Wired Bone: Chapter Three (Patreon)

Chapter Three

The world had been made untamed, left wild and scarred.

The road the caravan crossed was unstable and shattered, a line of concrete put together from what had remained after the tungsten rain had ended. The terrain surrounding it was nothing but sand and craters, silica bent into odd glass formations that bent out and reached up like the fossilized fingers of the Devil.

As Michael looked out, one hand on top of the steering wheel and the other propped against his jaw with the elbow resting against the window, he considered the passage of time, and how it had turned a hellscape into a dull slough to drive through.

The AC wasn’t doing much good under the sun, though they were only a couple days away from Third York. The summer heat was exacerbated by their passing by a thin area unprotected by Shield Towers, making them journey through a part of the world uncovered by the ozone layer.

The vehicles had all been sprayed with radiation cover and they would all take their shots to prevent any nasty surprises, but that did nothing to keep them from sweating like pigs.

Then again,Mike thought as he looked to his right, seeing Hitomi miserably fanning herself, It could always be worse.

The poor woman was a second-generation Chimera.

Objectively speaking, she was one of the lucky ones. She didn’t have to deal with autoimmune illnesses from both sides of her genetic code killing each other, she didn’t have instincts telling her to act like an animal fighting against her human brain, and basically all the advantages of both sides of the equation.

That was all little comfort when you were covered in fur and driving through a man-made desert, though.

As it stood, she’d halfway opened her shirt and had aimed the fans of the air conditioning system towards herself, and was swinging an actual Japanese-style wood fan at herself. She had few sweat glands, so she didn’t really have a way to cool herself.

“You know,” she said, Japanese accent thickening with her exhaustion, “Next time you talk me intro driving into this area, I’m going to have someone from the tribe shoot me.”

“Seems a bit extreme,” Michael noted.

“Well, if I’m stupid enough to think that this is a good idea, then I clearly won’t be of any good to us.”

“Oh, don’t be like that,” said Mike. “It’s not like I keep you around for your brains anyhow.”

“Remind me to hit you when I’m not melting.”

“Will do.”

Hitomi groaned in annoyance, showing sharp fangs that drew Michael’s eyes, then took the itinerary from where it rested between them. She leafed through the pages casually, her exhausted annoyance turning into a worried frown as she got further down the line.

“I thought as much when you made the deal, but… this is a pretty huge number of guns and ammo,” she noted.

“There’s also some raw materials,” Mike countered, already predicting and dreading the direction the conversation would take. “With all the biomatter and bits ‘n bobs we’ve got packed up, we’ll probably be responsible for more people and machine parts than dead people.”

Hitomi gave him an unamused look, then went back to reading the list more carefully this time.

“Are things getting that bad in Orleans?”

Mike scratched his stubbly cheek, musing the question. “… we left some time ago; a lot could have happened in that time.”

“Yeah.”

“… it was already pretty bad, though.”

“… yeah.”

The road turned at an angle, orbiting a titanic hole in the ground with obsidian walls. Because of this, the sun was briefly slamming into Mike’s eyes, making him fix his black Stetson hat.

“Ah’m thinkin’ we might not stay long there,” Mike suggested. “Maybe hole up at the nearest settlement and just send the trucks?”

“People will be mad,” Hitomi said. “It’s not a bad idea, but… there’s a lot to do in Orleans, a lot of jobs and fun to be had. People want to stretch their legs.”

“Ah know, but is it worth riskin’ everythin’?” said Mike. “Maybe we should just stay for as long as it takes to take a new gig.”

Hitomi worked her jaw, thinking it over. “… we’ll call ahead, see if anyone has anything lined up. That should cut down our stay time by a bit.”

“If we do that, it’ll probably be at El Paso, though. They’re not gonna talk long-distance jobs on the radio.”

“Probably not.”

Hitomi watched him carefully, he saw from the corner of his eye.

Did he really want to risk passing through Texas again? He’d long maintained the opinion that the best thing about entropy was that it made time linear, and thus every day brought him further away from his time in El Paso and just a bit closer to the day that the whole place fell to shit.

