Dead Land, Character Introductions Page 4

solar panel, and it had no chance of outrunning a moon buggy, at least not under normal circumstances. Sebastian reached inside and fetched the crossbow out of the back seat and quickly shot out a front tire on Frank’s buggy.

  “What are you doing?” Frank screamed. While he dashed back to his vehicle, Sebastian got into his own car, started it up and started moving.

  “Sorry, don’t know what happened, I’ll go get help!”

  Sebastian sped away. Frank’s profanity-riddled threats came steadily over the comm. for a minute or so, before slowly fading into constant static.

  It was a quick fifteen-minute drive back to the city. Sebastian felt a certain sense of relief when he entered under the shadow of the huge metal half-pipe that dominated the urban skyline. Turbine City West, and her sister city, Turbine City East, were the result of short-sighted planning by the reigning lunar warlord, General Maynard Kong, who took control during the brief Lunar War that followed the initial catastrophes that came to be known as the End Of The World back on Earth. These unfortunate events had been enough to instill a strong sense of paranoia concerning the Earthlings and there was little resistance when General Kong installed himself as their interim President: so long as he kept the Moon protected.

  The cornerstone of his Lunar Defense Program had been Operation Rotary. Operation Rotary involved building twin giant engines on the Moon’s surface, that, when activated, would rotate the massive natural satellite, bringing about giant artillery guns built on the far side (the result of another, earlier era of paranoia) to face planet Earth. During the planning stages, some of Kong’s cabinet expressed concern over whether such a wild feat was conceivable even in theory. His dissenting advisers were consequently discovered dead, all under mysterious circumstances, and Operation Rotary was begun in earnest.

  While the project had been a total failure, and resulted only in two city-sized turbine-engine substructures, before it effectively bankrupted the Moon of both money and materials, contemporary Moonlings generally agreed that, while it was doubtful Operation Rotary would have been successful, it was for the best that the project ran out of money before it was completed, just in case it had. Without resupply from or regular trade with Earth, however, Operation Rotary had sounded the death knell for general lunar quality-of-life.

  Fortunately, what was truly horrible martial planning turned out to be only mildly substandard civic planning. Dome 6, the main residential construct on the Moon, was fast becoming an overpopulated slum, and the engine substructures were easily converted into modest, if rural (as the Moonlings understood the term), housing. The residents of Turbine Cities East and West were formally considered squatters, as Operation Rotary was supposedly ongoing. Officially the People’s Democratic Lunar Republic was still at work on Operation Rotary, still at war with Earth, still under martial law, and still recounting the ballots of its first free election.

  When Sebastian arrived home and stepped through the inner door of their improvised airlock, he took off his helmet and flipped the light switch. The hovel remained dark. Sebastian frowned in confusion. A low arrhythmic thumping sounded from the next room over.

  “Home already?”

  Sebastian squinted and saw his brother, Malachi, sitting on the couch, casually holding a section of lead pipe. After a brief assessment, Sebastian judged there was no immediate danger the weapon would be used on him, and, as his eyes adjusted, he began to take in the room in more detail. The place had been trashed.

  Sebastian and Malachi were identical twins, moon miners from a family of moon miners. They had moved to TCW after their house in Dome 6 was commandeered by PDLR National Guard, and now lived in a broken-down compressor. The compressor itself afforded decent living space, divided into four different rooms by broad ply-board planks cutting—more or less—evenly across the steel-alloy cavity. The place was completely underground, accessible through a single porthole, facing the sky, the brothers’ lone modification to the superstructure. The setup saved on insulation from solar radiation and made burglary less likely; or at least it was believed to do these things.

  “What happened?” Sebastian asked, as he started picking up the living room.

  “One of your friend Frank’s buddies came over demanding money. I tried to explain to him that I wasn’t you, but apparently they get that a lot.”

  “Really? Well, it can be confusing for people, I imagine.”

  “He did a good job turning the place upside down.”

  “I’m surprised he didn’t take anything.”

  “He tried. I stunned him with this,” Malachi held up the pipe.

  “Where is he now?”

  “In your foot locker.”

  “Ah. So that’s what that noise is.”

  “He’s your problem now. I’m going into town.”

  “Why?”

  “To get drunk. And a new light bulb. I expect you to have this place cleaned up by the time I get back.”

  “Maybe.”

  Malachi gave him what—in the gloom—appeared to be a hard look, got up off the couch, and went over to grab his EVA suit off the hook. He pulled it on and sealed up his helmet. Sebastian rearranged the junk on the floor into neater piles. The knocking from Sebastian’s room became briefly louder, and then stopped at once. Malachi cocked his head to one side, as though unsure over his choice of the old footlocker, but soon shook it off. He tossed the lead pipe down on the couch for Sebastian’s use, stepped into the airlock, and out in the cold vacuum of space.

  …….

