by Reed King
We slept that night concealed in the trees, or tried to, fair game for everything that flew, sucked, stuck, and slithered. I jerked awake to the periodic splat of a giant insect exploding off the butt end of a rifle, and then again when the winds shifted, and brought with them billows of Mayday hail4 and a forceful gale that soaked us to the spleen and stripped trees down to skeletons.
We hunkered down to wait out the usual aftershocks, minor bowel rumblings still strong enough to make walking a bad idea. The delay put us all on edge. Barnaby was falling hard for the role of Prince of Darkness, and soon the idea of starring in a diplomatic drama was bound to lose its appeal—especially if he found out his brain was a key bargaining chip. And if Barnaby decided to scratch out on heading west, I had no means to force him.
The demons had their own cause to be itchy. Soon, Cannon grumbled, there would be nothing left to pick from the wreck but shit from the pump—and the demons took to blowing the hail out of the sky with their ammo until Zeb scolded them for wasting it.
“It don’t matter anyhow,” he said to me. He fumbled in his vest pocket and pulled out some fresh. I took a wad and chewed it. Cherry flavored. Still, it helped with the pain in my feet, and the constant hum of anxiety saying I was wasting time. “We were too slow. Billy Hazard’s crew already came through and picked most of whichever corpses they can sell. Fucking Billy.” He shook his head. “I taught that boy everything he knows. Showed him how to gut an intestine when he was no more’n a squid with a semiautomatic and a dream. And now he goes on and scoops me.”
“Who told you that?” There were no towers, no wires, no satellites to beam portal access: nothing but reality and more reality, bleak as a toilet bowl.
“Who do you think?” Zeb tamped a pinch of shiver down into his pipe. “The kid dropped me a word on the Yellow Brick Road just as soon as he packed up the haul. He’s got a set of balls bigger than his brains, I’ll tell you that.”
“The Yellow Brick Road?”
He blew another cloud in my face. “They don’t feed you anything but bullstrap out in Crunch, United, huh?” He shook his head. “The Yellow Brick Road is like one of your corporation intranets, but all around us. No borders, no firewalls, no lockouts.”
I didn’t understand. “So … it’s another portal?”
“Bigger,” he said. “You can find everything you want there and a lot you don’t. It exists in every country on the continent, at least the ones I’ve been to, and that’s most.”
“But who owns it?” I asked. “Who gets paid?”
“No one. That’s the beauty of it,” Zeb said. He thumped a hand on my back. “The Yellow Brick Road is free.”
“Sure, yeah. And I got a nice plot in Hawaii5 to sell you, just as long as you don’t mind snorkeling for it.” Information was like everything else: it belonged to the squids who could pay for it. Every so often, the firewall in Crunch, United, got bugged by other countries spamming us with reports of the Federal Corp’s corruption—like that would come as a surprise—or flooding our decks with stories of the corporation’s brutality in diplomatic posts. But for the most part, the only news we ever got was controlled, monitored, and doled out by the Federal Corp.
Zeb’s eye socket, puckered over with skin, appeared to be winking. “Don’t believe me, then,” he said, shrugging. “There’s many say you shouldn’t walk it anyhow.”
Maybe he’d taken a pinch of fresh too many. “All right, then. Prove it. Show me.”
He squinted up at the sky. The hail was floating softer now, drifting to fat wads of acidic snow even before it landed. The winds were changing again. “Nice try, Sally, but that’s not how it works. The Road is a virus. You have to find someone to give it to you, load it up onto that ancient helmet.” He gave my visor a thump. “And ain’t no way I’m going to pop that cherry of yours. I like you well enough. And of course you’re with Him”—he lowered his voice, as he always did when talking about His Highness, His Darkness the Lord of Evil, who was sniffing around, obviously trying to decide whether he could digest some metal shrapnel without caking his inner organs—“but you’re still green as a four-day-old floater. Let me ask you something. You ever torched a city? Or pillaged a backwater settlement?”
“I’m not even sure what pillaging is,” I admitted.
