Gravewalkers: Dying Time (18 page)

The watchman offered a
polite, “Hello,” as he used his key to pass Critias through into
his tunnel. That passage ran straight to yet another locked gate
that prevented access to a perpendicular utility corridor beyond.
The female guard at that gate saw him coming. She let him through
with a polite nod then locked back up again after he
passed.

Critias asked her for
directions, “Which way is it to Funland?”

The guard pointed down to
the right, “Go that way. Take the first left and then continue on
straight. You can’t miss it.”

Funland was the vast
basement or perhaps the underground parking garage of another major
city building. It was the place where the inhabitants of Jim’s city
took their recreation and ate their meals similar to the Back Hall
at Foragers’ Castle. Apart from the many tables and chairs, the
room had islands of couches for lounging about. There were dozens
of large video screens with libraries of movies and music. The
games ranged from the classical board variety to the latest
computer video systems. They had billiard tables, gambling
machines, and sports activities. Critias suspected they would have
had a swimming pool if it had been possible for them to carry one
off in the back of a truck.

A score of children at
toddler ages played and chased one another with the carefree joy of
better days while hundreds of adult survivors enjoyed themselves in
whatever way best suited them. Critias estimated that the numbers
of men and women still alive in the city were about equal. More men
than women had managed to survive the chaos of the Outbreak, but
the dangerous business of long-term subsistence had evened their
numbers.

Fat Jack was at the
Captains’ Table across the room at the end with the kitchen. With
him, he had George, Tony Banjo, and various other Foragers who
drank homemade beer while they chatted merrily.

When they made eye contact,
Jack waved for Critias to come over and join them. He introduced
Critias to some of the other Foragers. Jack began with an obviously
pregnant woman, “This is Sally Headshot, captain of the Milk Wagon
crew. You and Carmen will be taking over for that slot during her
maternity leave.” He introduced an African heritage couple, “This
is Henry your gunner and his wife Gloria who is the Milk Wagon’s
driver and road mechanic.” She was the same woman that Critias had
seen before when she piloted the Thunder Child on the
river.

Critias gave them all a
polite greeting as he took a seat.

Jack continued the
introductions, “Down there is George’s wheelman and road wrench,
Andy, and that’s his gunner Malcolm, the quick-draw kid. Last but
not least are Tony’s driver-mechanic Penny and his gunner
Wolf.”

Penny wondered what
happened to Carmen, “Where’s the perfect princess?”

Critias thumbed back toward
the way he came, “Carmen is back in the Tower helping Bob put
something together. I’ve no idea when she’ll be
finished.”

Tony Banjo could hardly
believe it, “Your lovely is helping Bob? She’s just full of
surprises then isn’t she? I can’t recall the last time anyone knew
enough about anything to help Jim’s mad scientist in his
experiments.”

Jack told the table, “I see
fat days coming. Critias and Carmen are not novices to our game.
We’ve much to teach each other and from that, we’ll reach
ambitiously. Our eyes have long been larger than our hungry mouths,
but now we’ll have much sharper teeth.”

The chief cook brought
their table another round of beers, “If you lazy louts spent as
much time harvesting as you did drinking, all the storerooms would
be full.”

George found the cook
amusing, “Is that you volunteering to come out with us next time?
You look ready to me. I know nerves of steel when I see them.”
George took his new beer then tossed the empty bottle up in the
air.

Malcolm shot the bottle
with his off-duty revolver while at the apex of its flight then he
had the pistol holstered before the broken pieces rained down. The
noise of his weapon was like thunder in the room. Many people
shouted in surprise and the cook shrieked as he dived to the floor
to hide under their table. None of the Foragers displayed any alarm
and most laughed.

The cook got up embarrassed
as he brushed off his apron. “Very funny,” he grumbled. “Maybe I’ll
go learn to be a welder and you can eat soup every night of the
week. Gabriella is chomping at the bit to be head cook. You keep
shooting at me and she’ll be making the beer from now on too. It’ll
go well with her pigeon eggs and rat meat soufflé.”

“
Just calm yourself,
Nick,” Jack told the cook. “Your idea of a hard day is burning your
finger on a skillet. I bet you have not even finished unpacking all
the new supplies yet and you’re already bitching for
more.”

“
Sixteen cases of red
beets,” Nick complained. “What am I supposed to do with that? I
can’t make borscht without sour cream. Where am I supposed to get
sour cream, milk Sally’s teats? I keep telling you to stop shooting
the damn goats and bring me back some live ones to milk, but no;
you keep shooting them.”

Tony Banjo asked, “If I get
you a damn goat will you stop complaining?”

Nick agreed, “I can’t milk
a buck, but we could breed them, so yeah, you get me some goats and
I’ll stop complaining.”

“
It will be worth it to
shut you up,” Tony decided.

George laughed at Tony,
“How are you going to capture a goat? Shooting them is one thing,
but grabbing one is another. What are you going to do, wave grass
at them until they jump into your truck?”

“
You don’t need to worry
about that,” Tony dismissed him. “Everyone will know my crew is the
best and can accomplish the most difficult runs.”

Critias asked Fat Jack,
“How many survivors do you have here?”

“
One-thousand-twelve was
the last count,” Jack informed him. “It’s been more than half a
year since we had any short-wave communication with other outposts.
I suppose anyone that far away wouldn’t bother calling for help
since there isn’t any way of traveling such distances
anyhow.”

Critias considered that,
“What about air vehicles?”

Jack told him, “We have had
two helicopters. A hunter took out one in a crash and the other
lost its pilot so we had to leave it behind on the roof of the city
hospital. Flying is risky, but convenient enough when it
works.”

“
I’m going to take a look
around,” Critias took his beer with him as he excused
himself.

