FOX CADENA

It was one of those nights when Virgil got to drinking and the mood suddenly turned from jubilant to dark, and all Fox could do about it was try to stay out of the old man’s way. Virgil had insisted they stop the camper in a little flat valley and set up what he called a “recreational fire,” even though the readouts said they were in an exozone that was likely to host dangerous creatures -- maybe even a Monster. “Let ‘em fuckin’ take us, then,” he said, “I had about enough’a this world.”

Now they were sitting on opposite sides of the fire, Fox keeping a cautious eye on his master, who gripped the neck of his rot-gut in one hand and used the other to scratch the left side of his face over and over, his fingers rasping through the white, wiry hairs of his beard. “I’ll tell ya this,” he said. “I’ll tell ya somethin’, kid. I’ll tell ya somethin...” The old man’s voice trailed off. The fire glinted off his eyes.

“Please do,” Fox told him. He crossed one leg over the other casually.

Virgil’s shoulders seemed to go tense, and he looked up sharply. “Huh,” he said. Then took a long swallow of liquor and muttered to himself. “Yeh. Yeh. Please do, he says. I tell ya, kid, you got a real political way about you. Is that what you think it takes to do this fuckin’ work? Huh? A fuckin’ affectation of neutrality?” He emphasized the last word like a curse.

There was nothing to do, here. Fox shook his head slightly to himself. He had lived some version of this night many times since becoming Virgil’s apprentice seven years earlier. Everything he said next would be wrong. Any response would only make the old man angrier. It was like being caught in a trap from which there was no escape.

He took a little comfort in knowing the foul atmosphere between them would only last until morning. When Virgil awoke tomorrow it would take him several bitter hours to become fully himself again. And then things would be all right for a month or so...

Though no apology would ever actually come, Fox knew the old man was always sorry, afterwards. That got expressed one way or another -- a week of abnormally effusive praise; a few extravagant meals; and once, a night with a prostitute that Virgil had called “the jammiest little swipe a’ jam in the cupboard.”

Fox had never felt right about that one.

He estimated the girl was about a year younger than he was then. Her face was soft and clear, somehow devoid of scars, sun-damage, the tell-tale signs of dehydration. She’d been well taken care of before ending up in that shitty hookhouse in a village called New Carbon. A great deal of noise was made about how Fox was her first customer, and what a great opportunity this was to tenderize that sweet young meat.

Virgil had grinned at him with his big yellow teeth, affectionately bumped his body to the side, tousled his hair. “Whaddaya think’a that shit kid? You’ll be the first!”

Fox said, “Sure, great,” in a tone that contained neither sarcasm nor excitement.

“Come on, boy, go get your man-bars,” he said -- whatever that meant.

Once in the room, neither Fox nor the girl, whose name had been advertised -- preposterously -- as Fleur De Lis, spoke. If they had, they might have expressed exactly the same degree of enthusiasm about what was about to happen, and then about what had just happened.

There was a fleeting moment in which Fox considered telling her, “You don’t have to do this, let’s just sit here for a little while and then go out and pretend it all went exactly according to plan.” But he didn’t know what she might say about that or how Virgil might react to it if he found out that Fox had just wasted his fucking money.

The world was what it was. Virgil had certain expectations for Fox -- the same way that older men in general seemed to have certain expectations of their younger counterparts. They got angry and suspicious if you weren’t exactly as brutish as they were. So he’d done what was expected of him.

There was a long silence as Virgil glared at Fox across the fire. He clearly had the expectation now that Fox would forthcome with a goddamned answer to the question Is that what you think it takes?

“I hope I’m learning what it takes from you,” Fox said. “I don’t have it all figured out yet.”

“Huh.” Virgil grunted. Then he stood up, squished his dick loose from his pants, and relieved himself into the fire, which spattered and popped against his piss-stream.

Fox looked away. The thing that bothered him most about men was their neverending fucking relentless shitty grossness. They seemed incapable of just being well-behaved. They always had to invade your world with how gross they could be. It was like a contest where the goal was to be the person who finally wore away your last shred of decency. Being around other men, or males in general he supposed, was to be assaulted with vulgarity. It was no different for boys of prepubescent age. Only the topics of discussion changed.

“Well,” Virgil said. “I’ll tell you somethin.” He jammed his cock back into his pants.

