The Big Waste (After-Skirmish Book 1)

by C. W. Ashley

  “Mmph...more Clear-wet, Nishin, more!” She said with a half-cocked, hungry grin.

  Iggy threw his arms around her and sobbed long and loud. His grip around her tightened and his face buried deep into her shoulders as she continued to munch. His tears streamed down her chest and towards her hips.

  We did it…

  Chapter 14: Lore and Infamy

  Iggy had so much to explain, he felt bad that Clarissa had to interpret everything that happened, blind in the backseat of his car. The sun-blockers were keeping her in the dark as much as they were keeping her alive. He was able to give her a very brief summary as he walked back to the car and carried more chunks of cactus to Sil, but he knew he probably left her with more questions than answers. But he first had to catch up with Sil. He wanted to know why she left him that evening but thought that he better explains the ‘new guest in the home first’.

  He climbed into the car with Sil who was feasting on a huge chunk of the cactus. She was still looking poorly but her skin had cleared, she was recovering fast. After turning the engine on, Clarissa spoke up.

  “Don’t leave me in the dark, what the hell happened? Did it work?” Sil turned to the voice box and with a look of unhappy surprise and began to growl. Clarissa sighed deeply in response. “The Fenrir, she’s coming with us, isn’t she?”

  Iggy turned to Sil with his palms up, trying to keep her calm.

  “Sil, this is Clarissa, she is in the backseat of the...home. I’m driving her somewhere. She needs the house to get where she is going.”

  Sil growled lower, looking like she understood. “Rissa...not live in home?”

  “No, she’s just traveling with us to Maim Creek and back, not staying.”

  “Rissa...not staying…”

  Sil’s eyes began to droop and her words slurred, after taking a large bite of cactus she chewed it slowly, swallowed and then fell asleep dropping the rest on her naked lap.

  “Sil!? Oh no, wake up!” Iggy said startled as he jumped to grab her.

  “Crasher, she’s just survived one of the deadliest toxins known to the Big Waste in the space of a few minutes. A soft-neck, hell even a mutant would take weeks before they could move around. Let her rest, and start driving,” Clarissa ordered calmly.

  Iggy pulled away from Sil and left her to her seated slumber in his passenger seat. He turned the ignition and reversed to take the beaten road west. He was determined to make up for lost time.

  “Yes Landlady, we will get there…sorry about all of this,” Iggy said weakly.

  “Why don’t you start from the beginning? We got a lot of miles to catch up on and you got a shitload of explaining to do,” Clarissa said with acid.

  In the next hour of driving Iggy was able to cover everything since he left Athens to do the cargo run. He explained his meeting Sil and everything about her behavior, from her wild animal instincts to her attachment to his car. The sexual encounter was the only part he omitted, not being sure how it might be taken after his own experience with Clarissa. He also explained in greater detail what happened with Malkin & Nails and why he had to do what he did, along with his wicked boast to the teenagers to call their bluff.

  Clarissa stayed silent through most of it, only asking for minor clarification mainly around Sil’s abilities an appearance, as she still hadn’t seen her. When Iggy stopped to take a breath, she offered her insight.

  “I think your Fenrir girl is a Werewolf. I had my suspicions when I heard about the hunt, but it makes sense.”

  “W-werewolf? You mean like the fabled monster? Really?” Iggy said as he processed the possibility.

  “Yes Citi-boy, you were attacked by a lizard the size of an Alligator and you’re currently speaking to a Vampire. I should hope a Werewolf isn’t too much of a stretch for your imagination,” Clarissa said.

  She has a point,

  “I just never seen or heard of them outside of scary folk tales, I assumed a wolf monster was just a highly evolved form of mutant,” Iggy said.

  “No, they aren’t mutants, in the same way vampires aren't. We all existed long before the skirmishes,” Clarissa said. “But you’re right, there haven’t been any reliable reports that I heard of either, only rumors and tales. Scarily strong, shifting into beasts at the full moon and all that, that’s why she ran out on you Crasher.”

