Chapter 35: New Faces III (Patreon)

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all."

- Helen Keller

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The N54 morning broadcast was running the same script it had run yesterday, just with updated numbers and a fresh coat of patriotic paint over the same shit stain.

"...Task Force Ironclad has secured the Tehachapi Pass corridor, effectively cutting the Free State coalition's last viable supply route between the southern Mojave theater and the Central Valley. Colonel Hansen issued a statement this morning confirming that NUSA forces have established forward staging positions along the Highway 58 junction, placing Militech armored elements within striking distance of Bakersfield. Free State resistance in the region has been described by Hansen as 'fragmented and operationally insignificant,' though independent reports from embedded journalists suggest that Arasaka-advised militia units have begun implementing scorched-earth tactics along the Highway 99 corridor, destroying agricultural infrastructure to deny Militech's advance the logistical advantage of a functioning supply chain..."

I pulled a short-sleeve hoodie over my head and over the black t-shirt underneath, and checked myself in the mirror. Sweatpants, sneakers, the silver cross at my throat, and the Malorian Overture, which I tucked into the waistband of the sweats at the small of my back, the grip angled for a right-hand draw that would clear the hoodie's hem in under a second if the day decided that shit needed to hit the fan.

Mom was at the kitchen table when I came out, drinking coffee and slowly scrolling through something on her tablet. She kinda seemed like she was half-reading and half-thinking about something else entirely.

"I'm heading out," I said, grabbing the G240's keys from the counter. I didn't technically need them since my Neural Link could interface with the car's ECU and handle ignition, locks, and engine management without a physical key fob. But Mom kept the keys on the counter out of habit, and I kept picking them up out of the same habit. I guess some rituals survived even when the technology that had created them became obsolete.

"Off with that girl from yesterday?" Mom asked without looking up.

"Yeah. I'll be meeting Judy's contact out near the scrap mountains," I said. "Should be back by the afternoon."

"Be careful, mijo," she said.

"No promises," I said.

"And tell that girl I said hello," she said.

"I'll pass it along," I nodded, knowing damn well I wasn't. I headed for the stairwell before she could add anything to the message that would surely end up making things much more awkward than they already were after yesterday's introduction.

I made my way downstairs, crossed the ground floor past the Widowmaker and the fabrication line, and keyed the bay door for bay four, which I had decided would be the new designated parking spot for the G240. The door climbed its track, and the morning light poured in, carrying the ambient rumble of the Ringroad overpass directly above and the chemical-tinged air.

I walked to the G240, pulled the driver's side door open, attempted to drop into the seat, and immediately said something that would have gotten me an earful if Mom had been within earshot. "Mothefucking son of a bit-mhmm why the fuck ma?"

The seat was practically touching the steering wheel. Mom had the driver's position adjusted so far forward that my knees would have been inside the dashboard if I had continued my attempt to sit down without moving it first.

I reached under the seat, found the adjustment rail, and slid the seat all the way back until I knew my legs would have enough room to exist without filing a complaint. I adjusted the mirror, which was aimed at a height that would have required me to be sitting in the trunk to use effectively, and then I settled in, connected to the Galena's ECU through my Neural Link, and brought the engine up.

The motor hummed to life beneath the rusted hood smoothly. I let the engine warm up for about a minute before rolling it out of the bay and into the lot, the tires crunching on the cracked asphalt. As I did so, I saw Judy walking toward the building from her apartment, an empty cargo crate in both hands.

I stopped the car and popped the trunk. Judy walked around to the back, loaded the crate in, slammed the trunk shut with more force than required, and then walked up to the passenger side and dropped into the seat.

"Morning," she said.

"Morning," I said, and pulled out of the lot onto the road.

The drive toward the Badlands border took us through the Northside industrial corridor, past the Watson Bridge interchange, and down the Ringroad South toward the city limits. The morning traffic was light by Night City standards, which meant I only had to change lanes aggressively eight times instead of the usual twenty or so.

Judy had her boots up on the dashboard within the first two minutes, which I chose not to comment on. From what I had learned about this chick, she was not the kind of person who waited for permission to be comfortable in a space she occupied.

"So," Judy said, adjusting her position in the seat. "Your mom."

"What about her?" I said.

"Is she always like that?" She asked.

