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  Junkyard Bargain

  Faith Hunter

  Lore Seekers Press

  Copyright © 2021 Faith Hunter

  JUNKYARD BARGAIN

  ISBN: 978-1-62268-165-5

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For more information contact Lore Seekers Press, P.O. Box 4251 CRS, Rock Hill, SC 29732. Or online at www.loreseekerspress.com.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Rebecca Frank of Bewitching Book Covers.

  Acknowledgments

  No book is written in a vacuum. This novel, and the entire Junkyard Cats series, has been dependent on several people.

  Robert Martin, physicist and theoretical physicist-adventurer. The creator of the science behind the WIMP engines and the EntNu communications system in the Junkyard Universe.

  Bonnie Smietanowska, physicist.

  Mud Mumudes for all things plant-ish and genetic-y

  Brenda Rezk for breaking down genetic stuff I couldn’t understand.

  Lets Talk Promotions for running PR.

  Agent Lucienne Diver with The Knight Agency for getting me an Audible Original with the Junkyard Cats series.

  Editor Steve Feldberg at Audible for all the wonderful suggestions and insights, for the Audible Original. Every care has been taken to deviate not at all.

  Cover design by Rebecca Frank of Bewitching Book Covers. Love it!

  Teri Lee editor extraordinaire.

  And my final thanks to Lore Seekers Press for the e-book edition.

  JUNKYARD BARGAIN

  Buck Harlan—my friend, the closest thing I had left to a father—was dead because of me.

  Dead protecting me.

  My first thought in the morning, every morning.

  Before coffee. Before breakfast. Every. Single. Morning.

  His face, half eaten away by a swarm of genetically modified ants. His Outlaw Militia Warrior tattoos left untouched. The note warning me, clutched in his fingers.

  I deliberately recalled everything, including tossing a half-empty gallon of Maltodine into the old Tesla fuselage, the vehicle that delivered Harlan. The accelerant burned his body to ash, obliterated the mutated ants that were eating him, and destroyed any evidence that might suggest I had killed my only friend in the world.

  I studied his face, the position of his fingers, in my memory. Every detail was seared into my soul like a prayer for vengeance. The memories of death and debts owed.

  I stared at the ceiling of my office, the smooth metal alloy reflecting the faint lights. So many secrets to hide. And three things to do: carry on my father’s legacy, keep myself hidden from the people who would try to use me, and take revenge on Harlan’s killers.

  The weight of all that was heavy, even this early, still in my bed, and my memory darted back to Pops shouting to get me up in the mornings after Little Mama died and the war still raged. “Get your ass outta bed, Little Girl! We got PRC to kill!” Every morning.

  The smell of coffee was fresh and potent in the filtered air, the trickle of water into the pot what awakened me. Coffee meant work, weapons to obtain, weapons that could take down my enemy—the queen who killed Harlan and sent his body to me, then followed it here to Smith’s Junk and Scrap and attacked me and mine.

  I had won that first battle, but if I waited until that queen, Clarisse Warhammer, attacked me again, I would end up as dead as Harlan. I needed to go to war against her and her thralls. Soon. As soon as I had possession of the weapons to make victory possible. As soon as I found her nest, I’d go to war. For Harlan.

  Satisfied that I had done my daily penance, I climbed out of bed. It was two hours before dawn, in the cool perfection of a desert morning, and I had work to do. I let the two cat queens of the junkyard prides out of the airlocks, used the waterless personal toilette compartment, yawned, scratched my fingernails through my short hair, and smeared on the first layer of moisturizers and sunscreens.

  I sniffed my work clothes from the day before yesterday and decided they weren’t too rank, so I pulled them on. Draping clothes across hot scrap metal in the midday sun helped to make the stench bearable, though nothing got rid of stains and sweat stink like detergent and water. But water was pricy. I lived quarter-to-quarter, which meant I was always broke. Decent now, I poured a cup of coffee and turned to face the airlock hatch, waiting.

