by R H Nolan
The Bloodletters knew about the skates. It was impossible not to see him zipping over the sand every day. But no one had ever said anything about them or tried to take them from him.
Yet.
The closest Bloodletter stalked toward him. The black greasepaint smeared under his eyes and around his forehead made his face look huge and his eyes look incredibly small and beady.
All Bloodletters wore greasepaint out at the Heap, though the rest of their visible skin was almost as dark with all the dirt, grime, and whatever else that came from living in someone else’s trash and never washing it off.
The man in front of Max carried a six-foot metal spear tipped with a nasty, serrated blade and tied together with wire. Working firearms—using either bullets or energy blasters—had disappeared from the Wastelands. Max had seen a gun once, but it was clogged with sand, and the action wouldn’t even budge.
But the Bloodletters never let that stop them. They made their own weapons—spears, swords, knives, crossbows. Whatever scavenged metal they had, they turned into something they could use to intimidate—or kill—someone else.
Max looked up into the Bloodletter’s squinty eyes, enjoying the man’s deepening frown when Max didn’t remove his tinted goggles.
“What do you want?” the man growled.
“Food.” Max didn’t even try to hide the bite in his words. Why else would anyone choose to come out here?
“It’s three bits to look around,” the man said. “More if you find anything better than normal.”
Max’s heart sank. He had run out of bits yesterday. “I don’t have any money.”
The Bloodletter grunted and looked Max over from head to toe. “Then I’ll take your jacket. Or those metal boots.”
Max might have smirked if the man didn’t have a weapon. No way would his jacket fit over this guy’s pumped-up shoulders.
Even more amusing was the man’s obvious confusion as to what the skates really were. But if he laughed, his small chance of somehow being allowed into the Heap would be completely gone.
“The boots aren’t for trade,” Max said.
The Bloodletter’s cracked lips curled up into a deadly sneer. “I wasn’t asking, sand mouse.”
A meaty hand swiped at the sleeve of Max’s jacket, but Max reactivated his skates and launched himself backward. The man stumbled forward with nothing to grab but air, then he lurched after Max with an angry shout.
The decision to split was an easy one to make. Max turned south and kicked up his skates, flying over the sand faster than the Bloodletter could run after him. His first thought was to head to the south side of the Heap and try to sneak his way to the edge of it somehow. But that plan died when he heard the alarm raised behind him and a metal bolt whizzed past his head.
That made him turn back just long enough to see a dozen Bloodletters running full speed after him, with more coming to join the chase from just beside the massive pile of trash. They flung curses and angry screams, but most of Max’s attention centered on the spears two of them swung back before launching his way.
The thump and whir of three more crossbows carried over the sand, and he was fast enough to lean and dart aside, changing the directional momentum of his skates almost ninety degrees before another metal bolt flew past where he’d just been. Gritting his teeth, he pushed the skates to their top speed, kicking up a huge cloud of sandy dust behind him as he pumped his legs an inch over the ground.
He knew they wouldn’t chase him long. Their treasure lay piled up against the side of Neo Angeles’ metal outer wall, and no Bloodletter would willingly abandon that treasure—or their all-but-enslaved women and children—just to keep up a useless chase. Max was way too quick for any of them.
But he was still starving—and Kier and Mom were still waiting for him to come home with something to fill their bellies and buy them another day of desperation.
Max would not go back to them empty-handed.
That just meant he’d have to find their food somewhere else.
3
By the time he was a mile southeast from the city’s wall, Max had already decided where he’d go next. Fortunately, he’d been heading in the right direction anyway.
He skirted around the curving outer wall of Neo Angeles, glinting on its eastern side now as the sun carried on its unending rise into the full, oppressive heat of the Wastelands. The giant cylindrical structure must have been three or four miles in diameter, winking at Max from its countless numbers of long, thin windows stretching from the sand to the very top of the wall and stacked about twenty feet apart. Inside that wall was the city fortress of Neo Angeles itself, two hundred feet tall and extending even more than that underground. He’d seen it, and he planned to see it again today. He doubted any Bloodletters who recognized him or his skates would let him trade again at the Heap. So it seemed his only option left was to sneak into the city itself to find his family food and water.
This wouldn’t be the first time he’d made it past what seemed an impenetrable barrier into the realm of City Dwellers, clean water, working technology, and enough food for everyone. It would, though, be the first time he worked his way inside to steal from the Dwellers.
That had never been his intention before. Max couldn’t help that he’d been drawn time and again toward the rising pillar of everything he’d lost in the last eight years. Most of it was curiosity. Some of it was a nostalgia he didn’t quite understand. But he’d always held enough respect for the place to never push his luck and risk being discovered, which would be even harder now that he’d be taking food from within the city walls—or at least trying to take it. The Wastelands stripped everyone of entitlement to anything. At this point, it had also stripped Max of the pride that had kept him from doing anything but taking a good look around Neo Angeles before returning to the Peacewind settlement. Today, this seemed like his only choice, though he realized it was still one more choice than most Scavengers ever had.
