Prayers to Broken Stone
by Jon Adcock
part 1
Call me Jackson. Occasionally, someone would ask if that was my first or last name. My response was always the same: “Does that even matter these days? It’s what I answer to.”
I poked unenthusiastically at the algae cube on the tray in front of me. I’m sure it was nutritious, but I couldn’t get past the fact that it looked and smelled like something pulled out of a shower drain. Unfortunately, my credit balance wasn’t all that healthy for the moment, and even the vat-grown meat was out of my price range. That was going to change soon. A simple tag and tail job in Old Town would earn me a pile of credits soon; it wouldn’t make me rich, but it would be enough to keep me in the sweet spot between the haves and the have-nots for a while longer.
There were a few other people scattered around the resident workers’ dining hall. Most of them were maintenance workers and techs, just off work or killing time before their shifts started. Several feet away, a lone service worker wore an indentured collar and listlessly moved a mop across the floor. He was small, gaunt, and still had enough of the wasteland rat look to show he was a recent arrival.
Back in the day, the city had a steady stream of refugees: people desperate enough to wear the collar for the five years it took to earn the right of citizenship. That stream had mostly dried up, but we still got the occasional few. Like this worker: people worn down and aged before their time, who finally came to the realization that all freedom had to offer them was hunger gnawing at their bellies.
I threw down my fork and pushed the tray away. There was a stash of protein wafers in my quarters and, for better or worse, I could buy something at one of the food carts in Old Town. The feral cats were getting a little too wily to be caught, but the rats were numerous enough to be on the menu at most of them. Yeah, I know. I could say it tasted like chicken, but that would be a lie. It was at least cheap.
The indentured man eyed the algae cube as I carried my tray past him on the way to the trash can. Over the years, I’d seen that look more times than I could count. I left the tray on one of the nearby empty tables. It was a small gesture, but it would save him the indignity of digging the cube out of the trash.
My quarters were on this level and were the typical one-room cubby assigned to all single workers. Once there, I logged into the security database, entered the name of tonight’s target, and studied his ID photo and bio when they came up.
Karl Moore was a short, pot-bellied maintenance worker on swing shift that night. When he got off work in a few hours, I was going to be waiting for him outside the factory gates.
Our economic model was great, provided, of course, that you already owned everything. For everyone else, it pretty much sucked, and people had caught on to that fact. As worker unrest increased, acts of industrial sabotage had become more common.
One group had claimed responsibility for some of the more egregious acts of late. My target, in defiance of all common sense and discretion, had hinted to his friends that he had some connection to the group. It took far less than thirty pieces of silver for one of those friends to sell him out to me.
To be honest, tonight’s job had been bothering me. While the shades of grey I felt comfortable working in had gotten increasingly darker over the years, this would make my eventual reckoning with St. Peter uncomfortable and short. When the final reckoning came, all I would be able to say was that right here and right now, it was better to be the butcher than the cattle.
The tremors in my right hand and fingers started up again. I got my tool kit, slit open the Syntha-Flesh on my prosthetic arm, and probed around the wrist and palm. Another reason why I needed a big payday: 30-year-old military tech had gotten harder to find, and pricier. Being an antique was a bitch.
I thought about apples as I left the elevator and walked up the brightly lit corridor toward the north exit. A trade caravan had brought back several wagonloads of apples last week. While most of them had ended up in the larders of the wealthy, there were still a few available on the black market. After tonight, I’d be able to buy at least one of them. A man should always have dreams.
The heavy blast doors to the complex have remained open for a generation. I stood just outside them and stared down at the older, partially rebuilt city that sprawled out in the distance. A small tactical nuke had taken out the eastern section years ago and, despite cleanup efforts, the crater and surrounding blast damage were still visible to the naked eye.
The western section was the industrial center. As if they were middle fingers to Mother Nature, tall smokestacks rose throughout that area and belched out acrid clouds of smoke and industrial pollutants. The rest of it ran the gamut from shantytowns near the industrial center to decent apartment complexes the closer you got to this hilltop complex, Grubville.
Traffic on the main road that led up to Grubville was sparse. The last shuttle had left over two hours ago, and the assorted beasties that pulled it were probably bedded down for the night. I needed alternate transportation; the hillside was scabbed with outbuildings and fenced off compounds. What passed for the motor pool was a klick away, located along a stretch of highway at the base of the hill. Though, to be accurate, it was more like a stable now.
