by Gard Skinner
“Why not just use cranes to do their work?” Dakota asked the rest of us.
“Yeah,” some smart-aleck kid yelped at her as he walked by with a load of hemp rope. “Like there’s any spare fuel left to run machines.” We were all staring at him as he went on his way saying one last thing: “Why don’t you climb out of your dream world, Granny, and pick up the slack?”
Level 22
Two things helped me make my decision that day: First, it wasn’t a bad idea to hide in plain sight and pick up as much information as possible. Second, up high, where I was, I had a great view of our surroundings.
They strapped me with a dried-out cord to an older man. I realized it was because we were probably the same weight.
A ring held the center of our line, and it was hoisted with the winch about forty feet into the air. Soon a sack full of rivets and a hammer was pulleyed up for each of us.
That was my day. A panel would be moved, hooked to the lines, and slowly elevated into place. The other guy and I—his name was Hal—would bolt a support over the top of the last panel and slot the next higher one in place.
Then we began the hammering, just as dozens or hundreds of neighboring crews were doing. Strike after strike clanging through the air. One panel took hours. My arms felt like they were falling off. Still I worked, on and on. Panting, sweating, trying to keep up. Soon enough, around midday, we were at the top and I finally got a view of both sides of the barricade.
I couldn’t tell which was worse.
Behind me and Hal was Redwood central, a crumbling slum of brick-and-mortar buildings. All the steel ones had long ago been cut down. They were now likely part of this enormous barricade that stretched miles in both directions.
But out on the plains, it was barren. It could not have been quieter, more stagnant, more laced with the stillness of death.
Trees were stripped. Grass was brown. Dust was claiming the land, one creeping inch at a time.
“Looks inviting, huh? But they’re out there.” Hal coughed at me. The guy must have been fifty or sixty, but he was swinging his mallet just as easily as I swung mine.
“They?”
“They’re watching. You know they are. Eyes in the dirt. Licking their teeth. Bellies to fill.”
“Who?”
“Go even a few feet past the wall guards and you’ll get snatched. I’ve seen it.”
I squinted but couldn’t pick out a single threat on the horizon. Maybe he was making it up. Old-timer with old stories.
“And you watch those girls with you too,” Hal warned. “Some of the hordes been trying to breed meat again. Eat the baby boys, grow the baby girls until they can have more veal of their own.”
“What?” I was starting to think he was bat-crap crazy. Nothing was out there. After all, where would they hide? It was just hardscrabble ground. Almost like a game environment, only this one was too detailed. Every dead tree was individual, every dust devil was natural. Even the sounds were unlike any recording you might hear.
Hal stopped talking, but he never stopped working. It was like he had something to prove, not to me, but to the foreman down there.
And the guards. They were always watching, either the wasteland or the work. It was still almost impossible to tell whether they were there to keep us in or Hal’s monsters out.
It got hot up there. I was boiling, but at least I could feel the wind. Layers of skin rubbed clean off my hands, and blisters formed on every finger. A rash began to develop wherever my soaked clothing touched skin, and I thought of my team down there on the ground.
It had to be twenty degrees hotter for them. And way more humid. Poor Mi. Poor Dakota. York and Reno would keep a stiff upper lip, but they had to be suffering just as much as the girls. Hauling serious weight. No water to drink. Sweating and heaving and feeling pain race through their backs. Knees twisting. Ankles cracking, not used to a load.
And this was everywhere. Thousands of workers. Scrambling and scratching out a meager existence in the hope that soon, not long now, the wall would be completed and they would be safe inside. But from what?
I still had too little information. To take my mind off the toil, I kept working old Hal for his story. This city’s story. What had happened between life as told by the Sims and the country as it really was?
First, the oil ran out. Once fuel was ten thousand dollars a gallon and all the refinery production stopped, so did all the continent’s farming.
So there was no food.
With no diesel gas, the world stopped mining metals and coal.
With no power, starvation. With no work, hunger.
People began to recycle everything they could. Scrap by scrap. Aluminum, bronze, copper, these became the most valuable currencies.
No taxes were being collected, so then, no federal government. No police. No firefighters. No schools. No military.
Crop wars for a few years. Corporate wars for a few more. Electricity wars. Rail wars.
The man babbled on and on, until he finally said, “Look! Scrappers!”
A cheer went up from the wall, a huge, resounding cascade of applause. Down below, Mi, York, and Reno wouldn’t be able to see over the top, but I watched closely. Workers abandoned their tasks and rushed to the site perimeter, cheering, yelling, pointing.
Out about three miles, I saw them. At first it was just a cloud of dust, wheels rolling fast over dirt.
Then it was a desert machine. Like a tow truck but with heavy, worn, hard rubber tires. Carving the earth, sending up a plume behind its four-wheeled trailer.
Stacked on that flatbed was its catch. Two rusting old cars, probably from the early 21st century, had been strapped to it with cargo belts. Somehow, somewhere out there, they’d been overlooked. They’d never been melted. And they were an unbelievable prize.
