by Nick Cole
“Right again,” Ellis said.
“That means this pool is here on purpose, which means one of two things. Either this is the extent of the tunnel system, and maybe they put this pool here as a spare water cistern—”
“Or?”
“Or, the tunnel probably continues on the other side of that wall,” Delores said.
“You’re a smart girl for only seventeen.”
“And you’re only five years older than me,” she said.
Ellis bent over and picked up a small clod of mottled clay and tossed it into the water. He counted until he saw bubbles surface on the water.
Twelve. Maybe twelve to fifteen feet deep.
“Those five years—the difference between my age and yours—they were lived after the Beginning, so they count double,” he said.
“I lived those five years too,” Delores shrugged. “So we’re back where we started. Closer than you’d like… in years at least.”
“In years,” Ellis repeated.
There was silence for a full minute as the two friends stared at the water. The surface had gone eerily still after the disruption from the clod.
“Someone has to dive down there and see if the tunnel extends through to the other side,” Ellis said.
Delores looked over at Ellis, “And I suppose you think that someone should be you?”
“I do,” Ellis replied.
***
Ellis lowered himself into the cold, stagnant pool. Though he knew the water had to be around fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit, it felt icy.
“If someone was walking around down here with little or no light,” he said through clenched teeth, “and if they were to fall in here, they’d go in over their heads. It’s deep. I don’t know how deep, but it’s deep.” He kicked his legs and flexed his muscles against the cold. “The shock might cause them to freeze or cramp up and they’d likely drown.” He looked up at Delores and smiled. “And even if they didn’t drown, they’d be soaked through. Hypothermia would be a certainty if they didn’t make fire, or get out of these tunnels fast enough.”
“You’re not making me feel any better about this,” Delores said.
“We have to find out if this tunnel goes through and under the Solekeep,” Ellis said. “If it is a way out, it is also a way in.”
“Shouldn’t we have started a fire first?” she asked. “Or maybe we should’ve gotten some blankets and dry clothes?”
“I won’t be down there long, Delores,” Ellis said. “And I won’t go any further if the tunnel goes on. I’ll just be in and out.”
“I don’t feel good about this,” she said, shaking her head.
“Well, I’m already in the water. Might as well take a dive.”
“Make it quick, Ellis.”
Ellis nodded his head. “I will. Keep your light on the water. It won’t do me much good past about eight feet down, but it’ll help me find my way back up.”
“Will do.”
Chapter 18
Interludes in the Wasteland:
Things to do Before you Die
For three days he walked.
Night.
Day. Night.
Day. Night…
The West Texas morning greeted Walker in furious gusts that tore along the arroyos and across endless wastes of dry brown sage. There was a white noise silence that seemed to come from everywhere, but he barely noticed it over the voices of his murdered friends. The dead and the dying shrieked over and over, again and again inside his head. Pain, burns, those things were there, but he’d turned that part of himself off. The part that felt.
Mind over matter.
You don’t mind…
He’d seen all the faces of his friends.
Seen them as he crawled out from the wreckage of the burning convoy. Seen what the bikers had done to the living and the dead.
…It don’t matter.
For three days now he’d crossed the land and seen it as nothing but a cemetery. One big, gigantic cemetery. Dead farms falling into the wild picked over crops. Dead towns surrendering to sand and blasted by the wind and heat. A dead city in the distance like the shadow of some ancient alien thing. For three days…
He was tired now. Tired enough to finally sleep, he tried to tell himself. Tired enough to let down his guard for the barest amount of time a man with revenge on his mind could afford to. In a small, sandy depression out of the wind, he set down the old Lapua sniper rifle, wrapped in burlap to protect it from the sand and dust that carried everything in it as though the world were ending all over again. He set it down against a low broken rock.
“Everything’s broken,” he commented, fighting to stay conscious as a rising blackness threatened to take him. After a moment, it passed.
“Why?” he whispered.
Why, what? he answered without words. Why, what?
Why fight it? Might not be so bad, and… what’s left, anyway?
He eased down into the small depression. He could see the broken rock was part of some forgotten fieldstone wall that marched off through the racing wind and swirling dust in the north. The wind rose a notch, howling. Keening.
Why?
He popped the tin of salve, its smell medicinal. He didn’t even know if it would do any good for the burns on his arm. His neck. His leg. Then he eased off the dusty, brown leather trench and began to smear the medicine on his burns. His neck. His face. He’d forgotten about the side of his face. He smeared it there and all the other places he’d been burned. When he was done, he took the 9mm from out of one of the trench pockets and held it with his good hand. He thought about how he would sleep. Where the gun needed to be while he slept in case someone was there when he awoke. Where the rifle needed to be if he needed to get to it next. Once the 9mm was empty.
Whoever came for him would go for the rifle first. Sure enough. They’d see it as a prize and head straight for it and if he heard them moving near his head, then…
He lay down with the pistol at his side. In his mind he visualized hearing them coming. The mustachioed bikers. He’d play possum and wait… wait… then… POW. There were four bullets in the 9mm.
Five in the Lapua.