“
You have time,” Fat Jack
informed him. “We can’t go back out until the infected have calmed
down and returned to their usual bullshit and that’ll be a day at
least. Did Jim get you two a room?”

“
Yeah, it’s fine for us,”
Critias had no complaints. “We can earn better once we’ve proved
ourselves to everyone else.” Critias went to see what other people
were doing. Most of them offered a brief polite greeting and a few
of the women were a little more curious over the opportunity of a
new man on the scene. He missed the Homer and hoped they would be
going home soon. As far as he knew, they had wanted him to deliver
the science android and he had accomplished that easily enough. He
reasoned that if he was leaving soon anyway, there wasn’t much
point in him trying to make himself comfortable. What Grand Marshal
Wayne had told him still nagged at the back of his mind; it was
something about an antigen for the infection and he had yet to see
or hear anything like that.

He wandered in a roundabout
way before he returned to his room. There was a different guard
than before at the gate to let him through into the basement
passage. It was also a different man that guarded the front door in
the lobby. As Critias encountered the second guard, he noticed how
the man checked in on his radio. It reminded Critias that he needed
to upgrade the frequencies in his helmet so he could join the
primitive local communication traffic.

On the way to the elevator,
he went into the Foragers’ weapon room to explore. He found the
place filled with well-oiled guns of every sort, even some gigantic
military cannons. There were man-portable rockets, mortars, and
lockers full of plastic explosives. One kind of military
assault-rifle in particular was there in duplicate number to the
hundreds. He was about to leave when he noticed a cabinet that
contained some of the more primitive weaponry; among many
stamped-metal machetes, axes, and hammers were a bundle of
classical swords. Most of them were junk like the stamped-metal
machetes, but among them were genuine antiques the Foragers had
salvaged from some collector or museum.

Critias appropriated two of
the weapons for himself and Carmen. He selected a single-edged
panga for himself that was much like a giant bowie knife on the
scale of a Roman sword. For Carmen, he took a samurai katana that
was clearly a genuine heirloom from that feudal period. He had
craved a suitable tool for beheading infected to stop any chance of
them making a regenerative recovery; to that end, both blades would
be excellent for that purpose.

He went back to his room
then sat on his bed to tune the radio in his mechsuit helmet.
Critias set it to scan the perpendicular frequencies and lock on to
any transmission that it caught. It wasn’t long before he picked up
the many guards at their posts and the patrols as they checked in
with each other. Jim kept the whole city tightly sectored so that
if one section ever fell to ghoul attack it wouldn’t instantly
domino into the invasion of all the others. Critias had to admit it
was a smart move. He put the helmet on a chair then laid back to
listen to the tedious messages between the sentries. As a marshal,
the chatter was a kind of peaceful music and its song was one of
safety and security.

A knock on the door awoke
Critias sometime later. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep.
Critias got up and then opened the door to find Gloria there and
she held a dinner tray.

“
You missed supper so I
brought you something,” she walked in to put it down on the small
table. “Some newcomers are shy about not wanting to seem greedy for
groceries, but I assume you had other reasons.”

“
I overslept is all,” he
took a seat at the table since he was hungry. “You seem like you’ve
something else on your mind.”

She did, “It was strange of
Jack to put you in Sally’s place considering how new you are, so I
told him I needed to know more about you if he wanted my
cooperation. It is my life at risk too after all.”

Critias nodded in that he
imagined what she would say, “What did Jack tell you?”

She paused then said, “He
told me something unbelievable. If you didn’t have things like
that,” she pointed to his mechsuit. “You and Carmen are something
called marshals from let’s just say not around here. What is it
like there?”

He described it, “People
have gotten comfortable living in orbit, kind of like some of your
people who don’t want to think about the outside world anymore.
I’ve been down to Earth many times to do my job, but never wanted
to stay there, don’t much like the oceanic habitat platforms
either.”

Gloria speculated, “Your
partner is a woman so the sexes must be equal in your time. Has
mankind moved beyond prejudice and warring on each
other?”

Critias remembered what Jim
had said about the androids being slaves and what Carmen had said
about how she felt he had raped her; before that, he would have
answered yes, but he no longer believed it. “In my time they make
artificial people and use them as slave labor and prostitutes,
though it never seemed that way while I was there. They evolved so
gradually that I guess we never noticed when they became better
than we are. Also, people are not as physically different as they
are here.”

She thought she understood,
“There are no people of color like me?”

“
No, not in the way you
mean. Not enough humans survive your era to maintain the identities
in centuries to come. Don’t get the impression that it was by any
choice or that it’s some kind of improvement. It didn’t make
everyone more special only less interesting. If you could go back
with me, you would find everyone shares a kind of incestuous
conformity. Here you may be just another person. In my time, you
would be a famous fashion model for being interesting enough to
recognize. I never realized that either until I saw all of you in
Funland. I never realized many things before coming here. If you
look out the window sometimes and feel like precious things have
been lost forever, they have.”

Gloria’s expression changed
from fascination to abhorrence as she put the pieces together, “You
came here alone and Carmen, that hair, her flawless skin; she’s
your artificial person prostitute slave.” Gloria became so angry
that she was on the verge of slapping him, “You rape her and beat
her like a dog?”

Critias pushed his tray
away having lost his appetite, “I used to do a lot of bad things
where Carmen was concerned, but I’ve never beaten her or inflicted
suffering on her. She’s been the jewel of my life since she first
opened her eyes. If you’re asking if I have treated her in ways
that were less than she deserved then the answer is yes. I dressed
her in a generic laborer’s suit as her only possession. I kept her
shut away unable to socialize with anyone but me until I had some
use for her. I never gave half a damn what she wanted or how she
felt about it. Carmen was a point of pride to me that I valued
highly, like my job or my gunship. She was the best of all possible
Forager perks.”