Golgotha Run

by Dave Stone

  “I’m scraping these bitches off us as of now,” the Testostorossa said.” You just keep that pinhead of yours on driving me.”

  Eddie gunned the turbo-acceleration and sighed. How the hell had he ever gotten himself into this?

  First Quadrant: Las Vitas Fault

  From the doorway a roscoe said “Kachow!“ and a slug creased the side of my noggin. Neon lights exploded inside my think-tank… She was as dead as a stuffed mongoose… I wasn’t badly hurt. But I don’t like to be shot at. I don’t like dames to be rubbed out when I’m flinging woo at them.

  “Killer’s Harvest”

  Spicy Detective

  July 1938

  Radio None

  “This is WWAXZY News, every hour, on the hour—sponsored by Big Easy Gumbo, steaming bowls of fishy goodness just like your big fat Momma used to make. Big Easy Gumbo is a property-division of Eidolon Industries SA. Big Easy Gumbo and Your Big Fat Momma are registered trademarks. All rights reserved.

  “And our top story, of course, are the rumours that chart-topping B-girl Freak-E has split with her longtime manager and boyfriend, Slee-Z. Freak-E, who is currently topping every corporate datanet download chart with her international superhit ‘Be My Pimp’, is said to be distraught and was unavailable for comment. Slee-Z, on the other hand, couldn’t say enough to our waiting reporters. ‘Yo, b___h, wheres my f__king money, ho? Think I’m gonna make you a star and then let you start s__king the next n___a’s d__k, think again, b___h. Watch yo back yo.’

  “Latest reports suggest that Freak-E is currently in talks with king of the New York hip-hop scene, Big Master X, about representing her. You can bet we’ll be bringing you more news on this one as is happens, folks.

  “Other news: across the pond in Merrie Olde England, the Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has criticised PM Peter Mandelson’s support for the US carpet-bombing of the Confederated Republics of the Congo as, quote, ’The act of a simpering and cowardly little freak, so far up the US President’s crack you’d need a pickaxe to get him out, and the world would be a cleaner place if he’d ran down his mother’s leg.’

  “The President was unavailable for comment. The PM himself is currently out of reach of our reporters. The Grand Old man of British politics, however, Sir John Lennon, has issued the statement that, ‘This outburst is simply not how we did politics in my day, and it shames me deeply that this man might be seen, by way of party membership, to have any connection with me in the slightest. I wish to disassociate myself from this execrable little s__t and his statements entirely.’

  “You go tell ’em, Johnny! Rock the House.

  “Closer to home, the mysterious outbreak of mass hallucination down in Los Bolivaros has now been explained by declassified footage showing seconded DEA agents burning genetically-modified coca fields as part of a joint operation with Securidad Internationale. The hallucinogenic effects of the toxins released, from a crop destined to become a major component in a whole new breed of Designer Crack, convinced befuddled locals that the very gaping Maw of Hell had opened up to spew creatures born of neither man nor woman, spawn of the Ever and Eternal Screaming Night.

  “Uncontrolled bleeding from the eyes and ears of these locals was purely psychosomatic—to believe that creatures spawning from the ever and eternal screaming night truly existed, in any way, shape of form, would be just plain loco.

  “‘Besides,’ sez Drugs Czar Karenna Gore Schiff, ‘anyone around to actually witness these hallucinations was drug-running scum, and shooting them in the head to put them out of their misery was better than they deserved.’

  “That’s the main news on this hour. Now here’s Freak-E with ‘Be My Pimp’…”

  1.

  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 mesato 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 nam
es 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…”

  2.

  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 gestu
red 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.