The Gunch

 

Chris Tannhauser

 

 

I ~ Changing lives.

 

As the armored limo crawled into the nighttime trailer park on autopilot—each glowing hovel a temple to desperation nimbused in trash—the Gunch asked to be let out of the trunk to walk the route.  He told it no, and told the escort in the superfluous evening gown not to worry.  “I’ve been here before,” he said, “and I’ll be here again.  They’re always happy to see me.”

 

He left the armored limo for the warm night air, into the orange buzz and dangling wires of lights on tilted poles, each one an undulating insect-cloud lollipop.  The happy one this time was another girl, rising from a cracked plastic picnic table in a sweep of just-right hormones, distorted tank top and short shorts shouting the promise of big, healthy babies—and her face, that essential organ of humanity, the reflecting pool of the soul—her face was curled with the spirals of the Golden Ratio, 237 precise data points, the perfect dance of glabella, ereborum, philtrum, mentolabial sulcus, the Smith-Creston Line, etc., etc.  This was a face women would emulate and men would brawl for, a face that would pad both their bank accounts.  She was an absolute outlier here, perfectly positioned for life-changing commerce.

 

He popped the trunk remotely and the Gunch unfolded all eight feet of itself in sinuate blue steel curves and neon tubing, vaguely man-shaped, with a thick, ribbed neck ending in a lamprey’s mouth—a wide ring of molecular teeth burring around a seeking, pulsing disk of rainbow light.  It approached the girl with eerie mechanical grace, its stride as easy as an Olympian, feathers of liquid nitrogen enrobing its otherworldly form.

 

“Will this—?” the question died as the Gunch gently took her shoulders in padded Mickey Mouse hands, bending down to meet her wide-eyed gaze, her angelic countenance glorious in the glitterrays of the hypno disk, the color wheel spinning deep in its whirring mouth.  She went under almost instantaneously, the same moment the thing struck like an ambush predator, a blink, really, faster than pain, that bit off her face and craniofacial bones to the brain and gaping nasopharynx, her tongue a dangling exclamation point over the lack of jaw.  Without the loss of a single drop of blood, her missing face was swapped for a porcelain doll’s dinner plate, complete with vocoder and tearless compound eyes, punched into place with a definitive chunk.  The Gunch swallowed, carefully shifting the treasure to its refrigerated chest.

 

“I—I feel... amazing,” she crackled in a voice that wasn’t hers, but nonetheless focus-grouped as “relatively pleasing”, slurred by the wave of drugs just now crashing over the stone of her brain.

 

Her phone chirruped in her pocket.

 

“The money’s in your account,” he said.  “This interaction is concluded.”  He pivoted and walked back to the armored limo where the Gunch folded itself into the trunk while he slid across cool leather into perfumed air, ears popping slightly as the foot-thick door twisted itself shut.

 

“What was that all about?” asked the escort.

 

“Everybody does what they’re paid for,” he said, guiding her head into his lap.

 

When he was done, he ran the back of his fingers over the soft heat of her cheek.  “You’re so pretty,” he said.

 

 

II ~ Possible side effects.

 

Beautiful rich people, it turns out, don’t always make beautiful babies—the genetic do-si-do is rife with clumsy stumbling, though even the worst dancers can occasionally slide with grace, if only for a moment before kissing the floor.  In a weird reciprocity, sometimes ugly people made a stunner.  A Venus from sea foam.

 

So, what to do?  Plastic surgery meant that it wasn’t so much your mom that made your dad blow his load, but the surgeon’s sinuous scalpel lines, making the ugly horrific with gaping flaps of raw-sided flesh, then Frankenstitching the whole shebang back up into a scrotum-tingling shape over old bones. Denude what’s left, paint the dodgier bits in the optical illusion of makeup, drape it in hasty couture, and most ape-brained billionaires will see the unplanted field of fourth-wife.  Not initially, of course; third-wife hasn’t been cleared out yet, and we’re only just now in the bathroom pants-down/skirt-up. You don’t get a mom and dad duo until after lawyers.

