by Forbes West
Guy claps his hands, the sound echoing throughout the empty pool area. “Very good. What about the other? Telekinesis? Can you work with that in the same way as you did the flames? I’ve seen people working with orichalcum for five years—ex-Green Berets, SAS—who couldn’t pull off that little trick.”
He points to a fallen girder that straddles the overflowing pool area. “Pick it up. Try to imagine the texture of that girder, its roughness, its absolute weight, and focus.”
You stare at your sneakers, trying to focus. “Give me a moment. Never something that, you know...”
Guy claps his hands together quickly. “In real life you don’t have a goddamn moment! Just do it, ya dumb bitch!”
His outburst startles you but you point the ori-baton, telekinetically reaching out to touch the girder. You try to use the same focus you did last time. In five seconds, you lift a steel girder that probably weighs two thousand pounds and is fifty yards long off the ground. “What do you think?”
Guy stares. “Sorry to get crazy there. You know my point.”
You feel the girder, actually feeling it in your own mind, really exploring its rough texture and rusted-over parts. Then you throw it right into the holographic display of the old ancient world, shattering the sickening replay of the men and women and those poor slaves in those hideous masks. The girder sticks into the middle of the holographic display panel, and a few sparks shoot out the side.
Guy zips up his jumpsuit a little. “It’s getting cool out.” It is, too—the clouds are thick and ghostly, hovering overhead in the moonlight. It seems possible a night-time rainstorm is coming through. He stares at the girder now stuck inside the building. The display is emitting a torrential rain of sparks.
* * *
For the next few hours, you practice what you can with Guy. He gives you tips on how to focus as he attempts to distract you at the same time, shooting his bolt-action gun into the air or crumbling a part of the complex onto itself so all you can hear are falling buildings. He tosses you up and down into the air in the most ridiculous goddamn ways in order to throw off your thought process. You can command fire and you can telekinetically lift and throw things—including Guy at one point.
You are a natural, you come to believe—a sort of freak.
Before you know it, it is getting lighter out, and Guy calls out time just as you are moving a vending machine and throwing it a hundred yards into the pool area where it explodes with a bang.
You return to the Karmann Ghia to find a sleeping Saki. Then she pulls out a pistol without opening her eyes and points it in your general direction. “Gotcha,” she says.
“Just drive us on home, girl. Please. And thanks for waiting,” Guy says.
* * *
A few nights later it’s just you and Guy doing a nighthawk run. Saki has work, of course, and can’t be out gallivanting around the dead city of Sargasso-3 like you and Guy can. She says it’s boring, which you know is definitely not true, at least for you. Treena says she wants to stay at the Benbow.
You take a leisurely route to the east of the super-sized city, passing a Mission Security car that immediately pulls you over to the side of the road with a flashing of its blue and red lights. A harsh, cold wind blows out from over the grasslands, chilling you and Guy as he rolls down the window of the Ghia.
You are greeted by a flashlight in your eyes. “No flying the S.B. Crue today, Guy?” the young officer asks. He’s got a similar uniform to Botha but it looks more rugged and lived in. Oddly, the other officer is looking up at the moons or the stars, ignoring you.
“Nah, just a midnight drive.” Guy takes out his wallet and gives the long range patrol man fourteen hundred Dii-Yaa. The Mission Security man winks at you. “Thanks for the donation to our Widows and Orphans Fund.”
The Counter leans into the car. “No one has heard anything about Mathias and Petty out here in a long time; be careful though.” He then slaps the car’s roof. “Alright, have a better one!”
Guy puts the Ghia in gear and floors it. “This little piece of pussy got some engine on her! This ain’t natural!”
“Holy God, you’re crude,” you say, as Guy flattens the gas pedal. You rush to the lights and the wreckage of the old city with old school devilish speed. The land flies by as Guy pushes the Ghia to top speed. After a while of making it through the city, you park.
