Golgotha Run

by Dave Stone

  From a bedroom a roscoe said: “Whr-r-rang!” and a lead pill split the ozone past my noggin… Kane Frewster was on the floor. There was a bullet-hole through his think-tank. He was as dead as a fried oyster.

  “Dark Star of Death”

  Spicy Detective

  January 1938

  Supplementary Data: A Common Childhood

  The light fell in actinic, dust-laden shafts through holes eaten in the rusting corrugated sides of the shed; inched across the ragged forms huddled on the dirt floor. A number of rats slunk through the hut, with a silent inconspicuousness and an utter lack of scurrying that might have seemed, to some observer, slightly overplayed and unnatural. Something the rats had learnt consciously rather than by instinct.

  This demeanour had developed in response to the fact that should a rat be detected, here and now, it would last about as long as it took to be torn apart and the pieces squabbled over and eaten. Such useful protein-supplements were beyond price—if anyone had even had sufficient resources to know what a price was—here in the camp.

  The gentle purr of an engine outside. A rat which had been, very quietly, very surreptitiously, investigating a particular huddled bundle of rags on the grounds that it might just have stopped moving for good, now joined its fellows in streaking for a bolt-hole in the side of the shed—a trajectory so complicated, designed so that it escaped the slightest breath of detection, as to be barely physically possible.

  The bundle that the rat had been perusing twitched, then stirred, then uncurled from the foetal form in which it had slept to show a pinched, pale face. A girl of maybe twelve years old, possibly slightly older, but her state of chronic malnutrition made it difficult to tell. Her matted, filth-encrusted hair could have been any colour. One eye was filmed by a cataract, which glistened silver-grey in the dim light. There was a large, open sore on the side of her neck.

  Rubbing absently at the sore, the girl picked her way, silently and cautiously as any rat, through the other occupants of the shed. Heading for the door, even though it would of course still be barred from the outside. She intended to be amongst the first into the food-crush, this morning; she needed to conserve her strength. The last thing she needed at this point was a fight.

  Dimly, she recalled a time when she’d had milk-teeth, friable as chalk due to lack of calcium in her diet, but they had at least served to give her some minute edge as a weapon. Her adult teeth, however, had simply never begun to grow. She didn’t even know that she was supposed to have them.

  Outside, the sound of engines acquired extra harmonics as they were joined by the tones of another. The girl had never heard that particular sound before, and curiosity got the best of her. She stuck her good eye to a rust-hole eaten in the wall and looked out into the Camp.

  Big yellow half-track carriers were parked in the compound. There were little blue bubbles on the top of their cabs, two to a cab, in which small, illuminated, reflective saucers revolved so that it looked as if the little blue bubbles were flashing with light. The girl didn’t know what the vehicles were, of course; her only experience with vehicles was the slop-truck that delivered what passed for food and removed waste. She wondered, vaguely, what the people of the Camp were going to be fed today. With trucks so big and splendid as that, it must be something very special indeed.

  Off to one side, she caught a glimpse of men in coveralls busily setting up what looked like a monkey-puzzle of steel, fluorescent tubes and medical equipment. Other men, in bulky yellow corslets of polycarbon body-armour, looked on, hefting black objects that looked a little like the shock-sticks used by the Camp guards, but bigger. The girl wondered what those things were—just not so much that she wanted to be the one who found out.

  Behind her, the other occupants of the shed were stirring awake. The girl found herself in something of a quandary. Something new was happening, and it could either be something good or bad. No way of telling which.

  Deciding that it was probably better to be more circumspect, the girl backed off from the door and returned to the main crush of occupants, not so far that she would end up at the back. If something bad was going to happen then it could happen to somebody else first. If something good, then there was a chance there’d still be some left when it got to her.

  Some half an hour later, the yellow-corsleted men unbarred the door of the shed and herded the occupants out, blinking in the sudden sunlight, into the compound.

  Now the girl stood towards one side of a line of children, their ages ranging from those of toddler to adolescent. From this vantage point she could see what was happening to several of the sheds that made up the Camp.