Sure, the alternative was staying at what would soon be a lit powder keg, but…

… but that wasn’t all that was wrong with Orleans. Every time he got there he was in a rush to leave, because there was always something… there. At the edge of his vision, writhing in the shadows. Something that the most primal parts of his brain told him that if he paid it real attention, he would never be able to look away.

The conflict was only going to intensify things. At least El Paso’s problems were just in the people.

“… we’ll try to make contact when we stop for the day,” Mike sighed, earning a soft smile from Hitomi that twisted her muzzle unkindly and showed sharp fangs.

The matter settled, Hitomi went back to perusing the list.

“… wait. We’re carrying how many creates of porno mags?!”

Ooh, yeah. He’d forgotten about that part.

0 * + * 0

Soon enough, the sun had gone down and they’d gotten close enough to a Shield Tower that they felt comfortable getting out of the radiation-proofed vehicles.

The caravan consisted of twenty-eight vehicles, which hosted a total of three-hundred and ninety-six people.

There were five repurposed buses, equipped with sentry guns on top and steel plates over the windows that connected to several cameras, which connected to screens inside that gave the simulation of windows with none of the risk. Michael had called for the replacement after the first time a bullet had gotten lucky and gone through a window, killing one of the original tribe members.

Three of the buses had a capacity for eighty people, while the other two were double deck and made to house forty, with the rest of the space dedicated to hammocks and beds so that a shifting rotation of people from the entire caravan could sleep lying down. Neither Mike nor Hitomi had gotten a turn in half a year, since Michael had gotten the stupid idea to be noble and offer someone else his turn, and Hitomi was too loyal for her own good.

Four quad bikes, each hosting two passengers, a driver and a shooter. These were sometimes loaded with light cargo, though the attached boxes usually held extra ammo. This trip, they were empty. They’d had a hard time buying ammo in Third York.

Seven improvised tanks, made from assorted scavenged land vehicles, covered in more of whatever armored plating they could find and solder on without messing with mobility. Attached were heavy ordinance weapons, along with small openings for a three-man-crew per tank to fire through.

Five trucks, two for actual movement of goods and three for hosting mobile labs, each driven by two people. Michael’s tribe in particular was blessed with a chemical lab, a mobile garden complete with bioprinters qualified for everything from comestibles to organs and limbs, and a medical station packed to the gills with everything they could get their hands on. Like most of the other vehicles, they were all armored.

Three pickup trucks and four cars. The trucks carry a six people each, four sitting on the back under flimsy shade. The cars carry five people each. All of whom are either clients asking to move from city-state to city-state or people recovering from surgery, not counting the drivers.

One of the pickups and two of the cars dragged behind them trailers. One hosted a radio station, which was usually manned by two people, another had a mobile bar and grill for communal eating, and the last one had an extra storage space for clothes, utilities and such, all shared between tribe members.

Each and every vehicle was rated to carry cargo, whether food and drink or products to transport.

Alone, they were each just lost people that for some reason or another felt they couldn’t live in a city-state. Together, they were the Winter Bulls, and they had stood together through rain, snow, fallout and conflicts of unspeakable variety.

Of course, it was hard to tell on an average day.

“You piece of shit!” Tall Larry yelled, being held back by three people as he tried to run across the playing field. “That was a foul and you damn well know it!”

“Oh yeah?!” Mean Lucas yelled back, being held back by a single hand grabbing onto the back of his black and white striped shirt. He pulled out a yellow card, “Well how about this? Unsportsmanlike attitude, penalty!”

Loud complaints echoed out from players in Tall Larry’s team, who started approaching the referee. The other team, lacking shirts, started advancing on them to hold them back. Soon enough, both sides were shoving each other and shouting expletives at each other, with the children calling out encouragements for their parents and caretakers to kick the ever-loving shit out of each other.

“Are you going to step in?” David asked.

“Mm?”

“Y’know, before this gets dumber?”

