It brought a question to my mind. Would the ammo have been stored with the weapons? I thought about it. Based on what I knew, I didn’t think that would be the case. Instead, the ammo and whatever useful explosive items would have been stored in a separate place, somewhere not close to where the humans hung out, just in case of an accidental explosion. Since the dark grove had covered pretty much all of the installation, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine that the place where the bang-bang stuff had been stored had come to this place, too.
Something with a little oomph might persuade the safe to open, as long as I didn’t blow the innards to pieces. (Poppops’ favorite Paul Newman movie was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The mental image of the scene where they used too much explosives on the safe on the train blossomed prominently in my head. Seriously, if the code keys were blown up, then I couldn’t use them.)
I began to search again. It took me until the sun was about to set to find it. It was spilled across a 100-square-foot range, but there was everything a post-apocalyptic girl could need. There were magazines with ammo for the M-16s. There was ammo for the Beretta pistols. There was a box of grenades. There was another box of claymores. (The “Front Toward Enemy” part on one side of the mine must have been helpful to those who wanted to plant booby traps.) There were some other things I didn’t recognize. I was like a kid in a candy store, except there wasn’t any sugar.
I gathered up some stuff, found a Beretta pistol, and loaded it up. Then I sat down and thought about how to best use the explosives so that I could open the safes. (Those safes were starting to tick me off.)
Too bad there weren’t any of those books about improvised munitions. (In Daddy’s office in a closed cabinet. I don’t think he actually used them, but they were reference material for projects he worked on. Daddy was lucky I hadn’t cared to get my hands dirty.)
In the end I broke open several of the claymores and got to the nitty gritty of it. Most importantly, there was a booklet in the box with the claymore mines that told me most of what I wanted to know. After the mine was planted, it would need to be detonated with a nonelectrical firing system. (The switch and wires were also contained in the box along with bandoleers for carrying the whole kit and caboodle.) I had to read quickly because the sun was dipping below the horizon on one side of the valley. To put it plainly, there were a gazillion steel balls set in epoxy that would be launched in one direction by C-4 explosive. One would not want to be in front of this bad boy when it was set off because one would have lots of holes thereafter. (One would be unhappy.)
Once everything was in the open, it was simply a matter of making a dirty bomb from the components and not blowing myself up in the process. I used the firing device and the blasting assembly to set it up. I rolled out the wire as far as it would reach and took cover behind a hill.
I glanced up at the fading purple light and flipped open the handheld firing device. I shrugged and twisted the switch.
A long time later my ears stopped ringing, and I was able to get to my feet. There was a cloud of dirt in the air, and the world seemed to want to keep spinning while I was walking. But the first safe was half-open.
I’d used the C-4 as shaped charges and arranged them so they would have to force the heavy door apart. It had worked enough that I could reach in and retrieve the contents.
Sadly, the contents of that one were all books. I glanced at the cover and saw a bunch of directives about Project Arrowguard.
I sighed and put them aside, then went back to work. I could have waited for the next day, but I didn’t think that was a good idea.
The second one worked better than the first one. I also remembered to plug my ears with cloth that I’d ripped off the bottom of my shirt.
The second safe contained paperwork. Apparently, the military loved its paperwork. There were a half-dozen personnel files, including one on Robert DeGroff, who had been an E-4 and twenty-three years old. He was from Gun Barrel City, Texas, and he had a young wife named Janie. I stopped reading the file at that point.
I paged through the rest and found that there had been a contingent of six people at the site. Who knew how many had made it to this place alive.
The third safe didn’t come undone as easily as the second one. (If blowing it up to get it open could be called easy.) I had to get the pry bar and the mallet to persuade it to come the rest of the way open. However, it paid off because there were a dozen code keys just as Ariel had described. Unfortunately, I knew I would have to open the other two safes just to make certain I had all of the code keys. Ariel didn’t know how many there would be, and there was the chance that she would have to try several in order to open the first set of safes at Cheyenne Jr.
By the time I was done, I had twenty-five code keys. It was full dark (fortunately, the flashlight I’d located in one of the Humvees worked) by the time I placed the last of the code keys in my backpack, thankful that they didn’t take up a lot of space.
Then someone from behind me said, “I guess you must have really been desperate to get into those things.”
Chapter 25
Lulu’s Dark Thoughts Lead Down a Dark Path
The Present – Location Unknown
I don’t know why I had expected to be alone forever and more. Shades of the self-doubt that I’d experienced in the dark grove still haunted me. It was so quiet in this new-and-unusual place that expectation had blinded me. For two days I had seen nothing and heard only distant howls to indicate that I wasn’t really alone. However, I made noise. I made a lot of noise over a few hours and thoughtlessly believed that it wasn’t going to be an issue. (“Hey, what’s that noise?” “Nothing, just a woman doing stuff with explosives. Just ignore her.” “Oh, okay.”)
I turned my head to see the dark shape of a man hunkered down about ten feet away from me. He’d approached silently and waited for me to finish. I brought the flashlight around, and he made a noise. “No, don’t do that,” he warned. He cleared his throat and added, “I really thought we’d covered all this area thoroughly. However, we missed this place. Do you know what it was?”
