Home Planet: Apocalypse (Part 2) (10 page)

Full of hope, I powered up the ATV, accelerating gingerly to a sedate 15mph. Somewhere over the western horizon lay Angels Station and civilization.

Fifteen minutes had elapsed and nothing had gone wrong. With it, my confidence had grown and I now sped along at the ATV’s top speed of 40mph—hardly NASCAR, but fast enough for the twenty-mile journey. I’d expected rocks and obstacles but found none—just ice under a layer of compacted snow with some gently undulating drifts. The worse that could happen, aside from ATV failure, was plowing into one of them. Still, I needed to keep full focus on the way ahead. If anything did happen there was no triple-A to come and tow me. As I drove westbound, I noticed that what had started flat and level had become a downward slope.

Perhaps it’s leading toward the ocean
, I thought, considering what might have been a seagull I’d seen earlier.

But even after the first half-dozen miles, and with no snowfall, the icefield still spread out westward to the horizon. If the ocean was out there, then it had frozen beyond recognition.

Another five miles rushed past and I found myself remembering the hours spent in L.A. traffic that even the advent of self-driving cars hadn’t solved. In the LAPD, we only drove our squad cars manually on very rare occasions and only with authorization. Long gone were the days of the traditional car chase where the humans did the driving. Far too many had ended in tragedy and, although I found manual driving exhilarating, I agreed with the overall goal to save lives. There was a time and a place for racing and driving the hi-tech ATV over the deserted icefield was one of them. It was the most fun I’d had for a while, a long while if I wanted to get technical about it.

Continuing to scan ahead—near, middle, far—something caught my eye and as I got closer, it grew darker and more defined through the mist. Smoke. A dirty plume of darkness climbing at a slant in the breeze. I kept going, the discovery leading to acceleration. At six miles from my target destination, I could see the smoke was brown, not black. There were also some dark spots on the icefield, buildings perhaps. One of them sat under the rising column and others resolved into view around it. I slowed to focus on them, wishing I’d brought binoculars. There were two— no, three spaced quite far apart. Darker than their brilliant white surrounding, they looked geometrical, taller than they were wide. The brown sooty cloud emanated from the middle one, somewhere near the top.

I sped up again, closing the distance over the next few minutes until more detail resolved by the time I stopped perhaps a mile and a quarter away. Each of the three structures had a unique shape and height. The farthest one was a simple cube shape with a dark, irregular surface. It rose as high as it was wide and looked like a squat little office building. The middle one—from where the smoke came—stood the tallest at about twice the height of the first. This cylindrical tower was a mixture of concrete gray, dark, and rust-colored patches. Parts of the outer skin were missing, exposing some of the building’s floors—mainly the upper ones. I could just about make out the hair-thin outline of an antenna and guy wires. This had to be where the transmissions were coming from. Alongside it, but protruding a fifth of the height above the roof, ran a flue pumping out its pollution into the pristine ice world. And where there was pollution, there were humans. Sad but true. The nearest building bore the shape of a box cutter blade, it’s skeletal structure clearly visible under the remaining glass panels covering no more a third of its area. This one stood at a height intermediate to the other two.

With part-relief and part-reluctance, I continued on, adjusting toward the closest of the three buildings. At a thousand yards out, what had been just a series of dark specks near the base of the cylindrical, middle building resolved into a handful of sled-like vehicles—a simple, open-topped design maybe half the length of a semi-trailer, fashioned from rusted steel. I had no idea how they worked or what their specific purpose was other than transport.

The skeletal box cutter blade grew quickly, looming large above the ice as I drew near. The angled roof ran across my field of view—from north to south—and I hadn’t noticed it as I approached, but the building had a pronounced lean. Like a derelict latter-day Leaning Tower of Pisa, the blade face of the box cutter leaned precariously eastward—toward me. I drove the ATV closer then stopped three hundred feet away. Some small pieces of freshly fallen rubble from the decaying building littered the floor below its overhang. I looked up at its decaying facade and then I realized something else. I
recognized
this building. The last time I’d seen it though it stood not at a hundred and fifty feet but more like twelve
hundred
feet above the downtown streets. The downtown streets of Los Angeles. This was the Hertford Building, finished in 2066—a year that will forever live in memory as the year I lost Juliet and my unborn son.