Guy and you step out of the car inside a building that is blown out and easily accessible to the street outside. “Okay, special eyes, keep a look out.” Guy jogs up ahead, switching his Geiger counter on; it beeps lightly. “I’m trusting you with my life, so don’t go full retard on me out here, okay?” You shuffle over a lot of rubble and wreckage. Modern graffiti paints some of the old buildings. A giant Sean Connery glares at you in black and white paint. Underneath him someone has written So A Man Walks Into A Bar With A Monkey. I Forget The Rest of the Joke But Your Mother is A Whore.
Another building has some sort of philosophical writing on it: Real Eyes Realize Real Lies. One building with its top half cut off and lying on the ground is covered in a picture of a cat with a watermelon. Another crumbling skyscraper is painted in an amazing array of bright crayon colors, and in red letters it says over and over: God is Love and Eat Dead Pork Rinds, Eat Dead Pigs.
People—humans, of course—have been all over this place, and quite recently. That makes you feel a little bit better, but the emptiness of the ruins, the great no-sound that is at play at here, frightens you.
“Cool,” you sarcastically whip out.
Guy, up ahead of you, turns. “Graffiti Alley. This is all picked over pretty well but there’s something I wanted to check.”
You stand there for a good long moment, looking over everything. Guy is far ahead, so you hurry after him. He points to the sky, and you hide behind a pillar. A large Network airship that looks like a modern freighter hooked to a massive steel blimp scans the cityscape with floodlights that dart in every direction. Loudspeakers blare out, “Illegal salvage activities will not be tolerated. Trespassers will be prosecuted,” in English, Spanish, and Japanese.
After the airship has passed on, you scramble over a piece of fallen skyscraper. Your hands are scratched and your knees scraped as you struggle to get over it. At the top of the ruin, you sit down and watch Guy slide down the side, helping him get down with the telekinetic ori. You look at your surroundings—this valley of broken stone and mortar. Though there are some vines creeping into the abandoned city, amazingly they have not turned this whole area into some sort of overgrown garden. The flash storms, you guess, keep some of the vegetation down, though you idly wonder how all the creatures you have seen manage to get through those storms. Must burrow or hide, you guess; something in their biology tells ‘em to take off.
You think you can hear a jackhammer at work but you can’t tell from where in that canyon of structures.
A white circle with two arrows is spray painted on the side of what looks like a Greek temple; a temple where all the statues with their four arms and long tails and are missing their heads. There is also a spray painted rectangle with a single dot in the middle. You push yourself off the bench and walk forward.
You then slip down the side of the fallen skyscraper, carefully sliding as much as you can, scraping your ass a little as you do so. Guy helps you down with his ori. He stops by what could have been a large office building made out of glass. The ruined shell, all the broken windows twinkling in the moonlight, partially obscures a massive machine. A couple of miles away you see this massive digging machine at work. It looks like the marriage between a couple of dock cranes, like you would see at a port somewhere on Earth, and a massive buzz saw/scooper. The whole thing is propelled by a series of treads the size of your old apartment back home. It is knocking over a couple of buildings and digging out the remains with the metal ripper at the front. The noise grows and becomes terrible. The simple white-with-red-sun flag of Japan flies from its control tower.
Guy le
ans over to you. “This is good! Jap the Ripper will block out the sound of any gunfire that may go on.”
“That’s not cool!” you say.
“What? The gunfire or what I said?” Guy frowns, screaming back his answer over the noise of the machine.
“‘Jap the Ripper’. It’s not very cool!”
Guy makes a jerking off motion. You slap his arm hard. “No duh! I didn’t name it. Yes, it’s offensive, I’m not going to argue that. It’s horribly racist. But that’s what everyone calls it. Especially the stupid goddamn Winkies. The fourteenth century people don’t know any better.”
He snaps out his baton. “You see that building over there?” He points to what looks like a large metal box with yellow and black zigzag marks on it. “The Network set up a half-assed subway system in this sector. See that?” He points to a hand-painted sign next to what looks like set of rusted metal stairs on top of old marble stairs that descend below the street. The sign has a rectangle painted on it with two circles along its bottom edge; it looks like a little train. You nod.
