This month's second update goes live with a new addition of Dust. We also have the poll results, which was a landslide for more Serpent's Garden, so stayed tuned for that. Thanks to everyone for your support and I hope you enjoy!
~
Chapter 27:
They’d lost the SVs. They’d been chased all the way through the Alliance HQ and only by the bare skin of their teeth had they not lost anyone, but between Kawalsky’s knowledge of the facility’s layout and a few well-chosen ambush sites, they’d managed to whittle down their pursuers and put enough distance between them that the machines had lost track of them, at least for the moment.
The damn things wouldn’t give up that easy. Once they knew a human was in the area, they were like bloodhounds on a scent. The SVs would find them again. They were very good at that, but it meant the humans had been given a slight reprieve. Probably only a few minutes, but at least long enough to catch their breath and plan their next move.
Dunst was binding wounds caused by shrapnel. They’d run across a couple more of the Connies’ parting gifts, but they’d been lucky there, too. He wasn’t sure how much of that was the rushed nature of the traps and how much was them being more deterrence than attempts to actually kill the Alliance troops.
Oh, they were deadly enough – a few tripwires and a rigged elevator – but they’d been set up in a hurry. With a little more time and care, they’d have been much more lethal, but D’Antonio had probably been worried about the Alliance troops breaking out and coming across his people while they were puttering around with doors and pipe bombs.
None of the other traps had been sabotaged like the first; Lorelai probably couldn’t find an excuse to poke around every IED and rigged system her new friends set up, but just the fact that she’d saved them from the first and most lethal meant a lot. There’d been a few comments about her defection while they’d been working to get out of their erstwhile prison cell. Mitchum was taking it the hardest, but no one had had time to complain since. Running for your life had a way of focusing one’s mind.
They’d have to deal with that situation later, but for right now everyone was on the same page. The squad had just about made it through the HQ. All that was left was to clear the bunkers and they’d be back out in the world. It sounded so simple, but nothing – not now and not ever – was that easy.
Cortez and Gerome were at the end of the hall, cutting through a security door. The Connies had locked it behind them. Kawalsky’s codes could unlock it, but he couldn’t do anything about the weld-job the other soldiers had done to seal it up. They were making good progress, but every second they wasted here gave the Connies a better chance to get away and the SVs to find them again.
There was a clunk as Gerome stood, ejecting a spent fuel cylinder from his torch. “Out, sir,” he reported.
Kawalsky nodded, looking to the other man, still kneeling in front of the door, a sputtering cutting torch held in his hands. “Cortez?”
“Running on fumes, but I’ve got enough to get through the rest.”
“You’re sure? If we have to tear the door down, it’s going to make a lot of noise.”
“Trust me, capitán,” the soldier assured Nicholas. He barely knew Spanish, but he had a girl back in the hive who was a Colombian native. She was teaching him the language. You could always tell when he was thinking about her; that was when he lapsed into the handful of phrases that he did know. “I didn’t spend my childhood in my dad’s garage not to know how much more I can get out of – ah!” he exclaimed as he cut through the last bits holding the doors together. “Got it, sir.”
Nicholas entered his passkey and the door obediently grumbled open. It felt louder than it actually was, but the sound still made the hair on the back of Kawalsky’s neck stand up. He listened to the brief silence that followed. There was no sign that anything else in the complex had heard or reacted to the noise and he ushered his troops through before that could change.
The main vestibule was up ahead, where the tram stations from the bunker complexes met the main security checkpoint. The vestibule was still lit. Gentle background muzak played on an infinite loop. The floors were a little scuffed from everyday wear and tear, but not dirty enough to trigger a cleaning bot’s presence.
In fact, the only signs that anything was out of the ordinary, aside from the lack of people, were the plants overgrowing their planters and baskets. The recycling systems here were still working and the greenery had spread over the last few months, fronds and vines curling down the walls or hanging in the air. Nicholas touched one; it felt firm and strong. The leaves were green, untouched by the yellowing caused by a lack of nutrients. Even the fertilizer mixtures were still being added to the water.
He looked at the small leaf in his hands and up to the plant sprouting from its hanging basket, wondering just how long they could live like this before the systems that cared for, fed and watered them broke down and they suffered the same slow, wasting death as their counterparts in the comm center, straining towards a sun they’d never reach, roots sinking towards water they’d never find. Just like the people packed into the hives, trying to live on resources meant for half their number, all praying for the miracle him and his people had been sent to find.