Michael considered the possibility, sipping at a frothy glass of stout from the barrels. These were supposed to be saved for special occasions, but the nice thing about being chieftain was that you got to decide when it was a special occasion.

That day, Michael was celebrating the existence of pineapple. He’d never had pineapple, but he heard it was pretty great, so he chose to celebrate it.

“… nah,” Mike eventually decided, licking his lips for foam and running his tongue over what might grow into facial hair. “Better to let them tucker themselves out, they’ll sleep better that way.”

“I think the children are just going to get more riled up,” David pointed out.

“Who’s talkin’ ‘bout the children?”

David chuckled and went back to pouring drinks for other tribe members, some of whom sat at the bar and some of whom wandered around with their drinks.

Bonfires had been made here and there, and people sat around them. Guitars and singing were common across the camp ground, only some of which were on-key.

Mike’s Stetson rested on the bar, next to the coaster, and his back leaned against the edge of the wood. His tan BDU shirt was open down to three buttons from the top, showing hairy chest and dog tags. The output sockets in his arms, button-sized and metallic surrounded by scar tissue, were clearly exposed and reflected light with his sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

Taking another shallow drink, his eyes wandered, watching how people moved, talked, or fought. Some people were dancing together, some were kissing, some were joking and playing cards. And there, in the corner of his eye, was Aaron.

Watching him and wringing his hands together.

Not letting it show that he’d seen him, Michael sighed through the nose and drank deeper. He kept drinking until his bladder made its needs known and his glass had been mostly emptied.

Mike left the glass on the coaster, grabbed the hat and nodded at David. The mustachioed bartender and amateur therapist nodded back, taking the glass and emptying it into his own gullet with no shame whatsoever.

Michael chuckled, put his hat on and walked off away from the campsite. He wandered into the dark, not so far that the moon was the only source of light, but enough that he’d be hard to see and impossible to listen in on without approaching.

He came up to a fairly sizeable glass bowl and stood on the edge of it, hands on his hips.

The wind carried sheets of sand across the sandy plains, some of which fell inside the crater and gathered at the center. A few more decades or centuries of that, and the crater would be buried.

Perhaps, if allowed, the desert would eventually consume all on the east coast. Michael didn’t dwell on that thought for long. It was an old habit to force his concerns to the smaller scale of nearly four hundred lives, rather than the shattered remnants of a nation.

Soon enough, footsteps came from behind him and stopped beside him, breaking him out of his thoughts.

Without looking, he said, “Padre.”

“Chieftain.”

Michael snorted.

The Winter Bulls were fairly casual, especially compared to other nomad communities, but some people clung to any type of structure like a lifeline, and they had a few of those aboard, including Aaron.

“So… what did you want to talk to me about?”

“… We need to turn back.”

Michael kept looking forward, towards the horizon.

Then, slowly, he turned to give a flat stare at Aaron.

Aaron kept facing forward, but his eyes flickered towards Michael a time or two.

Michael kept looking at him. Then he looked forward, sighed, and pulled down his fly to fish his dick out of his pants.

“Oh for…” Aaron said, uncomfortable. “Must you?”

“You came to me,” Michael said. He aimed for the glass crater, then thought better of it and turned around, facing towards the community. With a bit of effort, he started to leak, and he started writing his name on the sand. “Now, pleaseexplain what you mean.”

Still uncomfortable and torn between looking and not looking, Aaron spoke.

He was a weedy man, with a nasal voice that matched his appearance. He was balding, with only a crown of hair that left the top shiny and smooth. He tended to wear all black, even during the summer, and a golden crucifix hung from his neck on a thin rope.

Aaron was the Winter Bulls’ spiritual leader.

Which, when you lived among people that were mostly concerned with practicalities of life like living to see another day, was a position with very little power for having “leader” in the name. Practically speaking, Aaron’s job on the spiritual side involved officiating marriages and christenings, advising people and the occasional sermon when enough people were up for it.

His religion was the result of a melting pot of beliefs, mostly tied together by the stories that advocated cooperation and kindness, so as to be as inclusive as possible to the mishmash of people that filled a nomad tribe. Even the cross he carried around his neck was mostly for personal taste and aesthetics, more than any actual beliefs.

