Tunnel Rats_Episode One_The Diggers Page 4

  ... she remembered those burnt frames and the ash and the ominous woods of Pennsylvania beyond. Those days alone were the most beautiful and the most frightening she’d ever known.

  Hauntingly empty to be blind and alone in them at the world’s end.

  Like Prokofiev.

  Thinking of that one day when she’d been able to see what the world really looked like.

  “What was the last thing you ever saw?” she asked herself over the burble of river stones where she did the wash, tracing all their tiny notes in her mind without trying.

  People killing themselves and one another, eyes blank and staring. Horror etched on their features. That was the last thing I ever saw, she thought.

  But she’d learned to see with her other senses. So there were other sights after that. After the blindness came back to her.

  The tumbling mad dash through the woods. Alone. In a forest. Running from a bear, no doubt. Or at least, it had most definitely seemed to be a bear.

  And then there was warm blood running down her face and darkness again. Not seeing with her senses.

  And pain.

  She remembered it all, though. That last snap of a dead branch, so clear and sharp above the distant ones she’d fled, sure they were being broken by an oncoming bear in the night.

  In the silence after, she remembered, and now at the river washing sheets, in the silence of that forest at midnight, with the bear that never was, silent, in that forest she’d whispered though it felt like a scream inside her head, she’d whispered to herself, “I’m blind again. Forever.”

  She finished the wash toward noon only thinking to herself then that the river birds had been silent that morning. The little birds who chirped and called by the water’s edge had said nothing to each other in all that time and only now she was noticing. She could tell by the sun on her face that it was noon and that she needed to head back into Summner. She gathered up her laundry, searching for the basket, and headed back toward the gate into Summner.

  As she walked she thought about her dream of a better tomorrow. The dream Ford had made a promise to keep. The dream of a found violin.

  It had been five years since she’d touched one, but she was sure if they found one someday, she could play it. It didn’t matter if it was a good one, like the one her parents had paid for. A Strad. That’s what her dad had called it, shortening its proper name. That’s what people in the know called it. A Strad. The Strad. Nice Strad.

  Stradivarius.

  The violin Ford or one of the others might find in the wastes beyond the gate didn’t need to be a Strad. A Stradivarius. It could be any kind of violin. Even the one the poor kids had brought to band class back in high school. Any would do. She knew she could make it play. And if she could make it play...

  ... then that would be something completely different than the five hard years since she’d touched one. Since Juilliard.

  “Kate,” said the voice of Briggs the Gate Watch.

  Waiting to count the steps from the gate to home, Kate felt for the shadow of the tower to cool her forehead as she shuffled forward. When it did, she started counting. Two hundred and seven steps would take her back, then a right turn and ten steps and a step up and five steps and then the front door to the bar.

  But she had trouble counting today because there was so much activity. She could hear people arguing. She could hear the sound of guns being cleaned along the street. Of hammers aimed at nails and curses aimed at nothing. She smelled the sharpish gun oil that always stung her nose. The smell of troubles.

  Ford met her at the door, his presence hot and gusty.

  “Kate!” he exclaimed with a blast. “I...” and then he didn’t say anything.

  She waited.

  “Never mind,” continued Ford. “Just get inside and start boiling water. There’s a horde headed this way.”

  Kate’s blood went cold. Even though she was hot from carrying the load of laundry through the heat of the day, the sweat beneath her patchwork dress began to freeze making her feel clammy and sick all at once.

  “Will we be okay?” she could hear the fear. The fear in her own voice.

  “Never mind, woman!” shouted Ford. “Boil water and cut the sheets to strips and use the worst ones and not any o’ mine personal. Got me?” She felt his thick finger in her chest.

  She heard him stomp off.

  She went to the kitchen.

  She was shaking.

  She did as she was told and started the big kettle to boiling, stacking the cut hardwood, striking a precious match, failing. Hoping it would strike again because Ford would...

  He loved her. He said he did. Often when he’d finished with her, she was allowed to stay in his room unlike the other girls. His whores. They were just business.

  He loved her.

  That’s why he’d promised her the violin.

  If they ever found one.

  The match struck and she smelled the kindling, waiting for the thick, sweet smoke it made. She leaned close and blew.

  Not too much or she’d kill the flame.

  Pianissimo was what she always thought when she blew on kindling.

  She’d learned something from music. Something she’d never known would be so practical in building fires on the other side of the end of civilization. Softly. Quietly. That’s how one made kindling do its work and make fire.

  Pianissimo.

  Silently. Waiting. Waiting for the soft crackle. The first pop that would mean the wood had caught. Waiting.

  Then she felt the vibration.

  It was like...

  ...someone brushing up against the beautiful copper kettle drums in the orchestras she’d played in and remembered hearing. Even in that moment, that brief accidental moment of contact with that singular musical instrument, you got a hint of what they could do once someone got rolling on those immense drums. Then, it was like a storm coming.

  And this vibration was that.

  Except it wasn’t a result of accidental contact. It didn’t just happen and then it was gone and only the memory of tympani remained. This stayed and seemed to be something more.

