Kat Brooks: Post-Apocalyptic Bieber Hunter

A lone figure walked through the devastation of the wasteland. Before the Great Upheaval, this might have been a verdant field, or a picturesque town with white picket fences. Now it was just a craggy plain of nothing.

The woman surveyed the land around her cautiously as she moved. Her legs moved confidently in their black leather knee-high boots. A black mini-skirt and a dark brown bodysuit covered the rest of her body. A shiny leather cuirass held in her ample bosoms, fastened with many straps and buckles. Holstered pearl-handled revolvers and sheathed blades hung from a belt around her hips, and a large automatic rifle and a longsword were shouldered on her back. The woman's face was obscured by a turban-like scarf that draped over her head. A shock of brown hair found its way out between the cloth and a pair of darkened goggles. The only strange thing about the walking woman was an odd headset that protruded from the scarf over her ears.

The woman walked as if she were on a mission. And she was. Kat Brooks was trying to save the world.

* * * *

In the early years of the 21st Century, governments all over the world experienced a problem: The people of the world were too free. A sense of benevolent anarchy was settling into the internet-using, free speech-indulging cattle that government felt the financial duty and almost sexual need to control. This new world culture in which information was shared freely everywhere without government control was something they could not allow to continue. But how to wrest control back from the people?

It is believed that in the year 2013, that the U.S. Government made the first attempt to bring the people back to them. It started simply, with an advertising campaign. They contacted a number of popular performers for this campaign: Nicky Minaj, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Jay-Z, Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus. All six performers were spirited away to Nevada's Groom Lake, the legendary Area 51. At first, a revolutionary mind control technique was tried, having been given to the authorities by force from aliens picked up at Roswell in 1947. Unfortunately, since these subjects were pop stars, they had no minds to control, and the process turned them all into gibbering idiots. Luckily, the American public would never know the difference.

Scientists at Area 51 took DNA samples of the performers. One of the scientists has just watched Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and, much like George Lucas himself, came up with a truly horrible idea. Using alien technology, he created the first true human clone. There were now two Justin Biebers. Then four, then eight, then thousands. These Biebers became the new face of the American Armed Forces, armed only with a hypnotic ability to lull people into addled sycophancy with syrupy pop numbers.

Unfortunately, the government hadn't reckoned on the true power of this new Army of the Bieber. Rebel scientists now believe that something in the pop star's Molson and back bacon-damaged Canadian DNA was altered during the cloning process. Much like the Wendigo of legend, the Army of the Bieber became a shambling, cannibalistic, almost-listenable force that ravaged the North American continent.

Biebers now out-number humans one hundred-to-one.

* * * *

Kat Brooks stopped. Pensively, she turned her head slightly and listened, as she had thought she had heard something above the rush of the hot wind that pushed across the wasteland unabated. She pushed her darkened goggles up to her forehead and surveyed the area. About a hundred yards away, ahead of her in the rocks, Kat saw the briefest flash of movement. She unslung her rifle, a modified AK-47, and slowly moved forward, her eyes constantly moving.

After about fifty yards, she heard something. It was faint, over the noise of the wind. It could have been almost musical. But it was definitely not her imagination. She moved more cautiously toward the source of the noise. Suddenly, a shape moved at her, leaping from one of the crags of the low arroyo. Kat turned and pressed her trigger in one fluid movement. The noise of her rifle split the silence like a gunshot.

Kat cautiously moved to her target, which lay crumpled about five feet from her, a human-like creature lying on its side. She kicked it over with her boot. She saw a dust-covered sports white jacket, ripped chinos and a t-shirt that had some sort of saying on it that was now unreadable because of the blood. The creature's head was framed by long bangs that look liked they had been cut with a mixing bowl.

A young one, Kat thought to herself. But that means the rest of the pack isn't far away.

Suddenly, from behind her, Kat heard an inhuman noise.

"If I was your boyfriend, I'd never let you go..." came a chorus of high-pitched voices from behind her.

She spun to face five Biebers, all dressed in torn, tattered and filthy white outfits, like a sacrilegious Blink-182 with bad haircuts. "I can take you places you ain't never been before..." they sang in unison.

Oh no, Kat thought. The Bieber pack! She stood there, stunned for a moment, as the insidious lyrics began to weave their spell.

"Baby, take a chance or you'll never ever know," the Biebers continued, dancing around here in a carefully choreographed plan of attack. Kat could feel herself starting to sway to the bubble gum beat and the saccharine words. Her rifle began to droop in her hands.

"I got money in my hands that I'd really like to blow," The Biebers pirouetted around her to the staccato rhythm of the song of attack. "Swag swag swag on you!"

Kat's rifle dropped to the ground in a clatter that could not be heard over the hypnotic trill that was being created in her head.

"Chillin' by the fire, why we eating' fondue..." The Biebers began to slowly move in for the kill. "I dunno about me, but I know about you!"

Unknown to even herself, the word "fondue", being such a moronic word to be in a song, triggered a post-hypnotic command in Kat's mind. Without conscious thought, her left hand reached up to her headset and pushed a button. Suddenly, a hard bass line rebounded in her ears.

"If you like to gamble, I tell you I'm your man," the gravely voice in her ears intoned.

Rebel scientists, after many experiments that had resulted in many valiant deaths, had determined that only the music of Motörhead could reverse the loathsome spell of the Biebers' mesmerizing force. Lemmy Kilmister was the Anti-Bieber, and the leader of the resistance movement all over the planet.

The music in her ears broke the spell instantly. Her hands unsheathed the two large knives from her belt. With a swift and powerful motion, she plunged the blades deep into the throats of the two Biebers on each side of her. Biebers don't have a proper brain, so hitting them in the larynx was the only way to properly kill them.

"You win some, lose some, it's still the same to me!" the song continued, as Kat released her blades, which would allow the creatures to bleed out and die quickly.

"The pleasure is to play..." Kat rolled to her right side, Unsheathing the longsword as she stood up. Two more of the Biebers advanced.

"It makes no difference what you say!" A single long curving slash of the blade caught both Biebers in their throats. They fell to the ground, gurgling what remained of their songs and their lives in a fountain of red and white foam.

The final Bieber turned to run. Kat dropped her sword and took her time drawing one of the pistols from her holsters.

"I don't share your greed, the only card I need is..." She took aim at the retreating and soulless pop icon copy.

"The ace of spades! The ace of spades!" Kat's shot struck the Bieber in the base of his spine, rendering his spindly legs useless for dancing. Or running away.

Kat flicked off the switch of her headset and slowly walked up to the still-living Bieber. She stood in front of the creature as it tried to crawl away, flailing his arms on the rocks like they were a child's snare drum. When it saw the toe of her black leather boot, it looked up with a look on it's face that begged for mercy.

A harsh, croaking whisper told her "I'd like to be ... everything ... you want ... hey, girl ... let me talk to..."

Kat Brooks put a bullet in the throat of the creature before it could finish the chorus. And a second one into it's head, on the off chance it might bounce off something in the skull and hit the rudimentary brain. Kat allowed herself a satisfied smile.

She picked up and cleaned all her weapons, restoring them to their proper place on her lithe body. Straightening her mini-skirt. She once again started moving forward into the wilderness of destruction.

Soon, she thought to herself. I will find the hive. And then I can finally rest after the Prime Bieber has been rendered speechless.

The sun began to set over the fragmented devastation. Kat Brooks continued to walk on into the gloom of the burgeoning twilight.