Strange Company Nick Cole (best classic novels TXT) 📖

little old me would constantly suggest it as a way and route to get things done better. And by better, I mean less chance of anyone getting killed.

I thought about all my dead as we disappeared into the desert wastes ’round midnight.

“That’s enough of that, Sergeant Orion,” the First Sergeant once snapped at me when we were figuring out how to pull a raid on a firebase that was giving High Command some problems and we were near enough to the Wastes to make them of use.

After that I let it go. I was barking up the wrong tree and no one likes a barking dog.

The closest I ever got to figuring out why, before the night we were just ordered to go ahead and break up into smaller elements and link up deep within the Wastes, was when I spoke to a local native girl who’d been acting as a scrounger for the company. She was trading us supplies we couldn’t get through the command chain, in exchange for ammunition, which we could get a lot of because the war merchants in orbit made sure both sides had a lot in order to get this thing settled before the Monarchs showed up.

Funny how it turned out not to be that way in the end. When you thought about it as you listened to the wind and the night in the lonely desert, you realized it was only ever going to end that way. The Monarchs showing up with the Ultra Death Machine kicking things off. That was how it was going to go all along. Where we were all headed, even if we didn’t want to admit it back then.

I admitted it now because no one cared anymore. It was done, cooked, shot to hell. So why not? Isn’t that the first step in something? Admitting you have a problem.

I could barely keep my eyes open. There was nothing to see and too much had gone wrong. I needed sleep and maybe this would all be just a bad dream even though I knew it wouldn’t.

I asked her, the scrounger girl, one time when she managed to scavenge us a case of Rage-a-Hol, this new power energy drink we were all pretty happy with, what the deal on the Wastes was. Why the big mystery no-go zone?

“It’s like this, Ol’ Boy…” She always called me that. Ol’ Boy. I wondered where she was now the game of war was over. Maybe she was dead. We hadn’t seen her in three months. One day she just stopped coming around with stuff to scrounge. She was street-type and the term Ol’ Boy meant something along the lines of hard boy I respect. Same as all across the Pan. “You really needa know that area is all boogedy. Unnerstanna?”

When I asked her what boogedy meant she indicated haunted, scary, strange.

“Weird things happen out there. Ain’t right things. Stuff don’t grow. Bigga scars that go for hundreds of miles. And if you find something out there from off da Crash… well, two things happen to ya. You disappear and no one ever hears from yaz again.”

I told her that seemed like the same thing.

She told me in her way of seeing things that was two different things that could happen to yaz. I thought the point was moot and let it go.

“What happens to those people… salvagers or scavengers… I’m assuming… when they find something off the alien ship? I mean what do you think really happens?”

She looked at me like she was assessing a deal. Weighing out how much she could take me for, or how much I could be trusted.

“Listen… don’t know. Don’t wanna know. No one likes to talk about dat here on da Crash. It’s like… it’s like we know we ain’t s’posed to talk about what goes on out there, so we just don’t. Kenna? But you know how it is… kids and drunks always gonna spill the savage weed. So things get said. And what I think… hear what I think, Ol Boy. I think bad things happen if you finna thing outta there you ain’t s’posed to. Rico, the old man who steals the Rage-a-Hol you guys dig lotsa lotsa… he drink da mezex way too much at night down by da rivers… he say if you find something out there you kenna get to be a Monarch. Or as rich as one of dem canna make ya. See the Monarchs, says Drunk Rico, they want what’s there. They got a secret base out there and he say everything ain’t what it’s s’posed to mean when you seen and known it. That it ain’t haunted so much as jes’ real dangerous to go pokey pokin’ where yaz shouldna no been.”

What danger?

She saw the look in my eyes.

“Yeah you wonderin’ what the danger is? I tell ya. I tell from the eyes. They don’t lie. Sassamia says eyes the window to the hard drives… know what I mean, Ol’ Boy?”

I acted like I did.

“Apes. Dey call ’em apes. I don’t know what da hell an ape is. We don’t got ’em on dis world. But apparently they real dangerous and they all over da Crash. You go in there without guns and government, you gonna die. Tha’s what I think happens to all them scavs that never find no-anything and never heard from again. Know how I know? Monarchs don’t share. You born a Monarch… you a Monarch. Dey don’t make ’em. You got to be one. And why dey pay anyone when they canna just take? Tha’s what I do if I could. Jes take it… you feel me, Ol Boy?”

I understood more than she even knew. She knew only this world. I knew twenty where the dream of Monarch culture died hard when you saw the smoking ruins of what was left. And it was all theirs to begin with. That was the deal. It only got end o’ days when you decided you wanted