“Military installation,” I said. I pointed the flashlight at the ground and slowly stood up. The Beretta was tucked into my belt, and I turned slightly so that he wouldn’t be looking at it. If I was lucky, he hadn’t seen it. If I was really lucky, he wouldn’t know it was there until after I had it out and pointed at him.
“Huh,” he said. “That wasn’t food you were pulling out of those things. What were they? Safes? Why the hell would you want to blow up safes?” I couldn’t tell because he was in the shadows, but it seemed like he reached up and scratched his chin. (Just having a casual conversation in a distant weird place. All laid-back and mellow.)
My mind was awash with what I could have said. I was here and now. I might be stuck here. I might not. I needed information and here was a source. “There are MREs,” I said. “A box of them. Six different flavors.”
The man made another kind of noise. “Well, dang. I like the sound of that. Feast time. It’s better than eating the local fauna. Have you tried the fish that looks like catfish?”
“No,” I said simply. How much to tell this person. What would he want to know from me? How had I gotten here? How could I get back? Could I take him and a few dozen more of his compadres?
“It sucks,” he said. I wished I could see his face. I deliberately brought the flashlight around more. He was a large man; he hadn’t been starving himself, so he was eating something worth eating in this place. “Tastes like dirt. Probably because it’s a bottom feeder, you know.”
I didn’t say anything. I wanted my right hand on a weapon. I wished Mr. Stabby was in its sheath, but I’d be happy with the pistol or the bayonet.
“You shouldn’t move like that,” the man warned.
Someone else cleared their throat. That person was on the opposite side of the first person and directly behind me. Then there was cracking as someone deliberately broke a branch in anoth
er area. That person was at my three o’clock position. I was surrounded, and they had probably seen the Beretta.
“Name’s Westin,” the first one said. “The one directly on the other side of you is Devin. That’s Kane in the other bushes.”
I carefully looked around. The shadows revealed just glimpses of the others. The first one didn’t sound like a nutjob, but who knew what they’d endured here.
“There’s a colony west of here,” Westin said. “You come from there? I didn’t know they had any blondes. Damn, your hair looks pale in the moonlight. And your clothes, damn if they don’t look almost new.”
“A place called Sunshine,” I said.
Westin barked laughter. “That’s funny. Sunshine. Who came up with that? Someone who’s still hopeful, right?”
Again there wasn’t an answer for it. “They’re a little hopeful,” I said carefully.
“And you came from there to find this…military installation, and to open safes,” Westin said. Clearly, he was cogitating on that. “Huh. I can’t see why. Not much works. We heard the Humvee start up, but likely there’s not a spare ounce of diesel to be found, so that won’t work for long.”
The recognition that they’d been watching for at least a couple of hours was disturbing. To tell the truth or not to tell the truth? Hope for the best and pray that these people weren’t animals? “You haven’t seen a black door around here, have you?” I asked.
“A black door?” Westin repeated. He snorted derisively. “Not much left in the way of buildings in these parts. I hear tell there’s a whole building left where Salt Lake City was, but I haven’t been in that direction yet. Maybe later.”
“I guess that’s a no,” I said. “Heard about any way back to where we came from?”
Westin was silent for a long moment. “Hey boys, we’ve got a true believer here. She thinks we can return. One of them who thinks that if we believe, then we will be granted divine passage. That kind of bites. I hate to see the look on their faces when they finally realize that’s a bunch of hooey.”
“She didn’t answer you about what she put in the backpack,” Kane said.
“Yeah, I noticed that. Looks like CDs, but who’s needing CDs now? We can’t even use iPods because we’ve got nothing to charge them with.”
Devin said, “Are we going to just shoot the breeze here or can we get going? I’d like to get some sleep tonight.”
“Get those MREs,” Westin said. “Also, we need to scour the site for anything else. If this was really military, then there’s probably weapons and ammo, too. Like that Beretta she’s got in her belt.”
I heard the shuffle of cloth against something and realized that Devin had moved away.
“And we’ll need those weapons, cuteness,” Westin said. “The pistol and that bayonet. Anything else you’ve got, too. I’ll need to take a look at that backpack.”
“No,” I said.
Westin laughed. “We can do this two ways, peach. You seem clever, so I bet you know what the two ways are.”
“I pick the hard way,” I said. “Touch me and you’ll suffer.”
Westin clicked his tongue. “I don’t want to hurt you, woman. We trade with people who like their girls hale and hearty. So the less blood and bruises on you, the more food we can get.”
“Well, that’s just great,” I said. “I don’t belong to you, and I have things to do.” I reached for the backpack. Those code keys were the one thing that I really needed to hang on to. If those in this world were that desperate, the code keys were about the last thing they would want.
“Oh, don’t be that way,” Westin said. “I like a mouthy woman, but this is the way we do business now. You shouldn’t be out here alone, and we shouldn’t be stuck on a weird planet without 7-Elevens, but there it is all the same.”
