Borderlands: The Fallen (20 page)

“I don’t see anything out there,” she said. “Is it safe?”

“Safe?” Vance said, as if puzzled by the idea of a place that was really safe. “No place is safe.” He fell into a brooding silence. Then after a long pause, he growled to himself and said, “When I was a kid, I lived in a place that was supposed to be safe. Luxury space colony called Highbuckle, on the moon of Thora. We had security guards with big guns. We had an automated defense fortress in orbit right over us. We had cops and a militia. We had a protection pact with Thora. We had a force field projected from the fortress. We had walls and big doors and locks and computer surveillance—lady, we had it all. But the Wastemakers didn’t care about that stuff. They found a way into the autodef fortress, took it over, dropped our shields, turned the fortress’s guns on us. Killed most of the colony. Then they came down and killed the rest. Except for one or two …”

“The Wastemakers. I’ve heard about them. I thought they were a myth …”

He shook his head. “Crazy cult bastards. Think they got to cut and burn and ream their way across the outer colonies, because their priestess told ’em that they’re the promised people waiting for the Blonde Goddess to return from the Silver Screen of Heaven. And she’s gonna take them up to this Silver Screen, whatever the hell that is—and until then they’re the only real human beings around, see. They can kill anybody they want and take what they need till the Goddess returns. ’Cause they’re the only … goddamn … human beings.”

“Sounds like you heard about their religion from them personally.”

“Yeah. They take kids prisoners, for the fresh genetics, see, sometimes. They have this ritual that makes you ‘human’ all of a sudden so they can use your … your seed. I was with ’em a year, when I was eleven, while they waited for me to get to puberty. But I managed to kill the bastard that kept me prisoner, and I got in a robot shuttle, told it to take me someplace else, went into suspension. When I woke up it was a year later and I was in the hands of Sky Pirates. They coulda killed me, or sold me, but Captain Flench needed a cabin boy—a servant, like. When I was sixteen, I joined their fightin’ crew. Became a raider.”

She looked at Vance with a new understanding. “So—you saw the Wastemakers kill your parents?”

“Yeah. And my brother. In that safe little haven of spoiled rich people. Safe and protected Highbuckle. No place is safe, lady. No place.” He noticed her staring at him, and he scowled and looked away. “Let’s get a move on—we’re gonna go around the edge of this plain. It’s the long ways but … we’ll be too easy to spot out in the middle
of that big flat nothin’. We lose a day … but we’ll get there. Might be better if we got there second so’s we can make sure we got the jump on ’em …”

He accelerated the truck, turned it sharply, cutting back toward the grittier edge of the plain, skirting its glassy surface. They skidded and fishtailed at first on the slick surface, and then he had the truck close enough to the curving wall of rock enclosing the plain—here, sand and dust had blown into soft moraines that gave the vehicle better purchase. They bumped along over the snaking sand, at the edge of the glass plain, following a curving, indirect path but still generally toward the coordinates Zac had sent her.

Thinking about Zac, she asked, “Vance—what’d you mean, if we get there second we can get the jump on them?”

He chuckled. “You’re thinking of your old man. You got the crazy idea he might be alive, right? Chances of that are about as good as rolling a six on dice that only got snake eyes. Better forget him, girl. He’s long dead.”

Marla felt a chill quiver through her. “You know that? You heard it—on that communicator of yours?”

“No,” Vance admitted. “But that’s just how it is on this hellhole. Probably died in the crash and if he didn’t—he’s skag droppings by now, girl. Sorry but … that’s how it is. Ain’t nothing and no one safe. Unless maybe the guy with the biggest gun and the eyes in the back of his head. And not even then.”

“That communi—” She broke off, grabbing for the dashboard as the truck hit a sand dune and jolted. “—communicator of yours. Can you call orbit with it? I mean—if you can’t, how are you gonna get off the planet, once
you’ve got what you want, if you’re afraid to go to the settlements.”

