Chapter 2
Chapter 2
“The Truck” was an ever-evolving mammoth of a machine built from top-notch scrap steel scrounged from all over the broken world and set on the frame of a Mack cab and trailer. And yes, it was as ugly as it was gigantic. The 18-wheeler’s heart was a massive furnace of an engine that ran on equal parts diesel and brimstone, and its fiery, pungent soul rumbled out its hatred for the living world in great plumes of inky black smoke. Blue joked once about how the Truck made her a believer in two things: reincarnation and the Devil. The Adversary must’a died down there in Hell some time ago, she’d said, because that bastard’s spirit lives in that goddamned truck now. When she’d said it, Molly was all “Oh, come on now,” and “Don’t be so dramatic, Blue.” But after having spent the better part of two years inside that fire-breathing monster, Molly wasn’t so sure anymore.
He was sure that it was a good thing he was behind the wheel and not anyone else out there on the Post-Burn Earth. The bombs had stripped a heavy portion of the population, and it seemed like they’d taken more of the good than the bad. There wasn’t any shortage of villainous sorts out there in the Glow, and there were more maniacs and psychopaths out there now than there ever had been before. At least Molly hoped there were more crazies out now than there used to be, otherwise the Pre-Burn Earth would’ve been an even more ruthless place than it is today.
Either way, other than Blue Mahoney, the girl he’d grown up with, or Sweet Edgar, the man he had, in large part, created, there wasn’t a soul on this planet allowed on the Truck. Blue and Sweet Edgar had been with him since the beginning, and they knew well the kinds of whispers it seemed to put in your head. Whispers about power, eternity, and immortality. Promises of domination and control. The Truck was unstoppable, and it knew it, and it wanted everyone else to know it, too, and it’d be damned you weren’t going to show the world that it didn’t just have a thousand horses under the hood, but a thousand nightmares, all ready to stampede across the globe on their burning hooves.
It was just so powerful, you could hardly resist.
Fortunately, power wasn’t really what Blue sought after because it was something she already had in spades. She had the Soft Mutation, a change in her genes that made her blood a source of energy – she was like a walking, talking battery, in short. She’d heard some egghead types talking about a catalytic enzyme, and some preachy types talking about blessings and possessions and that kind of mumbo-jumbo. Blue really didn’t know about all of that, though; she wasn’t much of the religious type, you see, and if it wasn’t for Molly, and the things she’d seen him do with a wrench and a little grease, she wouldn’t put much stock in the scientific fields, either. Blue was a survivor, a doer, and if she had to do some thinking, she was much more inclined to think about the “how” of things rather than the “why.” And when it came to the energy in her blood, the question she typically preoccupied her mind with was, “how can I shoot this at people, or use it to shoot other things at people?”
That was where Molly came in, the Post-Burn’s resident master tinker, or so he claimed. He did know the in’s and out’s of every kind of thing, it seemed like, from the Truck and its guts to Blue and her guts. Well. Maybe not her guts too, but he definitely knew a thing or two about her blood and how to use it. And the best way to utilize it, of course, was to weaponize it, much to Blue’s delight. So Molly got to work learning about Mutech – that is, special tech that soft muties can use their blood to power. Fast forward, and here she is, riding shotgun in the Truck with a sandwich in one sleepy hand and ports and vents running along her ribs, spine, wrists, and forearms, open sockets just waiting for something to plug into them - “something” being one of a wide array of guns that Molly’d developed over the years, like the Gooper. And she had guns that could do more than just melt the heads of hostile robots; she could throw lightning harder than the darkest cloud you’ve ever seen, turn the chemical energy in her blood into heat energy and hurl balls of fire from her open palms, or even shoot lasers. Yeah, she could shoot blood lasers at people.
So, long story shorter, she didn’t put much stock into what the Truck had to say because she didn’t need what it was selling. So the Truck was unstoppable. Big deal. So was she.
Sweet Edgar’s history was a bit less cut-and-dry. Or, to be more precise, it was a little less “dry,” but a whole lot more “cut”; Molly met him when Edgar was in pieces. He’d had a run-in with some heinous folks who had a penchant for amateur butchery, and it was apparent that they’d set out with the intention of learning a thing or two from poor Eddie before he said his goodbyes. Molly took pity on the man for who the Hell knows why and fixed him up the best he could. At the time, he’d said he did it “just to see if he could.”
