It's Harder This Way
Page 2
“Yeah, but those are special things, you know? Mostly motorcycles. Cars have a hard time these days since the roads have all decayed. Plus, motorcycles are easier to hide if a Bull patrol comes along.”
“I’d think the noise would be a problem,” Tony said.
“We try to run ‘em as quiet as possible, but it kind of messes with the engines. Fouls them up or makes them weak. Plus we’re pretty sure the Bulls use infrared as well as visible to see, and bike engines are like flashing beacons to them.”
Tony frowned. “Sounds pretty risky to even use them.”
“It’s horribly risky. But they run forever on a small amount of fuel. We don’t even need gas. Most have some kind of setup that uses hemp oil, and I guess some are able to use propane.”
I nodded. Propane was extremely useful, but because of its nature it had to be stored in secure tanks. We’d found thousands of empty LP canisters over the years that had suffered seal failures, rust, or any number of misfortunes. Amazingly, we recovered more than enough that had held up. The brains at The Farm became creative at finding excellent uses for propane and kerosene over the years.
“We even have one rigged up to run on batteries,” Myers added. “It’s silent, doesn’t put out much heat, but only has a fraction of the range the others do.” He paused. “If the Bulls detect moving vehicles, they always send a ship to investigate. It rarely ends well for the rider, but at least it ends quickly.”
“I can imagine,” I murmured.
Bull soldiers carried weapons powerful enough to vaporize human flesh. I didn’t like to think about what the energy cannons on their shuttles were capable of. Humans no longer had radar to detect airborne threats, and up until today, I didn’t think they had a way to communicate over long distances faster than a messenger on horseback. I could see the appeal of a motorcycle even though the roads were nothing like they were in the old days.
I spent plenty of time as a kid watching videos of street bikes speeding up and down freeways, eluding police, or racing for trophies. These days, the first rider to try to go faster than twenty miles per hour would be the first rider to end up bleeding to death on a deserted, broken highway. Bicycles were challenging enough on the old roads to the point I preferred using the dirt shoulders.
I’d wrecked over a dozen bicycles at least a hundred times since fleeing Boise. The only paved surfaces still in decent condition were the interstate freeways, but even those were cracking and sinking thanks to the combination of weather and no one to maintain them. The idea of a motorized bike even on the freeway where it would have to constantly avoid potholes, rusted vehicles, and the bones of both animals and humans wasn’t particularly comforting.
We chatted for another hour until we came to the Little Deschutes River. Tony and I did our best to avoid prying for information. We figured General Pryor—whoever he was—would fill us in on the important parts once we settled in. Myers seemed sad that he had to part ways with us and resume his patrol. He assured us Corporal Yates would keep us company once we met up with him, and we could expect the same thing all the way down the line until we arrived at the base. We assured Corporal Myers he’d have plenty of company until the last of our people passed him, including a young woman named Kristin who would be his escort for mile or two until she passed him off to someone else. Kristin was attractive enough to make sure he didn’t pay too much attention to anything but her intense green eyes and disarming laugh. We shook hands and watched him begin his journey back up the Willamette Highway.
Tony and I resumed the march, neither of us saying much until we encountered Corporal Yates an hour later. Yates was a gruff, older man, but he was as likable as Myers. He was definitely more skeptical of the army’s ability to wage any kind of war against the Bulls, but he admitted it was mostly because he had seen what the aliens were capable of the day they arrived in orbit.
Yates didn’t badmouth the army or its commanders, and I could tell he was thankful they’d been able to provide luxuries like hot showers and electronic entertainment. But when it came to the reasons we were marching and the army was recruiting, his opinion became more guarded, less positive. I got the impression he was on board only because of the soft beds, guaranteed food, and the company of men and women who could hold off any of the typical bandit threats that were common these days. He didn’t seem the type to lead the gung-ho charge to eliminate the Bulls.
We linked up with several other army scouts along the way, each more impressed than the last at the size of our contingent. They had to have known how numerous we were, yet each encounter made us chuckle. One of the last scouts made me wonder if her eyes would pop completely out of her head when Tony verified that five hundred humans were stretched out for a mile behind us. Private Ailes didn’t look to be more than twenty years old, if that, so I understood why five hundred humans in a small area would be so surprising. She had never known what it was like to live in a city, surrounded by tens of thousands, sometimes millions of others.
I thought Spider’s eyes would burst out of his head when he met Private Ailes. If she seemed like a bumpkin based on her experience with large groups of humans, then Spider would be considered an inbred mutant based on his lack of experience with members of the opposite sex. Tony caught Spider’s elbow at least three different times to keep him steady as the awkward young man tried to stammer out a greeting to the attractive young soldier.
I was sure he was going to throw up on her fatigues before he got more than three words out but he kept it together well enough to only turn a shade of red that edged into purple. Private Ailes earned my respect by keeping her laughter in, both during the attempted greeting and again when Spider’s feet tangled up after being dismissed by Tony. The poor kid was still picking bits of dirt and gravel out of his palms by the time we bedded down for the night.
