Outland (Revised Edition)

by Dennis E. Taylor

  “We also need the rest of that inventory from the Walgreens,” Krista said. As Richard turned angrily on her, she quickly added, “Look, if it starts to rain we could lose it all. And we, including Bill, put a lot of effort into getting it out in the first place.”

  Richard snapped his jaw shut and nodded, then turned to Charlie. “Could the Bobcat make it there and back?”

  “Oh, hell yes. There are no creeks or big gullies or anything between here and the Walgreens. Just follow the path we’ve already worn with the pickup. It’ll be a lot more trips, using the bucket to haul the loot, but you can save the delicate items first, and maybe wrap the other things in tarps if necessary. For that matter, I think it has a trailer hitch—”

  “Okay, good enough. Krista, can you get someone started on that when we’re done here?”

  At her nod, Richard continued, “We certainly don’t want to start a war with the National Guard. First, because they’re the good guys. Second, and not to put too fine a point on it, they probably outgun us by a wide margin.”

  He slumped his shoulders and thought for a few seconds.

  “On the other hand, we’re not leaving Bill with them. That’s not part of the plan. So we’re going to have to find out what the reality is, then take steps to rescue him.”

  72. Things Keep Piling Up

  Matt watched the video image on the tablet as Kavi slowly turned the pole-cam. “No obvious pickets, which is good. But no sign of life, which is bad. Did the troops bug out, do you think?”

  Kavi stopped what he was doing and turned to face Matt. “I doubt it. Looking at those buildings, my bet is they decided to find safer quarters. I’m surprised the structures haven’t already come down.”

  “Military construction,” Bob said. “Even so, I’d be nervous to be in that building.”

  “So we just have to figure out where they went,” Matt said. “Great. That narrows it down to, what? All of Lincoln?”

  “Maybe we should let them come to us.”

  As the others turned to look at Ayanda in surprise, she continued, “Look, they’ll probably stop and question anyone caught walking around, but as long as we’re not actively looting or breaking into things, they probably won’t shoot us out of hand.”

  ”You hope,” Bob said.

  “Are you suggesting what I think?” Matt said.

  Ayanda nodded. “One or two of us will go through and walk around. The ash is pretty much hardpan now, most places, so walking is a reasonable thing to be doing. Hopefully sooner or later they’ll show up. And if not, we’ll at least be able to recon faster than right now where we have to do everything through the pole-cam.”

  Matt was silent for a few seconds, thinking about it. “It’s not actually a terrible idea. There’s a bit of a risk, though.”

  “Sure, the same risk we take every time we go through to Earthside. But this time we’re looking for contact. And you can pull us out with the gate if it turns into a shitshow.”

  “Sounds good,” said Matt. “Let’s do it. Set up the person-gate.”

  It took less than a minute for Ayanda to swap out the pole-cam for the six-foot gate, while Matt informed Rivendell of the plan.

  Kavi and Bob stepped up, ready to go through. Matt held out his hands. “No weapons, guys. We don’t want to give them a reason to be nervous.” The two men handed over their shotguns, then stepped through the gate.

  Matt and Ayanda quickly switched back to the pole-cam so they could follow and stay in communication. It took them a few seconds to catch up with the two men, who were walking slowly toward the deserted buildings. The Outland pair kept a good distance, staying just close enough to be able to keep Kavi and Bob in sight.

  “No sign of anything,” Kavi said through the walkie-talkie. “We’re going to head north to the civilian airport.”

  “That’ll be a bit of a hike,” Ayanda said to Matt. “Should we follow in the truck?”

  “Or we could carry the pole-cam, tablet, portal generator, and electrical generator in our pockets.”

  ”You’re a bit of a dick, you know?”

  Matt grinned back, unrepentant.

  The journey took almost an hour. Matt and Ayanda watched through the pole-cam as Kavi and Bob investigated buildings, very carefully not doing anything that looked like breaking and entering.

  Finally, success of a sort. Kavi and Bob stopped abruptly and raised their hands.

