KOZMOCALYPSE 1.0.1

 

   

                    ashes falling from the sky

                                        Kozmo wakes

to the sounds of someone shouting. Stunned, he blinks away the sting of cryosleep and sits upright. First thing he sees is Lock crouched behind a cryo unit, each fist filled with laser pistol and his gunslinger eyes dead on the door. The shouting is coming from Fletcher, a.k.a. Moneybags, who has a massive storm carbine trained on the door. “Who's out there?” Moneybags screams. His bodyguard drops her gun to the floor, fingers clumsy from the frost. Kozmo looks around for Caroline and Mahalo, sees them safe and secure behind the weapons crates where Ellen is grabbing a rifle. Then there's Rex, standing still as a statue, his eyes staring at the door. That's probably the only thing keeping that door shut. A sixty-pound mutant with a ton of TK. Kozmo doesn't feel a moment of pity for any hostiles on the other side of that door. The weakest adult in the room is his wife Caroline, and she swings a mean baseball bat. Anyone opening that door would be welcome by bullets, lasers, grenades, telekinetic projectiles, and a well-aimed sonic bowel disruptor.

        “Welcome to the Kozmocalypse!” he cries as he leaps into the fray.

        Studly buff Kozmo Kaminsky approaches the steel door and presses one badass ear against the cold metal. There's little but cold silence in the roar of Fletcher's mad panic. “Everybody shut the fuck up!” Kozmo bellows. Rex retorts, “I am being quiet!”

        “Not the fuck now you're not,” Kozmo growls, then braces himself in case the kid decides to let go of the door, which if properly swung by the telekinetic tyke could crush Kozmo against the wall like a Panamanian cockroach. The floor of the cryo chamber is a hundred years cold or more. Cold floor under his feet always makes Kozmo feel like he has to pee. Dammit. His bladder aches like he's been shot with a sonic disruptor. Which he realizes he left back in his cryo tank. Along with his other gun. He winced from the bladder pain. At least I can piss on them if they're hostiles.

        The door opens and closes in a flash. Too fast for a door that size. Rex.

        In that brief moment of openness Kozmo gets a glimpse of two people outside the door. A white man and a darker woman, the woman with dreds. There's always a white boy hanging out near a Rasta princess, Kozmo thinks. He could see they were carrying tools but were also strapped. “You out there,” Kozmo shouts. “This is Steve Rogers. I'm coming out. I'm unarmed.”

        Kozmo turns and motions for Rex to open the door. He notices a puzzled look on their faces. “Oh yeah,” he remembers. “While you guys were asleep, I rewrote all our life histories. We're a family of superheroes. You all have new names now. Superhero names.”

        “What's my name?” Rex demands.

        “Rex Fury,” Kozmo says. “Kid Crusher.”

        “What about me?” Ellen asks petulantly. She has a storm carbine in one hand and a saucer grenade in the other. It looks like she's trying to figure out how to fire a rocket launcher using her toes.

        “Jenna Fury,” he tells her. “Iron Girl.”

        She frowns. “I don't want to be his sister.” She pulls the bolt of the rifle and chambers a 10mm round.

        Kozmo thinks fast. “You want to be my kid sister?”

        Ellen smiles and lowers the rifle.

        Whew. “Okay, Rex. Open the door.”

        “I'm coming out! I'm unarmed!”

        He steps out the door with his hands friendly out-front, thinking, I for one welcome my new alien overlords.

        They were human.

        That was a plus.

        They weren't cannibals.

        That was another plus.

        They were looking for Fletcher.

        . . .

        Okay, so we didn't wake to a genius paradise. Kozmo sighs as he nods to Fletcher. “Yeah, we got a Felcher in here,” Kozmo tells them.

        Fletcher immediately hollers, “Yeah, I'm Fletcher.”

        Moneybags is no idiot and he can smell a business opportunity under heavy weapons fire. He follows Kozmo out the door and Rex closes it behind them. Kozmo notices the kid leaves it open just a little to eaves drop. Smart little freak.

        The rescuers were Fletcher's people alright, the Fletcherites, or the remnants of those stalwart warriors they had left behind on Thaumus. Left them in a MacArthur moment calling for them to rally forth and carry the flag against the tyrannic oppression of the vengeful geek Sarah McKillup. Left them to die a certain death, Kozmo had figured.

