Kyle sat in his usual place, on a wooden stool across from the old man. The passenger car itself had long ago been gutted of most of its seats. A small table and an ancient wood-fueled oven made up a small kitchen at the back of the car, both taken from other older train cars. A pair of bunk beds sat to one side, Juan was propped up on his elbows on the top bunk. He was leafing through a pile of comic books, probably for the thousandth time. The space was lit by a pair of lanterns hanging from the ceiling. Mile’s had been able to convert these to burn used motor oil, of which the museum had provided nearly an endless supply.
Every other available space in the car was stacked, piled or crammed with books. From large, leather-bound legal tomes to current events magazines, the newest of which was of course 15 years out of date. Miles had told Kyle once, that even from an early age he had enjoyed reading. Now that with the world in pieces Miles considered it his calling. His “Library” now filled three full boxcars, some of it on neatly organized shelves, most of it just stacked in piles. As far as Kyle knew it was the largest library left in town, maybe in the state for that matter. Acquiring knowledge taking a backseat to survival.
“Well don’t leave me in suspense,” Miles prodded as he stroked his chin whiskers, a sign Kyle knew to mean the man was deep in thought.
Kyle smiled and removed the folded magazine clippings from his jacket and handed them back to Miles. “You were right, it was there,” Kyle said with a grin.
The old man clinched a fist in victory. “I knew it! What was it like? Was it sealed up or was the door wide open?” Miles demanded.
Kyle grinned, the old man had been the one to find the article. When he had shared it with Kyle, it had taken him days to talk the Scavenger into risking the trip. In that time the two of them had read everything he could get his hands on about space exploration, from science fiction to science fact. It had fueled their debate on what could possibly be found inside and what value it could potentially have. Those talks had convinced Kyle the risk would be worth it, and so it had been.
“Well?” Miles demanded impatiently.
Kyle lifted his pack onto his lap and still grinning produced two of the rolls of toilet paper. He handed them over to miles who scooped them up with a large grin and a laugh.
“Oh my,” the old man said. “Look at us living fancy again. Juan,” he called to the boy.
Juan looked up from his comic as Miles threw one of the roles at him. The boy caught it and looked at it for a moment oddly, turning it over in his hands. He looked up at Miles, a look of confusion on his face.
“I’ll explain later,” Miles said frowning. “Kids these days,” he grumbled to no one in particular.
Kyle then pulled one of the bottles of Oxys from his bag. He gave the bottle a quick shake rattling the pills. Miles gave him an odd look as Kyle handed the bottle over. Miles read the label carefully, and his face went blank.
“For your leg, something to take the edge off, on tough days,” Kyle said hesitantly. The old man didn’t smile, he closed his eyes for a moment and lowered his head, as if in pain.
“Thank you, Kyle. Thank you for this,” Miles said with a somber tone.
“It’s yours, I’m not giving you anything. You earned this, without you I wouldn’t even have known where to look,” Kyle paused, considering his words, “And there’s more.”
“More?” Miles said sitting up again.
“Real medicine, a small cache of drugs. I gave it to Anna, for the clinic,” Kyle said feeling guilty. If Miles was his partner, he should get an equal half of everything. They had never discussed supplying the clinic before Kyle had set out on this latest venture.
“Good. Exactly where it needs to be. Anna will know how to use it for the best,” said the old man. He gave the Oxys a shake. “This is enough, more than enough. I do expect me and Juan will have free doctoring from now on though.”
“Like we would have ever let you pay,” Kyle said his grin returning. A weight he hadn’t realized he had been carried lifted from him. “Just one thing, you don’t mention those to Anna.”
Miles raised an eyebrow at that. “You holding out on the good doctor?” he asked.
“Yeah, I guess I am. I have a second bottle of those I’m going to use for trade,” Kyle said gesturing at the Oxys. “Anna would give it all away and think nothing about her own future. I’m protecting her from herself, and the rest of this shitty world.”
Miles just nodded, knowing the words weren’t really meant for him to hear. He asked instead. “What are you going to trade for?”
“A few things. Ammo for one, if I can get it. Most of it’ll be in straight water though,” Kyle said.
“Still planning your big escape across the desert?” the old man asked.
“Yeah. Though it’s not much of a plan without a place to escape too,” Kyle added, not wanting to argue it over with the old man again. Miles obliged him.
“Now I want you to tell me everything that happened. Start at the beginning and take your time, don’t leave nothing out,” Miles said as he leaned back and closed his eyes. So Kyle began telling his story as the old man listened in silence.
These little story sessions had become a regular part of Kyle’s visits. He would tell Miles of his discoveries and misadventures out in the wastes. The old man had a keen mind, which was as sharp as ever. The Scavenger knew the old man was trying to relive the experiences through him. His aged body and crippled leg meant Miles never strayed far from the museum. He even paid the merchants to deliver food and water to him and Juan. He listened as Kyle described the trek in, following the state route and his eventual discovery of the station and its large door. Kyle paused, and on cue, the old engineer unloaded a series of questions.
