Blog

His ears ringing, his body bruised and aching, his eyes blurred, Wartimus came to on the lawn of his father’s estate with a ring of burning helicopter wreckage all around him and the broken body of his best friend just out of reach.

“Simon,” he croaked as he rolled over onto his stomach and crawled toward him.

The boy’s eyes and nose and ears were bleeding and Wartimus had to place a hand flat on his chest to tell if he was even breathing. He felt the wet rattling in his lungs and the weak beat of his heart. He shook him gently and said his name. When he rolled him onto his side into the recovery position, he saw that Simon’s right hand was burned right down to the bone, rendered to just a blackened claw that still clutched the purple dildo, the helicopter killer, the out-time object–whatever it was. Wartimus worked it loose with his hand wrapped in the tail of his filthy shirt and tossed it away awkwardly.

Wartimus levered himself off the lawn painfully and looked around. The house was still in a defensive posture, searchlights sweeping the skies and the perimeter of the house. He was still holding his communicator but the display was dead. He tossed it away and bent stiffly, gather up Simon and then staggered toward the house.

Professor Riesigmann was waiting for them both at the rear security bulkhead off the brick patio.

“What did you do?” he demanded angrily.

“Nothing,” Wartimus said, carrying Simon into the house.

“Well, it’s obviously not ‘nothing,’ The house is under attack!”

“Simon is hurt. Can we talk about this downstairs?”

His father waved him away and began to secure the bulkhead. Wartimus took Simon downstairs to his father laboratory and laid him on a table in the surgical suite. His father shouldered him out of the way after he had straightened his friend’s limbs.

“Go scrub up,” his father ordered curtly.

Wartimus pulled off his burned and tattered clothes and dropped them into the hazardous waste bin. He looked at himself in the mirror over the surgical sink. His face was streaked with mud and blood and soot. He had an 8-ball hemorrhage forming in his left eye and there was the blunt end of a piece of metal buried almost to the hilt in the hollow space of his right clavicle. He pried it out and dropped it in the sink. He barely felt it.

“What the hell happened to his hand?” his father demanded behind him. Wartimus ignored him and splashed water on his face and the washed off the fresh blood running down his chest. He disinfected his hands thoroughly and put on surgical gloves.

“You’re bleeding,” his father said. He was bent over Simon, checking his pupil reactions.

“I know,” Wartimus replied. He packed some gauze into the puncture wound and taped a bandage in place.

“Is he going to be OK?” he asked his father while he pulled out a set of surgical scrubs.

“I don’t know,” his father said. “What’s left of the hand will have to come off, obviously, but the more immediate concern is that he has a concussion and might have intracranial bleeding. Bandage the hand while you tell me what’s going on.”

Wartimus filled a rolling tray with supplies while he began: “It wasn’t a meteor that came down. It was some sort of a device.”

“Device? A machine?”

“I guess. I don’t know. It looks like a giant purple plastic dick, Dad.”

“A dick?” the Professor asked, his normally detached composure giving way.

“Like a dildo. Anyway. One of those helicopters met us as the crater and we ran back to the house.”

“Simon’s hand looks like he grabbed an electrical transmission line.”

“I’m getting to that. Simon was carrying the device while we ran back. It did something to him. He changed.”

“Changed?”

“Like spaced-out and then he said it was talking to him.”

“Talking to him? The dildo from outer space was talking to Simon?’

“I know how it sounds.”

There was a rumbling that they both felt through the foundations of the house.

“You finish that hand,” Wartimus’ father ordered as he hurried away.

Wartimus taped off the end of the bandage. He squeezed Simon’s shoulder and followed his father.

He found him at the security monitors. “They tried to explosive breach the front door,” his father said and let out an ugly little laugh. Wartimus could see black-clad and heavily-armed men rushing the front of the house. His father jabbed a button and twin jets of flame engulfed them.

“They aren’t too bright, my boy,” he father said. “I haven’t even had to turn on the autoturrets yet.”

“When we got back to the house, Simon walked out into the backyard and the helicopters surrounded him. The dildo shot them out of the sky.”

“Shot them out of the sky? Like anti-aircraft fire?”

“Electrical arcs. Lightning bolts. That’s what happened to Simon’s hand. That’s the one he was holding it in.”

“It’s a weapon? I thought you said it was a purple dildo.”

“It’s both, I think.”

“Well, I’ve just got to see this,” his father said, finally turning from the security monitors. “Where is it?”

“I left it outside.”

His father moved in close and loomed over him. “Outside? You left it outside?!?”

