Wasteland

by Noah Mann

  Where she should have still been giddy with excitement, Elaine was subdued. Almost melancholy. The depth of her mood darkened mine. I turned back to my friend.

  “Neil...”

  He paused, smiling, serene, and looked toward me. If his belly wasn’t full, it was closing in on that state. With a half-eaten orange in hand he stuffed a selection of various fruits in his pack and joined me and Elaine at the door, noticing the absence of joy about both of us.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Elaine tipped her head toward the room with the dead tomato plant.

  “Come on,” she said.

  We followed her out of the greenhouse, past the wilted plant, and through the interior door on one wall. A hallway stretched out before us, half dim, some light spilling through windowed spaces to either side of the corridor. We passed an odd spiral staircase as we followed Elaine, steps winding up into what had to be the grain silo, which, it now appeared, was not that at all.

  “In here,” she said, standing next to an open door.

  Neil and I moved past her and saw what it was that had caused her to summon us from our feasting.

  A body. The body of a man. Sitting in a rocking chair with a Dragunov sniper rifle across his lap and a length of paracord tied around his ankle, its unseen end disappearing somewhere beyond a closed door opposite the one we’d come through.

  “You think this is him?” Neil asked. “Mr. Green Thumb?”

  Logic dictated my answer in the absence of any other indicators.

  “I do,” I said, and took a step closer to the almost mummified remains.

  The head was tipped back, mouth gaping unnaturally wide, the dead skin that had gone slack tightened again in the dry air, stretching a garish mask over the man’s skull. What exposed parts we could see pointed plainly at the cause of death—starvation. Bones pressed against the sallow skin of his arms, his legs, neck and head, as if the sharp lengths of his skeleton within were clawing to be free.

  “That’s a hell of a rifle,” Neil said.

  “And he put it to use,” Elaine said, pointing to a collection of expended shell casings on the floor beneath a sandbagged window.

  “Shooting perch,” I said.

  “There’s more just like that,” Elaine said. “In other rooms. He made sure he had clear fields of fire in every direction. That thing we thought was a silo was all bunkered out up top. Reinforced interior walls, shooting ports.”

  “Fire against what?” Neil wondered.

  To me, the answer seemed fairly apparent.

  “Whoever might want what we just found,” I said.

  The gold likely still in the vaults at Fort Knox was as valuable as dirt. What existed in the covert greenhouse the man had, presumably, crafted and maintained was beyond priceless. It was, without embellishment, the key to our salvation. Maybe the world’s.

  I stepped past the corpse, to a wall covered with memorabilia. Photos. Children’s drawings. Certificates. Diplomas. Degrees.

  “Dr. Myron Haskins,” I read from one of the framed degrees. “PhD in Molecular Biology.”

  “Masters in Agricultural Science,” Elaine read from another.

  I focused on an award, picture of a man, of this man, mounted on dark wood, brass plaque engraved beneath it.

  “Outstanding Faculty Member, two thousand and twelve,” I read. “He was a professor of Agricultural Science.”

  Neil stepped back and took in the totality of the small space. It was a den. A shooters nest. And a tomb.

  “He took it on himself to fix it,” Neil said. “Like some punk kids starting a computer company in their garage, he just decided to do this.”

  One man had put the hurt on the blight. Had beaten it, at least in this small slice of Wyoming. But how?

  “Was there anything else in here?” I asked Elaine. “Anything that might explain what he did? How he accomplished this?”

  She shook her head.

  “All I found were places to shoot and a sensor station up in the silo,” she said. “Some sort of alarm panel.”

  “Sensors,” I said. “He wired up his property just like I did at my refuge. He’d get a warning and take care of any intruders.”

  With clear fields of fire, unlike my house north of Whitefish, I had no doubt he’d made his place here an unwelcome destination for any who might approach.

  Except for us.

