Wear Iron Read Online Free PDF Page A

whatever, all in this constant flow right into their fat mouths—and they sit there and eat as much as they can. Sometimes it’s in ten minute bursts, sometimes it’s eat ’til you drop, it varies with the rounds. They get judged on capacity, speed, uh, weight gain...” Mooney laughed at the disgusted look on Strader’s face..
    “Sometimes they weigh the puke after.” Mooney laughed again, almost a giggle, as his twitch pulled his face into a manic sneer. “Y’know, so’s they can check speed of digestion.”
    Strader felt a little like he was about to throw up himself. He’d imagined something like a pie-eating contest from an old vid, or maybe one of the sick challenges restaurants used to do back before the war, before the concept of conspicuous consumption had fallen so heavily from grace. If you went to the halls of records, you could find seventy-year-old vid-shows where a guy tried to get a ten-pound burger down in an hour, or eat twenty plates of oysters in a sitting, like that was an achievement. Then again, maybe it was—Strader had never seen an oyster up close, but from the pictures they looked a lot like phlegm in a shell, and he had to imagine they tasted about the same.
    This, though... Strader couldn’t get his head around it. Inferno was one thing, but what Mooney was describing...
    How far was this city going to fall?
    He shook his head, as if trying to jar the mental picture loose from his mind. “These...” He swallowed hard. “These contests. How much do they actually get through? How much to they eat?”
    Mooney smirked, getting more comfortable as he poured himself another shot of whatever-it-was. He had Strader on the hook now, and Strader knew he knew it. “Ah, there’s usually eight to ten piggies at the troughs, and every trough holds around a ton. Not that anybody’s ever eaten that much, though—it’s just there to be sure, y’know? Like, just in case anybody can do it. Usually, though? Unless it’s a real good game, maybe a third of it gets thrown away. Just dumped on a landfill for the rats.” He smiled, a malevolent gleam in his eyes. “They pour bleach on it first. So no vags eat it.”
    Strader did the arithmetic in his head. Somewhere around three tons—pure waste. “Three tons...” Strader blinked, his face pale and sweaty. He remembered his mother, in the tiny, cramped apartment they’d shared after his father had walked out of their lives, watching him with a smile creasing gaunt cheeks as he devoured a single slice of processed, meatless baloney—their food for the day. That had been when the wage crisis was at its height, when fifty-five per cent of Americans just couldn’t afford to eat. Paul Strader’s family had been poor even by those standards.
    To this day, the thought of wasted food could wake him from a sound sleep. What Mooney was describing was like a nightmare come to life. “Why don’t the Jays do anything?”
    “What, the Judges?” Mooney snickered, shaking his head. “They love it, brother. Ain’t nothin’ illegal about eating food—hell, the way they see it, the cits need to be a little tubbier. Less trouble that way. It’s the hungry cits that cause the problems.”
    Strader stared at his empty glass, suddenly craving another drink. He knew all about hungry cits.
    Mooney leaned forward, warming to his theme. “You know what your problem is? You still think it’s how it was right after the war. Or back when we were kids. Advances have been made, Strader. We got mock-proteins now. We can grow pretty much anything we need to put in our bodies on one of them new food printers—make it up outta munce and synthoil. Maybe a bit of plasteen in there for texture—sure, it’s indigestible, but who cares? Point is, things ain’t hand to mouth anymore. We can afford to live a little.”
    Strader winced, hard. Mooney cocked his head, a brief flicker of sympathy crossing his face in between the twitches, and he took another quick look