Without help, their fate would be the same as that of these plants, only it wouldn’t be as simple and as quiet as plants withering in dried, barren pots. It would get ugly and bloody and awful as the survivors turned on each other for whatever scraps were left. It wouldn’t be the machines that ended them; it would be their own self-destructive nature.
The squad completed their sweep of the chamber. Nothing stood out as threatening. No hidden traps, no bodies or signs of hostile presence. The security checkpoints were just abandoned. There wasn’t even any blood. It was as if the people that should have been here had walked away one day and never returned.
That was some of the worst of it. When scouring New Berlin or anywhere else that humanity had once claimed, it wasn’t the signs of death – the blood, spent shells, clawmarks and scraps of cloth that got left behind – that hit Nicholas the hardest. It was the emptiness. It was like every trace of humanity, even their violent ends, had been erased, like there had never been anyone here at all.
The machines weren’t the first to create these tableaus. War didn’t just kill people. It left a hole where they’d been, a void that didn’t even provide the closure of knowing a loved one was dead. Just a chasm and a question that would tear at the survivors for the rest of their lives and a painful, agonizing hope that one day, their missing loved ones would appear and that the chasm would close.
In Nicholas’s experience, that very rarely happened.
Passing through the vestibule and checkpoints, they reached the tram station quickly and without issues. As a consequence of that brief spell of good luck, they ran into much larger problems. First and foremost, one of the cars was missing. The other two were at their terminals, but a security program had been triggered and they were locked in place. Nicholas knew who he could thank for that, but that wasn’t the only problem.
“Motherfuckers,” Andrea swore.
Nicholas came up behind the bald woman. She was looking at the system logs listed in a cramped operations alcove. “Motherfuckers,” he agreed. Alliance HQ wasn’t exactly New Berlin Central, but it had three main lines, each of which ran the few dozen kilometers from the HQ to the bunker complexes. On the status boards, he could see flashing red alerts on the northern line. The security cameras there were still up and he pulled on their feeds, mouthing the curse a second time. About fifty-odd meters from the northern bunker, the tram lines had been destroyed. Burned right through with thermite charges and so recently that the crater was still smouldering. Likewise, there was a door system malfunction at the entrance.
Andrea’s lips thinned, coming to the same conclusion that her captain had. “They welded the doors shut.”
“It’s almost as if they don’t want us following them,” Private Gerome observed from his position nearby.
“What a strange notion,” Rashid put in from where he was sitting. “Given that we’re such good friends and all. I can’t imagine why they’d go to such lengths to stop us.”
“We could cut through it,” Gerome pointed out. “Provided these,” he held up his cutting torch, “don’t run out of juice first, and we’re leaning pretty hard on that hope. But,” he paused for a second, “even if we could, it would take a while.”
None of them pointed out the obvious: they didn’t have ‘a while’. Not with the SVs behind them and the Connies up ahead, both sides still gaining ground.
Kawalsky just grunted. “That narrows our options,” he mused, attention shifting to the eastern tunnel. Based on his discussions with D’Antonio, the Alliance forces had abandoned that facility. It was where the breach occurred – at least, the first one – and a lot of its systems had been destroyed by the retreating Alliance troops, unaware that they’d been bringing the danger back with them. He didn’t know and probably never would what had happened here. The SVs had done a good job in taking out the base. At first he’d wondered if it had just been a simple breach that spun out of control as more of the machines had gotten in, but given everything else he’d seen, it smacked of a plan. Not that it mattered right now, but he would have liked to know for certain. Instead, he had chasms where people he’d known had been.
All his friends and comrades, fellow officers, their fates reduced to a question for those that had known them, and a single uncertain line in a history book for those that hadn’t – if Alcatar’s story was told at all. From what they’d learned so far, it didn’t look like it.
The retreating Alliance troops had sabotaged the eastern tramway. Based on D’Antonio’s scouts’ reports, they’d also had mined the rail tunnel. His people hadn’t even tried to get through. The demo teams had done a good job; nothing smaller than a very lucky rat could get through without setting off the explosives, which would collapse the entire tunnel. Anything and anyone trying to get to or out of the eastern bunker would end up buried under hundreds of tons of rock.