Guy looks at his watch. “Five minutes. Okay.”
You and Guy descend the metal stairs with a quick clang and stand inside what was once the Antediluvian world’s equivalent of a subway system. Cast off to the far side of the platform, you see clear, long, and plastic-looking monorail cars, God knows how many years old, their clear cockpits covered in still glowing and twinkling lights. You can barely make them out in the gloom, as the space is only lit by gas camping lanterns and torches. The monorail cars are shoved off to the other side of the marble platform, stacked up like forgotten toys stuffed into an old chest. Separating those cars from you are three metal tracks leading past the marble platform and into the black gloom of the large subway tunnel. A wooden sandwich board marks this platform as Atlantic City and Designated Flash Storm Shelter.
Within a minute of standing there, an old NYC subway car pulls up with a screech, its headlights heralding its arrival from the opposite tunnel. The blue and white Venn diagram of the Network is painted onto one side, masking the old NYC graffiti that still adorns every spare space of the subway car.
The car is driven by a girl, maybe even your age, and she says nothing as you get on-board. A large man, maybe three hundred pounds, with long, scraggly, black hair and a full goatee, black shirt and black shorts, sits next to the young girl. The man sucks on a candy and holds an automatic shotgun between his knees.
According to a poster on one wall of the subway, it’s forty Dii-Yaa for co-ops, fifty-six for independent operators. Guy puts his index finger up to his lips and mouths the word “Bugged,” pointing to the ceiling of the subway car.
The driver flips on a record player. An old blues record scratches out a tune.
Bright lights, big city, gone to my baby’s head...
Whoa, bright light, an’ big city, gone to my baby’s head...
You get to the first subway stop (Thunder Road; Radiation High) and a man in a full radiation suit along with a thick lead-covered case comes on-board and sits down on another plastic molded seat. Guy nods in his direction, and the radiation suit man gives a little salute. An ori-baton and a red tag attached to the outside of his suit mark him as a Registered Salvager. When he gets off at a stop called The River, he drops his Dii-Yaa into a goldfish bowl, next to the girl, that’s half full of money.
Two minutes later you make it to your stop (Nebraska) without incident. The conductor hands Guy a long receipt and you step back into the light. Another one of the Wanted by Ni-Perchta posters for Charles Mathias is pasted up here, though someone has written Good Luck, Love Charlie on it in marker. You wonder if Charles had indeed autographed it.
Farther away from the subway car, Guy speaks in a whisper. “Okay, the Wookie guarding the subway car back there is Sicko Steve from Santa Barbara. He works for the Rhodesians out of the Free Zone. He’s Mr. Conductor on this subway track with that Gwen Stefani wannabe, and he finds all the best lines on salvage.” You march up the stairs and into the moonlight of this open sector of the city. Guy straps the empty black backpack on without a moment’s hesitation.
You listen, keeping your eyes on everything around you, and take an Adderall pill out of the bottle you snagged from Treena a while ago and dry swallow it.
“Woooo! Okay,” you say.
Guy grabs your wrist and looks at the prescription bottle. “Okay, Hunter S. Thompson. Keep up with me.”
It is nearly three o’clock in the morning when you come upon the star at one end of a wide boulevard. When Guy mentioned it before, you hadn’t really bothered to ask him what it meant, figuring it was self-explanatory—which of course, it is.
Over thirty stories tall, this is a glass and steel building in the shape of a star. Its mid-section is like a glass bowl and its points, which are dissimilar in size and length, stretch upward and outwards. It’s not as big as Star in the Mountain, but this is still a monster of a building.
A few points have broken off and taken out what looks like a city block. The rest, however, seem to be in good condition. There’s an odd red light around it, barely there, but definitely not just a simple reflection of moonlight. A concrete statue the size of a house stands in front of it—a four-armed man with two heads. Someone has drawn a white rectangle with a big white dot in the middle of it on the statue along with a diamond with a line coming out of the top.