To the howl of the Redwood citizens, the tow truck weaved back and forth. Out of the brown sand, filthy creatures that might have once been men leaped and ran and tried to cut it off. The rig, with its heavy load, was probably only doing thirty miles an hour, but still the attackers thought they could catch it.
It veered, arcing cleanly back and forth, trying to avoid the beasts. They were jumping, dodging, doing whatever they could to mount the trailer and climb to the front cab.
Hal was right, though. The cannibals were out there. And they were waiting for any fresh meat, even if they had to swarm a speeding old vehicle.
The truck got closer. For a moment, it looked as if a pair of howling attackers might step onto the running boards, but at the last minute the driver gunned the engine, black smoke pouring out, and bounced them both cleanly off the front bumper’s cattle guard.
Red smeared away some of the dirt but was quickly engulfed and turned back to brown.
And then the tow truck was at our perimeter. Guards waved it in. The crowd parted to let it by, slapping the hood, admiring the courage of the crew. Every pair of eyes was longing for the huge riches in the three tons of jagged, corroded metal the truck had hauled out of the wasteland.
I saw something else. Something a bit disturbing. On the driver’s side, there was even more blood, but this was on the inside of the truck. Something messy had happened during their run.
Then the scrapper was gone, motoring off toward the city’s interior. I already had a couple of crazy ideas churning in my brain.
We weren’t back to work ten minutes when York whistled up to me.
“Phoenix, what’s that?” He was waving up the line, in the opposite direction from where the scrappers had just finished their successful mission.
I could see them too.
About five sections up the wall, around a crew that was slightly farther along than ours, ten men in black armor with matching assault rifles had just surrounded the team of workers. One at a time, they were removing hats, gloves, and other clothing from the men, women, and children. Checking them over. Very carefully.
When they were finished, they sent the labor party back to
their job and moved to the next section closer to us.
I looked at York. He had already found Reno. Mi and Dakota quickly scurried over.
“I’m climbing down, Hal,” I said to my partner. “Hold on to something so you don’t fall when I untie my end of the rope.”
“You can’t go!” he barked. “We need the manpower. If our section gets any more behind we’ll lose our chance of getting a spot on the inside!”
Then I saw him look where I was looking, then glance over at me and back toward the troops. Would there be a reward out for us? Sure there would. I couldn’t imagine that the surgery on my head or that slave tank came cheap.
The bounty was probably a whole lot more than the handful of coins this guy would make up here today.
I wasn’t going to keep chattering with the old-timer, waiting for him to do the math. A quick tug and I released my line, then slid down one of the hoist cables, thankful that the tape on my hand kept my palm from ripping apart.
My first plan was to run, like before, in exactly the opposite direction from the search team, but then I had a better idea.
What if they knew we would go that way? I’d used that tactic before, flushing an opponent, laying an ambush, guessing ahead of time which escape they’d take.
“Which way did the scrapper team go in their tow truck?” I asked Reno.
My friend pointed to the street.
It was pretty obvious. We knew their last heading.
So we’d be following tire tracks again. The five of us bolted off the wall’s work perimeter and ventured toward the inner city.
“Did anyone bother to get paid before we ran?” York asked.
Wow, our wages. Not that we were starving yet, but it’d be good to know how the local economy worked. To get our hands on those chits the foreman had mentioned.
“Not paid,” Dakota said as we walked quickly, “but I sold a heel of bread I got from Charlotte. The guy said he’d never gotten real wheat. Look.” She held out her hand.
Four plastic squares, stamped from cheap vinyl, sat in her palm. So that was the pay.
All of us took a turn holding one of the squares, rolling it in our fingers. They were light, crusted with dirt, but none of us said what I’m sure we all first thought.
The stamp in the middle. The logo. It was just way too familiar.
“So BlackStar controls the money.”
“Just in this town,” Dakota explained. “It’s company script. They pay everyone in it. And then the workers have to go spend it at the company store.”
“Prices inflated, ripping them off again, barely enough to survive,” Mi guessed. I bet she was right.
“Where’s this store?” I asked.
“City center.” Dakota pointed. She’d picked up good intel. “Highly fortified.”
“It’s got what we need?” York asked, and I was sure he meant guns and ammunition.
“Just like the supermarts of old days,” she continued. “They’ve got everything, but for a price.”
Now, finally, I had an idea what Jimmy had meant earlier. About how virtually nothing crossed that wasteland out there.
Well, one thing had to.
And I couldn’t wait to see it.
But for now, we were too weak, too small, and too unarmed to allow ourselves even a brush with those dark troopers. Full-scale anything was a long way off.
Block by block, we loped along after the set of dried dual tire prints.
Redwood, during daylight hours, was no better than a ghost town. Everyone was working on that wall. And doing it for scratch, for barely enough to feed themselves.
There was no rebellion, either. Why not? No whispers of an uprising. Just hard work.
