Motherlode (9 page)

Chapter Fourteen

At first Ryan’s eye refused to make sense of what it was seeing by the light of several bull’s-eye lanterns.

“Okay,” Mildred said. “It’s a wall of crap.”

Dark Lady smiled. “It is our treasure,” she said. “The lifeblood of our ville.”

“Beyond the trash?” Mildred asked.

* * *

D
ARK
L
ADY
HAD
led her guests down the stairs and into a back room, trailed by Mikey-Bob like a rolling mountain on a leash. There she produced several lanterns with reflectors and lenses to focus the light, which she lit with her huge assistant’s help. Keeping one and handing another to Mikey-Bob, she’d passed the others to Ryan and J.B.

From there she’d led them into a cool cellar, smelling of slightly humid earth and walled in what Ryan took for stabilized adobe brick. There were big wooden casks down there, which Doc eyed hopefully and Ryan and J.B. appreciatively. But neither the heady house brew nor the various wines in cool storage were the objects of the expedition.

Instead Dark Lady led them to a large double-valved trapdoor by a rear wall. Deftly sweeping back her skirts with her hands, she knelt and opened a heavy padlock with keys from the ring she carried at her narrow waist.

“From the looks of it that thing’s more to keep something down there from getting up here, than people up here from getting down there.”

“Both,” the dark-haired woman said, standing and gesturing imperiously for Mikey-Bob to open the doors. He complied without so much as a rebellious glance from Mikey.

Mildred was starting to look concerned. She didn’t look relieved when the cool air that gushed up from below smelled of staleness, mildew and general decomposition. Not rotting flesh, anyway—as even Ryan was relieved to note. But there may have been a hint or two that something had died down there.

“What exactly are you afraid might get out?” she asked, her eyes widening as she stared at the yawning pit of blackness.

“Who knows?” Mikey asked.

“We don’t want to take anything for granted,” Dark Lady said seriously. “We know how the world is.”

“Straight up,” Ryan said, “is there anything likely to be down there you
know
to be afraid of?”

“Afraid?” Mikey hooted.

“No,” Dark Lady said. “I assume that you people have the sense to keep your wits about you at all times in unfamiliar surroundings.”

“If only we had the wits not to keep putting ourselves in those kinds of surroundings,” Mildred said.

Without ceremony Dark Lady led the way down the ladder, holding the lantern high in her right hand.

Ryan wasn’t sure she wasn’t engaging in a bit of bravado, here, but he was also rad-scoured if he was going to let this skinny pale woman show him up. He went down right after her.

The weird musty decay smell was much stronger here.

There was cool hard-packed dirt beneath his boots. The walls were reinforced here and there with fieldstone and more adobe blocks, and the roof was braced by beams that had to have been brought down from the mountain pine and spruce forests.

They were at the center of a circular chamber about thirty feet across, with tunnels about ten feet around radiating in four directions.

“This took some digging,” J.B. said thoughtfully.

“Not as much as you might think,” Bob said. “Soil’s clay and pretty stable. Moisture from the underground stream keeps it from getting too hard or crumbly. This far below the surface it’s not double hard to work.”

“Underground stream?” Krysty asked.

“What do you think feeds the springs?” Mikey countered. “Or did you think the ville was named by the tourist bureau?”

“It’s not close,” Krysty said.

“Not here,” Dark Lady replied. “It’s not what I’ve brought you down here for. Follow me.”

* * *

S
HE
LED
THEM
fifty feet down a tunnel before it ended in a wall of trash. Unmistakable trash: soda cans, brittle plastic drink cups, random metal nuts and chunks stuck tight together in a matrix of compressed, damp, decomposing paper.

The gaudy owner turned to the skeptical Mildred. “I told you. This is the secret to the wealth of Amity Springs. This is why Baron Sand wants to buy it.”

“I heard it,” Mildred said. “I see. But I don’t exactly believe it. Or
understand
it, anyway.”

“Are you calling Dark Lady a liar?” Mikey asked, his broad-jawed face darkening.

Ryan pushed in between the behemoth and Mildred. “Easy now, big fella. We’re new here, remember? And kind of in the dark. So mebbe you could help us understand.”

Bob laughed. “For a guy who looks like a stone coldheart, you do have a silver tongue in your head.”

“So I’m told,” Ryan said.

He turned to Dark Lady. “What about it?”

“Your silver tongue? I admit, now I’m intrigued.”

“What?”

