“I’m two thousand years old, give or take a decade, and everything you consider Hightec is from my life. My people. My world, if you can call it that, since it’s so different.” His eyes narrowed, and I sensed his raw disbelief. “Let me explain how that’s true. You’re right to doubt me, but I’m not the only person who’s that old. Andi is, too.”
“Bullshit,” he said, but there was no heat in it.
“Fair enough. I was, ah—found—by Mira and her sister, Bel, to the north and west. I was in a machine that kept me in a permanent state of sleep all those years. I have—I have machines in my blood that kept me healthy, and when I woke up, I had no idea that the world was now an echo of what used to be,” I said.
He was quiet for a long moment, then he lifted his brows. “Let’s pretend for a moment that I believe this story, okay?”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
He turned to me, his eyes narrowed with intensity, but I didn’t flinch or look away. There was no need. I was armored with the truth, no matter how bizarre it might seem to this man from the distant future. “I’ve seen cars and trucks, engines. Computers, even. An array of things. None of them even hint at keeping a person alive. In fact, from what I can tell, machines kill people more often than not.”
“True. But the things in my blood are too small to see with the naked eye, and there are hundreds of thousands working right now. They’re called nanobots, and they are the absolute future of humanity. Do you want to know?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Andi has them in her system, and she’s my age. Mira and Silk do not, but they will, because I want them to be safe in this—this world. This leftover disaster that we made somehow by fucking with the nature of life and breaking it like a cursed mirror,” I said.
He whistled low, then tilted his head. “I’ve seen how you look at Silk. And Mira. You’re really going to—how do the machines get in their bodies?”
“By injection, directly into the bloodstream. We have a medical facility that can do it—properly, and at the right ratios.”
“And what happens?” he asked.
“Diseases are limited, or outright gone. I heal faster. I am faster, and stronger, and maybe a bit more decisive. Andi explained that the ‘bots key into our strengths and develop them even more than nature could, which made me nervous because that’s how we got all this,” I said, waving around at the desert and all its horrors. “But no more. The ‘bots are a means to drag humanity back from the edge, and we have them. We’re going to stabilize the population, remove the shit that goes bump in the night, and build a city. Then we’re going to build another, and after that, we’ll build roads and waterways, too. Do you know how I know this is going to happen?”
Breslin said nothing.
“It’s going to happen because I’ll be alive to see it, if I’m not killed by some shitbird warlord or a—I don’t know, a sand squid or some other tentacled horror that tears me apart in a fight.”
“Is that like an octopus?” Breslin asked.
“Yeah. More tentacles. Ten, not eight,” I said.
“No thanks. Saw an octopus in a river. If there are squid living under the sand, then I might have to live in a treehouse,” he said with a sly smile.
“I might join you. The rattlers and hogs and scorpions are bad enough,” I admitted.
We shared a quiet laugh, then his face grew serious again. “These—nanobots,” he said, going slow with the new word, “they can help my kids survive? Longer, and with less sickness?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “Then I will at least listen. Jossi will, too.” His face took on dark cast at the mention of his wife, but I ignored it. Family business was just that—for the family, and I was not a part of his.
I looked up into the night sky. Ever since waking up, I took every chance I could to see the stars. They were unaffected by cities and smog and anything else that humanity might have created, winking gemlike in an array of colors from horizon to horizon. A meteor flared to life south of us, and then it was just the Milky Way again.
“Are they the same?” Breslin asked.
“More of them, but, yeah. That’s my sky.” I stood, and Breslin followed. Around us, the dinner was breaking up as people found their places for the night. Silk and Mira were with Andi, looking at a light and pointing off down a lane, where they were doubtless planning to run the next powerlines. “I’ll leave to hunt before dawn, but we’ll be back by later afternoon. If you need anything at all, just ask.”
“I’ll show you what we can do tomorrow,” Breslin said, and we shook hands.
“Judging by your arms, I’m betting it’s a lot.”
