Wretched Earth

“Shouldn’t there be some kind of padding on the floors?” Reno asked. Their boot soles crunched on drifted dirt leavened with some kind of coarse material that didn’t seem quite like rock.

“Rats ate it,” Johnny said. “Hate rats.”

“I dunno,” Drygulch said. “Roast ’em just right, they can be mighty tasty. If they ain’t been eatin’ too much fresh shit or old chills.”

Reno licked his lips, suddenly remembering how ravenous he was. He hadn’t eaten since they broke camp in the watery, greenish-orange light of dawn.

It wasn’t just his wits and his packrat memory that had sustained him through a brutal childhood. There were the rats, too. Where people were, rats thrived. To the perpetually starving Hamster, the ones that had been feasting off shit and dead people tasted just fine.

“Here, what’s this?” Lariat said. She strode up beside Johnny.

They stopped. Lariat shone her flashlight at the wall, where a large white sign with red lettering had been bolted: Danger—Restricted Area—Authorized Laboratory Personnel Only.

Drygulch read the sign slowly. “Okay, what’s that mean?”

“It means we’re not supposed to be here,” Johnny said.

“I know that, ass face. I’m not stupe. I mean, what’s it mean here?”

“It means there’s valuable stuff inside,” Lariat said.

“What if there’s something living in there?” Reno asked, hustling to catch up. He didn’t think his friends would cut him out on any ace scavvie they found. He just didn’t like to leave too much to chance.

It was cold in here—as above, so below. Topside, the plains were dusted with light dry snow that eddied in the wind. Despite that, Reno’s skin prickled as if sunburned.

He hoped it wasn’t caused by rads from fallout from the old ground-burst crater a few miles west, drifting in through the cracks in the installation’s immensely thick concrete containment shell. They had no way of telling. Unless your skin started getting all mottled and your hair began falling out in clumps. Or you just went straight to the convulsions-and-bloody-shits stage.

With the first you might not die. With the second, you might not die soon enough. He’d seen both.

Drygulch held up his kerosene lantern. Next to the sign was a door that had been jammed partway open.

“Strike,” Lariat said. She poked her head through and shone her own flashlight around. “Looks like some kind of lab, all right.”

“I don’t know,” Drygulch said. “I don’t feel triple-good fucking with whitecoat stuff. Especially not from old days.”

“You think we’re in here scuffling like rats for rations and ammo?” the woman scoffed.

“Well, yeah. That and meds. Mebbe some blasters. Boots. I could use me some new boots.”

“Small-time. Mebbe you’re satisfied with that. Not me.”

Reno caught up. “I don’t think we’ll find much of that kinda stuff, anyway,” he said. “Place has seemed picked pretty clean so far.”

But Johnny Hueco was dancing from one disintegrating boot to another. “This is it!” he said. “It’s what I told you about.”

“No shit?” Drygulch said dubiously.

“Doesn’t look touched in here,” Lariat said, backing out.

“If there really was anything worthwhile in there, wouldn’t somebody have gotten to it by now?” Drygulch asked.

“Mebbe not,” Reno said. “Mebbe the door hasn’t been open long.”

“Why’d it be open now, Reno?” Lariat asked.

“Earthquakes,” he said. “Get a lot of seismic activity in this area. Some big quakes. Mighta shaken it open.”

Lariat studied him a moment longer. Her auburn hair hung to just above the wolf-fur-trimmed collar of her jacket, framing wide cheekbones and dark eyes with a touch of the Orient to them. Mebbe she wasn’t a beauty, Reno thought. Most men found her good-looking. She was queen of Reno’s world.

She’d made it clear early and emphatically that she was too good for the likes of Drygulch and Reno. They might be trail mates and partners, but no touchy-feely stuff.

Lariat nodded now. “Could be it. I’m going in. Who’s with me?”

“Might be bad animals in there, Lariat,” Drygulch said. “Muties even.”

She drew her .45 handblaster, pinching back the slide to confirm she had a round chambered.

“So, might be animals,” she said. “Right. I’m ready. Who wants to live forever?”

“Um, just a sec,” Reno said. The others turned, then followed his flywheel flashlight beam upward. The ceiling, higher in here than in the corridor, had buckled sharply downward. “So, if the concrete’s seriously cracked, the whole fucking thing might cave in on our heads at any minute.”

“It hasn’t fallen yet,” Lariat said blithely, and went in.

Eager as a hound pup, Johnny followed her. Drygulch sent an eye roll Reno’s way before he went on through.

Reno carried a Winchester Model 1897 12-gauge scattergun on a rope sling over his shoulder. A pump model with a hammer and a 5-round tube magazine, it had been old, Reno had read somewhere in an old scavvied magazine, even before the Big Nuke lit the skies with hell’s own light. At some point in the weapon’s long history the barrel had been sawed off a few inches past the end of the mag.

Transferring the flywheel flashlight from his right hand, which had seriously begun to cramp, Reno took the best hold he could on the shotgun’s grip and swung the barrel up. What possible good the weapon could do against a potential cave-in, the young man had no clue. He only knew holding it made him feel better.

“Okay, what’s ‘prions’ mean?” Drygulch was asking suspiciously when Reno entered the lab. He was peering at a cabinet stenciled prominently with that word, plus numerous danger symbols and scary messages. “I never heard of prions.”

There was a smell in there Reno couldn’t name. More than just cold metal and dust. Not like anything that had crept inside recently and died. And he knew that if anybody had died down here during the Big Nuke, in the hundred years and more that had passed, they’d have got their stinking done long since. But still, something made him think of death.

Then again, he reminded himself, that’s an occupational hazard for a scavvie. They were basically all about stealing dead people’s stuff, and trying not to join them in the process.

“Hamster,” Drygulch said, “you’re the one with your rat nose always buried in a book. What’s it mean?”

Reno frowned and scratched his brow. Questions he couldn’t answer tickled. “No idea,” he said.

“Call him Reno,” said Lariat, who didn’t look up from flicking through random debris on a countertop with hands encased in fingerless leather gloves. “Anyway, it means ‘the goods.’ Means we struck black gold.”

“You know this how?” Drygulch asked.

“Whatever prions are,” the woman said with an air of tested patience, “the whitecoats back before Fire Day thought they were worth squirreling away under that million tons of concrete and steel that’s got Reno’s panties in a bunch. And a sealed heavy door inside of that. I’d say that’s valuable whatever the fuck it is, wouldn’t you?”

“Cabinet’s locked,” Drygulch complained.

“Well, open it,” Lariat said. “Use your pry bar. Reno, guard the door.”