Trashland a Go-Go (6 page)

The sun beat heavily on Coco when she awoke. She could feel sweat pooling inside her plastic garment. She was wholly disappointed to find that she was, in fact, still at the dump.

She sat up and looked around. “Well, fuck…”

Rudy buzzed over from a pile of rotting food where he had been feasting. He looped around her head and weaved around her arms. “You smell delightful.”

Coco doubted that very much. She longed for the sweetness of her favorite cotton candy-scented body spray. She rose slowly and spent a few moments stretching her long body like a feline. She was delighted to see a pile of discarded clothing nearby. She dug through it for something to wear.

Almost all of the clothing seemed to have been damaged in a fire. The fabric crumbled in her hand when she touched it. The only article that was somewhat salvageable was a singed bridesmaid’s dress. A pink one. It had tiers of ruffles, and a large scalloped sash that cut across the chest. It was dreadful.

Coco unwound the plastic bags from her body. Small streams of sweat poured over her breasts, and down her torso and legs. She stood naked for a moment and let the breeze dry and cool her before she slipped into the pink ruffled monstrosity.

“Always the bridesmaid,” she said.

The dress tightly hugged her frame. It had cheap plastic boning in the bodice which pushed her breasts up in perfect mounds and stabbed at her ribcage. She shook the neckline of the dress vigorously from side to side to adjust her cleavage. There was a section running up from the base of the dress that had been burned out completely and left a large gap up the side. Coco’s leg was exposed almost to the hip.

Rudy landed there and paced the charred fabric with three sets of rapid feet. “This part sort of smells like bacon…”

“Bacon? Why would the dress smell like bacon?” Coco asked.

“Because someone was probably still wearing it when it caught on fire.”

Coco looked down at the dress in horror but realized that she had few options. It was this or stifling plastic. “Fuck it,” she said and began walking again.

They traveled for hours until they came to a large crumbling stone barrier and a rusty wrought iron gate. A small wooden shack stood to the right of the gate. Its planks were crumbling with dry-rot. Large sections of its walls were missing, which made it more like a lean-to or a booth.

Coco and Rudy approached a large, cracked cashier’s window at the front of the structure. It seemed silly to Coco to have to use a window when there were so many places along the sides to just step right through.

“Hello?” Coco called. There was no response. No shuffling or creaking. Not a single sound of life inside. She knocked on the window. The glass rattled against the pane, but otherwise, there were no sounds.

She walked around the side of the building and peered through a hole in the wall. No one was inside, and the room was completely empty. Weeds had grown between the floorboards. Coco stepped inside and the wood splintered underneath her weight. She tumbled gracelessly to the floor.

Rudy laughed.

She stood up and dusted herself off, feeling foolish. Clearly, no one was inside the building. She stepped back through the hole in the wall. She heard a low, mechanical whirring sound outside—like gears or fans—some kind of machinery. She couldn’t make out just what it was.

Coco followed the sound to the outside corner of the house. With each step it got louder. She stopped before she turned the corner, suddenly afraid of what she might find. Deciding she had to see what it was, Coco rounded the building. Her ears were assaulted with a shrieking “BEEEEP!! BEEEEP! BEEEEEP! BEEEEP!”

Coco jumped back startled and flattened herself against the wall with such force that the entire section let out a low miserable groan and collapsed behind her.

Coco lay flat on her back atop a pile of rust-colored wood. A large dust cloud rose, leaving her unable to see what came toward her—whirring, beeping and grinding. A large shadow loomed out of the dust, blurry at first, but becoming clearer as it approached. It appeared to be a robot—a terribly disorganized robot—and as it got closer she began to be able to decipher its construction.

It had a small round object for a head, which looked like it was jammed on a spike and driven into its bulky, square body. Its boxy torso had a smaller glowing square in its center. Two long arms waved from its sides. Two crazy legs were attached in such a way that caused the robot to walk in uneven, awkward steps.

When it was closer, Coco saw that the robot’s head was something from her childhood—the rounded chubby face of a Cabbage Patch Kid. Its hair had all been torn out except for a few small tufts of ragged yarn. Small holes littered the scalp. A metal antenna stuck through the center of its ragged plastic skull. A red light flashed at the antenna’s tip. Coco could see that the robot’s black square torso was a huge, industrial microwave.

The microwave beeped furiously. The LCD screen scrolled “FINISHED” in flashing green letters. Coco scrambled to her feet, and the thing moved toward her through the plume of filth.

