The Marlowe Transmissions: Scavenger's War Read online

  The Marlowe Transmissions

  Jack Sheppard

  Burst #1:

  Scavenger’s War

  To my wife, for believing in me.

  Copyright © 2012 Jack Sheppard

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by Alexis Arendt

  Formatted by Jason G. Anderson

  ORIGINS: Spark of Apocalypse

  Transmission date: 10.19.2655

  It all started with a girl, as so many things do. She was young and beautiful, curious, naïve and idealistic. Such women have been the downfall of nations, and so this woman proved to be. She had a name, once, something ordinary and forgotten. Now, her only name is Pandora. This Pandora, like the one from ancient mythology, opened a box and let evil loose upon the world. The evil she freed, however, wasn’t contained in a clay amphora — this box was far more commonplace: the human mind. In the oldest stories, Pandora was given a sealed jar and told not to open it under any circumstances. So, of course, consumed by natural curiosity, Pandora opened it. When she did so, out rushed all the evils of the world.

  This new Pandora was a chemical engineering major, back when such quaint things as universities still existed. She found a way to do something incredible, like J. Robert Oppenheimer and Alfred Nobel: names once common, but now lost to history. It had been said for nearly two hundred years that people only used 30 percent of their brain. This girl found a way to unlock that other, elusive 70 percent. Being young and naïve, she tested it on herself. She was successful in that she unlocked the rest of her brain with her chemicals and compounds, and she was successful in that she found herself capable of things far beyond imagination. People had theorized in books and movies about what would happen: telekinesis, telepathy, empathy, perfection — terrible and wonderful things.

  Terrible and wonderful, indeed. Telepathy, telekinesis…yes, she discovered these, and found them to be burdens; the weightiest burden Pandora unlocked, however, was immortality. She created the ability to prevent sickness, invented regenerative techniques to stave away Death’s specter — she developed all this, and more. But, like the ancient Pandora, what she opened couldn’t then be closed again.

  She took a lover, our postmodern Pandora, a courageous, foolish man, and together they conceived a child, and that child had control over its entire brain. And so it went. Children born thereafter were able to do nearly anything they wished…except exercise restraint.

  The purpose, it became clear, for that millennial restriction on the human brain was to protect mankind from itself, to protect men from themselves and each other: nearly infinite power, but no understanding of the forces they wielded and no self-control to guide them.

  The result was apocalypse. Not by nuclear holocaust, or melted polar caps, or asteroids, but because of one ambitious girl who thought she could unlock the mysteries of the human brain. So then, men murdered each other with bare hands, with lasers and plasma rifles and fission bombs and glow-pirates, with telekinesis and hate and hunger and overcrowding.

  See her now: stumbling across a blasted plateau, her bare feet catching on bleached bones buried in the soil, hair thick and youthful still, lovely face unlined by age, yet heavy and haunted with grief. She carries in her gut the thickest of gall stones: the knowledge that she wreaked this havoc, she created this hell, the road to which was paved by that commonest of stones, good intention.

  She cannot forget and she cannot die, while her lover lies long-rotted in the wind-scoured soil and her descendants stare out from caves in hillsides, loping through empty streets of skeletal cities, gaunt and gangrenous apparitions. Pandora, who carried in her synapses the spark of Apocalypse, now wanders Earth trailing the ghosts of mankind behind her in an ethereal skein of sorrow, palpable to her senses as voices singing elegies and curses to her ceaselessly. She weeps, and regrets, but she cannot close the box she has opened.

  This is where my story begins. I don’t know if anyone will ever access these transmissions, but I send them out anyway. I believe my story is important. I am not proud of many of the events recorded here, but I refuse to flinch away from the truth. Let the events speak for themselves. I made the best choices I could under the circumstances, but that doesn’t absolve me of the guilt, or lessen the burden I now carry.

