Crab Town Read Online Free PDF Page B

The suits are divided up by specialty: spades are for those with book smarts, hearts are for those with street smarts and people skills, clubs are the muscle of the organization, and the diamonds are for the cunning and agile.
    Jack immediately added the Six of Spades, aka Miss Doomsday, to his team. Her deceased husband, the King of Spades, was a close friend of his, so he knew she was the perfect choice for his team. But he had to recruit new people outside of the organization to fill his other three positions. Members of the House of Cards often get themselves killed, put in prison, disappear, or just plain quit, so there’s always openings. There actually has never been a total of 52 members at one time since the organization began.
    Sailboat was the second member he added to his team. Of all places, he found him out in the melt zone, where no one ever goes. The melt zone is where the bomb hit, leveling the entire area. Not a single structure was left standing. It’s just a mile-wide crater of hot concrete slabs baking in the sun. It’s the most radioactive area in town, so nobody steps foot there. The only thing you can find out there is an army of black crabs.
    Some people say the melt zone is where all the sewer crabs come from. There are hundreds of them out there, crawling across the concrete, eating the red slime that grows in the acid rain puddles. Some of the crabs are enormous out there, the size of dogs or even bigger. They’re vicious, too. You get too close to one of them and they’ll take a chunk out of your thigh for breakfast.
    Jack was out in the melt zone that day to drop off some money. He didn’t trust banks and couldn’t keep the money in his apartment or on his person. Muggings and break-ins are a weekly or daily occurrence in Crab Town. Even someone as tough as Jack could not protect his food and money. So he hid it out in the melt zone, where he knew nobody would ever go looking. It might eventually give him radiation sickness, but he didn’t really care about that anymore. If death meant that he could be with his wife and little girl again he would welcome it.
    After pocketing twenty dollars and returning his chest to its hiding spot beneath a flattened school bus, Jack heard someone shouting. He went deeper into the melt zone until he saw a muscular white guy running through the crater with a baseball bat, chasing after crabs. Jack assumed he was some crazed shitter.
    A shitter is someone who gets high off of the drug called crab shit. It’s not actually crab shit, but it is a mossy green substance that grows on the bellies of black sewer crabs. If you smoke it or consume it you’re going to go on one hell of a trip. You’ll go from euphoric to cosmic to violent to bat shit crazy all within the course of an hour. Then you’ll need to do more. The stuff is radioactive and deadly as all hell, but most kids in Crab Town don’t really give a fuck anymore. To them, just a tiny taste of happiness, even chemically-induced happiness, is worth dying for.
    “Die bitches!” Sailboat yelled as he chased down a big black dog-sized crab.
    Some of those bigger crabs aren’t just the size of dogs, they can also run as fast as dogs. But they run sideways. Sailboat chased after it across slabs of sun-burnt asphalt. When he caught up to it, he broke two of its legs first, crippling it. Then he smashed down on its black shell until its sludgy guts were covering him.
    There were hundreds of crabs crawling through the debris, all sizes. Most of them were deformed; some had extra pinchers, others had extra long legs, some shells were lumpy or lopsided, some were conjoined together into a black spidery mass. Sailboat went from crab to crab, stomping on the small ones, cracking open the big ones. If he slipped and fell, the crabs would turn on him, ganging up on him to get him while he’s down. Crabs usually only go after the wounded or the dead, so whenever Sailboat’s leg fell through a hole in the