“You can get me the keys?’ Tristan said. “What more could there be?”
“Nothing much.” He grinned broadly, enjoying his moment. “I found your brother.”
27
Troops in black trained matte black machine guns on Ness and Shawn. Roan bound their hands behind their backs with nylon zip ties. She turned her reptilian gaze on Nick, reached a snap decision, and tied him, too. A guard pulled a black hood over Shawn’s head.
“What the hell?” Shawn said. “Like we don’t know where we’re going?”
Dark fabric slid over Ness’ face. He tossed his head. Hands yanked him into the back of a van. Shawn swore. Doors thunked closed. The engine grumbled to a start.
“Don’t move,” Roan said from nearby. “I will shoot.”
Shawn snorted. “No seatbelts? Don’t get too itchy on the trigger when I start sliding across the floor.”
“Don’t speak.”
Ness could imagine Shawn’s face curling in contempt, but for once his brother stayed silent. The van’s wheels scraped on the asphalt, shifting tone as it entered the bridge. No one spoke. The van stopped on the other side, engine idling. Roan exchanged words with a man outside the car. The gate buzzed open. A minute later, the van stopped for good. Someone grabbed Ness’ wrists and marched him through a series of echoing halls.
Someone seated him. Yanked the hood from his face. Fluorescent light blinded him. The rumble of the core shook the floor. Ness was seated between Shawn and Nick in a windowless room. Daniel and Roan sat across from them. Roan had a pistol on her lap. Guards fidgeted at the closed door.
Daniel frowned at his collared shirt, smoothing it. “You boys have committed some serious crimes.”
“Taking our own jeep for a spin?” Shawn said. “Sorry we didn’t ask permission, Mom.”
“You willingly attacked a foreign species. You put the entire settlement at risk of reprisal.”
“Who cares? The aliens are all dead, ain’t they?”
“You didn’t know that,” Daniel said.
Shawn shrugged. “No harm, no foul.”
“Not all are dead,” Roan said. “We don’t know how many weren’t in the ship when it crashed.”
Shawn sniffed. “Either way, sounds like they got much bigger worries than what we might or might not have done to two aliens so lowly they got assigned to mountain farmhouse duty in BFE, Idaho.”
Roan rose while he was still speaking. She waited for him to finish, then struck him in the face. Shawn grunted, head snapping back, blood spurting from his lip.
“We are at war,” Daniel said gently. “The terms of that war are to be decided by the commanders. Not two rogue actors. What you have done is treason. Treason, in the United States, is a crime punishable by death.”
“Is that where we are?” Ness’ heart pounded. “I haven’t heard from the President in a while.”
“It doesn’t matter where we are. What matters is that you have betrayed us.” Daniel removed his glasses, huffed on the lenses, and swabbed them with his shirt. “But while you have caused harm to our settlement, it isn’t logical to execute you. Not when you can work to heal that harm instead.”
Ness smiled, sick to his stomach. “You want me to keep making ethanol.”
“We have a use for Shawn as well.”
“What about me?” Nick said.
Roan didn’t glance his way. “Be quiet.”
“We never should have come here,” Ness said. “I choose exile instead.”
Daniel pressed his lips together. “Exile isn’t among your choices. You can repay your debt one of two ways: with sweat, or with blood.”
“Starting with Shawn,” Roan said.
“Oh please,” Shawn said. “You’re not gonna shoot me any more than you’re going to grow wings and fry yourself from dinner. Shoot me, and what have you got left to threaten him with?”
Roan stood and moved behind them. Ness twisted around, adrenaline setting his nerves on fire. Roan lifted her pistol. Before Nick had time to show his fear, she shot him in the head.
The bang clapped across the room. Ness jerked away, falling to the tile floor and clawing from Nick. Shawn kicked back with a scrape of his chair. Nick lolled from the chair, blood pumping from the hole in his skull.
“Sweet Mother Mary!” Shawn yelled. “You shot him!”
Roan leveled the pistol at his face. “Choose.”
