Chương 69: New Faces IV

As we drove, the scrap mountains rose out of the Badlands like the spine of something buried in irregular formations of compressed metal, discarded industrial equipment, decommissioned vehicles, structural debris, and the accumulated refuse of a city that had been throwing things away for over a century. From the highway, they looked almost geological, their rusted flanks catching the morning sun in shades of orange, brown, and oxidized grey that made them resemble sandstone bluffs from a distance.

Up close, they were just towering walls of crushed cars, broken machinery, discarded building materials, and the skeletal remains of infrastructure projects that had been started, abandoned, and then buried under the next generation's garbage. The shop sat in a narrow clearing between two of the smaller mountains, a single-story structure that looked like it had been assembled from the same scrap that surrounded it.

A hand-painted sign above the front entrance read "TREY'S SALVAGE" in blocky yellow letters that had been faded by the sun into a ghostly outline of their original color.

A chain-link fence enclosed a small yard to the left of the building, filled with sorted metal stock, stripped vehicle chassis, and a collection of industrial components organized into rows that suggested someone, at some point, had attempted to impose order on the chaos and had achieved approximately sixty percent of that goal before giving up and calling it a day.

I parked in the dirt clearing in front of the shop, killed the engine, and performed a quick sweep of the area through my Kiroshis, tagging the terrain, the sight lines, the structural integrity of the surrounding scrap formations, and the three possible exit routes that would get the car back to the highway if the morning took a turn.

Judy was out of the car before I had finished the sweep, landing on the packed dirt with both boots and walking toward the shop with the familiar stride of someone who had been here before and knew the terrain.

"O. T.!" she called out, but there was no response. The shop's front door was closed, and the yard was empty. The only sound was the faint, metallic creaking of the scrap mountains settling under their own weight in the morning heat. I raised an eyebrow.

"Give me a second," Judy said, cupping her hands around her mouth.

"O. T.!" Nothing.

"O. T.! It's Judy!" She called out again. However, the only response she got was silence, the creaking of metal, and the distant hum of highway traffic.

"Your contact appears to be a no-show," I said, and as soon as I did so, a sound that started as a distant, mechanical whine quickly grew into the high-pitched, chaotic scream of a small engine being pushed well past its design limits. It was coming from the scrap mountain to our right, and it was getting louder fast.

I turned just in time to see a shape explode over the mountain's summit, silhouetted against the morning sun for a fraction of a second before gravity reasserted its authority and it began its rapid and uncontrolled descent down the mountain's face. It was a vehicle. Correction. It would be more accurately described as something that had once been two vehicles and was now one vehicle.

The front end had the handlebars, the narrow profile, and the compact electric motor housing of a scooter, while the rear section had been grafted onto a widened ATV chassis with fat, knobbed tires and a suspension setup that looked like it had been assembled by someone who understood the theory of shock absorption but had decided to interpret it creatively. The rider was standing on the foot pegs, leaning back against the descent angle, and for a few seconds, it looked like he might actually make it...

Needless to say, he did not make it. The left rear tire caught on something, maybe a piece of rebar, a buried strut, or a chunk of compressed metal that had been waiting in that exact spot for this exact moment, and the entire contraption pitched sideways with a sudden rotation. The machine was no longer in productive contact with the ground, and the rider separated from the vehicle at the apex of the tumble, launched into the air on a trajectory I could only say would be fatal. Then the gonk jumped in midair.

With nothing beneath him but ten feet of open space and a packed dirt landing zone. It was the telltale flash of Reinforced Tendons firing in both legs, the chrome engaging with a visible, muscular pulse beneath the skin of his calves, and his trajectory shifted from "uncontrolled ragdoll" to "controlled descent" in the span of a heartbeat. He tucked, rotated, and landed on both feet directly in front of Judy with a clean and absorbed impact.

It was as if the gonk had his skeletal system reinforced specifically for this category of stupid. He stood up straight to a height of maybe five-eight.

He was stocky, with a bowl cut that was, and I could not believe I was seeing this for the second time in two days, almost identical to Muamar Reyes's signature hairstyle, except this version had additional length in the back that cascaded past his collar in a way that said the barber had been given instructions and had followed approximately eighty percent of them. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

He was wearing a baggy, oil-stained jumpsuit with the sleeves tied around his waist, a faded band t-shirt underneath, and a pair of work boots that had probably been through enough shifts to have developed their own personality. He looked to be about nineteen, maybe twenty, and his face carried an exhilarated and entirely unrepentant expression, as if the man who had just nearly killed himself was upset that the landing hadn't been cooler. He didn't even look at Judy.

"Son of a bitch! AHHHH! I almost fucking had it," he said, pointing back up the mountain at the smoking wreckage of the scooter-ATV hybrid, which was currently rolling to a stop about halfway up the slope in a cloud of dust.