  Exactly five minutes and fifteen seconds after I rolled from bed, Cupcake tapped on the office door. Just like every morning. After the first couple of mornings, I figured she had learned how to access the chrono and the supply inventory functions of the office to better serve me, so she could get here with my food faster. I hated losing my morning private time, but I hadn’t figured out what to do with my unwanted guest, and Cupcake needed to be useful. A thrall’s desire to please was a little like having a dog that needed to herd, or fetch, or guard. Cupcake needed a job, and when I didn’t give her one, she gave herself one. She had taken over half the meal prep and gardening from Mateo. She cleaned my living area. She had begun organizing the business’s financial records. She was making a detailed map of the property and what scrap was where. She was organizing everything. She was driving me crazy.

  I pressed a small spot on the command board to unlock the hatch and said, “Come.”

  Cupcake entered through the outer, then inner, airlock doors, backing in with a breakfast tray. “Good morning, Sunshine!” she called. “We have pancakes with stevia, an MRE of fake scrambled eggy goo made with habanero peppers, and roasted beets with garlic. And you got a package in the mail! Look!” She waved a padded brown envelope that crinkled from the pressure of her fingers.

  I held in a sigh and a curse. Cupcake was one of those repulsive morning people, and when I didn’t appreciate her efforts, she was also weepy. She was mentally and emotionally geared to ruin my morning, every morning, and nothing I had done except stay silent had stopped her tears.

  “It smells kinda funky, but it sat in the hot mailbox all day yesterday,” she informed me, smiling happily, the envelope and flimsy hemp-paper fliers in one hand, the tray in the other.

  “Funky how?” I asked, sniffing the air. The only thing I smelled was the habaneros and garlic.

  “Rotten meat funky,” she said, waving it again.

  My eyes landed on the envelope.

  Cupcake placed the food tray and mail on the dinette bench, snapped open a tablecloth, and unloaded the china and sterling silver onto the cheap laminated table. I had no idea which outer shed she had raided for the expensive fancy dinnerware and the sterling, but on the final day of her transitioning to a thrall, I was eating off fancy porcelain. “Sit, sit, sit, sit, sit,” she said, holding out the package. Gingerly, I accepted it, and caught a whiff of stink.

  In dark blue marker was my name. My real name. Shining Smith, care of Smith’s Junk and Scrap, Near Naoma, West Virginia. Accurate as far as addresses went in the post-World War III world. Too accurate.

  I held the package away from me as if it would explode if I moved. Because it might.

  Staring at the envelope, I placed my mug on the table, and sat as Cupcake put a linen square across my lap. She brought more coffee.

  “I’m betting we’ll have broccoli coming up in a week or so,” she chattered, “and soon we’ll have watermelon.” Which was difficult but not impossible in a desert greenhouse. She plopped down, sitting across from me at the repurposed RV dinette.

  Carefully, I tore open the envelope, and the stench flooded into the room. Rotten meat for real. Gen
tly, I pulled out the crinkly old bubble wrap. Bubble wrap wasn’t made anymore, not anywhere, but there were tons of the old stuff, and it was used to ship delicate things like jewelry. But this bubble wrap was damp and sticky, coated inside with a wet brown residue.

  Cupcake asked, “Shining? Don’t you like the breakfast?”

  I looked at her and knew my eyes were too big. She didn’t seem to care about the reek, but I hadn’t eaten her offering, and that was bad.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, those blasted tears gathering. Cupcake had probably always been emotionally fragile. The original transition to thrall, forced on her by Warhammer to create a servant she could use, had weakened her, and my forced transition—to save her life—only made that instability worse. I was careful around her, not wanting to wound her more.

  “I’m good.” Thinking back over her last words, I asked softly, “Watermelon?”

  “I love me some watermelon,” she said brightly, and launched into a monologue about the various kinds. I lowered the damp, stinking bubble wrap below the table edge and peeled back the tape holding it together. It released and opened like a crinkly noxious flower.

  Inside was a finger. A human finger.