  Chapter 1: Detroit

  Snow falls, thick clumps drifting and hanging like a curtain of frozen fog, covering my tracks and muffling my footsteps. I’m grateful for the snow; I had prayed and wished for it, and had gotten it, miraculously. No one knew if Pandora’s Curse had ever given anyone control over the weather, although that was a question that was often asked in the generation following the Collapse.

  Terrence McHale was America’s first dictator. He seized power from the bottom up, beginning as a petty but ambitious drug lord operating in the blasted, war-torn slumtowns of Detroit, then wresting control from the various gangs and warlords, drug-runners and kingpins. He coalesced the various factions into a single united force, using brutality, bloody violence, and iron-handed authoritarian rule. Under McHale, Detroit eventually became a bastion of order, the last hold-out of any kind of lawful organization, and the de facto capitol of what remained of the United States of America. The first thing McHale did once his rule was secure was to build a wall around Detroit, a ring of stone and steel and razor wire. The rest of the country fell, city by city, emptied by war. Buildings were blown up, streets became territories fought over, then abandoned when supplies ran out; industry and business collapsed completely, taken over and exploited and ruined. Only Detroit survived, under McHale’s iron fist and brutal tyranny.

  McHale is a complicated man, they say. He wields his power with bloody-minded absolutism, but he does so with the single intention of preserving order. He carved a functioning community out of the ruins of a dying city. He has no intention of letting his little kingdom fall apart, and so has no qualms about keeping his power consolidated by any and every means necessary, defending it against the onslaught of the other city-states still surviving: New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, and Atlanta.

  I recognize the necessity for someone like Terrence McHale, but I don’t have to like him. His security force, which he calls the Fist of Peace, are little more than glorified henchmen, an organized, well-equipped army of thugs, but perhaps in such times as these that may be exactly what is needed to maintain some semblance of order.

  Whatever the case, it is these hardened, shoot-first soldiers that I have to get past tonight, if I want to get into Detroit, and I have to get in. I’ve got too many Scavengers on my ass to stay out here in the Wastes much longer. They’ve been tracking me for three weeks, despite my most desperate attempts to lose them. Now with the snow falling around me I just might have a chance, if they haven’t caught up and surrounded me while I was sleeping. They’re sneaky bastards like that. You think you’ve gotten ahead of ‘em, you think you’ve lost ‘em, but then just when you really think you’re safe, there they are, the rotting sickly foraging creatures.

  I don’t even consider them people anymore; they’re little more than semi-human cyborg amalgamations. Civilization may have collapsed, but technology never really slowed down, it just got twisted and misused, warped and made wicked. Now everything becomes a weapon for the Scavengers. They steal the obvious things, of course; clothes, weapons, power cells, food, but they can also take your bioelectricity. That, more than anything else, is what frightens people about the Scavengers.

  Bioelectricity is what powers technology these days. It was a known commodity for a long time, but it wasn’t any use to society until a young man named Takeshi invented a way to use bioelectricity to propel an automo
bile. He called the technology he invented “impulsion”. His development was borderline miraculous in two ways: one, he exploited the heat and energy within the human body, and two, he created a way to harness technology to the increased mental ability unlocked by Pandora. I’m no engineer, so I don’t get the finer details of how it works, but I get the basics. Somehow, the impulsion technology takes the unique signature of your bioelectric heat and converts it into power, which is stored in power cells. Then you use a mental impulse to send the vehicle into motion. The technology was converted for use in pretty much every facet of life after that, at least until the Collapse. It was used in cars, motorcycles, elevators, phones, anything and everything that uses energy.

  Takeshi’s invention may have saved the Earth in terms of pollution by eliminating emissions completely, but it couldn’t save humankind from itself.

  The most famous bastardization of Takeshi’s impulsion technology was the impulsor rifle. It was inevitable, really, and everyone knew it. We were all just waiting for the first person to come out and say they’d done it. And when someone finally did, the results were as transformational as everyone expected.

