Thursday, April 10, 2025

Junktown Blues

 

 .......This is an older story. Haven't updated here in a while, and I wanted to post something. I can only promise more updates in the future- not sure what or when.

Here is the original story, Junktown Blues. I've been working on creating a series of short stories of the same name- but this story fits within that context as something I want work on to fit within that compilation in the future. And I know the text is messed up- note to self to fix this garbage later.

Maybe.

Enjoy! ~BCR

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Lying in his bed was Bolt. He was sixteen, and he and his friends lived in the Cell. Their home was a mess of welded plates and support pillars dug out at the bottom of a giant mountain of garbage, cleverly hidden around twists and turns through endless piles of scrap metals, plastics, and trash. Piles of stuff got dumped daily onto Junktown from the big city to the east, New Dallas. But Junktown was less of a town than a playground for orphaned kids, a place where they gathered into underground gangs, barely scraping by while hiding from deranged scavengers, murderous robots, and rampaging bikers.

Bolt lounged on his bed, smiling up at his ceiling posters of deathmatch gladiators who ruled the big city arenas. But his favorite poster was an old, worn-out recruitment photo for the Church. ‘Protect. Serve. Join Today!’ It had a squad of Angels on it; giant humanoid shaped suits of flying armor armed with swords and guns, with huge wings. Bolt dreamed of joining the academy and getting a real chance to fly like the Cherubim pilots did in their Angels. His bedroom door flew open, and suddenly the sounds of the twins angrily arguing filled the room.

Nuh-uh!” Yelled Flare, her mess of long red hair waving while she sneered at her brother through the doorway, “Bolt’s gunna be in the big race, and he’s gunna win!”

Burner walked in behind her, rolling his eyes at his twin sister, arms crossed. He had short red hair cut close to his scalp and freckles on his pale cheeks. He smiled at Bolt, “Bolt dudn’t have to prove anything to the bikers! ‘Sides, kids who go to the big race always get buried or wipe out on purpose, just so’s the bikers don’t get ‘em! Ain’t that right Bolt?”

Flare ran over to Bolt’s bed and climbed up, jumping up and down on it while she yelled, “Bolt would never join those nasty, old, ugly bikers! He’s the fastest, and he’s gunna win, and then they’ll leave us alone forever!”

Bolt had won both of the last two kid’s races at the big track. He had easily skated circles around all of the fastest kids in Junktown. After the last race, though, one of the bikers stood up and pointed at him after he won, grinning at him like a fresh piece of meat. He saw the biker say something, but he couldn’t hear it over the roar of the kids cheering his name and hoisting him overhead as the winner of the kid race – Bolt! Bolt! Bolt!

“…Bolt?” Flare stared at him, looking worried.

Bolt smiled weakly at her, “I guess I don’t have much choice anymore.” Flare smiled back.

Burner ran to the bed, jumped up and knocked over his sister, then scrambled onto Bolt’s right knee and grinned at him with a toothy, crazy look, “I have to show you something Bolt! Come on, get outta bed, you gotta see!”

Flare got up on Bolt’s other knee, “He’s making-“

Burner tackled his sister and shoved his hands over and partially into her mouth. The two started screaming and fighting on the bed, rolling around and onto Bolt. Bolt pushed them off and got up, then started putting his skates on, checking and rechecking the Power Cores for cracks and a good charge. He fiddled with the emitters on the underside of the metallic shoes, making sure nothing had gunked them up before fitting them onto his feet and strapping them on. He tapped his heels, turning them on. He always enjoyed the familiar shudder and hum of the emitters under his feet, before jumping up and lifting off, hovering a couple of feet off the ground over the jets of flame that blew under him, suspending him in the air and burning the floor. Bolt clicked them off again, then looked back at the twins, who were still yelling and wrestling on his bed. “Burn-“

WHY DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO MESS EVERYTHING UP?!” Yelled Burner. “GET OFFA ME BURN, BOLT’S GUNNA GET MAD-“ yelled Flare.

BURN!” Yelled Bolt. The two stopped wrestling and looked back at Bolt sheepishly.

Are you going to show me the thing, or what?”

The three walked single file out of the bedroom and into the main room of the Cell. It, too, was a chaos of patchy welded metal plates and crisscrossed supports, all carefully fused to the floor and ceiling so the Cell wouldn’t collapse. Spike sat on a couch, eating a bowl of stale dry cereal, still wearing his studded jacket and too-big spiky helmet. He waved at the trio, and Bolt waved back. The flash of whatever Gear was working on lit up the edges of her door on the far side of the room. Wrench was nowhere to be seen, and Bolt was glad for that at least. Burn led the three to a big metal plate, which he budged just enough to reveal a hole that led deeper down into the Cell.

I started digging this tunnel a month ago to get away from Flare-“

Hey!” Flare scowled at her brother.

-But I found some good stuff down here, too!” Burn ducked into his tunnel and beckoned them to follow. Bolt had to crawl to fit in the long cramped space, and carefully avoided the precarious looking supports along the way. “Uh, Burn, you sure this tunnel is safe?”

Yeah! I had Gear look it over, and she said-“ Bolt knocked the ceiling with his back, and the sound of shifting trash made them all freeze. The ceiling buckled couple of inches, sliding down painfully slow, and Bolt felt his stomach hit the floor before it stopped. “…She uh… s-she said it was fine.”

The three hurried the rest of the way. The end of the tunnel was an open area, and Bolt could tell that Burner had definitely decorated it like a room. There were interesting pieces of scrap sitting in piles on the floor, and there were poorly made welds everywhere on the ceiling, walls, and floor. There was even a bed made out of old clothes and magazines. “Here!” Burner rushed off toward a three-legged table propped up with junk and waited until Bolt was close. He waited dramatically, and then he pulled back a dirty cloth to reveal a pair of partially repaired skates, just the right size for Burner. Bolt grinned at the skates, ruffled Burner’s short red hair, and picked them up. “Did you do all this yourself? These are good welds, Burn! Nothing like the hackjob you did on the walls.” Flare laughed and Burner turned red, but he was still smiling. “The walls were just practice! The right skate was almost done, but… I broke the tank.“ Burn pointed to an old oxygen tank with a busted top lying in one corner of the room, jumbled together with old welding tools held together with bits of wire and melted plastic.

Bolt smiled, amazed at what he had managed with such a shoddy set of tools. “Well, you’ll just have to borrow my old tank and torch to finish them!” Burn looked up at Bolt in awe and disbelief, “Really?” Bolt nodded, smiling wider. Burner ran up to his sister and hugged her, and the two jumped up and down happily and danced around the makeshift workshop. “I’m finally going to have skates!” yelled Burner gleefully.

And once yours are done, you can make mine!” said Flare, equally happily.

No way! I’d never make girl skates!”

The two started arguing, and eventually Burn tackled his sister again, and they went right back to punching, kicking, and screaming in the piles of trash on the floor. Bolt watched them and laughed. Eventually, making sure they didn’t notice when he did, he left.


Most Junktown kids knew better than to go too fast. Bolt had seen lots of kids, too many to count, land in a pile of trash at high speed and never get up again. Plenty of gangs had kids missing a foot, a hand, or even a whole leg; usually they just replaced them with whatever could be screwed on, and they’d be skating again tomorrow. But Bolt relished the dangerous, weightless feeling of falling forward so fast that the air pushed back against him like a rushing wave of water. He broke into a full sprint once he got out of the Cell, pumping his legs, skipping and hopping between steps to build up speed, burning or melting the trash he passed over. The hot Texas sun shone bright across the metal wastes, a blinding silvery lake covered in piles of rubbish that choked out anything green near or around Junktown.

Bolt skipped his way up a mountain of garbage and sat at the tip top, admiring the big city in the distance and the buildings so tall they pierced the clouds. Cars flew everywhere there faster than any kid could, quicker than any biker, weightlessly soaring through the air to, from, and around the city. Garbage trucks, freight cars, busses, sports cars, Police cars – Bolt had seen them all, sitting like he did every day, dreaming of the Angels he’d never seen, which were always just too-distant specks over New Dallas. One day, he’d go to the city, and he’d finally see an Angel, and maybe he’d even get close enough to make out its squadron, like in his poster.

Today though, he saw something else.

A bus flew across the old highway out of New Dallas, low enough to the ground that it turned the scrap underneath and behind it into a molten river of glowing orange. Bolt looked hard at it, trying to discern anything about it, but it was really far away and moving fast. He smiled, and put on his goggles. He jumped up and throttled his skates, already skipping down the mountain, kicking and boosting off the ground, bounding over the piles of garbage, going faster and faster, and keeping his eyes on the bus more than the ground.

Bolt had no idea what kind of crazy person would drive a bus along the highway straight through biker territory. Closer now, he could tell the bus was a scrapper, assembled from repurposed junk. It looked nothing like the clean city passenger busses that occasionally flew overhead. Something was following behind it, too. A lot of something’s actually! Bolt’s mind raced with the possibilities. Maybe a caravan is coming through Junktown… He thought of some good scrap he could pawn. Maybe… Maybe they’ll let Junktown kids ride, too! Bolt started thinking of all the stuff he could sell for a trip to New Dallas, all the while pumping his legs faster and harder, flying like a bouncing bullet toward the caravan.