  “Unless they’re messing with us,” Ayanda said, “we have a bite.”

  “Okay, Operation Follow-Them commences,” Matt said.

  “Really? Don’t ever write a TV script.”

  “Whatever. Let’s not lose them.”

  In short order, three soldiers came into view, rifles at the ready. There was a brief conversation, Kavi and Bob were relieved of their possessions, and the group began walking west.

  Matt and Ayanda kept their distance and tried to keep the pole-cam low and unobtrusive. The pole-cam aperture wasn’t large, but on Earthside it would show as a blue disk with a camera in the center. They didn’t want the Guardsmen to notice it.

  Kavi and Bob were eventually led to a hangar on the tarmac. As the pole-cam was maneuvered into the interior, Matt gasped. A sea of tents and suspended tarps formed a ragtag refugee camp. The occupants stood or walked around aimlessly. The occasional uniform mixed with the population, showing that these weren’t prisoners.

  Kavi and Bob were walked past this scene, craning their necks and gawking until one of the soldiers started poking them with his rifle barrel.

  “Well, this is very interesting,” Matt said. “We have to see where our guys end up, then we’ll radio this in.”

  Within a few minutes, Kavi and Bob were deposited in a room along the edge of the hangar, and a guard was placed outside the door.

  “Okay, good enough.” Matt changed to the Rivendell channel and pressed “talk.” “Rivendell, Richard, this is Matt. The bait has been taken. Everything is in the green.”

  “Not so much, Matt. Stay there and keep watch, and Charlie and I will join you. The Guard has arrested Bill, right in the middle of a scavenging op, which means he will be treated like a looter.”

  73. Doing Time

  The soldier directed Bill out of the back of the truck. He found himself in a large warehouse space. A hangar? The ones at the Lincoln airport had sloped roofs, so that seemed like a good possibility.

  The corporal had a clipped conversation with the driver, during which Bill managed to catch her last name. Chavez.

  As he waited, he realized that he was looking at an indoor tent city. He turned and scanned the crowd. A quick count indicated there were around fifty people, including a number of children. They looked dirty, tired, and desperate. While we live the high life.

  The corporal poked him with her rifle barrel. “These are the people that you stole food from their mouths, asshole.”

  Bill turned to her with a smirk. “These are the people from whose mouths you stole food.” He regretted that as soon as it came out. Baiting someone who was holding a weapon on him was probably not his most brilliant move ever.

  Sure enough, the corporal’s face turned red, and she looked for a moment like she was going to shoot him and screw the regs. Instead, she gave him a hard shove with her rifle, and Bill turned in the indicated direction. They went through a door and he found himself in a small, bare office, with an officer sitting at a desk. The nameplate read “Lieutenant Collins.”

  “Well, it seems this is our lucky day,” the lieutenant said to the corporal. “No results for weeks, then suddenly three in one day.” He gave Bill the once-over and pointed to a chair. The officer took a sip from a cup of coffee and made a face, then stared at Bill in silence for a while.

  This is the softening-up part, Bill thought. I get real nervous, and then try to fill the empty air with an explanation. Bill stared back with an innocent expression on his face.

  After a while the lieutenant sighed. “You’ve been caught looting
during a disaster, which means I can have you shot right here and now. So you’re going to give me some answers, and they’re going to be truthful.”

  Bill waited two beats before responding. “Well, no, I wasn’t caught looting, I was caught walking around in the general area of where your soldiers assumed some looting had been done. As for the rest, what you really want is to find out who I am, where I’m from, who else might be with me, and what other resources I might have. And I’m prepared to tell you all of that, in as much detail as you want.”

  Lieutenant Collins stared at him for a second, then slowly smiled. “You’ve sort of gone off-script. Not a professional looter, I take it?”

  “Do those really exist?” Bill replied. He decided to try simple candor. “Look, we’re all just ad-libbing things, you know? Up until about three weeks ago, I was an engineering student at UNL.”

