"The fuck is your problem, Lady?!"
The white furred rat bastard hissed, his tone more pained than defiant considering the tightly bound telephone wire I'd secured around his wrists and ankles. Were the squat rodent a human still, they'd have probably drawn more attention in the crowded marketplace. Us rodents are hardly worth looking down for even if we're the dedicated pilots of killer robot suits. This piece of shit wasn't just some idle hand no one would fail to appreciate the absence of, he is a Striker Pilot, and me? Well. I guess I am too but not by choice.
Rats like us aren't strangers to Bunker 18, in fact it's kind of considered a safe space despite the rest of humanity's opinion of us. I can thank my cousin for saving the place from certain doom for today's little victory. I can imagine he's pretty fucking spooked about being kidnapped regardless. He demands my name, I tell him to shut the fuck up and throw in a well deserved kick to the asshole's ribs. To me his name is dirt.
Four years ago, long before I was dragging him through the hovels and shanties of what remains of San Francisco's infamous Bunker 18, this rat bastard got me pregnant during a drunken night of festivities in which we were the two sober losers stuck on night watch. He's lucky I didn't kill him on the spot today, but alimony doesn't exist anymore and I only hunted his ass down to know for sure he got me pregnant. Albino Ratkin Striker pilots aren't exactly common, plus some other features that have been on my list since his little negligent payload finally got delivered. I'm just thankful my cousin didn't mind taking me and the three kids I somehow fit inside of my uterus for 9 months are sitting pretty into her ever-capable, if sarcastic paws. The kids are back in her little pet-project civilization in Arizona, leaving me room to find out who the dad of my kids is.
Nearest anyone knew before I got pregnant, ratkin aren't supposed to be able to have kids. At least that's what my former peers hiding up in Seattle and buried in Vancouver would still think. Most of us who get our genome twisted out of shape like this are sterile, hell I didn't even know my parts worked since I'd skipped every period since ripping my old skin off (guess that was enough blood loss for one lifetime). A lot of us rats end up pressed as Striker pilots of some kind, usually after losing everything about ourselves in the metamorphosis. There used to even be a special type of animal control for new cases. Before all this shit happened I was a career woman studying plants and viruses, and like many early cases of the early post-human rats, I got to re-discover myself while digging through the ruins of my old life just moments before the Rains fell on us all and ended civilization as we knew it. For what it's worth, I had big pretty blue eyes for a human. Now they're beady and green-ish.
Most of us rats transform, it's assumed to be some kind of Russian bioweapon derived from something mutagenic like HIV or Zika, but there ain't exactly a CDC-P Database or a WHO left to get confirmation from about that hypothesis. These days ratkin are almost always fodder for becoming Striker Pilots if they're not feral and their eyesight isn't shit, being small and quick thinking just makes us better at piloting the fucking deathtraps. In Vancouver we called the armored combat suits Strikers, but the people down here say Exos; my cousin's band of rejects like to say Suits, but her whole routine is old-world business executive speak. At any rate I'm pretty sure it's a dialect thing hovering around from before the world fell apart. I'm not one to ask, people like my cousin are the types who study how people change, my job is usually to keep them fed and not sick.
The white furred young ratman I'm dragging? I don't know his name, but I know his eyes. Rare case of abnormal heterochromia, an orange eye and a red eye; that's the kind of sexual partner you don't soon forget. I know he's the piece of shit who knocked me up because of that and the recessive traits that characterize his body with albinism, one of the kids is basically a carbon copy of him. He's normally been buried beneath cloths and wraps to protect the bits of him that don't have fur (presumably from the sun), but this far underground he struts about practically naked (it's not hard to see what I might've been interested in from his looks). I only caught his eyes earlier this week up at the surface while fighting off whatever the fuck genetic horror has happened to the packs of dogs here in San-Fran, but today he bumped into me in an empty hall near my current hidey-hole, basically naked. So after recognizing the chance, I yoinked him after a quick taze.
"Look jackass if this is a poaching, my boss is reasonable on rates, but I have got to get back to that hangar!", complained the twenty-something helplessly sliding across wilds-reclaimed cracking concrete.
"Shut up, kid. It ain't like that.", I muttered, already feeling gross about the whole exercise.
