Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (56 page)

“Aren’t,” whispers Molly.

“But we
aren’t
lost,” Samuel sighs and rolls his eyes behind the smudgy lenses of his old blowtorch goggles

“It won’t take long,” says Patrick Henry, and so Samuel kicks at the dirt and Molly frets while he squints into the compass’ mirror and studies the target, needle, and guide line, finding the azimuth pointing 270˚ from true north.

“Satisfied?” Samuel asks after a minute or two.

“Well, we’re off by…”

“We’re
not
lost,” Samuel growls, then turns and stalks away, as though he means to leave the other two behind. He never would, but it works, and soon they’re trotting along to catch up.

“It’s not as though we can see the sun,” Molly says, a little out of breath. “It’s not as if we can see the mountains.”

“I know the way to the station,” Samuel tells her. “That’s why Miss picked me, because I know the way.”

“It pays to be sure.”

“Fine, Molly. Now we’re sure. Shut up and walk.”

“You don’t have to be such a bloody, self-righteous snit about it,” she tells Samuel.

“Yes he does,” sneers Patrick Henry, and Samuel laughs and agrees with him.

The going is slower than usual, mostly due to deep new washouts dividing many of the thoroughfares. Patrick Henry takes a bad tumble in the one bisecting Davies and Milton streets, where the dead city’s namesake waterway has jumped its banks and carved a steep ravine. But he doesn’t break or even sprain anything, only almost loses the revolver Miss has entrusted to him. Samuel and Molly pull him free of the mud and helped him back up to street level, Samuel admonishing him for being such a clumsy fool every step of the way. Patrick Henry doesn’t bother to say otherwise. The three sit together a few minutes with Molly, catching their breath and staring upstream at the wreckage that had once been Beeman’s Mercantile before the building slid into the washout.

It’s afternoon before they reach the airship, and Samuel has begun to worry about getting back before their eight hours are up, before Miss writes them off for dead. Besides, with the dogs on the prowl, he knows from experience that every passing minute decreases their chances of not meeting up with a pack of the mongrels.

“It’s enormous,” Molly says, gazing up at the crash, her voice tinged with awe. All three were too young to recall the days when the Count von Zepplin’s majestic airships plied the skies by the hundreds. And this was the first time that either Molly or Patrick Henry had actually seen a dirigible, other than a couple of pictures in one of Miss’ books.

“It’s like a skeleton,” says Patrick Henry, and Samuel supposes it is, though the comparison has never before occurred to him. Once, almost a year ago, he’d crawled through the ruins of the late Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy’s museum on Kipling Street. He’d seen bones there, or stones in the shape of bones, and Miss had explained to him afterwards that they were the remains of wicked sea monsters that lived before Noah’s Flood and which were not permitted room on the Ark (he was polite and didn’t ask her why sea creatures had drowned in the deluge). The petrified bones had much the same appearance of the crushed and half-melted steel framework sprawling before them.

Samuel points to the narrow vertical tear in what’s left of the gondola. It’s black as pitch beyond the tear. “The larder isn’t too far in, but it’s rough going. So, we’d best – ”

“I’m not going in there,” declares Patrick Henry, interrupting him.

“Hell’s bell’s you ain’t,” says Samuel, whirling about to face the other boy.

“Aren’t,” Molly says so quietly they almost don’t hear her. “You
aren’t
going in there.”

“You shut up, Molly, and yes he is most certainly does. I don’t care if he’s a damned yellow-bellied coward. there ain’t no
way
I can carry all the food we need out alone.”

“I
won’t
go in there, Samuel.”

Samuel shoves Patrick Henry with enough force that the younger boy almost loses his balance as falls to the tarmac.

“You will, or I’ll kick your sorry ass to Perdition and back again.”

“Then you do that, Samuel. ’Cause I
won’t
go in, no matter how hard to beat me, and that’s all there is to it.”

“You slimy, piss-poor whoreson,” snarls Samuel between his teeth, and then he knocks Patrick Henry to the ground and gives him a sharp kick in the ribs.

