Zero City

by James Axler

  "Mebbe we should find you another one," the boy suggested.

  "I'll stick with what I have."

  "Nothing," Mildred reported from the doorway, her expression a mixture of disappointment and anger. "We have enough weapons to stage a war, but there's not a single scrap of food here."

  Ryan looked over the assemblage of his friends, noticing how thin they were becoming, faces haggard and belts tightened. Short rations for a month had turned them into skeletons.

  "Okay, everybody load up on ammo," Ryan ordered brusquely. "First, we'll do a recce of the base to make sure we're alone, then we go shopping. There has to be some supplies here."

  In perfect synchronicity, his stomach loudly rumbled.

  "Let's go find them," the one-eyed man stated, starting for the exit.

  Fully armed, the companions started at the bottom level and worked their way upward. Reactor room, maintenance, offices, barracks, were deserted. Not a sign of life, not even a mouse seemed to have breached the integrity of the underground bunker.

  On the level above the bio labs, they found a communications room with a CD player still struggling to play ghostly music over the intercom system. There was no jewel case for the worn disk, and so whatever the distorted tune actually was would remain a mystery. But at least they made the eerie noise stop. Oddly, the music had added a touch of life to the redoubt, and now it seemed even more deserted than before.

  Unfortunately, the kitchen was devoid of anything edible, the big freezers deactivated and empty as the pantry. Resting a boot on the seat of a molded plastic chair, Ryan glanced over the rows of long tables lining the cafeteria. The one positive aspect was that life support was starting to react to their presence and the water pumps were coming online. The kitchen taps spewed forth trapped air at first, then brownish gunk unfit to wash a corpse in and finally cool clear water. It wasn't much, but they took it as a positive omen.

  Moving to the top floor, the companions found the garage equally devoid of useful items. Bits and pieces of vehicles lay scattered about, but none in working condition. Heaps of trash were everywhere, string and paper and excelsior packing material, along with numerous crumpled cardboard boxes. The others moved about the huge room, giving it a quick once-over.

  J.B. headed directly for a battered Hummer near a workbench. The tires were flat, its headlights busted and the hood was up, exposing the partially disassembled engine. Tools lay on the block, and tiny boxes holding new spark plugs were stacked on the bumper.

  "Old plugs have never been removed," J.B. said thoughtfully. He wiggled a hose and tried yanking an insulated cable free without success. "Engine is still sealed."

  "Think we could get it working again?" Dean asked eagerly. Machines were his passion, and he could never ride long enough in any vehicle. The boy was still irked that he had never gotten a chance to drive the Leviathan before they were forced to abandon the giant war wag.

  "No prob fixing," Jak said, surveying the other wrecks. "Tires from that, headlights there."

  "What about the battery?"

  "That's a nuke battery," J.B. stated, pointing out the shielded box under the hood. "Those babies last forever and have enough juice to fry a griz bear, so be careful."

  The boy swallowed hard. "Yes, sir."

  J.B. bent over the radiator and started to fiddle with the distributor. "Find me a three-quarter-inch combination wrench, will you?"

  "Sure!"

  "Hold on there," Ryan ordered, joining them. "It would take hours, if not days, to get that junk pile into shape. Let's recce outside first. Might not be needed. A ville may be only walking distance away."

  "Or mebbe on top of mountain," Jak added in wry humor, raking back his snowy white hair with stiff fingers.

  Extracting himself from under the hood, J.B. laid aside the distributor cap. "Fair enough. No sense doing work if it isn't necessary."

  Leading the way toward the exit tunnel, Ryan passed one of the many busted boxes scattered about and nudged it with his boot to shove it aside. The sagging sides split asunder, and a wealth of tiny cylinders came tumbling out.

  "I'll be damned," he said aloud, bending to see what they were. The labels on the cans were badly faded but still readable. "Hash! This is corned-beef hash. Dozens of cans! Enough for months!"

  Across the room, Mildred spun about. "Excellent!"

  Dropping the power drill he had been inspecting, J.B. hurried over at a lope with Dean and Jak at his heels. Doc and Krysty walked over at a more leisurely pace.