“Why are you doing this?” Ness cried.
“Because we have to!” Daniel stood, face strained, and paced to the wall. “Paradoxically, the aliens kept us safe. None of the other settlements were willing to risk war when it could draw the invaders’ attention. Now that the aliens’ back has been broken, what’s keeping the barbarians away from the gates? Threats and bribes, that’s what. Without the fuel to back up both these prongs, this whole place will be put to the sword. One of mankind’s last candles will be snuffed out.”
He planted himself in front of Ness. “This is what you must believe: there is nothing I won’t do to prevent this place from falling.”
Blood pattered from Nick’s slumped body, bright red on the dirty white floor. Ness picked himself up, dizzy, and looked to Shawn for answers, but his brother was too scared to speak.
“Please don’t shoot him,” Ness said.
Daniel raised his gray brows. “Do we have a deal?”
Ness nodded. The world shrank to a small gray hole.
* * *
This time, he was to stay on the plant’s side of the river. Roan showed him to his new lab, a broad clean space that smelled like rubbing alcohol. Steely stills gleamed under the fluorescents.
“Shawn has two guards with him at all times,” Roan said. “If you try to run, he gets shot. If you try to sabotage, he gets shot. If you try—”
“I get the picture,” Ness said.
“Then get to work.”
He was surprised to find himself left largely unattended. A guard or two milled around outside the lab, and they locked him in a converted closet every night, but for the most part he was free to move and work as he saw fit.
Because they were right. They didn’t have to keep him under close watch. Not when escape or sedition meant a bullet in his brother’s brain.
He worked numbly, mashing, boiling, and yeasting the increasingly withered and rotten corn castoffs hauled across the river. The first snow fell overnight and melted in the morning sun. Often, he heard gunshots to the west, where Daniel’s Umatilla-hired mercenaries had set up a firing range. Twice, he heard shots to the east, across the river at the farm.
Day by day, a fence crept around the distant fields. A watchtower climbed into the sky, followed by three more, simple things with wooden frames and corrugated aluminum walls and roofs. They hadn’t thought it through. Come summer, the heat would boil the guards alive. Dogs bayed across the fields.
Soon, the bushels trucked to him switched from frost-withered mold-dotted cobs to dried, healthy kernels. Daniel was tapping into the food supplies.
“Experiment,” Roan ordered him. “The watchword is efficiency. Get the most from what we’ve got.”
“Fruit.”
She cocked her head. “What did you say?”
“Fruit is more efficient than corn.”
“And corn is what you have.”
“Where’s Larsen?” Ness said.
Roan went to the door. “Get to work, Ness.”
For several weeks, he saw no one but Roan, the guards, and the man who drove the truck with his grain. Shawn was kept locked in another room elsewhere in the facility. Ness had made no mention of Kristin; he didn’t want her to become the next person put to the gun to push him to work. He had asked about Volt, once, but Roan had paid him as little mind as his question about Larsen. Ness knew Volt would be all right. She was a survivor. She’d seen far worse winters in the mountains of Moscow. Here in the desert, it was hardly cold enough to snow.
Once in a while, between testing temperature, pH, and alcohol pe
rcentage, his work engrossed him enough to forget the hole in Nick’s face. The rest of the time, he thought about drinking half a gallon of pure ethanol in one go. He’d never been happy, not really. Even his old life with his mom had been a waiting game. Fifty-some years whittled away by computers and TV shows until he’d be allowed to die. It would not have been so bad.
There had been one exception. The cabin in the mountains. That had been good. That had been fun. Allowed to pursue his own interests without the pressure, expectations, or fear of failure that had always cowed him into inaction elsewhere in life, the days had reeled on with the pleasant exploration of a limitless world. If he could do it over, he would never have come here.
A part of him yearned savagely to walk away into the desert and leave Shawn to his fate. Better one of them find happiness than both staying enslaved.
But he was tipping self-serving poison into his own ear. For all their fights, Shawn had always been there for him. Protecting his back. Trying, in his own way, to push him forward. Ness couldn’t leave him behind to be shot. But he couldn’t see a way out of the woods, either.
