Is This The End?

by Craig Sargent

  “You got it,” the keep said, walking Stone to the door and opening it wide for entry of any oil men. Stone eyed the six old cars being driven up the street, which sent up thick black funnels of sooty smoke behind them. Clearly the grade of petroleum being used was of a low order. The cars looked as beat-up as they came, but the men looked even worse. They were covered in oil, black coatings of what looked almost like tar, from head to foot. Not that they seemed to mind it all that much as they whooped it up and hung out the glassless windows of their cars. They barely paid Stone a glance, nor the store he stood in front of, but headed down another fifty yards or so to the bar. They piled out of the cars, not even bothering to close the doors, and headed on in.

  “Damn bar,” the storekeep muttered as Stone mounted his bike and started up. “These oilmen always just want to get soused, instead of buying the things they need—like what I got for ‘em in here. Ah I don’t give a shit. Today you made my fucking day, mister. Good luck. Don’t mess with them freaks now, whatever your business be, or you won’t be buying things this way again. That’s a promise.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” Stone said and started the big Harley down the main street. It took only a few minutes to get through the town as it was only about twenty blocks long. Still, that was a veritable metropolis in this day and age. He followed the road out of town, and just as the keep had said, there were trucks rumbling by every few minutes. It was a regular superhighway, with the huge oil trucks filled to the rim as black liquid oozed out of the not-quite-closed containers and pushed even the thick Mack tires of the trucks down a foot or so.

  None of the truckers paid him any particular heed, although he did have to veer sharply to the far side of the road each time they came barreling along as they didn’t seem to care too much whether or not they sent his puny bike flying off into the prairie dotted with H-bomb craters like immense sores from a plague. He was just about ten miles from town when he saw several bomb craters very close up ahead. They looked a little odd, as if large parts of them had been dug away. As Stone came up to the top of a ridge and looked out over the range ahead he did a double take.

  Oil fields stretched off for miles. Black swamps of bubbling oil oozed up everywhere. There were no oil rigs of the kind that he had seen in the past, but just men wading around in the stuff with rubber suits on, shoveling it into barrels, which were being carted off to furnaces of some kind off to one side of the vast field. It was a scene out of hell, with the black figures struggling everywhere like an army of ants, looking as if they were going to be sucked under at any moment. Chimneys topped crude-looking refining plants that burned with long tongues of blue flame shooting up hundreds of feet into the sky, releasing smoke and noxious odors that covered the whole region.

  Stone let his fingers edge toward the trigger of his gun just in case there was trouble ahead. As he drew closer to the great oil swamp he could see what had happened. Two bombs had gone off close to where there had been a whole slew of real wells. The blast had sent every bit of equipment flying off like so many leaves in the wind. But they had also ripped open the huge underground reservoir. Now it bubbled up everywhere, an ocean of thick crude oil, like taffy. He watched the men sludging through the stuff like it was quicksand, filling buckets, then dragging them to huge vats which were set on wheels and moved atop tracks of some sort. The tracks, built up on wooden stilts, weaved through the oil field and men were pushing great loads of muck down the tracks over to the burning refineries a mile off.

  It seemed a waste of manpower, Stone mused, as he watched the operation. Why couldn’t they just use industrial equipment? But as he saw one of the men fall off a track headfirst right into the swamp of black sludge, he saw why. Men were cheaper. The slime who ran the show didn’t have the slightest concern for human life. The man sank under, without even having the chance to scream and there was not the slightest attempt at rescue, as it took too long to grope around the deep sections of oil to find anyone to make it financially feasible for the operators of the field to do so.

