Behind the Ruins (Stories of the Fall)

by Michael Lane

  Up another double flight of steps - both the basement and sub-basement had tall ceilings - one reached the ground floor. Castle life was centered here, with the huge meeting halls, kitchens, and honeycomb of old offices feeding or housing most of the hundred-plus troops and dozens of Castle staff and laborers.

  Above, all three wings of the building were lightly populated, with commanders quarters, or boltholes where the men of the garrison kept stashes of liquor. A trooper guarded the row of rooms where staff slept - Creedy had lost more than one staffer to the appetites of troopers, which was wasteful. Dead servants needed replacing, as did the trooper found responsible. Five years before, on Gregor’s suggestion, Creedy had set up a row of suites, complete with its own guards, that housed a rotating series of prostitutes, usually six women and one man. The whores usually didn’t last more than a year before being rotated out for fresh faces, but it helped keep the garrison quiet. If one died in some particularly rough play, then the trooper in question would pay for the replacement - or go to the post, if unable to.

  At the topmost level, the floors of all three wings were largely deserted. Corner rooms overlooking the Castle’s surroundings were manned by snipers, one per corner, allowing two guns to be brought to bear on any side of the complex. Each day one of the kitchen staff would climb the stairs to the top, carrying an old red plastic shopping basket with meals for the stationed snipers.

  Today was Marcia’s day to make the climb, and the old woman moved with patient care, wary of her footing on the cement stairs. She had to descend after climbing to the top in each wing since they had been designed with defense in mind, and only connected at the ground floor. This was the third and final wing, and she stopped to catch her breath on the landing, rubbing the small of her back. With a murmured curse, she started off once more, wending her way to the sniper’s room at the wing’s far end. The halls were empty, the floors drifted with dust marked by the footfalls of the few who ventured here. The air was flat and stale. The building’s windows couldn’t be opened, and what little ventilation there was came from the sniper rooms, where the tough glass had been hammered out.

  A scrawny teenager with a spotty blonde beard turned from the window as Marcia entered. He cradled a hunting rifle across his chest, which he leaned against the wall as he took his meal: Stew in a plastic container, a hunk of coarse bread the size of his fist and a slab of salty smoked beef nearly as large. Despite the warm June air outside, the room still felt cold. It occupied a northern corner, and the concrete of the walls held the night’s chill through the day.

  The sniper muttered a thank you and sat to eat. Marcia gathered up the dishes from his previous meal and put them in the basket before leaving.

  She worked her way back toward the stairwell, but turned aside before reaching it, quietly opening a door and stepping within. She turned the latch, locking it, and moved deeper into an old suite of offices, past cubicles where keyboards gathered dust and screens stared with fishy plastic eyes going white with age. She opened another door, this one of heavy wood, and entered an office with an expansive desk and a wall of windows that looked out over the dunes and bunchgrass to the north. She watched cloud shadows chase each other across the landscape for a moment; blue smears cupping each hill or hollow faithfully as they fled east.

  The desk bore a pile of wool yarn and a half-finished sweater of raw yellow-white. There were a pair of ragged, dog-eared romance novels scavenged from the sub-basement wreckage, a tin holding some lumps of sugar filched from the kitchens, a candle in a tin can and a small bottle of purple liqueur, half-empty.

  The old woman turned away from the window, locking the door to the office, and sat down at the desk. The leather of the chair wheezed dustily in complaint. She pushed the knitting aside, then opened the largest of the desk’s drawers. She grunted as she bent and retrieved a heavy, square case from the drawer, setting it on the floor by her feet. She released the metal latches holding its cover in place and removed the headset and key, setting them on the desktop. She bent again and retrieved a notepad and pencil.

  The lengthening cloud shadows chased each other faster as the sun set, hurrying to greet the rising dark, while Marcia wrote.

