Chapter 51 Jones
Three years ago…
“A fucking cave?” Jones did not approve of the new accommodation. He’d never have given up his suite at The Grand if he’d known those metal bastards were going to turn up. Almost two years since they arrived and everyday since had been worse than the last.
“There’s good ventilation, and a surprise inside.” Amber took his hand, she’d been by his side everyday of the last two years. He looked into her brown eyes that matched his. Nowhere would be that bad with Amber.
She led him through the cave. Spacious, warm, open caverns linked by curving pathways. “Surprise!” She took her hands from his eyes, revealing a still pool of faintly glowing water.
Jones could see his reflection in the surface. His greasy hair, shabby beard, crooked nose that never healed right. Jones had no idea how he ever got a beauty like Amber to so much as look at him. She was the whole package, smart, capable, fierce.
“What are you doing?” He asked, as Amber dumped her weapons and spiked armour. He shut his mouth as Amber stripped naked and jumped into the pool. “You’re crazy!”
“What’s a matter Jonesy, scared?” He loved the way she said his name. He lost himself in a rare moment of calm, until she splashed him, then stood in the waist high water. Then he joined her. The holes in the roof let the water soak up the sun all day.
“We’ll set up here, spend the night and get the crew in the morning.” Jones could make this work.
The next morning they returned with the six strong crew. It'd been double that when Jones had the bright idea to go into business for himself. A month later he found two of his oldest friends hung upside down from lampposts. Their heads crushed like stepped on cigarette ends. A symbol no one knew spray painted on the wall by them.
A year after that he saw those metal bastards strafe a camp from the air. Crews started banding together, talking about invading Farmborough. Jones knew how that would end, and headed south the next day, taking anyone smart enough to come.
Jones never liked violence, he could count the people he’d killed on one hand and still have fingers left. And two of those had been an accidental overdose. A poor excuse for a so called outlaw.
However what Jones did like, what he loved more than even Amber, was chems. If you could snort it, shoot it, or pop it, he could make it. He’d played the whitehat for a while, selling stimpaks, antibiotics, opiates for painkillers. But it didn’t take him long to notice where the profit lay.
“Alright,” Jones saw how low morale had gotten. They'd had a long walk carrying heavy packs. A hit of med x, cut more times than the last person piss Amber off, hadn’t helped.
“We’ve got enough left over to cook one batch. I’m going to make a start, when it’s done you lot can offload in the Corners. We’re in Family territory so keep it small. We’ll take the profit and make two more batches, do that for a week and we should…” Jones could see they weren’t listening. Amber stepped from behind him, ready to put size six bootprints onto a few stomachs. He stopped her. They needed hope not hurt.
Amber helped him set up. First they walked round the main cavern smoking cigarettes and watching where the smoke went. They found the ideal spot behind a cluster of stalagmites and managed to hang a few crates from them for a work surface. Several steps down from the chem factory at The Grand, but more than enough to start raking in the caps.
Jones double dropped his last two homemade Mentats with a coffee Amber brought him. The caffeine helped bring on the nootropic effect of the cognitive enhancers. He strapped his respirator on tight and got to work.
Jones found the smallest things fascinating, thanks to the Mentats. Vapours cooling into liquid and dripping. The slow hardening of liquid into clouded, glossy, sheets. The first satisfying crack that shot through the crystal when he tapped it with the handle of his knife.
Using his skill, Jones had put the remnants of toxic substances through the plastic bottles and tubes, held together by tape, and produced something from almost nothing. Cheap, nasty, methamphetamine. But enough to make a thousand caps. Even if his customers would be the twitchers and tweakers.
None of the party crowd would touch this. They wanted Jet, pre-packaged inhalers, quick and clean. Make the good times last all night. Jones could make it, as good as the high end pre-war stuff, he just couldn’t do it in a cave.
After a few weeks of churning out chems, Jones had started to make a profit. Not a lot, but enough to hide it away from the cave. He and Amber walked down a broken road in the forest. Stopping at an old six wheeled truck just far enough away. He hid his stash under the passenger seat.
“Anything goes bad, we'll meet here.” He said, Amber nodded.
"How much is there?” Amber asked, trying to keep her question casual.
“Fifteen hundred. The new equipment and glassware will pay for itself in a week or two.” Jones deflected, hoping she’d pick up on it. She didn’t.
“How much do we need to get back in?” Amber wanted to go back desperately.
“Ten.” That’s how much a suite at The Grand cost. He’d probably need another five to work out any issues with Management. Then he’d be back to doing all the work for a fraction of the pay. Amber deserves better, he thought.
“Why don’t you take some of the Tripper and Buffout into Shadowtown. Unload it and take a couple of days. Sleep in a real bed, eat something decent.” He hated not being able to provide.
“I’ll take the chems, but I’ll only stay the night.” Amber tried to look like she wasn’t pleased.