It was classic feudalism turned modern serfdom. A journey back to the Middle Ages, when the peasant class was doomed and those with the weapons controlled all the wealth. Now add in modern lords, their privileged children, unbeatable firepower, and superior mobility.
We’d all played a hundred historical games. Every one of us had been The Black Knight. Out here, though, the knights drove armored vans, and instead of swords they protected their bridges with automatic weapons.
So what level was the city boss? A prince? A duke? Earl of Redwood?
Something made me sure that no matter what kind of wealth his global game operation collected, he was not yet king.
And how had I come to that conclusion? It’d happened while we were following the tire tracks.
The roads were wide and pitted and seemed like they had a million miles logged on them. But the tracks from the tow truck were definitely bigger and rougher than those from the smaller tires I’d seen on the BlackStar security vans.
We walked—crept, really—and even though the streets were empty, we stayed in the shade. We passed buildings, every one of them looking like it might be bombed out, the glass exploded from inside. But upstairs, we could see dim lights and occasionally people going about their nightly routines. People lived. People died. They struggled every day for barely enough to get along.
The tracks kept rolling along. And then I realized BlackStar might not run the whole show after all. Because at an intersection, something broke the steady path. Crisscrossed the tire tracks, going off in a new direction.
While the security vans had big rubber and the tow truck had even larger, what I saw next made me shake my head.
These new tracks were enormous. Three times as wide as the ones from the tow truck. Spaced so far apart my team could lie end to end and barely touch either track.
“Holy . . . What made these?” York’s eyes went wide.
The rubber prints were really something, lugged for heavy terrain but also ridged down the center for high speed.
I had an idea. I also knew that following those tracks right now would be pointless.
I wanted to find that tow truck. I wanted to ask about all that blood dripping in its cab.
Level 23
I told Mi, “I think the old guy I was working with was doing it for more than just chits.”
“What do you mean?”
We talked about the horde in the desert. “I get the feeling everyone trying to seal off the city is working for their right to stay inside once the job is done.”
She weighed that, then asked, “Like there’s some really big pestilence out there on its way to wipe them all out?”
“It wouldn’t be a bad move by BlackStar. To make them think a horrifying threat is always looming. It’d keep them in line. Keep them from revolting.”
Mi and I were up front, just like the old days, leading the team, with Dakota about ten paces back. York and Reno were on our six, watching out for the BlackStar troops.
Mi said, “The whole time I was hauling rivets, I kept wondering how this’ll work out for us out here.”
“How did you expect it to?” I tried to smile at her. “Long days of labor? A family? Living in a scraped-out building like everyone else?”
“At least we’re together.” She grinned, but I knew we were both just putting a good face on it.
“Right, if we have nothing else . . .”
“And trust me”—she put her arm in mine; it felt great—“we have absolutely nothing else.”
“No food.” I went along.
“No money.”
“No home.”
“No identity.”
I pointed. “The area around my skull port is getting infected.”
She pointed too. “I keep getting stabbing pains in my chest.”
“Our kids have stopped doing everything we order them to do.”
She chuckled at that, then added, “I never thought the day would come, my mighty Phoenix, when you and I didn’t have one single, solitary bullet between us.”
My hand clasped hers. Wow. On those terms, I sure had let her down. I had let them all down.
But these were different terms now, right? Out here, combat rating didn’t mean a thing. Just surviving day to day, that was the tr
ue test. I guess maybe Hal, that old-timer, was actually one of Earth’s real winners. He was still alive.
“Where did we come from?” Mi asked suddenly. “I mean, am I all the way from Florida? Kidnapped off a street, away from my family?”
“I think Dakota suspects she got here like that. From up north. Some kind of slave trade. Like they take the best, apple-core their brains, slide in the cable port, and drown them for the rest of their lives.”
“Maybe. But it doesn’t completely add up.”
I realized how easy it had become for the world to control a population. Especially if that population had no transportation. “Seems like there’s really just one way in or out or around these days: through the unfinished wall. And then we go until we get somewhere. Or run out of fuel.”
“But the monster tires. Those tracks. What could have made those?”
I nodded. “They push a big machine.”
“No planes, though? I find that odd.”
“If they can barely come by a few gallons of regular gas, jet fuel can’t even be a consideration. Helicopters are too short on range, no good for the long haul.”
Up ahead, I believed, we’d get a few more answers. The street opened into a square, every side of it walled off by concrete. At the far end, a set of gates stood closed, guarded by a pair of the company troops. Those guys, from what I’d seen at the wall, were exactly what foot soldiers would have been back in medieval times: the ruling class, going from village to village, or in this case, building to building, drafting any male child with good size or strength.
That way, the lower class was always weak. And the soldiers themselves? Why wouldn’t they work in enforcement? It got them better food and better living conditions, and they wouldn’t spend their whole lives doing hard manual labor.
In front of the troops was a platform, and we watched the tow truck drag its loaded trailer onto the scales. The whole thing shimmied as it settled. Armed guards centered their weapons on the cab.
A door swung open. Pools of blood dripped out, then down the running board.