, folding on each other as he went in for a lean, "you'd be talking smack out of a paratrooper bicycle if old man Senior didn't pony up the cash for an upgrade."
"Don't get smart with me, boy!" the AI growled--and something whirred and buzzed nearby, like hydraulic lifts in the midst of their operations. It started from the back of the Hummer, growing a bit softer as the resonance inched its way up--and he could see a piece of cloth roll its self up.
"Holy cow.!" his heart beat quickly in his ears-- --And out came a huge monster from the depths of the cabin, its hard, angled body boxy and cumbersome. That dark, glassy eye shifted its endless gaze towards him as it pointed its steely, rifled nose at him precisely. His legs became cement, pushing a thick wad back down his throat as something clacked beneath that olive, plastic skin.
"BOOM!" Matt exclaimed loudly, almost proudly. "You're dead, Mr. Bonnet! They don't call me the MAT for nothing!"
He nearly fell on his butt, if the feeling hadn't returned to his wobbly legs.
"W--where the heck did you get that?" he stuttered as he fell back a step.
"Courtesy of your friend, the Commandant." The tone fluctuated erratically. The sounds pulsated out of the speakers, as if the very car itself was laughing. "Scared the crap out of you, didn't you? And let me tell you this SWARM system is *way* better than that other stuff the old model's got! Like to see her blast me with that laser after the MK19 get through with it!"
"Cripes, man.!" he breathed. "Just don't use it in here!"
"Do I look like an idiot to you, kid?" the vehicle rumbled. "Of course not! Not with all those fumes that's been circulating around here! Damn oil tanks. And would you please get some one to take care of that rust on the catwalks! Patch is spreading faster than wildfire."
"I'll get someone on it." He nodded, yet his eyes never left the unflinching gaze of the large barrel. There was a whirr nearby, the whispering sound a crescendo, and his blood quickened in his veins, as it seemed to sigh from all over the spacious arsenal. "Now could you-- *please*--put that thing down?"
"On one condition, Shia."
"What?" his eyes darted nervously around, hair erecting on the back of his neck as that whirr drew close uncomfortably. He snorted at the stench of foul, stagnant air that swirled in his nose as a gentle, warm breeze pressed into his back.
"Look behind you." The machine said simply, as if nothing was wrong at all. The world turned slowly around as he moved a foot behind the other, pivoting in slow motion, eyes capturing all that he turned his back to--
--Before that hideous, disgusting visage of that freak pushed into his face. The foul stench that followed it poisoned his nose while his heart pumped like it had never had pumped before. The bloodied front teeth, he could see through the scarred hair lip, became even more apparent as the thing creaked open its gaping dirty maw, drawing in air like great beast from days of yore.
And everything went black as he collapsed to the floor in a fit of screaming terror, writhing on the floor like a dying mouse, faintly feeling the wet cement scratch at his face. Yet through his girly, whinny cry, he could hear the distinct voice of the Major as he curled into a tight ball, before everything went completely dark.
"Ah. I *NEVER* get tired of that!" it said with an eerie, joyful strictness. "Punk!"
The F-15 was no more; bits and pieces of jet were strewn across the desert's shifting sands like rocks. The warm, sandy colors of the plane were smoked to a crispy brown, a charred black almost. He could barely make out the points of the blue star, scorched considerably beyond recognition. Vapors of whatnot steamed into the blue sky in a tower of black, pluming smoke; the sun itself moving and shifting through the heated, smoky veil in an angry red.
*Amazing what a SAM can do! *
Shia was in awe at the sheer destruction that had befallen the plane, the very destruction he had ensued personally. He could still see wisps of the vapor trail the missile had left. Over a 30-million dollar plane, which took months to build was gone--charred toast in an instant. The low flyer came at the convoy, easing its speed off a tic as if to drop a payload. But a fiery explosion quickly burst from the afterburners, small at first, before the swirling, burning clouds overtook the jet completely, all at the simple twist of the key and a push of a button.
