Doom Days

by Beaman, Sara

  “What you need the magazine for?”

  “Just being safe,” Veneranda said, trying to sound cool. “Had to take down a boar earlier. It’s out by the old church ruins. Tell the next party out, would you?”

  David looked troubled. Not much she could do about it. Threatening wouldn’t do any good, he got muley if he thought she was doing something reckless and no amount of browbeating would talk him down. Veneranda took her hip pouch of trail gear and rations out of the locker. “You got any other pressing questions?”

  “Erm...no. You heading out?”

  “After I change my pants,” she said, unbuckling her belt. That was all that was necessary; David wavered for an awkward moment, caught the look in her eye, and fled the locker room, back to his post at the gate.

  Veneranda smirked, until realization sank in. Now she actually had to change her pants, to maintain the lie. With a sigh she selected a pair of scrounged cargoes that seemed reasonably clean and hadn’t yet worn through in the seat or knees.

  When she was done, she gripped the side of the cabinet and gently pulled it. It slid out, away from its neighbors. It should have been bolted down, had been before she’d gotten at it one night with a hacksaw and a pair of pliers and her father’s socket wrench. If you just looked at it, or leaned on it, it looked bolted in, but pull up and out and it slid free with only a mild grating complaint.

  Underneath was the tiny cubby she’d made, just half a foot across. Inside was her special pouch. She pulled it free of its enclosure and checked the contents: seven roughly shaped balls of plain gray material, a few silvery ribbons, and five special rifle rounds.

  Her father knew the secret of making explosives. Veneranda was fairly certain a few other people in town had similar knowledge. Sabina at the clinic knew a bit of chemistry, and it was possible that some of the other medical types could work things out. Most of the town regarded the entire idea of volatile chemistry with suspicion. Veneranda supposed that was fair; old Tom Creedy had had a still in his basement that had blown up most of the ground floor, some years back. If moonshine could take out a house, real explosives certainly could.

  Veneranda herself had no such reservations. She’d carefully watched her father mix the compounds, learned their secrets, and made her own supply. What she knew was fairly basic, in point of fact, but the thermite blobs in the pouch had proven useful more than once. There were very few locks out in the wilderness ruins that wouldn’t yield to Veneranda.

  She slipped three of the balls of fuel into her hip pouch, along with their fuses, and placed all of her special rounds into her ammo case. Those latter had been a gift from her father, and she used them sparingly. Having them near made her feel better, though.

  Veneranda stood up and slid her locker back into place. She carefully fiddled with the bolts at the bottom until they appeared to be fastened, then returned the pile of laundry that concealed them from view. She closed her locker, left the Watch House.

  ****

  Her next stop was home. The two-story, gray panel house lay back a bit from the center of the community. The lot to one side was empty; the house had mostly collapsed in a hurricane when she’d been just a few years old. Her father had built his workshop there, and by gradual accumulation linked it to the house’s garage.

  Just now the large doors at the front of the workshop were shut. Her father was out some place; he always left the doors open while he worked, for ventilation, and shut and locked them whenever he left.

  Veneranda nonchalantly slipped ‘round one side of the house, toward what had been the backyard and was now a large garden. Veneranda paused amidst the ordered plots of verdure, as she always did, looking down at the little clump of rhododendrons, near the large and spindly bulk of a butterfly bush.

  Veneranda’s mother had planted this garden. It had been her hobby, a place she went for solace. Veneranda’s earliest memories of her mother took place in this garden. After she had died, Veneranda and Isaac kept the garden up, immaculately maintained, by silent mutual decree. It was what they both had left of her.

  Veneranda forced herself to move again. As she slipped through the garden toward the back of the workshop, a considerable part of her better judgement wondered why she wasn’t going to her father directly, telling him about Sutera and the University. Why did she have to deal with this?

  Because, she answered, if her father knew, he would do something. He would do it himself. And if he did it himself, he could die.

  That idea made the core of her become soft and nauseous.

