Golgotha Run Read Online Free

ears alive and alert to the sound
that had sounded wrong amongst the creaking of ruptured Behemoth skins, the
crackle of flames and the distant howls of feral dogs.
    There it came again. A faint and tenebrous clanking. Not the inadvertent
sounds of someone still, somehow, alive and strong enough to be coming for
you. More the sounds of someone trying, weakly and against all hope, to attract help.
    It was coming from one of the Behemoths other than those that had contained
troops. A slew of genetically-engineered offal, however, was not falling from
the blown hatch.
    Cautiously, reflexes wound up tight to flinch away from any sign of danger,
Eddie moved in closer.
    Even Eddie himself would have been hard-pressed to express what he had
expected to find, other than the satisfaction of simple rat-like curiosity
that it for the moment cost him nothing to satisfy. Maybe there was some
incredibly special and valuable cargo in there, the nature of which he could
not so much as begin to guess.
    As it turned out, the nature of the cargo surpassed his barely-formed
imaginings.
    The inside of the tanker looked like a cross between a palace and a
med-centre—though for all Eddie knew, this was what the rooms of rich people always
looked like when they went into hospital. Archaic-looking brass fixtures and
silken hangings and a big four-poster bed.
    On the bed, plugged into bloodpacks and bleeping med-units, the withered and
unconscious figure of an old man. There was something about his form that
seemed unsettlingly odd and wrong: that strange, coma-case distinctness that
comes from remaining utterly immobile while still being alive.
    Eddie didn’t particularly notice, far less care. His eyes were riveted on the
girl who sat, or rather slumped, beside the bed.
    She was in… you really had to call it a
costume
, rather than clothing or a
uniform. A nurse’s costume, the already short dress hiked up an inch or so to
expose the black silk of her panties, garters to black stockings and spiked
heels. One of the stockings had a ladder in it.
    The costume tried but spectacularly failed to contain breasts which seemed to
have a gravitational pull of their own—they certainly had a pull on the eyes
of one Eddie Kalish. Nipples the size of small grapes strained against the
thin fabric as if desperate to burst through. The ensemble was topped off by a
perky little cap perched on platinum-blonde cascades of hair, and cosmetics
applied to overstatedly libidinous effect. The bright red lipstick, for
example, was applied in the manner suggesting that the wearer had left a large
portion of it on whatever she had just finished sucking.
    The end result was, in effect, something to make that portion of the human
race with a Y-chromosome howl like one of the approaching dogs outside and
fall instantly in love. At least, for a time. Or as many times as might be
allowed.
    All in all, it was something of a pity that she had been gut-shot. Shrapnel
from the stray round that had breached the Behemoth hatch. Things slid around
in the hole.
    For all this, against all physical human possibility, she was still alive.
    “Please…” she rasped to Eddie as he looked on horrified and wide-eyed. “Get
us out… get us to GenTech. As much money as you want… more money than you
can imagine… just get us to GenTech…”

2.
    Halfway to Las Vitas a shitstorm hit them like a hammer—literally, in this
case. Amongst the miscellaneous crap that fell from the sky along with the
hail, and which gave these storms their name, was a collection of
crudely-moulded tools of the sort used in the New Soviet dreadnought yards, clear
across the world.
    Inferior lug-wrenches raided on the RV’s roof, and what might once have been a
seven-pound sledgehammer punched a neat hole in the windshield, size of a soup
plate, to land in the shotgun seat as an amorphous, smoking lump.
    “Jeezus!” Eddie beat at the incipient fire through the reek of scorching vinyl
and stuffing,