“This is what we call the ‘trash face,’” she said as if she’d never made the previous comment at all. “Our most recent excavation. We’re still digging into this deposit, old-days landfill. We haven’t yet found anything too valuable. But we’re hopeful.”

Holding her lantern in front of her, she walked back the way she’d come. Ryan and company stood aside to let her pass. Then, after exchanging bemused glances, they followed her once again.

This time she turned right. Within twenty yards the tunnel suddenly widened—farther than the lantern shine initially carried.

Dark Lady halted them on what turned out to be a ten-foot ledge running halfway around a pit thirty or forty feet across. Its surface was about five feet below the ledge. It was lumpy and blocky.

Running his beam over it, Ryan saw that it was more trash. But a different kind: a lot of it looked like pieces of furniture and equipment—metal boxes, cabinets, an upended set of metal shelves, a console with half the panels and long lightless blinky lights bashed in, all partially buried in dirt and crud.

“This is one of our most productive digs,” Dark Lady said brightly. “We’ve got a lot of prime scavvy out of here.”

“Who digs all this?” Mildred asked, running her fingers in awe along the raw clay walls of the chamber.

“Gaudy employees,” Bob said. “Townsfolk. Often as not, me.”

“Sometimes even herself,” Mikey said. “Depends on what else is going on at any given moment.”

“Even the...entertainers?” Mildred asked.

“Of course,” Dark Lady said. “If they wish to earn extra pay. Also they get rewarded for coming up with good scavvy.”

“What do you find down here?” Ricky asked. His eyes were bright with the prospect of unearthing predark gadgets.

“All manner of refuse, as you can tell,” Dark Lady said. “But what we’re really looking for is predark technology.”

He turned huge dark eyes to her. “You mean...?”

She nodded. “Old-days gadgets.”

“Why would there be any of that down here, more than the occasional odd or end?” J.B. asked, tipping his hat back on his head. “I mean, why here in particular?”

“Because this was the trash dump for a top-secret military research facility,” Dark Lady said.

“All this paper and plastic junk came from some kind of whitecoat lab?” Ryan asked.

“It was quite sizable,” Dark Lady admitted. “A substantial residential community grew up here in connection with it, according to what we’ve found. It’s not just here beneath the Library Lounge, of course. Although these particular deposits are why I chose to build my establishment on this site.”

“People are always digging up stuff, all over the ville, out on the outskirts,” Bob said. “Tools, measuring equipment, components—you name it.”

“And the piece you have hired us to recover from Baron Sand?” Doc asked.

“That would be classified as ‘you name it,’” Dark Lady answered with a cool smile.

“I don’t understand,” Krysty said. “Amity Springs certainly doesn’t look as if it was built out of any predark complex I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh, it wasn’t,” Dark Lady said. “There was very little of it left after the war.”

“Why?” Ryan asked.

“Got nuked flat,” Bob said.

Mikey sniggered. “Why do you think they call this Basin ‘Nukem Flats’?”

Ryan and the others stared at him for a moment, until even the saturnine Bob head grinned a snaggle-toothed grin.

“You mean,” Doc said with exaggerated delicacy, “it is not spelled N-e-w-c-o-m-b-e?”

“That’s what I reckoned, too,” Ryan said.

“Nope,” Mikey said. “N-u-k-e-m. As in, well...”

“The first survivors to return to Santana Basin didn’t exactly have sophisticated senses of humor,” Bob said.

Krysty was looking at her man in wide-eyed horror.

“Ryan,” she said. “The
radiation!
”

By reflex he glanced at the minute radiation counter attached to the lapel of his coat. “I checked it when we came into the Basin, and off and on since,” he said. “Same as usual. High background, but no more than you find a hundred other places. Not a real hotspot by any stretch.”

“Of course not,” Dark Lady said. “Otherwise why would we choose to live here in the midst of it, however much wealth we could extract?”

“I’ve known plenty of people who’d do a lot more stupe things than that, if the payoff was big enough,” Ryan said. “But I take your point.”

“In my collection I have journals kept by some of the first to resettle the Basin after skydark,” Dark Lady said. “They estimate a 150-kiloton warhead was air-detonated approximately 1800 feet above the middle of the actual facility, which lay about a quarter mile south of here—well outside the current limits of the ville. There is a hotspot there, at the hypocenter, although it’s small. Most of the unconsumed fissionables and the reaction by-products were carried away by the wind. Where—” she shrugged her bare white shoulders “—they became someone else’s problem.”