  Besides, there wasn’t any reason she couldn’t handle this herself. Her father was old. Too old to deal with this stuff anymore. Time for her to handle it.

  There was a rear door to the workshop, but Veneranda ignored it. Instead she removed her rifle and belt, dropped both to the ground, and crouched by the wall near the door. Old bricks and cinderblocks served as a part of the workshop’s foundation here, a weak point in the otherwise solid construction that her father kept saying he was going to fix up and never did. Two of the cinderblocks had completely shed the hold of the mortar between them and the surrounding foundation, helped out discretely by Veneranda’s well-aimed kicks over a period of months some years ago.

  Her father hid Christmas and birthday presents in the workshop. A clandestine way inside had seemed a solid long-term investment.

  Blocks pulled free, Veneranda slipped inside, just barely fitting through the gap. Once again her body’s unwillingness to stay rationally shaped proved bothersome. Inside, the workshop was dim and smelled of motor oil, solvents, sawdust and, vaguely, her father. She loved the workshop, almost as much as she loved her spot in the woods, and the garden. They were places that let her mind expand and relax. Places where she didn’t have to be something she wasn’t.

  She stepped quietly across the sawdust floor, keeping an ear cocked for the sound of approaching footsteps. Her father had a number of old drawers and toolboxes and kept them militantly organized. She knew where to find the batteries. As she rummaged through the drawer she realized the battery Sutera had shown her hadn’t indicated voltage. She grabbed a few different kinds, just in case.

  As she was shimmying back through the gap under the wall, the crunch of footsteps on broken asphalt and gravel suggested her father’s return. Veneranda quickly pushed the cinderblocks back into place, then stole off through the garden, back to the wall.

  ****

  When Veneranda got back to her spot it was late afternoon, and the dying gold of an autumn sunset was fast giving way to the deeper purple of twilight. It was black within the path through the forest, but a glimmer of light up ahead told her Sutera had a fire going, banked low.

  She crept closer, stealthily. It was impossible to be absolutely quiet on pine needles, but you could come damn close if you knew how to place your weight.

  At the entrance to the bower she paused, glancing in. Sutera was sitting with his head down, slowly prodding the corner of the fire with a small stick. He’d produced a thermal blanket from somewhere, and it was wrapped around his shoulders.

  “You’re good.” The sound of his voice made her jump. He looked up, producing a pistol from under his blanket. “Didn’t hear you until you were a yard or so from the entrance there.”

  With a sour grimace Veneranda slipped into the bower. “I got your battery.”

  He nodded. “I knew I could count on you. You’re a resourceful girl, Veneranda.”

  Sutera held out his hand. Veneranda gave him the first battery, the one that most closely matched the size and material of his own.

  Sutera pulled out his knife and the oblong device. Once again Sutera opened the backing. He’d apparently removed the old, dead battery. Now he replaced its empty socket with the new one from the workshop. He pushed the backing back onto the box and waited. Nothing seemed to happen, until suddenly an electronic chirping noise emanated from Sutera’s pack.

  “We’ve got an uplink,” he said with a smile. “Go
od work.”

  Veneranda nodded.

  “You don’t warm up easily, do you? I guess I can understand. Pretty girl like you probably has to fight off boys all the time.” Sutera patted a spot by the fire. “Why don’t you come have a seat for a sec?”

  Veneranda scowled. “I ain’t that kind of girl.”

  “Relax. I’m not going to touch you.” Sutera put the gun down and slid it well away. “You can even take down that rifle, if you like. You could get off a shot before I could grab my sidearm.”

  Veneranda stood stiffly for a moment. Then she nodded and sat down.

  “So here’s the deal. I need you to come with me and help me get this thing back in place.”

  “You didn’t say anything about-!”

  “Veneranda, look at my leg. I’m not up to doing this on my own and we need to get it done! The preliminary readings I got showed they were definitely enriching plutonium - that’s what they use to make the bomb. People around there were talkin’ about how pretty soon they’d have a weapon ready. When they have it, who d’you think their first target is gonna be?”

