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In Which I Am Bored, and Alice Suffers
I'm somewhat bored, which means that it's time to seek attention by attempting to inflame my FL. I would like to think that I do this simply because I wish to enlighten everyone's day, or at least make it lighter, but secretly I think that I'm just an asshole.
Astute people have probably already commented on Japan's inspection of older folk (between the ages of 40 and 74), and their attempts to penalize them through their employers if their waists grow beyond the state-mandated limit (33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women), in an attempt to control obesity (which visual examination reveals effects about fifteen Japanese who are not sumo wrestlers).
This is some source of amusement at work, because ever since a brief trip to Japan, Alice has been having a bit of a problem with her weight. She's five-foot-six, wears a US size four dress (or so she claims - I've certainly never seen her in one), and currently weighs approximately three-quarters of a ton.
"You know," I said today, looking off the side of the building at the impact crater she made after jumping exuberantly on the fire escape of a third-floor apartment, "We're going to have to do something about that."
"I hear that reinforced concrete is cheap these days," Daren remarked.
"That's not quite what I meant."
"It's the fucking Japanese," Gate was telling me, "They make abso-fucking-loutely everything out of this stupid iridium-osmium alloy. It's dense as hell. Sure, she's practically invulnerable to killer robots, or angry bears, or brats with lasers, but she falls through the floor all the fucking time."
Gate is actually named Emmanuel, but has picked up the nickname partially because he comes from San Francisco (and hence is near the Golden Gate), and partially because, to hold up the SF stereotype, he claims to be gay (there's significant evidence that he actually might be bisexual - but the nickname, whose origin is too diffuse to recount here, stuck). To further perpetuate the stereotype, he is slightly effeminate, slim, a bit dainty looking, with long flowing hair. His only other outstanding traits are that he swears like a sailor, and that he can build a motorcycle out of just about anything (including a Hot Wheels motorway and a PB&J sandwich). His ability to ride said motorcycles is somewhat less established, seeing as how he's crashed seventeen of them this year already (five of the crashes involved gunning the engine to jump the bike over exploding cars), but since he's walked away from all of them, perhaps he can count as skilled. Sometimes he punches bricks for fun.
"Now, this wouldn't be such a goddamn problem if someone," and here he glared very fiercely at the fidgeting member of our conversation, "would remember to keep her goddamn anti-gravity on."
"Sorry," Alice looked a bit sheepish, "I forgot."
"You've been doing that a lot lately," I said.
"Look, even cyborgs forget sometimes," she grumbled.
"You've caused sixty-five thousand dollars of property damage already today," I pointed out, "and that's even counting the Hummer you totaled as community service."
"He shouldn't have parked it under a balcony," she complained.
"You shouldn't have expected an iron railing to support your weight."
"They shouldn't have made such a crappy railing."
"And I can't believe I'm having this conversation," I finally cut it off. Some things should die young.
"Will you let me up now?" she asked. Gate's examination bed had hefty metal shackles to keep her in position. He claimed this was to limit the possibility of him accidentally triggering a dangerous muscle reaction, but I suspect it was mostly to keep her out from underfoot while he adjusted her circuits.
"That depends, will you remember to keep the anti-gravity on?"
"Maybe," she said.
"Then maybe I'll let you up," Gate growled.
"Okay, fine, I will. Now let me up, or else."
"Somebody wants her pain circuits re-aligned," Gate muttered, but let her up anyway.
"Why do you weigh so much anyway? You were barely twelve hundred pounds before you went to Japan." I asked as the two of us went down the hallway from Gate's lab back to the main core of the building.
"Because they had all this cool new stuff," she told me.
"Like what?"
Her right arm straightened and suddenly sprouted little blue flames that began to race around it like cars on a track, filling the air with a very loud, and very familiar noise.
"That appears to be a plasma chainsaw," I said.
"Yes it is," she agreed.
"But if it's a plasma chainsaw, then why does it sound like the old gas guzzler that we use on zombies?"
The sound cut off, even as the chainsaw kept going. "Oh, that's just a sound file they give you that I can play over my speakers. It's for the effect."
"So it took them hundreds of pounds to give you a chainsaw?"
"Well no. Not a chainsaw. More like a whole bunch of chainsaws. I have an arm chainsaw, a leg chainsaw, a fingernail chainsaw, even chainsaw teeth. And look, a Swiss Army knife with a chainsaw attachment."
I took that and turned it over in my hand. It appeared to actually be a Swiss Army knife with a chainsaw attachment involved. I had not seen her this happy since she had overloaded on shotguns.
"And the king of it all is this," she said, and a massive cannon materialized over her shoulder.
Now, let me point out here that I have no idea why she keeps getting this stuff attached to her body. She is, after all, connected to what is basically her own pocket dimension, in which she stores more weapons than an armored division, and probably more firepower than the entire US military, in large, unwieldy packages. I have seen her materialize, at moment's notice, everything from a katana, to a rocket launcher, to a state-of-the-art surface-to-orbit laser array into her itchy little hands. But I hadn't seen anything quite like the huge-mouthed gaping cannon she was now pointing in my direction.
"All right, I'll bite," I said. "What is it?"
"It's a gun that shoots chainsaws."
I opened my mouth in the vague hope that the appropriate words would choose that moment to arrive and set me free. They did not.
I finally settled for, "That's interesting."
"Do you want me to show you?" she asked.
Memories of the Agora Gatling Gun massacre floating before my eyes, I declined.
"We still have to figure out how to get your weight under control. It was bad enough at twelve hundred pounds, but that extra couple hundred seems to be wreaking havoc with your self-control."
"Maybe I could sign up for those weight loss programs," she mused.
"You don't actually process food," I pointed out.
"I could still try."
"I'm so glad you mentioned that," Charity appeared behind the two of us and put a hand on each of our shoulders.
It is a bad sign when your boss is suddenly behind you. It becomes a worse sign when she evidently feels that she has to sneak up behind you in order to surprise you. That bottoms out into catastrophic at the point when she needs to grab you by the shoulder in order to keep you from running away. I had to resist the urge to hurtle myself out of the window, because I could not break her grip.
"What thankless, ridiculous task may we perform for you now, oh boss one?" I asked.
"You're going to sign up for a weight-loss program," Charity said.
"Okay, we both may need it, but why the sudden interest in our health?" I asked.
"Don't you think you should care for your health?" Charity asked, smiling sweetly.
"Judging by that smile of yours, the best way to care for my health would be to be at home, hiding under my bed."
Charity's smile turned into a frown without passing through any intermediate stages. It was as if she suddenly decided to turn that part of the world upside-down.
