Eddie Kalish crawled on his belly and squinted through the good lens of his goggles. He’d picked them up maybe a year ago, from the crushed remains of a lone motorsickle package-runner who hadn’t needed them anymore.
The mutated coyote that had killed the runner hadn’t wanted them either, leaving them on the corpse after it had fed.
Coyote didn’t have the smarts, or the manipulation, to deal with truly human technology. They just set up these crude and dumb but incredibly complicated apparatuses for dropping rocks on people, without ever quite understanding why.
The bad lens of the goggles was crazed and crusted with liquid-crystal chemicals leaking from the multiple lead-glass sandwich. The good lens, though, could still track and target, zoom in on images and enhance them with some degree of clarity.
Eddie zoomed in, somewhat ineptly, down the mesa to the plain beyond, where steel and polypropylene and meat were being systematically taken apart.
The big Behemoth tankers of a GenTech Corp road-train had fallen foul of a jackgang-a variety of gangcult that, through a tortuous network of fronts and double-blinds, had a connection to some actual Incorporate patron. The patron supplied funding and a market for loot. This meant that large-scale hijacking was practicable, as opposed to pulling down the smalltime shit for the pure hell of it.
The jackgang had actively planned this, maybe over months. Whoever might be funding them had seriously tooled them up.
The road-train front runner, in his zippy little Toledo, had run straight over undetectable carbon fibre tyre-slashers, and smack into crash-barriers that sprang up under one-shot servos. The outriders were taken out by shoulder-mounted STS projectiles, closing off the turning-circle, and the mobile Command and Control unit by mortar, effectively boxing the road-train in.
The jackgangers had then moved in for the kill… only to find that they had walked into a trap of their own. With the concussion of detonation-bolts, three of the Behemoths had split open along pre-stressed fracture lines to reveal GenTech shock-troops armed with heavy-duty weaponry of their own.
In the world of physics, equally matched forces tend towards an equilibrium. In the world of humans possessed of heavy-duty armament, equally matched forces result in sheer bloody chaos.
Eddie decided to leave them to it. Only when the last bodies-or their component parts-were still, did he climb to his feet and head for the battered little Kraut Karrier RV that counted for everything he owned in the world, and thence down the dirt track leading down from the mesa to the plain.
A misdirected mortar shell had totalled the hauling rig-even if a jackganger or a trooper had survived in a state to drive it, the road-train wasn’t going anywhere soon.
One of the refrigerated Behemoths, one of those that had been carrying the payload rather than troopers, was breached and spilling packaged human organs. Many of the packages were split and already spoiling in the New Mexico heat. The smell was already attracting scouts from the feral dog packs that roamed the wasteland.
Eddie hefted an automatic rifle and sighted on one of the canine scouts, preparing to empty whatever was in the clip into it, but the dog caught his attention on it and backed off sullenly. Things would be different when the pack arrived, but for the moment a single dog was no match for an armed human.
Eddie was relieved. He was unsure how to operate the somewhat overcomplicated control mechanisms of the rifle anyway. Besides, the gun was still chained to the surprisingly heavy mass of a severed forearm, and he didn’t feel up to trying to detach it.
He dropped the arm and gun to the blood-washed dirt and looked down on their previous owner. The guy was mangled and paralysed but still just barely alive. One of the jackgangers.
Eddie had always been confused by the way in which some people could take a look at some gangcult, read the crawling mass of insignia and tattoos and go, “Aha! These are obviously the Clan of the Leaping Viper, operating out of the Los Palamos barrios and the scourge of the area between InterStat checkpoints 703 and 709 inclusive!” and the like.
He strongly suspected, since the only way you could walk away from a gangcult was to leave them dead, you could say what you like about them after you did-and so these people who had walked away just made all the tough-sounding names up.
It gave you more kudos to say, “Just took out the dreaded Tungsten Razorbacks,” than, “Jeb and Earl Terwilliger and a bunch of their good ole pals tried to jump us with shotguns, but we had a Gatling so we like just as to totally slaughtered them,” that was for sure.
All Eddie Kalish could see, looking down at the jackganger, was a big and mean-looking sack of crap who would have been able to tear him, Eddie Kalish, a new hole and use it as an ashtray had he been in any way mobile.