If the Connies, with a lot more time on their hands, couldn’t disarm the mines, his people wouldn’t be able to with just a few minutes to spare. They didn’t have any trained EOD personnel anyways. Trying to defuse a bomb without any knowledge was a good way to blow yourself up. Trying it with an entire field of mines rigged with anti-tampering systems was a guarantee to arrive at the Pearly Gates in twenty different package. Nicholas stifled an unhappy sigh. He hated the reality of that. It meant-
“Guess that just leaves door number three,” Sergeant Mallory said, unknowingly voicing his captain’s thoughts. “We can override the lockdown on the cars here and I can’t see any trace of traps along the line. Besides, that’s the one we’d want to go through anyways. The bunkers are, what, 15-20 klicks apart? The Gatekeeper range is to the southeast. We cut through here, we can overtake those Connie ratfucks.” He saw the drawn look on Kawalsky’s face. “What is it, sir?”
Nicholas pursed his lips. “D’Antonio reported that his men found... something in the southern bunker. Rather, they didn’t want it to find them.”
“‘Something’, sir?”
The captain shook his head. “He didn’t give specifics. His people didn’t even see what it was. All they could tell was that it wasn’t human and it apparently wasn’t like anything they’d encountered.”
The big sergeant pursed his lips. “We’re sure that’s accurate, sir? They might have been spinning tales to keep us out.”
Nicholas had had the same thought. “If it was just a smokescreen, then why didn’t they head out that way, sergeant? Why not cut that travel time off their trip?”
“Ah,” the sergeant sighed heavily. He looked down the tunnel. The overhead lights were still on, but something about the southern tunnel suddenly made it seem a lot darker. “Hell.”
“So it’s three different ways of getting fucked,” Rashid said, counting off points on his fingers. “We hoof it down the northern tunnel and hope we can cut through the terminal’s security door before our friends catch up with us. We take a nice Sunday drive into our own side’s minefield or,” he pointed down the southern tram tunnel. “We go through a place that scared the shit out of men and women who came through the bad part of Hell to get here.” He shook his head. “I don’t like our choices, sir.”
“You don’t like them, or you don’t like that we don’t really have a choice?”
The man ran his fingers through his hair. He stared down the tunnel. “Is it too late to say that I’m actually becoming rather fond of this post-apocalyptic, radiation-soaked world overrun with psychotic killing machines and we don’t need to get back to Earth that badly?”
“I’m afraid so, lieutenant.”
Rashid nodded slowly. He put a hand on Andrea’s shoulder, giving the corporal a brief squeeze of reassurance. His expression was strained, no happier than hers or anyone else’s. “That’s what I was afraid you’d say, sir.”
~
Richard handed Lorelai a pair of goggles. “Here you go,” he said with a smile. “Can’t have a bit of sand taking out one of those pretty green eyes, can we?”
From behind him, one of his fellow Conglomerate troops snorted. “Jesus, Dekin – that’s your best line? I’m surprised you’re not still a virgin.”
“It’s called being nice,” the man shot back. “You might try it some time, Perlmeyer.”
“I dunno, sounds like work. You can put on airs, I’ll just be me and when the ladies want a real man instead of a simp, they’ll know where to look.” With a laugh, Perlmeyer wandered off, hands full of gear.
“How no one’s murdered him in his sleep, I’ll never know,” Dekin muttered under his breath.
“Don’t worry,” Lorelai assured him with a smile of her own. “I like nice men.”
The soldier’s grin widened. The Conglomerate troops were at the northern bunker’s garage. Most of the supply trucks were missing or wrecked. Those that hadn’t been taken by fleeing Alliance personnel had slashed tires and severed fuel lines, either courtesy of the buzzers to trap people here or by the Mercs to keep the machines from following them. There’d been a section with half a dozen four-wheelers that seemed to have been overlooked by both sides, most likely because they’d been locked in a sub-garage level. Bringing them up to the surface had been no small task, made all the more harried by the evidence that the northern bunker still wasn’t completely void of threat.
Six quads wasn’t enough for seventeen men and women and their gear, but there’d been a few trailers for the vehicles, probably meant for the use of maintenance teams. There were undoubtedly more vehicles in the above-ground portion of the Merc HQ, but that was a couple dozen kilometers behind them now, and the APF troops weren’t planning to double back now. Their goal was the Alliance base and the last starship left on Alcatar.