There’s a click, and Samuel turns his head to see Molly pointing her Colt at him. With both thumbs, she drawn back the hammer and cocked the gun, and has her right index finger on the trigger. The barrel gleams faintly in the dingy light of the day. Her hands are trembling, and she’s obviously having trouble holding the revolver level.

“You leave him alone, Samuel. Don’t you dare kick him again. You step away from him, right this minute.”

“Molly, you wouldn’t dare,” Samuel replies, narrowing his eyes, trying hard to seem as if he’s not the least bit afraid, even though his heart’s pounding in his chest. No one’s ever held a gun on him before.

“Is this the day you want to find out if that’s for true, Samuel?” she asks him, and her hands shake a little less.

Samuel turns away from her and stares down at Patrick Henry a moment. The boy’s curled into a fetal position, and is cradling the place where the kick landed.

“Fine,” says Samuel. “If you’re lucky, maybe the dogs will find the both of you. That’d be better than if Miss hears about this, now wouldn’t it.”

“You just don’t hit him no more.”

“You just don’t hit him
again,”
Samuel says, and the act of correcting her makes him feel the smallest bit less scared of the gun. “You might be a slattern, but you don’t have to sound like one, Molly Peterson.”

Patrick Henry coughs and squeaks out a few unintelligible words from behind his respirator.

“May the dogs find you both,” Samuel says, because there aren’t many worse ways left to curse someone. He puts his back to the both of them and climbs into the dark gondola. It’ll take time for his eyes to adjust, and he leans against a wall and listens to Molly consoling Patrick Henry. Samuel grips the butt of his own Colt, tucked into his waistband.

If I had another bullet,
he thinks, but leaves it at that. Miss will take care of them, and oh, how he’ll gloat when the coward and the turncoat bitch get what’s coming to them. Unless, like he said, the dogs find them first. He thinks,
Molly knows all about the dogs firsthand,
then chuckles softly at his unintentional pun, and begins making his way cautiously, warily, through what’s left of the passengers’ observation deck.

4.

As has been said, Miss has told all her charges there’s no point dwelling on what was, but has been forever lost.

“That time is never coming back,” she said, on the occasion Samuel ever asked her about how things were before the War. “We have to learn to live in
this
age, if we’re going to have any hope of survival.”

“I only want to know
why
it happened,” he persisted. “Didn’t everyone have everything they wanted, everything they needed? What was there to fight over?”

She smiled a sad sort of smile and tousled his hair. “Some folks had everything they needed, and a lot more besides. You might look up at the dirigibles, or see the brass and silver clockworks, or the steam rails, or go to a great city and wonder at the shining towers. You could do that, Samuel, and imagine the world was good. You could listen to the endless promises of scientists, engineers, and politicians and believe we lived in a Golden Age that would last forever and a day, where all men were free from want. But those men and women were arrogant, and we all swallowed their hubris and made it our own. Ever wonder why folks who never went near a foundry or flew an ‘thopter, people who never even got their hands dirty, used to wear goggles?”

“No,” he told her, after trying very hard to figure out why they would have. Admittedly, it didn’t make much sense.

“Because wearing goggles made us feel like we were more than onlookers, Samuel. It made us feel like we all had our shoulder to the wheel, that we’d all
earned
what we had. We wanted to believe there
was
finally enough for everyone, and everyone did, indeed,
have
everything they needed.”

“But they didn’t?”

“No, Samuel, they didn’t. Not by half. We didn’t talk about Africa, the East Indies, or the colonies elsewhere. They didn’t talk about the working conditions in the mines and factories, or the Red Indian reservations, the people who suffered and died so that a few of us could live our lives of plenty. Most of all, though, they didn’t talk about how
nothing
lasts forever – not coal, not wood, not oil or peat – and how one nation turns against another when it starts to run out of the resources it needs to power the engines of progress. They didn’t tell us about the weapons the Czar and America and Britain, China and Prussia and lots of other countries were building. Our leaders and scholars and journalists didn’t talk about these things, Samuel, and very few of the lucky people never bothered to ask why.”

“So, we weren’t good people?”

She stared at him silently for almost a full minute, and then she said, softly, “We were
people,
Samuel. And that’s as good an answer as any I can offer you,” she told him, then said they’d talked quite enough and sent him away to bed. He paused outside the room where the boys sleep and looked back. She was still sitting on the concrete bench, and had begun to weep quietly to herself.

