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 nottooobvious.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 itwashim, 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. HowdareVargr 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 longpause, 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.