"Sergeant!" he called out loudly. The man jogged over to him with a wave of his hand, jumping the twisted hurdles of scrap on his way. A small cloud of dust kicked up, quickly dissipating into the warm air in a plume. "What have we got here?"
"An F-15, Sir!" the man quickly said. "One of the IAF fighters, if I'm not mistaken."
"I can see that." He rolled his eyes. "But what's it doing out in the Negev? A bombing run?"
"Couldn't tell you, Sir." The soldier shook his head. "Possibly reconnaissance, since we can't find much ordinance anywhere. But even that's speculation."
"No matter." He nodded. "I'm calling headquarters, and asking for assistance. I want every piece of this plane brought to the Organ Grinder facility, every scrap that's salvageable. No one goes near it unless I say."
"What about Commander Drazen?" the soldier asked.
"I'll talk to him myself," he replied, "now get moving. I want our convoy back at the base by sunset!"
"Sir!"
Sand and pebble ground together as the man took off for the larger scraps of the plane, but he turned his head away at a gentle vibration at his pocket. The vibration found a voice, a sweet melodic digitized voice as he wrenched out his cell phone from his vest. The desert breeze hushed the music as his thumb pushed at the button.
"This is Bonnet." He pressed the thin device to his ear.
"Shia?" that quite, warming voice of his beloved whispered into his head. A voice he thought had long departed him ever since he left for the old coot's island villa. "Is that really you, or your troublesome employer?"
"Aw Robin," a warm, gentle smile stretched across his face, "I told you not to call me on the job. And besides which, don't let the Major catch you calling him that. I don't think you'll survive the meeting."
"Bah!" she dismissed. "I'll take my chances with that nut. But are you coming home tonight?"
"I don't really know right now." His smile dropped to a flat line. "Something big just happened, and I don't know what the heck Uzi's going to have the outfit do about it."
"You could always just blow him off, dear." She said simply. "Come on, now. I'll make us a nice dinner.!"
"What are you making?" his lips pulled into a smile again.
"A nice. juicy. steak." She said playfully, egging his belly to disobey. "Kosher meat, of course."
"Can't have blood, can we?"
"No sir." She agreed. "Just like the Torah said. But do you think you can make it home tonight?"
"I don't know yet." He ground the toe of his boot in the dirt, twisting back and forth at the ankle. "But I'll see if we can work something out."
"O.k" her sighing breath sounded like flurry of static in the earpiece. "Just promise me you'll be back sometime this week? I miss you."
"I've been gone for less than two weeks, Rob." He noted casually.
"Hmm.!" her voice was an annoyed growl for a split-second. "That's not my point, is it?"
"Nope." He touched a hand to the belly of his vest, lips pressing tightly together as a sudden pain sharply poked at him. "Hmm--sure isn't! But I got to go now, okay?"
"Okay." She said. "Talk to you later, sweetie. And be careful."
"I will." he coughed. "Take care!"
"Bye." There was a small *click* in his ear, and the phone went silent. He thumbed the button blindly, and he stuffed it into his pocket habitually as he scrambled for his medicine. The ulcer, the bane of his life was always egging him, poking at him at inopportune moments of his day, which the body nearly keeled over from every time.
*The bullet.! Uzi.! One of them will be the end of me, I swear! *
***
Something was up with Ron. Just they way he sat in the passenger seat, his back completely flat against the seat with his legs pressed together and his arms folded tightly across his chest. He hadn't spoken a word since sunrise--a breathtaking spectacle, with creamy peach crawling across the sky as the orange ball crept over the arid, undulating horizon-- and he hadn't complained about his black hole for a stomach since they left the Nile Delta.
"So there I was," Sadie, the team chatterbox, continued with her tall tales of her exploits and journeys, "in the Detroit Auto Show, sitting in my booth, looking pretty while Freeman lived up the fame and glory--*as* usual! Did anyone pay attention to me--the whole reason why we were there-- even for a split-second? I think not!"