  That wasn’t entirely true. He’d broadcasted the message to the world. In the blind. With the hope, one assumed, that people of good will would receive it. People of intellect. That, I now suspected, was why he’d provided no precise location in the transmitted images. He’d wanted only those capable of analytical thought to find what he’d done. Thinking individuals to exploit his discovery.

  I wasn’t sure how much we fit what he’d envisioned, but we were here. We were the chosen ones.

  Yet we were, in a way, still in the dark.

  “He had to leave more than just the plants,” I said.

  “Why?” Neil asked.

  “What if those in there end up like the first one we saw,” I said. “More pumps fail. All anyone would find is a room of dead trees and rotting food.”

  “He was a professor,” Elaine said. “A scientist. He would have documented what he did.”

  “Okay,” Neil said, playing along. “Where is it?”

  Elaine crouched and gently lifted the length of tan paracord wound around the man’s emaciated ankle. She held it a few inches off the ground and eyed where it dove under the door.

  “Maybe wherever this leads,” she said.

  Twenty Four

  We opened the door and followed the length of cord outside, pulling it up from layers of sand and dust that had covered it. Across a field behind the house and the covert grow building. Foot by foot it led us to a spot. A dark spot in the open, no structure or dead tree within fifty yards.

  “What is that?” Elaine asked.

  I pulled the last twenty feet of cord up from its shallow burial and found the end knotted to a steel spike driven into the earth next to the nearly black circle amidst the field of grey. A black circle of solid metal atop a foot of cylindrical steel rising from the earth.

  “A covered well?” Neil suggested.

  “Five feet across?” I asked doubtfully, then pointed to a sturdy windmill just beyond the hidden greenhouse, its blades turning lazily in the calm breeze. “That pumps from the stream. He didn’t need a well.”

  “It’s two pieces,” Elaine said, pointing to the cover. “And hinged.”

  She was right. The lid to whatever this was had been crafted to such tight tolerance that it seemed the split between the halves was just part of the pattern stamped into the metal. And the edge of each part where it met the metal cylinder was attached by heavy custom hinges, welded expertly. Someone had taken care in building this. More than one would to secure a well, or a septic system.

  “Let’s have a look,” I said.

  Neil and I each gripped the opposite sides of one half and lifted the cover, no lock securing it, and no need for one with the man’s constant vigilance over his property. The semi-circle groaned open on dry hinges, its bulk tipping back, then stopping, held open just past vertical by stops mounted to the underside.

  When it was open we looked down into blackness.

  “I’ve got my weapon light,” Neil said.

  He removed the light from his pack and directed its beam down the shaft, brightness finding the bottom a good distance below.

  “Thirty feet,” Elaine estimated.

  “I’d say about that,” I agreed.

  Neil shifted the light around, scanning the sides of the vertical shaft, just roughly sculpted earth and rock.

  “No ladder,” he said.

  The beam froze, Neil aiming it at a dark recess at the bottom of the shaft’s wall.

  “Does that look like a tunnel entrance?” Neil asked, implying his belief in that very estimation.

  “It does,” I said.
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  The horizontal opening at the base of the sculpted hole appeared to be roughly six feet tall. Enough for a person to pass through with ease. Where it led we could only guess.

  “I’m going down,” I said, reaching to Elaine’s pack and removing the length of rope she’d kept strapped there.

  “You sure?” Neil asked.

  “You sure as hell aren’t,” I said.

  A flash of embarrassment washed over my friend, born of his determination to pull his own weight, even when ailing. I’d anticipated his reaction.

  “Because you have that whole fear of the dark thing going on,” I added quickly.

  Neil smiled and helped me fashion a makeshift harness for the descent from an extra belt and two sturdy carabiners.

  “You want to leave your pack?” Neil asked.

  “No,” I said, winding the rope through the carabiners. “If anything useful is down there I can shove it in and you can haul my pack up.”

  Neil nodded.

  “You know, I’m the lightest here,” Elaine reminded and volunteered all at once. “I’d be the easiest to lower and raise.”

  I finished setting the rope, tying it off to a protruding bolt from the hinge mount.

