The Space Noir Bar, Michael Marino [people reading books txt] 📗

I had to blow the rusted lock off the steel door with my trusted Link Wray Ray Gun the most powerful handgun of the day that included a deadly vaporising disintegration setting. Developed 30 years ago by an arms scientist named I Claudius Faubus Wallace, the company’s motto summed up the guns purpose succinctly...DISINTEGRATION THEN, DISINTEGRATION NOW, DISINTEGRATION FOREVER.  It’s saved my sorry drunken ass many times. One day...five Retropolin years ago I was on a case involving a gang of mineral thieves I was hired to track and bring into Promethean Headquarters. They were stealing power crystals used for fuel and mutant munitions. Seems a little coup d’ grace was in the works on Planet Hydra.I got lucky and cornered one red handed, or blue handed in this case. Hydrans are one colorful race and had three heads allowing them the distinction of being the only sentient beings in the galaxy who could read, think and give a decent Hydran blowjob all at the same time.Shots were fired, I fired back with my accurate Link Wray and wounded one of the blue tri-heads.  As it lay on the ground bleeding its lavender blood slower than a stopped up catsup bottle I stood over it..game over and asked it one simple question “Did I fire six shots or only five? To tell you the truth in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being this is a Link Wray XL, the most powerful ray gun in the galaxy and could blow your  three Hydran heads clean off, you've gotta ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, you three headed punk?I wasn’t always that lucky, and sometimes ended up on the other end of the stick sporting a few broken ribs and face stitches for my trouble. The price you sometimes have to cough up to stay in this game. That’s when I obtained an illegal Link Wray Ray Gun the type of which had been banned by the  252nd Retropolin Congress. I had my black market contact, Izzy the Jew from Jersey jack a shipment of guns to get one of these babies.

Now I was in business..a real bad ass dime novel drugstore cowboy..and no more broken ribs or legs. One more leg fracture and I’d be limping  along  like Walter Brennan with my limbs so pliable I would be able to wrap them around my head and bounce on my ass.As we forced headquarters door open we were immediately spotted by a military drone that began unleashing a barrage of disintegration pulse artillery shells in our direction. Usually deadly accuracy was their destructive calling card but with rapid reflexes we all dove into the doorway onto the concrete floor littered with empty disintegration  small arms shell  cases from the last battle the Labians had with the overwhelming forces of the Toho’s before going underground.Labian Headquarters had been completely abandoned, Now how the hell will we find the Rabbit Labian leader and hence the secret location of the fantastic Falcon to free Mary Asteroid and save our own skins in the bargain. It was all a crap shoot now I thought until Asrini fessed up. “Maddie and I know where she is, c’mon. Keep the Link Wrays on max and turn the safety off,” she hollered with the authority of a dominatrix as we raced back  the street, this time dodging small arms fire from two directions. We were now now in the crosshairs of a crossfire between the Toho’s and the Comreds who had pursued us in stealth mode from Retropolis. We ran through the streets firing blindly in all directions. “Goddamn it, if you knew where she was why didn’t you bark it out sooner. Might have saved us from almost getting fried and vaped.” The it hit me with the impact of a crash dummy hitting the wall. “Excuse me.” No answer. “EXCUSE ME! You know where the Rabbit Hole is? Why didn’t you say so and how do you know?”
 
   We kept running while Maddie jumped in with a double barreled reprimand, short but sweet, if you like that kind of thing. “Fuck off Yucatan. We had to check headquarters first to see if we could get any help getting through the Valium Vector, held by holdouts with a slight drug and gun problem who also want to murder their way to power. They hate Labians as much as they hate Toho’s.”Asrini stayed focused and fired volley after volley while sprinting through the shower of firepower being leveled at us. The two of them were in great athletic shape for this shit, while I felt as tired out as a Chinese ping pong ball after ten rounds of fierce competition in Pyong Yang between the current laser pong champs Suc Muc Dik and Long Wang Chung.Now, as though I were not having a great time, we had to fight our way through a Disneyland theme park of hypodermic hipsters who could smell fear ten blocks away and were as thirsty for blood as a fresh Tampon.  

It didn’t take long to reach the Valium Vector when shrapnel balls were being lobbed at us from the rubble surrounding us. The Hypo’s had spotted us as I spotted some of their stolen Toho armored vehicles racing towards us with their Red Zeppelin flags flapping in the rocket fires red glare of Toho artillery, Comreds small arms fire and a flotilla of drones in a flying wedge formation heading for victory in the vector.  The Red Zeppelins, as the Hipsters called themselves, only waged war with the Labians for control of the Kotex Vortex up until now. Unfortunately we had now  brought the entire para-military planetary war into their living room. I had a feeling we would not be greeted by a  Red Zeppelin Welcome Wagon and free ticket to ride a Thorazine Train to a stairway to  heaven.  

