Golgotha Run Read Online Free PDF

frames, and had wondered what it was. He’d had the idea that
Recreational Vehicles were supposed to be these big old sixteen-wheelers with
a load the size of a prefab house and dirt bikes slung across the back.
    This was just a clunky little capsule barely bigger than any street car.
    Small enough that Eddie could imagine taking it and driving it away.
    “It’s a
Veedubya
,” Little Deke had told him, spitting out the word along
with a wet gob of thoroughly masticated
loco
weed. “Fuckin’ Kraut Karrier.
It’s older than I am. Now get your sorry ass over here and help me strip down
this piece of shit coolant system.”
    Eddie’s thoughts had kept coming back to the little RV. He’d been working for
Little Deke pretty much as long as he could remember—long enough that he
didn’t remember if Deke was any kind of family or just some guy.
    Little Deke hadn’t treated him particularly badly, but as he’d gotten older
Eddie had realised that all he was, and what he was, was stuck there in the
junkyard going nowhere.
    There had just been nothing to keep him there. Eddie had taken to sleeping in
the little RV, spent odd hours fixing it up, waited for his chance to swipe a
working hydrogen cell, and then just got the hell out. There was a big, wide
world out there, apparently, and Eddie had wanted a taste of it.
    In the end, he had never got so far. A couple of years aimless wandering,
never pulling down the kind of score that might get him further… and now he
was crawling back.
    “Cut him in on the money, he’ll be fine,” Eddie told Trix Desoto, not sure at
this point whether she could hear and understand him or not. “That is, if he
doesn’t just shoot me on sight.”
     
    The electrowire stood dark and silent—which meant nothing, on account of
the fact that several million volts running through steel mesh gives no
visible sign.
    The gate was held securely shut by a heavy-gauge electromag-lock, and there
was no sign of movement behind it save for the vague flapping of polymer
sheeting and the like amongst the junk.
    A camera tracked back and forth in its housing to regard them, a light
blinking on its faceplate under the lens.
    After a while the lock buzzed and low-yield servos cut in to swing the
gate-sections open, outward, against the force of gravity that held them
customarily shut.
    “Well, he hasn’t shot us yet,” said Eddie. “That might be a sign.”
    Eddie nosed the van into the compound, alert for the first flash of movement.
    No sight or sound of threat at all… not even from the skunk/rottweiler
hybrids that, he now recalled, Little Deke left the run of the compound to when
not around.
    Dogs with skunk glands grafted into them, together with microelectronic
triggering implants. Kind of like those money-packages that spray you when you
try to rip them off—although money-packages didn’t have the kind of jaws
that could tear you a new one before they went off.
    Back in the day, the creatures had been trained to recognise Eddie’s scent and
not attack; these days, Eddie wasn’t so sure, even if they were old enough to
remember him being around.
    Ah, well. The lack of skunkdogs meant that Little Deke was going to be around,
somewhere. Eddie supposed that he could be holed up somewhere in the piles of
junk, waiting and drawing a sniper-bead on him, but he knew that wasn’t Little
Deke’s style.
    If he was still angry, after a couple of years, he wouldn’t be exactly subtle:
he’d just come at them roaring and blazing away.
    Eddie shut off his engine. Off to one side he could hear the hum of the
meth-generators that supplied the compound and its fence with power, but the
old AmTrak boxcar which served Little Deke as a domicile was dark and silent.
    No lights burning even though it was getting on for dusk. The big floods
lashed to various items in the junk piles and lit the yard for night work
stood dark and dormant.
    Eddie left the van and made his cautious way to the AmTrak car. “Deke?