Golgotha Run (3 page)

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…”

Halfway to Las Vitas a shitstorm hit them like a hammer—literally, in this
case. Amongst the miscellaneous crap that fell from the sky along with the
hail, and which gave these storms their name, was a collection of
crudely-moulded tools of the sort used in the New Soviet dreadnought yards, clear
across the world.

Inferior lug-wrenches raided on the RV’s roof, and what might once have been a
seven-pound sledgehammer punched a neat hole in the windshield, size of a soup
plate, to land in the shotgun seat as an amorphous, smoking lump.

“Jeezus!” Eddie beat at the incipient fire through the reek of scorching vinyl
and stuffing, blistering his hands. It only occurred to him later that he
could have simply popped the shotgun door and kicked the smoking lump of
low-grade steel out.

Then again, exposing the interior of the RV to the storm directly would as
like to have had him shredded on the spot.

As suddenly as it had started, the storm stopped, as if a switch had been
thrown.

Even in a terrain of desert heat punctuated by violent squalls and
flash-floods, weather shouldn’t happen this fast.
Something inside insisted, blindly, that the sheer speed of the transitions
was wrong.

Little Deke—and you’d better believe that no one made jokes about his name
to his face—had explained all this to Eddie once.

They had been grabbing a couple of cool ones after junking the almost complete
wreck of a Malaysian caterpillar-treaded logging rig deposited up on the
mesa
by a particularly violent storm. This was back in the days when things had
been cool between Eddie and Deke, and Eddie was working for food and a place
to sleep behind electrowire.

Eddie had advanced the proposition that the shitstorms were maybe being done
to the world by aliens—to the vague extent of what he imagined aliens to
be. It seemed to be about as strange and pointless as corn-holing rednecks out
of their pickup trucks and messing around with cows, that was for sure.

“What the
fuck
would aliens be doing, going around dropping shit on folk?”
Little Deke had told him. “They got all those there laser cannon and tactical
nukes and shit. Or they would have if they even existed in the first place.
But they don’t. Not like you mean. They proved it. There’s nothing out there in
space we can use. It’s empty. That’s what space
means
.”

Little Deke was the richest man Eddie knew, and he knew things. One of his
first acts, on settling down in his junker’s yard outside of Las Vitas, had
been to install an array of parabolic dishes, hooking him into the global
datanet, TV-syndication and all manner of other shit. Eddie had been forced to
bow, outwardly at least, to his wisdom.

“So where does it come from?” he’d asked Little Deke. “I mean, what causes
it?”

“Skyhooks.” Little Deke had gestured in a direction that to Eddie, who had less
sense of compass-direction than of how you were supposed to tell one gangcult
from another, could have been anywhere.

“Shit they’re building out in Florida,” Little Deke explained, “up there in
Boston, whole bunch of other places. Run a monomolecular wire down from a satellite and you can run shit up and down it
like a fuckin’ elevator.”

“If there’s nothing up there in space,” mused Eddie, who thought he had
spotted a logical flaw, “then why do the guys need an elevator to go up
there?”

“Fuck should I know? Maybe all them rich corporate folks from the compound
blocks like the view.”

Deke took another pull on his Corona, noticed it was empty, scowled and flung
it at a ferroconcrete stanchion, where it shattered. Most of the shards fell
in a sawn-off oil drum that half-heartedly served as a recycling bin.

“All I know is, they seriously fuck up the weather,” he said. “‘A step-system
of microclimatic tiers existing on the point of localised catastrophic
cascade-collapse’ or some such happy crap from Discovery Weather Channel. All
I got from that was that the weather round these parts is frankly screwed.
These days anything can fall out of the fuckin’ sky.”

Microclimatic tiers on the point of catastrophic cascade-collapse or not,
Eddie still found it hard to imagine what kind of storm could pick up a bunch
of tools and the suchlike from Smolensk, or wherever, transport it halfway
around the globe then and dump it on some out of the way spot in New Mexico.

Or how it could be caused by someone just hanging what was basically a string
from a satellite down in Florida. He just couldn’t imagine the through-line of
how it could be possible.

The point about that, though, was that when it actually happened, imagination
was not required.

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.