  Chapter 18: Posterity

  Rastowich, dressed in the dark olive of his dress uniform, stood with Mayor Williams as Moorhouse and Kovacs were hanged. The battalion’s executioner, a meek bespectacled man named James Wood, moved with practiced economy, hooding the pair, then settling the noose around each man’s neck, the knot just below their left ear.

  The two stood, hands tied behind them, on a scaffold erected inside the university’s stadium. The football field had been covered in plastic turf and remained an eerie bright green despite the years of sun and rain. The scaffold looked ungainly and dire on the emerald background. It was built of scavenged lumber, black with age.

  Townsfolk filled a handful of the thousands of seats and children romped up and down the steps, dodged down rows of bleachers and called in shrill voices. Most of the adults, Williams included, were smiling. The Colonel was not, and ignored the traditional reading of charges by the lieutenant in charge of the execution, studying instead the scrap of paper he held.

  Speed essential. Area now locked, status of goods not known. Unknown if C in possession or knowledge of goods. Third party actions against C accelerating schedule. Third party unknown.

  Rastowich folded the paper neatly into his jacket pocket as the traps of the scaffold thumped open. The former Castle commander and his underling jerked to a stop on their respective ropes. The bodies kicked and spasmed briefly, but soon hung limp, twisting lazily. Urine began to dribble from the dangling legs as the bladders drained.

  Williams was extending a hand and saying something congratulatory. Rastowich shook it twice and dropped it, looking over the Mayor’s shoulder and speaking across his thanks.

  “Captain?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “Second and fourth company to ride, tomorrow at dawn. We’re going on ahead, the rest to follow ASAP.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Three and a half years to get here, reflected Rastowich as he pushed past a still-talking Williams. Three and a half years, and now I’ve got no time.

  “One more thing, Captain. Meet me in my tent after mess. I need to fill you in on something.”

  The camp buzzed. Troopers readied their gear to depart while others packed to move into garrisoning positions within Pullman itself. Troops to travel with the Colonel were lining up by squad at the supply wagons and being issued additional magazines for their rifles. The noise was constant and made worse by the hissing thump of one of the engineering steam tractors that had arrived yesterday. The rivet-sweating metal beast was twice the size of a bus, with a set of rail-gauge wheels tucked under its belly and a four segmented tracks that could, with time and effort, be raised or lowered as needed. The engineers had been repairing track in teams, and reported that supply trains were waiting on one more shipment of rails to bridge the final gaps in the route. The shipment was at least three days away, according to the telegraph. This one tractor had ranged ahead, exhausting most of its tender of coal, to bring a crew and tools to finalize the work on the old Pullman switchyard. Rastowich hoped the predictions were accurate, as supplies were thin after their quick advance, but it would have to take care of itself.

  The Captain presented himself precisely one-half hour after the bugle call for mess, ducking into the Colonel’s tent just as Rastowich was pouring himself a cup of tea. The Colonel poured a second one, setting the pot back on the ring of a diminutive white-gas stove that hissed quietly on a folding camp table.

  “Have a seat, Captain. And some tea.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Rastowich sipped gingerly, watching the Captain over the lip of the tin mug. Captain Nakamura was broad and square. Not tall, but taller than one expected due to the width of his shoulders.

  “How many years is it, Captain?”

  �
��Since we started west? Three years and seven months, sir,” Nakamura took short sips of his tea, balancing the cup on his knee between each.

  “This talk is informal, Captain, so relax,” Rastowich said. “I need to share some information with you, in case anything happens to me before we can take the Larson facility.”

  Nakamura tipped his head in a brief nod.

  “So, to start, the Larson facility is the main reason we’ve taken a northern line to the Pacific,” the Colonel said. “We could have crossed through Texas and into California, but the Puget Sound cities are seeing most of the trade out of Asia, so that’s a factor as well. The San Juan Islands protected a fair bit of their infrastructure from the same post-impact waves that tore San Francisco up so badly.