"That sounds like it sucks." She replied, but she never took her eyes of Ron. They way he sat like a stone, quiet and unmoving; it really unnerved her.
"I guess it wasn't too bad." The AI continued. "I did happen to meet this really nice car named KITT, sitting in the next booth. He might have been a Pontiac or a Honda, but I couldn't tell from the angle I was parked in. But boy--let me tell you, that posh New York accent of his could really put my RPM on cloud 9000."
"Does Sadie have a crush?" she smirked.
"Hey--he--hey!" Rufus' bucked teeth shined brightly in the mid- morning sun, doing a little dance on the center armrest. "Sadie got a boyfriend--Sadie got a boyfriend! Yep--yep!"
"Watch it, pipsqueak!" the bars on the readout's equalizers reached their peaks. "You could throw my transmission out of gear!"
"Hmm!!" The rodent stuck his whiskers in the air, twitching them haughtily over his frowning lips.
"Sensitive aren't we?" she smirked.
"." The bars flat-lined.
"I'll take that as a yes."
"I'm not in real love, Kim." The car spoke. "Nor could I experience it for myself."
"That's how it works for you, doesn't it?" she slouched. "Sad, isn't it?"
"I wouldn't know sad, even if I was." The AI explained. "The infatuation I experience is nothing more than fluctuations in my Neural Processing Unit. Nothing more than an anomaly in otherwise a mathematical harmony and procession, triggering the onset of an emotion just like would the chemical precursors in your brain."
".Tragic."
"I'll take your word for it, Kim."
*BEEP--BEEP--BEEP--EEP. *
"Hold on a sec." she made a sharp sigh as she reached for the Kimmunicator, rattling carelessly in the driver's side cup holder with that ZIP disk she found in Prague. "Wade-master calling."
"That's okay." The vehicle said. "Just don't drop it on the floor. Doc had the rugs cleaned recently."
"Right." Her screen flicked on in a veil of static instantly. The snow flashed and flickered, disappearing into a blue-gray painted room with more monitors than she could have counted. "What you got, Wade?"
"Nothing much." The portly kid smiled. "I just got the Kimmunicator satellite in Israeli airspace, with a little help from Barbie-doll of course."
"Of course." she rolled her eyes. "Can live with her, can't kill her either."
"I know." The boy nodded. "But my hands are still tied over here, courtesy of our 'friends' at the State Department. So essentially, I'm here for morale support."
"Anything else you *can* do?" she asked.
"Well." the boy scratched his double chin, "anything you'd like me to run on Google?"
"Oh please!" the vehicle exclaimed. "Google!? Don't make my gas flow back up!"
"I see you made it to your dead drop without incident." The Webmaster yawned.
"Yeah." She nodded. "We're a few good hours away from the border at the Gaza Strip."
"Good." He nodded. "And you should know that you now have a direct link-up with Yune's laptop computer at the Tel Aviv hotel, via the Kimmunicator. Feel free to contact him anytime, and vise-versa, as long as you have the PDA with you at all times."
"How'd they get past our encryptions?"
"It's all in the card." A tired frown pulled his thin lips. "And Kim?"
"Yeah Wade?"
"Tell Barbie-doll to pull her hackers off my network!" he yelled.
"Oh." she glanced away, "eh--yeah!"
"Good." He yawned. "Call me back later. when the sun shows its face around these parts."
"Gotcha." She thumbed the button--and Wade disappeared in a veil of flickering snow, just before the tiny LCD went black. The PDA danced its jerky, rattling tango with the disk as she dropped it back in the cup holder. "Man--I hate time differences."
"Kim," the vehicle said calmly, "there's something I've got to tell you about."
"Go ahead." Leather squelched beneath as she sat back up. "I'm used to things going wrong."
"A few months prior to this, some hacker creep broke into our computer systems and stole the blueprints for the SADI system." The SUV explained. "We didn't think too much of it when we called the cops, but there's been rumors circulating around the Middle East over a SADI knockoff."
"And given our situation," she smirked, "this was perfect timing."
