Prunella brought the Zeppelin down at the edge of The Dome, hoping for a gentle touchdown onto a recent snowfall that covered the bombed out, abandoned and derelict, Veterans & William L.E. Gates the 30th, golf course. The landing could be accomplished with all of the android crew pitching in willingly. They loved Prunella's so soft skin and her domination over their human nemesis and geeky turd-face overlord, Willard the Weird. Prunella had advanced skin, soft as kid gloves, while theirs was the texture of laminated cardboard.
She concentrated on piloting the immense Zeppelin down the slick pyro-glastic side of the gigantic dome, towards the course's 18th hole and burned-out bar and game shop. The 19th Hole of Your Dreams, was an immense burned out shell of a recent conflagration that was shaped like a giant concrete martini. In her absolute concentration, she failed to see the rag-a-muffins, scoundrels, and hooligans appear at the outer boundary of The Dome. They closed in on her landing location with sticks, stones, burning torches and vagabond dreams of up-up and away to anywhere but this horrible reality.
Six intense men, silly-looking gits in golfing beanies, appareled in fine golfing threads and armed with Ak-97s, continued playing golf, seemingly not to notice the silent Zeppelin nearing them, only a few feet above their heads. The Passing Wind Zeppelin, nearly as long as the course's longest drive (Hole 6 - 1090 meters) floated down into the middle of their game.
“Fore! Fore! For God Sake … FORE!” Prunella heard, as she let go of the wheel and jumped from The Passing Wind's gondola.
She rolled in the soft snow, still in her Scheherazade garments, auburn hair flowing, veil flapping as she descended into a swamp-like sand trap containing a dozen roosting Penguins. The Penguins stared at her vacantly, nesting contentedly on greenish and glowing newborn chicks and never-to-hatch golf balls.
Pathetically impoverished men, women and children with bandaged heads, arms and minds, all radiation burned and still glowing, grabbed the dozens of guide ropes hanging from the Zeppelin and hung on for dear life as the Zeppelin ascended towards the San Gabriel Mountains.
Their fates were of no concern to Prunella. Her sole motivation: gain entrance into The Dome, make her way down Sunseting Blvd, to Fartington Avenue, to San Vivisection Drive, to the New Rivera Country Club and finally to her old home, her mansion on Woodybent Circle. Casa Buildmore was less than three miles, as the canary-crow flies. Home-sweet-home, and as she stared into the smoldering mountainsides of the Hollywood Hills, above the Bentwood home, she wondered if Harley Davidson still loved her madly.
The golfers played on, cursing the Zeppelin, the newly fallen snow, the belly-dancing pug-ugly dame, the riff-raff and the impoverished vagabonds invading their little piece of peaceful nuclear decimated heaven and golf course, as if it were another day of exceptional trap hazards.
As Prunella limped away, adjusting her belly-dancing costume to give her more warmth and protection from the freezing cold, she felt a tugging… suddenly she was tipped head-over-heels and was violently swept up in the air.
A mooring line from the Zeppelin lassoed her foot and she was sent up, up and away, hanging upside down, her perfect bioelastic breasts now freed from the Scheherazadian bejeweled tank top ... dangling, beautiful, hard-nippled breasts in the freezing wind, pointing out in different directions, as if looking around to find her bearings.
Many were running upright, but at angles on The Dome's surface — crazy, raving alcoholics, Zrack-heads — still eager to board the Zeppelin for parts unknown, lusting for extraction towards any freedom outside the BadLands of Outer Dome, L.A.
Many pawed at her with demented looks on their faces, trying to pull her hair out, trying to remove her clothes as she descended to near ground level. Frightening burka clad hags tried to rip off her belly-dancing costume, out of envy or spite or hatred for the flaunting of ancient traditions…. All twirling their tonguing tongues at Prunella in some ancient vocal rampage of revenge and strict indignation, for ignoring decency, debasing religious dogma, a dogma proclaimed by Muhammad Meta O'Shaughnessy Steinberg, the nation-less Messiah of the 24th Century, who preached reverence to the remaining noses of Mount Rushmore, Cassava melons douches and Icelandic espresso coffee enemas.
