“You’re an idiot,” Heinz says to him. “You bring shame to the master race.”
Heinz drops the sledgehammer, puts his hand into his pack, and into a mechjaw’s neck. Although the mechjaw’s minigun is out of ammo, its teeth are still as sharp as ever.
“I don’t think I’ll kill you,” Heinz says. “You deserve much worse.” He brings the snarling head of the mechjaw toward Scavy’s ankle, below the boot-knife. “I’m going to turn you into one of those things out there.” The dog head snaps at Scavy’s flesh. “You’ll spend all eternity as a disgusting, disgraceful living corpse.”
Scavy kicks him in the calf, breaking his spear-wound wider. Heinz releases Scavy’s leg, and the punk kicks his boot-knife through the mechjaw’s face.
Heinz steps back, clenching his wrist below the dog head. He slips his hand out of the mechjaw’s neck and tosses the growling head over his shoulder. Then he pulls off his glove. Examining his hand, he sees his blood mixing with the dog’s green zombie slime. The boot-knife had gone through the mechjaw’s head, through the glove, and into Heinz’s fist, infecting him with the zombie virus.
Looking at Scavy with distress, Heinz holds his hand, shivering in fear.
“You infected me?” Heinz says.
Scavy sneers through his drooping lips. “Checkmate, motherfucker.”
Anger flashes across Heinz’s face. He retrieves the double-fisted sledgehammer from the floor. The poison has now paralyzed all of Scavy’s body, so the bleeding, burnt up punk just laughs up at the nazi. He chuckles at him as loudly as he can, as Heinz lifts the sledgehammer, aiming for Scavy’s head.
Domino was dead. The Diamonds no longer wanted to fight a war against Scavy. Then Tim Lion was found dead in his club one morning, murdered by a lone mysterious assailant.
“Tim Lion’s dead?” Brick said to Scavy. “Are you serious?”
“That’s what they say,” Scavy said, lighting a cigarette.
“You’re the luckiest motherfucker on the planet. I can’t believe you got away with it.”
“I think I’ve got a guardian angel,” Scavy said.
Just before Heinz lowers the sledgehammer into Scavy’s skull, something hits the nazi in the back of the head. His neck breaks, his body goes limp, and then he falls to the floor. Scavy looks up to see a guardian angel standing over him. A golden, glimmering guardian angel named Mr. T.
“You forgot this,” Mr. T says, then tosses the twisted casing of a rocket at Heinz’s chest.
Scavy smiles in a daze as his guardian angel picks him up and carries him down the hall. A particle beam is fired at Scavy, but his guardian angel blocks it with his elbow, then swats the camera ball out of his way.
“Hang in there,” says the guardian angel. “The T-2000 knows how to fix you up. You’ll be back on your feet in no time.”
When Mr. T looks down at Scavy, he sees tears of blissful joy on the punk’s face, as if Scavy is looking at the most beautiful angel in all the heavens.
The three merc punks arrive at their destination: the city’s art museum. A fortified white building covered in brown hop vines.
Xiu says, “Let’s get in, get what we need, and get out.”
Her Arms nod their heads and get to work, prying open the barricaded entrance. Zippo uses his claw-hands to cut through the boards and vegetation. Vine uses his wires to rip open the doors. Clouds of dust billow out of the shadowy interior as the merc punks enter.
“The client wants as many as we can carry,” Xiu says. “But most importantly we need to get the masterpiece. He said we’d recognize it by the red dress.”
Her Arms get straight to work, searching the museum for the works of art they were hired to retrieve. Many of the paintings in the museum have been destroyed by moisture and UV rays entering from the cracks in the ceiling. Some of the works of art are so faded that the images are completely unrecognizable, worthless.
Zippo finds one that is still mostly intact. A picture of two little girls gathering acorns. He pulls it off the wall and wipes a layer of dust from the surface.
“That’s not one of them,” Xiu tells him over his shoulder. “The ones we are looking for are different. Unique.”
Zippo smiles and gazes at the little girls in the picture. Xiu wraps her arm around his waist and peers longingly into the image from behind Zippo’s shoulder. They put the picture back onto the wall, then press their foreheads together as they take one last look at the girls gathering acorns.
The day Xiu, Zippo, and Vine became a unit was the day that they were married. In Mongol culture, the ceremony that brings three children together into one unit is also a bond of matrimony. Merc punk units are all threesome relationships. They share the same bed as a trio, they mate as a trio, and they raise children as a trio—until their children are old enough to join their own trio.
When the Head of a unit reaches the age of twenty-three, they can decide whether or not to take time off to breed. They have another chance at age twenty-five, and at age twenty-seven. Xiu wanted to have a child. Even though she would not be able to raise it for long, she still wanted to produce young. Zippo and Vine also wanted to have children badly, because it was what their Head wanted. So Xiu put in a request to enter a breeding period.
During a breeding period, merc punks don’t have to go on missions or do much work of any kind. They get to stay on their boat and spend their time trying to get pregnant. These are the happiest days in a merc punk’s life.
The first time Xiu’s unit made love, they were all very awkward. Because a unit is trained to think and act as one being, sex is more like masturbation.
“Ummm…” Xiu giggled as they sat naked on the bed together, in a circle. They were already completely familiar with each other’s bodies, yet intimacy on this level was new to them. It was mysterious, exciting.
Zippo was the most awkward of the three. As an Arm, he is not supposed to have desires and feelings of his own. He is supposed to put all of his attention into mimicking his Head’s feelings and desires. Arms are trained to empty their minds of their own thoughts and fill them with the thoughts of their Head. They see their bodies as puppets for their Heads, and their consciousnesses as mere spectators that view everything from above the action.
However, Zippo sometimes finds himself with desires of his own. He is in love with Xiu, more in love with her than any Arm is supposed to love their Head. Sometimes he wants to hold her in his arms, kiss her with all of his passion, but if Xiu doesn’t order him to do these things he’s not allowed to. He just has to wait for the moment to come, when she commands him to do so.
Zippo was on the bed, shaking with the thought of being able to make love to Xiu for the first time. He knew that Xiu saw it only as if she was just making love to herself, but he couldn’t stop the feelings from flooding in. He waited patiently for Xiu to order him onto her body.
Xiu smiled at her Arms and giggled. It was as if she didn’t know where to begin. They had all been waiting so long for this moment that they could hardly believe it was finally happening.
Zippo visualized strings connected to the end of Xiu’s fingers as she reeled him toward her body. She giggled as she had him lick her left breast, suck her cocoa-colored nipple into his mouth, rub his hands down her tobacco-scented chest. She leaned back and put her hands behind her short black mohawk, as her Arms followed her telepathic commands. Vine kissed the right side of her neck and ear, as Xiu’s strings pulled Zippo’s tongue further down her body, over her belly button, to her inner thighs.