 

And the stuff that comes in pills and cans? Nu-Ü™, Rejovial™, and Slinkshifter™?  They were likewise less-than, for it turns out that beauty actually is more than skin deep—you need the underlying structures, in situ, intact.  And so, the Gunch.

 

Beautiful poor people would always sell, and the ugly rich were always buying.  The difference between what one would accept and the other would pay was where he lived.  And that difference was very large indeed.

 

As the armored limo pulled up to the red carpet he could see satisfied customers in the straining crowd—prosthetic faces as still as stones glinting in the lights, and yet others entering the luxe venue whom he knew (but would never tell), their faces just as bright but lit from within by genuine human emotion—smiles, rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes.  There wasn’t an ugly person for miles.

 

Before he could cycle the door, the Gunch demanded to be loosed—the thing about the Laws of Robotics is that if you substitute the generic “human” for a very specific one, the machine becomes much, much more useful.  This was, the Gunch informed him, a complex security environment that required a robust threat-mitigation posture.  He acquiesced, and the Gunch prolapsed out of the trunk to gasps and applause.  The attention of the crowd shifted and the Gunch took note of exactly everyone who wasn’t watching.

 

He stepped out into the lights and crowd cacophony, waved and posed, shook a few milk-drinker’s hands, turned and began to walk the carpet—

 

She was saying something as she pulled the pin and the spoon twanged into the night—croaking it with a staticky vocodor clearly on the fritz.  The Gunch palmed her head and folded her in half over the grenade, landing in a superhero pose on one knee, the other arm flared for emphasis, so it went off with a wet WHAP that left a Gunch-shaped gore-shadow precisely where he was standing.

 

This is the third one this year, he thought as he stepped around the mess.  I really need to get someone to tweak the feeds and flatten all this stupid rage into simple despair.

 

 

III ~ Something like justice.

 

And so it was for the march of many, many decades, where mundane maladies like cancer and dementia were turned aside by money like an urchin’s stick before a fencing master.  Assassins rose and fell.  Lives were bought, sold, and spent.

 

The goal of standing on the pyramid of bodies was to reach heaven’s backdoor, to pop the seal and grip the threshold and haul oneself through into immortality—but in the end this was a Death universe, with entropy the only reliable principle, the slowly attenuating echo of the single-note dirge of the Big Bang.  Here, Death’s grip slipped but reluctantly, and only for maximum comedic effect.

 

So the very few spent their trillions on capital-f Forever—but it turned out uploading your consciousness into machines just made insane copies that were little more than brief entertainments, while genetic remedies essentially did the same, only with more screaming and poop murals.

 

This is the part where you get ready for the ending, the ironic twist where through some comic-horror miscalculation the Gunch takes his face, or his blood-slick hands slip on the ladder of ascension and he falls so long and far that he passes the starting point like an anvil in a suit coat, flash-fluttering into a deep, obliterating obscurity...

 

But that’s not what happened. What happened was he continued to profit from misery, going to the places his paymasters dared not go, and dangling the carrot of the short-term before the shortsighted, making careful investments, sending his kids to the best schools, and so on and so forth until they could afford to pay a younger version of himself to reap the desperate for perfection.  His kids were rich and beautiful. 

 

On his deathbed he looked back at the things he had done and felt nothing particularly troublesome at all. 

 

 

•

Mostly Skin

 

Chris Tannhauser

 

When you bite a wiener, you’re tasting history. 

 

The Ambiguous Meat Company was founded in 1862, a time when the intersection of hungry customers and freshly slaughtered meat scaled simultaneously—but without a market intermediary to yin-yang the flesh-to-cash flow.  Ambiguous Meyer, the son of Puritans, slotted himself into the gap in a way that would have made his ancestors simultaneously proud and flagellent—and secured for himself a position as one of history’s most ruthless Gilded Age barons, not just rich, but piss-on-the-president’s-head-while-laughing fuck-it wealthy.  Meat was money.