Unfortunately for Edgar, though, Blue was right on target when she said that Molly’s skills weren’t worth a damn if he was working on the flesh-and-blood rides that we all bumble around in, and Molly knew it too. So in order to keep the ball in his court, Molly decided to “upgrade” Eddie’s meatsuit into a mostly-metal contraption of gears and servos – and after he figured out how to wire the squishy bits up to the mechanical ones, working on Edgar was no different than working on the Truck, or on Blue’s implants, or anything else, really. No stitching, sewing, or surgery needed. Just a little elbow grease. Oh, and Edgar’d gone mostly crazy due to being mostly dismembered, so Molly had to wipe his personality. When Blue asked him where he’d learned that little procedure, Molly’d gone somber and told her not to play with jumper cables. She’d left it at that, and Molly’d gone back to work making Eddie into a new man.
Getting Sweet Edgar back to the point of “functional person” took a few years. Molly could’ve programmed in some basic nonsense that would’ve passed as a personality, but it would never have been genuine, and while Molly was no stranger to the finer arts of cheating and lying his pale ass off, when it came to something like the foundation of a man who didn’t even ask to be saved in the first place, he tended to feel the itching tingle of his conscience when he considered robbing the poor fellow of his second chance at life. So instead of giving Edgar a few lines from Microsoft Sam and a sunny disposition, Molly gave him a name and the ability to learn for himself. And teaching Edgar stuff was easy, you just had to make sure you said his name first to get his attention.
And as far as Molly could tell, the Truck either hadn’t bothered to learn Sweet Edgar’s name, or maybe the two just spoke different dialects of machine, because the cyborg never once showed any interest in the behemoth or its temptations. Mostly, he just rode quietly in the back with the rest of the gear until Blue or Molly called him from his electric thoughts. Molly wondered if he felt more comfortable back there rather than in the cab with them; maybe he felt a little more at home amongst the cold hardware than he did around humans. Maybe they reminded him too much of what he used to be, and could never be again. Molly knew that Edgar remembered things from before, even though neither had ever spoken about it. Molly intentionally left Sweet Edgar’s memory centers alone when he was cleaning out his personality, so the physical memories were still in there, and sometimes Molly or Blue would catch Edgar looking at their sharper tools with the closest thing to an emotion Edgar ever had on his face. And it wasn’t a comforting look.
No, not even a little bit comforting.
But Sweet Edgar was typically as sweet as the name on the can implied. Inquisitive, loyal, trusting – all of the things Molly would never have chosen for him, more or less, with the world as messed up as it was after the Old Wars scoured the earth and scourged the seas. But he got by. Largely because Blue and Molly were there to keep him on the rails, probably, but Edgar’s naivete and innocence did more than a little to keep both of them on the level with him, too.
And then there were other times when Edgar wasn’t so sweet. Times when he thought something was wrong with Blue, or when Molly got into a jam.
BANG BANG
Or the times when something heavy slams into the Truck like that, yeah.
Wait, what?
Molly realized that ugly banging wasn’t inside his head with the rest of his driver’s daydreams. He shook the reverie from his eyes and glimpsed a whipping black tail of greasy smoke snaking out from the side of the Truck in his mirrors. They’d been hit alright, and it must’ve been a doozy to punch a hole in the side plating.
Next to him, one of Blue’s snores caught in her throat when the explosions startled her awake. She sputtered, pointed to the rear of the Truck, and coughed out a few more curses as she hiked over the seats. Molly knew what she’d meant and nodded with a “Go, go!”; she went to check on Edgar and the damage. He glanced down at her seat and saw her “sidearm” on the floor – her damn hand cannon must’ve rattled from its holster while she slept.
“Grab a gun, Blue!” he yelled as he craned his neck around, scanning the horizon and the craggy hillocks around the Truck, trying to find where the shots had come from. A muffled reply came back from behind him, and Molly figured it sounded enough like a “got it” that he put her out of his head. After a few moments of cursing beneath his breath and dodging his about like an angry bird, he spotted them. And when he did, his cursing went from under his breath to over it.
“Shit,” he said; it was quickly becoming the Word of the Day, it seemed – and since it was at least in the top four Words of the Day for about the sixth day in a row, that meant that Molly was having a pretty shit week.
While he wasn’t quite looking down the barrel of a gun, Molly did find himself looking at the chasm-ish barrel of some kind of rocket launcher. And the real unfortunate part about it was that it was not empty and it was being pointed at him by a greenish humanoid with a full-faced helmet and backward-bending knees, a feature that made him look distinctly birdlike to Molly.