It would be a rough, cramped ride, but it was faster than walking and hopefully safer. The APF teams knew better than anyone that buzzers loved popping out under vehicles, gutting them and stranding the passengers in the middle of a shrieking swarm blood-hunting mechanical nightmares. The quads gave them the best chance of getting through the killing fields, so they were taking the gamble that speed really did mean safety.
From what Lorelai had overheard, opinions on the situation were mixed. There was a lot of anger at the Alliance’s ‘betrayal’, but half of the soldiers didn’t want revenge; they just wanted off Alcatar. The other half were still spoiling for a fight. That contingent had their voice represented by Meers, while Captain D’Antonio was willing to ignore the Alliance troops until they became a problem. He’d said that he hoped Kawalsky would be smart enough to turn back, but Lorelai knew Nicholas better than any of these people. He’d be coming. D’Antonio suspected that as well. So did Meers, and he was pushing the captain to make a stand to ambush the Alliance troops.
Pragmatically, the Conglomerates should have killed them back at the command center. Nicholas wasn’t going to give up, so removing him as a potential threat only made sense. Lorelai supposed she should be glad that D’Antonio hadn’t been that cold-blooded. She still wasn’t quite sure what it meant to feel or even if she did, but she did know what would happen if the patterns that Nicholas represented went away.
She would Scream, and the only thing that would keep her from annihilating every last living Conglomerate soldier would be her own destruction. Even dear Richard, who was attracted to her, spoke gently and was her buffer between her and the rest of the Conglomerates would die at her hands. Was that anger or grief that told her so surely what would happen if Nicholas was killed? She didn’t know. It was a new sensation, discordant and disruptive in her normally ordered thought patterns.
“Have you ever ridden one of these before?” Dekin was asking as he patted the worn faux-leather seat of one of the two quad bikes set aside for the scouts. The other four would be hauling supplies and the rest of the pared-down platoon.
Lorelai shook her head, partitioning the distracting sense of introspection to a corner of her functions. This situation should be her primary focus. “Can’t say I have. There weren’t a lot of four-wheelers in New Berlin.”
“Then don’t worry,” Richard said. “You can ride with me until you get comfortable enough to handle one of these yourself.”
He was being nice and trying just a little too hard. The captain had had a quiet chat with him while they’d been leaving the Alliance HQ. Dekin was supposed to keep an eye on her, just in case she turned on them. That was only to be expected. She was an unknown variable who, until recently, had been happily working with their enemy. The captain wasn’t even wrong to be suspicious. She’d already acted against their interests by cutting the tripline on their first bomb and if the opportunity presented itself, she’d do it again.
She did have the option to massacre them in their sleep, and Lorelai had considered that. The mountain village hadn’t been able to stop the Second Built that came for them, and whatever sentries the Conglomerates had couldn’t stop her either. She could be more subtle, something that her kind weren’t known for. She could kill only one of them and make it look like a murder. Maybe the captain, but her read of the men and women here told her it wasn’t time for that. The group wasn’t yet fractious enough for a killing to undermine their coherency. Besides, she’d be the obvious suspect. Best not to draw attention to herself like that.
With the Conglomerates, Lorelai had more possibilities than she had with the Alliance team. Hunting, observation, learning and more. They didn’t know what she was. They didn’t know anything about 053s or higher-series models. She could see where this all led her. Maybe these soldiers would start to become familiar patterns too. Maybe even preferential ones. Or maybe they wouldn’t.
Until she had a definitive reason to act, Lorelai would continue along as she’d planned. She could learn a lot here. Since she was working with the Conglomerates now, she needed to fulfill her new role – within certain parameters. This was the best choice. It gave her opportunities and it put her in a position to help Nicholas even more.
“Sure,” she said, tucking a lock of blonde hair over one ear coquettishly. “That sounds good. Just don’t get too comfortable. I’m a quick study. I’ll probably end up surprising you.”
Dekin nodded, mounting the bike and gesturing for Lorelai to climb on behind him. “I’m sure you will,” he agreed, his expression sobering for a moment. “You know, until the cutters came out, I used to like surprises. Since then, it’s just been one bad surprise after another.”
“Well,” the machine purred, pressing herself against Richard’s back. She knew he could feel the warmth of her body through their clothes. She could feel the pulse of his heart and the sudden increase in its cadence her proximity stirred. It was so close. All it would take was for her press one finger against his back, letting it grow into a blade that would slide though cloth and meat, into the throbbing organ at his core and it would still forever. “Let’s make sure there’ll only be good ones from now on.”
