Interview in a prison cafeteria

“And what happened then?” Mal Porter, Zed Memphis and Rod the benefactor are sitting in one of the large cafeterias that once served the facility’s prisoners. The walls are stark concrete, all tables and chairs are bolted to the floor. Red, man-sized letters on one wall say “PLEASE KNEEL WHEN SHOTS ARE FIRED”. In one corner, a surveillance camera scans the hall. The men look a bit worse for the wear. Zed’s left leg is in a plaster cast, Mal sports a number of bandages, patches and band-aids and moves with the slow deliberateness of a man covered in bruises. Only Rod looks as if he had a good last week. The man asking the question is an old Asian man in a monk’s habit with a sparse crown of silvery hair and perfectly trimmed beard. While he asks, he powers up a laptop. He is Father Ling, the “primus inter pares” of Refugium, as he would say, or the “big cheese” in Zed’s words.
While there are other inhabitants of Refugium in the cafeteria, the interview seems to be closed to the public at large. Mal answers: “Well, it was your standard setup. A trap for the car and some shooters on the roofs and at the crossing ahead. A classic ambush.” Zed cuts in “Not wholly standard. The stuff they splashed on the car? That was no poison, but it attracted all the girtabs in the vicinity. The scorps came out of the sand, lots of them, and attacked the car. That would have made anyone nervous, and those shooters would have had an easy job picking us off while we dealt with the scorps. Of course, I was up front on the crossing on my bike, and the others were leaving the car in a hurry, when Rod here screamed that the stuff was nerve poison.” Rod gives a tiny, lop-sided smile. “Well, my mistake. But getting away from the car was for the best. Mal here got to high ground and took care of the attackers on the other roofs, while Dan Hawking and me cleared the ground floor of scorpions.” “Where is Hawking now?” “He is outside, watching the car.” And he got the worst of it, Mal thinks, the girtabs took him down in the old wooden church, when I hosed the church tower with the MACs. Rod had to inject him with his last dose of aesculapin, and Dan still can’t remember the minutes just before he collapsed under the mass of claws and stingers. Mal continues “It was hard going. They were very well equipped with all the guns they got from their previous ambush. Assault rifles. One of them had a grenade launcher. Anyways - Zed engaged the men at the crossing. In summary, we were able to kill those attackers that we couldn’t drive off, and took one of them prisoner.” Like the other attackers, the man was mal-nourished, but fierce, sporting a crude painting of a scorpion on his chest. He lost his left hand many years ago, and fought Zed with a primitive prosthetic hook and a knife, before the man from Memphis knocked him out and handcuffed him to a car wreck. Mal goes on “We questioned him, and he told us some things. About a dozen of his gang were still around after our little tussle, well armed after taking down that group of scavengers. One member of this group was still alive. A girl. The gang had made a camp in an old community building at the other edge of the town, that’s where they held her. They had fed the others to Big Gee. At that time, we didn’t know what he was talking about. We thought that the gang was practicing cannibalism. He also told us that they followed a man he just called Prophet, and he was scared of him – Prophet made poisons and the fluid which attracts girtabs, he planned the ambushes and he somehow controlled the scorps in Bakersfield. Sounds like he got himself a little cult following him around, while he followed Big Gee.” Ling stops typing “Where is this prisoner now?” “We let him go”
The gun in the girl’s hand, tracking the one-handed man as he vanishes in the darkness
“We got the jeep out of the pit and hid it in the ruins. Then we decided to have a look and find out if the last prisoner was still alive.” “That is a very noble thing to do.” Zed says “Well, that’s what we do where I come from. I reconnoitered the building, some religious structure with a big ass steel cross in its front yard, all cube-like. Said Bakersfield Christ Risen Church out front. It’s quite sizable, with a theater that seat two- or even three hundred people. Then I got the others and we infiltrated.” And we infiltrated the hell out of it, Mal thinks. Zed went in with is large combat knife drawn, moving from one sentry to another. Not easy going, not at all, but at times rather slippery. “We were able to stay hidden until we got to the second floor. There we got into a firefight with Prophet and his surviving men. That was fucking furious, real up close. Textbook definition of point blank. Prophet had himself a laboratory of sorts, bottles and bowls, some burners, and lots of hacked apart girtabs. The girl was there, too. They had her in some cage made of shopping carts. Of course, with Mal here spraying the place, and with the Prophet’s gang shooting, something was going to break. Prophet smashed some of the bottles on purpose, before he made is exit.” Ling raises an eyebrow “He was able to escape?” Zed goes on “We had him. We had him. All his thugs were dead. He was running like a hare, Mal would have put him down if not for his vest.”
“So why didn’t you stop him?”
“Someone ran heavy interference.”
“Who?”
“Big Gee.”