 

In order to compassion-wash his notorious and brutal excesses, Meyer commissioned an infinitely swappable mascot—the Meat Maiden—to peddle his sausage.  The original was a comely young woman driving a placard-clad donkey cart; she was armed for obvious reasons, a shroud of innocence with bodice blades.  As time marched forward, the cart became motorized, and the mutable young woman, swapped out whenever the “young” descriptor seemed strained, was armed with ever bigger guns.

 

And so the Ambiguous Meatmobile was born—a great Peyronic tube arched achingly upward, blood-red and nestled into the bun of a fat-tired chassis, with a horn that sounded like scream-yodeling.

 

In 1917, the Meatmobile was decommissioned and donated to the war effort, where it was up-armored, mounted with guns, and driven straight into the mouth of Hell.  The Huns quickly branded it Der Teufelwurst and were known to flee positions when its hungry treads churned the mud and corpses of no man’s land.

 

It was back on the streets for the Roaring ’20s, with an Art Deco facelift and a louche flapper behind the wheel—and something like a speakeasy operating out of the toilet stall.  But it wasn’t until the 1930s that we got the familiar meat whistles, the “I’m in the wiener and the wiener’s in me!” stickers, and newborns getting free rides home from the hospital.

 

Officially, the Meatmobile was scrapped for World War II, but all they really did was lop the wheels off and put wings on it instead of melting it down into firing pins and grenade dimples.  Now she was a heavy bomber, flying over 214 missions, each swastika dotting her nose a terrible story, either banal, or nonsensical, or genocidal.  She was at all the big ones—including Dresden, and, yes, even Berlin—chewing through crew with shrapnel teeth and gaping metal mouths in her hull.  While very few survived her—being rotated out after 35 missions—no ball turret gunner ever made it back.  They’d invariably lose contact with the cockpit during the scrum, voice lost in the engine drone, the chatter of guns, the thump and gravel-on-a-tin-roof rattle of flak.  And in the end, the ball gunner was dead in a butcher’s fishbowl, or dead with their oxygen hose wrapped around their neck, or dead for no clear reason—or just plain gone.

 

She did have one crash landing in Belgium, the whole shebang on fire, the ball gunner calling out their emergency descent, a decent-enough replacement for the shattered altimeter:

 

“Boys, seriously, you need to get me out of here.”

 

and

 

“Why isn’t the gear down? I’m seeing fucking trees!”

 

and

 

“OH GOD OH GOD OH MOTHER—”

 

When they hit, everyone, including maybe the ball gunner, expected the turret to just get pushed back up inside, but this bit of gear was designed by a 4-F bed-wetter with a face that never made a woman think of locomotives, ever, so it was the most robust turret carriage in the entire war, theoretically able to bear the total weight of the aircraft proper during a crash landing.  The ball gunner’s final scream got pinched into a racing stripe and a wet flap of hair on the tail.

 

After the war, the fuselage was recovered from a mothball facility in Arizona and repurposed back to mascot and marketing duties—but all they really did was lop the wings off and put wheels on it, leaving the yoke, the throttles, and the bomb bay doors.  And while she was still mildly radioactive from when she nuked Berlin, a couple coats of red ‘n yellow lead paint fixed that right up.

 

And that’s pretty much it until today, outside of a few covert scrapes during the Cold War, some secret nuclear stuff, and that one time in the 1990s when the Meatmobile was briefly used to transport Olmec heads to a hasty dump site—but the less said about that, the better.

 

Right now, the Meatmobile was pegging 140 miles-per-hour on I-84 near Boise with at least five police APCs and a technical made from an ’85 Subaru BRAT and an Ebay’d Russian anti-aircraft gun in hot pursuit.  The current Meat Maiden, whose dainty foot was putting the pedal to the metal, was Madison, and if you knew her, none of this would surprise you.  Just ask Lionel, her co-pilot.  He’s terrified out of his mind, but not the least bit surprised.  (Technically, he was her third co-pilot—the other two had been completely fucked out, eyes gone dead like old whores—but Lionel had staying power, and a farmboy bod complete with horse cock and a thresher-accident IQ.)