I edged closer in the ATV, keeping the speed low and quiet. The building had been there for this long, so I wasn’t concerned about it collapsing just in time for me. But there was always the risk of falling debris and some of the cracked, degraded glass panels that remained, so I skirted around to the north, looking for signs of life and an entry point. The ground floor panels were mostly gone, revealing the rusty reds of the outer steel framework, some of which clung onto patches of fire-retardant coating. As I parked up right outside, the crumbling central core, complete with rusting rebar and a doorless elevator opening came into view in the gloomy interior. Snow and ice covered the floor, and drifts had congregated on the southern and western sides, halfway to the ceiling in places. The place was an empty shell, abandoned and unused. I pulled the orange-tinted goggles over my black ski mask and got out of the ATV. With the retention strap unclipped on my holster, I advanced gingerly toward the threshold, aware that this place could be a deathtrap. The space that would’ve once been an office was largely empty, but not completely. A handful of rusted office chair frames, with the plastic fittings still attached sat upturned here and there. There were a few broken pieces of wooden furniture and partitions and what looked the remains of some smashed up electronics. It looked as if scavengers had been through and left very little. I stood looking at the rusted plaque beside the elevator opening and could just about make out the number sixty-eight. Five hundred years ago, the Hertford Building would’ve commanded some of the best views in the city. Now, it was two minutes to midnight and nearly gone. I surveyed the open-plan space and looked at the ceiling. Only the stumps of piping, cabling and false ceiling framework remained. Whoever had stripped this place had done a thorough job. I imagined manufactured goods were at a premium ever since the impact. Then something struck me. I’d expected to see some evidence of blast damage—scorch marks, embedded glass fragments or such like.

Is that what happens when an asteroid hits?
I thought.
Or maybe it struck halfway around the world and the west coast suffered from its other effects.

With nothing else to see on the sixty-eighth floor, I skirted around the concrete core and found the doorless stairwell. As I exited on the sixty-ninth—or second—floor, the taller, cylindrical building came into view through behind the rusty girders and glassless window framing. It stood about six hundred feet away, pumping out fumes as furiously as ever. I thought back to the last time I’d been downtown in 2070 and realized which building it was—the Sigma Tower. In 2070, the site had recently been cleared after the demolition of the previous buildings. Boarded off with images of the planned sixteen hundred foot high tower, they were to start construction that same year. I recalled the boasts about it being the tallest building west of the Mississippi. They said it’d take three years to complete. Apparently, that was fast. So whenever the asteroid had hit, it wasn’t before 2073. Three more years of life for Mom and Nikki, a minor highlight in the scheme of things, but sometimes you had to count your blessings.

The sixty-ninth was much the same as the floor below, but something drew me to the west-facing side—the unmistakable sight of a human skull. The other bones were loose, but beside it. There were no clothes, shoes or anything else nearby. Just as I started wondering how and when this person died, I heard something outside—men’s voices and the sound of a dog growling from the direction of Sigma Tower. I glanced up and instinctively drew my 9mm. There were two of them, clad all in white and both armed. The dog-handler had his rifle slung over his shoulder, while the other one held his gun across his chest, barrel down. Both of them continued jogging double-time straight toward me. In less than a minute, they’d see the ATV—a priceless asset—and then I’d have no choice but to stay. Running away from men with rifles across the icefield was not an option. We had to meet at some point, may as well start things off friendly and civilized. I chambered a round and left the safety off the 9mm, placed it in back in the holster. I did the same with the .45 cal in my jacket pocket and kept my hands in both. With any luck, they’d just focus on the holstered piece.

I went to the edge of the building closest and waved all friendly, calling, “Hey, how you doing? Let me come down there and say hi.”

They slowed and the dogless guy raised his rifle.

“No need to get jumpy, friend. Let’s talk. I’m coming down there now. Stay calm.”

I ran down the stairwell and behind the central core to the ATV, leaning inside to check it was ready to go. With the door open, I leaned on the ATV, casually awaiting their arrival, hands in my jacket pockets.