"I was referring to what was going to happen to you if you didn't say 'Yes ma'am'."
"Yes ma'am."
"Good. Now there's a new weight loss clinic downtown that I want you to look into. The usual, aimed at women, housewives mostly, upper class. It's become pretty big, pretty fast, and I find that suspicious."
"A weight-loss clinic? In Southern California? What a shocker. Don't tell me that there's going to be sun in the afternoon too," I clapped a hand to my forehead, using up about three years of a normal human being's sarcasm allotment in one sentence.
"Normal weight loss clinics don't make extra money by selling corpses to Vinnie the Shark," Charity replied.
"That's true," I admitted, "Wait, we can make money by selling corpses to Vinnie the Shark?"
"Anyway," Charity is like a freight-train. All attempts to sidetrack her usually end in you being smashed under a very large, very heavy object. "There's something not right about this, and I want you to find out what it is."
"Maybe they're sucking the fat out of their bodies and using it to create a new race of alien beings," Alice exclaimed.
"I thought we were cutting off her access to TV," Charity whispered to me.
"She can pick up TV signals with her brain," I hissed back, "What do you want me to do, lobotomize her?"
"I've considered asking," Charity told me.
“Anyway,” she returned to her louder voice with enough force to keep Alice, who was now absently hopping around the corridor in some imitation of hopscotch, back to attention, “I want you to go and check it out. Oh, and you should take the newbie.”
“Right. And I'm driving,” I forestalled both disaster and instant death.
“Oh,” Alice groaned.
“Hey newbie!” I yelled, as we passed through the office complex, almost running Daren over. He was in the hallway composing poetry again. “You're coming with us.”
“What?” Amanda appeared out of her office, her UC-Berkeley T-shirt fast disappearing behind a hastily donned bullet-proof, magic-proof vest. She was learning about the hazards of the job rather fast. “And when will you stop calling me newbie?”
“I've seen a lot of newbies come and go,” I told her roughly, “I've learned not to bother with their names until they show that they've got what it takes to survive out here in the streets.”
Amanda glared at me, “All right, you've made your obligatory Film Noir remark. So what's the real reason?”
“Because it annoys you,” I told her honestly, as the elevator arrived at the parking garage. Alice attempted to use our temporary inattention to lunge for the driver's side door of the nearest car, but Amanda tackled her before she could get out of the elevator, giving me enough time to get to the car. She might have been new, but nobody was new enough to let Alice actually drive the car.
“I never get to have any fun,” Alice complained from the back seat.
“That's because the rest of us want to live,” I replied, shifting the car into reverse.
Because of budget constraints, we never buy large vehicles. In fact, the Honda Accord that I had chosen, based on its proximity to the elevator, was one of our larger vehicles. This is a bonus in Southern California, where the probability of finding a parking space that can fit your vehicle is inversely proportional to the ability of your vehicle to ram a battleship and actually sink it. Unfortunately, it is never sporty enough or big enough to keep Alice happy.
“You would go a lot faster if you were one lane over,” Alice complained, pouting.
I glanced down out of my window. “Alice, that's on the other side of the road.”
“There's no traffic coming.”
“Yet.”
“I could dodge it,” she said. Which was true. Cyborgs have very good reflexes. She is the only driver I know who has actually made her passengers black out while making a turn.
“Anyway, why are we going to a weight-loss clinic?” Amanda asked.
I explained it to her.
“And how are we going to get in?” she asked.
“The front door?” Alice suggested.
I ignored her. “One of us is going to have a weight problem she's worried about. And I think it's going to be Alice.”
Amanda looked at me out of the corner of her eye, “Alice looks like she weighs about a hundred-ten soaking wet.”
“This is true, but she can weigh whatever she wants. That's going to be a very useful skill if we want to pull any of this off.”
“Well, why not us or-”
“Because neither of us could probably keep a straight face. Besides, Alice really does have a weight problem, and I want to see if they can fix it. And I'm too fat to look like a rich person.”
“Well, I'm the heaviest of us all, by conventional methods,” Amanda replied. “My body-mass index is practically into obese territory.”
I shook my head. This is true. According to her profile, Amanda weighs a lot for her height. About one percent of that is fat. Judging from the way she looks in a swimsuit, if I had punched her in the stomach, I probably would have broken my fist. “You've worked a lot to get that body. Are you willing to take the risk that they might give you something that might actually destroy it?”
“All right, you have a point there.”
None of this, of course mattered. I should not have worried about Alice, because next to the smiling blond woman who met us at the door, she looked fat. Next to the smiling, blond woman who met us at the door, toothpicks are fat. The entry lobby of the building, which was one of those old, brick factories that you sometimes see in old downtowns, with only the interior refurbished, was plastered with posters that probably could have been only a foot wide, and still shown the entirety of the posing model. There were some men mixed in there too. At least, I think there were. It was a bit difficult to tell.
“Right this way please,” she said, leading us through a door and down a pastel-painted hallway.
“I wonder if her leg would break if I kicked it?” Amanda muttered.
I shrugged. How was I supposed to know that?
They weighed Alice, who turned out to weigh about one-twenty today. Apparently, this was extraordinarily bad news, and soon there was a cluster of women hovering about her, clucking disapprovingly. Alice glowed at the attention, literally at one point until I hissed something in her ear. Then came the crowning moment.
“Of course, we can help you with your problem,” the blond woman sounded vapid, but I was not ready to trust that kind of precise absent-mindedness. In her hands she held a blue plastic bottle filled with swishing liquid of some sort. "Our plan involves daily doses of our patented, doctor approved weight-loss formula. It's easy and simple, all you have to do is take a dose a day, and you can eat whatever you want, whenever you want. Here, why don't you take a gulp now?"
She poured a thick blue liquid into a cup and handed it to Alice, who gulped it down in one shot. Then Alice's arm shot out and grabbed the sales representative by the wrist.
"Dragon spleen?" Alice asked. I forgot that she had a spectrographic analyzer built somewhere in that chest cavity of hers, "That's strictly prohibited. Where's your license?"
The sales representative did not answer, being too busy screaming at her broken wrist.
"Er...sorry," Alice looked embarrassed and let go of the hand.
Several of the walls, which had up until this point been covered in posters of beauty queens who appeared to have been crushed in a vice, suddenly turned into doors. Shambling forward, dozens of men and women began to stagger into the light, all looking rather thin, gaunt, and very angry. Many of them had firearms.
"Time to run," I suggested.
