“Never thought of doing that, and I’ve heard of a lot of people dying of starvation,” Mira said as she walked up to us, shaking her head in amazement. “Can you get all three?”
She inclined her head to the source of the shadows, which descended from high above with hesitant circles, getting smaller as they gained confidence at Natif’s small size and lack of motion. They were buzzards, and big ones, but far from bald. These had huge crests of golden feathers, leaving them somewhere between a carrion bird and a huge pheasant with an attitude problem. The first landed, shrieked at his cousins, and walked with purpose to launch a razor-sharp beak at Natif’s toe.
My bullet splattered the bird’s head, then I snapped off two more rounds, each taking another flying pair of drumsticks with ease.
“I sort of thought that would be harder,” I said, looking at the huge birds as Natif leapt up and grinned.
“Easy, told you!” Natif piped from his former grave. He brushed sand away, grabbing the first bird with a grunt. The blood chickens were huge, and I walked toward the downed creatures to help bring them back. Mira grabbed one, I took the other, and we gave Natif the honor of bringing in the third since it had been his superb acting that baited the creatures into our trap. “They’re dumb that way. All you have to do it be still.”
“Brilliant,” I told Natif, who beamed. “I’m no expert, but I don’t think we can eat feathers.”
“I’ll pluck,” Natif said. “I did it a lot before Lasser took me in.”
He was good as his word. In less than an hour, the birds were plucked, skinned, gutted, and roasting over a small hot fire on three sticks leaned together for support. “We’ll move them every few minutes so one side doesn’t burn,” Mira said. She was a post-apocalyptic barbecue expert, fussing with the birds to get each side crisp and sizzling. We would have well more than five kilos of meat from each bird, which meant we wouldn’t starve before locating something more nutritious than exceptionally stupid birds.
“Time is an issue, so we’re going under,” I said when the birds were cooked. We filled our skins, checked weapons, and eyed the sun. There was still plenty of daylight left, but I wanted to avoid the surprise of a night attack, even though I thought it unlikely.
“I’ll watch the fire and venture out with Natif,” Lasser said.
“Sounds good. This is going to work,” I told everyone. Tension was building in the air, and I wanted to get ahead of it. If we were going to crush Taksa and Senet, it would come down to many factors, but the one thing we wouldn’t do was be hesitant. I would take the fight right to their doorstep, and I would do it with a smile.
“Ready?” Mira asked. She stood with Silk, guns and torches at the ready.
“Ready. Natif, Lasser, I only have one order before we go into the ruins,” I said.
“What’s that?” Lasser asked.
I pointed at Natif with a mock frown. “Save me a drumstick.”
33
“We go left this time,” I said, turning to hold my torch ahead. The facility was bigger than I imagined, and the floors looked intact in the second wing. “So far, so good. The buildings up top must be for show.”
“Why for show? They’re made from concrete,” Mira said.
“Yes, but I think they were just a distraction. Like Alatus, this is where the real work got done.” I leaned around a corner, but like the other halls, it was empty. A dead place, filled only with ghosts and the leftovers of my world.
“If there are seeds on the other side, then what will this place be?” Silk asked. “Seems like less—what did you call them? Offices?”
“It does. That’s good. We like stuff, not paperwork and cubicles,” I said, moving forward at a steady pace. There were a lot of doors. It would take weeks to explore and find everything useful, but something stood out at first glance. “Look at this,” I said, kneeling.
“This was animal skin,” Mira said, probing a circle of fragments and dust.
I lifted my torch high, peering into the darkness. A flicker caught my eye, and I stepped toward it. “Plexiglass. A wall between labs.” The wall was ten meters long. It was an open area, filled with machines and lab equipment of all kinds. A gold mine in the right hands, and I knew we had found something to secure our future.
Then I saw the writing.
“Can you read it?” Silk asked.