Seconds later, they emerged from the side of the building and the dog started growling menacingly, pulling on its leash. It had to be the biggest German Shepherd I’d ever set eyes on—sized more like a wolf than a family pet.

“Heel boy!” shouted the dog handler, calming the beast somewhat as the other guy covered me with his rifle.

Apparently, the handler was dissatisfied with his charge and kicked it hard in the side, quelling its aggression. The dog sat and winced quietly. Both men wore dirty white coveralls, woolen beanies and round, tinted goggles that looked more like swimming goggles than snow-wear. The dog-handler had a faded number 19 painted on his chest, his buddy pointing the gun wore a number 13. Both were small in stature, with gaunt faces above their scraggily dark beards and aged, windswept skin, all dark and cracked. It was hard to tell them apart.

“Who are you?” barked Number-13
,
looking edgy like he was dealing with something new. He was.

“My name is Dan Luker, I’m from the
Juno Ark
—a starship that left Earth over five hundred years ago. I’ve been in stasis for most of that time.”

“What’s that …
thing
?” he asked, pointing his rifle at the ATV.

“That’s an All-Terrain Vehicle.”

Number-13 said something in a low voice to Number-19 with the dog. He reached behind his back, took out something on a chain, and threw it over to me, where it landed on the floor at my feet. It was a pair of manacles. They looked homemade, with a pair of hinged circular wrist irons, each with a little padlock, the keys still in them. The last time I saw this type of padlock I was securing my suitcase for vacation.

“Put them on!” ordered Number 13.

Once I did, I’d be one step closer to being at their mercy. I bent down and picked up the manacles, deciding what to do next.

“Put them on!” repeated Number-13, angrily.

Or maybe it’s fear
, I thought, picking up the roughly made manacles. I had choices to make. And fast. Did I try for the 9mm in the holster and beat a man with a rifle at thirty yards, or maybe fire through the jacket pocket with the .45 cal? Their rifles looked primitive, homemade, and probably less accurate than my handguns. Possibly. And the ATV was only six feet to my right—would jumping in get me out of there? Perhaps. But if it did, then what? Wander the icelands until the power cell ran out, then wander some more until my food did the same, hoping to find some more friendly natives? Holding possibly the only buildings within tens of miles, using fossil fuels and having men in uniform with guns told me they were a powerful group. Besides, they looked jumpy as hell.

“Okay, man, no need to be so up-tight,” I said as I put on the left wrist iron, clicking the ancient little padlock closed.

“You want the key? Or should I swallow it or something?”

“And the other one!”

“Okay, okay mister grouchy … But can you tell me why I’m under arrest?”

“Just put it on!”

“Tell me why I have to wear these, then I’ll consider it.”

“You’re an outlander!”

“That’s a crime around here?”

“No.”

“So why the frosty reception? Excuse the pun.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Okay, what crimes
are
you accusing me of if being an outlander isn’t one of them?”

“Trespassing.”

“Trespassing? Are you
serious
? Didn’t see any signs.”

“We don’t need signs. Everyone knows this is the Great Marshal’s domain.”

“Well, I guess I’m kinda new around here. Anyway, who’s the
Great Marshal
?”

“Great Marshal Valdus. Enough talking. Put on the manacles, or we’ll
release the beast.”

Number-19 voiced a command and the dog reared up, bearing its teeth, straining the leash.

I could only push him so far, but at least he’d divulged some facts. I put on the other wrist iron and now held two tiny silver keys.

“You want the keys then?”

“Throw them here!”

“Best not—they might get lost in all this snow. Why don’t you come and get them? Here.”

He gritted his teeth, raised his rifle and fired, causing me to duck. The shot went wide, but not by much. I stood back up, trying to appear unfazed, as he loaded another single round from his pocket—not such tough opponents after all. In the time it took him to fire one inaccurate shot, I could’ve downed all three targets. And then the cavalry arrived—or the infantry, anyway—as another four white-clad riflemen came running over from Sigma Tower. It was game over. Time to play nice. I put the manacle keys together then tossed them out in front of me. Number-19 jogged forward, his rifle on me as the other four men fanned out in an arc, all pointing their barrels my way. Number-19 bent down and picked up the keys. He half-turned and waved another guy over—this one a taller man wearing a number 45. He was darker-skinned but as bearded and gaunt as the other two. He sent a nasty sneer my way, bearing his crooked, blackened teeth.