“How big was the door exactly? What condition was the control panel in? Was it steel or some aluminum alloy? If it was ordinary steel, do you realize how much that must weigh? Why so large? It seems a waste to have anything larger than a man size portal as an exterior door.”
Miles fired off these and others in rapid succession, giving Kyle very little time in between to think and respond. Lucky for Kyle many of them required simple one-word answers, for many of them “No” would suffice. Once the old engineer’s curiosity was temporarily sated, he allowed Kyle to move on with the story.
Kyle described his treacherous climb up the mesa and the discovery of the “glass” dome. As he described the circle cut into the station Miles opened his eyes again and leaned forward. Kyle described the material and the especially the nature of the cut as accurately as possible. He paused, but Miles didn’t interject he just scratched his chin, deep in contemplation.
“I thought perhaps the people that had been in the station had been forced to cut their way out. Maybe using some of the leftover hand tools from when the mesa was dug out. That article says that was the original plan, after all, have robots do the digging on Mars and some of them were engineers after all. Of course, the robots would be useless just like everything else,” Kyle added.
“That makes sense if they couldn’t get out. But everything I have read about the shuttles, the space station, anything that NASA produced has redundant, sometimes triple redundant systems. Seems odd that a complete power loss would leave them trapped. I bet each door some type of backup system, probably even manual ones as well,” Miles responded.
“Well I didn’t see anything like that, of course, I wasn’t really looking for it either. I also did end up leaving much sooner than I had planned,” Kyle said, not wanting to get ahead of the story.
“Also think about this, did these space-age super rock cutting robots ever exist? This station’s whole purpose was to prove the theory. I bet the cave was cut out of the rock using very down to earth methods and tools. Why would a company spend millions of dollars to design and build a fleet of robots, if the very structure they were intended to build hadn’t been tested or proven yet?” Miles asked.
Kyle found himself shaking his head, “That makes s
ense, I guess.”
“Not only that, but I bet that new private space company banking the whole thing wouldn’t even have sunk a nickel into designing and building robots until NASA handed them a big fat grant. Why waste their own money, if the government was willing to waste its own,” Miles added.
“An actual case of the chicken having to come before the egg,” Kyle said.
“Excellent, succinct as always,” Miles said leaning back in his chair.
“Well one way or another, someone cut a damn big hole in the roof of this place,” Kyle continued.
The Scavenger pushed on, telling of his discovery of the wasted field of crops and the precious water. They talked at length of the smaller interior door that had also refused to open to Kyle’s demands. Miles asked many of the same questions as he had before. With Kyle again providing many of the same answers. The men agreed that a separate interior door made sense, allowing space in between for an air-lock, but both agreed that the need for a smaller interior door was odd.
Kyle then described his entrance into the station proper. As he spoke, Juan joined them, sitting on the floor between the talking men, the boy’s comics forgotten as he hung on Kyle’s every word. The Scavenger described his exploration in detail. The three sharing the thrills and disappointments as if they all walked those dark halls together. Their hearts plummeted at the discovery of the collapsed tunnels and of the living space turned into a crematorium. Then they rose together again as Kyle described the medical clinic and its untouched backroom.
Kyle was standing now, acting out his glorious toilet paper discovery, Juan laughed at Kyle’s over the top flaying. Miles frowned but continued to hang on every word just as closely as the boy. The story of course culminating in the discovery of the precious medicine, with Kyle wildly grasping for invisible falling pill bottles. He then chased them across the floor to Juan which of course ended in a round of tickling and laughter. Even Miles laughed as the pair wrestled on the floor of the passenger car.
When Juan escaped back to the safety of his bunk bed, Kyle sat back down breathing hard. Miles was still sitting across from him, still smiling but obviously waiting for Kyle to continue the story.
“Sorry,” Kyle said, and Miles simply nodded in reply.
“That was about the time I discovered the light,” Kyle said, and the old man’s eyes widened as he spoke, Kyle grinned.
“I was back out in the field and saw it in the dark on the far wall. At first, I thought it was just my imagination because it flashed only every few minutes.”
“Wait, wait, are you telling me you found an honest to god working light bulb?” Miles demanded skeptically.
“Yeah, I guess. I mean it was definitely a light, and it flashed off and on a bunch,” Kyle replied.
“Flashed? Was it broken? Flickering out?” the old man asked leaning forward.
“No, it just flashed blue light. The longer I was there, the faster it flashed. I couldn’t really figure out why though,” Kyle said.
“What type of light was it? A ceiling light or maybe one of those emergency exit type of things,” Miles asked, the excitement plain in his voice.
“No. It was the oddest thing. Once it flashed a second time, I found it. It was high on one of the rock walls. It was Shaped kind of like a... three-legged starfish,” Kyle said, feeling like an idiot even as he described it.
“A what?” Miles asked.
“You heard me right, a fucking three-legged starfish. But made out of metal,” Kyle said looking down at his feet.
“This blue light, so it came from a bulb or LED or something, attached to this, ahhhh…starfish?” Miles questioned sounding confused himself.
“Not that I could see. The light seemed to come from inside the metal. Like the whole thing would just suddenly glow real bright and then turn back to metal just as quick,” Kyle looked up at the old man, who was now scratching his chin with a fury.
