Golgotha Run (6 page)

This lag in reaction-time gave Eddie Kalish the bare second he needed to let
out a yip of fear and lurch back—and this was when the third factor came
into play, in the form of the heap of panel-sections that Eddie himself had
somewhat inexpertly stacked some years before.

These had come, predominantly, from the hulking shells remaining from
automobiles of the 1950s and 60s—from before oil embargos and the like had
made sheer weight an issue. They were good, solid steel plate as opposed to
membrane-thin aluminium that turned to lacework at the first breath of an
oxyacetylene torch.

They were an incompetently stacked accident waiting to happen, basically—and
now they came crashing down on the trooper.

The screams before, and as, they hit sounded a little odd to Eddie and it was
a moment before he worked out why. For some reason, Eddie realised, he’d had
trouble imagining a quasi-military stealth-killer as a girl, for all that
there was no reason in the world why not.

From the image that terror had etched onto his eyes, though, he now recalled
that the shape under the combat-fatigues had been undoubtedly female, and damn
well-built at that.

Of course, any shape she might be in now would be decidedly unattractive and
quite beside the point. This was the first person Eddie had actually killed in
his life, whether by accident or design. He really didn’t know how he felt
about that.

There was another explosion of sound and light. It seemed that it was coming
from beyond the compound wire, and that was just like as to fine with Eddie
Kalish. Too much had happened. His reflexes were shot.

All he wanted to do at this point was crawl away somewhere and hide and let
the world go to Hell in any way that it liked.

Thomas Marlon Drexler slapped at the inert monitors bolted onto the dash and
said: “Fuck you you piece of shit!”

This was, in actual fact, the longest single string of expletives he had ever
used. He had simply, somehow, never seen the point or felt the need, even in
the heat of combat. He was a little surprised that he even had it in him.

The EMP from the explosion within the targets’ RV had knocked out the HumGee’s
electrical systems. MIRA “herself” was probably still alive—or, at least,
sentient-grade self-aware—since her housing was rated as shielded for
anything up to a pony-bomb nuclear blast.

The secondary systems that would make her being alive and aware of any actual
use, however, were blown.

These included the door mechanisms. Drexler had remained here, trapped, while
things had exploded outside. He had attempted to work out what was happening
in the junkyard compound beyond the wire, but the loss of Klieg-illumination
had left him with nothing useful to see.

It was the sense of disassociation from the world that was the worst thing, he
vaguely realised. MIRA might have snidely called him a robot, but the fact was
that a large proportion of Thomas Marlon Drexler’s self-image resided in the
fact that he considered himself, basically, a tool.

He was a part of something larger and more important than himself. He was the
strong right hand—no, rather the hammer in that strong right hand—when
his NeoGen masters required the application of direct force.

This was his function, and he performed it without ego or self-congratulation,
without compunction or remorse. Taking out the ringleaders of a labour-dispute, removing some intracorporate rival together with his wife and kids,
it made no odds. It was his function. This was the core of his being and his
life.

Now he was stuck here, sealed off from the world and unable to affect it in
any way. He was about as much use as a spare dick—and the sensation was
maddening.

This was not, quite simply, what the world was and how it worked. It was
almost enough to make him take the ten-gauge from where it was stowed under
the dash and use it to just switch the world off.

Something big and heavy thumped into the HumGee outside, rocking it on its
suspension and flinging Drexler forward to smack his head against the padded
crash-cage which—had the electrics been working—would have ordinarily
racked itself down on servos to cushion the impact.

This direct evidence of a world outside galvanised Drexler and his basic
impulses took over. Now he grabbed the ten-gauge, pulling it free from its
snaplocks with no thought in his head save to aim it at the HumGee’s
windshield and blast his way out.

The fact that the shot would have almost certainly rebounded from the impact-tempered glass and shredded him where he sat was beside the point—the
mindless need to simply
act
, overwhelming as it was, had burned away any
last vestige of rational thought.

Thus it was that when the entire top of the HumGee split open under a claw and
inhuman strength, Drexler was already in the process of bringing up the gun
and unloading both barrels.

The shot tore into the thing beyond, opening up a hole within which internal
organs gave off their own pale glow.

In this light—or for that matter any other—these organs looked like the
insides of nothing on or of this Earth.

For a moment, the creature recoiled, eyes rolling down to regard the wound and
jaw yawning open in a moment of imbecilic, even comical, puzzlement.

“Got you, motherfucker,” Drexler snarled, thereby increasing, again, the
number of times he had sworn in his life by an actually measurable percentage.
“Fuckin’
hurt
your ass!”

The moment of incongruous puzzlement passed. The skin of the creature
liquefied and flowed over the hole and knitted.

The creature brushed at itself momentarily, and somewhat fussily, with a claw.

Then it reached in, clamped its talons around Drexler’s head and hauled him
out of the HumGee, snapping his neck in the process.

This was probably more fortunate than otherwise for Thomas Marlon Drexler,
since it meant that he could not feel what the creature did next.

From his immobilised point of view, past the foreground spray of various
fluids as the creature went to work with a vengeance, Drexler could see the
night sky. The stars burned brightly, in a wide range of colours due to
suspended atmospheric pollutants.

The last thing Drexler saw was one of the stars visibly move and expand.
Something coming.

Big light coming down.

“Oh shit,” Eddie muttered, increasing the number of times he had sworn in his
life by no particular increment at all. “Here comes the backup.”

Hunched up in the lee of a caterpillar-treaded hoist, which he had operated
years before under the instruction of Little Deke, life had become quite
simple, containing a grand total of two possibilities. Either the thing that
had once been Trix Desoto would tire of amusing itself with the NeoGen troops
and come sniffing after him, or NeoGen reinforcements would arrive to shoot
him in the head.

