ORIGINAL BURN — EP08
"Skippy"
Five idiots. Several guitars. One shortcut through the Wasted Lands.
Jonny had a map.
A proper one.
Routes. Distances. Elevations.
Things marked in colours that probably meant something important.
Skip looked at it for about three seconds.
Then pointed the other way.
“Shortcut.”
I looked at Jonny.
Jonny looked at me.
Skip was already walking.
So we followed him.
The first sign said PROHIBITED.
Big letters.
Red lights.
Barrier down.
Skip walked around it.
Fair enough.
The second problem was a ravine.
Not a little one.
One of those Wasted Lands cracks that disappears far enough down you start wondering if the bottom still belongs to the same world.
There was a beam across it.
Skip was halfway over before the rest of us realised that was the route.
Jonny checked his map.
Then checked Skip.
Then checked his map again.
I don't think the map enjoyed the experience.
Things got vertical after that.
Ladders bolted into cliffs.
Maintenance platforms hanging off rusted supports.
Walkways built by people who apparently had very different ideas about workplace safety.
Skip climbed.
We climbed.
Skip talked while he climbed.
That seemed unnecessary.
At one point Jonny tried explaining that the route didn't agree with the topology.
Skip looked genuinely confused by the problem.
“You just go where it goes.”
Hard to argue with that.
Mostly because he'd already gone.
There was a lever.
There is always a lever.
Skip pulled it.
KLONK.
Something enormous woke up somewhere beneath us.
None of us asked what.
Experience was beginning to suggest that questions only slowed things down.
Then came the old transit systems.
Rails.
Carriers.
Cages.
Platforms.
Things suspended over distances that should not have had things suspended over them.
Every time we reached the end of one impossible machine, Skip found another.
Sometimes it even worked.
Sometimes Disco made it work.
Sometimes Mobie made it work while expressing several opinions about whoever had designed it.
Jonny kept checking the route.
The route kept refusing to apologise.
Eventually we found a checkpoint.
It wanted tickets.
Or identification.
Or blood.
Hard to tell.
The machine printed enough paper to bury a small settlement.
Skip stepped over the barrier.
We stepped over the barrier.
The machine continued printing.
Probably still is.
By then, nobody was asking if Skip knew where he was going.
That question had stopped being useful several miles back.
The better question was whether the Wasted Lands knew where Skip was going.
Because somehow the place kept opening for him.
A rail here.
A maintenance corridor there.
A machine nobody had touched in decades coughing itself awake just long enough to carry five idiots and several guitars somewhere they had absolutely no business being.
Maybe he could read the place.
Maybe broken things made more sense to him than working ones.
Maybe he really was off his head.
Didn't matter.
We had a gig.
And Skip was getting us there.
The last door opened.
Lights beyond it.
Noise.
People.
A stage.
Skip stopped.
Just for a second.
After everything we'd crossed, climbed, ridden, pulled, broken and probably violated several forgotten transit regulations to reach—
there it was.
The reason.
I held out my hand toward the stage.
He grinned.
Didn't need telling twice.
Then Skip did the one thing nobody had questioned all day.
He played.
No maps.
No shortcuts.
No impossible machinery.
Just Skip, a guitar and a crowd that understood him immediately.
The Wasted Lands had spent the whole journey trying to tell us there was no sensible way through.
Skip never needed one.
He just needed somewhere to go.
And a reason to get there.