  Impulsor rifles work the same way cars do, converting the user’s bioelectric signal into an explosive force and storing the energy in rechargeable power cells. No need for powders or intricate machinery any longer, just a few wires, power cells, and induction plates. They were silent, initially. Battles after the invention of impulsor rifles were bizarre scenes, men running and ducking, blossoming crimson blooms of blood as they clutched wounds, screaming and dying and cursing, but absent was the deafening crash of gunfire. Then some enterprising gunsmith developed the expansion chamber, a way of exponentially increasing the explosive force of the rifle, and that provided enough impetus for the projectiles to break the sound barrier, so each bullet fired creates its own sonic boom mid-trajectory. So now, when gangs or armies meet, the deafening noise of gunfire is delayed, the boom happening after the rifle is fired, and since impulsors can fire bullets as fast as the person using it can think, the sonic booms come in concussive chains that are often as destructive as the bullets themselves.

  I hear a howl behind me, the piercing, ululating shriek of hunting Scavengers. It’s answered by howls in front of me and to either side. Shit. The miserable clanking bastards did surround me while I was sleeping. I lean back against a tree and exchange clips in my rifle, checking to make sure there are spares readily accessible, checking that my handguns are loose in the holsters tied low on my thighs. A deep breath, and I’m stepping silently through the snow, ears attuned to the silence around me, listening for the heavy tread of Scavengers.

  There, to my left. I crouch, pivoting to face the approaching knot of creatures. They’re still quiet, so they haven’t seen me yet. When they have prey in sight, they growl and moan, chattering at each other in their slurred, guttural language. Scavengers hunt in large packs, splitting the whole group into units of six or seven that spread out and surround their prey, communicating with each other by means of those squealing shrieks. I thumb the switch that turns off the expansion chamber so I can kill them quietly and retain the element of surprise for a while longer. They know they’ve got me surrounded, but they don’t know exactly where I am yet, so hopefully I can drop this bunch and slip out of their noose undetected. If not, I’ll have a hell of a fight on my hands. These things don’t die easily.

  I draw a bead on the first Scavenger, fire once, and watch its chest burst open. Before the others can howl in surprise, I drop them one by one, a single bullet for each; ammunition is scarce out in the Wastes, so I can’t afford to miss. The only sound when I shoot is a low, barely audible thump of air followed by the wet crunch of the bullets striking the Scavengers. There’s six of them in this bunch, and I drop five before the last one has time to flinch. The only problem is, it only takes a millisecond for it to bark out a warning.

  Damn it. Not fast enough. I hear the other groups hollering and hooting around me. I splat the last one, jog over to the bodies and search them. These haven’t been scavenging long, judging by their mostly human appearance. They have two arms, two legs, and one head each, which isn’t the case with ones that have been out in the Wastes scavenging for a long time. They acquire new parts, become more machine and less human. These, so close to Detroit, have high-quality tech grafted on to themselves, rather than the obsolete cast-offs that you’d see on Scavengers farther afield.

  These have human faces, four male, two female. All are scarred and sickly and have long, matted, tangled hair. Their torsos are also normal in appearance, but after that the resemblance to humanity ends. Cybernetic arms are clumsily grafted onto shoulders, hastily and poorly modified to be rifles, swords, laser-cutters, and a few other less-identifiable objects; legs are made from rusting tech, all-terrain wheels instead of feet, reverse-knees, anything and everything, all stolen from wayfarers, scavenged from dumps and ruins and ghost-towns. Skin, where it exists, is gangrenous and crusted and filthy. All the machinery and hunger, the desperation and disease and insanity, has twisted them away from humanity into nightmare creatures. If you were able to get close enough to them — and stay alive long enough — to hear them converse, you might understand one word in five or ten as English, the rest being growls and grunts, howls, clicks, slurred and garbled words.

