“Penny. My name is Solomon Jobs. Your parents hired me to find you,” I said.
She did not respond. I saw no flicker of recognition in her eyes... neither of her name nor at the mention of her parents.
“Your name is Penny McKellen. My name is Solomon Jobs. Your parents sent me. I’m here to get you out,” I said.
I got a response... just not one I was looking for. A low, animal growl began to vibrate from her throat. She furrowed her brow. Her face twisted into a grimace. The muscles of her arm clenched as she tightened her grip on the pickaxe. Her shoulders hunched like she was preparing to lunge. All of this was alarming but nowhere near as alarming as what I saw in her eyes... or, more accurately, what I did not see. I did not see a shred of innocent, little Penny McKellen in those tiny green globes. Whatever nightmare she had endured over the past hundred-plus standard-days had stripped her humanity away. This kid was completely feral.
She sprung at me. She swung the pickaxe one-handed as she launched her little body across the short space between us. It was insane that a twelve-year-old girl possessed the muscle tone to accomplish that feat of strength... but I did not pause to mull it over. Any hesitation would have resulted in a pickaxe upside my head. I leapt forward, closing the distance before her arm could complete its deadly arc, and caught her elbow with one hand and her throat with the other.
Penny went batshit. She squirmed and thrashed like a mongoose in a sack filled with cobras. She dropped the pickaxe and flailed her arms, slapping and clawing at my head, arms, chest, and face. She sent vicious kicks pistoning at my legs, gut, and junk. I climbed to my feet to protect myself from the onslaught, giving myself better leverage to control her arms and getting my balls out of striking distance... but now I was a head taller than everyone else around me. I was clearly visible to the kabebe guards.
Then Penny made it worse. Her growls transformed into a high-pitched snarling wail that went on and on and on, like her lungs were bottomless pits. I looked around to see if this shitshow was attracting any unfortunate attention... and made eye contact with the nearest kabebe guard. It screeched something to the other guards in the bowl. I was too far away and Penny was making too much noise for my translator implant to decipher it but I did not need to know what was said. The gist was clear. A fuckton of kabebes spurred their giant rats toward me. They raised their magnetic weapons and opened fire.
The sound of a fuckton of magnetically-propelled projectile weapons echoed throughout the bowl. High-pitched whines stung my ears as rounds split the air near my head. Children dropped all around me, spurting blood from multitudes of wounds as they went down. Those who were not hit did not run, as common sense would suggest. They just stared dumbly at the fallen, like barnyard animals too stupid to recognize slaughter even when it was happening right beside them.
I experienced a moment of indecision. I did not know where to direct my attention... the dying children around me, the frenzied child in my grasp, or the kabebe guards with their horrible marksmanship. My mind rapid-fired through the options. The slaughter of the children was unfortunate but it was not my problem. They were simply collateral damage. Penny McKellen was my problem but she was not in the mood to be cooperative. It was going to take a bit of resourcefulness on my part to get her out of there. The kabebe guards were shitty shots but there was a lot of them. If you pump enough shitty shots into the general area of a target over a long enough timeline, eventually one of them will find its mark.
I made a decision. I dropped Penny McKellen. She hit the ground, pushed herself away from me, skidding backward across the floor, then flipped over, gained her feet and ran, shouldering her way through the crowd. I spared a split second to see what direction she went then filed that factoid away for future use... I had more pressing concerns at the moment. I pulled my revolver from my coat.
The nearest guard was between thirty and forty feet away, spurring its rat toward me, firing wildly with its magnetic gun. Forty feet was just under the maximum effective range of my revolver. I took my time, aimed carefully, ignoring the whine of passing projectiles and the screams of wounded children... and fired three shots in rapid succession. One went wide, zipping off to hit something behind the kabebe. One clipped the rat’s head, sheering off flesh, fur, whiskers, and an ear. The last one struck the kabebe in the dead center of its tiny body. The impact threw it backwards off its mount, blood spurting out of the wound in its torso like the tail of a tiny quill-studded comet.