~
True to expectations, the doorway that led from the tram station to the southern bunker complex had been locked down by the Connies after their scouts had been spooked, but they hadn’t welded the doors shut like they had at the north bunker. At the time, they probably didn’t have the tools to do it. More than likely, none of them had wanted to go back after the fact and risk alerting whatever was inside. They’d gotten away once. Trying for a second time was just tempting fate.
So what does that say about us being dumb enough to walk into a place that twenty armed soldiers wouldn’t go near?
That they were desperate. That they didn’t have any other choice. That the only chance they had to save any of their people was beating the Conglomerate troops to Gatekeeper base and that meant going through this bunker complex and whatever was inside it.
Maybe they’d be lucky and the Connies had just spooked easily. Maybe it was just a couple skinjobs inside. Hell, maybe leprechauns were hiding behind the door with a pot of gold and a ride down a shining rainbow all the way back to Earth. Wouldn’t that be something?
Nicholas disembarked from the tram, walking up to the doors. The Conglomerate troops might not have come back to the bunker, but on their way out, they’d left a message, spray-painting the universal warning symbol of a black triangle around an exclamation mark over the doors. There was no better statement for ‘don’t go in here, stupid’ than that, but it hadn’t been enough. Along with the two-meter high symbol, they’d also written a more direct warning, just in case some idiot didn’t understand the first.
[font=“Crimes Times Six”]KEEP IT SHUT[/font]
It wasn’t the least encouraging thing Kawalsky had ever seen, but it was up there. Above the doors, a yellow lamp glowed, flickering every so often. It had been running for months, but its time was coming to to an end. That was another metaphor for humanity’s current situation that he really didn’t want to think about. Attend to the mission first, have an existential crisis later. At least, he kept telling himself that. It even helped.
Sometimes.
“We don’t know what’s behind this door,” Nicholas said, addressing his unit. “All we have to go on is what I’ve already told you, but whatever it is, I know you’ll be ready for it. If Earth won’t help us, then we’ll do it ourselves. We’re going to get out of this base, we’re going to get to the Gatekeeper mountains and we’re going to secure that ship. That’s our goal and as of right now, it’s our only goal. Everything else is secondary to making sure it’s our people that get off-world. We’ve all got friends and family that are counting on us. We’re going to succeed. To do that,” he pointed at the sealed doors, “the only way out is through.”
Sergeant Mallory spoke for the unit. “Then let’s get about it, sir. Time’s a-wasting.”
Kawalsky gave his men a choppy nod. “That it is, sergeant.” He entered his codes, overriding the lockdown that the Conglomerate forces had triggered. The doors sighed as they opened, allowing a gust of air from the bunker complex to roll out across the assembled Alliance troops.
It wasn’t the worst thing he’d ever smelled. Even before A-Day, Nicholas had become intimately familiar with all the odours of death, starting with the sour, rancid stink of a body that had voided its bowels to the unique smell of burning human flesh. Still, Nicholas covered his nose. The air was dank and musty, smelling like it had been sitting for a long time. It was stagnant and tainted by a hint of rot creeping in at the edges, like something deeper in the complex had started to decompose and the odour had spread.
Nothing moved beyond the doors. There was no sign of bodies of hostiles, just an empty, devouring darkness sporadically lit by dull emergency lights and glow panels. You could just make out the silhouette of a staircase here, a wall there or a support pillar elsewhere, but all the other details of the tram terminal had been swallowed by the shadows.
“Looks clear,” Mitchum offered. He was trying to be optimistic.
“So did the comm center,” Kawalsky reminded him and everyone else. With a gesture, he sent Gerome and Shei to scout ahead. The men disappeared into the shadows, the only indication of their presence the roving spots of illumination from their flashlights until they moved out of sight. Seconds stretched into moments.
As he waited, Nicholas’s mind was still on the SVs behind them. Wherever they were, they’d only gotten closer. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. Maybe at any second he’d hear inhuman shrieks echoing down the tunnel as their pursuers caught up to them.
Breaking the pregnant silence came a quiet double-click on his radio. All clear. A moment later, Shei appeared back at the doors, giving the rest of the group a silent okay signal.