  Electric shock cascaded through me, igniting every nerve ending. I slid the napkin off my lap to the bench seat and placed the bubble wrap and finger on it. Studied it. Couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  It had a rounded nail, painted with the remnants of purple polish. It was slightly stubby, hairless, and had been clipped off with something like gardener’s snips if the end was any indication. She had been alive when it was cut. There had been a lot of blood, and it hadn’t been washed off.

  “You need to eat. That eggy stuff isn’t good when it gets cold.”

  I looked at Cupcake, seeing her as I seldom bothered to. She was forty-two, blond, curvy, and prematurely wrinkled and deeply tanned as most Old Ladies are, from riding bitch seat behind their biker made-men. When she came to me, injured and near death, she had been hard-bitten and angry, but the transition had softened everything, including her mental acuity and her ability to handle stress. It made sense. She had been infected with bio-nanobots from her own queen. Then with my even weirder ones. My nanos were probably still doing battle inside her, still changing her immune system, brain, and body, down to the genetics.

  Her tears spilled over. I had upset her. Again. I didn’t know what to do with Cupcake. She didn’t know what to do with herself. I had no idea how to keep her happy because all she wanted to do was work and serve me, her queen, like a worker ant in a hive-nest.

  I wiped my fingers and lifted the fork. Carried some mushy eggy stuff to my mouth. It didn’t need to be chewed, was barely palatable, and only then because it was full of hot peppers and salt, but the yellow slop was protein, and no one wasted protein. I swallowed, despite the rotten stench rising from the seat beside me. Still beneath the tabletop, one-handed, I rolled the finger into the bubble wrap and my napkin. I needed to run diagnostics on it for identification, but not while Cupcake was in here. I quickly finished the peppery goo.

  “I love broccoli,” I said, shoveling beets into my mouth. “I had broccoli pesto once. It’s good.”

  “Oh my god, yes. Anything with garlic and pine nuts is good. You ever tried Brussels sprouts pesto? So good! The greenhouse is just blooming up a storm,” she nattered on now that I had contributed to the conversation, once again cheery, her blue eyes sparkling. I ate and heard her say, “That new hemp mesh Mateo and I strung up? The stuff that was left over from shading the greenhouse compound? We put it up on aisle Tango three.”

  “Mmm,” I said, now scooping in the pancakes. Trying not to puke at the growing rotten-finger stench.

  “This place needs a good cleaning,” she said. “It’s getting kinda rank in here.”

  “Right. Soon. New hemp mesh?” I reminded her.

  “It’s absorbing and capturing moisture out of the night air like a dream. Come winter, we might bring in enough to actually get a shower once a week.”

  That caught my attention. I swigged my coffee so I could talk. She poured me more. “Fresh water?” I asked.

  “Nearly a week’s supply for drinking and watering the greenhouse, in a little over ten days,” she said, pouring herself a cup of coffee. “We think we can do twice that in winter.”

  My hand, holding the fancy fork, halted halfway to my mouth. “That’s . . . That’s really good.”

  “It’s not a full replacement, yet,” she prattled, “but not bad for summer, and if Mateo and I can get that water tower off the office roof and patch it up, we’ll have a good place to store water.”

  Something like pleasure, maybe mixed with joy, flowed through me—a rare and unexpected sensation. “I’m . . . I’m proud of you, Cupcake.”

  Cupcake’s blue eyes widened. Her color went high as she blossomed at the praise. “Eat,” she ordered, pointing at my meal, shaking with elation.

  I didn’t praise her enough. I had to remember to do that. I ate. The buckwheat and millet pancakes were tasty enough. The roasted beets were surprisingly sweet and tender.

  “It’s good.”

  She hid her smile in her coffee cup. That was the thing about thralls. They were eager to please, needed to please, quite literally might die if they couldn’t find a way to serve and didn’t get attention from their nanobot-donor queen. She set down her cup, whipped a nail file out of her pocket, and reached for my left hand. “Not this morning,” I said softly. To keep her from freezing in uncertainty, I continued, “Tell me more about the netting and the free water.” Then, because it made her glow, I added, “This is exciting.”