  “In any case, good trading port or not, we’d have had to come north to retake Larson. The Larson facility was built just a few years before the Fall on old Air Force land near a town in Washington called Moses Lake. It was built for Homeland Security as a western operations headquarters, not long after San Diego was hit. How much of that is still taught at the Academy?”

  “That San Diego was the target of a terrorist nuclear device. It was the first nuclear strike on the continental US and it precipitated a lot of political changes,” Nakamura rattled off. His mouth curved in a brief smile. “I don’t remember what the changes were, I have to admit.”

  “Constitutional changes, largely, but its moot now. When the Congress reconvenes it’s going to have to start from scratch. Anyway: Larson. Larson was basically a secure block of offices where intelligence was gathered. It was a paranoid time, and the government wanted decentralized control to avoid any chance of a concentrated attack taking out a large chunk of the chain of command. So they built a few centers like the Larson facility.”

  Nakamura raised an eyebrow and poured a second cup of tea before speaking.

  “What’s hidden in there, Sir? Nukes?”

  “No. We still have nukes no one knows what to do with, getting older and dustier in a hundred shielded silos. Ironic that the only technology well enough shielded to survive the Fall was in deep silos and isn’t useful for anything, anymore. Though some of the systems there now are, well, never mind,” Rastowich trailed to a stop, scratched vigorously at an ear and took another sip before continuing.

  “What’s in Larson is more valuable than weapons, or gold, or even medicine.”

  Nakamura squinted. The Colonel waited with a half-smile.

  “Leprechauns?” The Captain asked, deadpan.

  “Knowledge,” Rastowich said, smiling. “More in one spot than may exist anywhere else in North America at this point.”

  “It can’t be computers. All but shielded ones were fried, if the Academy profs told me the truth.”

  “Not computers, no,” Rastowich said. “As a culture we lost almost everything with the Fall. We’d spent the preceding decades transferring everything to electronic storage, and God crapped a handful of rocks on us and erased it. Poof.”

  “There are still stored media, aren’t there?” Nakamura twirled a finger. “Those CCs or whatever they are?”

  “CDs. And DVDs. There are,” Rastowich agreed with a humorless chuckle, “But they’re beer coasters now. And we don’t have the only ones that would matter – the ones they were archiving in DC. Still, you’d need a computer. We can’t even make a player for the discs, and what few surviving computers we have are busy in deep bunkers as is. We can’t spend time searching discs unless we know they’re worth the time. No, as a culture we made a mistake. We got rid of paper and went to new, efficient storage that was fast and perfect and utterly vulnerable. They thought that information couldn’t be lost because it was stored repeatedly in so many places, but it was all stored electronically, and when it went, it all went.”

  Rastowich stood, took a step to where his battered satchel hung and dug a slim brown book from it. He tossed it to Nakamura, who read the title and raised an eyebrow.

  “Basic Arc Welding for Students. Volume two. Sounds like a thrilling read, Sir.”

  The Colonel smiled.

  “For our engineers it was, I’m sure, as we crawled out of the smoking pile of crap that had been the postindustrial world. You know we had to relearn the most basic things - chemistry, blacksmithing, weaving just as an example. What books survived are incredibly valuable.”

  “There are a lot of books around still, aren’t there, Sir? I mean, they’re not rare. I’ve seen thousands.”

  “Yes and no,” Rastowich said, sitting down and sighing. “In the ruins of any major city, you can scavenge as many copies of The Shining or The DaVinci Code as you want. They’re interesting as historical exercises, but not useful. Schools aren’t much help. In the mid-twentieth century they would have been, with textbooks by the ton, but they went electronic as well. Little Jimmy took a PDA to class.” Nakamura raised an eyebrow. “Sorry, it was a type of little portable computer.

  “Anyway, even the Library of Congress and the major museums in old DC went with the flow. Outside of some religious groups, most large libraries were transferred to digital media, and many of the books were discarded or destroyed.”

