Chapter 41: Bloodline Town
[Warning: You are entering a nuclear contamination zone]
A battered, rusted street sign stood ahead, spray-painted with crude symbols and text.
The Bloodline District lay in the southwest of Liuguang City, a long way from even the closest neighboring zone, the Pharaoh District.
Only a single dilapidated highway still connected to this once-glorious place. Aside from the occasional opportunist, outlaw, or deranged researcher passing through, almost no one visited the wasteland.
Right now, a heavily modified armored pickup rolled down the ruined highway, a Blood Blades emblem painted on its chassis.
A Drifter Band song drifted from the windows. Lorna gripped the steering wheel with her newly installed Cyberware right hand. She wore a red leather jacket and black leather pants, her face covered by a metal plague doctor mask. An Eastern tobacco cigarette hung from her lips, smoke curling from the mask's open beak.
She stared through the windshield at the desolate, scorched plains ahead, dragging on the cigarette harder.
Decades ago, this had been an emerging zone. Unlike many districts in Liuguang City populated mostly by immigrants, the Bloodline District gathered those born locally within this free state, their bloodlines a chaotic mix.
The first generation of bloodliners had worked hard to pioneer this southwestern wasteland, building roads and communities.