The woman nearest to me fired a shot in my direction, and then screamed as the pistol's recoil broke both of her wrists. Out of curiosity, I kicked her gently in the shin, and listened to the crack as it snapped.
"The answer is yes!" I shouted to Amanda as we ran back down the hall we had come from.
"Is that really relevant to anything?" she asked.
"Wait," suddenly Alice stopped. A bullet banged off the wall next to her, but she did not seem to notice, "Why are we running?"
"I dunno," I shrugged, "habit?"
At which point the floor beneath us opened up and dropped us about a floor into something that went squish when we stepped on it. Judging from the sudden wet feel on my legs, and the way that something seemed to be squeezing them gently, like a rogue pool of jelly, it appeared that we were knee-deep in...something. Fortunately, it was far too dark in here to figure out what it actually was.
“Does somebody have a light?” Amanda asked.
“If they do, don't turn it on. I don't want to know what I'm standing in,” I replied.
“Well, it's sticky, whatever it is,” Alice complained.
“So what's going on here?” Amanda asked.
“Let's see. Weight loss, leading to complete degradation of the body's integrity, fragile bone structure, and burning off of muscle. If that's true than what's happening is that they're not losing weight in the normal way. They're burning it to power some sort of spell. Which unfortunately means that after a certain point they reach the final stage and-”
There was a low moan in the darkness.
“-and then what?” Amanda sounded suspicious.
“-they turn into zombies,” I finished.
There was a long pause, followed by another moan and the sound of things splashing somewhere in the distance. A lot of things. Or possibly one thing with a lot of legs.
“I hate zombies,” Amanda said.
“Well, not traditional zombies. More like soulless, but still mostly functional corpses,” I filled in.
“I hate those too.”
“Well then maybe we should think about getting out of here,” I suggested.
“There's a ladder about two meters behind Amanda. It appears to lead out of here,” Alice's voice cut through the darkness.
I turned in her general direction. “You can see in the dark?”
“Of course.”
“Are there really zombies out there?”
The splashing sounds were starting to get closer. “Maybe about a hundred or so.”
“Ah, then we better start climbing.”
Which is easier said then done in pitch darkness. Fortunately, if it was hard for us, as demonstrated by the fact that Alice finally had to pick me up and carry me to the ladder, and nearly bruised my ribs in the process, it was harder for the zombies, who seemed to lack the muscular control needed to stand upright. Then we had to get up the ladder, made slightly disgusting by the fact that whatever we had been standing in was now dripping from Amanda's boots onto my head.
The ladder emerged from a heavy metal door into a dusty room that probably had once been used to assemble sewing machines or something, littered with the detritus of a previous age, and enough dust to cover the entire Smithsonian Institution. I did not care if it emerged in the middle of a cactus greenhouse, as long as I could see what was trying to kill me. Catwalks ran criss-crossing through the upper levels of the building, bathed in light from a few slanted holes in the roof. Below them, a few vat-looking machines bubbled away on the floor, waiting for some minor crook to fall into them and become horribly scarred for life and turn into a homocidal maniac. And at the front of the room was a woman in black who, having avoided the scarred for life part, appeared to have satisfied the homocidal maniac part. She was holding what would be, if it were smaller, considered a Chicago Typewriter. It looked more like a Chicago Telegraph Pole.
“You know, I'm getting tired to people pointing guns at me,” I said.
“It's only happened twice today,” Amanda pointed out.
“Yes, but my weekly average is through the roof.”
“I knew that sooner or later someone was going to come and try and stop me,” the woman at the front appeared to have decided that now was the only time she was going to get to give her evil monologue. “It will be a shame that it comes now, just as I got started, but I suppose it was inevitable. After I clean you three up, I'll be out of here and off to another town, along with my army of zombie servants.”
“You knew somebody would be on to you sooner or later,” Amanda said.
The villainess nodded. “Yes, in retrospect, selling corpses to Vinnie the Shark was probably a mistake.”
Amanda turned to me. “Wait, we can make money selling corpses to Vinnie the Shark?”
“So I hear,” I shrugged.
“Regardless, it's far too late to stop me. I already have what I came for. Do you even have the faintest idea what I've done?”
“Judging by the general smell of the place,” I gave the interior of her factory a cursory glance, “you're using the old Polyglotol will-powered wish-giving spell, probably mixed with a large dilution factor to cut down on effectiveness. The victim takes some and finds that their weight is going down just as fast as they had hoped it would – it keeps them from getting suspicious. The fact that they waste away is largely ancillary; it happens because their body simply can't support that level of gravity negation on the human energy budget, so they use up far too much of their own self. Soul included. Eventually their soul just breaks down, and they turn into zombies, mindlessly loyal to their last fix, which means that they'll follow you forever.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Ah, er yes, and do you know why?” the villainess finally asked.
“Probably because all the popular kids teased you in school, so you came up with a ridiculously complicated plan to turn those same kids into your own private army by preying upon their insecurities, specifically the insecurity they had in their body image. And then you discovered that not only could it create for you an army, it could make you fabulously wealthy as well.”
“Uh...also correct,” out villainess appeared to be running out of something to say. “But...do you know the code that unlocks my voicemail?”
“No idea,” I said.
“Ha, now that's something you don't know,” the laughing sneer fell from her face for a moment to be replaced by uncertainty, “Uh...really? I mean, you really don't know?”
“Not a clue,” I said.
“Oh, that's too bad...I mean, ha! I'm clearly superior to you. And one of you has already fallen into my clutches. You drank it, didn't you?”
“Yes I did,” Alice said happily, “it tasted like grape juice. Well, except for the dragon spleen. That tastes like glue.”
“And look what it does to you.”
I could hear the crackle of sudden magic zap along Alice's body like she had just stuck her finger in an electrical outlet. A moment later she tried to stand on her tiptoes, only to bounce slightly off the floor.
“Look at me,” she squealed, “I'm weightless. And I don't even have to concentrate anymore.”
The villainess now whirled on us, pointing somewhere between Amanda and myself, “Now, don't you wish you could be like her?”
“Er, not particularly, no,” Amanda shook her head, “I'm fine with my body image.”
“My self-esteem is to low to be boosted by such trivial matters,” I added.
“Surely the two of you don't think you can resist the power of viral marketing.”
Amanda shrugged in a valiant attempt to let the embarrassment run off her shoulders, “Sorry, I'm still new at this job. I tend to ignore anything that's not actively trying to kill me.”
“And I try to stay away from anything that has to be pronounced in italics,” I put in, “although I am partial to things that involve explosions. That is, things that are not me which involve explosions. I'm not so fond of the other kind.”
