by Rajan Khanna
“It’s still intact,” I said to Dad, the excitement sending a tingle through my fingers. Power to the locks meant that they shouldn’t have been opened before. The trick, of course, was getting them open ourselves.
“Can you do it?” I don’t actually remember if Dad asked that, or if he just gave me that look.
“I think so.”
“Then . . .” He waved his hand. “Do your magic.” There was the hint of disgust to his words. Dad preferred mechanical locks.
I pulled out the device from my pocket, careful not to damage it. It was the result of one of Mal’s trials. We would race, assembling them from old, antique camera circuits and other bits of machinery. A portable EMP.
I held it out, then looked at Dad. I gave him a little nod, then fired it off.
The lock disengaged with a clank. Dad was ready—he grabbed the handle and pushed it open.
I covered him. He had his revolver, and I had the pistol I was using at the time, a big black beast that was a little heavier than I liked to carry but had some crazy stopping power. We stood by the open door and waited, listening for any sounds. You’d think it was clear, seeing as the locks had held all this time, but Ferals had a way of finding holes and collapses and working their way into warm, sheltered environments. They used to be people, after all. And people aren’t equipped well enough for the elements.
The inside of the place smelled sour, and dusty. A hint of mold threaded through the still air. Dad’s boots kicked up a carpet of dust on the floor, disturbing the eerie silence.
“Shut the door,” Dad said. I did so, and when the power kicked back on and the lock clicked, I jumped a little. I hated being locked in again, but we had both been through things like this before. If there was an alarm system, and it went off because of the door being open, that could set off sirens, and that could attract Ferals or opportunists or whatever bad things were around.
It also meant there was a locked door at my back. From the inside, the windows looked like normal windows, but large metal shutters enclosed them. Keeping intruders out, but also us in. So, yeah, we were trapped.
“Dad . . .” I said.
He held up a hand. Always cautious. He was listening. He’d drilled it into me often enough when I was younger. “You need to use your senses. All of them. Not just your eyes. Your ears—to hear for their scrabbling, or their yammering. Your nose—to smell their stench.” Back then, I would complain about how I could do that with the goggles and the scarf and the hat. But now . . .
Dad cocked his head, as if he heard something. But his revolver remained down, his posture still relaxed. Then I heard it. A low hum. Dad pointed. I looked in that direction, my gloved hand resting on the butt of my pistol. I saw a dim but definite glow there. Some kind of power or status light.
“The juice is still working,” I said. “Everywhere.”
“It’s a good sign,” he said. I could practically hear what he was thinking. If this place still had power, and it was untouched, there could be useful tech here. Intact computers were valuable to the right people. Later, when I hooked up with Miranda, I saw exactly why. Yet again, this could be the score that we were looking for. Just maybe.
In hindsight, I realize we thought that a lot. I suppose that’s part of what kept us going, the hope that we would find something that would set us up—if not for good, then for a long while. That we could stop scrounging and scavenging for food and supplies and that we could, maybe for the first time in our lives, relax.
We were naive.
I don’t push the voice away this time.
We were fucking naive. Thinking that there was some score, some hidden way out, a door into another life. But there is no other life. There’s just the Sick. Shitting on you all the time.
The upstairs area was wrecked. By time, by the elements, coated in dust and mold, the bright colors faded to a muted gray. Here and there hints of what once were peeked through—a vibrant red echo, a bright blue ghost—but the Sick had pissed on this, too.
The thing I remember most was the image, still visible beneath the dust and grime, of a man, or what I took for a man, with an elephant’s head. He had four arms arrayed around him, and a fat belly, the kind I had never seen on anyone aside from the leader of a fringe cult. It was unclear what the many hands held. One seemed to clutch a weapon. Another, a flower. It was the strangest and most beguiling sight I’d seen in a while.
Later, when I was foraging through a library, I had identified the figure. Ganesha. A Hindu god. God of beginnings, and the Remover of Obstacles.
For years afterward I thought on that, after everything. Whose obstacle was removed after all?
* * *
There was nothing to be found on the ground level, nothing valuable at least. It looked like a meeting hall. Crumbling chairs and hanging pictures and a small stage or dais at one side. So trying to find the basement occupied our attention.
The basement level was even more sprawling than the ground floor. What looked like offices lined the walls, containing, as expected, computers. Dusty but intact. Dad looked at me as he hovered over one, and pressed the switch that would turn it on.
A moment passed as we both held our breath, and then the screen flickered to life.
“What does it say?” I asked as my dad peered at the screen (I had begun suspecting that his eyesight was worsening).
“It’s asking for a password,” he said.
I thought back to something that Tess had once told me. “Try password.”
“What?”
“The word ‘password.’”
He shook his head but did it. “Fuck me, that worked.”
I smiled.
He smiled back at me, youthful in that moment. “It works,” he said. Then he clapped me on the shoulder. “This will earn some nice barter.”
“And there are more.”
“Get the bag.”