2. Distant Arrival
“What do you think?” Tony asked as we settled down to sleep.
I knew he was asking me about what would happen when we eventually arrived at Crater Lake. I watched the last few flames of the small campfire flicker before disappearing, leaving only the glowing coals behind.
“I don’t know,” I said, turning on my side so I didn’t have to talk loud. “With fifty or so of them out and about, we might be able to surprise them, hit them hard before they can get organized.”
“That’s pretty cold,” Tony said.
I narrowed my eyes at him, but it was too dark and the remains of the fire were too dim to see if he was joking.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling defensive. “It is. But what I’m worried about is the longer we hang around, the more our people integrate with theirs, the harder it will be to do what has to be done.”
“True,” he said. “A couple hundred new faces…”
“New genitals, you mean,” I said with a chuckle.
“It’s amazing that I have a couple hundred potential partners to choose from, and you… you probably have a couple thousand. Yet we’re just as interested as our ‘soldiers’ when it comes to meeting new people.”
“You could always join the dark side,” I laughed. “Though I have to say you’d be more miserable than you are now because we’re even bigger assholes.”
I felt a small pebble hit me in the arm and laughed again. I was happy that Tony was warming up to me enough to have a normal conversation about normal things. We’d spent months together as a scouting pair for The Farm but had barely exchanged a couple of paragraphs worth of conversation. Ever since our election to the Council, he’d become a little less introverted.
It probably helped that my own sister was gay and I loved her enough to search for more than a decade to find her. Even with the fall of humanity, old prejudices still existed, though most of us realized the old hate was useless since it fractured the remnants of humanity instead of uniting it. I didn’t have to “protect” Tony from anything, but I’m sure it made him trust me enough to exit his shell during these moments alone.
; “Still,” he said, steering the conversation back on track, “it’s a good idea. We’ve got enough homemade C4 to drop a few tons of rocks on their front door and still have enough left over to collapse any extra openings they might have carved out.”
“Unless they have something like a massive titanium door with a security lock and a couple of .50cal machine gun nests creating a kill box for a hundred meters around it.”
“You’re too negative, Evan,” he said, throwing another pebble at me but hitting the dying coals instead. “As far as we know, the Bulls knocked out the major installations, and I never heard of any kind of base at Crater Lake. The machine guns though… That’s probably a given.”
“Good bandit deterrent.”
“Yep. But giant steel doors like in the old movies… they’d need an advanced forge and some serious equipment to engineer that. Not to mention the actual engineers to produce military-grade hardware. We’ve got engineers at The Farm and in two decades we’ve built a pretty nice set of apartment buildings and a working sewage system, yet we can’t even manufacture simple firearms, only repair some of them.”
I wrinkled my nose, more for myself since he couldn’t see it, but also made a slight gagging noise to let him know what I thought of our sewage treatment facility. It worked, he was right about that, but it wasn’t anything to be proud of during the summer months. The worst was when I would be assigned to a scouting team and finally forget the odor, only to have its essence rudely renewed upon returning a month or two later. Even the stench of a maggot-rich corpse in the forest was better than a sewage drain field in the middle of a dry July.
“Okay, so they’ve probably carved out an old mineshaft or tourist attraction,” I said, my tone admitting the foolishness of worrying our target was an ultra-modern military base on high alert. “From what we’ve been told, they only seem organized in the sense that they’ve figured out how to generate electricity and pipe in clean water. Or just hot water. They don’t trade with us and they don’t trade with any of the southern reaches beyond The Farm, so they are getting their food from somewhere else or hunting the region bare. But readiness if a fight suddenly broke out?”
“A fight against a dozen stupid or desperate humans is one thing,” Tony agreed. “But against five hundred armed men and women with a plan? It should go pretty quick.”
“What about their radios? We’ll have fifty or so of them hunting us down. The stupid ones will come guns blazing, but the smart ones will whittle us down all the way back to The Farm, and probably continue to harass the region.”
“We should probably at least see what it looks like inside whatever this base is, for sure. Find their radio room at the minimum.”
“Before everyone gets a taste of hot showers and computer screens?” I asked.
He laughed. “I don’t know, I’m kind of hoping to take one last hot shower before I die.”
“Wonder what the kids are going to think,” I said.
My mind wandered to those in our group who had never known such a thing as a water faucet that could be turned on and hot water would come out of it for half an hour. The two-minute showers allowed to those who were assigned to the actual farming tasks were either lukewarm or scalding, the propane burners never achieving the proper temperature that I barely remembered anymore.
“They’ll probably be playing a lot of grab-ass with the new people.”
***
It took us two more days to reach Crater Lake. We saw more of the soldiers as we drew closer, finally running into a squad of ten who escorted us the final ten miles around the west end of the famous lake. A number of us wanted to rush to the top and look out into the clear, cold, blue water, but the squad leaders kept everyone in line, including me. The old scenic byway would have been beautiful to hike on in the old days, but no one “saw the sights” just to see them anymore. The world was too dangerous for tourism.