Bounding up and over a hill of trash, Bolt finally laid eyes on the bus, and his heart dropped. He saw bikes following the bus. Not hired mercenaries or caravan guards, but bikers, heavily armed and taking shots at the bus with pistols and shotguns, whooping and hollering over the roar of the bus and their own bikes. They were all adults, some younger than others, but all gangsters of the worst kind, Bolt figured. The group left a river of molten steel behind them, passing over the highway at an insane pace. Bolt stopped, cut off his skates, and ducked behind an old blown out hovercar to watch from a safe distance.

There were eleven bikers in all. The shots they fired pounded dents into the sides of the hoverbus, but didn’t appear to damage it all that much. Bolt saw one of the clear glass windows get hit and not even crack. There was a sign on one side of the bus that Bolt could read: Lemonade. There was an even smaller sign near it that read and Guns. Both were barely legible, with some backwards letters, and all painted in an ugly yellow.

A biker rode up to the side of the bus, waving a shotgun over his head, yelling at the bus, “Open up, goddamn it!” He fired a shot at the closest window, which bounced off in a deadly spray. Much to the biker and Bolt’s surprise, the window rolled down. The biker divided his attention between the window and reloading his shotgun.

A kid popped his head out of the window. He was young, even younger than Bolt. He had sunglasses on, and a leather jacket that was too big for him. He definitely looked like a Junktown kid, and his long hair flapped in the wind. The biker didn’t stop reloading, although he looked just as confused as Bolt felt. He pointed the shotgun at the kid, who held out a hand, palm out toward the gangster, as if to say stop.

Pull ov-“ A loud boom rolled over the wastes. Bolt gasped, waiting for the kid to tumble out of the open window. But he never did. The biker fell over the side of his bike, falling down into a sideways roll. Three others trailing behind him turned off the highway to avoid crashing into the mangled mass, but the bike rolled under another biker close behind and bounced up and directly into bike behind him. All three bikes exploded in a huge plume of fire, smoke, bike and biker. Bolt felt the shockwave, and looked from the distant explosion to the bus.

The kid on the bus smiled at the huge crater now far behind, and then leaned out of the window to watch the bikers turn off the highway and ride away into the wastes. He gave them a friendly wave as they went, yelling as loud as he could in a happy voice, “Get fucked, assholes!”

Bolt!”

Bolt jumped, flipping on his skates and boosting twenty feet into the air out of pure reflex. Below him, he saw his best friend Spike being thrown backward into a pile of trash from the blowback of Bolt’s sudden boost, “Spike?!” Bolt dove for the ground and skated over to Spike to help pull him out of the trash he was stuck in. “What’re you doing out here? This is biker territory-“

Spike looked angry, but his voice was cracked with fear, “I-I was looking for you, Bolt!” Spike checked his skates, which flickered back on. Spike had always been a little clumsy, but he always had Bolt’s back when it mattered. “It’s the Cell – Flare’s hurt!”


The trip home was painful because Bolt couldn’t leave Spike behind, despite wanting to ride back to the Cell faster than he ever had. Bolt was first inside with Spike close behind him.

Burner was digging near the hole to his workshop, which had been covered by a heap of fallen scrap. Gear had a robotic arm working to move piles of trash from the avalanche of garbage that had shifted and fallen into the Cell. She was working on a hydraulic support near the pile, looking frantic and panicked under her hooded jacket. “-j-just a minute, I’ve almost got it Burn! Hold onto her!” Burn was crying while he dug, holding onto something poking out near the bottom of the collapsed tunnel while he dug with his other arm. Bolt felt the blood drain out of him when he saw that it was Flare’s arm, pale, unmoving, and lifeless.

Wrench stood nearby, watching and wearing a grim look. He looked disinterested, more intent on fiddling with his missing hand than helping. Bolt felt anger boiling up in his stomach and ran over to the collapse. “Bolt, here, help me-“ said Gear, trying to shift a big horizontal sheet of metal enough to shove the support under it. Immediately, Bolt tried to lift it, but it must have weighed more than a car, maybe more than a bus, since there were tons of garbage piled over it. Even with all three of them – Bolt, Spike, and Gear together, they couldn’t budge it an inch. Spike and Gear backed away to catch their breath, but Bolt kept trying, lifting until he felt his back pull tight and his arms grow weak. “…It’s no use. She’s already dead anyway.” Wrench sounded like he was complaining.

Burner had stopped digging or crying completely, and stared quietly at his sister’s bloodied limp hand, his eyes wide. Bolt glared at Wrench, who wasn’t even looking their way anymore. Instead, he was messing with his metallic arm, the one he’d lost falling off his skates last year, which had been replaced with a big metal tool, the old wrench that he used to just use as a weapon.

Bolt flicked on his skates and shoved his feet into the ground under him, burning molten pools into the floor of the Cell. Wrench yelled at him, “Bolt, stop! You’ll-“ Bolt screamed in effort, but he felt the metal plate cut deep into his hands, down to the bone. But he gripped harder and didn’t let go, and only boosted harder. The plate shifted, and one whole side of the Cell shifted with it, along with the heaps of trash that had piled there with the cave in; the entire wall moved, but Bolt rose, and the plate rose with him. Gear ran over and shoved the hydraulic support she’d made into the newly created gap. Immediately, the plate lifted higher faster, and Burner pulled his sister into his arms, weeping into her long red hair, muttering between sobs, “Please wake up. Please, please… please…”

Bolt couldn’t feel his arms or his hands. He flicked off his skates and stomped his way over to Wrench. “Well well, looks like Bolt saves th-“

Bolt slammed his fist into Wrench’s face as hard as he could, splattering it with fresh, hot blood. Wrench reeled from the blow, stunned. Bolt grabbed him by his shirt and pulled him close, hoping Wrench would take a swing. But Bolt saw fear in his face, the kind of fear he’d only ever seen when bikers were around and Wrench thought nobody was looking at him.

What happened?!” Yelled Bolt into his face.

Gear spoke up, “Wrench told Flare to show him Burn’s workshop. Then the tunnel collapsed, and Wrench yelled at Spike to go get you.” Bolt looked back at Burner, but Burn was looking at a wall, whispering into his sister’s ear, rocking back and forth with her in his arms.

Wrench stared daggers at Gear, but the same fear from earlier came back to him when he met Bolt’s eyes. “What, you think I did this? Burner’s shitty tunnel practically exploded! Whatever the fuck he had in there was unstable, it must have-“

Bolt punched him again, but Wrench didn’t falter this time. He pulled out of Bolt’s grasp, looking angry now and ready to swing. But he didn’t. Instead, the two stood inches from each other, their faces nearly touching. Spike stepped in, staring at the space between them, “Gear, make sure Burner and Flare are okay.” He swallowed hard, looking from Wrench to Bolt and back again, “Do you two really want to do this? Right now? Flare needs help, we have to-“

No. We have to settle this shit now,” said Wrench, “Me and Bolt, the fastest there is,” he said sarcastically.

Bolt laughed, “What, you want to race for the Cell or something? I’d beat you barefoot.”

Half-pipe deathmatch. Right now.” Gear, Spike, and even Burner looked up at Wrench, each one looking tired and scared, but each was silent.

Bolt smiled, happy to get exactly what he wanted.


The old half-pipe wasn’t far off from the Cell. It was a public place, and although the sun was starting to set on another summer day, it was busy with dozens of kids skating around and on it. Teenage gangsters with matching color or themed outfits skimmed around on their hover skates, laughing and giggling, yelling and fighting, trading and racing. One of the older teenagers on the top of the half-pipe looked and spotted three figures coming toward them. He squinted, and then grinned, “Guys! Guys, it’s Bolt! The champ is here!” A dozen teenagers skated off toward them – Bolt and Wrench skated side by side, not looking at anyone or saying anything. Bolt had bandages over his hands, and his fingers were turning blue at the tips. Wrench’s face was swollen up, and his eye was black where Bolt had slugged him. Spike followed behind them, and yelled when they approached, “Wrench has challenged Bolt to a deathmatch! Everybody off the ramp!” The teen gangsters everywhere whooped and cheered, and within seconds the half-pipe was clear. The teens gathered up into a crowd around it and everyone stopped to watch. Even the little kids skated up onto big piles or nearby mountains of trash to watch.

From opposite sides of the gap, Bolt and Wrench stared each other down with angry expressions. One of the older teen girls yelled up the half-pipe at them, “Hey, where’s Bolt’s weapon? Wrench already has his!” There were snickers and laughs from the crowd, and someone tossed a sword up which landed next to Bolt. Bolt stared at it, unsure if he could even hold it in his numb hands. Wrench turned a dark shade of red, “This isn’t my weapon anymore bitch, it’s my arm!” A loud oooh ran through the crowd, and someone tossed an old pipe up to Wrench, which elicited more laughs from the crowd.

Spike stepped up into the center of the basin of the half-pipe and raised his hands over his head, “Fellow Junktowners, Wrench has challenged Bolt, the undisputed winner of the last two Championship Races! Today’s match is a death match – nobody is allowed to leave until the other is dead!” The crowd cheered and clapped.

