James Axler – Exile to Hell

Grimly Boon declared, “Dwarf, mutie, drunk or sober, he assaulted a Magistrate.”

“An accident,” said Grant. “You’ll see and hear a lot of things in the Pits. Ninety-nine percent of the time, none of it means anything.”

“What about that other one percent?” Boon was a little calmer now.

“You’ll learn to recognize the one-percents,” replied Kane. “If you don’t, you’re dead.”

Boon shook his head. “Seems safer just to flash-blast this whole fucking place, send ’em back where they came from.”

“Ah,” said Grant, trying unsuccessfully to blow a smoke ring, “then who’ll clean the floors, fix the sewers, till the fields and wipe the collective asses of all of us in the high-towers?”

Boon didn’t answer.

For the remainder of the afternoon, they continued on Pit patrol. Boon decided to make something of a game out of it. At first, he checked the ID chips of every third person he saw, then of every man over the age of fifty, then of every female over puberty. Kane and Grant picked up food from street vendors, ate and drank and smoked their cigars and watched him. They figured that sooner or later, Boon would sicken of it and quit. He didn’t. The sun began sinking behind the walls, washing the streets in a purple gray dusk.

“This is ridiculous,” snapped Kane as Boon made another female inspection. “He’s checked at least a hundred people so far and come up blank each time.”

“Maybe he’s on the prowl for that one percent you told him about,” Grant replied. “The law of averages. There’s got to be one bogus chip out of a couple of hundred.”

“And he’s likely to flash-blast the poor bastard on the spot.”

“Yeah, like you never itched for the opportunity to sling around lead. Like the time when you thought you had a roamer cornered in a gully and blew the head off a cactus. Spent a week picking needles out of your face.”

“That was twelve years ago. Why do you keep reminding me of those things?”

“I’m your partner and your elder. I’m supposed to remind you of those things.”

Kane checked his wrist chron. “About two hours till shift change. A half an hour to get back to the division, a half to fill out the reports and another half for busywork. Then we can go home.”

“You’re half an hour short,” observed Grant.

“Okay, half an hour to walk back to the compound.” Kane took the cigar out of his mouth and shouted, “Boon! Enough for the day!”

Boon didn’t look up from the arm he was inspecting. The arm was attached to a girl who might have been sixteen years old or twenty-six. It was hard to tell in the shifting light. But her eyes gleamed like polished rubies. Her white hair was ragged and short, held away from her angular, hollow-cheeked face by a length of satiny cloth. She wore a T-shirt and a pair of red, high-cut shorts that showed off her pale, gamin-slim legs.

Kane had seen albino women before in the Outlands, but never one so young and pretty. She looked as if she were crafted from flawless porcelain. The treated lenses of his glasses picked out a detail he had missed on first glance. The girl’s headgear wasn’t decorative; it was functional. Blood seeped slowly from the bottom edge of the bandage wrapped around her head.

Injured people were part and parcel of life in the Tartarus Pits. Some days it seemed as if every street were clogged with the walking wounded. But this girl didn’t seem in pain. She seemed terrified. Her eyes darted back and forth like a panicked animal’s. Her delicate pale lips parted, and though he was too far away to hear what she said, Kane was able to read the words formed by them.

She said, “Please. Danger.”

Boon didn’t hear her. At the precise moment she spoke, he whooped in triumph, his hand tightening around her wrist. Grinning, he turned to Kane and Grant and shouted, “I got me a bogie! I got one!”

Grant took the cigar out of his mouth and spit. “Ah, shit. I was afraid of this. Now we’ve got to handle an ejection. Or if Boon has his way, probably an on-the-spot termination.”