We set about carefully disconnecting the computers, making sure to retain all of the cords and attached pieces. The plugs wouldn’t work outside of this place, of course, but enterprising tinkers or boffins could hook them up to solar cells or batteries, or both, and get them running again. There was a tinker back on Gastown, before the Valhallans took it, who could wire and rewire computers any way you could want them. I never did—they didn’t do much for me—but I know he did a brisk business.
I wrapped each piece in a bit of fabric to help protect them and carefully placed them in the bag until it was full. “We might need something else,” I said.
“We’ll look.” His voice was exuberant, and he moved with more energy than I’d seen in a while.
We kept on going throughout the basement, rifling through the offices, removing any electronics that we could find, stacking things in old worn boxes, even in drawers that we removed to use as carrying devices. We amassed quite a stack of things, though we hadn’t even begun to figure out how to get it all out. Carrying everything up one by one seemed to be the only option available to us, but if I knew Dad, he would try to come up with something better.
At the end of the floor, we saw a door, and behind that, another stairway leading down. There was even more to this place. I knew what I was thinking—that if these were the offices, where the people who ran the temple worked, then beneath would be the storage. The gear and maybe even the food and water. Like Tess’s stash in the library. That’s where it would have the most protection.
So Dad reached out to the door handle and opened it.
The Feral behind it barely gave him time to react.
* * *
It must have been waiting just at the top of the stairs, attracted by our noise, the footsteps above it. Was it just coincidence that it was right there when Dad opened the door? Or was it smart enough to know he was approaching? I’ll never know. But that Feral sprang out of the door like it was fired.
It took Dad completely by surprise. It slammed into him, and he fell to the ground, with the Feral landing hard on top of him.<
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I had my pistol out in an instant. The moment I saw that thing, I reached for the gun and pulled it free of the holster.
Then I hesitated for a moment before I took the shot. It was only a moment, and it was what any good shooter would have done in the same instant. Make sure I wasn’t going to hit my father by accident. Make sure I aimed the shot so as not to splatter Dad with a spray of blood. It was the smart thing to do. And yet . . .
I’ve spent a lot of time since then wondering if that was when it happened. If just a drop or two of that Feral’s saliva fell onto my father, a tiny drop catching him in the eye or on his lips, which he later licked. Or maybe he just inhaled it. It would have only taken that moment.
Then the moment passed, and my finger closed on the trigger and two quick shots rang out from my pistol. That moment of assessment had worked, at least with regard to my aim. The two shots caught the Feral in the side, up near his back, sending him spinning off of Dad, the wounds not likely to cause too much spray, and in the other direction.
As my senses started to return in the wake of the adrenaline spike, I heard whooping, chattering—more Ferals, coming from below. I made a quick decision. I ran for my father, grabbed his arm, and hauled him to his feet, and half pushed, half pulled him toward the way out.
I was vaguely aware of him protesting, shouting at me, but I just shook my head. “There’s no time!” I screamed. “More are coming! We have to get out of here.”
He must have still been shaken from the attack, and having been through something similar, I can imagine what he felt like. Legs like limp rubber. A kind of sharp yet hollow feeling inside. A pressure inside the head. So he let me guide him out. I don’t know, maybe he really wanted to get away in that moment and knew that’s what I was trying to do. But I got him up to the ground floor and then to the door.
The locked door, I realized, as we barreled toward it. I threw Dad ahead of me, almost slamming him into the door as I fished in my pocket for the portable EMP.
I heard Dad yelling at me again.
“Ben!” It finally penetrated my panic. “It’s open!”
Because of course it locked people out. Not in. Dad had his revolver out. I realized I was still holding my pistol. I nodded, taking up a covering position as he yanked open the door. I checked his exit path, then whirled around to cover his back when I saw the outside was clear.
Then it was a mad sprint back to the Cherub, and up into the Blue.
* * *
“What the fucking hell were you thinking?” Dad yelled, his face puffy and red from anger, or maybe from the excitement of our exit, or both. His hands gripped his hips, something he did only when he was good and furious.
“I was trying to get you out. Get us both out. Who knows how many Ferals were down there?” I was trying to be reasonable, but I was still buzzing, too, from the adrenaline. I had just gotten him out. Alive. And I could feel the anger there, simmering down below. Starting to surge upward.
“We could have barricaded the door,” he yelled. The tendons in his neck stood out like steel cables.
“That Feral was already through. It knocked you down, for fuck’s sake.”
“It was the only one out of the door, Ben. You should have moved to the door after you shot it. Shut that door. Put a desk or a bookcase against it.”
I closed my eyes for a second and willed the heat to stop flooding through me. I passed a hand through the tangle of my hair. “There could have been another one just behind.”
His eyes narrowed, then, and he got that mean look that he sometimes got. It seemed to be more frequent in those days. “There could have been anything. There was a huge haul down there. There was a shitload of good barter. And you know where it is now?”
I couldn’t bring myself to say “still there.”
“Exactly where you left it,” he said.
I shook my head. “You raised me to be safe. Not to take unnecessary risks.”