"Exactly!" the SUV replied. "Mutually Beneficial. I'll help you with your transportation problems, and you can help me search for my little black market item."
"Deal." She nodded.
"All right." Through the bright sun, Kim could see the every inch of the 4X4 resonate that shifting, pale glow. "Look like you're busy, Kim. I'm shifting paintjobs for something more appropriate."
Her fingers wrapped around the glowing steering wheel at three-and- nine, and she felt the sole of her shoe touch on the floor-mounted pedal.
"Right." Her arms moved easily to the vehicle's movements.
"Buckle up, you two." Sadie warned firmly. "Because this is going to be a bumpy ride."
***
The empty bottle of scopolamine hydrobromide let out a hollow clatter on the floor, rolling in a skewed semi-circle before the bottle came to a halt. Uzi felt like his head was swimming again, and the tablets he downed didn't seem to be acting at all. The Grinder's medical staff was fresh out of motion sickness medication. And the recent news of his brother's passing didn't help his mood either.
"I don't understand." the stainless steel walls of his quarters were moving and shifting oddly all around, the light playing off them in strange reflections, "he was doing so well. *uh*. in recovery! What the fuck went wrong!?"
The stubble scraped at the pads of his fingertips, as they ran slickly across the smoothed shrapnel stuck in his head. The construction of the medical wing had just been underway a few hours ago, and a faint smirk crawled across his gullied face as he had the machinists sharpen his brand new weapon.
--The multi-line phone let out a piercing bleat, its inner workings clicking and clacking. There was a quiet whir and small crackle of static, as if a thin piece of tape was being drawn over a roller of some kind during a recording.
"I know you're there, Uzi.!" a voice spoke in his native language, a familiar voice like his own, yet with a strange *machine*-like quality. "I think those quarters of yours are oh-so stylish, and I think your head will look really good impaled upon that ceiling fan you've got!"
His heart quickened in record time, and he felt like his breakfast was working up his neck all on its own.
"Oh." he groaned. "Who--who is this?"
"Do you like robots, U?" he heard fluctuations in the static, as if the man was snickering at the other end. "I know you love robots! Especially how one nearly took your guts out and draped them on curtain rods like."
The spinning world took its time as his eyes took a lap in his head. "Curtains.?" he yawned.
"Uh. yeah!" the machine agreed--and the phone clicked, and the dial tone hummed like a flat line on an EKG.
He stumbled to his wobbly feet, nearly kissing the hard carpet as his head warbled back on his shoulders. Slowly, he reached for the phone on his end table, fingers stumbling on the case in a dizzied stupor. The hand fell on its thumb side, crushing the call-return button into the case--
--And there was pulsating beeping from the other side of his door, a pulsating bleat that lasted approximately two seconds before a steady pause. And then it bleated again. and again.
*Like the POS is right at my door! *
The end table's drawer scraped open, and his hand tumbled off of the tabletop and into the drawer. Faintly, he could feel the firm, plastic grip of his Desert Eagle underneath his shaky hand. His thumb pried under the gun, inclining it up, the web at his saddle joint pressing against the back as his fingers weakly wrapped around the grip at the front.
The drawer banged and rattled on the floor as he wrenched his hand away from the table, and he limped for the door on wobbly legs. The muzzle bobbed and weaved in his grasp, as the door steadied in his sight. His neck firmed, and he pushed his creeping breakfast back down as he reached from the door, metal fingers gracing the shiny knob--
--*Bang! *--
--And his butt met the cold floor as the door smacked him silly on its arc. His pistol skittered away, rubbing the fibers of the carpet the wrong way as it scraped out of his reach. The door let out another *bang* when it met the adjacent wall, and towering before him stood a creature the likes he had never seen.
His face! The creature had *his* face--a burnt, scarred face that made his own visage look like paper cuts. The jaw was not his own, but a squared piece of metal, flared at the edges, fashioned to resemble one yet with a tempering line right where the metal angled toward its toothy mouth. The horrible, scarred body had no arm on the right of flesh, but of metal. It was like a claw he had seen in the scrap yards, smaller, and welded straight onto the shoulder. And wheels! As YHWH as his witness, the thing had wheels--tank tracks at the very bottom of his waist!
