A young, stone-faced soldier drinking a cappuccino unholstered his sidearm and pressed the barrel under his chin.
“You don’t have to prove anything to me,” Skinner said.
“This is the fuck and death party,” Cube said. “You don’t wanna see the death? How about some of the fuck? We’ve got a surprise downstairs. You fellows can help yourselves to the leftovers. We’ve had our fill. Go on ahead, indulge.”
“You don’t have girls, do you?” Carl said, his face falling.
“No, man, we’re following the code. We got ’droid pussy.”
“Tell that idiot to holster his weapon,” Skinner said.
Cube nodded. “Goldberg, we don’t need you to hit the reset button just yet.” He turned back to Skinner. “You look like you’ve been at this for a while, soldier. Tell me, do the newmans make any sense to you? Has killing them made it any easier to determine whether they’re the human beings or if we’re the ones who come out of factories?”
“I kill what I’m told to kill,” Skinner said. “I don’t give a fuck if it’s got guts or chips.”
“Good for you,” Cube smiled and tossed his toy to Skinner. “Now mess this puzzle up and solve your way out of it.”
An iron stairwell led to a basement. The stairs opened into a dim, low-ceilinged space that smelled of opium smoke and industrial-grade lubricants. A soldier elbowed past them on his way out, zipping his fly. The 83rd turned on their beams and swept the floor with light. The room appeared littered with dissected mannequins. An arm crawled out of their way and hid under a sofa as they advanced. They followed the sound of sex groans to a curtained alcove. When Skinner swept aside the curtain they found a fat, naked man on his back on a couch. Skinner blinked, trying to figure out what exactly he was looking at. As best he could tell, it was the lower half of a male newman, the legs wearing fishnet stockings, mounted on the fat man, rocking back and forth while the man stroked the thing’s artificial cock. Where the torso should have been was a mess of organic newman technology, cords and sacs, severed tubes spurting clear fluid. While this half of a newman got fucked, a severed newman head of indeterminate gender licked the fat man’s balls.
“Hey! Can’t a dude screw in peace around here?” the fat man complained.
“My God,” Skinner said. (Decades later, in Carl’s living room, Carl said, “Yeah, that shit was sick. And you don’t even remember it as gross as I remember it.”)
“Identify yourself,” Skinner said.
“And you are?”
“My name is: I’ve got a loaded Cherry Coca-Cola and your dick is up a robot’s ass.”
“Name’s Caponegra, senior regional manager of the Pfizer 183rd.”
Will Ferrell spoke up. “Guys? Is it considered a threeway if two of the participants used to be one person? Just wondering.”
“Shut the fuck up, Ferrell,” Carl said.
“We’re sweeping the ’hood for insurgents,” Skinner said, yanking the newman body half off Caponegra’s lap. “And you’re going to data dump all your intelligence on us.”
“Dammit, fine. Let me rub one out and I’ll brief you upstairs.”
Upstairs, over coffee at a table freckled with cigarette butts, Caponegra, now mostly clothed, told stories of raids, ambushes, casualties received and delivered. Skinner divvied the info into little piles, separating a soldier’s braggadocio from strategically relevant data. Caponegra’s blustery yarns did support the case that the newmans were in full retreat, escaping into the forests upstate where they were burying themselves under trees to hibernate.
“They’re like bears,” Caponegra said. “I got a report from a scout in the Glaxo-Wellcome 3rd infantry that they cornered four of them up near Saratoga Springs, all huddled in a hole in the ground, skin going pasty from lack of sun, eyes glowing red as they went into sleep mode. Interrogation revealed they had no power-up date. Meaning someone would have to come along, find them, and manually turn them back on.”
“We’re sweeping west through Soho,” Skinner said. “What can you tell us.”
Caponegra rolled his eyes. “You guys got the easiest job in the world. There’s no one left out there. We practically bleached the place.”
“So what are you doing hanging around here?”
Caponegra gave him a look. “There’s somewhere else?”
They came to a building halved vertically by an explosion. Looked like an NYU dorm, a cross section of what appeared to be, more or less, normal collegiate life, a couple dozen hive-like stories of beds, computers, desks, a Jules et Jim poster, microbiology and civics textbooks with passages highlighted in pink and yellow, the pillowy forms of bags of popped but uneaten microwaved popcorn. Paper drifted in the smoke. Here and there a fire. In one of the exposed dorm rooms on the second floor, a girl sat hunched over her desk, head in hand, reviewing self-made flash cards.
Carl consulted his handheld. “She’s human.”
“Hey you! Student!” Skinner shouted. “What are you still doing up there?”
Visibly annoyed, the girl called down, “Leave me alone! I’m studying! Midterms next week!”
“You need to evacuate asap!” Carl replied. “This ain’t the time to study! Come on, we’ll set you up in a library where you can study all you want!”
Somewhere on the island another building fell, rattling the earth beneath their feet and the teeth in their jaws. Helicopters in formation sliced across a sky too grimy and chemical-burned to be of any use to anybody.
Carl said to Skinner, “We got to get her out of there. She’s in shock, obviously.”
“Stupid bitch,” Skinner said. “Let’s save her ass.”
Skinner put Will Ferrell in charge of the unit while he and Carl climbed over the rubble looking for an entrance. The comic actor called after them. “Guys? This is against protocol, you know? Shouldn’t we all stick together?”
“Go fuck yourself, Ferrell,” Skinner said. “We’re getting this chick out of here.”
(Years in the future, in the living room, Carl said, “Not exactly how we remember it.”
“Yeah, but here it comes,” Skinner said.)
Carl pushed aside a Foosball table, found the stairwell. Walls covered in anti-newman graffiti. Skinner doubted many of the students who’d screwed and crammed and gotten ripped in these dorms had made it off Manhattan alive. Rifle drawn he kicked open the door to the second floor, exiting into a dark hallway where postpsychotherapy Metallica played faintly from ceiling-mounted speakers. In a corner beneath a fire extinguisher lay a wounded Christian American soldier. Looked like a contractor from Toys “R” Us. Hard to tell exactly where he’d been hit; his whole torso was caramelized in bloody goo. Carl bent over him with the handheld and got his vitals.
“Soldier, where you from?” Carl said.
“Huh?” the fallen man said. “Who the f-f-f-fuck are you?”
“We’re the Boeing 83rd. We’re going to fly you out of this joint.”
“The college chick—” the soldier said. “They’re using her as bait.”
“We got nooms up in this shit?” Carl said as a round pinged the fire extinguisher over his head, unleashing a cloud of white vapor. Down the hall dorm rooms cracked open and out stumbled half-obliterated newmans wearing the collegiate T-shirts and hoodies of their victims. Carl’s face assumed the intensity of a man assembling a particularly tricky piece of furniture as he raked the hall with ordnance. Skinner’s head rolled to one side and he caught sight of a Mohawked, child-sized newman wearing a Led Zeppelin SwanSong T-shirt and nothing else, its crotch smooth and plastic with the absence of genitals, round after round perforating its jerking, humanoid form, an arm shot off in gouts of purplish lubricant, its cat-like eyes glowing yellow in the fire-retardant haze.