“I was afraid to touch it.”

“Afraid? Afraid? I’m pretty sure you were a boy when I saw you come out of your mother.”

“Dad…”

“Don’t ‘Dad’ me. Go back outside and get it.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“The armory is open. Draw arms and get to it.”

*****

In light-swallowing black body armor, Wartimus brought up the night-sight scope on his heavily-modified P90 and surveyed the backyard. His father had snorted derisively at the boxy gun, but Wartimus was comfortable with it from the range and had slung a second one for his left hand in case of dual-wield mayhem. The fires set by the helicopters were out and except for the random sweep of the roof-mounted security lights, the backyard was dark. His ears had recovered enough to hear the distant wail of sirens and thwump thwump thwump of another copter. He disabled the roof-lights with his replacement communicator and stepped off the patio, out of the cover of the herb garden wall, and walked carefully toward where Simon had been injured. He was immediately shot twice in the chest.

Wartimus grunted under the twin impacts and jumped back onto the patio. Silent bullets began chewing brick all around him as he rolled up against the wall. The fusillade ceased as quickly and as silently as it had begun. The armor on his chest had held and the rounds had only felt like being lightly punched in the chest twice. His father’s design.

He tapped a few commands into his communicator and the autoturrets on the roof deployed in smoothly. Wartimus flipped the monocle down from his helmet and surveyed the yard again through their sensors. Three hot spots under infrared, two prone, one elevated, maybe in a tree, east woodline. He waited for the turrets to pick up the targets and then sent a few hundred rounds into each, delayed to give him time to clamp his hands over his ears. It still sounded like the sky being ripped open.

“You should have used the turrets first,” his father’s disapproving voice crackled in his ear.

Not rising to the bait, he put the turrets on standby and surveyed the yard again. The sniper team still glowed hot, but so did the rapidly cooling splashes of light all around them.

“How does it feel, killer?” his father whispered. He ignored the assumption that these were the first people he had killed and dialed the volume as low as he could.

He stepped out on the lawn again and moved toward dildo quickly. He could see it easily as he approached, bright under infrared, blood-warm in the now cool night. He pulled a heavy insulated glove over his left hand and snatched it up. Running with it held out from his body, he headed back to the house. A shot rang out and tore up the grass in front of him and he skidded to a halt.

“DO NOT MOVE!” said a voice over a loudspeaker. Wartimus dropped to the ground.

“I SAID DON’T MOVE!”

Wartimus calmly switched over to the turret sensors. Low-light, infrared, millimeter wave, but the turrets weren’t picking anything up, not even movement.

“GIVE US THE OUT-TIME OBJECT!”

“You mean the dildo?” Wartimus yelled.

“GIVE US THE OUT-TIME OBJECT!”

“You mean the big, purple dildo?” Wartimus asked. He held it up and waggled it queasily for emphasis.

“Who are you talking to?” his father asked, no more than a faint whisper.

“There’s someone out here. They took a warning shot at me.”

“There’s nothing on the screens.”

“The turrets aren’t picking them up,” Wartimus whispered.

“Impossible.”

“OK. It’s impossible then.”

“Don’t be facetious, son. Get ready to run when I tell you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Cover fire pattern. Run straight for the rear security door. Straight at it.”

“Acknowledged.” Wartimus tucked the dildo into a pocket on his vest and shucked off the glove. He rolled over onto his knees and bunched his legs under him, a P90 in each hand.

“Ready?” his father asked faintly.

“Yes.”

The roof turrets started up as soon as he left the ground, all six of them, even the front yard batteries taking a low angle over the peaks of the roof. The yard and woods exploded all around him, bullets everywhere except for a three-foot path that led to the rear door. The loudspeaker said something completely drowned in the storm of bullets. Wartimus opened up with the P90s as well, spraying bullets in a flat arc all on both sides. He felt a bullet hit his right thigh, glancing away with no more force than a bird off a patio door. He dropped the P90s when they were out and leaped over the last couple of yards of lawn to land behind the garden wall. The turrets were still firing, spinning barrels glowing. When they finally whirred to a stop, Wartimus saw the back door swing open. He dived through it and slid across the kitchen floor.

*****

“This thing is just drenched in tachyons,” Professor Riesigmann said as he studied the dildo under the scanner.

“They called it an out-time device,” Wartimus replied. He had re-armed and re-armored after checking on Simon. The stump of the boy’s arm was just a bandaged club. While he was outside, his father had amputated the skeletonized hand. It floated in a specimen jar, the index finger straight out like an accusation. He had no idea how he was going to explain any of this to Simon’s parents.