“Explosions...” the evil CEO, which was probably a redundant term, jotted that down in her notebook, somehow not dropping the Chicago Telegraph Pole.
“Look what I can do!” Alice was still squealing, bouncing up and down as if she were on a trampoline.
“That's nice dear,” I replied, thinking quickly, “why don't you go play on the catwalks while the adults talk?”
“Okay. Wheee!” she bounced off in the direction of the nearest metal stairway. Her feet barely rang against the metal as she ran up them.
“It's so easy to corrupt them, you know,” Evil CEO told us, “All I do is bombard them with mass media all day, telling them that weighing less is better, that it makes them better people, and soon they start to believe it, not just on the outside, but on the inside. Cover the walls with pictures of models that are basically sticks with legs, and they begin to emulate it. Women begin to believe that this is what they should look like; men hide it, but begin to doubt their own manliness in their heart. Every day they are constantly surrounded by my propaganda, by my ingenious twisting of their vanity into self-destructive-”
“That's not you,” Amanda interrupted impatiently.
“What?”
“It's not you. I read about it. It's really someone else who does that. The Freemasons.”
“It's not the Freemasons anymore,” I corrected her.
Now it was Amanda's turn to say “What?”
“They traded some time last year. I think they took over International Banking instead.”
“You mean they gave up a massive conspiracy that it took them centuries to develop?” Amanda asked, looking a bit flabbergasted.
“Oh, I'm pretty sure that they didn't develop it,” I reassured her, “In fact, I'm pretty sure that it was developed by Loki-”
“Really? Why?”
I shrugged. There are gods whose motives you do not speculate on because the secrets they hold would drive any mortal mad. And then there are gods who would stick their fingers in the electric socket just to see their hair stand on end. “Probably just to fuck with people's heads.”
“He would do that?”
“Remember that foot-binding thing in China?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she blanched, “don't tell me that he was responsible for that too.”
“No, but I'm pretty sure I know who was, and he was just trying to fuck with people's heads.”
Amanda suddenly got a puzzled look on her face. “But wait a moment. If the Freemasons aren't in charge of Self-Destructive Body Image, who is?”
“I dunno,” I shrugged, “They got International Banking from the Jewish Conspiracy for World Domination-”
“So it's the Jews?”
“I don't think so. I think the Jews ended up with Brainwashing Children With Fluoridated Drinking Water. But if the Jews got that, and the Mexican Reconquest of the Southwest got Income Tax, then it must have gone to the Feminists.”
Amanda began to wave her hands, “Wait a minute. You're telling me that the International Feminist Superiority Conspiracy is in charge of implementing the very same conspiracy that leads to women having a destructive image of what their body should look like?”
“Well, yes,” I admitted.
“That's...” she appeared to be searching for an appropriate word lurking somewhere behind her teeth.
“Ironic?” I suggested.
“No, not really. Retarded is the word I was looking for, but I could accept ironic.”
Considering that the entire International Feminist Superiority Conspiracy is run out of a bakery in Fresno, California, I have a hard time disagreeing with either description. Regardless, the evil CEO was looking somewhat more impatient.
“And do you know why they keep doing this to themselves?” she snapped, waving her giant gun around.
“To look attractive?” Amanda hazarded. Over her head, Alice was leaning far over a catwalk railing, probably trying to count the bubbles in the vat of bubbling goo beneath her.
Both the villainess and I burst into laughter.
“What? NO!” the villainess howled, nearly dropping her gun as she got her laughter under control, “Attractive? Attractive? Do you think anybody is really attracted to a woman with legs that are skinnier than an ostrich's? Do you think anybody really wants to hold you when the only thing they can hold will probably give you lacerations? Does anybody want a guy who is so afraid of food that they can barely look anything more substantial than a salad in the face?”
Amanda looked at me. I nodded. It sometimes surprises me that this is not basic knowledge.
“What about Gradius?” she hissed. “He said that he likes really skinny girls.”
“Gradius likes everything,” I whispered back, “He even has sex with office furniture.”
Amanda shuddered, “His own, I hope.”
“That's a good thing to hope for.”
“AHEM!” evil CEO cleared her throat.
“Oh, sorry, interrupted a monologue. All right then, why do they come?” I asked.
“Because it's a way to rate themselves,” she ranted, “Somewhere along the way, all those people telling them that it was good to be thin finally got to them, and they started really believing it. And if it's good to weigh less, then the less you weigh, the better you are. It became like the model of car that they drive, or the stores that they shop at, a barometer of their personal worth. Even if they never shared it, they could cradle the declining numbers to them in the darkness of their soul and pretend that they were better than those successful people who started running the world around them. It became a drug, a shot to their self-esteem. It became everything.”
“Someone has issues,” Amanda murmured.
Alice, meanwhile, had danced her way out over the villainess's end of the room, and was attempting a ballet pirouette.
“And what if they don't like the price? They must notice as they whither away. What if even one of them had reported you?” I asked.
She laughed. “They can't. It happens too fast, too easily. Their esteem rises too much, depends on it too much. They become addicted to something only I can supply. And if I ever hear of them saying anything against me-”
Lazily she raised her hand, smiled, and snapped her fingers. Above her, there was a crash. It went on for a long time.
“She's seventy percent Iridium by mass!” I shouted into the giant hole that now marked one end of the factory floor.
“You knew that was going to happen,” Amanda accused.
“Karma has a strange sense of humor,” I said.
A loud moaning broke out from below.
“You realize, of course,” Amanda added, eying the hole warily, “that you've just dropped Alice down to the basement. The basement filled with zombies. Alone.”
Another moan broke out from below, and you could hear the sound of feet dredging their way through the sludge, of flesh slapping on flesh in a single-minded rush to find and devour the newest intrusion into their lightless universe.
“Yes alone,” I said, stretching. “Just her and the zombies. Well, her, the zombies, and a gun that shoots chainsaws.”
“A what?” Amanda asked.
Something making a loud, revving noise erupted out of the floor and shot past both of us, the long blade cutting a swath in the brick wall as the heavy handle hit and ricocheted it off into the darkness, trailing a line of blue fire.
“Plasma chainsaws,” I corrected myself.
Another one shot up from down below, hit the roof and bounced back into the basement through a brand new, smoking hole.
“I'm going to relocate elsewhere,” Amanda backed away.
“Where?”
“Timbuktu sounds nice.”
“I'm right behind you.”
Out of this, we managed to learn three things:
1) Never sign up for a weight-loss program that requires you to lose your soul as well.
2) You can earn money by selling corpses to Vinnie the Shark.