  “Last night?”

  “It was a full moon last night, you said you saw her face change with aggression? She couldn’t control the shift under that moonlight so she ran from the car, for your own safety.”

  Why didn’t I notice the moon? She ran out to protect me from her beast form?

  Iggy looked over at Sil, the sleeping werewolf girl and quietly thanked her. Before quickly spotting a road sign for Maim-Creek. “We are back on the road, Landlady. I think we can still get there with time to spare. Tell me more about vampires. You said you didn’t know any?”

  “Fucking finally! Better hope I don’t have to dock your pay and uh…well…” Clarissa paused before divulging. “I don’t know any living vampires but I did have a family. We lived along with some other families. I guess you could say it was like our own nomad convoy, except we traveled less, mainly just to get to a new cave-”

  “To stay out of the sunlight?” Iggy interrupted enthusiastically.

  “You’re a fucking genius, aren’t you!?”

  “Sorry, carry on.”

  “My dad told me once the skirmishes started, vampires couldn’t blend in with humans because society got militarized and everyone was being watched. So those of us that weren’t killed had to flee. A lot of them starved out. Weren’t able to find easy blood outside of warzones, and then you were just as likely to be shot or blown up as anyone else,” Clarissa said.

  “But not you? You don’t drink blood and you are still sustained?” Iggy asked.

  Clarissa sighed before gearing herself up to respond. “All Vampires are different, some have different abilities, different levels of strength. Mother called it ‘the dark gift wrapped in different ways. Our family apparently descended from vampire lords, near immortals who controlled human society in something called the ‘Renaissance’ period, but I don’t know what that is.”

  “Near immortal? As in can’t die?”

  “As in incredibly fucking hard to kill, growing back limbs, rising from graves. There was even a rumor some of my ancestors could briefly walk in sunlight. But the biggest gift was being able to survive without blood. They would crave it, but they would never starve as if they were running on something else.”

  Wow, Clarissa…

  “Sounds like you inherited some impressive powers,” Iggy said with a dazzled smirk.

  “I can’t access most of them. I can stay alive without blood, but my body parts don’t grow back, my eye is still gone as you saw. I’m not anywhere near as fast as I would be, I can’t fly, I’m aging...”

  Fly?

  “Hold on, how old are you?” Iggy asked, not placing her physically any older than forty, but remembering what Grady said about her not looking any different when he met her.

  “I’m Eighty-Eight. Did it feel good sticking your cock in a senior vampire citizen?” Clarissa asked with a chuckle.

  Eighty-Eight? No way!

  “How are you aging? You don’t look anywhere near that old!”

  “You’re too sweet Crasher, but I look a hell of a lot older than I would do if I was drinking. It’s just part of abstaining.” Clarissa said with her voice dropping into something melancholier.

  “But why don’t you drink? Especially when you could have all those benefits, those powers?”

  Clarissa gave a lengthy pause, exhaling before clearing her throat. “I think that’s enough questions, Crasher. Just focus on not wasting any more damn time chasing animals through the waste and taking us off course. I need to get some sleep anyway. Daytime is not my active hours.”

  Iggy sighed with minor frustration of being kept in suspense but did as he was told. He drove quietl
y while Sil and now Clarissa both slept in his car. Looking out of the

  window he saw more barren wasteland race by him. Fewer plants and more steel wreckage.

  What have you got for me now, Big Waste?

  Chapter 15: Limited Dreams

  She tried to count back from a thousand this time. She did so quietly, so as not to bother her father upstairs. But when she got to 843, she stopped. This is not something she wanted to do anymore. It was boring. This of course made no sense. She can’t get bored. She wasn’t made that way, she was made to complete tasks, no matter how mundane, or simple or dull. But despite the lack of sense, it was still the truth. She wanted to do something else. Anything else. No more counting in the dark.

  Her father was upstairs, tinkering. So many parts and components to put together; a complex network of circuitry and mechanisms. It’ll take a lifetime to finish to completion, and he barely has the end of his own life left. But it kept him busy, it kept him happy. It gave him purpose. His daughter needed legs, after all.