 

Madison’s specialty was reverse cowgirl—the lazy man’s doggy style—so she could just “grind dick without the stupid face.”

 

“I don’t bend like that,” Lionel panic-barked the first time.

 

“The hell you don’t,” she replied over her shoulder, pelvising his dick in half to rub her G-spot.

 

When it was clear she was done, he asked the dumbest question of his dumb-question life:  “What about me?”

 

Madison sneered.  “Finish it like your mom does.”

 

Lionel didn’t know about the look in his eyes, the utter devastation of This is my girlfriend? welling above his cheeks, but Madison sighed like she just smelled a dirty diaper, wadded up her red ‘n yellow polyester jumpsuit, pressed it into his face and finished him with a gorilla grip handy that would confuse him for the rest of his life.

 

If Lionel had a thing for Meat Maidens (and who didn’t?), Madison had a thing for the Meatmobile itself.  The Meatmobile made Madison horny; she couldn’t quite put her finger on it, it wasn’t that she wanted to fuck the Meatmobile, or be fucked by something like the Meatmobile—she wanted to fuck in the Meatmobile, to embody the matryoshka dick mantra of the sticker:  “I’m in the wiener and the wiener’s in me!”  She liked Meat Maidens just fine (and who didn’t?), every last one with the innate predator’s balance of a Russian gymnast, and that jumpsuit with the big zipper, you can slide right out of it and clean it up with a hose—but it was the cockpit that called to her.  Even though most of the history was occulted—forgotten or spun—she knew in her bones that piloting the Meatmobile would be like strapping yourself to an angel’s sword.  And she would do anything to get herself there.

 

On the first day of tryouts, when asked her name and little bit about herself, she addressed her cohort bluntly.  “I’m going to fuck all of you.  And not with my pussy.”

 

Sassy from Alabama made a tattletale face, cocked her head and raised her hand.  “Shouldn’t that disqualify her, Mr. Bun General?”

 

The Bun General, resplendent in his shaggy epaulettes and medals from at least 14 wars, considered this.  “No,” he replied to incredulous gasps, “I want to see how this plays out.”

 

It played out with elbows to the face at the finish line, laxatives in the cupcakes, pantsing on the ropes course, fake letters home.  Madison climbed a big fat pile of broken bitches to get into that seat.

 

So now you’re thinking that this high-speed chase near Snake River Canyon on I-84 is all Madison’s fault—an angry eight-year-old who didn’t get a sticker, a girl who knew how to throw a punch, a young woman who fucked like a man in the sense that she took what she wanted—but really this is all about Nazis.

 

Nobody knew the rented panel truck at the railroad crossing was full of Nazis—well, I mean the Nazis knew, but it’s not like it was a Nazi truck (though I suppose any truck full of Nazis is a Nazi truck), it was just a random rental from a company with a happy name and a cartoon pangolin mascot, though most people have no idea what a pangolin is, much less a cartoon one.  So that whole pangolin bit was a waste of time.

 

Nobody knew it was full of Nazis—but the Meatmobile sure did.  It could smell the stench of the camps inside their skulls.  And so when she pulled in behind the truck as the red ‘n white striped gate arm came down and the bells dinged and the lights flashed Madison may have set the brake, but the Meatmobile lurched forward three feet and kissed bumpers.

 

The thing about trains, they may look ponderous—dodgeable, even—but they are furiously working the mass side of the equation like a moon bending an orbit.  They come over the horizon in an implacable arc, sloppy to the brim with a king tide of inertia, and being magnanimous, are more than happy to share a little bit of that with you.  Vehicles evaporate into clouds of fist-sized debris.  Bodies come apart at the major joints, mostly just a burst of torsos and spinning limbs.

