Pickers 1: The Find

by Garth Owen

  Pickers

  1. The Find

  Garth Owen

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  The bunker echoed with its first human sounds in decades, the slap and squeak of rubber soles on marble flooring.

  A slight figure sprinted out of the corridor into the three storey atrium, hurdled a chaise and slid to a halt in a crouch. With a sweep of her legs, she turned to face back the way she had come. There may have been the hint of amusement in the eyes as she looked back down the corridor.

  Her black hair was cut haphazardly, and a scarf covered her mouth so she didn't have to breathe all the dust she stirred up. Only her eyes and a slit of dark skin around them were visible. Dressed in loose trousers, dark body suit and light jacket and with an old courier bag over her shoulders, she had weapons and exploration equipment carefully secreted about her body. She was ready for the men who chased her.

  Her name was Maxine, and it was her job to be the decoy. She was enjoying it more than she should.

  She couldn't yet see her pursuers, but they made enough noise to compensate for that. They were doing what they were supposed to, following her into the residential wing so she could lay a trap for them. Now that she had them here, she had to work out what that trap would be.

  White circles in the ceiling were light domes, diffusing the daylight far above that had been channelled through mirrored light tubes. Rectangles set into the wall lit up with uncertain flickers. They would be powered by the mini nuclear plant far below the floor. Even after all these years, the automated systems still worked, which was impressive. Maxine studied the newly illuminated room, doing a tactical assessment.

  The atrium was circular, with only one entrance on its lower level, the one Maxine had entered by. A semi-circular balcony looked down from the level of the first floor opposite the corridor, a dark wood double door at the mid point. Curved stairs led up to the balcony, and a jumbled mix of marble and bronze statues were gathered around the walls. So far, so much like the plans Maxine had seen.

  Darting toward the nearest statue, Maxine jumped up on to its hunched shoulders and pushed off from its head to grab the balustrade of the stairs, clambering over them. It saved her whole seconds over the less flamboyant route from the foot of the stairs.

  The double doors swung open easily, opening onto a darkened room. As more motion sensing lights turned on, Maxine closed the doors behind herself and drew a seat across to barricade them. It wouldn't hold for long, but she only wanted to create a small delay. She studied the tableaux revealed by the lamps.

  She was in a large dining room, dominated by a long table. Three desiccated figures were sat before their final suppers. Judging by their attire, two women and a man. One woman was sat nearly upright in her chair, head twisted toward the door and mouth open in what could as easily be a smile as pain. The other woman, across the table, had slumped forward into whatever she had been eating.

  The man sat at the head of the table. There was something lopsided about his head. As Maxine neared him, she recognised what was wrong. Most of the left side of his skull was missing. She walked around the back of his chair and there, still clutched in the leather wrapped bones of his right hand, was a large semi automatic pistol. The fingers snapped off as she pulled the weapon from them. On the table beside the man's meal was a box of cartridges.

  Outside the room, there were voices, shouts of orders, then a hammering as her pursuers tried to force their way in. She held up the gun. Pulling back the slide to chamber a new round, she didn't like the feel of it. She had seen too many guns disintegrate under test firing to trust this one. There was a .38 revolver in a holster under her arm that she did trust, and a 9mm on her hip, but she wasn't sure the guys on the other side of the door were worth the expense of bullets. She felt like improvising.

  False windows in the walls looked out onto idealised visions of the world before, back when there had been abundance. They looked like nothing Maxine had ever seen. She imagined they bore little resemblance to the world that had led the occupants to build this bunker, either. Under the windows were long tables laid out with the pretty and pointless possessions the rich folk hiding here had felt were important. An array of big watches caught Maxine's eye. There was a pile of pashminas and shawls in silk and cashmere beside the watches. She wrapped one of the soft wool scarves around her fist and picked up the heaviest, most unnecessarily knurled of the watches.

  Beside the doors, there was an override switch for the room's lights. Maxine turned the lights off and stood beside the switch as the battering on the door began to splinter the chair barring it. It gave way, finally, with a creak and crack, and the door pushed open. Two figures entered, back lit from the atrium.

  "She be here?" the nearest one said.

  "Must be. None else to go to."

  "Why no lights?" said a voice from the balcony.

  "She hide. We find her."

  "We find her, we do her good." the nearest one said. He added a high pitched scream to the end of his statement.

  Maxine had kicked the side of his knee with the flat of her foot, tearing ligaments and separating the bones with a horrible pop. As he started to topple, she punched him hard just behind the hinge of his jaw. The watch wrapped around her fist embossed a circular wound as it dislocated his jaw. She moved quickly, pulling him down and simultaneously pivoting around him to drive the tip of her boot into the solar plexus of the man beside him. Her second victim staggered backwards, and she grabbed his outstretched hand. Doing a bizarrely graceful pirouette, she twisted his arm, wrenching it so hard that it popped out of the shoulder socket.

  A blood coated, barbed arrow head suddenly sprouted from the chest of the man whose shoulder Maxine had just torn apart. She had been planning to push him backwards onto the balcony to distract the two others she knew were out there. But one of them had panicked and, trying to shoot her, had skewered his companion instead. Now he was just dead weight, and he dropped to his knees.

