Scum of the Universe Page 3

  Jim’s second project was to make a couple of pillows, which required the exact same materials as the bed, but he went to the trouble of sewing the furs together with some tough strands of Ruska’s fur threaded through a mole-tooth needle. It turned out okay, considering how Jim was entirely devoid of any bankable skills.

  At Ruska’s insistence, project number three was a crib for the upcoming baby. All Jim had to do was line a rusted shopping trolley with whatever pelts he had left. Once the cot was completed, Jim spent all night just sitting there, staring at the baby-sized bed, his brain empty, his emotions absent, and his voice silent. That rotten object only served to make the reality of his misery even more concrete, and Jim eventually decided that enough was enough.

  The next time Ruska went hunting, Jim immediately looked about for something, anything, he could use to escape from this prison. And if an escape wasn't possible, at the very least he’d need something to eat that wasn't an abomination against God. Honestly, at this point Jim would even settle for fat-free two-minute noodles. But most of all, more than freedom or a meal that didn't twitch all the way down his throat, Jim needed a damn cigarette worse than ever before.

  Carefully searching through the mounds of sharp, rusty wreckage scattered around the service station in a vain attempt to find anything that had a practical use as a tool, weapon, consumable or smokable, all that Jim found was a very efficient way to scratch and bloody his hands and arms. To make things worse, pile number six was the breeding hive of some highly-territorial fist-roaches who proceeded to chase him about for the better part of an hour. Finally managing to kill the last of the swarm with a rock, Jim sobbed in defeat, curled up on the brown lino and tried to ignore the swelling roach-bites all over his legs so he could sleep away the misery.

  Snoozing became difficult, however, as the floor picked this precise moment to collapse.

  Jim fell through the dark void for a little over a second and landed with a thud that knocked him out on impact. Reality jumped around like a kicked television as Jim regained consciousness, but his brain soon settled back to its usual blank channel after a minute or three.

  Ow…

  Rolling onto his side in pain, but still too winded to moan pathetically yet, Jim felt almost as battered as his first Valentine’s Day with Ruska. Whatever parts of him weren't already dotted with half-infected roach-bites and other assorted scratches were now streaked by nasty bruises. He hurt in places he didn't know he had until now.

  He could hear something...some sort of mechanical hissing and stomping...

  Jim eventually made it back to his feet with a lot of groaning and swearing. As he wasn't Mensa material (to say the least), it took another few more moments for Jim to finally register that he'd fallen into a hidden basement. Looking up, a simple safety ladder disappeared into a distant corona of desert sky.

  Blinking away the bright spots, Jim's eyes soon adjusted to the low light. It took Jim only the briefest of moments to realise that he’d discovered a treasure hoard comparable to that of Smaug himself. It was beyond his most ridiculous dreams.

  Jim literally wept.

  It turned out that the hissing and stomping noises were coming from an automated chemical replication lab going full swing. Even Jim wasn't stupid enough to think for a moment that there was anything legal being brewed here in the middle of the desert. On closer inspection, it turned out the nearest cluster of industrial-strength hardware was liberally splashed with the logo of TRANCE Unlimited, a well-known conglomerate that specialised in automated hardware. In fact, after doing a lap of the room it turned out that just about everything here had been sourced from TRANCE Unlimited, as their logo had been stamped on every pipe, chamber and vat. Whoever set this place up knew what they were doing, and had serious contacts.

  For a moment, seeing the word “TRANCE” tickled something at the back of Jim's brain. It was a feeling that he was meant to remember something, that TRANCE wasn't just the name of a company, but was the core of some deep secret. However, Jim's brain was only interested in two things at this point: getting blackout wasted, and then doubling the dose.

  Jim went all the way to the start of the line and watched a pearly white liquid replicate in a chain of steaming vats. This vanilla fluid was then piped through a maze of fine tubes, filters and vacuum chambers before being pounded into tiny beige tablets. The pills were stamped with a symbol and sprayed with a rainbow of different glazes before ending the relatively simple process by being funnelled into a large metal hopper. Jim had to look away from the stockpile for a while, as he’d begun to drool uncontrollably.

  Must calm down, must calm down…

  Wandering around this incredible stash of recreational chems, which he reckoned must have been running without interference for years, Jim's next breath jammed up in his throat when he noticed that one dark wall of the lab had been dedicated to stacking up supply crates emblazoned with military stencils. The crates, like all heavy military goods, had thin, powerful antigrav wafers built into their bases, which meant that a single person with no equipment could easily move them about as easily as rolling a skateboard.

  Hoping against hope, Jim effortlessly dragged a coffin-sized crate away from the pile and jimmied it open with a handy orange crowbar. He was greeted by neon-yellow boxes of self-cooking Mac&Cheese, which had a theoretically unlimited shelf life and only tasted a little bit like curdled ass.

  Jim grunted. It was a good find, sure, but not what he was after right now.

  The next crate was filled with plastic jars of honey. Number three contained blister packs of water purification tablets. Yep, they’d be useful. Crate four held thousands upon thousands of disposable paper-thin televisions and double-sided tape so you could stick them to any convenient wall. And crate number five...