Michael wasn’t entirely sure he had personal beliefs. Like a bad priest, he told people what they wanted to hear, but like a good priest, he used it to tell them what they needed to hear. Like wrapping medicine in cheese for your dog.

Most days, he worked the radio station, keeping communications open with their destination and nearby caravans they might bump into.

“I was doing what Hitomi ordered, about looking for jobs in El Paso before we got there,” Aaron explained, starting to wrangle his hands again. “And we actually caught a call from Third York, since we were still in range of their better comms.”

“Government?” Michael asked.

Aaron hesitated, then shook his head.

Michael sighed. Only very specific types of people in Third York had comms that could reach this far.

“What kind of job?”

“Um… smuggling.”

Michael’s stream petered out and he shook a bit, then tucked his dick back into his pants.

Very slowly, he asked, “What kind of smugglin’?”

Aaron hesitated to answer.

“What kind, padre?”

“… Dark Technology.”

Michael closed his eyes, sighed, pulled up his fly then turned towards Aaron.

Aaron looked at him.

Michael took his dirty hands and rubbed them all over Aaron’s face.

“Ack!” Aaron smacked his hands away, “Stop that!”

He kept it up for a while longer, then finally allowed Aaron to stop that once he’d gotten a finger inside his nostril, and then his mouth.

While Aaron gagged and choked with fussiness that Mike thought he should’ve dropped on the first hour on the road, he pulled out a small soap rock from a bag that hung from his belt.

He held it in his hands, which shaped a bowl, and he waited expectantly for Aaron to pick up the cue.

He did, reaching for his water bottle and pouring generously over his chieftain’s hands as he rubbed them clean.[1]

Once done, Aaron put the almost empty bottle back in his pocket and Michael put the reduced soap stone back in the bag.

“Dark Tech,” said Michael.

“Yes,” said Aaron.

“From Third York.”

“Yes.”

“… what kind?”

“Artificial limbs. Non-medicinal.”

“No, that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?”

“…”

The output plugs running across his body ached, a phantom pain that lasted a millisecond. His muscles tightened uncomfortably anyways, and to distract, Michael asked, “What’s the pay?”

“Everything we get from selling them in Orleans.”

“Everythin’?Too good.”

“It’s part of a bigger deal the madcog’s got with one of the factions in Orleans. We’re just a middle part he can’t do away with.”

“He?”

“…”

“… there’s somethin’ you’re not tellin’ me.”

“Two things, actually.”

“What are they?”

“One will make you agree. The other will make you punch me in the face.”

“… tell me the punchin’ one first.”

“Must I?”

“Aaron.”

He sighed, “The… the Dark Scientist behind this request is… Kingston Hill.”

There was a moment of silence in the desert.

“The Impaler?!”

“To be fair, that was just one time—”

“Yeah, and that’s all you need to be known as The Impaler! You know why?! Because he fuckin’ impaled people, Aaron!”

“Michael—”

“And that’s the nickname he got because there aren’t words for all the other shit he’s done!”

“Mike—”

“You’ve seen the same pictures as me! The videos!”

“Please, I can explain—”

“They were still breathing, Aaron!”

“We need the money!” Aaron snapped back.

“For what?!”

“Marinette is—!” Aaron caught himself at the last second.

Michael’s anger dissipated in a second.

Marinette was a fifteen-year-old girl, born in a settlement that had the bad fortune of being caught up in minor nuclear fallout. Not enough to instantly kill anyone, but enough to poison the water, bloody the toilets and make hair fall out. Cancers were abundant, and the cure wasn’t cheap, especially not outside a city-state.

Having been a settlement under control of El Paso, the owners hadn’t been eager to pay for people’s treatment. Michael had sympathized with them for that reason, and thus the Winter Bulls had taken in as many as they could.

Marinette had been eight at the time, and it had been at the insistence of everyone that joined that she be the first one cured.

