It Came For Jeremy (Or: Inconsistencies Continued)

The Gangster was the easiest to understand, but the Robot was a close second. When you got right down to it, his bosses told him to help out the Doctor, and they paid him to do so, so he did. The fact that he got to pepper Krauts with slugs from his Chicago piano was icing on the proverbial cake. The pay kept him fed with plenty of smokes and booze as well, and that was almost as nice a bonus as making Krauts bleed from freshly opened orifices.

The Robot was a Socialist. The Krauts had put him together from some of Tesla’s old prototypes and they’d even used higher end computer hardware from America to build his brain. They’d also done their level best to indoctrinate him into the goals of the party, and to a certain extent it had worked, for the first month he’d worked with the rebels he shot every black man and Jew he saw to bits with that arm of his, eventually realizing that he could ignore his programming if he turned off his ability to visually detect color an no one said anything particularly Jewish to him. Something got crossed in its brain down in the labs though and he’d latched on to Socialism and started going on about the means of production and their distribution. The Krauts hadn’t liked that and tried to decommission him with a hammer to the skull. The SS hadn’t really understood the intricacies of robotic anatomy and the Robot had turned them to hamburger with the heavy gun of his. He came to America after they tried to hack his brain using some wireless transmitters and he’d had to rip out half his sensors from his metal skull. He and the Doctor had found each other and the Robot had told the Doctor that until the Nazis fairly distributed the means of production and the resources and technologies of the Earth, he would fight them alongside the American rebels.

The Driver was on the edge, he had no cash and no associates and he’d fled Chicago in a car that wasn’t supposed to exist with a mushroom cloud filling his rearview mirror. The Chevy was a prototype from a plant that had been decommissioned, the Driver had found pieces of it and had put it together as best he could, after that the Robot and the Doctor took their respective whacks at it and it ran most of the time. Sometimes powered by the Robot, other times gasoline. Regardless, it ran and the Driver conducted a Dogdamn symphony with those rubber tires as he pounded down the road. He and the Gangster had grown accustomed to working together with the Doctor and the two of them often shared a smoke and a joke at the Doctor’s expense.

The Doctor was a nutjob. He’d fled the Nazis after being kept in one of their labs for a bit too long. He was always yammering about beam weapons and superscience technologies, crap that Tesla used to blather on about before the Krauts heaved him into an oven. He’d only manage to make off with one of his gadgets when he’d fled the SS, his gauntlets, and to his credit they got the group out of almost as much trouble as the Doctor’s crazy missions got them into.

They’d been fleeing back into Chicago and the Chevy had flipped. This wasn’t the first time, so the sides had been reinforced a while back and the car was undamaged, other than the paint. They were just pinned behind the thing by three APC carrying a dozen Werhmacht each. The Chevy’s undercarriage had been reinforced with the same metal that was the Robot’s outer shell, so they were safe from small arms fire, but they were still stuck.

The Robot was on the other side of the Chevy with his arm outstretched and ammo belts whipping around as the barrels on the arm cycled and spat shells at the Krauts. Sparks glowed on his metal hide as bullets ricochet away from him. Unfortunately, the sides of the APC’s were made of the same stuff as his hide and the undercarriage of the Chevy, albeit slightly thinner. Not thin enough though, the Krauts were basically blind firing and the Robot was basically soaking up rounds.

The Driver was also the demolitions expert, and three of his homemade concoctions went sailing over the Robot’s head and clanged against the side of an APC. Thermite cuts everything, including Robot hide and APC armor and the APC that was hit was engulfed in flames and Werhmacht soldiers went screaming and burning every which way. With one APC cracked open, the Robot advanced under the hail of fire and took the fleeing soldiers down with his gun. Beams that would do old Tesla proud flashed and lit other soldiers on fire when they didn’t obliterate an entire appendage, and that was the Doctor’s contribution. He wasn’t the sort that could put you together again, but he sure as fuck could take you apart.

The Gangster had one claim to fame and he excelled at it. When the Tommy gun game peeking around the edge of the Chevy you could just see the tip of the brim of his battered fedora and that was it. Nonetheless when the piano began sounding off, men died and they died screaming. As he reloaded, another duo of incendiaries smashed into the other APCs and cracked them open. The Krauts had run out of grenades themselves when the Chevy had first flipped and they’d thought the quartet were easy meat, the Doctor’s other gauntlet had bounced every grenade back to the Nazi bastards, and that had taken care of the fourth APC and her payload of shitheads.

Between the Tommy gun, the Robot’s gatling arm, and the Doctor’s gauntlets, the Krauts were done once the thermite cracked open each of their APCs. They stacked the bodies like a woodpile, they’d seen pictures of death camps in Europe where the Jews had been stacked in piles taller than a man and they wanted to show the Krauts that they were just as easy to kill and demean as the Jews had been. With their message sent, the quartet fled back into the ruins of Chicago with a pile of bodies and burning wreckage in their rearview mirror.