Cellmates, start your skates!” Wrench swung the long, straight pipe experimentally, and Bolt picked up the sword. It felt much heavier than it looked, and he felt the cuts in his hands open up as he gingerly gripped it in his right hand. The bandages turned red, and he felt blood dribbling out onto the pommel of the sword and drop to the ground. Flicking on their skates, they stared each other down while hovering over their respective edges. They both looked at Spike, who nodded at each of them, and ran off the half-pipe. Under the roar of the crowd of teenagers and kids, they could barely hear him say, “START!”

Bolt flew down into the half-pipe, coming up the other side and meeting Wrench before he even made it to the halfway point. Bolt swung his sword up to cut at Wrench’s chest, but only met his pipe and wrench. The sword rang against the metal like a bell, and it took every bit of strength Bolt had not to drop it as he sailed past him and sped up the other side. They both spun around, each hanging weightless in the air, staring and trying to see what the other was going to do when they came down. Bolt grabbed the sword with his other hand, but his blood had made the whole handle slick. Wrench looked at Bolt with a hateful, foul smile.

Bolt tilted into his fall, boosting himself down the ramp and up the other side, and his sword met Wrench before he was on the ramp. Bolt’s sword hit the pipe again, but the jaws of Wrench’s wrench wrapped around the base where blade met hilt. Wrench twisted, and the blade snapped off of Bolt’s sword. Bolt flew high through the air, still holding the useless handle in his numb hands, watching the blade of his sword fall away from him. He tried to drop the useless handle, but his fingers wouldn’t move anymore. Wrench landed on the other side, watching Bolt soar through the air from the other side of the half-pipe. Bolt looked out past the mountains of trash and saw New Dallas, a rainbow of dazzling lights in the distance. It was like thousands of technicolor bugs zooming around an electric beehive.

Bolt had to boost hard to land properly, still holding the bladeless hilt. He had to shake it out of his hands, but it finally slipped out of his grip. He looked and saw that his bandages had ripped open, and his hands underneath were pouring blood from cuts so deep he could see inside them. His stomach turned, and he tried to close his hands, but his discolored fingers wouldn’t move anymore. Wrench rested his pipe on his shoulder, shaking his head sadly at Bolt, “Well slowpoke, if you give up now, I’ll let you come back and live in the Cell. I’ll even help you bury your girlfriend!”

The crowd booed Wrench, but he just laughed at them. Someone held Spike back by one of his arms, “Fuck you Wrench! I knew you did it to Flare on purpose – fuckin’ kill him, Bolt! KILL HIM!” The crowd joined in and chanted with Spike, “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!”

Bolt didn’t break eye contact with Wrench, watching and looking at him from his feet to his face. He felt a fresh wave of disgust wash over him, knowing he had to win. Wrench shrugged and half yelled under the roar of the chanting crowd, “Well, if you insist, I guess I’ll kill him!”

Bolt and Wrench both jumped down into the half-pipe, but Bolt went slow and jumped too high. Wrench came up fast, faster than Bolt had seen him go before, and he swung his arm and the pipe so hard he spun into the swing. Bolt ducked and cut off his skates, slamming his back into the half-pipe, and then kicked his feet into Wrench’s skates. Bolt boosted hard enough to send him flying out of the half-pipe and into a nearby crowd, landing in a pile of surprised teenagers. When he woke up, Bolt heard Wrench screaming; he saw Wrench lying in the middle of the pipe holding one of his mangled legs and screaming a terrified, blood curdling yell. The Cores in his shoes had exploded, taking his feet and most of his shins with them. There were teenagers around him saying nothing, but they were tying metal wires around his legs near the bloody stumps and bandaging him up. He might not be dead, thought Bolt, but he won’t live through the night out here. Once they were done, everyone left, with Bolt being carried back by Spike. Night fell, and Wrench never came back.


Bolt was carried home as the new leader of the Cell. Plenty of kids, mostly the older teenagers, asked him if he was going to be in the race the day after tomorrow. “I… I don’t know. We need help, Flare’s injured, she-“ Before he could say more, several of them yelled at their buddies to get their best doctors to the Cell, taking as much medicine as they could scrounge up.

But Flare was still unconscious when Bolt and everyone else made it back to the Cell. “I don’t know Bolt,” said Gear, who had been working to help her since they left. She and the other kids were trying to figure out what was wrong, why her breathing was so shallow. “I think… I mean, she got crushed. I just don’t…” Gear’s voice cracked, and she lowered her head. The other’s tried to help, but after hours of trying, nobody knew what to do.

Bolt went into Gear’s room and saw Flare lying on the bed, her red hair a dirty mess on the pillow. Burner hadn’t left her the whole time, still holding her hand. He turned and looked at Bolt when he saw him, “Flare would… she always wanted you to be leader, Bolt. She hates Wrench.” He tried to smile, but sobbed instead, and fresh tears streamed down his face. Bolt hugged him, and stayed there with him.

It was already dark outside by the time everyone had left. Burn had fallen asleep still holding his sister’s hand, but Bolt just stared at Flare, watching her breathing. He looked at his hands covered in fresh bandages, and none of his fingers would move. Blood still soaked through, despite changing them twice. Gear came in, “Bolt, you’re still awake? You should-“

I need you to do something for me, Gear.”

Gear frowned, but nodded.

Skating at night was the most dangerous thing most anybody could do, so nobody did. Junktown didn’t have lights, and skates burned brighter than a bonfire in the dark. Gear had helped Bolt strap Flare to his back and change the cores in his skates. Despite his bruises and useless hands, he knew Flare wouldn’t make it through the night. He had to take her to New Dallas, and it couldn’t wait.

Without the usual sounds of distant bikes roaring across the wastes or the Junktown kids boosting around, the silence was deafening and terrifying. It was practically pitch black outside, and the moon was hidden behind the clouds tonight. Bolt carefully flicked on his skates and glided toward a more open area, hoping he could remember how to make it to the highway. From there, he could easily see if someone or something was watching him, and there wouldn’t be any piles of junk to slam into.

Slowly, he made his way through the twists and turns around the Cell, past and over heaps of garbage, trying to listen under the low hum of his skates for anything. Something shifted in a pile of trash, and he stopped, trying to discern whatever it was in the darkness.

Nothing moved. What felt like forever passed by in complete, dead silence.

The sound of shifting metal parts made Bolt turn again. He spotted two glowing blue eyes in the darkness, barely illuminating a metallic jaw filled with sharp, metal teeth. Junkyard dogs ate piles of scrap metal and chewed through kids like snacks. They ran faster than most kids could skate, and they never got tired. But Bolt wasn’t most kids.

Bolt kicked off and pumped his legs, bounding blindly through the night as fast as he could. He could hear the big metal dog running close behind, howling an unearthly, blood curdling noise. Bolt was going by memory now, trying to remember every bit of garbage that had shifted in the last week or fallen from the dump-trucks. He remembered what to do as he went, jumping over rusty metal pipes and deep sinkholes of trash. Bolt remembered a huge pile of polycrete that had been dumped and leapt over it, listening to the Junkyard dog not bother to climb over, but instead plow through it. Even after that, it was close enough that he could hear the whirring of its limbs pounding as it ran through the heaps of garbage. It howled again behind him. He felt a sickening feeling well up in his stomach at the noise, and it lurched when he actually heard a response, another horrible but distinct howl close by, and then a third from somewhere else.

Bolt raced blindly toward the highway, listening to the three hounds close in around him, still barely managing to avoid the half-remembered obstacles he had to bounce around, over, and across while still managing to keep Flare on his back, who he could hear breathing shallow breaths on his shoulder.

A blinding light broke the darkness. Something big was barreling toward him and the dogs. In a panic, he slammed his skates against the dog next to him and boosted as hard as he could. The blast sent him flying out of the path of the bus, and he turned over in the air to land, but when he tried to boost to land on his skates, he heard a pop, and skidded painfully across the ground. One of the dogs was a nothing but a whining molten puddle, and whatever it was must have slammed into another, blowing it into pieces littering the area. But the last one, the one that had followed him all the way from the Cell, the same one that he’d boosted in the side, got up and limped toward him. Bolt landed on his stomach thankfully, and he could still hear Flare breathing in his ear. But the cold blue lights of the Junkyard dog were getting closer, and he could see the warm red glow of its belly furnace smoldering on its underside.

A boom rang out in the night, and Bolt saw the flash of a big gun go off. The dog stumbled and growled at his attacker, rearing up for a leap. Three more shots, boom, boom, boom, exploded in the night, one after another. Bolt turned to see the silhouette of a kid, and the flashes all came out of his outstretched palm. The Junkyard dog didn’t stopped moving, and the glow of its eyes dimmed in the darkness.

“…The hell you doing out here at night, kid? Shit’s dangerous around here you know, ‘specially at night.” Said the younger kid. Bolt could hear a clicking noise coming from him in the dark, and the same hoverbus from the highway was coming back toward them. Another kid stuck his head out of one of the bus’s windows, “What, you trying to find costumers at night now, Annie? Look at ‘em! Probably got a disease or summin’.” Annie looked back and shrugged at the other kid in the bus window, “No, I just saw robo-dogs, and I hate those robo-dogs, so I figure I’d kill ‘em.”