“So you built your ville deliberately...” Mildred began.

“On top of the dump. Yes.”

“What about your fresh water supply?” Krysty asked. “Weren’t the people who built the place concerned about contamination?”

“Like they cared about that stuff in the old days,” Mikey said. For once his twin nodded grumpy agreement.

“Actually, they seem to have been careful to isolate their landfill pits from the aquifer,” Dark Lady said. “They needed fresh water, too. Lots of it.”

“So who buys the high-tech scavvy you recover?” J.B. asked. Ryan thought the shine in his eye didn’t look double different from the one in Ricky’s.

“The highest bidder,” Dark Lady said. “Shall we adjourn back to my office?”

Chapter Fifteen

“Cognac, anyone?” Dark Lady asked. She held up a cut-crystal decanter half full of amber liquid taken from a cabinet behind her. “Well, not technically cognac, I suppose. But it amounts to the same, even if it’s not imported from what used to be France.”

“Still must be some primo scavvy,” Mildred said as Dark Lady began to pour the fluid into a number of shot glasses on a maroon pottery tray painted with Day of the Dead figures an uncharacteristically silent Mikey-Bob had set on the desk in front of his mistress.

Dark Lady looked at her from under abruptly upraised brows.

“It isn’t scavvy at all,” she said with some asperity as she continued to pour a couple of fingers into each glass. “It’s made by monks downstream in the valley to the west of the Basin, in fact. They have a fortified monastery and their own vineyards, and they do quite well, thank you very much.”

“I’m sorry. I should have considered that possibility.”

Dark Lady finished pouring and set the near-empty decanter on her desk.

“You will forgive me if I overreact,” she said, still pretty briskly, as she straightened with a tumbler in hand. “You touched a sore spot. I am not a fabricator myself. That’s not my training nor inclination. But I appreciate the making of things, and its necessity.”

She raised the glass to her black-painted lips. For a moment she looked as if she was going to throw back the brandy. Then she took in a deep breath through her nose and visibly reasserted control.

She took a tiny sip. “It frustrates and infuriates me how many people in our current age seem willing to accept their fate, to live in a world constantly devolving, constantly descending into some...some pit of apathy and misery. Yes, a terrible thing happened to the world. Terrible things happen today. And terrible things have always happened.”

She took a bigger drink.

“Fatalism may have its uses,” she said. “But dwelling in it makes you a willing victim. Makes you an accomplice in your own slow destruction. That is what I am sworn to counteract. That’s what I do.”

“What
do
you do, Dark Lady?” Krysty asked.

She shot a warning green glance at Mildred, who just might’ve made an incendiary comment about Dark Lady’s trade.

“Aside from the obvious, I mean.” Krysty took her own glass in one hand as the other gestured around at the bookshelves in the neat office, and by extension, the entire gaudy.

Dark Lady was sitting back clinging to her glass with both hands and gazing down into it as if it comforted her and she was hoping it would counsel her.

“Rebuild,” she said. “With books. Knowledge. A spirit of doing, of
making,
not blankly accepting. Or just taking. And yes, our trash.”

“So if you aren’t baron, who is?” asked Ricky, who looked only briefly sulky when J.B. waved the brandy tray away from the youth.

“Nobody,” Bob said.

He set the mostly empty tray on the desk and looked a question at his employer.

“Of course,” she said. “I poured for you, as well.”

Both hands came out and picked up the two remaining shot glasses of brandy. They raised them, then the heads turned toward each other.

“Here’s looking at you,” Bob said.

“Here’s mud in your eye,” said his brother. They clinked glasses and drank.

“Why has not a power vacuum arisen, then, in the absence of a strong central figure?” Doc asked.

“What the nuke do you think Dark Lady is?” Mikey asked. He belched, set the glass down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The right one.

“Excuse you,” Bob said.

“Whatever.”

“The residents of Amity Springs seem to find their own autonomy, as individuals and family groups, sufficient.”

“She’s way too modest,” Bob said. “She pretty much runs the show. She lets everybody make up their own mind. Then they usually do it her way.”

“Not always,” she said.

“They wouldn’t if you were an iron-fisted baron, either,” Ryan stated.

She finished her glass and glanced at the decanter. With something that struck Ryan as a lot like regret she leaned forward and precisely set the empty tumbler on the tray.

“I negotiate on behalf of the ville,” she said. “And regardless of the impression the boys might give you, I do consult the others. I have no authority here.”