  Men in coveralls, with masks over their heads, had opened up the metal boxes sunk into the sides of these sheds—the boxes that the girl, and for that matter anyone else in the Camp, had attempted to get into at some time or another, and see what was inside, purely for the sake of something to do—and were loading them with pressurised canisters. One of them tested a canister as the girl watched, twisting a tap on its neck, then nodded.

  Another pair of men were wandering between the rows of standing children. One held a portable data-terminal, the other a camera—though the girl of course did not know what either of those things was.

  They stopped in front of the girl.

  “You’re a little sweetheart, aren’t you?” he said. “Isn’t she a little sweetheart, Karl?”

  “She’s a sweetheart, Lenny,” said Karl. “Yes indeedy.”

  “Give us a smile, sweetheart,” said Lenny, sticking the camera in her face.

  The girl smiled.

  “Turn your head, sweetheart,” said Karl.

  She turned her head.

  “Visually, Karl, she could be good,” said Lenny, studying the display on his data terminal. “Don’t worry about the rickets or the incipient lupus, those are correctable. She’s got the general facial-structure, that’s what counts. Pity about that sore, though. Looks viral to me. She’s gonna need reconstruction, and that means, maybe, more bucks upfront than GenTech Entertainment needs.”

  Karl shrugged. “So, we take a flier, Lenny, and if it doesn’t work out then GenTech Entertainment shoots her in profile. People won’t be looking at her neck, much, anyway. ’Cept the ones who are into it. There are those. Say something, sweetheart.”

  This last to the girl, who dredged up as much basic English as she knew how to speak. It wasn’t so much that she was following orders as that it cost her nothing to do so, it was something to do, and she might as well do it as not.

  “What do you want me to say?” she asked.

  “I like the voice,” said Karl. “Personality.”

  “Microtremors show an incredible potential range,” said Lenny, waggling his data unit meaningfully. “I think we might just have ourselves a screamer here.”

  “What’s your name, sweetheart?” asked Karl.

  “Trix,” the girl said. “My name’s Trix.”

  “Nice name,” said Karl. “Very apt.” He pulled a paint-stick from his pocket and scrawled a small collection of symbols down her arm. “Now what I want you to do, sweetheart, is go over there. They’ll take care of you over there.”

  He shoved her off in the direction of the biomedical monkey-puzzle, and big, old people in white who would babble about path-testing and debriding, and shove a needle in her, arm and that was the last thing she remembered for a while.

  Her eyes and lips were crusted with dried mucus when she woke, at last, to find herself lying on something flat, and impossibly soft, and with an IV-drip in her arm.

  Dark shapes hazed before her against a blazing white light. Something hard and shockingly cold was pressed against the sore in the side of her neck, and she tried to jerk her head away. She found that her cheeks, however, were pressed between two padded blocks, rendering her head immobile.

  Something she simply did not recognise was water, for the simple reason that it was not sludgy and stinking, dropped onto her eyes and lips. Sh
e opened her eyes.

  A man with a shaven head and a jet-black Suit loomed over her. Impossibly old, even older than the guards in the Camp. Possibly even thirty, if such a thing could be imagined.

  Something cold and slim and tubular slid into her mouth. She tried to spit it out.

  The man slapped her. Not particularly hard, just hard enough to hurt.

  “Drink it,” he said.

  Trix drank what she would later learn to be fruit juice warmed to body-heat so that the basic unfamiliarity of it would not be rejected by her body. All the same, her blood-sugar rocketed too fast for an atrophied liver to even begin to cope—and due to the clamped position of her head, she almost choked to death before hands, off to one side that she couldn’t see, found an aspirator.

  After she was more or less settled, the man looked down at her and smiled. It was probably meant to be reassuring, but even Trix could see that it was just a movement of his mouth; he’d trained his mouth to move in a certain precise way and didn’t mean it at all. Even though she couldn’t see them for the obloids of black glass that covered them, Trix knew that the smile never had and never would touch his eyes.

