Capital City Chronicles: The Island Read Online Free Page A
Author: S.E. Goss
merchandise:
YOUNG DOLLS
GIRLS FOR SALE
THRALLDOLLS DISCOUNT BULK
FRE HIST DO LS IN CC
I couldn’t help wondering the fate of the girls to be bought tonight. The typical buyer on Doll’s Row was the sweaty, middle aged man wearing bermuda shorts and an aloha shirt, here to buy and discard a girl or four for his weekend business trip to Capital City. He was the rich frat boy punk who wanted something to clean up after him. He was the deranged woman slasher in a spotless suit. Tonight, there would be hundreds of sales, especially of the disposable thralldolls, for use at countless parties. They would be taken off to all corners of the city, and no doubt the police would have to assign entire units to clean up the ones found in abandoned hotel rooms, alleyways and dumpsters.
The woman across from me, however, was a different kind of buyer. In her suit and briefcase, she was buying for permanent use. This was rare for Doll’s Row; most harems bought through private, high end dealers and breeders, not from shady street-side merchants. Though it did happen, often enough at least, that most merchants would have a private panel truck ready in the alley behind their store for the buyer to ship the purchases. She would buy probably a dozen or more of the youngest, load them into a truck and after a year or two of training, some GCI executive would have a fresh batch of professionals at his disposal.
A sense of disappointment and despair weighted me to the bench as the woman shuffled past me toward the aisle. As she passed, something fell into my lap, tumbling down between my pack and my stomach. I looked up at her, and she ignored me as she hurried to the doors and out onto the platform. Moving my pack I felt around my lap to find what she had dropped. Under my left leg I found it. A business card. On one side was printed only the name of an Underground message board:
Capital City Jazz Review
I flipped the card over to see the same dog and hand logo, again in red. The message, however, was different:
EAT YOUR MASTERS
As the doors of the train jerked closed, I leaned toward the window, cupping my hands on either side of my face to block the glare. I wanted desperately to see her again, to get some signal, some clue as to what it meant. But I saw nothing, she had gone about whatever mysterious business she was on, and disappeared. The platform swept away as the train sped ahead, and I was left to wonder.
Looking at the card one last time, I tucked it into a zippered pocket on my hip and tried to focus on the job at hand. NerveTown was approaching.
* * *
If purgatory were a neighborhood in Capital City, it would be NerveTown. A three mile long stretch of warehouses, storage buildings and repurposed motels, all dark but for the multicolored, soft flickering glow that spilled from windows, neon tubing that ran the edges of buildings and fiber optic angel hair that hung from long burned out street lamps. The streets were narrow trenches dug through waist high piles of broken and burned computer monitors, circuit boards and components, all bound in tangles of thousands of miles of frayed cable. While the rest of the city raged with a relentless noise of a level unmatched by any world metropolis, NerveTown, in a way, sat silent. The only noise was from the web of overpasses that swooped over and under and between each other without any logical direction. It was indeed noise, and loud, but unlike the rest of the city, it was a kind of constant and steady white noise that was as close to real silence as one could find out of doors.
I glanced upward at the traffic as I exited the CCTA platform. It would have been impossible to pick out a single CCPD evidence van among the thousands of vehicles that flew in every direction, but it wouldn’t feel right not to take the chance. By placing the evidence garage in NerveTown, it could be accessed from anywhere in the city in less than two hours, thanks to the Interstate
YOUNG DOLLS
GIRLS FOR SALE
THRALLDOLLS DISCOUNT BULK
FRE HIST DO LS IN CC
I couldn’t help wondering the fate of the girls to be bought tonight. The typical buyer on Doll’s Row was the sweaty, middle aged man wearing bermuda shorts and an aloha shirt, here to buy and discard a girl or four for his weekend business trip to Capital City. He was the rich frat boy punk who wanted something to clean up after him. He was the deranged woman slasher in a spotless suit. Tonight, there would be hundreds of sales, especially of the disposable thralldolls, for use at countless parties. They would be taken off to all corners of the city, and no doubt the police would have to assign entire units to clean up the ones found in abandoned hotel rooms, alleyways and dumpsters.
The woman across from me, however, was a different kind of buyer. In her suit and briefcase, she was buying for permanent use. This was rare for Doll’s Row; most harems bought through private, high end dealers and breeders, not from shady street-side merchants. Though it did happen, often enough at least, that most merchants would have a private panel truck ready in the alley behind their store for the buyer to ship the purchases. She would buy probably a dozen or more of the youngest, load them into a truck and after a year or two of training, some GCI executive would have a fresh batch of professionals at his disposal.
A sense of disappointment and despair weighted me to the bench as the woman shuffled past me toward the aisle. As she passed, something fell into my lap, tumbling down between my pack and my stomach. I looked up at her, and she ignored me as she hurried to the doors and out onto the platform. Moving my pack I felt around my lap to find what she had dropped. Under my left leg I found it. A business card. On one side was printed only the name of an Underground message board:
Capital City Jazz Review
I flipped the card over to see the same dog and hand logo, again in red. The message, however, was different:
EAT YOUR MASTERS
As the doors of the train jerked closed, I leaned toward the window, cupping my hands on either side of my face to block the glare. I wanted desperately to see her again, to get some signal, some clue as to what it meant. But I saw nothing, she had gone about whatever mysterious business she was on, and disappeared. The platform swept away as the train sped ahead, and I was left to wonder.
Looking at the card one last time, I tucked it into a zippered pocket on my hip and tried to focus on the job at hand. NerveTown was approaching.
* * *
If purgatory were a neighborhood in Capital City, it would be NerveTown. A three mile long stretch of warehouses, storage buildings and repurposed motels, all dark but for the multicolored, soft flickering glow that spilled from windows, neon tubing that ran the edges of buildings and fiber optic angel hair that hung from long burned out street lamps. The streets were narrow trenches dug through waist high piles of broken and burned computer monitors, circuit boards and components, all bound in tangles of thousands of miles of frayed cable. While the rest of the city raged with a relentless noise of a level unmatched by any world metropolis, NerveTown, in a way, sat silent. The only noise was from the web of overpasses that swooped over and under and between each other without any logical direction. It was indeed noise, and loud, but unlike the rest of the city, it was a kind of constant and steady white noise that was as close to real silence as one could find out of doors.
I glanced upward at the traffic as I exited the CCTA platform. It would have been impossible to pick out a single CCPD evidence van among the thousands of vehicles that flew in every direction, but it wouldn’t feel right not to take the chance. By placing the evidence garage in NerveTown, it could be accessed from anywhere in the city in less than two hours, thanks to the Interstate
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