‘Four hours and then back here,’ I said.
‘Comms discipline?’
‘Tight burst once per hour. Use the crypts that Pagan gave us. Signal to me and back to Morag and Pagan, agreed?’
‘And we hit trouble?’
‘Quick burst to me, or me to you, but if possible exfiltrate first. Some of these gangs are well organised and they’ll have some serious hackers. We can’t compromise the others,’ I said.
‘Agreed.’ He seemed reassured by what I’d said.
‘What’re you carrying?’ I asked.
‘Just sidearms. They’ll be enough for a quick recon.’
I nodded. I had my pistols and the assault shotgun clipped to the side of the bike. I looked up and he was gone. Disappeared into the settling dust.
I had been sloppy; there was no other explanation. I’d noticed them pretty quickly. Their rad gear was old but well maintained. Their gear was a dust-covered black colour and they had a red cross on their left breasts over the heart. They were difficult to miss. They’d started following me in a monster truck, heavily armoured and decorated in their colours. Vicious spikes of scrap metal and the barrels of military surplus heavy weaponry protruded from the truck. I was going to be able to outrun that easily. I was a bit more worried about the motorcycle outriders and the fact that they presumably had a better knowledge of what the configuration of Crawling Town was tonight.
I was so concerned about the ones behind me that I hadn’t noticed them getting in front of me. I should’ve but the place was full of people so there wasn’t a great deal I could do. Even checking on thermographics would only have shown me what I already knew, lots of people and hot engines. Even so I don’t think this would’ve happened had I been on my game. The jeeps slid from either side of the crossroads ahead. They had enough discipline for their gunmen to competently cover me. I got out of the way of the first net. The second only clipped me and somebody died with a round from the Mastodon through their skull. The third net got me and they pumped enough current through it that even my systems weren’t able to cope. I hope I cost them a fortune in energy. I was too busy being electrocuted to send out a distress message to Rannu and too unconscious to do it when they’d finished electrocuting me.
They were called the Wait. They were a skinhead monastic order that’d been evicted from their commune in Oregon and subsequently joined Crawling Town. It’d taken me a while to figure out the whole skinhead swastika thing. They were Nazis, a political ideology from back when people had them, which promoted white supremacy – as ridiculous as that might sound. It was a pre-FHC idea that apparently had resulted in quite serious wars at one point. I was surprised to find that people like this still existed. I guess that in times like these people needed to find something to hang on to, to try and make sense of things. Even if that thing is old and foul and pointless. Also I doubted they’d been able to make out that I was a quarter Thai, so I did wonder why they’d picked on me.
To give them credit, they knew how to secure someone properly. They’d attached a spinal clamp, effectively paralysing me. They’d stripped me and taken all my gear but otherwise I was in pretty good shape. I just felt embarrassed and more than a little angry with myself. I’d tried to send a comms message out to Rannu but I could feel some kind of inhibitor jacked into one of my plugs.
The skinheads had set up a compound of sorts. They’d run electrified fencing topped with programmable razor wire between several huge armoured mobile homes. They’d also set up several other security measures and were patrolling the compound relatively professionally. Thing is, I got the feeling that few if any of them had ever seen service. These were hate-filled children playing soldiers. I always wondered why people like this never joined up. I mean if they really felt the need to wallow in hate-filled pseudo-military bullshit?
From out of the mobile home, which I guessed was supposed to be Command and Control, I saw three of them exit and head towards me. Two of them wore black rad ponchos with the red cross on them. They carried replica Schmeissers chambered for 10-millimetre case-less. The guy in the middle did not have a rad suit on. He wore a spotless, pressed black tunic with matching trousers and high black boots which actually looked like they’d once been part of an animal’s skin. They were very black and shiny. He wandered over to where I was crucified and looked up at me.
‘Hi,’ I said. His head was totally shorn of hair. In fact he seemed to have no hair anywhere on his head and I couldn’t work out why he seemed to be wearing purple lipstick. Across his scalp, just beneath the skin, I could see a complicated network of circuitry. It was high-end expensive stuff. This guy was obviously a hacker. I didn’t like his eyes; they were blue and multifaceted like an insect’s. It wasn’t right. He just watched me for a long time. I could see multiple images of myself reflected in the eyes.
‘What do you want?’ I finally asked, irritated at being unnerved by someone I guessed wasn’t much more than a kid.
‘We have everything we want.’ His voice was so cold and expressionless, I was sure it was modulated. This guy was so image conscious he had to be young.
‘Why am I up here?’ I asked.
‘Are you Anglo-Saxon?’ he asked, as if the term had any meaning whatsoever.
‘Yes.’
‘Your accent sounds Scottish; the Scots aren’t Anglo-Saxons.’
‘I’m still white,’ I said hopefully. I was planning on choking the life out of the little shit when I got down. The insect-eyed Nazi went quiet.
‘You still haven’t told me why I’m up here,’ I said eventually.
‘To suffer.’ That didn’t sound good.
‘Any reason?’ I asked.
‘To suffer for the crimes the lesser races have inflicted on the master race. To show God that some of his chosen people still care. So you can feel an iota of what our Lord Jesus felt when he was brought low by the likes of you.’ Something struggled through my memory. Some half-remembered conversation with a Christian signalwoman attached to my first squad when I’d joined the Paras.
‘I’m not Roman,’ I told him, pretty sure that was right. ‘I’ve never even been to Italy.’ He ignored me.
‘For untermensch you are strong, yes?’
‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘I think you will last a long time and your sacrifice will be great.’ I came to the conclusion that there probably wasn’t going to be a great deal of reasoning with this guy.
‘Oh bullshit, you whiney little cunt. This isn’t about ideology or religion, this is about your own fucking inadequacies. You’re weak and frightened so you have to fucking act out. Try and get people under your power. Get people to fear you because respect and love are beyond you. You know as well as I do that if you guys hadn’t got the drop on me you wouldn’t last ten seconds in a locked room with me. Don’t you, don’t you!’ I screamed at him. I think I saw a flicker of annoyance, but to give him his due he retained his composure quite well.
‘Cook him. Take him to the craters,’ insect-eyes finally said.
For a while it wasn’t too bad. They drove the dune buggy over rough ground, and because I’d been restrained with my arms outstretched every bump put a lot of stress on my back and arms, causing pain despite my reinforced physiology. Pretty soon that was the least of my worries. It was the dust. It was corrosive and stung. Filters or no filters, I felt the dust filling my nasal cavity and throat. I tried to keep my mouth closed, opening only to scream when I was jarred particularly painfully. As my head nodded down I saw that I was covered in blood. My skin and flesh were being slowly stripped down to the armour as the dust sandblasted me. I felt like I was disappearing, being peeled back layer by layer. When I tried to scream I just choked on more dust.