The plexiglass was covered in script, beginning at the left and crawling down the wall in small, neat blocks. “Scratched in with a point of some kind,” Silk said, running her fingertip over the lettering.
The breath left my body in a rush as I began to read. “They were here for a long time,” I said.
“Who were they?” Mira asked. “Are they still here?” She began looking around, but there were no skeletons. No evidence of anyone other than us.
“Let me—okay, I get it,” I said. Reading quickly, I scanned the first four panels of writing; all were the same person using brief, professional language. Probably an officer or commander, I thought. “They went into lockdown after the virus hit a tipping point, but this place was never meant to be a fort. It was a working lab in plant and medical tech. There were thirty-one people here when they closed the door up top.”
“What happened to them?” Silk asked.
“They died off. Four suicides, a few were wounded and couldn’t be saved,” I said, reading the report of utter chaos across the entire world. “There were doctors, but some of the wounds were beyond help. They were down to twenty people in a month, and then some of them left, trying to get to Altus. Alatus, I mean. Two went northwest to another base. They never came back, but the rest tried to organize a communication network.”
“Is that what this is?” Silk asked. She pointed to a diagram of lines two panels down.
“Good eye. Six in all. So there were more of them,” I said. “Six bases. A local defense network set up by the Air Force. No wonder I never knew about it. I doubt anyone did.”
“Jack, what’s this?” Mira asked. She tapped a huge double door just beyond the glow of my torch. “It’s been oiled and used. There’s no dust.”
“Something Velarus was doing, I bet,” I said. “Step back. We might not be the only ones who understand traps.” I put my hand against the door, feeling a low vibration. “Something is still working in there. Machines.”
“A thing that works for two thousand years?” Silk asked in a stunned voice.
“I guess so. My people could build to last, but still...” I let my voice trail off, thinking about risk and reward. “Clear the door. I’ll open.”
Silk and Mira split to either side, guns ready and torches high. With my boot, I pushed on the door, taking deep breaths in case everything went to shit.
The door swung open easily, as the sound of falling water reached my ears. “A waterfall?”
I looked around the door, gun ready—and stopped in my tracks, too stunned to move. Mira peeked over my shoulder, then I heard Silk’s noise of surprise. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Another garden?” Mira asked.
“More than that. It’s a greenhouse, and I think we just found the way to build our life,” I said.
The room was huge, brightly lit, and filled with the smells of life. Three long raised beds of dirt were crowded with young trees, flowers, and vegetables, all green and healthy.
“How...?” Mira asked, but I just pointed to the panels above.
“Water power from there,” I said. The water wheel turned at a steady pace, a falling stream entering from a tube in the wall. The water made power, lighting panels on the ceiling, and then filled an irrigation system of copper tubes that ran to the end of each huge bed. “It’s a greenhouse and a power system. It’s the seed of life. I wondered where they got the trees.”
“Why plant them here?” Silk asked.
“Too hot up top. Get everything started down here, cover it, protect it, and you can keep producing food and trees, all to make the oasis bigger and bigger. It’s b
rilliant. It’s also way beyond that idiot Velarus, which means this was set up by someone a long time ago. I bet Velarus got the wheel working by unclogging the spring. Once the water flowed, he had a way to start all over again.”
“Look—bones,” Mira said, lifting a small animal bone from the nearest bed.
“Fertilizer. Velarus was descending into the state of an animal, but he wasn’t always like that. They brought the soil back, planted seeds, and made a garden in the Empty. I bet there’s a record of the original one if we read all of the notes left behind,” I said.
“What are all these plants?” Silk asked.
The farthest bed had few trees, but a lot of vegetables and even some fruit bushes—berries shining like beacons of a life that the Empty hadn’t seen in a long time.
“Food. A future, reborn. Velarus did some good things before he got greedy,” I said.
“Greedy?” Silk was confused by my answer.