Whatever.” The other kid ducked back into the bus and slammed the window shut. Annie looked over at Bolt, his mirrored sunglasses reflecting Bolt’s confused look. The area was illuminated by the headlights on the hoverbus, which looked surprisingly big, bigger even than a normal passenger hoverbus, so far as Bolt could tell. “Don’t mind Warpigs. He hates getting woken up.” Annie smiled and fished a shotgun shell out of his jacket pocket. Bolt watched curiously as he pressed the shell into the inside of his elbow, where it slid up into his arm toward the wrist and clicked. He loaded three more shells into arm, then pumped his fist in the air, and his whole arm clicked exactly like a loaded shotgun.

Who the hell are you?” Said Bolt, still lying stomach first in the garbage.

Oh, I’m Annie. Wanna buy some lemonade?” Annie smiled mischievously.


Warpigs reluctantly agreed to let Bolt and Flare ride on the bus to New Dallas. “It’s his bus after all,” said Annie, “He built it, and Mysteryman, too!” Annie pointed at the android driver. Mysteryman had bright glowing eyes, and sat in the driver’s seat, expertly working the levers and panels to keep the bus moving.

Does he talk?” Bolt had met a few androids before, and they made him uneasy. Some of them even said they used to be people, and talked about missing their skin.

Warpigs tells him not to…” Annie looked at Flare with a neutral stare, “Is she alright?”

Bolt looked at Flare, and saw her barely breathing. He felt hot tears streaming down his cheeks when he looked at her, and his voice cracked, “I-I don’t know.”

Annie frowned, “Don’t worry kid, we’ll be there soon. Let’s go Mysteryman! Give ‘er all she’s got!” The hoverbus shook and sputtered, then zipped off toward the big city at a high speed. Bolt watched New Dallas growing in the distance, the dazzling colors dancing in the black night. It had always seemed like a distant dream, a far flung hope, but now, when Bolt would be there soon, it seemed menacing and dark, glowing like the blue lights of the Junkyard dogs he had barely escaped.


Mysteryman drove the bus up to the hospital, which was one of the biggest and tallest buildings in the whole city. It was clean everywhere here, and all the buildings, people’s clothes and cars, and even the ground looked new. Despite it being the middle of the night, hundreds of people were coming and going around the hospital. Bolt stepped off the bus and realized that the streets were all polycrete, with no metals at all except for the tall light poles that dotted the nearby streets. He held Flare in his arms and walked toward the big hospital, and he was immediately approached by a strange man in a white coat, “Excuse me, young man, what’s wrong?” He looked from Bolt to Flare. Something about him made Bolt feel nervous, but he spoke up anyway, “My friend, she’s hurt, she needs help, I don’t know how much longer… I don’t…” Bolt felt the world shift under his feet and lost his balance. The man caught him before he fell, but his arms were so weak, Bolt almost dropped Flare. The man called for help, and a minute later they were both being pushed into the building in beds on wheels, with doctors shoving things in Bolt’s mouth and pricking him and Flare with needles. Whatever they gave him was making him sleepy, and he panicked before losing consciousness. He was scared, horribly afraid to separate from his friend, watching her being led away from him. He saw them taking her apart, peeling away her skin and replacing her insides, piece by piece, with mechanical parts. “I remember… their faces. But not their names…” said the android. How a robot looked sad, Bolt didn’t know, but it did just the same. “My family… they took them.”


Bolt woke up in a hospital bed. He tried jumping out of it, but he was attached at the arm. They had put a huge needle in his arm, and he pulled it out. When he did, the bed started beeping at him, but he ignored it, instead suddenly realizing that his hands worked. But they didn’t just work; they were perfect, as if he had never cut his hands at all. He flexed them, and they weren’t even sore. An old scar on his right hand was gone, too. Bolt checked an old scar on his knee he’d got in a crash two years ago, but it was gone too. Fear crept into his mind – maybe he wasn’t himself anymore, maybe he was a robot under his skin, maybe-

The door to his room opened, and a doctor stepped inside. “Hey there, Bolt. How are you feeling?”

Bolt didn’t recognize the doctor smiling at him, and suddenly felt naked without his old clothes or his skates. Shit, he thought, the cores were shot… he remembered blowing them out on the road, and then he remembered why he was here at all. He looked up at the doctor, suddenly angry, “Where’s my friend? I want to see Flare-“

The doctor waved his hands, “Woah woah there Bolt, easy! Of course you can see your friend – Flare, was it? – She’s just fine, I assure you, although she was nearly beyond even our help when you brought her in. You saved her life!”

Bolt wanted to sigh in relief, but he still felt naked in his hospital gown and out of place in the spotless hospital room. The doctor smiled at him, “Okay, well, your clothes are here-“ the doctor took Bolt’s old clothes with his skates sitting on top an armed guard in the doorway. A guard in a hospital? The doctor handed Bolt his stuff; someone had cleaned both his clothes and skates. Bolt looked up at the doctor, who smiled at him, “Alright, well, get dressed and we’ll talk in my office, Bolt.” The doctor left the room and closed the door behind him. Bolt heard the lock click into place. There was no handle on it, just a keypad with no numbers.

Bolt scoured the room for power cores while he hastily pulled on his clothes. He’d found a dozen lamps in Junktown that were nearly identical to the ones in his room, and he knew exactly how to take them apart. But when he did, he found that the cores had already been taken out. Defeated, he knocked on the door, skates on, dead or not. An armed guard opened it, and Bolt could see a second guard directly behind the first. “The doctor will see you now.”

The two guards walked Bolt to the doctor’s office and pushed him in. There were books and stacks of papers piled high on his desk, and he sat lounging in his chair, smiling at Bolt when he walked in. “Hello, Bolt. I imagine you’re wondering how I know your name?”

Bolt said nothing. The doctor waited, and then eventually shrugged.

So… no questions, then?”

Where’s Flare?”

The doctor sighed, “As I said, she’s fine. Here-“ The doctor pointed to a small television near one corner of the room. He tapped on an electronic panel on his desk, quickly flipping through a set of menus. The picture on the TV changed to a camera in a hospital room, and Bolt saw a small red-headed girl laying in a hospital bed. There were tons of lines and numbers on the screen, too, none of which Bolt understood. “See that?” The doctor pointed at a steady beeping line on the screen, “Heart rate is good, breathing is normal. Flare will wake up feeling better than she probably ever has. She was irradiated, malnourished, and suffering from a dozen different maladies, which are all now little more than a memory. You yourself weren’t much better off.”

The doctor flipped the channel off of the camera, and a beautiful woman in a bright red sports hovercar danced on the screen, along with a price tag over the car. Hot ladies, hotter cars! Don’t be a wimp, drive a NeoToyo! Bolt looked back at the doctor, trying not to look as mad as he felt.

“…and the two of you, Bolt, could live happily here in New Dallas. We could find a family for each of you. You could go to a nice schools, have parents, a yard, friends, and spend summers skating to your heart’s content in a safe neighborhood, one without bikers trying to hunt you and your friends down. No more scavenging to survive. No more struggle to live.”

And I could join the Church. Bolt thought of the things he’d been wanting for as long as he could remember, and the harsh reality of Junktown. He’d lived in the wastes since he was younger than Flare and Burn, always on the run. It was all right in front of him on clean plate, ready for him and Flare. But every time he looked at the doctor, he couldn’t help but feel his skin crawl. Something about his offer sounded so sincere and wonderful that even he believed it. Bolt considered having a family, a real family, and finally made up his mind.

I wanna see Flare. I need to tell her everything’s alright and calm her down when she wakes up.” The doctor smiled. He tapped his finger on his desk and spoke to the panel on it, “Please take young Bolt here to Flare’s room. She’s in forty-six-fifteen-A. Thank you,” the doctor got up to shake Bolt’s hand, but he was already leaving.

One guard walked in front of Bolt, and another behind him. They both had swords and guns, and they were definitely wearing some kind of armor under their uniforms. Their feet clicked in perfect unison as the three walked into a nearby elevator, rising floor after floor up to forty-six. One of the guards looked at Bolt in the elevator and chuckled, saying nothing. Bolt focused on how high up they were going, wondering if the doctor planned it that way.

Bolt’s heart pounded when they walked up to Flare’s door, which the guard took his time opening. Bolt barged past him into the room and threw the door shut behind him, which locked. He heard the guards laugh on the other side.

Flare looked cleaner than he’d ever seen her. Her breathing was steady and even, nothing like it had been. All the color in her skin had come back, and she definitely seemed perfectly healthy so far as Bolt could tell. He carefully slid the needle out of her arm, and was almost glad to see a little blood. “Flare, wake up,” he said softly, “Please Flare, you’ve got to wake up.”

