“That was ten years back, wasn’t it?”
“Something like that,” I said. “There’re still a lot of subdivisions over there, but ten years of building left the area dotted with clusters of big populations in the midst of an ocean of housing subdivisions. There’s no telling what we’ll find as we head east.”
“When are you planning to start those caravans?”
“Pop wants to consolidate what we’ve started first, but we’ll have to do it soon, or we’ll have the same thing we were trying to prevent over here. We’ve got the men, and we’ve got the food now that the combines are back in the field.”
“And we have the trucks to run all the way to the Waterfront.”
“Yep. Now we have the trucks. We have enough fuel to operate for some time, but we’re going to have to go south and get with Collins to get some more moving this direction. Now we have a Port, though. We can get it brought in to us and truck it to the Farms.”
“That lady on the Waterfront kind of had a thing for you, didn’t she?”
“She was nice,” I said, “but she’s from the city.”
“And?”
“You see what that place is,” I said. “It’s a monster just sitting there poised to strike at us. We can stall it by feeding it, but it’s like feeding a lion. If the food becomes scarce, the lion will look at us. Perhaps if we’d been sooner, the city wouldn’t have sank as far into the abyss as it did, but there’s no telling. Look at Destil. It was an independent town, and they were eating one another within a year of the Fall.”
“What does that have to do with the lady on the Waterfront? She and her people are good.”
“Better than the others, yes. But why didn’t they try to do something? Same with Wilderman. They barricaded themselves in and watched their own city burn around them.”
“They’re just people, Zee,” he said. “They didn’t have a Pratt family to drag them kicking and screaming away from the brink. It doesn’t make them bad people. Not many people can be a Zebadiah or a Kendrick Pratt. I couldn’t. I’d probably have barricaded my family and friends in and hoped someone like you and your dad would come save the day. I didn’t have to do that because you were already there.”
“Someone else would have done it if Pop hadn’t,” I muttered. What he was saying made me uncomfortable. It made us sound like some sort of saviors.
“Who? Your dad didn’t want to hold that much power and left it in the charge of the seven most respected of us. They let those bastards take one of their own rather than do anything. People are just people, Zee. We see them everywhere. Heroes…well, heroes are a bit less common in this Fallen World.”
* * * * *
Chapter 49
Wilderman had walls up across the street this time instead of just the guards.
“Glad to see you guys,” the red-coated guard said as he pulled the gate open. “Starting to wonder if you’d be coming back through.”
“It’s a big damn city,” I said.
“No doubt,” he said as we watched the wagons roll into the zone. “I’m amazed you guys even tried. Most people would have just let the city die.”
“Pop just couldn’t do that,” I said.
“And because of that, you’re a more welcome sight than you might think. Stores are running low, and the MREs you guys brought last time have been priceless.”
“I think you guys will be happier this time,” I said. “We have other supplies, too. Beans, corn, flour, corn meal, and oatmeal. Plus the MREs.”
“That’s going to make some happy people,” he said.
“I hope so,” I said as I watched the last wagon roll inside. “I’m tired of dealing with those psychos to the east. It’ll be refreshing to have some civil folks around.”
He grinned and closed the gates. “We do try to be civil.”
“See you inside in a little bit, Robert is it?”
“Close,” he said. “Roland.”
“I knew it was an ‘R,’” I said.
“Not bad for a guy who spoke to me once over a month ago.”
“You had a little girl with you when you came through the line. Looked like about the same age as my daughter,” I said.
“Ah, that makes sense.”
“I’ll see you later in the line,” I said.
He nodded, and I followed our wagons along the street toward the skyscraper Wilderman had chosen to use for his headquarters. It was the tallest in the zone. They’re always in the tallest buildings. They always want to be higher than the others.
“I’d be looking for a bunker like the one we found to the west of the Farms. A small force could defend it,” I muttered.
I stopped in front of the Obsidian building, but the guards weren’t there. The whole time I’d been in the zone last time, there’d been guards on the door.
I turned to walk toward the building.
“The beast is in there,” a voice came from my left.
I turned to find a young woman standing there.
“The beast?”
“They had a guy in there they kept in a cage. He got loose two weeks ago and killed everyone. Everyone says they see his shadow moving around inside at night. The guards went in and came back out saying they wouldn’t be going back.”
“Has this beast hurt anyone besides the people inside the building?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Thank you,” I said and handed her a couple extra chips everyone had started calling script. “That’ll get you a few extra when you go through the line.”
She grinned and followed the wagons.
I pulled the radio from my belt. “Ray, I’m going inside. Go on and set up.”
“Roger,” he said from the head of the caravan. “You need an escort?’
“No. If the guy’s still here, I don’t want anyone else close by.”
“Gotcha.”
