Dead Land, Character Introductions Read online

restraint.”

  “Captain, Captain, don’t you worry. I know a guy who’ll pay good money to get his hands on bona-fide Salvation Army PMS meals.”

  Thorne grunted and passed by them both, climbing back up the ramp and into the boat he had inherited years back. So much time on the sea had transformed it into yet another home, perhaps the only one he understood not by name alone. Arriving in Genoa, his realities were finally clashing, however.

  No one was aware he had spent a chapter of his childhood there; moreover, no one knew Thorne had himself a wife and child waiting for him in Drum City. To him, trust only introduced risk, and with his family, Thorne took no risk. Also, the duality was easier on his mind. He took a different form all-together out on sea. It was a bloody way to make a living, a lifestyle capable of whittling a man’s soul down to the primordial core, that primitive beast exposed to the light of day. Maybe that’s just what I’ve become on my own, he thought. He still had splinters embedded in his face from a water battle not a week past. There was gore and filth in his hair and mixed into his rusted beard, and a sour smell about him commonly associated with animals or hobos.

  Below deck, in his cramped quarters, Thorne took up a shiny cutlass in his hand and fit a broad-rimmed fedora over his greasy head, throwing shadows over his eyes. He collected an empty flask from a shelf, then this and that of his belongings, and finally an old photograph of his wife and kid. Not thirty minutes on land and he was already soft, with ancient memories of joy now haunting the brutal calculating leader that the hard world had formed.

  Thorne climbed out of the wooden belly and up to the ship’s deck to an overwhelming blinding light and that foul smell that clogged the senses, but to which he had already acclimated. Three of his crew saw him and they threw themselves on the floor before his feet.

  “Please, Captain, please let us get a look at that there relic one more time! We trust you taking it with you, we just wanna ask it for some stuff is all.”

  “I’m asking it fer a goat. I’ve always wanted to be able to make my own milk, maybe even learn me to make goat cheese. You ever eat some real goat cheese, Captain?” another crew-member said.

  “You bring a goat on this boat and I’m making a stew out of it,” Mr. Crumbs said. He was the ship’s cook and another of the relic worshipers.

  “What do you think: this chunk of rock caused that boat-robot to explode out there?” Thorne said. “It was a fluke. Just a fluke. You better wise up before you go hitting the poker tables and prostitutes tonight. They’re always looking for fools, you know.”

  “We saw what we saw, Captain,” Mr. Crumbs said, with teeth mostly absent from his white sun-chapped grin.

  “Right, that’s some kind of Doomsday cross, I tell ya,” another offered.

  “I don’t like any of you enough to entertain this. And don’t let anyone on my ship while I’m gone, or there’ll be hell to pay, I promise,” Thorne said, returning to the swaying docks, that immediate illusion of solid ground that he was finding hard to shake.

  He crossed over into his old stomping grounds, familiar sites and faces returning. Warrington was the dock’s keep and an old friend to Thorne. The two had served together as teens in the same unit of the local militia. He had the type of job now that was good at getting gifted men ruddy and fat from excess. Everyone was willing to throw the dock keep a little extra for safe harbor, and Warrington was very good at securing ships when properly motivated, often hinting to his partiality of pricey booze and cheap whores.

  “Hey, Thorne! How the hell’s it been?”

  “Bleak at best. You?”

  “Oh, fine, fine. Life’s all shit and roses. Can’t complain, don’t imagine people’d listen if I did,” Warrington said jovially, and then pointed at Thorne’s boat with his swollen bejeweled finger. “She looks pretty beat up. How long you keeping her docked?’

  “A month for repairs and the like,” Thorne said and handed Warrington a satchel.

  The dock keep’s face lit up like a bulb at the sight, and as Thorne handed over the coin, he caught the wonder of a child in the fat man’s big round eyes. The dock keep poured out the satchel and made a quick count of the money.

  “Thorne, you’re a good friend.”

  “Just look after her, alright?”

  “Of course, Captain, of course, like a baby,” he said and patted Thorne on the shoulder.

  “That old geezer still got a leather shop on Broadway?”

  “Old man Dylan, yeah, why?”

  “No reason.”

  The door to the smith’s shop hit a cluster of bells over-head. They rang out as Thorne entered and rang another time as the door shut behind him. Soon a deformed old man scuttled out from a linen curtain that hanged from the ceiling, dividing the sales floor from the living space. The man’s gait was made awkward by the hump rising out of his back like a great mountain range. It made walking an obvious effort, but the cripple had the reputation of a skilled craftsman.

  “Well now, you’re a big fella,” he said, sitting on a bench behind his workspace. He had pallid blue eyes and deep crow’s feet extending to edges of his white thinning hair. His nose was crooked, shifting left to right, before pointing down to an incriminating thin-lipped grin.

  “Can you make something to carry this,” Thorne asked, holding out the covered relic.

  “Oh sure, sure,” Old-Man Dylan said, looking him up and down with a hairy eye. In the same breath he started hacking violently. He muffled the horrible sound with a rag, which he pulled from his back pocket. His face was turning several shades of purple, before he finally settled down and returned the mouth rag to his pants.

  “My coat’s got some tears in it too.”

  “Put it on the counter then,” the old man said.