"Like what?" I asked her, raising my eyebrows. "Embarrassing? Nosy? Convinced that every human being I interact with is a potential romantic interest?"

"All three," Judy said.

"Yeah," I said. "She's been like that as long as I can remember."

Judy let out a short laugh. "That sounds about right."

"She means well," I said. "She just... her filter got fried somewhere in the last couple of years, and now everything that passes through her brain exits her mouth at approximately the same speed without any quality control applied to the process."

"I think it's kinda nice, actually," Judy said, and her voice carried something quieter underneath the amusement. "Having someone who gives enough of a shit to embarrass you. That's not nothing."

I glanced at her. She was looking out the window, watching the skyline thin out as we approached the city limits, and her expression had shifted from the comfortable, teasing ease of a moment ago to something more reserved.

"Yeah," I said. "It's not nothing."

"Also," Judy said, the quieter moment dissolving as the grin returned, "the goldstar lesbian thing? With Lourdes?"

"We don't need to revisit that," I said.

"No, no, I think we do," Judy said, pivoting in her seat to face me with the delighted energy of someone who had been holding this in since yesterday and was unable to contain it any longer. "Because your mom told a lesbian she just met, within thirty seconds of meeting her, a story about another lesbian who married a man. As a conversation starter. That's not just oversharing. That's a competitive sport. She should get a trophy."

"Yeah? So she can display it proudly?" I asked with a chuckle.

"On the mantle," Judy agreed.

"We don't have a fucking mantle," I laughed.

"Well, from the bit I gathered about your mom, I bet your ass she'd build one," Judy said. "Specifically for the trophy."

I started laughing despite myself. The image of Mom constructing a mantelpiece specifically to display a trophy for competitive oversharing was so accurate that resisting it was impossible.

"For the record," I said, once the laughter had subsided enough to let me talk, "I'm pretty sure that she does like you. The interrogation is how she shows affection. If she didn't care, she wouldn't have said a word."

"That's a terrifying metric," Judy said.

"Welcome to my world," I said.

We drove in comfortable silence for a few minutes, the engine humming steadily under the hood. Traffic thinned as we passed the Rancho Coronado exit, and the urban density began giving way to the sun-bleached sprawl of the city's outer edge.

That was when I glanced down at the fuel gauge and watched my Kiroshis tag the reading in my overlay.

CHOOH2 Level: 11%. Estimated Range: 14.2 miles.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," I said.

"What?" Judy asked.

"My mom forgot to fill up the tank," I said. "We're running on fumes."

Judy looked at the gauge, then at me, and the grin that spread across her face carried the delighted energy of someone who was thoroughly enjoying the ongoing saga of Santiago Reyes and his perpetually complicated relationship with his mother's domestic habits.

"The woman who tried to play matchmaker with a lesbian didn't fill up the car," Judy said. "Shocker."

I pulled off the highway at the next exit, following the nav to a CHOOH2 station on the edge of a commercial strip, about half a mile from the Badlands border. It was a standard four-pump setup with a small convenience store attached, which probably made most of its revenue from synth-snacks and energy drinks sold to nomads and truckers passing through the city's perimeter. The pumps were old, the concrete was cracked, and the station's overhead canopy bore a Petrochem logo that had been sun-bleached to a pale ghost of its original corporate green.

I pulled up to a pump, killed the engine, and looked at Judy.

"Want anything from inside?" I asked.

"Grab me a NiCola," she said. "The green one, not the red."

"You got it," I said. I stepped out, connected the CHOOH2 nozzle to the Galena's fuel port, initiated the fill through the pump's payment terminal, and walked into the convenience store.

The store was small, fluorescent-lit, and populated by a single cashier who looked like he had been standing behind the counter since the early 2040s. I grabbed a green NiCola for Judy, a can of sparkling Real Water for myself, and a bag of synth beef jerky.

I paid and pushed through the front door back into the morning sun and into a junkie who was at the G240's passenger side, hunched over the door handle, his fingers working at the latch with a twitchy and uncoordinated urgency. The junkie was thin and visibly chromed with budget-grade chrome, not that I was doing any better, but that shit he had on had been installed badly and maintained worse. The RealSkinn around his right forearm was peeling away from the housing in patches, exposing the corroded metal underneath.