Further and further Prunella was dragged, suspended fifty feet in the ice cold air over the smoldering destruction that was once Belly Air, Beenadick Canyon, Beaverly Hills, Cold Squatter Canyon and West Hollyweird. Devastation was everywhere, still blazing remnants of the tribal wars between the Riverside - San Berdo Angles of Hell, and the Ventura-Oxnard Angels of the Heavens, flared, as both cyber-robot biker groups had gone rabid, hyper-virtual in a pitched battles, using tiny robotic model cars with zapping lasers and deadly rocket propelled grenades firing from their midget cars in the smog and smoke burdened sunset….
Veering up towards the charred, glowing Hollywood Hills, the Zeppelin's rounded tip slowly descended, to nuzzle snuggly and sexily into the welcoming basin of the burned-out, hot, moist and wide open destroyed remains of the Hollywood Bowl amphitheater, like a happy and horny gargantuan married couple, comfortably copulating in the great outdoors after a conflagration.
Above, in the gondola, Prunella spotted a leather-masked Willard, still in his snipped up, rubber-leather regalia, waving to her, throwing her kisses, acclaiming her the best lay he'd ever had, at the top of his squeaky-geeky voice.
He landed her safely outside the Hollywood bowl, although she was dragged over mesquite and sagebrush, leaving a variety of scraped, sanded punctures and tears in her, with thorns sticking out of her so, so soft bioelastic skin.
His intention was to climb down a rope ladder and rescue her. He was a deviant knight in shinning leather and rubber regalia, carrying a ball-gag and a matching leather facemask for Prunella, the droid girl of his perverted dreams.
Disengaging her foot from the mooring rope, she ran down Odin Street, while painstakingly picking out the thorns, yelling to Willard, promising to look for him someday and for him never follow her. She made her way to the bombed out and cratered Hollywood Freeway, the gateway to West Hollywood and beyond… if there was a beyond. Willard called out words of love, over a bullhorn at 290 decibels, which permanently deafened him in one ear.
On the useless mega-highway of ragged and raw broken concrete road, with asphalt crumbling disks scattered about everywhere, an acting troupe preformed Jack Kerouac's, On The Road. They sang a round-robin contrapuntal version of, ‘Son of a Wino', culminating in beautiful three-part harmonies when they hit the ‘O', in wino, for each of the seventeen verses… beat poetry of a bygone era, on the highway to nowhere.
Somewhere nearby, a bomb went off, a muffled, but mighty explosion… a rumble that reflected off the curvilinear surface of The Dome in every direction. To Prunella, the explosions seemed miles distant, yet a few minutes later, Prunella heard another… closer, then a third explosion, seemingly only a few blocks distant.
Shakespeare's 55th Sonnet struck her:
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lover's eyes.
“The Tattooed Girl of Dark Midnights and Eggshells is at it again”, one of the acting troupe told her and went on to tell her in falsetto, "The Dome is sealed and impenetrable to the disenfranchised riff-raff you see now milling about everywhere." In a poetic cadence of singsong contra-basso, he added, "The Dome repels the seething groaning humanity of wretched filth and decay, the hubris deities of all-out war, including any explosion up to and including a 50-megaton nuclear device…" The solo trouper stopped and abruptly sang at the top of his wheezing lungs, a loud a ca'pella solo (as the troupe cooed the word ‘wino' in a seemingly never-ending sustain),
“Only a Son of a Wino, Mother forsaken restless ho's yo-yo, Snortin' Cesium aglow yodelin' manly screeches, desperate to eat a rolling stone, hit the beaches mangy, mangy creature, of small chicken-poxed boxed fleeces, hamboned burin' trarshcan, ashcan life of a ... a mama's boy-toy stinkin' wino, a decoy's wino's wino... Only a Son of a Wino....”
Leaving them to their reveries and snapping fingers, she skipped away, while nearby another loud bomb exploded. She saw the smoke rising in billowing billows and wondered if she was walking into big trouble.