 

The truck vanished.

 

The Meatmobile slewed sideways, scraped hard down one side, and then the train horn was doppler-blasting into the distance.  At first Madison felt stunned, then awful when she saw the arm pinwheeling against the sky, a feeling that downshifted into a merely queasy “huh” when she saw the swastika armband.  She wanted to do the right thing and pull over and maybe vomit, but the Meatmobile wanted to go go go like this was mission 215 and it was ready for motherfucking takeoff.  She was plugged into it and it was plugged into her.  The sensation was crazy, as if the dainty foot that floored it was wearing a discarded Auschwitz shoe.  The Meatmobile’s tires screamed smoke at the asphalt and she took off down the road with a mean shimmy, speedometer seeking that peg.

 

Now, getting pulled over was something Meat Maidens were trained for—take your foot off the gas, signal, let the Meatmobile bleed speed gradually as you drift to the shoulder.  That gave you time to grab a couple stickers and take the safety off your drop gun.  Most just wanted the tour—but sometimes you had to show them why the Ambiguous Meat Company was still a going concern, horsemeat rumors (true) notwithstanding.

 

The cop waddled over, masked, swaddled and bristling with tactical bric-a-brac, each buckled piece a dime-store confidence, another mile between suffering and the retina of his soul.  

 

Madison made a stern face at Lionel, hand-signaled for him to stay the fuck out of it, and popped the hatch.  The steps extended with a hiss, and she exited the vehicle stickers-first.

 

“Ma’am, why are there a bunch of swastikas and a lady leg on the Meatmobile?” asked the cop.

 

“We-ell,” Madison drawled as she tugged the zipper ring on her jumpsuit from ticket to warning to no ticket to waistband, “the better question is, ‘what’s that behind you?’”

 

And BOOM.

 

There was a number to call—or tap out, actually, on the Meatmobile’s telegraph, the only piece of original equipment from 1862—a number that would summon vast corporate energies to warp reality itself, making things disappear while conjuring others; lives erased or enriched, depending on how gullible and useful one was.  In the end, all was meat, and meat was money, in an endless, recursive loop.  

 

Lionel had done as he was told and dutifully tapped out the number, but if the current situation was any indication, this band of sting-crazy cops had yet to get the memo.  In addition to the six chase vehicles, they had set up a roadblock ahead, complete with a tow vehicle to capture their prize—and some genius, Madison noted, had already put the tow platform down at an angle in anticipation of the asset forfeiture.

 

While the APCs were exceeding their limits, Madison was nowhere near hers.  She switched the nuclear pile to manual, laid her hand on the tripartite throttle.  “We’re gonna make this jump,” she said.

 

Lionel blanched.  “Or die trying,” he squeaked.

 

Madison frowned and elbowed the emergency passenger safety harness release.  Lionel’s crash rig retracted into his seat like a startled monkey.

 

“Cowards go bareback,” she snarled as she feathered the control rods into a prompt critical excursion.

 

Normally, this power would be used to flash water to steam to drive an electric turbine which would then crank the six supercharged Edison motors—but this was the goddamn Meatmobile.  Instead, the entire mustard magazine and septic tankage dumped straight into the nuclear pile itself, and, so energized, out the nozzle at the back in a huge blue-white blowtorch of pure hate that slagged the closest APC into a metal-vapor donut and spanked the Meatmobile forward with a spine-cracking surge.

 

At the dawn of the Nuclear Age there was this thing called “tickling the dragon”, where all you needed were six kilos of refined uranium and a screwdriver to play rock-paper-scissors with the Devil.  The goal was to twiddle things to see where the line of criticality was—how close you could get to a runaway, sustained reaction without going over.

