All Bad Things

—2—

“This section must have been sealed off when the building above collapsed,” Cyrus says. He looks up at the ceiling, rotting acoustic tiles, exposed ductwork. “Nothing but mud and rubble up there as far back as I remember.” He runs a finger through the thick layer of dust on a counter.

“Never seen a place ain’t been looted before,” Samson says. He sees a sign made of glass tubes on the wall. “What’s this say?” He knows the sign is letters, but Samson can’t read.

“K O C T,” Cyrus says. “Cocked? The hell does that mean?”

Samson shrugs. A reflection in the lantern light catches his eye. “Hey. Think I found something.” He steps around a desk next to a door at the far side of the room. Shoves it out of the way for a better look.

“Bones,” he says. No meat on them. No smell, either. What little clothing left is rotted away except for buckles and plastic. Samson nudges the bones with a toe and spies a badly corroded pistol in the corpse’s hand.

Cyrus bends down, plucks a shiny buckle and a handful of metal buttons off the corpse. Looks the gun over, tosses it aside. “Man, if there’s more like this, we’re gonna be rich. This place is a gold mine.”

Samson has already moved on. He finds a gray metal box on the wall with a big red lever on one side. He’s seen these before. Never asked what they do. No point. Every time he’s pulled a lever, nothing’s happened.

So he’s surprised when he pulls this one and the lights come on.

“Holy Jesus monkey fucking Christ,” Cyrus says. “There’s power.”

Samson blinks at the lights in the ceiling. Most of them are dead, but the ones that work buzz like pissed–off wasps. He traces a metal conduit up to the ceiling from the box.

“It’s not a generator,” he says. “Gas in a generator would have gone bad a long time ago. Solar?”

“Has to be,” Cyrus says. “Can’t be nuclear. Let’s see what else this place has.”

“Miracle it’s still workin’,” Samson says. Something about this place feels off to him. Not bad, not wrong, just different. Special, maybe. He’s having a hard time seeing it the way Cyrus sees it, as a place to loot. There’s more here than just things. He can feel it.

“I want to know what this place used to be,” Samson says.

As it turns out, it used to be a television station called Knights of the Church Triumphant.

Samson’s heard of television stations, though he’s never seen a working television. They find a series of offices and a full studio with three cameras on a set with a big desk in front of a dusty map of the world with a big red stain covering most of it. Samson’s seen a few maps like it, pictures of distant places he’s convinced don’t really exist.

“’Nother body,” he says, bending down to look at the moldering bones. The skull is a shattered mess, and it doesn’t take the stain on the map behind it to tell them what happened.

“Somebody shot him,” Cyrus says.

“Bad way to go,” Samson says.

“You know a better one?”

Samson thinks for a second. Shrugs.

“I ain’t seen any other ways in or out of this place besides the tunnel,” Cyrus says. “You?”

“No. You think this was a bunker? Panic room?”

“Probably, yeah. Those steel doors were pretty thick. Explains the power.” He puts a hand against an air vent near the floor. “Ventilation too. This place was buttoned up tight.”

“How come they didn’t come out?” Samson says. “Think they ran out of food?”

Now it’s Cyrus’s turn to shrug. “Dunno. If they got power, some of this old stuff might still work. Keep looking. See if there’s anything we can load up and sell at the Market.”

“No,” Samson says.

“Whatta ya mean, ‘no’?”

“I don’t want to tell anyone about this place yet. If we sell stuff people ain’t seen in fifty years, they’re gonna wonder where we got it. I don’t want them to know. Not yet.”

“But—”

Samson leans over Cyrus, his face twisting into a frown. “I said, no.”

“Fine. Fine. We don’t tell anybody.” Cyrus shrinks back from Samson’s gaze. “But we’re gonna have to sometime.”

“When I’m ready,” Samson says.

There are mysteries here. Samson can feel them hidden just out of sight, but something tells him there are answers, too.

Three days later Samson finds them.