“How about despoiling a woman’s honor? Ever raped a virgin? Impregnated a grandma?”
I shook my head, and he squinted at me.
“Have you ever had sex with anyone?”
“Technically speaking, from the strictest standpoint…” I lowered my voice so that Bee wouldn’t hear. “No.”
“And yet the Lord of Darkness chose you for His escort.” He shook his head disgustedly and spat, missing my foot by an inch. “You’re not ready for the Brick Road yet, believe me.”
We moved on as the temperature rebounded with the change of winds, climbing up into the eighties. As the last of the ice melted off, we scoped the trash blown down by the gale for anything useful. Nikhil found an unused purine; Fats, a bag of uneaten PotatoChipz™, miraculously intact.
Sometime around midnight there were two sharp blasts of a whistle from the scouts up ahead. The whole clanking, rattling, stomping, huffing chain gang of us came to a halt.
Zeb, who’d been flanking with Bee, pushed roughly by me.
“Come on, greenie. This should be a good show.” And then, to Bee: “Cut the big man loose. The rest of you, don’t do squirrel till I give the signal.”
The road winched right at a gas station long dry of gas. When we came around the bend, we saw Thrasher and Nikhil, canned in by a group of twenty or so men, all of them with the same rough-hewn, weather-beaten look, like pieces of wood spat out by a tornado. Some of them had decent guns—I spotted a few long-range rifles—but most of them were carrying weapons that might have been prehistoric, including billy clubs cobbled together from thick branches and, in one case, even a slingshot. The air was so tight with tension, you could of strangled yourself on it.
“Evening, boys,” Zeb said casually. “Nice night for a stroll, isn’t it?” He stretched so his jacket came open and his belt of artillery was visible.
I could see the roadslicks measuring their chances. Four Devil’s Army demons—five, if you counted me, which I was pretty sure they wouldn’t—against twenty. Risky, but not suicidal.
One of them cleared his throat. “This here’s a toll road,” he said. He sounded young. Impossible to tell age with these hillbilly types. They all looked forty by the time they were fourteen. “Coin, food, and weapons only. We got no use for other currencies.”
“A toll road,” Zeb said, as if he’d never heard the term before. “I thought all of BCE Tech was private property.”
“It is,” the roadslick said. “Which means you’re trespassing.”
“And so are you,” Zeb said.
“We been here since before dissolution.” The tension in the air ticked up another notch, until I felt as if every breath I took was choking me. “Besides, you and your crew got blood to answer for.”
This made the demons laugh. “We’re in the blood business, sucko,” Zeb said. “You’re looking at the Department of Sani-fucking-tation right here.”
“I’m talking about those scavengers crashed the bullet train into them hills,” the roadslick said. His voice was shaking a little—out of fear or anger, I couldn’t tell. “Friends of yours, were they?”
“We don’t have friends but the kind that shits bullets in your face,” Zeb said.
The roadslick either didn’t hear or ignored him. “They plugged four of our kind from a distance, just for creeping close to the wreck. One of ’em weren’t more than ten years old.”
Bee and Nikhil exchanged a look. Thrasher lit up a shiver pipe and took a nervous huff.
Even Zeb looked uncomfortable. “We don’t kill kids,” he said shortly. Then: “Not enough gas in ’em to make it worth the cost of freight. And we don’t pay toll for other people’s problems either.�
��
There was a ripple, a slight change in the roadslick’s posture. “Fair enough. But you’re gonna pay for your passage just the same.” A new one spoke up—a woman, though you would never of known it from looking at her. Her face looked like the sorry end of a toilet plunger. “This road is ours.”
“You’ve done a crap job keeping it,” Nikhil piped up. “I broke my leg around these parts last year. Had to splint the bone myself with nothin’ but chicken wire and some kindling.”
Zeb, Thrasher, and Bee sighed. It was one of Nikhil’s few stories. She was a good fighter, but, like Thrasher, hailed from one of the nuclear towns and it had mushed up her brain. It was the reason, too, for all her extra fingers.