“She’s just always right,” Mikey said, then to his twin, “What? It’s true.”

“That’s why Baron Sand asked you to remind me of her offer,” Dark Lady said. “And why I felt able to refuse it without consultation. Again. As I have when the whitecoat representatives have made similar offers.”

“Whitecoat representatives?” Ryan asked.

“Who do you think buys the hot-stuff scavvy?” Mikey asked.

“Oh, way to go, asshole,” Bob said. “Loose lips sink shit.”

“It’s ‘ships,’” Mildred said before she could catch herself. Then because she reckoned it was too late to stuff that bullet back in the blaster, and also because she was Mildred, drove right on. “It was a saying from—”

“The Second World War,” Mikey finished smugly. “Yeah. I know. I actually read. You wouldn’t think I’d need to, with these good looks. But the boss kinda insists.”

“My brother especially likes books about war,” Bob said. “Go figure.”

“I see no great harm in revealing that fact,” Dark Lady said. “After all, our guests aren’t stupid. If they were, I wouldn’t continue to repose faith in them recovering my stolen property. The ville’s stolen property, to be exact, although I own a share.”

“You said ‘whitecoat representatives’?” J.B. asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “From a facility somewhere outside the Basin, is all I know for sure. They take some pains to disguise where they come from. For obvious reasons.”

She shrugged. “I suspect they disguise themselves, too, and that instead of hirelings negotiating on behalf of this group of whitecoats, they’re members—whitecoats themselves. But of course the prejudice against whitecoats still runs hot and wide.”

“Not without reason,” Krysty pointed out.

“Perhaps not. Still, they would risk humiliation, harm, or even outright lynching should it become widely known they are whitecoats. For my part, I’m willing to accept them so long as they follow the same rules of decent behavior I expect everyone else to. At the very least, the whitecoats who were responsible for destroying the world are long dead.”

“For the most part,” Mildred murmured.

“Amity Springs has a reputation for unusual tolerance,” Krysty said. “Of muties especially. Both Madame Zaroza and Sand mentioned it.”

“And Sand seems to have a soft spot for muties,” Mildred said, “not to mention other kinds of freaks.”

“Among Sand’s many vices and crimes,” Dark Lady said, “no one could truthfully accuse her of intolerance. Except perhaps for behavioral norms. Especially rules concerning other people’s goods.

“But as for Amity Springs, yes. While no muties live openly among us, at least overt discrimination against them is rare. For what it’s worth, and as Madame Zaroza may have told you, it’s her preference that her caravan camps well outside the limits of villes her traveling show plays. I cannot say her people would be accepted with open arms in this community. But they would be safe.”

“What about Mikey-Bob?” Ricky said. “Uh, sorry.”

“We told you, we’re not muties,” Mikey said. “We’re conjoined twins. Dumb-ass kid.”

“Sorry! Sorry!”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bob said. “It’s a good point. Easy enough mistake to make, even a dolt like you’s gotta admit.”

“It’s hard to imagine anybody discriminating too actively against you, Mikey-Bob,” Krysty said.

“Not twice,” both heads said in unison. They smiled.

Ryan thought they looked as if they might be reminiscing a bit.

“Is that your influence, Dark Lady?” Krysty asked.

“I do what I can. Let me emphasize that you use the right word—influence.”

“So, is there anything else you need to talk to us about?” Ryan asked. “We all had a long day.”

She looked at him with challenge in her dark, black-painted eyes.

“Can you recover my stolen artifact?” she said. “Please answer honestly.”

“I have no idea,” he said. “Honestly. She may not still even have it. I reckon you’re not the only one who can have dealings with these whitecoat reps or whatever they are.”

She nodded.

“Also, her place looks like a tough nut to crack. Even sneaking in for another crack won’t be triple easy. Her peasants or subjects or whatever the fireblast they are seem to like her fine. If they or their dogs find out strangers are creepy-crawling the area, they’ll run right and tell her.”

He frowned and scratched his jaw.

“One thing in line with that—I won’t tell you exactly how we are gonna play getting your doodad back. Because you got a spy in your house.”

Mikey-Bob growled in outrage.

“Are you implying—” Bob began.

“—that we’re the spies?” Mikey finished.

Ryan faced them both with a cool stare. He instantly discovered he couldn’t look both of them in the eye at once. So he settled on fixing his gaze at a point between their heads, where their ears almost touched.

“I’m only saying there is one.”

“I know,” Dark Lady said.