For one of the few times in his life, he screamed!
And the creature let out a scream, bellowing over his own in a terrible, blaring yelp. That tongue was pinned down set in the jaw, flailing and thrashing at him pointedly, the screws--*screws* keeping it in place. Saliva pooled and sloshed around uncontrollably like tidal waves on the shoreline.
He screamed louder!
And it screamed louder, and the tracks creaked sharply as it wheeled itself inside!
"Cripes, Bro!" the being said in that machine like voice, and its hazel eyes lit up with subtle glee. "You're *so* JUMPY!"
"Galil.?" he caught his breath, breathing it in deeply and letting it sit in his lungs for a bit. "What. the hell man!? The guys told me you died!"
"Don't you just *LOVE* a good practical joke, Bro?" the mangled man said rhetorically. "It just makes your day so much more. better! I don't know how else to describe it!"
"You call that torture a JOKE?" he yelled. "You nearly gave me a heart attack!"
"Ah." the thing combed its flesh hand through the thin strands of long hair- the mere testimony of that full, dark mullet he and the rest of the crew once knew--proudly, "my work here is done."
"What the hell happened to you, anyway?" he shook his head vigorously, briefly. "An arson disaster at a Skynyrd concert? Or maybe you just got a little too happy with a bottle of kerosene?"
"I don't know." Galil's yawn was like a digitized screech from a strangled raven.
"Ugh.!" he blinked. "Some yawn you got there."
"It's the voice actuator." The brother said. "Sometimes it can't get the voice right."
"Not that it means a whole lot." He smirked. "People don't really want to know someone that looks like Aqua-man, sweltering on Acid for six months."
The shadow of his brother cocked an eyebrow, what was salvageable of it. Fine whiskers moved up and down, waving gently in the still air at the whim of the gnarled brow.
"I think I should call you Arthur from now on." He laughed.
"What did you expect?" the claw angled a bit as the thing shrugged. "The quacks you got only had a damn robot to work with! Which reminds me.!"
"Shia?"
"Exactly!"
"He should be back in a few minutes with that scrap metal I told him to get." He yawned--and his brother shrank by a couple of feet as he pushed himself back on firm legs. His bones moved back into place as he stretched completely out. "And pieces of downed plane. It's good to have you back, man. what's left of you, anyway."
"Feeling's mutual." The short man yawned. "And just call me the 'tank-man' if you want."
"Of course." He shrugged, and he glanced at hands the watch fastened to his wrist. "And by my watch, Shia should just be arriving with that scrap."
The brother smiled with a prankster's joy. "Goodie-goodie." his twisted features pulled into a smirk. "All the better for me!"
"Indeed."
A pair of the four tank tracks creaked their bands backwards, the hum of the motors echoing loudly in his tiny room as Galil turned around. All four bands rolled toward him as the brother barely wheeled himself through the doorway, the carriage for his waist clanging and clattering over the door's stripping as if it were a speed bump. Carefully the mangled man turned the corner--but the sounds of his motors hummed a different tune as he unexpectedly backed up, just barely in sight through the doorway.
"And Aqua-man is the worst superhero ever!" the 'tank-man' retorted, and treated him to the sound of his motors, whirring faintly down the corridor.
Uzi shook his head. "*Shmuck*!" he yawned.
***
"Benjamin Cross!" the scarred man with his olive-clad back towards him called. The holler seemed to have resounded from every which direction in the open, cavernous room. "Welcome to the VSA headquarters: The Organ Grinder!"
The grated catwalk nosily clanked underfoot as the scarred man took his first steps on, climbing up a small flight of diamond-sheet steps with large poles for banisters. Ben gazed slowly around the bright, dank grotto, with nothing to see but an array of wide, slatted catwalks that the fumes of the huge oil vats below flowed through like water. Stagnant water, it smelled like, a bittersweet stench that made him want to loose his early lunch.