A vague memory told Prunella that making her way to Yucca and Vine Street would get her to the Capital Building of New Los Angles and possibly a legal way to get inside The Dome. Petitions to The Department of Circumlocutions for Androidal Affaires allowed the dispossessed, the disgruntled and exiled androids types like her, a method, in presumed circumlocutional folly, to make her case against the Medea Rich-Buildmore’s of this stratified and dome-vaulted society.
A small sign on the Department of Circumlocutions bulletin board, on the inside of The Dome's thick fibro-glassy-glass, directed petitioners to visit an address at North Higherland and Franklin-lin Avenue, and gave circumlocuting directions to an unnamed North African Oasis themed bar & restaurant. Petitioners were to ask for, Dinah Pauley Shore.
The bar was called Gaddafi's Ducks. Next to it, The Nighthawk's Diner. The restaurant was a retro, art Nuevo joint in the 2390 era, featuring a number of tuxedoed manikins and manikinettes, poised on barstools with shifty mechanical eyes, following the riff-raff and derelicts that wandered by under the influence, or looking for an influence.
Prunella watched Gaddafi's Ducks' Bar window from across the street in an alleyway off Grubber and Grubby Streets, determined it was 'the' place undocumented workers slipped into The Dome to get the grunt work.
Gaddafi's Ducks` was a notorious bar, known even to a pampered service droid on a juggernaut towards mystery's trap doors of love. It was infamous for wanders, vagabonds and scallywags, anarchists, mad-bombers and homicidal maniacs… the usual types wandering the star crossed avenues with holo-viddy dreams, all wanting to become actors in holo-movies or v-band poets or Country-Eastern stars…. All wide-eyed slowpokes, cowpokes, buddypokes in life's wagon train of desperation, circling The Dome of affluence, fightin the Injuns of progress without reservations.
Prunella, an ugly droid, with one leg shorter than the other, wearing a Scheherazade belly dancing costume… all worked against her …and besides this, she had no radiation burns or scars or disfigurations. Dressed as she was, alone under a pukesant mercury-vapor street lamp, she knew she stood out like a hot and horny restless virgin before the very first time.
Limping back into an alleyway, she found a young, snorin' Sonoran Mexican man, frozen into a deep, dead sleep and buried in the snow, or perhaps he was as dead as a Norwegian Blue Swallow with a cricket in his voice box. He was dressed as a Calvinist Pilgrim of the 16th Century, with colorful confetti strewn all around his body.
Pilgrim & Confetti In the Snow… little did Prunella know she'd happened upon a murder, wherein the scene duplicated the extreme precision and details depicting a famous work of art (Pilgrim & Confetti In the Snow) by the reclusive artist and showman, Arturo Roark.
Completely destroying the beauty of the ritual murder - art scene, she searched the dead man's pockets; found his identity papers, a few YaunDollars and a John Hammler fake mustache and beard kit.
The dead man, with a cricket in his throat, was Soln Lozext … or so it said on his Dome Maintenance & Mechanic License. He had a taxi driver's permit, a SAG card and a picture ID, stating he was in the William L.E. Gates regiment, the 42nd, and was discharged a wounded veteran. The man had a foot blown off in the war, which gave him wounded veteran status and consequently he walked on a built-up Pilgrim shoe, which was a perfect fit for Prunella's shortened bioelastic foot.
She speedily stripped herself and the dead man, redressed him in the belly dancing apparel and slipped on the socks with garters, thermal underwear, Pilgrim breeches, big silver-buckled vinyl-leather shoes, frilly white shirt, waistcoat, full-length imitation beaver skin outer coat, beaver-skin Calvinist hat and glued on the furry new moustache and pointy goatee.
A new identity emerged in the form of a man named Soln Lozext, ready for a Thanksgiving feast anywhere in New America or to a time warp to Plymouth in 1626 to share a pizza with John Maxfield, Max Keanu's distant relative, also in a time warp.
She walked proudly to the entrance of the restaurant, with nary a hint of a limp, hovered about, listening and learning. She heard the password uttered a half dozen times, then walked toward the entrance, hoping no one milling about knew (or murdered) Soln Lozext.
“Nighthawks At the Dinner,” and she was through the door of the restaurant and escorted down the hall towards the bar by a pitch-black Ethiopian giant who said, “Yo Pilgrim, you got a real pretty mouth and before you be hittin the bar, you be hittin my chrome dome, savvy, cute little mustached dude?”