A bitter smile crossed his face. “Sometimes the risks are worth it.” He threw his hands up in the air. “Do you just want to continue the way we have? Getting by on scraps and the occasional mediocre find? That haul was worth it.”
I gritted my teeth and looked at the floor.
“Dammit, Ben, you could have at least closed the door. Now the place might be crawling with Ferals.”
“We got out.”
He nodded and the bitter smile returned. “We did. But now we’re going to have to go back.”
“What?”
He nodded again. “That’s right. We’ll wait a little while. Let them figure out that there’s nothing there for them to eat, and then we go back in and grab the bags and boxes.”
“The place could be swarming with them.”
He met my eyes, his expression cold. “We’re going back. We’ll just have to make sure we’re armed and ready in case there are other Ferals.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said, my voice low and dark.
“I don’t care what you think, Ben. We’re going.”
And that was that.
I went back to my room on the Cherub. I told myself that maybe after a couple of hours he would cool down and reconsider. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel the pull of that haul down there. It wasn’t that I didn’t see how it could set us up for a long while. I remember being hungry at the time and cognizant of our rapidly dwindling food stores. But something about that place, and the Ferals there, spooked me. We’d been in places before where things got crazy, where everything fell to shit, but usually it was a surprise, and usually we ran like hell. This time, we were going back into the shit.
I didn’t get it at the time, or for a long time afterward. But I think now, being older, possibly wiser, but certainly wearier, I get it. Dad was getting old. He was definitely feeling his age. Those scraps he mentioned—we’d both been living like that for a while. But of course it had been a lot longer for him. He had always been hoping for his score. For the find that would set him up for a good long time. Looking for a rest. He’d spent his life trying to stay alive, then trying to keep my mother alive, then me. I didn’t really understand that until Miranda. Until I had someone else I was worried about, someone I needed to protect. So it was the need to feel safe, for him and me, but also the thought of not having to hustle. Not having to run away or go down to the ground to pick at the carcass. Finally being able to fucking relax.
I get it now.
He’d found his score. Maybe not the one of his dreams. It was a little more practical. And it would require a little more work finding the right barterers, but this was the closest he was probably going to get. I think he was thinking of his time, which I’m sure felt like it was pissing away. Where’s the fun in enjoying a rest if you’re old and falling to shit? No, I see it now—his way out of the life.
So, in retrospect, I’m not surprised, though I was at the time, that he came to me two days later. “We go now,” he said. He tossed me a spare automatic pistol and a box of ammunition. “Make sure you’re fully loaded.” I noted the second pistol in his own belt.
I thought about fighting him. I still had that terrible feeling. But there was something in his eyes, something in the way he stood, that frightened me. Like an obsession. This score was all that mattered in that moment.
So I loaded both pistols, made sure they were working, and together we went back down to the ground.
* * *
We did it the same way we had done it last time. Kept the Cherub close. Kept each other covered. Crossed the ground to the temple as quickly as possible. The portable EMP still had some juice in it, so we used it again and opened the door. This time inside was more nerve-racking. I pulled the door open and Dad swiveled around with the revolver out. He wore another gun strapped to his leg, within reach of his off hand. We were both wrapped to the gills, too. I mean, we usually were, but we’d taken extra time to minimize the visible skin. I had my goggles on. Dad wore the swimming mask that he liked, with all
of its careful modifications so he could breathe well, so it wouldn’t fog up. Scarves wrapped around our faces. Knit caps covered the tops of our heads. We had shirts and jackets. Pants tucked down tightly into boots. Form-fitting gloves on our hands. We weren’t taking any chances this time. It’s ironic.
We moved again through the main hall. Again I saw the picture of Ganesha. One of his hands was empty, held out, palm forward. It almost seemed to be saying stop.
But there was no stopping Dad. He moved confidently toward the end of the hall, toward where we found the stairs, and then . . . he paused.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, my gun up. It’s difficult, talking with the scarves and the masks and the ear covers. You almost have to yell to be heard, but then of course anyone or anything around can also hear you.
“Dad?”
He shook his head for a moment. Like a dog might.
“Dad?”
Still facing away from me, he pushed the swimming mask up over his forehead and pulled the scarf down. I heard a cough.
I moved forward. “What’s wrong?”
He coughed again as he turned toward me. He finally faced me, skin pale, perspiration all over his face. Sweat freckled his upper lip, and dripped down over his eyes. He shook his head slightly. “I don’t know,” he said. “I feel . . . sick . . . all of a sudden.”
He wiped his face with the back of his sleeve.
Then he doubled over, dropping to the floor, bent. The revolver spilled from his hand and thumped on the ground. I bent down to him, picked up the revolver, tucking it into my belt for the moment, and helped pull him back to his feet.
“Are you going to throw up?” I thought back to what we had eaten over the last day or two. Not much, that’s for sure. It was easily possible that our meager stores had turned and gone bad. “We need to pull out,” I said. “You can’t do this in your condition.”
“I can,” he said, forcing himself straight. “I don’t . . .” His face twisted. In confusion.
“Dad?”
“Need,” he said.
“Need what? Dad, let me get you out of here.”