Junkyard Riders #4
The roadhouse, including its repurposed and re-painted spaceship hatch front doors, was built to withstand small-arms fire and anything up to a short barrage of mid-load rockets, and it had its own armaments, well placed and out of sight.
Silk-plaz windows let in outside light but no one outside could get visuals and no heat-sigs from inside showed through, which was an inconvenience to would-be drive-by shooters and long-range assassins.
I’d made sure the building could stand up to a battle, because I had too many bloody-damn enemies. Like Mina.
The whining but distant scream of Mina’s bike came through the open front doors. The spaceship hatches hadn’t been open when I left.
“Marconi of the Hell’s Angels,” he said over the speakers.
“Roadhouse, Little Girl.” I said. “Your kid is approaching.”
“Which one?” But by his tone he already knew.
“Mina.”
Marconi cussed a bit, then said, “Lorenzo. Go see how many she killed getting away this time.” To me he said, “I got her on DM, and I never increase the dose.” Which implied she was now always jonesing. “She knows you . . . knows about DM.”
DM. Not using the name in case someone had cracked our comms. Devil’s Milk. I grew it in a hidden green house for the cats and for Mateo, who was always in pain. Or used to be. Lately he was weaning off the DM. My nanobots were helping at least that much.
“You got it for her?” I asked, wanting to be sure.
“It was that or kill my own daughter.”
“If she breaks the wrong rules, she’s dead anyway.” I made a cutting motion and the comms went dead.
The Rules of Entry were painted on the front doors. Anyone who entered the roadhouse had to pass through a scanner that worked as metal detector, X-ray machine, and explosive detection device. No guns, no weapons allowed. Except Jolene’s. And mine.
No spitting. No clipping toenails. No sex unless you paid for a private room. Lots of rules, and breaking any of them resulted in stiff, often painful repercussions.
Despite the rules, if Mina was jonesing, she’d be willing to break them all.
“Marconi is trying to contact,” Jolene said, the sound this time coming from her bot.
“Do not engage. If you have to shoot Mina, shoot to kill.”
“Sugar Love, do you think I became sentient yesterday?”
I laughed silently through my nose. Walked to the swinging doors. And out to the front porch. I pulled one of the rocking chairs over to block the entrance, sat, and settled my blaster on my lap.
I could tell when Mina turned into the drive. The cold wind had kicked up and dust devils spun. Seemed appropriate.
Jolene stepped around me and took up a position to my left.
Her eye-searing wig and glittery dress was gone.
Her bot body was fully exposed, but instead of sleek lustrous black, she was now wearing gray, rock-desert, mining-country camo, head to three-toes.
And her lower arms had been retracted to expose much larger caliber weapons than I carried: a warbot-capable blaster and a barrel big enough to carry elephant shot, which, if I remembered right, was . 450 and up.
My Berger chip started up. “The .404 Jeffery is a very effective cartridge, often considered more effective than the .375, especially with higher velocity rounds. However, it is unknown if any elephants survive on the continent of Africa—”
I tapped it off. I didn’t need to hear the current extinction rate.
Humans had been running out of species to destroy long before the WIMP bomb explosion over Germany tore through the planet’s electromagnetic shield and ripped all the good stuff out of the atmosphere.
Rain was scarce everywhere, now, and so were animals.
Storms were few and far between, and when they came, they were monsters.
The crotch rocket the psychopath rode whined up to ear piercing levels.
Mina liked fast Suzukis, streamlined and heavily muted, the bike shielded.
She used battery backup for stealth runs, so the engine scream was intended as a war cry, meant to intimidate.
I grinned my Pop’s ferocious smile, all teeth and no joy.
When she tore into the drive, Marconi’s killing machine in human form was already pointing a weapon at the roadhouse.
Before she could aim in my general direction, a net appeared out of thin air and dropped heavily over her. In that same instant, she hit the perimeter defenses. Her front tire blew, her bike spun around backward, then flipped in a vertical, one-eighty.
Mina flew into the air, somersaulted a good six feet off the ground, and stopped, hanging, as if grabbed by an invisible hand. Her body whipped forward, back, and swung around in a circle before she was released, to flop onto the parking lot. Her head hit first. Good thing she was wearing a helmet.
Full visual shielding disappeared from Mateo’s warbot suit, and the tall, spider-looking unit materialized, bending over the girl.
“Repetitive,” I said to Mateo. “You dropped the last one too.”
“Not repetitive to her. It was her first time.”
