They saw shadows twitch in the corner of their vision, but they ignored them. Instead they maintained the air that walking along broken, twisted streets in the middle of the night was perfectly natural to them. Amber heard them first.
The excited, fast, almost nonsensical, jabbering speech patterns that usually meant one thing. It wasn't long until they came into view. E-boys. Back in the day they’d have been known as adrenaline junkies, always searching for the next thrill. Like everything else they needed to find ways to adapt to the new world. Rather than relying on drugs to keep adrenaline flowing through their systems they had found alternative routes. Some, like the ghouls and elves, had physically changed their bodies so that adrenaline coursed through their veins. Rake thin but strong, fast and wiry to better allow them to do whatever crazy thing struck them at the time. They healed faster too, which was just as well as they were continually being injured. Others went with a more technological route. Medical science has experimented with ways to transplant materials into humans who were disabled or seriously injured. As computers and microtechnology spiraled to greater and greater heights the research was noticed by the military. Rather than trying to merely help injured people, they looked at ways of augmenting and even replacing body parts. Perfectly healthy limbs and organs were substituted for “better” artificial ones. Many E-boys came from wealthy backgrounds and so had “acquired” the technology one way or another. There were still problems with these replacements though. The newer the technology, the less it had been tested and the human body was not designed to deal with that much adrenaline. Gradually they burnt out from within. However, given the risks they regularly took in search of the next thrill, they had shorter than average life expectancies anyway.
Ghost and Amber came to a gentle stop. The E-Boys jittered their way over to them. It was a marked contrast. Ghost and Amber were calm and still. The E-Boys were in constant motion unable to pause even for a moment.
“Funnight tobeout thislate,” one of them remarked.
“Ah, you know, just out admiring the stars. You can see them so much better out here away from the conclave lights,” Amber smiled.
One of them rolled his deep brown eyes. “H,h,h,haven't youseen anythingmore interestingthanthat tonight?” He looked pointedly at her shotgun.
“Well, there were some interesting looking things about half a mile that way,” she gestured behind her with the tip of her shotgun “but we gave them a wide berth, they didn’t seem like the star-gazing kind, if you know what I mean?”
That got their attention. E-boys were unpredictable but the one thing they could all be relied upon was for their insatiable interest in fairly suicidal experiences. The trick to dealing with them was to distract them with something far more interesting as quickly as possible. They did not deal well with boredom. The idea of “things” too scary for two obviously competent people to want to deal with was like a flame to moths for them. Excitedly, the group ran off into the night in the direction Amber had pointed.
Ghost and Amber waited for a minute, gazing up at the stars in case any of them should happen to look back. Then they calmly continued to walk. Slowly but surely, the condition of the roads began to improve. Though no one would admit it, there was a buffer zone of sorts between the wastelands and the enclave. It seemed to have formed naturally, neither wanting to be near the other. The poor lived here. They had enough to get by and water and electricity mysteriously kept finding its way to them despite the attempts of the companies to prevent it. Some believed those in the enclave sponsored the essentials to keep the riff-raff away from them, but it might just have been a vicious rumor.
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