Authors, Writers, Publishers, and Book Readers

The End Game of Free Clinic

Considering that some of you might be interested, here is our heroine getting closer to the goal post. What happens after this sequence, well... you'll see later.

My Best,

Ten Minutes Later, Sammy Hypersonic over New Mexico

I didn’t know what to make of our trip. Seemed to me that we was headed North first, then ripped South; this seemed right from the looks of it, but we was moving way too fast for me to get a realtime fix. Sky looked like he had lost two shades of brown as our whirly jumped in and out of hypersonic and made some really gut grabbing banks. My guess was that we were playing “dodge the piggy pokers” with the FED, but I couldn’t say for sure. We was strapped down tight and going somewhere straightup fast. That’s all I really knew.

Sky was holding my hand so tight that I thought it might turn purple. I realtime knew that he hadn’t ever flown like this before, so I held on to his hand and tried to keep him together. The rest of the crew seemed to be having way too much fun as the grav forces fooled around with us. I trusted our pilot ‘cause I’d been flown into other sits by her. She was as good as they get and as crazy as they come, like most of the white check folks.

“We’re twenty minutes out,” I heard in my earwig.

Twenty minutes out of where? I wondered. I had firstup thought we was headed toward ‘Laska, but that didn’t make any sense in realtime. My guess was we were going to So-Cal, seeing as how we seemed to have had shifted South. I knew there was a PanAsian Alliance base somewhere there near the Western wastelands, or so I’d been told. I still wasn’t realtiming what the whole point of our flight was. But at least we hadn’t been shot out of the air. Yet, I was thinking.

From what I’d heard, the FED had all sorts of traps set near the PanAsian borders to keep folks from defecting. Mark had told me that folks were flocking West by the thousands and that the FED was really frizzed about it. For me, the West was nothing but storybook stuff. I knew the history part, but in realtime I knew absolutely nothing.

Meanwhile, FED HQ, Quantico VA

Carol had done the right thing, she knew. Her long time friend at the Iowa research facility had gotten the message. Now it was a matter of managing an enraged, very dangerous and very powerful group of men who were more than hell bent on stopping the World Immunization Project. She could easily kill Director Sparky Loveless, but that wouldn’t stop the other factions involved. She had to finesse the situation so the whole group would politically implode and disconnect just long enough for the first part of the longer solution to be implemented. It was imperative that the PanAsians and the other not so well known independents on board with the project not be allowed to carry stage one to fruition.

As much as she wanted to, killing Sparky at this exact moment would be counter-productive. She had to devise a way to strongly distract him and his pals from across the pond. She needed to somehow mitigate the all out offensive that was taking place in Louisiana.

When the idea came to her, she just about jumped out of her mental skin. It was so simple. Why she hadn’t thought of it before, she couldn’t figure.

Bait and switch, she thought. Bait and switch!

She was on her way to the tactical hub when all of this started to gel in her mind, but she made a detour toward her own quarters.

“Just where in hell are you, Carol!?” Sparky screamed into her earwig. “I want you in Tac ten nanos ago!”

“On my way, sir! I just tripped and fell.”

“Learn to tie your laces, b****, and hurry up!”

The killing urge hit her again, but when she got into her quarters and lit off her specialized, totally secure deskport, she felt a little less homicidal for the moment.

Once inside her system, she opened up the mirrored data files from the classified systems that she had carefully extracted and encoded for months. She began to produce the necessary materials. She thought very seriously, hoped very seriously, that what she was about to do would change things to the point of catastrophic chaos for the current operations being implemented by her so called bosses.

It took no more than a pad punch to send the data out.

She sprinted out of her quarters and headed toward the tactical command center, hoping to watch the fireworks. She had her snapper taped neatly between her breasts and her sternum. She also had a small, two-cart whizzer strapped to her right calve.