I must outrank him by a full decade at least... though no one really knows their age like they used to. Shit, old rats look and act like young rats, we tend to all have to start over mentally after our bodies get a lot of molecular clocks reset, I'm quietly hopeful that he was of age four years ago when he knocked my dumb ass up. I'm already feeling like I'm gonna vomit, but I have to know if I'm right about him being the one who did it, its more for me than it is for science but I'll get my cousin to find a way to make it useful. Once I make it to my side of the concrete hovels, I drag his tied-up ass over to my makeshift lab. The grunts who keep my Striker looking pretty and loaded for bear acknowledge me with a murmur. The kid (for a lack of a better way of putting it) looks about nervously. For a second there he almost looks like he's realized something, before returning to being angry and confused.
"Look, if this is about what happened in Reno, you got the wrong fucking company of Exos-"
"Quit yapping. I'm here for your blood, rather literally. Four years ago, Seattle, you were piloting an Exo by the callsign 'cyclops', yeah?", I barely manage to keep eye contact with him, god how young is he...?
"W-who's asking? You ain't one of those Cascadian Psychos, are you?", his eyes are wide with a fresh terror. I can feel my heart racing thinking about those old monsters too.
"N-no but we fragged the lot of them after a one-night stand at your Company's FOB. I uh, I have good news and bad news. Good news, you're a dad. Bad news is, I'm the one who found out that could happen for us rats.", I can barely look at him, the tough-girl act isn't my forte.
There's basically an entire softball lodged in my throat with how nervous I am feeling. The kids were lied to, for years. A guy I liked in my Company up in Vancouver, Chuck, was who I told them was their daddy. He'd have loved playing along with the lie if he was still alive, he always wanted kids. We even thought about getting married before the Rains, human and rat dating stigma at the time be damned. Hell, I told the same lie to so many people for so many years, I sort of started to believe it myself that a long-dead ghost could've given me kids. Most everyone who'd have known better was buried in little unmarked graves next to him in the bombed-out remains of YVR's field hospitals. Poor bastards.
"That's fucking impossible and you know it, crazy bitch. Did you have to drag me halfway across the bunker for this prank?", this kid's sour tone isn't undeserved but I'm in no mood.
"Honey, don't talk like you know anything about what I've been through. You gave me three of them. I named them Jasmine, Melvin, and Tracey. A girl and two boys, if Nature was still being published I'd have an academic article to cite. Instead, you'll have to settle for a photograph.", I grabbed the rare photo from my makeshift desk. My cousin is the type that amasses weirdos with unique skills, and an amateur photographer who had a lifetime supply of old chemicals is among them.
The picture of the three kids, myself, and my cousin in front of the ruins of Biosphere 2 several dozen miles north of the Tucson ruins is carefully preserved in an ever-rare instance of a thick sided ziplock bag. You know the kind, with the external zipper you can sort-of fix if it goes off the track. God just looking at it makes me want to cry, I can't stomach the thought of hurting them with what I know. There's a moment he reads the scene, the gears are turning visibly and his features soften. The boys especially look like him, especially the shape of their muzzles and the aggressively sharp jawlines. The albino kid's face sinks, his defensive posture melts as he droops forward in a slouch. His ears go from pointed up and alert to sagging low behind his brow, and his shoulders slump as his tail goes slack, he looks at me with a look that broadcasts deeply unpleasant pain. Shit.
"F-fuck that white one looks just like me. They all kinda do...", he stammers, after a minute.
I nod quietly, you can see both of us in the three little rats if you hold us side-by-side. It's uncanny, I want so badly to run away but I push through, focus on the academics, and sit down to chat about it. He doesn't exactly relish the idea of having his blood pulled for a genetic comparison, (it's not like he's had shots since before the war) but in light of the evidence he spills his side of the story and doesn't squirm too much when I take a blood sample. The whole picture is rather sad, I try to keep myself focused on the work, but there's a terribly deep wound I've inflicted and it's hard to ignore. I was sort of hoping he was going to be the bastard I built up in my mind, it'd make walking away that much easier.
