Rage

TWENTY-SIX

When Raine left, loaded with a box of small incendiaries that Kvasir had bartered from someone, he looked back and watched the old man study his progress across the bridge.

The early light colored the hills in brilliant morning shades of yellow, orange, and-in the rocky shadows-a deep purple.

Kvasir had shown him on the drawings the main Dead City building used by the Authority for its experiments, which was once a hospital.

He had also warned him about what he would face.

“Muties. God. Lots of them. Hiding. Waiting. People still try to get into the city to get things. Most don’t get out.”

Then about the things that were there that Kvasir knew nothing about.

“What they did after I escaped-the experiments; what’s there now -I can’t tell you.”

So, as Raine drove, he couldn’t even imagine what lay ahead.

And there was nothing he could do about that.

The journey was free of any bandit or mutant attacks.

Almost too free, Raine thought. He spotted a few burned-out vehicles, buggies that maybe had been attacked on their way to the Dead City. As he passed one, he saw the charred skeleton of its driver, still grimly holding onto the wheel. All black bone, flesh long gone.

The flesh. Just burnt away or stripped away? Raine wondered.

He came to what remained of a highway. For a while he tried to drive on the road, but the cracks and jumbled sheets of upturned pavement made it worse than the rocky desert floor, and he quickly got off it.

It had barely looked like a highway anyway.

Kvasir had said it would be about a half day’s journey. Raine wanted to get there fast, hopefully returning to the old man’s before dark.

Then on to Wellspring.

And is that what I should be doing? He had been sent here with a mission. Did that mission now include joining the Resistance?

He remembered reading by flashlight in a cave in Tora Bora. A history of the French Resistance. How Le Resistance might have done little to deter the Nazi’s plans. And worse-it made life hell for the people of France. A hundred people executed for any Nazi or Petainiste killed.

Heavy price to fight back.

Raine’s philosophy was that, in a war or a battle, you best have a chance of winning. Otherwise the struggle and the loss of life just wasn’t worth it.

So he told himself, at that moment, he’d decide where he stood-and what he’d do-when the time came.

The broken road by his side, even more gaping pieces without any pavement, curved right. He followed alongside it.

And then-around a small hill, just ahead-he saw a city.

Raine tried to match what he now saw and what he had studied on the charts. A few towering buildings had obviously been broken in half, like branches stuck in the ground during a hurricane and roughly snapped in two.

He saw a few glimmers of reflected light, windows that still had glass. But most of the buildings had dark, gaping holes. Other buildings missed a wall or had no top. It looked as if some force had pried the roofs off like the pull tabs on a can.

The hospital, he thought. Near the center of the devastated city. He’d have to go deep into this destroyed city, the Dead City, to get there.

Did they use this place because it was well away from the cities and settlements… so they could keep their work secret?

Or was what they were doing so dangerous that this “dead city” was the only place they could do it? Suddenly he wished he had a convoy with him. A few squadrons of well-armed grunts following in his tracks. Because-sitting here in his buggy, a few sidearms and grenades his entire arsenal-it seemed absolutely insane to be going into the place alone.

He went slowly.

Crevasses mixed with chunks of broken street. Towering buildings had fallen across what were once avenues, forcing him to stop, turn around, and find another way forward.

Once, he nearly drove over what looked like merely another oversized pothole but in fact turned out to be an opening that could have eaten his buggy, a giant pit sliding down to… what?

Sewers? A subway? Underground tunnels?

And all the time, while he navigated the streets, he kept looking left and right.

He heard a sound.

At first he took it to be the wind sighing through the open structures, creating weird whistling and groaning noises that cut through the skeletons of the buildings. And some of what he heard was definitely that.

But then he heard other noises. Sporadic. Sudden. Like barks. Quick. Sharp. No wind was making that particular sound.

It was made by something alive.

He had the shotgun across his lap. His automatic rifle and handgun sat on the seat next to him.