  And... it was growing.

  A horde was coming out of the desert.

  In the five years since the collapse, she’d been sold three times. She’d been...

  ...she didn’t want to think about that. Those times. She imagined instead the violin. The violin Ford would give her. Because he loved her. Her violin.

  She touched her hand lightly to the big kettle. Warm.

  Being sold and all the things that had come with it...

  The long walk down to Texas.

  The hard work.

  Other things.

  The horde was still worse. The worst of all bad things.

  She remembered the grizzled loner with the big rifle who’d paid Old Tom, the first man to own her, for a night with her. Before he’d lain with her, as they’d all sat around the campfire inside the old mall, the grizzled loner had talked of seeing a horde wipe out Atlanta. His voice had sounded rough and scratchy, like the beard she’d felt on her skin later. He talked like she and Old Tom hadn’t even been there listening to him and his stories. Like he just needed to get the poison of what he’d seen on the road out of him.

  He hadn’t had her. He’d just lain next to her. He’d held her all through the night. In the morning he’d left without saying a word.

  But before, he’d told them of many things. Rumors of here and there.

  The cannibals out in Connect-i-cut as he called it. Come in from the sea on raids to carry people back to the coast, out onto ships and boats and off to islands everyone assumed.

  Zombies out in Californy, different from the hordes. Actual undead walkers. Where the army had lost and pulled out completely.

  The mutated freaks,
cancers erupting on their skin, along with all kinds of other stuff and noses falling off. They lived in Dee Cee, as he’d called it. Some super antibiotic refusing to let them die.

  And the horde.

  A mindless mass of people. Not human anymore. They just moved in waves, following each other one moment, ripping each other to shreds for protein in the next, all of it to just keep moving. Then they’d find some place. Some place that the last of Government had managed to defend for a little while. Or that humanity had put up as a start to try again at the game of civilization.

  Rumors.

  “Cee Dee Cee ‘round ‘Lanta kept that city runnin’. That and my old buddies in the 82nd,” he’d said. “That horde come up outta North Carolina or something. Crazy. Plain and simple crazy. Like Sherman they said, but worse. A thousand times worse. Musta been... a hundred thousand, easy. No way I can say now, really. I was s’posed to shoot down on ‘em from a water tower. We could hear ‘em twenty miles outside the city. I seen how many of them there were and just let ‘em go on by. Didn’t have enough bullets on me to stop ‘em. Weren’t enough in all of At-lanta. Three days later, I went in and seen what was left.”

  Silence around that long ago campfire back when Old Tom had been the one to own her.

  “And whatcha’ find, stranger?” asked toothless and smelly Old Tom.

  Silence in the dark mall. Kate could hear their voices echoing off the abandoned stores and long halls of the silent place. Long since looted to emptiness. Long since.

  “Nothin’,” whispered the loner.

  And then he told how the horde had ruined everything beyond the meaning of the word ”ruin’t” as he’d pronounced it. How they’d eaten everything and everyone. “And then they just left and you could see where they waz a’going by the destruction and the wreckage they left behind ‘em.”

  After a time Old Tom, who’d loved tales of bad so much they were the death of him when they shared supper one night with the gang that owned her next. After a time, Old Tom said to the grizzled loner, “It was a medical miracle that makes ‘em do what they done.” He chuckled to himself. He loved knowing things others didn’t. “Medicine caused it before the collapse. It was a supplement they was all takin’ to lose weight and get buff like porn stars and movie folk. Made ‘em crazy for proteins. The television told ‘em they could eat whatever they wanted and still lose weight. That’s why they do what they do. They have to eat or they’ll die. Need it so bad they do, ‘cuz o’ their vanity!” He finished as though delivering an indictment to a grand jury, which was Old Tom’s way of putting paid to civilization in the silence of the abandoned mall.

  That too had also happened to her.

  She had been there on that night, listening to tales of the end of everything she once knew and had taken for granted.

  A horde, thought Kate now as she chanced a quick touch of the kettle which had become merely hot.

  She could hear the chipped and cracked plates they used to serve customers and salvagers come in from the wastes, beginning to rattle and clink against one another.

  An hour later, the big pot was in boil and she could feel the floor trembling beneath her bare feet. Ford had not returned. She felt her way to the front bar, the glassware rattling. Some of it had fallen, she’d heard the crashes and shattering. She inched cautiously forward, dragging her feet, her tiny toes feeling for broken shards of glass.

  She thought about getting down on her hands and knees but she couldn’t chance her hands. Hands that had played the violin, and would again one day.

  Because Ford had promised.

  She made the front door. She could hear the shooting beginning. The shooting along the walls of Summner. She opened the door and heard the distant scream of white noise she’d been hearing for some time jump from muffled to clear, echoing all around the walls of Summner.

  Like voices trying to become the ocean.

  How many?

  A hundred thousand, the loner had said. Maybe more.