Molly hated birds. Especially the humanoid kinds, and double-especially when they were shooting at his Truck.
“Bastard bird-people,” he muttered and pulled a sour face. The avian was on a stony outcropping off to the right of the road; his hill wasn’t an especially sheer one, but it was definitely a serviceable perch for firing down at the vehicles that’d be traveling through these parts. “Bastard highwayman bird-people.”
As the bird man raised the targeting screen on the side of the launcher to his eye, Molly white-knuckled down on the wheel and brought the Truck to bear on the avian. If the change of course made the birdfolk feel any type of way, the mask hid his face and his body didn’t betray him otherwise. And instead of showing the shock that Molly was sure he was feeling, the truck jacker expressed his intentions by firing another explosive round directly at Molly in the driver’s seat. Luckily for Molly, though, he was accustomed to this particular form of wasteland negotiation when it came to road warriors, vigilantes, and most other vehicular criminals; he was already levering down on the handle that’d close the cab’s blast shutters before the missile was even in the air. Segmented steel rolled down from above Molly’s head to cover the windows and windshield, with a single, narrow plexiguard slot for Molly to peek out through.
He’d seen some impressive and terrifying stuff leave that thin strip of basically-plastic unscathed, but staring down a rocket-propelled ballistic device was always an intense experience, he found. The rocket came at him, he squeezed his eyes shut, and started screaming. One of the loudest BOOMs he’d ever lived through followed, and the high-pitched whine of stunned and dying sound receptors in his ears followed after that, but he was alive and unhurt; he opened his eyes in time to see (through the still unmarked plexiguard slot, now undoubtedly the best damn material on the planet) the avian take a rolling tumble down the hill and out of the Truck’s rumbling way. Molly wasn’t sure if the bird had friends, but he knew that it was pretty uncommon for these types to work alone; he trusted his guts and left the blast shutters closed and started on the tough task of bringing the Truck around. As he was hauling on the wheel, he grabbed a handset from the dash and put it to his mouth and asked, “Blue, what’s the damage?” His voice was thready and cracking. He chalked it up to the nerves.
When no response came, the Word of the Day came up again, and he repeated his call, to Blue and Sweet Edgar both.
Still nothing.
Word of the Day.
The last thing he wanted was to stop the Truck because that was exactly what the gunmen outside wanted. Molly knew that as soon as he stopped moving, they’d close in like the damn hyenas they were. But with his mind running through the possibilities of why Blue and Edgar were giving him the silent treatment, he decided that it was just as risky for them if he kept on rolling with the blast shutters closed – after all, if they’d somehow ended up outside the Truck, the mechanical beast would gobble them up just as fast as it would’ve the bird man if it had gotten a hold of him. And if they died on the job, he’d be torn up, but they know what they’re getting into whenever they pick up a gig, especially ones that call for hits against someone like the Old Man’s operations. But if Molly himself killed them?
He didn’t feel like thinking about it presently, so he just hit the breaks instead and hoped for the best. Still moving, Molly threw the parking break on and turned the slow roll into a grating skid, slammed the deadbolts on the steel-plated shutters home to keep the riffraff out, and spun up from his seat and away from the wheel. If he couldn’t get a damn status report out of Blue or Edgar, he’d have to go and take stock himself. There was a rack of guns beside the doorway. Molly grabbed two handguns. He was sure they wouldn’t be throwing birdshot, but he was hopeful that what they had to say would do the trick no matter what waited for him.
What he found in the hallways of the Truck’s interior was not Blue or Edgar. It had the same kind of mask as the thing shooting rockets outdoors, the same backward-bending knees and bootless, clawed feet, but a different weapon in his hands (Molly thanked his stars). Instead of something huge and highly explosive, this brigand opted for a more compact, hostage-taking piece of tech, by the looks of it. At least he was hoping it was a stunner when the indoor birdman raised the weapon and a flash of electricity snapped within a see-through chamber set in the body of the gun; if it wasn’t, then that bird fella had every intention of frying him.