I looked for my next target. Three more kabebe guards were guiding their rats through the crowd, firing wildly as they went. They were approaching from different directions but were all about the same distance away, approximately twenty feet beyond their newly-dead comrade. Shooting at any of them would have been a waste of ammo. I reloaded my empty chambers and waited, debating with myself over which one to kill first.
The slaves settled the debate for me. An eerie calm descended over the bowl. The children, all the children, fell silent. Even those wounded by stray kabebe bullets stopped screaming. They lay on the ground, bleeding to death in silence. The banging, clanking, ringing, and grinding sounds of mining operations had stopped as well. All I heard was the growling of giant rats, the rapid thwump-thwump-thwump of magnetic guns, the occasional muffled screech of a slave getting struck with a stray, and silence... massive, oppressive, deafening silence.
The violence started small. The children in the immediate area of the kabebe I had killed suddenly went nuts. They roared in unison, eviscerating the silence, as if someone had issued a telepathic command, twenty little throats letting out a howl of rage that was high-pitched and childlike and, at the same time, vicious and inhuman. They swarmed all over the place where the kabebe had gone down. The giant rat was buried under a dogpile of frenzied children. Moments later, pieces of rat and kabebe were flying through the air.
Whatever it was that had caused the children to go batshit, it was contagious... fantastically so. The violence spread. Beginning with the slaves on the perimeter of the melee, the chaos swept across the bowl like a shockwave. Within seconds, the docile herd of slaves became a roaring, bloodthirsty revolt. Every rat-riding guard in the bowl was swarmed. The kabebes quickly forgot about killing me and devoted their attention to saving themselves.
I seized my opportunity while the guards were distracted. I looked toward where I had seen Penny go. My height was an invaluable advantage. I was a head taller than the entire mob. I could see the whole chaotic clusterfuck. My eyes immediately located a bright mop of red hair, in the middle of the writhing crowd, moving away. I charged after feral, little Penny McKellen, shoving rioting children out of my path.
The children seemed to recognize me as a member of their own species and most of them did not attack me. A few were too caught up in the frenzy to discriminate between human, kabebe, or rodent targets. I did not shoot any kids, but I did have to punch one or two... or several. I did not worry about it. If punching children had been the worst thing I had ever done, I would never have wound up on that shithole planet in the first place.
The density of the crowd changed, shifting from relatively even numbers across the bowl to concentrated swarms around each rat-riding kabebe. The guards blasted away with their guns as fast as their tiny fingers could pull their triggers. They used their quills as weapons, jerking their bodies this way and that, stabbing and slashing at their attackers. The rats fought with their massive jaws, biting through children like they were butter, and slashed with claws that were like six-inch-long curved knives. Bloody chunks of children rained down around every guard but more kids kept coming and coming.
They formed rings around each guard, ten kids deep at their thinnest points. Some attacked with pickaxes, shovels, or other tools. Most went at their captors barehanded... punching and kicking and clawing and biting. They were not organized. They were in pure berserker-mode and they did as much damage to each other as they did to the guards. Blood splattered as kids were struck with mining too
ls. Teeth flew as kids were hit with fists. Bones broke, abdomens burst, and chests and heads were caved-in as kids trampled other kids. They were not deterred by their casualties, however. They did not even seem to notice them. For every child that fell, another took his place, equally as bloodthirsty as the last.
As the mob condensed around the various guards, the kids in the areas in between thinned out. I was able to pick up speed. I sprinted toward Penny McKellen’s mop of bright red hair. She stood alone about a hundred feet away. Her head swiveled from side to side, like she was trying to decide whether to keep running or to join in the revolt. I hauled ass, the tail of my trenchcoat flapping behind me, pumping the hand clutching my gun and holding my hat on my head with the other. I halved the distance, then halved it again. I was within twenty feet of her when her head swiveled toward me. Her feral green eyes locked on mine. She snarled at me then took off again, sprinting toward the outer edge of the bowl. I followed close behind.