“It’s definitely not any sort of current technology. It is seething with energy and full of densely packed machinery,” his father said.

“Why does it look like that?”

“See the end here?” his father asked. “It’s an attachment socket. It’s obviously meant to be worn.”

“Worn?”

“As in ‘instead of,’ son. It’s both a replacement penis and some sort of weapons platform.”

“Holy fuck,” Wartimus whispered.

“Not quite, son, but you’re on the right track.”

“Who made it? Who’s supposed to wear it?”

“Did you say that it spoke to Simon?”

“I don’t know. He thought it was, at least. And he said it knew me, whatever that means.”

“It’s time to experiment, my boy. I want you to touch it.” He retracted the fume hood until into the ceiling.

“No way. Did you see what it did to Simon’s hand?”

“I think that was just a defensive reaction. It’s should be perfectly safe in a laboratory environment.” His father grinned at him.

Dubious, and with a look of distaste, Wartimus reach out and touched the dildo from the future. He held his finger there as his father fiddled with dials and looked at readouts.

His father grumbled and walked away. Wartimus took the opportunity to pull his finger away from the slick surface. He rubbed his fingers together and then wiped them off on his shirt making a face. His father laughed.

“It’s self-lubing,” the Professor said cheerfully. “Give me your hand, son.”

He grabbed Wartimus and sank a lancet into the ball of his thumb before he could pull his hand away.

“Don’t be such a baby. It’s sterile,” his father said. He milked a fat drop of blood and let it fall on the socket end of the dildo. Wartimus jerked his hand back and sucked on the tiny wound.

“GREETINGS, WARTY HUGEMAN,” it said in a flat, synthesized voice. When Wartimus said nothing, his father elbowed him lightly in the side.

“Hello?” he finally asked.

“PARADOX,” the dildo from out of time said. “PARADOX. PARADOX.”

 

Chapter Three |

The estate’s proximity alarm began to scream from Wartimus’ communicator. He scooped the space dildo in the bucket and dragged Simon out of the pit. The spotlight on the helicopter followed them.

Under cover of stand trees, Wartimus looked his communicator and disabled the audible alarm. “Back to the house,” he grunted, “Someone is attacking the estate.”

The two boys began to run through the woods together, zig-zagging to elude the helicopter’s questing light. Wartimus estimated they were close to halfway back when the helicopter shut off its searchlight and quietly turned back in the direction of the crater. He and Simon crashed to the ground.

“Are they gone?” Simon gasped as Wartimus checked the communicator again.

“No,” he said in a rough whisper. He began flipping through the security camera feeds. “The far west wall has been explosively breached and there are several large armored vehicles in the front yard.”

“It’s so big,” Simon whispered. He had picked up the dildo from the bucket and was studying it. “Like huge. Why would it be this big? And so heavy?”

“I don’t know,” Wartimus replied absently, typing out a message for his father.

Simon held the dildo up next to Wartimus.

“It’s bigger than your entire forearm!”

The message to his father came back as undeliverable.

Simon dug in his backpack noisily and brought out a flashlight. Carefully shielding the lens with his fingers, he turned it on.

“And there’s some sort of socket on the end. Metal. A metal socket,” he said.

“Simon, there are armed men on the property. It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does,” he said, shaking the dildo at Wartimus. “They are obviously here for this. Why would they be after a dildo? And why did it fall out of space?”

“Simon, we’ve got to get back to the house,” he said. He stood and shrugged out of his backpack. “Leave your pack. We’ve got to travel light. Even the flashlights, Geiger, everything.”

“But…”

“We can come back and get them in the morning.”

Simon nodded and turned off his flashlight. He dropped his backpack beside Wartimus’ and said, “I’m ready.” He held the dildo out to his friend.

“You can carry it.”

“It’s so warm,” Simon said, “And kind of slippery.”

“Simon…”

“I know,” he said morosely, “More running.”

“We’ll just walk the rest of the way. We need to be quiet and keep our eyes peeled.”

As they started off, Simon used the nickname he used so rarely and asked, “Warty? Why do you do think it’s purple?”

“No clue,” Wartimus admitted.

Simon didn’t say anything about how his friend was guiding through the moonless night without flashlights and concentrated on walking quietly. Wartimus dialed the light down on his communicator and silenced it. He tried to resend the message to his father again only for it to fail again. He was looking through the network settings when he realized Simon was no longer behind him. He had to backtrack almost a hundred feet. Simon was giggling in a small clearing as he swung the dildo around, making lightsaber noises.