Nine rounds to kill every one of the bikers.
He pulled the trench over him. Like a blanket. Like a body bag. Like a final rest. Then he closed his eyes and felt sleep and fatigue come rushing past the pain of the burns and the three day walk and the faces of the dead.
He let it all go…
…and thought, nine rounds to kill them all.
And, just before the darkness…
That’s why.
Chapter 19
Vargas didn’t drink as much as he used to. Then again, there wasn’t as much to drink as there used to be. Sure there was Mexican Red to smoke. There was always a lot of dope to get loaded on. A lot. Even the high-powered chronic the gang cared for in their hidden little farms, cared for more than their lost families and heartbroken mothers, was abundant. But, Vargas was tired of weed.
He’d kill for a bottle of bottom shelf tequila.
Straight up lighter fluid.
No color.
All burn.
Tequila Blanco. Then he’d get real crazy.
Everyone knew Reyes Badfinger had a bottle. Had taken it off some now-dead farmer a few days back before the attack on the armored busus. A few days before the Stranger in Black had told them where they, along with some other gangs that were so inclined to work together for the moment, might wait for a convoy coming out of the west.
Now, if he could get his hands on that guy, the Stranger in Black, why he’d wring the man’s fat neck.
Vargas stood and brushed the dust and dead grass from his chaps.
The bikes were parked along the crumbling remains of an old place from before the collapse. Casperville. Out in a
residential section of the small town where the roofs of old ranchero houses sagged and the corners all seemed to lean into the east. The mere shapes of dry lawns and the forgotten memory of worn out sidewalks were the resting places of tents for the bikers who’d come here after midnight. After the attack on the convoy.
They’d lost almost half their number in that attack.
They’d taken three women.
Gear. Guns. And Groupies.
That’s what they called their slaves. Groupies.
For a fleeting moment Vargas thought about one of them, but his sudden burning lust morphed into thoughts of cheap tequila and visions of slaking his thirst while wringing the Stranger in Black’s fat neck. Vargas saw the man’s eyes bulging as he choked him. His purple tongue lolling out of his thick, cracked, red lips.
Across the dusty street Reyes Badfinger popped up from the flap of his tent, pulling at faded and torn jeans. Hammering one of the groupies no doubt, thought Vargas, who was tired. Tired of not having what he wanted… when he wanted it. Reyes, El Rey as some of the other bikers called him, had led them into the scrap against the convoy. And what had they gotten? Some women and some guns. The other gangs had made off with more, Vargas was sure of that.
His fingers traced the tip of the grip of the knife strapped to his leg. Yes, Vargas was indeed very tired of not getting everything he wanted. And more than just being tired, he was thirsty. Very thirsty.
He crossed the old broken sidewalk where once little white girls had played hopscotch. Or so he imagined. Little white girls like ghosts playing hopscotch in their dresses. He crossed into the street, heading straight for Reyes Badfinger. El Rey. The leader of the gang and their king and that nice bottle of tequila he’d been holding back since the farmers they’d raped and murdered.
Rape and murder?
Vargas didn’t think of it that way.
No, not at all.
Re-distribution. Just like he’d been taught by La Raza back in school before the collapse. If you weren’t part of the race, well, then you were just something less. A nobody to take from.
He looked at Reyes with trouble in his heart.
It’s just redistribution, he told himself.
In that moment as Vargas let his hand fall to the grip of the knife…
In that moment before he’d flick it underhand right into Reyes Badfinger’s heavily tattooed chest and then go in and find that tequila and drink it all down and then have the groupie Reyes had just finished with…
In that moment before all the bad things that he wanted to come to him…
Vargas’ deep, dark brown eyes met the similar eyes of Reyes Badfinger.
Once you start redistributing, where does it stop?
Reyes Badfinger knew that look. You don’t get to be the leader of a sociopathic post-apocalyptic biker gang without knowing the look. The “I want what you got” look of the unrestrained sociopath, or psychopath.
That look.
Reyes, in one surprisingly effortless motion, reached down inside his tent and drew out the 12 gauge shotgun.
Double Barreled.
He had a sheath, a patchwork canvas holster right inside the flap of his tent. Only the groupies knew about that.
When it was drawn out and pointing right at Vargas, dead center, Reyes Badfinger smiled.
Vargas hadn’t even fully gripped the knife strapped to his leg and he knew he was dead.
So did Reyes.
In that last moment Vargas tried a quick, almost sheepish smile that said “my bad”. Whatever that meant. Then Reyes pulled the trigger on both barrels because he couldn’t take a chance on a bad shell and a misfire.
***
Later, after going at the groupie again, and after Vargas was nearly finished crying and dying in the middle of the street where Reyes Badfinger had put him down with two blasts from the old shotgun, El Rey stepped out of his tent again. He held his bottle of tequila right in front of Vargas’ wet, red and now staring eyes. Held it there like he knew Vargas was still somewhere inside that body. Vargas was down to seconds and he smiled when he saw Reyes hold out the bottle of cheap Tequila.
Just like he’d wanted.
