by T. K. Malone
Laura’s eyes spoke of her fear, and Zac’s matched hers with ease.
“Four hours,” her voice came over the two-way radio.
“Can we make that two,” said Noodle.
“Emergencies only, Noodle,” Laura impressed upon him.
Somehow, Zac thought, she’d become the unofficial leader of their expedition, but then knowledge had a way of electing folk to that position. She’d helped Billy, Switch, Loser, and Noodle into their suits, and double checked his, too. Zac could tell that everyone around him was nervous. He glanced over at Noodle. He’d seen the man do some crazy things, take on some huge risks, but he’d never seen him this subdued. Somehow, the vast black stain that had once been Black City had turned into a thing of dread, something they feared, a thing to be respected.
Billy shoved the casket to the edge of the truck’s bed. Zac pressed the two circles and the silver poles sprang out. He reached over and hung a roll of silver tape on each and wondered if it could really save them if they tore their suits. Nodding at Noodle, they both then lifted the casket, Billy and Switch doing the same on the other side. Laura switched on the locator and began walking along the road, Zac and Noodle directly behind her, Billy and Switch following up.
She pointed out over the brush—or what had once been brush—but now it was just charred soil, burned like a crust, the tiny creeks boiled away, their beds cracked and filled with ash, like black veins. In places it looked like the earth itself had bubbled up, heaved and stretched with shock before being roasted into place. Although she indicated beyond it all, she kept to the road, even though in places that too had blistered and buckled, like the devil’s own breath had scoured it as he’d sought out more victims.
Zac still wondered where all the bodies were. Somehow, even with what little he knew, with what Laura had told him, out of nine million he’d have expected some kind of undead walking the earth, their faces scrapped of skin, the white bone of their skulls showing through, hideously disfigured, limping along, slumped to one side, a leg dragging, a mournful moaning spilling through their torn lips. Wasn’t that how apocalypses were supposed to be? A mass of half-dead folk destined to walk the earth in eternal pain? Or had that been part of The Free World’s bargain? If the worst was going to happen, then give their chosen ones a fast death with no suffering. Let those outside the city suffer—they were good at it, after all, used to it.
Just over the scorched wasteland, he could see the city itself, the old blocks, the slums, some still standing, reaching for a sky which had forsaken them. Before the apocalypse, the buildings of the grid had been the ones clad in black—clothed in the sun cells which made the entire city self-sufficient for power, supposedly independent of the outside, clad in those icons denoting the future and so an inspiration to the world—but now the slums were black, too, seared like the wastelands. There was nothing left now but melted concrete, molded into hideous representations of what they had once been.
Eventually, they reached the freeway’s off-ramp and dropped the casket, to take a breath. They all turned toward the now nearer city, looking on without the need for words. It was impossible to find anything of beauty, for nothing lived there anymore other than desolation and despair. The outer buildings that still stood looked like chipped, rotten and blackened teeth, a tongue of charred rubble lurking behind them. The wispy sky had greyed, and the wind whipped up dust into mini cyclones. Ahead, the road was even more of a mess, strewn with debris which was heaped into ridges, as though the devastation had come in waves, death ebbing away with its outflow. It was grim but it was powerful, a testament to man’s greatest achievement, and it all lay at Zac’s feet, his to reign. King of something, king of nothing. Would those in the hills fight for this place, or was its battle now done?
Laura pointed straight toward the city, and with the relief of no longer having to look at it, Zac bent for his pole and helped raise their burden, then on they went, one step at a time, toward the man-made hell.
“What does the locator say?” Zac asked over the radio.
“We’re going roughly right. We need to be farther over that way, though,” and she pointed.
Zac’s breaths were getting on his nerves, the constant hiss of his inhalations and exhalations somehow adding to the feeling of doom about him. It was as the though the whole world was nothing more than him inside his suit, what he could see through his visor just some surreal movie. His arm was beginning to ache, the cask, though not heavy—a constant pull—and he knew he was tiring quickly.
Images of Charm floated through his mind. He wanted to imagine the man’s head under his boot, or the man himself cowering in a corner, but could only envision him laughing, as though everything, the desolation before Zac, the cask above him, the suit, Connor, Teah, or Laura Meyers, was just a joke—a thing played out for his sole amusement. And then the first spits of rain dribbled down his visor, and Charm’s mirth seemed complete.
“Shit” said Noodle, “Amen to that” said Billy Flynn, and Switch stayed silent, but the never-ending walk continued, step by painful step.
“We need to get over,” Laura’s voice came over the radio, pulling Zac from the trance of his breathing and the pitter-patter of the rain—the soot-stained rain.
Zac looked where she was pointing, trying to get his bearings. Everything had changed, and even what he thought he recognized seemed to have shifted in some way. He knew he should remember, that the direction somehow had to be familiar, but what was left of the city was now so alien that nothing fitted.