“He was like Taksa and Senet. Wanting too much power, too much change with medicine and tech he couldn’t hope to understand, and now he’s dead.” I walked over to a tomato plant, and it smelled like life itself. When I turned back to Mira and Silk, my smile was unstoppable. “So much good here.”
“This is a nursery, sort of?” Mira asked, running her fingers over the leaves of a young oak tree. There were hundreds of them, from knee high to well above my head and everywhere in between. As much as they would help, the working water power was even more important. The greenhouse was worth more than anything else in the world right now, because I was here, and I knew what to do with it.
“It is. We think Taksa will come from the west, if he follows the route from Alatus. That means we need a way to peel the slaves away so they don’t get caught in the crossfire,” I said, staring at the saplings. An idea took shape, and if it worked, we would need a few hours to make it happen. “Back up top. We need all hands to find the wagons and—” I stopped in my tracks, lifting my nose to smell the air beyond the water wheel. There was something sharp underneath it. A familiar scent, but so unexpected, I walked as if in a dream toward the end of the greenhouse, looking for another doorway.
I found it to the left, almost hidden behind a thick group of blackberry bushes in the farthest bed of soil. It was one in yet another series of doors, but larger and made with two panels. “Smell that?”
“Sort of like...the still where Wetterick makes his shitty liquor?” Mira asked.
“That’s it,” I said as the memory clicked. Like a distillery. I held only my gun now, pushing at one side of the door. It wasn’t locked, but a small stopper held the panels closed. With a flick, I kicked the wedge of wood to one side and the door opened slightly. “I’m going in, but we need—wait, no torches. Open the door as wide as it will go. There could be fumes.”
Mira helped open both sides of the door wide enough that light flooded the room beyond. “It’s another growing place?”
“Smaller but sort of,” I said. There was a smaller bed filled with different plants, none of which appeared to be fruits or vegetables. My eyes played over the space, taking in a long series of shelves, a large distillery, and something else. “Holy. Shit.”
“What?” Silk asked. They fanned out behind me as I moved into the room. The air was heavy with rot and chemicals.
“It’s a distillery alright, but not for booze.” I pointed to the most beautiful sight I’d seen since Mira and Silk.
Fuel cans. More than a dozen, at least five gallons each, and they looked full, their metal sides bulging with potential.
Silk ran her finger over one of the cans, its side labeled with a flame. “My girls have heard about this before, but I’ve never seen it. Not in my lifetime, at least, and not this far west.”
“You’ve heard of people making fuel? For what?” I asked, shocked to think that the world had kept more than just nanobots and solar panels in working order.
“I heard about a mining outfit that used a train engine to dig. Way out west, they’re tearing through a small series of hills left from an old city that burned. It’s too slow using people, so they have a giant screw, powered by an engine. Been out there for years. They produce more metal than anyone in their area, and I think they still forge weapons too,” Mira said.
“I’ve heard that as well. Ruins of Danvar. Huge place, I’m told by my sources,” Silk said with a grin.
“I bet your sources told you anything you wanted to know.” I know I would sing like a canary if I had any secrets to keep. It was a good thing she was on my side.
She gave a lazy, sensual smile that told me she was thinking of our time together. That made two of us.
“Why here? Why wouldn’t we know about this if there was a—I don’t know, a train, or mine, or something else here in the Empty?” Mira asked.
“Something tells me we’re going to find out. Once we secure this place, there are a lot of mysteries to solve, not the least of which is why they’re producing biofuel for a system that doesn’t seem to be here.” I drummed my fingers on a fuel can, listening to the liquid slosh. “We’ll find out. I guarantee it.”
“How?” Mira asked, curious.
“Because engines run out of fuel, and we have it,” I said with a smile of satisfaction. If we controlled a fuel source, then we would have power over whatever tech was using it. I liked our new home more with each passing minute, and we hadn’t even cleared a single wing of the facility.
“Can you make fuel?” Silk asked. She considered the process before her, taking in tubes and cans that would be utterly alien to anyone who didn’t understand basic science. Fortunately, I did.
