Gold's Price

by Rich X Curtis

  Gold’s Price

  Rich X Curtis

  ARROW NORTH PUBLISHING LLC

  Copyright © 2020 by Rich X Curtis

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher. For permissions, contact the publisher: Arrow North LLC, 2 Margin Street #341, Salem, MA 01970 or hello@arrownorth.co

  Cover design: Arrow North

  Gold’s Price is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter One

  The scavengers came at dawn. Gold watched them from above, from the lip of her little nest she had cobbled together high in the skeleton of a skyscraper. Mostly just a rusty metal frame, still some masonry floors between 18 and 32. Above 35, it was just a mangled mess of collapsed junk. The building had burned, at one point, the walls pocked with artillery scars. It was hard to tell what had blown off the top floors, but it had been big. It had taken out a lot of the nearby buildings completely; it looked like. Collapsed, like 9/11, only for blocks and blocks. The bottom floors of this one were still intact. Then the middle, skeletal section, with one stairwell going about halfway up to 26 and ending in a hunk of a collapsed wall. Only a skinny person could get through that and then they would face eight stories of mountaineering to reach the next intact floors. Gold had gotten good at traversing that section. She had rigged a few cables to give her options up and down. Fat lot of good this did her now. Trapped.

  The scavs milled about below. She had seen only one or two of the bolder men from the suburbs who did this, picking over an already well-picked-over corpse of a city. But this crew was different. They were bigger, for one, about a hundred. She heard them marching, talking loudly, making a ruckus. She wondered at this, then decided it was to announce their presence to locals, who might take the hint and move along. But it wasn’t their size in numbers that had her stuck. No scavenger crew alone would give her problems. She could melt right through them.

  But they had a truck of some sort with them. Big and yellow and loud. It took up half the street, and a bunch of them had been riding on it, so they could have come from pretty far away. And worse, they had drones. Big ones, the size of a goat, quadcopters. They had zipped by, scouting; it looked like. She had only glimpsed them coming ahead of the column of scavengers for a few seconds, before deciding that if she could see them, they could see her. After that, she could hear them, buzzing around as the crew worked their way down the wide avenue, ransacking buildings picked clean generations ago. What were they looking for?

  All the buildings in the city had been picked clean of salvage. By her reckoning, must have been several waves of salvage, which had worked their way through each street, avenue, and boulevard. First, the survivors. They took the food and anything that would burn. They fortified some defensible buildings and cleaned up a lot of the debris from the streets. Or at least piled it into mounds along the sidewalks. These mounds were green hillocks now, average height about that of a tall man. The survivors had tried living in their bombed-out city for quite a while, before giving up and moving on. Maybe a generation or two had clung on in numbers, before it became clear nobody was coming back to turn the lights and water back on. At some point something big had moved through the wider, flatter part of the city like a bulldozer. A glacier? Something big, anyway.

  The people, they had moved out, to the suburbs, or the farming communities she had glimpsed outside the city. Few people in the city now, despite it being one of the largest she had ever seen, back on twenty-first century Earth. Nobody could live here for long. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink. Which was why she stayed here. Fewer neighbors.

  But now she was stuck. This meant an organized group that had working tech. That was interesting. It was interesting enough to check out. But it wasn’t interesting enough to get shot, or worse, caught over. So she covered up, squeezing down under her two styrofoam mattresses while the drones buzzed around below. She listened, trying to make sense of their dopplered droning, trying to figure out if they were moving or stopped. But it was useless. Buzz buzz buzz. Gold closed her eyes. These people annoyed her already.

  But they were people who wore clothes and had a truck. Not the fur-clad cavemen she’d seen in the suburbs. These people seemed to have a mission. She had lost her mission. So she listened.

  The drones were sophisticated ones, probably piloted remotely. Or piloted by machines, a thought she disliked the taste of. They were close, she could hear them down below. The city was mostly silent, aside from the wind which howled down its ruler-straight avenues, and she could hear the rumble of the truck almost directly below her. She listened to them work for a while, while the drones buzzed by below her. She tried, fruitlessly, to grasp the pattern of their flights. This was also interesting.

  After some time, she risked a peep. If they came up her building, she was safe, since only the most determined climbers could follow her up here. It was dangerous by design, and even she didn’t do it in anything but full daylight. If it was too dark to reach her little nest, she stayed in one floor below until it was light out. Or if there was weather. She’d been careful, down there, to not make it look like someone was living there. Which was stupid, since she knew there were people in small numbers all throughout the city. She did it anyway, out of habit. Concealment was something she had long practiced.

  The locals were transient, she figured, and left them alone. She’d met one when exploring something like an office building, but the man had gibbered in terror of her, and they shared no language. She had considered subduing him, and forcing him to teach her his tongue, but that would take a while, and she didn’t want to be here that long. Better to get somewhere with proper supplies before attempting that. She had thought of going back to the old, old pattern she and Silver had lived through countless lifetimes back on Earth. Find a community, join it, become their leader, or better yet, the power behind the throne. It was a living, but it took time, and it helped to speak the language, although Gold thought she had done it that way before, arrived somewhere with no language and made it work. She sighed, listening to buzzing drones. Complications.