Flare turned over and groaned unhappily, but then her eyes shot open. She looked around and saw Bolt, then flew to his chest and clung to him, suddenly sobbing, “B-Bolt, Wrench, h-he made me – made me s-show him Burn’s skates, and he left… h-he…” she cried into his shirt, and he hugged her close to him, and she continued after a moment, “…but I knew you didn’t – that you w-wouldn’t leave me there-“ Bolt hushed her, and she quieted a little. He pulled away from her and grabbed the nearby lamp, taking it apart with a practiced ease. “W-where are we Bolt? What-“ Flare looked around the strange, too-clean place. She looked afraid, but it was replaced with awe when she saw the window. She looked out of it at the buildings across the way and the cars flying past both below and overhead.

We’ve gotta go, Flare,” Bolt whispered, hoping the cameras wouldn’t hear him. He tossed her the clean clothes they set out for her, and she quickly started dressing.

Go?” Said Flare loudly, “Back to Junktown?” Bolt popped the power core out of the lamp and smiled at Flare, then nodded. She smiled back.


The doctor ran through the halls. 4609A, 4609B, 4610A, 4610B… If Bolt got away, if the Champ managed to escape from the hospital, it might very well be his ass. His boss would have him killed if he let Bolt leave the hospital, leave the life planned for him and his friends.

The two guards spotted the doctor running toward the room, “Hey, what’s up, doc-“

OPEN THE DOOR YOU MORONS!”

While the one began to question him, the other immediately opened the door. A bright flash came from the room, and they all heard the sound of glass cracking. The guard who had opened the door pulled out his gun, “DON’T YOU DARE!” The guard didn’t aim it inside, but he lowered it. The doctor slumped against the inside of the doorway, gasping for air after the long run down the halls. Inside, Bolt had Flare on his back, both skates on, but only one powered on. He was already hovering, balancing himself two feet in the air on just the one skate. There were already fires burning in the room, and the skate was making a pool of molten polycrete.

Bolt, please, stop-!“ he continued trying to catch his breath, “For both your sakes, for your friend’s sake, stop! You could be happy here, all of you, just bring them here and we can help you! You could all have families, real homes!”

Bolt turned back and looked at the doctor, smiling sadly. “My Cellmates are my family.” Bolt tucked his arms under Flare’s legs and slammed into the window, feet-first, breaking through the glass and sailing out into busy Sector Four traffic.


Skating down a vertical surface was hard. Well, skating it wasn’t hard, but slowing down was. Bolt couldn’t see the street below past the hovercars roaring by at high speeds. Thousands of them were flying every which way in a cacophony of noises. Worse was the feeling of going faster, as Bolt leaned into his fall and used his skate to move through the air. He could feel the air blasting his goggles into his eye sockets, and Flare screamed wildly in his ear, gripping him so tight around his neck and waist that he could hardly breathe.

Bolt may not have liked it, but today, he relished the thought of really being the fastest. But he could hear sirens. He looked back – well, up – and saw two cars flying straight down, trying to catch up to them. They’ll just catch us when we land, he thought to himself.

But just then, Bolt passed an Angel.

It was big – bigger than any adult, but smaller than a bus. It was shaped like a person, with legs, arms, and a head. He’d never seen one so close before, but seeing it now was terrifying, although it looked just as shocked to see him as he was to see it. Something about finally seeing one made Bolt feel a little sad, because it looked so fake up close, so mechanical, and en-masse factory produced. It was all shiny reds and golds glimmering in the afternoon sun. Clean, pristine, and manufactured, just like everything else in New Dallas. Bolt smiled in spite of a despair he felt, like he’d lost something he didn’t know he had.

When he looked down again, he panicked. A dump-truck was fast approaching them, coming up blindingly fast. He would have to boost hard to avoid it, maybe too hard, and with only one skate, he might blow the core in his skate again. But Bolt smiled a sudden and crazed sort of smile. He looked back up at the Angel. As good a sign as any! He boosted hard, slowing down, and then boosted again toward the back end of the garbage truck. The police cars zoomed past it a second later, slowing down and searching for where the two kids had gone, but they were nowhere to be seen.


Bolt and Flare spent their time laughing on the long ride home in the back of the garbage truck. They were both happy to see New Dallas at a distance from the back of the truck, happy to be heading home to the Cell. It was an uneventful trip, the end to a long and terrible-

The race!” yelled Flare into Bolt’s ear. He nearly fell over in surprise. He had completely forgotten about the big race! They were quick to get back, hoping they could gather up their stuff and head to the track. But they were both surprised to find Gear, Burner, and Spike at home in the Cell. “FLARE!” Burn yelled and ran up to Bolt, crying happy tears when he saw his sister. Flare jumped off of Bolt’s back and tackled her brother, and the two were started laughing and wrestling on the floor. Spike ran over and hugged Bolt, and Gear joined in. The three watched Flare and Burn wrestle. “You guys!” Bolt said, “We’ve gotta go! I’ve got a race to win!”

What d’you mean Bolt, the race was yesterday!” Flare and Bolt had been gone for two days. Spike and Burn showed up to the race yesterday in the hopes that Bolt would have been there, and Gear stayed in the Cell like she always did. Everybody expected to see Bolt there and for him to try to win the big race, and all the Junktown gangs were worried and sad when he didn’t.

At first, Bolt was sad about missing the race. He learned later that Wrench had been there on a hoverbike, and he took third place, guaranteeing him a spot in a prominent biker gang. Spike heard that someone had given him a bike in the hopes that he would run Bolt down and kill him, and after the race, Wrench even made a point of calling out Bolt as a coward for not showing up. Wrench knew all too well where the Cell was, and now that he was a biker, Bolt and his gang would have to leave their home. Bolt thought about the doctor’s offer, and he thought about going to join the Church and becoming a Cherubim pilot. He thought about family and new friends, about leaving Junktown and the Cell behind, as well as Wrench, Junkyard dogs, stale cereal and mountains of trash.

Once he told the gang they had to leave, Burner was the first to ask what they were all thinking, “Where are we gunna go, Bolt?”

He smiled. “I dunno, Burn. But we’ll go together.”

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Jim Slinger pt. 1

 It's been a while, but Jim came to mind. So here's some Blue Lights featuring Jim the Slinger. 

******

"....Thanks Mike! Tonight here in the market district of Sector Three, a lone, armed man barged into a local clothier and slaughtered more than two dozen civilians, injuring fifteen more, and finally expiring when Cherubim units were called in to end the horrific rampage. We're here at the scene with a representative from the local branch of the Blue Light mercenary corporation, commander Weiss-"

The camera pans across Susan. She is wearing a bright, some-what revealing yellow sundress, her tan skin brightly lit by the Texas sun - the storefront is a burnt husk of a building, although four more stores on either side, making up nearly half of the storefront block destroyed along with it, with the crater of building's foundation being cleaned out by local garbage men who pick across the debree, tossing polycete blocks into a nearby cement boiler. The commander is wearing an advanced mach four version of the usual Blue Light corp armor suits, fitted with built-in machine gun wrist mounted guns, shoulder cannon grenade launchers, full five digit actuator durasteel gauntlets, and standing over eleven feet tall, wide and tall enough to not quite fit his head or his left shoulder into the frame of the shot. The crowd watching the footage in Hel chuckle, half the bar quieted down and the music cut just to see what the hell had happened today. The camera pans up and back.

"Can you - can you see- am I in the shot? Shit-" Susan moves a too-heavy, sizable piece of polycrete to stand on. The Commander's military facial glow-tattoos, along with his synthfibre mohawk, are a violent green-blue, and his eyes swirl with synthetic colors pulsing at his heart rate; he grins looking down at the newswoman. She met his gaze with her usual stern, and neutral face.

"Mister Weiss, your company is claiming that the suspect was, in fact, not within the legal liability contract of your company. How can you justify the kind of carnage that occured here today, and yet your corporation expects the store owner, the mercantile, and the greater city of New Dallas to pay for what can only be described as a terrifying and bloody murder spree by one of your members?"

The commander rolls his eyes at her, a smile never leaving his lips, "Blue Light corporation takes no responsibility for an off-duty mercenary using stolen hardware to commit whatever crime, be that robbery, or murder, or destruction of property. This man was obviously a deranged psychopath, and our records indicate that he had gone off grid more than twenty-four hours prior to entering Sector Three. Anyone found with our hardware and not connected to the network is a rogue agent and therefore a threat to our hardware security, be they member or otherwise, and he was reported to the local police once our operatives realized his armor was missing from company property while he was not on duty."

"But this so-called psychopath was using equipment and training developed by your company, commander. Why wasn't his suit tracking information sent to the authorities earlier? At what point did you know that he had gone, how did you put it - off grid?"

"Every unit is seperated into core groups with a commanding officer, and the grid tech in Blue Light suits uses state of the art neuraltech networks, which function on a local basis to avoid wireless intrusion - better to lease the privacy of our off-duty members during work hours than risk misfiring weapons because of some chemhead deck-jockeys, who prefer to get a suited mercenary to do their killing for them. His commanding officer was killed by the suspect early yesterday, so the report never went through, and the police were informed only minutes before the incident about a rogue from our membership and to be on the look out, which didn't give NDPD enough time to react accordingly to the threat of a Blue Light anyway."

"So the suspect managed to bypass the neuraltech security? How often does this kind of thing happen?"