“I can, and we will. As long as we have filtration, we can make fuel indefinitely. How much, I don’t know, but just having this as a resource means we can build things that will make life easier. A safer existence means more people and a better life. We can do this. It’s a huge leap forward,” I said.
“You’ll have to teach us. Both of us. We should never fail to pass secrets on, in case anything happens to us,” Silk said. Her eyes were distant. I wondered what information she knew was lost because of people failing to share.
“I will. Promise. I have goals, and they can’t happen without other people sharing the same knowledge. Nobody really understood my society’s tech, even though we used it all the time. We lived with it, but as to how it worked? It was beyond most people. This,” I said, waving at the distillery, “is easy. We’ll share it, we’ll tell it. People will know, and we’ll all grow because of it. We start with three of us and move on from there.”
“Three it is,” Mira said, but there was a hint of sadness behind her eyes. I knew she thought of Bel and wished the number was four. I did too.
“Three it is,” Silk confirmed. “I’m going up top, to help look for the wagons. If things like this are down here, then we need everything we can find to protect it. I don’t know what the Harlings left behind, but I’m sure it’s something we don’t have.”
“Let’s all go. This will keep until after we make our stand,” I said.
“To the sun again,” Mira said, and I knew she was fighting to leave her sister’s ghost behind.
“To the sun,” I agreed, feeling the weight of my gun. Some things were worth fighting for, and what we found was more than a greenhouse and fuel. It was the future.
34
“Jack! Jack!” Natif shouted, pausing only to gasp, bent over with his hands on knees. Lasser came into view from the south, hailing us with a wave. The sun was setting, a scarlet flare on the horizon with only a hint of clouds to the west. Tomorrow would be clear and hot, with good visibility.
“Catch your breath, big guy. I take it you found the wagons?” I asked him, holding out a waterskin.
He nodded, drinking deeply then wiping his mouth with a small hand. “There are four, and something else too, but he would not let me see. He said I was too young!” Natif said with the kind of indignation only a pre-teen can manage.
“Let’
s wait for Lasser and see what it is. You get under the shade and fill that skin again at the spring. I don’t want you overheated. I need you for tomorrow and the next day, okay?” I told him.
He ran off, skin swinging and shoulders high with purpose. I shielded my eyes from the sunset, waiting for Lasser to approach. His body language was grim.
“What is it?” I asked.
When he paused to gather his thoughts, I tilted my head as a distant hum ran through my blood. Lasser was an experienced man. He’d seen things. That meant this was something new, and most likely terrible. I wasn’t wrong.
“The wagons are untouched, even unopened. They’re filled with goods and close enough that we can bring everything here in small loads. As to the crew, and what was left of the Harlings—”
He paused to rub his face as if he could erase a memory, but I saw his eyes, and there was no leaving the horror behind. Lasser was shaken, badly.
When he spoke, his voice cracked with emotion. “It’s best if Natif doesn’t see. In truth, it’s better if no one sees, but you have to. We have to, so we understand what they are. What they will do to us. To everyone, given a chance. They have to be utterly wiped out, Jack. Not one bit of their poisonous tradition can continue past tomorrow, no matter the cost.”
I turned and lifted my voice so Natif could hear at a distance. “Start a fire, Natif. We’ll be back shortly, and hungry.”
“Got it, Jack,” came Natif’s piping answer.
“Okay,” I said, my thoughts as dark as the coming night. “Show me.”
The wagons were ten minutes south, hidden so skillfully behind an outcropping I would have never suspected they were nearby. There were four wagons in all, in good order and bright in the last rays of the dying day. Their wheels were heavily built, the yokes driven into the sand to keep the wagons still.
“Other side,” Lasser said. He made no move to join us. Silk and Mira looked at each, wondering what lay ahead, then stepped forward with me into the sandy depression just past the line of wagons.
Future Reborn Box Set Page 21