“Take a breath,” he said, and they set the casket down. “I can’t seem to focus, Billy. Where’s she pointing?” but as he’d asked it, he understood. Even though the road led nowhere anymore, it used to be by the river, and that had changed, its course altered by the damming the fallen buildings had caused. He’d been using its course as a reference point, now no longer valid. It made sense of the tide marks he’d seen, and left the road as the only true marker.
“She’s pointing to the old trading route,” Billy said, and Zac saw it now, Charm’s laughter growing and pulsating all around him.
“Bastard,” he muttered.
“What, Zac?”
“It’s in the old tunnels,”
“The ones where Connor nearly died.”
“So, what’s the best route?” asked Noodle.
Now they were close, Zac could see small puffs of smoke drifting along a few feet above the ground. Closer still, standing at the edge of the road, Zac could clearly make out the veins of black soot had changed, were glowing orange, the wisps no longer smoke but steam, where the rain was boiling.
“It’s all on fire,” he muttered, and each and every one of them stared out from the edge of the road.
“We best get away from here,” Billy said, rushing back to the cask.
“What the hell was this place?” asked Laura.
“A dump. A tip. There could be anything under there.”
“Perhaps a light jog when the road permits?” suggested Noodle.
They all followed Billy Flynn and went back to the cask, hoisting it to their shoulders again and picking up their pace, aiming straight toward the city. Along the way, the land to one side of the road started spitting fire, flames soon blasting into the air like hot geysers, showering sparks all around them. Zac set his eyes on the end of the road. The erratic flow of river water may have doused it for a while, but whatever was under there now seemed to be reaching a critical point.
They came to where the road was clearer, as though the floodwater from the river’s interrupted flow had scrubbed it partially clean, and there they made better time. Zac scoured the road’s end, where the barriers should have been, where the pillboxes used to stand guard, where only a few days ago he and Billy had raced through with drones overhead, drones which would fly no more.
Black stalagmites that were once the slums loomed ahead, but otherwise nothing was recognizable. It was also impassable. At the stark scene before them,
no one said a word, Zac’s breath once more becoming his only reality, the one outside too strange to comprehend.
They picked their way through the smoldering once high-rise slums, their boots now blacker than black, stained by the soot-laden rain which splashed up their suits. Then a dull thud had them all ducking and the wasteland in the distance erupted in a spurt of what looked like molten rock.
Why there? Zac wondered with each step they then took on their continued stagger. Why where Connor had nearly died? But secretly, Zac had always thought there was more to it than was apparent at face value. It had always seemed an opportune place, that meeting of tunnels, that confluence of disused sewers and vast interceptor chambers. Convenient for Charm, no doubt, his goods always appearing when due, never late, never early, and always under the watchful eye of the supposed vagrants who’d ambled and shuffled around outside.
Neither Zac nor Billy had ever questioned it, though. Sometimes, the fortuitous was just that, a lucky occurrence, and they’d settled on a sure and steady route had been accepted without further thought, soon becoming no more than routine. This had consigned any misgivings he’d had to the back of his mind, forgotten until now. What secret had Charm been hiding? What did he keep in those tunnels?
“We need to get out there, Zac,” said Laura, nodding toward the boiling land, but Zac knew already.
“There’ll be a way,” Zac muttered into his radio. There always seemed to be a way. Charm had molded them, bent them all to his will, so that will would be done.
The rain had become heavier now, teaming down, forming into oily puddles, into streams which leached the filth away from the wastelands, and all the time, they carried on, plodding along the only route open to them, sandwiched between two dooms: a radioactive city and a polluted wasteland.
Then it came to Zac: an understanding. Charm had known he’d remember where to go, had known the city would be destroyed—like as not even run the simulations—so he must have known the firestorm would have made the wastelands smolder.
“Storm drains,” he said into his radio.
Billy looked around.
“We need to find the storm drains, Billy. There was a big one around here somewhere. He wants us to go underground, use the locator to find it from there.”
He heard Laura take a breath, and Noodle and Switch both cursed. Billy, though, just nodded and altered course, heading for the slums and no doubt a tortured course through their destruction. It turned out barely passable, but not impossible, and sheltered somewhat from the driving rain, Billy picked his way through the hideous carnage until he found what he was looking for. Then he signaled for them to put the casket down and they all took a well-needed breath.
They were beside a huge storm drain which stretched back into the city. At its wasteland end stood a great grille, bent and battered and clogged with debris, where it vanished underground.
“Good idea, boss,” Noodle said, and Zac would have laughed but for his exhaustion.
He made his way to the grille end where he looked down at all the twisted and bent debris piled up against it. Switch came past him and clambered up a short slope, so he was above the grille. There, he searched around for a short while before signaling to them. When Zac saw Laura had taken Switch’s place, he went back to the casket and they hauled it up.
Switch waited, standing by what had once been an access hatch, but which was now just a hole in the ground. He knelt down and peered in. “A bit more than a ten foot drop, by the look of it,” and he sized up the casket. “Let’s hope this thing tilts without upsetting anything.”