3) If the Japanese really want people to weigh less, they should stop equipping them with guns that shoot chainsaws. Seriously.
Astute people have probably already commented on Japan's inspection of older folk (between the ages of 40 and 74), and their attempts to penalize them through their employers if their waists grow beyond the state-mandated limit (33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women), in an attempt to control obesity (which visual examination reveals effects about fifteen Japanese who are not sumo wrestlers).
This is some source of amusement at work, because ever since a brief trip to Japan, Alice has been having a bit of a problem with her weight. She's five-foot-six, wears a US size four dress (or so she claims - I've certainly never seen her in one), and currently weighs approximately three-quarters of a ton.
"You know," I said today, looking off the side of the building at the impact crater she made after jumping exuberantly on the fire escape of a third-floor apartment, "We're going to have to do something about that."
"I hear that reinforced concrete is cheap these days," Daren remarked.
"That's not quite what I meant."
"It's the fucking Japanese," Gate was telling me, "They make abso-fucking-loutely everything out of this stupid iridium-osmium alloy. It's dense as hell. Sure, she's practically invulnerable to killer robots, or angry bears, or brats with lasers, but she falls through the floor all the fucking time."
Gate is actually named Emmanuel, but has picked up the nickname partially because he comes from San Francisco (and hence is near the Golden Gate), and partially because, to hold up the SF stereotype, he claims to be gay (there's significant evidence that he actually might be bisexual - but the nickname, whose origin is too diffuse to recount here, stuck). To further perpetuate the stereotype, he is slightly effeminate, slim, a bit dainty looking, with long flowing hair. His only other outstanding traits are that he swears like a sailor, and that he can build a motorcycle out of just about anything (including a Hot Wheels motorway and a PB&J sandwich). His ability to ride said motorcycles is somewhat less established, seeing as how he's crashed seventeen of them this year already (five of the crashes involved gunning the engine to jump the bike over exploding cars), but since he's walked away from all of them, perhaps he can count as skilled. Sometimes he punches bricks for fun.
"Now, this wouldn't be such a goddamn problem if someone," and here he glared very fiercely at the fidgeting member of our conversation, "would remember to keep her goddamn anti-gravity on."
"Sorry," Alice looked a bit sheepish, "I forgot."
"You've been doing that a lot lately," I said.
"Look, even cyborgs forget sometimes," she grumbled.
"You've caused sixty-five thousand dollars of property damage already today," I pointed out, "and that's even counting the Hummer you totaled as community service."
"He shouldn't have parked it under a balcony," she complained.
"You shouldn't have expected an iron railing to support your weight."
"They shouldn't have made such a crappy railing."
"And I can't believe I'm having this conversation," I finally cut it off. Some things should die young.
"Will you let me up now?" she asked. Gate's examination bed had hefty metal shackles to keep her in position. He claimed this was to limit the possibility of him accidentally triggering a dangerous muscle reaction, but I suspect it was mostly to keep her out from underfoot while he adjusted her circuits.
"That depends, will you remember to keep the anti-gravity on?"
"Maybe," she said.
"Then maybe I'll let you up," Gate growled.
"Okay, fine, I will. Now let me up, or else."
"Somebody wants her pain circuits re-aligned," Gate muttered, but let her up anyway.
"Why do you weigh so much anyway? You were barely twelve hundred pounds before you went to Japan." I asked as the two of us went down the hallway from Gate's lab back to the main core of the building.
"Because they had all this cool new stuff," she told me.
"Like what?"
Her right arm straightened and suddenly sprouted little blue flames that began to race around it like cars on a track, filling the air with a very loud, and very familiar noise.
"That appears to be a plasma chainsaw," I said.
"Yes it is," she agreed.
"But if it's a plasma chainsaw, then why does it sound like the old gas guzzler that we use on zombies?"
The sound cut off, even as the chainsaw kept going. "Oh, that's just a sound file they give you that I can play over my speakers. It's for the effect."
"So it took them hundreds of pounds to give you a chainsaw?"
"Well no. Not a chainsaw. More like a whole bunch of chainsaws. I have an arm chainsaw, a leg chainsaw, a fingernail chainsaw, even chainsaw teeth. And look, a Swiss Army knife with a chainsaw attachment."
I took that and turned it over in my hand. It appeared to actually be a Swiss Army knife with a chainsaw attachment involved. I had not seen her this happy since she had overloaded on shotguns.
"And the king of it all is this," she said, and a massive cannon materialized over her shoulder.
Now, let me point out here that I have no idea why she keeps getting this stuff attached to her body. She is, after all, connected to what is basically her own pocket dimension, in which she stores more weapons than an armored division, and probably more firepower than the entire US military, in large, unwieldy packages. I have seen her materialize, at moment's notice, everything from a katana, to a rocket launcher, to a state-of-the-art surface-to-orbit laser array into her itchy little hands. But I hadn't seen anything quite like the huge-mouthed gaping cannon she was now pointing in my direction.
"All right, I'll bite," I said. "What is it?"
"It's a gun that shoots chainsaws."
I opened my mouth in the vague hope that the appropriate words would choose that moment to arrive and set me free. They did not.
I finally settled for, "That's interesting."
"Do you want me to show you?" she asked.
Memories of the Agora Gatling Gun massacre floating before my eyes, I declined.
"We still have to figure out how to get your weight under control. It was bad enough at twelve hundred pounds, but that extra couple hundred seems to be wreaking havoc with your self-control."
"Maybe I could sign up for those weight loss programs," she mused.
"You don't actually process food," I pointed out.
"I could still try."
"I'm so glad you mentioned that," Charity appeared behind the two of us and put a hand on each of our shoulders.
It is a bad sign when your boss is suddenly behind you. It becomes a worse sign when she evidently feels that she has to sneak up behind you in order to surprise you. That bottoms out into catastrophic at the point when she needs to grab you by the shoulder in order to keep you from running away. I had to resist the urge to hurtle myself out of the window, because I could not break her grip.
"What thankless, ridiculous task may we perform for you now, oh boss one?" I asked.
"You're going to sign up for a weight-loss program," Charity said.
"Okay, we both may need it, but why the sudden interest in our health?" I asked.
"Don't you think you should care for your health?" Charity asked, smiling sweetly.
"Judging by that smile of yours, the best way to care for my health would be to be at home, hiding under my bed."
Charity's smile turned into a frown without passing through any intermediate stages. It was as if she suddenly decided to turn that part of the world upside-down.
"I was referring to what was going to happen to you if you didn't say 'Yes ma'am'."