Through the window, I could see Judy in the passenger seat, her left hand raised with the middle finger extended at full deployment. 

"Hey!" I called out.

The junkie's head snapped up, and he turned toward me with a jerky, over-rotated motion. It was as if his Kerenzikov had been fried by whatever he was putting in his veins. He took one look at me, at my height, the bag in my hand, the expression on my face, and then he did the thing that junkies always did when confronted by someone larger than them, which was reach for the only leverage they had left.

He pulled a knife. It was a cheap folding blade with a chipped edge and a handle wrapped in duct tape, and he held it in front of himself with a shaky and unfocused grip.

"Yo, you know where I can find some Black Lace?" he asked, the words coming out in a rapid, slurred cascade. "I need some Black Lace, choom. You know where I can get some? Just tell me and I'll leave."

I tilted my head. "Nah, I don't use that shit."

"Bullshit," he said, the knife wavering in front of him like a compass needle trying to find true north. "You gotta know. Everyone around here knows. Just tell me where I can find some and we're good."

"I don't know where to fucking find Black Lace," I repeated. "Now get the fuck away from my car."

"You lying motherfucker! I'll gut you right here," the junkie said, and took a step forward with the knife extended, his eyes wide and glassy, his jaw working against the chemical interference that was currently making his decision-making process even worse than it already was. "I swear to God I'll fucking do it. I'll gut you right fucking here."

I set the bag down on the pump island beside me without much of a hurry. Then I reached behind my back and pulled the Malorian Overture from my waistband, letting it hang at my side with the barrel pointed at the ground.

"I don't know where you can find Black Lace," I said, my eyes narrowed, and my voice dropped even further than it already was. "But I do know where your brains are going to end up splattered in about five seconds if you don't get the fuck away from my car."

The junkie looked at the knife in his hand and then at the Overture in mine. The chemical fog in his brain parted just enough for the remaining functional neurons to perform a basic threat assessment and arrive at the conclusion that the person holding the bigger gun was going to win this exchange.

"Fuck you," the junkie said while sounding like a little bitch, yet still wanting to have the last word in our exchange. He folded the knife, shoved it into his pocket, and turned away, shuffling across the station lot in a slouching, muttering curses as if he was arguing with God about the unfairness of his circumstances.

I watched him until he cleared the lot, tucked the Overture back into my waistband, grabbed the bag, and got into the car.

Judy was looking at me with both eyebrows raised and the NiCola already open in her hand, which she had apparently retrieved from the bag through the open window while I was having my conversation with the local pharmaceutical enthusiast.

"That was smooth," she said.

"I try," I said, starting the engine.

"The voice drop was a nice touch," she added.

"Oh, yeah?" I asked, to which she nodded. "Why, thank you. I've been practicing."

We looked at each other for a few seconds, and then both of us started laughing at the same time. It was a release of adrenaline that had nowhere else to go, and the shared recognition of what had just happened was simultaneously dangerous and absurdly stupid.

"Black Lace," Judy said, wiping her eyes. "He tried to shank you over Black Lace."

"It's only nine-thirty in the morning, too," I said.

"Night City, baby," Judy said, cracking up again. "City of dreams."

I pulled out of the station, merged back onto the highway, and continued toward the Badlands border with a full tank.

As we drove, the scrap mountains rose out of the Badlands like the spine of something buried in irregular formations of compressed metal, discarded industrial equipment, decommissioned vehicles, structural debris, and the accumulated refuse of a city that had been throwing things away for over a century.

From the highway, they looked almost geological, their rusted flanks catching the morning sun in shades of orange, brown, and oxidized grey that made them resemble sandstone bluffs from a distance. Up close, they were just towering walls of crushed cars, broken machinery, discarded building materials, and the skeletal remains of infrastructure projects that had been started, abandoned, and then buried under the next generation's garbage.

The shop sat in a narrow clearing between two of the smaller mountains, a single-story structure that looked like it had been assembled from the same scrap that surrounded it. A hand-painted sign above the front entrance read "TREY'S SALVAGE" in blocky yellow letters that had been faded by the sun into a ghostly outline of their original color. A chain-link fence enclosed a small yard to the left of the building, filled with sorted metal stock, stripped vehicle chassis, and a collection of industrial components organized into rows that suggested someone, at some point, had attempted to impose order on the chaos and had achieved approximately sixty percent of that goal before giving up and calling it a day.