Not that Molly really cared much for the intentions of some avian road warrior who somehow found its way onto his Truck – he could guess pretty well at what this birdperson in particular wanted, and it wasn’t looking to make friends. While the avian took the time to raise the weapon to its shoulder and begin charging it, Molly’d used the same time to point one of his readied handguns – the bigger and meaner of the two, of course – squarely at the intruder’s masked face. He sensed that right then wasn’t the most apropos time for small-talk, so he pulled the trigger and left the bird without a head. He hesitated just slightly; he was interested in the gun still stuck within the avian’s clenched fists, but he stepped over it and the rest of the remains and continued toward the back of the Truck. His curiosity would have to wait until the coast was clear and the killing was done. And after throwing a parting glance at the headless corpse leaking all over his floor, Molly was pretty well certain that it wouldn’t go too far with its current owner. He could be content enough assuming it’d be there when he was finished.
Edgar was the first of the two that Molly found, and he seemed alright, by all appearances, but unresponsive. And not unconscious-unresponsive, more like the “I’m watching TV, go away” unresponsive; when Molly found him, Edgar was standing before and staring at the hole in the side of the Truck’s plating. Molly snapped, slapped, and shouted him, but Edgar seemed out of it. Just before Molly gave up on him, though, he noticed a burn on his left leg. Well, not the leg so much, since that was more metal than not, but he saw that the fabric of his trousers had burned and, upon closer inspection, that there was some blackening on the parts beneath.
“Looks like the stunner worked wonders on you, Eddie,” Molly spat as he smacked Sweet Edgar on the neck. He could have Edgar as right as rain, he was sure, but it’d take time, and it meant that Sweet Edgar would be out of commission until further notice, of course. “Wish you could give me some answers, big guy.” Molly looked off toward another door and narrowed his eyes when he heard a muffled groan come from beyond it. “Like where Blue went, maybe...” He started toward the compartment and listened at the door with his hand on the handle. As he gave it a tentative twist, the door exploded outward and drove an edge into Molly’s face, painting the wall beside the door with a spatter of fresh blood from his now-broken nose. He reeled, holding his face and sputtering curses with one pistol aimed forward to blast the bastard that just busted him up.
“Molly?” He couldn’t see her – in fact, he couldn’t see a damned thing, his eyes were running so bad – but he recognized her voice. And he was angry about the broken nose before, but when he heard the typical petulance in her voice instead of any kind of concern, it made the situation all the more upsetting for Molly.
“The fuck are you doing, Blue?” He was yelling the best he could, but his voice was cracking with the strain of not crying and he was already choking on the rush of blood running down his throat. “Why didn’t you fucking answer me?”
“Because I was too busy getting jumped and roasted by some feathered prick, is why I didn’t fucking answer you,” she said, turning sideways in a futile attempt to show the tear-blinded Molly the blackened shocks of burnt flesh at her back. Her and Eddie had a matching set, it turned out. She swatted the gun that he was still pointing at her aside and said “Get that thing off me.” After a moment, she gestured toward his face and added, “I really got you good, huh?”
Molly couldn’t see the smirk on her face, but he could hear it in her voice. He dabbed at his face and spat blood and curses at the floor. “Yeah,” he coughed on the word and winced, “yeah, you did.” He thought for a moment, rolled his tongue over his teeth, took a loosened incisor between his thumb and forefinger, and pulled it out of his mouth with a grunt. A fresh run of deep red drool spilled out of his open mouth, and he spat again as he dropped the tooth. He tried to blink through the tears that swam in his eyes, but there seemed like an endless supply waiting to roll down his cheeks. He wiped at them with red fingers and muttered a soft “fuck me.”
Blue shrugged at him – the closest thing to an apology he’d get from her, he knew – and said, “The bird dude was headed up toward the cab, last I saw. Did you take care of it?”
Molly nodded, struggling through his misty blindness to find his sight again. “Yeah, he’s down.”
“Down down? For good?”
“Yeah, he’s down,” he repeated and pointed the barrel of the gun he had to hand toward the front of the Truck. “He’s up behind the cab, and he’s got at least one friend outside with some heavy shit. Sweet Edgar’s out, so it’s just you and me. We need a plan.”
Blue lifted her eyebrows and planted her hands on her slender hips. “Then get to planning, O Captain, my Captain.”
Molly, still hunched and holding his leaking nose in one hand and a cannon in the other, opened his arms in bewilderment. “I’m not exactly in the planning way right now, alright? Give me something to work with here.”