Finding a good dentist can’t be easy around here
, I thought, mirroring his sneer with my twenty-first century pearly whites.

“Cover him,” said Number-19, before edging gingerly toward my 9mm.

He lunged the last half yard and struggled to get it free, the front sight catching on the holster. I chuckled but kept my hands out front. He stepped back with the 9mm, eyeing it intensely.

“Nice gun,” he said as if he
really
meant it.

“Yeah. You might wanna put the safety on.”

“This one?”

“Yeah.”

It clicked on and he pocketed the 9mm.

“Cover him,” he repeated, nervously.

In my Arctic gear, and standing a good head height above the tallest of them, I must’ve looked intimidating. As Number-19 patted me down from the legs up, I wondered what the punishment was for trespassing. Not that severe—or at least, it wasn’t back when L.A. wasn’t run by a bunch of scrawny runts with homemade rifles. He found the survival knife and the .45 cal as expected. For these guys, it was probably like an alien first contact. For all they knew, I
was
an alien beneath my ski mask and goggles.

Maybe it’ll calm these jerks down if I take off the mask
, I thought.

“Hey, mind if I take off the mask?”

“Yes, take it off … But stay where you are!”

“Sure, whatever you say, hotshot.”

And I slid off the mask and goggles.

Number-19 came and gestured to give them to him.

“I’d like to keep those.”

“No,” said Number-19.

So I threw them on the floor. He darted down to get them.

“Come with us,” he said.

And they led me toward Sigma Tower, still belching out thick brown smoke.

The giant letters near the top had rusted all over. It now read
S gma T
, with the
T
hanging at an angle by one corner. Along with broken and missing windows, rusty panels—once gleaming stainless steel—created a patchwork of dereliction. As I looked higher, less of the outer skin had survived, revealing crumbling concrete floors with their rusty rebar lattices poking out.

Closer still, and behind the missing windows and panels, men in dirty white coveralls stood watching their comrades lead me toward the entrance. A heavy machine gun, its operator low and unseen, tracked me from a floor above. The entrance was nothing more than a gap in the otherwise walled-off ground floor. Either side, a few of the original windows had been boarded up to maintain integrity. Sandbag-protected heavy machine gun emplacements sat just inside of the entrance, one on each side. Two men manned each gun and looked on wide-eyed at the strangely dressed outlander

“Where we going?” I asked.

“Inside,” said Number-19.

“That’s helpful, thanks.”

We passed the gun emplacements and went inside the dim space that was once a sky-high office block. It smelled of damp with concrete walls that had seen better days. All the fittings, carpet, and ceiling that had once made this a modern, bright area were gone, no doubt scavenged long ago. The cold, uninviting space was empty, save for a handful of riflemen skulking in the shadows. In the center of the large round space was the central core and the elevator bank with four doorless entrances, just like in the Hertford Building.

“Where we going?” I repeated.

“Down,” said Number-19 as he and his posse led me to the far right aperture.

The left-most two were empty, except for the cables. Inexplicably, they ran not in the center of the elevator shaft, but at the front. The second-from-right shaft contained a large bore pipe in the back right corner and some smaller pipes and electrical cables climbing the opposite one. Between them ran a ladder. I guessed safety wasn’t high on the Department of Labor’s agenda anymore. The thick pipe must have been the flue, pumping out its noxious-looking fumes above.

“Glad we’re not taking the ladder,” I said, grinning.

“Elevator,” said Number-19, pointing to the rusted platform inside the right-hand shaft.

“Sure that thing’s safe?”

He walked in, so I followed with Number-45 behind. The guy with the dog had disappeared around the back where I’d heard them both climb the echoey stairwell.

