credits to your account.”
“Um. Okay.” She bounced in her seat, ready to cry from happiness.
“Please wave your NetMini past the terminal for account identification or insert credit stick with balance sufficient.”
She stared at the panel for a moment, shrugged, and waved her hand past it.
“Read failure. Please try again.”
Wave.
“Read Failure. We are sorry. We are unable to process your NetMini. Please reboot your device and try again. If you are a PubTran employee, please provide verbal override code.”
“Please, I want to go home,” she whined at it.
“Please, I want to go home.” Her voice echoed back at her from the wall. “Is not a recognized override code. Voice analysis indicates occupant is a juvenile. Please locate your parents.” The voice dipped an octave low at the end.
“I’m trying to. Father is in Querq. Please take me home.” She banged on the emotionless thing.
“We are sorry. PubTran Corporation cannot accept liability for stray children. Please exit the vehicle.”
Althea sighed, feeling sick to her stomach. It was not fair. This thing made her think it would take her home.
“Please exit the vehicle.”
She crawled into the cold night. The door sank closed and the driverless thing zoomed off. Plodding along, she walked for an hour, seeing no change to the endless city. No matter how many streets went by, she felt no closer to home than before. As her feet grew numb, her mind shifted, and she thought about Beard. He knew how to get there; in fact, he even offered to take her home. The next time she saw Flatline, she would ask him to find Beard and bring her to him.
At least having a plan, she decided against aimless wandering and went back the way she came. The little crate Whisk gave her had some nice mildew-laced blankets she could keep warm with, far better than being out in the wind. Another block down, the sound of a man shouting drifted from an alley. His words teetered at the edge of his voice before thundering down with intense gravitas; she could picture the spittle flying. Curious, she went towards the ruckus, approaching the flickering shadows cast by fire blazing from a trio of metal cylinders as tall as she was. A dingy mural dominated the wall opposite the stage: a dove drawn in reflective white paint with spread wings and a flower in its beak. Trash brushed across her legs as she waded through it, one hand tracing the wall as she went.
A crowd of vagrants ringed a pile of various large objects upon which a corpulent man in multicolored rags of gradient filth gesticulated and waved. The carpet of old green and black coats followed him like a cape, swirling about the ground as he walked back and forth across his stage. He held a metal rod five feet long; two curled bits of white glass screwed into sockets at one end and a length of wire ran from the other into his pocket.
Around his neck on heavy industrial chain, a great metal cross hung swaying and gleaming as he shambled around. An explosion of white-brown, belt-length hair surrounded a face red to the point she half expected it to pop at any second. With every tiny movement he made, a grunt escaped his lips as if the act came with great exertion.
An array of shimmering holographic panels painted the abandoned building behind him in otherworldly light. They came from silver strips dangled by wires at odd angles, tied to a network of metal rods rising from the back of his platform like crone-fingers into the air. Some showed war and death, others static, two near the top had the faces of old men ranting, and a few had a peculiar brown-haired man in a robe holding up a hand with a hole through it.
She drifted through the crowd, approaching the stage of junk from which he preached. His boots roamed back and forth at her eye level as he ranted about the “end-times” and the “sins of man.” His impassioned wail kept time with the shifting images of fiery explosions, red desert, war machines, and wounded children that flashed behind him. He screamed about something called god as well as evil, and the sins of Mars. A man put a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at a face hidden behind long strands of dark silver hair. She sensed no ill will; he was being friendly and welcoming her to the group. She returned his smile, and looked back at the tech-evangelist.
“How long will this continue without the voice of the people being heard? Death surrounds us all. In the streets here on Earth, in the skies on Mars, the greed of the money-changers goes unchecked by the blood of the innocent.” He leaned back and the corkscrews of glass at the end of his stick lit up. “The technology devours our souls. Where will you stand when cometh the Day of Judgment?”
She hid her eyes when the pointing finger swept past her.
Grunting, he shambled to the edge of the rostrum in front of her.
