The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Utah’s Deserts
Series 1, Episode 3
by Dustin Steinacker
Kindle Edition
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide Series Copyright © 2017 Stephen Lawson.
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Utah’s Deserts Copyright © 2017 Dustin Steinacker.
All rights reserved.
Cover art and logo by Preston Stone Copyright © 2017 Stephen Lawson
All rights reserved.
For series information, author/artist bios, interactive maps, pictures, and upcoming releases, visit tpatg.com
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide: Series 1
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Louisville Copyright © 2017 Stephen Lawson.
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to St. Louis Copyright © 2017 David VonAllmen.
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Utah’s Deserts Copyright © 2017 Dustin Steinacker.
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to the Mojave Desert Copyright © 2017 Sean Hazlett.
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Los Angeles Copyright © 2017 Jake Marley.
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Seattle Copyright © 2018 Philip Kramer.
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This novella is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons either living or dead is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No parts of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, without written permission from the author.
Dedication
For Helena, for walking alongside me.
Table of Contents
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Utah’s Deserts
About the Author
The Post-Apocalyptic Tourist’s Guide to Utah’s Deserts
On Saturday, Emmie gave Alva the entire back row of the SUV. It wasn’t safe for anybody else.
As she drove, she tried not to think of the rot the boy was spreading. The cirrus residue had rolled out from the hollows in his right arm across the seats until it became their new upholstery. The dog-eaten foam and protruding wire was covered by that pattern now, periwinkle tendrils probing until they reached another sort of material and then stopping shy. But yesterday she’d found some on the windows. It hadn’t scraped off.
In the passenger’s seat Delcena was asleep. That resentful look had left her eyes, but Emmie knew it would come back when she woke. The look that said “Somehow, all of this is your fault.” Not just the contingencies of this trip, everything.
It was one of those nights where the light diffused bright across the clouds and you couldn’t tell where the moon was. Good—the glow let her drive at night. Whoever had retooled this once-solar car had disconnected its old electricks, except for the headlamps. She’d heard that they ran tests down in the mountain vaults of Little Cottonwood Canyon, brought the things they built up to the surface to see if they drew the Swarms. Maybe the car’s lamps were a product of that process, maybe they were weak enough to be safe. But she wouldn’t risk using any electricks. She had traded them in pieces for food the first chance she had.
Delcena stirred. “Are we there yet?”
Emmie opened her mouth to respond, before seeing the girl’s narrow smile. It was there, for an instant, before the sullenness settled back in.
“Never known you for a funny person.”
Delcena shrugged, then backhanded a mosquito against the roof of the car with a flourish that made Emmie jump. She studied the back of her hand before rubbing it against her dress. “I thought I heard him talking, earlier.” She glanced back to Alva, who blinked and looked away, out the window. “In his sleep.”
“We’ll need to pour in the last of the fuel soon. I’m not sure where we’ll get more.”
“He said something.”
“You were dreaming.”
Delcena flinched and quieted at the edge in Emmie’s voice.
Already Emmie felt guilty. She didn’t know much of Delcena’s past, other than that she was twelve and that if the Kingstons found her she might never see the sun again. Generations of ancestral consanguinity were there in her face—in that gawky look, in the forehead and the ears—and she couldn’t mask that, even if she managed to find something other than that pastel dress for her to wear. She’d been born of a child wife and groomed to be a child wife. No doubt the Cult had used harshness to correct her where she strayed from her God’s vision. When Delcena heard a rising temper, she braced for violence.
Ahead the road was growing patchier. Rougher. This was rare road for traveling, she could tell that much. If she ran into anybody else with a motor or god forbid a real weapon there wouldn’t be much she’d be able to do.
(Though, she thought with a mingled thrill and terror, in an eventuality like that, one of the gadgets hidden in the hatch might have a little bite to it...)
“Look!”
Emmie nearly jerked the wheel, but there was nothing in the road. Her gaze followed Delcena’s finger directly ahead, to a sea of moonlight glinting on the horizon, like reflected stars.
“Water?” Delcena muttered dubiously, crooking her neck out the passenger window.
“Haven’t heard of a lake here,” Emmie said as she squinted. “Maybe a reservoir. Where does the road even curve around it? I don’t see...”
She stopped the car. Left it running, of course, or they’d have to push it back to a jump-start, but braked hard.
“That’s metal,” she said, trying to keep the quiver out of her voice. “A lot of metal.”
Buildings wrought in salvage, could be. Or one of those ancient Mormonian temples, fortressed up, done up with reflective metal to keep it cool during the day and blind any would-be invaders. She’d heard of things like that, in this southward part of the state.
“Maybe a truce-camp?” Delcena said, face brightening. A settlement where tribute bought you time without worry of violence, which resulted ironically in a flourishing raider trade, as the worst bosses kept house in the camps and sent their vassals out to find tribute.