“Alright, I’m going in.”
“Be careful, Sir.”
“Will do,” I said and pushed open the door.
The foyer of the building was a mess. There were old bloodstains on the walls, and the desk that had sat just inside the door was broken into pieces.
“Damn,” I muttered. The desk had been metal and was torn apart.
There were no bodies in the room, and I opened the doors behind the desk to move further into the building. Behind that door was a dark hall. I could still see by the residual light that filtered in the front door, but it would be much darker the further inside the facility I went.
I reached into my pack and pulled out one of the flashlights I carried. One of the perks of ready electricity was the ability to charge a lot of the equipment we hadn’t been able to use before. I didn’t know what we’d do when the batteries wore out, unless Spriggs knew how to do that, too. The man had proven his worth many times over.
The light pierced the darkness, and I continued down the hall. There were bloodstains on the walls, the floors, and even the ceiling, but there were no bodies.
“Wonder if Wilderman’s guys came back and cleaned up,” I muttered.
The hallway turned and sloped down to work its way underground. There were more bloodstains. Whatever the guy had done, it was violent. Who would do this to people who were trying to help him?
The first room I found that led off the hall was a control room of sorts. As I looked at the control equipment, I saw an emergency power switch and flipped it. A few moments later the lights above the door lit up, and I cut the power to my flashlight. Continuing down the hallway, I found more bloodstains, and a lot of bullet scoring on the walls.
“This is where he met the guards,” I muttered.
The walls were thick, and I doubted the gunfire was heard in the street. Still, there were no bodies. Wilderman must have come back to scavenge the place; there were no guns laying around, nor bullet casings.
I continued down the hall. I could picture this guy fighting his way out of the place, or he could be completely insane and they
were just trying to contain him. So far I wasn’t sure if he was prisoner or patient. They hadn’t mentioned the guy the last time we came through.
The hallway continued down, and another door led to the left.
“Wilderman didn’t clean this up,” I said.
I was looking at several racks of weapons and body armor. If Wilderman’s guys had come this far, they’d have taken the guns. The blood had been concentrated outside this room, in the wide spot that could have been a security checkpoint at one time. I looked through the room a little and moved on down into the depths of the facility.
Another level brought me to a dormitory section, where it was obvious the people who’d been here were living. There was a lot of blood and no bodies. The deeper I went, the more I wondered. Was this guy a monster, or was he just someone who fought a lot like I did? I’d torn those people apart at the Port of Philadelphia. Perhaps this was something similar. I could imagine what those men had seen when they entered the facility, and I could understand them stopping before the armory. There’d been a lot of bloodstains in the open area in front of it. These people hadn’t seen the things that went on outside this zone. They weren’t prepared to see what was in here.
I proceeded deeper into the facility. The bottom level held three rooms, and a familiar fixture on the far wall of the hall. They had a thermal generator, which explained the emergency power. Thermal generators were just becoming a viable source of power when the war with JalCom ended. It had proved too costly to apply in general use, but OAF was working with it some. That put this facility at twenty years old or so.
There was a lot more blood around the thermal port. Whoever had cleaned up the bodies had dumped them into the thermal generator. It would be an effective way to get rid of the bodies, which would have been incinerated.
The first room contained a pair of cylindrical machines. Jimmy’s description identified them as Imprinters. Both were blackened at the end with the wiring. The computer system that seemed to be attached had also taken fire damage.
I left the room to look into the next one. There was a table with metal straps, which were bent and torn in places. This must have been where they’d kept him. There was a lot of blood in the room. I shook my head and looked into the third room, where I found a desk and viewer. The viewscreen showed the table in the other room.
I sat down in front of the viewer and opened the desk drawer. There was a stack of data cubes.
I shrugged and picked up one of them. I started to put it in the port when I noticed there was one already inside the viewer.
I played the cube in the machine.
The man on the table looked like any other man you might see in the street but there was nothing inside when you saw the eyes. He looked like a body on an autopsy table, but he was alive. They’d peeled skin back in places, and I shuddered as I watched them place the drill against his temple. The second the bit touched his skull, the eyes were no longer vacant, and the next few minutes were some of the most gruesome things I’d seen in a while. He’d ripped the metal restraints as he came up off the table, and put an arm through the chest of one of his tormentors. Then he ripped the rest of the people in the room apart. I heard gunshots from the recorder as he left the room, and then I heard screams. Whoever they’d awakened inside the Agent had been a merciless killing machine.
As I looked through the other cubes at all the things they’d done to the man, I realized some people deserve what they get in this Fallen World.
* * * * *
Chapter 50
I joined the wagons as they were loading up the supplies we’d traded a great deal of food for. They had clothing, books, furniture, and many other things we found interesting. I was happy to be leaving extra food with them, and glad to trade for just about anything, including three crates of hair dye, so the kids could keep playing with Wandrey for as long as they wanted.