6
I nudged Mira, whose eyes popped open immediately. “Time to bring home the bacon.”
She smiled, her eyes bleary with sleep. Silk and Andi didn’t stir, though I knew they would both be up shortly. When there’s no city bustling around you, sleep comes easy, and you adopt a rhythm that your body considers natural.
“Mmm. Bacon. You just said one of the only things that will get me up before the sun,” Mira murmured, putting her hair back in a leather thong.
We stood, moving quietly to the door. Our house was no bigger than the others, except for a small room on the back that served as an office and armory. There was a bed there, too, in case one of us needed alone time, though we hadn’t used it yet. In a moment we were dressed and outside, standing next to the basin where we washed up. I handed her a towel while we brushed our teeth and then checked our weapons by hand. The first streaks of rose split the eastern sky, and somewhere overhead, a blood chicken squawked in protest. The day began, and we walked through the silent Oasis to the vehicle shed. The solar trucks waited, side by side and at full charge, courtesy of Andi.
“North, I think. We saw hog signs along that stack of bleached wood, you know the one?” I said, turning the key as we pulled silently away from the shed. The lane was wide, the ground dry, and when we came to the outer edge of homes a guard waved at us, alert and holding her rifle.
“Morning,” she said in a musical voice. “Dinner hunt?”
“Hey, Shazz. Boys asleep? I thought they were stuck to your hip,” I said, smiling. Her answering grin told me she, a mother of four young sons, was glad for the peace and quiet of a watch shift.
“Dead asleep. They chased lizards all day and got more sun than they needed.” She wrinkled her nose at their youthful mistake, her own freckles and green eyes standing out on a light complexion.
“Nothing like a little chase to tire them out,” Mira said. She liked Shaz. We all did. Her arrival a week earlier—along with her sons—had been something of a miracle, given their trek south from a defunct ranch that had been scoured clean in the storm. We were hearing that kind of story more than I liked, but I fully expected a steady stream of refugees once they learned of us. Especially given the savagery of the last storm season.
“We’ll be back by afternoon. Who’s relieving you?” I asked.
“One of those cowboys, the tall one with the long nose?” she said, uncertain.
“Vikez. He’s a good shot. I’m sure he’ll be right along.” I started to pull away, waving goodbye.
“Save the feet for me. I’m going to pickle them,” Shaz said as we drove off.
I made a face but dipped my chin to acknowledge her request. “She’ll pickle anything, won’t she?” I mumbled to Mira while accelerating.
“I think it’s a mom thing. She’s got four sons. They’ll eat anything, and I’m not joking. They weren’t chasing lizards for fun. They were chasing them to eat. Or . . . pickle.” She shuddered, sticking out her tongue halfway.
“Pickled lizard?” I said, trying not to frown. “We really have become barbarians, haven’t we?”
“If that word means unwashed animals, then yeah, but they’re little boys. I think they’re all like that.”
“You like me, don’t you?” I tried to leer, but it was a bit early, even f
or my libido.
She pulled at her lip as the desert sped by. “I might. After we bring down the hog.”
I smashed my foot on the accelerator, and she laughed wildly into the sky. “That pig is as good as dead.”
We spun quietly over the desert in companionable silence, and then, at some odd moment, we stopped being lovers on a day trip.
We became hunters.
“Sign,” I said, squinting into the growing light. We were a full klick from the stack of bleached trees where I’d seen tracks a few days earlier, and even now, I could see fresh dirt turned up.
“Tuskmarks,” Mira agreed. There were scars in the desert where the enormous hogs had rooted and torn for prey. Once they smelled an animal underground, they would stop at nothing short of digging a small canyon to pop it free. The feral hogs were opportunistic eaters, but then again, so were we.
“Walk it in,” I said, rolling the truck to stop. We got out and unshouldered our rifles, checking ammo belts and knifes with the absent gestures brought about from practice. Mira moved like a wraith, while I stepped as lightly as I could at my size. My ‘bots honed each sense to superhuman levels, and in moments, I smelled the distinctive odor of pig shit.