The latter, it seemed, would be the case.

The big VTOL carrier hung in the air stitching fire into the junkyard. Eddie
had scrambled for cover before realising that the VTOL was merely firing
tracer-flares to provide snapshot-illumination, maybe for some variety of
photosensor-system. This inference gave him no impetus to come
out
from
cover, though, on account of (a) a direct hit from a tracer-flare wouldn’t do
him much good, and (b) the little fact that if NeoGen saw him they were gonna
shoot him in the head.

As the carrier banked and descended, however, Eddie caught sight of the
illuminated logo on its side:

This wasn’t reinforcement for the bad guys, Eddie Kalish realised belatedly.
This was the cavalry.

A drop-hatch opened and a score of impact-armoured troopers hit the dirt. Each
of them toted a big MFG, and it would have been more to Eddie’s taste if they
hadn’t looked more or less identical to the NeoGen operatives he had seen, but
then you can’t have everything.

One of them, presumably the squad-leader, carried a small flatscreen readout,
which he was busily consulting.

“
Primary target is forty metres south-southeast
,” he ordered through a miniature amplifier. “
Carter and Trant, secure the package.
”

A pair of troopers peeled off and headed in the direction that Eddie vaguely
remembered leaving the comatose old guy.

”Track-and-tranque detail, see if you can’t find the silly bitch. Try to take her alive. Try and shock her into latency. The rest of you clean up the area. Standard track and pop…”

Eddie decided that, on the whole, it would probably be better if he made his
presence known rather than wait for the troops to come across him. Moving slow
and trying to make himself look as unimpressive and unthreatening as possible,
which wasn’t hard, he walked from the cover of the hoist and gave the troops a
small wave. “Hey, guys ..?”

Those of the squad who remained here, maybe ten in all, swung their MFGs
toward him instantly.

“
You!
” the squad-leader bellowed. “
Give me your clearance!
”

“What?” said Eddie.

“
Security key-code clearance! Now!
”

“What the fuck?” said Eddie.

Automatic fire from maybe three sources stitched into him, and that was the
last thing Eddie Kalish remembered.

From behind me a roscoe belched “Chow-chow!” A pair of slugs buzzed past my
left ear, almost nicked my cranium. Mrs Brantham sagged back against the
pillow of the lounge… she was as dead as an iced catfish.

The conurbation that would eventually become known simply as the San Angeles
Sprawl was built on the processes of overexpansion and of dying back, both
happening simultaneously.

That isn’t the oxymoron it might first appear. Population-pressure had been
well along the way of thickening up the developments along the routes forming
an irregular and somewhat elongated triangle formed by Los Angeles, San
Bernardino and San Diego, turning any last vestiges of natural landscape into
an urban-landscape, when the ultimate collapse of petrochems as a global
source of power had forced human populations to collapse and congeal in a
specifically structural manner.

The vast majority of the urban population now subsisted in what were basically
corporate hives—fortified and monolithic compound-blocks, resource-regulated and microclimatically controlled, amongst the rubble and wreckage of
what was almost literally, now, an urban jungle.

It was, in a sense, as if humanity itself had split itself in two. Those with
the ant-like temperament to survive in
corporate-controlled culture had holed themselves up in these arcologies;
those who were essentially nomadic, or indeed bandits, took to the roads…
but when the world splits in two, whatever the sense, there are always those
who fall through the cracks.

Sometimes these people gravitated toward settlements, like the ill-fated Las
Vitas in New Mexico, and eked out a living on sufferance, servicing those who
truly lived out in the wide-open spaces on the simple basis that there has to
be somebody who does.

For the most part, though, they ended up crawling through the tenebrous
wreckage of cities cannibalised and consolidated into the corporate hives,
living in the ruins of the No-Go Zones. Living the best they could, like
maggots on the rotting corpse of the old world.

Of course, even amongst the society of maggots on a corpse, or any other
parasite or scavenger, there were differing degrees of devolvement and
ferality.

There are some who wax fatter than others… and some who don’t.

These had once been the tunnels of the Los Angeles Transit Authority Subway.
Never particularly well-regarded or frequented when they had been operational
in the first place, years of dereliction had left them choked with the
recycling detritus of the ruins and their punctuating corporate compound-blocks above.

Things lived down here in the mix of garbage and toxic sludge, some of them
human, some of them not.

A variety of okapi, for example, released by animal rights activists years ago
from the Los Angeles City Zoo, had managed to gain purchase here. Turned
nocturnal in this endless subterranean night, surviving while all manner of
other released creatures died, subsisting on the fronds of a similarly
incongruous fungus that had proliferated through the tunnels on escaping from
some or other biolab in the world above. Such coincidental survivals might
give the more thoughtful pause for thought on the indomitability of biological
life.

Not in the case of this particular okapi, though. As it delicately finished
its fungus-frond meal and prepared to leave, a meticulously sharpened blade
that had once served as one half of a pair of garden shears sliced through its
neck and it fell.

Dogboy Who Waits yanked the blade back on the nylon lanyard knotted to the
little hole on the tine, which had once served to secure a polypropylene
handle. The lanyard itself consisted of woven lengths of fishing line. Dogboy
Who Waits, of course, had not the slightest idea of what the origin of these
items was; putting them together like this had just, somehow, felt right.

Dogboy Who Waits wasn’t even his real name. Indeed, he had only the barest
rudiments of conceptual language. He merely knew, in some basic nonverbal
sense that he was a Boy, that he felt akin to what he knew as a Dog, and that
Waiting was one of the things he did most of. He had been lying patiently in
wait for his prey, under the cover of a discarded maintenance pallet, for what
those who reckon time in the usual sense would reckon more than thirty-six
hours.