The wheezing, beaten old mechanical thing pushed itself as hard as its partner could. The driver was the organic equivalent of the dilapidated, once-proud vehicle: sad eyes thirty years beyond their age which crowned the midnight-tinted sagging flesh bags beneath and their own wrinkled, branching, limb-like crevasses of stress and mourning.

Reef had been through so much. They both had. They all had. But now, only one man and one car remained.

He thought back through the colorful assortments of playful vehicles that used to dance with him down this crumbling mountain pass, when his bags were lighter, when his own car sounded of husky torque and not the final coughs of a bitter sage. Once they had been the Arigato Boyz, the premiere free-driving gang in the Wasteland between Northus and SOUTHUS. It was only four years ago when they’d met, and only one night ago when the rest had been forced to self-harvest.

The notorious Seventh Hairpin approached. The original speed limit for the entire route, when there were still life and law in the ruins of Appalachia, had been 25. The posted warning speed for the particular turn was 15. The Arigato Boys had gotten comfortable taking the turn going 30mph (signs in the Wasteland were still, of course, posted in old-SOUTHUS units). Now, Reef was in the straight approaching the graded turn and going 55… 65… 75…

He thought back about the last time they’d actually taken the turn. He wasn’t sure which time it was, what date. The memories blurred together, a consistent, uproarious, jubilous repeat of the many times Reef, Zingo, Ms. Asus and Dr. Skonk had whipped expertly around that turn, their individual laughters the only thing loud enough to be heard over the screech of the wheels at their traction limits and the roaring of well-tuned engines. A midnight blue convertible, a tan rusted hatchback, an antique Mustang and, of course, Reef’s old WRX.

This time, though, he was alone on the all-important lead-up to the final boss of all mountain hairpins. Every time they’d hit the mountain, every one of them had been fully aware it could be their last time. It was dangerous—horribly dangerous—and that’s what made it so fun, so thrilling. It was a risk they took every time they hit the pass, often twice a week or more. They’d had some minor bumps and crunches and required some hackjob fixes, but they’d accepted that possibility, too. What irony that they’d been instead systematically executed by corporate brown-shirts for sleeping outside of corpostate jurisdiction instead! Not a scratch on Reef, not a hair out of place on Ms. Asus, not a wrinkle in the suit of Dr. Skonk or the plastunic of Zingo came from their extended stupidity on the touge.

No, instead, when the abandoned motel had been found and it was realized life existed still blissfully out of the all-consuming grasp of the Immortals, it had been the slow, cold torture of the Memory Chambers which had ended the other three. Technically, they had harvested their own lives—there were many many ways to do so within the Memory Chambers, and no automated process for forcing it, aside from the endless looping torment, algorithmically testing every possible trauma response while the victim was trapped in slow-time stasis, until that perfect combination was automatically found by the all-powerful Machine God Mind which will drive man to do anything it takes to end the suffering.

Reef wondered as the guardrail approached ahead which memories they’d triggered to make them all do it. He knew them better than he knew himself, better than he’d ever know the family he didn’t have, but they had never delved into the unpleasantness that had led them all to the Wasteland to begin with. It had been an escape for them from that—they’d come here to leave the trauma, the memories, the forced vampirism of blood and credits both, the veritable rotting seminal cradle of apocalypse that corpostate civilization had become.

He had his suspicions, based on generalized knowledge of their trades and how they fit into the world: Dr. Skonk had probably been forced to deny treatment to someone suffering, possibly even a child, rather than face the all-pulverizing fists of the pneumat cops to the skull she knew would come if she helped someone on corpostate time who she knew would be unable to pay. It was a common reason for the 20% suicide rate among healthcare workers (not counting Memory Chamber victims, where the rate became a universal and general 100%). Ms. Asus was a mere peon, so it was more likely a personal loss for her—being forced to replay over and over in slow motion the pain of miscarriage, of holding a child in her arms and watching it die, of feeling a childhood pet’s last breath and then being forced to stare for a simulated eternity into its cold dead eyes. These were less specific guesses, and based more on the general types of weakness the Memory Chamber was known for.

Zingo, though? Reef really had no idea. Zingo had always seemed more stable than the others, like he’d gone through relatively less before making his way to Wasteland. He had no way of guessing that Zingo was the easiest to harvest: the algorithm’s first try was to replay the day he lost his job, his house, and was asked politely by his wife’s boss to come remove her unsightly body from the break-room ceiling fan where it was dangling and had begun to smell. That was the part the Machine God Mind had really honed in on: the slow motion circles of the corpse, the empty expression in her hollowed eyes, the scent of the perfume Zingo had found to feel more like home than their actual home now competing with the sickly scent of freshly rotting flesh. The death-bloated belly, a mockery of the pregnancy she had so dearly craved and been always unable to achieve, was the eternal torture that had led Zingo to unzip his neck from his head with the appropriately provided tools within.

Reef didn’t have to wonder what the Machine God Mind would pull out to make him harvest himself. It didn’t take a Memory Chamber to make him see it superimposed over every waking moment in every corner of his vision: arriving at the motel after a solo practice run in the ol’ Subaru with a handful of smuggled SOUTHUS snacks he’d forgotten to bring in before, walking into their private lobby palace, and finding the bloodless, harvested skinhusks of the rest of the Arigato Boyz.

He wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of self-harvesting, though. No—he was going to let all that precious, power-packed blood go to waste, and the Immortals couldn’t stop him. There wouldn’t be a single salvageable Stint of it for the sick fucks, and he knew that would anger them more than anything else he could ever possibly do.

For the first time ever, one of the Arigato Boyz didn’t swerve into the hairpin. Reef faced the guardrail head-on, unflinching, exceeding 90mph. The old car tore through the ancient rusted metal barrier like it was mere tinfoil, launching over the edge and soaring above the endless forest now reclaiming the land so many hundreds of feet below. The windows open, Reef spread his arms like wings, feeling and knowing that his car felt just as free. He had never felt so alive.

The landing into the hard, dense foliage was swift, merciless—a momentary squall of shattered glass, mangled steel, and crunching bones, then naught but the soft crackling from the brilliant pyre of purifying flames.

Birds screeched overhead. A wildwoods dog howled at the moon. The flames consumed every last drop which could have been harvested. Reef smoldered away, his skull locked forever in a sardonic, satisfied smile. He’d become a skinhusk without giving up a drop. He’d managed to attain death without harvest. The Arigato Boyz had seized one small final victory, after all.