Peace in an Age of Metal and Men Read Online Free PDF Page B

than I remembered. Too close. A couple hundred meters away, there loomed a junk pile outside of the metal wall, mangled into sculpture of expressive anger. It was a heap of hurt with jagged metal and slender spikes of glass sticking up everywhere.
    I grabbed the steel bar in both hands, braced myself, and jammed it hard into the ground in front of the skidder. It hit a rock, jerked back, flew out of my hands sliding straight through my giant metal fist.
    The force of the impact slowed me a little, but now the skidder was spinning. I gripped the handlebars.
    Nearly a hundred meters away now, the junk pile gleamed in the first rays of morning. Steel and stone jutted from the heap like jagged teeth getting ready to chew a meaty breakfast. Fifty meters.
    I yanked the bars right, trying to compensate for a hard counterclockwise spin. It wasn’t enough. My head whipped around as I tried to track the incoming heap.
    Twenty meters. I leaned hard. The skidder was sliding fast, but if I could get hold of some scrub on the ground maybe I could—
    Ten meters. It wasn’t working. I was going to hit and there wasn’t anything—
    I cranked the antigrav as hard as I could. My stomach dropped and the skidder launched straight up, catching the top spire of the heap as it passed. The skidder spun faster, up, up, over the wall and into the junkyard proper.
    With a twist, I cut power. The skidder plunged down, hit the red dirt with an ear-splitting crash, and sent me flying into a dingy shack. My back hit the door, tumbling through with enough noise and violence to wake anybody a hundred meters around.
    It didn’t need to. The two women were sitting at a tiny table holding cards and smoking cigars. When I crashed through the door, neither one of them so much as flinched.
    The older of the two women placed her cards down on the table, took a swig from a bottle of amber liquid, stubbed out her cigar, and smiled at me. “Evening, J.D.,” she said.
    The younger woman smiled. “It’s morning, Auntie.”
    The older woman frowned at that. After a moment, she smiled. “Morning, J.D.”
    I stood up, realized I was still terribly dizzy, and fell flat on my ass.

Chapter 7
    Josephine Jefferson had a laugh like a hyena—a hyena that had just spent a hard day drinking and a hard life smoking. She laughed so hard that tears welled up in her eyes and rolled down the smooth, dark skin of her cheeks. She clutched her belly as if to keep it from shaking right off. Jo was a big woman with the grimy fingernails of someone who worked and the nimble fingers of someone who knew how to operate tech. She wore overalls and her bare arms were covered with scars. When she laughed, her age showed in the tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She had lived in Dead Oak all the while that I was the sheriff, but I’d had little to do with her other than to have her work on the cruisers from time to time.
    The young woman across from Jo was probably in her late teens and pretty as they get. She was just as dark as Jo, but where Jo’s skin bore the lines of a life well fought, this girl had the smooth shine of tech-enhanced skin. Her hair was a long, dark mess of unkempt dreadlocks. She was nearly drowning in a pair of Jo’s old overalls, and her feet were bare. She looked at me with wide eyes that glittered with tech and struggled to focus, as if a night of drinking whiskey had taken its toll.
    The younger woman’s eyes showed just as much laughter as Jo’s, but she had significantly more tact. That’s not to say she kept from laughing entirely. Rather, she covered her mouth politely and snickered like a pot of humor was nearly ready to boil over. The restraint was appreciated, but a man’s pride can only take so much humiliation.
    My head steadied itself so I stood up, tipped my hat, which was somehow still on, and said, “Howdy,” to the young girl. “Name’s J.D.”
    “I gathered.”
    The shack was little more than a machine shed with workbenches