  I spent nearly half of Smith’s Junk and Scrap’s profits on drinking water, and adding Cupcake to my expenses had already ruined this quarter’s budget. Since the Russians exploded WIMP bombs over Germany that punched a short-term hole in the magnetosphere, tore away the ozone layer, and wrecked the atmosphere, rain was a rarity everywhere, especially in the West Virginia desert. I usually got a shower only when I went into Naoma for supplies.

  Cupcake talked nonstop through the rest of my breakfast about the water collection device and the long list of plant varieties she was planning. Finally, Cupcake wound down and said brightly, “I’ll feed the cats and get Mateo to bring the skids with our trade goods up to the entrance so we can pack the truck. I’m excited about our trip. It’ll be fun!”

  Fun. Not the word I’d choose for a dangerous mission to gather the weapon we needed to kill Warhammer. “Good,” I lied.

  She swept her blonde hair to the side, like a teenager. “Can I help you pack?”

  “I’m packed.” She looked skeptical, so I added, “I packed the dress you insisted on.” I kept several duffels ready to go. All I had to dump in were the IDs and the toiletries for each trip’s purpose.

  “I’ll bring the truck up, then. I did a full eval on the electronics and a mech assessment yesterday. We’re ready to go.”

  I stared at her. “You do evaluations and assessments?” That was new.

  “Mateo loaned me one of his Berger chips. Once I plugged in the info, it was a piece of cake.” Briskly, she gathered up my dirty dishes and placed them in the sink where she wiped them with a rag and spritzed them with cleanser before leaving them to dry, the citrusy scent almost overriding the rotten-meat smell. She grabbed the tray and the tablecloth one-handed, carried kibble out the inner airlock, and rattled cat food into the metal pans before opening the outer airlock. I heard eager cat sounds as they came running. Cupcake closed the inner airlock and left me alone.

  A little nauseated from the stench, I carried the bubble-wrapped finger to the med-bay, opened the hood, and set the unit to T.O.D and C.O.D—time of death and cause of death—and Identify. I could have used the portable viber, but I needed more info than it would provide.

  I closed the clear plasticized med-bay hood, started the process, and waited. The finger was small and bloody and dead. I had no actual proof yet, bu
t the finger delivery had to be related to Harlan and his death.

  I’d taken out most of Warhammer’s no-longer-human nest, but she and her primary mate had gotten away. I couldn’t let that stand. As soon as I had the weapons and the location, I was going to war. Part of that would be a complicated, dangerous, and beyond expensive fight-my-way-through-to-Charleston expedition.

  If this finger belonged to the person I feared it did, I was going to have to adjust my plans, incorporate a rescue into the war, and move up my timetable, fast.

  The med-bay dinged. On the screen, I read the name I had been fearing: Captain Evelyn Raymond, second-in-command of the USSS SunStar.

  “Bloody damn,” I whispered. I fell onto the dinette seat and put my head on the old laminated tabletop. “Damndamndamn.” I sucked in air against my anger, wishing I hadn’t promised Pops I’d never say fuck. It would be so satisfying right now. “DamndamnBloody… Gaaah!” I raised my head and stared, unseeing, into my living space, breathing through the fury and frustration. As Mateo and I had long feared, Clarisse had captured Evelyn Raymond. We had to rescue her.

  I rested my head on the cheap tabletop until my temper cooled, sat upright, blew out a breath, and centered myself. I envisioned Tuffs, the original queen and Guardian Cat of the Junkyard Cats. Within seconds, Tuffs and her court were at the inner airlock, chasing all the hungry cats away, claiming territory.

  I let in the cats and they raced everywhere, exploring. Tuffs brought a different batch each time she came to visit, the Guardian Cat making sure all her pride members knew the layout of the office and where the food was kept. I also knew that if I somehow died, they would devour my body until there was nothing left but bones and teeth. They had feasted on human flesh. They liked it.