“This was an electric light, right? Not a candle or maybe some type of glowing, I don’t know, moss or something?” Miles asked not looking directly at Kyle anymore but starring off on his own.
“Well it had the brightness of an electric light and the way it turned off and on, it had to be electric right?” Kyle replied now asking the questions.
Miles ignored him. “Did you see a wire running down the wall?”
Kyle thought for a moment. “No, nothing like that. I had a really good look too, I tried to pry it off the wall for you.”
“How was it attached, was it bolted to the rock?” Mile’s asked
“Not that I could tell. But I would guess it had to be bolted and then tightened down too hard because they managed to crack the rock all around it when they put it in. Kyle said, proud of his deduction. “I got a good look because the thing was flashing pretty regularly by that point,” he added.
Miles looked directly at him. “What? Don’t tell me you broke it. You didn’t break it, did you?”
“I did not. In fact, I couldn’t even get my pry bar under the damn thing,” Kyle said defensively.
Miles stood quickly and then grimaced in pain for his effort. Kyle reached forward to try and steady him and then stopped himself, knowing Miles. “Let’s go, I want you to look at something,” the old man said.
Kyle knew what that meant. “Miles I can’t be here all day; I really have things that I need to see too.”
The old man ignored him and called over his shoulder as he picked up his pipe gun again. “Juan, lock up after us. We’ll be in the study,” Kyle groaned and reluctantly followed the old man out of the passenger car.
Miles study was an old wooden boxcar, the last in a line of four. The first three contained his “Library.” Originally the study had been intended to act as a classroom for Juan. Kyle had helped locate, recover, and carry in a pair of whiteboards for the one-room schoolhouse. While the old man still forced Juan to sit through a handful of classes each week, the boy’s lack of speech had made things difficult. That and the fact that no one was exactly sure how much English or Spanish that Juan understood. The space had slowly transformed into Miles “study.” Not the type where you sniff Brandy from a decanter or share cigars after an evening meal, the kind where people went to actually study.
Miles struck a match and lit a single waste oil lamp that hung from the ceiling. The pair of whiteboards hung side by side, a pair of folding steel chairs sat in front of them. Kyle could feel his ass starting to ache just looking at them. Miles moved to stand before the boards and leaned against his crutch. If Miles considered his library a calling, then solving mankind’s greatest and perhaps last mystery was an obsession. One of the boards was partially covered by a map of North America, a few places seemingly at random had been marked with colored dots.
“That’s new,” Kyle said nodding to the map, hoping to stall the lecture to come.
“Yeah, just taking a fresh look at things. Finding corroboratory evidence,” Miles said.
“For what? The sky turned blue, and all of the electronics stopped working, everybody knows that,” Kyle said.
“I have pulled apart every bit of electronics I can get my hands on. From the smartest phones and tablets, to turn of the century ignition wiring, all fried, useless. But It’s all from here. From this area you see, not much commerce moving things around these days. I was wondering if the effects had been the same everywhere or if some places had gotten it worse than others. Perhaps some places only lost some electronics, and some had survived,” the old man said scratching his chin and looking at the map.
“We have been hearing those rumors since the day after. That next town over, all of their stuff still works or was it the town after that? Along with the one that the National Guard will arrive any day or FEMA or the Russians for that matter,” Kyle said.
“I know, I know. I have been talking to folks that aren’t from around here. One of the Hub merchants was just south of Chicago when it happened,” Miles said gesturing to blue dot in Illinois. “Met anothe
r fella a few years back, said he was in Atlanta when it all went dark,” the old man pointed to a red dot in Georgia. “A very nice lady that works, if you can believe it, over there at that Killer Indian’s ranch. She and her family walked all the way here from Panama.”
Kyle grimaced at the mention of Coal. He hadn’t told anyone of the Indian’s part in getting him home safely. Probably best not to, it could only lead to trouble for Kyle and Anna. A lot of folks in town feared the man and though Kyle doubted Coal saw it the same way. Fear and respect were two completely different things.
“Really, but it’s been years since anybody new has actually come into town, with the lack of rain, desert expanding and all,” Kyle pointed out quickly changing the subject.
“And what did you find?” Kyle asked already knowing the answer.
“Exactly what you expect that I found. It’s the same everywhere. Everything electric suddenly pops, smokes or melts. Even circuits not plugged in or powered down at the time. Not a single person I’ve spoken too. Not a single one of these people, many of whom spent years drifting across the continent to get here have seen a single functioning electrical circuit, nothing since that night.”
Kyle shook his head already seeing where this was leading.
“That is until today. When you tell me you found a blinking light in a cave,” Miles said pivoting on his crutch to face Kyle.
“We have to find out what it is. Why it survived and functions when nothing else has. Was it somehow protected by the stone, shielded from the effects? And what type of power system does it have to still have energy after all these years?”
“Why? What does it really matter? A few lights aren’t going to kick-start civilization Miles,” Kyle said with more venom than he intended.
To Cross a Wasteland Page 10