His grin faded and he turned her a cold look. “I’m not afraid of
anything.
I’m just not gonna be stupid.” He frowned at the windshield, steered around a pothole, and added, “Don’t you worry, I’ll get off this rock. Maybe I’ll take you with me—if you don’t ask stupid questions, and if you don’t try and steal that communicator. That thing won’t call orbit anyhow—it’s just for local transmissions, and only bandit frequencies. You can get that idea out of your head.”

They drove for another half hour, along the curving edge of the plain, in the shadow of the natural stone wall around it, bumping over short sand dunes, and all the time she wondered,
Is he lying about that communicator?

“What the hell is that?” Vance burst out, stopping the truck.

They’d come to a barrier of boulders, about ten meters high, with spikes sticking out of it, thin shards of glass each about a meter long. It extended from the cliffside out about forty meters into the plain, and then stopped out there like an unfinished wall. It almost looked like it could’ve happened accidentally. But then again, looking closer …

“Somebody put that damn thing up,” Vance said. “Looks like they brought down part of the cliff … stuck those glass spears in there.”

“What would be the point? We could just drive around it, onto the plain.”

“Yeah. Seems like. But what’s on the other side of it? Maybe some kinda ambush.” He backed the truck up
a few car lengths and put the truck in idle. “Listen,” he whispered, getting out of the truck, “stand just outside the truck, Marla—and talk to me as if I’m right in front of you and we can’t decide what to do. Do it kind of loud. Like we’re about to turn back or something.”

“What?”

“Just do it.” He walked softly toward the wall.

She shrugged, got out of the truck, took a deep breath, and, almost yelling, said, “Well dammit man what are we gonna do, are we gonna stay here or what? Are we going around it? Are we going back? I mean, what the hell? I mean shit, why don’t we make up our goddamn minds? What? What? What kind of way is that to talk to me?”

As she bellowed this, Vance was climbing the wall, easing up between the glass shards, picking out his footing with great care. He looked over his shoulder and silently mouthed,
“Keep it up! More!”

She went on, “I mean, Jeezis, can we get off the dime and get movin’ here, man? You know, this is just like you. I do and do and do for you and you sit there behind the wheel yawning and scratching your nuts …”

Then he was at the top of the barrier, peering carefully through a space between two rocks down at the other side. He shook his head, then climbed quickly down.

“And another thing … !”

“Forget it!” he told her, hurrying over. “Nobody over there.”

“So who was I yelling for?”

“Somebody who might’ve been there. To cover for me as I took a look.”

“I know, but—who put this barrier up? What’s it for?”

“My guess is, somebody was setting up something here and they got killed before they could finish it.”

“You sure? Maybe we should go back a ways, then head out on the plain, take a long circle around it, Vance. It’s just too …”

He looked at her with narrowed eyes, seeming irritated. He’d made his decision and she was second-guessing him. “That’d take too much time, and it’d expose us too much. We’re going around the barrier right here and we’re moving on the way we were going. We’re already taking the long goddamn way to the crash site …”

If there is an alien crash site,
she thought. The whole thing could be a boondoggle.

They got in the truck and he started around the barrier, heading out onto the glass plain. The wheels skidded a little on the slick surface, but driving carefully he was able to make good progress, passing the barrier. They had gone a truck’s length past it, turned toward the edge of the glass plain again—when cracks appeared in the glassy surface, all around them, making
crick-crick
noises as they opened. The cracks spread out from the truck in every direction, like thin ice breaking under a weight.

“Oh shit!” Vance burst out, flooring the accelerator. The wheels spun in place—and then the truck fell, straight down, through the shattering thin glass surface.

A second later the truck’s wheels struck the surface below with a jarring thud that cracked Marla’s teeth together, whiplashed her neck; a flailing grab at the dashboard saved her from cracking her forehead on it.

Engine dead, the truck sat on all four wheels in a thin cloud of dust. Light angled sharply down from above;
to either side were rough columns of stone. As the dust cleared Marla could see the chisel marks—the stone had been hollowed out here.