The Commander sighed. Although Susan was picking up on wireless comms access from the commanders head units through her own nueraltech implants, she logged the thought for later, and gave him a moment to 'think.'

"Blue Light Corp uses modern neuraltech to create sensory information grids between mercenary units, and we have adaptive chem-induced emotional regulators, along with the best monitering software available, made by the Corp. Commanding officers are trained to watch for irregularities to prevent just such a thing as what happened here today. Besides outright murdering his commanding officer and finding a nutjob to hack his suit, we have no information in regards to how the suspect managed to trip the neuraltech, fall off the grid, and find his way into the Sector Three mercantile. I would deduce that the deckjockey fried his neuralnetwork in the process of trying to stop the tracking software, likely causing enough brain trauma to send him spiraling into criminal insanity. So far as how often this may happen, this is the first incident in six months of a member going suited, off-duty, and so much as daring to leave the local neuralnet radius of their commanding officer, approximately one-point-one-two-five miles."

Susan knew it was a stupid question to finish with, but Circuit 61 New Dallas News demanded it. Even if her boss would be pissed later.

"There are also allegations that the Blue Light Corporation recruits unstable, criminally insane individuals as well, commander. This reporter, for one, wonders if this neuraltech software wasn't inhibiting that behavior, so when it glitched or outright failed, the member went rogue, killed their commanding officer, and tried to flee in order to be free from the corp and the suit neural tech."


The commander had stopped smiling at the word allegations, his expression slowly becoming more angry, but speaking with a calm and monotonous tone, "Our recuits go through intensive training, are constantly monitered while suited, and are tracked better than most luxary cars flying the hi-ways of these Texas skies. We are a zero-discrimination mercenary corp, ma'am, and I will not have people, like this reporter, for one, bismirching the good name of my corp as unsafe, or some subdued, criminally insane maniac. These allegations are likely from criminal elements which fear the good our corp does for companies who need to hire the best, most effecient military corp without the federal red tape of involving Cherubim, who tend to work more in ultimatums like the burning rubble behind us, rather than the quiet, clean operations the likes of which our corp is so beloved for."


The body and suit of the suspect and member had not been recovered, and Susan knew that the Church had sent three Angels - just another nearby patrol unit flying the skies of Sector 6 - to deal with the Blue Light who had begun gunning people down across a busy storefront. People knew he was insane and had begun to flee prior to his opening fire - his babbling, incoherent screaming vaguely sounded like wails of pain, begging 'not to go back,' 'not another mission.' The Cherub had missiled the area, blowing out the market, which had already been cleared of living civilians, or so says the Church's report. They had reduced the blown out storefront into a mass of molten polymer and burnt ashes.

"Thank you for your time, commander."

"Thank you for having me, Susan."


* * *


The music in Hel went back on full blast. The deep thrum of the electronic dance music thudded across the bar, quieter due the the dampening field Cerf usually had to have fixed every other week. He drank from a nearby flask, which was his handy work flask number three. Wednesday, he liked to have called it some thursdays, or even mondays. And today was definitely a Wendesday - not far enough along to hope for the weekend, and not enough corpses through the week for a Monday.

"You okay, Cerf? You drank half that bottle, man."

Cerf stared at his costumer. Jim sat at the bar, covered in blood, a bundle over his shoulder. He looked ragged, like he had been running only minutes earlier, and stank like a wet bag of greasy rags, so like he usually did. "The fuck are you doing in my bar, Jim?"

Jim held up his hands defensively, "Look, I know what it looks like-"

"You owe me like sixteen thousand for the last time Jim, I told the-"

During the broadcast, Cerf failed to notice his doorman bouncer missing. Byter number Two's vitals were out of action, be they unconscious or dead.

Byter Three walked up to the bar sheepishly, "I'm sorry Cerf, he tricked the door gun. You want I should kill him now?"

Jim stood up, but the hulking mass of Byter, whether him or his six identical android brothers, gingerely pushed Jim down without breaking his spine, shoulder, or neck with one hand. The music goes quieter, and people nearby get ready for a show of violence.

"How much have you-"

Cerf looked and saw three empty bottles, top shelf, empty at the bar in front of Jim. Jim looked positively plastered.

More impressed than angry at this point, Cerf knew Jim well enough to know he was in serious trouble.

"I'm going to do the next guy a favor, Jim. I'm not going to let B-Three tear you into small pieces and throw you in the back dumpster - instead, I'm going to let you go about your business today, in fact, here-" the barman turns and gropes drunkely at the bottles behind him for a moment.

Cerf hands Jim the cheapest bottle of alcohol above 60% he can find nearby.

"-take a handle while you're here, but do your business, get it over with, and the NEXT-" Cerf didn't mean to scream the word, but he did anyway, "time one of my bouncers SEE'S YOU, you will be DEAD, if you don't have my CREDITS!"

Jim graciously takes the bottle, and Byter slowly, although as sadly as his robotic face can look, lets his heavy hand off of him.

"How much was it Cerf? Ten thousand, right?" Jim smiles.

"Twenty four thousand, after your tab today. And another twelve for B-Four's repairs. Goodbye."

The dramatic pause in the music ceased, and Jim walked away from the bar, barely able to see straight. He shoved the bottle into his secondary pack on his back, and fished around in his synthfiber rain coat for a couple of uppers to feel less like the world was spinning. Three pills later, he felt stable enough to remember he was here to work.

The client was the usual mix of shitty and poor - but Jim had to get rid of the piece he had gotten today. It was heavy on his back, the sweat from all the liqour pouring into his already partially wet clothes only making it all the more of a burden. The crowd was a bustling mix the usuals, plus all of teens who had followed him in through after he had busted the door, before two more Byters rushed to stop some of them flooding the dance floor with underaged chemheads. The music away from the bar was all you could hear besides the laughing, giggling fits of the dancers, or the screaming patrons trying in vain to speak at the tables.

One table he knew was bad news was the Blue Lights. Just like the broadcast, they sat in armor too big for normal seats, sitting in the bench seats near the VIP tables in the back. The captain glared at Jim after he barged in at the front of the crowd covered in blood.

Jim only hoped his reputation didn't precede him today as an arms dealer, picking up bits of military grade and hawking it to whoever still bought from poor ol' Jim. Poor, poor ol' Jim who just wanted make a decent living in Zero, bouncing from sleeper hotels to blown out buildings, scrounging enough to keep his head above water. Jim never believed in implants, took his nano-vitamins, and tried to eat something besides literal trash most days. Jim had been to a real bath house this week. Self care wasn't in the vocabulary of most slummies, but Jim was looking for a change.

The cold durasteel of the Blue Light helmet on his back, carefully wrapped and padded to look differently, was heavy on his shoulder, and that damned captain was still glaring at him like he knew. How could he? Jim knew to take the nuclear power cores out - he'd hawked those for rent before breakfast. He'd woken up to a gun fight in the hotel last night, and when it had gone quiet after an explosion, he could hardly believe the helmet laying the floor surrounded by burnt corpses. 'What luck!' he had thought at the time, 'things are really looking to turn around for poor ol' Jim!' he had believed.

Jim had checked the tracking against his deck's monitering softwares, but the helmet was deactivated. No locals, no long range wireless comms, just a dead helmet.

The visor of the captain panned when he walked across the dance floor, meekly shuffling his feet in an attempt to act natural, all the while sweating enough to smear gore across his face when he went to wipe it. Nearby people smelled him and cursed, muttering about burning garbage or heaps of refuse, but Jim danced all the harder, clearing a small circle while he skimmed the crowds for his guy.

A man sat at a table opposite the dance floor. He had horns on the top of his head, fur around his neck and the backside of his hands, and a rather loud shirt showing a tuft of groomed hair from his chest. He raised his eyebrows at Jim, suddenly looking a little sick.

'Thank the fucking Church!' Jim casually danced toward the table, eventually sitting opposite of him, pulling out the bottle Cerf had given him and a stolen glass from the bar. He poured himself a drink, and offered the Chimeran a drink, who shrugged and let him pour some into his cocktail glass.

Jim drank some down, and eyed him up. "You Pofferus?"

Pofferus nodded at Jim, tasting his drink and frowning, "Church, that's awful. Jim, I take it?"

Jim nodded, his eyes never leaving the goatman as he swigged for a solid two seconds from the liqour, not bothering to drink from his full glass yet. He leaned back, lidded and then slipped the bottle back into his pack. "We can't deal here, too many eyes."

The goatman scoffed, "Bullshit. Tanaka military ops don't-"

"This isn't Tanaka corp hardware anyway." Jim said plainly, crossing his arms and his eyes.

"I'll be the judge of the that." The goatman waited, impatiently tapping one foot-hoof under the table, frowning and scrunching up his face at the taste of his drink, "That really is awful, how can you-"

Jim drank his glass. The whole glass. It was a water glass he had taken from the bar when Cerf wasn't looking, and the sudden whoosh of drunkenness washed over him like a hammer to the face. He couldn't tell which goatman he was supposed to be staring at anymore, but he glared at him with every fiber of his being, stony faced and green as he was.