“Keep your eyes open for any precursor. A couple of drums of high octane fuel and we’re back at The Grand in a week flat.”
Jones found the crew waiting in the cave. Grumbling that threatened to become something more in the air. He gave them the night off, and enough chems for them to enjoy it. Jones even joined them, after weighing out six different chem deliveries for tomorrow.
He sat back, watching his chems take hold, smoking cigarettes and chewing hallucinogenic mushrooms. Jones got wonderfully lost in shapes emerging from the exhaled smoke. The harvested plants that seemed to be still growing. The faces in the flickering flames.
Then something made him laugh, people started passing out. “Call yourself outlaws! Fucking lightwei—” A hiss of compressed air accompanied a dart like, ten cc syringe sticking in his thigh. Jones caught a glimpse of shadows coming to life before he passed out.
He stirred in minutes, ten cc’s of Med x rebuffed by his tolerance. He heard movement and half opened one eye. The shadows were people, dressed in black. Holding each of the crew upright in turn. They put something with a blinking light in their mouths. Then poured in water, and made them swallow it. He went limp as they manhandled him, swallowing the large rubberised capsule without resistance.
Jones waited till he heard silence, took a quick glance around, and darted for his workbench. He gulped down salt water from a beaker and heaved up the blinking capsule. Before he could begin to work out its purpose, small metal canisters pinged and bounced into the cave.
Stolen novel; please report.
Jones froze, then the canisters hissed out gas. Thick, acrid, green gas. The respirator from his bench got him through the green haze and almost out, then the seals melted.
As the mask fell away he saw his crew writhing, convulsing, turning a shade of green. He could see the lesions and blisters up his arm. He could feel the chemical heat on his skin. He knew anything this fast acting would already be in the blood, and be fatal.
In one last desperate act, Jones choked down fistfuls of Mentats from his bench. More than enough to stroke out his brain. He chased that down with liquid amphetamine, to blow up his heart. And finally he gripped a pair of injectors in his trembling hand, ready to deliver a massive overdose. The needles bent as they struck the hardening skin on his thigh. Jones collapsed, hoping the chems killed him quicker than the gas. It didn’t.
His bones cracked, pulled apart by the swelling muscle. His skull grew, twisting his features. His skin thickened, toughened, and turned a putrid shade of green.
Jones woke, feeling odd. He couldn’t quite place it at first. Sober maybe, he thought, unsure how long he’d been asleep. He stood and felt dizzy, like everything seemed further away, smaller somehow. He rubbed a hand across face, finding his beard and hair gone. Then he saw it.
His hand the size of a dinner plate, fingers like branches. He looked down at his bare chest, broad and muscular, not scrawny. I’ve been spiked, again. Mixing cognitive enhancers with hallucinogens brought on incredibly detailed and vivid trips. He knew how to mix a simple compound that would flush his system and sat at his bench to make it.
Jones landed flat on his back like someone pulled the chair out from under him. He let out a yell, it sounded deep. As he stood, expecting to see someone behind him, panic began to burn in his mind. The metal stool, that had taken both his and Amber’s combined weight before, lay crushed like a tin can. This is real.
He paced back and forth, taking longer strides than before, getting close to the cave walls. Jones shut his eyes tight and knelt, desperate to wake up back in his own body. Then he heard movement. Something stood, and he knew. The hulking, ten foot, green brute was a mirror image of himself. As were the five others, waking to this hell.
“What the fuck is going on?!” Jones asked, unable to tell one from the other, never mind which one of his crew it used to be.
“HUNGRY.” The creature grunted. Jones looked into the yellow eyes that matched his, and saw no trace of anything beyond base animal instinct. He envied the ignorance.
All six now stood, hungry and grunting. Between them the animalistic instinct sensed the weakest, a foot shorter and not as broad. They turned on him, unleashing a primal anger. Oversized fists and heavy stomps laid into the nine foot tall runt.
Jones knelt and pressed his shovel sized hands over his ears. The brutality stirred something in him. A deep and primal rage. If the beating had lasted a minute longer he would have given in to the urge to smash and break, but it stopped. Then the chomping started. Jones felt sickened, more so because he felt the gnawing hunger too.
Jones curled up in the corner, desperate, terrified, wondering whether keeping his sanity would be for the best. Then it got worse. From outside the cave his new hearing picked up the sound he’d dreaded hearing for the past two years. The whirring stomp of power armour.
“THAT SOUND! WHAT IS IT?!” Drawn by the noise, one of them moved to the cave mouth. Gunfire erupted outside, shredding green flesh. The sight drove the others into a frenzy. Screaming, the rest of them hurtled out of the cave.
Jones scrambled over, unsteady on his tree trunk like legs. Peeking out, he saw two metal bastards, flanked by two more in black. They gunned down all but one of the things that looked like him.
