The Earth Transformed - Ghost Book I

by Mike Stackpole

  The bartender spoke up. “I know something that might help you, though it might not be current anymore. When I worked in subject holding the password to the cell block was Proteus.”

  Angie nodded. “Not exactly what we were looking for, but thanks.”

  She turned back to Razor, Thrasher, Vargas and Athalia. “All right, on your way, then. I’m gonna keep canvasin’ the locals.”

  “You’re gonna keep drinkin’, you mean,” laughed Vargas.

  Angie chuckled as the three rangers swaggered out, the sister following.

  “That too.”

  I kinda wanted to do a little more drinking myself, then take Angie into a quiet corner for a private heart to heart, but she didn’t look like she was going to budge from the bar, and neither did Ace, so I downed my dregs and headed out too.

  “Gonna go make sure Kate’s okay.”

  That got a look from Angie, and also Ace, which is probably why I said it, but neither of them said anything, so I kept walking.

  ***

  I’d seen libraries before. Ranger Center had a good one, one of the best in Arizona. Darwin Village’s library took up two classrooms in an old school building. Everything looked neat and orderly, with the books shelved properly. I checked out the criminal sciences section and was pleased to see they had near a complete set of the Hardy Boys Case Studies. Wasn’t a ranger alive didn’t hope to do the memories of Frank and Joe proud.

  The most fun, however, was watching Kate. From the sheer, astonished joy on her face, I figured her home village had fewer books than people, and most volumes were likely Bibles. She looked like she was in hog heaven. I, not needing to be any smarter, just followed my nose, pulling out books at random —mostly the picture books.

  Kate on the other hand, after spending a while just soaking it all in, buried herself in a section called reference and began pulling out books as big as tombstones and flipping through them like she was in a fever. After an hour of that, I was beginning to regret leaving the bar, but finally she raised her head from yet another dusty volume and looked up at me.

  “I don’t think they’ve got a disease at all.” She said. “They were dyin’, no doubt about it, but they’re dyin’ so slow and in such a particular way that I’m thinkin’ poison — radiation most likely. The question is, was it deliberate? Or was it some accidental exposure?”

  I scratched my chin. “Well, it’s mighty peculiar that the folks that died first were the most educated folks, the ones who might realize quickest what was going on. Maybe they were gotten out of the way.”

  “Maybe,” said Kate. “But it could also be that there was some accident in the research lab and the researchers took the biggest hit, while the support staff just got residual radiation.”

  I frowned. “But if that’s the case, then how is Doctor Finster still alive?”

  “Are you sure he is?”

  That stopped me. “What. You think he’s dead in there? And the voice the townsfolk have been hearin’ on the PA system is just a recording?”

  She shrugged.

  I sighed, then gestured at the books. “Well, I guess all that is kinda beside the point. What’s more important is, did any of those books tell you a cure for radiation poisoning?”

  “They did,” she said, then sighed louder than I had. “But the chances we’re going to find what we need to make it around here are about a million to one.”

  Chapter Five

  “Prussian Blue?” The bartender’s forehead furrowed in the middle like a rumpled blanket. “Hell yeah, we’ve got some Prussian Blue. Dave Cretian at the Black Market has barrels of the stuff. Never could find anybody to take it off his hands. Never knew anybody who knew what it was for except to use it as paint. Fact, he painted his house with some of it a few years back, but there’s plenty left over.”

  “There better be,” said Kate. “Because it cures radiation sickness, and I’m pretty sure that’s what everybody here has got.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Vargas. “House paint that cures radiation sickness? Did somebody spike your ginger ale?”

  Kate shrugged. “I know it sounds crazy but it’s true. I read it in one of the books in the library. This guy in Germany found out that if you ate the pigment it sucked out the radiation as it moved through your system, and when you pissed it out again, the radiation went with it. It’s like an antitoxin. It removes the toxic waste from your body.”

  Ace snorted in disbelief. “And what are the odds that the exact thing you need to cure this disease is right here where you need it?”

