The Collector

A note from JB: A treat for Monday. This is the first scene in the first chapter of a book I’m thinking of writing next year. I flagged it in Friday’s private column to see if there was any interest in a novel about a character who stalks the ruins of our fallen civilisation, collecting dues from those most responsible for its fall. Interest was high. It was great fun to write while I was away over the weekend, so there’ll be a few more of these in future, specifically while I’m travelling with Jane through September-October for our 25th Wedding Anniversary extravaganza. I have zero intention of writing angry columns for those two months, but I can prep a bunch of these stories to drop while we’re on the road. Probably with a book review or two. I’m opening the comments to everyone today. If you’d like to see somebody in particular hunted through the ruins of our soon-to-be former civilisation, just add them to The Collector’s list. ScoMo, Gina and Clive were nominated multiple times on Friday, so cast your net wider.

The land was trying to kill me. The sky too, but the earth was closer. Heat radiated back at me from the hard-baked ground, slowly roasting me over the same broken rocks that wanted to trip me up and snap an ankle. Leave me for the carrion crew. I shuffled forward, bent over, mindful of traps and deadfalls hidden under the scree. Knew a collector fell through the skylight of a buried mall once. Fuck that.

So I sweltered inside the small, hot cave of my canvas cloak, and I studied every inch of murderous ground. Hours before I got to New York, I could see the white sun glinting from the tallest towers, but only if I blinked away the sweat. Mostly I kept my head down, eyes on my lengthening shadow, as the sun fell into the west behind me.

I had to be careful of looking up too often. A couple of road agents jumped me in back in Kanas. I left them for the buzzards, but they smashed my goggles and my GPS going upside my head like that. Repairable, once I got to the city, or replaceable at a Guild safe house, but I had to get through the barrens first with sun and shadow as my only guide. I was a laydown certainty for sand blindness if I didn’t take care, and you better believe I was gonna take care with this job. The last name on my list.

Gave myself sand blindness once, chasing one of those Musk duplicates out of Fort Vegas for the Chamber of Commerce, which is to say, for the Mob, cos that’s the only commerce they got going on in Vegas these days, amirite? A good paying job, though, for a side-quest. I scratched the original Musk off my list a long time ago, but nobody wants Elon replicants getting into the food chain.

So I chased the dupe and the bounty all the way out to Barstow. Slagged his neural net with a dirty little EMP, but it was close. Fried my ride doing it and had to walk back to the fort during a sun storm. No goggles, not even a pair of salvage Raybans. I was blind ten klicks out, but luckily one of the Chamber’s border bots picked me up and took me the rest of the way in.

That’s why I like working for the Mob. A contract is a contract with those guys, and I carried that ugly fuckin Musk head all the way back, dripping blood, trailing wires and talking shit. Fuckin’ mushheads. They never stop talking. The job came with health cover, so they fixed my peepers and gave me a bonus for salvaging the neuralink mesh. I didn’t ask why they wanted it. I just got paid, got better, and went on to the next job. A coal baron called Palmer.

That was, jeez I dunno, twenty or thirty coal barons ago. Not all of them as big as Palmer. That dude was a whale. A real contributor to The Problem, you know. A lot of them were just sooties. Small-time petro-crims, digging a seam for black rock here. Fracking the old blue flame over there. Some weren’t even real sooties, just simps and grifters chasing scraps from the baron’s table.

Hard to say why, these days. I collected ‘em all. The law is settled. Ecocide is a death sentence. At least in civilised places like Fort Vegas. Some places in the old days, it was law that you had to kill a grifter on sight unless you had damn good reason not to. Real frontier energy there, which is why most of those places are gone now. Underwater or ashes. Still, they led the way.

I let my shadow lead the way.

With the sun getting low in the west, I was my own compass, a long dark finger of shade creeping over the baked hardscrabble and fine drifts of ash and silicate. Used to be suburbs and towns and whole cities out here, all the way into the eastern barrens, if you can believe the archives. But it all burned. Everything burns in the end, if it doesn't drown first, right? We still hold some truths to be self-evident around here.

Evident to my good self was the chances I had of surviving a night in the sandpit if I didn't make the city gates in time. Zero, in case you were wondering. Ordinarily, I might've looked for an old cellar to lay my head down at dusk, something underground and defensible, but I wasn't salting my story when I told you the sky wanted to kill me just as much as the earth. I couldn't quite see it yet, but I knew there was a dust storm coming in from the plains. Had word of it from the raven express back at Sunbury Station, an old riverbed fort. A force nine duster rolling in from the deep deserts. When it came, it’d come fast, hungry and mean, but for now, if you didn't have word from a raven, you had to read sky-sign.

After twenty years collecting what’s due, I could read sign double plus good, and I knew that fucking sky was fixing to kill me. The hazy, washed-out grey wasn't promising clouds, not from that direction. Only promise from there was dying hard. You’d probably choke as your throat filled up with ash and dirt, but a force nine dry storm has a medieval sense of humour. Might literally stone you to death, scythe the meat from your carcass with a mile-wide gravel hammer smashing into you at three or four hundred miles an hour.

Nothing for it but to put one foot in front of the other. I lengthened my stride and quickened the pace, even as I redoubled my efforts at reading the ground sign.

The parched ruin of the barrens gradually gave way to dry, cracked mud and clay as the iron hammer of the sun fell with just a little less force. The difference was subtle, but it was there. It told me to get moving.

I looked up, and in the impossible distance, the city cut a dark, jagged line through the metallic sheen of heat and salt. I was close enough to think that I might even make it. I didn't bother looking back. I knew what was coming up behind me. A deep red bruise on the sky, the shape of a howling mouth with lightning fangs. The air tasted of metal and burnt plastic, but beneath that, I could smell a hint of something else. Rot and genesis. Human waste.

The City. It was just lines and abstract shapes for now, a mountain that had turned itself inside out. But I was real close.

The wind stirred, and I tasted the first flicker of grit on my lips. I dropped my hood and let the world flood in.

The earth was still a hot plate underfoot, the ground here the texture of an uneven brick. I knelt down and swiped at the sand. Two flicks and an old road surfaced from beneath the scatter. I got back to my feet and read the ground sign deeply.

I could see it now. And old highway like a concrete ribbon running up to the city walls. Six miles away, I guesstimated. I could walk it in an hour and a half, but the storm would be here before then, and the gates would close even earlier.

Decision time.

I sucked the last of the hydrolyte from my fluid pack, and I started to run. It felt good to finally have safe ground under my feet. I could follow the sign all the way in. No chance of falling through a skylight into a buried mall now.

My boot heels crunched on the coarse-grained sand as it spin-drifted over the remains of the buried freeway. I’d been sweating all day, but I was quickly drenched with my own rank stew, even as my cloak flew free behind me, flapping the breeze of my accelerated passage.

Lightning strobed, painting the hellish landscape in forty-eight shades of brown and grey.

I ran, smelling sulphur and the industrial stink of spilled fuel, tasting the static electricity building in the air. I ran, ignoring the discomfort of bleeding toes and the ache of tired bones. I ran, boot heels punching through the crust of dried mud now, into the soupy clay beneath.

The walls of the free city of New York rose higher with every pounding footfall.

I smiled without any sense of delight.

Free city, my arse.

This was Rupert Murdoch's town. His bastion and fortress. His spider hole.

He was the last name on my list, and I was here to collect.