One of the robot’s arms was a long piece of PVC pipe with a hand mixer attached to the end. The spinning mixer was aimed at Coco who stood staring, paralyzed with fear. The machine began to shoot red and white projectiles with tiny flapping tails from its mixer arm.

It wasn’t until one of them hit Coco that she realized they were tampons. Used tampons. She screamed and turned to run. The robot jumped forward and grabbed her by the hair with what Coco saw was a human arm. It was the gray, bloodless color of a lifeless limb, but it was muscular. Coco would have admired its well-sculpted muscles were they not attached to a gross, recycled arm trying to snap her bones through her skin.

The machine continued its furious blending. It brought the blender closer and closer to Coco’s head, and although the spokes were not sharp enough to cut her, she screamed all the same. The machine continued to beep. It caught Coco’s hair in the mixer and pulled it tight.

Tugging free meant tearing away a large portion of her scalp. But letting the monstrous robot keep ahold of her seemed worse. Coco pulled and struggled against the machine, screaming for someone to help her.

The mixer whirred, tightening its grip. The microwave beeped. Coco could see a tampon stuck behind the mixer blades, twisting as they spun. From the corner of her eye, she saw the human arm reaching to the machine’s microwave chest. It opened the door while the mixer arm pulled her closer. The robot punched in numbers on the keypad and tried to shove Coco’s head inside. The human arm, with its fleshy, gray fingers punching buttons, reached for the START button.

Coco screamed while the machine shoved her head inside the microwave. Her own shrieks nearly deafened her—bouncing off of the inside of the box. She closed her eyes tight and waited for a pile of bubbling goo to replace her face, kicking and pounding on the junky killing machine killing her.

She wondered if the door had to be closed to nuke her head. Part of her hoped so, but part of her knew that meant decapitation was a possibility.

As she twisted against the mixer tearing her hair, and its hard plastic arm holding her head inside the microwave, Coco felt another hand grasp the back of her dress and yank her backward. She heard the sound of metal scraping on metal as she flew back with her eyes squeezed closed.

Coco landed on all fours and crawled away on shaky knees through sludge and soggy paper products as quickly as she could manage. She turned her head and looked back over her shoulder. She saw the broad back of a man wielding a machete. He tossed his weapon inside the microwave, slammed the door and punched the START button.

The robot’s doll head had the eyes of a sad puppy painted-on plastic on an otherwise expressionless face. Despite its communicative handicap, the machine’s panic was obvious. It turned left, then right, then left again. It groped desperately at the microwave door with its mixer hand. Its dead human arm squirmed in the dirt at its feet.

Blue sparks danced inside the machine’s microwave chest and the timer ticked off the numbers: 7, 6, 5, 4… More sparks spurted from the vents on the machine’s side.It sputtered and shook, convulsing and sparking above Coco as she cowered behind a small pile of goop.

The man dove on top of her, tackling her flat to the ground and covering her body with his. Coco’s face was pressed into the dirt. Rotten juices and soggy particles of who-knows-what seeped between her lips. She closed her eyes tighter and tried not to swallow while she heard the machine beeping in panic. Then there was a roaring explosion, and metal and plastic clattered to the ground around her.

When the sound of raining mechanical remains sputtered to a stop, Coco noticed that the man was still crushing her into the soggy disgusting ground. She wriggled around beneath him for a while, before saying “Would you mind getting the fuck off of me?”

Coco stood and shook the debris from her dress and hair. She reached up and shook her hand through her matted tresses. She found a good hunk of hair had been cut off. The man had chopped it with his machete to free her from the mixer. She wanted to be angry, but despite her lopsided and matted hairdo, she was alive and not being cooked in a microwave. So she thanked him instead.

“It’s my job to maintain the Gatekeeper,” he said. He moved wreckage to retrieve his weapon. “It’s been malfunctioning lately. They only perform for so long before they get a little crazy. Sorry I didn’t get here sooner.” He looked at the ground sheepishly.

“I’d say you got here just in time.” Coco offered.

She looked him over. He was a tall, broad man. He wore full body armor made from tires. The tread neatly lined up and looked like stylish utilitarian pin-striping. He had a rugged look about him. It could have been the tire tread body armor, his scruffy, unshaven face and unkempt hair, the tattoos peeking up out of his collar and crawling across the exposed flesh of his stubbly neck. Coco didn’t care much one way or the other. He had saved her life and he was delicious.