  That was annoying. Maxine had choreographed the next part of the fight around using him as a shield and distraction. No matter. She spotted the throwing knives in the band around his left arm. Drawing one quickly, she threw it underhand at the nearest figure outside the doors. He had been struggling to reload a cross bow, but he dropped it when the blade lodged just above his collar bone. Her aim wasn't as good with her left hand as her right, she thought, so she drew and threw another knife for good measure. This one sank deep into the left side of his chest. He staggered backwards and tipped over the balustrade. There were two thuds as he hit statues on the way down.

  The last of the quartet who had chased her into the trap was standing at the top of the stairs, holding up a machete. He waved it around as Maxine stepped out of the room and made a show of adjusting the watch wrapped around her fist. She nodded toward the doors. "One of them in there is still alive. You can take him and get out of here if you want."

  "Bitch!" was the carefully considered reply.

  Maxine feinted a jab at machete man's chin. He flinched and stepped back. His foot slipped over the edge of the top step and he fell backwards, flailing his arms around, hopelessly striving to get his balance back. There was a crack as his head hit the corner of a step, then he rolled down the stairs like a bundle of rags. Somewhere along the line, he managed to impale himself on his own knife.

  Grimacing, Maxine turned away from the atrium. She had offered him the chance to live, the idiot. She liked fighting enough, but she preferred not to kill unless she had to. Which reminded her, one of them
was still alive.

  With the lights back on, she stood over him as she removed the watch from her fist and unwrapped the soft material that had padded it and protected her fingers. He was conscious, more or less, and groaning with the beating she had inflicted on him. Taking the knife from his belt, she held it to his throat as she knelt behind him. "I'm going to turn you over and take all your weapons. Don't try anything stupid now."

  "Biff!" he mumbled, spitting blood, but he didn't make any hostile moves, and both his hands were in plain view. As Maxine pulled him over onto his back, pain closed his eyes tight and turned his mouth into a twisted grimace.

  The bandoleers across the injured man's chest gave up a large collection of throwing stars, knuckle dusters and other items. Maxine kept some of them, and threw the rest across the room. He had even more weaponry concealed in the pockets of his trousers and strapped to his boots. When she had disarmed him, and taken anything interesting, Maxine held the knife to his throat again. She thought about it, and removed the knife, putting it into her bag. "I'm not going to kill you. I'm not that kind of person." His expression reminded her that he had just seen her kill three of his friends. "Really. You looked like a Scouting party. Are there any more?"

  He was young, and might have been attractive with all the grime removed. And if he hadn't been more than willing to rape and kill her minutes earlier. She could see thoughts of defiance shaping his features, but they cleared away after a mere moment. He nodded. "How many?" This, he wasn't going to tell her, and she let him have that little victory. "They'll find you. Probably. Maybe I'll leave them a sign."

  Wounded as he was, it might not be such a mercy to let him live. The raider gang he rolled with likely wouldn't give him any support. They might just kill him or, worse, take him a few miles away and dump him somewhere to die. But Maxine didn't do cold blooded murder, and, as her father said, where there was life, there was hope.

  Keeping an eye on him, just in case, Maxine went through the same disarming process with the harpooned guy. He provided a leather satchel that was a useful supplement to her own bag, and she worked her way quickly around the room, picking the items worth salvaging from the rich peoples' status symbols. The guy with the broken jaw and busted knee had passed out whilst she did this, so she just left him where he was and headed down the stairs. Fully loaded already, she didn't go through the pockets of the bodies on the lower level.

  * * *

  Two levels below the atrium, Maxine's sister and brother in law were doing the job they had broken into the bunker for.

  Tony stared at the door to the server room. "Did you hear a scream?" he asked.

  "No. But if there was one, it would just be Maxine doing her job." Veronique said. She pulled another drive from the rack and slid it into a compartment in the bag they'd made specially. "And if she's having to do her job, that means we don't have long to finish ours."

  "I know, I know. Anyway, I'm two ahead of you. I have a little time to spend worrying." Tony was clearing disks out of another cabinet. They didn't know which, if any, held the information they sought, so they were taking them all. This was the last of the drives he had to remove, so he zipped his bag up and carried it over to the trailer behind his ATV.

  Veronique removed the last of her assigned drives, zipped up her bag and put it in the back of her own trailer. "If there weren't so many damned raiders in the area, I would love to go through this complex room by room and strip it of everything of use."

  "And bury those poor bastards next door." They had opened the wrong door first and found a pile of a dozen or so- it was hard to tell exactly with them all stacked up- corpses. It appeared that most of them had been shot, who by was a mystery they'd have to leave unsolved.

  Tony led the way back up the tunnel, his electric motored ATV running nearly silently. Apart from the rumble of tyres on concrete floor and the rattle of the trailer over the occasional bump, they made no sound. The corridor curved and ran up a gradient and they soon reached the first of the blast doors on the way to the entrance hall. They had left it open and, when he was through it, Tony stopped to look at the turn handle to crank it open and closed. "Raiders are going to find this place now. We've cut them a path right to the door." he said.