One of the dying man’s last thoughts was, “Reyes isn’t such a bad guy after all.” He’d get his drink before going wherever it was he was going, he’d never really considered where that would be, though he’d been headed toward it all along.
But Reyes pulled the bottle back to his own lips and drank. Deep, slurping, pulls. His eyes squinted the way Vargas knew tequila that was so bad it was good made your eyes squint.
If he’d waited, and by waited I mean not died, why, Vargas would have seen the Stranger in Black arrive shortly with a cartload of all the bad tequila one could ever want to blind themselves with. All of it gurgling and sloshing inside old laundry detergent bottles and other such random containers.
If he’d just waited.
But death, death is impatient that way.
Chapter 20
The Baron of the Scraps
The Baron’s real name was Mark Barrone. Before everything went south, he’d been a long haul trucker and smuggler. He’d only been at it for a couple of years after getting out of the Navy as an electrician’s mate. Dishonorably discharged for illegal activities involving the misappropriation of government goods. But after everything went downhill for the world as people knew it then, and by downhill just read: fell off a steep cliff, which is a sort of an extreme version of downhill, then Mark Barrone became the Baron. It took a while to become a man known by such an imposing and almost regal sounding nickname, but in the end, as his little band of metal scavengers bested, clawed and occasionally murdered the local competition, he became known as the Baron.
The ruler, for the moment, of the Scraps.
A note on that “murder” thing. It wasn’t like his band of metal pirates had just gone out and murdered people for their stuff the way outlaw biker gangs did. No, the murder referred to here specifically involved a certain man known as Rhino who’d had it in his greedy heart, and on his ambitious to-do list, to make sure that the Baron got murdered first. Word got back to the Baron’s crew when they were operating out of the scraps along with a bunch of other crews, that such dastardly intentions were the active pursuit of the aptly named, and now deceased, Rhino. Soon enough, one thing led to another and poor old Rhino got it before he could do it.
Still, it was murder.
Or at least that’s what the world that once was would have thought.
But not now. Now, preemptive elimination was considered a character trait to be admired, and of course, imitated. Such is the way of all bad behaviors gone unchecked.
But what can be wrong when nothing is really wrong? That’s the way the old world was headed anyway. Going off the cliff had just codified the eventual reality.
The Scraps were firmly, for the moment, and as much as such tenuous hold in a post-apocalyptic life can be called “firmly”, the Scraps were firmly under the influence of the Baron, who for a time, seemed to be running the show there in the little ad hoc fortress everyone had cobbled together.
One Saturday morning… someone must have once known that such a day would be a Saturday. A Saturday morning on a calendar kept by someone or some electronic thing when the keeping of times and days and even dates was important. Even though now no one really cared if it was a Saturday morning or not. The Baron announced that Saturday morning that he had another expedition in mind. After breaking practically every bone in Scrounge McGee’s body the night before and then leaving him chained to a guard rail out where the county roads intersected, they’d all returned to the Scraps to drink an eye-watering potato vodka someone had been ginning up lately. That was when the Baron announced that he wanted to quote unquote “make a foray” out into Casperville and see what they might pick over.
Some
few of his men needed the word “foray” explained, and others, like Hutch Hutchins, knew exactly what it meant and offered their thoughts thusly on the matter.
“Casperville been picked over hunnerts o’ times, Baron.”
Everyone gathered their tools regardless. Orders were orders, for now. Pliers to strip wire. Crowbars to dislodge pipes and panels. Rendered fat to free up rusted bolts. All the thing metal salvagers need to salvage.
In response to this true statement of fact from the wisdom of Hutch Hutchins, the Baron merely continued to groom his horse and pat the hindquarters, whispering as he did so.
“Some folks lived out that way year ‘fore last.” This was a contribution from Tom whose real name was Tim but everyone took great delight in calling him Tom anyway. One more bad winter or flu, or even an encounter with some biker gang and all who could remember his name as actually being “Tim” might soon be gone. History, whatever that meant in these record-less days, would put him down as “Tom” on some wooden marker out in the sand and sage along the old highways where the pirates did their business and often buried their dead.
“Naw,” replied Hutch Hutchins. “All a‘em died o’ the flu thang last winter. Ah rode out there ‘bout the enda the storms and they had the signs up telling everyone to stay away. They’s all dead when I went in to have a look anyways.”
Hutch had taken some nice things back to the Scraps that no one knew about and even now some of those things were buried out near a rusting car off a road the map once marked as Paradise Highway.
“Naw, sure enough they’s all dead,” pronounced Hutch again.
The Pirates were beginning to form up into the two long columns they always walked in, their gear and sacks and goggles and makeshift armor secured. Weapons consisting of improvised shovels and picks and the occasional machete were ready. Everyone with their crowbar. That was standard Precious Metal Pirate gear. In fact, that was pretty much how you could tell someone had gone pirate. The crowbar was like a badge of honor to them.
“Well then, shall we ride out to Casperville and have a look around?” asked the Baron, as he swung easily into the saddle that’d been occupied just a few days prior by that McGee character. The rapist they’d tried to use as bait to gain intel on the high valley.