  Jim's brain refused to believe what it was processing for a few seconds, like it was some kind of sick, hopeless dream that would only serve to make him miserable when he woke up. Jim gave an unprecedented prayer of thanks and cried like a slapped baby, as six hundred shrink-wrapped boxes of extra-strong chlorine-flavoured self-lighting cigarettes were regarding him with their neon CIGARETTES ARE LETHAL, DICKHEAD disclaimer stamps.

  It took less than five seconds for Jim to rip away the shrink-wrap from a carton, pull out a packet, open it up, jam one of the smokes in his gummy mouth and draw back like a drowning man who had just broken the ocean’s surface. The chemical suck-burner in the tip lit itself in response to the drag, and Jim inhaled the green smoke in total ecstasy.

  Sucking down three cigarettes one after another until he felt as though he’d started to make up for lost time, Jim critically regarded the huge pile of Mac&Cheese for a while, but something as unimportant as food could wait. What Jim wanted really, really wanted was to get high on one of those pills. The closest thing Jim had to a commendable trait was that he wasn’t picky with how he got off his face, as long as it got him so hammered that he could barely remember that he even had a face.

  Approaching one of the half-full hoppers at the end of the drug production line, Jim carefully picked up a tiny pink pill and inspected it closely: the word BLINK had been stamped into its chalky surface below an Eye of Horus symbol. Placing the mysterious tab on the tip of his tongue, Jim stared up at the glowing hatch far above.

  “I wonder why it’s called Bl-”

  *

  “-ink?”

  Jim returned to awareness in the deep desert. He was naked, covered in scratches and cuddled up tight to Ruska, who was snoring like a flatulent cow after a bucket of Chilli Con Carne.

  “What the spug...”

  Checking his ancient digital watch (which was the only thing he was still wearing), bright green digits informed Jim that nearly three days had passed between the point he’d tongued the pill and when his brain had abruptly restarted like an old Datsun. It had been three days without worries, without any regrets, without…well, anything at all.

  A total void was now on offer to Jim,
and in unlimited quantities.

  Poor mathematical skills aside, Jim honestly couldn’t remember how many different colours of Blink he’d seen in those hoppers, but it was somewhere between a tonne and totally endless. Jim wondered if the colours meant anything, or were only cosmetic, but then he felt really, really excited about how he was going to discover the answer to this important question in the only way he knew how.

  Jim shrugged. If he had to tolerate life out here in Hell, then he might as well find a way to skip big chunks of it. To a sub-human like Jim, Blink was the ultimate cure to his situation, and he couldn’t think of a single drawback.

  *

  Finally, the big day came when a new baby was brought into the world, and his birth was an especially unusual one, as his Mum didn't even wake up for it.

  One moment, Jim and Ruska Tuesday were lying together in a bed covered in roughly-stitched moleskins stuffed with even more moleskins, and the next there was a newborn baby screaming next to Jim's feet. Crying until dear-old-Dad finally took notice, Jim regained just enough consciousness to cut the umbilical cord with a rusty butter-knife and carried his first-born to a fur-lined crib made from a shopping trolley. Jim eventually managed to focus his eyes just enough to see the time on his wristwatch: it was two in the afternoon.

  “It's too early. Shut up.” Jim muttered at the red-skinned, squalling baby, going back to bed.

  Finally waking to the astonishingly shrill noise of her newborn screaming bloody havoc for the whole of the Mojave to hear, Ruska staggered over to her son and held him up. Blinking away the gunk from her eyes, Ruska regarded the boy, who was perfectly smooth from scalp to toe, and hugged the hairless baby tight.

  “My son,” Ruska cooed.

  She held the infant up to her face in one large hand and smiled with several rows of teeth. The bub screamed in terror, but Ruska confused fear for hunger and drew the infant close so he could feed from one of her six nipples.

  “What will we call you, little man?”

  Jim sighed loudly from under the blankets.

  “Bob. He's called Bob. Now shut up.”

  Ruska growled dangerously, and Jim popped his head out of the moleskins to grin weakly at her hostile expression.

  “Please, my darling. Please. Thank you. Thanks.”

  “Now, we go hunting!” Ruska said proudly.

  “He carn't hunt, he's a bloody baby!” Jim snapped.

  Ruska looked down at the pathetic little bundle who had just been christened as Bob Tuesday. He continued to suckle noisily.

  “Not now. But soon.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  OUT OF HELL AND INTO PURGATORY

  No matter whether you are as high as a Hilton or as low as a Tuesday, time passes, things change, and the inevitable happens. So while the deep Mojave changed very little over the years, the burnt-out service station that a family of three called home slowly adapted to their presence as the months drunkenly staggered by and threw up in the corner. Thanks to the emergency supplies Jim had accidentally discovered in the hidden basement, their lives had become sustainable, to put it in generous terms, but it was still an existence of hardship and deprivation.

