Chapter 35
35
They assembled before the bridge, the foot and wing-solders, Willow, their one biotechie, the two weaponsmiths, Maura the token human, and her, Cyn, she was the unknown—not forgetting Toother and Little Mo, of course, with his newly painted shell. The route onto the bridge was restricted to one entry point that Rutger and a few others had widened by brute force.
Cars were not easy to shift, and nothing, Cyn decided… nothing emphasized how different the world was now better than her feeling safe among these weird people.
“Let’s go.” Rutger waved them forward before heading to the gap beside a crushed car. Beginning at the car, a pile of motorbikes curved upward into a striking, spoked-wheel and chrome arch, with the other side of the arch coming to rest on the battered cab of a semi.
It brought to mind the trellised gateway into an English country garden, only this garden was dark and leafless, and the litter underfoot was spark plugs and screws, rotted tire rubber and other lost bits of random humanity, and the occasional bone. If you could drill through the floor to what lay beneath, you’d fall into a chasm and drop for a couple of miles before you hit the ground. It was not very quaint, delightful, or English.
As she passed through, Cyn trailed her fingers over the leather of a bike seat where it had lodged at waist-height.
This space continued for many yards, weaving left and right as cunningly as a snake, and she knew someone had designed this. It had to be so. This many cars and trucks jig-sawed together could not be a natural post-apocalyptic barricade.
Which gave rise to a question. Her man-beast was ahead of her. “Hey, Rutger. Are we post-apocalyptic or are we like… in the middle of an apocalypse?”
He chuckled, his broad shoulders shaking under his satin-grey shirt. “Tell me when you have it figured.”
Someone had been clothes foraging last night. She approved. Dress for success and all that. He looked handsome, rugged, and deadly, with his horns, bulk, backpack, and the rifle slung over his shoulder. Everyone looked deadly. Weapons were as common as canned food, and every beaster carried a pack stuffed full of such necessities.
The cars had been left mostly empty.
Whatever lay ahead they’d have to scavenge for or use what they carried. There were no shops… wait, no, so very wrong. She clicked her tongue at herself. Duh. Shops were everywhere, though they were tardy about stocking up.
The space widened, and the few foot-soldiers ahead of them had halted and began to shift to the left and right.
“Greetings!” said someone with a very deep and gravelly voice. “Fee Fi Fo Fum, and all that. I smell a human. He-he-he.” His words might have been rolled over stones and sledgehammered.
She moved to see past Rutger and spotted Little Mo using a duct to negotiate the ceiling. The shiny dark purple with black spots rendered him more obvious than a rusty bot but not too obvious. Good. The sandpapering off of rust had taken her an hour.
Three gigantic beasters stood arrayed across the clearing—the four lanes of roadway bounded by footpaths then dirt-smeared, windowed walls. Beyond the windows was air and blurred glimpses of the quarter they wished to reach. These guys were twice as wide as Rutger, which meant they were eye-poppingly immense. Whatever nanites they’d been treated with could not have been the usual. Their skin was distorted by rugged lumps and their muscles and bone structure must have expanded to make them this big. Their fists were grotesque hammers with stumpy thick fingers. Eyes were sunken into gnarly pits and skin was a chalky brown.. Instead of normal clothes, they wore loose cloth with belts and no shoes, but then what would fit them?
“My god,” Rutger muttered in a voice too quiet to carry. “What have we done? Mankind, I mean. Were the Ghoul Lords a good enough excuse?”
“They were humans, once,” she said, softly, and that pang in her heart was from regret and sadness. “This Doctor Nietz would have been in jail, if these were normal times.”
“You killed Nietz, though,” Vargr said from her left. “Yes?”
“No.” Her mouth twitched, and she resisted kicking his leg with her steel-toed boot. “If it was him, and I really don’t remember what he should look like, he was already dead.”
“So you say.”
It’d been a suit of skin that the Ghoul Lord, the Thing, had used. A barely alive shell. How dare Vargr say that.
“Are you two done arguing? Pay attention.” Willow sauntered forward, her hand hooked on the belt holding up her blue jeans, not far from an augmented revolver similar to the one Cyn had used on skin-suit Thing.
Which only reminded her that no one had thought it wise to re-arm her.
“We’re done,” Vargr drawled.
“Good. Hello there, ahead! We want to pass through and reach the quarter on the other side!”
Cyn had to admit this woman was an admirably pretty and determined-looking leader. Firm jaw and voice, willing to get whatever needed doing done right. And getting her hands dirty was nothing to Willow, even when it lost her friends. That black leather jacket with the steel studs over her black shirt—damn, she had clothes-envy.
She’d have followed Willow anywhere, until that day she faced her across the judges’ table.
Now? She was likely heading in that direction again.
“We thought as much,” bellowed the middle, bald-headed one blocking their path. His red satin robe seemed modelled after a kimono. “Let me introduce myself. I’m Vincent, and these are Lennox…” Lennox was bare-chested and wore kilt-like tartan. “… and Neo.” Neo favored a toga in skull-patterned black. Both Neo and Lennox had sparse brown hair sprouting on their uneven scalps.
“I’m Willow, but there are too many of us to introduce. Will you let us pass?”
“If I wasn’t inclined to, I’m sure you’d go by anyway. Though each of us can fling a car if we want to.” With a baleful eye, he assessed the Road-trip Band where they’d lined up across the roadway, beside Cyn, Vargr and Rutger. “Might I enquire where you are going and why?”
“Hmmm.” Willow cocked her head.
