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Susan Benson
, November 07, 2010
(view all comments by Susan Benson)
Global Warming Gone Feral
Picture a future America destroyed by climate change, polar meltdown, and greed for natural resources: a place inhabited by powerfully rich swanks and insufferably poor masses. The swanks, who band together in clans, hold the power, while the underprivileged masses, who labor slavishly for the swanks, band into crews. To belong to a crew means that someone’s got your back, that there is an ally in a world of fear and violence. This is Nailer’s world–the world of a ship breaker. Each day Nailer, a small framed teenager, and his light crew enter grounded tankers to scavenge metal, wire, and items of reusable value. With his small, compact frame, Nailer crawls though the ship’s ducts, stripping wire for the crew owner, Bapi. Scarred across his face Nailer wears Bapi’s work tattoo. Nailer’s only relative is his hardened psychopathic father, Richard Lopez, a drug sliding, mean, brutally strong, murderer. Nailer knows it is only a matter of time before his vengeful father kills him.
When a city killer, the name for a regularly occurring hurricane, rips apart the coastline, Nailer and fellow crew, Pima, find on a nearby island a shipwrecked swank clipper. They are momentarily optimistic over the big scavenge until they discover a young woman, a swank, Nita, still alive on the clipper. While they are deciding what to do about Nita, Richard Lopez shows up with his own crew of hard edged men and women. Blue Eyes, a woman with a long scar down the side of her body wants to sell Nita’s organs to the Harvesters of the Life Cult. While his father’s crew sleeps off a drunken stupor, Nailer tries to escape the watchful guard of Blue Eyes, but botches the attempt. Just as Blue Eyes is about to cut Nailer with a machete, Sadna, Pima’s mother diverts Blue Eyes’s attention. Nailer escapes, but not without the stain of blood on this hands. Now, Nailer and Nita, with the help of Tool, a halfman, must find their way to Orleans so that Nailer can hide from his father’s wrath and Nita can find her people.
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