“Fuck me,” Mira said a minute later. “They’re such—”
“Pigs?” I asked.
Her smile was quick; her snort not very ladylike.
“If you make me laugh and give away our position, I’ll develop a sudden case of lockjaw, and hips that won’t move,” she said, arching a brow.
“Understood.” I pulled her up a small incline, then we both began to slither over the ground like eels. Below us, The Empty fell away, brutal and beautiful all at once. We were 200 meters from a crazy jumble of broken trees, bleached to bone white. The wooden mass caught my attention as both potential building materials and a nexus for prey.
“There they—oh, what the fuck is that thing?” Mira asked. She was looking away, near the end of the long pile of debris. The trees were stacked ten meters high by the stormwaters that had gutted the area. The animal that lurked behind them was three meters at the shoulder and moving fast.
Right toward a trio of giant hogs.
“How do they not smell or see that thing?” Mira asked. The beast was in the open now, churning sand and grit with each driving kick of its clawed feet. It was six meters long, thickly built, and bulging with muscles under a thin coat of mottled brown fur. It had—
“Horn?” I said, mostly to myself. “Wait, horns. It’s a big bastard. Looks mean as hell.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it, not alive anyway. Saw a skull kind of like that in the relics that some merchant in Kassos kept. Said it was a fossil. Something about—”
“What the hell. It’s not a regular rhino,” I said.
Mira turned to look at me in bewilderment. “What? A rhino?”
I grunted, never taking my eyes off the beast as it stopped to glare with eyesight that looked to be less than spectacular. “Rhinoceros was from my time, but in Africa, over the ocean. That big fucker is a wooly rhino, but with a light coat of fuzz. They died out long before civilization came on the scene.”
The rhino began to paw the earth, its shoulders tensing for a charge. The hogs whirled and stood shoulder to shoulder, their own tusks lowered in a menacing display of ivory that shone in the rising sun. The scene felt like I was watching a nature show filmed in hell.
“The big one is going to turn them into paste,” Mira said.
“Agreed.” My rifle slammed a second later, and the closest hog fell over with a squeal. I wasn’t going to let a prehistoric beast turn our barbecues into bloody mud. No matter how badass the razorbacks were, they didn’t stand a chance against a creature the size of a truck.
With horns.
My shot was the tonic the pigs needed. They lowered their heads even further and charged, two massive slabs of ham with nothing to lose and attitude for days. Their low hindquarters shook comically as they accelerated away from us toward the rhino, who lowered its own horns and began to trot forward like a tugboat picking up steam. The space between them closed quickly, from a hundred meters to fifty and then ten.
Then the hogs split apart like wolves on the hunt, and the rhino bleated a cry of alarm.
“They’re going to—” Mira said, then stopped because the three animals met, but not in the way the razorbacks intended.
The rhino dug in, slashing to the left with a horn that was a meter of brutal ivory, catching the closest pig in the jowl and hurling it skyward like a toy. Bu the rhino wasn’t done, following through with a pivot that brought its hind end around in a flash, the hooves lashing out to catch the second pig in the ribs. Even at our distance, I heard bones cracking as the pig rolled sideways in a tremendous spray of sand and gravel. The rhino slid to a stop, whirled again, and proceeded to gut the second hog with a single, vicious cut of its horn, spraying viscera into the sky like a fountain.
“Seriously, that’s gross,” Mira said.
“Right. He did gut the pig for us, though. If he doesn’t—oh. He’s not done.”
The rhino pummeled the corpses for a moment in a move of absolute superiority, then stalked off at a dignified trot that was neither slow nor fast. The dead hogs lay steaming in the sun, their bodies broken, their hides worthless.
“Well, at least you shot the one,” Mira said with a shrug.
“Let’s take a moment and make sure that rhino puts a little distance between us. I don’t want to try him, even with our rifles.”
“You don’t have to ask me twice,” Mira said, pulling out a flask.