“We’re going to find something that will help us destroy the Ghoul Lords, and we also hope to find out about the experiment that made us.” Rutger had answered, though from the long pause, Cyn had the impression Willow might have been about to refuse to answer.
“I see.” Vincent ran a hand over his bald scalp. “Well, well. Then I have a request, and please don’t judge us by our fashion sense since your kindred back there in Adult Quarter have done so.”
He waited and she thought he almost expected them to say something terrible, to reject him.
Adult Quarter? If they took their name from the buildings, where had that come from?
“We do not judge you anything except to be fellow beasters.” Willow looked to her left and right along the line of her people. Toother ambled forward to squat on his hindquarters near her also.
At that… at that her vision wobbled and an intensely attractive siren call made Cyn whip her head sideways, then up. She should be elsewhere.
Wait, wait, no. Not that. Stop. She blinked.
This was not daylight hour. Why, then? She groped forward and encountered a shirt, and muscle beneath that shirt. Rutger’s hand came around and squeezed hers.
Her need cleared, and she breathed again. Just a momentary glitch then. Breathe.
She noticed Vargr staring at her and shrugged. It was nothing.
The scare made her look inward in search of her Lure manipulation power. It was there. It had to be. She closed her eyes, opened them, and for the first time since she killed the Thing she saw the translucent pink threads. They thronged the air, yet this was dusk, and then… then she discovered the column of them wriggling down from above through a part of the ceiling. Was there a flaw in the bridge roof, or some natural concentration of Lure threads? Whatever the cause this place was not as safe as it should be.
Her stomach crawled with fear, and who wouldn’t fear this if they saw it coming?
Fuck. If she backed away and left, she might be better off, or she might find herself lured again. It was a terrible dilemma, and Rutger was a better choice than being alone. In the meantime she should practice.
At least she saw them again.
So she reached for the threads while the others listened to Willow.
“We’ve not seen your beaster type before. Do you have a name for what you have become? I am a biotechie. I can do some forms of healing, and also I can handle electronics.” She extended her arms to show how the blue under her skin ran down to her wrists and hands. As if her neon-blue snake-hair and her eyes weren’t evidence enough. “These others are weaponsmiths, and soldiers of foot and wing. This one, Cyn, is an unknown.”
Unknown me. It was true. Not an insult. To her sorrow and frustration, that description still hurt. It made her feel an outsider.
And so? Look at these guys. She was wallowing in misery when no one was normal anymore.
“We call ourselves rockmen. It’s apt.” Vincent smiled. “Our skin resists most traumas. Our?—”
“Wait. You say this quarter refused to let you live there, sir? And so you live here, the three of you?” Willow indicated the bridge.
“We also claim a part of the adjacent quarter.” The bald rockman nodded. “I like your sirs , your politeness, Willow.”
“Thank you.”
“I will admit to…” He sighed. “Being disliked by this quarter.”
“You committed some offence?”
“We are too ugly, too unusual for them.”
“Seriously?” Cyn couldn’t help asking. This was ridiculous.
His gaze switched to her. “It’s true, miss. Besides, they have several humans among them, and the smell does bother us. We are not prejudiced against our origins, just the scent of a human is bitter to us.”
“I see. We have one human only.” There she was apologizing for Maura. And Maura was completely oblivious and zombified—only the rope attached to her waist that Locke held was keeping her from wandering.
“You may pass, Willow.” The three rockmen began to move aside. “Just step carefully with the Adult Tribe. They can be touchy.”
“Wait. What if I were to invite you to come with us? Would you? I think there will be fighting along the way, and you look as if you can handle that.” She nodded at the cars they’d obviously been rearranging.
“Let us discuss this.”
The rockmen went into a huddle.
The concentration of Lure threads gave her an easy target. Cyn reached out again and tried to weave them as she once had. Pain built slowly between her temples, but she refused to acknowledge it. If she pushed through the middle of these threads, maybe…
A lance of darker pain blasted in. She ducked her head and splayed her hand across her forehead. Stopping was not an option. Not now, not here. When she looked up again, temples still throbbing, with the Lure threads worming at her thoughts and beckoning her, she found Vargr peering at her. He blurred, refocused. The whispers began. She stomped on them.
No!
Concern radiating from his frown, Rutger took her wrist and pulled it down, away from her face. “You okay, girl?”
“Of course,” she bit out the words, took a slow breath. “I am okay.”
“She’s not. She needs fucking.”
Grrr. She showed her teeth. Not here. The asshole meant to embarrass her. Not that all those here would not have experience with Lure-affected humans… except she was not merely fucking human!
Vargr only smiled at her.
Her practices with the Lure yielded her nothing but headaches and now she had Mister Asshole amused. She swung back to the conversation, for Vincent returned.
“We will join you, providing we are equals.”
“Of course you are, sir.” Willow lifted her chin. “What else could you be.” Not a question, a statement, bless Willow’s heart.
Cyn found herself tearing up. What the fuck was this discrimination in the middle of the fucked-up mess this world was in? As if there were not evils enough to screw with anyone; as if simply surviving was not a big enough pain in the ass.
Then it hit her again, the beckoning , and it echoed, plucked at her, and she collapsed to one knee and cursed whatever was there. The floor, the Lure, this despicable weakness. She would not go. She would not.
While she was still cursing at the floor, someone grasped her by the wrist and began to tow her away. “Come.”
Rutger? Vargr? She hadn’t the opportunity to look. Opening her eyes would render her weaker. Easier prey to the Lure. She clung to the shreds of her sanity and went with them, blind.