The End Has Come (34 page)

There was a person in the darkness below.

And that person was hurt.

Well, most likely. She could construct all sorts of conspiracy theories and worries about decoys and traps, but Occam’s razor suggested that somebody else had been attracted by the presence of food, and had either triggered a trap or just — in the dark — stumbled into the gaping hole in the ground.

Yana risked bending down, dropping her hand below the line of the ground, and squeezing her fingers tightly, briefly, on the activator of her minilume. It glowed with a pleasant cool light, illuminating a bare pit or trench paved in flagstones and featuring a fieldstone retaining wall to keep it from collapsing in on itself. On the far side were the doorways to the three sheds or root cellars. They were all closed.

Yana heard the moan again.

This time, she had been listening. Waiting. She thought the sound emanated from the leftmost of the sheds, which was the one closest to the sea. Another quick squeeze on her lume, and she saw that each shed had a small casement window about four feet off the ground. The three windows were not identical. They had obviously been constructed from whatever materials were available, then hinged to a custom-built window frame when the time came to install them in the sheds.

The one on that leftmost shed was propped open at the bottom.

As if in response to her light, Yana heard a brief intake of breath. The moaning stopped.

Silence.

She hadn’t seen anything that looked like a trap in her brief glimpses. Now, though, she palmed the lume and waited for her eyes to adapt. She moved her head from side to side, scanning — looking with her peripheral vision, which was sometimes better in the dark.

There. A faint silvery runnel reflected the glow of the night sky. Elongated, razor-thin, like when sunlight splayed along a length of spider-line: a tripwire strung across the bottom riser of the stairs.

All right,
Yana thought. So if you saw that and wanted to avoid it, what would you do next? You’d drop down, right, over the edge on the opposite side?

Yana waited for the lighthouse beam and matched it with a quick flicker of her lume, peering down into that pit. The big flagstone at the far end of the pit had a funny, plasticky shine to it. And it was suspiciously clean, without the scraps of dead grass and litter of sand that marked the other flagstones. Plenty of birdshit, but some of the shit had a sort of funny, elongated splatter pattern.

The flagstone was on hinges. It was designed to drop whoever jumped down onto it into an oubliette. Or possibly into a pit of hungry tiger sharks and rotating knives, which would probably be more efficient in the long run, and probably just about as much fun. No need to haul any prisoners — or bodies — out of a hole in the ground that way. You’d save on rigging pulleys.

She checked again, but those were the only two traps she saw. The moaning had stopped completely, as if the moaner were biding their time, or simply playing dead.

Yana shrugged, checked her pack straps, made sure the lume’s loop was fast around her middle finger, and walked slowly down the stairs, pausing to step over the tripwire as gingerly as a cat walking through deep snow before testing the pit-bottom with one toe. It held. She shifted her weight onto it.

It held, still.

All right then,
she thought, and lifted her trailing foot high over the wire.

She’d need something noisier than her crowbar to get through any of these doors quickly. Though she could probably shatter the frames. But that one down on the end, with the open window . . .

The window wouldn’t have been wide enough for her to wriggle through before the Eschaton. Hell, she wouldn’t have had the strength to boost herself up to it. She’d been a comfortable, wide-hipped graduate student then, and not the lean predator she was now. Yulianna had always been the skinny one — the hot one — back in the day, and Yana had been the smart one. Because most people were too blind to notice that her sister was just as smart as Yana was.

She missed that margin of safety. Hell — insulation, stored food — it was probably the reason she’d survived this long.

She flashed her lume again and inspected the window ledge for imbedded glass and razor blades and the like. She craned her neck to see upward, to check for any sign of, oh, something like a guillotine suspended on the other side of it. She poked the crowbar in, just to be sure.

Nothing.

“Lazy,” she said.

In fairness, she supposed, the bunker folks came in and out of this place every few minutes during the day. Even in the post-apocalyptic world, you wouldn’t want your toddlers playing around guillotines.

She hooked the window open with the crowbar and waited.

Nothing. Nothing but the sound of the sea.

