by Joshua Guess
Jem and I made these drives a couple times a month. Sometimes twice a week. We weren’t numb to the hell around us, but that isn’t the same thing as not being used to it. The horrible events of my youth, which included knifing a pedophile to death, prepared me for it more than any person I know. Yet even the least prepared of the folk living with us in Bastion no longer bat an eye when some new horror pops up.
You do get used to it. That’s probably a bad thing in a lot of ways.
It took us about an hour to get home. You might think it would have wrecked our nerves, but you’d be wrong. Jem had his window down, his hand thumping against the outside of his door to the southern rock CD in the stereo—he won the coin toss—only bringing it inside when we passed a bit too close to the undead shambling in the road.
Not that I didn’t find the tree thing interesting. I really did. I looked forward to talking about it with Ellis, our resident guru for all things undead. I just wasn’t gripped with existential dread over it. If that’s what the universe was going for, the joke was on it. I’ve lived with that since before I got my period.
We crunched down the gravel road leading onto my property, which was really our property now. I’d bought the property, situated on a corner of land backed by an enormous stretch of wood and a little marshy, using a massive savings thanks to the lawsuit I’d filed against the crazy church I was raised in. I had to dump a lot of my own money into it as well as financing a bit, because the shitty ten acres came with its very own underground bunker. Used to be just my trailer and a small shed, both placed over the two entrances to the bunker.
Now there stood a wall. The shipping containers spread out over a huge portion of the field and well back into what had been woods only six months earlier. The forest overall wasn’t in danger of being reduced more than fractionally in size, but we needed both the wood and the space to expand.
A lookout atop the metal wall waved at us with one hand, rifle casually resting in the other with the butt of the gun on his hip. The gate slid open and just like that we went from a lost world to civilization, like going from the sweltering heat into a cool lake.
The inside was so organized it might have been a deliberate effort to contrast the world outside. While many of the containers making up the walls held supplies, there were several of them sitting apart in neat rows which acted as easily accessible storage spaces. Dirt walkways ran in a grid, intersecting the long driveway, and the squares formed by them were filled with crops. People tended them, though this late in the season the work was reaching its end.
I waved at a few people milling about in front of the rows of mobile homes we’d hauled in, every one of them doing a chore of some kind. Housing was an issue we had to deal with continually, but fortunately the shipping containers could be converted pretty easily when needed. It was just work.
Everything was work nowadays.
The truck had barely ground to a stop when Carla appeared. One second we were alone in the cab, stopping in front of what used to be my trailer and preparing to get out. The next, she was standing at my window with a clipboard in hand, peering at us expectantly.
I started a bit, jumping in my seat. “Jesus, woman, did you just teleport there?”
She raised an eyebrow. “My ways are mysterious. How’d it go?”
I sighed theatrically. “Never any foreplay with you, is there?”
Carla smiled at me in a way best described as alluring. “Get me drunk enough, and maybe.”
Jem cleared his throat next to me. “You want the long or the short version?”
“Short, for now,” Carla said. “We’ll save long for inside. Did you find evidence?”
The thing we’d been looking for, the reason Jem and I had been making so many of these trips despite the large number of other Bastion residents already doing the scouting, sat between the three of us invisibly but heavy.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re pretty sure. There are signs of a lot of traffic coming through as close as ten miles away. People are out there moving, and some of it is military.”
Carla simply nodded, as if I’d just declaimed about the color of the sky or the religious orientation of the Pope. “Well, we knew of all people, they were high on the list of those most likely to survive.”
Jem stepped out of the truck and popped his back. “Doesn’t mean we should be happy about it. It’s not like they’re coming around offering to run guard patrols, is it? No, they’re looking for volunteers.”
He nearly spat the word. Jem was every inch a modern guy, just past thirty and without the many preconceived notions and biases deeply seated in earlier generations. Yet what I liked about Jem, what had drawn me to him, was the John Wayne quality of his character. Granted, when the world ended he didn’t take it well, but for the most part the guy was unflappable. He had no flap to give.
But the military, or at least a part of it, looking for so-called volunteers never failed to put fire under the well of deep rage in him.
“Hey,” I said to him, poking a finger into his chest. “They’re not going to come take me in the next half hour. Let’s go inside and have a drink. We’ve planned for this. Hide in plain sight, remember?”
Jem looked down at me and then away a little guiltily. “Yeah, okay.”
Somewhere out there was a research facility desperately working on a cure for the Nero virus. Probably more than one of them, but this one was apparently housed in an unassailable bunker or base, staffed to the gills, and had hundreds or thousands of soldiers on call to search the land for test subjects. We’d seen enough travelers over the previous months to know how far the definition of ‘volunteer’ had been stretched and broken. People like me, who had some weird variation of Nero symptoms, were prime targets.
You can only hear horror stories of people who tried to hide their groups or communities only to be hunted down before you see a common thread. To wit: acting like you have something to hide is proof enough in the minds of predators that you actually do.
So we went the other way.