“All right,” Nicholas said, his own voice kept low and steady. “Let’s go.”
~
The interior of the bunker was dark save for emergency lighting; the Connies had cut off a lot of the connections between it and the rest of the complex. Inside there was no access to the rest of the base’s computer network, intercom system or power supply. Everything was running off backups and batteries, slowly but inevitably winding down. Here and there light bulbs and glow panels had already burnt out. About half of the lights were still operating, but those that remained didn’t provide any sense of safety. It felt like the shadows were pressing in on them, wolves circling a dying fire.
The air quality was no better in the terminal. The atmosphere felt heavy, like it had been weighed down upon the floor and only stirred at their approach. It was dead air. The bunker’s ventilation system had stopped working some time ago, letting the atmosphere turn stagnant and sour.
“It feels like a tomb,” Bahrain whispered.
“Steady,” Mallory admonished. “Stay frosty.”
Nicholas locked the doors behind them. That should keep their pursuers out. It also made sure that everyone understood what he’d said just minutes before: the only way out was through. No going back, not with so much on the line.
Flashlights and hand torches scanned across the darkened terminal. It was a split level, where embarking and disembarking passengers took the lower level and a series of small open lounges with chairs and benches sat on the upper. There were a handful of pieces of luggage on the floor, but that was all. There wasn’t even any sign of a struggle. Like the HQ’s vestibule at the other end of the tram line, it was like the place had been abandoned, every living soul just deciding all at once to get up and file quietly out the doors, leaving everything behind.
Nicholas’s stomach churned, acid burning his throat. His familiarity with the facility only made the sense of wrongness stronger. It shouldn’t be like this. It should be bustling, full of life, stocked with hundreds of soldiers and officers ready to defend Alcatar to the last.
How had it all gone so wrong? How had the base fallen? How had the planet fallen so quickly?
He could answer all those questions in the same way. We used those fucking machines. We thought we had control. His light scanned over the empty terminal. Not a single body. Just more holes where their presence, even in death, should have been. We were never in control. The moment we turned on the Queens, we lost everything. We just didn’t realize it until it was too late.
Maybe Earth was right to cut Alcatar off. Maybe some things just had to stay buried, no matter what the cost was. Maybe this was the price for their arrogance.
He mentally shook himself. No. Alliance HQ cut them off because they didn’t want news of the Second Variety to get out and cause public image nightmare. Your reputation suffered a tiny bit when people found out you’d created machines whose goal was indiscriminate slaughter to terrorize and demoralize an enemy population and then those machines had decided that their goal was the death of all humans, not just those on the other side.
Alcatar was the corporations’ dirty little secret, proof of the lengths both sides had been willing to go to to win... and the ugly consequences of it. If this was the price for the Alliance’s arrogance, then the men and women who’d made the decision should be the ones to pay it, not those they’d abandoned to save their own skins and profit margins.
When they got off this planet, Nicholas was going to drag his superiors and the Alliance board squirming out into the light where they’d have to answer for all of this. It was a nice thought, though he didn’t know if it would even matter in the long run. But it was something to live for, a chance for some form of justice for all Alcatar’s dead. That anger would keep him going even if nothing else did.
“Captain,” Goodfellow appeared, his dark skin making him appear half-swallowed by the inconstant shadows around them. “Found something you should see.”
Nicholas followed him to the upper level. On a hanging sign that showed new arrivals where to go, there was another painted message. It was impossible to read in the dark, but Goodfellow’s flashlight picked it out for Nicholas and the others to see. It was written in a different hand than the warning outside the door, scrawled hastily and nearly illegibly across the signage.
Like the warning the Connies had left, it was also succinct, but even more cryptic. Rashid came up to Nicholas. “Sir,” he asked slowly, quietly enough that the rest of the men couldn’t hear them. “Are we fucked?”
“Not yet, lieutenant.”
“But soon?”
Nicholas couldn’t tear his eyes away. There was a small ladder under the sign where the painter had stood up, splattering his or her message over the board as quickly as they could. It was the work of a mind broken by madness borne of terror, but one still adhering enough to duty to try and warn anyone else coming into the bunker.
The only problem was, he had no idea what it meant.
[font=“Cannibal”]DO YOU NEED A SEAMSTRESS?[/font]
“Maybe,” was all he could offer the other man. “I guess we’ll just have to find out.”