  Grabbing a can from the pile to show them, Ryan's own elation faded when he saw the side and tops of the container bulging from massive internal pressure.

  "Dammit, they're spoiled," he announced, dropping the container as if it were unclean on the outside. "Probably why they weren't taken along by whoever cleaned this base out so efficiently. God alone knows how long they've been lying there."

  The rush slowed to a walk and the companions gathered around the deadly food, the happy smiles gone as quickly as they came.

  "There's so much," Krysty said woodenly. The memory of what pan-fried hash tasted like surfaced in her memory, and she savagely killed the recollection. It was bad enough looking at the stuff without remembering how good corned beef was.

  Swallowing twice to clear his mouth, Jak felt his stomach churn at the mere sight of the cans. "All bad?" he asked.

  Ryan nudged another box with his boot, and more rounded cans spilled across the floor. "Seems to be," he stated coldly. "One mouthful of this could chill an army."

  Kicking apart another box, J.B. sent cans rolling across the cold floor of the garage in every direction. "Shit!" he yelled, then stomped one flat. The thick contents gushed out like speckled mud, the salty meat streaked with vile greens and blues. That killed his anger and his appetite at the same time.

  "Mebbe we could boil the cans without opening them first," Dean suggested hopefully. "You know, to kill the germs and stuff inside."

  "Still be deadly," Mildred explained sadly. "Toxicity is also a chemical composition, not just a bacteriological infection."

  "Oh. Nothing we can do to fix them?"

  "No," Ryan and Mildred said together.

  His arms full of cloth, J.B. returned and threw an old tarp over the boxes and cans. "Out of sight, out of mind," he stated.

  "Mildred, how much do we have?" Krysty asked, putting some distance between herself and the rotting meat. The stench was ghastly, worse than the breath of a Louisiana vampire.

  "Six cans of beans and a pound of rice. Enough food for two, maybe three days," Mildred reported stolidly, the meager weight of her backpack not very reassuring. "After which we start boiling our belts."

  "Huh?" Dean said.

  His father answered. "Remember that leather is edible, if cleaned sufficiently." He surveyed the redhead in her bearskin coat. "We could stay alive off the soup that fur would make for at least a week."

  Registering disdain, Krysty glanced at her coat.

  "Not hungry enough to eat boots," Jak remarked.

  "Not yet," J.B. said. "Come on, let's check outside. Been a while since I've been hunting."

  An entire stanza of a Walt Whitman poem came unbidden to mind, but Doc refrained the impulse. Literary allusions seemed pointless before the specter of starvation, the only enemy ever faced they couldn't stop by force of arms.

  Moments later, the companions reached the door to the redoubt. Twice the height of man and wide enough to allow a tank passage, the titanium steel was as perfect as the day it rolled out of the foundry. Nothing encountered could even scratch the resilient material.

  Ryan tapped in the access code on the armored keypad. Nothing happened. Ryan tapped in the code more carefully. There was no lever, and, obediently, the portal rumbled aside, exposing a dark tunnel.

  "Now that's odd," Ryan murmured. "Don't recall ever finding a redoubt with an exterior tunnel."

  "Looks handmade," Krysty said, squinting.

  "Let me check this,"
J.B. suggested, removing the rad counter from his shirt collar and pointing it toward the opening. Everybody remembered when they had nearly gotten fried alive trying to exit a redoubt that was at the bottom of radioactive blast crater.

  "Got no readings," J.B. said, lowering the silent device.

  "Check them," Mildred told him, digging a tiny wristwatch from her backpack. The mechanism was long broken, but that wasn't why she still kept the time piece. The physician held it out, and both J.B. and Ryan waved their rad counters over the timepiece. Each counter gave off a click when over the tiny radium-lined hands of the watch.

  "Okay, let's go," Ryan said, attaching his rad counter to the collar again. "Standard positions, single-yard spread."

  As they walked into the tunnel, the huge door rumbled shut behind them, loudly bolting closed with a series of dull mechanical thuds. Lighting a few candles, the companions proceeded along the rocky tunnel. The passageway was clearly artificial, the rough walls supported by concrete columns set at regular intervals. The tunnel curved gently to the left, and suddenly their way was blocked by something huge and leathery, the object barely visible in the flickering candlelight.