  “No,” I said, images of Burke being blasted to oblivion flashing in my mind. “This is for me to do.”

  She didn’t try to change my mind. I suspected that she knew exactly what I was thinking right then.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Neil handed me his weapon light.

  “It’s the brightest we’ve got,” he said, noting the deplorable state of our batteries.

  I tucked the light in my pocket and tugged on the rope, leaning back, testing its anchor point and the strength of the harness. It felt solid.

  “Ready,” I said, then stepped over the steel lip of the shaft cover.

  * * *

  Friction slowed my descent as I settled deeper into the shaft, rappelling cautiously, feet planted against the rough wall, bits of rock and dried earth breaking away as I ‘walked’ backward toward the bottom.

  “You okay?” Neil called down from above.

  “Peachy,” I told him.

  The day’s brightness ebbed with each foot I descended, sunlight struggling to fill the shaft. By the time I reached bottom and unhooked from the rope and stepped out of the harness a cold darkness had enveloped me. Looking up I had to shield my eyes at the hot white world above, a half circle of it visible through the bifurcated hatch, silhouettes of my friends peering down just black, featureless splotches.

  “I’m down,” I said, raising my voice to lift the words to the top.

  “Be careful,” Elaine said to me.

  There was no need to answer. To assure her that I would be. We’d come this far, had found more than we’d expected, but still we needed more. We needed what might exist down here.

  A way to take the salvation we’d discovered back to those we’d left behind.

  I moved to the entrance to the tunnel and took the light from my pocket, listening for a moment before turning it on. There was only silence. No hum of pumps. No buzz of electricity.

  And no voices. I was alone.

  The light filled the way ahead as I turned it on, beam revealing a horizontal passage cut through rock and earth. I moved ahead, entering the tunnel, passing vertical supports spaced along the walls, ducking beneath others fixed to carry the load of tons of earth that pressed down from above. Twenty feet in I reached a turn, the tunnel taking a sharp right at a precise ninety degrees. Twenty more feet and it turned again, left this time, another ninety, matching the original heading.

  Coming around that corner my light found the red curtain.

  It hung from hooks attached to a ceiling support, a thick bolt of fabric the color of a fire engine.

  Red... Red... Red...

  It wasn’t the last thing that crossed my mind as I laid eyes upon the flimsy barrier. Those blasted words, that color, both of which had announced the end of the world I’d known. That we’d all known. Here it was represented by the thing that hung before me.

  I approached, letting my AR hang on its sling across my chest, reaching out to feel the cloth with my free hand. Only it wasn’t cloth. The texture against my fingertips felt closer to something plastic, like a blackout shade meant to prevent even the smallest infiltration of light. Why that might be necessary I hadn’t a clue.

  Not yet.

  I gripped the side of the curtain and eased it to one side, stepping past, the light I shone ahead filling a larger space. A space dotted with tables, and instruments, clear containers, both empty and filled with liquids of differing colors. Darkened lights hung from the stout supports that spanned the wide ceiling in the room that was, very clearly, a laboratory of some sort.

  A few steps took me into the lab. Tracking the light across its width and length I noted several things. An insulated cable protruded from one wall and angled down into a bank of batteries, wires snaking from this to a panel, and more from it to fans, and to the lights above, and, finally, almost comically, to an electric tea kettle. I walked to this oddity and noticed a cup next to it, bottom of the white vessel stained dark.

  “You worked here,” I said, my breath jetting in the subterranean chill. “You worked here in the cold and drank your tea.”

  But worked doing what? Figuring it out how?

  I turned away from the tea kettle and cup, my head catching the corner of one of the lights. It swung from the impact, slim chains that suspended it from the high supports squeaking. I reached to still it, and that was when I noticed something different about the light. About all the lights.

  Each was fitted with some kind of film over its clear plastic lenses. Sheets of plastic, multiple layers of varying colors. I peeled back several and counted five, a mix of blue and red and green, as well as clear and some speckled opaque sheet.