  Another worker was quickly put behind the steel-wheeled vat and with three other men there they continued to push their load down the tracks toward the refinery. It took only seconds to replace the dead. Even as Stone drove on, he saw a man with a bucket about a hundred yards in from the road step forward and disappear into the depths. The oil fields had been so torn up by the bomb blasts that it was uneven, jagged in its bottom ground. The going could suddenly get much steeper, like stepping off the Continental Shelf, only you couldn’t swim in this stuff no matter how many merit badges you had. Not through one black inch. And Stone realized that was part of the fun of being an oilman. And he saw why they were well-paid and why they ran to the bar the moment they hit town. You couldn’t get a brain-damaged mule to venture out in those black death pits. Only men.

  CHAPTER

  Eleven

  THE stench got even worse as he drove past the chim-neys burning off impurities in a dozen extremely primitive refining factories. Stone had taken a trip through one once in a high school class trip and he remembered how complex it had been with pipes and tanks running off every damned place. This thing looked more like a bunch of country stills for making moonshine. But somehow they were producing something. He slowed to a crawl to watch the fiery process and could see that out of the bottoms of the round stacks stuff was being pumped into waiting trucks that ate up whatever was slugged into their innards. It was hard to believe that they could be running vehicles with this stuff. He wouldn’t put it in the Harley. No way, José.

  Even as he watched, Stone saw guards on the inside of the gate that fenced the entire oil field start walking over to see what he was up to. They clearly didn’t like anybody eyeing their operation. Stone didn’t feel like talking and just turned the throttle up. The bike shot ahead and he kept it going fast for the next mile or so. No one followed.

  The storekeeper had said just keep going past the fields to find the locale of the freaks. Stone could see why he couldn’t be more specific than that. The place was a wreck. It looked as if some vast military complex that went on for miles once existed here. Steel pipes and the remains of buildings, fences and all kinds of high tech gear now rusted and twisted like yesterday’s toys filled the landscape. He had to slow the bike down and slowly make his way through the obstacle course of debris, which formed immense mounds. Whatever the hell had been here had been big, and important. The area, like the oil fields, had clearly had the shit bombed out of it.

  He drove the bike up a high mound of rubble that rose forty feet with a shallow enough angle so that he could throttle the Harley right up the side. On top he brought it to a stop amidst the bricks and pieces of steel frame and looked around. The wreckage extended off on every side. What the hell had this place been? Air force base, missile complex? All this was the same kind of steel and concrete debris as if it had been homogenized by some great wrecking machine. Stone had seen the mushroom clouds of some of those “wrecking machines.” They did their job well.

  Seeing that he was getting nowhere fast he parked the bike, kicking down both wide kickstands so the bike was well balanced on the somewhat uneven wreckage beneath. He went around to the back and opened the dog’s box. The pit bull was still snoozing away like Sleeping Beauty. What the hell was the dog waiting for—for him to dangle a frog under its nose? Stone knew he was pissed off just because he felt so helpless. But how long could the animal not even eat or crap or do anything?

  He got out the bottle of tetracycline the storekeep had sold him and broke the seal. He sniffed hard at the contents, making sure they didn’t have that rotten smell that so much of what he found and opened did. Most of the leftovers from five and a half years ago when manufacturing had basically ceased, had reached the limits of their storage life. Stone took out one of his Spam tins. His mother had loved the stuff, finding ten thousand ways to cook and disguise Spam back in the bunker. Stone had hated every one of them. Now he was eating the stuff half th
e time because he had no choice. He mashed some of the pink meat up in a metal cup and then added some water, making it a gravy. He broke open four of the antibiotic capsules and sprinkled their white powder through the gunk, mixing it around until everything was all the same color and the whole thing looked extremely unappetizing. He knew if the animal was awake it would have raised quite a stink about having to chew down this gunk. It wasn’t going to get the chance this afternoon.

  Stone turned the dog’s head sideways to make sure it didn’t choke and started doling the stuff out in a spoon, one little bit at a time so it didn’t drown on lunch. After every few helpings he lifted its head and moved its body and neck around trying to make it swallow. After almost half an hour only about half made it in. But Stone was satisfied with even that much. And when he opened the dog’s jaws and looked inside nearly gagging from the foul breath, he saw that what had gotten inside had made it down the gullet. Maybe he should take up a second career of veterinary medicine.

