by James Axler
Mikey-Bob put his hands on the sides of the doorframe and started to thrust himself into the room. Dark Lady held up a palm. He stopped.
There followed a moment of silence.
Dark Lady took a number of deep, almost gasping breaths. She kept holding her hand up. Eventually, with a final subterranean rumble, Mikey-Bob backed out of the door.
“All right,” she said finally. “I presume you have an explanation for this.”
“The way I saw it,” Ryan said, “this doesn’t pertain to the work we’re doing for you.”
“You don’t think working for the person who stole from me, while at the same time working to get back from her what she stole from me, constitutes a conflict of interest?”
“No.”
She frowned, looking as if she were getting angry.
“Please,” Krysty said, “hear him out. It sounds crazy, but I think he’s right.”
“Stop helping,” Ryan said darkly. “But think about it. The deal we cut with Sand—I cut with Sand—has nothing to do with this...thing of yours. It has to do with the Crazy Dogs.”
She was nodding now, although it was as if she were forcing herself to do so against a hand trying to hold back her forehead.
“I begin to see,” she said. Then she turned her head slightly away and eyed him sideways. “I also begin to see why the Crazy Dogs were so insistent I turn you over to them this afternoon. At first I wasn’t even sure they were talking about you. I had no idea what they were on about, frankly.”
“Today was not our first encounter with that particular band of blackguards,” Doc said.
“We had a bit of a dust-up with them when we first hit the Basin,” Ryan said. “The Dogs had a wag with three Mormons down from the Deadfalls in it, trying to persuade them they were a customs checkpoint or some such crap. We started to walk by. The coldhearts thought they had a right to stop us. We thought differently.”
He shrugged. “And we’re here. So you can reckon how that turned out.”
“They’re getting bold,” she said, shaking her head. “The mountain folk are really not to be trifled with.”
“These acted pretty meek and mild, ma’am,” J.B. pointed out.
“They were out of their element. They don’t actually like to leave their high valleys and their flocks. They’re decent folk, although their ways aren’t mine.”
She smiled slightly. “And I’m well aware that my ways aren’t theirs. But they know better than to try to impose their values on others hereabouts. Nobody’s much interested in their proselytizing here in Newcombe Flats. For the most part they’re content to live their lives in their mountain meadows and let the rest of the world continue its well-advanced journey to Hell in its own way.”
“They got hit hard by the plagues after the Big Nuke and skydark,” said Bob. Mikey was still looking sullen and rebellious. His calmer twin seemed to be trying to smooth things over. “Especially among their women. So polyandry became the rule.”
“Hmm,” both Krysty and Mildred said. They looked at each other, then burst out laughing.
Ryan made a growling sound deep in his throat.
“Don’t get too excited,” Mikey grumbled, as if reluctantly drawn to play along. “If it sounds like fun, they’re against it.”
“Word has it they’re prone to sectarianism and doctrinal disputes that sometimes turn violent,” Dark Lady said. “But should anyone try to come into their land and impose on them, they pull together instantly and go after them like stickies on jolt.”
“So these hill saints are rather like the ancient Swiss,” Mildred commented.
“Yes,” Dark Lady said. “They may even deliberately model themselves on the ancient Cantons to some degree.”
“I’m amazed you know that! It’s ancient history now. And this is by no means a time that venerates history—when it has so much in the past to fear.”
She laughed and waved a hand around at the book-crowded shelves. “These aren’t merely for decoration, Ms. Wyeth. The Library Lounge is both things. We provide a wide spectrum of services here.”
“So,” Ryan said. “Like I say, a separate gig. At worst I figured a little goodwill wouldn’t hurt with negotiations. And you didn’t seem on any better terms with the Crazy Dogs than Sand, even before this evening’s fandango.”
“No negotiations,” Dark Lady said crisply. “I want my property returned. And that’s that.”
“We’re working on that,” Ryan said. “Speaking of negotiations, there is one more thing. I can’t rightly claim to understand it, but Sand asked us a couple times to remind you that her offer to buy the ville still stands.”
“Absolutely not,” Dark Lady said with a firm shake of her head that made the ends of her hair swish around her narrow chin. “I’ve told her that will never happen.”
“Wait,” Mildred said. “You did say no, right. But you also acted as if that whole thing makes sense.”
“Oh, she’s offered to buy Amity Springs before.”
“But why would anyone buy a ville?” Mildred asked.
Dark Lady smiled. “Our trash.”
She stood, then laughed at their expressions.
“Come with me,” she said. “I’ve got something to show you.”
Chapter Fourteen
At first Ryan’s eye refused to make sense of what it was seeing by the light of several bull’s-eye lanterns.
“Okay,” Mildred said. “It’s a wall of crap.”
Dark Lady smiled. “It is our treasure,” she said. “The lifeblood of our ville.”
“Beyond the trash?” Mildred asked.
* * *
DARK LADY HAD led her guests down the stairs and into a back room, trailed by Mikey-Bob like a rolling mountain on a leash. There she produced several lanterns with reflectors and lenses to focus the light, which she lit with her huge assistant’s help. Keeping one and handing another to Mikey-Bob, she’d passed the others to Ryan and J.B.