“Yeah, I wish you would.”

Virgil sat back down and took another pull on his rot-gut. “You may as well know,” he said.

Fox forced himself not to sigh. Just get on with it, old man.

“For six years you been learnin’ everything you could from me, that’s the way it works, see, you’re my apprentice.”

“Yep.” It’s been seven years, you old fuck. Your brain’s turning gentle on you.

“But at the same time, kid, I been learnin’ from you. And what I’ve learned from you is, you ain’t got what it takes to do this work.” Virgil shook his head vehemently. “You’ll never be a Fixer, and you may as well fuckin’ know.”

For a second Fox’s heart jolted. Then he scowled. This was a new level of cruelty, even for Virgil. To threaten to take away the only thing Fox wanted -- the thing he had been working toward since he was ten years old, and the reason for enduring so many belligerent nights like this one -- it was so shitty. He rubbed his hands together. The heat from the fire penetrated into his knuckles. It was so shitty of the old man to make him feel this awful over nothing -- some meaningless gesture of capriciousness that would be forgotten in the morning anyway.

Fox thought of Virgil as two different people. There was Virgil, just Virgil, his master, guardian and friend, and there was Drunk Virgil -- sometimes he thought of him as Dark Virgil. He had always hated that second asshole. But now his hatred had graduated, finally, to a new level of venom. He wasn’t sure they could come back from this. Wasn’t sure he could ever look at just Virgil the same way, even though it was Dark Virgil talking.

His anger pulsed in his ears. It buzzed against the skin of his fingers.

Virgil squinted across the fire at him, his narrow face winched into a hawk-eyed squint, studying his reaction. So Fox decided he wouldn’t react. Neutrality bothered the old man so much? Fox would be the perfect example of neutrality. He kept his face blank and looked back at his master. “Hmmm,” he said. “I guess you’ll be dropping me off, then, when we get to wherever we’re going next. Camelot, was it?”

“That’s right,” Virgil said. “Leavin’ you in Camelot. Pains me to say. But they tell-tale it’s the biggest city in the world. Must be plenty’a opportunities there for a young strap like you to take ta their full advantage.”

Fox nodded. “You’ll give me back the deposit my mother gave you on my training, I assume.”

“Course I will, kid, I’m a man of honor. Little sum to help you set up your next life.”

“I believe you agreed to return me to her in the event of this not working out.”

“Now look, I’m not a magician. Your mother’s ten years back somewhere. And besides which you’re a grown man, now. Then you was a kid. It’s different.”

Now it was ten years? Fox noted the old man’s disunited powers of recollection and wondered if there might be something else wrong with him, aside from just being fucking ossified.

“Okay,” Fox said, rising to his feet. “I think it’s about time for me to retire for the evening. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Virgil jumped to his feet and threw what remained of the liquor against the exterior of the camper. The bottle shattered, and dirty brown liquid ran down the huge words painted on the camper’s side in block letters:

I S O L V E

PROBLEMS

Fox froze in place, his back to the old man now.

“This is the whole trouble with you!” Virgil shouted. “This is why you’ll never even ‘come a journeyman Fixer, let alone a master! We ain’t diplomats. That’s not this job. Look at you -- cold-blooded as the goddamned lizard.” He gestured with borderline derangement at the chrome hexcerasaur -- just a statue now, standing perfectly still -- hitched up at the front of the camping trailer. “You gotta bleed to do this work. You gotta take a stand once in a while. I tell ya that you’ve washed outta my trainin’ and you don’t even have a fuckin’ opinion? Clients don’t want that shit, boy. They gotta know you’re on their side!”

“Good night, Virgil. I’ll see you in the morning.” Fox strode to the back of the camper, opened the door, and stepped up. On the inside it was about 20 feet long and 10 feet wide, with almost no room to navigate. The space was packed with metal cupboards, sinks, drawers, and blinking lights. In the front left corner there was a swiveling chair with an array of screens and cables and switches before it that lit the camper’s interior with a soft glow. Fox’s cot was on the right, tucked beneath an overhanging water tank.

He fell onto it and faced the wall, thinking about how one minute everything could be okay, and the next your whole world could end.

