Linc wanted to spit but had run out of saliva. But they all watched silently the man they’d worked with being dressed down like a bitch in front of his family. The chalky dust on their overalls and their jeans and their boots didn’t even budge. One of them looked like she might boot all over her jeans. But the social workers looked flesh-and-blood enough. The cops were likely partially cyberized, their essential parts replaceable hence their stomping around irradiated wasteland. On its front, a display of a white man’s mustachioed face. The County Sheriff was there, a large metal sphere with arms like a spider, one sporting a small caliber pistol. When they got to Ace’s spot, a slouching duplex that used to be painted blue and yellow once upon a time, there was five-oh out front and a couple people that looked maybe like social workers. The houses here on the outskirts of that neighborhood looked no different, but out front, piled up on the sidewalk were mattresses, some with blood stains like large copper half dollars on them, children’s clothes mixed in with dirty linens, ants swarming over half-empty bags of fast food, old radios that looked like they’d only recently stopped working. The broken windows with their crumbling frames like Bishop’s droopy eye watched them pass. They drove out of the old Ivy Quarter and the dilapidated houses got smaller, their lean more pronounced. The window only went halfway up after that. “His place comin’ up right now.” And with that, Bishop retreated. Linc leaned over to be heard over the rumbling through the abandoned roads by the old Ivy Quarter. “You gon’ break my goddamn winda poundin’ like that.” The driver’s side window creaked downward and a leather-skinned black man with a lazy eye, the ratty remains of a cigar in his false teeth and a straw hat on his head, leaned out on his elbow. When nothing happened, he rapped again, hard enough to crack the plexi-glas. Linc stirred, then rapped loudly on the back window. He had his hammer draped across his chest, his head propped against the rickety back of the flatbed, his hat brim low over his eyes. “We pickin’ up Ace?” one of the youths asked. Otherwise, they’d be out there just like he was before rehab, letting hunger compel him to destroy the very things he needed. Linc knew the work would be the best thing to happen to them. The whores vanished behind a corner, and the young men retreated to their seats. None of them looked up at the red-blue sky threaded with knife-scar clouds and the Colony hovering like a pitted moon overhead. He wanted to get at least a little bit of sleep before they got to the worksite, but the heat was just a few dozen degrees past sleepy, so why not holler at a few whores to pass the time?Īt least it wasn’t raining at least it wasn’t cold enough to aggravate his busted knuckles and the smashed fingers and toes that belonged to any number of kids in various angles of repose in the flatbed. They laughed and it sounded like thunder, joyous, irresponsible laughter and even as Linc gripped the handle of his hammer, he couldn’t help smiling. “Them trackmarks get me a discount?” one shouted. The other men in the back of the truck with Linc, leaned over the side of the flatbed and whistled. In the shadows cast by the leaning, crumbling apartment towers stood black girls and a few jaundiced snow bunnies in leather, neon-colored short skirts, hips kinked to one side while the stone wall supported their lewd poses. But Linc thought he could maybe hear the wreckers up ahead, monstrous, steel-tooth jaws spreading open to dump another load of bricks on the growing pile. The truck, lifting carpets of ash and dust into the air like someone spreading a bedsheet, provided the morning’s only sound. Linc tucked down the bill of his worn Red Sox cap and closed his eyes against the sweat stinging them. Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.
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