  Someone ran past her and knocked her down to the street. The smell of gun smoke hung heavy in the air. The shooting was cacophonic and suddenly the wave of white noise which had seemed distant before was now startlingly present, and she knew it was coming from the top of the walls as a hundred thousand of them climbed like a massive wave in the ocean and crested the walls of tiny Summner.

  Ford did not come and get her and take her away.

  The sounds of the raving horde overwhelmed her and she seemed to disappear into it, forgetting herself as she had learned to and thinking only of a found violin and the beauty of music one might make. And the strings she’d seen in the sky of heaven that one day when her eyes had seen.

  This too, happened to her.

  ***

  A day later, the horde had finished devouring Summner. Every wall had been knocked down. Not to destroy the defenders, but to beat the others of the horde who’d searched for the place. To beat them to what lay beyond and within those walls. Buildings were gutted like killed animals, their entrails exploding from doors and windows. Hasty meals were made of those who remained and anything useful that might keep the horde warm and help them in finding more protein. Everything of value was carried off as the horde chased itself to its next meal.

  A man, who had first taken the miracle supplement Slenderex five years ago, labored up from what was left of Kate. Who knew why he began to lurch off toward the west. Eyes dead, but searching. He didn’t even know anymore. He’d lost his mind long ago. He’d lost his mind to an endless craving that promised everything in a tiny bottle. He was heading toward the Basin. Toward who knows what. But in doing so, everyone in the horde who’d watched him go followed him, convinced he knew something they didn’t. Convinced that he would get wherever first. Convinced he had what they wanted and that he would not share it with them.

  Coveting the covetous.

  And so they followed, leaving the remains of Summner.

  And that, happened too.

  Chapter 6

  Ellis walked up just as the boys were hoisting their yokes to carry two five gallon buckets of water apiece down to the farm.

  Ellis laughed as he approached. “I’d give you a hand if you had two more buckets ready to go.”

  Shooter flashed a conspiratorial grin and pushed aside an old piece of carpet to expose two more full buckets of precious water ready to be hauled. “We’re glad you offered, Ellis! We don’t have another yoke, but we’ll take a few breaks along the way so you don’t get too worn out.”

  Ellis shook his head. “You guys set me up.”

  It was Chuck’s turn to laugh now. “It’s not like you’re predictable with your walks, Ellis. We use you as a timepiece. Shooter even calls you “Timex” when your back is turned.”

  Ellis grabbed the two buckets and raised up to stretch out his back and prepare for the long walk. “I’ll have to remember to vary my schedule a little, so I don’t get roped into water duty.”

  “Water duty,” Chuck said, “that thankless and endless task that will only ever be overcome by a working, intelligently designed water delivery system.”

  Ellis blinked and then cocked his head. “I’m workin’ on it.”

  “May not rain for a month, you know,” Shooter said.

  “What would you have me do about it?”

  Shooter shrugged under the weight of the yoke. “I’m just making conversation… but… since we’re on the topic. The Pumping Station is only a mile up the river. It’ll have pipe, pistons, leathers or rubber for making gaskets. Everything we need to make a hand pump. It’s probably a gold mine.

  “You know what else is out there if you aren’t careful and if we don’t make our decisions based on what is doable and not on what’ll limit the amount of work we have to do?”

  Neither Chuck nor Shooter ventured an answer. They already knew what Ellis was going to
say.

  “That’s right, boys. Death. That’s what’s out there for us if we aren’t smart.”

  “Wise as serpents, harmless as doves,” Chuck said. He knew the speech.

  The three men walked in silence for another five minutes, and then Chuck led the way to a fallen tree on the edge of the forest. They let down their burdens and stretched their backs before sitting down for a rest.

  Chuck pointed at the water they had in the buckets. “These six buckets will be dumped on the gardens and it’ll be gone before we can catch our breath, Ellis. We’re wrecking ourselves and we can’t ever make any headway.”

  Ellis leaned back and felt the sinews and muscles of his back scream in protest. “What’s your solution?”

  Chuck bit his lip and stared at Ellis for a minute before he talked again. “I’m saying that the risk is worth it. We need to get to the Pumping Station no matter what it takes.”

  Ellis stood up and looked Chuck in the eye. “When you say, ‘whatever it takes’, make sure you know what that means.”

  “I know what it means.”

  “Do you?”

  “I think so.”

  Ellis pointed back at the farm. “Are you ready to bury any of your family back there, Chuck? Because if we just run off every time we have an idea, we’ll be burying those people before long.”

  Ellis knew his words had found their mark. Found it too well. He remembered Chuck as a young boy when he’d first come to them. Dirty. Covered in crusty, dried earth. He’d already buried a family once in his life.

  Ellis started to apologize. But that little frightened and brave all at once boy that Chuck once was continued on.

  “I’m not saying we don’t do it smart, Ellis. I’m saying we think it through and make a good plan. And then we do it. I’m sure it can be done.” Chuck picked up a stone near the tip of his old boot and threw it at a stump leftover from cutting last year’s firewood. “But I’ll tell you this. If we don’t do it, and the dry time goes on for much longer, we’ll be burying someone.”