Even if a nomad tribe had better opportunities than someone in a poisoned settlement, the cure hadn’t been that good. Marinette still shaved her head, and she was still sickly and frail, prone to coughing and vomiting. She was one of the lucky few from the settlement that had survived this far.

She’d confided in a few, like Aaron and Hitomi, that she lived in fear. You wouldn’t know it looking at her.

She always did as much work as her body would allow. She always looked after the younger children when parents were exhausted. She assisted the tribe’s medics, she took arms when marauders or experiments approached, and she sang beautifully when her throat hadn’t been made raw by coughing.

She was cared for by the Bulls.

Michael took a deep breath, let it out through the nose, and looked at Aaron.

“Tell me everythin’.”

“There’s… not much to say. She and one of the boys got… friendly—”

“Which one?”

“Is it relevant?”

Michael glared.

“… I’ll tell you when you’re less homicidal,” Aaron sighed. “Though I’ll do it under protest.”

“Mah heart aches for you, padre.”

“In any case, Marinette is… pregnant. As you can imagine, her health being what it is…” Aaron sighed and rubbed his head. “It took some work, but I got her to talk to one of the medics after I talked him into not reporting anything to you or Miss Hitomi. It’s looking like it’ll take some pretty serious surgery to keep everyone alive at the end of things. Weekly injections during pregnancy just to make sure everyone’s healthy, maybe daily on the first months.”

“She could just not have the baby,” Michael pointed out.

“She said she’d rather keep it. And so did the father.”

“Oh, lovely. Well, we might get another mouth ta feed, but at least maybe someone else will die. Balance things out.”

“I understand the appeal of humor, but this isn’t the time, chieftain.”

“Humor. Right,” Michael sighed and rubbed his face. “Okay, so… I’m guessin’ we can’t just print what we need?”

“It’s nine months of weekly and/or daily injections. They’re not big injections and maybe we can stretch them out if you’re fine with gambling with her life—” there was an art to how Aaron snuck passive-aggressive guilt trips in the middle of a sentence with no hesitation or punctuation “—but even then, we’re going to need a pretty big injection of cash, and the sooner the better.”

“So, if we get some money in Orleans…”

“We can use it to get all the raw bio matter and ready injections we might need,” Aaron finished, then tried for an optimistic smile. “Besides, you know Orleans. We might make enough money to renovate some of the vehicles.”

Michael gave him an annoyed look, then sighed again, adjusting his hat.

Aaron dropped his smile, then turned to look in the same direction as Michael, towards the community.

Laughter and light spilled from the gathering, altering the cold desert night. String lights had been hung between vehicles to make the place easier to find for those that snuck away for clandestine cuddling, since discouraging was like pissing in the wind.

Speaking of which, the shifting sand had already covered the muddy letters that had formed Michael’s name. In his glum mood, that almost felt like an apt metaphor for his life.

“… it’s just one life.”

“True. But I think most if not all of us would be quite upset if this particular life left us before her time.”

“Ah can’t save everyone.”

“The way I think of it… it’s your job to save everyone you can. And it’s my job to show you that you can save more than you think.”

Michael groaned, then started walking.

“C’mon,” he said.

“Where are you going?” Aaron called out.

“C’mon!”

“Going,” Aaron said, hurriedly stepping after his chieftain.

The two of them cut through the gatherings, barely stopping for Mike to whistle in Hitomi’s direction, making her interrupt her conversation with one of the medics to gather with the two.

Together, the trio gathered around a folding table that was removed from one of the trucks. On it they stretched out a plastic map of the east coast of the North American territories, and while Aaron explained the situation to Hitomi and got punched in the face when he got to the part about working for The Impaler, Michael did some quick math and drew a cross on where they were with a black marker.

“We can’t take this job,” said Hitomi, while Aaron struggled to pick himself up, bruise already forming on his jaw.

“We need the money,” said Mike.

“So we take a lot of jobs, until we find one that pays well.”

“As well as dark tech in Orleans?” Aaron questioned.

