IPB-124 Night Of Bondage by Bart Morgan [ILLUSTRATED] (EB)

Jarvas Talbot stopped as he saw the eighteen inch wharf rat run across the broken sidewalk in front of him. The full moon glistened on the beast's yellow-white teeth as Jarvas waited for the rat to move. He hated rats, and he almost wished the San Francisco fog had come in so he would not have seen this one. The night sky, though, was clear as a bell, and the bright fog lights of the ships in the harbor seemed bright... and useless. Fog horns pierced the general silence, making the emptiness of unused pier 29 all the more lonely. Just the way he and his partner, Tony "Knuckles" Morgan liked it. The smells of ship exhaust and rotting fish dropped on the pier blasted at his nostrils, reminding him that he was far from his land-locked home of Kansas City. And mingled with the smell of dead fish was the prominent odor of the Oakland steel mills. Shit! How could people live like this? The whole fucking city smelled.