  I hear three more groups of them, behind and to my left and right, close and closing in. I finish pawing through the corpses, finding three more clips of ammunition, then I sling the rifle over my back and draw my handguns; the cumbersome rifle will be little use in close-quarters combat. I lope off at a space-eating pace, the gait of someone long-accustomed to distance running. Detroit is only four or five miles off, and if I can get away from these Scavengers I’ll be home free. Well, relatively. Nothing is certain: the Fist is notorious for refusing entrance. Right now, however, simply surviving will be enough.

  Shit. Here they come. Just can’t get away from them, the filthy creatures. I run eastward at top speed, ears and eyes searching for any hint of movement in the white-blanketed landscape. I see one to my right and send a round towards it at supersonic speed; the bullet goes clean through its chest near the shoulder, spraying blood and clockwork cogs everywhere, and into the next Scavenger a step behind it. Panic is pinching me with its claws, blurring the edges of my control with desperation. I keep running, not stopping to finish off the group like I know I should, but fear has my feet under its control and I give in to it.

  I hear a growl over my shoulder, inches away, accompanied by labored gurgling breath. A Scavenger has caught up to me, moving with blinding speed on a chassis sporting four large knobbed tires where its legs had once been. As it comes abreast of me I can see that this one is a male, a thin, lank-haired boy of eighteen or so. He has a makeshift machete in one hand and an ancient pistol from the pre-Collapse era in the other. He veers towards me, swinging the machete. I duck and stumble, and he bashes into me, sending me flying, slicing open my arm along the triceps with a wild swing. I hit the snow rolling, feeling dirt and snow and pine needles mash against my face and in my mouth, tasting bitter and cold. The wheeled Scavenger is barreling towards me, firing his pistol. I feel the bullets whip past my face, three angry wasps buzzing by my ear. He fires again twice more and one creases my thigh, but I barely feel it with the adrenaline coursing through my system.

  I brush my eyes clear and fire my own pistol once, feeling a rush of satisfaction as his head explodes. There are three more charging at me now. I lurch to my feet and fire with both pistols, the reports coming in such quick succession that it sounds like a long peal of rumbling thunder. Two bullets slam into the first one, dropping it instantly, two more for the next, and by now the third is barely five feet away and barreling at me, growling rabidly and swinging a spiked club at my head. I throw myself backwards to the ground and let him stumble past me, firing upwards into him at point-blank range. His torso bursts open, spraying gore all over me, and he drops to the ground.
I wipe snow on my face to blot off the blood. Five corpses lay strewn around me, and I search each one carefully, taking their weapons from their slack hands and clips from their ragged pockets. They have nothing else of value so I leave them where they lay and take off through the snow and trees of the primal forest surrounding the wall of Detroit.

  I hear the rest of pack howling wildly behind me, banding together now that they have their prey on the run. I know they’re gaining on me, but I have no intention of waging a running battle against them. I’m nowhere near that stupid. I sustain a flat-out run for another ten minutes before I let myself stop. The snow is still falling heavily now, obscuring my tracks within seconds.

  I pull my rucksack off of my back and rummage through it until I find what I’m looking for: three mines and a length of razor wire. Working as fast as I can with bare, numb hands, I fasten the razor wire at chest height and plant the mines in the snow in an arc beyond the wire. As soon as the trap is set I move off again at a full run for the road, the remains of the freeway once known as I-75. Now it’s little more than a clearing in the forest littered with crumbled chunks of concrete and rusted hulks of vehicles. It’s the only way into Detroit, so I have no choice but to follow it even though my instincts tell me to stay far away from open spaces — in the open, the Scavengers have you at their mercy. I hear a cry of agony followed by three massive explosions that send me sprawling into the snow. I get to my feet and brush off the snow, waiting and listening. Silence reigns over the forest once more.

  Damn, I’m good.

  That feeling of satisfied pride lasts for the thirty seconds it takes for the adrenaline to wear off and my wounds to make their presence felt. I wrap the cut on my arm with a strip of cloth from a pocket, examine the crease along my thigh and decide it’s not worth bothering with. I put gloves back on my hands — the only downside of impulsor firearms is that they require direct skin contact to work — and set off eastwards towards the road.