When the dark metal wall completely blocked the Heap and the Bloodletter settlement from view, Max turned to head north again, still moving quickly away from the city on his skates. For anyone else coming from the east, it would have looked like nothing existed in the desert but the huge metal fortress and the sand and the hazy sky. He was even too far away now to see the rise of the Peacewind settlement farther west, which made him feel a lot better about where he was going. If he couldn’t see anyone else out here over the sprawling desert, no one could see him, either.
Finally, he made it to the two sand-colored pipes jutting from the desert just under two miles northeast of the city. Whoever had designed Neo Angeles’ venting system definitely had his admiration; with the city’s trash dumped in one place on the other side of the outer wall and left for the Wastelands Scavengers to fight over, no one else cared much for exploring what lay on the other side of the city. Distract the hungry, poor, and desperate with enough leftovers, and who would care about what looked like two rocks poking out of the sand miles in the other direction? The half-buried, destroyed starships littering the Wastelands had been picked clean this close to the city decades ago, and it was impossible to mistake the glint of their ruined metal hulls even under feet of sand and from miles away. But hunger and desperation had never lessened Max’s curiosity.
He’d found the vents three years ago, and as far as he knew, no one else in the Wastelands had discovered them there. Most likely, no one else had even looked; it was bad enough to walk all that way in the heat and the glare, and the chances of exploring only to find absolutely nothing were high enough to make most people avoid that all-too-frequent disappointment. Max probably wouldn’t have come this far himself if it weren’t for the skates.
The pipes rose to about five feet and the top of Max’s chest, pumping a perpetual gust of hot air out into the endless expanse of more hot air in the desert. This came straight from the city’s power plants, which he’d discovered on his first trip through these pipes. He wouldn’t be going
there today.
He powered off his skates and grabbed the edge of the pipe to lift himself up and into it. The metal rungs lowering all the way down into the pipe had probably been put there for maintenance purposes, though he’d never seen anyone exit the city, let alone travel all the way out here to climb down a giant tube with warm air blasting in their face. They worked well for Max, though.
The tube went maybe five more feet underground before bending at the bottom into a narrower tunnel Max had to crawl on all fours to navigate. That made things cloyingly hot until it he came to the manhole cover on his right. It was still just as easy to remove from the tunnel wall as it had been the first time, greeting him with a burst of cool, fresh air. Though the manhole cover could be pulled back in place behind him with the thick handle welded to the other side, he always left it off until he came back. The last thing he wanted was to find himself trapped underground, somewhere between the vent tubes and the city, with no other option but to search for another way out. Max had been lucky finding the vents. He didn’t think he’d be that lucky twice.
He crawled through the much cooler tunnel until it opened into a metal cavern tall enough for him to stand. Since he’d found this unused entrance into the city’s underbelly, he’d spent more hours than he could count moving through the labyrinth of steel-walled passageways, just to see where they led. He’d marked them all, too, with a small knife not sharp enough for cutting but plenty useful in scratching at the walls. At every corner just above the floor, he’d left himself a sign—one line for a turn that led to where he wanted to go and two lines for those that didn’t. It had taken a long time of finding dead ends and sealed grates he couldn’t open before finding the right passages leading directly into the city, but he’d done it. Max didn’t need the marks anymore to know where he was going, but he enjoyed seeing them there all the same. In this world where nothing was certain and few things lasted very long at all, his scratches on the metal walls were proof that he’d been here. That he existed. That he was a real person, Scavenger or not. And they’d be here a long time after he was gone.
The metal soles of the skates clacked against the steel floors. He’d never activated the skates in here; though the repulsor technology worked as well with metal as with sand—maybe even better—he had no idea if there were any other fields powered around the passageways. The idea of finding himself propelled headfirst into the ceiling by a much stronger field somewhere didn’t exactly make him want to test it out. So he walked.
It might have taken him an hour to move through the passageways toward the city, maybe less, though it always felt like he got there in no time at all. The idea of slipping into the city without anyone knowing always made the time move faster. Finally, he came to the last series of branching channels. The one straight ahead led to a large underground hall that served as a marketplace, though it was almost always busy. The tunnel to the right opened just inside the city’s outer wall. The room on the other side grate at the end was something like a storage room, which was almost always empty, though Max still had to listen at the heavy metal door to be sure no one was close enough to see him slipping out of it.
The passage on the left, though, he’d never taken before. Not because he’d thought it was dangerous or unimportant but just because he’d already found two ways into the city and had never felt the need to find another. Today, though, something pulled at him to try the left corridor. It wasn’t like he had that much left to lose, anyway. So he did.
It curved for a few dozen yards before stopping in a pool of blazing sunlight streaming through a grate above him. Max blinked against the light bouncing off the metal floor, then found this part of the tunnel stretching up to the surface had another ladder of metal rungs for him to climb. He couldn’t see anything against the glare, but he figured he might as well try.
The grate twisted and slid aside with little pressure and a soft hush. When he poked his head out through the narrow opening in the ground, he couldn’t believe his eyes.