  “Pretty good, actually, now that I think about it.” Angie swung around on her bar stool. “If the experiments up at the facility involved a lot of radiation, then they’d likely have kept plenty of stuff that cured it around in case of an accident, right?”

  “But if that’s the case,” I said. “Why didn’t Finster tell all his employees to take it?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know,” said Ace. “A lotta jerks who call themselves scientists these days are only fools who found a book or two, and don’t know much more than normal folks.”

  “Or maybe it’s what I said,” said Kate.

  I looked around at her. “That he’s dead? Maybe so.”

  The others turned — even the locals.

  “You think the boss is dead?” asked Metal, who had joined Angie and Ace at the bar, along with his friend Mad Dog.

  “How can he be dead?” asked Mad Dog. “We hear him on the PA system all the time.”

  “Thought that might be a recording,” said Kate.

  “Who cares if the boss it dead or not?” snapped Angie. “The important thing is keepin’ everybody else alive.” She turned to the bartender. “So where’s this black market place? We gotta get down there and get this Prussian Blue stuff.”

  The bartender held up his hands. “Hang on, now. You ain’t gonna be able to just take it. Cretian is gonna want to be paid for anything he gives you, and he’s got the muscle to keep you from stealing it.”

  Angie’s voice rose. “He’s gonna charge for the cure when the whole town is dying? What kind of monster is he?”

  “The worst kind,” said Metal. “He’s a business man.”

  ***

  “Absolutely,” said Cretian. “Got all the Prussian Blue you want. Four hundred scrap a barrel and it’s yours. Got at least twenty of ‘em if you need that much.”

  Angie, Ace, and me were standing behind Kate, who was on her tip–toes at the service window of the Black Market talking to Cretian, a burly redheaded man with mean eyes and a big–bore hog leg tucked into a leather shoulder holster under his arm. The gun was overkill, really, considering he was sitting behind a reinforced steel door inset with a sheet of one inch plexi closing off all but two inches of the window. There were also two well–armed security guards standing behind us on either side of the exit.

  Metal and Mad Dog were there too, sitting on a bench by the wall, looking like the walk over from the bar had completely pulled the stuffing out of them. And now Cretian’s price seemed to have ripped out their hearts. They slumped even lower on the bench. Mad Dog groaned.

  “F—four… hundred?” Kate stuttered. “Uh, how much is in a barrel?” “Fifty five gallons or so.”

  Kate looked relieved. “Oh, well, I don’t need that much. Probably not more than a gallon for the whole village. How much would that be? Uh… eight scrap, right?”

  Cretian gave her a nasty smile. “Sorry. Can’t sell it any smaller than by the barrel. It’s four hundred or nothing.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I stepped up beside Kate. “Don’t you understand people are going to die without this stuff? Your whole damned village. You’re probably sick too. And you’re gonna be a dick about a gallon?”

  “Who else are you going to sell it to anyway?” asked Angie, joining me. “The guy at the bar said you haven’t been able to give the stuff away. He said you’ve been sitting on it for years.”

  Cretian spread his hands.
He didn’t seem the least bit angry at our outbursts. “Exactly. I’ve been sitting on it because there hasn’t been a buyer. Now there’s a buyer, so I gotta get the best I can for it, right? Simple economics. Supply and demand.”

  “And you’d let your friends and neighbors die for supply and demand?” Angie asked.

  “Of course not.” Cretian smiled again. “I know they got more scrap than they let on. If the community bands together, they’ll come up with the four hundred easy.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it, Cretian,” said Metal. “With everyone sick and not getting paid for weeks, we got nothing. It all went into your shop when we bought supplies from you.”

  Cretian shrugged. “Well, then maybe you should go up to the lab and get an advance from Finster. Or better yet, maybe you can convince these rangers to part with some of their equipment. I can see from here they’re carryin’ a good hundred scrap worth of weapons and armor between ‘em, and I hear there’s three more of ‘em runnin’ around someplace. Get ‘em drunk, steal their equipment, and we got a deal.”

