Razorchain ---------- See the chain. It is long and winding and blemished with every aspect of claret that he could put on it. It drags on the concrete behind him and rattles and the noise irritates him greatly but he does not coil it around his shoulder because he has not the strength. "Where are you from, stranger?" Stranger indeed. He has never felt stranger than this. He asks her what this town is called. She says it is called Lurleen. He looks out at the cross-section cut into the earth visible from the plywood of the bar-front. The concrete is old and cracked and he remembers the Warthog that he will not see again. The trio of strange skeletal rusting hulk-things lumbers across the street in their peculiar and timeless patrol. "Can I get you something?" He shakes his head and he says that is not why he's here and studies her face. She doesn't look surprised and that surprises him. She reaches under the bar and he hefts his chain but he is too tired to lift it in good time. From the cubby she retrieves a crumpled pack of Skewports. She looks at him and lights one and watches him and he watches her and in this plywood hovel is a confessional of the soul performed via the windows thereto through a screen formed of nicotine. "Well?" He can't think of anything to say to that. He spits. Emaciation eats at him and his stomach begrudges him the lost saliva to swallow in lieu of sustenance. "Honey you couldn't hardly kill a rat." He nods. "Why is that?" He holds up his hand with a starvation-born lethargy and between his fingers is the webbing of some curious frog or lizard that has transplanted itself into a body in which it does not belong. He tells her of distance. He tells her of miles walked and confusion and being lost in the snow and cold and he tells her of his fingers and how they grew purple and dropped from his body and how his genitals followed. He tells her of desperation and the strength within and how he drew on what he had in the webs of his limbs and how they stitched his fingers and his balls back on and he tells her what it cost him and of the gnawing and evil hunger that swelled in his gut until he could not think for a lack of glucose to thrum within his veins and give him some semblance of life. She looks at him. "You coulda just gone to the General Store. Ol' boy Furst sells dogjerky." He says nothing but plops his wristpad on the bar and shows it to her and the green numerals thereupon. There is the time. There is the date. And there is the number with the dollar sign and it is two preceded by several zeros. She exhales smoke again and watches him. "Honey I don't know how it came to this. With you. I know how it came to me. I just don't see the chain of events. You're hungry as all git out and you came from the West and people usually come from the East. What in Sam Hill were you doin' freezin' your balls off west of the Pass?" He holds up the chain. It tumbles haphazard across the bartop and its links are edged with ragged red hate and they stick in the top of the plywood and catch. He jiggles the chain to dislodge them and the undulation runs through the length of the metal, a serpent of steel made animate on the lifeblood of the desperate, coiling its way sideways and tinkling into a bottle of Sham Adams. He looks at her. She looks at the chain. "You went out there for this?" He nods. "Stole it?" He shakes his head and tells her he found it. He tells her of green skies where fury speaks from the heavens in lightning that irradiates the skin and stuns the senses. He tells her of cracked streets and weird creatures that roam and the train, oh Lord, the train. The train that thunders and takes lives on some long forgotten mission to go from someplace to someplace else and he tells her that he doesn't know where it goes because he was too frightened to ride it for all the hideous blood red ichor that coats its exoskeleton as the wheels skitter to a halt and crush the unwary beneath its mandibles of reinforced aluminum and then return to whatever godless hive from which it came. He tells her of looking into what it had left behind. He cannot tell her for nausea of the body parts stacked high in their dread cornucopia of stringy gristle and the red meats of the fresh and the stinking purple-brown meats of the already long dead who had been rendered animate only to die once again in a sick pantomime of life and death that would skullfuck the dreams of even the most seasoned clone vat technician. Somewhere in that mess, he tells her, he found it. She looks at him. She does not believe him and she does not need to say it for it is well-written in her features. Then she looks at the chain again and leans forward over it to inspect its links as if some clue as to its factual origins might be divined. He moves his arms with the last strength available to him and hauls the chain over and yanks. The larynx goes first. It is crushed beneath the weight of chain. Her flailing arm sends bottles smashing into the floor. She pulls and he pulls and he is halfway pulled over the bar and the splinters of rough plywood stick in his arms. She is stronger than he is and he knows it and she drags him clear across the bar and into the wall and he crashes against it and sends sprinkles of cheap wallpaper clattering into his matted hair. He hauls. He says something but she cannot hear it over the blood hammering in her ears and then spurting out of her neck as the chain bites. He throws himself back over the top of the bar and drags the chain with him. The head follows his passage in a low spray of red that mixes with the bouquet of carmine already spread across the chain. The body does not follow with it. He scampers back. He stares at his wristpad. He knows no God or he would pray and so he stares and sits and rocks back and forth and whispers nonsense to it, his mouth for all the world as useful as the blood-filled remnant of a mouth with its just-splintered tongue lolling out of the face that owns it as that face's eyes watch his panic and desperation with the detached glassy gaze of death. Then: "Nice job on Clara, kid. Here's the money."