The guards were losing the fight. Rats were dropping to the ground all around the dome. The fallen were buried under waves of children. Some rats were still partially visible. Swatches of grey fur or toothy snouts or whip-like tails peaked out from under the children that swarmed all over them like ants on dead grasshoppers. Some rats were completely covered. They were only distinguishable as small mounds in the writhing mob. The kabebes that had been riding the rats were simply gone, consumed by the bloodthirsty crowd of rioting slaves.
Penny ran before me. I was almost close enough to reach out and grab a handful of that bright and filthy red hair. The outer wall of the bowl loomed before us. It curved from the floor up to a sheer cliff fifty feet up. Penny was headed straight for a large set of metal jaws that sat at the base of the wall like a discarded pair of giant’s dentures. A pile of big rocks lay on one side, a pile of pebbles lay on the other, and a stack of empty ore-sacks was beside that. A system of ropes and pulleys ran from the top of the wall down to the crushing machinery. It looked like she was going to try to climb her way out.
“Penny! I’m here to help you!” I shouted.
She skidded to a stop and spun around to face me. Her green eyes blazed, shooting daggers of pure animal aggression at me. She snarled and growled. Streams of drool oozed from the corners of her mouth. She hunched her shoulders and curled her hands into claws.
The memory of her pickaxe assault was still fresh in my mind. I did not want to deal with that unchained animal intensity again but I was too close and moving too fast to stop... and I had a job to do. I put on speed, hauling ass as fast as I could, and charged straight at her. Right before I was about to collide with her, I swung my revolver at the side of her head. It caught her in the temple with a loud Thonk! and she dropped.
The child-riot had spread out again. All the guards were down. The kids had left their concentrated slaughter-piles and were turning their aggression on the tools, equipment, and the fuel ore veins. Several children had reached the walls of the bowl and were climbing up the ropes, going after the kabebes on the cliffs above them.
Penny lay on the ground. Her eyes were shut. The animal fury was gone. For that moment, she looked like innocent, little Penny McKellen again. I hoped that she was only unconscious. If I had killed her, she would have been easier to handle but worth a whole lot less. I bent down and pressed two fingers against the side of her neck. Her pulse was right where it should have been. My big-ass payday was still a possibility. I looked around for something to restrain her with, in case she regained consciousness while I was trying to get her the fuck out of there. My eyes fell on the stack of ore-sacks, the same kind that the kabebe convoy on the Big Staircase had been using to transport children. Two minutes later, I was headed back toward the tunnel with unconscious, little Penny McKellen stuffed in a sack and slung over my shoulder.
I made it to the mouth of the tunnel without having to punch any more children. The tunnel was too low to go through with her on my shoulder. I lowered the sack to the ground and looked back at the mine. The bodies of rats, kabebes, and children were strewn everywhere. All of the tools and equipment were broken and cast about. Large, bloody splotches spotted the floor at random intervals, marking the places where the guards and their rats had been killed. The children had reached the top of the wall. A writhing line of fighting bodies was spreading devastation all along the lip of the bowl. I watched as a few tiny quill-studded bodies were cast off the top of the wall to plummet fifty feet and splatter on the floor below. That unfamiliar twinge of emotion popped up in the back of my brain again. It felt kind of like satisfaction... maybe because it looked like the children were going to resolve their problems on their own.
I pushed the emotion out of my mind. There was no time to feel. I still had a job to do. I bent down, took hold of the sack, and moved into the tunnel, dragging innocent, little Penny McKellen behind me.
Chapter 10
The hardware store was small. The product display area was about twice the size of my office. The walls were lined with shelves stocked with an array of mining supplies. It was mostly hand tools... picks, shovels, drills, jackhammers, and the like. The selection included some small ore-handling tools... buckets, wheelbarrows, and carts, all of various sizes. The largest thing in the shop was a combustion engine-powered cart/forklift/rock-crusher combo about the size of one of the carts the sheriff’s deputies used to zip around the Promenade. It sat in the back corner, sandwiched between a display of sledgehammers and a locked case containing explosive charges. The layer of dust on the contraption suggested that no one had shown any interest in it for quite a while.