“Such sin.” He extended his arm. “We live in a society where the innocent are cast into the streets and forgotten. Look at this child and see what evil dwells within the hearts of man.”
The crowd’s gaze focused on her. She studied her toes, hoping no one noticed the blue light.
Air puffed from under the stage as he tromped away. “Only if you embrace the Lord can you find redemption. He shall guide us beyond the stain of this existence to the light.”
Pointing at random people in the crowd, he asked if they had been saved. Some shouted yes. Others stared at him.
“Are you saved, my son?” The fat man pointed at an emaciated bum in dark clothes with his finger three knuckles deep in his right nostril.
The man looked up startled, and farted. The finger remained where it was.
Althea’s giggle drew every eye in the crowd. She had a hand over her grin, embarrassed at her reaction. Some of the street people gasped, others peered with curiosity. The fat man gawked when he saw the glow.
“On your knees,” he roared. “The harbinger of the end walks among you!”
A few of them fell in place.
Althea shrank in on herself, clasping her elbow to her chest. “What?”
The preacher waddled down from his perch, grunting with each step, and laid his old lamp at her feet. Her shadow grew immense upon the wall behind the crowd as he knelt before her. When he looked up, such fear was upon his face Althea peeked into his mind. Through his eyes, she saw herself, standing in line with the mural; the luminous painted dove wings spread out from her little figure as if part of her.
“Please, O angel of wrath, tell us we are to be spared.” He bowed close enough for his hair to tickle her toes.
She crept back a step. “I’m Althea. I’m not a angel of wrath. I don’t even know what that means. Please get up, you’re embarrassing me.”
He lifted his face from the ground, gaping at her. “You are… I can feel the purity in you.” He knee-walked after her and traced a thumb over her cheek. “Your innocence glimmers in this place like a white candle in the darkness of an infinite abyss. If not wrath, then mercy?”
“Umm. I got kidnapped. I’m trying to go home. Do you know Beard?”
“The Angel seeks the one known as Beard.” The fat man grunted to his feet, rattling the lamp-turned-staff at his flock as he spun with a cascade of cloth shreds. Shadows danced and swayed. “Knowest any of ye a Beard?”
A few of them laughed.
“Bring you the end times?” He turned at her with scary eyes, bushy eyebrow twitching.
“No. Are you sick? Why do you talk strange?” His thoughts sounded like a ramble about half as bad as Flatline’s baked brain. He thought her some kind of winged thing from a place called Heaven, come to destroy the world and take a select few back there with her. “I help people. I don’t kill them.”
He shambled up a short stairwell to the dais, grunting again. “She is a messenger. He hath provided us another chance to redeem ourselves.” The preacher scurried to the other end of the platform. “Bear life unto others. Tend to the sick. Be ready for the end times.”
Althea backed through the murmuring crowd and slinked off into the dim quiet of the next block. Every alley looked the same. Picking one on a feeling, she climbed through more tras
h and found the street. One left turn had taken her to the strange gathering, so another left should point her back to Whisk and the others. Several steps later, she looked up at the towering structures and the glowing streaks between them. The little flying machines with their light-pictures were not so thick here; this place gave her the feeling nobody cared about it anymore.
A shadow ballet upon a windowless wall caught her eye, its accompaniment a series of muffled screams and fleshy thuds. Two of the silhouettes held the arms of a third, as a fourth struck him from behind and the dusk-form melded with the ground; blood spattered the black phantoms on the wall.
Althea crept to the alley’s edge, but stopped before looking. The police said no one in this place knew her as the Prophet. Her reputation would not protect her here. She bit her lip with anxiety, wanting to help the man, but afraid of what his attackers might do to her.
Wet plastisteel embraced her as she leaned against the building and listened.
A whispery voice, blurred by alcohol wailed, “Please, no.”
A sinister chuckle, the ring of a blade in the air, a tremendous scream, a splatter.
