Streetlethal Page 14

  "Valuables? What kind?"

  "Underground bank vaults with money—paper, securities, gold, Service Marks. Security tunnels for the jewelry exchange, some of which lead to diamond caches. Canned food. Equipment. More than I can tell you in a few minutes."

  "Well . . . damn, why do they just let it sit down there? How come everybody and their mother isn't down here, ripping it out of the ground?"

  "Think about that, Aubry. Think about the structural damage the Quake left behind. The aftershocks alone were more powerful than any quake that hit California in the preceding hundred years. This entire area is a deathtrap. There is wealth to be had, but the cost is too high for anyone but a Scavenger."

  "You mean the Government lets you come down here and take whatever you want?"

  She laughed. "We have an unofficial franchise. Like I said— it's not profitable enough for any of the Conglomerates to care, and dangerous enough for the Government to leave it to us crazies."

  "Scavenging. Why do you do it?"

  "Because my brother is here." Her thin shoulders bundled in a shrug. "Because there's nothing for me topside. I don't have the skills needed to make it Corporate. I loathe the Maze, and I'm not ready for the work farms." She shuddered and seemed to shrink at the thought. "Doesn't leave me with a whole lot, does it?"

  "I guess not. So you want me to join you—to pay for her treatment."

  "It's an honest exchange, if she means enough for you to stay."

  He looked at the still, vulnerable form of Promise. What did she mean to him? They had been partners in crime, and that was all. It wasn't much, but what else did he have? He had no career, nowhere to go. He was being sought as an escaped convict and as the killer of Luis Ortega, scion of the most powerful criminal organization in the western hemisphere. Mira probably didn't realize it, but there was nothing in the world he would like so much as a place to hide and work, and think about the turns his life had taken. And decide if there was enough left of it to go on.

  Stay, hell. They would have a bitch of a time throwing him back out onto the streets.

  "All right," he said finally. "For her."

  "No," Mira said. "It has to be for you."

  "What's this crap? Why can't I just say yes?"

  "Because if it's not for yourself, one day you'll quit, with nothing but resentment to show for your efforts. Our people will rely on you. Trust you with their lives. It has to be for you."

  "That doesn't make sense."

  "It doesn't have to. That's just the way it is."

  Aubry's lips twisted in frustration. "There's somebody else who talks like that. I just can't quite remember where...."

  "In a dream?"

  Mira was smiling, laughing silently at him.

  "Yeah, maybe—how would you know?"

  "Like I said: Kevin has already seen you." She patted his hand. "Rest now. We'll do what we can for your friend, and we'll talk to you again in a few hours." She stood, crossing to the door.

  "Wait—Mira. When am I going to meet this Warrick?"

  "He'll be back in a couple of days, don't worry." Then she was gone.

  Aubry turned over on his side and watched the slow rise and fall of Promise's chest. He wondered exactly where, and how badly her body had been hurt, wondered what she had done to her nervous system to create the violent shock of light that had bought them their escape.

  And wondered why he cared. That, at least, was an easy question to answer. Hell, he had nothing else to care about.

  10. The Scavengers

  Death Valley? He grinned to himself in the darkness, knowing the answer.

  The air turned cooler, and he could hear the distant whine of the recycler pumping air down to hirfi. Without it, he and the others would suffocate in minutes. The man to his left, invisible around the bend, sighed in relief. 'Thanks Aubry," he yelled around the corner, "We need some canaries down here."

  "Canaries?" Aubry grunted, hefting his pick and swinging it against the wall.

  "Canaries. Birds, man. They used to use 'em in coal mines to tell when the air was going bad. The little buggers would just keel right over."

  The pick tangled in a snarl of metal mesh, and Aubry jerked it free. "You're kidding."

  "Nope."

  He bent down to one knee, looking more carefully at the wall. "Where in the world do you dig up all of this crap, Peedja?"

  The clang of pick against cement ceased, replaced with the sound of dragging feet. Peedja poked his head around the corner. "Same place I got my name, man. Books."

  "How's that?"

