Desolation Angels

“Already on it,” Ryan said, looking down at the small rad counter pinned to the lapel of his coat. “Rad levels are high, but not enough to be a real problem in the short run. We’ll just have to keep our eyes skinned for fallout hot spots.”

Mildred shrugged. “Somehow the idea of dying of cancer in thirty years doesn’t really terrify me,” she said.

“I daresay that when you visited Detroit before,” Doc said, looking out a window to the southwest, “it looked substantially different from this. And I do not refer to the obvious damage.”

“I didn’t expect it to be this overgrown,” Mildred said. “I mean, it’s pretty humid here. This is Great Lakes country after all. There’s a river not far south and a smaller lake somewhere not too far east. But usually urban desolation is more, uh, desolate.”

“That may suggest where the water pressure came from to drive the flooding of the late redoubt,” Doc said.

“What could’ve cracked its shell like that?” Ricky asked.

“Mebbe shockwave from a ground burst,” J.B. said. “Or some of those big earthquakes they had everywhere before the bombs even stopped falling.”

“Been over a hundred years of hardship and bad times since,” Ryan added. “A lot can happen in that time. Even to a redoubt.”

He gestured out the window Doc had been gazing through. “And I don’t know if you’ve noticed. It’s not all just overgrowth busting up through the pavement and whatnot. That’s an actual open field right there next to us, though it’s a small one. And that’s not random weeds and brush, either.”

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “It’s a truck garden! They even have growing frames.”

“Well, we know people are here,” Mildred said. “They have to eat. It makes sense they’d grow food where they could.” She laughed. “So that gives us an idea where all that poop came from. But why so much of it?”

“Mebbe a lot of people live in these ruins,” Krysty said. “Might be plots like this all over the place.”

“But why would they all be pooping into the old sewer system?” Mildred demanded. “I mean, I know gravity still works. Without power to pump it to treatment plants, it’ll all just flow down to the river. And God help the poor bastards downstream. But why do they bother?”

Ryan scratched an ear with his forefinger.

“Mebbe we don’t live as refined as people did back in your time, Mildred,” Ryan said, “but we still remember the old saying, ‘Don’t shit where you eat.’ And why bother digging latrines if you got sewers?”

“You’re right, Ryan,” Mildred said, instantly contrite. “I didn’t mean to imply everybody these days is a barbarian.”

Ryan chuckled. “Mostly we are. Just not that kind.”

“So where do we go from here, lover?” Krysty asked.

“There’s a big structure another few blocks, the way we were going,” J. B. said. “Looks half-trashed. You could still fit a respectable ville’s worth of folks inside by the looks of things.”

“Downtown seems to be behind us,” Ryan said. “And to the north from what I could see as we were leaving the redoubt. Not that I looked hard at anything but a way out of there.”

“Do we want to potentially meet a whole ville’s worth of people?” Mildred asked. “That first bunch seemed anything but friendly, and I’m not even counting the muties. What’d they call them again?”

“Clayboys,” Ricky said. He had taken up station beside a front window, keeping an eye on the way they’d come. He had his DeLisle unslung. Jak crouched by the southwest window like an alert dog.

“Yeah. Look,” Mildred added, “if I recall correctly, Windsor’s right across the river. It used to be part of Canada. The only part of Canada south of a big U.S. city, at least in the old lower forty-eight, I think. And if we’re south of downtown, or close to it, we’re near the river. Maybe we should head that way.”

“Mebbe not everybody’s as hostile as that first crew,” J.B. said.

“And here I thought you were the reliably paranoid one, John,” she replied.

“I just reckon that if we took people by surprise in their own backyard, naturally they’re gonna react.”

“Who’s growing the food?” Krysty asked suddenly. “Those punk types didn’t strike me as the farming sort.”

“More like enforcers,” Ryan said. “Or raiders.”

He rubbed his jaw. Quick-growing stubble rasped his palm.

“Why did we want to be in a hurry to shake the dust of this place off our boot heels?” he asked.

Everybody looked at him.

“I presume that was not a rhetorical question,” Doc said slowly. “Inasmuch as you have notoriously little patience with such.”

“No. Practical. Why do we think we’d get a better reception in this Windsor ville, anyway? Seems like they’re in pretty much the same boat as Detroit. And let me remind everybody, although we’ve got lots of ammo at the moment, we’re starting to run low on rations.”

“Then what’s your plan?” Mildred asked. “It doesn’t look as if the beans and corn across the street are near ready to be picked and eaten.”

“Not to mention they’ll be guarded,” Krysty said. “Either by the bunch with the pink Mohawks or those against them.”

“And that’s it,” Ryan said. “You got food here. You got people growing the food. You got people with blasters. That means you got trouble.”

J.B. shrugged. “Could have stood pat with just, ‘You got people,’” he said.

“Yeah. Well. What I’m saying is, there’s trouble for us to fix. And food to pay us with for fixing it. I’m not sure a better deal’s liable to just come strolling along.”

“It’s a big city, Ryan,” Krysty said. “Isn’t that kind of a tall order?”

He grinned.

“When isn’t it?”

* * *

THEY HEADED OUT. Ryan decided to keep going the way they had been, southwest, in the general direction of the immense half-collapsed rectangular structure.

Krysty had misgivings about that. She was in her own way even more attuned to the natural world than their former wild child Jak, who was now ranging out in front of the rest scouting for danger—a job he insisted on doing despite his discomfort in urban surroundings. Being in the middle of the steel-and-concrete corpse of a great predark city felt unnerving enough, though the greenery bursting out through cracks in the rubble as if to reclaim it in so many places kept her from feeling cut off from Gaia.

The corner they approached was apparently an entrance. It consisted of blocky shapes tiered outward and upward from a corner cut out of the giant building. The doors had once held glass, long since blown out, leaving rusting metal frames like cage walls.

A colonnade ran down the building face along the street to their left. The street itself remained more or less intact. It was still passable, anyway, in spite of being heaved and broken in a crazy quilt of angled planes. And still passed, she reckoned, to judge by the fact that little more than sprouts and tufts showed through the network of innumerable cracks.

The space between it and the facade had obviously been a broad walkway. Now the pavement was gone, replaced by neat rows of cultivated plants—potatoes, beans twining up stakes, green vegetables, rows of shoulder-high corn along the edge closer to the structure where they wouldn’t deny the other crops light. It all looked terribly vulnerable to Krysty.

“I wonder where everybody is,” Ricky said from behind her.

As they approached the vast derelict—or ruin, she corrected herself, because somebody pretty evidently still occupied it—they had fanned out into a V formation, with Ryan at the point, Krysty at his left side and J.B. to his right. Mildred walked just behind J.B. Doc followed Krysty. Jak zigzagged cautiously ten yards ahead of Ryan. Ricky brought up the rear in a line behind Ryan.

“Somebody’s spent a lot of time tending that garden,” he said. “Like the one behind us. And somebody keeps the junk from building up in that place we took our break. So where are they?”