As a very impressive, but slightly battered  command vehicle slammed to a halt some very nasty looking armed hopped up thugs emerged. These were not Mousketeers. These were born killers with some very serious derangement issues. We were dead meat and I never even got a chance to bang Asrini or Maddie or both. My bad luck was on path of a winning streak…. of losing!

A Red Zeppelin gang tank flanked by a flotilla of smaller armored vehicles dead stopped in front of us. Heavy metal military looking dread tread contraptions from an earlier era, time warped junk yard dogs with rusting weapons protruding from slits. Mobile fortresses with unforgiving fire power and enough bite and bark to accompany the gauntlet of the generalissimo machismo that soon flowed from the big kahuna with the torn faded insignia haphazardly sewn onto his army surplus chic non-com uniform that suddenly made him a faux general. 

He also sported a pair of Midas Memphis “thank you very much” gold lame pants and over sized orange sunglasses. Great, I’d seen this kind of character before...in cartoon but, never in real life! A paramilitary picture of imperial perfection if this were a backwater banana republic or Graceland whichever comes first. If Elvis had really left the auditorium he ended up here as a cyborg celebrity just in time for the next dinner show! Viva Robotia!
The “Gen”, as he was called, and his merry hypo hipster hop head henchmen approached us armed with older version Faye Ray model guns, usually available on the cheap at the army navy girl scout boy scout surplus stores along with small mess kits that can be converted into small land mines to blow the small 15 inch legs off of a midget and other terrorists posing as little people.

At it's highest setting, sedate stun, i is no match for our state of the art rock, cocked and locked trusty Link Wray Defender with it’s “kill them all” max setting models as advertised in Field and Stream of Consciousness magazine and other guns and ammo periodicals periodically produced by Ted Nugent XXIII Publishing.

My confidence level increased exponentially along with my adrenaline as I began to feel more and more like Snake Plissken being flanked by the Laura Croft Tomb Raider armed and fabulous Doublemint Twin cheerleaders. I could see out of the corner of my eye Asrini making a subtle move for her weapons safety catch. Maddie followed suit. What the hell, we were ready for anything. “Hold it ladies. Not yet. Too many of ‘em and too much armor protection,” I mumbled. Asrini shot back with one of those “put your tail between your legs “ admonishments, “I’ve dealt with this space trash before, you haven’t. Gotta stand up them to gain their respect.”

I nodded and surveyed our situation. Not good at first glance. We were surrounded now on Robotias Valium Vector streets, beat streets, hard streets and harder alleys than I ever saw even in Old Detroit. These streets were smaller, and more cramped with rubble from ongoing battles between the competing gangs keeping the area cloaked 24/7 in the perpetual dark purple haze of artillery and small arms gunfire with a hint of grey and black from the smoldering ruins. Even the broken sewer lines leaking and seeping to the streets had smoke on the water.
This place was a Skull Island in the ocean of black hole degenerates and galactic junkies with it's faux Chinese restaurants, one room Soma bars with broken stools, deep within the loins of the tender, with row upon row of skids, all in narcotic film noir sequence, dark, and slow. I had the feeling I was walking upwards against the downward flow of a thousand liquid rain children freely falling from the skies, the other children having broken free from the split apart pinata and spilled out, falling and bouncing down the streets to hinder our quest for the Falcon. We did in the end dodge them artfully as we tread deftly as we avoided pharmacologicl projectiles from space, fired from the Robotian moon at the behest of a beast from the outer rings of Saturn’s rear end planet, Uranus, yer anus, jumpin' Jupiter yumpin Yiminy.

All of the Red Zeppelin gang members had the same vacant look. Crazed and deranged thanks to the popular street drugs. Lenny Bruce junkie juice flowing hot and steamy, and dealing from the bottom of a marked deck of cards at a pharmaceutical convention, with unconventional doctors in attendance, wearing togas stolen from New York City bath house locker rooms with fat sweaty Greeks and those from the Baltics with secret rings...eating lunch naked with William Burroughs and a typewriter with keys that stick and ribbons that were worn and faded.
Even the junkettes, the young gang girls were strung out, but my x-ray vision allowed me a gander at nubile puberty ready breasts just peeking above the skin with a pink nipple tipped volcano cane ready to erupt with passion as pubic hair began to sprout it's fertile garden below. It was an erotic Robotian visual voyeuristic symphony performed by an orchestra of puberty creating a variation of a hypodermic dream version of the War