Golgotha Run (4 page)

“Storm’s over,” Eddie told her. “We’re moving again. Listen, you’re not
looking so good…”

“
Talekli lamo da ti saso ma, hasi de lospadretnaso tik de lama…
” The girl was babbling with delirium. “
Masa tu so gladji beri rama…
”

Somebody had once told Eddie that English was his second language, and he
didn’t have a first one. Even he could tell, though, that this wasn’t any kind
of language you could find on Planet Earth. It was like that Speaking in
Tongues shit they did over at the Dog Soup Tabernacle up in Silver City.

“…
saso ti da mati natno, zara ti raguesta di la ramo…
”

“Listen,” Eddie said. “What happens if you die? You die, what do I do? How do
I get on this more money than I can imagine you were talking about?”

“…
maso si nami lama
—what the
fuck
are you talking about, you scavenging
little shit?”

Instantly, Trix Desoto was lucid, and lifting her head to glare at him
cold-eyed. It wasn’t even like she was fighting off the pain. That switch thing yet
again; a completely different person had been switched on in her like a light.

Eddie found himself feeling shamefaced under her direct and contemptuous gaze.

“All I mean is,” he said, not a little shamefacedly, “is that I don’t know
what any of this is about. I don’t know who to call. You die on me out here,
how am I gonna know who to call?”

“Then my advice to you would be to drive like a motherfucker and just hope I
don’t.”

The light of coherence snapped off and her head fell back.

“
Slami makto, shaba tlek na doura rashamateran…
”

Eddie drove.

Las Vitas was little more than a glorified truck stop: a settle-down because,
what the hell, folks just sometimes still have to stop somewhere. A cluster of
second-string services around the dead remains of a TexMexxon station.

The station itself had croaked near around twenty years ago, so far as those
who were in a position to know had told Eddie Kalish. Bolt-on hydrogen-fusion
technology had not been kind to the dealers from the days when vehicles needed
their regular fix of hydrocarbons.

What Las Vitas had was communications. With the C&C rig totalled back at the
site of the ambush, Las Vitas was the nearest place that Trix Desoto could
make whatever calls she needed to make.

That, at least, had been the plan.

“Shit…” Eddie checked the scene and then just kept on going. “Gangcult hit
it hard and serious—maybe the same guys did you. This was heavy-duty.”

The big, vestigial
TexMexx
sign which had served as an accretion point for
Las Vitas was down, the dishes strapped to its superstructure shattered or
scattered. That had probably been the first order of business: take out the comms before they could get off a signal to the US Cav.

And vehicles that might have been stopping over were long gone, save for a
flipped-over garbage truck with a hole punched through it. Prefab cabins were
just smoking polycarbon shells; the jerry-built structures that had been
thrown up from local materials in the first place merely ash.

Reddish-brown smears dotted on the levelled concrete expanse where trucks and
road-trains had once parked; weird little organic lumps that you didn’t want
to look at in case you worked out what they were.

The ruins of Las Vitas still smoked gently. The fires had had maybe an hour to
burn down. If survivors were going to be crawling out of—or back to—the
wreckage then they would have done it by now. Las Vitas had been
zombie-towned—in coming weeks and months it would turn into a ghost town, but for the
moment the meat was just too fresh.

Eddie kept his eyes on the pristine blacktop and just drove, mind working
furiously. Such as it was. Only one immediate possibility occurred.

“Las Vitas is a bust,” he said, wondering if Trix Desoto could even hear him
through her babbling. “There’s only one thing for it. We’re gonna have to try
Little Deke.”

Last time Eddie Kalish had seen Little Deke had been in the rear-view mirror,
as the guy was bringing up a scattergun and loosing off as Eddie tooled the
stolen RV out of his compound.

Eddie had come across the thing, half-buried under a collection of old
dune-buggy frames, and had wondered what it was. He’d had the idea that
Recreational Vehicles were supposed to be these big old sixteen-wheelers with
a load the size of a prefab house and dirt bikes slung across the back.

This was just a clunky little capsule barely bigger than any street car.

Small enough that Eddie could imagine taking it and driving it away.

“It’s a
Veedubya
,” Little Deke had told him, spitting out the word along
with a wet gob of thoroughly masticated
loco
weed. “Fuckin’ Kraut Karrier.
It’s older than I am. Now get your sorry ass over here and help me strip down
this piece of shit coolant system.”

