Earthbound (18 page)

“I think they were locking people out, not
in,” Pace replied.

We rode around the perimeter of the building
and found more of the same. No easy way inside.

“Let’s climb up on the roof?” I
suggested.

We grabbed hold of that thick ivy and hoisted
our bodies up. As we reached the roof, we both froze. There was no
roof. It had caved in, who knows how many years earlier. Tons of
concrete chunks mucked around in moss and watery mud from the
elements. Couple a birds flew out past us. Guess it was a nesting
ground too.

“Let’s find a way down,” I said, looking for
a way to climb down inside.

“Why?” Pace asked. “It’s a mess down
there.”

“But it doesn’t look like it was ever picked
over. Might be some good stuff in here. Worth a look.”

There was some kind of metal rack that had
collapsed, so the top of it was leaning within reach. I leapt onto
it, tested its sturdiness and then climbed downward. Seeing that it
wasn’t complete suicide, Pace followed.

On the ground level it wasn’t quite as bad as
it looked from the outside. Portions of the building were protected
from the elements by an attic between the roof and the ground, so
those areas weren’t as battered by rain, snow and concrete. Instead
we saw rows and rows of stuff. I’m not sure what a lot of it was.
Packages. Plastic mostly. Dusty and yellowed, and some of the stuff
inside had turned to dust. But some things were still somewhat
intact. Some toys for kids I imagined. I pulled one out of its box
and it crumbled in my hands.”

“Catch!” Pace yelled.

I turned just in time to see some kind of
ball heading straight for my face. My reflexes kicked in and my arm
whipped up to catch it.

“Hey!” I protested.

“Take a look! It’s a baseball!” Yeah, big
effing deal. We had baseballs when we grew up. This one just had
some fancy stitching on it, but other than that it was nothing
special. “Remember that movie we watched when we were kids? About
that guy who loved playing baseball? But then he got some kind of
disease so he couldn’t really play anymore, and he was dying? And
then he gave that big speech.” Pace held his hands over his mouth
and yelled at the top of his lungs, making a fake echo noise. “I
consider myself… myself… myself… the luckiest man… man… man… on the
face of the earth… earth… earth!”

Oh yeah, I remembered that. Pace used to run
around the playground shouting that all the time. I wanted to deck
him then and I nearly wanted to deck him all over again.

“Look!” Pace shouted. “Baseball gloves!” Pace
tossed me something I’d never seen before, except in movies. It was
made of nice soft leather, and even though it had been discolored
by the sun and kind of stiff, I was still able to fit my hand in
it.

“Nice,” I said.

We spent an hour or so throwing the baseball
back and forth, getting used to our gloves. I overthrew the ball a
couple a times and crashed it into some waterlogged boxes. We got a
good laugh out of that. I always did have a powerful throwing
arm.

Later we walked past some cases surrounded by
shattered glass. We stepped around carefully and saw boxes with
some kind of weird equipment pictured on them.

“What is this stuff?” I asked.

“Says they’re cameras. Computers. Cell
phones.”

We picked a few out of their boxes and took a
look at the small technological marvels in our hands. Then we
tossed them to the ground. Whether they still worked or not they
were useless to us without electricity. And even then, who would
know what the eff to do with them anyway?

“Let’s try to find something that’s actually
useful,” I said.

We searched around and did find an area with
clothing, but most of that had gotten soaked, then frozen, then
thawed, and it was covered in mold. Then we found something
amazing. A whole section with tools. Some of them had rusted over,
or snapped when we picked them up, but others were in decent shape.
I found an axe. That was all I needed to cut down some trees in
Riverside Park and get a real fire going. Pace found a handsaw, a
sturdy hammer and a lot of not too rusty nails. With all of that we
could board up all the windows and keep the cold out much better.
Nearby we found some fishing poles too. That’d come in handy for
all the fish swimming around in the Missouri.

Our arms and pockets were overfull so we
figured it was time to climb on out of there. But then we turned a
corner and saw a sight we never thought we’d see. We dropped
everything in our hands.

“Mother-effer.”

Before us was a display case filled with
firearms. Revolvers. Pistols. Shotguns. Rifles. Even some big
scary-looking thirty-round semi-automatic rifles with detachable
magazines. Sweet.

The glass they were behind was extra-thick,
which was probably the reason why it hadn’t shattered. So we found
a few chunks of concrete and smashed that case right open. We
damaged a few of the firearms in the process but that still left
plenty for us to examine. Most were rusted through or the firing
mechanism was forever stuck from years of neglect. But a few seemed
to be in decent working order. A Winchester double-barreled shotgun
seemed to have held up. Some pistols from a company I never heard
of before called SigSauer. Never saw anything like ‘em except in
the movies. They were mostly six-shooters, so not as handy as what
we already had, but a few of ‘em had laser sites. Definitely not
something I needed, but it would help Pace out some with his aim.
So I tossed a few over to him. He could figure out if they still
worked or not. I went through the revolvers – the type of gun I’m
most happy with. Most were only six shooters, but I found a few
with ten chambers the way I liked it. None were as pretty as the
one I carried, but that didn’t matter much. I only needed one more
so I’d have one in each hand. Gimme twenty bullets at a time and
I’m pretty hard to handle. I found a couple from Smith & Wesson
that seemed like they’d be in decent shape with a good cleaning. I
tried a few of the big semi-automatic rifles on for size but they
were too bulky, even if they still worked. No place to stash them
on a horse, even if they were kinda sexy.

