As I had said
before, most people here in the Waste make their living by salvaging and trading old tech for food from the farms and ranches
that litter the region. My uncle was one such trader, though he was part of a
group that was labeled a bit more adventurous than the average trader. These
people were called tekkers; the reasons behind the name were never clear, but where a standard trader would buy bits of salvage
off of anyone who found it then repair it and sell it for a profit, a tekker would excavate old technology themselves. Such work was dangerous, as a lot of what was excavated wasn’t fully understood,
and the fact that most caches that survived the War were military in origin only made them that much more dangerous.
Uncle Eric and
my grandfather grew up together and were partners for over a decade, but then my grandfather married Eric’s sister and
settled down, starting up a trading post and roadside inn on the outskirts of their hometown, which happened to lie just off
one of the major highways of our time. Eric continued his life as a tekker, along
with their other two partners, Vol the Ogre and Mera, a small lizard-Were. Eventually
Vol decided he wanted to settle down as well, so Eric and Mera continued on by themselves.
Eric is several
years older than my grandfather, but to look at him one would think he was my older brother instead of my great-uncle; he
has lived on this Earth for more than sixty-five years, and he looks to be no older than twenty-five. Something he found in an old vault somewhere changed him; to hear him speak of it, it was a blessing, though
my grandfather often told me it was just as much a curse.
My grandfather
says that Eric came in for a visit shortly after an expedition right after my mother was born, something weighing heavily
on his mind. Grandfather knew something was wrong, but neither Eric nor Mera
would speak of it. They left before they had even spent an entire day with our
family, and to my knowledge never came back until the day Eric brought news of my older brother’s death.
I learned later
from Grandfather that Eric actually came to visit quite frequently, but came in secret and only meeting with him and my grandmother.
Grandfather said that each time Eric came to visit he looked younger, healthier,
stronger, until his age simply froze. Grandfather knew it had something to do
with that fateful expedition, but Eric was still tight-lipped about the incident; I think that was what worried Grandfather
more than anything, as he and Eric had never kept secrets from each other through all the years they had been friends.
Eric was a legend
among the traders even before the incident, and the fact that he would take on any lead, no matter how dangerous, and always
come out on top only made him more mysterious. After the ‘incident’,
he kept all exposed skin tightly wrapped in heavy cloth and wore shaded goggles over his eyes.
Rumors spawned with all sorts of explanations: that he was a Vampire that chose to brave the world of daylight; that
he came across a still functioning defense system in an old base that scarred him permanently; that he was infected with a
pre-war disease that ate his flesh but left him alive and he needed the bandages to hold himself together… Each was more ridiculous than the one before, but each was believable enough to keep people from asking
for the truth.
Some of the stories
about him were true though. Eric was a better shot than anyone else in the Wasteland,
and I saw him place a bullet perfectly between the eyes of a man over three hundred yards away in the dead of night. I saw him take three bullets to the chest, dig them out with his fingers, stand up
again to kill his attackers, and then watched as the holes closed up without so much as a scar in front of my eyes. Once I even watched as a building collapsed on him; thinking he was dead and being in danger myself, I
fled only to have him catch up to me the next day.
I eventually learned
the secret of his invulnerability, his seeming immortality, but that revelation is part of my own tale…