  “In retrospect it seems idiotic,” Nakamura muttered, turning the pages in the book he held. He looked up at the Colonel and handed the book back.

  “Yes,” Rastowich agreed. “Pride cometh and all that. But we got lucky. When the Library of Congress was digitizing, a few people resisted destroying the physical books. Some of the books, ones representative of their time, or rare, or simply something that a librarian had a fondness for, were stored. In time these stores exceeded the space available to any of the organizations, and they petitioned Congress.” Rastowich shook his head. “From what I’ve read, they barely managed to convince people that keeping anything was worthwhile, and funding for a permanent storage facility wasn’t forthcoming, but they did manage to get a stay of execution for a lot of the material.

  “The Larson facility had a quiet second duty under its original charter. It was to house fourteen underground cellblocks, where those deemed most dangerous could be kept and interrogated, quietly, away from public scrutiny. Word of this somehow got out, and despite the paranoia of the times, and the modifications to Constitutional law, the backlash was so great that the project - the underground portion - was brought to a halt and never completed. So the government suddenly had a series of huge underground bunkers and a public relations black eye. To make nice, they allowed the storage of the books at Larson. And that’s why we’re going to go there and recover them.”

  Nakamura sat quietly for a moment before speaking.

  “How many books are there, Sir?”

  “No idea. The project to move them was still underway when the Fall happened. When DC was hit, any distinct record of it was wiped out. There could be a few thousand volumes. There could be a lot more. How many pages of other documents, who knows?

  “One thing, Captain: No one but you and I know this. If word got out, it would be easy enough for these squatters to destroy whatever is there, or – more likely - hold it hostage. I wanted you to know, so if I suffer a sudden unintentional retirement you can tell someone you trust in turn.”

  Rastowich showed Nakamura the radio set, gave him the frequencies and the cipher key.

  “We have to make sure that Larson is taken intact and garrisoned until we can reinforce it. Use the set to inform headquarters, if I can’t.” The Colonel stood, and Nakamura stood as well. “Anything or anyone that gets between us and controlling the facility is to be removed, immediately and permanently. Clear?”

  “Yes sir. One question: What if the outlaws know what they have?” the Captain asked.

  “They’re animals. I don’t imagine books are of much interest to them. If they do, we’ll deal with it.”

  “Got it, sir.”

  “Good. Get some sleep. We have a long ride ahead of us.”

  Chapter 19: Departure

  The wind had picked up. The gr
ass lay nearly flat, jerking and twitching under the gritty blast that carried bits of trash, dust and dirt in a stinging hail. The horses tossed their heads and were prone to brief fits of bucking and malingering.

  Mal led. He had wrapped his scarf around his face and wore an set of yellow ski goggles over his eyes. Grey and Georgia followed a hundred yards behind, with Clay riding drogue, another hundred yards back.

  The wind came out of the west, but veered about as it stumbled through the scabland hillocks and canyons. Sometimes it rose behind them like a tide, pushing them toward the Castle, and at others it slapped at their faces, pushing them away. It was too windy to talk, and Grey spent the time remembering.

  The wind had been bad that day, too. It had been colder, though, with the wet chlorine taste of promised snow in the air.

  Grey’s knuckles ached. He’d had to discipline one of his riders the evening before. The kid had stolen a bottle of whiskey from the supply wagon, and had lied about it when questioned. Stealing from the band was bad, but lying to Grey’s face made him furious. It was so insulting, so stupid. The kid had been seen, the whiskey found in his duffel bag, and he refused to admit the theft. It made him furious. To deny it to Grey’s face was to assume Grey was an idiot who could be fooled by childish lies. He’d blacked the kid’s eyes, and probably broken his jaw, but it had cost him a set of sore knuckles. The cold made the ache sink deep into the bone.

  It had been his whiskey, too. Maybe that’s why he had been so angry. He tried to push the thought away, but it didn’t go very far.