I parked in the dirt clearing in front of the shop, killed the engine, and performed a quick sweep of the area through my Kiroshis, tagging the terrain, the sight lines, the structural integrity of the surrounding scrap formations, and the three possible exit routes that would get the car back to the highway if the morning took a turn.

Judy was out of the car before I had finished the sweep, landing on the packed dirt with both boots and walking toward the shop with the familiar stride of someone who had been here before and knew the terrain.

"O.T.!" she called out, but there was no response. The shop's front door was closed, and the yard was empty. The only sound was the faint, metallic creaking of the scrap mountains settling under their own weight in the morning heat.

I raised an eyebrow.

"Give me a second," Judy said, cupping her hands around her mouth. "O.T.!"

Nothing.

"O.T.! It's Judy!" She called out again. However, the only response she got was silence, the creaking of metal, and the distant hum of highway traffic. 

"Your contact appears to be a no-show," I said, and as soon as I did so, a sound that started as a distant, mechanical whine quickly grew into the high-pitched, chaotic scream of a small engine being pushed well past its design limits. It was coming from the scrap mountain to our right, and it was getting louder fast.

I turned just in time to see a shape explode over the mountain's summit, silhouetted against the morning sun for a fraction of a second before gravity reasserted its authority and it began its rapid and uncontrolled descent down the mountain's face.

It was a vehicle. Correction. It would be more accurately described as something that had once been two vehicles and was now one vehicle. The front end had the handlebars, the narrow profile, and the compact electric motor housing of a scooter, while the rear section had been grafted onto a widened ATV chassis with fat, knobbed tires and a suspension setup that looked like it had been assembled by someone who understood the theory of shock absorption but had decided to interpret it creatively.

The rider was standing on the foot pegs, leaning back against the descent angle, and for a few seconds, it looked like he might actually make it... Needless to say, he did not make it.

The left rear tire caught on something, maybe a piece of rebar, a buried strut, or a chunk of compressed metal that had been waiting in that exact spot for this exact moment, and the entire contraption pitched sideways with a sudden rotation. The machine was no longer in productive contact with the ground, and the rider separated from the vehicle at the apex of the tumble, launched into the air on a trajectory I could only say would be fatal.

Then the gonk jumped in midair. With nothing beneath him but ten feet of open space and a packed dirt landing zone. It was the telltale flash of Reinforced Tendons firing in both legs, the chrome engaging with a visible, muscular pulse beneath the skin of his calves, and his trajectory shifted from "uncontrolled ragdoll" to "controlled descent" in the span of a heartbeat. He tucked, rotated, and landed on both feet directly in front of Judy with a clean and absorbed impact. It was as if the gonk had his skeletal system reinforced specifically for this category of stupid.

He stood up straight to a height of maybe five-eight. He was stocky, with a bowl cut that was, and I could not believe I was seeing this for the second time in two days, almost identical to Muamar Reyes's signature hairstyle, except this version had additional length in the back that cascaded past his collar in a way that said the barber had been given instructions and had followed approximately eighty percent of them.

He was wearing a baggy, oil-stained jumpsuit with the sleeves tied around his waist, a faded band t-shirt underneath, and a pair of work boots that had probably been through enough shifts to have developed their own personality. He looked to be about nineteen, maybe twenty, and his face carried an exhilarated and entirely unrepentant expression, as if the man who had just nearly killed himself was upset that the landing hadn't been cooler.

He didn't even look at Judy.

"Son of a bitch! AHHHH! I almost fucking had it," he said, pointing back up the mountain at the smoking wreckage of the scooter-ATV hybrid, which was currently rolling to a stop about halfway up the slope in a cloud of dust. "I almost had the full fucking run. If you two hadn't distracted me at the bottom, I would've stuck the damn landing clean."

"We distracted you," Judy said flatly. "From the bottom of a mountain. While you were at the top."

"Sound travels, Judy," he said with unshakable conviction, as if he was committed to his version of events and would defend it against all evidence to the contrary. "I heard you yelling my name and it broke my concentration. That's on you."

"You almost died," Judy said.