Yeah, some voice inside him said, because worlds fucking end. Just look around…

In the scattershot way of human minds, he then found himself thinking about his favorite book. This old paperback novel he had found once in a ruin that he had read, loved, and carried around for years. It was a relic of the ur-world, a story about some teenagers teaming up to save their planet from a demise only they saw coming. Fox had often wondered if the strange society depicted in its pages had been some fantastical creation of the author, or if it was more or less an accurate depiction of the reality she had lived in.

He closed his eyes and listened carefully to the sounds outside the camper. Sometimes Virgil got to talking to himself on these nights, and sometimes you could learn something from his wild mutterings. Most times, though, like now, he got quiet. All Fox could hear through the little window that was almost always left open was the gentle crackle of the fire outside and the whispery, fan-like sound the levitators made as they did their work, floating this ancient piece of molded aluminum off the ground.

He reached his arm down beneath his cot to where he kept that old paperback book, and he ran his thumb against the corner, flipping three-hundred pages up and down. Feeling them flutter against his skin.

It was strange how your perspective on a book could change over the years. The first time he read it he was several years younger than the tightly-bonded band of teenagers in the story, and the primary attraction for his thirteen year-old brain had been all the drama and excitement of the plot.

When he read it now his sense of knowing the characters, really knowing them, was stronger than almost anything else he’d ever felt. He thought of them as his peers and friends. It was as if he was there with them on their adventure, the seventh member of the group, and they loved him as much as they loved each other. It was just that the author had forgotten to mention him.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

He also realized now the absolute stupidity of the plot depicted in its pages. You couldn’t save a world. Saving worlds was impossible.

The voice came back to say again Just look around…

He heard the door creak open. Dark Virgil humped up inside, stomped through the navigable space, found his own bed, and promptly began to snort and snore in a raling rattle that sounded like fucking death. The old man hadn’t remembered to get the hexcerasaur moving again.

Fox briefly debated whether or not he wanted to get to Camelot as soon as possible, or later, or never.

He quietly arose, went to the swiveling chair that Virgil sometimes called the Fixer’s roost, and sometimes just the cockpit, and put his eye up to a little rubber fitting connected to a larger machine. There was a brief whirring sound, then a click. Then the touch-monitor that controlled the chrome hexcerasaur lit up, its red glow contrasting with the pale blues and greens given off by the other monitors.

He entered the commands that set the great metal beast into a canter towards Camelot, and the camper gently accelerated intomotion and glided smoothly into the night. Fox fell asleep knowing now that he had a problem of his own to solve. Because it didn’t matter what the old man had to say about it. He would be a Fixer. There was no other path for him. No matter what he had to do to make it happen.

* * *

DAZZY FUCKSLEAZE

The clouds above her crackled with blue energy, and that freak high-pitched thunder that signified a Glass storm, rather than a regular one, rang through the air and vibrated Dazzy to the bones.

A burst of wind pealed through her hair, blowing it across her eyes, and for a moment her flowglider lurched crazily to one side. Her stomach fell upward into her chest. She tugged the hair out of her face and saw the ground tilting toward her. Still far enough away that it wasn’t of any special concern. She used the handbrakes to pull back into a level float. What was of great concern was the increasing wind. She knew storms like this only got worse and worse. She needed to get down as soon as possible. The winds these Glass storms generated reached speeds that could easily tear her glider apart and send her spinning to her death against the red rock cliffs below.

Worse than that, when it rained Glass -- that ethereal blue smoke that drifted toward the earth like a fog -- everything living thing it touched went as rigid as steel and flattened into smooth translucent vertices that seemed terrifyingly unnatural. Usually this only happened to birds, bats, and other flying creatures. Things high up. The stuff dissipated as it fell and usually evaporated before touching anything on the ground. But every once in a while it got people. Often people who got caught on a high plateau with nowhere to shelter -- like The Fucksleazes right now.

Dazzy tried to crane her head around to see where the rest of her gang were and what they were doing, but the angle was bad. She would have had to turn the flowglider around, and conditions made that pretty much impossible now.

She went into another turbulent dip. The harness she was in cinched hard against her legs, and the sound the wind made as it snapped and rippled across the gray sailcloth was fucking upsetting.

She moved one hand off a handbrake long enough to bring her radio to her mouth and shout into it, “Uh, can we get me the fuck down now?”

The thing crackled and beeped, and a gruff male voice said, “You find us anything useful yet?”