“You shut up,” said Hitomi, snarling at him and making him flinch back at seeing her fangs. Chimeras were very firmly uncanny for a lot of people, though most of the Winter Bulls had gotten used to Hitomi in particular. “God, I can’t believe Mari wouldn’t come to me about this.”

“She didn’t come to me ‘bout it either,” Mike pointed out.

“Well, yeah.”

He stopped where he was drawing line with his finger, immediately losing the count in his head, and looked up at her. “What does that mean?”

“Well, it’s just… you know?”

“No, Ah don’t know,” said Michael. “Are you saying she doesn’t trust me?”

“No! No, Michael, it’s not that!” Hitomi rushed to say.

“Yeah, it’s just… she didn’t want to disappoint you,” Aaron explained.

“Why would I be disappointed?”

Aaron and Hitomi traded looks.

“Dear god, is this what you people think of me?” Michael asked, horrified.

“Well, calling us ‘you people’ doesn’t help,” Hitomi muttered.

“That’s… fair,” Michael recognized. “I’ll speak with Marinette later. Make sure she knows we support her.”

He went back to doing math on the map.

“I still think this is a bad idea,” Hitomi insisted. “There are better ways to make money.”

“But none quite as fast or opportune,” Michael noted, giving up and starting to write down his calculations since they insisted on talking as he worked. “Nine months is a lot of time for repeated expenses, but it ain’t a lot of time for earnin’ money.”

Not with all the other expenses that could pile up in that time. A quick infusion of money that could be focused on one issue and perhaps other necessities was ideal.

If only it didn’t cost their souls.

Hitomi winced, and stopped arguing, which was about as close to saying someone else was correct as she got.

“… okay,” said Michael. “How ‘bout this? Aaron goes in one of the tanks with one of the quad bikes. Five-man crew total, one muscle and the triplets, since they’re our best smugglers and they’re decent with tank guns.”

“Why am I going in this?” Aaron asked, not exactly alarmed but not exactly eager either.

“Because you made contact and I don’t this freak talkin’ to more of us than necessary,” Michael explained.

Aaron nodded with some resignation.

“Not a lot of space for cargo on the tanks,” Hitomi pointed out.

Michael considered it, trying to make it work in his head, then conceded the point. “True. Truck, tank and quad?”

“Might be best to drop the quad.”

“I don’t like them travellin’ without high-mobility muscle.”

“We can handle it,” Aaron weighed in.

Hitomi glared at him again, but Michael took his word for it with some reluctance.

“Alright, truck and tank… we can still make it a five-man crew, one of the triplets goes with Aaron in the truck to make sure things run smooth.”

“Can they hide anything big in the truck?”

“We divide it between there and the tank, we modify the latter a bit to have more storage space in exchange of less holes to point the guns out off, and… we hope that they get a bribable Ranger.”

“In Third York? That’s the only part of the plan that might work,” Hitomi joked.

Michael snorted and Aaron chuckled.

“Right, so… they leave tomorrow, first light,” said Michael, tracing the hypothetical path with his finger on the map. “They should be able to move a bit faster than us, so we’ll keep moving until the nearest settlement and try to do some work there while we wait for them to get back to us.”

“What’s the nearest settlement?” Aaron asked.

Michael looked at Hitomi.

“Uh… P-71 shut down after it got hit by Academy scraps, didn’t it?” Hitomi asked, being met only with blank looks. “Right, let me check the records and I’ll get back to you, but until then it sounds like a good plan.”

“Ah’d say it’s more like ‘good enough’, but thanks,” Michael said, scratching his short hair under his hat.

Aaron crossed his arms and shuddered a bit, drawing Mike and Hitomi’s eyes.

“Getting nervous, padre?” Michael asked.

“Remember, this was your stupid idea in the first place,” Hitomi bitterly commented.

“I know, but…” Aaron swallowed. “It feels like we’re getting in the middle of something bigger than us.”

[1] In nomad culture, what little there was shared between the dozens if not hundreds of clans roaming the North American territories, to ask for water during negotiations was a gesture that you would listen to the other’s requests. How much the other party shared was indicative of their desire for this request to be met.