Because if she didn’t have sepsis after this, she was luckier than he was on a Saturday night at the races. Than hehadbeen. Still hard to remember it was all gone. It jolted him whenever he slipped. No more races. No more humanity, pretty much.
“Where you from?” she asked him as he rummaged in his pack, fingers pressed to the red-welling wound. Tears tracked down her face. Possibly she was distracting herself by talking.
“The tribe? We call ourselves the Mercantors, after this quarter of buildings. There’s a sign,” he added lamely, waving his hand in the direction of the outer limits of this section whereMERCANTORwas one of the few signs left hanging on the side of a skyscraper.
After a few years, it’d seemed natural to name themselves. The Worshippers Quarter had an overabundance of churches, temples, mosques, and now they had their Doctrine of Logical Gods. There was a certain karma of the universe how that’dhappened. Buildings were history and meant stuff, patently solid stuff.
“Tell me. Winning?”
He scrambled to translate that. “Us? The war against the Ghoul Lords?”
She nodded, grunted as if something had pained her below. Her fingers cramped in, then relaxed.
He pulled out the bandage pack and the tube of antiseptic. “Hell, no. Hate to rain on your parade, luv, but things are pretty stuffed up, to put it mildly. Humankind is going down the tubes, and we, my kind, the super-soldiers that were supposed to save us all…” He shook his head, sniffed. How to put this kindly?
Nah. It was what it was.
“We are what is left. Guesstimates place us at less than a million, across the globe. Everyone else, is gone, or drawn by the Lure to the top of the world and in line to be eaten by our fun-loving alien overlords.”
Her mouth fell open. “The Lure?”
“Yeah that thing the Ghoul Lords do that attracts humans. Where have you been that you don’t know this? Have you been a feeder all these years? Up there? They’ve been chowing down on humans for years, whittling us down for whatever reason. Breeding up, some think, before they leave us and go somewhere else. Another planet, perhaps.”
She remained silent for a while. “How long?”
“How long since the last organized resistance fell, since we your great fucking saviors gave up and hid in the shadows?”
Cyn nodded, blinking, her hand still flat on that wound.
“Five years. Five long years.”
“Oh.” Tears shone in her eyes.
“Oy? Where have you been? You can’t have been a feeder all that time? Can you? I saw you fall with a piece of GL tentacle in hand. Am I right?”
No answer.
“How’d you do that? Girl, Cyn, no one else has escaped from above, ever. You are going to have to answer some questions…”
Hard questions. Ones to help them figure out if she was safe to have around.
If she survived. Remember?
“I…” She licked her lips then ran on, words spilling more easily, “I somehow pulled off a part of one, and I guess it messed up that thing you call the Lure?”
“Yeah?” So she had no clue how she’d done it?
He bandaged her wound, searched the nearby kitchen, and found a full packet of painkillers in an overhead cupboard, not aspirin – that shit made you bleed. He muttered a thanks to the spirits of the vanished owners—one of those things he did to make the world feel better.
Vargr toed a line in the dirty floor with his boot.
All the fires and explosions as safety features failed or missiles hit, the meltdowns from power stations and other Armageddon-themed problems had released pollution and radioactive gases and made the scrapers shake to hell and back. Immense clouds of smoke and dust had engulfed the planet. Sometimes a whole quarter of scrapers fell down, crumbled into rubble. If there were beasters or humans living in them still, they were dead.
He took a last look around the filthy granite bench tops, the oven, microwave, the half-empty knife block, then returned to her.
He handed her his water bottle, watched her swallow the tablets, wincing as her ribs and muscles moved. What was she? He’d seen her swinging by her fingertips on a broken floor, and that first fall and catch of building edge, how was that even possible? He might do it, or any other beaster, but a plainhuman, no. It meant she wasn’t exactly human, yet she was also not a beaster.
Those people genetically modified by the nanites of Dr. Nietz were well described in type, well established, and no more types had been created since the doctor’s passing.