  ' 'Last year I almost broke my neck hauling a set of Britannica out of a library. Encyclopedia. Peedja. You should try books some time, Aubry."

  Knight felt a stab of irritation. "Nope," he said sourly. "I know everything in the world that I need to know. More."

  Peedja shrugged and limped back around the corner, attacking the wall with renewed enthusiasm. "Is that right? I'll bet you don't even know what we're working in here." Fie grinned at Aubry's silence. "This is an electrical vault. It used to be a central cable connection. Held a transformer, too, but we already stripped that out. We're pretty close to the surface, but there's about half of a collapsed building over the manhole cover."

  "Just what I needed to know. Now, back off, or I'll see if your sharp little head will get through this concrete faster than a dull pick."

  "You wouldn't say that if I had both my legs."

  "I'd say it if you had your legs, and two or three other people's besides."

  Peedja laughed unconcernedly, and went back to his work. Aubry set the dull edge of his wire cutters against one of the strands, and heaved, taking satisfaction in the feel of his tendons bunching with effort.

  When the last strand was severed, he snorted with relief and raised his pick again, swinging it with a grunt, trying to put every ounce of energy into the swing. There had to be a way. If he didn't have room to stretch his body, there had to be another way to get the exercise he craved. He had to do something. Anger solved nothing, and brought on waves of nausea.

  He had to pause, waiting for the racking pains in his belly to cease.

  He fed the embryonic surge of anger into the strokes, trying to see the wall as the face of Charteris, Death Valley's assistant warden. The first flash of anger, and dizziness overwhelmed him.

  All right. Not that, then.

  He had to find a feeling, the trailing thread of a feeling that was anger and fear and maybe some other things too, all wrapped up together in a package. Maybe he could confuse the response.

  He felt the vibration travel back up his arm as the pick thundered into the concrete, driven by muscle and will and emotion.

  In his mind, he did see Charteris leering through the mists of pain. Aubry envisioned the pick landing directly in the center of that grinning face, saw the grin dissolve in a welter of blood and shattered bone.

  Aubry saw it dispassionately, from an emotional vantage point far distant from his usual level of involvement, and was pleased to feel no twitch of nausea.

  The pick almost flew out of his hands as it penetrated his wall, and Aubry jumped in surprise. He bent down to peer at the hole he had created, then reeled back, overcome with the stench.

  "Peedja! Put your filter on. I broke through over here, but there's somethin' real dead in there. Smells like stewed skunk-shit."

  "Gotcha." Aubry heard the distant sound of Peedja struggling with his headstrap, as he slipped his own breathing filter into place.

  The light from his helmet penetrated several meters into the dark, but it wasn't enough to see anything but swirling dust.

  Even through the filters Aubry caught the smell of corruption, and knew that he was about to see something he wouldn't like.

  Peedja rounded the corner, bringing the end of the airhose with him. The little man's dark eyes were bugged with admiration. "You're the first to break through, Aubry."

  "And I'll be the first to suffocate if you don't get some air
to me." He pulled his head out of the hole, and reeled back against the far wall, panting for air. When Peedja thrust the hose toward him, he grabbed it and sucked directly from the end, clearing the cobwebs from his brain.

  "Are you all right?"

  "Fine," Aubry said. "But I want one of the oxygen kits before I go into that hole."

  "Fair enough. Here." Peedja unstrapped his personal kit and handed it over. "You made the hole. You get first salvage."

  Aubry snorted and resisted a negative comment about the quality of the honor. It seemed to matter to Peedja, and the little man had done nothing to earn an insult.

  He took off the air filter and strapped the rebreather on, sucking air from it harshly five times before the flow became sweet. He nodded to Peedja. "If anyone's stupid enough, send 'em in after me."

  "Everybody. Aubry—" The big man paused and turned. "Don't touch anything—things are probably pretty unstable in there. It wouldn't be the first time that a roof has come down on a Scavenger's head."

  "You've got it."

  Wiggling through head first, there wasn't quite enough room for his shoulders. He growled, realizing as he did that the excitement was building inside him. He scooted back out and hefted the pick for another dozen strokes, smashing at the concrete and then pulling chunks of it free.