  "What is that?" Dean asked curiously. "A pile of luggage?"

  Instantly, the obstruction turned and snarled loudly, inhuman eyes dominating a misshapen face.

  "Mutie!" Ryan yelled, drawing his blaster and firing.

  J.B. brought up the Uzi, the muzzle-blasts strobing the passageway in flashes and giving them a brief glimpse of wings and a fang-filled mouth on the end of a serpentine neck.

  Screaming and spitting in rage, the beast jerked at the impact of the 9 mm rounds, then advanced toward the humans, seemingly unaffected from the lead and steel coming its way.

  Now they all discharged their blasters, the noise almost deafening in the tight confines of the shaft. Then a thunderous boom overwhelmed the irregular barrage as Doc unleashed the LeMat, a foot-long lance of flame extending from the muzzle.

  Oddly, the beast wailed in pain, covering its gnarled features with both wings. Then turning tail, it rushed away from the companions and disappeared.

  Staying in combat formation, Ryan and the others moved forward slowly until reaching the end of the tunnel. A soft breeze threatened their candles, and the companions cupped hands around the tiny flames. The underground passage fronted at the crest of a low hillock, the ground gently sloping away into the night. Overhead, a full moon was struggling to send grayish light through a heavily clouded sky. Not a star was visible, but they did spot a tinged figure flapping for the horizon as if running for its life.

  As they walked farther out, the friends watched where they stepped. In the cracks of the stone flooring, a single small flower was growing, the delicate white petals spread wide to challenge the world.

  "Some sort of bat, I think," J.B. commented, tracking the passage of the beast with his Uzi just in case it returned. "Ugly bastard."

  Ryan scanned the ground. "Don't see any blood. Our blasters did as much damage as pissing would."

  "Did you see those eyes?" Mildred asked, her ZKR pistol still in her hand. "Solid black with no pupils. Definitely nocturnal."

  "Night feeder," Jak said, then he sniffed loudly. "Not smell spoor. Not home."

  "Just waiting for prey, like a vulture sitting in a tree," Ryan said, resting the stock of the Steyr on his hip. "This is a good vantage spot. Probably can see for miles in the daylight." He paused. "Look over there."

  The windswept dunes of the desert below formed gentle ripples in a flat sandy sea that reached out to the horizon. There stood the ruins of a predark city, a ragged array of skyscrapers reaching into the clouds proud and majestic. Very few predark cities had escaped the bombs, or the firestorms that followed.

  "Where are we?" Doc asked, staring. The ruins didn't resemble any metropolis he knew from the past.

  J.B. shrugged. "Sky is too cloudy to get a reading with the minisextant. Could be anywhere."

  Unexpectedly, twin rods of light erupted from the ruins, the beams steadily sweeping across the sky, casting lucent circles on the bottoms of the cloud banks overhead.

  "Searchlights," Mildred breathed, amazed. "I'll be damned."

  "Mebbe just machines," Ryan said thoughtfully. "Comps still trying to fight a war over for centuries."

  J.B. checked his chron. "Too irregular," he said, winding the timepiece and returning it to his pocket. "Those are hand operated."

  "People," Jak stated with a smile. "Folks gotta eat."

  "And we have goods to trade," Krysty said confidently. "I would guess it's about a three-, four-day walk from here."

  "Only be a few hours in the Hummer," Dean offered hopefully.

  J.B. rubbed the back of his neck. "It is fixable."

  "Sounds good," Ryan said, hitching up his belt, a finger feeling the new hole in the strap to make it smaller. "We'll rest up tonight and leave at first light."

  "It is odd, though," Krysty remarked thoughtfully. "Why would anybody advertise their presence these days? Likely to get you attacked."

  "Could be throwbacks," Mildred suggested. "Savages still doing a job their great-great-great-grandfathers were supposed to. And now it's a religion to them."

  "Or slaver trying to lure in fresh merchandise." Doc scowled. "Great Scott, what a disagreeable notion."

  "Cannibals," Jak added, a knife appearing in his hands as if from nowhere. The teenager flipped the blade and tucked it away again.

