Analog Science Fiction and Fact - March 2014

by Penny Publications

  She walked until she was able to reckon by the number of sun-baked disposable diapers in the surrounding working faces that she was well down into the '80s. She checked in with the kids by radio, and started digging in the least picked-over lifts. The amount of glass and cardboard packaging was astounding. There was more metal than usual, corroded twists of iron and pot metal, and the cigarette filters were absolutely everywhere. In some places the mounds had been neglected so long that cactus and grass had recolonized, and some bugs and lizards had come back. In the afternoon she hit a pocket of soaking-wet newspaper, and quickly covered it up again. Wet paper that hadn't decayed in sixty years meant something toxic enough to kill the microbes.

  The sun was settling toward the mountains and Maggie stumped around, whacking the ground with her shovel wondering whether to give up, when she saw something flutter at the edge of her vision. It was a young barn owl, perched on an outcrop. She put her hand on her hip, and the owl turned its heart-shaped face toward her. Its black-marble eyes shone. Then it launched, swooped, and snatched something from the ground. The owl flew off, and Maggie saw two more brown shapes scamper along the edge of a garbage face and vanish.

  "Pack rat," she muttered.

  After a few seconds, her headset keyed on. "Did you say 'baccarat'?" Juno said over the radio.

  "Oh," Maggie said. "Forgot my mic was on."

  "Like that card game we read about?"

  "No," Maggie said, moving toward where the rats had gone. "Pack rat. Most of the rats in the 'fill are Norwegian brown rats. But there are also some native kangaroo rats and pack rats."

  Maggie found the burrow entrance and started digging.

  "And this is interesting because..."

  "I always tell you kids that you never know when some little piece of information is going to save your hide. Pack rats collect things. Shiny things. And stash them in their burrows."

  Maggie's shovel knocked something loose, and a cascade of garbage slid down around her boots, revealing a cavity with little brown shapes vanishing down its several passages. She turned on her headlamp and leaned in. The burrow was scattered with bits of fur, chewed up paper, rat turds, and a small heap that sparkled with crystallized rat urine.

  She stuck her fingers into the midden, grateful that her respirator saved her from what must be a truly horrific smell. Then, it popped out—white, graceful, and glossy, and whole as the day somebody illegally threw it away.

  The three of them sat in the kitchen staring at the object that Maggie had put in the middle of the table.

  "What is it?" Alex said.

  "It's called a compact fluorescent light bulb," Maggie said. "A CFL. I never expected to see one."

  "What's it for?" Juno said.

  "It's what they used for light before Bio-LEDs."

  "Is it worth a lot?" Alex said.

  "Dysprosium, Yttrium, Europium. It's like a little treasure chest of rare earths."

  "How much?" Juno said.

  Maggie leaned back and crossed her arms. "Intact? At current prices? Enough to move out of the 'fill. We can get cash for it instead of clinkers. Down payment on a house. School vouchers for you two. Med insurance. If we're careful, we can live on the leftovers for years."

  They all stared at the bulb and Maggie felt her throat tighten, admiring the graceful white twists, the still-shiny spiral of the aluminum cap. Now there was just the problem of getting it past the fence without attracting Rivits's attention.

  A scuffing sound—somebody's shoe in the dirt—came from outside. Maggie grabbed a dish towel and threw it over the bulb. She picked up the nearest heavy object, which happened to be a crowbar, and opened the door.

  "Who's out there?" she called into the dark.

  A tall, skinny figure stepped into the patch of light from the doorway.

  "Is that you, Judd Mortonsen?" Maggie said.

  "Yes, Ma'am."

  "What are you doing lurking around in the dark?"

  "Hunting." Judd held his rifle up slightly.

  "Night is when the coons come out."

  "Did you see any coons in our yard, Judd?"

  "No, ma'am. But my dad said he thought you might be short after the price you got on your plastic today." Judd unslung the sack he carried and held it out. "He sent me over with this."

  Maggie put the crowbar down and stepped into the doorway. "Tell your dad thank you, but we're doing fine on our own."