“And there was a great earthquake, and the moon turned red like blood and the sun turned black like sackcloth—”

Samson hits the stop button on the VCR, freezing the image of the blond man speaking on the screen, his arms outstretched, eyes wild.

“What’s sackcloth?”

“Dunno. Cloth you make a sack out of?” Cyrus says. “Come on, hit the button again. I want to see what he says next.”

They’d found the room full of old videotapes, labels faded, plastic pitted and worn, on their first day. They didn’t know what they were or how to use them until Cyrus found a sheet of instructions laminated in plastic stapled to the wall. Samson couldn’t read them, but Cyrus figured it out pretty fast. He popped a tape into one of the machines and they watched the video, transfixed as the Right Reverend James King came on, his voice scratchy through the old, degraded speakers, preaching something about end times and the sins of Communists. Given that he was sitting behind the desk in the studio in front of the giant wall map, they figured this was the guy they’d found who’d had his head blown off.

Each tape they watched was pretty much the same thing, though who King railed against changed from tape to tape. Communists, Washington Elites, Pinkos, Women’s Libbers, Reaganomics, Jimmy Carter, Sesame Street. Samson had never heard of any of these things before, but if James King were to be believed, they were responsible for the destruction of civilization.

“Friends,” James King says on the screen, his blond, moussed hair as still as a helmet as he bobs up and down in his seat, “today we are going to talk about the real end times. Not just what the Good Book says, but real, absolute, no–shit end times.”

This is different from the other tapes Samson has watched. At about this point King would take callers who would ask him about the Rapture, or his assistant Mindy, a woman with hair almost as shiny and blond as King’s, would come on and talk about how the Women’s Libbers were going against “God’s plan for the weaker sex.”

“Friends, there is a reckoning coming. In the waning days of this century, there will be a calamity the likes of which no one has ever seen. Brother will turn against brother, nation against nation. The bombs will come a–crashing down and lay waste to this world like the stinking Sodom that it is.”

“Hey,” Samson says. “You think he—”

“Quiet. I want to hear this.”

“In the darkening days of 1998,” King says, punctuating each point with a fist slapped into an open palm, “the missiles will fly, the bombs will drop, and everything we know, every dark and stinking sinner, every whore and whoremonger, every sodomite, every devil, every sick and perverted nightmare will be wiped clean from the Earth in a storm of fire and radiation that will sweep across the globe!”

“Holy shit,” Cyrus says, grabbing the tape case and rubbing dust off its cover. “This tape’s from 1996.”

Samson sits there slack–jawed. “He called it. He called the Apocalypse.” Everybody knew when the bombs fell, when the missiles flew. Even now, seventy–five years later where there were no schools or lessons or teachers to teach them, people learned that the sky turned dark with ash and fire in 1998.

“And this is how it should be,” King says. “This is how it’s meant to be. The world is sick with sin, and the only cure is fire and blood. You know that I won’t let you be swept up in this plague of fire and ash. Some of you will be called up by the Rapture instead. God will call you home before the flames burn everything to the ground. But some of you, some of you will be left behind to finish God’s work. Not a punishment, but an honor. He will call upon you to bring fire and retribution to those who refuse to be saved. And I, your Shepherd, will show you the way.” King leans forward, spreading his hands. “But we’re going to have to prepare. Bunkers and food and weapons with which to do the Lord’s work, and as you know, those things take money—lots of money. Which is why I want you to call the number on your screen right now. The end times are coming, my children. And only your dollars can save those left behind.”

Samson and Cyrus stare at the screen, dumbfounded, as numbers flash by and the announcer shouts about credit cards and toll–free numbers. Samson had always heard crackpots going on about how God had made the Apocalypse happen, but he never paid attention to them. What did they know? How could they be any more privy to God’s plan than anybody else? After all, wouldn’t they be in the shit, too?

But this was different. This man had predicted the end years before it actually happened.

“Put in another tape,” Samson says, his voice quiet. “I wanna know more.”