by Dave Stone
It was like the way that if the Lord God Almighty were to suddenly turn up, spraying lightning from his fingers and demanding sacrifice, you wouldn’t start debating your belief in him or otherwise; you’d be casting around like a bastard and wondering where you could find the nearest fatted calf.
The engineered algae that permeated the blacktop of the main highways, and kept them in a state of constant self-repair, was doing its stuff. Holes punched in the surface by hail and debris were knitting themselves together, the debris itself sinking as though dropped into a pool of engine oil.
Eddie could never quite work out how the algae knew the difference between garbage and, for example, a battered old Kraut Karrier piece of crap that was barely one step away from being garbage at the best of times. He worried about that, sometimes. He had visions of the blacktop yawning open one of these days and swallowing him up.
In any event, it was fortunate that Eddie had decided to risk the highway, as opposed to sticking to the dirt roads. A shit-storm out there would have churned the ground to mud, leaving him bogged down and stranded—whether for hours or days, it didn’t matter in the present circumstance.
Even minutes might be too long.
Eddie turned the engine over and swung a glance back into the RV, which was more than somewhat cramped. The old guy was lying on the sprung fold-down bunk that had served as Eddie’s bed these last few years, coma-still body loosely wrapped in mirror-reflective polymer sheeting like a pot roast in a microwave.
Tubes and wires ran from under the sheeting to modular portable medpacks, their inner workings pumping and whirring away with a sound like the insides of a notebook computer. Their displays were shut down to eke out the power remaining in their cells.
Eddie had lugged the old guy into the van and installed the med-packages under the semi-lucid instruction of the girl in the nurse’s costume.
On first seeing her, he had assumed she was just that—a hooker in costume, hired by some rich old guy to go with the clinical technology that actually did the job.
She had known her business, though, even while going about the business of dying from the wound in her gut. Eddie had wondered if she couldn’t have used some of the old guy’s medical crap on herself, but she had insisted, quite vehemently, that there would be no point. The important thing was to get her charge to GenTech.
Her name, so Eddie gathered when she was lucid, was Trix Desoto.
Now Trix Desoto lay, curled up foetally and clutching her belly, on a couple of garbage sacks containing the old clothes that were pretty much all Eddie owned. Still alive, but in a bad way.
The sense of sheer sex she exuded, in collision with the bloody horror of her wound, made Eddie feel weird. It was like patching into a descrambled movie channel and suddenly realising you were watching pay-per-view snuff.
The wound beneath her interlaced fingers had stopped bleeding. Eddie knew enough, having seen enough people die even in his few tender years, to know this meant one of two things: blood-loss, shock and coma—or, if there was enough blood left for the heart to pump, lingering on for hours and days before the infection from her messed-up insides finally took her down.
She seemed to be going the second route. Burning and shaking with fever—and this seemed a little odd. It had just come on too fast, like the way that shitstorms came and went too fast to be possible, like a switch being thrown.
It was just in his mind, but he felt like he could feel the heat she was putting out, pulsing over his face like the radiation from a thermal element.
“Storm’s over,” Eddie told her. “We’re moving again. Listen, you’re not looking so good…”
“Talekli lamo da ti saso ma, hasi de lospadretnaso tik de lama…” The girl was babbling with delirium. “Masa tu so gladji beri rama…”
Somebody had once told Eddie that English was his second language, and he didn’t have a first one. Even he could tell, though, that this wasn’t any kind of language you could find on Planet Earth. It was like that Speaking in Tongues shit they did over at the Dog Soup Tabernacle up in Silver City.
“… saso ti da mati natno, zara ti raguesta di la ramo…”
“Listen,” Eddie said. “What happens if you die? You die, what do I do? How do I get on this more money than I can imagine you were talking about?”
“… maso si nami lama—what the fuck are you talking about, you scavenging little shit?”
Instantly, Trix Desoto was lucid, and lifting her head to glare at him cold-eyed. It wasn’t even like she was fighting off the pain. That switch thing yet again; a completely different person had been switched on in her like a light.