"Yes ma'am."
"Good. Now there's a new weight loss clinic downtown that I want you to look into. The usual, aimed at women, housewives mostly, upper class. It's become pretty big, pretty fast, and I find that suspicious."
"A weight-loss clinic? In Southern California? What a shocker. Don't tell me that there's going to be sun in the afternoon too," I clapped a hand to my forehead, using up about three years of a normal human being's sarcasm allotment in one sentence.
"Normal weight loss clinics don't make extra money by selling corpses to Vinnie the Shark," Charity replied.
"That's true," I admitted, "Wait, we can make money by selling corpses to Vinnie the Shark?"
"Anyway," Charity is like a freight-train. All attempts to sidetrack her usually end in you being smashed under a very large, very heavy object. "There's something not right about this, and I want you to find out what it is."
"Maybe they're sucking the fat out of their bodies and using it to create a new race of alien beings," Alice exclaimed.
"I thought we were cutting off her access to TV," Charity whispered to me.
"She can pick up TV signals with her brain," I hissed back, "What do you want me to do, lobotomize her?"
"I've considered asking," Charity told me.
“Anyway,” she returned to her louder voice with enough force to keep Alice, who was now absently hopping around the corridor in some imitation of hopscotch, back to attention, “I want you to go and check it out. Oh, and you should take the newbie.”
“Right. And I'm driving,” I forestalled both disaster and instant death.
“Oh,” Alice groaned.
“Hey newbie!” I yelled, as we passed through the office complex, almost running Daren over. He was in the hallway composing poetry again. “You're coming with us.”
“What?” Amanda appeared out of her office, her UC-Berkeley T-shirt fast disappearing behind a hastily donned bullet-proof, magic-proof vest. She was learning about the hazards of the job rather fast. “And when will you stop calling me newbie?”
“I've seen a lot of newbies come and go,” I told her roughly, “I've learned not to bother with their names until they show that they've got what it takes to survive out here in the streets.”
Amanda glared at me, “All right, you've made your obligatory Film Noir remark. So what's the real reason?”
“Because it annoys you,” I told her honestly, as the elevator arrived at the parking garage. Alice attempted to use our temporary inattention to lunge for the driver's side door of the nearest car, but Amanda tackled her before she could get out of the elevator, giving me enough time to get to the car. She might have been new, but nobody was new enough to let Alice actually drive the car.
“I never get to have any fun,” Alice complained from the back seat.
“That's because the rest of us want to live,” I replied, shifting the car into reverse.
Because of budget constraints, we never buy large vehicles. In fact, the Honda Accord that I had chosen, based on its proximity to the elevator, was one of our larger vehicles. This is a bonus in Southern California, where the probability of finding a parking space that can fit your vehicle is inversely proportional to the ability of your vehicle to ram a battleship and actually sink it. Unfortunately, it is never sporty enough or big enough to keep Alice happy.
“You would go a lot faster if you were one lane over,” Alice complained, pouting.
I glanced down out of my window. “Alice, that's on the other side of the road.”
“There's no traffic coming.”
“Yet.”
“I could dodge it,” she said. Which was true. Cyborgs have very good reflexes. She is the only driver I know who has actually made her passengers black out while making a turn.
“Anyway, why are we going to a weight-loss clinic?” Amanda asked.
I explained it to her.
“And how are we going to get in?” she asked.
“The front door?” Alice suggested.
I ignored her. “One of us is going to have a weight problem she's worried about. And I think it's going to be Alice.”
Amanda looked at me out of the corner of her eye, “Alice looks like she weighs about a hundred-ten soaking wet.”
“This is true, but she can weigh whatever she wants. That's going to be a very useful skill if we want to pull any of this off.”
“Well, why not us or-”
“Because neither of us could probably keep a straight face. Besides, Alice really does have a weight problem, and I want to see if they can fix it. And I'm too fat to look like a rich person.”
“Well, I'm the heaviest of us all, by conventional methods,” Amanda replied. “My body-mass index is practically into obese territory.”
I shook my head. This is true. According to her profile, Amanda weighs a lot for her height. About one percent of that is fat. Judging from the way she looks in a swimsuit, if I had punched her in the stomach, I probably would have broken my fist. “You've worked a lot to get that body. Are you willing to take the risk that they might give you something that might actually destroy it?”
“All right, you have a point there.”
None of this, of course mattered. I should not have worried about Alice, because next to the smiling blond woman who met us at the door, she looked fat. Next to the smiling, blond woman who met us at the door, toothpicks are fat. The entry lobby of the building, which was one of those old, brick factories that you sometimes see in old downtowns, with only the interior refurbished, was plastered with posters that probably could have been only a foot wide, and still shown the entirety of the posing model. There were some men mixed in there too. At least, I think there were. It was a bit difficult to tell.
“Right this way please,” she said, leading us through a door and down a pastel-painted hallway.
“I wonder if her leg would break if I kicked it?” Amanda muttered.
I shrugged. How was I supposed to know that?
They weighed Alice, who turned out to weigh about one-twenty today. Apparently, this was extraordinarily bad news, and soon there was a cluster of women hovering about her, clucking disapprovingly. Alice glowed at the attention, literally at one point until I hissed something in her ear. Then came the crowning moment.
“Of course, we can help you with your problem,” the blond woman sounded vapid, but I was not ready to trust that kind of precise absent-mindedness. In her hands she held a blue plastic bottle filled with swishing liquid of some sort. "Our plan involves daily doses of our patented, doctor approved weight-loss formula. It's easy and simple, all you have to do is take a dose a day, and you can eat whatever you want, whenever you want. Here, why don't you take a gulp now?"
She poured a thick blue liquid into a cup and handed it to Alice, who gulped it down in one shot. Then Alice's arm shot out and grabbed the sales representative by the wrist.
"Dragon spleen?" Alice asked. I forgot that she had a spectrographic analyzer built somewhere in that chest cavity of hers, "That's strictly prohibited. Where's your license?"
The sales representative did not answer, being too busy screaming at her broken wrist.
"Er...sorry," Alice looked embarrassed and let go of the hand.
Several of the walls, which had up until this point been covered in posters of beauty queens who appeared to have been crushed in a vice, suddenly turned into doors. Shambling forward, dozens of men and women began to stagger into the light, all looking rather thin, gaunt, and very angry. Many of them had firearms.
"Time to run," I suggested.
The woman nearest to me fired a shot in my direction, and then screamed as the pistol's recoil broke both of her wrists. Out of curiosity, I kicked her gently in the shin, and listened to the crack as it snapped.
