blankets were stained but useable, the dog food and rubbers untroubled by their liquor soaking, and the drugs – which I'd hoped would be my most valuable bargaining chip – had alternately dissolved, shattered, fallen out of the pack, or dribbled away. Two of the Bliss hypos remained, along with a single vial of 'phets and the baggie of skunk. Nate kept moaning quietly under his breath every time we found something else ruined or missing, like he'd had it in his mind that the longer he stuck with me, the more of my stash he was liable to inherit.
I wondered vaguely if the drastic losses were enough to make him stop following me round. To break the debt.
I let the thought go, for now – content to let things carry me, trusting my instincts – and poked about in the miserly little stash we'd rescued. Five years of misery and starvation since the Cull, and the 'drugs problem' had mutated mysteriously from 'There's Too Much', to 'There's Not Enough'. It's hard to take the moral high ground when you've watched your friends die, when you've spent all day chasing ornamental ducks along stagnant canals, when you're freezing to death and when someone's offering you a quick and easy way to escape.
'Just say no?' Fuck that.
Just say gimme.
If fuel was gold in this mean-arsed new world, then hardcore narcotic stimulation was platinum.
'Not going to get you much.' Malice shrugged. 'How far you gotta go?'
'How about you show me what you've got?'
She shrugged again – the baby hiccupped – and gestured towards the rear door of the tent.
I stepped outside and felt my neck prickling. This is the same feeling all men get, when they step into a room full of gadgets, or fast cars, or big guns.
Set back from the main square, on an adjacent street between black painted walls of corrugated iron and criss-crossed walkways manned by gun-toting guards, Malice led me through rows of cars, vans, pickups, SUVs, motorbikes, bicycles and – shuffling nervously against the rope walls of a makeshift paddock – a trio of horses. Amidst the dozens of wheeled contraptions the whinnying livestock was about the only means of transport in the place that hadn't been radically altered in some way, and even they'd been daubed with crazy patterns in black and red branding paint. On everything else clashing colours and crudities were smeared along every chassis, windows were shattered or missing, innards had been comprehensively plundered. It would have been faintly depressing – like a scrap yard refusing to give up the ghost – had it not been for the special area, roped-off with its own guards. Inside its boundaries everything had been augmented, streamlined, changed. I gazed lovingly at steel roll-bars, wheel-covers in three types of mesh, hulking nitro canisters wedged inside passenger seats and ten different variations on the theme of 'heavily armed.'
Pintle mounts poked like miniature SAM-sites from the roofs of jeeps and spot-welded AVs. Swinging hatches – just like on Nate's old school bus – replaced side-doors and load containers, whilst several cars sported a sneaky set of exhausts below the rims of the front doors, to blast flames at the touch of a button at anyone dumb enough to try getting inside.
I wanted to play.
All of them were painted black and red.
'What're these?' I asked Malice, barely able to control the drooling.
She smirked. 'Rentals.'
'And how do you make sure the customer brings them back?'
'Oh, that's easy.'
'Oh yeah?'
'Yeah. We go with them.'
At the far corner of the section my eye fell on something. Something big and angry-looking. Something spiky.
I nearly fell in love.
'The Inferno,' said Malice, following my eye. 'Cute, huh?'
It had been a fire truck once, though to be fair it bore about as much similarity to its previous incarnation as a shark to a diving bell. It was… sleek, which was an adjective I'd never have picked to describe a fire engine before. 'Like a speeding brick', maybe, but never dangerous. Never predatory.
Progressive layers of sheet-iron had been built-up from a sort of conical crest along the truck's nose, like the scales of a dagger-like fish. Below its new snout a shallow dozer-scoop clamoured with spikes and barbed wire, whilst wide flanges protected the windshield above.
All four tyres wore heavy swaddles of chains, canvas padding, rubber coils and thick iron rims, and a set of spares were lashed carefully beneath a wire and sheet gurney on the left flank. Halfway down the truck's 30-foot length an angle-poised turret reclined its muzzles towards the sky, its firing position enclosed on all sides by a low balustrade of welded plate steel. At one time it'd been a water cannon, easily hitched to a tanker truck and fired in great arcing loops. Now it had been modified. Converted in ways I couldn't easily see, so the central cannon stood surrounded in a clutch of cables, secondary devices and dangling controls. I think I picked out a Mk19 grenade launcher amongst the oily barrels, which told me everything I needed to know.
You did not fuck with the Inferno.
Secondary and rear-angle tertiary gunmounts were placed further along the vehicle's spine, each one protected by small forests of steel jags and corrugated shields. The whole thing was painted as black as sin, except the rims of the wheels and the hood above the windshield, which stood out in vibrant red like the belly of a Black Widow.
It was something of an effort to form words. 'How many… does…?'
'Four crew. Five if you want the big guns out, but that's extra. Room for as many passengers as can hold on.'
'And how much… ah. How much would it cost to…?'
She stared at me. She wasn't smiling.
'A lot more,' she said, 'than you've got.'
So that squished that one.
Long story short: I ended up embarking on my perilous quest on the back of a fucking quadbike, which sputtered and farted every time I throttled it, and it cost me everything I had except a single can of dog food, a sodding cashmere blanket and a packet of condoms. Malice said I'd got myself a bargain, and filled the whiny little vehicle up for free.
I settled into the driver's seat – feeling pretty good, letting the engine tick over – and turned to thank her for her help. She was already walking away, disappearing into the tent, and the last I saw of her was her baby staring at me owlishly from her shoulders, dribbling with a smile. I sighed, wondering what I felt.
Attraction? Loss?
Guilt?
Nate was staring at the quad with a sort of disgusted fascination. I sat back in the seat and folded my arms. Let him choose, I thought, feeling nasty. Let him ask.
'So, ah…' he shifted from foot to foot.
Then tsked.
Then started clambering on.
'Whoa, whoa… hang on…' I waved him off. 'You're coming just like that?'
'Too damn right.'
'But, you're… I mean…' I gaped, earnestly astonished. It felt a little like a limpet had attached itself to me, and no matter how long I held it over the fire it wasn't going to let go. 'You don't even know where I'm headed!'
I watched his face.
There. There it was again.
The hesitation.
The eyes flicking to the pack on my back, then away again.
'Don't matter.' He said, forcing a smile. 'I'm game.'
'And if I wanna go on alone?'
'Then I remind you how I saved your life.'
'But…'