  Veneranda paused. She thought of Missy’s face, her laugh, and coupled it in her mind with the rumors she’d heard about the University. People who went to the University to trade didn’t always come out, and some who did weren’t right in the head afterward regardless.

  “What would I have to do?”

  Sutera produced a folded up map from his pocket. The paper had once been glossy, but had been smudged to a faded gray. As he unfolded it, Veneranda saw that it was heavily annotated, with lines and shorthand all across its surface.

  “This is the primary compound, the one deep inside old Raleigh. There are squatter camps somewhat nearby, but nothing on the order of your town. This is an outer perimeter, mostly chain-link fence, but you can breach it at the places I marked with a triangle, where there’s an old building or they used a palisade instead. The inner area is basically as shown on the map, although a few buildings have been abandoned. We can expect guards here, here and probably here...”

  Veneranda watched as he outlined the University’s stronghold, its security features and likely guard rotations. She was amazed at how thorough he’d been. Finally, they came to the reactor.

  On the map the building was opaque, the label smudged, though Veneranda could make out the word ‘Nuclear.’

  “This is the main door, here. It’s guarded around the clock - we won’t be able to get in that way. However, around the back here...” He traced a finger around the building. “They’ve got an old maintenance door. It’s locked, but with a little elbow grease it should come open. You could shoot the lock out, if it comes to that.”

  Veneranda thought of the thermite in her pouch, but said nothing. She just nodded.

  “So what’s the plan then?”

  “One of us is going to make a distraction - I’m thinking me, since I’m not moving very well. I can fire my gun off from a good distance, attract some attention. That oughta get them away from the facility. You get inside. There’ll be a door, fifth on the right, labeled ‘Networking.’ It’ll be locked but there’ll be a sort of grid thing next to it, with numbers. You know how to count?”

  Veneranda glared at him. “I can even count from one to patronizing jackass.”

  “Right. Okay. So you enter these numbers: Five - Seven - Two - Eight - Three. Got it?”

  Veneranda paused for a moment, repeating the combination over and over in her head. Finally, she nodded. “I got it.”

  “Good. You enter that number. It’ll get you inside. There’ll be a bunch of racks with wires and boxes. Put the monitor under the rack on the far left. If you put it on the floor, there’ll be a box right above it, with a bunch of blue plastic wires. Unplug the wire that’s in the lower right hand corner, then plug it into the monitor here.” Sutera indicated a tiny sort of recess on the side of the device he was holding. He pointed back at his map “Then you get out of there and meet me here, at this breach in their outer wall. You got it?”

  Veneranda felt a sour pit forming in her stomach, the sort of feeling she got right before the outriders headed out to investigate a bandit sighting, or when she got cornered by an animal and had to fight. But she nodded. “Yea, I got it.”

  “Good girl.” He glanced at the fire, then said, “It’s about twelve hours’ hike to the University from here, give or take some. That’s giving allowance for my leg. If we set out early in the morning, we’ll get there after dark. Work for you?”

  Veneranda nodded. “I guess I’ll camp out here tonight.”

  “Good idea. We can get an earlier start if we’re together.”

  Veneranda eased herself into a comfortable spot between two large tree roots. The loamy soil was soft and in her sweater she wasn’t too cold. The low fire made the bower pretty comfortable, all told. Sutera remained sitting, prodding the fire once again.

  “I’ll watch first,” he said.

  “Wake me up in a few hours and I’ll be fine,” Veneranda murmured.

  ****

  They moved across country more swiftly the Veneranda had imagined they’d be able to. Sutera seemed surprisingly untroubled by his injury, although periodically he did ask to stop so he could check the dressing and rest a moment. They used the highways, where available. A lone woman, even with a rifle, was a target for bandits, but it was considerably less likely that bandits would bother with a party of two, both of whom were armed and one of whom was a man.