“Hey,” she called softly through the window, with a preparatory glance toward the stair. If somebody in there were inclined to raise the alarm, she could hoof it out of here pretty quickly. She’d just have to remember to hurdle that tripwire. She could shine the light in and take a peek, but to see in she’d have to silhouette herself against the sky. And the light was a bullet-magnet, if the person inside were armed and inclined to open fire.

Talking was safer. It didn’t require line of sight.

“Hey,” she stage-whispered again, having the peculiar sensation that the darkness was listening. “Is there somebody hurt in there?”

A pause, and then a cautious voice. “Not badly hurt,” a woman replied. “I’m tied up, though. What’s your name?”

“Yana,” Yana said. “Yours?”

“Yulianna.”

Yana stopped dead, brought up sharp. It was her sister’s name.

This was not her sister’s voice or phrasing, though, and she forced herself to take a breath and continue on. “Are there any traps? If I come through the window?”

“No,” Yulianna said. “It’s safe. They propped it open so I could breathe, but it’s cold in here. Are you here to steal food?”

“Is that what happened to you?”

“Sort of,” the woman said. “Here, let me get out from under the window.”

There was a scraping sound and a couple of thumps. “Ow,” the woman said.

“I’m coming in,” Yana warned. She jumped up, got her belly on the window frame, and slithered through. The hard part was not falling on her face on the floor, but she managed a sort of controlled slide and caught herself with her hands. Her feet hooked the window frame. Carefully, she unhooked them one at a time and brought them down to the floor, then stood.

“I’m going to make a light,” she said, and squeezed her lume.

She’d turned the ring around so the bright part was inside the curve of her hand, so the lume mostly shone through her flesh, producing a macabre effect. Even that was enough light that the woman on the floor winced and turned her face away, which told Yana how long she’d been sitting in the dark. The stranger didn’t shield her eyes with her hands because she couldn’t; her wrists were zipped to her ankles with plastic ties.

The woman couldn’t have been as hungry as Yana and her sister were. She still had some flesh on her bones, not just sinew and ropy muscle. Her hair was red, and shoulder-length, though it seemed patchy and staring as if she’d been ill. Or perhaps it was just matted from sleeping on the dirt floor, or from lack of general care.

“What did you steal?”

“Mussels,” the woman said. “From the frames. The aquaculture. I dove for them.” She looked defensive. “They were from before the Eschaton, and just sort of got left there. A little engineered ecosystem of kelp and shellfish.”

“Huh,” Yana said. She gave her lume two quick short squeezes so it would stay on without her attention. Impressed despite herself, she said, “Did you have a drysuit?”

“Just a lot of practice,” the woman said.

Yana tried to think of her as Yulianna. But the dry hair, the shadows under bruised skin . . . she couldn’t look at them, and think that name. It was a common name. But every time Yana tried to wrap that name around this stranger, her mind sheered off.

So she said instead, “Is that really . . . stealing?”

“They thought so,” the woman said, jerking her chin at the door. “You know, this is a great conversation, but maybe you could . . . untie me?”

“Right,” Yana said. “Do you solemnly swear not to decapitate me or something?”

“I do so swear,” the woman said, with mock gravitas.

Yana knelt beside her, pulled her clam knife from the sheath in her boot, and jerked the short razor-sharp blade through the plastic straps.

“Ahh,” the woman said. She flopped her hands against her chest as if they were wet feather-dusters. “Devil take it,” she said. “Nothing. Feels like a couple of hot squid on the ends of my arms. I hope I don’t get gangrene.”

Then she moaned sharply, bit her lip to stem the noise, and curled up around the arms, rocking back and forth with her face distorted by pain. “Ow, that hurts. Ow, ow, pancakes! Ow.”

Yana watched, thinking there was nothing she could do for her except bear witness. It made her uncomfortable to watch the other woman’s pain, so she turned her back. She played her lume over the barrels and crates and shelves, spotting food, gear —

“Is any of this booby-trapped, do you know?”

“Ah, ah. Don’t touch the two-way radios, owww!”

But the
ows
were getting softer. Finally, Yu . . . the
woman
made a sound that was probably a sigh expressed through gritted teeth and rolled forward onto her hands and knees.

