Golgotha Run Read Online Free Page B

when it actually happened, imagination
was not required.
    It was like the way that if the Lord God Almighty were to suddenly turn up,
spraying lightning from his fingers and demanding sacrifice, you wouldn’t
start debating your belief in him or otherwise; you’d be casting around like a
bastard and wondering where you could find the nearest fatted calf.
    The engineered algae that permeated the blacktop of the main highways, and
kept them in a state of constant self-repair, was doing its stuff.
Holes punched in the surface by hail and debris were
knitting themselves together, the debris itself sinking as though dropped into
a pool of engine oil.
    Eddie could never quite work out how the algae knew the difference between
garbage and, for example, a battered old Kraut Karrier piece of crap that was
barely one step away from being garbage at the best of times. He worried about
that, sometimes. He had visions of the blacktop yawning open one of these days
and swallowing him up.
    In any event, it was fortunate that Eddie had decided to risk the highway, as
opposed to sticking to the dirt roads. A shit-storm out there would have
churned the ground to mud, leaving him bogged down and stranded—whether for
hours or days, it didn’t matter in the present circumstance.
    Even minutes might be too long.
    Eddie turned the engine over and swung a glance back into the RV, which was
more than somewhat cramped. The old guy was lying on the sprung fold-down bunk
that had served as Eddie’s bed these last few years, coma-still body loosely
wrapped in mirror-reflective polymer sheeting like a pot roast in a microwave.
    Tubes and wires ran from under the sheeting to modular portable medpacks,
their inner workings pumping and whirring away with a sound like the insides
of a notebook computer. Their displays were shut down to eke out the power
remaining in their cells.
    Eddie had lugged the old guy into the van and installed the med-packages under
the semi-lucid instruction of the girl in the nurse’s costume.
    On first seeing her, he had assumed she was just that—a hooker in costume,
hired by some rich old guy to go with the clinical technology that actually
did the job.
    She had known her business, though, even while going about the business of
dying from the wound in her gut. Eddie had wondered if she couldn’t have used
some of the old guy’s medical crap on herself, but she had insisted, quite
vehemently, that there would be no point. The important thing was to get her
charge to GenTech.
    Her name, so Eddie gathered when she was lucid, was Trix Desoto.
    Now Trix Desoto lay, curled up foetally and clutching her belly, on a couple
of garbage sacks containing the old clothes that were pretty much all Eddie
owned. Still alive, but in a bad way.
    The sense of sheer
sex
she exuded, in collision with the bloody horror of
her wound, made Eddie feel weird. It was like patching into a descrambled
movie channel and suddenly realising you were watching pay-per-view snuff.
    The wound beneath her interlaced fingers had stopped bleeding. Eddie knew
enough, having seen enough people die even in his few tender years, to know
this meant one of two things: blood-loss, shock and coma—or, if there was
enough blood left for the heart to pump, lingering on for hours and days
before the infection from her messed-up insides finally took her down.
    She seemed to be going the second route. Burning and shaking with fever—and
this seemed a little odd. It had just come on too
fast
, like the way that
shitstorms came and went too fast to be possible, like a switch being thrown.
    It was just in his mind, but he felt like he could feel the heat she was
putting out, pulsing over his face like the radiation from a thermal element.
    “Storm’s over,” Eddie told her. “We’re moving again. Listen, you’re not
looking so good…”
    “
Talekli lamo da ti saso ma, hasi de lospadretnaso tik de lama…
” The girl was babbling with delirium. “
Masa tu so