        But here they are, two of them at least, slack-jawed with awe at the Real Jack Fletcher. Kozmo listens as they explain everything to Moneybags. Fifty-eight years have passed since they went into cryo sleep. Not the five centuries Kozmo had planned. He'll mourn the death of that scheme later with his friends Jim Beam and Nat Sherman. He perks up when the rescuers mentioned the Queen of Light, knows right away it's her, remembering something like it's a dream he forgot a long time ago. She's here, she's alive, the bitch. Fifty-eight years and she's still with us. Kozmo smiles. Good. I still get to kill her. Life's worth living after all.

        This is the gist of it: after the Battle for Los Angeles, McKillup and company found themselves dealing with an insurrection at Thaumus. Some escaped Sarah's pogrom and fled to the mainland where they hid out underground. Sarah apparently performed experiments on Walter to develop warp ships to take the battle to the aliens. Once she'd secured a victory against the nickel-hoarders, she turned her psychotic attentions to the harmless rebels. Her egg-like robots patrol the surface scrounging for materials to use in the manufacture of more robots. Meanwhile back on Thaumus she has enslaved the population to breed and do her bidding. Apparently now an uploaded consciousness within a supercomputer, she is now known as the Queen of Light and resides within a heavily fortified Tower of Light that apparently has the ability to destabilized reality.

        No big shakes to Kozmo – he's been dealing with an unstable reality for most of his life.

        The two rescuers aren't alone. They're part of a colony of people who descended from those who escaped the Queen. Those left behind were apparently given cybernetic or nanotech implants that make them part of a hive mind that works for the Queen. Her robots stalk the earth scrounging for metals. When they find the stray human or two, they take them back to the Tower of Light where they're implanted and added to the matrix. Nobody knows what the Queen is building in her vast fortress. Kozmo's money says she's building herself a boyfriend, or possibly a time machine. Which is awesome because that means he might get to kill her more than once.

        Convinced the rescuers aren't flesh-eating zombies, Kozmo ducks back into the cryo chamber and tells everyone to start packing. They're a smart crew of eavesdroppers so they're already ahead of him. Kozmo grabs a storm carbine and a fresh cigar and heads back out the door. “Show me this bus you keep yammering about,” he tells one of the rescuers.

        Fletcher pauses in his self-glorification. “Shouldn't we all wait and go together?”

        “I don't want to march all the way to this school bus they're talking about only to find I've walked my family into a trap of flesh-eating zombies?”

        “School bus?” Rasta girl looks puzzled. “We not zombies.”

        “No offense,” Kozmo says. “But I've seen enough movies and read enough comic books to know what I'm talking about here.”

        “We can go back to the bus if you want,” the white guy offers. “But it would be better if we carried some stuff with us. We've got a long trip ahead.”

        “You see, Kozmo?” Fletcher implored with his hands and rolled his eyes in frustration. He puts his hands on his hips and then wags a finger at Kozmo. “So just put way your gun, go pack your things, and we'll all walk over there together.”

        “Hey, Fletch,” Kozmo growls. “You need to check our shorts. I think your balls fell of in cryo.”

        Three days underground with Fletcher would be enough to drive a man to murder. Add the mutant twins Ellen and Rex, the brooding Willa, manic Marcus, cool Caroline, and the gawking strangers who didn't seem to know anything about the past... let's just say Kozmo spends a lot of time alone, or voluntarily taking the infant Mahalo for a solitary walk so Moms could dig on some alone-time, or just offending whoever is horning in on his personal space. He doesn't much like the company of people anyway, and since waking from cryo he's been having these micro-seizures that he'd rather keep to himself for the moment, at least til he can figure out the cascade of apparently unrelated images that keeps crashing his consciousness like a Michael Bay movie loop. Ashes falling from the sky. A battle of light in the clouds. Explosions. All of it like remember a dream he forgot he ever had. Only Kozmo knows he never had this dream, never saw these events. He knows enough about cryo to know there would be after-effects. Whatever Sarah did to him back at Azimuth, whatever affected his perception so that everything was at half-speed sometimes – there must be some strange interaction between that and the cryo. He'd mention it to Marcus or Lock but one would tell the other and one or the other would tell Caroline, and then she'd tell him to lay off the weed, the sauce, the cigars, or all three.

        Goddammit. He forgot to smoke a cigar before getting on this sealed underground trolley ride. He'd been busy making sure Fletcher didn't start labeling things as they were loaded and keeping an eye on Rex, who kept levitating boxes instead of doing any physical labor. Caroline had packed the boxes but he had one in his pocket, intending to smoke it, taking it out a few times when he was interrupted by some gawking dirt-covered future Morlock. There were only a few people to meet. It would be worse when they got to this city they kept mentioning.