The New Project

Prologue

Prologue

Craters N Radiation Sickness

2027

The pilot looked incredulously into his tumbler of Old Number Seven. He took a long draught, and, shaking his head, met Wamira's eye with a thousand-meter stare.

"The fuck you wanna go there for?" The pilot's voice betrayed years of smoking; his yellowed skin and eyes, a habit of drinking picked up fighting in the war. Probably a year at most before he succumbs to liver failure.

"To see an old friend."

"Ain't nothin' out there but craters n' radiation sickness." And with that, the pilot slumped back in the shabby sofa and found a renewed interest in his whiskey.

Wamira didn't want to sound desperate. Here was the only pilot for perhaps a thousand miles, and he clearly did not want to go anywhere near the site, despite the fact that it was less than a hundred miles off.

"I don't suppose you'd believe me if I told you I could make it worth your while?" Wamira asked. This was met with nothing more than an irritated exhalation and the sound of the hammer on a pre-war revolver being pulled back. "Go ahead, you'd be doing me a favour."

Wamira's voice waivered, defeating the act of calling the pilot's bluff. His hand was steady, pistol at his waist. Wamira gazed into the oblivion of the hollow barrel. A shaft which leads to nonexistence. Dead eyes looking at him, looking beyond him. Wamira wouldn't be the first man he'd killed, nor the last. Just one in a string of dead.

"I don't want your money. I don't want your medicine. I don't want your kind pokin' around here. It's folks like you who did this to us, and I don't want none of you comin' round here surveyin' the damage ya done. I ain't killed you yet because I don't want to have to clean nothin' up, but if you get to be much more of a nuisance than you are now, I might just have to change my mind about that. See that door?" He gestured to the only door in the prefab with the whiskey glass, the pistol remained perfectly trained on Wamira's forehead. "I suggest you start walkin' through it."