Refraction | Part 1 | Darwin's Steroids
20) Shafts
I think it’s fair to say it has been a tough road. After my fever broke and I asked the old guy (who it turns out wasn’t Native, just really, really tan.) about what the fuck was up with the cruelty to animals bit, he damn near laughed his ass off. Turns out it wasn’t a dog. Turns out it was the guy to whom I had applied lethal doses of Chuck-power. That fever had me screwy for a while. That old guy though, he fixed me up with about a gallon of IV antibiotics. This guy, his place, this terrible ramshackle hut of a place, with its shitty little goat pen, and mangy fucking chickens pecking at the dust, turns out, it’s about a mile from an open silo. One of the ones they launched.
Spooky shit.
I ask the old guy about it and he tells me it chock full of supplies, and heap full of ghosts. The two air force majors, (after unleashing their mega-tonnage on the valiant forces of who knows who the fuck, because that whole war was one super fugazi fest the whole fucking time), well apparently they had a pact, or else the one guy had a serious surprise for his comrade. Anyway they were dead as doornails with bullet holes in them when old guy got there. This was pretty early on in the war he tells me. This guy no shit, he talks a lot. I think he maybe talks to people about once a fucking decade, because he doesn’t shut up for days. He tells me all about his life as an accountant before the war and how he came out here from Los Angeles right after they quarantined the greater San Diego/Tiajuana metroplex. He goes on and on about what a great survivor he turned about to be and how if Elaine had listened to him they could have started a new life together. Blah blah blah this guy. But he keeps feeding me and giving me drugs for the infections of my many and various wounds, so I let him talk and I lie still and heal. I heal pretty quickly. One of my strengths, I guess. Any way those two Air force corpses, he tells me he hauled them all the way up that shaft then buried them in two smaller shafts he had dug just for the purpose. He tried to live in the silo for about a week. No go. Heap big ghosts, he said.
Spoo-ky shit.
Then he built the old shit hole built his crappy ass goat pen and spent the last thirty years of his life doing okay scrounging around in the nearly empty desert. We were well outside of the hot zone, the old guy tells me. I figured the old guy would’ve been dead if he had been wrong about the radiation, so I tried not to sweat it too much. Turns out being wrong about other things got him just as dead, but I try not to sweat that too much either. It’s not like he was some prince of a guy, he told me he planned to sell me to some slavers running a mine a few klicks south of his dumpy crapper of a shack. That was the first thing he wrong about. He also believed that the chains he used to shackle me were of a high enough quality to keep me bound. That was the second thing he was wrong about. These mistakes culminated in my grabbing him from behind by his forehead while I punched him in his neck successfully causing his spine to snap like a dry twig right at the C3 and C4 vertebrae.
Then I put him in his own little shaft in the ground.
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