"The answer is yes!" I shouted to Amanda as we ran back down the hall we had come from.
"Is that really relevant to anything?" she asked.
"Wait," suddenly Alice stopped. A bullet banged off the wall next to her, but she did not seem to notice, "Why are we running?"
"I dunno," I shrugged, "habit?"
At which point the floor beneath us opened up and dropped us about a floor into something that went squish when we stepped on it. Judging from the sudden wet feel on my legs, and the way that something seemed to be squeezing them gently, like a rogue pool of jelly, it appeared that we were knee-deep in...something. Fortunately, it was far too dark in here to figure out what it actually was.
“Does somebody have a light?” Amanda asked.
“If they do, don't turn it on. I don't want to know what I'm standing in,” I replied.
“Well, it's sticky, whatever it is,” Alice complained.
“So what's going on here?” Amanda asked.
“Let's see. Weight loss, leading to complete degradation of the body's integrity, fragile bone structure, and burning off of muscle. If that's true than what's happening is that they're not losing weight in the normal way. They're burning it to power some sort of spell. Which unfortunately means that after a certain point they reach the final stage and-”
There was a low moan in the darkness.
“-and then what?” Amanda sounded suspicious.
“-they turn into zombies,” I finished.
There was a long pause, followed by another moan and the sound of things splashing somewhere in the distance. A lot of things. Or possibly one thing with a lot of legs.
“I hate zombies,” Amanda said.
“Well, not traditional zombies. More like soulless, but still mostly functional corpses,” I filled in.
“I hate those too.”
“Well then maybe we should think about getting out of here,” I suggested.
“There's a ladder about two meters behind Amanda. It appears to lead out of here,” Alice's voice cut through the darkness.
I turned in her general direction. “You can see in the dark?”
“Of course.”
“Are there really zombies out there?”
The splashing sounds were starting to get closer. “Maybe about a hundred or so.”
“Ah, then we better start climbing.”
Which is easier said then done in pitch darkness. Fortunately, if it was hard for us, as demonstrated by the fact that Alice finally had to pick me up and carry me to the ladder, and nearly bruised my ribs in the process, it was harder for the zombies, who seemed to lack the muscular control needed to stand upright. Then we had to get up the ladder, made slightly disgusting by the fact that whatever we had been standing in was now dripping from Amanda's boots onto my head.
The ladder emerged from a heavy metal door into a dusty room that probably had once been used to assemble sewing machines or something, littered with the detritus of a previous age, and enough dust to cover the entire Smithsonian Institution. I did not care if it emerged in the middle of a cactus greenhouse, as long as I could see what was trying to kill me. Catwalks ran criss-crossing through the upper levels of the building, bathed in light from a few slanted holes in the roof. Below them, a few vat-looking machines bubbled away on the floor, waiting for some minor crook to fall into them and become horribly scarred for life and turn into a homocidal maniac. And at the front of the room was a woman in black who, having avoided the scarred for life part, appeared to have satisfied the homocidal maniac part. She was holding what would be, if it were smaller, considered a Chicago Typewriter. It looked more like a Chicago Telegraph Pole.
“You know, I'm getting tired to people pointing guns at me,” I said.
“It's only happened twice today,” Amanda pointed out.
“Yes, but my weekly average is through the roof.”
“I knew that sooner or later someone was going to come and try and stop me,” the woman at the front appeared to have decided that now was the only time she was going to get to give her evil monologue. “It will be a shame that it comes now, just as I got started, but I suppose it was inevitable. After I clean you three up, I'll be out of here and off to another town, along with my army of zombie servants.”
“You knew somebody would be on to you sooner or later,” Amanda said.
The villainess nodded. “Yes, in retrospect, selling corpses to Vinnie the Shark was probably a mistake.”
Amanda turned to me. “Wait, we can make money selling corpses to Vinnie the Shark?”
“So I hear,” I shrugged.
“Regardless, it's far too late to stop me. I already have what I came for. Do you even have the faintest idea what I've done?”
“Judging by the general smell of the place,” I gave the interior of her factory a cursory glance, “you're using the old Polyglotol will-powered wish-giving spell, probably mixed with a large dilution factor to cut down on effectiveness. The victim takes some and finds that their weight is going down just as fast as they had hoped it would – it keeps them from getting suspicious. The fact that they waste away is largely ancillary; it happens because their body simply can't support that level of gravity negation on the human energy budget, so they use up far too much of their own self. Soul included. Eventually their soul just breaks down, and they turn into zombies, mindlessly loyal to their last fix, which means that they'll follow you forever.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Ah, er yes, and do you know why?” the villainess finally asked.
“Probably because all the popular kids teased you in school, so you came up with a ridiculously complicated plan to turn those same kids into your own private army by preying upon their insecurities, specifically the insecurity they had in their body image. And then you discovered that not only could it create for you an army, it could make you fabulously wealthy as well.”
“Uh...also correct,” out villainess appeared to be running out of something to say. “But...do you know the code that unlocks my voicemail?”
“No idea,” I said.
“Ha, now that's something you don't know,” the laughing sneer fell from her face for a moment to be replaced by uncertainty, “Uh...really? I mean, you really don't know?”
“Not a clue,” I said.
“Oh, that's too bad...I mean, ha! I'm clearly superior to you. And one of you has already fallen into my clutches. You drank it, didn't you?”
“Yes I did,” Alice said happily, “it tasted like grape juice. Well, except for the dragon spleen. That tastes like glue.”
“And look what it does to you.”
I could hear the crackle of sudden magic zap along Alice's body like she had just stuck her finger in an electrical outlet. A moment later she tried to stand on her tiptoes, only to bounce slightly off the floor.
“Look at me,” she squealed, “I'm weightless. And I don't even have to concentrate anymore.”
The villainess now whirled on us, pointing somewhere between Amanda and myself, “Now, don't you wish you could be like her?”
“Er, not particularly, no,” Amanda shook her head, “I'm fine with my body image.”
“My self-esteem is to low to be boosted by such trivial matters,” I added.
“Surely the two of you don't think you can resist the power of viral marketing.”
Amanda shrugged in a valiant attempt to let the embarrassment run off her shoulders, “Sorry, I'm still new at this job. I tend to ignore anything that's not actively trying to kill me.”
“And I try to stay away from anything that has to be pronounced in italics,” I put in, “although I am partial to things that involve explosions. That is, things that are not me which involve explosions. I'm not so fond of the other kind.”
“Explosions...” the evil CEO, which was probably a redundant term, jotted that down in her notebook, somehow not dropping the Chicago Telegraph Pole.