  There was something off about the man that Thorne now noticed, something beyond the obvious deformity and emerging stutter. As Thorne took his coat off, the smith started clapping nervously; then he let out a wheezy little chuckle that only illuminated his peculiarity.

  “Oh, how nice!” the smith exclaimed as he tapped a boney knuckle against Thorne’s bionic metal arm. “This is good work, this is very, very good work. I’ve never seen work like this before, so...sleek, just beautiful. It’s quite rare, it is...quite-quite-quit-quite-quite rare indeed! Who was the surgeon? I-I-I just need to know.”

  “Carver was his name.”

  This was an obvious lie.

  “Haha! Hahaha! Yes, yes, Doctor Carver, very fitting. I don’t know him, but he sounds like a doctor for sure,” he said, picking up the leather trench coat, then setting it back down on the counter.

  “He’s dead now—”

  “But I do have a friend in the cybernetic business. Doesn’t do work like that, of course. But if you ever need anything done. You have one-hundred percent function? Does it use any of that nano-science stuff?”

  “What’s it to you, old man?”

  “Hm. Well, if you ever need any work done—”

  “I’ll just be needing the case and the patches to my coat.”

  The smith studied the cross. “Mighty interesting, ain’t it?”

  “Don’t get any bad ideas, smith, you’re too old to live it down.”

  “It’s hot, huh? No problem, no-no problem. You wanna leave it here?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Right-right-right, of course. Well I think I got a potato sack around here, if you’re looking to be discreet.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  “Lets just...”

  The smith pulled out a piece of hide string from his apron pocket and turned his focus to the dimensions of the cross, taking detailed measurements, which he then scribbled in his notepad. Thorne had a couple of hours before the geezer would be done crafting the case, so he wrapped the relic up in a burlap sack and went off to kill some time in one of the busiest and most deadly port towns on the East Coast.

  The center of Genoa was a swarming, stinking mess. Thorne couldn’t reac
h out without hitting someone, couldn’t walk a foot without stepping in something foul. Buildings in general stood no more than seven or so stories tall, but they were constructed so closely they were almost stacked on top of each other; the original town plan now busting out of its belt to accommodate a flourishing outpost of human society. A town mostly of killers, thieving whores and bottom scum. Gypsies in ragged cloth and raw-hide faces begged for change, dropping to their dusty knees for the slightest act of charity. A gang of local punks pushed people over as they moved through the crowd, looking for trouble. A dizzying spectacle of street venders rattled off prices in heated competition, announcing “one-time offers” to the multitudes of potential clients. Crime was common and committed openly on the streets, absent of shame or fear. That was what generally happened when port towns became too populated. Law and order got squeezed out.

  A poverty-stricken old man wrapped in a tarp, followed Thorne, pulling closer whenever the streets became congested. Thorne finally grabbed him by the arm and the geezer quickly shrank to the ground in pain and awful fright.

  “What did you take from me?” Thorne demanded.

  “Please don’t kill me,” the elderly crook pleaded, dropping Thorne’s silver watch-piece.

  The thief had a bulbous sun-baked nose and two sunken beady eyes shrouded under a tan veil. He was more or less a skeleton already, splattered in dark splotches and bleeding scabs, signs that he was likely dying of the sun cancer.

  “Don’t let me see you again.”

  Thorne released him and the geezer crawled off like vermin down the sidewalk. The noon sun made for hot tempers on the streets, but Thorne saw no point in breaking a desperate old pickpocket already near the end of his days.

  I need a drink, he thought.

  He walked past a butcher shop selling mostly mangy carcasses of MSCs. As the predatory abominations were quick to overwhelm indigenous species and thrive in their place, they were a common butcher staple. A fresh coyogre was splayed open and draped over a pole to let bleed out, flies swarming around its powder-covered insides. The beast was easily the length of a man, some much larger, its fur like the coat of the rare porcupine, with great gnarled teeth crowding its unhinged mouth. Thorne had killed this breed of MSC once before in his travels and it wasn’t easy, so he was impressed by the butcher’s feat. He couldn’t, however, imagine coyogre meat tasting any good; even it was treated and heavily flavored. Thorne crossed over a pitted street and headed toward a sprawling saloon. The sign outside proclaimed it to be The Shrieking Clam.

  The place was packed full of blood money and drunken hotheads. But the bike outside was enough motivation for Thorne to walk straight into a room full of trouble. Inside it was the typical dive scene: whores bent over the second-floor railings, calling out the names of regular patrons, tempting them to venture upstairs and into their lumpy cold beds. One of the prostitutes at the banister already had herself a customer and skipped the formalities, her skirt dancing overhead and a grubby pirate grinning and clutching her waist from behind. The floor was a more sober scene in contrast, where gamblers took to the tables and threw away good money or trade for a chance to win it big. Differences were settled with crashes of glass and fists and teeth. Every winner was a cheat and every loser was left sore in such a place. From above, a high-pitched scream came from a man who was on his way down from a fourth-story push. He crash-landed, shattering a table and interrupting a game of knives-out poker. The place hadn’t changed. Thorne went up to the counter and called over the bartender.

  “Whiskey.”

  “Comin’ up.”

  The bartender wiped a tin cup clean with his grungy cloth and poured out hootch until it hit the very rim of the container. Thorne grabbed it with his two shiny metal fingers and opened the hatch, spilling out harsh