by Set Sytes
He would stay with her until the end.
Sometimes he was almost proud of his faithfulness, as though he was gallantly fighting the expected, defying the odds. He knew that was a fucked up idea. The rest of the time he knew he was only walking the thinnest of lines, or that he was outright deluding himself. A body could stay faithful, with a strength of will that corresponded to your chances and opportunities in the world. How your cards were dealt. Red’s were not dealt in his favour, at least not if contentment and commitment were the games being played.
The body was easy enough to manage though. But the mind? How could a mind stay true? A mind like his? Red saw it as impossible. So completely and utterly impossible that, while he suffered from a constant nagging, tugging guilt, he couldn’t let it pull him down completely. You can moderate your base nature but you can’t fight it inside you or you’ll tear yourself apart. The best you can do is stop it escaping from you and into the outside world.
He knew if he started apologising it would never end. He couldn’t apologise for just being himself. He was full up with all these wants, all this fucked up desire and desperation and frustration and eager, excited need. He had a need for filth. He also knew that acting on any of these things would never be as cruelly pleasurable as the fantasies could be. The mind was always hotter. But in reality, the pain would always be greater.
He was still young, but that wouldn’t last long.
WASTELAND
The Store, like all the stores, got its supplies from the City. Sometimes the owner would shut up for a while and go himself. This was a much higher risk, and so usually the owner hired runners. Temporary to semi-professional traders that would buy from the City and sell to the stores. Someone unknown might come to the Store and ask to sell. You deposited goods in the hatch, you received money or goods in return. You used your own transport.
If you’d proved yourself at least moderately reliable, through repeated use of the store, whether buying or selling, the owner, if he or she didn’t think you were scum, might let you freely rent a dunebike from their store’s garage. Through this dunebike those without vehicles of their own could become runners for their “local” store. Even the cheap models were expensive to the average Wastelander, and upon renting such a vehicle you would immediately entered an unwritten contract. If, after a few days (each owner would set different limits), you were not to return the vehicle, a bounty would be put out on your head, and advertised both outside and inside the store. These bounties were an uncommon occurrence in the Wasteland, as all store owners were suspicious, cautious and cynical types, and they prided themselves on being excellent judges of character right off the bat. They had to be. Those that weren’t did not last long, nor their stores.
Johnny made his money through black market runs for the Store. He went about once a month and got the goods that good citizens weren’t supposed to have. Illegal goods, goods in scarcity (a shortage either real or artificially created), goods that had ceased production. Narcotics and alcohol and cigarettes and guns too, of course. No questions asked. Of course, it was all run behind the scenes by the Elite. Anyone with their heads screwed on right could tell you that.
About two weeks had passed with a barrenness of incidence since the attempted robbery of the Store. Johnny skidded and dived amongst the hills and rocks and flat wastes on his way to the City. Sand and dirt kicked up in small coalescing clouds. The engine of the dunebike humming away. Loud revs were for the bandits and their prey.
He was an honest man, consistently reliable in his every dealing with the Store and the black market. This was not to achieve any greater end than to go on living just within his means. Rez almost trusted him, a fault of character of the bastard if applied to anyone else. He had started with the smallest exchanges, costing next to nothing, and slowly built up until he was Rez’s biggest runner and a respected market trader. He knew if he ever betrayed any of them, whether Rez or his suppliers, he’d be hunted and killed and there was nothing he could do to stop it. This was reasonable. He had no instinct for betrayal. If ever there was a moral bone left in his body it would be turned against such things first and foremost. Trust was thin enough on the ground as it was. So thin as to be near non-existent. It was a miracle humanity had not already collapsed. Or perhaps it had and all that was left to be seen was its corpse.
There were very few ways to make money in the Wasteland, short of becoming a bandit. Running for the stores, robbery or murder contracts from clients in the City or elsewhere in the Wasteland, self-employed and small-time thieving in the City, or – the option the majority of Wastelanders took – City hand-outs. To call such hand-outs welfare would be to misunderstand both the pitiful, poverty-line of money received, and the intentions with which it was given. It was not offered on any basis of human rights, nor of charity. The money came, sparingly, in order to keep the Wasteland separate from the City. Nobody wanted the rough-edged and hungering Wastelanders to move to the City; it was packed tight enough as it was.
Bribing the Wastelanders to stay away, to enjoy their tormented freedom while it still lasted, was used in conjunction with the aforementioned robbery and murder contracts. Sometimes known as ‘raze and desist.’ Even the bandits would sometimes be hired, surreptitiously of course, to sweep and burn an area. Keep the people on their toes. Keep them in need, a distant need held at arm’s length.
Wastelanders were often kidnapped too, to sell to the highest City bidder. Sold into prostitution and sex slavery. Sold for the sick pleasures and power games of the Elite. If you ever watched a snuff film you were likely watching a stolen Wastelander in the last moments of his or her life.