  “So then why don’t you start by telling us how many people are in your gang or whatever it is?”

  “A little over three hundred.”

  Lieutenant Collins’s eyebrows rose at this statement. “Three hundred people, and we’ve not seen hide nor hair of you. Nothing but a lot of tracks, despite almost a month of patrolling. How does that work, pray tell?”

  Bill leaned back in his chair and did his best to look casual. “Well, that’s kind of a long story.”

  Lieutenant Collins spread his arms, palms up, looked around, then said, “Corporal Chavez, please cancel all my appointments, including my date with the president.”

  Chavez grinned and made typing motions into the air. Then she said, “Done.” They both turned to look at Bill, Chavez not quite able to suppress a smirk.

  Bill laughed out loud. “Nice. I bow to your sarcasm-fu. I think we’re going to get along.”

  74. Gotcha

  Pete and Phil pulled over once they were out of sight of the camp. They had borrowed the bikes on the pretext of doing some scouting, and Pete promised himself that they would do some actual scouting at some point. But for now, he and Phil needed something to relax, and a chance to tend the garden.

  He looked at Phil and patted his pocket. It wasn’t that they thought they’d get in trouble for smoking a little pot; after all, there were literally no cops anywhere on this planet. Well, there were the two retired guys, but they didn’t give a damn.

  But Pete had a limited supply and didn’t feel like sharing with the entire student body. He motioned to a spot over by the trees, and they rode their bikes over to it.

  As they came to a stop, there was a pop, and Phil staggered and fell off his bike. As Pete’s eyes widened in shock, there was another pop, and the world came to an end.

  Zeke and Carl hit the kill switches on the dirt bikes. They quickly pulled the bodies into the trees, then rolled the bikes into hiding. It took only seconds to remove the weapons and anything else of value from their victims.

  Zeke said, “We’ll have to move the bodies, maybe try to cover them. We can’t spend all day parked next to a couple of corpses, and if animals come along and start dragging pieces of student around the landscape, it’s going to set off alarms.”

  “So? Why don’t we just shoot anyone who comes looking?” Carl said.

  Zeke shook his head. “Carl, there’s only two of us. If we give them time to run for their guns, we’ll be outgunned a hundred to two. We have to be able to catch them by surprise.”

  “After dark? I’m not thrilled about walking around after dark.”

  “Me either,” Zeke said. “No, I was thinking around dinnertime. They all gather in that fenced area in front of the sheds every day. We can approach from behind the sheds. I didn’t see anyone watching on that side.”

  Carl shrugged in silent agreement, and they bent to the task of getting rid of the bodies.

  Dinnertime.

  After a day of moving stuff around in the Earthside warehouse, Monica settled down gratefully with her plate of something stew.

  The colony had settled into a routine of communal meals. It helped a lot that a good fraction of the students were from rural homes and knew how to convert a deer into food. A couple of gallon-sized cans of chili added to the pot produced a very serviceable stew. Meals might get monotonous, but there would never be a lack of calories.

  Meals were always held inside the protected fenced area. The fence had been expanded as much as possible, using every available panel. Even so, many people had to seat themselves inside the sheds during mealtimes.

  “Hey, where’s Pete and Phil?” someone asked.

  Monica looked around, and didn’t see them. “The stoners are probably out getting blitzed again,” she replied. “Or as they call it, ‘scouting.’ ”

  “You’d think hunger would have driven them back by now,” Erin observed drily.

  “Maybe they’re in one of the sheds. I’ll have a quick look.” Monica got up and headed for the second shed, plate in hand. Since it contained most of the equipment, it had a lot of convenient places to sit and eat.

  She walked slowly through the shed, looking left and right. The lights hanging from the ceiling gave adequate if somewhat uneven illumination. Going to have to watch our fuel usage for the generators until we can get more in, she thought idly.

  Pallets of supplies alternated with crates of equipment and weapons. Off to one corner, the portal equipment had been stored. And there, sitting on one of the portal generators, was Kevin, writing in a notebook.