The sun burned crimson through the haze, and it would probably be a beautiful sunset in an hour or so. It was also stifling hot. Rivulets of sweat ran down my back and the highway appeared to ripple in the heat haze like a tapestry in a breeze. Over the last few weeks, an inversion layer had seared the city and kept it blanketed in a fetid cloud. The air quality was particularly bad today and my lungs burned from the chemicals with every breath. The jacket quickly became uncomfortable to wear, so I pulled it off, stashed it in my backpack, and made my way down the hill.
“Nothing with a pulse,” I told the recom on duty at the motor pool. He was mute and stared uncomprehendingly at me. “Nothing that shits. I want old. Old like me.”
He grinned and led me past the stables to a large garage in the far corner of the motor pool. The area by the garage was cluttered with wrecked vehicles and piles of discarded tech. The cracked concrete around the refuse piles was stained with reddish streaks from the rust that had bled down on it.
The garage itself was dark and sweltering. Most of the overhead lights were burned out, and dust motes performed a complicated dance in the spotlight formed by a hole in the middle of the ceiling. There were a few electric vehicles scattered about, but this was primarily where old fossil fuel vehicles had come to die.
Near a trio of partially dismantled personnel carriers, I found a grimy motorcycle. It was freckled with rust, and a lattice of spiderwebs connected it to the wall it leaned on. Fortunately, the power pack still had three-fourths of a charge, and it hummed softly when I switched it on.
I gave the man a thumbs-up and waited while he fumbled with the tablet he carried. As he struggled to sign the motorcycle out to me, I tried to guess what was used in his genetic cocktail, but quickly gave up. There was something vaguely simian about him, but he wasn’t one of the splicers’ better efforts.
The recombinants were our manufactured underclass. They did our scutwork and gave our poor somebody to look down on so they wouldn’t notice how bad their own lives were. Unlike my indentured friend downstairs, the recombinants wore collars that would never come off.
I rolled the bike out of the garage. Since I had time to kill, I stretched out across the hood and windshield of a nearby wreck and waited for the sun to set. Behind me, the ground sloped up to the concrete and steel entrance to Grubville. Its real name was something pretentious, but Grubville was what the poor slobs down in Old Town called it now.
Back in the middle of the last century, underground bunkers for the filthy rich became all the rage. The rich burrowed down and lived under a ceiling of steel and concrete while the little people scrabbled around in the dirt and heat above. Grubville was one of the largest: a self-contained city with restaurants, shopping malls and its own private security force.
And when the end times finally came and the waves of the hungry and desperate arrived, those heavy steel doors did what they were designed to do: they swung closed and became the rocks those waves of humanity broke against. And me? I was on the right side of the door during those days. I was part of that private security force, sickened and ashamed but relieved I wasn’t one of those poor bastards on the outside, scratching their fingers bloody and raw against a cold sheet of steel. I suppose people have sold their souls for less.
Now, so many years later, the sunset was beautiful. The sky was striated by bands of scarlet and the sun was a crimson drop of blood that slowly slid down the face of Heaven itself. When the last glow of the setting sun faded and darkness seized the world in its jealous embrace, I climbed down and wheeled the bike towards the exit. After a few moments, the floodlights throughout the compound sputtered on and the darkness was chased back to the far corners where it crouched and waited.
A loud snuffle from one of the larger pens made me pause for a moment and peer in. Something big and shaggy looked back, something with four legs and large, mournful eyes that had too much self-awareness in them. The splicers used far too much human DNA in their concoctions for my comfort level.
I stuck my arm through the gate and waited while it tentatively came close enough for me to reach up and scratch its forehead. Its hair was coarse, and its skin felt rough and leathery. A dry, raspy tongue gave my arm a quick lick and a bit of poetry by Yeats popped into my mind: “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
After I gave my new friend a final scratch behind the ears, I made my way to the exit. We were a long way from Bethlehem or anywhere else remotely holy, but I passed a whole menagerie of rough beasts on the way out.