Johnny could remember when he was younger, when his father sat poor and haggard in his chair and told him of the calls of wild dogs and the screeches of birds that would echo through the valleys and hills, bouncing off rocks as though they were thrown by spirits. He had listened as if hearing tales of unicorns and other imaginary creatures and he had struggled to believe that such things had ever existed. That his father was not part and parcel of the lies of the world.
The animal population was now a complete zero. Even scuttling lizards and spiders and most of the insects lay dead from radiation or mass slaughter. Caught in huge quantities in nets, brewed in vats in the cities for soup or shredded for meat pastes. Genocides of animal species were often just sport, just a new distraction in an emptying world. How many dogs can you kill. How many lizards can you gas. How many flies. Poisoning water holes with nuclear toxins was a favoured tactic to exterminate populations quickly, as was setting gas mines near warrens or areas sporting brackish plant veterans that had somehow survived this far.
Except when bandits tore up the landscape, hollering and revving, the Wasteland was as silent and menacing as the dead.
For sixty years the Second Civil War had raged, blistering the land and its people. At first it had been rebels against the government. Then there was no government, and it was rebels against rebels, states against states, and finally cities against cities. Small genocides were enacted, as if on nought but whim, as if it were a natural human drive. All weapons were brought to bear against each other: biological, chemical, nuclear. Whole cities disappeared, smouldered from the face of the earth. Communities vanished and oft there were not even bones to mark their existence.
Sixty years of chaos and blood ravaging the land. Allegiances split and then split again, fraying and tattering. Old biases, convictions and bigotry resurfaced with a vengeance. There were times you could no more trust those at your side than those you were fighting.
It was called the Years of Blood, the Great Death, and, by some, the Apocalypse. The Sixty Years War was the name used by most now, a generation raised in its aftermath, and yet there was no real count on when the war had ended. Some say it never had. There had been no peace treaties. No official ceasefires – for there was no-one official to make them, and no-one left who would trust them.
Instead, exhaustion crept
over the land like a reaper of hearts. There was an uneasy stillness, where the smoke and ashes drifted and the radiation settled like a plague risen up from the bowels of the earth. Numbers were too few, resources too scarce. There had been too much blood. Too much by far. The capacity to wage war had shrank until all sides on all fronts were so weary that they would look into each other’s eyes and could be forgiven for thinking each other dead themselves.
In the place of war, rising out of the dust of the Wasteland, were the cities. Offence had turned to defence, to security above all else. They were the new castles, the fortresses of the new age. Missiles were shot down, the few armoured vehicles and aircraft left were blown in seconds from afar, human attackers were gunned down in hordes like sacks of meat, left to bubble and stink at the cities’ doorsteps.
Some semblance of peace reigned, cold and implacable. The final impasse.
Only about a dozen cities remained from the Old World, and they gave little indication of their former selves, cruelly shrunk and brutally shaped. There were a few new ones, formed from advance war bases, and these were even leaner and tighter in their design. The cities were walled in, a claustrophobic system of the most exhaustive defence. There were no weak spots. They could not be afforded. The walls could not be moved, could not be extended, for reasons as much as fear of opening a weak spot as for lack of funds and material. Enough of each city’s finance was spent on the upkeep of its defence as it was. And thus all growth of the cities was restricted to one direction only: vertically.
Tower blocks and great houses and offices and industries rose ever skywards, as if climbing to reach the moon. They punctured the air like needles. They daggered upwards into the thin, steel air, moving towards the clouds. On some days they shifted in fog and mist. The highest were the abodes of the families, the Elite.
Structures grew under the earth, too, their foundations long and deep. Buildings stuck like spikes in the soil. Two thirds of most of the cities were now underground, networked through tunnels and shafts, subway tracks and elevators, under-earth roads and streets. All crowded and confined, the weight of all that lay above them dark and heavy on the mind, an unceasing pressure making its influence behind all that was said and done. This was the life of the workers, the underclass, the Hive.
There was no gradual move from Wasteland to City. There were no outlying communities, no villages, no suburbia. It was the great divide. One moment you were surfing the sand in a dunebike. The next you were at the City. And the first thing you came to was the Wall. The Wall was about three houses high and surrounded the City, a perimeter that on the other side was nestled and hugged by every crammed-in shit of a building there could be.
A heavy cloud of smog hung over the City; you could see it for miles. You could barely breathe right in there. The underclass were stricken with ailments and breathing problems. The Elite, if they had to venture out of their ventilated complexes, would wear gas masks or other breathing apparatus. The gas masks were favoured not for practicality but for the menace and sense of foreboding, enforcing in others a shivering eagerness to comply.
The Wall was bristling with security. Every ten metres up top were two armoured and bulletproof cameras pointing at slightly alternate angles side to side of a gun emplacement. Bullets, RPGs, gas, flame, electric. At intervals along the Wall were heavier emplacements, holding missiles and mortars, things with armour piercing capability the like could blow the last Fallout tank, the Mark XVII, the kind that looked like a rolling bunker – well it could blow that in three shots. These guns and cameras stretched around the entire City. It cost a fortune to keep them running. It was a fortress.