  Judd nodded. His long neck made him look like a goose giving a greeting. "He said you'd say that, Ma'am. So I'm supposed to bring back some sludge for our bug tank in trade."

  "Well I suppose that'd be all right." Maggie held out her hand and Judd handed her the sack. She glanced inside and saw a hunk of skinned raccoon.

  "Juno," Maggie said, "Can you please show Judd around to the biogas tank and give him a bucket of sludge? Take a crank light with you."

  Juno went out with Judd, and Maggie grabbed the tea towel with the bulb wrapped inside and stashed it under the hatch by the stove. When Juno came back, the three of them stood around the kitchen facing each other.

  "How much do you think he heard?" Juno said.

  Maggie sighed. "There's no help for it now. Tomorrow I'll go to the station and try to slip out. Look for a buyer in town. We'll see if our luck holds."

  The next morning, thunderclouds swelled on the horizon. Maggie fed the kids pretty much the last of the food except for the raccoon. They wanted to come along, but Maggie didn't want to attract attention. She told them to stand by the radio and be ready with their go bags.

  About five minutes' walk from the house, Rivits, his g-morph bodyguard, and two station toughs stepped out on the path in front of her.

  "Well," Maggie said, "Looks like the party's over."

  Rivits frowned. "What?"

  "Nothing," she said, turning off her headset. "How can I help you boys?"

  "You found something," he said. "Something that belongs to me now."

  "Somebody been telling you stories, Rivits?"

  He came closer. "You know how it is. Thirsty kid comes into Park's after a long night of hunting. Coonskins don't buy much, so a friend spots him a few drinks. He gets to talking."

  "You're not even going to pretend that you're not robbing me?"

  He moved fast, and she hadn't been swung on in so long that she forgot to get out of the way.

  "I'm not screwing around. Give me my property."

  The blow had knocked her hard hat off, so she bent down and picked it up. Her cheek stung, and she thought maybe his rings had cut her. She put her hat on and looked him in the eye.

  "I don't have it on me."

  "Take us to it."

  She led them back to the house. On the way, she had to remind herself over and over again that a piece of salvage wasn't worth her life. When they got there, thank God, the kids were gone. They had heard her code phrase over the radio and gone up into the hills to hide. Their bags had clean water, respirators and tools. They knew how to survive up there, and they wouldn't come down for anybody until she radioed them.

  Maggie led Rivits and his thugs into the house, to the trapdoor by the stove. She started to open it, and—in a motion almost too quick to follow—the bodyguard whipped a gigantic pistol out of his jacket. Maggie recognized it from pictures in the salvage guides: a military.56 recoilless. The muzzle seemed to blot out about half the world.

  "Slowly," he said in a voice like broken gravel.

  Slowly, she lifted out the towel and moved it to the table. She unwrapped the CFL and backed away.

  Rivits looked at it and gave a single bark, which Maggie took to be laughter.

  "How stupid do you think I am?"

  Maggie was too confused for a snide answer.

  "Do you know what it is?" she said.

  Rivits rubbed a bony hand over his shaved scalp. "You scavs always think you're so smart. Think I don't know a piece of junk when I see it? The Mortensen kid said you were talking mansions and sending your kids to Ha
rvard." He brought his face close to hers. "You think I'm fool enough to believe a piece of twisted glass can buy all that?"

  For the first time, she saw his spikes and studs and rings up close. They were all junk. Cheap electroplate and counterfeit finishes.

  "Rivits, I think your buyer is ripping you off. You really don't know what this is?"

  "I know it's shit!" He grabbed the CFL and flung it against the wall. It exploded and the shards scattered across the floorboards. He turned back to Maggie.

  "Now are you gonna show us where the real shit is, or do we have to tear this place apart?"

  Maggie's hands had involuntarily gone up to cover her mouth. She couldn't do anything but point to where the CFL had hit the wall.

  "That was it."

  Rivits nodded to his men. The g-morph's huge hand fastened around Maggie's arm, and he led her outside.