  Another effort got him past his shoulders and the rebreather, and with a final push against a cold and grimy floor, his feet came free.

  Even the stench had not prepared Aubry for what lay on the other side of the wall.

  As Peedja had predicted, it was a basement. Collapsed beams blocked one side of it. He pulled a lightstick out of his backpack and beamed it down the other end, to a door with what looked like a pile of rags leaning against it. He took a step and stumbled, catching himself on the palm of his free hand.

  He had tripped over a corpse, so badly decomposed in the dim light that he couldn't tell if it was male or female. He scrambled back from the heap, his chest suddenly twitching with fear, a surge of claustrophobia hammering at his senses, making him want to flee screaming out of the hole in the concrete.

  Choking back the urge, he caught his breath. He let his lightstick beam crawl along the floor, passing three more bodies before it reached the door at the end of the corridor.

  It was deeply grooved with scratches. The pile of rags at its base was another corpse, someone who had died trying to get through that door.

  There was a scrabble of noise behind him, and Aubry turned, waving his hand towards the door. "This'll be our way in," he said gruffly. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the light, he could see two more bodies, painfully small ones.

  Behind him, Peedja gave a low whistle, muffled by his mask. "Will you look at this?"

  "Yeah." Dust and dehydration and insects had done a fine job of obscuring sex and identity, but Aubry could guess that one of the larger bodies was female, the other male.

  "What happened here?"

  "I can guess, Aubry. Sometime after the Firestorm and the Collapse, these people came down here—"

  "Scavenging?"

  "God only knows. Maybe just looking for a place to hide. They should have known better—the Government issued boo-coo directives about staying out of underground structures, but by that time a lot of people thought that everything the Government said was utter crap. So they came down here maybe to set up house. Who knows."

  "And what happened?"

  "Aftershock, man. Warped the jamb, and they couldn't get the door open. Their haven turns into an air-tight prison."

  Aubry tried to imagine dying like that, hearing your children's whimpers in the dark....

  Peedja gripped his arm. "Hey, mister. You're going to see a lot worse than this. Believe it."

  "You just cheer a guy all to hell."

  "That's what I'm here for." The little man's grimy face was tilted up to Aubry's and there was concern in his eyes.

  "Well, we've gotten this far—what now?"

  "We wait. Someone will bring tools, and we'll go on through.

  Warrick has been notified, you can bank on that much. He should be here pretty soon."

  "Good. I'm getting a little sick of hearing all this talk about someone I've never met." He turned his face back to the door, just keeping the corner of his eye on Peedja. "I'm almost beginning to wonder if the man's a myth, you know?"

  Peedja grinned at him. "No myth," he said. After a moment's reflection he added, "But I'm not totally sure he's a man, either."

  Aubry's face screwed up in irritation. "Now just what the hell do you mean by—?"

  Banyon was crawling through the hole, dragging a bag of tools behind her. She was a squat, muscular redhead with a patch of hair and skin missing from the right side of her head, courtesy of a past cave-in.

  She took a brief look at the pile of corpses and spat, just missing her own steel-tipped shoes. Then the flash of emotion vanished, and she was all business again. She eyed the door distastefully, and hoisted the bag over to it, becoming more businesslike every second.

  "Firedoor," she said finally. "Old bastard. Steel over wood. Can't go through it, so I'm going to burst the hinges. Move this body."

  They found a roll of carpeting and gently pushed the corpse off the steps into it, enfolding it neatly. As they did, Banyon rummaged around in the bag until she found the tool she sought, something that looked like a slender wedge attached to a crank. She spun the crank a few times, and the wedge opened into a pair of claws, so cleverly dovetailed that when joined they looked like a solid bar of metal.

  She set the wedge into one of the hinges and worked it in as far as it would go, then took a hammer from her bag and began driving it into the slit. With every stroke, dust rained from the ceiling and puffed from the doorjamb.

  When she finally had the wedge halfway in, she paused, and motioned to Aubry. "Here, muscles. You need to learn how to use one of these, and this is a perfect opportunity. I'm tired."