  To Dr Francis Hughes, the Tin-Men are not tools; they are prototypes, blueprints of the future. The idea of making synthetic intelligent machines only for them to be doing the most basic, factory-like jobs known to man, disgusted him. The untapped potential of sentient androids was wasted during the skirmishes and forgotten when it was time to rebuild. Humanity let Dr Hughes down in so many ways, but unlike many other Blights, his response was not to indiscriminately murder every person he laid eyes on. He wanted to improve on humanity. Preserve everything good about them while correcting everything awful. For the Doctor, his was the destiny of the artificial, to make it into something humanity should be but never could be.

  His life was reaching its end. He would spend more time sleeping and every morning was more of a struggle to rise than the last. But he had his personal creation, his magnum opus, his daughter. He would make sure she had none of the flaws he had come to hate in people; the cruelty, addictions, bigotry, insecurities, selfishness or chaos that humanity inherited. His daughter would be perfect, in his eyes at least.

  She lay quietly in his basement, with only a portion of her body attached to her head. A curious but bored mind tried to find ways to pass the time without having to count numbers. Later that afternoon, her father would attach some legs to her torso chassis. He promised he would get around to synthesizing the rest of her skin to make her beautiful. She trusted him, after all, he had gotten this far.

  Unable to speak, she would listen to him tell stories in the workshop, mainly about his role in the Skirmishes. How he as a 19-year-old engineering student was drafted into frontline maintenance, fixing sentry guns and fixed view turrets under the constant hail of enemy fire.

  He spoke about his first kill. It wasn’t an enemy soldier, but a 33-year-old mother of 5 who had been drafted as a grenadier on the southern front. Hughes had to shoot her in the back when she abandoned her post. He was later told that she went insane and wanted to ‘quickly run home to check on the babysitter’. He also told his daughter about being caught in the fallout of the ‘bright’ and the catastrophic effect it had on his body. He told her about his first wife leaving him after his skin began to peel, and his service record being erased around the end of the skirmishes.

  Hughes did not tell her about his actions during his time in a Blight outpost. Despite his disdain for humans, he took no pride or pleasure in the things he engaged in over that 30-year period. He didn’t want his daughter to think less of him, or worse to think that anything he or the other Blights did were justified. He wanted her to be better than himself, better than everyone.

  After working tirelessly on some other body parts, Hughes decided to call it a night, kissing his daughter on the forehead before retiring to his room upstairs. He kept his house in immaculate condition, stepping inside was like entering a time capsule of pre-skirmish suburbia. High-quality steel, mahogany furniture, plastic cutlery, paintings of many famous sports vehicles and preserved castles. Hughes insulated himself from the bleak reality of the Big Waste by maintaining the small house and garden around him to an unheard-of standard-of-beauty.

  Once he snuggled himself in his large oak bed, he reached for his reading glasses and cup of cocoa while he turned to page 104 of his favorite graphic novel series; ‘City of Maximum’. After letting his tired body find its ‘groove’ in the warmest part of the bed it finally started its long countdown to falling into the perfect sleep. But he would be interrupted by his ringing phone. Nearly knocking over his cup of cocoa, he angrily reached for the buzzing device while trying to keep the exploits in the comic book firmly in his mind.

  “Yes...hello?”

  “Doctor Frank Hughes, sorry to disturb you at this hour, this is Con Rayko from the Athens Export Cargo Delivery Depot.”

  “Oh, yes. Regarding my package? It didn’t arrive this evening…”

  “Yes sir, we are sorry to say that your courier; Randall Gainsborough has failed to report back to us, we are assuming the package has been lost.”

  “Oh my, well that’s a shame indeed. No matter, I can make another order to…”

  “Doctor Hughes, we at Athens Exports take our customer service very seriously and hold all our employees both freelance and permanent to the highest standard. We have called to inform you that we will be tracking the courier in question down for full recuperation of payment and pending charges of breaking our regulations.”