“You feel this wind?” Dazzy shouted. “I’m not crazy, right? It’s getting worse and worse? What the fuck Tommy.”

“You know the deal, bitch,” came the cold response.

She reached out and pulled the handbrake to keep the flowglider as low as possible. Look at yourself, she thought. You wanted to fly and now you’re up in the air like a mouse strapped to a fucking kite. She couldn’t forget how this hard started, though. It had all been her idea, back during the war with another band of outlaws called The Waterbugs. “Get me up into the air,” she had said. “We’ll spot them from miles away -- literally.”

And Tommy had shrugged, chewing on a toothpick, and said, “What you got in mind, Dazz?”

Now the Dazzy and the rest of the Fucksleazes were starving and desperate, exiled from Camelot -- the only place around here where a person could reasonably survive -- and scavenging the wastes. Trying to stay out of exozones. Dazzy floated above the jagged red cragscape , tied to a cable 1500 feet long secured to an ancient gray bus. The bus was painted on both sides with the words

THE FUCKSLEAZES

THE FUCKSLEAZES.

The Glass storm above her began to haze into a blue rain.

“There’s nothing out there, Tommy!” she shouted into the radio. “You can see this is fucking Glass right? Can’t you?”

There was a pause. Then the radio crackled Tommy’s reply, “There better be something out there, then. For your sake.”

She let the radio dangle, grabbed the handbrake again, and screamed “FUCK!” at the storm. Blue light flashed through the clouds, and the storm thundered back at her.

This was fucking it then. She was going to die.

Step one: be born. Step two: spend twenty-seven violent years fighting for scraps, the violence always totally disproportionate the starvation-level rewards, twenty-seven years where you could never fight enough or fuck enough or do enough drugs to make you forget for one moment that life is a tornado of shit and all you can do is ride it into the void. When you find the one thing on the planet that makes you feel something? It kills you. Like, step three: get turned into a hunk of yellowy Glass and shatter when you hit the ground.

She supposed life was hell for everybody, but that didn’t make her feel any better about it.

The drifting-down Glass fog looked closer and closer. Or was it just spreading out? It was impossible to judge the distances of the clouds above her. There was no frame of reference. Just sky.

What did people do when they were about to die? Pray?

She got back on the radio. “Tommy, you want me fucking die for it?” Sending her up and telling her she wasn’t coming back down until she spotted something they could all eat had been the punishment he’d handed down when the others found out she had food she hadn’t shared -- which had been a reedy little stand of edible desert flowers. He didn’t care if it took hours, he said. He didn’t care if it took days.

He couldn’t have known then that in short order a Glass storm would be breaking above her head. This couldn’t be what he intended. “This is a fucking death sentence!” she shouted.

“Don’t give me that shit!” he shouted back. “You broke the rules. And shut the fuck up, I don’t want to hear your voice again until you’ve got something real. The fucking end! Fuck off.”

A particularly vicious swell lifted around her, spinning her so far back it threatened to flip her over backwards. Her legs rose up in front of her like a child on a swing.

She managed to straighten out, but barely.

“Fuck,” she whispered to herself.

The fucking end, she thought. The fucking end. It’s the fucking end!

She scanned the desert as if something might change. Looking for -- well, anything. There was nothing out there. The only thing that wasn’t rock or dead powder was a single S of vegetation in the distance that gave away the presence of a stream, but the place was deep within the exozone, and if that zone contained Monsters, the stream would likely be where they found their water. Going there would be death. That might not bother her, a slightly-delayed death being better than the imminent one she faced now, but Tommy and the rest of The Fucksleazes would never go for it. The never dared very deeply into a zone.

Okay.

She was going to be that person.

She was going to be a cliché.

She was going to be pathetic.

She was going to go out begging something -- anything -- for her life.

How did this go? Was it like a letter? Dear God, Love Dazzy, P.S.?

“Dear God,” she whispered. Then -- fuck it. She raised her head upward toward the clouds and screamed it. “Dear God or Godsor Whoever might hear this! This is Dazzy Fucksleaze, and I’m about to die! I never asked you for anything, I don’t even know if you’re real, and I know I fuckin’ never gave you anything either, so never asking you for anything probably doesn’t score me any kinda points, I get that, but whoever you are --” She took in a deep breath. “Whoever you are, I just want to live. Okay? If you’re real and you’re a God you can figure out my situation so I don’t need to go into the particulars! But I just want to live! I don’t want to go splat into the hard rock below. I don’t want to get Glassed. I want to live! Can you make that happen? Please make that happen! Love Dazzy!”