“Right. Well, I hope she enjoyed the demonstration. Did you break her arm too?”
Mateo pinched the girl’s wrist, lifted it and released it. “Sadly, no.”
“Jolene,” I said, “upload the vid of her ignominious arrival and landing to Marconi. I estimate it will take him ten seconds to call. Sixty seconds after the Old Man tries to reach us, I’ll take his call.”
“Giiirl. You do like to tie a man up in knots.” Jolene punched a key on her camo-ed metal arm.
“Vid sent. Comms to you. Countdown is set to your morphon, to initiate upon receipt of incoming call. When it hits sixty, take the call all by your lonesome. I’m fixin’ to go inside and brew some sweet tea for the lunch crowd, and release Alex and her mama, Wanda, from protective custody.
Mateo,” she said without raising her voice.
“Stick that little nutjob into a medbay. She’s clearly jonesing for Devil’s Milk. ”
“Yeah?” Mateo bent over the object of his demonstration of warbot suit camo and defensive measures. “Affirmative on the withdrawal symptoms. Shaking, sweating, pale, clammy. She looks puny.”
He picked her up again, this time by both legs, and carried her, dangling upside down, toward the UC.
The Urgent Care trailer had several medbays, and I was sure one would be capable of mitigating Mina’s symptoms. Not that she would ever be totally clean.
Once a human was addicted, they were always addicted.
Except Mateo. My nanobots were healing (had healed?) the former starship commanding officer.
Too bad my nanobots and the medbays currently available to me couldn’t regrow limbs and brains.
I pushed up my sleeve to reveal my morphon. I already had an urgent summons from Marconi waiting and he’d had the vid for maybe eight seconds.
Twenty seconds into my countdown, before I pressed the button to accept Marconi’s call, I heard Mina’s squeal from the back of the roadhouse, the high pitched noise changing to hissing and screeching. “She’s got DM! She’s got it. I want it. It’s mine. I’ll kill you all—”
Mina’s tirade went silent. I assumed Mateo had shaken her or hit her. I hoped he had held back. At least a little.
I accepted the call and put it on speaker.
“Junkyard Roadhouse and Motorcycle Club, Shining Silver, Prez, speaking.” Just to remind Marconi that I had power now, too, and also to remind him that he wasn’t a prez of anything yet, just the Hells Angels Charleston chapter house president.
Admittedly, it was a powerful position, especially now, when I had gifted him a fortress in the hills outside of Charleston, West Virginia.
Before he could reply to my hello, I added, “How’s the new place I gave you, Marconi?
You making friends with the locals yet?”
Marconi, his voice colder than hell, said, “You. Have. My. Daughter.”
“Yup,” I said. “She came onto my territory, armed. She entered the roadhouse grounds, armed. She aimed a loaded weapon, with intent to kill, at me. I would have been within my rights to shoot her and give her to the cats.”
The ambient noise changed and a woman with a lovely Italian accent said, “Forgive my husband. Most men think with their fists when their daughter is in danger. Good morning to the president, from HA Charleston.”
“Good morning, Lucretia,” I said to Marconi’s wife. “It’s always nice to speak with the real power of the Charleston chapter.”
“Humph. You flatter well. Is my daughter alive?”
“Of course. Maybe a little bruised. Maybe a little concussed. Maybe a lot addicted.”
There was silence in the background and I figured I had been muted.
While the Marconi’s debated their next move, I gloved up and righted the damaged bike, kicked the twisted front wheel until it was mostly front-facing and pushed it toward the repair shed.
The covered shed was the latest addition to the roadhouse.
Bikes always needed repair, and with parts in short supply, and mechanics worth their weight in gold and rarer than the aforesaid gold, bikers needed a safe place to trade parts and fix bikes, gossip, and fight.
Fighting not allowed in the roadhouse itself, only in the parking lot, so the shed was close by to accommodate the necessary violence.
Jolene wanted to add a beer tap to the shed, so greasy, mean-assed bikers would stay outside, but I had nixed that plan because letting customers have access to a tap could cost me money, and I was not about to lose any of that.
I had been poor for too many years. I was curious how long it would take Jolene to figure out how put in the tap and still charge for the beer, without one of the roadhouse members having to be on site to monitor the tap and take money. Knowing the AI, it wouldn’t take long.
I shoved the damaged bike to the side and left it, heading back into the roadhouse and out of the cold. The call resumed as I closed the swinging spaceship doors on winter.