A girl can never be too careful, she thought

0 members like this

Comment by Mark A. Santomieri on March 6, 2010 at 6:48am: South-Western Nevada. . .same day.
Chuck Williams was drunk as the proverbial skunk, if such still existed anywhere on the planet, when he nearly rolled his old “Hummer” into a ditch. Somehow, he managed to get a reign on the thing and got it back on the beaten path back toward his habitat. He called it his “cave”, which it was in fact.
He had converted an old silver-mine shaft into his place of residence several years back, built his stills and rebuilt several old cars and trucks with tools he had scavenged. When he wasn’t blind drunk, the forty eight year old veteran of the First Triages was actually pretty clever. He apparently was also an immune, which he always said was why he drank so much.
When he saw the flames and smoke rising from just over the horizon, he thought he might be hallucinating. When the smells of oxy and hydro poked his nose though, he figured this had to be realtime. He steered off the beaten track and went toward the sight of what looked to be something big and nasty had crashed to the ground. He looked over at his dog, Beaver, probably one of the last of his kind alive on the planet, and patted him on the head.
Underneath Beaver’s belly was a halfie of home-hooch, the same stuff his “Hummer” ran off of, and he grabbed it. He uncorked it deftly and swigged a good thirty two drams in one gulp, then punched the accelerator. Beaver, a ten year old Cocker Spaniel-whatever-the-heck-ever mix, decided to get up and stick his head out of the glassless window, tongue lolling. He smelled something new!
When he got to the site of the fireworks, he figured it pretty well. It looked like some kind of a high tech whirly had hit hard and there were folks on the ground, one of which was a fem steelskin who had a whizzer pointed right straightup at him as he swerved into the gully that the bird had made. If he had been a little more sober, he might have turned tail, called it a day. But the ethanol made him braver than he usually was.
Uncharacteristically, Beaver jumped straight out of the window and hit the dirt running, only yelping a little when he grounded. He ran right at the steelskin fem, tail up and wagging. For a nano, Chuck thought she might shoot his rare and precious dog.
But it didn’t work like that. She actually set her whizzer on the ground quicktime and scooped the dog up, rubbing his head and actually laughing as he licked her face.
“Well, I see we have a pup loffer leff on the planet,” said Chuck, slurring his words more dramatically than necessary.
“I haven’t seen one of these guys ‘cept on vids!” said the ‘skin pilot.
“He’s real ‘nuff. Eats like a pig and poops like a horse, but he’s a good boy.
“What in Falthwell’s all shorts of hell is this s*** all about?” He gestured toward the exploded bird and the ditch it had left and to the folks getting back “on track” near where he had pulled up.
“We’re not FED,” she said, letting Beaver down. He seemed fascinated by her smell.
“Didn’t figure so,” said Chuck. “C’mere, boy! Leave the nice shteelskin girl alone.”
“My name’s Chrysten Dunmore, not ‘steelskin girl’.”
“Well, Chrysten, nice to meet you. I’m Charles, or Chuck, as most folks used to call me.”
Beaver changed venue as soon as Chrysten let him down, and went over to Doc Saul and Doc Paulson and the other two members of their team, who were getting oriented and starting to assess their own injuries from the crash. He sniffed at Doc Saul and began to whine.
“You might want to tend to that one, young thing,” said Chuck, nodding toward Doc Saul.
“Beaver’s good about diagnosin’ med prollems. He’s saved my butt more than once, the old hound.”
“You sound and smell drunk, Chuck,” said Chrysten, making her own assessments. She picked up her whizzer and cubby-holed it.
“Sure as snot. But I’m still half-assed sane. I run me and my antique ‘hicle here off of my home-hooch. Ain’t never had a V and I got a live Doc of a canine. Go beat that with a stick.”
Chrysten had to admit that it was all kinds of unusual to find this drunk roamer out in the middle of the badlands with a real live dog. Stranger yet, this dog seemed to know that Doc Saul was either sick or injured, perhaps both.
She went to Doc Paulson, who was still wrecked by Ming’s death and was tending to his own bleeding forehead; she grabbed him by the chin and turned his face up toward hers, asking simply, “Is there a problem with Doctor Solstein?”
“I can answer that for myself, Chrys,” said Doc Saul. “I have apparently sustained some minor degree of internal injuries during our crash. However, I have also been self-medicating for pancreatic cancer for several months. I’ve seen better days.
“This pup, bless his little heart,” he finished, patting Beaver’s head, “recognized that.”
Chrysten turned her attention back to Chuck.
“What kind of range you got with that heap of yours?”
“What you mean?” His eyes were more yellow than red and glassy as all get out. Chrysten figured he’d been pumping nearly as much of his “home-hooch” into his body as he had into his vehicle.
“I mean that we gotta get to Dryden in short frigging order and I’m wondering if you could provide us the transpo.”
Chuck looked confused for a nano, shook his head. Then he figured it. “I got enough in my back to go a couple hunnered klicks. You mean Dryden, the old Air Force base? Where they’re shooting up those big ass rockets?”
Chrysten nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “You figure how to get us there?”
Chuck shook his head again. He was getting too sober for his own liking, thinking about what the ‘skin wanted of him.
“We gotta go back to my cave first,” he said. “We gotta get another few liters of go-juice and some water and some food. But I can do it. It’s about a half hour back that away.” He pointed East and North.
“How long from there?” Chrysten asked.
“Given we don’t break anything loose ‘long the way, four hours or so, my guess.”
He pulled off his hat, a vintage Aussie-War floppy, and scratched at his scalp. His hair was a mess of greasy gray and black tangles and Chrysten suspected that he hadn’t bathed in weeks. Her ‘suited sense of smell seemed to confirm that opinion.
“Allright,” she said. “Help me get these folks into your transpo. Can you do that?”
“You bet,” Chuck said, again feeling a lot more sober all of sudden than he wanted to be.
It took them a good fifteen minutes to get everyone into the vintage “Hummer” and get them situated. Doc Saul did not look good, Doc Paulson looked depressed beyond words, Augustine and Philip looked wrecked. Chrysten, being ‘suited, was already starting to go into the first stage of shitwater withdrawal. The only two happy campers seemed to be Chuck and Beaver. Chuck got realtime happy as soon as he pulled a couple of more swigs off of his halfie and Beaver just seemed to like being on the move. He sat in Chrys’s lap, head out the window, tail brushing at pace.
“Can I get a pull of that, Chuck?” asked Chrysten, as they bounced along back toward the beaten track.
“Knock yourself out. There’s another halfie in the dash if you want. Gotta warn you; that s*** will kick your ass all sorts of sideways.”
Though not a substitute for the required nano-tech enhanced supplement that she needed, the good couple of pulls she took off of Chuck’s hooch, nasty stuff even by her standards, eased the pain enough for it to be tolerable. She knew, though, that she only had a maximum of about eight hours before she would get violently ill if not provided with her required dosage. It was one of the most inevitably fatal downsides of a being a steelskin.