"Fuck that. If you aren't ever a little bit close to death, did you even live at all? Plus, almost doesn't count," he said. "That's literally the whole point of the word 'almost.'"

He dusted himself off, cracked his neck with a casual sideways motion, and looked back up at the wrecked hybrid with a wistful and evaluative gaze. He was clearly an inventor of something. And right now, he was reviewing test data rather than a man reviewing the site of his near-death experience.

"The center of gravity is still too fucking high," he said. "I need to drop the ATV chassis by another three inches and redistribute the battery weight toward the rear axle. Then the full-mountain run is totally doable."

"Or you could just not drive homemade shit off mountains," Judy said.

"I could... but where's the fun in that?" O.T. asked, apparently genuinely confused by the suggestion. "What, I'm supposed to just build things and then not try to kill myself with them? What kind of gonk does that shit?"

"A living one," Judy said.

"Highly overrated," O.T. said.

Judy turned to me with an expression that said, very clearly, "This is the type of shit I have to deal with."

Then she pointed at me. "O.T., this is the choomba I told you about. Santi."

O.T. rolled his eyes with performative exasperation. He turned to me, looked up at my face, kept looking up at my face, and his eyes went slightly wide.

"Sup," he said. "And for the record, the name is Razor. This gonk," he jerked a thumb at Judy, "calls me by my initials because she thinks it's funny."

"You almost ate shit off a mountain on a scooter contraption, and I'm the gonk," Judy said.

"It's not a scooter," he said, visibly wounded. "It's a modular terrain traversal platform."

"Also, nobody calls you Razor," Judy said.

"Plenty of people call me Razor," O.T. said.

"Name one," Judy deadpanned.

"My cousin calls me Razor," Orsen said with beaming pride.

"Your cousin calls you 'that idiot with the bowl cut,'" Judy shot back.

"That's... Look, the point is, the name is Razor," O.T. said. "Use it or don't. I'm not going to beg."

I looked at him, his bowl cut, stocky build, jawline, and his particular energy. It was as if he were simultaneously the smartest and the most reckless person in any room he occupied.

"What's your actual name?" I asked. "Since O.T. are your initials."

"Orsen Trey," he said, straightening up and brushing the dust off his jumpsuit as if he was grooming himself, ignoring the fact that he almost became one with the trash around us had it not been for his chrome. "Orsen. Trey. Two words. One mothafucking legend."

"Uh-huh," I said. "You wouldn't happen to be related to a guy named Muamar Reyes, would you? Because you are the spitting image of him, just with more hair on the back of the bowl cut."

Orsen stared at me for a second, then looked at Judy, then looked back at me. "Who the fuck is Muamar Reyes?"

"A guy I do biz with," I said. "He's got the same build and bowl cut. I figured there had to be a connection."

"Nah, choom," Orsen said, running a hand through the back of his hair with a reflexive protectiveness. I had just compared his hairstyle to a stranger's and it was clear he didn't quite know how to feel about it. "No relation. The bowl cut is just a lifestyle choice. A bold one. Not everyone can pull it off, and I respect anyone who tries, but I promise you, this," he gestured at his own head with both hands, "is an original."

"The bowl cut is a lifestyle choice," Judy repeated flatly.

"Fuck yeah, it is. It's a bold one," Orsen confirmed. "I said what I said."

The coincidence hung in the air for a moment, and then Orsen clapped his hands together and rubbed them with a brisk "let's-get-to-work" energy.

"Alright," he said. "Judy tells me you need clean scrap. Good metal with no irradiation, chemical contamination, and a structural-grade stock that your fancy scrap-fab can actually do something useful with."

"That's the short version," I said.

"Preem," Orsen said, turning and gesturing toward the chain-link yard beside the shop. "Because the short version is that I've been mapping the composition of these mountains for three years, and I know exactly which sections have the good stuff and which sections will give your machines cancer. Let me show you what I've got."

He started walking toward the yard, and Judy fell into step beside him, and I followed, watching the bowl cut bounce with each stride, thinking about Muamar Reyes and his identical haircut, and wondering just what kind of fucking person looked in a mirror, saw that haircut, and decided not only to keep it but to defend it as a lifestyle choice with the conviction of a man presenting evidence in court.