Eddie’s thoughts had kept coming back to the little RV. He’d been working for
Little Deke pretty much as long as he could remember—long enough that he
didn’t remember if Deke was any kind of family or just some guy.

Little Deke hadn’t treated him particularly badly, but as he’d gotten older
Eddie had realised that all he was, and what he was, was stuck there in the
junkyard going nowhere.

There had just been nothing to keep him there. Eddie had taken to sleeping in
the little RV, spent odd hours fixing it up, waited for his chance to swipe a
working hydrogen cell, and then just got the hell out. There was a big, wide
world out there, apparently, and Eddie had wanted a taste of it.

In the end, he had never got so far. A couple of years aimless wandering,
never pulling down the kind of score that might get him further… and now he
was crawling back.

“Cut him in on the money, he’ll be fine,” Eddie told Trix Desoto, not sure at
this point whether she could hear and understand him or not. “That is, if he
doesn’t just shoot me on sight.”

The electrowire stood dark and silent—which meant nothing, on account of
the fact that several million volts running through steel mesh gives no
visible sign.

The gate was held securely shut by a heavy-gauge electromag-lock, and there
was no sign of movement behind it save for the vague flapping of polymer
sheeting and the like amongst the junk.

A camera tracked back and forth in its housing to regard them, a light
blinking on its faceplate under the lens.

After a while the lock buzzed and low-yield servos cut in to swing the
gate-sections open, outward, against the force of gravity that held them
customarily shut.

“Well, he hasn’t shot us yet,” said Eddie. “That might be a sign.”

Eddie nosed the van into the compound, alert for the first flash of movement.

No sight or sound of threat at all… not even from the skunk/rottweiler
hybrids that, he now recalled, Little Deke left the run of the compound to when
not around.

Dogs with skunk glands grafted into them, together with microelectronic
triggering implants. Kind of like those money-packages that spray you when you
try to rip them off—although money-packages didn’t have the kind of jaws
that could tear you a new one before they went off.

Back in the day, the creatures had been trained to recognise Eddie’s scent and
not attack; these days, Eddie wasn’t so sure, even if they were old enough to
remember him being around.

Ah, well. The lack of skunkdogs meant that Little Deke was going to be around,
somewhere. Eddie supposed that he could be holed up somewhere in the piles of
junk, waiting and drawing a sniper-bead on him, but he knew that wasn’t Little
Deke’s style.

If he was still angry, after a couple of years, he wouldn’t be exactly subtle:
he’d just come at them roaring and blazing away.

Eddie shut off his engine. Off to one side he could hear the hum of the
meth-generators that supplied the compound and its fence with power, but the
old AmTrak boxcar which served Little Deke as a domicile was dark and silent.

No lights burning even though it was getting on for dusk. The big floods
lashed to various items in the junk piles and lit the yard for night work
stood dark and dormant.

Eddie left the van and made his cautious way to the AmTrak car. “Deke? You
there? I just wanna say that…”

Snapshots.

Eddie would never have a clear and sequential memory of the adrenalin of panic
kicking in. Just telegraphic snapshots of single, discrete images, like the
output of the random camera of the eye jump-cut together:

The extensive collection of antique porno (genuine paper magazines) which
Little Deke had preferred to the girls available in Las Vitas—mylar bags
ruptured and their contents shredded by automatic fire.

The telecommunications unit that plugged into the signals from the parabolic
dishes outside, smashed to pieces by some blunt implement. Maybe the butt of
an automatic rifle.

The breadboarded-together collection of personal computer circuitry that
served as a maintenance-and-control deck for the compound’s security
devices—like the cameras and the lock on the gate that had so recently let Eddie
inside. The monitor screens had been punched in, but the deck had been left
relatively intact. Someone had placed what looked like a big, black
polypropylene-skinned slug on the keyboard. It rippled, operating the keys,
and thus the compound-security, under remote control.

The headless body of Little Deke, the 450-pound bulk of it hanging from the
articulated gimbal-harness he used to get around indoors. There was
surprisingly little blood; the neck had either been cauterised by whatever had
decapitated him, or Little Deke’s heart just hadn’t been up to producing a
gusher from his sheer mass.