He thought he’d forgotten what the color green looked like, and now here it was, all around him. Blossoming trees and leaves fluttering in a breeze that had to be artificial inside the city’s high walls. Rows of pruned bushes shaped into perfect spheres. Bursts of red, yellow, and purple flowers. Somewhere nearby, he heard the splash of water—actual water, just falling around somewhere in the open. And a repetitive, high-pitched chirp that sounded anything but artificial rang out above him. Were those birds?
Max looked up to see the open sky above him, somehow less hazy and filled with dust now but resembling something much more like blue. Or maybe that was only because this garden he’d stumbled upon had more color than he remembered seeing in one place. With a deep breath, he forced his mouth shut again and climbed the rest of the way from the underground tunnel. His hands landed on something unbelievably soft and cool, and for a moment, Max could only blink in wonder at the blades of real grass beneath his fingers.
Squatting there beside the hole in the ground and the grate he’d removed, he took another sweeping glance of the garden and found the bushes just beside him sported the most delicious-looking red berries he’d ever seen. He had no idea what they were, but he might not have been able to help himself even if someone had told him they were poisonous. Max scrambled toward the bushes and ripped a cluster of berries from the branches, stuffing huge handfuls into his mouth and laughing through the sweet juice. His life stats blinked once in the top right corner of his vision, and he watched the numbers return remarkably quickly to what he wished he could sustain all the time.
HEALTH: 995 (99%)
Core: 500/500
Secondary: 297/300
Nourishment: 99/100
Sleep: 99/100
STRENGTH: 99/100
STAMINA: 218/220
AGILITY: 109/110
Of course, seeing the numerical proof of his body reacting that quickly to food—and good food, grown right here—was nice. But Max’s delighted relief had nothing to do with his stats. He’d never tasted anything as fresh or delicious as those berries.
He picked a handful to take back to Kier and Mom, but realized quickly how easily they could be mashed as the juices flowed all over his fingers. If he put them in his pocket, simply banging into a wall would squish them and make a mess, so he looked around for other things that might survive the trip in better shape.
Over the berry bushes stood a tree with bright red shiny fruit dangling from its limbs. He had seen the fruit long, long ago when he was learning his alphabet, when he still lived inside Neo Angeles. He even remembered eating some of them, just barely.
A is for Apple.
Max reached up and picked one of the apples and bit into it.
Unlike the berries, the apple was crisp and solid. A totally new flavor burst into his mouth—sweetness without any of the tartness of the berries. He hungrily devoured the apple, then stuffed another five into the pockets of his pants.
He looked around the rest of the garden and found other fruits and vegetables he knew from learning his ABC’s—things he barely remembered, and had never seen since he’d left Neo Angeles.
O is for Orange…
C is for Cucumber…
P is for Pear…
He tried all of them, and marveled every time he bit into a new food. The orange was tough and sour at first, and then he realized he had to peel away the skin to get at the sweet flesh beneath. After that it was delicious.
He stuffed the pockets of his pants and jacket full of fruit and vegetables, ecstatic that he had something that he could take back to Kier and Mom. This would get their stats back up to high levels, would nourish them and satisfy their thirst all at once. It was more food than they had had in the last two weeks combined, and a hundred times more delicious.
When he reached out for one last apple, the loud throat-clearing just behind him made him jump and almost fall over.
Max slowly turned around, terrified to find a guard pointi
ng a blaster at him—
And instead found himself staring at the cleanest, prettiest girl he’d ever seen.
She was about his age, her wavy blonde hair cut just above her shoulders, which were bare beneath the thin straps of her knee-length dress. Her wide blue eyes stared at him—not with disgust or contempt but something more like fascination. Max only had a few brief seconds to consider how odd that was before his gaze fell to her arms folded across her chest. One of them was clearly an enhanced prosthetic, and he couldn’t for the life of him decide which was prettier—the girl or her sleek metal arm.
Torn between them, Max pulled his eyes away from the almost-white metal attached at her shoulder to look again at the girl’s face. Only briefly did he glance at her 100% Health hovering above her head.
Of course she had full Health; she was a Dweller. Somehow, even if this girl maintained her max numbers in perfect health, Max had expected her other stats to be lower than his. How could a girl who lived within the safety of Neo Angeles’ giant metal walls—with everything she could ever possibly want right at her fingertips—be as strong or as fast or as able as Max, who’d been fighting every day to scrounge up every meal for the last seven years?
“I could alert the computer,” the girl said. “Then everyone would know you’re here.”
She raised an eyebrow, and Max had a feeling her threat wasn’t really made in fear but just to see how he’d react. That was a little odd.
“Please don’t,” he said and slowly rose from where he knelt to stand before her. He lifted his hands in something like surrender.
The girl’s eyes flickered from his face to his repulsor skates and back again, taking in the sight of him. “Why not?”
Max shrugged and didn’t dare look away from her eyes, though he really just wanted a better look at her arm. “I’m not hurting anybody.”
She tilted her head, as if considering the truth of that statement. “You know, I’ve never actually seen a Scavenger in person before.”