  Aubry nodded and took the device, trying to find a good grip on the crank. It twisted easily in a clockwise direction, but he swiftly got resistance turning it the other way. It opened another quarter turn, and then stuck.

  "Change the gear ratio," Banyon suggested.

  Aubry inspected the device from top and bottom and found the gear switch, turning it to low. Then he leaned into the door and began to turn the crank. The door began to groan almost immediately, and he could see the claws separate as they ripped at the metal.

  Encouraged, he set himself more firmly, found the angle from which he could move his arms smoothly, and turned until the hinges screamed out and one of the flaps of metal ripped free and stood away from the door.

  He held the leverage device up to the light. "Nice Tittle gimmick here."

  "Not bad, tough guy. Now let's get the other hinges if you don't mind."

  The other three hinges went swiftly, and Aubry stepped back as Peedja and Banyon slipped their crowbars into the jamb and set themselves, levering strongly. Aubry hid his smile as he admired the way Banyon used and conserved her strength— there wasn't a wasted twitch.

  The door moved a fraction of an inch, then dust puffed out around the edges, and there was a sharp crack as the lock ripped free of the wood.

  With a tortured sound, the door toppled out of the casing. Peedja scrambled out of the way, and Banyon pivoted smoothly as it fell past her shoulder. She grinned at Aubry. "Practice," she said.

  The hallway beyond seemed to open out indefinitely, and Aubry felt his heartbeat speed up. He started to advance, and then turned to Banyon. "After you?"

  "Yer full of it, Shields," she grinned, preceding him into the tunnel.

  Smashed glass was everywhere, and fallen beams, and chunks of ceiling.

  The glow of their three lightsticks probed out into the gloom like ghostly fingers, revealing bodies, shriveled and chewed, and trash of every description.

  Peedja moved forward carefully, feet crunching glass as he walked. He cast his beam to the side an
d lit the remnants of a store window, the moldered manikins staring back at him with mindless smiles, posing with hands on hips for customers who didn't care any more.

  "Jesus," Aubry breathed as his light found shop after shop. Some of the windows weren't broken. To his left there was a meat shop of some kind. Insects had reduced the store's wares to shriveled husks, but he checked the door anyway, found it stiff with rust but unlocked.

  As the gloom retreated before his torch, he saw rows and rows of dust-covered wrapped packages.

  There was a rack of cans to his left, and he tiptoed through the trash and inspected one of them. The cover picture was of an artfully garnished, clove-studded ham. Aubry's mouth watered.

  He looked back at the others, trudging through the dust and investigating the other stores, then slipped the can into the backpack. "Banyon!" He yelled. "Canned food in here!"

  She appeared at the door almost instantly.

  "Good." She rubbed her hands together, calculating.

  "If you're not careful there, you're gonna smile."

  "Never happened. Warrick should be here with a main crew in a few minutes. Leave this and let's get the rest of the place mapped out." She looked at him appraisingly. "You're pretty lucky, Shields. First week on, and you've bought into one of the biggest hauls ever. This is the Los Angeles Mall. Only the Multiplex is larger. Warrick will be happy."

  "That thought lightens my load." He followed her out of the shop, down the remnants of a subterranean street that had once teemed with life. With shoppers, workers, perhaps craftsmen. He wondered what it had been like, the day that the Quake hit.

  Behind them there was noise, as more Scavengers joined them, setting up portable lights and air pumps. The subterranean world was growing lighter, realer, the shadows pushed back as human life came again to the Los Angeles Mall.

  He could see where there had been trees and decorations, and it was entirely too easy to think about what it must have been like, with the halls full of shoppers and Christmas cheer.

  Then the Quake. December 23rd, two days before Christmas, and California got a present that had been long overdue, one that everyone expected and nobody wanted. Streets had split, ceilings shattered, tides rose to swamp the beach areas. And here, hundreds had died, been crushed or suffocated, hearts bursting with fear and awful knowledge, eyes dimming for the last time as the final darkness enfolded them.