Eddie found himself feeling shamefaced under her direct and contemptuous gaze.
“All I mean is,” he said, not a little shamefacedly, “is that I don’t know what any of this is about. I don’t know who to call. You die on me out here, how am I gonna know who to call?”
“Then my advice to you would be to drive like a motherfucker and just hope I don’t.”
The light of coherence snapped off and her head fell back.
“Slami makto, shaba tlek na doura rashamateran…”
Eddie drove.
3.
Las Vitas was little more than a glorified truck stop: a settle-down because, what the hell, folks just sometimes still have to stop somewhere. A cluster of second-string services around the dead remains of a TexMexxon station.
The station itself had croaked near around twenty years ago, so far as those who were in a position to know had told Eddie Kalish. Bolt-on hydrogen-fusion technology had not been kind to the dealers from the days when vehicles needed their regular fix of hydrocarbons.
What Las Vitas had was communications. With the C&C rig totalled back at the site of the ambush, Las Vitas was the nearest place that Trix Desoto could make whatever calls she needed to make.
That, at least, had been the plan.
“Shit…” Eddie checked the scene and then just kept on going. “Gangcult hit it hard and serious—maybe the same guys did you. This was heavy-duty.”
The big, vestigial TexMexx sign which had served as an accretion point for Las Vitas was down, the dishes strapped to its superstructure shattered or scattered. That had probably been the first order of business: take out the comms before they could get off a signal to the US Cav.
And vehicles that might have been stopping over were long gone, save for a flipped-over garbage truck with a hole punched through it. Prefab cabins were just smoking polycarbon shells; the jerry-built structures that had been thrown up from local materials in the first place merely ash.
Reddish-brown smears dotted on the levelled concrete expanse where trucks and road-trains had once parked; weird little organic lumps that you didn’t want to look at in case you worked out what they were.
The ruins of Las Vitas still smoked gently. The fires had had maybe an hour to burn down. If survivors were going to be crawling out of—or back to—the wreckage then they would have done it by now. Las Vitas had been zombie-towned—in coming weeks and months it would turn into a ghost town, but for the moment the meat was just too fresh.
Eddie kept his eyes on the pristine blacktop and just drove, mind working furiously. Such as it was. Only one immediate possibility occurred.
“Las Vitas is a bust,” he said, wondering if Trix Desoto could even hear him through her babbling. “There’s only one thing for it. We’re gonna have to try Little Deke.”
Last time Eddie Kalish had seen Little Deke had been in the rear-view mirror, as the guy was bringing up a scattergun and loosing off as Eddie tooled the stolen RV out of his compound.
Eddie had come across the thing, half-buried under a collection of old dune-buggy frames, and had wondered what it was. He’d had the idea that Recreational Vehicles were supposed to be these big old sixteen-wheelers with a load the size of a prefab house and dirt bikes slung across the back.
This was just a clunky little capsule barely bigger than any street
car.
Small enough that Eddie could imagine taking it and driving it away.
“It’s a Veedubya,” Little Deke had told him, spitting out the word along with a wet gob of thoroughly masticated loco weed. “Fuckin’ Kraut Karrier. It’s older than I am. Now get your sorry ass over here and help me strip down this piece of shit coolant system.”
Eddie’s thoughts had kept coming back to the little RV. He’d been working for Little Deke pretty much as long as he could remember—long enough that he didn’t remember if Deke was any kind of family or just some guy.
Little Deke hadn’t treated him particularly badly, but as he’d gotten older Eddie had realised that all he was, and what he was, was stuck there in the junkyard going nowhere.
There had just been nothing to keep him there. Eddie had taken to sleeping in the little RV, spent odd hours fixing it up, waited for his chance to swipe a working hydrogen cell, and then just got the hell out. There was a big, wide world out there, apparently, and Eddie had wanted a taste of it.
In the end, he had never got so far. A couple of years aimless wandering, never pulling down the kind of score that might get him further… and now he was crawling back.
“Cut him in on the money, he’ll be fine,” Eddie told Trix Desoto, not sure at this point whether she could hear and understand him or not. “That is, if he doesn’t just shoot me on sight.”