“Is that hooch?” I asked her, holding my hand out.
“Uh-huh. I brought some of that whiskey and a couple other things you might interested in,” she said, a wicked grin on her face.
“Like what?”
“These.” She lifted her shirt. Her breasts were proud and glorious, and everything right with the world. “After we butcher the hog, of course. You know how bacon turns me on.”
“That makes two of us,” I said, sad that her shirt lowered but now highly motivated to skin that pig and tie it to the truck. Nothing makes a man work like proper incentives, I always say.
We waited and sipped the whiskey, and then we drove down to the kill zone. Up close it was even more gory, and for a moment I wondered if I had it in me to get naked with Mira that close to a meat market.
As it turned out, I did.
We skinned the hog and broke it apart, tying each huge section of meat to the truck and then covering it with a tarp. The heat was rising and we only had a few hours to get it to the fire, but we were only an hour’s ride from The Oasis, which meant we had a surplus of time.
Mira took out wet cloths and wiped me down, then I did the same for her. She smiled up at me, her face a perfect mix of beauty and challenge. I touched a freckle on her honey skin, and her green eyes narrowed.
“Are you going to be romantic, or are we gonna let that hog spoil in the sun because you’re being slow?” Her smile was brilliant, her lips full and inviting.
I leaned close, but didn’t kiss her. Instead, I untied the heavy belt she wore, letting her pants fall to the ground. She was naked underneath, her skin tanned all over from years in The Empty. “I noticed, this truck is just about the right height.”
Her brow went up as her hands went forward. Then my pants came down, and we both stood in each other’s orbit, smiling at our good fortune. When she took me in her hands, they were far from those of a woman who had to fight for every day. Her touch was soft, and in second, I was hard. I touched her, then ran my fingers along her inner thigh, folding back the delicate skin that was already heating from our desire.
“Sometimes I don’t want to kiss either,” she said, sliding forward and pushing down hard on every inch I had to give. It was slow going, and then it wasn’t, as her will overcame her body’s inability to keep up with what she wanted. She wanted us, together, pushing slow and holding tight under
the blue sky.
I wanted the same thing, but her lips were too great an invitation. I kissed her, long and slow, and she kissed back like she was discovering me for the first time. Mira’s edges were hard, but her core was softer than anything I’d ever known, and it was given only to me in moments like this. So, I was careful with it. Our tongues played, lazy and warm, and then I felt her clench around me with a need that made my vision swim.
It was a perfect kind of heat, standing there moving inside of her in the desert air. I took her dark blonde hair in my hands and pulled her up, then lowered her back on me with a push that took her breath away. And mine, too, as she nipped my ear with her teeth, breath coming in faster gasps that told me we were on the same page, and our chapter would be finished sooner rather than later.
“Now,” she said, and I kissed her harder as she wrapped her arms around me hard enough to make my breath a chore. It was everything Mira was—fierce, honest, hot, and giving—and it was mine just then. I came as she did, lifting to the balls of my feet like I was straining to touch the one cloud that passed over us as we collapsed against each other, out of breath and smiling into each other’s necks.
“Better every time. Almost like we learn,” she mumbled, biting softly at my neck. Her tongue flicked out to taste the salt of my sweat, and then she did it again. I could feel the smile on her face as I faced the moment of withdrawal. It felt like the end of a perfect vacation, that Sunday before you go to work when the scenery is perfect but your dread is building with each hour closer to the end.
I pulled out, and she frowned, then kissed me again. “We’re not doing that enough.”
“No argument here,” I told her. Then, with a gallant bow, I pointed to the truck. “Would milady like to drive or hold down the giant dead pig?”
“I think I’ll drive, but the other option is tempting. You really know how to spoil a girl,” she said, her green eyes glittering in the sun.
We drove back, and in the afterglow of Mira I began to wonder about the rhino, and the general state of animals since the virus.
Future Reshaped: A Post-Apocalyptic Harem (Future Reborn Book 3) Page 3