Last Ranger (11 page)

None of the truckers paid him any particular heed, although he did have to veer sharply to the far side of the road each time
they came barreling along as they didn’t seem to care too much whether or not they sent his puny bike flying off into the
prairie dotted with H-bomb craters like immense sores from a plague. He was just about ten miles from town when he saw several
bomb craters very close up ahead. They looked a little odd, as if large parts of them had been dug away. As Stone came up
to the top of a ridge and looked out over the range ahead he did a double take.

Oil fields stretched off for miles. Black swamps of bubbling oil oozed up everywhere. There were no oil rigs of the kind that
he had seen in the past, but just men wading around in the stuff with rubber suits on, shoveling it into barrels, which were
being carted off to furnaces of some kind off to one side of the vast field. It was a scene out of hell, with the black figures
struggling everywhere like an army of ants, looking as if they were going to be sucked under at any moment. Chimneys topped
crude-looking refining plants that burned with long tongues of blue flame shooting up hundreds of feet into the sky, releasing
smoke and noxious odors that covered the whole region.

Stone let his fingers edge toward the trigger of his gun just in case there was trouble ahead. As he drew closer to the great
oil swamp he could see what had happened. Two bombs had gone off close to where there had been a whole slew of real wells.
The blast had sent every bit of equipment flying off like so many leaves in the wind. But they had also ripped open the huge
underground reservoir. Now it bubbled up everywhere, an ocean of thick crude oil, like taffy. He watched the men sludging
through the stuff like it was quicksand, filling buckets, then dragging them to huge vats which were set on wheels and moved
atop tracks of some sort. The tracks, built up on wooden stilts, weaved through the oil field and men were pushing great loads
of muck down the tracks over to the burning refineries a mile off.

It seemed a waste of manpower, Stone mused, as he watched the operation. Why couldn’t they just use industrial equipment?
But as he saw one of the men fall off a track headfirst right into the swamp of black sludge, he saw why. Men were cheaper.
The slime who ran the show didn’t have the slightest concern for human life. The man sank under, without even having the chance
to scream and there was not the slightest attempt at rescue, as it took too long to grope around the deep sections of oil
to find anyone to make it financially feasible for the operators of the field to do so.

Another worker was quickly put behind the steel-wheeled vat and with three other men there they continued to push their load
down the tracks toward the refinery. It took only seconds to replace the dead. Even as Stone drove on, he saw a man with a
bucket about a hundred yards in from the road step forward and disappear into the depths. The oil fields had been so torn
up by the bomb blasts that it was uneven, jagged in its bottom ground. The going could suddenly get much steeper, like stepping
off the Continental Shelf, only you couldn’t swim in this stuff no matter how many merit badges you had. Not through one black
inch. And Stone realized that was part of the fun of being an oilman. And he saw why they were well-paid and why they ran
to the bar the moment they hit town. You couldn’t get a brain-damaged mule to venture out in those black death pits. Only
men.

T
HE stench got even worse as he drove past the chim-neys burning off impurities in a dozen extremely primitive refining factories.
Stone had taken a trip through one once in a high school class trip and he remembered how complex it had been with pipes and
tanks running off every damned place. This thing looked more like a bunch of country stills for making moonshine. But somehow
they were producing something. He slowed to a crawl to watch the fiery process and could see that out of the bottoms of the
round stacks stuff was being pumped into waiting trucks that ate up whatever was slugged into their innards. It was hard to
believe that they could be running vehicles with this stuff. He wouldn’t put it in the Harley. No way, José.

Even as he watched, Stone saw guards on the inside of the gate that fenced the entire oil field start walking over to see
what he was up to. They clearly didn’t like anybody eyeing their operation. Stone didn’t feel like talking and just turned
the throttle up. The bike shot ahead and he kept it going fast for the next mile or so. No one followed.

The storekeeper had said just keep going past the fields to find the locale of the freaks. Stone could see why he couldn’t
be more specific than that. The place was a wreck. It looked as if some vast military complex that went on for miles once
existed here. Steel pipes and the remains of buildings, fences and all kinds of high tech gear now rusted and twisted like
yesterday’s toys filled the landscape. He had to slow the bike down and slowly make his way through the obstacle course of
debris, which formed immense mounds. Whatever the hell had been here had been big, and important. The area, like the oil fields,
had clearly had the shit bombed out of it.

He drove the bike up a high mound of rubble that rose forty feet with a shallow enough angle so that he could throttle the
Harley right up the side. On top he brought it to a stop amidst the bricks and pieces of steel frame and looked around. The
wreckage extended off on every side. What the hell had this place been? Air force base, missile complex? All this was the
same kind of steel and concrete debris as if it had been homogenized by some great wrecking machine. Stone had seen the mushroom
clouds of some of those “wrecking machines.” They did their job well.

Seeing that he was getting nowhere fast he parked the bike, kicking down both wide kickstands so the bike was well balanced
on the somewhat uneven wreckage beneath. He went around to the back and opened the dog’s box. The pit bull was still snoozing
away like Sleeping Beauty. What the hell was the dog waiting for—for him to dangle a frog under its nose? Stone knew he was
pissed off just because he felt so helpless. But how long could the animal not even eat or crap or do anything?

