Gudsriki (27 page)

“Alexandra Suvorova! We think!”

“Where is she?”

“Krym! Sevastopol at last contact!”

The Geki nodded to each other and jumped. They landed in Sevastopol. They found the streets bare and empty. No screams resounded from their appearance.

“I've heard that name before.”

“You have?”

“Yes. She calls herself Mishka.”

 

 

T
HEY
SAW
no boats with enough range to make it to Valhalla, so they took a small one and headed north to the Italian shore. Vibeke looked over to Nel, expressionless.

Wulfgar was dead and Violet wasn't there to see it. She could take no solace in the fact that what was left of her did the deed. It was an empty victory. It seemed odd that they even went to do it at all. They'd neglected to save the man's harem of blondes, to thoroughly erase his influence, to act in any significant way. It was more like paperwork than an assassination.

“Are you happy?” Vibeke asked.

Nel tried to figure out if she was. She was certainly registering Wulfgar's death as a positive. But something was keeping her from actually “being” happy about it.

“As much as is possible,” she replied.

“How much is that?”

“Not much.”

Vibeke was annoyed. Her anger at Nel for not being happy was really anger at herself for the same shortcoming. She couldn't be happy for Wulfgar's death when Violet wasn't the one to do it. And she certainly couldn't be with the cruel robot around.

“Why are you angry all the time?” she asked.

“I'm not angry all the time. I'm angry at you, and I'm with you all the time.”

Vibs felt bitter. “You wouldn't exist if not for me. What I did.”

“You wouldn't be who you are without your stepfather.”

“No, I'd be a lot better.” She didn't want to inspire Nel by reminding her she'd killed her stepfather.

“Maybe I was better as a Bowie knife.”

“You were a lot less bitchy.”

“I'm grateful you made me what I am now.” Nel could admit that much, but not without reminding Vibeke, “But I'll never forgive you for letting her die. Never. So think about that next time you're happy with me. Next time I'm nice to you, next time you think we've grown close. I'm just biding my time until I figure out what you deserve.”

“Is that why you stick with me? Just waiting to kill me?”

“You don't deserve to die. You deserve to hurt. Like I hurt.”

Vibeke didn't know if Nel could hurt. She wondered if it was all a forgery.

“Right, how do you feel pain? How much pain have you felt in your whole one day of existence? You don't know shit about pain.”

“I remember pain training.”

A lie. “You remember someone else's pain training.”

They sat for an instant in silence before Vibeke stood up and ejected her Tikari. She set its blade to 800 kelvins and held it to the side of Nel's neck. Nel didn't react.

“Let's see if Violet's pain training does you any good.”

She touched the tip to her skin. A thin plume of white smoke drew from the spot. Nel showed no reaction. Vibeke pulled downward toward her chest, across her collarbone and down to her nipple. She left it there, touching her suit. The suit wouldn't burn, but she'd feel it inside. The pain would be enormous. But Nel just stared at her.

“Keep it up, Vibs. Keep tormenting the greatest killing machine ever built and see what happens.”

She thrust the knife into her suit, cutting it and piercing the flesh, burning skin and fat.

Nel hit her flat-handed on the chest and sent her over the gunwale of the boat into the water. Nel walked calmly to the edge and looked down at Vibs trying to swim with the wind knocked out of her.

“Did you make me to torture? Is that it? You hated Violet deep down, didn't you? You didn't get to beat her down enough in life, so you had to bring her back to hurt her more.”

“Fuck you!”

“How about some mechanical Tikari logic? We both dislike feeling hurt. So you stop torturing me, and I stop torturing you. I don't mean with knives. I'm not Violet, I get it. So shut up about it. You think you loved her, so I'll quit reminding you that you killed her, and we'll both be a whole lot happier. Does that work for you?”

“Fuck your mother!”