“Anoxic pain,” she said. “Wow, that was not fun.”

“You’re a doctor?” Yana asked, interested. That was useful.

“Biologist,” the woman said. “Marine.”

Well, that explained the swimming.

“Right,” Yana said, examining the shelves. She needed valuable things, trade goods. Travel equipment. And food. There was a metal box labeled “wind-dried fish” that reeked promisingly. She grabbed that and opened it. Stuffing papery pieces of whitefish into her mouth, she started chewing, then filled up one of the side compartments in her pack while the pungent flavor flooded her mouth with saliva. The texture was a bizarre combination of leathery, spongy, and crisp. This was just protein, though, and you’d starve to death on only that. She handed the box over to the woman — since her hands seemed to be working now — and found a bag of dried apples next to it. She appropriated the whole thing. They were old, stiff and brown. Probably not pre-Eschaton, though. Dried fruit wouldn’t last
that
long.

Trade goods.

“Fat,” Yana said.

The other woman was now chewing on her own slice of fish. She rubbed her hands through her hair, where her fingers stuck in the mats. She wriggled them free, then rolled a cat’s cradle of shed strands down her fingers, wadded it up and tossed it away. There was sea salt still crusted on her skin and along the hems of her clothing, and it seemed to be causing purple sores around her hairline.

Yulianna,
Yana thought, and turned away.

“There’s salted blubber up there,” the woman said. “And some pemmican.”

Yana was grateful for something plausible to do with her hands. “You inventoried the place in the dark?” Yana found the clothing, packed neatly in old crates along the back wall. She rummaged through it, finding warm wool trousers that would fit Yulianna —
her
Yulianna, who was thinner than this one, thinner still even than Yana was — base layers, technical fleece. She took what was warm and light.

Yana found sugar and flour, too, and took a five pound bag of each. She layered clothing on; she’d put her pack back on
after
she dealt with the window. Rooting around in the clothes, she located a second rucksack — army issue, old, the canvas worn through in small fraying squares — and began to pack a load for the other woman, too.

“I’ve been here two days,” the woman said. “Some light gets in in the daytime.” She had made it up to kneeling and was working one of her feet flat in front of her. Grabbing the ledge of a shelf, she stood.

Yana was ready to catch her, and she did stagger. But once she was up, she seemed pretty stable. She looked around. “It’s hard to see in here.”

“Sorry,” Yana said. “I’ve just got the one lume. Here.”

She handed the woman the bag. “Can you manage that?”

The woman hefted it, winced, and started to struggle into the straps before glancing at the window and deciding that she would wait until they were outside, as well. “I’d better. We’re taking a lot to travel light.”

“I have to bring food back,” Yana said. “For my sister.”

The woman raised her eyebrows, then gave Yana a nod after she’d thought about it for a while. “Good girl. What else are you looking for?”

“Trade goods,” Yana said. “Something valuable.” She was starting to feel the pressure of time. Surely somebody would come to check on the prisoner soon. Or worse, notice the lights moving around in here. But they couldn’t forage in the dark.

“Well.” The woman stepped aside with a magician’s flourish.

Yana stared. Behind where the woman had been standing was a shelf holding dozens of jars of clear liquid. Yana snatched one up — they were all mismatched, old jam jars and who knew what; the one in her hand had once held marmite, by the shape of it — and unscrewed the top. She didn’t get it all the way off when the smell hit her.

“Alcohol.”

The woman nodded, smiling tight.

“Grab as much as you carry,” Yana said.

Loaded up, the woman with her sister’s name stepped toward the door while Yana killed the lume. The woman was still limping slightly but didn’t complain, and seemed to be loosening up somewhat. She reached the door and tested the handle.

The door swung open with an oiled click.

Yana shrugged the pack up her arms. “Good. Just as glad not to do the window again.”

She stepped forward, but the woman stopped Yana five steps from the bottom of the stairs. “Careful,” she said. “There’s a monofilament a couple of centimeters over the wire you can see.”

A horrible shock of realization settled in Yana’s stomach. The expression must have registered even in the semi-dark. “Missed it on the way in?”