by K.Z. Freeman
With caution in every one of our movements, we enter the cave. A palpable coldness grips me with unexpected suddenness, almost choking the air out of me. With our weapons drawn and our sights aimed, we creep along the corridor, following the light streaming from up ahead. The corridor runs at a straight line, then bends left at what we figured would be the end of it.
Iron beams are placed all over the cave and support the weight above us, sometimes in seemingly random spots. None of the pillars look like they should be able to do what they are doing.
I’d be lying if I said I’m not scared out of my skull about the prospect of the tunnel collapsing.
A constant sound of stone grinding away above me cascades dust-trails down between the closely jammed rocks. I pick up a distinct, cold smell of pulverized concrete.
“Why not just move the rock? Why make a cave and risk collapse?” I whisper.
“Greed, probably,” Ty answers as he walks ahead, hunched. “They knew it’ll take a few years to remove all of this by hand.”
“So instead they made a cave? Doesn’t make sense, seems like more work to me.”
“The more I see this, the more I doubt using explosives in this mess is a good idea,” he admits.
“Didn’t you say the blast would be centered? Or channeled?” The fear makes me forgetful.
“In theory, yes. But there’ll still be a shockwave no matter what. A tremor, at least,” he whispers back.
“We killed two men to get here,” I say, “I don’t want to be the next to die from your ill-conceived plan.”
“Shhh.” Ty gestures with a finger as he peaks around the corner. I hadn’t noticed a soft, chipping sound until after we both shut up. The noise bounces off the bend in the corridor.
Chip.
Chip.
“What is it?” I ask.
Chip.
Chip.
Like metal on stone.
“Just as I thought,” he says. “They’re digging into the wall of the bank.”
“How many?”
“Three,” he says. “Unarmed.” A dubious smile spreads over his lips and he aims his pistol.
I grab it and pull down his hands. “We don’t have to kill them, let’s just tie them up.”
“Are you stupid? They’ll inform their masters who robbed them and they’ll come looking for us.”
“The whole town already knows we’re after the damn vault, you were here for how long asking questions? We don’t need to kill them.”
Before I even manage to finish my sentence, Ty empties what’s left of his clip. Silenced, the bullets spit through the back of the emaciated workers’ heads and, one by one, their sweat-ridden bodies fall, pluming dust with their thuds.
“By the time they grow the balls and send someone to check what has happened, we’ll be gone,” Ty says. “They were slaves, I freed them.”
There’s no point in objecting to his line of reasoning at this point.
We walk ahead and near the vault. The cavern had been neatly excavated about the safe floor, half of it still buried below tons of rock and debris. Cashier counters lay buried and/or broken, caked with dust. Ahead of us, a doorway had been torn off and a steel-enforced gate clearly visible. An area had already been dug in in an attempt to circumvent the bulkhead and get to the enclosed compartments beyond.
In my mind, a different picture had formed about this place, but clearly this had been a small-time bank and elaborate seals were not required.
The lighting inside is provided by four sets of torches propped up on each of the walls, perched on make-shift holders slammed into the rock. More than a dozen lanterns are placed all over the floor. The mixture of oily scents and that of the burning torches sting my nostrils to the point where I almost need to gasp for breath.
I take one of the charges out of my large coat pocket. It’s an unassuming, fairly thin object. It feels heavy in my grip, despite its size, which is about that of a sheet of paper. I hand it to Ty who proceeds to attach it upon a wall next to the safe. The detonation trigger seems already wired, and all that is left for him to do is set it. He removes the safety and presses a small, white button. A bang flashes, a quiet *pop*. The shockwave, however, propels a chunk of the wall into the room ahead. We creep inside through the smoke, trying to dissipate it with our hands, waving them before our faces. The smoke has nowhere to go, insisting instead to attach itself on our clothes and invade our lungs. I pull the coat’s collar over my mouth. But besides making it harder to breathe, it doesn’t help much. I cough away the stale air and, through the haze, begin to notice a suspiciously empty safe. There are many closed compartments inside, but getting to those might prove next to impossible without a key. We decide to try our luck with the charge left to us.