“No, I’d have heard about that, from those scrappers back in Parowan. There—on that humpy little mesa. We’ll hide the car and sneak out, see what that shine is. If there are people we can get a read on them, and if they look bad we’ll roll the car down the other side and get up enough speed to start up again. I’ll expect you to wait here, have it on the slope and keep the brake down.”
Delcena stuck out her tongue. “Fine. I’ll just talk to Alva.”
“You do that.”
“If he turns into a monster and eats me while you’re gone, it’s your fault.”
~~~
The Summon, some were calling it. When she’d first heard of it around winter, she thought the name sounded a little grandiose, too much like the driving force in one of those yellowsheet stories she used to read. The ones they’d print up in cheap ink, back when she lived in the blockhouse. The stories were always secret messages this or goodhearted messengers that, leading quiet, careful children who didn’t eat too much to clean water or Candy Mountain or some place where people lived in glowing Swarm-proof domes tended by electrick robots, who did the work of keeping you alive and just let you enjoy the living. The robot ones had always been her favorites.
But this
one was true. Not because the story was any more realistic— the first she’d seen of it in person was nothing more than the words “LIFETIME SANCTUARY OFFERED IN RETURN FOR DEVICE NOT OF HUMAN ORIGIN, TEMPE, AZ” painted in clean, square red letters on a concrete wall—but because it had proven its truth to her. Just days after stealing this car, she’d seen another yellowsheet from these unnamed messengers from Tempe. On it was drawn an ovaloid disc like the one she’d found in the car’s foot locker, which had lenticular lines criss-crossing about which wrested the light in all directions, making it a maddening thing to look at, hard to focus on. She’d studied it for hours without incident, but the first time she’d let Alva hold it, it had changed him. Stopped him speaking, stopped him eating the usual way, made him a living cipher, like the disc itself. The first time, she’d had to pry it off his hand. And every time she gave it to him to feed, it got harder to remove. Last time it had nearly crusted over into his palm before she’d managed to dig it out.
Tempe. That’s where they were going. If these messengers offering sanctuary knew of the device she was bringing them, they might know what it did. They might know how to reverse... whatever was happening to the kid. They could undo Emmie’s mistake.
Forward she crouch-walked behind the bitterbrush, watching the dark horizon’s glint, her sling wrapped in two loops between her palm and elbow. She probably wouldn’t be much of a shot in this light, but swinging the cradle might buy her a few seconds to run if she came upon somebody in the dark.
She felt a drop land on the back of her neck and looked up into the specter gray of the sky.
Fantastic.
Maybe a hundred yards from the mass of metal she stilled, blinking and moving her gaze by degrees to wipe the old light away and gather new, looking for any hint of movement, listening for voices or even animal-sounds. Nothing. Just the light patter of rain on metal.
Closer still and she could see the nature of the ruins before her. Not buildings or a gleaming shanty town—automotive. Hundreds of cars were stopped still, many half-buried in the earth and beginning to look oddly vegetative. All appeared to have been looted ages before, windows smashed or stolen. Still, some seemed intact, and she didn’t see any liers-in-wait.
She parked the SUV in the vehicular graveyard, close enough to a couple of similar vehicles that she hoped it might look like another abandoned unit, shiny and improbable though it was. She knew better than to check these Swarm-eaten wrecks for water or supplies, but she tried a few anyway, and she found nothing. Anything useful had been taken. There they spent the night, in the back of a large van with only one half-broken window. She gave Alva the blanket, telling herself that it was out of sympathy but in truth it already bore the signs of his use and neither she nor Delcena would use it now.
“I like this,” Emmie said, when they were settled.
Delcena scrutinized the grimy van, and gave her a disbelieving look.
“No, I mean the rain. Reminds me of growing up, the patter on the aluminum sheet roofs we had in the blockhouse.”
Delcena sighed. “You always talk about this. You had sanctuary already. Why leave?”
Emmie thought. “It’s not so easy.”
“But you had what you needed.”
“And so did you, right?” She propped herself up on her elbow, trying to ignore Alva’s silent but thoughtful gaze back at the van’s double doors. “You’re going to tell me you think that’s the same thing as being safe? With the way I found you?”
“I want to go there. I want to live in a blockhouse. I can keep guard or watch the water distillers or whatever they want. Why do we need to go this way?” She sniffed.
It was difficult, keeping her patience with this girl. Emmie was barely five years older than Delcena but she found that more often than not the girl forced her into a maternal role she found alien. That teenage loathing rarely gave way to anything more pleasant than an unfocused, universal indignation. As if it had been Emmie’s demand that she come along, as if this were some sort of leisure trip, like the ones the bosses took to the lake because they could afford the protection needed to swim for its own sake—
Delcena’s breath caught sharp in her throat, and Emmie realized that she’d been crying. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet. “What was it like, living in a fortress?”
Emmie opened her mouth to answer but was silenced by a loud crack from outside.
“What was—”
“Shh...” Emmie reached out and gently brought Delcena back to the bed of the van, flat on her back. “I’m going to look. Be quiet.”
Delcena nodded, eyes wide, breath still.