To think I was chasing him these last few weeks around this stupid fucking ruin, when he was apparently chasing me for years. I guess agreeable, literate rat girls who remember the old world aren't exactly common, much less someone from Vancouver. He'd stayed at Bunker 18 after meeting my cousin, I guess his Company had been chased out of Reno and followed the hear-say about the battle for the Nimitz. As for our little coupling four years ago, he shared what he remembered of that night. I guess I'd been bitching about losing a lot of guys up in Seattle, how my would-be husband ate it during the Rains, how I loved Vancouver and the coastline. Stuff like that would have been was on my mind all the time before I wandered south following rumors of Biosphere 2 still existing. For the record, he thinks he's 23, I'm pretty sure I'm 38. That'd have made me 34 when he was fucking 19.
There's a time and a place to lose my lunch, and all over my presently captive and unlikely mating partner is probably not where I should choose to lose it. He's young enough to almost be a niece or nephew from one of my older brothers. The nausea is definitely noticeable, he's begging to know more about what the kids are like, what I'm like, how things are where they were left. I don't give him enough to look for by-name, he can't know or he'll probably come down. I don't want the kids to get hurt, it was hard enough to leave them to do this selfish quest for closure. After I get what I wanted out of him, I give him a plausible outline of what I need to do, and I let him go. It takes my body guard John's firm and uncompromising grip on the albino kid's shoulder to escort the him out of my little travel laboratory. I tell him before he leaves that I'll grab him again when I have the labs ready, and fuck me. He's the one, the analysis is conclusive enough, but... as it turns out, I lie to people when I'm scared. Myself included.
There's no way I'm ready to talk to him. I spend days after finishing my work just fucking lying around trying to unfuck my feelings. A trillion unanticipated questions have rocketed into the empty space that this stupid bastard occupied. What'll the kids think? Are they even old enough to understand? Can he even be trusted around kids in the first place? Do... do they have to know I found out? Are they going to hate me for fucking lying to them for basically four years? Do I even deserve to go home now that I know, and worse fucking abandoned my kids in the desert for months to find out? I try drowning the thoughts in a bottle of finely aged dollar store wine that'd somehow survived the end of the world until entering my possession, but by the time I can see the bottom of the glass through the opening my thoughts are roaring through my head like the supersonic nuclear missiles that ended the fucking world. Everything washes over me like the Rains, and to my own detriment I'm still alive when it keeps getting worse.
I lose track of little bits of the resulting drunken evening. When I come to in the middle of the night, I'm sobbing in that bastard's lap. I tell him I hate him, I tell him he fucking ruined my life, I try to push him away with whatever pathetic bullshit my drunk ass can barely fabricate. I blame him for the guys who died in Vancouver, anything and everything I can stutter out with slurred venom-filled words, but he stays. He just fucking holds me. Firm, but still gentle. Every fucking alarm bell in my mind is going off but I can't push this goddamn kid out of my life, it's like I did this whole thing on purpose to trap him under me. He just holds me, tells me he's sorry, that he's just happy to know us rats aren't going to just die out. I think I hear a story from him about how he celebrated his 13th birthday soaked in blood and cowering under his bed after sinking his new fangs into an animal control guy's forearm. 10 years ago, by dead reckoning, right before everything went to shit. Pretty sure I spent the night there, but fuck if I know how long. He did make me feel safe, for what it was worth.
John wakes me up the next morning, to my own surprise I'm clothed and in my own bed. At 23, I'd have probably fucked me if I was him. I faintly recall talking about that, like a compulsion or some shit. I think he let me down easy, thank god. The kid dropped me off around 5am, no signs of foul play. He told John that his Company is going on the move, headed north to the hole near Sacramento to go fight some hillbilly mormon nazi-type jackasses from Idaho. I find a note tucked in one of my pockets from him.
"You don't have to tell them, it's not your fault.", it's signed simply as 'Simon'.
Thank god for John's long history with me as his boss, because I've got an ugly cry that sounds like a dying animal caught in a bear trap. That first day I spend in the makeshift bed sobbing into a fucking blanket while John gently pets me. That loser fucking knows me too well, he says we should go after the kid before he gets killed. I lose another three days to slowly packing up my equipment, lingering around Bunker 18 in hopes I can say goodbye or some shit. Apologize, maybe. The opportunity doesn't come. It's gonna be a long fucking hike back to Arizona, what's a quick detour to Sacramento? Maybe I'll be able to live with myself by then, and actually walk away.
Call Marketing Series Directory:
#1: Call Marketing, it's not my department.
#2: Post-Apocalyptic Reruns of the Maury Show, and other miseries (You are here)
#3: When it Rains, it pours. Then shit gets desperate.