Pace whacked me on the shoulder. “Ash, check
this out.”

I turned and saw a steel cage, and what was
inside was way more exciting than the weapons. Ammo. Boxes and
boxes of ammo.

Pace gave the cage a good look. “They might
be in good shape, if they didn’t oxidize,” he told me. Then he gave
me a look. “That means if they were sealed away from oxygen.”

“I know what the eff ‘oxidize’ means,” I
replied. I had no effing idea what ‘oxidize’ meant.

The case did seem to be airtight, encased in
some sort of plastic mesh. It was locked with a rusted padlock,
which came off with a swift kick. Then the case made some sort of
hissing noise as Pace opened it. Yup, that was airtight. We had
maybe two thousands rounds of ammo in there. It was a very happy
day.

The problem was bringing everything back to
the hideout. We did find some shoulder bags to help us haul
everything up and out. Left a few things behind just so we wouldn’t
overburden the horses, but we came back for them the next day. On
that second trip, we also found another boarded up warehouse.
Seemed kinda interesting. It was some kind of military facility.
Inside I found boxes of bullets that had turned to dust. Some thick
blankets. We could use those. Some bad-ass looking weapons,
although none of them worked. Some field glasses that still worked
– that’d be useful. And some bricks of some kind of clay. The cover
on the crate just said the letter C and the number 4. I picked up a
brick and stared at it curiously.

Then I realized I knew what this stuff was.
C4. Some kind of explosive. Slowly I put the C4 back in its crate.
Didn’t want to blow us up. But it could come in handy someday.

Heading back to our hideout with a whole lot
of supplies, I looked up and I saw a vulture circling overhead.
Yeah, you’re gonna have to wait, buddy. It’s not our time yet. Boy,
those vultures get impatient. When we lost one of our cattle to a
bear or whatever, those vultures showed up in no time to pick over
whatever’s left behind. Funny, I guess that’s what we were doing
too. Picking over the remains of people who don’t exist
anymore.

We headed back to the hideout and decided to
take a couple a days to get the place fixed up as best we could. I
started with the firewood, happily cutting down trees in Riverside
Park and whittling them down to kindling. We worked on boarding up
the broken windows. We used the hammer and nails from that Walmart
place, and we got some big scraps of wood we pulled off of other
buildings. With the boards up, the hideout felt a good twenty
degrees warmer. Next we spent a little time getting to know our new
weapons. Most of them turned out to be shit. They’d been sitting
around probably a hundred years too long. But the Winchester was in
good shape, and one ten-shooter revolver worked great for me. Pace
was partial to two of the SigSauer pistols. He couldn’t get the
laser site working though. That would’ve been sweet.

Later we played catch in the street outside
of our hideout. We were starting to call that area our yard, which
was kinda funny, but it was like our front yard. We were slowly
reclaiming it from the wild. The opposite of when nature reclaimed
it from the city man had built.

When it got too dark we got drunk as usual
and went to bed. Funny though. Before I fell asleep I could see
Pace playing with something inside his sleeping bag. No, not
that
. Pervert. No, he was playing with one
of those little computers we saw in Walmart. He must’ve pocketed it
when I wasn’t looking. It didn’t work and there was no way to get
it to work, but I guess it fascinated him all the same. He probably
thought I’d think it was stupid which is why he hid it from me. But
I thought no such thing. I rolled over and went to sleep.

The next couple of weeks was a good time.
Yeah, we went out to Fort Benton and Havre and Lewistown and hit
their banks, killed more robots, hid away our loot in our hiding
place. Nothing special. My initial enthusiasm of going somewhere
I’d never gone before quickly started to fade. Everything in the
Great Plains all seemed to look the same. Bunch of prairies. Some
forests. Couple a mountains. Ho-hum.

We also kept improving on the comfortability
of our hideout. Set up some animal traps we found to protect the
perimeter of our yard, giving us more room where we felt safer.
Cleared out more of the rubble from the lobby. Had Pace help me
build out a vent for the fire pit. That lobby really started to
warm up. Built a makeshift outhouse in the yard so we could manage
our shit a little better. We practiced our shooting too, since we
had plenty of bullets to spare. By this point, we were both
accustomed to shooting with our right hand, but we were both
determined to learn how to shoot ambidextrously. Okay, I don’t know
what the eff that word means, but Pace said it enough times. Over
time we started to improve but it was not as natural as our
dominant hand. At some point we found a box of girly magazines in
one of the nearby buildings. Never had anything like that back in
Great Falls, and even though the pages were yellowed and stuck
together they came in handy. We started to eat better too. We took
our fishing poles and found a fairly calm spot along the Missouri.
Lots of trout, catfish, sturgeon, walleye, paddlefish, yellow
perch, plus a whole lot more species to be caught. Plenty of grubs
and worms all around to use as bait. We started catching fresh fish
every day. And one day when I was starting to get bored of all that
fish all the time, we awoke to good fortune – the sounds of pigs
snorting. At first I thought it was a dream, but no, when I looked
outside there was a wild boar herd moseying right through our yard.
I nudged Pace and we sat up as quiet as we could and grabbed our
guns. Actually I took hold of that Winchester shotgun. It was high
time to see what that baby could do. Then it was pig shooting time.
I knocked down six of ‘em before they ran off. Pace got two. Not
bad considering his skills. We ate well all day. If we had salt I
could cure some so it would last longer. Maybe even make bacon out
of the pork belly. Damned Pace.