  “Sorry about that,” the man said. “We’ll have to dilute that for a while. At least until we bulk you up a bit with glucotics.” He paused, looking at her thoughtfully. “Do you know, you really are a lucky little girl indeed.”

  Trix just looked up at him. She didn’t feel particularly lucky. Then again, she didn’t have all that much to compare “luck” to.

  “You’re a very lucky girl indeed because we’ve been looking out for you. We here at GenTech. Looking out for people just like you.”

  The man did the thing with his mouth again.

  “You can call me Masterton,” he said. “We’re going to do great things. Would I lie to you?”

  13.

  Up through Pasadena and then they hit the Glendale Blockade. Eddie hauled the Testostorossa back and let a modified Behemoth, the front end reinforced and fitted with hydraulic rams, take them through under main force.

  The good citizens of Glendale scattered and the barrier went to pieces; the Brain Train made it through encountering nothing heavier than disorganised small-arms fire.

  That gave the Brain Train a straight run west to San Fernando, before hitting what had once been Route 14 and turning north.

  “I feel like some music,” Eddie Kalish told the Testostorossa. “Switch on the radio and find some tunes.”

  “What, are your hands tired?” the Testostorossa asked him with heavy sarcasm. “You poor thing. All that beating off guys’ cocks, I’ll bet. Fuckin’ do it yourself.”

  Eddie was wishing that whoever had programmed the Testostorossa’s AI had gone a little easier on the virtual personality. Or given it a completely different one, come to that. The relatively limited amount of processing power that a car, supercharged or not, was able to lug around led to semi-sentient entities with decidedly one-track character traits.

  He was also, absolutely, not going to admit that while he had received a thorough grounding in the Testostorossa’s systems and controls by way of the Loup—in much the same way as it had allowed him to operate the data-systems back in the Factory—this had for some reason not extended to an ability to operate the built-in entertainment set.

  The fact was, with a large proportion of the US population turning to a life on the move, the number of radio stations competing for bandwidth had skyrocketed. It took insanely complicated receiver-controls to pull anything at all out of this jumble of signals in the first place, let alone something which one might enjoy listening to.

  The radio receiver crawled with knobs and dials, and Eddie didn’t have the first clue as to where to start.

  “Just do it, okay?” he said. “It comes down to it, and it doesn’t go against the Mission Directives Masterton loaded you up with, you have to do what I say. So I’m fucking ordering you, okay? And if you dare put out ‘It’s Raining Men’, ‘Boystown’ or anything at all by the goddamn Village People, I shall personally open up your hood with a can-opener and see what your artificial brains look like after being fucked over with a monkey wrench. Are we clear?”

  “Suit your fucking self,” said the Testostorossa. It squeal-blipped through the stations, most of which seemed to be playing the latest track by somebody called Freak-E and of whom Eddie had never heard, and settled finally on something with a pair of interminably duelling banjos.

  Eddie decided that no music at all would be better than that, found the power switch and shut the radio off.

  “What’s the matter,” said the Testostorossa. “Didn’t like it? Seems to me, you’d be a fan of Country with a big C. Something with a big C, anywise.”

  Up around Mojave, they ran into a gangcult calling themselves the Long Reds—not, the Testostorossa’s HUD explained rather snottily, on its targeting profile, because of any perceived kinship with American Indians, but because’ of the long red stains they commonly left their victims in on the blacktop.

  Eddie streamed the targeting data back to Trix in the Brain Train Command rig, then bugged out. Dodged through the Long Red horde with Al-assisted efficiency and put in some distance.

  Some few minutes later, Trix Desoto broke in on the corn-sat link: “Get your ass back here, Eddie, we need a bit of an assist.”

  “What?” Eddie said. “I thought I was strictly recon. Sort of trouble you got, what actual help could I possibly be?”

  “Get your fucking ass back here now, you little shit!”

  “Charming.”

  Eddie slewed the Testostorossa round in a handbrake turn he would have never believed he could do—and which, incidentally, had the Testostorossa calling him a total fucking maniac—and headed south.