  Jim hadn't embraced his new life without plenty of complaints, of course, but Ruska had point-blank refused every demand to take their little family back to civilisation. She explained that if the Russian government found out she’d had a child they would probably vivisect all three of them on the spot. On Jim's fifteenth request, however, Ruska decided not to both repeating herself again, and had instead described, at great length, a certain information-extraction technique she'd been taught called “squiffing.” It took ten minutes of lurid detail to explain why this horrific act had been the core reason behind assembling a new Geneva Convention two and a half decades ago, and how it was one of the only crimes in the 24th Century that would merit the penalty of Death By Crow as a minimum sentence.

  Jim didn't ask again.

  Bob developed as you'd expect in such an environment with the parents he'd been dealt, but it was immediately obvious from the day of his birth that the extreme genetic engineering Ruska had suffered at the hands and hypodermics of Soviet scientists hadn't been handed down, which meant Bob could pass as completely human without a second glance. Thanks to a combination of Jim Tuesday's bad genes and the local background rad, young Bob's inherited smirk was only composed of ten brittle baby teeth. However, Bob's salt-and-pepper hair was unaffected by the terrible conditions, and by the time he was the age of a gradeschooler it flowed down almost to his waist.

  Following closely in his Dad's footsteps from the time he was the size of Verne Troyer, Bob slept away the insane heat of the Mojave in the sunlit hours and spent his nights consumed by staring at the paper-thin televisions Jim had found in the stolen surplus crates. Bob, like most children, was raised by the very best programming nine-hundred-and-forty-eight free-to-air channels had to offer, and although he could not read, write, do basic mathematics or touch his own nose with his eyes closed without falling on his head, Bob quickly learned some of the most offensive combinations of words that the Unglish language could marry. His sheer verbal unpleasantness soon soared far beyond that of most other humans, let alone other six-year-olds, and what Bob lacked in intelligence and book-smarts he made up for in pure, savage vulgarity. In fact, the litmus test Bob applied in finding out whether he’d developed a particularly exceptional insult when he received a smack from his Mum, and he'd file those special ones away for future use. In this way, Bob could perhaps be called a prodigy, but it was hardly the sort of talent that would get you into Harvard. Bob also enjoyed watching the Flower Arranging channel, but he was always ready to switch over to the Olympic Deathsports channel with a double-blink before Mum or Dad caught him.

  It was his secret shame.

  Of course, Ruska wanted to have a major influence over Bob's upbringing as well, and her lessons were very different to the terrible example that Jim set. From the time he was able to walk, Bob was taught how to scurry from hiding spot to hiding spot, to vault over obstacles, to hide in the shadows, and to attack and kill fist-roaches using nothing but his teeth and bare hands. As Bob grew, though, his lack of retractable claws, acidic saliva or even a superhuman sense of smell meant that he needed to be taught how to be violent like a basic, flimsy Homo Sapien, which meant he'd need the right tools...

  Ruska picked Jim up by his nose one morning and demanded he be a good father for once by making some sharp weapons for their clumsy toddler. Jim complained, but after getting juggled a bit he quickly agreed to the task. He spent hours and hours sourcing useless rusting junk for materials, and this involved deconstructing shopping trolleys, ripping out safety railings and digging through miscellaneous garbage piles. It took a month of hard work, but Ruska was holding Jim's entire stash at ransom, so the stakes were high.

  Finally, the celebration of Bob's sixth full year in hell involved his best gift yet: a crude assortment of half a dozen dangerous things. They consisted of a spear, a filleting knife, a skull-breaking club, a cleaver, a sword and a large hook. They were nothing more than chunks of orange corrosion wrapped with Jim's dodgy home-brew leather, but Bob had never known such luxury and was speechless. When he was also given a leather belt to hold the treasures in place on his loincloth, Bob nearly cried from happiness.

  His training began the same day.

  Ruska painted simple pictures of common kinds of Mojave wildlife on the walls by using the blood and bile of a coyote as ink, and Bob was told in no uncertain terms that he was only allowed to practise on these decorations for now. Ruska taught her son which parts to stab, which parts to bludgeon, and especially what parts should never get within range of his soft flesh. Bob learned to spring and stab, to stalk and slit, to leap and bash, to roll and hook. When other children were crying for their Mummies on their first day of preschool, Bob was cutting jugular veins.

  Bob’s ninth birthday involved a rabbit for breakfast and a six-legged weasel
for lunch. Although this may not seem like much, eating more than once every couple of days was an alien concept to the youngster, and Bob felt like the luckiest kid on Earth. Bob wasn't naïve enough to expect any gift beyond a full digestive system, let alone anything that wasn't absolutely essential to his survival. This kind of attitude was beyond valuable when you lived in a wasteland, as it was an ideal way to avoid disappointment. And after being stranded for nine years with a gibbering junkie imbecile and a borderline animal, Bob was surely a world-leading expert in disappointment.

  Despite the fact that Dad wasn't awake (Bob could clearly hear Jim Tuesday snoring from the dumpster next to their service station, probably in the depths of his latest Blink binge), Ruska didn't have any reservations in giving her only son his other present on her own: a folded pile of tough leather. Wordlessly placing the bundle in his outstretched arms, Bob instantly noticed that the suit was a lot heavier than he expected treated skins to be. Bob looked down at the brown mass for a few seconds and turned it over a few times, but his face clearly showed that he still didn't understand. He looked up at his Mum with a question on his face.