About The Same Time, perhaps a little later that day, Over Iowa.

Carol Takes Care of Business
It didn’t take long for Carol to figure it. Right on spot, Justine’s purloined whirly appeared on her tag screen. At Mach 4 plus, she had made good time catching up.
The hard bit was going to be about getting Amanda Naysmith out of the damn thing safe. But she had an idea.
She had trained to become a steelskin once. She just didn’t have the genetic profile to fit a suit, but she knew all the tricks. She quicktimed an EEO, an emergency code only a ‘skin pilot would understand and anyone else in the pilot’s cabin wouldn’t notice. She was figuring that the hostage pilot was a white check, so she used white check code.
“Dump fem hostage safe at all costs,” she coded and hoped for the best.
She got a quicktime response. “Got it.”
Justine was oblivious to the communication, just coming out of unconsciousness. She became more concerned about putting her whizzer back at the pilot’s neck. If she had noticed that the pilot had been in touch with a rapidly approaching bird, she might have thought about killing him, even though she probably couldn’t have flown the hypersonic whirly if she wanted to.
What happened next was totally unexpected for her.
“Get your passenger locked into the back seat and lock yourself in,” said the pilot. “We have company.”
“Why, you f***!” yelled Justine. “You did this?!”
“No, ma’am. We’ve been painted by an unknown. Now take the fricking whizzer off of my neck and strap you and her in.”
Although Justine kept the whizzer pointed generally toward him, she complied. Amanda just let it roll.
As soon as she did so, saw that Amanda Naysmith was strapped in tight behind them, he said, “Hold on!”
Before Justine could squeeze the trigger, he hit the switch that blew the canopy off the bird and punched the co-pi seat-- and her--out of it, quicktime. He then throttled the bird back and dove it toward the more oxy-rich environment below, so he an Amanda could breathe. And breathe they did.
Justine thought little as she watched her jumper evaporate around her, having been propelled into the thin atmosphere at near Mach 2 and flying like a skipping rock for a kilometer or so.
Her last thought was “Why are my fingernails turning blue?”
She was dead by the time the seat’s chute opened, some two kilometers later. Neither her body, nor the very valuable synthetic polymer escape chute attached to it, would be retrieved for some time to come.