  As the Brain Train hove into view, Eddie caught on to what the problem was. A lucky shot from a shoulder-mounted launcher had breached a Behemoth tanker and it was leaking the coolant that kept the cargo refrigerated—and more importantly, kept the hydrogen-fusion processes of its power cell at an optimum operating temperature for not leaving a huge hole in the ground.

  What kind of idiot, Eddie wondered, as the Loup obligingly dropped a sense of the mechanical schematics into his head, would tie the systems directly together? In any event, harassed as it was by Long Red motorsickles, the Behemoth was in no position to stop and effect repairs.

  “There’s a shutoff valve on the linkage assembly,” Trix Desoto told him via the comsat link. “You have to get up there and shut the flow down manually.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Eddie. “And wearing a fucking tit for a hat I am.”

  “What?” Trix Desoto asked in what seemed like genuine puzzlement. “What was that?”

  “Sorry,” said Eddie. “That came out wrong. I don’t quite know what I meant myself. The point is, what do I know about acrobatics on top of a speeding truck? Get one of the outriders to do it—they look like the sort who’ll do any dumb thing for a laugh.”

  “Their job is to keep these jokers off you while you do yours. Besides, ever tried to stand up on a motorsickle while simultaneously pulling a lever that throws your balance off? Just do the job, okay?”

  “No,” said Eddie. “And you can’t make me.”

  It occurred to him that was the wrong thing to say, to a woman who had control of a Leash that was, currently, the only thing that was preventing him from turning into a monster and exploding on a twelve-hourly basis.

  Then again, so what? The important thing, here and now, was immediate survival from being crushed under the wheels of a loudmouth Testostorossa with a profound streak of homophobia and/or a Behemoth.

  It was at this point that he felt the Testostorossa lurch. It slowed and segued in, then gunned the acceleration to match speeds and drive in tandem with the stricken Behemoth.

  “The fuck?” Eddie exclaimed.

  “I’m taking control under Emergency Override,” Trix said via the comsat link. “It’s locked in. The car itself couldn’t change
it, even if it meant going against the mission directives.”

  “And you’re, like, totally fine with that?” Eddie asked the Testostorossa. “Totally surrendering all your individuality and volition and shit?”

  “Fine by me,” the Testostorossa growled. “The girl’s a total babe and I like her. You, I don’t care if you live or fucking die.”

  “I can just sit here,” he said. “I can sit here and just do nothing. In fact, I think that’s what I’ll do. Or won’t, if you get what I mean, and I’m sure that you do.”

  “Hey, well, fine,” said Trix Desoto over the satellite link. “I’ve got two words for you. Ejector and seat.”

  “Oh dear God,” said Eddie. “You wouldn’t. I mean, even GenTech wouldn’t do something so cheesy and fucking stupid as fitting a car with an ejector seat, right?”

  “You’ll never know,” said Trix Desoto. “Or at least—you’ll know for about two seconds before your head hits the blacktop. So are you gonna do the job or what?”

  Eddie slithered into the shotgun seat and racked open the door. Scrambled up on to the roof of the Testostorossa and stood there in a semi-crouch.

  It was easier, actually, than he had imagined. They were in the lee of the slipstream generated by the Behemoth and the air seemed, for the moment, still. And the Testostorossa’s suspension was a dream—albeit the kind of dislocated and horrific dream from which you are desperate to wake up.

  Willing himself into a the kind of terrified calm that has you moving very slow and sure in the knowledge that any sudden move might break the spell, Eddie turned to survey the tubes and cables of the Behemoth’s linkage system that connected the cargo tanker to the cab. The shutoff lever for the coolant was plainly marked and visible—just well out of reach for someone who didn’t have springs in his heels.

  Eddie leaned in. Maybe he could get some purchase on the rig and haul himself over… and it was at this point that a Long Red zipped in around from the blindside, on a four-wheeled arrangement that seemed to consist of a pair of motorsickles lashed to either side of an aviation turbine, and levelled a sawn-off twelve-gauge directly at his head.