  Veronique recognised the tone of her husband's voice. "And we wouldn't want them to get at a nuclear generator, would we? I have some of Maxine's thermite bombs. I thought we might want to melt some mechanisms, one way or another."

  Tony started cranking the door closed as Veronique opened a hard case in her trailer and pulled out a can. Once, long ago, it had contained preserved food of some sort. The label had been ripped off, and now it held a carefully mixed formulation of iron oxide and aluminium powder. The new top, cut from another tin, was strapped down with two metal bands and had the cap of a fuse screwed into it. Pulling the string that came from the top of the fuse set the chemical timer off. Because the timing on the chemical fuse could be haphazard, it was a very long piece of string. More string, wrapped around the tin, could be used to fasten it in place until detonation.

  When the door was closed, Veronique perched the bomb on the lip just behind the turn handle and tied it in place. They mounted their ATVs and drove slowly up the slope until they had reached the limit of the string pull. Veronique took up the tension until, with one last tug, the chemical fuse was activated and the string went limp.

  As they sped off, their was a whooshing sound behind them and a blueish white light flared up and cast their shadows on the curve of the wall ahead of them. There were another two doors to sabotage, if they had the time.

  * * *

  There were three motorcycles parked in the entrance hall. It was behind the back wall of a shop that had been looted long before. They had spent several hours knocking a hole in the wall big enough to get the ATVs through, then Maxine had stayed behind to stand guard.

  They must have left tracks on the road up the hill from the centre of the dead little town. It was just their luck that the four riders had been in the area to find them. They'd roared in too fast for Maxine to draw them away from the shop, so she'd taken them for a run through the tunnels to the dining room. The riders had dismounted to chase Maxine on foot because she had led them through one of the narrower doorways. They couldn't have known how wide the corridor beyond it was, or that they could, with work, have got the bikes into it.

  Maxine studied the bikes. One of them was a battered road machine, missing its aerodynamic fairing and with chunky treads hand cut into its slick tyres. There was a rifle case slung over the seat, she added it to her bags. The second bike had a makeshift side-car welded to its frame. The side-car was a cuboid frame with sides and a bottom tacked into it and a makeshift seat. The passenger had been squeezed in, apparently with their legs either side of a jerry can full of fuel. Maxine shuffled some of the rubbish in the bottom of the side-car, but found nothing of value. She unscrewed the cap on the petrol tank and sniffed. As she'd thought, it was running on alcohol.

  The last of the bikes was much more interesting to Maxine. The chunky white off roader didn't have a fuel burning motor, but was electric powered instead. A motor integral with the frame drove the rear wheel through a chain, whilst the front wheel had a big hub, suggesting another motor was housed in it. Her own electric bike had been damaged on the last leg of the trip, and she had ridden to the bunker on the back of her sister's ATV. Perhaps this one could provide spares to repair her bike, or be a straight up swap.

  Raiders didn't take great care of their rides. Under the dust, the two alcohol fuelled bikes were held together with twine and good luck. The white electric bike was in better condition, they must have found it recently, She decided she would take it, they'd even left the key in.

  Maxine mounted up and kicked the stand back. The bike responded to the slightest twist of the throttle and she did a quick circuit of the other bikes. This one might even be better than what she already had. Heading out through the gap in the wall, she wove
her way through the shop to the street. They had left tracks going into the building, and the raiders had left more. If there were more of the gang out there, as promised, they'd find this place easily enough. She listened, and soon the rasp of engines came to her. It came from downhill, the same direction as the raiders' tracks led off in. The street ran straight down to the town square, where there were already two bikes circling.

  The bikers didn't appear to spot her, and soon left the square, heading back toward the heart of the noise. The whole gang would be down there soon enough, just in time for Veronique and Tony to appear on their ATVs. They'd need something to block the narrow street just long enough to put a safe distance between them and the gang. She knew just the thing. Spinning the bike, Maxine raced back into the shop.

  Maxine didn't have to get further than the top of the tunnel to the lower levels to see the flare of one of her thermite bombs. When Veronique and Tony arrived in the entrance hall, backlit by more thermite, Maxine was strapping the bike with a side-car to the rear of the electric cycle. They pulled up either side of her, not at all surprised that she had found her own ride and wouldn't be sitting on the back of one of their vehicles for the return journey. "We're going to have to take the high road out of here. Can you load that stuff into one of the trailers."

  As Tony put Maxine's salvage into his trailer, she engaged the drive on both wheels of her bike to pull the motorcycle and side-car out of the building. She lined it up pointing down the hill and used straps to lock the handlebars straight. Just in time. There were more bikes in the square now, and just as the ATVs pulled up beside Maxine, one of the bikes at the bottom of the hill stopped, and its rider pointed in their direction.

  There was one last thermite bomb in the box in Veronique's trailer. Maxine wedged it into the trailer, laying the jerry can on top of it. "Go! I'll meet you on the track up the hill!" she shouted, waving Veronique and Tony away. The ATVs set off, as fast as their loads and the incline would let them. On her new bike, she'd catch up with them long before they turned off the road into the forest.