VIII. Drunk on Dust Devils
Wild Rides Come in All Shapes, Sizes & Bottles...
Heya, I don’t know how to break this to ya, but we got a problem.
Oh yeah, Rory here, beat machine for Metröpolis, howyado? Anyway, I know you usually get these from Nic. Speed talking a big game, telling ya about our time on the Patrol together and all that, but we got a serious problem right here: dude is DONE.
Capital D. Capital U. Capital N. DONE.
I rode in with my current croppa cats from Hell Patrol, and Nic invited us over from his favorite booth. Turns out he got Harry Garret and Scarlet there too, but the dude is shit-faced beyond belief. I don’t think anything happened to Lita, otherwise he’d be a helluva lot more sober and helluva lot more pissed. And I know he probably told you I was the psycho of the group.
And he’s right.
So my yardstick for loco ain’t your average bear’s, but I ain’t ever seen the bastard this turnt in a while. ‘Cept maybe 2460 when all of Doc’s good-time gals came out to play. Chicks crawling all over us while we were playing. I think one of them even blew Nic on stage. Sure wasn’t me, poor bitch woulda kept getting kneed in the head during “Overkill.”
Alright, I’m gonna try and get him cleaned up as best I can, but brace yourself, he might be a raw one tonight…
Am I on? I’m on, killer.
Alright kids, Speedfreak here, you ever gone tornada hunting?
Yeah, didn’t think we had real weather in the Wastes, did ya!?
Well this is what happened when the three of us did…kinda-sorta-it’s-a-long story (what’s new). And it starts with your favorite, my favorite, every junkie in a nine-block radius’ favorite: radium.
We were patrolling the area just a coupla clicks north of the Oasis. A J.T.R. was being called out across the whole Central Region Patrol network. Randy Way, black wolf, my height, driving a Plymouth Duster. No arson or creeping, just good-old fashioned murder, like Grandma used to make. There’d been a recent rash with a clear-as-day motive; the victims were all junkies and their glowing green crack rocks were all abducted. We were expecting to see either a hound glowing green or his trunk glowing green all Repo Man-like.
What we wasn’t expecting was the dearth of action.
Not even a coupla quarter-mile runs to keep us frosty kept that boredom from smothering us, though the heat was certainly trying its hand.
“Had to be fucking patrol,” Harry groaned, boots kicked up on the bike-chain steering wheel of his rat rod. “Couldn’t be lead investigator, couldn’t be assistant investigator. Had to be on patrol; waiting for Junk O’Clock to strike.”
“I don’t think our drag times’ll get any better.” Rory quipped, laid out on his hog like a white cat on a winda sill.
My black ass couldn’t be fucked to say anything because I was coasting on nothing but two hours of sleep. No bennies or uppers, just a few weak-ass cups of coffee, sat in my deep blue pickup, ready to let my boot slip and my hands fall off the wheel just to get a thrill or a jolt or anything to get my eyes opened.
Harry at least brought his Fender with him, an amp in the backseat and started riffing away like there was no tomorrow. Good steady hard rock shit, the kind that’d put my ass to sleep, and I mean that in the nice way, not in the cunty way lotta folks’ll mean when they say it. I sleep to speed metal man, it’s a true grown hound’s lullaby, scouts honor. As that sweet guitar tone of his worked its way across my mind, I felt my eyes almost close up shop for good.
Then it came in on the wind.
First small gusts, then some real whipping. Came in fits and starts, but boy did it flip those eyelids right up.
“The forecast didn’t call for these.” I hollered.
At first the dynamic duo simply shrugged, but then…then the day blessed us with a true sight to behold; dust devils.
Big beautiful sandy tornadoes, all the shades of beige imaginable, crossing the desert like great majestic beasts of yore. Of course getting pelted by the odd stone wasn’t pleasant, but it didn’t draw blood and all our shades and windshields were built to last. Looked like this troop went shopping in the local mines because there were gems in dem der devils. Nothing pricey, no diamonds-r-shit, just a few neat odds and ends. And it was on that day I learned dear old Harry was a collector.
