Sal fingered at the bark.

“Leave it alone,” I told him. “Take one of these.”

I handed him one of the pistols I’d snagged from the pod.

“Come on,” Crow bellowed, and I yanked up the rear hatch with Alpha behind me, and Sal at my elbow, ready to shoot.

“Fire,” I yelled, and we let it rip. Just squeezing the triggers, letting off a round of those fancy bullets, a round that seemed like it might never end.

The GenTech pods didn’t fire back at us. They just kept on coming, our bullets puncturing the purple steel but not slowing them down a damn bit.

“The glass,” Crow called. “Aim for the glass.”

I tried. Kept trying. But it was too hard to point straight, what with the wagon swerving every which way as we bounced through the sand.

Finally, I cracked one of the windshields and sent that pod reeling into the crops. The others opened fire now, keeping their bullets low, aiming for our tires.

“Keep shooting,” I said to Sal, but he held his gun up. Empty. I handed him what was left of mine and reached for Alpha’s rifle in the front of the wagon, stretching my arm out across her crumpled body, groping through the dark.

But my hand never found the rifle.

The duster appeared out of the crops in front of us like a wall of steel teeth. Crow seized up the brakes but we hit. We hit hard. The wagon never stood a chance. Those duster blades ripped right through the engine and gobbled it in pieces, clamping down every inch and dragging it inside the belly of that giant metal beast.

The blades chopped through the steering wheel, and Crow’s thighs exploded as the metal ripped them apart. I grabbed his arms and yanked what was left of him into the rear of the wagon.

But the duster kept coming.

Sal was gone, I remember. Like maybe he’d been hurled out the back on impact. Or maybe he’d scampered free. And Alpha was out cold. I dragged her on top of me with one hand and clawed toward the open hatch with the other. The sound of the duster was something beyond noise. So loud it seemed silent. Or perhaps I’d already gone numb.

Crow pulled his bleeding stump along with his fingernails. The three of us moving too slow. But then we reached the hatch. Pushed through.

My wagon thrashed and spun into tiny chunks behind us and I remember gazing back down the throat of the duster, watching my old life being digested and sorted into scraps. And the duster seemed to keep eating my wagon, long after everything had stopped moving, even after the blades had stopped spinning, after every engine shut off.

And in the same way, I don’t think there was a time I stopped screaming. Crow all bloody and twitching, and Alpha all gone beside me.

I wailed and hollered and I wished I was dead.

Then the duster fired up a torch beam and brought that light down upon us. The color of a bruised purple sun. And the headlights of the pods all fused together, making things as bright as they were bad.

I heard footsteps. Doors opening and closing. I heard voices. Then they were taking Alpha from me. They had blood on their suits. Purple and red. And I couldn’t stop them from taking her because they were taking me too. Needles jabbing at me, breaking my skin.

“Hold still,” someone yelled. As if I was moving. Then I could hear Crow screaming and it was exactly what the Darkness must have sounded like. The twenty years of night.

“Not again,” Crow roared, till his voice split in two. “Not again.”

When I came to, I wished to hell I hadn’t. I’d lost Alpha. And Crow. Sal and Hina.

They’d been replaced by strangers.

We were on a road, and I knew that immediately. Being on the road’s in my blood, I guess. It’s hardwired into me. I felt the shake. The unpeeling feeling. I tried lifting my head but only my eyes would move. Drugged. Strapped in place. And back on the road, staring at the brightest sky I’d ever seen.

I peered at the strangers to the right of me, the strangers to the left. Their eyes were closed and I told those faces to just keep on sleeping. Ain’t nothing to see up here anyway.

No more corn. The world had changed.

New smells now. Familiar smells.

Plastic. Steel and juice.

Ah, yeah. Juice. The smell of the road. Lifeblood to every set of wheels that’s rolling.

When the first building passed over my head, I thought it was nothing but a shadow. I thought maybe I’d blinked. But those buildings kept popping into my sky, flashing past me, more and more of them until the buildings took over and the sky disappeared.

Endless shades of black and gray and silver. You never seen so many windows. Like glassy eyes. Buildings so high, they bent like a landscape, arcing all together, slivers of steel in plastic sleeves, pointing at the sun.

Then pointing at the moon. But then even the moon got blocked by the buildings. Even that massive old moon.

I could smell the fumes off the bio vats. The greasy stink of hoarded corn being brewed into juice. And that juice must have flowed through pipes as wide as ancient rivers, all tunneled through the streets like veins.

When the lights came on in the city, it made the drugs feel even stronger. First the windows sparked up, but that was nothing, just a simple orange like something burning. It was the fizzy billboard glow that got me. Lights of every color, you couldn’t even try to count them. They never flickered, but they spun and I spiraled, orbiting in light like I was drowning in stars. It made it hard to swallow, and I chewed at my tongue and my cheek. Signs flashed at me. Saying what? Who cared? Not me. Couldn’t read those suckers anyway.

Until the last one.

All the wealth in the world and this is what they do with it. Tall buildings and lights that burn twice as bright and all night long. So much juice, you’d wonder how there was any corn left for eating. But I’m sure they were eating plenty in that city that don’t sleep.

No sleeping in Vega. No rest for the wicked.

But I thought maybe I could drift off now, the buildings disappearing, the lights going out. We were being sucked under the ground. Deeper and deeper. Yeah, just go to sleep, that’s what I wanted. Except, that last sign I’d spotted, it bothered me. Because I hated to think it might be the one word I could read, like it was the only word that mattered.

GenTech.

I don’t even want to tell you what it was like down there. It was a place the sun didn’t shine and no wind whispered.

They kept the lights low, and that was the one nice thing they did for us. They had a system, I guess. Though I had no idea what it was.

But of course they had a system. This was GenTech. They knew what they were doing. They knew what they wanted.

Sick bastards. Dressed in purple and marching about with their clubs raised high. And I don’t know what they needed those clubs for. Most of the prisoners were still unconscious, and the ones like me were too drugged numb to fight. We were just bodies. Not even people. We were bodies that pissed and puked and moaned as the agents picked through our limbs and faces and dragged each victim one by one to a staging area in the middle of that nasty black hole.

I reckoned this was the lowest point to which all else tumbled. The end of the road for all those lost souls who’d been taken. The people plucked from the dust and sold off by slavers. The people like my father and the old Rasta and Alpha’s mother and now me.

It was GenTech. In the end, it had always been GenTech. The purple fist crushing the last gasp from our crusty lungs.