"Like the smell?" the scarred man's flat, dull voice numbed his ears from all around. "You'll get used to it. sometime."
"Ugh.!" he coughed. "This is the whole damn facility? It looks more like a refinery!"
"Because this is a refinery." The man walked on, gesturing half heartedly here and there for simple formality. "The crude oil we tap into comes into these vats, where the various oil derivatives are extracted in our own little refinery a level below. This section of the facility is the lifeblood of our force. If we didn't have it, we were pretty much finished from the get-go."
"When did you get this stuff?" he asked.
"A few days ago." he yawned. "When we put our newfound funds and *income* to good use. And we're currently stockpiling some ground equipment, and a whole lot of scrap material."
His brow perked with interest. "Scrap metal?" he said. "What for?"
"Couldn't tell you." The man shrugged. "But the Major's been stockpiling on the stuff since we got our first deposit. Word has it that he's got some new fangled project in the works, when he isn't focused on getting this base up and running."
"Right." He nodded.
The scarred man came to a large, heavy door, bolted to the wall by some heavy-duty hinges with a thick window the size of a small plank. A door, he typically saw, that housed such equipment ranging from small arms to chemical weapons. Not that he saw them on an everyday basis, just seen them pictured on the big screen in a movie theater. To the left, no more than an inch away from the handle, was a scanner.
The man's boots clanked no more as he stepped onto hard cement, slick with some kind of dew. The boots' soles glimmered in the bright halogen lights as the liquid ran while the guy walked for the scanner. His head dipped at the neck, and the large, black rests nearly swallowed his head as the machine chirped and bleated--
--And something clunked, something large and heavy, that caused the impassive door to jerk a bit loose.
"Access granted," the neck made a little *pop* as the olive man angled it a bit, "as usual. Follow me please, and stick close."
He held his SMG close to his side at the ready, and he pushed a lump back down his neck as he followed the man through.
"What happens if I don't?" he asked--and two men, very *large* men swooped in on him from the flanks. The tanned, brushy faces were expressionless, and the jaw on the left one moved in a circular fashion, a cross-bite like a cow munching on its own cud.
"That happens." The scarred man turned his head a bit to the back, and he could barely make out a sliver of scar tissue that gnarled the outskirts of his cheek.
The cud-chewing thug held out his hand expectantly, like a schoolyard bully awaiting his money.
"Gun, please." The chewer mumbled--nearly moaning it out.
"Do what he says." The other joined in. "New recruits can't be armed in here."
"Uh. right." He pushed the sling up and over his head, and it slid down to the crook of his arm as the UZI tapped onto the hard floor. The chewer squeezed the sling tightly in his large hand, and he worked it over his head.
"Don't worry." The scarred man said flatly, as reassuring as it got. "You'll get it back."
The men moved back, into their foldout chairs that flanked the door, their bull-pup rifles at a lax ready on their forearms. The man walked on leisurely on as Ben had just been able to move his legs again.
"Man.!" his exhale was like a breeze. "With this entourage, you guys look like you're preparing for war."
The man brought his boots together, tightly together as he turned his head back a bit.
"What did you say?" his voice dropped to a bulldog's growl.
His eyes glanced nervously around the corridor, "War.?"
The back of the man's dark head became a blur, his boots screeching on the moist pavement as he spun quickly around--and Ben's blood dropped a few degrees as his eyes ran over that scar. The gnarled mounds of tightly wrinkled flesh consumed half of his face, his lips, nose and brow. Yet the dark, unmoving eyes were untouched by the flames, beaming the dark emptiness of the darkened heart with such power that made his nearly stop.
"Say that one more time, son." The man's twisted lips twitched.
"War." he swallowed.
"For well over two thousand years, we have been at war." The man leaned into his face, and he could feel the hot, angered breath wisp over his features. "We've been hated, murdered, butchered, toasted, gassed, and nearly have been slaughtered five different times since '48! And I don't know what planet you, or the rest of those good-for-nothing hypocrites have been on, but we're still at war!"