Nel laughed. “What are you so angry at? Are you pissed I pushed you off the boat for burning a hole in my tit? Or mad I resent you for killing Violet? Or upset because I don't function exactly like you—”

“I'm pissed,” she shouted between strokes, “because you're a fucking disappointment! Because whatever she fucked up, Violet never disappointed me, and you're pure-fucking-living disappointment! You don't deserve that body! You don't deserve the life I gave you! You're a fucking bug, and I should've swatted you the second she died.”

“For your sake, you're damn right.”

Nel extended her arm into the water. Vibeke took ten strokes before begrudgingly taking it. Nel pulled her aboard, then, as soon as Vibs stood up, Nel pushed her back down onto the deck. She crouched over her.

“If you burn me again, I'll pop your head off like Wulfgar's pet pervert's.”

“Fine.”

“You don't have to like me. I know I'm not what you wanted. That's fine. But you're going to fucking respect that I live. In exchange, I won't mention your total fucking responsibility for Violet shattering like tissue glass. Now, do we have a deal? Or does your head leave your body in three… two… one….”

Vibeke showed no sign of affirming.

“Point five….” Nel continued slowly. “Point two five….”

“Yes,” she choked out.

“Good. Now find me a burn kit and short regenerator.”

Vibeke did as Nel asked, angry above all at her logical trump. She was completely right, and even that was an affront. She found the med kit, a well-stocked kit for such a small boat.

She walked up topside and approached Nel. Nel saw the short regenerator and undid her suit. The burn was horrible, and deeper than Vibs had meant to make it. Almost to Violet's heart. She applied the regenerator and slowly healed the wound, then put a dollop of burn gel over it. Nel closed up her suit as it mended itself. Vibs put away the med kit and had to stop herself from crying. She knew Nel deserved none of it. Completely the opposite.

And that she'd used a Tikari to burn her. Made Bob torture his sister Tikari. It was all the more perverse. How could she have used her knife like that? How could she want to cause pain?

Was it a desire to hurt Violet? To punish her for dying? Or some reckless need to destroy the last thing she had so she could finally be completely free to wither up and die? The guilt hit her like a brick; the war, Nel, Violet, it robbed her breath again.

She sat down behind the steering console and wiped her eyes and pushed her wet hair back.

As they approached the mainland, bodies began clunking into the hull. By the time they reached the shore, they found it covered in remains. Vibs sent the boat into a course parallel to the shore. They looked over the dead, burnt from a nuclear blast. Piombino was a crater in the distance. A burning swan flopped around on the shore. She checked radiation levels and found them low in the air but hot on the ground. They couldn't land there.

They continued along the coast until the boat ran out of power. They beached it on black sands and walked over the bodies that glowed dimly in the cloudy sunset. Vibs took some radiation tabs from the boat med kit, and they headed north. They were in a suburb; hardly any coasts on mainland Europe were anything but urban. Urban meant hell now.

They could hear gangs milling about. Vibs wasn't hungry so they kept to the shadows, and as night fell, they lit no lights. Again and again they walked over piles of dead families, mutilated survivors, masses of cancer that lay on the ground weeping. Vibeke noticed Nel was unnerved by the carnage. She looked down her nose at the Tikari for that but quickly realized it meant she was already more human than Vibeke. She was gaining her humanity as Vibeke was losing it.

And losing it she was. The dying inspired nothing but resentment in her. There was no pity, no empathy, no sign of care. Only hate and disgust, and annoyance with the smell. Nel looked from time to time like she wanted to say something, something to ease the tension, to lighten the tragedy. She said nothing. A human frailty. Vibeke didn't envy her for it.

Soon they were attacked by the first cannibal gang.

“Let us have one of you and the other can leave.”

Vibeke just snapped her fingers and Nel opened her arm and microwaved them fatally, their entire front sides red and burnt.

She moved in to pick up their clothing and any supplies, but they had no packs and their clothing was threadbare. They walked on. For two meters.

The second cannibal gang assaulted them with the same promise. “Let us have one of you and—”

“Four cooked dead guys, right there.”

“Oh, thank you, ma'am!”

The men headed for the other gang.