There were no customers at the moment. Mr. McKellen and I were alone in the store, standing on either side of a long counter that ran across the front of the shop, a flimsy barrier separating the merchandise from the lawless public. My hat was on the counter in front of me. A lockbox was on the counter in front of Mr. McKellen.
“The deal was the standard rate for white work times three, right?” Mr. McKellen said. He opened the lockbox and began shuffling through its contents.
“Plus expenses,” I said.
“Of course, of course... I’ll pay you even more. Call it a bonus. It’s the least we can do. I never expected to see Penny again.”
“The rate we agreed upon will be fine.”
“Whatever you say, Mr. Jobs. Whatever you say.” Mr. McKellen began counting money and placing it beside the lockbox.
A loud crash erupted from deeper in the store. We both glanced at a narrow door in the far corner, nestled between two sets of shelves. It led to a back room that served as a combination storage and living area. Growls and snarls could be heard coming from behind the door. Mrs. McKellen’s voice could be heard in between Penny’s outbursts, sometimes soothing, sometimes scolding, sometimes pleading. The kid was restrained back there. I had made sure of that when I had handed her over. I wondered how this conservative couple was going to cope with having to deal with a feral child, on top of all the other challenges that came with living on this backwater shithole.
“I can’t imagine what she’s been through,” Mr. McKellen said.
“Slavery,” I said. “It was one of the more brutal forced-labor operations I’ve seen.”
“Someone should do something about it.”
“The kids were taking care of it when I left. I’d stay away from the lower levels for a while, if I were you.”
He gave me a puzzled look, then shrugged and pushed the money across the counter. That stack of cash was awesome to see. It certainly was a big-ass payday. I figured that it was enough to spend the next two standard-months relaxing in my office, stoned out of my fucking gourd. Or I could pay off a few debts. I held an internal debate for about nine seconds, then decided that being stoned out of my fucking gourd was the preferable option.
I divided the money into four piles, two large and two small. The bulk of the cash was in the two large piles. The small piles were emergency funds, each containing enough money to purchase ab
out a hundred milliliters of dope. I put one large pile into a pocket in my coveralls and the other into a pocket inside my trenchcoat. I stuffed one emergency fund into the bottom of my shoulder holster, beneath the barrel of my revolver. I tucked the other emergency fund behind the sweatband inside my fedora.
I put my hat on and turned to leave. Another loud crash came from the back room. Mr. McKellen and I glanced in that direction.
“Will she ever be normal again?” Mr. McKellen said.
I shrugged. “I’m a mercenary, not a psychiatrist.”
I turned my back to him and walked out of the store.
I merged into the chaotic flow of traveling creatures. The McKellens’ store was four levels beneath the Promenade. I headed toward the Big Staircase, moseying my way through the crowd. The foot traffic was not quite as hectic as the crazy nut-to-butt mania on the Promenade, but it was close. Despite the danger of provoking an incident, my mind was only partly in the moment. Most of my mind was dedicated to daydreaming about the near-future, about purchasing a few liters of liquid synthetic opioids and blasting off into a drug-induced utopia.
It was dangerous to be distracted in public on that backwater shithole and I paid for it. I was barely halfway to the Big Staircase when a massive hand grabbed the collar of my trenchcoat and yanked me off my feet. Instinct kicked in. I went for my revolver but another massive hand seized my wrist. I hung there, my boots dangling four feet off the floor, my trenchcoat pulling my shoulder blades up until they were almost touching, trapped. The hand gripping my wrist pulled me around. I slowly rotated until I was staring into the bug-eyed, noseless, scale-covered face of a grindle. It was Fluffy.
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