The five goatmen sighed, and waved at the barmaid, "a private room, please?" She whispered something back, and he sighed deeper and more sadly, "Yes, yes, my tab, of course."


* * *


The two made their way toward the VIP tables and beyond, all the while Jim fished out his last few pills to feel something, anything besides how sick he was. He popped three more, slowly widening and closing his eyes as the world shifted above and below him. The piercing screeches of the crowd washed into focus, a sharp dancing shape laughing into his head, banging deeper into his ears than he could feel.

"Come on Jim, you fucking drunkerd chemhead-" goatman looked pretty wasted too, and he pushed Jim through the crowd toward their private room.

"Keep yer filthy hooves offa me, goddamn Chimeran bastard-"

Pofferus pushed him harder, and the two made their way off the dance floor, "This is the last time I deal with racist a piece of shit like you, Jim."

"Can't trust non' animal man, man, not a one-" Jim mumbled, half willing himself to sound more drunk than he actually was. Acting was part of bargaining with a shit head like Pofferus, wait for him to feel like he has all the bargaining power, like Jim was out of control. Little did he know, Jim had never actually controlled a thing in his life, much less himself.

And maybe the Blue Light Captain would forget, maybe stop staring at him over that visor, just like the helmet slung over his shoulder, but different. Captains had differen't helmets, more additions of tech smattered over it, thicker armor here or there - each piece of armor was unique with their corp. The shoulders bore rank, and they rarely if ever removed their helmets like the man on the TV had. They were here, but they weren't drinking.

The captains helmet panned to him and stared.

Jim let Pofferus push him into a room, acting stubborn, "No! No, I don't think you actually have the credits, man! NO!" Pofferus kicked him in, hard enough he'd probably have a hoof print on his ass, and slammed the door when they both got in.

"SHOW ME, JIM! NOW!"

Jim sighed, lugging his burded off his sore shoulder. His hand wouldn't open, still crusted from where he had been gripping the bundle tight enough that he had long since lost feeling in the digits of his left hand. He slowly managed to let go and uncover the helmet, and the goatman gasped when it was revealed - a bit singed, but still fully intact, the gentle blue hue of paint scuffed with blackened marks enough to reveal solid durasteel, and a network of complex neural interfaces lining the inside.

Pofferus covered it back up, and Jim immediately clung to it like a precious egg that could crack at any moment. "Fifty thousand."

Pofferus scoffed, "Are you insane? I can't move that. Shit, you are crazy Jim, how did you-?"

"Just my lucky day I guess. I didn't hear a no?" Jim smiled, sweat and blood still running down his face.

"I'll give you five."

Jim stared at Pofferus, his mouth agape, "I can't believe you would insult me like that. I seriously can't even believe it. Fifty for this is a STEAL-"

"What, for a death wish? Jim, I'm not sure I can even get out of here alive being SEEN with you today, let alone trying to deal with you about it." Pofferus stands up, and walks towards the door slowly. Too slowly. So slowly, Jim knows he's bluffing. The headpiece is a hundred-thousand credits in cost to the corp making the helmet, which is completely unique to each Blue Light. The helmet Jim cradled like a loving mother was worth hundreds of thousands of credits to the right buyer, and he knew it. Pofferus knew it.

But the Chimeran was at the door. He sighed, and turned, "Good luck, Jim. Die fast, not slow." Pofferus walked out the door and closed it behind him.

Jim gulped hard, wrapping up the helmet as closely as he could to his body, making it look more like a lump than the military contraband that he threw over his shoulder.


Jim slipped an earpiece into his ear. The listening device was one of the few things he'd decided to keep - discreet enough to look like an earplug, but useful enough it was better to be found dead with it still on his corpse. Radio chatter across the sector quieted down into a casual hurricane of noise as he focused, the neuraltech interfacing with his plug he'd had since he was born. He could hear the captain in the other room talking about a possible suspect, still waiting, "....the buyer wants to talk?"

Pofferus was going to sell him out. Again. Poor ol' Jim had been to risky, barging into Hel the way he did today. Pofferus wouldn't get a second chance with those Blue Lights, though. They were going to hunt him down and take back that beautiful piece of hardware - military tech was, after all, Jim's speciality. Why not sell the most expensive thing on the market? Why not steal the best of the best, and try...

Try to survive. Jim shook his head - he had to go.

Jim slid the door open, and could hear across the Captain's comms as Pofferus explained what Jim had on his back. Damned if he didn't even have a headstart - but Hel was different.

"Have confirmation - tracking target." Jim heard as a wireless outbound, "Jim... the slinger? Empty records indicate a real slummie boys, keep an eye out if we-"

The captain stopped speaking and glared at the open door, but couldn't see Jim already on the dance floor. The stupid kids barely noticed that they were stomping him, stepping on hands, feet, back, head, everything Jim had, even his soul, he felt.

"Target is missing. Comms?"

"Checking-"

Cerf was calmly trying to clean a glass. Pofferus had paid before hand to use the room for five minutes, and now it was empty again, and he felt relief wash over his body. A sigh even escaped his lips. Jim had slunk out of there like a spider, and although the strange creature was nowhere to be found, at least he wasn't in the private room, where maybe B-four or Five could throw him out easily.

A nearby security screen lit up with automated privalage. The Blue Lights drank here because they very rarely caused real trouble, and because Cerf actually let criminally insane psychos like those Blue Light freaks drink at his bar, they could take control of his security at their leisure. Cerf wasn't even sure he could stop them, anyway, be it drinking or hacking, so better to just bend over and let it happen, maybe take their credits when they decide to pay a tab. He felt his heart drop a little with the Captain in the VIP seats glaring at him from the security moniter system, mouth-to-typing the words, "Where is he?"

"Who?" Said Cerf to his own security moniter.

"Jim the Slinger."

Cerf reached for his flask as a cold sweat started in.


Jim had made it across the dancefloor, bruised and bleeding some his own blood at this point, bottle broken, a few sprains or possible cracked bones he might feel if he could feel much of anything at this point, hiding under an occupied table of three teenagers in a passionate moaning contest to see who could get who's clothes off first. Jim pulled his second-to-last medical vial out and shoved it into his leg, and although the copious mixture of alcohol and uppers began to fade, he could already feel the horrors of the last two minutes begin to subside into the usual waves of euphoria following a well deserved medical nanostim. He could feel the three shattered ribs from last week slide into their proper place, the taste of metal and salt went away, and he suddenly vomited nearly a gallon of toxins under the table, a wash of compounds the nanites simply couldn't abide. Jim could physically feel the nanites drawing moisture from the blood, sweat, and gross water drenching his clothes, actually drying him partially as they restored him to peak hydration. A fool might have needed a gallon of water, but ol' Jim just needed ten minutes outside and a lack of any semblance of hygene.


The trio had long since stopped their lovemaking to wretch and Jim and his stench. He felt a boot kick his back, sending him sprawling into his own noxious vomit. The fresh bruise brought him back to reality, eyes darting across the bar.

Byter's Two, Four, and Five were walking through the dance floor, pushing people and barking something, which he assumed was his description or stench. Both could lead them toward his table near the front door, where Byter Six stood bouncing, waiting, looking for anyone to bother him or get near the door. Another shotgun turret was mounted near the upper wall, but this one Cerf would be watching. The bartender looked busy, sweaty, and aware that somehow, for whatever deranged reason, finding and killing poor ol' Jim would be in his best interest.

B-Six looked at the rushing pool of vomit leaking from under the table, and saw the teens complaining at whatever they had just kicked.

Jim rushed the door.

B-Six came bearing foward toward him, and Jim did his practiced slide. There may not have been any rainwater here, but the vomit let him slide in a disgusting line across the floor, his steel durasteel shoes slamming into the bottom hard enough to make his teeth rattle. The shotgun bore down on him, but paused instead of firing. Jim looked up at Cerf at the bar holding the joystick, finger on the trigger, as if waiting.

B-One slammed open the doors and barged in, knocking Jim away before the shotgun fired. It nearly blasted B-One, but instead blew a hole through the door, smattering Jim was bits of plasteel and polycrete as he crawled out toward Sector Zero and out of the bar.

The drenching smell of the endless rain washed over Jim like a hug across the back from an old friendly waterfall running out of the side of a sewage plant. For all he could, he got to his feet and plowed down the sidewalk, barely dodging a lightpole playing commercial headlines about the newest neuraltech finger implants for sensory enhancement and broadcast. The crowd of overarmed and chemmed out kids rushed the bar past Jim, forming a kind of chaotic wave that tried to shove him back toward the robots, or the angry mercenaries, or the alarmed but silent shotgun pointed at him in a crowd of teenagers.

It never fired, and he got down the street, tripping and shoving who had to to get by.


* * *


Jim walked as casually, yet fast as he could manage, which looked more like a panicked sprint. It was four blocks deeper into the southern reaches of Zero to find his sleeper hotel, which he could pay for tonight. The crowded streets here were flooded with other slummies trying to get to work, trying to get north toward the Zero mercantile, or find a way to get out of the rain. Ahead, he could see an Autocop skimming the crowd for suspects, and so he was already fumbling for his credentials by the time it spotted him and flashed its overhead light.