"I almost had the full fucking run. If you two hadn't distracted me at the bottom, I would've stuck the damn landing clean."

"We distracted you," Judy said flatly.

"From the bottom of a mountain. While you were at the top."

"Sound travels, Judy," he said with unshakable conviction, as if he was committed to his version of events and would defend it against all evidence to the contrary.

"I heard you yelling my name and it broke my concentration. That's on you."

"You almost died," Judy said.

"Fuck that. If you aren't ever a little bit close to death, did you even live at all? Plus, almost doesn't count," he said.

"That's literally the whole point of the word 'almost.'" He dusted himself off, cracked his neck with a casual sideways motion, and looked back up at the wrecked hybrid with a wistful and evaluative gaze. He was clearly an inventor of something. And right now, he was reviewing test data rather than a man reviewing the site of his near-death experience.

"The center of gravity is still too fucking high," he said.

"I need to drop the ATV chassis by another three inches and redistribute the battery weight toward the rear axle. Then the full-mountain run is totally doable."

"Or you could just not drive homemade shit off mountains," Judy said.

"I could... but where's the fun in that?" O. T. asked, apparently genuinely confused by the suggestion.

"What, I'm supposed to just build things and then not try to kill myself with them? What kind of gonk does that shit?"

"A living one," Judy said.

"Highly overrated," O. T. said. Judy turned to me with an expression that said, very clearly,"This is the type of shit I have to deal with." Then she pointed at me.

"O. T., this is the choomba I told you about. Santi." O. T. rolled his eyes with performative exasperation. He turned to me, looked up at my face, kept looking up at my face, and his eyes went slightly wide.

"Sup," he said.

"And for the record, the name is Razor. This gonk," he jerked a thumb at Judy, "calls me by my initials because she thinks it's funny."

"You almost ate shit off a mountain on a scooter contraption, and I'm the gonk," Judy said.

"It's not a scooter," he said, visibly wounded.

"It's a modular terrain traversal platform."

"Also, nobody calls you Razor," Judy said.

"Plenty of people call me Razor," O. T. said.

"Name one," Judy deadpanned.

"My cousin calls me Razor," Orsen said with beaming pride.

"Your cousin calls you 'that idiot with the bowl cut,'" Judy shot back.

"That's... Look, the point is, the name is Razor," O. T. said.

"Use it or don't. I'm not going to beg." I looked at him, his bowl cut, stocky build, jawline, and his particular energy. It was as if he were simultaneously the smartest and the most reckless person in any room he occupied.

"What's your actual name?" I asked.

"Since O. T. are your initials."

"Orsen Trey," he said, straightening up and brushing the dust off his jumpsuit as if he was grooming himself, ignoring the fact that he almost became one with the trash around us had it not been for his chrome.

"Orsen. Trey. Two words. One mothafucking legend."

"Uh-huh," I said.

"You wouldn't happen to be related to a guy named Muamar Reyes, would you? Because you are the spitting image of him, just with more hair on the back of the bowl cut." Orsen stared at me for a second, then looked at Judy, then looked back at me.

"Who the fuck is Muamar Reyes?"

"A guy I do biz with," I said.

"He's got the same build and bowl cut. I figured there had to be a connection."

"Nah, choom," Orsen said, running a hand through the back of his hair with a reflexive protectiveness. I had just compared his hairstyle to a stranger's and it was clear he didn't quite know how to feel about it.

"No relation. The bowl cut is just a lifestyle choice. A bold one. Not everyone can pull it off, and I respect anyone who tries, but I promise you, this," he gestured at his own head with both hands, "is an original."

"The bowl cut is a lifestyle choice," Judy repeated flatly.

"Fuck yeah, it is. It's a bold one," Orsen confirmed.

"I said what I said." The coincidence hung in the air for a moment, and then Orsen clapped his hands together and rubbed them with a brisk "let's-get-to-work" energy.

"Alright," he said.

"Judy tells me you need clean scrap. Good metal with no irradiation, chemical contamination, and a structural-grade stock that your fancy scrap-fab can actually do something useful with."

"That's the short version," I said.

"Preem," Orsen said, turning and gesturing toward the chain-link yard beside the shop.

"Because the short version is that I've been mapping the composition of these mountains for three years, and I know exactly which sections have the good stuff and which sections will give your machines cancer. Let me show you what I've got."

He started walking toward the yard, and Judy fell into step beside him, and I followed, watching the bowl cut bounce with each stride, thinking about Muamar Reyes and his identical haircut, and wondering just what kind of fucking person looked in a mirror, saw that haircut, and decided not only to keep it but to defend it as a lifestyle choice with the conviction of a man presenting evidence in court.