Ain't Talkin'

Miner and his compatriots had been tight-lipped about their destination, though they drove slow enough for Roche and Alex Markus to follow closely in the transport.

The sun set quickly, and after nearly an hour on the main drag, the sedan turned off to a dirt road through a chain link gate. Cacti and dry trees flanked the road as the landscape rose into the foothills of a cluster of mountains. Within another mile, the road was a carved divot in the scenery that may have once been a riverbed.

Rounding an arc of road, Roche could see the faint glimmer of lights far ahead.

The floodlamps over the main gate were bright halogen and blinding. The way the shale banks along the sides of the road crept tightly inward, it made it impossible to turn around, and with the lights blinding them from the front Roche saw the checkpoint for what it was; a killbox. Anyone who followed a Res car down the road would be shot dead and blind. But the sedan led the way, and Miner made sure to wave the Corporation truck through. Passing the light stands Roche could see what the entrance was. Racks of sheetmetal and tire-walls, the kind of stuff that’d slow a car down but not stop it, framed over steel girders that supported catwalks. Atop them were four-foot halogen spotlamps trained on the riverbed-road, and a dozen armed soldiers.

Once through the gate, the miniature canyon opened up outward and down.

The Resistance outpost was an old silver mine. In times gone by thousands of men had gone to the west to seek their fortune in the hills and mountains of the Mojave. The landscape beyond the reach of civilization was dotted with mine shafts of varying depths and sizes. This mine may have been a smaller thing once, but the Resistance had fortified it.

Reached only by a hazardous switchback trail, and blocked at the end by blinder lights and a funnel of walls, the killbox was their welcome mat. The compound spread out to the left and right, a series of low, wooden buildings like somethin’ out of an Americana painting, something Mormon. A gas pump was hitched to the back end of a tanker truck sat in the center of the open hole in the landscape. Men on the backs on synthetic horses milled about the edges of the compound, scanning the dusky desert with binoculars in night vision. They wore masks and scarves against the coming nighttime cold and kept a wary eye on the Corporation truck as it rumbled into the compound.

Markus stopped the truck behind the sedan when the little red car crept to a stall. The kid pulled the brake up and turned to Roche.

“Why’re you doin’ this?”

“What’s that?” Roche flipped his lighter open and struck the flint.

“Helping the Resistance.”

“I ain’t yet. Suffice to say what the good doctor said got me some kinda curious.” Roche tugged on the cigarette and watched the soldiers outside the windshield rustle up from the outpost, jogging with their rifles strapped to their vests.

“Yeah, but you’re here. That’s further than all the stuff I said would’ve ever gotten you. What gives? Something that doctor said about a girl.”

“Yeah, kid. Somethin’ about a girl.” Roche’s eyes glowed with the cherry from the end of his smoke.

Alex Markus held out a hand, thumb and forefinger pressed together in a can-I-have-a-smoke gesture.

“Kid?”

“Can I have one?”

“You smoke?” Roche was genuinely surprised.

“Used to, quit a long time ago. Too expensive or something. I had a reason, I’ve forgotten it.”

“You’ll live longer.”

“You’re the exception to that aren’t you?” Markus smiled as Roche handed him a hand-rolled menthol cigarette from his poke.

Roche laughed a little, small sound in the back of his throat. “Guess you’re right, kid. Guess you’re right.”

Markus lit the cigarette, inhaled, coughed and asked again;

“So?”

“Doesn’t matter who she was, kid.”

“She’s your kin?”

“Not even close. Just someone I knew once. Long gone.”

“But still dear to you.” Markus watched out the windshield. The soldiers seemed to be getting impatient and were agitatedly dancing around the truck, though Miner, with his cane and wobbly knees seemed to be keeping them at bay.

“Watch yourself, kid. And maybe, just maybe you’re right.” Roche snubbed his smoke on the dashboard of the truck. “C’mon, we gotta go before they rip us outta this truck.”

“Hey?” Markus stopped Roche before he’d hopped down. “One more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t like that doctor, and I don’t know who this girl was he’s cloned or whatever the hell he’s done was to you, but if she mattered I’m sorry. And she must have if you’re sticking with the Res just to get her out. And if there’s anything I can do, I’ll try to help, but they might ferry me off to start working for them wherever, but Roche. . .you been alright to me. I won’t forget that. Thank you.”

Roche turned all the way around in the bucket seat of the truck and looked at the kid from under the wide brim of his had. He never was much of a thing. More a scared animal than a man, but half good at things when he set his mind to them. Wasn’t such a bad kid, no. Still a single charge job in a sea of work that had gone on for longer than Roche cared to think about.

And this girl, if the doctor was lying about making a baby from genetic material collected from Mollie’s relatives for the sake of spurning Roche and getting his attention, then Roche would kill him. If he wasn’t lying, Roche would kill him slow. Wasn’t a world for a baby and wasn’t a world for a girl like Mollie Groux, some bastard version of a girl he’d known. It was all a shit-storm in a world gone to hell in a handbasket. Wasn’t much choice. Wasn’t much to do.

“You been alright too, kid. You been alright. S’go.”