Soul Killer by Michael John Grist

Author:Michael John Grist [Grist, Michael John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

ME

14. RACHRANIKA

In a day I reach Calico. The boat is running on fumes by then, choking out as I pull close to the proto-Calico verge of floating barges. The Skulks. I've never seen them with my own eyes before, Me, this fragment of Ritry Goligh. For him it was reality, a pit in which he grew out of the chrysalis of his survivor's guilt.

To me it is a distant memory, a black and white history that lived long before I was born.

The tsunami Wall rises off-white above the Skulks like a vast and sheltering hand. One day this too will be crushed by the ravages of time. Looking at all this I remember Ritry's life, lived on both sides of that wall. On one there was despair, on the other, hope. I know what lies beyond; Loralena and the children, and also what lies beneath; Don Zachary's broken bunker.

I let my eyes fall across the ramshackle line of the Skulks, all-new since Ritry destroyed them with a quakeseed a year ago, but already stretching as far as I can see to either side. Neon lights pick out their conjoined contours; the bars, brothels and barrios that make these lawless, forsaken neighborhoods tick, that keep the flow of money flowing through. They seem in places to hover magically over the dark water, buoyed atop a low blue line.

These are the barrels that keep the proto-city afloat. Atop them lies a foundation-structure of twisted rebar and driftwood salvaged from the last Skulks, with reclaimed blue-tarp matting and plate-metal hewn from the gutted innards of old subglacics. The Skulks are a forager's world, last bastion of traumatized marines and all those who can't face the structure, law and forward-looking hope of Calico.

The engine sputters and I coax it a little farther, to the place where a great black ash-stain rears up the side of the wall like a towering Rorschach blot. I flip the EMR HUD's visor down and zoom in, picking out the pit-marks and freshly-poured cement reinforcements stippling the wall's black face.

This is what my quakeseed wrought. Ritry Goligh's quakeseed. It did not destroy Calico, and I'm grateful. It did not tear down the wall, beyond which the family of my other life lies, but everything else…

Below the scorch-marks lies just another Skulk, agglomerated buildings made of flotsam, freshly built atop the bunker that once stood here. I spot a bar at the water's edge, its neon light flashing a tawdry Morse welcome into the evening dark, regular as a lighthouse.

ZACHARY'S

Someone has a sense of humor, perhaps.

I throttle the boat up to the mooring clamps of this replacement Skulk, already looking for my next mode of transport. I can't get to the Black Sea in a speedboat. I need something faster and larger.

I climb from the boat onto a bobbing jetty strewn with drying gray seaweed and octopus skins, their smell of salty desiccation rising up in a fog. I take only Far's mission pack with me, pressed close to my chest in a plastic wallet.

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