Stephen Blackmoore
WASTELAND: CULTS AND CRIMINALS
ALL BAD THINGS
—1—
“Greatness comes from humble beginnings. One man can shake the Earth until it falls from the quaking.”
No one causes trouble in the Central Market. The snipers make sure of that.
It’s been here for years, at least as long as Samson can remember, in the middle of a bombed–out five–story building on South Broadway, the roof torn out and all but the bottom floor destroyed. The walls—ringed at each floor by a few feet of rickety, crumbling cement and steel pipe that the two–man sniper patrols walk along, looking for trouble down below—seem held up by magic. The only concession to a roof is a series of badly stitched–together blue tarps that flap and snap in the wind high above. They keep the sun and the worst of the rain out, but just barely.
The first time he was here, Luke Samson was five, maybe six years old, and running with some kids in a gang called the Leather Jerks, doing what they had to do to stay alive. Good days were running messages, picking pockets, bashing heads. Bad days—well, there were things some of the kids did that didn’t bear thinking about. By the time Samson had joined up he was already towering over kids twice his age, and nobody made him do anything he didn’t want to, but he’d seen things. The memories make his blood boil even now.
But he’s not that little kid anymore. Six–foot–five, solid muscle, flaming red hair and a matted tangle of beard beneath eyes that people call crazy even on his good days.
He steps to the head of the line, patient, calm. That’s what you do at the Central Market if you don’t want a bullet through your head. He towers over Bernie, a wiry man with jet–black hair slicked back with greasy pomade, the wrinkles in his nut–brown skin so deep you could toss bricks in and never fill them up. Bernie ticks a mark with a graphite disc onto parchment made from dog skin, tallying up the people who step through the gate.
“Name?” Bernie says, his voice creaky like a rusty hinge.
“You know me, old man,” Samson says.
“Yeah, you know us,” Cyrus adds, poking his pock–marked face with the fringe of unruly brown hair out from behind Samson. For a moment Samson had forgotten Cyrus was with him. Loud when he wants to be, silent when he needs to be, it’s easy to forget he’s there sometimes. Until you suddenly have a knife in your throat.
“Yeah, I know you,” Bernie says. “But do you know yourselves?” He cackles at a joke only he seems to understand. Laugh turns to cough, then to hocking a thick, phlegmy gob onto the cracked pavement.
“The fuck does that mean?” Cyrus says, but the question has Samson stuck. Does he know himself? He’s been wondering that a lot lately. Not sure what he’s doing, not sure why he’s doing it. Maybe the real question isn’t what he’s doing, but who he is. His brow furrows and he can hear the clicking and clacking of bolts being rammed home, snipers taking position. He blinks, lost for a moment.
“Meant nothin’ by it, Samson. Meant nothin’ by it.” Bernie is sweating, eyes wide, shaking.
Samson blinks. “What happened?” he says. At least three snipers on the walls above have him in their crosshairs.
“You got that murder look on your face, Sammy,” Cyrus whispers. “You chill? Tell me you’re chill.”
“Yeah, I’m chill.” Murder look? That only happens when he’s angry. “I was just thinkin’ is all.”
“We talked about that, man,” Cyrus says. “I do the thinkin’ for us. You know that.”
“Yeah,” Samson says, slowly coming back to himself. “Uh, here.” He fishes a couple of pieces of scrap out of his pocket, chunks torn from a busted–up carburetor they scavenged out in Monterey Park, hands them over to Bernie. “That get us in?”
Bernie takes them, looks them over carefully. “Shell casings would be better, but this’ll do.” He squints up at the snipers. “All good here, boys. All good.”
The snipers stand down, go back to their patrols, but Samson can still feel their eyes on him.
“Weapons in the box,” Bernie says. Samson puts his sledgehammer and shotgun into the plastic bin and takes his marker, a green rubber toy that’s so chewed up he can’t tell what it used to be. Cyrus does the same with his knives and pistol, and he grabs a pair of plastic dice threaded together through holes drilled in each. “You lose them tickets, you ain’t gettin’ these back.”
“We remember,” Samson says, but he knows Bernie has to say that. One time he didn’t and there was an argument over a lost ticket. Guy got drilled by the snipers but not before he tossed a grenade into the Market and took out eight people.
“And keep your elephant on a leash,” Bernie says. It takes a second for Samson to get that he’s talking to Cyrus.
“Sure, sure. All good.” Cyrus leads Samson past Bernie and into the Market.
“The fuck’s an elephant?”
“One of them things with the long noses,” Cyrus says. “I showed ’em to you in that book a while back.”
“Oh, right. Right. Did I really have my murder face on?”
“Man, you so had your murder face on. Come on, let’s go sell some shit.”
The sights and sounds of the Market are jarring. Multicolored string lights line every stall, recorded Mexican music whines through tinny speakers competing with an unseen drum circle somewhere in the back. But it’s the smells that hit Samson the hardest. Outside they compete with burning trash, swamp water, rotting vegetation, the occasional corpse, but in here it’s all hot metal, cooking meat, spices carted down from Gilroy. Samson stands there a moment with his eyes closed, just breathing it all in.
Samson follows Cyrus as he makes his way over to Two–Ton Tess, an enormous Asian woman with jowls that flap when she talks and skin growths that look like barnacles on her forehead. Cyrus upends a bag of reading glasses they looted from a buried pharmacy last week. Samson is proud of that find. They’re in pretty good shape.
“The fuck are these?” Tess asks, her voice wet, breath stinking like a dead rat.
“You never seen glasses before? You wear ’em on your eyes,” Cyrus says. “You see better.”
She peers through one lens, grunts. “Whatta ya want for ’em? Got some Pruno the Russian boys brought over today. They say it tastes just like vodka.”
“Horseshit. Whatta they know? Nobody’s made real vodka in thirty years,” Cyrus says. “Ten kilos of saltpeter, three of mercury fulminate.”
Tess cackles, her jowls wiggling. “For this? Nobody wants to see better in this place, pencil–dick. What are they gonna look at, their festering boils? This gilded fucking paradise we call home? One kilo of saltpeter and a gram of fulminate.”
“Nine and a kilo.”
Samson watches the haggling go on for a few minutes before he gets restless and wanders off. He stops at Pedro’s Carniceria, his mouth watering at the smell of dog and rat cooking over a grill. He buys some possum on a stick with a chunk of scrap metal, then wanders back over to Cyrus as he’s finishing his negotiations.
“Three kilos of saltpeter and five grams of the fulminate,” Tess says. “Final offer.”
“Done,” Cyrus says.
“Pick it up outside in the back,” Tess says. “And be careful carting it around. The fulminate’s in water, but it’ll still go up.”
“That’s okay,” Cyrus says. “Sammy here’s carrying it.”
“Fire in the hole,” Cyrus yells, touching a burning stick to the fuse while Samson shoves his fingers in his ears. The fuse goes fast, faster than either of them expects, but when the blast comes it’s less an explosion and more of a metallic pop.