We came to a sign that announced we were near Annie Creek, followed by another that only had enough of it left to let us know we were entering a campground. As we came to the top of the slight rise, I nodded to myself. A flat plateau with a number of dirt roads leading into it was a good place set up shop for a group that had enough firepower to hold it. Most of the old huts seemed to be empty and in danger of imminent collapse.
The sergeant leading us smiled and explained that it was definitely a good setup, but a dangerous one even if the Bulls weren’t around. The solders made use of the area to store wood, concrete, copper wiring, whatever they could scavenge. The shelters and watch areas were for the scouts on the perimeter. The real base was down in Annie Creek Canyon, apparently named that since the creek was already named after her.
We slowly made our way down into the draw—it wasn’t a true canyon like the ones I’d grown up around in Idaho. During our descent we saw that the small valley at the bottom had been set up for agriculture, though it couldn’t possibly grow enough food to sustain the entire base. Tony tapped me on the shoulder and nodded east along the opposite canyon wall. I felt my eyes widen at the mishmash of pipes and jury-rigged enclosures jutting out of the rock, some of them letting off barely detectable wisps of steam. Sergeant Stern chuckled at my expression.
“Steamworks,” he said. “Used to be a geothermal research station. Crater Lake is technically an extinct volcano, but apparently the huge river of lava running under the Cascades left a big pocket of it near the surface underneath us.”
“Is that where your electricity and hot water comes from?” I asked.
“Damn skippy,” he said, a phrase I hadn’t heard in twenty years or more. “We of course have upgraded it where we could and expanded it as best we could. You don’t want to know the amount of cursing and hate that went into dragging concrete, steel pipes, and thousand of pounds of copper along these roads then down into the canyon. Some of it came from as far away as Redding.”
“Impressive,” Tony said, scratching his chin.
I wondered if he was plotting to blow it up. It had been the second thought to cross my mind for sure. The first revolved around taking a hot shower under the warm glow of artificial lights. Sergeant Stern guardedly told us about Bull tech and how some of it had been adapted to make the geothermal station produce enough energy to also have a functioning production facility. He didn’t go into detail about what exactly the facility produced. My best unspoken guess was ammunition and possibly firearms.
An hour later, Tony and Druscilla alerted everyone we were going in to meet General Pryor. By now, all of them had seen the steamworks as well as the small farms littering the canyon floor and were chomping at the bit to get a hot meal and a hot shower. Sergeant Stern passed us off to Colonel Collins, a stunningly gorgeous black woman I couldn’t stop staring at.
The Farm had plenty of diversity, as our four thousand or so citizens definitely came in all shapes, colors, sizes, and ethnicities. But we didn’t have a lot of citizens who were what we used to call “African-American.” From what I remembered of the old days, Americans with black or even dark brown skin were treated like second-class citizens more often than not and had spent a few centuries distrusting whites. During the apocalypse, they had likely stuck together for safety, which meant they rarely ventured into areas that were majority white.
I thought about how many lived at or near The Farm while trying to not stare a hole through Colonel Collins’ face and came up with a number of about two hundred. They still carried the worry they would be insulted, blamed, discriminated against, or attacked. Mom set the punishment for such offenses to the maximum, which usually meant an offender was banished from The Farm.
Sometimes it meant The Cage, which was often worse than banishment. She confided in me one night that threats couldn’t actually change a person’s beliefs but they could at least keep a person from causing dissent and disharmony by openly being a bigot. There wasn’t a hard rule about “free speech” at The Farm other than some speech was met with swift and unforgiving retribution.
“That’s fine, Colonel,” I said, trying to find the balance between looking in her eyes and staring at my feet. “We’re just glad to be here. Actually, we’re just excited to take a hot shower.”
“Amen,” she said with a grin now that I wasn’t acting like a teenager. “It’s the most beautiful feeling in the world. If you’ll follow me…”
She turned on her heel and marched along an oiled dirt road for fifty meters until a cave seemed to appear out of nowhere. It was hidden in the canyon wall, and only after staring at it for a few seconds did I realize the wall itself was made of concrete. It had been poured and shaped or molded to look like natural lava rock, complete with some kind of stain or paint to give it a flat, dark finish.
Colonel Collins turned a wheel in the middle of the door, then stepped back after tugging it open. She smiled again and gestured for us to enter. Tony and Druscilla entered but Collins put her arm out to block me.
“Do you have a problem with me?” she asked, the smile gone from her lips.
“No, Ma’am,” I said with a sigh. “I’m sorry if that’s how you took me gawking at you like a teenage boy.”
She stared at me for a few seconds until I heard Tony cough lightly from inside the passageway. Her hard eyes softened a little, but her lips remained in a straight line.
“If you want something from me, just say so, Mr.—” she trailed off.