  When they finished wrecking the inside of the house, they started on the outside. They overturned and broke up the carts, pushed the composting outhouse off its stilts, shoved the onion garden off the roof and sifted through the dirt. They knocked over the bio-gas tank and spilled the sludge everywhere. Maggie watched it all, helpless with the bodyguard's hand on her arm. Then a fire started— small at first, but it spread until the whole house blazed. The house where her kids were born. Their crayon drawings and baby teeth. The books and tools. Jake's whimsies. Even traces of rare earths left in the CFL base would vaporize in the flames.

  Rivits watched it all, his eyes darting to follow every movement of his thugs. When they didn't find anything, he came over to Maggie.

  "It wasn't in the house, was it?"

  "I told you. You don't believe me."

  "Shut up!"

  "You know, I think my neighbors might see the smoke and come looking—"

  "I said shut up!"

  Rivits put his face right in hers and spoke quietly.

  "Okay, you're going to take us out to the place where you found this shit, and you're going to show us where it's hidden."

  Maggie didn't flinch. "I can show you where I found it, but I need my tools."

  Rivits backed off and the giant hand released her. She went to the wrecked shed, moved some of the fallen boards, and pulled out the heavy CBRNs.

  "Stop stalling," Rivits said. "You don't need any of that shit."

  Maggie touched her fingertips to her cheek, then held the bloody fingers out for Rivits to see.

  "You're the one who cut my face open. With the stuff in the air where we're going, I won't get far walking around with an open wound."

  She suited up, and Rivits said nothing. She clipped the respirator pack on her tool belt, and picked up an entrenching tool. The big guy was suddenly there grabbing it out of her hand.

  "Okay, then you carry it," she said.

  She walked off toward the south, and they followed.

  Maggie reviewed her options. She probably couldn't outrun any of them, especially the g-morph. He could run all day at twice her speed and snap her neck with his fingers. The cannon in his jacket could take her head off at a quarter mile. She'd have to go along with them for now and hope something came up. She led them through the trenches to the deep cells near the south fence. When they got deep enough, she sealed her hood and turned on the respirator fan. The thugs exchanged glances. They'd heard the stories and probably seen some bodies. But Rivits and his bodyguard were stonefaced.

  The thunderheads in the distance rolled closer. She led them into the broad-sided pit and stopped.

  "This is where I found it," she said, her voice muffled by the mask.

  Rivits took the entrenching tool from the bodyguard and dropped it at her feet. "Dig," he said.

  "What's the point?" she said. "There's nothing here."

  "Dig now, or we put a bullet in your skull. Then we'll track down those little rats of yours and make them tell us where it is."

  She almost went for his throat right then. But she forced herself to think rationally. If she got herself shot, there would be no help for the kids.

  She took the shovel, picked a spot, and started digging. She dug a trench almost straight down, hoping she'd either find something Rivits would accept as valuable, or knock loose something toxic and fast-acting. After a while she realized that even if she found something, she wasn't coming out of the hole alive. Rivits couldn't take the chance that she'd report him to the real police. She was digging her own grave.

  The sky darkened, and the rain swept in like a solid curtain. Thunder cracked overhead, and Maggie turned on her B-LED headlamp She was shoulder-deep in the trench. Water pooled around her boots. Then the shovel hit something. She hacked out a channel to guide the water away and saw curved terra cotta pierced with rows of quarter-sized holes.

  "What is it?" Rivits said. He looked like a waterlogged rat in his dripping silver suit.

  "Clay pipe. The leachate system," Maggie said.

  "What the fuck does that mean?"

  Maggie shook her head and muttered inside her mask. She yelled to be heard over the noise of the storm. "The bottom of the landfill." She hit the pipe with her shovel, and it cracked open. The water rushing into the hole sloughed away chunks of clay, leaving the jagged end of the pipe exposed.

  Rivits cursed and moved away, and over the noise of the storm she thought she heard the words "waste of time" and "pop a cap." When the bodyguard started to turn, Maggie did the only thing she could think of. She flung her shovel at his face, then dove headfirst into the pipe.

  It was tight, but with the rainwater making the pipe slick, she was able to wiggle in. She stuck her arms out ahead and squirmed down maybe twenty feet, then her hands hit something. Her headlamp beam showed a wall of silt blocking the pipe. Water dribbling from above pooled in her face. The filter inlets would be submerged in a minute. She groped down to her belt and flipped on the dedicated air supply. The mask wasn't designed to be watertight, but it would give her a little more time.