The three of us walked into the massive building we’d raised around and in front of my trailer, which still existed as a private residence in the rear. Built from salvaged materials, the place looked like something out of a Mad Max movies. It was all metal with rough squares cut out for windows, festooned with strings of lights and filled with tables and chairs slapped together with convenience rather than comfort in mind.
Eighty feet wide and a hundred feet deep, the Ragnarok Pub was also stocked with enough booze to destroy the livers of an entire army. Or at least get them fucked up enough to not ask questions.
3
“Work or trade?” I asked the man who walked up to the bar with tentative steps.
He stopped short, eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “I’m sorry?”
I threw the bar cloth over one shoulder because movies tell me that’s what you’re supposed to do. “Are you paying with trade or work? It’s not like cash does anyone much good these days. Unless it’s to start a fire. I’m assuming you came in the giant-ass tavern for a drink.”
The man slid up to the bar and sat down. “How does that work?”
I leaned on the bar. “Trade is a little complicated. We have a manager who keeps a list of things we need, then want, with luxuries on the bottom. They decide what your trade is worth and give you a receipt. Work is a lot easier. You go to the same manager and they assign you work we need doing. Nothing backbreaking. Every hour of work you put in earns you two drinks. Before you do any of that, how about you give me a name?”
“Taylor,” he said. “An hour of work for two drinks doesn’t seem like much of a deal to me.”
I took him in. He was young, at least a few years my junior, and while the angles of his features spoke of hard work and not quite enough food, he didn’t appear to be starving. His short hair was a ragged and uneven brown. “Taylor, you’re welcome to go out in the world and find your own booze. Most of ours comes from the
surrounding areas, so you’ll have a bit of a job finding a drink. We make our own beer here, and a surprisingly good back yard whiskey. If you want to put in a day of work, you get a night in a cot for just an hour of labor. Space doesn’t cost us anything. Then you have fourteen drinks worth of credit saved up. And our manager isn’t shy about extra rewards for hard workers.”
Taylor frowned. “What about food?”
“Food is free,” I said. “We don’t believe in letting people starve. Someone shows up and wants to camp out on the floor in a sleeping bag, we feed them. There’s always something cooking in the stew pot.”
He seemed to relax at this. “So who do I go talk to for work, then? I don’t have much for trade.”
I directed him to Carla, who kept an office within the bar itself. I watched him walk off and reached down below the bar and ruffled the giant head I found there.
Nikola, my enormous Rottweiler, leaned into me as I found the spot behind his ears. “Good boy, Nik,” I cooed. “He didn’t even know you were there.”
Taylor was far from the first to show up at Bastion. There were a few mathematical realities to the end of the world. The one that really matters is that even with all but five percent of the population wiped out—an educated guess at best—that left fifteen or twenty million human beings living in just the US. That translated to a lot of travelers looking for something better. Logic would seem to dictate we’d see very few people, but the opposite is true. Since most survivors start out alone or in small groups, the human instinct to band together in tribes forces many of them to risk the dangers of the larger world.
In the bar at that moment were three other recent arrivals, all still looking nervous and cradling their drinks like prisoners in a cafeteria. Another half dozen were older hands, full citizens of Bastion who had hoofed it to us using the obvious signs of habitation as their guide.
It was all Carla’s doing. She took command of the daily operations at the outset, designed the work schedule, coordinated nearly everything. Ellis, our expert on everything Nero, spent about half his time working as her assistant. I didn’t envy Taylor; Carla’s office was a nightmare of paperwork and records, and she suffered pointless interruption badly. Hopefully the guy would be polite and quick.
As if summoned by thinking about him, Ellis walked in through the front door in a spill of early-morning sunlight. He ambled over to me at top speed, which for him was a fast walk. His cerebral palsy was mild. When I’d found him months earlier, his family had tied him up and hoisted him into a tree to save him from a swarm of zombies. The stress left him unable to focus enough to walk well, but the intervening time wrought a profound change in the young man. His dark skin fairly rippled with lean muscle from months of strenuous effort. He didn’t want to feel like a burden, an attitude he steadfastly refused to work past no matter how often the rest of us explained how useful he was.
“You need to get out of sight,” Ellis breathed as he filled the space left by Taylor a minute earlier. “We’ve got military incoming.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. It took concentrated effort not to let the volcano of anxiety rampaging through my body to express itself in projectile vomiting. We planned for this. We weren’t being caught unprepared.
Leaning over the bar, I kept my voice low. “How many? And how long ’til they get here?”
Ellis didn’t pull out any of the small notebooks he kept on his person at all times. He tracked massive volumes of information with them, but he was smart enough not to write anything down our incoming guests might find suspicious. “They’re in town and coming this way. The scout took off on his bike as soon as he saw them. Maybe ten minutes, and it looks like a few dozen soldiers.”
I blew out my cheeks. “Okay. Alright, we can deal with this. They’re not driving tanks or anything, I assume?”