  By the time he was done Stone saw that although it couldn’t have been past one the sky was already darkening quickly to the north. Another storm, just what he needed. He packed everything up and closed the dog in, noticing that he’d let the mutt get pretty dirty. He had to clean it up and soon. It was becoming a scandal how filthy the creature was, the wildlife for miles around was talking. He vowed to not let another sun set without giving the pit bull a bath.

  Stone mounted up and eased the bike forward, riding down the far slope as if he were on a sled going down at nearly a sixty degree angle. Then the bottom of the mound of rubble evened out and guided him over the more evenly strewn out wreckage. He moved along slowly through the remains of a lost civilization looking for he didn’t even know what. He’d know when he found it. A lot of the fallen structures still retained their original shapes and were bizarre-looking to say the least. Huge round steel globes, black boxes twenty feet high that had antennae poking out of every inch of their surfaces. Everything looked like it had been aboard the Starship Enterprise. Whatever had been transpiring here had been of the highest technological order.

  “Star Wars,” Stone muttered into the dusty breeze. Maybe this was the control center they were building to maneuver all those satellites and lasers, and whatever they were throwing up there just before the war and the collapse. If so, the satellites must now be wandering around aimlessly up there looking for Mom. Probably start falling down to Earth over the next few years, if they hadn’t already. He prayed they weren’t nuclear, too. Or there could be a secondary series of atomic detonations far after the original fact. That would doubtless tip Earth’s already severely poisoned environment that much further to the side of total extinction and annihilation. What a legacy coming back to haunt mankind.

  The remains were fascinating, and he rolled along at hardly more than a turtle’s pace inspecting the larger debris of once immense and interconnected equipment—computers, telecom units. Suddenly amidst a pile of girders that had been twisted around into pretzels Stone saw a four-drawer metal file that looked almost untouched. He stopped the bike and walked over, reaching under and grabbing hold of the thing. It was heavy, but he dragged it sideways from beneath the bottom beam and set it upright. He opened the top file, and to his surprise, it slid right out as if wanting to release its store of information.

  Stone leafed through the folders within and whistled. “Top Secret.” “Ultra Top Secret.” “For Security AAA Clearance Only.” This shit was as hot as it came. He took out a few and looked through them. He was right—Star Wars. The most secret of several Earth control bases that had been set up. Diagrams of particle beam alignments, computer codes for directing satellites to release missiles. It was incredible, like a how-to book to blow up the world. When he got to the last file his eyes opened ever wider. He’d hit it.

  NAUASC. North American Underground Assured Survival Complex. There had been a whole subterranean headquarters built beneath all this so there would be a control if the surface arrangements were terminated. Well, they had been right about that. The pieces were slowly coming together. But the puzzle seemed to grow more complex. Stone’s head was spinning. On the last two pages of the manual he found the listing of six entrance locations, clearly pinpointed to the square foot on the grid map that was attached.

  For the first time in days Stone started allowing a little hope to bubble around in his guts. This could be just the thing he had been looking for, an ace in the hole to gain entry to the complex. They weren’t expecting him, the element of surprise—if he went slowly—could help his terrible odds a little bit. For somehow, though he didn’t know where, April was down there beneath his feet, beneath the rubble. And she was alive.

  It was difficult to really follow the directions of the grid chart in the booklet, because all the landmarks they gave as reference points—buildings, concrete parking lots, whatever, were now gone, or rather mixed together in such a stew that a super computer couldn’t have put them back together again. But Stone was able to figure out what had been a few structures, even though they now lay on their sides. It took nearly an hour of constantly readjusting his direction but at last he came upon a large metal plate in the midst of the rubble. Only there was no rubble on the plate itself: it looked completely seamless, attached to the dirt around it as if it were fused into it. Stone drove the bike up to the edge of the ten foot wide square of steel. It was blackened on the surface but the charred coating was only fractions of an inch deep. Still, it must have taken some of the heat from the original blasts that had gone off nearby.