On The Road Again. . .
Chuck and Chrysten and Beaver were getting along famously, two halfies of his “home-hooch” and two hundred klicks down the road toward Dryden. Doc Saul was even amused by their banter, though in pain. Doc Paulson was still in a deep funk. The other two members of the team had opted to sleep the trip away thus far.
“So what’s it like, bein’ a ‘shkin on the loose?” Chuck was back to his old drunk self, but he was flying through the desert at a good clip. He turned and looked at Chrys, winked.
“Kinda like being like your pup, here, Chuckles. I got a whole bunch of fur stuck to me that feels pretty good, some days. Feels good in the wind.” She took another pull of hooch and started laughing.
Chuck laughed too. “You mean you is furred, not ‘skinned then, huh?”
“Well, like I said, kinda.”
He erratically, and expertly, avoided a burm in the road. And then she said, “Hey! Watch it! You drive like I fly! Ya nearly ‘jected Beaver out the window. You need a ‘suit, damn sure.”
Taking another pull off of his halfie with one hand and down shifting the transmission with the other, he said, “I’m already ‘suited. I got me a live fur ball of a dog to keep me warm at night and a halfie of shitwater always handy!”
It took Chrysten, who was now pretty buzzed up, a nano to realize that he had used the word “shitwater”. Only someone who knew a ‘skin or had been skinned themselves would know to use that word, what it meant.
She went for it. “You were a ‘skin once.”
Chuck turned his head toward her again, gave her an almost sober-solid look and said, “Twishe, young lady. Wanna she my scars?”
And then he began to cackle, adding acceleration to their travel. Beaver pulled his head away from the window, jumped out of her lap and went to the floorboard of the vehicle, settling himself at her feet. She was getting a smell off of Chuck that wasn’t booze. It had been there all along, but she couldn’t figure it. He was a ‘skin, or had been.
“I know you,” said Doc Saul from the seat behind them. He pulled himself closer forward, obviously in pain. “You were on the blue checks. Charley, they used to call you.”
“Good mem, Doc. Dat wash me.”
Another burm and another expertly navigated correction.
“How did you end up out here?” Doc Saul asked.
“Jush lucky, my guess. Got ‘jected from that scrammer that took all my folksh down with it. Now how I got unsuited is a whole ‘nother shtory.”
Chrysten was baffled, and drunk. As far as she knew, there was no such thing as being unsuited.
They were getting very close to their goal by then, maybe another hour or so, by Chrysten’s reckoning. Beaver had obviously found himself a comfortable place to sleep, at her feet. She reached down and rubbed his head. There were too many crazy questions floating around in her mind.
Doc Saul elicited some unsolicited clarity.
“You must have detoxified at one point, Charley,” he said.
“Not quite, Doc. Got near dead after my shute died, the first time. Figured it like thish: gotta find a subshitute.” He raised his nearly drained halfie up.
“Booze?” asked Saul.
“More than, Doc. I muggered some old Indian herbals and some local plant stuff into it. I shinthesized. I’d learned that from you, you old Jew bastard. Shinthesize! Hoorah!”
Chrysten suddenly understood why she wasn’t as sick as she should be from her shitwater withdrawal. Saul was nonplussed.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. . .I read all of your papers, you smart old goat. So there ya go! Charley, out.”
In the distance, they could all see first signs of the slagged ruins of So-Cal and thought of the beyond border of PanAsia. Chuck got uncharacteristically quiet and Beaver just laid there, sound asleep. In the far back, the two other team members continued to snore on. Lucky them, Chrys thought.
Chrysten was tempted to nod out herself, but instead took a couple of really heavy pulls off her halfie and started to try to put her head back realtime into the game. In another hour, or less at Chuck’s full throttle, they might be in the s***. Drunk or not, her mission was clear. She pulled her whizzer out of its cubby, checked ammo, and put it back.
“Three carts or so, maybe more, unner your seat,” Chuck said. “An’ pull me my snapper out, while you’re at it. Be careful, the snapper is armed.”
As soon as she started to try to filch around under her seat, Beaver jumped up and headed over her shoulder in a quick bound, realtime quicklike, toward the back. He landed on Doc Saul’s lap and then headed right down for the deck underneath Saul’s feet. The pup knew when the s*** was about to hit the fan

Comment by Mark A. Santomieri on March 6, 2010 at 6:49am: More fun and the last of the pivots. Head hopping can get strange when world-building.
My Best,
M.

Comment by Mark A. Santomieri on March 6, 2010 at 4:10pm: A quick note to all who are following Free Clinic.
In this last bit, where Chuck and Beaver are introduced and become pivotal to the story line, I found myself asking the fatal question: how will it all come together? One of the most important things about story telling is leaving the folks you are telling the story to in one of two states: satisfied or wanting more. In traditional saga format, the latter is best. And so goes Free Clinic. I will post more, as my editor allows.

Comment by Mark A. Santomieri on August 3, 2010 at 1:16pm: Hey all. If you have followed Free Clinic posts, you are in for a special treat. This book goes to print in less than a month. It will be available in e-book (Amazon Kindle) format as well as in hard press. I suggest that you print some of these posts, because the actual finished product, after careful editing, are different. Not much, but enough for the posted drafts to become valuable in time. The dates, times and places of first print book signings will be posted.

Write on!

My Best,
M.