"But--I wouldn't go that far--!" he leaned back and away.
"I used to think that same way too." His cold, dead eyes narrowed. "I thought that dialogue and diplomacy could solve anything. I even made friends with one litter of them. But look where that got me. and my friends."
That scar was like a memorial to the man, he thought, to all the men and women lost in the on-going war that had been raging in his head since that mine skidded under his convoy. There was no solace, no closure for them; they who are about to die.
"Our way of life has been fighting since YHWH had given us this slab of dirt, Ben." The man mumbled. "So don't lecture anyone here on war. Got it?"
"Uh." he blinked before he found his neck muscles for a nod. "Yes sir!"
"Good." The man angled his neck condescendingly. "Now. be a good soldier, and let's continue our tour, shall we?"
His back went stiffer than a board as he stood up straight. "Yes sir!"
"Good." The man shunned him, his back facing him again. "Let's go."
***
Shia let out a deep sigh of relief, and the gentle cold soaked through his BDU as he laid his back against the Hummer. Somehow, he had finally lost that freak of nature somewhere in networked maze of corridors and tunnels, leaving its giant claw snatching at his dust as it wheeled for him on its tracks. The screaming--oh how it made his very balls recede into his body, inch by inch at the sound of squawking, rabid penguin.
"Watch the paintjob!" A gruff, growling voice barked. "The guys slapped it on yesterday."
"Oh--!" with a grunt, he sat up, feeling his backbones bend at the disks into a hunch. "Sorry about that, Matt."
"Can you blame me?" Matt said rhetorically. "Not my fault I want to cruise around with a perfect shine, and not with this huge raw spot where the monogram should be."
"Of course." He closed his eyes, and his eyes moved a back into the sockets a little as his fingers drew over his eyelids. "The logo is everything."
"Don't say, 'of course'!" the voice sternly said. "Say, 'you're damn right'."
"You're damn right." he yawned, and he buried his crown into the palm of his hands.
"What's up with you, all of the sudden?" Matt asked. "Not your usual, upbeat self today. That bullet giving you trouble again?"
"Nah." he shook his head. "Not much trouble. I'm a little bummed."
"From what?"
"The fact that the Major's having everyone pulling the graveyard shift tonight." He weakly explained. "Over that stupid plane I shot down. Our teams discovered some kind of payload while we were salvaging for parts, and Uzi's worried about retaliation for the missile attack."
"Anything in particular?" Matt asked.
"Every available person manning the flak guns and the new missile batteries, making sure that the military doesn't try anything else." He mumbled grudgingly. "Killing my dinner plans in the frigging process!"
"Robin?"
"Yep." He frowned. "Going to have special night too. No work, no band practices! It's just her and me for the whole night. Even my band got a gig at a swank hotel up in Tel Aviv this evening. But can I play my hunk of brass? No--*hell* no!"
"Charming." Matt affirmed. "Kind of like me Sadie. sometime."
A teasing smirk slowly crawled across his lips. He nearly found himself flat on the floor, chin first as he turned around and pushed himself to his feet simultaneously. He pushed his arms through the sheathed window, letting them drape inside the cabin by the elbow as he tiredly gazed at the bright green light in the center console.
"What are talking about?" he smirked weakly. "You never even met the thing! I don't think it even knows you exist."
"I put the word on the street!" the bars and lines on the readout fluctuated, jerking erratically at the sound of a stressed syllable and word. "There's a new hotrod on the road, and it's looking for love!"
"More like your sister." he looked away in thought, "brother. counterpart--whatever you call it. You two are basically the same design-- "
"What's my name, Shia?" the speakers vibrated with such frequency as the voice growled.
"Is this a trick question?" his brow perked.
"Its MAT--Shia--MAT!" the bars reached their glass ceiling, and the acute angles took the lines to the highest peaks on the readout. "Mobile Automated Turret! MAT!"