“A star like this could hold up to five thousand people, if not more, so it could be an effing zombie town in there,” Guy says. “You see those signs? They mean ‘danger’ and ‘defend yourself’. You notice anything?”
You squint your eyes, really taking the place in. “It’s red.”
“What’s…” Guy pipes in.
“It’s got the color, I mean, this glowing...”
Guy takes out his baton. “Okay, well, that’s not good. You’re sensing the security system being on.” As you walk towards it, he whispers to you. “That huge bastard back there told me a while ago there’s a new hole in the side of the building. Jap the Ripper weakened one side of it and it must’ve collapsed later.”
All around you lay emptiness and destruction. Roads and buildings have been chewed up and spat out as gravel and small chunks of rubble.
“Normal Network salvagers have already picked the area clean, ‘cept for our little secret opening. You see that, Sarah? It looks like something caved in the side there, probably after they cleaned out the block.”
You look at him. “Saki is our friend and let’s respect her culture.”
“What? Because I called that machine Jap the Ripper? I respect her culture. I go down on her all the time. I don’t know how to respect her culture more. Look, I love Japan. Japan is the coolest nation on Earth beside America, so don’t look at me like I’m the racist here.” He shakes his head and descends what looks like a pile of gravel leading into a giant black hole inside the star. With the moons blocked out by the rest of the star, it’s like looking into one giant black mouth. “Japanese the Ripper took out some sort of support and this caved right in.”
You follow after him, descending, making small avalanches of gravel with every footfall.
“Stars can’t be broken into usually, but it looks like this one has been.”
Guy takes out a flare gun strapped to his thigh and shoots it into the empty, black hole, illuminating what looks like a large lobby with a very high ceiling. The flare sticks to the high ceiling, revealing creatures hanging upside down inside. They’re the octopus-like animals with those odd single wings like blankets draped over them. Guy fires another flare to get more light and barely misses hitting one of them. The animals aren’t disturbed in the slightest.
The opening leads into what was once a shopping mall. Murals of people shaking hands or drinking or kissing line the walls. Inside this lobby there are small, box-like buildings that may once have contained buyers and sellers.
“You see anything, Sarah?” Guy asks. “That Superman vision working?”
>
You shake your head slowly. At the bottom of the gravel hill, you step onto the stone floor of the lobby and start breathing heavily, scared of this musty place that you can barely make out, even with the flares burning.
What you first think are rocks on the floor turn out to be human skulls. “Huh.” Guy kicks one away like a soccer ball.
You and he walk through this shopping mall. You constantly scan around you to see if anything is lurking. A few neon lights and fluorescent light poles come on as you walk around, giving you a little more light to operate with, but not enough.
With the lighting system disjointedly popping on, disturbing shadows play out against the great walls of the star. Guy walks into one of the small buildings. Inside are strange glass tubes, each containing a skeleton. “Now that’s just odd,” you say.
A creepy hologram starts to play. A half-naked and beautiful woman with green eyes, wearing a white towel, busily sucks on the neck of a young girl in a Greek chorus-like mask in a way that is sexual and definitely depraved. The masked girl is dying during the scene, and then is dropped on the floor like a discarded soda can. You trip and fall backwards, and the hologram stops for a moment. The woman in the white towel then speaks; you see noticeable fangs amongst her teeth. She asks you questions in a language you can’t understand—an odd, almost musical language. The hologram stutters and then disappears in a puff of smoke that comes out of the wall.
“The Wookie was right,” Guy says. “Civilian shopping area. Let’s see what we can nab here.” He steps away from the building while you take a few deep breaths. He takes off his backpack and peeks into doorways, backpack in hand. Other odd holograms go off randomly, even more disturbing than the first one you saw. One you swear is trying to sell you human flesh; another is some sort of sexual advertisement.
Guy ignores them and finds what he was looking for. “Oh yes, yes, yes...” Something that looks like a large refrigerator is propped against the wall, and glows. Guy opens it like he’s about to take out a cold beer. Inside are row after row of small gray tubes lined up on white racks.