A jet of air came and swept her off to one side, and she straightened the flowglider once more. Her hair blew wildly around her face.

Check again. The landscape was desolation and cracked skin.

God knew what He had to do. Right? She had prayed, so now it was His job, if He was real, to give her the thing she had prayed for. If that’s not how this worked, why were there religious people? What did they get out of it? Either God was magic, or God was bullshit. As far as Dazzy was concerned, it had to be that simple.

Now’s your chance, God or Whoever. Prove all the doubters wrong by saving me, here. Swear if you do, I’ll live a different fucking kind of life. Whatever kind you want. I really will.

“P.S.!” she shouted with every ounce of herself. “And punish Tommy! Really punish him, okay? He’s proved himself to be an absolute tortoshit of a leader for us Fucksleazes. And also P.S.! Bless us with some kind of good fortune. Okay?”

Okay, she told herself. Leave Whoever alone. Now you’ll either die or you won’t.

She tried to clear her mind and think of nothing. She felt the cold burn of the wind on her cheeks and the backs of her hands.

Then, a minute later, perhaps two, something happened. Changed.

In the early dawn light with the energy of the storm whipping around her and the glittering mist of Glass about to be upon her, like, any second now, something gleamed out there. She squinted carefully. There was a flicker to whatever-it-was that shined, and that flicker told her it was moving. This wasn’t merely the morning sun shining through the clouds and hitting some previously-shadowed reflective object.

What was that thing? Her heart thumped with momentary excitement before getting stomped by God. This would be the thing that would get her down and then get the Fucksleazes fed. This would be the thing that would change their fortunes for th --

Oh. No it wouldn’t. The thing was an exozone Monster.

She had the binoculars crammed up against her skin and she was binoculing that flickering gleam like crazy.

It looked like an enormous lizard -- a fucking dinosaur, she thought. It slung itself along the top of a far-away plateau. It was made of metal. Chrome. Glowing with an impossibly clean mirror shine. It was hard to judge its size, but she estimated that maybe it was 12-to-15 feet tall, and 25-to-30 feet long. Its four legs looped forward in perfectly coordinated rotating motions, never breaking rhythm even for a micro-second, movements perfect to the point of being synthesized. Its face resolved into six flat points, and there were segmented joints at the --

Dazzy said “What the fuck?”

Was this dinosaur wearing some kind of armor?

She’d heard stories of the secret things that rampaged the exozones, everyone had. Terrible and bizarre phantasmas of uncreditable description. But this one was wearing armor. How was the fucking thing wearing armor?

The next thought was so obvious that she hadn’t previously bothered to turn her attention to it. She did so now. Was it a machine?

Tommy’s voice sizzled over the radio. “Okay. God damn it. Okay. You win. We’re bringing you down. Fuck.”

Oh, God yes. The man had caved. Not a moment too soon.

But there was something else -- something following immediately behind the huge burnished reptile.

Dazzy felt a tug at her back as the other Fucksleazes started winching the rope back toward the ground.

She let the binoculars fall back onto her chest and scrabbled the radio back up to her mouth. “No, wait!” she said. “Wait, stop! Give me a second!”

The downward pull stopped.

Tommy shouted into the radio “You got something?”

The Monster, or machine, or whatever it was, pulled behind it a beatup ur-world trailer. Something painted on the side, words she couldn’t make out. She began to laugh.

Consider your heart unstomped, you glorious bitch.

“Pull me down,” she said. “Get me outta this fucking wind!”

“You got something?” This time there was an edge of desperation in his voice.

“Yeah,” Dazzy said. “Somebody’s traveling South through the goddamn exozone. Get the bus ready, we can ambush them on the road to Camelot if we hurry.”

Tommy crackled back: “Halle-fucking-lujah, baby!”

Dazzy closed her eyes, trying not to imagine what other goodies people who owned a fucking metal dinosaur robot might be carrying. In spite of herself, in her mind she saw carnage, and she began to tingle with anticipation, and she smiled.