E - Mattie Crimcraft

Name's Crimcraft, Matt Crimcraft - people call me Mattie. Boy, I
love my job. We all love our jobs - I mean, you couldn't do this if you
didn't love it. The money's okay, but c'mon, seriously, there's plenty
of less dangerous work out there pays just as much. We've all of us had
our little accidents now and then, y'know? That's when you get to know
if a new guy really loves the job - when he has his first 'mishap'. If
he's anything like I was, he'll be back in soon as he can stagger. If
he thought moosh-bustin' was gonna be an easy ride, man, he'll never
come within five klicks of the Depot after that. I reckon about
seventy-five percent of the guys who come here quit after that first
wake-up call.

Me, I was mindin' my own business, my business being torchin' mooshes,
course, when I got my ticket stamped. That was back in the day, all
right. Green as a frog, I was - 'bout as strong, too. Those tanks take
some liftin', I tell you. Course, comes natural to me now, but that's
cos I've had so many years practice. Back then&;#8230; woo, it was
all I could do to walk in a straight line. I don't understand the
science behind it, but they cram a helluva lot of gas into those
VacPacs. Look tiny, but you try havin' one of 'em strapped to your
back!

Bishop Wellum was still about in those days&;#8230; now there was a
good man. Fought in the war, lost a leg. Got it replaced, course, but
still, least he made the sacrifice. I mean, it's one more leg than I've
had blown off for my country. I'm sure Boone's an all right sort too,
don't get me wrong, I'd never say a word against any of our church, or
may God strike me down&;#8230; just that war makes a man, somehow.
Least ways, that's how I see it. Half the time, I can't make out what
Boone's trying to say. He's spent most his life staring at screens or
picking through books. That's the thing about people today - they
forget we had to fight for all we got. War's what makes a man.

So, they gave us these little DJ Magpies to get round with. Geez, do
you remember the Magpies? The real Magpies, I mean, the originals, not
the five-point-twos we zip about on now. Crazy. You had to watch 'em
else someone'd come and try and steal 'em. Stupid, really, there was
nothing they could do. The things had immobilisers, GPS tracking, I
mean you so much as looked at them cock-eyed and a whole precinct's
worth of Guardsmen'd be on you quick as blink. Didn't matter though.
People liked to smash 'em up, or hack off the bits that weren't bugged
to sell for scrap. It was that kinda area. Still is.

Anyway, you know how it is. I park it up round Lower St John's Street,
get off, start staggering over chunks of rubble big as boulders. It was
like being on the Moon, I tell ya, 'cept course I've got this big old
VacPac weighin' me down, and the mask and the suit, so I look like a
crappin' Martian with all my crazy gear. I was making my way towards
the building over by the canal. That was when a lot of the damage was
fresh; well, y'know, pretty fresh anyhow. Only five, six years old.
Some of the guys at the Depot used to say that deep down in the rubble
there was still fires burning. I don't know anyone who could've proved
that, y'know, it's not like one of us was about to take a shovel and go
find out, but a lot of people said it all the same. Big Gav, this guy
who used to be Shift Warden, explained it to me once. Something about
heat and pressure. He was good with science, Big Gav. Looked like a big
dumb lunk, but there were brains tucked away in that thick ape skull of
his. He could've been a doctor, I'll bet, but like I say, we all do it
- he did it - for the love of the job.

Thing about the Old Town slums is, they were built to be slums, y'know?
No one ever wanted them to be high-rise des-res penthouses, they were
always your factories, your Jap-style accomodation for workers. You
know what I mean? It was like, if you're going to bomb us, you're gonna
have to get it right on the money, cos they'd squeezed all the
production into this one little dot on the map, and pushed all the
buildings half-underground, like icebergs. Most of 'em, especially the
apartments, had maybe fifteen, twenty floors under the surface, tiny
rooms, crawl-way corridors, crappy fire provisions. Shitty if someone
decides to bomb you. They never excavated the place, but y'know, the
whole area's just one giant grave now.

Anyway, the target was this big building, or least what was left of it.
Like I say, most of the stuff's underground. You used to get cave-ins
now and then. Not everyday, but often enough so's you'd watch your
step. There's a crevasse just off Simmons Road so deep you can't see
the bottom. City'd cover it up if they could just get close without
being shot at. Back then, you used to hear about the Lawfuls dumping
the bodies of suckers who'd crossed them into it. Called it the Pit,
they did. Anyone falls in there goin' straight to Hell, no doubt 'bout
it.

Can you believe some folks don't even know what mooshes are? Maybe I'm
being unfair. I forget, see, I mean I know what they are and so do all
the guys but then, Moosh-busters are an exclusive breed, y'know? I told
you, didn't I, that people don't take this up for fun. It's not a
crappin' sport. You love the mooshes, you hate the mooshes, you love
the work, you love the team, you take the knocks and you get back up -
that's what it's all about. We're a team. We love our job.

People, I mean people from the good side of town now, don't realise how
much we do for them. Don't get me wrong, I don't do it cos I want to be
some kinda public hero. That's not my dream and never was. I'm happy
being in the background, slogging away, toughin' it out. But y'know,
I'm talking more about the Depot, here, the department and what we do.
We're the only line of defence between them and a full-scale invasion.
I'm not kidding. Wish I was. 'Cept, course then I'd be out of a
job.

We're kinda encouraged not to talk about our work. I think people'd
panic if they realised the extent of the, well, y'know, the whole moosh
kinda problem. I guess they thought we could spray 'em all with poison
gas or let loose one of those viruses and just watch 'em all die.
Course, it's not as simple as that, but if I wasn't an expert, that's
what I'd say too. I mean, we must have the technology, right?

