Ma Rickets. Picture a woman—sixty, maybe seventy. Had a few kids in her time, husbands long since gone to dust. Owns a diner on the verge of civilization. Cooks a mean canned peach pie. Words like pleasantly plump probably come to mind. Motherly. Rubenesque, even, if you’re of a certain mindset. The woman in your head has short hair, perfectly coiffed and tinted a steely blue-grey. She smiles and she’s got dimples, and she won’t let you leave until you’ve eaten more than your fill.
That ain’t Ma Rickets. Well, maybe that last part.
She’s a skeleton of a woman, flesh sucked in around the bones, ropey muscles bulging against the long smock dress she wears as a uniform. Only thing that gives her a shape that isn’t straight is the cinch of her apron, tied so tight around her waist you wonder if she’s trying to cut herself in twain. Her hair is short, but it’s all in sawed chunks dyed nuclear green. She don’t smile much, because smiling would interrupt her chain-smoking. It’s true about the pie, though.
Beast kicks up a dust plume she can see from the horizon, and as soon as my foot crosses the diner’s threshold, Ma Rickets plunks a gleaming plate of biscuits and gravy on my usual table. The kid gives her pause.
She squints at Omega, nods to herself, sucks down a long drag of her cigarette, and exhales the smoke as she says, “Just a moment.” She’s wearing bunny slippers today. One dingy pink ear flops forlornly as she stomps back to the kitchen.
We sit, and I shove a glass of water toward the kid as I set about dismantling my biscuits. The kid hitches up an eyebrow. I guess she was raised some place with manners.
“Tell me why I just lied for you,” I say.
That eyebrow comes crashing down. Ma Rickets appears over her shoulder, shoves a matching plate in front of the kid, gives me a look, and scuffles off. It happens in an instant, but it’s enough time for the kid to gather herself.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“All right. Let’s start a little simpler. Tell me why you and your sister were in that truck.”
“I don’t know.”
“Take a guess.”
Gravy dribbles down her chin, and every word she speaks is in between bites. Cheeks puffed like a prairie dog, she swallows hard, gulps water, and leans back to look at me. I’ve got the goggles shoved up, the bandana yanked down. Eyes like ours, they’re hard to miss. She nods to herself.
“You know,” she says.
“Pretend real hard that I don’t.” Some things I worked too hard to forget. Far as I’m concerned, my life began the day I set foot on these badlands.
“Pac-At was going to send us to the Atlantic Coalition.”
“Why?”
She rolls bony shoulders. “Corporate summit. There were some people they wanted us to meet.”
My gaze locks on her gloved hands, and she nods. So, Pac-At hasn’t changed much since my tenure. I never really thought they would. They keep me on the books, after all. But they’ve gotten sloppy, sad to say. Some of their enemies must have found out what that truck held, or else suspected strongly enough to risk the attack.
It’s no large leap of logic. It’s always been easier to smuggle undesirables across the land instead of through the sky, and augment checks at airports make air travel even harder for Pac-At’s operatives. Private jets or no, every major city in the world’s got a wide-radius scanner attached to their ATC now, and once those sirens start complaining, they’re real hard to keep quiet.
“You sure you just freelance?” she asks, looking at me hard, wondering what eyes like ours are doing in a skull out here in the middle of nowhere. Designer eyes cost. Designer eyes with a gleam only other Pac-At operatives can see cost more.
“I am.”
“How?”
“Long story,” I say, and wave Ma Rickets down for some coffee.
“This was my first mission,” she says, unprompted, and something clicks into place in my mind. That hesitant shuffle before she stepped out of the truck, the furtive movement of her gaze.
“But not your sister’s.”
“No.”
So. Someone knew Alpha was on that ghost truck. But they hadn’t counted on Omega.