From there she’d led them into a cool cellar, smelling of slightly humid earth and walled in what Ryan took for stabilized adobe brick. There were big wooden casks down there, which Doc eyed hopefully and Ryan and J.B. appreciatively. But neither the heady house brew nor the various wines in cool storage were the objects of the expedition.
Instead Dark Lady led them to a large double-valved trapdoor by a rear wall. Deftly sweeping back her skirts with her hands, she knelt and opened a heavy padlock with keys from the ring she carried at her narrow waist.
“From the looks of it that thing’s more to keep something down there from getting up here, than people up here from getting down there.”
“Both,” the dark-haired woman said, standing and gesturing imperiously for Mikey-Bob to open the doors. He complied without so much as a rebellious glance from Mikey.
Mildred was starting to look concerned. She didn’t look relieved when the cool air that gushed up from below smelled of staleness, mildew and general decomposition. Not rotting flesh, anyway—as even Ryan was relieved to note. But there may have been a hint or two that something had died down there.
“What exactly are you afraid might get out?” she asked, her eyes widening as she stared at the yawning pit of blackness.
“Who knows?” Mikey asked.
“We don’t want to take anything for granted,” Dark Lady said seriously. “We know how the world is.”
“Straight up,” Ryan said, “is there anything likely to be down there you know to be afraid of?”
“Afraid?” Mikey hooted.
“No,” Dark Lady said. “I assume that you people have the sense to keep your wits about you at all times in unfamiliar surroundings.”
“If only we had the wits not to keep putting ourselves in those kinds of surroundings,” Mildred said.
>
Without ceremony Dark Lady led the way down the ladder, holding the lantern high in her right hand.
Ryan wasn’t sure she wasn’t engaging in a bit of bravado, here, but he was also rad-scoured if he was going to let this skinny pale woman show him up. He went down right after her.
The weird musty decay smell was much stronger here.
There was cool hard-packed dirt beneath his boots. The walls were reinforced here and there with fieldstone and more adobe blocks, and the roof was braced by beams that had to have been brought down from the mountain pine and spruce forests.
They were at the center of a circular chamber about thirty feet across, with tunnels about ten feet around radiating in four directions.
“This took some digging,” J.B. said thoughtfully.
“Not as much as you might think,” Bob said. “Soil’s clay and pretty stable. Moisture from the underground stream keeps it from getting too hard or crumbly. This far below the surface it’s not double hard to work.”
“Underground stream?” Krysty asked.
“What do you think feeds the springs?” Mikey countered. “Or did you think the ville was named by the tourist bureau?”
“It’s not close,” Krysty said.
“Not here,” Dark Lady replied. “It’s not what I’ve brought you down here for. Follow me.”
* * *
SHE LED THEM fifty feet down a tunnel before it ended in a wall of trash. Unmistakable trash: soda cans, brittle plastic drink cups, random metal nuts and chunks stuck tight together in a matrix of compressed, damp, decomposing paper.
The gaudy owner turned to the skeptical Mildred. “I told you. This is the secret to the wealth of Amity Springs. This is why Baron Sand wants to buy it.”
“I heard it,” Mildred said. “I see. But I don’t exactly believe it. Or understand it, anyway.”
“Are you calling Dark Lady a liar?” Mikey asked, his broad-jawed face darkening.
Ryan pushed in between the behemoth and Mildred. “Easy now, big fella. We’re new here, remember? And kind of in the dark. So mebbe you could help us understand.”
Bob laughed. “For a guy who looks like a stone coldheart, you do have a silver tongue in your head.”
“So I’m told,” Ryan said.
He turned to Dark Lady. “What about it?”
“Your silver tongue? I admit, now I’m intrigued.”
“What?”
“This is what we call the ‘trash face,’” she said as if she’d never made the previous comment at all. “Our most recent excavation. We’re still digging into this deposit, old-days landfill. We haven’t yet found anything too valuable. But we’re hopeful.”
Holding her lantern in front of her, she walked back the way she’d come. Ryan and company stood aside to let her pass. Then, after exchanging bemused glances, they followed her once again.
This time she turned right. Within twenty yards the tunnel suddenly widened—farther than the lantern shine initially carried.
Dark Lady halted them on what turned out to be a ten-foot ledge running halfway around a pit thirty or forty feet across. Its surface was about five feet below the ledge. It was lumpy and blocky.
Running his beam over it, Ryan saw that it was more trash. But a different kind: a lot of it looked like pieces of furniture and equipment—metal boxes, cabinets, an upended set of metal shelves, a console with half the panels and long lightless blinky lights bashed in, all partially buried in dirt and crud.
“This is one of our most productive digs,” Dark Lady said brightly. “We’ve got a lot of prime scavvy out of here.”
“Who digs all this?” Mildred asked, running her fingers in awe along the raw clay walls of the chamber.
“Gaudy employees,” Bob said. “Townsfolk. Often as not, me.”
“Sometimes even herself,” Mikey said. “Depends on what else is going on at any given moment.”
“Even the...entertainers?” Mildred asked.