Technology's what got us into this mess in the first place. That is to
say, it wasn't the only reason, but it was like trying to make a fire
go out by chuckin' wood on it. It just made a bad situation one helluva
lot worse. They should've seen it coming. I wasn't around back then, I
mean we're talking way back, back to when I was a kiddie living off out
in the sticks with Mom, and southside was all wall-to-wall
factories.

We get the whole history bit when we enrol. Gives us a sense of
purpose, y'know? It's like, the war's still on, just most people don't
know it. When you know you've got a cause, man I'm tellin' you it turns
your whole life around. There's people happy working nine-to-five, they
get their wife, they get their kids, bit of dough stashed away,
whatever, and that's all they want. They're happy with that. The
thought of me endin' up like that, like all the rest of 'em&;#8230;
I'd sooner go out fightin' the good fight, you see where I'm comin'
from? Me and all the guys at the Depot, we're the ones fighting to
protect that. War makes a man, there's no denying it.

So, anyway, like I was sayin', I was makin' my way through the
rubble&;#8230; it was all rocks and dust, oh, and girders - twisted
like giant spaghetti. They've cleaned it up a bit now, but, y'know,
it's still shit. I guess I should've mentioned earlier that the Depot
didn't used to give us Beebees back in those days&;#8230; Beebees
being Motion-Sensors, course. One of those Depot things, y'know,
callin' them Beebees. I thought it was cos of the noise they made, at
first, y'know, like bee bee bee&;#8230; when you're trackin' a pack
down a crawl-hole or somethin'. Big Gav s'plained it to me once, when I
was still new. He knew all that language stuff, proper interested in
it. He said it was like, when they first came in - y'know, the
Motion-Sensors - when the City first started equipping us with 'em,
everyone just called them Motion-Sensors. I mean, you would, wouldn't
you? But then, it was like you had to shorten it, cos 'Motion-Sensor'
is pretty clumsy when you just want to sign out a piece of equipment
and get on with your job. So, Gav says people started callin' 'em
Mo-Ses for short, see, like the first bit of each word&;#8230; and
that kinda sounds like Moses - well shit, it is Moses. The
guys&;#8230; I dunno, it gets pretty stale using the same word over
and over for somethin', so I guess they just started playin' around
with it, seein' what they could do. It wasn't long before some of the
men were callin' 'em Burning Bushes, what with Moses and, course, us
with our flamethrowers and all&;#8230; and it kinda got shortened to
Beebees. No one remembers all that, though, 'cept Big Gav&;#8230;
and he's not around no more.

Anyway, the long and short of it is I heard a noise and thought it was
mooshes. They're greedy little fuckers - go round in packs, feedin' off
rubbish and any punter too weak to fend 'em off. Big as dogs, they come
now. Huge, leathery bastards with teeth like broken glass. Thrive on
poison, they do, poison, shit and meat. See the thing is, rodents 've
got short life spans, so they grow, drop hundreds of babbies, then bam
they're dead. Means they evolve fast - lots of generations, weak ones
get weeded out. After the bombing, all those mooshes trapped
underground in all the heat and the noxious fumes, with nothing to eat
but trash and corpses&;#8230; then we spray 'em with gas and virus
pellets, try to give 'em diseases that make 'em blind or sterile or
make their guts swell up and burst like rotten fruit&;#8230; and
most of the buggers die, 'cept the very toughest, very biggest,
nastiest, poison-proof, gas-proof mooshes with jaws strong enough to
chomp through cartilage and bone. Then, course, they all interbreed,
and soon there's millions of the fuckers, roamin' round in the caves
under the Old Town like packs of fuckin' wolves. Man, if you go out
after dark in these parts, it's not the gangs you want to watch out
for.

Course, I heard a noise, back then, and I think 'Shit! Here goes!' and
get ready with my gun. Fire's all we got left. Mooshes can stand most
about any heat - those apartments must of been like crappin' ovens when
the firestorms were still ragin' - but I ain't met one yet who's
fire-proof. They roast just like a fat rump steak. Y'couldn't eat 'em,
course. People 've tried, desperate people crazy enough to try and kill
one and lucky enough to succeed. They're toxic - make all your hair
fall out and your eyes run. Some of the gangs though&;#8230; killin'
a moosh is like a ritual, y'know, like initiation. They wear the pelts
'cross their shoulders to show they've passed. I got no time for folks
like that. Unlicensed vigilantes like that, runnin' down mooshes with a
sharpened bit of wood, like it's a game? If it weren't for the Depot,
they'd be so many bone splinters by now.

Yeah, so what I thought was the sound of a moosh was actually these two
gangers. Novembers, they were - had the tats. Jumped out from behind
this bit of wall, nailed me with fletchers. I went down, course. Lucky
they didn't hit my tank; we'd all of us of been ash if that'd happened.
Last thing I remember, they were comin' over to take a good look. Think
they got the wrong guy. I was bleedin' pretty bad. They got me twice in
the leg.

Woke up from it, though. Big Gav came to the ward, congratulated me.
Said I was one of the team, now. Disappeared, three months later, doing
a job off Newgate Road. Trin territory, it was. They found his Magpie,
untouched.
Still, those of us left, we're all old hands, y'know? Old hands and
tough bodies, built like a fleet of 'Dozers. God made us to last. I
wouldn't do it if I didn't love the job, I swear to ya. Won't rest 'til
every last moosh is burnt to cinders. None of us will. War makes a man,
dammit.