Steel Sky by Andrew C. Murphy Page B

back and forth furiously, ripping into the arm. Tatters of cloth and plastic are flying around them.
    Orel gets to his feet, finding it more difficult than he expected. He pulls a wrench from his tool belt and circles around to approach the creature from behind. With each step, he staggers a little to one side. When he is almost upon the creature, it hears his steps and turns its almost hairless head. It squeals deafeningly, baring long, white teeth. Its tiny, black eyes glisten with menace.
    Orel swings the wrench down against its head as hard as he can. The creature moves to evade the blow, but not quickly enough. Its head collapses with a wet crunch like an old, rusty pipe. It falls sideways, red and gray bits falling from its crushed skull. Bernie struggles out from underneath its body.
    Orel is barely aware of him. He is watching the creature’s body to make sure it is really dead.
    “I’m going to throw up. I’m going to throw up,” Bernie says, ripping off his respirator. He stands with his head bowed for a moment, then holds the respirator back over his face. “I can’t,” he says. “I’m too damn scared to throw up.” He takes a few deep breaths. “What the hell is that?”
    “Rat,” Orel says, dropping the wrench. He, too, is breathless and sick with adrenaline.
    “It could have killed me!”
    “It would have, too, if it had latched onto your good arm.” Orel gestures at Bernie’s exposed cybernetic arm beneath the torn fabric and plastiflesh. Long scratches have been made in the black metal. “Look what it did there. It could have stripped your other arm to the bone.” Bernie edges closer. “It’s dead, isn’t it?”
    “It’s dead. Skull caved in. Pretty easily, too. Must not have had enough calcium in its diet.”
    Bernie laughs weakly. “Let’s not talk about its diet.”
    “Cyborg, medium rare.”
    Their laughter sputters out. “Do you really think he’s a Rat?” Bernie asks. “Maybe he’s just some lunatic.”
    “He’s a Rat, all right.” Orel kneels down beside the body and, hesitating a moment before touching it, turns it face up. “Or rather, she ’s a Rat.”
    The creature is short and wiry. She is naked from head to toe, but nothing suggests her sex other than her genitals. Her breasts are mere bumps. Her face is gaunt and devoid of personality, its character lying not in the pinprick eyes, but in the angry, oversized incisors protruding over the thin lips and recessed chin.
    Orel is surprised to see that her right arm ends in a red, twisted scar just below the elbow. “We were nearly killed by a one-armed girl,” Bernie says with a grimace.
    Orel turns the creature’s head and lifts the lid of one eye. The pupils of her eyes are so dilated so that they nearly overwhelm the irises. “Look at this,” he says. “That’s why she broke the lights. She couldn’t stand the brightness.” He lifts the creature’s good hand. “Look at the callus. On her hands and knees as well as her feet, for climbing across rock. She’s a cave dweller, all right.”
    “I’ve never heard of one of them coming into the Hypogeum,” Bernie says. “I thought maybe they were just an old story.”
    “I wonder why she decided to come here.”
    “There are scars all over her body, like the ones on my arm.” Bernie kneels down next to Orel, his voice rising in excitement. “She was attacked by other Rats. She didn’t want to come here — she was forced to!”
    “Do you think that’s how she lost her arm?”
    “Maybe. Or maybe she lost the arm in an accident, or a fight, and that’s why the others chased her out. Because she was crippled.”
    Orel considers this. In his imagination he sees the Rat, her arm trapped under a rockslide. She tries to pull loose, but the stones are too heavy. The other Rats turn away from her, giving her up for dead. She is left alone in the dark, crying in pain. Desperately she leans forward and bares those enormous teeth. She begins to chew . .