CHAPTER 1: A SUNDAY DRIVE, WITH CANNIBALS
The tricked-out, inch-thick depleted uranium armor-scaled ‘73 Dodge Swinger called the Festering Wound hauled ass through the Wasteland down the cracked and cratered, debris-strewn remains of I-80 on adaptaplastic tires, her breeder reactor thrumming dangerously close to red-line.
Trip was behind her wheel, plugged into the dash and driving with his mind through the coiled patch cord jacked into the socket behind his right ear. The steering wheel jerked freely on its own, Trip’s eyebrows twitching to swerve the Wound around long-abandoned cars and potentially Dodge-swallowing pot-holes.
“You know,” Trip said, taking a final drag off one hand-rolled cig, jabbing it out in the overflowing dashboard ashtray, and immediately lighting a new one with the car lighter, “I’m seriously thinking about giving up this whole reprobate adventurer thing and going into accounting.”
Trip was 23, tall and wiry, pale and twitchy, with jet-black hair sculpted into a Jack Lord curl. He wore a grime-caked long-tailed tux jacket with the collar popped and the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, a t-shirt that simply read “Game Over”, ripped and faded black jeans, and red canvas hi-tops kept together with duct tape.
“Have you ever given any thought to lion taming?” Rudy asked, along with the sound of a zipper being yanked down, all wet and mushy.
“No good — I’m allergic to chairs.” Trip glanced over at Rudy in the passenger seat, and instantly regretted it. He winced, quickly looked away. “Vishnu’s nipples, man, can’t you keep your hands out of there for five fuckin’ minutes?”
“Not if I want to keep my buzz going, I can’t, no. I’m burning through mix like nobody’s business today. I blame stress. By which, of course, I mean you.” Rudy was 22, compactly stocky but muscular, with ruddy skin and a flame-red soul patch. He was already balding. What hair he had left jutted out in curly tufts from under a crumpled leopard-print fez. He wore a Peace-symbol t-shirt under an ammo bandolier, forest camo parachute pants, and steel-toed hikers.
Rudy plunged a hand through the zippered opening in his own stomach, pushing aside intestines to rummage around in his guts with practiced abandon. “‘Let’s go East’, you said.” Rudy’s fingers found what he was looking for hiding behind his spleen. “They love us in the Wasteland.’“ A twist and a hiss and he pulled out a thumb-sized cylinder, empty and dripping with viscera. “Ass.”
Rudy tossed the empty over his shoulder into the back seat, then slid a fresh, full cartridge out of his bandolier. Biting his lip, he shoved the cart into his gut, squirmed around to fit it into place. A twist the other way and with a sharp hum the chemical synthesis plant in his belly came back online, refueled, almost instantly re-flooding his bloodstream with fresh THC-analog. Rudy went all content and withdrew his hand, zipping his stomach back up and patting his hairy belly. “Ahh, sweet pseudo-cannabis bliss. I’m ready for death, now.”
Trip snorted. “We’re not gonna die.”
“I don’t see how that’s possible.” Rudy wiped the viscera from his hand on his camos and pulled his t-shirt down. “Unless they’ve all of a sudden given up and gone away?”
Trip glanced into the driver’s side-view mirror. The Magnums were still on their ass, the whole mind-linked, cannibalistic howling mad WOLFpack of them, weaving after the Wound half-a-meter off the road on plutonium battery-powered sonic surfboards. Two dozen of them, maybe more. Obsessed with the old TV private eye, they all looked like prime 1980’s Tom Selleck, even the women, thanks to sloppy amateur elective plastic surgery, cheesy hair-plug mustaches, and tattered Hawaiian shirts. Each one had a whip antenna grafted onto a temple, the tips of the antennas blinking angry red in staccato unison. They brandished a variety of weapons: nail-encrusted baseball bats, crowbars with spikes welded to their tips, sawed-off shotguns, and one severed leg with the foot wrapped in razor wire.
“No, apparently not.” Trip took a long draw from his cig. “We’re out of grenades, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, you used them all back at that sports bar in Albuquerque winning that Karel Capek bobblehead alarm clock from those robo-bikers.”
Trip smiled proudly. “Showed them how real men play Candyland.”
“You just had to have it, didn’t you?”
“It was near-mint-in-box. It’s a collector’s item.”
“Which you promptly threw in the trunk and haven’t looked at since.” Rudy scratched his soul-patch, thinking, then snapped his fingers. “What about the autocannon? Just flip us around, charge the bastards and open fire.”
“You traded the last box of shells