“Scavenger rat-fuck-bastard piece of scum!” the jackganger croaked as Eddie went through the remains of his clothes looking for anything he might use. “Don’t do nothin’ save as to slime in there and rob the dead.”
“Yeah, well.” Eddie examined the sharp and well-kept hunting knife he had unearthed. “It’s a living.”
Leaving the jackganger to his own devices, Eddie was feeling pretty good about himself-just like he had refrained from slitting the jackganger’s throat out of profound moral sentiment rather than simply not having the guts.
Closer to the centre of the smoking carnage, the bodies were far less intact and just as dead as it was possible to get.
A fortune in weaponry, both on the troopers and the jack-gangers, looked to be more-or-less undamaged, but Eddie paid it no heed. A hunting knife was okay, that was useful-but you carried any more than that and there was no way anyone you might run into would let you live, crawl and beg for your life as you might.
Eddie was looking for food and medical supplies-commodities he could use, and sell to those few people he knew who were of a kind to be grateful. Grateful enough to barter, anyhow, if not pay actual credit. There was a girl over in Las Vitas, for sure, who would reciprocate a dose of fast-acting, one-shot antibiologics in the manner that had her needing the dose in the first place-
Something wrong.
Scavenging rat-bastard Eddie might have been, but you didn’t survive the nearly seventeen years he had by going against those ratlike instincts.
He stayed there immobile, semi-crouched, ears alive and alert to the sound that had sounded wrong amongst the creaking of ruptured Behemoth skins, the crackle of flames and the distant howls of feral dogs.
There it came again. A faint and tenebrous clanking. Not the inadvertent sounds of someone still, somehow, alive and strong enough to be coming for you. More the sounds of someone trying, weakly and against all hope, to attract help.
It was coming from one of the Behemoths other than those that had contained troops. A slew of genetically-engineered offal, however, was not falling from the blown hatch.
Cautiously, reflexes wound up tight to flinch away from any sign of danger, Eddie moved in closer.
Even Eddie himself would have been hard-pressed to express what he had expected to find, other than the satisfaction of simple rat-like curiosity that it for the moment cost him nothing to satisfy. Maybe there was some incredibly special and valuable cargo in there, the nature of which he could not so much as begin to guess.
As it turned out, the nature of the cargo surpassed his barely-formed imaginings.
The inside of the tanker looked like a cross between a palace and a med-centre-though for all Eddie knew, this was what the rooms of rich people always looked like when they went into hospital. Archaic-looking brass fixtures and silken hangings and a big four-poster bed.
On the bed, plugged into bloodpacks and bleeping med-units, the withered and unconscious figure of an old man. There was something about his form that seemed unsettlingly odd and wrong: that strange, coma-case distinctness that comes from remaining utterly immobile while still being alive.
Eddie didn’t particularly notice, far less care. His eyes were riveted on the girl who sat, or rather slumped, beside the bed.
She was in… you really had to call it a costume, rather than clothing or a uniform. A nurse’s costume, the already short dress hiked up an inch or so to expose the black silk of her panties, garters to black stockings and spiked heels. One of the stockings had a ladder in it.
The costume tried but spectacularly failed to contain breasts which seemed to have a gravitational pull of their own-they certainly had a pull on the eyes of one Eddie Kalish. Nipples the size of small grapes strained against the thin fabric as if desperate to burst through. The ensemble was topped off by a perky little cap perched on platinum-blonde cascades of hair, and cosmetics applied to overstatedly libidinous effect. The bright red lipstick, for example, was applied in the manner suggesting that the wearer had left a large portion of it on whatever she had just finished sucking.
The end result was, in effect, something to make that portion of the human race with a Y-chromosome howl like one of the approaching dogs outside and fall instantly in love. At least, for a time. Or as many times as might be allowed.
All in all, it was something of a pity that she had been gut-shot. Shrapnel from the stray round that had breached the Behemoth hatch. Things slid around in the hole.
For all this, against all physical human possibility, she was still alive.
“Please…” she rasped to Eddie as he looked on horrified and wide-eyed. “Get us out… get us to GenTech. As much money as you want… more money than you can imagine… just get us to GenTech…”