  “Kind of primitive, isn’t it?” Monica asked, pointing at the notebook and pencil. She was careful to smile as she said it, as Kevin had a tendency to miss social cues.

  Today, Kevin was getting it. He smiled back and said, “Yeah, but running the generator just to recharge a tablet seems kind of wasteful. And in the longer term, we’re going to have to figure out how to live without it.”

  Monica nodded, then brought the conversation back on topic. “So hey, I’m looking for Phil and Pete. Seen them around?”

  “The stoners? No, sorry.”

  Monica laughed inside at the thought that even Kevin got it where those two were concerned.

  Suzie sat with her friends, enjoying the last bits of her meal. It had been another long day. In the tradition of familiarity breeds contempt, she found herself bored more often than not. After a while, even the roars of large, supposedly extinct cats in the distance lost its edge. And once she’d seen twenty or so mammoths, she was good for life.

  The days had fallen into a routine. Oh, it wasn’t the same for everyone, of course. The scavenging parties had just run into far more excitement than they wanted. But for kitchen staff, not so much.

  She’d helped prepare the meal today, and once it had been handed over to the serving staff she was free for the evening. Venison chili again. Suzie sighed. This Bill Rustad had an unholy fascination with chili. He’d stocked up literally gallons of the stuff in those big tins. But it was better than those Meals Ready to Eat. Wow, talk about an oxymoron. She’d tried one and had decided that if someone needed to be punished, it would be enough to make them live on those for a day or two.

  As they ate, the friends compared notes.

  “I got to help make fences again today,” Bruno said. “Oh, what fun! Not! I must have poked myself with the barbed wire a thousand times.”

  “I’m on chainsaw duty,” said Curt. “I actually enjoyed myself. Maybe if I can’t get a job as a history professor, I’ll take up lumberjacking.”

  Suzie had a sudden mental image of Curt in a plaid shirt and a toque. She started singing “The Lumberjack Song,” and everyone cracked up.

  “I’ve been with the group that’s been inventorying what we have and trying to figure out what we need the most,” Joy said. “We’ve finally finished, and we’re ready to give the scavenger crews a list. Up until now they’ve been bringing back everything they find, and it’s kind of getting crowded.”

  It was an enjoyable moment, sitting with her friends, relaxing and talking about whatever came to mind.

  Su
zie saw movement by the fence, right where it abutted the edge of the shed. Two figures were moving around. She heard a screech of rubbing metal as one of the figures pulled the fence panel up off the stake that had been holding it in place. Before she could make sense of what she was seeing, the other figure had rushed at her, grabbed her by the hair, and pushed a shotgun in her face.

  Erin watched Monica go into the shed. As she turned her attention back to her food, she heard a sudden grinding and scraping sound from the corner where the fence attached to the shed. She swiveled her head to look, and the sight was so unexpected that for a second she was unable to make sense of it.

  It was two of the thugs from the warehouse altercation. One had yanked the fence panel off the stake, and the other had moved quickly into the compound. Before anyone could react, that guy had grabbed a student by the hair and held a shotgun to her head.

  He gave a nasty grin and yelled, “Nobody moves, or the kid’s brains get splattered all over! If I see a gun, if I see anyone run for the shed, if I see anything that makes me upset, the kid’s dead!”

  As Erin got to her feet, she realized that the other thug, the big ugly one with the beard, was bearing down on her. Before she could think what to do, he grabbed her by the front of her shirt and pressed a pistol under her nose. She had time to see that he had a shotgun on a shoulder strap.

  Erin’s brain re-engaged and she remembered their names: Zeke and Carl. She glanced around but couldn’t see the third one, Jimmy. Erin glanced in the direction of the shed and could just make out Monica’s head peering around the door.

  Carl, meanwhile, raised his voice so that all could hear. “Unless you want her to join the two shitheads with the bikes, you’re all going to do what we tell you.”

  Someone called out, “Wait, you mean Pete and Phil? Where are they? What did you do with them?”