“Look what I can do!” Alice was still squealing, bouncing up and down as if she were on a trampoline.
“That's nice dear,” I replied, thinking quickly, “why don't you go play on the catwalks while the adults talk?”
“Okay. Wheee!” she bounced off in the direction of the nearest metal stairway. Her feet barely rang against the metal as she ran up them.
“It's so easy to corrupt them, you know,” Evil CEO told us, “All I do is bombard them with mass media all day, telling them that weighing less is better, that it makes them better people, and soon they start to believe it, not just on the outside, but on the inside. Cover the walls with pictures of models that are basically sticks with legs, and they begin to emulate it. Women begin to believe that this is what they should look like; men hide it, but begin to doubt their own manliness in their heart. Every day they are constantly surrounded by my propaganda, by my ingenious twisting of their vanity into self-destructive-”
“That's not you,” Amanda interrupted impatiently.
“What?”
“It's not you. I read about it. It's really someone else who does that. The Freemasons.”
“It's not the Freemasons anymore,” I corrected her.
Now it was Amanda's turn to say “What?”
“They traded some time last year. I think they took over International Banking instead.”
“You mean they gave up a massive conspiracy that it took them centuries to develop?” Amanda asked, looking a bit flabbergasted.
“Oh, I'm pretty sure that they didn't develop it,” I reassured her, “In fact, I'm pretty sure that it was developed by Loki-”
“Really? Why?”
I shrugged. There are gods whose motives you do not speculate on because the secrets they hold would drive any mortal mad. And then there are gods who would stick their fingers in the electric socket just to see their hair stand on end. “Probably just to fuck with people's heads.”
“He would do that?”
“Remember that foot-binding thing in China?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she blanched, “don't tell me that he was responsible for that too.”
“No, but I'm pretty sure I know who was, and he was just trying to fuck with people's heads.”
Amanda suddenly got a puzzled look on her face. “But wait a moment. If the Freemasons aren't in charge of Self-Destructive Body Image, who is?”
“I dunno,” I shrugged, “They got International Banking from the Jewish Conspiracy for World Domination-”
“So it's the Jews?”
“I don't think so. I think the Jews ended up with Brainwashing Children With Fluoridated Drinking Water. But if the Jews got that, and the Mexican Reconquest of the Southwest got Income Tax, then it must have gone to the Feminists.”
Amanda began to wave her hands, “Wait a minute. You're telling me that the International Feminist Superiority Conspiracy is in charge of implementing the very same conspiracy that leads to women having a destructive image of what their body should look like?”
“Well, yes,” I admitted.
“That's...” she appeared to be searching for an appropriate word lurking somewhere behind her teeth.
“Ironic?” I suggested.
“No, not really. Retarded is the word I was looking for, but I could accept ironic.”
Considering that the entire International Feminist Superiority Conspiracy is run out of a bakery in Fresno, California, I have a hard time disagreeing with either description. Regardless, the evil CEO was looking somewhat more impatient.
“And do you know why they keep doing this to themselves?” she snapped, waving her giant gun around.
“To look attractive?” Amanda hazarded. Over her head, Alice was leaning far over a catwalk railing, probably trying to count the bubbles in the vat of bubbling goo beneath her.
Both the villainess and I burst into laughter.
“What? NO!” the villainess howled, nearly dropping her gun as she got her laughter under control, “Attractive? Attractive? Do you think anybody is really attracted to a woman with legs that are skinnier than an ostrich's? Do you think anybody really wants to hold you when the only thing they can hold will probably give you lacerations? Does anybody want a guy who is so afraid of food that they can barely look anything more substantial than a salad in the face?”
Amanda looked at me. I nodded. It sometimes surprises me that this is not basic knowledge.
“What about Gradius?” she hissed. “He said that he likes really skinny girls.”
“Gradius likes everything,” I whispered back, “He even has sex with office furniture.”
Amanda shuddered, “His own, I hope.”
“That's a good thing to hope for.”
“AHEM!” evil CEO cleared her throat.
“Oh, sorry, interrupted a monologue. All right then, why do they come?” I asked.
“Because it's a way to rate themselves,” she ranted, “Somewhere along the way, all those people telling them that it was good to be thin finally got to them, and they started really believing it. And if it's good to weigh less, then the less you weigh, the better you are. It became like the model of car that they drive, or the stores that they shop at, a barometer of their personal worth. Even if they never shared it, they could cradle the declining numbers to them in the darkness of their soul and pretend that they were better than those successful people who started running the world around them. It became a drug, a shot to their self-esteem. It became everything.”
“Someone has issues,” Amanda murmured.
Alice, meanwhile, had danced her way out over the villainess's end of the room, and was attempting a ballet pirouette.
“And what if they don't like the price? They must notice as they whither away. What if even one of them had reported you?” I asked.
She laughed. “They can't. It happens too fast, too easily. Their esteem rises too much, depends on it too much. They become addicted to something only I can supply. And if I ever hear of them saying anything against me-”
Lazily she raised her hand, smiled, and snapped her fingers. Above her, there was a crash. It went on for a long time.
“She's seventy percent Iridium by mass!” I shouted into the giant hole that now marked one end of the factory floor.
“You knew that was going to happen,” Amanda accused.
“Karma has a strange sense of humor,” I said.
A loud moaning broke out from below.
“You realize, of course,” Amanda added, eying the hole warily, “that you've just dropped Alice down to the basement. The basement filled with zombies. Alone.”
Another moan broke out from below, and you could hear the sound of feet dredging their way through the sludge, of flesh slapping on flesh in a single-minded rush to find and devour the newest intrusion into their lightless universe.
“Yes alone,” I said, stretching. “Just her and the zombies. Well, her, the zombies, and a gun that shoots chainsaws.”
“A what?” Amanda asked.
Something making a loud, revving noise erupted out of the floor and shot past both of us, the long blade cutting a swath in the brick wall as the heavy handle hit and ricocheted it off into the darkness, trailing a line of blue fire.
“Plasma chainsaws,” I corrected myself.
Another one shot up from down below, hit the roof and bounced back into the basement through a brand new, smoking hole.
“I'm going to relocate elsewhere,” Amanda backed away.
“Where?”
“Timbuktu sounds nice.”
“I'm right behind you.”
Out of this, we managed to learn three things:
1) Never sign up for a weight-loss program that requires you to lose your soul as well.
2) You can earn money by selling corpses to Vinnie the Shark.
3) If the Japanese really want people to weigh less, they should stop equipping them with guns that shoot chainsaws. Seriously.
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