She peeked around the edge as a hand raised a gleaming blade for the fatal stroke. A wave of telempathic fear flew from her outstretched arms, hitting three men with such a profound effect they sprinted away screaming, without looking back. Crinkling plastic and echoing footsteps chased them into the distance. Althea hurried to a shuddering body lying face down in the alley. Life gurgled out of his mouth and a cavernous hole yawned out of his back. She skidded to a halt, almost falling as her toes found tepid, slippery blood. Several pieces of inner-bits littered the area, and she collected them as fast as she could move.
Like a three-dimensional puzzle, she stuck each one inside the man where she thought it looked proper. Some big pieces were missing, but the heart remained intact. His air bags were gone.
Elbow-deep in the man’s chest, Althea established a link to his life-shapes. The pain stopped, the formless blobs were terribly askew. She manipulated shifting outlines of color as her hands molded his flesh like clay. New organs formed as her psionic energy empowered his body to regrow. The salvaged fragments moved into their proper place as street grit emerged through the closing tissue. She worked her fingers out through the mending flesh until her palms rested flat against new skin.
The man took a great moaning breath, as if the touch of air hurt his new lungs. He shuddered, curling into a ball, whimpering. Althea held his hand, keeping the pain at bay.
Just as well, she was too tired to stand anyway.
ware of little more than her hand upon warm flesh and the chill of slick metal under her knees, Althea’s mind drifted through a fog of indistinct time. She wanted to crumple to the ground and pass out where she was, but the darkened alley filtering in through her half-closed eyes looked anything but comforting. Vigilance kept sleep away.
A hand touched her back. “Am I dead?”
Althea shook her head, almost falling over from the momentum. “No.”
“You… You’re an angel.” The man she had saved trembled as if he gazed upon a creature not of this world.
“I’m Althea.” Her whisper held only a hint of a voice. “Did I miss a hurt?”
He patted himself along his chest and gut. “There is no pain. I…” With a sudden look of guilt, he rummaged through his bloodstained clothing.
Her hand on his arm stalled his search. “You don’t have to give me pay-things. Do you know a man named Beard?”
“No.”
His stomach growled. Hers answered.
“Can you take me to Querq?” Her weary glance met his, and then fell after his look of confusion.
The man picked at his shirt. “I don’t know where that is.”
“You should eat something.”
He tugged at her hand until she managed to stand. “You shouldn’t be in this part of town alone; it’s dangerous here.”
“I’ll be okay.” She glanced at the trail of blood leaving the alley.
“No girl your age ought to be calm in a place like this.” He looked up to the smog, and gave her a smile with a wink. “I know you’re not just some kid; you heard my prayer.” He bowed. “Thank you!”
The mass of gory rags ran off, and she touched her belly as if to acknowledge the hunger. A series of sanguine smears and footprints led from this place, deeper into the alley. Nibblers, she thought, but how did the cannibal tribe get past the wall of fire, and why did they leave so much meat behind? Nothing in this place made any sense.
Stark black against the grey, the bloody trail led her through the perfect dark. Bodies, pressed against the walls, drew sharp breaths as they noticed two spots of glowing azure floating along in the middle of the night. Althea glanced at them, her eyes cast weak patches of light on the walls. Some hid their faces, others stared in awe, and a handful tried to follow until they tripped over things they could not see.
At the end of the third alley, the street undulated with a soft pink glow. She edged up to the wall and peeked around. Two blocks away, a life-sized naked woman made out of light undulated above a black-painted door. Her slave-dance bathed the entire area with unnatural iridescence. Althea looked down; in the light, the black smear became crimson.
The trail of streaks and drips went to a stairway sunken into the metal earth, past large pipes and the smell of rust. She paused at the top and crouched, gripping the edge of the first stair on either side of her feet. Voices echoed, sinister sounding men celebrating something they called a ‘score.’