  “Filters,” I said to the empty room.

  That made sense. They were filters. And they were on every light in the room. The professor wanted to control light in this space, this laboratory, taking precautions to prevent any from leaking in from above. The red curtain, the turns in the tunnel. He’d wanted no direct or indirect sunlight to reach where he worked. Wanted only the filtered light he provided to brighten this space.

  I saw a switch box mounted to a support just inside the room and went to it, flipping the switch on. Nothing happened. A few more up and downs convinced me that whatever power there’d been to the space had been disconnected. Possibly the professor had diverted it to the greenhouse, which needed heat, and supplemental light, and pumps to water the plants and trees. His work here, it seemed, had been completed.

  “But he wanted this place to be found,” I reminded myself.

  There was no sign of any plants. Just empty tables with a dusting of rich earth. He’d grown something down here, beneath the filtered lights. He’d worked down here. Drank tea down here.

  Tea...

  I turned to the table again where the tea kettle and cup sat. I’d always preferred coffee. On my desk at work there had always been a mug of it, straight black, steaming as I sipped it while I worked. While I went over bids. Took notes.

  “Right here,” I said. “This is where you did it. You sat here, and you—”

  “Eric!”

  The shout was small and distant, Elaine’s voice carrying weakly down the shaft and through the angled tunnel. I’d been down here ten minutes, with not a word shared with my friends. Not a sound.

  “I’m fine! Still looking!”

  I thought I heard an ‘okay’ in reply to my assurance, but my focus was not on my friends’ concern. It was on the spot where I stood. Where the professor once stood. I shifted the light around, scanning under the table, on the floor, then to the rough wall behind it.

  That turned out to not be rough at all.

  A cabinet of sorts hung there, mounted to a vertical support beam. It was small, and hastily crafted, with a thin slab of wood mounted as
a door over it, short length of wire twisted around an exposed screw to keep it closed. I undid the simple binding and eased the door open, much as one might a medicine cabinet in the world that did not exist anymore.

  What I saw within gave me hope that that world would exist, in some form, once again.

  Vials and vials filled slender shelves, clear, capped tubes with labels affixed to each, identifying information penned on each. Penned by the professor.

  Peach. Apple. Carrot. Lima bean. Plum. Cabbage.

  And on, and on. Dozens of vials. Each filled to the top with seeds.

  Seeds...

  I reached to the shelves and began plucking the vials, gingerly, setting them upon the table. When I had them removed, all forty four of them, I saw what had been placed behind them.

  A notebook.

  It was small and blue. A pen was clipped to its leathery cover. I took it in hand and opened it, flipping through pages that were filled with things I understood, and more that I did not. Plain descriptions and directions mixed with formulas and diagrams alien to my contractor’s brain. Types of plants, both common and, I suspected, the Latin names used by those more far more knowledgeable than me. Dates. Times. Measurements. It would take days to read through all that was contained within. Longer to even attempt some semblance of full comprehension. I wasn’t going to accomplish that down here, if at all.

  I slipped out of my pack and opened it, placing the notebook within, then each of the vials, trying to cushion the collection of seed containers with a wrapping of my second set of clothing. Finished, I turned back to the room. The laboratory. I hadn’t yet checked every corner, every nook. What more there was to find I didn’t know, but I needed to. I slipped back into my pack and started across the space.

  That was when I heard the yelling.

  It stopped me cold, drawing me fully out of my desire for further discovery. Angry, muffled shouts echoed along the tunnel and drifted into the underground lab. Animus from unfamiliar voices.

  I hurried back into the tunnel, killing my flashlight as soon as I came around the last turn, glow from the vertical shaft ahead bleeding into the chiseled cavern, blue light sparkling in the cold, dusty air before me. The voices were clearer now. Male. Two of them. Giving orders. Demanding answers to questions. Drop your weapons. Your knives. Are you alone? What’s that rope for? Who’s down there?