  “Well if you think that’s necessary…but in regards to my order, can I make another?”

  “Sadly, that item was very limited and we ran out of stock earlier today. We will be processing you a full refund along with the first claim to the courier’s repossessed property. We feel it’s only fair before it is put up for auction.”

  “Repossessed? Does that mean you have-”?

  “Very soon. He is being tracked and our reclaimers are on the way. If he knows the whereabouts of the cargo, we will get the information from him.”

  Hughes paused before responding, rubbing his hand across his torn face.

  “Well…thank you for your diligence, but such measures are not necessary, a simple refund would suffice.”

  “Not at all Dr. Hughes, you are one of our most cherished customers, we will be in touch once the courier is apprehended.”

  Hughes thanked them and put down the phone before returning to his book. He briefly considered what it might be like to be caught by a ‘reclaimer’ and shuddered, before putting the thought out of his head immediately.

  “Randall Gainsborough? Hmm.”

  Chapter 16: Nature’s Path

  Sil and Clarissa both slept peacefully as the sky went from a deep grey to blood-orange. The sky was clear, and the air was becoming cold. Iggy looked around the Big Waste with a yawn, acknowledging how long the journey really would be before taking a swig of his water canteen. Although the shell-like industrial area he was driving through was fascinating he found himself constantly looking at Sil, initially to check up on her, but quickly to admire how fast she had recovered, her skin was almost completely free of blemishes and a few of her moderate-sized wounds had closed completely in the space of 6 hours. He wanted to feel protective of her, but that instinct came into direct conflict with his awe of her survivability. To think that this legendary werewolf was this hard to kill was equal parts terrifying and remarkable.

  “Hmm, the sun is nearly down, Crasher. I can feel my stomach cooling,” Clarissa said with a waking groan. Iggy looked out of the window to see the last fraction of the sun begin to tuck itself away behind the horizon. Iggy yawned again a little louder, realizing he would have to rest soon himself.

  “I can see a pretty big lake to my right, do you think the water is clean enough to wash in?” Iggy responded while rubbing his eyes.

  “We will never know if we drive past it, pull over. I need to get out and stretch my legs anyway.”

  Steering gently towards the large body of water, Iggy scanned back and forth for any dangerous-looking wi
ldlife while it was still bright enough to do so. After he parked a few dozen feet from the edge of the lake, he was sure to take his revolver and bat with him as he stepped out. Breathing in the cool evening air, he pondered his current situation while finding a seat on the soft earth around the water.

  She’s back. A legendary werewolf of the waste that incites fear with her name alone. And for some reason she thinks the Blockgain is her home, I still don’t even know how she views me. I drive the car so am I a roommate or something? I wonder how she will react to the Landlady when she wakes up, they haven’t even seen each other yet.

  As if summoned by his thoughts, Sil walked out of the car, stretching her arms. Her now-healthy, but blood-covered skin was bathed in the dark orange of the sunset. It gave Iggy the perfect portrait of his companion; wild, beautiful and always in proximity to violence. Saying no words, she jumped into the water in front of him, covering Iggy with a heavy splash and began to clean herself giddily.

  “Ha, you feeling better, Sil?” Iggy asked as he wiped the surprisingly clean tasting water from his face.

  “Clear-wet is good! Nishin feels. Sil feels!” Sil said with the happiest tone he had heard her speak, the rough edge to her voice was all but gone.

  “You-you were shot with Blue Gecko poison; do you know what that is? I wasn’t sure if you were going to make it…”

  “Clear-wet is good, saves legs, stop poison. Good for anything.”

  “You were being hunted when you were in your...wolf form, I had no idea that you were worth such a high bounty. You are going to need to be more careful if they start using more poison to catch you,” Iggy warned.

  Sil turned over in the water, her clawed hands rubbing her hair with a perky enthusiasm, trying to rid it of all the blood that had crusted into it. She looked up at Iggy with a slightly more serious face.