“Get your gun ready!” Vance barked, turning to get the combat rifle from the back window shelf. “It was a tunnel rat trap! I fell for it like a green dumbshit!”

“What?” Still dazed, she fumbled for her pistol. “What are tunnel rats? You mean actual rats or …”

“People!” He opened the truck door. “They went degenerate in the tunnels! They eat human flesh!”

Vance was already climbing onto the truck cab roof and immediately firing at the dark tunnel mouths revealed by the settling dust. Hooded faces drew back into the shadow at his burst of gunfire.

Faces? Not exactly. More like goggling glass eye sockets, rubbery snouts in place of noses …

Instinctively, she pushed the passenger side door open, stepped out behind it, fired her pistol through the open window, blasting blindly into the darkness.

Muzzle flashes lit up the figures in the tunnel as they returned fire with pistols and shotguns. She saw they were indeed human in shape, though gas masks made their faces look snouted and rodentlike.

Bullets cracked against the armored door of the truck—there were flashes overhead as rounds impacted on Vance’s shield. She had no shield herself.

That’s another thing Zac would’ve done, she figured—first thing he would’ve given her his shield. The one they’d scrounged for her from the dead bandits had run out of power.

She fired again, emptying her clip, then looked up to see
Vance firing his rifle at the wall of dirt and rock to his left. Why was he doing that? Trying to cause a cave-in?

In a way, that’s just what he was doing, she realized—the soft, already undermined rock crumbled under the impact of his bullets, and a rough ramp of stone and dirt tumbled on his side of the truck.

“Come on, girl!” he yelled, leaping up onto the tumble of rocks.

“Help me up!” she yelled, as the tunnel rats came at her. She tried climbing up onto the truck cab, got onto her knees on it as Vance kept climbing, ahead of her, up toward the daylight just about two and a half meters above. Bullets splashed into his shield, making it flicker. Two tunnel rats clambered up onto the heap of rocks and grabbed at his legs. He smashed one in the goggles with the butt of his gun, cracking the glass and driving in the shards so the tunnel rat screamed, blinded; Vance shoved a pistol into the other one’s mouth, pulled the trigger, blowing through the back of the tunnel rat’s head.

Marla got to her feet, started to follow Vance—and then clutching hands grabbed her ankles and jerked her off her feet.

The wind knocked out of her, gasping for air, she clawed at the rooftop, tried to call out to Vance. The clutching hands were pulling her back, off the truck. Claws dug into her legs and dragged her painfully, inexorably, back down … to the floor of the tunnel. One of them clawed her gun from her hand …

She looked up past the truck to see Vance, silhouetted against the sky, standing on the rim of the break in the glassy surface of the plain—he fired a burst down at a
tunnel rat near her, shot the top of its head off. She tried to stand—but saw that four other tunnel rats were holding her down, their visages completely enigmatic in the gas masks.

“You will be with us, we will share you, in many ways,” hissed one of them.

“Vance!” she screamed, as terror licked up in her like flame in dry kindling.

She caught a glimpse of him looking cautiously down into the pit. He fired at a tunnel rat, then jumped back from return fire. Bullets strafed past him.

Who sells these horrid creatures guns?
But she knew. People like Grunj would sell guns to tunnel rats—people like Grunj and Dimmle, and probably Vance …

Another burst of gunfire from Vance. He was shouting at her. She couldn’t make it out. She caught only one word—
sorry
.

The tunnel rats dragged her, struggling, away from the truck, into shadow and then deeper darkness. In the last scrap of light, up above, she could make out Vance, crouching to peer down at her from up on surface of the plain. He cupped his mouth and shouted, and this time she heard,
“Sorry, girl! Too many of ’em! You were a good—”

That’s all Marla heard—a wiry arm crooked around her head, muffling the rest as she was dragged backward.

Tunnel rats hissed and muttered as they clutched at her. A necrotic stench closed around Marla, making her gag—the stench choking her exactly as the darkness of the tunnels closed around her and clawed fingers began tugging at her clothing.