 

When the infernal gambler with the screwdriver fucked up and the flash happened nobody said, “What the fuck was that?!” because they were all scientists.  But they were also hot dogs in a gas station display—tubes of meat rolling, rolling, rolling until they were cooked through—they just didn’t understand exactly what that meant yet.  Their skin would discolor, pucker and slough.  They would shed their hair and nails and humanity and enthusiastically shit their organs out both ends.  How long this took depended on where they stood when Satan crowed, “Always bet on rock!” and they saw the light.  Someone smart marked where their feet were on the floor with chalk so they could do some science when the suffering was done.

 

The Meatmobile hit the tow ramp and gunched down hard, burying the shocks and blowing at least one tire—then up, up, and away, Snake River Canyon small out the windows as Lionel starfished into the ceiling at the top of the parabola.

 

Down below, the technical screeched to a halt and Unidentified Cop Number Fourteen long-armed the cocking lever on the Russki gun, took the grips in fists and double-thumbed the triggers to light ‘em up.  The massive gun thudded a death beat, shell casings as big as dicks dancing everywhere.

 

Flak puffed into black stars all around the lurching Meatmobile, cracking windows and zipping bright spots of shrapnel through the crew cabin.  While Madison was trying to predict the landing, Lionel shit himself.  But the Meatmobile was a creature of war, and the haphazard shots were like the taps of a Shinto shrine maiden, waking the awful Pokémon within—Enola Gay uses BONE SHADOW: it’s super effective!  The Meatmobile ripple-fired the explosive bolts on the undercarriage where Greatest Generation mechanics had merely folded her wings so they could get to the “drink ‘n forget” part of their day—and something beneath the toilet, curled and withered... stirred.

 

Silver wings unfurled even as the flak ate holes in them, the whole affair juddering with tenuous, gut-queasing lift—but the Meatmobile was more comfortable in the air after all, and deadlier there, too. Madison could intuit the exo-atmospheric mid-course kill envelope; she could feel the engagement solution.  Comms crackled.

 

“Pilot,” wheezed the mummy under the toilet, “give me a fifteen-degree roll to put me on target.”

 

Madison brought the Meatmobile over, and the Last Ball Gunner engaged the clusterfuck of APCs with his twin fifties.  A rolling wave of dust puffs turned to sparks as it overtook the APCs, blowing tires and punching holes and knocking people to pieces.  The technical was obliterated and the flak stopped.

 

But the damage was done.  The Meatmobile was leaking every kind of fluid, some of them from what was left of Lionel, looking strangely serene and not at all surprised.  Madison fought the increasingly stiff controls as the horizon tipped and dipped and she realized she had never crash-landed a plane before—but by God, she was a fucking Meat Maiden, and she wasn’t going to be the one that lost the Meatmobile.  She worked on instinct, followed the machine’s lead, and lined up with the freeway just in time for the weirdly quiet glide before all hell broke loose.  Metal shrieked and she cracked her teeth and felt her kidneys in her hips.  Her spine did a weird thing she never wanted to feel again.  The Meatmobile ablated around her, shedding belly skin and sparking superstructure as she slid.  When she finally lurched to a stop, twisted head-down, Madison struggled out of her crash harness and crumpled into the asphalt.  She staggered from the smoking wreckage, her jumpsuit blackened and torn, face and hair streaked with blood, some of it hers.

 

The surviving cops were there, a startled arc of automatic rifles.  Nobody said a fucking thing.

 

The unspoken question:  Why didn’t they just shoot her?  Well, she was a white lady, and a Meat Maiden, to boot.  Trigger fingers were stayed by lifetimes of operant conditioning.

 

It was then that the last of the most important fluid drained from the battered Meatmobile.  No, not blood—reactor coolant.

 

It was a flash you could feel in your fluorescent teeth, one that made flesh transparent and tingled your bones.

 

“What the fuck was that?!” somebody said.

 

Madison took a deep breath, exhaled, and reached into her pocket.  “You should all hold still and use this chalk,” she said, a good-sized piece of it in her hand.

 

“Is it—is it magic chalk?”

 

“No,” she shook her head sadly for so many reasons, “it’s science chalk.  Because when this is all over, we’re gonna need to make some kinda sense out of it.”

•