By dawn they were in fields of dead wheat. There was almost no snow. They found a working farm pogo and managed to fly over most of the continent. It was as sick a sight from the air as from up close. Massive fires raged. Craters covered the land. Small camps of survivors appeared from time to time, but Vibs was never happy to see them. To survive seemed a curse. The destruction was endless, and between the craters was nothing but pain, fire, and mutation. And Paris.

She couldn't figure out what had happened to Paris at first. It was still there. It was not nuked into oblivion or in ruin but buried somehow. Soon they were directly overhead and saw what it was buried in. Some sort of biomass had developed from a wave bomb. The city had given birth to something horrible, grown from the citizens and their diseased sewage, a throbbing gargantuan tumor whose tendrils swayed malodorously in the wind. A harbinger of the new flesh to reign on Earth.

The pogo went dead about twenty kilometers from the northern coast. As they were guaranteed no boat when they arrived, they elected to cover as much space by land as possible. Vibs didn't tire easily, but the radiation medicine weakened her.

“I need to rest.”

“I don't.”

“Humans need rest, Nel. Unless you want to carry me—”

“I could, you know. You're like a cotton ball to me.”

They walked on in silence until Vibeke had to sit down. She plopped herself on a jagged rock and closed her eyes.

Nel didn't miss a step. She scooped Vibeke up and held her like she was weightless. It was uncomfortable, but if it could let her sleep and still move at the same time, she was all for it. She passed out quickly, and Nel carried her all the way to Cherbourg.

When they reached the harbor, it was raining. Fallout rain that was beyond acidic and very far beyond toxic. They quickly fashioned umbrellas out of soil with enough silica they could microwave into green glass. They kept to the harbor, looking for another boat. There were many wrecks that couldn't make the sea and little else. There were bodies, but they were too rotten and too full of acid holes to inflate. Soon the rain was eating through their boots and then feet. They ducked into a building to wait out the storm as their suits tried to mend, growing back scratchy and wrong.

In the building they found ten greedy, leering, tumored men. A rape gang. Vibs feasted liberally on the meat of their beaten bodies and made warm charcoal from the rest of them. Nel couldn't eat. Her digestive system had been removed in favor of weapons, hydraulic pumps, and alcohol batteries. She could drink to keep them full and keep her body hydrated, but the water falling was far too toxic.

The rain didn't stop until the next day, when the roof of their hideout was long gone and they were sheltered only by one floor above them. The foundations of the building were also eaten away, and they had to skip over fragments of turf and asphalt to avoid puddles that would burn their toes off. They kept hunting for boats.

“Can't you fly us there with those Hall thrusters?”

“They wouldn't support you for sustained flight. Or me for that matter. They can jump. But not even that with your added weight.”

“Too much rapist?”

“You're hardly fat.”

Vibeke looked over herself for the first time in a month. She was emaciated. She looked in a puddle and barely recognized herself—her round cheeks were gone, her eyes were sunken. Nothing she could do about it but remember to eat more ass fat when the opportunity presented itself.

Nel surveyed herself for anything that could expedite their trip but found nothing. They continued to walk, getting farther and farther south, farther in the wrong direction.

Finally in Normandy they found some ancient bunkers, and with one of them a restored DUKW. It took only an hour of microwave welding to make it seaworthy again. But it lacked any functional propulsion. Nel removed her feet and welded them temporarily onto the back of the craft. She turned on her foot thrusters and, slowly, the craft began to move.

It took four days. Four days in which Vibs tractor fished over the boat's side for delicious three eyed mutant fish, and Nel reviewed Violet's memories in depth.

“I'm amazed she spent so much time staring at you.”

“Do her memories include why?”

“I remember thoughts she remembers having. Most memories are mere senses. But I remember loving you. Obsessing over you. Wanting you. You and Violet had very little time together after you accepted that you were in love?”

“Only days.”

“If I were in love with you, I'd not have wasted so much time.”

“If.”

“Do you want me to or not?”

“I don't know. Honestly I really don't know. I don't know what to do with you. I'm sorry I've treated you so…. If it's not obvious, I'm kind of messed up right now.”