The road was empty this time of night due to the curfew, so I left the headlights off and opened the bike all the way up. I relished the feeling of speed and power as I hurdled headlong through the darkness. I slowed down when I hit the edge of the city and weaved through evening streets packed with pedestrians and public transportation beasties. I got more than a few stares as I did so.
After a bit, the streets became meaner, and the looks became harder. The pedestrians were replaced with small clusters of disaffected youths and assorted junkies who were either after a high or on the way down from one. Some things never change.
Soon, the buildings I passed were marred by graffiti. There were the usual gang symbols here and there, but anti-Grub slogans far outnumbered anything else that had been scrawled on the walls. Tempers had heated up in this part of the city, and we had our first, honest-to-God, protest march a few months ago. It started a few miles away on a bright, sunny afternoon and was a throwback to the old days with chants, signs, and heartfelt speeches. The authorities were able to wash away most of the blood by nightfall.
On a quiet side street near my destination, I pulled the bike into an alley, leaned it up against a wall, and slapped a holo projector on it. The bike disappeared, replaced by a projected image of the empty wall. It could still be tripped over, but this was as safe as I could make it. I took my jacket out and put it on just in case.
I ghosted a few blocks away. As the stealth circuits embedded in the jacket activated, I faded out of sight like a Cheshire cat. Not even my boyish grin remained. There was enough of a charge left in the batteries to keep me hidden from view for at least three hours. More than enough time to tail my talkative terrorist and see what turned up.
Once I got to the factory, I waited on the steps of an abandoned, semi-demolished house across from the factory exit. My right eye was prosthetic, and its facial recognition software worked overtime as the swing-shift workers streamed out through the gates. After their shifts, the recom workers were herded back to kennels inside the factory. There were enough displaced human workers in the area to make it dangerous for the recoms to leave the factory grounds.
The software got a hit. Karl walked out of the factory and stopped just outside the gates. He stood there and glad-handed quite a few people as they walked by. Then, like a hawk on a field mouse, he swooped down on a petite and very pretty woman in the crowd. As he walked towards her, she looked to the left and right as if she wanted somewhere to bolt. They talked for a few moments and, when she walked away, he gave her the same look the indentured had given my tray. I wondered how long it would be before he dropped clumsy hints to her that he was in the resistance movement. He left the factory grounds, and I was right behind him.
The shift change had put a ridiculous amount of people on the street and, while I kept as close to the buildings as I could get, I still had to weave and dodge to keep up with him as he made his way through the crowds. He had told my source that there was something big on for tonight. All I needed was a few scans of his accomplices to score big.
While we walked, the crowds eventually thinned out and the buildings became increasingly more squalid and decrepit the closer we got to the eastern section. There were enough hot spots still left from the nuke that this section of the city was avoided as much as possible. We walked on through deserted streets, piles of rubble and the skeletal remnants of burned-out buildings all around us. The area was what a whimper of pain would look like.
We soon reached the Ghost Walk, our little version of Pompeii. Down this section of street, the nuclear shadows of some of the victims could still be made out on the nearby walls; dark, human shaped blotches surrounded by the lighter-colored brick that had been bleached by the thermal radiation.
Maybe it was the eeriness of these traces of long dead people or maybe it was just the late hour combined with the silence of the surroundings, but Karl started to act spooked. He looked over his shoulder frequently and paused at one point to listen. Or maybe, even though I tried to be quiet, he could still make out another set of footsteps on a street that appeared deserted. I stopped when he stopped and when he started again, I made sure to tread more softly.
At the end of the next block, a dilapidated warehouse squatted forlornly. The vacant lots that surrounded it were choked with weeds, and a palpable sense of desolation clung to everything. A faint glow shone through the warehouse’s glassless windows; all it needed was a banner that proclaimed, “Clandestine things are happening here.”
Karl went in through a hole in one of the walls. I waited a few moments and carefully followed him in. There were at least ten or twelve people standing in the center of the warehouse, bathed in the feeble green light of the glow sticks that had been tossed on the ground around them. The glow sticks struggled to beat back the darkness, and their green light made the entire tableau look as if it were sitting in some underwater grotto. Pinpricks of light danced and moved among the surrounding rubble and trash. The eyes of a legion of rats showed they had been disturbed by our presence.
Copyright © 2022 by Jon Adcock