People around Jim got out of the way, some sprawling into others or over into the streets, where hovercars rode close enough to cook passerby. They all made a circle around the person who just got caught by an Autocop. Jim walked stoically toward the machine, a rough rectangular box on large treads. It had a head like a television that displayed whatever it said in six languages quickly enough that nobody could usually read it, "HALT! Citizen, please present-"

Jim was practically rubbing the card on the faceplate, then carefully stepped back when alarms started blaring on the thing and it revved whatever nuclear engine ran the damn Autocop. Its head flashed and went dim for a moment.

A few seconds passed while Jim stared behind him, the crowd rushing away to get as far as possible from the incident. He looked back and could see huge figures moving quickly in this direction. Maybe other mercenaries, maybe Blue Lights, but Jim couldn't tell.

"...Slinger... hotel three-three six, Sleeper Heights Motel-"

The address to his primary bed at the sleeper hotel rang out across wireless comms, the very same transmission frequency the Blue Lights had used earlier.

They were coming.

Jim impatiently waited for ten full seconds for the Autocop to process his identity and confirm him as a citizen of New Dallas. He may not have credentials to make it higher than Zero, which took more money in the bank than he had left, but it would be enough just to have the ID for him not to get paved today. Somewhere else, he could hear the screaming of someone who wasn't so lucky as poor ol' Jim as they were being ground to bits, slowly mixing with the grime washing down the gutters of the nearby street.

"Welcome, Citizen! Welcome!" it chimed happily, as if in celebration. It turned and began skimming the nearby crowd immediately, and Jim started into a run down the road.

The Sleeper Heights Motel number Seventeen-B was poorly lit. Jim slipped his earpiece into his pocket, turning it off. Several gangsters eyed Jim up as he walked toward the door, and one of them held up a hand, palm up, waiting for the toll. Another nearby goon pushed his arm down, "He paid this morning. We'll collect later, when you get back out, right, Jim?"

Jim said nothing and walked in quickly, and the thug who had his hand out followed him as he swung past the front desk. The robotic teller at the desk barely seemed to notice either of them, greedily eyeing them up to see if they came for his cables in the wall. So long as nobody bothered the teller, Jim knew he'd just sit there and wait, not doing anything except charging the same battery that never quite fully charged. The teller had been that way for months here, with his jagged metallic arms sharpened to razors and held out, ready to cut anyone down that threatened his access to precious energy, like the corpses that often littered the hallway, thinking they might hawk the android for a quick cash grab before they saw too late that it was ready to tear them apart.

Jim rushed up the stairs, the dark-blue polycrete walls scrawled with enough graffiti to look like a scribbled canvas of anger, slurs, hate, and gang members. People crouched in the hallways asleep, and the security cameras followed Jim up the first four flights. He was careful not to disturb the sleepless chemheads blocking the stairwell in numerous places. The long halls of rooms had casket sleeper units lining all the walls of its rooms, six-to-ten stacked, floor to ceiling, with dozens of stacks to a room, and dozens of rooms to a floor. By the fifth floor, the cameras had been broken or ripped out of the walls, and the freaks were awake. Higher up still, they were actively shooting drugs, cackling, moaning, vomiting across the filthy floors, wretching and crying, wailing and screaming throughout the building. But Jim was dirty enough that he looked like a resident, and although they wailed at him, shook him, grabbed at him as he passed, he kept moving, kicking and shoving as he went, hardly noticed in the shrieking abuse of a dozen fights with cheering, kreening maniacs laughing as people brawled on the disgusting floors of emptied out rooms.

Floor thirty-three, room six, was more quiet. His name was on the address board across the front panel of the room, but it would be anyone's guess as to which casket was his. His only chance at this point felt like a trap. He walked across the hall toward his spare casket in a different room, the one that had a fake name he'd rented out for storage. He paused at it, trying to find the thug that followed him in the darkness, hoping he'd lost him floors below through the crowded motel halls. People were here, sure, but the dimmed lights, the noise, the smells and sounds made everything feel like a wave of human suffering, faceless and agonizing. Jim slipped into his casket as quickly as he could, cuddling his food stores and turning the temp of the foam insert up to feel less like a fridge. He split the wrapper on a mango nutri-sludge pouch and cut his earpiece back on, and carefully tuned his mind to the right frequency. He heard a grizzly voice in his head midsentence, fading in and out.

"...fifteen... fl... sixteen, by the Church... filthy motel-"

The captain's voice cut in suddenly, "Quiet, Leuitenant... a read on floor three... some kind of device-"

Jim cut his earpiece off in a panic, choking on the sludge pouch, caughing it up. The dim hum of the casket unit masked anything but the wailing down the hall outside of his sleeper casket unit. Maybe they couldn't pinpoint the earpiece from here - the walls were thick polycrete and durasteel framed, so signals tended to read poorly in a place like this. Jim waited for what felt like hours, listening to the screaming, cackling madness that haunted the outside of his prison, desperate to use his ears to hear his death approaching.

Jim more felt than heard the thud of their footsteps. Four, maybe five, maybe more of them. People went silent when they came up the stairs, the unusual quiet haunting Jim as he listened to them walk down the hallway, slowly but surely making their way closer. He listened to them in the other room walking, moving around. A loud banging, then a knocking. More banging, and then gunshots. Jim cringed and slipped deeper into the foam insert of his casket, listening as gunshots rang out methodically, the time spaced out carefully, bang, bang, bang. He tried to count the shots, but after twenty, thirty shots, each spaced only a few seconds apart, it was all he could manage to keep breathing without crying or vomiting. Occasionally, he heard multiple shots and screaming, crying voices, followed by more gunshots. But eventually, silence dominated the area again.

Jim listened and heard things being moved around. Heavy caskets banging against the floor, the wrenching sound of metal being tore open angrily, as if a machine were tearing them open.

More of a long, dead silence.

Jim felt boots walked across the floor toward his room. He heard the heavy footfalls crossing the hall and entering the doorway, partially blocked by a mass of people who screamed and cowered. Gunshots rang out in the room, and the sound of corpses hitting the floor and washing it and nearby caskets in gore was all Jim could hear under the sounds of screams and crying, then silence. The heavy footfalls echoed across the floor, the crunch of bones snapping under the weight of ten feet of metal humanoid not bothering to step over the bodies of the dead or dying. A gunshot sounded close by, followed by the wrenching sound of metal as a casket was emptied of its contents. Jim felt his heart beating out of his chest when shot rang out so close, he thought that it must have been him, that he must be dead and not even know it yet. He waited but the sound of metal twisting under inhuman strength never quite reached him, instead content to ring out nearby as a wailing person dropped to the floor just nearby. Another gunshot followed by dead silence. And then another, and another - another casket, another casualty, another gunshot, another empty casket, another gunshot.

Eventually, Jim couldn't hear anything anymore. Whether he had fallen asleep or lost his mind, or maybe died and didn't know it, he couldn't tell. Dead silence dominated everything. How long it lasted he couldn't tell. Hours, maybe days. Jim didn't dare eat, or speak, or do anything besides breathe for a long time. He found himself falling in an abyss, watching in dead silence as people wailed and cried, torn apart by metal wolves, searching for him, looking for his face, sniffing his blood, the trail of blood from his head, his ears, his mouth, a vomitous pour of gore-

Scratching on his casket woke Jim up. The normal sounds of the sleeper hotel came back in a wash, but turned up too high - wailing, crying, screaming, and screeching. He popped the lid on his casket and knocked back a scavenger chemhead, with too many implants and a rotting face, who glared at him with a starving, mad look. The man lunged, and Jim used the bundled helmet to smack him across the face, sending him sprawling into a pile of refuse behind him.

No, not refuse. Corpses. Mostly naked, picked over, cut and shot, still bleeding mounds of flesh steaming in the middle of the freezing hotel room. The man nursed his broken jaw and scattered away and out of the room, where people were crying and screaming madness still amidst the gore and torn up sleeper caskets. Half of the caskets in the room had been checked, and his had been one of the lucky few that were left mostly untouched. He saw a bullet hole in the side, not quiet close enough to have taken off his head, but he was bleeding, and stone deaf in his left ear.

Poor ol' Jim had lucked out again, he thought. Although maybe it would be better to be dead so quickly, and end to all of it. But that wasn't the change Jim wanted today. Or maybe it had been yesterday.

It wasn't the change he wanted now.

Jim hardly remembered walking through the halls of the sleeper hotel, making his way down the floors where people had made themselves scarce. There were more bullet holes, more gore splattered across the walls, and fewer people around. But it was a blur of the same thing he saw coming in. Even after death had walked in and taken dozens of lives, they still fought and screamed, wailing into the darkness. They clawed and grabbed and screamed, and he pushed and shoved his way down the floors, eventually back to the front door, where the thugs had left. More bullet holes, more broken polycrete - the teller at the desk was missing, too. Jim saw the cameras watching him, and he stared at the one near the front door of the place for a while.

Let them see me. Let them know that Jim is still here after all. The lense twisted and focused on him, and Jim turned and left, running out into the rain of Zero to find the right buyer.