Each few yards deeper into this city made him feel more edgy. It got to the point where he had to remind himself to be steady. Keep your eyes open. Finally saying those words aloud, as he might to a squad trailing along with him.

“Steady. Eyes open. Don’t rush.”

No, rushing could be the worst. Wanting to get in and out without proper scouting, you made mistakes.

He passed two cars, one a cab, the other an SUV. Both with their hoods open, their innards removed, paint vanished. He wondered if whoever came for the parts got out of the city.

Then, barely recognizable… a store.

God, he thought, a bodega. A few letters were still visible, and the faded sign advertised fruit, a few faint bananas sitting next to a faded apple.

He stopped and, from the buggy, looked inside the hollowed-out inside of the building. Whatever it carried had long ago vanished. Now only the ancient signs remained, a reminder of what life used to be.

He took a drink of water from the canteen Kvasir gave him. Then he ripped off a piece of the “bread,” its doughy texture a poor excuse for what he remembered.

“Loaded with good stuff,” Kvasir had said.

He thought: Will I ever taste real, fresh food again? He looked longingly at the pictures of fruit. He imagined that all those tastes, the smells, were gone forever.

All gone.

Raine started the buggy again.

The way to the hospital was blocked, as though someone had piled up a line of smashed cars and trucks, half a bus, and a container car from a train to create a wall of metal.

Odd, that they all just ended up here, cutting off the street.

He’d have to leave his buggy, climb over, make his way to the entrance of the building.

Raine looked up.

Three stories tall, and Kvasir said the data room of the hospital was at the top. The Authority had run their experiments out of this building until they couldn’t anymore.

He had heard sounds. Were there mutants here? And if so, where were they?

It was an edgy feeling that he’d had before, patrolling dark city streets in Iraq.

But never this bad.

He killed the buggy’s engine and grabbed the pack from the back. The hard drive Kvasir described would be compact and not have much weight-the pack Kvasir had given him should be perfect for the job. And, despite how quiet it was, he put a few incendiaries into the pack.

He got out, stuck the handgun behind his back and filled his pockets with shells.

He’d like a free hand, but it would be wisest to bring both the automatic rifle and the shotgun. He looked into the buggy, seeing if he’d forgotten anything.

He grabbed the tools from the back. The screwdriver. The hammer.

The tire iron.

You never know…

Quiet wasn’t always a good thing, he told himself. He slid the iron into his pack, the handle sticking out over his shoulder.

He started climbing over the wreckage that blocked the way to the abandoned hospital.

The revolving door had been smashed, the rotating blades devoid of glass.

A sign in the lobby said: BE PREPARED TO SHOW PROPER AUTHORITY IDENTIFICATION.

The place smelled. A sharp metallic stench mixed with something like oil, as if pipes had burst here. To the right he saw stairs. They were behind two security doors, both now hanging off their hinges.

Whatever-whoever-went through this building didn’t like doors.

A sea of shattered glass glistened on the floor. A reception desk had been smashed in two.

Would anything be left of their computers?

Seemed unlikely.

Holding the rifles at hip level, he took a breath, the smell still horrible, and started up the stairs.

On the second-floor stairwell-in the darkness, with scant light coming from the corridor outside-he stopped.

He heard sounds now. Nothing too loud. But there was definitely movement. A sound of steps. He tried to place it. On this floor, or below? Or maybe just above him?

Fuck, he thought.

He just knew one thing now: he definitely wasn’t alone. How many incendiaries, the handmade grenades Kvasir had given him, did he throw into the pack. Four? Had he taken enough?

And though his pockets were filled with ammo, if there were muties here, you could go through bullets so sickeningly fast with them.

You never had enough.

The sounds stopped.

He started up the stairs again.

He walked past laboratories, the once gleaming metal tables turned over, cabinets with empty shelves ripped off the walls.