Life wasn’t worth living. It was now a matter of how much longer he could resist that truth.
In mid-January, they allowed Shawn to see him at the lab. Shawn hugged him, thumped his back.
“Still at it, huh? Bet you could make some badass bourbon by now.”
Ness glanced at the door. “Don’t give them any ideas.”
“You seen the fence across the way?”
“Hard to miss.”
“Almost done.” Shawn nudged one of the stills with his boot. “They got this new program in the works, ‘Earned Citizenship.’ You get thirty credits, you get promoted to full-fledged member of the community. Votes and shit. The fence will get me ten credits.”
“They’ll raise it to forty right before you reach thirty.”
“Look, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll make it and maybe I won’t. They got to do something to prove Daniel’s not Dr. Doom.”
Ness itched his nose. “It’s a trick, Shawn. So long as a few make it over here from the farm, the others will go on working, because they think they can make it, too. Most will die in the same place they were born.”
“You don’t know that. I’ll talk to somebody. See if you can start earning credits, too.”
“They’re just waiting for me to perfect the process,” Ness said. “Then they’ll kill me. Just like they did Larsen.”
“Larsen isn’t dead,” Shawn said. “I seen that big Swedish bastard working at the farm just the other day.”
Ness laughed. “Even better.”
“Well, until you got a better idea, I’ll keep plugging away. What else is there to do?” Shawn turned for the door, but stopped with his hand on the handle. “Look, Ness, where’d that brain of yours go? We aren’t gonna get rescued by dragon-riding dwarves. You want out of here, you got to figure a way out.”
Ness watched him go.
More snows fell, smothering the dust. Ness wrote a note asking permission to scout the feral orchards around the river. Next summer, the fruit trees could bolster his ethanol output without touching the staple crops. That was his out-loud rationale, at least. What he didn’t say was that he was so bored he would do anything to get beyond the fences of Hanford, and that he held hope, however slim, he’d see something in the wilds to help him plan an escape.
One night, as he laid down in his converted closet to go to sleep, the door creaked open. Light sliced into the gloom. He sat up hard, pulling his sheet past his bare chest.
“Kristin?”
“Shh!” She closed the door behind her, enfolding them in the darkness. “Sweet pad you got here.”
“How’d you get in?”
“I bribed the guards.”
“With what?”
“What do you think?” she said, an edge of sharpness to her voice. “Civ IV and porn.”
He rose and hugged her. “They’ll kill Shawn if I try to leave. I didn’t want to get you in trouble. I didn’t know if you’d want to see me again.”
She pulled back. It was too dark to see her face, but he could hear her breathing. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know.”
“You are strange.” She kissed him. “I would have come sooner, but it’s been crazy. They’re trying to lay a backup water pipe into the reactor because Daniel’s all paranoid about getting bombed by our rivals. The new pipe would have taken a miracle before the apocalypse. It’s been soaking up every spare minute. I didn’t even know they had you here until last week.”
“Well, I’m glad you came.”
The smile was audible in her voice. “Not yet.”
He got her there with the second try. After, they lay tangled in the darkness. The closet was close and their sweat stuck their skin together. Their breath panted from the walls.
“Have you ever thought about leaving?” she said.
“Every day,” he said. “Then I remember they’ll shoot my brother if I do.”
“Seriously? I thought you were joking.”
He shook his head. “They say we committed treason.”
“There was a riot at the farm last month. Did you hear? They shot two of the workers. They’ve been shipping in new ones ever since. I see them on the trucks.”
“Where from?”
“I don’t know.” She brushed her hand across his chest. “But judging from the chains, they’d prefer to go back.”
“I wish we hadn’t killed the aliens,” he said. “Maybe they could have saved us.”
She laughed. A while later, she caught herself snoring and jerked awake. She had to be gone before the guards changed shift. She kissed him goodbye. She didn’t know when she’d be back.
It was all right. He understood. And at last, he had an idea.
