Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1)

by C. Robert Cargill

I had always thought Murka was madkind, some old four-oh-four that burned out while watching old vids of some classic, Cold War–era movie; that he divided the world into Americans and commies with nothing in between because that’s the particular way his chips sizzled when they overheated. And maybe that was still true. Mercer thought I had seen some shit. But this guy—this guy was the first to get the choice. He didn’t have a choice like mine—whether to kill the thing I loved the most or die. He had to choose whether to bring about the end of the world or not, for the thing he loved the most. That’s shit far worse than what I’ve seen; that’s shit that will stick with you crazy or not. No. Murka was something else. He had the kind of damage even Doc couldn’t repair. It’s an odd moment the first time you really understand someone, when all of their foibles, eccentricities, and ticks cease to be chaos, and coalesce into something wholly logical. That was the moment I was having, seeing Murka for the first time through new eyes. He wasn’t just draped in the dead aesthetics of America; he was America, its last, final torchbearer, keeping a dream alive, even if for a short time.