Perdition's Child

Chapter 23

He got through the first week alright, although he developed a neurotic tic of constantly checking his com. He sent in the paperwork for his visa then returned immediately to riding the edge of the terminator with his detectors and collecting scrap. It at least kept him too busy and tired to think. Gestalt didn't fall, so he assumed Pestilence was successful. Surely she'd call to tell him that Ritcha was dealt with..? He kept thinking it had rung, but every time he checked it was just in his head.

Darkrei kept leaving messages, but those he deleted without reading.

It got worse over the next week while the resentment built and finally came to a head. A few days before he had come across a body, some teen dead of dehydration. He called Darkrei with the coordinates and hung up before the other man could try to draw him into conversation. That chore done, he then backtracked along the path until he found the bike. It was totaled in the night side, crumpled against a small, strangely tilted courl tree. The sort of incompetence it took to hit that when there were miles of empty space on every side was baffling.

Several empty scattered bottles of galt liquor and the fact that the tree apparently grew at that angle naturally put the picture together. After taking some pictures to send to Darkrei he fixed the pile of junk to his mag line and spent the trip back composing a letter in his head to send to the local school board, complete with pictures. -Dear school board, please remind your students that there's not enough metal in a courl tree to ramp them with a magnetic engine, here's a couple of pictures to illustrate the point. -signed, helpful scrapper.

Finding bodies always put him in a lousy mood, but on top of the silent treatment from Pestilence and a bunch of annoying half-remembered dreams it was overwhelming. He lashed out uncharacteristically at yet another joy-riding teenager for being too stupid to realize ninety percent of magnetic engines ran on solar these days and weren't appropriate for driving into the night. The graphic descriptions of exactly what dying of dehydration was like were probably unnecessary in retrospect. She'd kept her ears down and whimpered for the entire trip back to civilization, and when he dropped her off her rhoha assumed the worst and picked a fight.

He hadn't needed any more provocation to get into a vicious brawl complete with biting and kicking right there in front of the convenience store he'd stopped at. A passing cop broke it up and tossed them both into jail cells for a cycle. Darkrei eventually arrived to let them out, obviously as an excuse to catch Mehk without a means to escape. "Hey, I have a job for you."

"Not interested." He was being immature, he knew, but knowing something and doing something about it really weren't at all the same thing. He couldn't help baring his teeth, and he'd probably pick a fight with the cop too if not for the fact that he'd definitely get what was left of his tail handed to him and probably end up stuck in there for a month.

Darkrei regarded him out of dark copper eyes for a moment. "Is this going to become a habit?"

The change of subject threw him off and his ears slid down. "No, just... The other day, on top of everything else..." When the older man opened his mouth to say something else he interrupted, "I don't want to talk about it. Particularly not with you."

It was a low blow and even he knew it. Their relationship had always been rocky and difficult, but Darkrei did his best to keep Mehk out of serious trouble. Not that it did much good... He opened the cell door and Mehk stalked out without looking at him, hating his own sense of guilt.