“Of course,” Dark Lady said. “If they wish to earn extra pay. Also they get rewarded for coming up with good scavvy.”
“What do you find down here?” Ricky asked. His eyes were bright with the prospect of unearthing predark gadgets.
“All manner of refuse, as you can tell,” Dark Lady said. “But what we’re really looking for is predark technology.”
He turned huge dark eyes to her. “You mean...?”
She nodded. “Old-days gadgets.”
“Why would there be any of that down here, more than the occasional odd or end?” J.B. asked, tipping his hat back on his head. “I mean, why here in particular?”
“Because this was the trash dump for a top-secret military research facility,” Dark Lady said.
“All this paper and plastic junk came from some kind of whitecoat lab?” Ryan asked.
“It was quite sizable,” Dark Lady admitted. “A substantial residential community grew up here in connection with it, according to what we’ve found. It’s not just here beneath the Library Lounge, of course. Although these particular deposits are why I chose to build my establishment on this site.”
“People are always digging up stuff, all over the ville, out on the outskirts,” Bob said. “Tools, measuring equipment, components—you name it.”
“And the piece you have hired us to recover from Baron Sand?” Doc asked.
“That would be classified as ‘you name it,’” Dark Lady answered with a cool smile.
“I don’t understand,” Krysty said. “Amity Springs certainly doesn’t look as if it was built out of any predark complex I’ve ever seen.”
“Oh, it wasn’t,” Dark Lady said. “There was very little of it left after the war.”
“Why?” Ryan asked.
“Got nuked flat,” Bob said.
Mikey sniggered. “Why do you think they call this Basin ‘Nukem Flats’?”
Ryan and the others stared at him for a moment, until even the saturnine Bob head grinned a snaggle-toothed grin.
“You mean,” Doc said with exaggerated delicacy, “it is not spelled N-e-w-c-o-m-b-e?”
“That’s what I reckoned, too,” Ryan said.
“Nope,” Mikey said. “N-u-k-e-m. As in, well...”
“The first survivors to return to Santana Basin didn’t exactly have sophisticated senses of humor,” Bob said.
Krysty was looking at her man in wide-eyed horror.
“Ryan,” she said. “The radiation!”
By reflex he glanced at the minute radiation counter attached to the lapel of his coat. “I checked it when we came into the Basin, and off and on since,” he said. “Same as usual. High background, but no more than you find a hundred other places. Not a real hotspot by any stretch.”
“Of course not,” Dark Lady said. “Otherwise why would we choose to live here in the midst of it, however much wealth we could extract?”
“I’ve known plenty of people who’d do a lot more stupe things than that, if the payoff was big enough,” Ryan said. “But I take your point.”
“In my collection I have journals kept by some of the first to resettle the Basin after skydark,” Dark Lady said. “They estimate a 150-kiloton warhead was air-detonated approximately 1800 feet above the middle of the actual facility, which lay about a quarter mile south of here—well outside the current limits of the ville. There is a hotspot there, at the hypocenter, although it’s small. Most of the unconsumed fissionables and the reaction by-products were carried away by the wind. Where—” she shrugged her bare white shoulders “—they became someone else’s problem.”
“So you built your ville deliberately...” Mildred began.
“On top of the dump. Yes.”
“What about your fresh water supply?” Krysty asked. “Weren’t the people who
built the place concerned about contamination?”
“Like they cared about that stuff in the old days,” Mikey said. For once his twin nodded grumpy agreement.
“Actually, they seem to have been careful to isolate their landfill pits from the aquifer,” Dark Lady said. “They needed fresh water, too. Lots of it.”
“So who buys the high-tech scavvy you recover?” J.B. asked. Ryan thought the shine in his eye didn’t look double different from the one in Ricky’s.
“The highest bidder,” Dark Lady said. “Shall we adjourn back to my office?”
Chapter Fifteen
“Cognac, anyone?” Dark Lady asked. She held up a cut-crystal decanter half full of amber liquid taken from a cabinet behind her. “Well, not technically cognac, I suppose. But it amounts to the same, even if it’s not imported from what used to be France.”
“Still must be some primo scavvy,” Mildred said as Dark Lady began to pour the fluid into a number of shot glasses on a maroon pottery tray painted with Day of the Dead figures an uncharacteristically silent Mikey-Bob had set on the desk in front of his mistress.
Dark Lady looked at her from under abruptly upraised brows.
“It isn’t scavvy at all,” she said with some asperity as she continued to pour a couple of fingers into each glass. “It’s made by monks downstream in the valley to the west of the Basin, in fact. They have a fortified monastery and their own vineyards, and they do quite well, thank you very much.”
“I’m sorry. I should have considered that possibility.”
Dark Lady finished pouring and set the near-empty decanter on her desk.
“You will forgive me if I overreact,” she said, still pretty briskly, as she straightened with a tumbler in hand. “You touched a sore spot. I am not a fabricator myself. That’s not my training nor inclination. But I appreciate the making of things, and its necessity.”
She raised the glass to her black-painted lips. For a moment she looked as if she was going to throw back the brandy. Then she took in a deep breath through her nose and visibly reasserted control.