“Simon,” Wartimus hissed. “We have to get back to the house.”

“It’s a weapon, Warty,” the boy said dreamily. “I can feel it. It’s doing something to me.” He had a two-handed grip on the dildo from outer space and a faraway look on his face. Wartimus could see that Simon’s pupils were fully dilated.

“Give it to me, Simon.”

“It’s a weapon,” he repeated. “Watch.”

Simon pointed the dildo at a nearby tree and twisted the base sharply until there was a muted click. A gout of fire arced out of the tip and hit the tree trunk and stuck, burning with a bright blue flame as it ran down to the ground like a thick fluid.

“Holy fuck!” Wartimus shouted in a hoarse whisper.

“It’s telling me how to use it,” Simon said and laughed. He twisted the base again and tossed the dildo to Wartimus. It writhed in his hands like something alive and he almost dropped it. When he looked closely he saw that dozens of tiny tongues had broken out all over the surface and lapped blindly at the night air like an erotic rash.

“Maybe you better hold on to it,” Wartimus said and tossed it back with a shudder of revulsion. It seemed to slap itself in Simon’s hand.

“It knows you, Warty Hugeman,” Simon said in a distant voice. “It thrills at your touch.”

Wartimus blinked a few times and then turned for the house without bothering to check if Simon was following.

*****

Wartimus crouched at the edge of the forest and lawn. Three helicopters hovered over the house, their spotlights playing over it, not bothering to run silently like the one that had followed them from the crater. Someone on board was shouting over loudspeakers, words that just ended up sounding like the feedback howls of faulty equipment. He hailed his father on the communicator, the network connection stronger here. Either the attackers were blocking communications on the estate or his father was blocking theirs to hinder coordination. Maybe they were both pumping electronic chaff into the air. He set the communicator to scan for active channels.

Wartimus turned at the crack of a twig to see Simon walking calmly toward him out of the woods. He cradled the purple dildo in the crook of his left arm and stroked it like a beloved pet.

“Get down, Simon,” he told his friend.

Simon ignored him and stepped out of the edge of the woods and onto the manicured expanse of lawn.

“SIMON!” Wartimus called but the boy continued walking at an unhurried pace. One of the spotlights on the helicopters picked him out. All three angled away from the house and came to hover over the boy, the grass flattened around him in three huge overlapping circles.

Wartimus’ communicator squealed angrily over the cacophonous noise of the helicopters and lit up. He had to jam it close to his ear and heard a babble of unfamiliar voices.

“The readings are clear!” someone said, the sound of helicopter blades echoing strangely. “He has the out-time object!”

“Who the fuck is this?” Wartimus screamed into the communicator.

“Take him!” the voice said, just an angry crackle.

“STAY RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE!” the helicopter loudspeakers shrieked. “WE WILL USE LETHAL FORCE!”

Simon stared up into the sky unmoving.

“SIMON!” Wartimus screamed again, useless in the hurricane of sound. He broke from the wood line on instinct, running toward Simon. He covered the distance in seconds, his muscular legs tearing up clumps of grass as he accelerated. He tackled Simon and covered him with his body.

“You’re going to get yourself killed!” he yelled in Simon’s face.

Simon smiled serenely and jammed the blunt end of the dildo into the exposed skin on the back of Wartimus’ hand. He felt a sharp sting and he rolled off of Simon in surprise. He could see in the actinic light of the helicopters that his hand was bleeding.

Beside him, Simon clambered to his feet and held the dildo aloft. It flashed once, a searing purple light that left a clear outline of it in Wartimus’ vision. As he raised his bloody hand to shield his eyes, thick snakes of electricity arced from the bulbous tip of the dildo in Simon’s hand and all three helicopters exploded simultaneously.

 

Chapter Two |

Simon shouldered his backpack. “How far do you think?” he asked.

“The descent was steep and the sound of the impact was right on top of the flash, so I’m pretty sure it’s on the estate grounds,” Wartimus said, storing the counter and settling his own backpack in place. He pointed to the thin column of smoke.

“I got due east,” Simon said looking at his compass.

Wartimus consulted the luminous face of his own compass. “Agreed. Due east,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The two boys crossed manicured lawn of the backyard and entered the mature woods beyond. The red gels over their flashlights preserved their night vision as they rustled through last year’s leaves. A dry summer had kept the undergrowth down and they made good time.