  The sun had crashed into a horizon broken by the jagged teeth of dead civilization when they finally reached the thoroughfare that had once run along one side of the University. Now the street was split by a large chain fence, rusted and topped with razors. Periodic structures dotted its length, and in each Veneranda could see the telltale glints of movement that gave away watchers on a moonlit night.

  “The towers are built pretty well,” Veneranda murmured, “but their guards suck.”

  “You’ve got the University in a nut shell, there,” Sutera replied. “Great engineers, shitty soldiers.”

  “So how’d you get caught?”

  “Got careless.”

  They rounded the southern side of the compound. Cloud cover was beginning to roll in across the sky from the north, thin streamers that probably foretold more serious weather later in the evening. That was fine with Veneranda; she’d rather troop through the rain if it meant less light for people to see her by.

  “Here’s the breach we’ll use.” Sutera pointed at a spot where a partially collapsed building formed a gap in the chain link fence. He gestured at the ground. A hole had eroded the pavement, revealing a precarious-looking ramp into what must have once been a basement. Sutera led the way down, picking a slow but careful path through the chunks of old concrete and exposed rebar.

  The interior of the compound was shrouded by twilight. This surprised Veneranda somewhat - why not have lights if you had a working power plant? Still, so much the better. She crept along behind Sutera, keeping an eye to the shadows. They slipped amongst the squat brick structures, Sutera moving with surprising grace despite his hobble. Occasionally there were distant voices. They would pause each time, as the voices grew closer or more distant, but inevitably the conversationalists would veer off. Only once did a group of four speakers approach any closer than five or six yards. They hid against the side of a building, and no one so much as glanced at her.

  At last, they arrived at the reactor building. It reared up, a dark mass of cracked concrete, its facade gone sickly green as pale moonlight shone on two decades accumulation of algae and creepers. The building had imposing, metal double doors, in front of which stood two bored guards. One was watching the cloud cover move in; the other trimmed his fingernails with a small knife.

  “You think there’s gonna be weather?” one guard asked, his voice carrying to Veneranda across the small square in front of the building.

  “Naw, those clouds aren’t the right kind...”

&n
bsp; “How d’you know?”

  “Adjunct Gabriels told me.”

  “Adjunct Gabriels works in physics. Plus, he’s an adjunct.”

  The two men carried on arguing. Sutera looked at Veneranda.

  “Alright. You get in position, then wait for the shouting.”

  She nodded and slipped off into the night, giving the arguing guards a wide berth. There was a narrow alley that ran along the left side of the building, mostly clear of detritus and leaf litter. She moved quickly, able to almost run across the hard brick pavement.

  The backdoor was as Sutera had said it would be. A hefty iron lock held a metal plate in place, but that seemed to be all. Veneranda produced one of her thermite balls and pinched off a considerable amount between two fingers. She shaped the stuff into a ring around the lock’s loop and slipped the magnesium strip of the fuse in place. She waited.

  The darkness seemed to swallow her up, the moon finally retreating behind an ever-thickening layer of clouds. What was taking Sutera so long? Had he been caught? She hadn’t heard any shouting-

  There was an abrupt yelp of commotion, a long, drawn out scream, and more shouting. Veneranda immediately shielded her eyes and flicked her lighter. As the flame flared, she held it to the fuse by feel, waiting for the telltale hiss before jumping wall away and shoving her face against her knees. Even with that precaution she could perceive the flare as an intense light in the corner of her eyes. It was over quickly - hopefully so quickly that no one would notice it amidst the other confusion.

  Who had screamed, and why? Had Sutera been injured?

  No time to think about that. Veneranda used a wad of her sweater to yank the half-melted and still red hot lock free of the door. She flipped the metal plate aside and opened it.

  The hallway within was lit, immediately destroying her night vision. She blinked away spots, cursing herself for not expecting the sudden brightness. Just because they didn’t light their streets didn’t mean they’d leave the reactor in darkness.