  Mad Dog shot up from the bench, twitching and shaking. “Goddamn it, Dave! You’re gonna pull this shit when we’re practically brothers? We went to the schoolhouse together. You married my goddamn sister, for Christ’s sake!”

  Cretian held up his hands, his face as untroubled as a preacher’s. “Sorry, Fist. It’s not my fault you went to work at the lab like every other fool in this town. If you had done what I did and started your own business, you wouldn’t be sick. None of you would. Why should I have to pay for your bad decisions?”

  Mad Dog’s shoulders sagged. “I… I don’t know what to—”

  I don’t know where it came from, but all of a sudden a towering rage blazed up in me and I pulled my pistol and jammed it into the gap at the bottom of the reinforced window.

  “I’m sick of this shit! Just give us the fucking cure!”

  Cretian yelped and dove aside, out of my line of sight, screaming for his guards. “Kill them! Kill them!”

  I whipped around, shredding my knuckles as I jerked my gun free of the window slot and swung it at the goons. I was way too late. They had me beat by seconds, the barrels of their shotguns perfect black circles aiming right at my head. Fortunately, Ace had them beat by half a second. His machine gun burped twice, “Brip. Brip,” and they were screaming and falling and shooting.

  A shotgun blast shredded the ceiling over my head and my ears rang liked they’d been punched by brass knuckles, then I was on the floor with everybody else, covering up and looking around in the smoke and falling plaster.

  One of the security guards was past fighting, his hands pressing futilely at his throat as it gushed red all over the linoleum. The other guy had been luckier — if that’s the word — and had taken Ace’s rounds in the belly. He was still looking for a target with his second barrel — and aiming my way.

  I beat him to the punch this time and fired over the prone bodies of my friends to put one through his nose and out the back of his head.

  It got real quiet after that. Just the sound of Kate sobbing under the counter and the ringing in my ears. Then Angie rolled on top of me and started punching me in the face as hard as she could.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” she screamed. “You fucking lunatic! Are you trying to get us all killed?”

  I shoved her off and Ace grabbed her, holding her back. I looked around, nose and mouth throbbing and bleeding, and saw everyone staring at me — Kate, Mad Dog, Metal, Ace, Angie — and I swear to you, that was the first second since I’d pulled my gun that it occurred to me that I had put everybody in danger. Up until that point my entire world had been me, Cretian, and my rage. There had been no other factors in the equation.

  I stared, blank and numb, at the shotguns lying near the dead guards, the shotguns that could had turned my friends into hamburger if Ace had been one second later on the trigger.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit, you don’t know!” shouted Angie. “You must know! You—”

  A noise from above me brought my head up. Cretian was feeding the barrel of an automatic rifle through the slot, looking for a shot. I snapped my hand up and caught the barrel, then pulled hard. He tried to hold onto it and his hands came with it. One got pinched in the slot, pinned between the plexi and the body of the gun, and he was trapped and howling in pain.

  Angie’s rage cleared enough for her to see the opportunity, and she stuck her pistol through the slot too, and aimed it at his belly.

  “Put your key through the gap. We’re coming in.”

  Mewling with pain, Cretian did as he was told, and passed a big old skeleton key under the plexi. I kept his fingers trapped until Angie opened the door and went in around him to take the gun from him.

  “Now,” she said, when we were face to face with the man. “You are gonna measure out a gallon of Prussian Blue, and Kate is going to pay you your price for it — eight scrap.”

  “And what are you going to pay me for my roof?” Cretian whined. “And my guards?”

  Angie flicked a cold look at me, then gave him a dazzling smile. “Sorry, cretin, you’re just gonna have to eat those costs. Asshole tax.”

  ***

  The whole bar crowded around as Kate and the bartender mixed up some Prussian Blue cocktails using the powder from Cretian’s barrels, some juice squeezed from cantaloupes we bought at the local market, and a shitload of booze to kill the taste. Finally they had a few pitchers of the stuff, which ended up a disturbing sea green color, and the bartender set up every jam jar and mug he had in the place.