The woods on the estate had been their playground since they had first met in second grade. Hieronymus had insisted that Wartimus attend the local public school for—in his words—“the sheer lumpen experience of it.” Nearly all of the parents of the children he went to school worked for his father. Simon’s parents worked in the biosciences division, riding the funicular every day to where the factory of Riesigmann Industries clung to the top of the mountain like the enormous claw of an eagle. Simon was the only boy in his class not terrified of Wartimus, the brooding 8-year-old with visible abs and a father that owned the entire town. Wartimus was just happy to meet someone not in awe of his father.

Playing with Simon gave Wartimus the semblance of a normal childhood, as long as a normal childhood involved raiding the estate armory to stitch machine gun fire across enemy trees or engineering a mistletoe blight to ruin Christmas that caused robins maddened by the mutant berries to attack his entire class while on a field trip. Simon loved to spend time with Wartimus, even if he could never tell his mother that their tree house had a number of deadfall traps dug around its defensive perimeter and Simon was expected to run a homemade mortar in case of attack.

The second compass check was made in a small clearing they came upon twenty minutes from the gate.

“Is this…” Simon began.

“Yes,” Warty said. He swung his flashlight over to a blackened stump.

“I told you napalm was a bad idea,” Simon said.

“We contained it.”

“Your father was so angry.”

“Not really,” Wartimus said, “The propane tank didn’t blow. And it wasn’t like Tree House Mark One was anything he had helped build anyway.”

Wartimus straightened and held his hand up in the starlit night.

“You hear that?” he whispered to Simon and the boy shook his head.

Wartimus tugged Simon back under the cover of the trees as a downdraft of air blasted the clearing and a helicopter blotted out the sky. It was nearly silent and moving slowly. Eventually, it went behind the tops of trees at the far end of the clearing.

“It’s moving due east,” Wartimus spat. “I’m going on ahead,” he said and took off running.

He immediately left Simon behind. Alone, Wartimus no longer had to pretend he needed the flashlight and tucked into the holster on his belt, his pupils dilating to drink in starlight. He leaped over obstacles he would have had to walk around with Simon in tow. His lungs shifted in his chest to better strip oxygen from the night air and his heart hammered away. Simon had seen some of the things Hieronymus had engineered into Wartimus, but small things that could be dismissed, like skin a little too resistant to cuts or landing on his feet from a fall a little too far to survive unharmed. His strength and inhuman grace as he moved through the forest would have frightened Simon.

Wartimus outpaced the slow search pattern of the helicopter and skidded to a stop at the rim of the crater ahead of it. It was three meters across and almost as deep. The trees around the crater were down, blasted outward, blackened and still smoldering. There was no way the helicopter would miss this, he knew he had to hurry.

Wartimus peered over the edge looking for an impactor. There was a faint Tyrian glow from the center of the crater. He backed off and got out the Geiger counter. There was only the slow tick tick tick of normal background radiation as he circled the crater. The glow faded as he made it back to his starting point and Simon came crashing through the underbrush, specimen bucket rattling, his flashlight bouncing wildly, the red gel lost.

“How… long… have… you… been… here?” Simon managed, holding his side.

“Less than a minute,” Wartimus lied.

“Radiation?”

“Nothing. I can’t see anything in the crater. I’m going down there.”

Wartimus took the bucket from Simon as the boy continued to catch his breath. He removed the safety gloves and put them on. Handing the still ticking Geiger counter to Simon, Wartimus took a pair of heavy-duty tongs out and practiced working them with the awkward gloves.

As they walked around the crater looking for a good spot to climb down, the helicopter passed close enough to send a cloud of dead leaves and pine needles toward them. Wartimus estimated they would be right over the crater on the next pass.

“We have to go now!” Wartimus shouted and jumped over the edge and rode the slope down in controlled fall. Simon followed less gracefully, the specimen bucket rolling ahead of him. Wartimus caught him before he fell face-first. The Geiger counter didn’t change as Simon waved it close to the center of the crater.

“It’s OK to put that away,” Wartimus said as he fell to his knees and began brushing back the fine dust that had gathered at the lowest point. There was no residual heat or shock geology.

“It didn’t come down very fast,” Wartimus told Simon. Something was just visible in the shaky beam from Simon’s flashlight. He scraped a channel all around it and lifted it carefully, grunting under the unexpected weight. It was purple and studded and looked to be covered in open sores.

“It’s some sort of…” Wartimus began to say but a towering pillar of light stabbed down from the helicopter as it slid in place over them.

“It’s a huge dildo!” Simon yelled in surprise.

 

Chapter One | Chapter Three