I am drawn to something luminous on the far wall. I see Ty move in slow motion, his hands like slow clockwork. There are rays of a kind of light I had never seen before reaching forward from the wall, onto my face and painting my clothes white. I step forward, leaving Ty behind. I look at the white edges and see … I see… what I know cannot be. There’s a landscape there, strange beyond description. Shapes move within it. They have wide hats or what seem like heads too large for their straight and rather thick bodies. They are small. They notice me. They cock they heads to the side and breathe as one, expanding and contracting. I see something black open above their heads when a terrible rumble sounds above us. I see Ty look at me and know what his gaze means. We bolt.
As we make the bend and go ahead on the straight corridor, we are showered by debris and dust cascading down from the unstable ceiling. A deluge of mist-particles cloy our eyes and obstruct a clear view of the exit. The only reference to go on is that the outside seems darker than the rest of the corridor. A sound like a million men racing above our heads makes any attempt of speech utterly unheard.
The building then decides to die on top of our heads. Its ash stings my eyes, and I curse for ever thinking this venture might pay off. An urgent sense of impending doom propels me to even greater feats of speed. I see Ty stumble next to me. I help drag him back to his feet. Somehow, through all the falling rock and collapsing support struts, I make it through the tunnel first, tripping over the dead body of the guard Ty had killed earlier. I feel each blink tearing microscopic lines into my eyeballs.
I turn about after gaining a bit of sight. I can see Ty meandering out in time, the gust from the collapsing tunnel propelling him from his feet as a cloud of dust expunges itself out the cave as tons of rock avalanche down behind him. The sound of the huge boulders is like the earth collapsing. The bodies of the two guards are buried under the rubble, along with any evidence of them being killed by anything else than the tunnel.
How I had allowed Ty to talk me into planting an explosive charge inside the bowels of hell is lost to me at this point. But then again, greed and necessity had, in the past, driven men to things that may make our venture seem next to genius…
At least we still had one charge left. For even after knowing him for less than a day, I already knew he would sooner part with his own cock than with something that could punch a hole cleanly through a wall of solid stone.
We make a break for it through an alley ahead. The path snakes in between what used to be a maze of low buildings with large rooms and we make our way up in the direction where we had first talked.
We know there’s no sense in stopping now.
Some time passes before either of us speaks.
“At least I still have this baby,” Ty says.
“Plan?” I ask.
“We head to the town over the hill, it’s quite close, we should be there in about an hour. But let’s make it two, I’m really not in a hurry.”
“What do you know about the town?”
“It’s pretty much the same as this one. Used to be a small, unimportant piece of land where humans congregated, nothing too pressing. It had a bank, and I don’t think they’ve broken into that one either.”
I nod, f
iddling with my last bundle of creditcards in my pocket.
Slowly but surely, I am running out of them. I have about a week’s worth left on me. I don’t think Ty has any at all. He probably doesn’t even care. I think as long as he has a gun to steal what he wants, he would be fine.
After we reach a place with a view, I can see a few lights in the buildings of the skeletal town we left behind. The skyscrapers sport some illumination in a room here there, but that’s it.
I suppose no one had even gone to check what the rumble we had caused had been.
I begin to wonder, like so many times before, what the world had been like pre-War. I heard a few of the old-timers I had met along the road tell me of electricity. But I had rarely encountered anyone with a circuit which wasn’t fried in the EMP blasts and nuclear detonations. A few had managed to scrape together what they called sun-cells, but without the know-how and the ability to understand how to connect them so they would actually produce power, they are useless.
What I had seen in the safe doesn’t leave me. I try to imagine it and what it might be, but ideas do not come. Some projection from the pre-War era? I’ve heard of something similar before.
Further up the hill, we pass what had once been a scrap yard and decide to check it out.
Milling through it we quickly lose hope. There is nothing left but useless and corroded sheets of metal and parts of strange devices called vehicles. I knew these will never be of any use to anyone. I can almost sense the passage of time upon every broken thing around me.
“Damn. I’m fucking hungry,” Ty whines.
“I have some seeds left,” I say.
“Seeds? What the hell am I gonna do with those? Plant them?”
“Eat them,” I tell him. “But if you don’t want them, that’s even better.”
“If you playback what I said in your mind, you’ll notice I never said I didn’t want them,” he smiles. I chuckle despite myself and hand him half of my fistful of seeds, keeping a few extra in my pocket. I can hear them crunch in his mouth as he begins to chew. Walking ahead, the sound of Ty savoring their taste becomes replaced by our feet, echoing through the night.
CHAPTER 4