  Because now, this would be a problem. Technology, working machines, meant somebody had their act together somewhere nearby, and that was a different sort of community to infiltrate. If they had AI, such as Smoke’s Center, or even that thing they had met in the mountains, it would be near impossible to join covertly. She considered all of this, listening to them buzz and yell and clonk and thud below her. She had to see.

  She inched her way out towards the edge of the concrete floor, where she could ease her head out and look. Slowly, slowly she inched forward, until her eyes could see down into the street below.

  They were here, all right, not raiding the buildings but the sewers, it looked like. They had cut a gash in the street, several gashes. Figures in yellow jumpsuits were in the gash. They were digging and pulling. She watched as they uncovered a gray metal box, which seemed to have conduits as thick as a man’s waist feeding into it.

  Ah, they had cut gashes all around this box, in a circle, or rather, a clumsy circle composed of several connected arcs. The truck was more of a tank or construction machine. It had several big articulated arms, and its upper portion, not attached to the wide black tank tracks, looked like it could swivel around. It had a bed on top, and what looked like a gondola or cage lashed to it. There was something inside the cage. Someone. The small figure pointed, and the machine lurched forward, two men scrambled away from it. An arm came down and grasped the box in wide, backhoe-like jaws. It tugged and jostled it. She saw
it lift, and it pulled the box out of the hole in the street and put it in the bed on the back. As it swung, her nostrils flared. It had no driver.

  She craned her neck to see more, then stopped, and listened for the drones. She could hear them from below, faint but growing louder. She rolled over quickly, scrambling for her machine pistol. They had come up the other side of the building as she watched. One, two, three, four, they crested the lip of her perch and spread out.

  AI for sure, no human could have flown a drone like that, she thought, wondering if the gun was a good idea. She hesitated, and then it was too late. They were on her level, four of them, spreading out to flank, then surround her. She stood slowly, raising her hands to show she was no threat. Damn.

  The drone to her front dipped, and slowly approached, until it was five feet away. She looked at it. There was writing on its carapace. Some kind of Chinese, definitely an Asian script. She sighed. Silver had lived in China; she could probably tell her. Silver would know what to do here. Gold was at a loss, so she waited. The drone bristled with antennae and protuberances, some of which were surely weapons. Gold waited, thinking.

  For centuries, she had had an enemy. This enemy, her gods, were omnipresent and terrible. They had ridden her like an animal through her dreams. Forcing, cajoling, demanding things from her. That she do this, or that, or go here, or there. She had been their slave.

  Then, she had had Silver, and everything changed. She had not been alone. For a while.

  Smoke had flicked his hand, and she had been here, in the city, with a machine pistol, a radio, and eight magazines. She’d had a PowerBar in her pocket, so those first two days she methodically rationed it into three meals. Smoke had banished her here, but where was here? Some bombed-out post-disaster city, a city that was the size of Mexico City, but built up like New York or Shanghai? Taller, even? She’d seen towers to the south that dwarfed hers. Smoke had taken her here with his new power as the conduit between the Center and Alpha, the newborn AI they had met in that underground data center. With a flick of his fingers, he had brought her here.

  As punishment? Caprice? It didn’t matter. What Smoke, she hoped as she lay awake at night thinking of him, of snapping his neck like a twig, may have not realized, not taken into account, was her affliction. Her enslavement. He had, with his casual gesture, brought her here. And had freed her.

  Her gods, with her for so long, were silent for once. Gone. It had hit her like a thunderclap. She had been so dazed she had staggered into a building and crouched, shivering in a corner. For a long time. She felt empty, lightheaded. Her thoughts were hers and hers alone. To think free thoughts. To be free. She felt drunk with it.

  The drone blatted at her. Some machine harmonics in that, she thought, wincing. “I’m not a machine,” she said to it.

  It spoke, something Asian-sounding to her. She shook her head.

  “Español?” she ventured. “English?”

  It whirred at her. Then, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Gold,” she said, wondering too late if she should have given it a fake name. She shrugged. Too late.

  “You will come down,” it said. Its English was good, standard American English, she reckoned.

  “OK, I will.” She paused. “Can I bring my weapons?”

  “No weapons.” It didn’t seem upset. She had a knife but didn’t feel like mentioning it. Guns would not help her here, anyway.

  “Come down now,” it said. “Street level. Grasp the landing skid securely…”

  “Fuck that. I will walk down,” she said. “I’m not riding this thing down forty stories.”

  It was silent for a few seconds. “The drones will shadow you down. Do not attempt an escape.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “You got me.”

  For now. For now.

  Chapter Two

  The forest on the mountain was alive with the breeze, but he almost felt he could still hear the drones. Lurking, just beyond the line they had drawn for him this time. Watching for him. Watching him, he didn’t doubt. Keeping him here.

  The man sat on one of his favorite rocks and looked down the mountain, down into the valley formed by its eastern shoulder, and a smaller peak a few miles to the west. He looked, shading his eyes. He had good eyes, and after a time he had seen enough.