  She shined her headlamp on the blockage ahead. Sludgy muck with jutting sticks and bits of construction waste. The water washed up around her ears, and between the thuds of her own pulse she heard voices from outside. If they started shooting, she'd be a smear on the walls.

  Then faintly in her memory—but almost as real as if he were speaking in her ear—she heard Alex's voice piping.

  Groundhogs are wonderful diggers, using their powerful claws to break through the earth and their paddlelike back feet to shove dirt out of the burrow behind them.

  "Oh, fuck me," Maggie said.

  An adult groundhog can move as much as one cubic meter of earth when digging a burrow.

  "Fuck," she said. She sank both gloved hands into the sludge and shoveled it aside. She grabbed more of the stuff as quickly as she could, pushing and kicking and squirming her way down like a worm burrowing in mud. She tried to control her breathing to conserve her air while keeping her head up out of the mix of rainwater, mud and debris. After a while, she had wiggled her way into the sloppy black mess enough that it was all around her. Except for a small airspace around her head, it pressed her on every side and blocked off the pipe behind her.

  She kept digging, shoving the sludge aside and wiggling forward, keeping her breathing as regular as she could. How long would her air canister hold out? As long as Rivits thought she might come back up, maybe he would wait—which would mean he wasn't looking for the kids. But what was to stop him leaving somebody to watch the pipe while he went after them anyway?

  Big chunks of crap came out—broken metal and pipe—and she shoved all that aside and squirmed past, praying nothing would tear her suit. She tried to remember everything she knew about the leachate system. The collection pipes led down to massive underground tanks. Since she was facing down, that meant a sump was somewhere ahead. But it could be miles away. Or the pipe could be narrowed or collapsed ahead. And even if she got there, what then?

  She noticed her breathing was getting faster. Was she running out of air? No, it was panic
. She was feeling the weight of the earth pressing down on the pipe just above her shoulder blades, realizing there was no going back through the plug she'd already made behind her, worrying she'd hit a blockage too hard to dig through. Frustrated sobs caught in her throat. She would die in this pipe. She would never see the kids again. Rivits's thugs would hunt them down and kill them.

  She stopped digging, planted her mask in the mud, and squeezed her eyes shut. The tears ran over the top of the respirator cup and dripped onto the inside of her faceplate. She wanted to thrash around, to kick and flail, to try to break free of the tons of earth surrounding her. She held very still, fearing the slightest movement would set off the panic.

  After a few minutes, she felt a stillness come over her. She thought about how she could just stop here. It wouldn't be peaceful at the end, but the bad part would be pretty quick, especially if she turned off the air. Then she'd black out, and it would be over. No more fighting and fighting and never getting anywhere.

  She took a deep breath. Or, she thought, she could just keep going.

  She grabbed two more handfuls of silt and shoved them back behind her. Then she was digging again. Ten minutes went by. The air inside the mask tasted stale. Twenty minutes. Pain shot through her shoulders and arms. Her lungs had expanded from hypoxia, and it felt like the pipe was crushing her. She wiggled forward bit by bit, wondering if she was moving at all.

  Then her fingers punched through. The silt in front of her slid away, and she kicked forward. She fell through an echoing blackness, hit something hard, and all was freezing and the roar of blood in her ears. She was underwater. "Watch the bubbles," she remembered reading somewhere. The beam of her headlamp picked out the glistening beads traveling past her feet. She rolled and kicked up to the surface.

  The headlamp didn't show anything but blackness, but the shadows and the echo of trickling water told her the tank was huge. She didn't dare take off her respirator, even though her air was more stale than ever, because who knew what kind of toxins were blowing around down here. She paddled forward until she reached a wall, then moved along it until she found a pipe going up. It was iron, rotted away below the water's surface, and big enough for her to pass through. She dove and surfaced inside the pipe. Then, by bracing her back against one side and her feet against the other, she pushed herself up. At the top, the pipe leveled off, and she clambered up and in.