  -Capt. Thorne-

  A WHOLE NEW WORLD

  By Richard Cunningham III

  A sulfur smell accompanied the bay of moaning docks in the overcrowded trading-town of Genoa. Her citizens barely recognized it, but foreign merchants, drifters and the like went to great lengths in order to avoid the rotten-egg odor so potent on her breath. The illustrious harbor docks, constructed of strengthened synthetic and manufactured wood, created a boastful forum, a hub of commerce amid the general despair of the modern world. Off the coast, clouds like pillars stood in the sky and stretched out to a far horizon. The sea was again brewing up a tempest to wreak havoc on the souls of men in her misbegotten trust. Directly overhead the sky shook and stirred, already a violet haze shifting in the air and a great yellow disk above that, piercing through the layers of flimsy ozone to overwhelm man and nature alike in its once-sweet sunlight. A few skyscrapers of old-Boston jutted out of the ocean’s surface, rusty jagged reef threatening the vessels that navigated the popular harbor day and night. The seas encroached on this ancient metropolis at some point in the late nineties and entombed it by the year 2150. That was the lore of the times anyway. No one in the Dead Land knew much about its history. An education in the “Bomb Parades”, or the “Great Fire of old-Los Angeles” had become irrelevant next to surviving the abundantly hostile world they now tread. Still, there was no denying the impact of its absence, a chip borne on the shoulder of an entire species of bastards, left to a bizarre and unwelcoming land.

  Standing on the dock, Captain Thorne was a giant among common men, but in the high noon even more obvious of the Captain was his prosthetic arms: reflective metal-alloy limbs, constructed by a scientist who had a proficient understanding of bionic technology, common once in the old-world, but now a rarity among a number of mechanical debacles pedaled by two-bit quacks.

  Under messy strands of hair, Thorne’s cold blue eyes squinted out toward the outpost, unsure for a moment about leaving the wilderness for the noise and the stench of civilization. Powered Zinc coated his cheeks and forehead, offering some protection against sun disease out on the wide revealing sea. He wiped a flood of sweat from his brown, staining the arm of his coat white, and then went back to checking out near-by vessels and their owners, for the discovery of either friend or foe. His crew went up and down the boat, carrying crates and barrels, yelling and spitting and tossing ropes around as they tethered the boat to the posts lining the platform. The men had spent much of th
e past year afloat and now they were finally unloading their profiteering boat to make trade with the land settlements that dotted the largely barren landscape of the east. The ship, after all, was a wreck, torn apart by recent blood battles waged at sea. These skirmishes were fortunate, ultimately, for the captain and his crew, who were already hopelessly stranded and conceding to die of thirst on the open waters. The victories were also fortunate personally for Thorne, who barely avoided outright mutiny and had, through good fortune or sheer chance, acquired a stolen relic cross in the violence, owned prior by the New Salvation Army.

  The relic was no doubt of high value and the NSA would be after it, so Thorne was eager to cash in on the score; but it was far too risky to try pawning off hot NSA goods in Genoa, the trail too obvious, when it was only off the port town’s coast where Captain Thorne encountered the transport ship; the same that he ultimately sank to the depths of the ocean. Thorne had approached the ship under the pretense of trade for fresh water and directions—though he had in fact secretly desired a contest with the other ship’s captain. The ensuing conflict produced Thorne this hidden treasure, and guaranteed an inflated price on the Captain’s head.

  The artifact itself was quite large, almost three feet in length, with ascending cross-pieces made of stone. Thorne had disguised the shape in a cloth and tucked it under his tattered leather trench coat. He had already resorted to hiding the relic even before reaching shore, as some of his crew was convinced the chunk of rock had actually saved them from imminent death. Thorne didn’t see himself as a very superstitious man, nor was he religious. He did, however, consider himself an entrepreneur, trying to get by in an ugly cut-throat business, and this rare find was the closest thing he might get to a meal ticket.

  Cooke, the only to rival the Captain’s size on-board, or likewise the immediate vicinity, approached his long-time friend. Cooke was a grizzly piece of work, gnarly patches of hair covering his slightly misshapen head and face; missing a right eye and his left hand, which he had happily replaced with a crude meat hook.

  “How much ya say we could make off that thing?” Cooke asked.

  Thorne looked at him with suspicion, deserved suspicion. Cooke was a good blunt weapon in a pinch, but he was all brute and no brains, easily manipulated, often by his own runt-brother, Goose, who had tried to kill Thorne before and was probably the orchestrator of the most recent mutiny attempt.

  “You just worry about selling off those crates for a good price.”

  “Booze, whores, and killing’s on my agenda, Captain.”

  “That’s well and good, just make sure you get around to business. They got some hospitals around here that’d pay decent money for those Menthols, probably would take those PMS packs off our hands, too.”

  “Hell, I ain’t gonna do any of that stuff,” Cooke said, lighting up a Menthol. “That’s what I got Goose for. He’s the one with the brains.”

  “Not if he disappears with the ship’s score, he won’t be. I’m making you responsible for him. Remember that.”

  “Don’t worry. He’ll fetch you a decent price.”

  “Sure I will, Captain,” said Goose, a skinny bookworm in round spectacles and an old wool suit, appearing from behind his massive brother, like it was a parlor trick. “Anyway, we all know the real money is with that relic there that come off the boat. So where are you going, Captain, with that prize of yours?”

  “Like I’d answer to you, you wet little rat. You’ll have plenty of killers hunting you down should you get greedy with those crates. Just think about that kind of violence coming down on you, if you’re looking for