  “Something’s up,” he told the nameless dog. “The drones have stopped. Haven’t seen one in two months and there used to be a lot more. A lot more.” He smiled at the dog as they joined a path, worn wide with walking. “Who’s a good boy? You are, aren’t you?” He found a stick for the dog. Threw it.

  The dog bounded off after the stick. It dragged it back, and dropped it at his feet.

  “You,” he said, “are a dum-dum.”

  The dog looked up at him and, seeing that the man was looking at him for a long while, barked. The man patted the dog on the head, and together they walked back towards the little hollow with the cabin.

  The dog didn’t have a name; the man had thought, arguing with himself one night. Why do dogs need names? Don’t they have dog names? He’d had dogs, many times, but he had stopped giving them names. Names were cruel. Names. They made you remember things.

  The mountain had had a name, but nobody knew it now. Had probably had a few names, he thought, as the natives here before the settlers, before the white man came, must have had at least some names for it. He was just north of Yosemite, so this was pretty well-traveled, back when people still traveled. Nobody came up here anymore. Nobody traveled, either.

  There had been a town, once, down in the valley. But it had burned, or been burned, and all those people had left. He had watched it happen. There had been explosions. So he had hidden, being afraid, until it was too late, and they were gone and he was alone on the mountain.

  Hiding, he had thought. Being clever, to go far away again. But no, wrong again. He was caught. He had only thought he was hiding, coming up here to the mountain, building onto the little cabin by the stream. But they’d found him, or followed him, and, apparently, kept him here. Maybe they had herded him here. He didn’t know. But time passed. He had been wondering when something like this would happen. It had taken a long time, but something had happened. Something had switched off in the world. Something bad happened.

  He had watched, in the long years after his capture. First, he had watched out of a terrible resolve. Catch him? Cage him? Locked in a cage, patrolled by drones, trapped on a mountain like a grizzly bear or mountain lion? He had tested the drones, and they had trivially defeated him. He tried a night sneak. Caught. Sirens and their hooting blats driving him back up the mountain. A tunnel, and they flew over and dropped rocks on the entrance to on it. As soon as he had been safely away from it, blammo. After that he had watched out of a detached wariness.

  He watched, waiting at the trailhead near the slope that marked the edge of his prison. From there he could see the southern sky unobstructed by trees, and the trail that led up from the valley below. The boy or his father would come soon, he thought. Spring and summer, like clockwork. It occurred to the man, that maybe the father had been the boy, and that this cycle had repeated itself before. Maybe several times. He wasn’t sure. He’d been here that long.

  The man had a name, but nobody said it anymore. He didn’t say it. He was tall, with reddish-brown hair he wore shaggy about his ears, hacking at it with a knife when it got too long. He wore buckskin leggings, and a dark gray skintight thermal shirt, woven of an untearable fabric. The leggings were old, and much patched with knots and passable stitching. The shirt was older still, he knew, but didn’t like to think about how old it was. How old he was.

  The mountain was old. How old? he wondered. Hundreds of millions of years? How to even measure it? A mountain was just part of the Earth’s skin, pinched and pushed up into a peak. At what point does it deserve the name mountain? There had probably been a metric for it, a set height. Anything above this is a mountain. Five thousand feet? But there had been mountains in New E
ngland, when he was young, which they called which Mount This or Mount That. Mount Washington. THIS CAR DROVE MOUNT WASHINGTON. Red and white text. Bumper stickers. He shook his head. Woolgathering again. It happened. Old, in mind if not in the body. Lonely.

  He stood up and stamped his feet. He shouldered his pack, a wooden frame and leather construction of his own design, which he had based on what he remembered of his Boy Scout pack. He glanced down the slope. No drones. No walkers. He started down the trail. The boy wasn’t coming. The father wasn’t coming. Nobody was coming.

  He walked farther down the slope, up to where, once, the drones would have swooped on him, harassing him with noise and flashing lights, rubber bullets and noxious sprays. No drones. The sky was clear and blue. The dog followed him down the hill.

  It was time to leave. Past time, probably. But he couldn’t stay on the mountain, now that the town was gone. Now that the boy, or father, would not come bearing a wagon of food for the winter. Without that food, he would starve. He could stay warm, as he’d laid in ten cords of wood, neatly stacked and seasoned. But without food he would die.

  He passed a tripod that had stood for many years, watching him. He stopped and inspected it. The last winter had been rough, and the snows and ice had toppled it, finally. But it had been dead, he guessed, for several years before that. Maybe for a dozen. There had been drones, though, until this last winter. And the spring before that, there had been at least one or two walkers. Of that he was sure. The town had burned last year. Or maybe the year before. He didn’t remember. And the trucks, out on the far strip of highway, had stopped just before that. Hadn’t they? Or maybe longer. He had, he knew, lost track. Dreamtime.

  He ran his hand over the metal and plastic tripod frame, now a crumpled mess. Flakes of blue paint still adhered to the central trash-can-sized carapace that had sat atop it, bristling with antennae. It lay half-covered in brush and mud. There was writing on it, characters the man couldn’t read. Chinese, he assumed. Chinese was like that, much more static than western languages ever had been. If he had ever learned Chinese when he had the chance, he could probably read these words.