Boy 90

By Tina Kolesnik

One-time cop with the Service, prisoner Beck Hirsch is suspended from work assignment in the mines after a violent altercation with another convict. On her way home she's accosted by a young wanderer desperate for shelter, and something more...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tina Kolesnik
• Release date: Mar 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9780974419596

Tina Kolesnik

Retail home of Tina Anderson's unsold short works (as Tina Kolesnik) and the collected episodes of her ongoing scifi series, Femitokon.

Book preview

Pristine snow-white tundra stretched before him, its ennui fractured by sky-high concrete. His world wasn’t safe. Gangs of opportunistic women moved freely between the unprotected villages; even the villagers, despite their sorority, gave in to the occasional lure of violence. Very few men existed in this world, if at all.

River had known six, all dead.

Yanxi-Four was the eighth corporate-owned mining settlement he’d sought out, and he still hadn’t found her. The last town on the train route, the woman he sought, had to be here, if only it weren’t such a long way down.

The ridge would be too steep for his slender legs, and dreading the biting snow, he tightened the cording on each boot and pulled tight the belt keeping his short coat secured.

Steady at first, River lost his footing and tumbled down the remaining three hundred feet until he flattened out below. He lay there a few moments, adjusting to the cold. Once upright, he made sure nothing was broken or sprained before setting off for the walled settlement.

The gusty wind stung his cheeks, harbingers of a coming storm.

Intense whiteouts with deadly temperatures crawled over this land, lasting days at a time. He needed shelter from those winds, many strong enough to sweep him off his feet. Jogging through the snow, he made for the mining-camp perimeter.

Trash bins the size of plowing tanks lined the walls, but they carried no shanty-style tents or communal bonfires between them. Vagabond wanderers often camped around such structures to escape the elements. Perhaps the storm was closer than he thought, as the wanderers always cleared out beforehand.

River darted past one of the large-wheeled dumpsters, and along the wall, found the first of many corpses. He felt no pity; nomadic women like these had plagued River all his life, and a dead one meant another moment of safety. Wanderers were the lowest level of life. They earned no room assignments or ration cards, and they wore whatever they could salvage from Service landfills.

He witnessed the village women chipping out dead wanderers from the ice and butchering them for food when a boy. He wasn’t allowed to eat wanderers; his mothers had told him human meat was bad for his skin and digestive system.

Along the wall, exposure had made most of the coats and hats too stiff, their hoodless jackets not worth the trouble. River searched limbs sticking out of the snow for better boots and became excited to find a pair of brown ones pointing up out of the snow. They came attached to a lifeless body covered by a Service blanket.

He never