The cats stopped eating and pricked their ears, staring out into the night. Moments later, I heard an electric engine in the distance, a soft hum of tires on gravel and grass.
I adjusted my helmet’s face shield and saw an ATV with two cats on the dash. Cupcake was driving, she and Amos both wearing Dragon Scale exoskeleton anti-recoil armor like mine, and they were laden with weapons. Cupcake gave me a military-style head jut and a halfhearted salute and turned her vehicle around, a clear indication I was supposed to follow them. In the distance I heard the faint hum of the Simba running on silent mode, which meant Mateo was back in his battle tank.
Cats on the narrow dashes of both vehicles, we made our way down the overgrown road, then to a wider road, where we rendezvoused with Mateo, piloting the Simba. The battle tank moved quickly, silently, and efficiently, and our glorified golf carts couldn’t keep up. At the next intersection, Mateo opened the Simba’s front hatch, extended his warbot’s telescoping legs, and picked up our four-by-four vehicles, placing them side by side on the flat top near one of the Simba’s rear hatches.
Far down the road, visible through the dead trees, we saw the flashing lights of the Hand of the Law. Before I could react, Mateo shoved the Simba’s discrete legs down and lifted the tank treads off the ground. He turned the battle tank off into the trees and down into a deep gulley where he went silent and still. On the street, the cops’ patrol cars roared by—old models, running on diesel, engines loud enough to muffle a marching band. The flashing lights slowed, stopped, and turned around. They traveled up and down the road, back and forth, searchlights sweeping the bare trees.
Jolene said into our comms, “I got into the local law’s communication system. They had a notification from the military that something big and unregistered was moving up the road. Y’all sit tight. As per CO Mateo’s previous order. I got to get into the corporate sat systems and make you look like a glitch, so the military will call them off.”
Bloody hell.The military, the Gov., and corporate military complexes had been in each other’s pockets since before the war, and with no oversight it had only gotten worse since the war ended.
My heart was racing, and I felt a little nauseous. If the military caught us with the Simba, we’d end up in an underground jail and never see the light of day again. If we lived through the confrontation. Which wasn’t likely.
Minutes passed.
Jolene said, “They sent up some aerials with cameras. Keep it dark.”
“Roger that,” Mateo said.
I tapped a private channel to Mateo. “Why here? Why now?”
“We must have triggered a sensor before we turned off the highway and took this tertiary road. Which we did to bypass the border checkpoints.”
Half an hour later, the cops pulled off and turned down the side road, spotlights shining into the trees as the rising sun made the shadows long and blacker than the night had been. Then they pulled away, emergency lights going dark.
“Okay, CO Sugah. The military’s sensors are now showing a glitch, but y’all can’t stay on the roads. You’re gonna have to travel overland some. I’ve got topo maps, and I can keep you from falling off a cliff, but it ain’t gonna be a fun trip home.”
I punched the button to remove my armor, stored it in the ATV, and dressed in black layers from the stuff Cupcake had packed into my gear bag. Prewar, the trip would have taken maybe two hours. Three with traffic.This is gonna suck,I thought.
I was right.
Thanks to the change in route, the piss-poor back roads, and having to ford mucky river beds whose bridges had been washed away in floods over the years, it took us two-and-a-half nights to get back to the junkyard. For the most part, we had to hunker down and hide in the ATVs by day, trying to sleep. We were sunburned, dehydrated, and miserable when we pulled in, arriving after midnight, having been gone for five nights and four days. We were tired, sleepless, gripey, and stank to high heaven.
In the office, I tossed my armor into the donning station where the receptacles for body fluids would be sanitized and the entire suit treated to a decontam for my own nanobots. Exhausted, I wanded myself halfway clean, gave all the cats kibble and water, and fell into bed. Maul curled against my spine and Spy draped around my head like a crown. I had a feeling that was less happenstance and more symbolic, but I was too tired to care.
* * *
At four a.m., a rooster crowed and woke me. It wasn’t the first time. The rooster had gotten out of the henhouse and taken off into the junkyard where, I assume, he ate toxic bugs and chased the hens when they got out. And he crowed. I said, “Gomez, mute all outside noise.”
“Muted,” the AI said in his calm voice. I shoved Spy off my pillow, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
At ten a.m., I woke to comfortable temps, the AC not yet running in the background. I completed my ritual mourning for Harlan and remembered, one by one, all the people I had killed, ending with the brown-eyed sentry. She hadn’t deserved to die. Several hadn’t deserved to die. But they were gone, nonetheless.
I rolled out of bed, let out the cats, hitstarton the coffeemaker, and spent enough time in the personal toilette compartment to actually feel cleanish without the use of water. A full body wanding took time, and when I was done, I still had to vacuum up the dead skin cells and hair. Hygiene in the barren stone desert of West Virginia was difficult and time consuming.
I sniffed the clothes I had left hanging over the stall door days ago, decided they didn’t stink too bad, and dressed, then finger-combed hair goop through my short, sun-bronzed hair, slathered sunscreen over my brown skin, and opened the door to the office. The smell of coffee, faux bacon, and eggy goo with peppers and garlic was a sour spicy scent that wasn’t entirely pleasant. And there were people. Even after all these weeks, it was still a shock to my system to see humans in my office-home. Thralls had no sense of personal space, so they seldom knocked, had figured out how to get inside no matter how well I secured the doors, and were here every single morning with my breakfast and their itinerary.
Every. Single.Bloody. Day.
Cupcake dished up our plates; Amos poured our coffee. Tuffs, the pride’s Guardian Cat queen, was sitting on the back of the Comms chair, and her mate, Notch, sat on the foot of the bed, watching. The tip of Tuffs’s tail was twitching, a sign that she was less calm than she appeared. Taking my place at the dinette I had repurposed out of a high-end RV meant turning my back to the cats, which was still difficult to do and required more trust than I normally possessed.
Tuffs had a tortoiseshell coat, eyes the color of spring leaves and forest moss—green things I remembered from before the war. She had strange, bobcat-like tufts on her ears and one gimpy paw that been partially amputated in a junkyard accident. I called her Tuffs because of the ear feathers and because she was so tough. Notch was a solid steel gray with a notched ear from a fight long ago, and was one of the few intact fighter cats who Tuffs allowed to breed.
“Good morning, Sunshine,” Cupcake sang as she slid my plate in front of me.
I grunted. Amos grunted too and handed me a cup of hot, strong black coffee. The real thing. Having all this new money meant no more drinking fake coffee, no old stale coffee, no weak coffee that was more water than caffeine, and no fear of running out of coffee, kibble, or water. And that ability to buy stuff was a direct result of Cupcake being in my life. If only she didn’t talk so much.
All. The. Time.