Crack! It was louder this time—and now something had been broken or smashed.
Gently, Emmie pulled Alva along the gritty floor by the ratty blanket, away from the door, hoping that the corrugated grooves of the van’s bed wouldn’t make any sound against the rain. She picked up her foot-wrappings and Delcena’s boots and deposited them carefully behind her.
Then, fingertips perched carefully along the bottom of the van’s back-right window, she raised herself by degrees until she could just see the moonlit world outside...
“Hey!” she shouted, and then covered her mouth in horror.
The man on the roof of her SUV froze, tire-iron in mid-swing. He met her eyes.
One of the vehicle’s solar panels lay cracked on the ground. The other was nearly loose as well.
Goddammit, September!
She continued cursing herself as she torqued the van’s right-door handle—one, two, and three times—and as the rusted thing finally gave and the door opened.
“That’s my car!” she shouted, running full-out into the rain and reaching for the sling in her back pocket. Her right heel throbbed as she stepped on something sharp, but she kept her eyes on the stranger as the rain poured down the back of her neck.
It was an old man—no, her age, just gaunt and unhealthy, body wound like a rusty spring. Eyes that knew violence, but not the eyes of a raider. A man only recently come into desperation.
He was crouched, and for a moment Emmie was given the impression of some scavenging animal, feral and wary but determined. He looked wrong, didn’t fit into any of the boxes she tended to put people into, the ones which told her what state starvation and deprivation had driven them to—being broken-down, flighty, or brutal. Whether they were in the throes of some shed-made chemical which took their life by degrees as it made them a danger to the lives of others.
After a moment he smiled, pointing with his tire-iron at the fallen solar panel. “Though I could sell these. For passage.”
She thought again of drugs. “There’s nothing for you here. We’re moving on, ourselves. Take the panels if you want, we don’t need them, but go. Get on, all right?”
He scratched the back of his neck. “I’ve seen it. I’ve been traveling aways, you know.” He pointed at some amorphous point on the horizon. “... or was it that way?”
While he was otherwise occupied, she took the opportunity to pick a stone off the ground, not as round as she’d like but about the right modest weight. “Seen what?” she asked politely, as she set it into the sling’s cradle.
“People use panels like these, to heat water. Electricity-free, Swarm-proof.” He smiled again.
“Wherever you’re going” she said, stepping out and brandishing the sling, “go there. You’ve got what you wanted.”
“You know, I saw you weren’t exactly armed earlier,” he said, holding out his hand. “It’s a show of trust, don’t you think, that I didn’t throw this?”
“I’ve got others with me. You’d have regretted it.”
“Yeah, others you’re protecting, maybe. You said this thing runs?” He whistled. “I’d love to see a motor in action—”
His knees buckled and he fell like a sack of grain. He reached at the empty air and made a sick sound as his forehead smashed into the roof of the neighboring sedan. He did not get up.
She checked her foot.
Oh, godsakes...
Something had bit deep into the heel, likely glass or metal. One puncture she felt deep and another shallower one, to the side. She’d be looking at infection, best-case. Worst-case, lockjaw and its attendant agonies. She couldn’t spare water but she’d pour out the rest of their ethyl alcohol into it and wrap it tight. The bite of the ethyl would surely be the worst pain of her life.
She checked the boy’s skin for needle-marks, looked at his teeth and his pupils.
He looked like a depleted version of something capable. What Mawmaw Henty would have called “scrappy.” Wouldn’t eat much, didn’t look consumptive. She searched his little shoulderpack and found desiccated jerky, mechanical remnants for barter, and an abused journal which didn’t look it contained the writings of a madman.
We’ve maybe got a driver here, she couldn’t help thinking. A fighter, or at least a warm body between me and the other bad’uns. Friendly, or at least good at pretending it, not some feral type. Could put him down if I had to.
She weighed the fors and againsts. Looked back to the van. Emmie, with a maltreated tween and an invalid to look after. Emmie, who could stand a bit more of a buffer against the things and the people of the desert.
Sighing, she took the boy under the shoulders and began pulling him toward their makeshift camp.
“Cripes,” she muttered. “I’m going to have to teach you how to drive.” She’d only just learned it herself.
~~~
With his eyes closed, Thursday tried to place himself. The heat was there, the smell of people crammed together out of necessity. And that feeling in his head—not enough water, too many pints of the cargo his companions had been hauling, gifts of a brewer’s gratitude. He felt dried out.
He’d never had beer before St. Louis. He’d never had much of any good thing, let alone too much of a good one. This was a new type of remorse.
He took a deep breath. No, the convoy, that was days before, wasn’t it? The air here smelled wrong, not that warm-bread hops smell and sweaty funk that had forced him up front with the driver as often as not. There was something antiseptic about this air, some sister chemical to ammonia, maybe. Something he couldn’t place. After a few seconds he felt the judder of what could only have been an engine, not the less-even gait of horses. So it wasn’t just his toes tingling. He was in the passenger seat of an automobile.
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