Golgotha Run Read Online Free Page A

blistering his hands. It only occurred to him later that he
could have simply popped the shotgun door and kicked the smoking lump of
low-grade steel out.
    Then again, exposing the interior of the RV to the storm directly would as
like to have had him shredded on the spot.
    As suddenly as it had started, the storm stopped, as if a switch had been
thrown.
    Even in a terrain of desert heat punctuated by violent squalls and
flash-floods, weather shouldn’t happen this fast.
Something inside insisted, blindly, that the sheer speed of the transitions
was wrong.
     
    Little Deke—and you’d better believe that no one made jokes about his name
to his face—had explained all this to Eddie once.
    They had been grabbing a couple of cool ones after junking the almost complete
wreck of a Malaysian caterpillar-treaded logging rig deposited up on the
mesa
by a particularly violent storm. This was back in the days when things had
been cool between Eddie and Deke, and Eddie was working for food and a place
to sleep behind electrowire.
    Eddie had advanced the proposition that the shitstorms were maybe being done
to the world by aliens—to the vague extent of what he imagined aliens to
be. It seemed to be about as strange and pointless as corn-holing rednecks out
of their pickup trucks and messing around with cows, that was for sure.
    “What the
fuck
would aliens be doing, going around dropping shit on folk?”
Little Deke had told him. “They got all those there laser cannon and tactical
nukes and shit. Or they would have if they even existed in the first place.
But they don’t. Not like you mean. They proved it. There’s nothing out there in
space we can use. It’s empty. That’s what space
means
.”
    Little Deke was the richest man Eddie knew, and he knew things. One of his
first acts, on settling down in his junker’s yard outside of Las Vitas, had
been to install an array of parabolic dishes, hooking him into the global
datanet, TV-syndication and all manner of other shit. Eddie had been forced to
bow, outwardly at least, to his wisdom.
    “So where does it come from?” he’d asked Little Deke. “I mean, what causes
it?”
    “Skyhooks.” Little Deke had gestured in a direction that to Eddie, who had less
sense of compass-direction than of how you were supposed to tell one gangcult
from another, could have been anywhere.
    “Shit they’re building out in Florida,” Little Deke explained, “up there in
Boston, whole bunch of other places. Run a monomolecular wire down from a satellite and you can run shit up and down it
like a fuckin’ elevator.”
    “If there’s nothing up there in space,” mused Eddie, who thought he had
spotted a logical flaw, “then why do the guys need an elevator to go up
there?”
    “Fuck should I know? Maybe all them rich corporate folks from the compound
blocks like the view.”
    Deke took another pull on his Corona, noticed it was empty, scowled and flung
it at a ferroconcrete stanchion, where it shattered. Most of the shards fell
in a sawn-off oil drum that half-heartedly served as a recycling bin.
    “All I know is, they seriously fuck up the weather,” he said. “‘A step-system
of microclimatic tiers existing on the point of localised catastrophic
cascade-collapse’ or some such happy crap from Discovery Weather Channel. All
I got from that was that the weather round these parts is frankly screwed.
These days anything can fall out of the fuckin’ sky.”
     
    Microclimatic tiers on the point of catastrophic cascade-collapse or not,
Eddie still found it hard to imagine what kind of storm could pick up a bunch
of tools and the suchlike from Smolensk, or wherever, transport it halfway
around the globe then and dump it on some out of the way spot in New Mexico.
    Or how it could be caused by someone just hanging what was basically a string
from a satellite down in Florida. He just couldn’t imagine the through-line of
how it could be possible.
    The point about that, though, was that