Under a Killing Moon

PROLOGUE:

In the moonlight, New San Francisco sparkles like a chunk of cubic zirconium, an island of hollow beauty surrounded by a red sea of radiation. Five million souls drowning in gamma rays.

It’s December 2042. Some optimistic visionaries predicted that this millennium would usher in a new age, where technology and enlightened minds would combine to create some kind of heaven on earth. Well, that isn’t how it turned out. We kicked things off with another “war to end all wars,” only this one may have lived up to its name. Half the planet took it on the chin, forests turned into ashtrays, oceans into cesspools, and a large minority of human beings into genetically disfigured casualties of war.

These unlucky souls are called Mutants. The effects of radioactive fallout added another check box to the census forms. Now, there’s a whole new form of discrimination. New San Francisco is one bad decision away from civil war.

Most of us got lucky, or at least our genes did. The lucky ones are classified as Norms.

I’m one of them. Most of them live in the new city, but I don’t. I live among the unfortunate souls, the Mutants and the destitute, in the wreckage of Old San Francisco.

My name is Tex Murphy. I’m a private detective — or at least I used to be. Since my marriage hit the rocks, I haven’t done much more than look for the bottom of a bourbon bottle. I haven’t had a case in weeks, or months, if I don’t count the ones I wasn’t paid for. In my book, this chapter’s titled “The Year I’d Like To Forget and Probably Will.”

I hand my hat in a dingy joint called the Ritz Hotel. My office on the third floor doubles as a studio apartment. Just like me, the Ritz used to be something. Now it’s just another grimy building in a rundown part of town. And I’m almost out of bourbon.