He asked to speak with Daniel. It was days before the old man granted him an audience. Roan watched from the far wall of Daniel’s office, pistol on her hip.
“We brought some things back with the jeep,” Ness said. “Alien things. I’d like to take a look at them.”
“Why?” Daniel said.
“Because they look interesting.”
“Like the lasers,” Roan said.
“No.” Ness flushed. She’d seen straight through him. He supposed that was a good sign. To pass among snakes, you must think like one. “Do you know how bored I am in there? Dipping sticks in vats of old corn all day? I’d rather be back in high school.”
Daniel raised a skeptical brow. “And you think tinkering with strange gadgets will make you more productive.”
“Look, I don’t know. I thought it might be cool. I don’t care.” And it was true: it had all been a ruse, an effort, however unlikely, to get his hands on one of the lasers, or to discover one of the other items held secret powers—something that could blast down a wall or reduce a man to a shocked skeleton. Roan had defused that spark at once. Even if they gave him something, it would be an impotent trinket, incapable of violence unless he threw it straight at their heads.
Yet it was his exasperated indifference, oddly enough, that changed everything.
“We’ll see,” Daniel frowned. “What about this other suggestion of yours? These feral orchards?”
“Fruit ferments best,” Ness said. “That’s why you don’t see a lot of corn champagne.”
“The old farms. Which you propose to visit for yourself.”
“Visit once,” Roan said. “As he sprints right past them.”
Ness rolled his eyes. “So you can put a bullet in Shawn’s ear? If I wanted to escape, I’d run from the lab while the guards aren’t looking. Those guys don’t do their jobs for shit.”
“What about your other duties?” Daniel said.
“I’m just messing around in there. Killing time until I have more material. The stills won’t have me overworked until the next harvest.” Ness stood. “Well, I thought I could help. Take me back to the lab.”
“Christ, you’re
a sullen one,” Daniel sighed. “We’ll discuss it.”
Ness doubted that, but the old man was serious. Two days later, a guard delivered him a handful of small objects they’d taken from the aliens: two flat metal circles etched with strange sigils; four abstract idols that might resemble chess pieces, so long as you didn’t look too closely; a narrow plastic rod of no obvious use. As Ness gazed at these in disappointment, the guard mumbled about going to the truck, then came back with a touchpad attached to a small square screen.
“Mr. Wizard said to tell you there’s no wireless on this one,” the guard said.
“Mr. Wizard?”
“The old man. King Daniel.”
Ness laughed and took the items to his desk to start playing. It took him more than an hour to learn how to turn the pad’s screen on—there were no buttons, and the touchpad wasn’t supposed to actually be touched; instead, it responded to gestures made in the space above it—and even then there was little in the way of navigation. The screen showed shapes as abstract as the tiny chess-idols. He could change the display, sometimes, by waggling his hand around the air above the pad, but the symbolism remained inscrutable.
The other items were even less interesting. The metal was pretty, a smooth, iron-like surface swirled with iridescent colors, but the objects themselves were inert. He took to carrying one as a good luck charm, absently running his thumb over the symbol-etched surface whenever he grew stressed.
A couple days after the delivery of the trinkets, a driver arrived to chauffeur Ness to the wild orchards up the river. They fueled the pickup with his own ethanol and took off for the backroads. The rows of trees were long done fruiting, de-leafed by the winter. Grass grew thick between them. Many looked outright dead, or at least well on the way, but others sported hopeful green buds. Ness sketched rough maps and rougher tree-counts. The next day, he took the alien screen with him to kill the long drive into the fields.
The first few trips, the driver shadowed Ness at all times. The next few, the man wandered off on his own, seeing whatever there was to see. Ness was left to his own devices until the driver called through the orchard to let him know his time was up. Very soon, the man didn’t leave the pickup at all, listening to old Metallica tapes on the car stereo while Ness tramped between abandoned rows of apple trees. Getting the fruit back to Hanford would have logistical issues, but given the labor to pick it and load it, it would pay for itself several times over in fuel.
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 134