Ellis shook his head. “Sounds like the same thing we’ve been hearing. Those weird custom trucks.”
The frequent travelers were useful in several ways. We fed them not solely out of the goodness of our hearts, but also because it made them more inclined to relax and share gossip. When they left, word invariably spread about the trading post with a tavern of all things where anyone could get a hot meal or do some trading.
Among the many facts shared by those people were the tactics the roving bands of soldiers used to entice so-called volunteers to go with them as well as what kind of gear they used. Their vehicles were unusual, from all reports. Long and low, they were said to look like a flatbed train car with modular boxes attached to the bed. More than one person told me they ran on treads rather than tires.
I tossed the bar towel on the gleaming wood and stood back. “I’m going to the Lair. I’ll head out the bolt hole. Send me a flare when everything is safe.”
Ellis nodded and I turned to leave. He reached out and put a hand on my elbow, stopping me. Nikola observed this with great attention from his spot sitting at my feet, but if Ellis was put off by the dog’s concern, he didn’t show it.
“Please be careful, okay?” Ellis said, nearly pleading. “I can’t lose you too.”
Though he was never anything but friendly, even brotherly, with Jem, I knew the two of us getting together hurt the kid. He’d raised me up on a pedestal after I helped him out of that tree. The crush was obvious. He was respectful of my choices, though, and a good friend.
I put my hand on his and gave it a squeeze, then leaned over and gave him a peck on the cheek. “I will. I promise. Nikola, guard.”
The dog lurched to his feet and kept to my side as I moved deeper into the building and, with any luck, to safety.
With all the expansions, my old trailer was invisible from the outside. It was still there, hiding away in a shell of plywood and cinder blocks, but the only entrance was the front door. I had to walk down a hallway to get to it.
The advantage of so many people working all the time was that we had long left behind the need for anyone to share my house with me. The entrance to the bunker was in what used to be my bedroom, though I’d moved into one of the guest rooms a while back. It was just easier that way. Much as I loved the little space, I didn’t like people traipsing through my bedroom all day and night.
Nikola by my side, I dashed through the house and down the stairs leading to the bunker. At this time of day it was empty of people, though it was far from desolate. Along the wall running to the left of the entrance were the many work benches I had installed years before, now beefed up and added to by dozens of other hands. The space was a hundred feet on a side, twenty-odd feet high, and absolutely packed with all manner of things. One corner was stuffed with bunk beds. Another housed a small, two-room medical center nestled among the boxes of supplies. The very back held the batteries, both of which we’d bulked up to handle the loads our salvaged solar panels and wind turbines brought in. The water system got an upgrade, too, which took a lot of work.
I pushed away all thought of the bunker and ran for the lift. Nik and I had practiced this run three times a week for months and I had no fear my dog wouldn’t stick with me.
The lift was a hydraulic elevator powered by the battery system. Back in the day when the place had been a functional site, it was used to bring in replacement parts and cable for the telephone lines protected within. I put a shed over the exit point when I bought the land, but here too we had made improvements.
Nik and I rode the lift up. I silently begged the universe to make the rough hum of its motor inaudible to any soldiers who might be listening above.
With a final, soft clunk of metal on metal, the lift stopped. The doors covering it had opened as we ascended, only a black void beyond. My practiced hand reached out and found the lantern easily. I switched it on and saw the familiar metal around me.
Nik and I stood inside a shipping container, but this one was reinforced and buried under a huge mound of dirt. We’d excavated a long tunnel underground leading away from it and put every grain of that soil over the metal box to
hide it. The hill stood out, but was long and wide enough to look like a weird land feature instead of an obvious hiding spot.
Nik and I shuffled to the end of the box and sat on a pile of throw pillows there. The floor was cut away in a neat square, the edges filed. A small LED light box was glued crookedly to the wall, its wire snaking down and through a hole drilled through the metal.
When no more soldiers were outside Bastion, someone would flip a switch inside to give me the signal. I sat and waited, Nik’s head on my knee, and it was the longest wait of my life.
I’m not fond of small spaces. While a psychologist wouldn’t categorize it as full-blown claustrophobia—or at least mine hadn’t—years of being thrown in the cells gave me a powerful distaste for dark, closed spaces. The twenty minutes that followed felt like a thousand years. The only thing keeping me sane was the soft fur beneath my fingers.
When the green light finally blazed to life, it nearly blinded me. My hand tightened on Nik’s fur, and though he stiffened he offered no complaint.
I stood and pointed silently at the narrow steps leading down from the hole. Nik trotted down them, far more agile than a dog his size had any right to be, and I followed.
The tunnel was about two feet wide and six feet tall. By hand, it would have taken us weeks to dig. Tony’s obsessive collecting of heavy machinery allowed us to get it finished over a long weekend.
The dirt walls were marked by heavy uprights every ten feet, the supports not unlike those found in mines. The roof was a series of plywood sheets overlapping each other like scales, giving the entire thing immense strength. Which was good, because all the dirt on top of it was heavy.