  So many questions, with only one way to get any answers. Ryan turned away from the city. "We'll find out in the morning. Come on, we have work to do."

  Chapter Three

  On the far side of the dead river, the darkness descended upon the large ville, sealing them in for the night like the lid on an iron pot. Bobbing points of light came from the dozens of bright lanterns held by the sec men patrolling the outer wall, the lamps giving off an odd bluish light from the burning alcohol-soaked wicks. A stationary series of crackling pitch torches dotted the repaired main streets and the baron's huge mansion.

  Closing the wooden shutters on the glassless windows, the blacksmith shut down her forges, letting them cool for the night. The glassmakers did the same, but banked their kiln to keep it warm until the following day. The prisoners assigned to sewer digging were unwrapping the rags from their hands used in lieu of gloves and washing the stinking grime of their toils off tired bodies.

  Behind a barricade of pungi sticks and barbed wire, the shine gang ate its dinner and tossed lumps of black coal into the dull reddish fire underneath the huge distillation vat of the still. From the top, the coils of copper angled downward, leading to rows of painfully clean metal barrels waiting to be filled with alcohol for the next day—juice for the vehicles and fuel for the lanterns. And the dreaded Machine.

  Murmuring voices came from the patched houses of the full citizens, joining soft conversation from the patched tents of the immigrants yet to be rewarded by full status. The crack of a whip sounded from a three-story building secreted among the ruins yet to be reclaimed by the workers. Downtown, happy laughter sallied as a family celebrated the birth of a child. A singing drunk fell to the ground in front of some sec men, who stepped over the man and kept walking. A husband and wife were screaming at each other, with the neighbors listening for any good details. And faint tinkling music drifted out from the well-illuminated gaudy house set prestigiously between the market square and the barracks of the sec men.

  But from one tiny oasis came an endless barrage of cursing and grunting. A partially built greenhouse towered above the streets, the framework roof draped in folds of protective canvas.

  Straining from the load in their grips, the two men shuffled away from a huge rock pile, their bare hands desperately clutching a tremendous granite slab.

  "Easy, dammit, Felix," the tall man cursed. "Not so fast. Nearly tripped me!"

  "Blow it out your ass, Ben," the other retorted. "This thing weighs a ton!"

  "Do we have to finish
this now?"

  "The sec men says we don't get fed till this wall is up," Felix grunted, the smell of dinner a tantalizing torment in the air. He tried not to think about baked potatoes smothered in fried onions with all the mushroom soup he could eat, and failed miserably. The baron may beat a person at a whim here, but a person was fed! "First thing they taught me when I arrived here, no work means no food."

  Rivulets of sweat running down his hairy forearms, Ben struggled with his grip, the slab of stone shifting dangerously in his slick hands. "Watch it!" he cried out.

  Releasing his end, Felix jumped backward as the stone hit the ground like an earthquake.

  "Is it broke?" Ben asked fearfully, dropping to the ground and running his hands over the granite. "Please, no. I can't take another whipping."

  Scampering nimbly through the stacks of wood beams and salvaged nails, Felix returned with the old battered lantern. Standing over the granite, he recklessly turned up the wick, bluish light washing over the deserted construction site.

  "It's okay." He sighed, lowering the light to the bare minimum again. This was all the alcohol they would get for today. When it was exhausted, they'd have to work in the dark if that stone wasn't in place. And that was a sure way to lose fingers. Wasn't a man or woman among the crew whose hands weren't covered with scars from the rigors of masonry.

  "We'll never get this freaking thing in place," Ben grumbled, flexing his aching shoulder muscles. "Why can't we bust it into pieces?"

  "Baron Strichland wants this greenhouse twice the size of his private one," Felix stated, "which means bigger end walls, which means stronger foundations." He glared hostilely. "Unless you want to tell the foreman to go jump a mutie."

  "And get fed to the Machine? Fuck that."

  In the distance behind them, the great beams of the Alphaville searchlights swept the sky in their endless motions, back and forth, a slight wobble every now and then as a prisoner slowed at his task and a sec man encouraged him to do better with a lash from a knotted bullwhip.

  "So what do we do?" Ben asked, eying the slab hopelessly.