Blue reached back into the compartment she’d been waiting in and pulled a short, two-barreled slug thrower out from behind the door. She broke the barrels, checked the shells, and ratcheted the gun closed. “You know what happens when you leave the big decisions to me, Molly.” She tipped the gun toward his head, “You’re the thinker,” then back at her own, “and I’m the shooter. And I’m about damn ready to do some shooting, so if you don’t get to thinking, it’s gonna get even uglier around here.”
Molly lifted his outstretched arms up in an exasperated shrug, “What a grand idea, Blue.” He pointed back to the front of the cab with his handgun. “Let’s go out there, grab some more guns on the way, pop the blast shutters, and just start fucking shooting at who-the-hell-knows what’s out there.”
She perked up and smiled. “Really?”
Clearly, Blue was only really receptive to sarcasm when it was coming out of her own damn mouth, Molly thought.
But, shit, what other options do we have, he asked himself. And given the circumstances, Molly knew there weren’t many. He shook his head, sighed, and set his handgun down. He gingerly plugged a nostril, blew a gob of bloody goo to the floor, wiped his face, and picked the gun back up. Fuck it, he thought, and pulled the smaller firearm from his trousers. He held them both high and at the ready and took a steadying breath.
“Really really. Let’s hit the racks and move to the cab from there. Take point, and I’ll be right behind you.”
Molly and Blue didn’t encounter any problems on their short way to their on-board armory; it was only two doors down from where Edgar was patiently awaiting resuscitation. Blue eyed the array of hosed and corded weapons that’d slot into the ports on her body with a skeptic’s squint and shook her head in the end. “I nodded off before I finished my sandwich, and I didn’t even get a piece of a nap in. I don’t think I could keep my eyes open if I tried using any of the good stuff, Molly.” She looked over at him with an apologetic shrug.
Molly pulled a carbine off the rack and handed it over to her with a fistful of clips. “Don’t sweat it. Whitebread bullets’ll do just fine, I’m sure.” In addition to the two handguns now resting in his pants, Molly grabbed another assault rifle for himself, slung it over his shoulder, and loaded the cargo pockets of his pants with ammunition. “How did that bird guy get in here, anyway?” he asked. “I saw the hole that Eddie was checking out, but I’ve got no idea how anyone could’ve made it in through a hole like that when we were at speed. It just doesn’t add up.”
“Beats me. It’s almost like they shot the guy right through the wall, isn’t it?”
“That’d be something.” Speaking of the hole, Molly stepped back out into the hall and leaned over to check on Edgar and the breach. No sign of anyone, and Sweet Edgar was still right where they left him. Really, it seemed like any solid-bodied thing would be hard-pressed to fit through the hole anyhow; it wasn’t too much larger around than a bowling ball. The avians were thin-boned creatures, but not that thin-boned. Satisfied, and with Blue stepping out to join him, he headed toward the cab. “It’s pretty damn quiet out there. Wonder why they stopped blowing holes in the Truck.” He popped the base of the clip with the heel of his palm. It was locked up nice and tight. “Think they wanna take ’er alive?”
Blue scoffed a breathy piff, “I don’t think anyone’d wanna take her anywhere, any way. She’s not exactly a pretty little girl, Molly.”
Molly gasped, pulled his best offended face, and put a hand to his chest. He put the same hand to his lips, smooched it, and laid it against the cold metal wall of the hall. “She didn’t mean it, punkin. Momma loves you.” He narrowed his eyes at Blue and barked “You tell her she’s pretty right now, dammit.”
Blue rolled her eyes, “We’re about to go do some serious shooting, and you’re wisecracking. You’re impossible, Molly Thatcher.”
“But at least I drive a pretty truck.”
With a groaned “please,” and a hand-wave, Blue pushed passed Molly, stepped over the headless bird corpse in the middle of the floor, and opened up the door to the cab. The blast shutters were still shut tight, and the home front had been as quiet as could be. She didn’t like that part; quiet was never good, especially when you were expecting the sounds of heavy machinery, explosives, and/or really, really hot stuff doing it’s thing on poor, unsuspecting metal.
But Blue didn’t fret. It was suspicious, sure, but those criminal-sorts always were, weren’t they? So instead of worrying about that quiet waiting for them out there, she simply resolved to cast it out like the eerie demon it was – and the only way she knew how to break up the calm before the storm was by bringing on the storm.
With a steadying breath and a glance over her shoulder at Molly, who nodded his ready, Blue threw the lever and sent the blast shutters snapping back upon their rollers.