“Billy,” Zac said, “you first, and Noodle—you’re the next tallest. Laura, you go down too.”
“First: check your suit for rips, just to be sure,” she said, although she’d already told them they’d know if they had been torn—something about not being able to ignore the blistering pain—but they all checked anyway as she slid the silver tape from the casket’s handles and onto her wrist.
“Clear,” said Zac, the others soon reporting the same.
“Clock’s ticking,” Noodle muttered, and he grabbed the edge of the hole, then stepped onto the remains of an access ladder and swung himself down. Laura threw a roll of tape after him. “Any tears, bind them straight away,” and then Billy slipped into the hole.
The big man soon radioed he’d taken a rip in the arm of his suit, and Laura immediately climbed down after him. It was only a few moments before her voice came over the radio: “Anything?” and Billy replied “Tingling”. Zac waited anxiously, but she soon told him she’d managed to seal it, then radioed up: “Let’s get it down”.
Half an hour saw them all in the drain, the casket scratched and scuffed but not broken. Some light came in through gaps in the debris cluttering the grille and from the entrance to the hole above, but their way ahead lay in darkness. They all switched on their suit-lights, Laura using hers to look at the locator, then they edged forward.
The drain was circular but with a flat base, rainwater streaming in from behind them and forming a river a few inches deep. Their flashlights picked out the tunnel’s charred lining, but otherwise it looked undamaged. Zac’s breath yet again became his everything as he settled into a slow and deliberate pace, Laura taking point, ever watchful of the locator. The light from behind soon deserted them and they were left with only the erratically dancing beams of their flashlights.
It was a while before Zac sensed they were getting close, a feeling Billy also seemed to have when the big man called Zac’s name and nodded. Then Laura raised her hand and they all stopped.
“Another drain crosses up ahead,” she said through the radio’s static. “Must take the water off to the river; a lateral collector; something we need to cross. It looks like it's on the other side of the pipe.”
“Can’t walk through concrete,” Noodle muttered.
“Billy?” Zac asked.
“They’ll be a way—straight toward the signal my vote”
“Carry on it is,” Zac muttered.
The lateral drain was about twice the size of the one they were in, the water flowing faster and deeper. They found a maintenance walkway to one side and set off along it.
“I make it one and a half hours; nearly halftime folks,” muttered Switch.
“Over there, Zac,” and Billy pointed his flashlight.
Just ahead, a steel walkway crossing the flow led to what looked like a bulkhead door. Slumped to one side sat a hooded figure, one leg outstretched, the other crooked, head bowed. They lowered the casket. Billy edged around it and drew level with Zac.
“What did I say about bringing guns?” he said.
“A little late now,” said Zac.
“Shall we?”
They crept nearer the crossing, Zac’s light shining on the body. It didn’t move. Zac went into the lead and led Billy across the bridge until they stood in front of what Zac assumed was a man. He nudged the outstretched foot with his own.
Slowly, the hood raised and a face looked out, blistered, scoured by oozing sores. Then its arm moved, reaching out to Zac. He and Billy jumped back, but Zac noticed a key in the man’s hand and leaned forward and took it. The man hung on to it, though, looking up into Zac’s eyes, his lips mouthing silent words.
Slowly, a feeble breath coaxed those words into the still air: “From Charm. From Charm. From Charm.”
Zac nodded, as did the man as he let go of the key. There was movement from his other hand, though, slipping from within his cloak, something glinting in Zac’s flashlight—a gun.
“Zac—”Laura’s distorted voice screamed over the radio, but the man held Zac in his stare, transfixed, then he smiled, weakly, and raised the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.
18
Zac’s Story
Strike time: plus 6 days
Location: Black City
“You can take your masks off,” Laura said over the radio. Zac looked around; she was already shaking her hair out. Noodle
was slumped against the wall of the room. Zac didn’t need telling twice.
“What the hell is this place?” Noodle asked, once he’d removed his mask.
“Beats me,” Billy said, “but seeing I can take this bloody helmet off now, it’s already up there with that bar in Christmas.”
They were in a stark white chamber made from some form of resin. It was the same shape and size as a large train carriage. On one side were row upon row of empty white shelves, all scratched and scuffed by use.
“I guess we know where Charm stored his gear,” Billy said, running his fingers along them.
Noodle sat on the lower one. “We need to synchronize watches. This down time isn’t costing oxygen.”
“Is it radiation-free in here, then?” Switch asked.
Zac ran his fingers through his sweaty hair. “Bloody well hope so,” and he looked at Laura.
“According to the locator, we’re at a staggering zero.”
“How come that guy was outside,” Billy said, “just sitting there waiting to die? Why didn’t he come in here and wait it out?”
Zac shrugged. “He was cooked, man, completely cooked. I doubt he’d been there more than a day.”
“Wonder where he came from,” Noodle mused.
“Charm always used guards up top,” Billy muttered. “I guess he had them down here, too.” He shrugged. “Maybe it was just his shift?”