Sorta.
“Ayo Speed! Betcha you can’t nail a stone from here.”
I looked at my long-and-lovely Model 3 and laughed my ass off. “Get ‘er up Harry, shooting gallery sounds good to me.”
My Hilux pulls up alongside the red-and-white rat rod and we both get ready to take aim. I got eyes on this pretty lil’ pebble some sorta shade of green, and he has eyes on somethin’ purple. Kinda amethyst-like.
So here this brown-furred sonofabitch takes his revolver and pops his shot. Doesn’t get it on the first try, not with these damn things spinning like our rides’ wheels, but manages on the second. Respectable. Then comes my turn.
I look at that strange lil’ green blur and plink like the dickens for it. Shot One, miss. Shot Two, miss. Shot Three, BOOM!
But not any old boom. That rock flashed when I nailed it and the sucker shot a blast wave rips the damn devil apart.
“You think that’s” was all Rory got out before we saw what followed behind: the bright-red Duster sat profiled on our modules. And though we couldn’t see him from that distance, Mr. Way sure as hell made one neat racket screaming, smoking, shaking like a Friday night.
“Speedfreak to HQ,” I called over the radio, foot on the floor. “Car matching J.T.R. description spotted chasing dust devils. We believe there’s some radium swirling in them.”
I get the “keep us posted” note from over-the-air and soon the threes of us are hustling and bustling our way to…well Way. What we didn’t count on was what we were gonna find when we started riding that Duster’s tail.
Randy was a thin dude, suffering all the usual effects, but the hooting and hollering also came not from some hound raving mad that some twisters stole his hash, but he seemed rather pleased about the whole thing. He had that Plymouth screaming for mercy as she went hurtling for Nature’s go-to slice of desert phenomena, and the closer the car got, the more the steady beige of the dust devils grew green.
Swear to fuggin’ God, yes! Green. Green goddamn tornadoes. These fellas will attest to it. And what’s more, motherfucker actually made it! This fucking nut job, throttle jammed through the footwell, his on-board Geiger counter screaming gimme shelter, gets that car into the cyclone, just as we make it to him. The thing goes whipping right up and into the body of it. So here we are, looking at what has got to be a suicide of some kind. A helluva suicide, but one nonetheless. Knowing how radium works on these cats now, we figured the G-forces up there would make pureed bat guano outta the man before it spat his mid-size sedan out for us to see.
And yet, dude wasn’t. In fact, in the quick flashes we caught of him through the windows, he wasn’t even rotting away. Whatever the cat was up to, he wasn’t high on the supply. High on the adrenaline, sure, but not the supply.
I lay on the loudspeakers. “RANDALL WAY. I…I REALLY DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK TO DO WITH YOU. HAVING FUN AT LEAST?”
The gleeful whoops were the best I could get out of him before he gave us the closest we’d get to a giveaway. In his husky voice, we could faintly make out this:
“RUBEN, IT WORKS! THIS SHIT FUCKING WORKS! TRY STEERING!”
And just like that, a trio of dust devils, whose powers combined would probably get you up to F3 on the old scales, swung to the left. Whoever was moving the damn thing shoved the joystick over too hard though, because every car picked up by it was launched out of the cyclone.
Me and the boys were all scrambling to make sure we came out on our wheels, but the Plymouth was first to land, and land she did.
Like a well-chucked Matchbox, made of tin foil, and packed with plutonium.
There was also some kind of receiver inside the car because the great green crack rocks that were still spinning around in the dust devils all went off simultaneously in a great big fireball, blowing the tornadoes apart in a flash. Thank fuck for the reflexes because we coulda been dead of fifty different things from the way that sucker landed and the way they all went off.
I radioed in the perp’s death, got us all to a detox station just to be safe, but that left us with a helluva lot more to the case than just “a randy goes killing people for atomic uppers.” Someone, namely a Reuben (though I could go for a pack of pastrami myself right about now), was working on some certifiable bullshit if “controlling weather” was anything to go by.