The roadslick ignored her. “There’s five of you. That means a toll of one of your flavors, plus whatever food you got in your packs. And you can be on your way with no scrum.”
“I see.” Zeb pretended to think about it. “There’s just one problem, I think, with that little arrangement.”
The roadslick frowned. “What’s that?”
Zeb smiled. “You counted wrong,” he said. He brought his fingers to his lips and blasted two short whistles. At that moment, the moon broke through the thin layering of clouds, just for a second, and showed the rest of the demons coming up behind us, all of them smiling and loaded up with more flavors than these lumps had ever seen together in their lives. The big man, hauling the wagon, looked in the darkness like an honest-to-God giant.
And then came Barnaby. His eyes were yellow in the moonlight, and in a livery of dried-out insect husks and clattering garlands strung from chicken bones, he might really of crawled out of hell.
“Hello,” he said, in his reedy voice. “Did we find some new friends?”
The roadslicks hesitated for only a second.
Then they ran.
* * *
An hour later, Thrasher spotted two drones tailing us at a distance.
We weren’t far from the crash site, and I hadn’t forgotten what the roadslicks had said about the killers. As far as we knew, they might still be hanging around, ready to pop any more unwanted visitors.
The whole gang pulled up to a halt when Thrasher gave the whistle. Dawn was still an hour off at least, and the sky was just turning from purple to the rich blue of chlorinated toilet bowls. It was hard to spot them in the dark, but we could hear them well enough, whirring above the trees.
“What’s the problem?” Nikhil asked through a mouthful of fresh.
“Spy eyes,” Thrasher said. He held up two fingers, then pointed. But just then the drones dipped out of sight behind the trees.
“They know we’ve sighted ’em,” Zeb said. He knocked a rotten tooth back and forth with his tongue, like he always did when he was thinking. “Cannon, Nikhil, you ride the wagon. Might as well keep on keeping on, least till we get a clear shot. I want to see one of you blow these bastards off our tail.”
“Stay on your game, fellas,” Bee added unnecessarily. “These locos might be hanging around just looking for the chance to plug us.” As if we were in any danger of forgetting it.
A mile or so on, the trees thinned out and the hover tracks came into view again. Spooky-looking squirrels with sharp fangs and the red eyes of the nuclear zone were picking through a litter of glass. There were footsteps imprinted in a soft wash of mud: maybe other body pickers, maybe backlanders, maybe whoever had come to clean up the job. The wind turned putrid and carried the sharp scent of burning. The demons turned their noses to the air. The stink reminded me of the ash that blew from the Crunch 407 furnaces, which reminded me of my mom, which made me feel a little like puking. “Bodies,” Nikhil explained, just before I tagged the smell myself. She might as well have been saying BaconBitez™.
We crested a low hill and the breath got knocked out of me completely: lying in a scorched runway of black earth was the enormous mangled mess of metal and glass, trailing intestinal wreckage. Then the sharp report of several rifle blasts nearly jumped me out of my skin. I whipped around to see Thrasher hopping down off the wagon.
“Nailed ’em both,” he said, grinning. The drones were gone. The rising sun looked like an organ carved out none too carefully from someone’s insides, and it spilled its guts all over the tree line.
We went down the hill to the wreck. I had to breathe through my sleeve. The smell was so bad it had a taste to it. Zeb was right: most of the bodies had been cleared out, and the ones left were a squeak more than beef jerky.
But the fire had missed the freight cars: packages, luggage, crates, and cartons remained, intact and untouched. Whoever had derailed the train hadn’t bothered to clean out the cargo, and the early crew of body pickers had been in too much of a rush to poke around.
It was the biggest haul, Bee told me, they’d ever come across in one place, except for the time they’d happened on a hillbilly town wiped out over three months by a superflu, the people who lived there too sick and scared to do anything but stay, piling the bodies of their friends and family into an old Mobil station before getting sick themselves.