  “Alright,” said Kate. “Line up and drink it down, then go get everyone else in town and have them come drink some too. It isn’t gonna work immediately, and some folks are gonna be too far gone for it to have any effect, but once you start pissing it out again, you should start getting better.”

  She turned to the bartender. “Keep makin’ this stuff for as long as people keep having the symptoms, and give them a drink a day.”

  He nodded, then turned to the crowd. “Got it. Blue drinks on the house for as long as it takes!”

  The crowd cheered and started knocking back their blue booze, then heading out to round up their friends and family.

  Metal wiped his mouth as he finished his, then turned to Kate. “Any long term effects from this poisoning that we should know about?”

  Kate frowned, uncomfortable. “Uh, you should, uh, probably think twice about having children.”

  Mad Dog barked at that. “What? Why?”

  “Well,” said Kate. “The radiation has, uh, probably mutated some of your DNA. That shouldn’t be a problem for you, but any children you have after this, particularly with a woman who has also been irradiated, might be—”

  Angie’s walkie squawked, interrupting her. “Angie, it’s Vargas! Got us some nasties up here. Need some back–up. Get up here ASA—” Gunfire through the radio drowned him out for a second, then he was back. “ASAP I said. Copy?”

  Angie snatched the walkie off her belt. “Copy, Snake. On our way!”

  She hopped off her stool and beckoned to me and Ace. “Come on. Let’s vamoose.”

  We ran after her as she bolted out of the bar. And even though she hadn’t been asked, Kate came too.

  Chapter Six

  We followed the echoes of gunfire down into the earth.

  The facility didn’t look like anything from the outside, just a featureless gray brick block house, hardly bigger than a garage. That was just a stairhead, though, and we charged down six flights before we got to the first level. The gunfire was louder as soon as we kicked open the door. It rang in our ears as we paced through a maze of featureless white hallways. The sound was so fractured that I stopped being able to tell which direction it was coming from, and would have got totally lost except that our fellow rangers weren’t stupid. One of them, Vargas, Hell Razor, Thrasher — hell, maybe it was Athalia — had jammed o
pen every door they’d gone through, so once we found their trail it was easy to follow.

  The facility reminded me of Sleeper Base One in terms of construction, all blank walls, stainless steel, and frosted glass doors, chrome trim and softly glowing lights that illuminated the baseboards whenever we got within a dozen feet. It didn’t feel real. It wasn’t part of the decaying world six flights above us, and not just because it was separated by technology and style. It literally felt like we’d gone back through time to the golden age before the bombs — back when everything was clean and new.

  We moved through those glowing halls in good order. Angie, Ace and me trading point and cover at the corners like a seasoned squad and Kate following a cautious distance behind. Ace’s movements were so professional that it reminded me of how neatly he’d dealt with the goons at the Black Market, and that made me wonder about his background.

  “Angie said you were a mechanic,” I said as we covered her advance. “Handle yourself pretty well for a grease monkey.”

  “I used to work for Faran Brygo.” He shrugged. “And mechanic sometimes has more than one meaning.”

  “Ah,” I said. “As in you fix things.”

  He nodded. “Whatever’s broke.”

  We ran on, following the scent of cordite and the sounds of mayhem.

  I’d never been in a more antiseptic place in my life. The walls and floors and ceilings weren’t just white, there wasn’t any dust on them at all. There weren’t any boot scuffs on the floor. There weren’t any thumb prints on the chrome. We pushed through a kitchen and it had been cleaned to the point where we couldn’t tell if anything in there had been used. Ever.

  That was weird. Creepy. We knew people worked here. We’d just talked to a bunch of ‘em. And people have to eat. And people eating means there will, at some point, be bacon. Civilization might have crumbled, but God wasn’t so cruel he would let knowledge of how to make bacon vanish. And bacon meant bacon grease, and unless your cleaners went about their task with a superhumanly tight focus and mindless devotion, there’d be a trace of it somewhere.