We had started by checking in with all the indie science stations out in Central. Lots of folks doing stray experiments with whatever they could get their hands on. Some of it was for the Force, some were ex-residents of Paradise West (Haven for those not in the know). One croppa cats knew the name Ruben, but it turned out to be the name of a prototype bot built for expedited welding. A couple had been theorizing about artificially generating cyclones like the ones we saw, but said it wouldn’t even need any sort of nuclear power. We got a pretty cool lab demo where they whipped one up using this little solar-powered rover doohickey that moved slow as molasses, so it couldn’t have spat Way out the way it did. In fact the way Way went was weally unweal and–HMPH! Shit!
Thanks for that, coulda been talking like a toddler for the resta night.
Anywhonow, so most of our interrogations had been more like a Coronet film festival than a perp walk. Until we made it to one lab. The name “Dr. Ruben Wells, PhD, MD, EngD, Esq” was a pretty good tip-off, though the white coat wasn’t tipping his hand any when we swung by.
Was a nice normal gray, well-dressed, working with a small crew. Never got hot under the collar when we explained the whole sitch, until we got to talking about radium. He put on a pretty good floor show about not digging the stuff. Not a very subtle one though. When we asked if he had any on-site, he did all that good old harrumphing at the very thought. “I wouldn’t dare harbor such materials on these premises, not unless commissioned by the Patrol or the Force for any analysis.”
And like a goober, in walks one of his aids with a box of the stuff, glowing green as emeralds on an Irish down.
I’ll explain Ireland later, after this story and a good black beer.
Anyway, so Ruben goes RUNNING. And while we go after him in our hot rods and token hog, he hops in his own contraption; one of these artificial dust devils. Starts it up and is cloaked by whatever tech he’s standing on. One mean force-field too because our laser rounds aren’t doing shit. So off he goes in this armored tornado, and obviously the three of us goons are trying to put an idea together. We know what’ll happen if we throw any of our rides into it, he can make the starts and stops necessary to chuck us off the proverbial hood and under the proverbial wheels.
Then it hits us. The tornado. And all of us go whipping and whirling up into the cyclone, pelted by dust and stone and all sorts of fun stuff. I get a fossil to the face, Harry is firing at everything that ain’t Rory or me, and that crazy white cocksucker Rory is having the time of his life. I think he even started singing a few bars of “Free Fallin,” showing how serious he saw it all.
Now when I looked down, I could just barely make out the distortions the shield made. And then I catch sight of something gray and I shoot. I blow the guy’s hand clean off. Even with all the wind and wailing, we can hear him screaming black, blue, and bloody murder all at once. What it tells me though is that there is a limited range on that force-field. When he steps out of the cloak, he’s outta the cloak. So while we’re all getting motion sickness, trying to survive the great ride in the sky we’re all taking, I got my sights on the next move he makes out of that field. And sure enough, a control or something got jammed, or maybe he was trynna throw us out, but I see his back jump out of the field and I blast him where I saw. Ruben drops dead on the spot and his private dust devil evaporates in a second, all threes of us dropping down Wile E. style. Richter’s rat rod got his head, Madskin’s bike broke the dude’s legs, and I landed on the stump of an arm.
Suspension was a little funky for a while, we all had some spinal realignment, but hey, we’s still here, alive and scoliosis-free, ain’t we?
I swear by God and gentle Jesus, that is the whole cotton-pickin’ story, and if it ain’t, may the Lord drop me before I finish this beer…
I’d wager he made it about three-quarters of the way there. Don’t worry, he ain’t dead though. His liver might be after tonight, but old Ridgefield’ll pull through. Dumbass hasn’t failed to yet.
As for the accuracy of that one…nah, pretty much how it happened, give or take a few lines. ‘Til next time!
I said, “Til. Next. Time.”
Ah shit, I dunno how to turn this thing off…hey Doc, mind lending a hand?