  Stone got off his bike and had walked a single step to take a look at the plate when he heard whirring sounds coming from every side. And even as he spun around, metal fixtures began rising up out of the earth all around him. There were six of them and as he focused on the metal objects attached to them, his eyes dilated. Machine guns, robot-controlled, and every one was turning and aiming at him.

  “Attention, this is an unauthorized area. Repeat—you have entered a No Access Zone,” a tinny voice said over a hidden speaker. “Get back onto the motorcycle. Do not reach for a weapon or try to escape, or we will fire all the guns at once. You will be dead in less than a second.” Stone looked around but for the life of him couldn’t see the speaker. He noted the guns turning slightly in the air, rising, moving, adjusting their sights constantly even as he shifted an inch or two one way or another. Even if he got off any shots, which was highly doubtful, the things weren’t even human.

  “Now, move your motorcycle slowly forward until you’re in the center of the plate,” the voice commanded. Stone followed the orders. You didn’t have to say “Simon Says” when you had six auto-controlled machine guns aimed at a man’s nose. Once in the middle of the steel plate, the speaker rumbled again.

  “Place your hands on the back of your neck with fingers interlocked.” Stone didn’t hesitate. He didn’t know how much it took to get these robot guns riled up and he sure as hell didn’t want to do any experimenting. Suddenly the entire steel plate began descending into the earth as the machine guns leaned over on ball bearing joints and followed him down, just to make sure there were no last-minute tricks.

  CHAPTER

  Twelve

  AS Stone descended into the earth he looked up to see a second steel plate slide over the opening and the light above shrink into a narrow band and then disappear. He wondered if he’d ever see daylight again. He was in a shaftway with countless doors, which he passed as the elevator dropped smoothly down. There was a dim amber lighting recessed into the shaftway, just enough to see by. The descent seemed to go on forever and Stone knew what it must be like to be a South African miner and just keep going down as if there was no bottom. If he was heading into the Survival Complex, they had built the damn thing deep. But then they had been planning to be able to take a direct nuclear hit so they had to be pretty subterranean—a thousand feet or more. The craters all over the area, the wreckage above, showed that someone had sure been trying to
ice their tails.

  Stone felt his ears click three times on the way down and his throat get a strangely dry sensation. He was just debating whether to come out firing at the bottom like Rambo when the mechanical voice spoke out again.

  “Keep your hands up, mister. The stress modes show you’re thinking of trying something. Don’t!” Stone didn’t know how the hell they were doing it, but clearly they were monitoring everything about him—even his blood pressure. He couldn’t see a thing, not a camera, wires, anything either on the steel slab or the smooth-sided shaft-way that looked like it had just been built. Titanium alloy, no doubt. Stone had seen some of the super-hard metal that his father had employed in his munitions company in various armaments configurations. And that had been before the war. Whoever he was up against was far, far ahead of anyone topside. Stone felt a chill ripple across the nape of his neck and then back again. For some reason he felt like a kid all of a sudden, and that he had bit off a little more than he could chew. Suddenly the unit dropped down into a large chamber and there were bright lights and armed guards who were waiting for him with their SMGs at chest level.

  “Hey guys, shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble,” Stone commented as the platform clanked into some kind of locking mechanism beneath him, and a whoosh of air hissed out, letting the thing settle down until it was level with the concrete floor. Stone did a quick scan of the place. He’d seen pictures of such. Underground getaways that the government had spent hundreds of millions, probably billions on. The cavern he was in was a cylindrical shape about forty feet across and Stone could see even from within the inset elevator shaftway that the subterranean world extended off as far as the eye could see in six directions via wide connecting tunnels. Stone could see men marching back and forth through them like ants. Jesus Christ, the level of operation down here was staggering. What the hell were they all doing anyway?