"But can the rest of us call you Sadie?" his lips pressed together, and his cheeks bulged with small pockets of air as he bit back a chuckle.
"Just because you guys were too damn lazy to rewrite the source codes and slapped another voice on me, doesn't make her and I the same damn thing!" Matt exclaimed. "I'm a lover; not just a wheelman!"
"Not from what I understand." He shook his head. "Since you both came from the same damn codes."
"Pf." Matt dismissed. "Sadie can't live like I can! She can't see past even the simplest of strange operations, just sees them as bugs or glitches in her processing power that her programmer needs to tackle. Not me--*oh* no! I embrace the fluctuations my NPU can't compute. I don't just know about them--I live them! Shall I even say. *love* them?"
"Well." the curly hair atop his head shifted as he angled his head, shrugging all the while, "you just did, technically."
"Well. yeah!" the Hummer agreed. "If you want to get all technical about it."
"Technically," his arms dropped back onto the tip of the sheathed window, folding on each other as he went in for a lean, "you'd be talking smack out of a paratrooper bicycle if old man Senior didn't pony up the cash for an upgrade."
"Don't get smart with me, boy!" the AI growled--and something whirred and buzzed nearby, like hydraulic lifts in the midst of their operations. It started from the back of the Hummer, growing a bit softer as the resonance inched its way up--and he could see a piece of cloth roll its self up.
"Holy cow.!" his heart beat quickly in his ears-- --And out came a huge monster from the depths of the cabin, its hard, angled body boxy and cumbersome. That dark, glassy eye shifted its endless gaze towards him as it pointed its steely, rifled nose at him precisely. His legs became cement, pushing a thick wad back down his throat as something clacked beneath that olive, plastic skin.
"BOOM!" Matt exclaimed loudly, almost proudly. "You're dead, Mr. Bonnet! They don't call me the MAT for nothing!"
He nearly fell on his butt, if the feeling hadn't returned to his wobbly legs.
"W--where the heck did you get that?" he stuttered as he fell back a step.
"Courtesy of your friend, the Commandant." The tone fluctuated erratically. The sounds pulsated out of the speakers, as if the very car itself was laughing. "Scared the crap out of you, didn't you? And let me tell you this SWARM system is *way* better than that other stuff the old model's got! Like to see her blast me with that laser after the MK19 get through with it!"
"Cripes, man.!" he breathed. "Just don't use it in here!"
"Do I look like an idiot to you, kid?" the vehicle rumbled. "Of course not! Not with all those fumes that's been circulating around here! Damn oil tanks. And would you please get some one to take care of that rust on the catwalks! Patch is spreading faster than wildfire."
"I'll get someone on it." He nodded, yet his eyes never left the unflinching gaze of the large barrel. There was a whirr nearby, the whispering sound a crescendo, and his blood quickened in his veins, as it seemed to sigh from all over the spacious arsenal. "Now could you-- *please*--put that thing down?"
"On one condition, Shia."
"What?" his eyes darted nervously around, hair erecting on the back of his neck as that whirr drew close uncomfortably. He snorted at the stench of foul, stagnant air that swirled in his nose as a gentle, warm breeze pressed into his back.
"Look behind you." The machine said simply, as if nothing was wrong at all. The world turned slowly around as he moved a foot behind the other, pivoting in slow motion, eyes capturing all that he turned his back to--
--Before that hideous, disgusting visage of that freak pushed into his face. The foul stench that followed it poisoned his nose while his heart pumped like it had never had pumped before. The bloodied front teeth, he could see through the scarred hair lip, became even more apparent as the thing creaked open its gaping dirty maw, drawing in air like great beast from days of yore.
And everything went black as he collapsed to the floor in a fit of screaming terror, writhing on the floor like a dying mouse, faintly feeling the wet cement scratch at his face. Yet through his girly, whinny cry, he could hear the distinct voice of the Major as he curled into a tight ball, before everything went completely dark.
"Ah. I *NEVER* get tired of that!" it said with an eerie, joyful strictness. "Punk!"