“Hold!” A woman’s voice boomed from the armour, bringing the gunfire to a stop. Jones watched the last living brute shrug off multiple bullet wounds and charge. The Steel bitch drew twin swords with a matte finish and calmly walked forward. She held her ground against the charge till the last possible moment, then side stepped and turned into a strike. A thick green arm landed with a thud, fingers twitching.
The one armed brute grew more enraged, lunging wildly. The woman easily avoided the haymakers by stepping and turning. She grew tired of dodging and slammed into the broad chest. Starting with the double sword point and finishing with shoulder plate to the square jaw. The brute let out a shrill yelp and dropped to its knees, defeated. The woman withdrew her blade and separated them. Holding one in each hand, she used them like shears to slice the muscular neck clean through.
As Jones watched the swollen head roll he thought about walking out, finding release from this nightmare. The black clad figures heaved something onto the back of the armour. The woman took a metal tube in the mechanised hands and squeezed. Flames shot forth under high pressure, incinerating the green bodies.
She took off her helmet, exposing her blonde hair and sadistic grin. “I love the smell of burning mutant in the morning.” She made a joke. They were laughing.
Instinct took over and he made for the tunnel at the back of the cave. As he staggered, his large foot kicked something along the ground. The canister pinged and clattered, the noise brought back a memory of the night before.
They did this to me.
Jones fought with everything that remained of him to smother the rage in his mind. Knowing to give in to it now would only lead to a quick death. Revenge. That one word repeated in his fractured mind. It gave him a singular focus.
The whirring stomp at the cave mouth snapped him out of the repeating thought. He scrambled for the tunnel deeper into the cave, but his bulbous shoulders stopped him from passing through. He slammed into them, again and again, to no avail. Thinking quickly he made for the pool, forcing himself to slip in slowly, wondering how much air his new lungs could hold.
Reds and orange flared above the water as Jones held still. He could feel the vibrations through the stone and water as the Steel bitch immolated the cave. He stayed under till he couldn't feel them. Then he remembered the first time he’d been in the pool. Amber!
Jones climbed free of the smouldering cave through the hole that warmed the pool. His size and strength made it easy. Outside the world looked sharper, clearer, he could see further. There was something else, like the smell of food in the air. He ignored it, making for the truck, just to see Amber and make sure she was ok. He wouldn’t let her see him like this.
Pounding strides soon quickened into running. He staggered and stumbled, but soon made his way through the forest. Jones caught a scent he knew, sparking a craving for a cigarette. A few paces brought him within sight of the truck, and Amber.
She’s ok, he thought, seeing her pacing and smoking. She looked pensive, and judging by the stamped out cigarette ends she’d been here hours.
He watched her a while longer, unable to tear himself away. With a heavy heart he shut his eyes and turned from her. She doesn't deserve this. He took a step, cracking a branch and stumbling into a tree with a loud thud.
“Jonesy? That you?” As soon as he heard her say his name Jones knew he had to talk to her. Anything to feel connected to another human.
“Amber, listen…” His voice sounded deep.
“What is this? You’re scaring me Jonesy.” Amber didn’t frighten easy.
“It’s me ok, I promise you it’s me. Something happened.” The more he said the closer Amber got to spotting him. He summoned his nerve and stepped into the sunlight. Amber’s eyes went wide with horror as she stared at the hulking, ten foot brute claiming to know her. “It’s me Amber, I lov—” She opened fire.
The buckshot hit Jones in the chest and felt like hail. The true pain came from the look in Amber’s eyes. “Amber! We met in the bar at The Grand, we left together.” The more he spoke the more frightened she became. The sawn off clicked instead of firing, Amber turned and ran. “Wait!” He had to make her understand.
A few strides brought him up behind her. Unable to see beyond his own need for human connection he reached out an overgrown hand. He misjudged the size and strength of his terrifying new form. Clasping his hand not on her shoulder, but around her head. He heard a snap.
“Amber! Amber!” She dropped like a puppet with cut strings. The inhuman rage over took his mind and he lashed out at the world around him. Pounding the blacktop and cracking it. Smashing trees with heavy kicks. Finally flipping the husk of the truck right over with both arms.
The noise sent something running through the forest, and like a beast he gave chase. Suddenly his footing became sure, his pace rapid, his bounding strides in a steady rhythm. Jones tackled his prey to the ground, pounding the stag’s heads into paste. He ripped a leg from the carcass and tore the warm flesh right of the bone. Blood smearing his snarling face. He devoured another leg of raw muscle and sinew before he found himself within the monster.
Jones dug a grave with his shovel sized hands, it didn’t take long. He laid Amber in it, buried her and marked it as best he could with the bumper from the truck. Folded at an angle, driven into the ground, it almost looked like an A. She deserved better.