There’d been no sign the Agent had been living in the facility, but I didn’t tell anyone what had been going on inside that place. I did bring the guns and body armor out and loaded it up.
“Those are the property of—”
“The Farmers,” I interrupted Wilderman. “What you allowed to go on in your own zone doesn’t speak well of you, Wilderman, but I’m not going to release the evidence, because you’re doing good things here. What they were doing was most definitely not. I suggest you suck it up. If I show everyone what you let them do to the guy they held in there, it would be bad.”
“I didn’t know anything about—”
“I watched all the videos,” I said, “even the ones you were present for. Did you think shock therapy was as far as they went with him?”
“They said they were trying to fix the guy and extract the database. Biscal said the shock therapy should work.”
“You never went back to see if it worked?”
“Biscal reported that the guy had died.”
“And you just let them kill him?”
“They said it was accidental,” he said.
I could see the expression in his eyes. There was genuine regret in the big man.
“Maybe so,” I said, “but you still let that go on, and I think you know what happened here. He didn’t die, but they were in the process of dissecting him alive when he awoke. They deserved what they got, and I’m not sure you don’t deserve the same.”
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“You didn’t want to know,” I said. “I’ll expect better of you in the future. Don’t make me regret destroying the data cubes.”
He nodded.
I pulled the cubes from my coat pocket and crushed them in my hands. Wilderman watched in silence as I finished loading the armory into one of the wagons. He walked back toward his skyscraper without another word.
I hoped I’d read the man correctly. He was partially responsible for what had happened in the facility. I’d only heard him in a single video while they were doing the shock treatments, but he hadn’t argued when I’d used the plural. His expression when I’d said they were dissecting the man convinced me he was unaware of that part. He’d been horrified, and he’d been ashamed.
We’d just have to see if he could be the man he should’ve been before. I’d never have stood by and let them do what I saw in those videos.
I saw Roland and his daughter as we rolled toward the west gate of the zone and waved. If I took down Wilderman, what would happen to people like them? I looked toward the skyscraper. I didn’t want to know the answer to that, so we rolled out the gate toward home.
Ray rode up beside the wagon I was driving.
“How’d you manage to get those guns without trouble? Seems like a guy like Wilderman would have never let those go.”
“I didn’t really ask,” I said. “His people are terrified of that place, so they’d have just sat there. Lee can use the extra weapons at the Port, or Sam can use them at the Depot.”
“I don’t know about moving so many supplies that close to this place,” he said.
“Me neither, but it’ll keep the food rolling so much faster. We only have so many horses, and if we can run supplies into the Depot and the Port with trucks, the horses only have to be used to deliver to the zones.”
“Why can’t we use the trucks in the city?”
“To be honest, the horses work better to keep things moving at the pace I prefer. We can’t get too dependent on the fuel yet. The supplies can be brought in by horse as well as truck when the fuel runs low. The farm equipment is the first priority on fuel. We’d use so much more fuel inside the city; I’d rather have the horses. We might change things a little, though. I’d love to mount the fifties on trucks so we don’t have to drop it and send the horses running when we need to fire it. But we need to see how long the fuel reserves at the Port last.”
“We have about a year’s use at the rate you’re talking. Shipping the food into the city on trucks is going to eat up a lot of fuel.”
“And there’s about two or thr
ee times that amount left at the Port to ship back out. That gives us three or four years to get our supply lines set up with Collins or Renardi. If we can get one of those fuel tankers to run up here to the Port, we have fuel taken care of.”
“That sounds like something that needs to be set up fairly soon, then,” he said. “You thinking of making a trip?”
“Yeah, I’m thinking of a trip. Those pirates are scheduled to be back in a few months, and I want to know some things about the islands. There’s something that needs done down there, but we have a lot to do here before I can go. We have to do something about the Circus. I hope what I have in mind works.”
“The power? I thought they had generators going in there.”
“They do, but gennies only do so much.”
“True.”
“What would they do to have a steady source of power?”
“Just about anything,” he said.
“And that’s what we’re betting on. If it works…”
“If it works, we have a new negotiation point with the Circus.”
“Checks and balances,” I said. “They’re a necessity in this Fallen World.”
* * * * *
Chapter 51
“Archie’s been busy,” Ray said as he rode up beside the wagon.
There were seven buildings under construction as we rounded the last turn in the road toward the Farms. What had just been our small farmhouse and a bunkhouse had become a small town since the Fall. The new buildings were multi-level housing units. Archie was doing what he knew best and loving every minute of it. He was an old carpenter, and he loved to build. Even more important, he loved to teach others. He had several crews of men and women working on the buildings.
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