He got out the bottle of tetracycline the storekeep had sold him and broke the seal. He sniffed hard at the contents, making
sure they didn’t have that rotten smell that so much of what he found and opened did. Most of the leftovers from five and
a half years ago when manufacturing had basically ceased, had reached the limits of their storage life. Stone took out one
of his Spam tins. His mother had loved the stuff, finding ten thousand ways to cook and disguise Spam back in the bunker.
Stone had hated every one of them. Now he was eating the stuff half the time because he had no choice. He mashed some of the
pink meat up in a metal cup and then added some water, making it a gravy. He broke open four of the antibiotic capsules and
sprinkled their white powder through the gunk, mixing it around until everything was all the same color and the whole thing
looked extremely unappetizing. He knew if the animal was awake it would have raised quite a stink about having to chew down
this gunk. It wasn’t going to get the chance this afternoon.

Stone turned the dog’s head sideways to make sure it didn’t choke and started doling the stuff out in a spoon, one little
bit at a time so it didn’t drown on lunch. After every few helpings he lifted its head and moved its body and neck around
trying to make it swallow. After almost half an hour only about half made it in. But Stone was satisfied with even that much.
And when he opened the dog’s jaws and looked inside nearly gagging from the foul breath, he saw that what had gotten inside
had made it down the gullet. Maybe he should take up a second career of veterinary medicine.

By the time he was done Stone saw that although it couldn’t have been past one the sky was already darkening quickly to the
north. Another storm, just what he needed. He packed everything up and closed the dog in, noticing that he’d let the mutt
get pretty dirty. He had to clean it up and soon. It was becoming a scandal how filthy the creature was, the wildlife for
miles around was talking. He vowed to not let another sun set without giving the pit bull a bath.

Stone mounted up and eased the bike forward, riding down the far slope as if he were on a sled going down at nearly a sixty
degree angle. Then the bottom of the mound of rubble evened out and guided him over the more evenly strewn out wreckage. He
moved along slowly through the remains of a lost civilization looking for he didn’t even know what. He’d know when he found
it. A lot of the fallen structures still retained their original shapes and were bizarre-looking to say the least. Huge round
steel globes, black boxes twenty feet high that had antennae poking out of every inch of their surfaces. Everything looked
like it had been aboard the Starship
Enterprise.
Whatever had been transpiring here had been of the highest technological order.

“Star Wars,” Stone muttered into the dusty breeze. Maybe this was the control center they were building to maneuver all those
satellites and lasers, and whatever they were throwing up there just before the war and the collapse. If so, the satellites
must now be wandering around aimlessly up there looking for Mom. Probably start falling down to Earth over the next few years,
if they hadn’t already. He prayed they weren’t nuclear, too. Or there could be a secondary series of atomic detonations far
after the original fact. That would doubtless tip Earth’s already severely poisoned environment that much further to the side
of total extinction and annihilation. What a legacy coming back to haunt mankind.

The remains were fascinating, and he rolled along at hardly more than a turtle’s pace inspecting the larger debris of once
immense and interconnected equipment—computers, telecom units. Suddenly amidst a pile of girders that had been twisted around
into pretzels Stone saw a four-drawer metal file that looked almost untouched. He stopped the bike and walked over, reaching
under and grabbing hold of the thing. It was heavy, but he dragged it sideways from beneath the bottom beam and set it upright.
He opened the top file, and to his surprise, it slid right out as if wanting to release its store of information.

Stone leafed through the folders within and whistled. “Top Secret.” “Ultra Top Secret.” “For Security AAA Clearance Only.”
This shit was as hot as it came. He took out a few and looked through them. He was right—Star Wars. The most secret of several
Earth control bases that had been set up. Diagrams of particle beam alignments, computer codes for directing satellites to
release missiles. It was incredible, like a how-to book to blow up the world. When he got to the last file his eyes opened
ever wider. He’d hit it.

NAUASC.
North American Underground Assured Survival Complex.
There had been a whole subterranean headquarters built beneath all this so there would be a control if the surface arrangements
were terminated. Well, they had been right about that. The pieces were slowly coming together. But the puzzle seemed to grow
more complex. Stone’s head was spinning. On the last two pages of the manual he found the listing of six entrance locations,
clearly pinpointed to the square foot on the grid map that was attached.

For the first time in days Stone started allowing a little hope to bubble around in his guts. This could be just the thing
he had been looking for, an ace in the hole to gain entry to the complex. They weren’t expecting him, the element of surprise—if
he went slowly—could help his terrible odds a little bit. For somehow, though he didn’t know where, April was down there beneath
his feet, beneath the rubble. And she was alive.

It was difficult to really follow the directions of the grid chart in the booklet, because all the landmarks they gave as
reference points—buildings, concrete parking lots, whatever, were now gone, or rather mixed together in such a stew that a
super computer couldn’t have put them back together again. But Stone was able to figure out what had been a few structures,
even though they now lay on their sides. It took nearly an hour of constantly readjusting his direction but at last he came
upon a large metal plate in the midst of the rubble. Only there was no rubble on the plate itself: it looked completely seamless,
attached to the dirt around it as if it were fused into it. Stone drove the bike up to the edge of the ten foot wide square
of steel. It was blackened on the surface but the charred coating was only fractions of an inch deep. Still, it must have
taken some of the heat from the original blasts that had gone off nearby.

Stone got off his bike and had walked a single step to take a look at the plate when he heard whirring sounds coming from
every side. And even as he spun around, metal fixtures began rising up out of the earth all around him. There were six of
them and as he focused on the metal objects attached to them, his eyes dilated. Machine guns, robot-controlled, and every
one was turning and aiming at him.