The electrowire stood dark and silent—which meant nothing, on account of the fact that several million volts running through steel mesh gives no visible sign.
The gate was held securely shut by a heavy-gauge electromag-lock, and there was no sign of movement behind it save for the vague flapping of polymer sheeting and the like amongst the junk.
A camera tracked back and forth in its housing to regard them, a light blinking on its faceplate under the lens.
After a while the lock buzzed and low-yield servos cut in to swing the gate-sections open, outward, against the force of gravity that held them customarily shut.
“Well, he hasn’t shot us yet,” said Eddie. “That might be a sign.”
Eddie nosed the van into the compound, alert for the first flash of movement.
No sight or sound of threat at all… not even from the skunk/rottweiler hybrids that, he now recalled, Little Deke left the run of the compound to when not around.
Dogs with skunk glands grafted into them, together with microelectronic triggering implants. Kind of like those money-packages that spray you when you try to rip them off—although money-packages didn’t have the kind of jaws that could tear you a new one before they went off.
Back in the day, the creatures had been trained to recognise Eddie’s scent and not attack; these days, Eddie wasn’t so sure, even if they were old enough to remember him being around.
Ah, well. The lack of skunkdogs meant that Little Deke was going to be around, somewhere. Eddie supposed that he could be holed up somewhere in the piles of junk, waiting and drawing a sniper-bead on him, but he knew that wasn’t Little Deke’s style.
If he was still angry, after a couple of years, he wouldn’t be exactly subtle: he’d just come at them roaring and blazing away.
Eddie shut off his engine. Off to one side he could hear the hum of the meth-generators that supplied the compound and its fence with power, but the old AmTrak boxcar which served Little Deke as a domicile was dark and silent.
No lights burning even though it was getting on for dusk. The big floods lashed to various items in the junk piles and lit the yard for night work stood dark and dormant.
Eddie left the van and made his cautious way to the AmTrak car. “Deke? You there? I just wanna say that…”
Snapshots.
Eddie would never have a clear and sequential memory of the adrenalin of panic kicking in. Just telegraphic snapshots of single, discrete images, like the output of the random camera of the eye jump-cut together:
The extensive collection of antique porno (genuine paper magazines) which Little Deke had preferred to the girls available in Las Vitas—mylar bags ruptured and their contents shredded by automatic fire.
The telecommunications unit that plugged into the signals from the parabolic dishes outside, smashed to pieces by some blunt implement. Maybe the butt of an automatic rifle.
The breadboarded-together collection of personal computer circuitry that served as a maintenance-and-control deck for the compound’s security devices—like the cameras and the lock on the gate that had so recently let Eddie inside. The monitor screens had been punched in, but the deck had been left relatively intact. Someone had placed what looked like a big, black polypropylene-skinned slug on the keyboard. It rippled, operating the keys, and thus the compound-security, under remote control.
The headless body of Little Deke, the 450-pound bulk of it hanging from the articulated gimbal-harness he used to get around indoors. There was surprisingly little blood; the neck had either been cauterised by whatever had decapitated him, or Little Deke’s heart just hadn’t been up to producing a gusher from his sheer mass.
In any case, Eddie didn’t think about all this until later. At the time all he saw were the snapshots, the flash-flash-flash like you get in movies that tell you what the basic story is—and the story was, at this point, that one Eddie Kalish was now in the total shit and it was time to get out.
Forget about learning the details or any happy shit like that; just get the fuck out.
Eddie jackrabbited from the AmTrak and flung himself towards the van—just as big Kliegs clashed on, slamming the world into a monochromatic state of dead black and magnesium white. They weren’t the junkyard floods; they were coming from outside.
In the shock and dazzle, before his eyes were overwhelmed, Eddie caught sight of the shapes behind the chain-link and lights. Blocky trucks—not the lashed-together bikes and pods of a jackgang. They were military spec.