Curiosity pulled her forward, and she crept down a few steps, holding on to thin vertical pipes that felt like the bars of a one-walled cage. A thin ray of light shimmered in the dust an inch above one of the stairs. Althea was not sure what to make of it, but got the sense that normal people could not see it. Strange things were best left undisturbed, so she gathered her skirt and stepped over it. Deep through the patchwork of girders, wires, and yet more pipes, she looked into the bowels of this underground place. A small area of color dwelled within the sea of greyscale lines. Men crowded around a figure in white who held bloody air-bags to the light and examined them. Grinning, he lowered them into a glass cylinder of peach-colored liquid barely large enough for them. More inner bits filled shelves behind them, in jars of various sizes.
When the man in white moved away to place the stolen air-bags on a shelf, a sinister-looking thing that could not make up its mind if it was a chair or a bed came into view. A mess of buckles and straps hung from it, filling her with the thought anyone on it would not want to be there. A finger of ice tickled her heart at the sight.
These men stole pieces of people, and from the anticipatory greed shrouding them, she knew they thought of them as pay-things. She glowered, stunned anyone could do something so wicked. How was this place, this fortress of metal cut off from the Earth, any better than the Badlands? Her knuckles whitened and she growled under her breath. What could drive men to do something so evil just for pay-things?
Some men just gotta die. Rachel’s voice floated through her mind, followed by a wave of guilt. Witnessing this made the words sound closer to truth, but the thought still made her sick.
“Oi, Doc. Whazzat blue light o’er there?” A man in a black vest covered with knives and decorative chains pointed at her. Fuscia spiked hair wobbled with his sudden motion. “You install some new whoosy-fuckit at the stairs?”
“Sounds like one o’ them little rat-dogs snarlin’.” Another chuckled. “Prob-lee just its eyes catchin’ the light.”
“Be certain.” The man in white spoke in a voice like a scalpel scraping over steel.
A sharp wave of his hand sent the other three men moving toward her.
Althea scrambled up the stairs, careful to avoid the strange line of glowing dust. This evil demanded action, but what could she possibly do to them? She could order them to stop, but that would only last a few minutes. The sound of her running upon the smooth metal echoed t
hrough the endless canyon of plastisteel and glass, alarming in its volume. She slowed to a nervous, silent jog, keeping her weight on her toes, fighting the building urge to look over her shoulder.
After a series of random turns and no sign of pursuit, she stopped and sat on an overturned trashcan to rest. Heavy breaths drew in a whiff of food, and her stomach cried out in protest. Her nose led her to a curtain of light leaking into an alley from the street beyond. Edging up to the oasis of color, she pressed herself into the wall and peered around it. Along the ground floor of a building across the road, large windows offered a view of a room full of tables where a number of people sat and ate. Most hunched over their plates, ignoring everyone around them; many looked tired.
Seeing no cars or people moving on the road, she darted up to a set of plain metal doors with tall oval windows. They lacked a handle; when she reached out to push on them, they slid open with a sharp hiss. Althea jumped away, clasping her hands to her chest at the shock. They glided closed without a noise. Two breaths later, she took a step towards them and they opened again. She was ready for it this time, but still flinched. Afraid of being crushed, she leapt through and whirled about to stare at the opening as she backed away. They remained apart until she went further in.
The aromas of edible things cavorted in the air, many of which she did not recognize beyond smelling like some kind of food. To her left, a counter with those padded nail-things like Tumbleweed’s bar stretched off, but the two men seated on them had food instead of orange happy juice. Booth seats ran along the wall opposite the counter. On the right side of the building, a room of freestanding tables held the bulk of the people.
Althea went into the table room, eyes wandering. A recently used spot had three abandoned plates, with scraps of bread and green strips of some manner of plant next to chicken bones. She ran to it, grabbing anything edible and stuffing it into her mouth with alternating hands. People nearby glanced over at her one at a time; some gasped with revulsion while some aww-ed at her, but she ignored the noises they made. A few of the chicken bones even had meat left on them.
Prophet of the Badlands (The Awakened Book 1) Page 31