5.

Lugging his bulging burlap bag loaded with cans and bottles back through the perilous gauntlet of Deck B, Samuel isn’t thinking about the conversation with Miss. The sweat stung his eyes, and his head ached from having bumped it hard against a sagging I-beam. His back aches, too, and he’s lost track of time in the darkness of the gondola. He isn’t thinking about much at all except getting back before their eight hours has passed, and how many they might have left. He has room to worry about that, and he has energy to fume about Molly Peterson and Patrick Henry Olmstead, the dirty cowards shirking their duty and leaving him to do all the hard work. He takes satisfaction in knowing what Miss will do to them back at the bunker, how they’ll go a day and a night without meals, how everyone will be forbidden to speak to them for a week. Miss doesn’t tolerate deadbeats and cowards.

Samuel’s footsteps and breath are so loud, and he’s so lost in thought, that he’s almost reached the tear in the hull before he hears the dogs. He eases the burlap bag to the floor and slowly draws the Colt from inside his jeans and his slicker. His hand is sweaty, and feels loose on the gun’s stock. All at once, the snarling and barking and low, threatful growls are so loud that the dogs might as well be inside the dirigible with him. He knows better, knows it seems that way because he wasn’t listening before. He was breaking another of Miss’ rules: never, ever lower your guard. But he had. He’d become distracted, and here was the cost.

“Damn it all,” he says, but the words are no more than the phantoms of words riding on a hushed breath. He knows well enough how sharp are the ears of the packs. He puts his back to the wall and edges towards the breach. Samuel knows he should retreat and seal one of the hatchways behind him, then pray the dogs go on about some other business before too long. But Molly and Patrick Henry are out there. He
left
them out there, and all his anger is dissolved by the fierce, hungry noises the dogs are making.

As cautiously as he can, Samuel peers through the tear, and sees that the dogs are wrestling over what’s left of his dead companions. The pack is a terrible hodgepodge of timber wolves, coyotes, the descendants of dogs gone feral, and hybrids of all these beasts. In places, their fur has been burned away by the rain, and some are so scarred it’s difficult to be sure they are any sort of canine at all. Two of the smaller dogs are wrestling over one of Molly’s legs, and a gigantic wolf is worrying at a gaping hole in Patrick Henry’s belly. Samuel wants to vomit, but he doesn’t. He almost cocks his revolver, but, instead, he drags his eyes away from the sight of the massacre and quietly returns deeper into the bowels of the crashed airship.

I never heard a gunshot,
he thinks, wiping at his eyes and pretending that he isn’t crying. He’s too old and too brave to cry, even at the horror outside the gondola.
I never heard even a single shot, much less two.

But he knows the dogs are fast, and it’s likely as not that neither Molly nor Patrick Henry had time to get a shot off before the animals were on them. Not that it would have made any difference, unless they’d used the guns on themselves. Which is what a clever, clever scavenger does, when a pack finds them.
For yourself, or for one of the dogs. That has to be your decision,
Miss had told him, as she always did. But he’d always understood she
meant
the former, and the second half of her instructions were only an acknowledgment of his choice in the matter.

With the hatch sealed, the corridor is completely black, and Samuel sits down on the cold steel floor. At least he can’t hear the dogs any longer. And at least he won’t starve, unless he can’t find his way back to the storeroom and manage to fumble about in the dark kitchen until he finds a can opener. Not that he dares stay long enough to grow hungrier than he is already. Miss’ silver pocket watch is ticking, and for the first time it occurs to Samuel to wonder why she only allots the expeditions beyond the bunker only eight hours. Why not nine, or twelve, or fifteen?

Maybe she’s not much saner than the men and women who started the War,
he thinks, then pushes the thought away. It’s easier to dupe himself and credit her with
some
reason or another for the time limit.
Like all those people who never got their hands dirty, but wore goggles,
he thinks, tugging his own pair from off his face. He does it with enough force that the rubber strap breaks. Samuel drops them to the floor, and they clatter noisily in the darkness. Then he sits in the lightless corridor, and he listens to the beat of his heart, and he waits.