“GRABYA ANKLES, SWEETHEART!” an amplified voice barked, out beyond the wire. And the thump-thump-thump of an annoying and generic Boystown Disco Beat started up. Regulation issue psycho-warfare protocol.
“JUST YOU RELAX AND TAKE IT EAAASY!” the amplified voice came over the mix. “NEOGEN GONNA TAKE YA, JUST RELAX AND TAKE IT EASY!”
Detonation cutters sliced the fence on two sides. Through the flare and dazzle Eddie saw the dark figures hazing in.
4.
Up on the mesa, out past the burning remains of Las Vitas, a pollutant-mutated scorpion was in the process of laying its eggs in the still barely-living flesh of a hairless dog.
There was no one to see this, and therefore no one to remark on how the air around scorpion and dog now shimmered, how a sickly light hazed from their forms.
Instantly, as though some switch of unlife had been thrown, both arachnid and canine flesh crumbled into their component molecular parts, leaving nothing but skeletal remains and a perfectly intact chitionous husk.
“We got troubles,” Eddie said, slamming back into the van. “Looks like soldiers.”
“TWO MINUTES TO SURRENDER,” the bullhorn-voice boomed cheerfully, “THEN WE GET LETHAL. IT’S LIKE TOTALLY YOUR DECISION, GUY.”
“Mercenaries,” Trix Desoto said. “Delta-trained. NeoGen runs a cadre of them for hunting parties.”
Eddie strained his eyes on the dead black shadows outside, imagining the stealthy figures as they silently and invisibly took up position. He didn’t actually hear and see anything, of course, on account of the meaning of the words “silent” and “invisible”.
He wouldn’t hear or see a thing, he realised with a cold sick certainty, until they dropped the hammer.
“MINUTE AND A HALF…” the bullhorn boomed. “SAY, YOU A SPIC, BOY? YOU A CATHERLICK? TIME FOR A COUPLE OF HAIL MARYS IF YOU REALLY FEEL THE NEED FOR A QUICK RATTLE ON THE ROSARIES!”
“Where the fuck did that come from?” Eddie muttered to himself. There might or might not have been some Hispanic in his parentage—it was about as likely as anything else—but he couldn’t see what that
had to do with anything.
“Destabilisation tactics,” Trix Desoto said. “Like the disco. Keeping us off-balance for when they come in to take the package.”
“Package?” Eddie said.
Trix Desoto indicated the supine form of the unconscious man.
“THAT’S THE BUNNY!” came the bullhorn. “NICE OF YOU TO GIVE US A GOOD LOOK AT THE MERCHANDISE!”
For a second, Eddie was unaware of what the bullhorn guy had meant. He sat there in a cold sweat, looking at the van’s interior light, trying to work it out.
Then he lurched towards it with a curse and shut the light off.
“CLEVER GUY!” came the bullhorn. “WE GOT NIGHT SIGHTS AND THERMAL-IMAGING SYSTEMS OUT THE ASS, MAN! YOU JUST LEFT YOURSELF BLIND AND IN THE DARK. THIRTY SECONDS!”
If there was one thing, absolutely one thing, that Eddie Kalish was not going to do it was turn the light back on again.
Besides, what with the spill-in from the big Kliegs outside, it didn’t make any real difference. The guy was just trying to find another way to rattle him and keep him from doing something all resourceful and heroic. Not that that made any difference, either. If the resourceful hero in Eddie Kalish was waiting to make itself known, it was taking its own sweet time about it.
“That’s it, then,” Eddie said. The choices had come down to sitting here and dying, or even pretending to believe in this “surrender” crap and dying in the open. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“Oh there’s something we can do,” said Trix Desoto. “There’s something I can do.”
Looking at her in the in the glare of the Kliegs, it finally percolated through Eddie what had been odd about her since he had made it back to the van. Gone was the delirious swinging between lucidity and alien-sounding gibberish.
Now she seemed entirely and unnaturally sanguine—and not in any sense relating to the catastrophic blood-loss from the wound in her gut.
In fact, she was looking pale but strangely healthy. The body in the comedy-nurse uniform seemed somehow bulkier and stronger.