The demons unloaded shirts and pants and clean underwear; hairbrushes and toothbrushes and Bug-Off; cartridges of tobacco and stacks of fresh; shoes and ultraviolet-filtering sunhats. I refused the boxers Thrasher tried to grift me—it felt like bad luck to rub junk with a dead man—but I took three shirts and an extra pair of pants.
More and more, it looked like Rafikov was tracking me already. I skant thought she’d miss the chance to kill me again. And if I was going to follow Biff and Roger into some body picker’s ice van sooner rather than later, I figured I might as well look good for the ride.
13
No one likes a roadslick. In my experience there’s only two kinds of language they speak: money and bullets.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
Some days, it was hard to think of a reason to go on. There were mornings when the whole nine yards of it—standing, pissing the bladder of urine, scrubbing the rot from the back of your teeth, covering the stink of your underarms—seemed about as useful as putting makeup on a corpse.1 We were all dying, the planet was dying, the party was over. Soon the earth would go back to the roaches and skeeters, all the species that had found a way to survive without ever once inventing online porno or plastic zip ties.
Yeah. There were days it was hard to get up in the morning, especially when your morning started on your back in the hard dirt with an android poking you hard in the breastbone and doing terrible vocals over the Crunchtown Crunk©.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Ever again. Promise me.”
“Good morning,” Sammy said. “How did you sleep?”
“Fantastic.” It was barely dawn. My grille tasted like the inside of a garbage compactor. Meanwhile Barnaby had slept in the wagon on a bower of old cotton crop. When I spotted him, he was flat on his back getting a belly rub from Nikhil and Bee.
“Hello, Lowly Servant of the Dark,” he called out to me, waving a hoof. “The devil be with you this morning.”
At least I was getting used to the idea of his nob split open by Cowell’s scalpel.
The wind showed strong leanings to turn tornado: the clouds were so low and queasy green they looked like something you’d find on the underside of a tissue. We’d need to find a bolt hole before the storm dropped.
As I was packing up my rucksack, I caught the Straw Man looking my way.
“Where’d you find that roll-up?” he asked me, and it took me a second to work out he meant The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA. The cover was coming unslung in my pack, and half the pages were water-stained or swelled with bloat.
“A friend” was all I said, and shoved it deep down beneath my new clothes. Thinking of Billy Lou was like thinking about birds: suddenly, you started seeing the sky for being empty.
“I ain’t seen that book in an age,” he said. “I’d trade you for it, but those boys took my kit when they snuck me.” X-man was
carrying his pack now, and the spam he was rattling around on the shelves for sale was the most pathetic I’d ever seen: a spool of thread, a pigeon feather, and a used toothbrush.
“That’s all right,” I said quickly. “It was a gift anyway.”
“You be wise with it, then,” he said. “I bet there’s not five of those left in the world. Has everything you need to know right in those pages.”
I didn’t want to tell him I’d barely cracked the cover, so I just smiled. He may of been a Straw Man, but his fists were still the size of my head.
We hitched up the wagon and moved on, angling north toward a trader outpost, where we could barter for goods and find an ice van to ship the Straw Man’s body to someone who would pay.
Just after dawn the town poked its peaky head out above the horizon, and an hour later the road twisted us into the buildings, all of them scrapped together from the graveyard bones of buildings fallen before them, ugly as a stuck jaw. But for a minute, with the sun rising behind us through a sediment of green-bellied clouds, and sliding down through the streets and up, up, up, to touch the portal towers gold, it might of been the prettiest place I’d ever seen.
Portal towers meant I would finally get help.
We split up—Barnaby for the town dump, and most of the demons for whorehouses and moonshine stands to load up before the storm blew in. Sammy went to clean the grit from her soft joints at a detailing station, and I plugged in at a juice bar and nearly cried when my visor powered on. I was so excited, I swiped twice to Settings accidentally.
Hundreds of unread messages streamed into my feed. Jared’s messages were all tagged urgent and shouted at me to open them right away, so I jumped right over the company alerts.
Dude, where are you?? are you alive??
SERIOUSLY, WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU? Everyone is freaking the fuck out and I don’t know what to believe …