I swung the flashlight around toward Kane, and he cursed before I pointed it away. I frowned for a moment. The man looked odd, like he was almost as purple as the skies and the air. His clothing was odd, too. It looked homespun, and I almost immediately understood why. Most people had popped up in this place naked. There weren’t stores to pick from, so they’d had to get handy, and quickly, if they’d wanted to survive.
I grasped the backpack strap and swung it up over my shoulder. The flashlight skittered over my features for a moment, and I blinked trying not to be blinded.
“Wait,” Westin said abruptly. “Kane, did you see that?”
“Yeah, I did see it.”
“Where are you from, woman?” Westin demanded brusquely.
“San Francisco,” I said.
“Not from before,” Westin said impatiently. I swung the flashlight toward him as he stood up. “From now. Where have you been that you’re still pink and pale? How is that even possible?”
“You wouldn’t believe me,” I said. “You can have the food. Hell, you can have the whole site. I just want my backpack and I’ll go.”
“Shine that flashlight on your face,” Westin ordered.
“I’ll stick the flashlight up—” I said and Westin interrupted, “on your arm, then.”
I hesitated and then did it. It wasn’t going to hurt me.
“Jesus,” Kane muttered. “She looks like she just came from Earth. We heard tell about that other woman, remember? The one who came to that little town looked like this one.”
“Shine it on me,” Westin said. I did it and saw what I hadn’t seen before. He was purple, just like the skies and the clouds and even the color of the dirt. The people who had come here had absorbed something making them like that. Who knew if it was bad or good? “Where did you come from?” he asked.
“I came from Earth,” I said. “There was a black door. I went through it and came here.”
Silence answered me. Finally, Kane said, “Bull. She’s pulling our legs.”
Westin rubbed his face. “What happened to Earth?”
“People vanished,” I said. “Then there weren’t many left. There were also new things that appeared.”
“Why did you get to stay there?” Westin asked.
“That would be the big question, slick,” I said. “No one knows.”
“I don’t know how many people just popped up here,” Westin said. “The first days were the worst. Then people started to die of thirst and some kind of bacterial infection from the water here. Later they died of starvation. A lot of people died until we figured things out. I figure there’s only about 10% left at best.” I didn’t like the sound of that. It meant that the odds were high that my parents and my grandfather were dead. Westin leaned forward trying to see my face. “You really don’t know?”
“I woke up here yesterday,” I said. “I was in a grove of trees that drugged me. I figure that’s how it eats. It lures people and animals in, emits some kind of hallucinogenic compound or gas, and then my guess is that it feasts on the remains. There was some kind of black door, and I ran through it. Here I am.”
“If we find this door, then can we go back?” Westin asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There are things going on that no one understands.”
Devin appeared in the ring of light on my right. “Box of MREs just like she said, minus the one she ate. That jacket looks almost new, so do those cammies.”
Westin considered me and my apparel. “I don’t know what to believe.”
“If it’s too good to be true,” Kane started and then trailed off. He scowled and added quickly, “Let’s just trade her for some meat and produce. There isn’t going to be some magic way out of here. We’ve all heard the rumors. There isn’t a way back.”
I could see it in Westin’s eyes. He was the leader, and my story was too fantastical. It was too good to be true, and I wasn’t going to convince him otherwise. I pulled out the Beretta and began to bring it up. A hissing noise whisked past me, and my fingers suddenly dropped the pistol. The reason was apparent. One of the two men in the shadows had just shot me with an arrow. It stuck into my shoulder, and the purple flet
ching was still quivering. The pain rudely flooded through me. I dropped the flashlight and fumbled for the bayonet while I dove for the deeper shadows. My shoulder screamed at me to stop while the old wound in my thigh agreed vehemently.
The flashlight spun about on the ground and illuminated the three men around me. Westin darted at me while I feinted to one side. Kane cocked another arrow and waited while Devin blocked me from the opposite side of Westin.
Fear and terror shot through me. If I couldn’t get back, then I couldn’t help all the ones I loved. I had the code keys. I was so close. I just needed something more. I plunged to one side and hit Westin in the face with my fist. I’m sure his face didn’t feel any better than my fist. I lunged to the other side.
There had been a strange dream where I stared into a large black door that pulsated oddly and wondered if I should go in or not, but it transmogrified into dreams of wedding finery and fripperies that made me giggle.
I kicked Devin in the face as I thrust myself to the other side. My boot connected with the side of his forehead as I heard Kane giggle.
“Well, that and a quarter won’t buy me a cup of coffee,” I snipped. My eyes narrowed at something that was behind Landers. It was a door that was all black on the inside like light was not allowed to go there. It beckoned to me, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I was about to ask Landers about it when someone shook my shoulder, then Landers was gone. So was the black door.
Westin grasped me by my upper arm and snarled something at Devin. It sounded like, “Grab her, dammit,” but I was lost in between terror and memory. He yanked me closer as my brain writhed.
Something very sharp went into my shoulder. I yelled inarticulately, but it was disregarded. My vision blurred but not before the vision of purest evil wandered before me. Behind the vision was that same black door I’d seen before. It wavered, and I perceived that it wasn’t real. However, the other was very real indeed.
Forest of Dreams Page 24