“Think I'm cute do you?”
“Yes-saw, definito,” the lanky giant replied, with a smile of tinned teeth and a jackrabbit dinner still on his breathe. “You ain't got the HagPhage or burns … why you be android and you be a woman and you be slippin past… My googdgy-googdgy droid well nart be nat a woman be you. You be one ugly wombaby clone… however, my tiny darling as a man, not be bad. You must be desperate, chancing droid deactivation, beby entering da restricted dome-zone bar. Love or money?”
“Love. You won't turn me in will you…?”
“Call me Diddy-Puffy, sweat machine. Well, now… every man, man needs a little blowin', a little lovin in the freezing cold wind of La-La. Doorman, usher to 'The Dome' starvin' nat be enough back door, front door lovin', sweetlips.” The gangling giant of a man said, laughing and unzipping his ancient Cleavers.
****
At the Gadhafi Duck's bar, Prunella soothed back the hairs of her new mustache, stroked her pointy goatee and soon realized it was some hidden signal for every gay horn-dog and unharnessed oldy-modly hooker in the place to descend upon her. She picked a confident woman, dressed as a man, the best-dressed man-woman in the place and pulled he/she to the bar, took an aggressive stance, then dismissed the others by lifting her veil and hissing at them.
“I'm Peter Cannon, actor, stunt man, raconteur and ventriloquist…” Peter said, in a voice that said all woman underneath, but with manly gutturals.
“Soln Lozext. I knew you were an actor, a male impersonator the moment I walked in. Said to myself, where have I seen that chiseled chin, prominent and heavy occipital ridge, single eyebrow, those brawny arms and that sparkling smile? Must be a movie star… probably from one of Brandt David's holo-extravaganzas of the outer-dome genre.”
The man hearing such praise and flattery, thinking he'd was up for a royal funk and lick, melted like butter into the barstool and placed a hand inside Prunella's hot beaver skin coat.
“Well I'm an aspiring actor to tell you the truth. It's a tough game. Go to the actor's clinic… I've done one commercial for—“
“‘THE' actor's studio… inside, 'The Dome'?”
“Yep, on Hollywood Blvd, right at Woody Woodpecker's star.”
“Can you take me there? I want to become an actor. I want to be in one of Brandt David's movies.”
“Who doesn't? My place first, dinner, dancing with the stars, tonight my darling we’ll see fireworks of love….
****
A powerful explosion ripped through Gadhafi Ducks'. Prunella sat perfectly still as the shards of glass flew towards her at 18,000 mph, pocking her so, so soft skin with various kitchen utensils and rusted and open safety pins. She felt the severe pain for a nanosecond, however her pain receptors shut down completely, soon after a silver foon embedded into the skin of her teeth.
By not moving an inch during the concussive blast, a terrific blast that pealed the skin and smiles of all those in the bar, she was able to spot the lone bomber. The bomber was a she, a shapely and fine looking human woman, across the street lookin in, a woman in her early twenties clad in a skin-tight hoody-hooded pink sweatshirt and sweaty-sweatpants with sweat stains at the armpits and crotch. Prunella saw her short dark hair (or was it a wig?), thick safety glasses and a broad smile of gapped teeth on a slightly freckled face. The girl looked directly into Prunella's eyes; probably thinking she was a man, and placed two fingers to her eyes, then pointed those two fingers at Prunella, and mouthed, “You're a dead man, pilgrim. But... but, God-damn you're so cute for a man!”
Little did Prunella realize the mad-bomber of Hollywood High had her in her pyro-lusting sights for participation, evil schemes, rebel dreams and a nihilistic, balls-out and ballistic romance.
Peter Cannon, alias Marjorie Laredo, alias Larry Figueroa, lay dead at her feet; a 100 YaunDollar note still in his bloody hand. Prunella pocketed the money, took his Laser Derringer DD4 and made her way towards the deranged anarchist, mad-bomber and The Dome's, and Cornucopia Magazine's supreme dream super-model, Genissley Jones, with numbed and numbered thoughts of revenge.