It was also complete overkill. Raiders pursuing any aggressive action, even they wouldn’t be thick enough to attack the City. Even if they bandied up, something that would never happen, all the dunebikes and armour-plated buggies for fifty miles couldn’t take a single ten metre stretch.
All the security was kept, however, because nobody was about to suggest disarmament. That would be close to treason. What about foreign invasion? The reason we defended ourselves in the first place?
Yeah, what about it, Johnny thought to himself. Have we seen or heard about any foreign powers lately? There’s just the Wasteland and the Cities. And no City would ever attack another. The underclass all the way up to the lower echelons of the Elite might be led to believe it could happen, could happen any day, but truth is there’s just too much money to be lost. Better keep each City a castle. Keep trading. Keep the Elite in power. Keep the people safe and scared. Safe and scared. Safe from us bad Wasteland folk. Safe from all the demons and ghosts out there. Safe from everyone but their own rulers.
CITY - BLACK
The City leaked its effluence. Every mind within was saturated by that inscrutable miasma of chaos and control. The chaos was self-evident, with any but the underclass considered a force of unpredictability, acting on whim, fucking, stealing, burning, corrupting, perverting, kidnapping, killing, raping. You could have your home taken out from under you and you could not ask for help. You had to make your own help. You could be assaulted in a street and unless you were connected to the Elite you had to take matters into your own hands or try and forget and move on. Laws were whatever were in the curt, immediate interests of the Elite. If you could not serve them in some way you did not matter to them. Everybody were means to each other’s ends. Everybody looked out for themselves, finding strength, caution and reclusiveness as the tools of survival. There was no cohesion to any of the chaos, no individuals banded together for common causes. The lid was firmly on the bubbling pot. The status quo remained unthreatened. The production lines continued to run. People continued to live their games.
Crime was not everywhere, only in the corners and the cracks (of which there were many), but you would be forgiven for thinking it was omnipresent. It did not help that most of the City was shadowed, the streets on all but the highest levels in the loom of buildings. Nobody looked up, and in a darkness lit only by artificial lamps they did not know if there was a patch of sky way, way above them or if they were indoors.
Of course, it wasn’t crime if it was by the Elite. In fact, the word “crime” itself had lost nearly all meaning since the Sixty Years War. With an absence of defined laws, with the free tyranny of the families and the subjugation and commodification of an entire class of people, calling certain acts crimes no longer seemed to make sense. There were things that affected you, and things that didn’t. There was no justice. Even that which you made yourself was not really justice; there was no moral consideration of balancing the world, no real idea that what was done to you was wrong and unforgiveable. They were things that happened, and they all had their common place in the world. There was no justice, only revenge and no regrets.
Few really cared. Not while there were games to play. Better lives to lead.
The City was polished and it was grotesque. It gleamed and it scabbed. Rust flaked and walls moulded while up above the families sat with feet on naked slaves and each looked out a window of a wall at the world of sky.
Johnny hurried through this vile place of putridity and pomp, not wishing to remain there any longer than necessary. He picked up supplies in the black market and walked quickly away, along narrow streets and walkways and up elevator shafts to ground level. He was about to cross a main road when he stopped.
He looked across the street and stared. There was a man there walking along, holding hands with an attractive red-haired girl. She was on the other side and he couldn’t see her face. He could see the guy’s though. He watched as the man tousled fingers through messy blond hair. His eyes were bright and good-natured, yet the set of his face and the lean of his back suggested that things were not all that rosy inside.
The man looked a hell of a lot like Kidd Red.
Is it him . . . murmured Johnny to himself. It’d be a fair miracle of a coincidence. That I come to the City now and see him, there, stood out from all the other inhabitants
in this huge black hive. But . . . hell they could be twin brothers. The character is usually modelled on the player. Especially a vain bastard like Red.
Johnny lit up a cigarette and kept watching. The couple were halfway along the street now.
You don’t go up to another player who you only knew in-game. It’s for creeps, stalkers and the mad. Those with a vendetta, those who took the game too seriously. You especially don’t go up to one you killed. What would be said? Hey. Hey. You shot me. Yeah, yeah I did.
You just don’t go up to a man you shot and say howdy. You just don’t. Johnny took another deep drag and as he breathed the fumes in he turned away and walked off, lowering his hat down on his brow and puffing smoke that covered him like trailing clouds.
Kidd Red felt something, some shadow moving in the darkness. He let go of his girlfriend’s hand and looked up with startled eyes, searching. He saw the back of a man in a cluster of men and they all walked the same way and one by one disappeared.
CITY - RED
Kidd Red was in the Hive. He walked the underground streets, drunk, feeling the weight of the drink and all that was overhead lying on him. He felt like some insect in the bowels of the earth, or some mechanical thing not really real, moving between dirt and dust.