A tubular steel frame made the elevator platform into a cube, open on four of the sides—front, top, left and right. Across the back face ran an axle with a car wheel—complete with tire—at either end, keeping the platform off the back wall. Number-19 pulled the lever, releasing the simple brake pads on the tires. I grasped the frame with my manacled hands as the platform began accelerating down the dark shaft, a meager filament bulb on the frame the only source of light. The freezing air rushed past and I saw Number-19 counting as the floors rushed past, his hand occasionally pushing the lever to slow us down. Some of the floors were lit, others barely so. I saw people, too. Even though detail was hard to gather at that speed, none of the levels looked very inviting. After maybe a dozen floors, I started to feel something strange as gravity no longer acted straight down. Now the back wall wheels and the front-running cables made sense—the elevator shaft was not vertical, but grew in inclination with every floor we descended, like a kind of banana shape. I counted sixty floors when Number-13 started applying the brake continuously, slowing us with its high-pitched buzz reducing in pitch with every floor. The platform now sloped toward the back wall, putting more force on the tires and more on my arms holding me upright. Sixty-nine floors now which, based on the Hertford’s sixty-eighth floor being at ground level, put us close to the bottom of the Sigma Tower. The smell of vaporizing rubber filled the air as we halted a foot below the intended floor.

“We’re here,” said Number-45, prodding me with his rifle.

“You prod me like that again and I’ll wrap that thing around your neck,” I said, glaring down at him.

He looked away, so I decided exit without flooring him.

The small drab area wasn’t the grand, if decayed, lobby I had imagined. The place looked more like a shantytown, with a low ceiling and bare concrete floor. There was a long straight corridor ahead and one going both left and right. All were narrow and flanked by makeshift walls made from a mish-mash of ply, drywall, tarps and old office partitions. There were doorways, covered with simple, tattered curtains on the left and right every thirty feet or so. The only source of light was the mixture of bulbs hanging from the plywood ceiling. Irregularly spaced and on different lengths of cable, variously colored LED and filament bulbs made up their number. An old man with an unkempt gray beard appeared from the left-hand corridor carrying a bucket of water. His clothes were torn and tattered, and as filthy as his skin. He cast his eyes down on seeing us and said nothing. He shuffled past and along the corridor in front, disappearing into one of the entrances.

“Come on, this way,” said Number-19, with his rotten-toothed friend bring up the rear.

As I passed the curtained doorways, I heard low voices from inside. The place felt damp and joyless. My breath still produced a tenuous mist with every exhalation. It was cold, but nothing like on the surface. A few doorways later, a starved-looking young man in rags went to exit, but quickly retreated in fear when he saw us.

Was it the goons or me?
I wondered.

After two hundred feet, the dreary shantytown gave way to a tunnel twice as wide and tall, bored straight through the ice. We followed it downhill and to a three-way junction, taking a left. A forlorn-looking mother carrying a small child came the other way and looked down when she saw us, standing aside to let us past. Number-19 looked her up and down in disgust, grunted then continued.

“What
is
this place?” I said.

“The Great Marshal’s city,” said Number-19.

“Doesn’t look too great to me.”

He said nothing.

“How many people live down here?”

“That’s secret knowledge, Outlander.”

“O-kay... How do you people feed yourselves then? Or is that secret knowledge too?”

“From mined food and grown food.”

“Wait, what do you mean,
mined food
?”

“Food from the ancient world found at one of the mine faces.”

“So what, you dig through the ice scavenging canned food and stuff.”

“Yes.”

“How do you grow food?”

Number-19 turned around and pointed his rifle at me.

“Are you a spy, Outlander?”

I chuckled. “No, I’m not a
spy
... Why would a spy want to find out about food?”

“Because alongside fuel, food is a scarce strategic resource.”

I thought of the enormous amounts of it orbiting overhead on the
Juno Ark
.

Maybe Reichs
is
sane and I’m the mad one, coming down here.

“Not where I came from—we had the opposite problem—too much food.”

He gave me a strange look, as though I was crazy, and we started walking again. We passed ice tunnels left and right and carried on downhill until it leveled off. Here the ice floor disappeared, replaced instead by the asphalt of twenty-first century L.A. Onward we went past turnings, which led to centuries-old street-level buildings. Most were unrecognizable, but I could see some used to be shops, restaurants or office entrances. It was an icy warren of tunnels that combined, would’ve added up to some serious distance. And every person I saw looked unbelievably poor and thin, some of them emaciated.

Unexpectedly, Number-19 said, “We grow food in the hydroponics levels.”

“How do you power the bulbs and heat this place? Is that what the smoke’s about?”