And past the labs, what might have been patient rooms-save for the fact that the bed frames had leather straps all around. Whatever was put into these rooms… no one wanted them to get up.

In one room, he saw walls covered with a dark, purplish crust. Like blood spatters, the type of thing you’d find after a firefight in close quarters. Except here the color was wrong. He thought back to his fight in the desert with the mutants and remembered something.

They didn’t have the same deep red of human hemoglobin.

He squeezed his guns tightly. His companions.

Where the hell was the data center? So far he just saw rooms with echoes of whatever mayhem had taken place here.

Finally, at the end of the corridor, he came to a room without any glass. Two heavy doors lay flat in the hallway.

Something wanted in, and had ripped them off.

He looked into the room. Without electricity, it was dark. But there were two high, narrow openings, the glass shattered long ago, sending in thin shafts of light.

It would have to be enough.

He had a moment’s hesitation at the entrance. The sounds seemed to have faded.

Rats, he thought. Mice.

Except he imagined that the rats and mice of this world were long gone.

He walked into the room anyway.

Raine ran his hand along the flat metal face of the hospital computer. Kvasir had shown him which section held the hard drive. And as he touched the metal, he felt indentations in the panel.

Someone had tried smashing into this metal wall, denting it but unable to get inside.

If it had been mutants, they probably wondered what might be inside that they could eat or use as a weapon. If it had been humans, maybe their thinking was that the stuff inside would be of use in trading. No matter who, they had moved on, never getting at the guts of the computer.

He came to the third section of the machine’s casing, his hand still sliding over more indentations.

Then he crouched down.

Shit-hardly any light at all. At the bottom, the front face of the panel ended in a lip. And below that lip, three different holes with a hexagonal shape.

He put down both his guns and dug out the screwdriver from the pack.

Raine worked it into one hole-not a perfect fit, but tight enough so he could wedge the iron into the hexagonal hole, twist it to the left, and then begin to loosen the bolts holding the bottom of the panel.

He worked on each bolt.

And when the last one came loose, the metal panel popped open a few inches from the bottom.

More bolts probably on the top. But now, with that opening at the bottom, he could use the tire iron as a wedge. He slid it into the open bottom, and began to pry the metal panel open.

He kept prying it until he could slide his arm in and up.

The interior felt pristine.

Undamaged.

He felt along inside, running his fingers over the wires and chips that made up the machine’s brain.

He felt for the hard drive-a flat, book-sized rectangle, Kvasir had said. One of many backups and redundancies.

His arm buried awkwardly in the thing, Raine weighed getting something to stand on so he could get up to undo the other bolts on top.

Just get the damn thing open.

But then he felt it. Smooth. Firmly planted in a rectangular bay.

The drive. Had to be.

All the data from whatever they did here. Whatever the hell the Authority had been doing with the mutants.

He grabbed it, his fingers barely able to close around the shape, because of the bad angle. He was hurrying. He told himself to slow down.

He pulled on the drive. Nothing.

And he didn’t want to pull so hard that it snapped. Or popped out so fast that it flew up and out of his hand, smashing to the floor. Useless.

He gave it another controlled pull up, measuring the amount of strength he used.

And then he felt movement. He adjusted the pull, and the drive popped free.

Now, like removing a living creature, something being born from its mother, he withdrew his hand.

He had it. For a second he looked at the prize.

His gift to the Resistance. His ticket, too. Maybe.

Now to get out and away.

But in those seconds of looking at the drive, at the thin black brick in the shadows of the room… Raine heard the noises again.

Louder now. On this floor. Steps.

Mice, he thought. Nice try, Raine.

Something was stumbling over debris. The sound of shattered glass being stepped on.

Not too much stealth going on.

He was deep in this hospital from hell-and he was trapped.

He put the drive, the screwdriver, and tire iron into his backpack, slipped the pack on, and picked up his rifles.

There was no point waiting here for them to arrive.

Time to see what’s still alive in this “dead” city.