In any case, Eddie didn’t think about all this until later. At the time all he
saw were the snapshots, the flash-flash-flash like you get in movies that tell
you what the basic story is—and the story was, at this point, that one
Eddie Kalish was now in the total shit and it was time to get out.

Forget about learning the details or any happy shit like that; just get
the fuck
out.

Eddie jackrabbited from the AmTrak and flung himself towards the van—just
as big Kliegs clashed on, slamming the world into a monochromatic state of
dead black and magnesium white. They weren’t the junkyard floods; they were
coming from outside.

In the shock and dazzle, before his eyes were overwhelmed, Eddie caught sight
of the shapes behind the chain-link and lights. Blocky trucks—not the lashed-together bikes and pods of a jackgang. They were military spec.

“GRABYA ANKLES, SWEETHEART!” an amplified voice barked, out beyond the wire.
And the thump-thump-thump of an annoying and generic Boystown Disco Beat
started up. Regulation issue psycho-warfare protocol.

“JUST YOU RELAX AND TAKE IT EAAASY!” the amplified voice came over the mix.
“NEOGEN GONNA TAKE YA, JUST RELAX AND TAKE IT EASY!”

Detonation cutters sliced the fence on two sides. Through the flare and dazzle
Eddie saw the dark figures hazing in.

Up on the mesa, out past the burning remains of Las Vitas, a pollutant-mutated scorpion was in the process of laying its eggs in the still barely-living flesh of a hairless dog.

There was no one to see this, and therefore no one to remark on how the air around scorpion and dog now shimmered, how a sickly light hazed from their forms.

Instantly, as though some switch of unlife had been thrown, both arachnid and canine flesh crumbled into their component molecular parts, leaving nothing but skeletal remains and a perfectly intact chitionous husk.

“We got troubles,” Eddie said, slamming back into the van. “Looks like
soldiers.”

“TWO MINUTES TO SURRENDER,” the bullhorn-voice boomed cheerfully, “THEN WE GET
LETHAL. IT’S LIKE TOTALLY YOUR DECISION, GUY.”

“Mercenaries,” Trix Desoto said. “Delta-trained. NeoGen runs a cadre of them
for hunting parties.”

Eddie strained his eyes on the dead black shadows outside, imagining the
stealthy figures as they silently and invisibly took up position. He didn’t actually hear and see anything, of course, on
account of the meaning of the words “silent” and “invisible”.

He wouldn’t hear or see a thing, he realised with a cold sick certainty, until
they dropped the hammer.

“MINUTE AND A HALF…” the bullhorn boomed. “SAY, YOU A SPIC, BOY? YOU A
CATHERLICK? TIME FOR A COUPLE OF HAIL MARYS IF YOU
REALLY
FEEL THE NEED FOR
A QUICK RATTLE ON THE ROSARIES!”

“Where the fuck did
that
come from?” Eddie muttered to himself. There might
or might not have been some Hispanic in his parentage—it was about as
likely as anything else—but he couldn’t see what that had to do with
anything.

“Destabilisation tactics,” Trix Desoto said. “Like the disco. Keeping us
off-balance for when they come in to take the package.”

“Package?” Eddie said.

Trix Desoto indicated the supine form of the unconscious man.

“THAT’S THE BUNNY!” came the bullhorn. “NICE OF YOU TO GIVE US A GOOD LOOK AT
THE MERCHANDISE!”

For a second, Eddie was unaware of what the bullhorn guy had meant. He sat
there in a cold sweat, looking at the van’s interior light, trying to work it
out.

Then he lurched towards it with a curse and shut the light off.

“CLEVER GUY!” came the bullhorn. “WE GOT NIGHT SIGHTS AND THERMAL-IMAGING
SYSTEMS OUT THE ASS, MAN! YOU JUST LEFT YOURSELF BLIND AND IN THE DARK. THIRTY
SECONDS!”

If there was one thing, absolutely one thing, that Eddie Kalish was not going
to do it was turn the light back on again.

Besides, what with the spill-in from the big Kliegs outside, it didn’t make
any real difference. The guy was just trying to find another way to rattle him
and keep him from doing something all resourceful and heroic.
Not that
that
made any difference, either. If the resourceful hero in Eddie
Kalish was waiting to make itself known, it was taking its own sweet time
about it.