“We might assist you in divining the miscreant, my dear lady,” Doc said brightly.

“And dealing with him,” J.B. said. “Or her.”

Sadly, the black-clad woman shook her head.

“It isn’t that simple. If I eliminate the current spy, Sand will merely emplace another. And be aware that I’m on to her.”

She gave her head a little shake and produced a wan and wistful smile. “Well, she knows that, too. It’s one of these games of ‘I know that she knows that I know.’ And so on ad infinitum. But at the least it would alert her that something is afoot.”

“If I take your meaning correctly,” J.B. said, “don’t you think she knows that already?”

“Again—it’s a matter of degree, Mr. Dix. Heightened awareness on my part would lead immediately to the same on her part. And I should think that would be the last thing you would all want. If you do still intend to carry out my commission. You do, don’t you?”

“I said yes,” Ryan said. “If it can be gotten back, we’ll get it.”

She nodded.

Ryan sensed there was something more to her reticence to act against the baron’s spy in her house. Was it reluctance to really believe one of her own would betray her, or reluctance to harm one of her own?

“In any event,” Dark Lady said, lifting her face and her tone, “neither you nor I need specify further at this present time. I only wanted to make sure that you intended to keep trying. And that you thought there was a possibility you might succeed.”

“Oh, there’s a possibility,” J.B. said. “When you got Ryan Cawdor on the job, there’s always a
possibility
.”

“So I gather,” she said, looking at J.B. and then back at Ryan. The intensity of the way she looked at him was starting to tickle his subconscious. Not enough he was sure what it was trying to tell him, though.

“Before we all retire for our well-earned rest,” she said, “there is one final point I’d like to raise. Baron Sand is right. The Crazy Dogs have become an intolerable nuisance.”

“After that scene tonight down in the bar,” Ryan said, “it’s a safe bet they’re about to become more than that.”

“Indeed. As a consequence, I would like to extend to you the same offer Baron Sand has. Aid us in solving the Crazy Dogs problem, and I will pay you well. Over and above the agreed-upon price when you recover my property.”

“Are you crazy, D.L.?” Bob demanded.

“Crazier than usual?” Mikey said. “You wanna pay ’em for what they’re already doing?”

“You trust them?” Bob asked.

“Yes. And yes,” Dark Lady said. “I want to ensure they are dealing with more than just the Crazy Dogs that make themselves unpleasant to Sand. And at this stage, frankly, I believe it’s in our interests—especially mine—to do what we can to assure ourselves of these people’s help.”

“It’s not like they got your precious jimjam back,” Mikey said.

“It’s not as if it was an easy task I set them,” she replied. “I have little use for excuses. I don’t really think they’ve made them, so far. They have reported factually what happened.”

She looked yet again at Ryan. “And this task, at least, is eminently straightforward. And I daresay, more in line with their usual line of work.”

Ryan held her gaze a moment more. Then he tossed back the last of his brandy.

* * *

T
HEY
WERE
STILL
climbing the stairs to their rooms when Mildred blurted, “Ryan, what in the name of God’s green Earth were you
thinking?
”

“Which time?” he said.

“Well, any of it! But just for argument’s sake, let’s start with why the Hell you thought it was a good idea to blurt out every last detail of why you agreed to start working for our employer’s mortal enemy.”

“Keep it down,” Ryan said. “I don’t mind having it out. I do mind everybody else in the damn gaudy knowing all about it.”

“Don’t you remember what Dark Lady said about spies, Millie?” J.B. asked.

“That there was one here,” she said, “yeah.”

Then in a softer tone, “And so, yeah, I will turn it down. But so what if that Sand has a spy in this cathouse?”

“Don’t you reckon Dark Lady has spies of her own?” J.B. asked, as mild as always.

“J.B.’s right,” Ryan said, resisting the urge to add, “of course.” They’d gotten Mildred quieted down but not yet mollified. “Or at least, I wasn’t about to assume she doesn’t have a spy in Sand’s happy valley. And how do you think she’d feel about us when she found out we’d neglected to mention that one little detail?”

They had come onto the landing and out into the corridor where they roomed.

“Like we’d sold her,” Mildred said. “But wasn’t there a risk she’d decide that anyway when you told her? Mikey-Bob sure jumped on that conclusion with both his size-eighteen feet.”

“Yeah, a risk,” Ryan said. “Better than a head shot certainty.”

She sighed. “Well—okay.”

He turned away. “If there’s nothing else.”