Outland (World-Lines Book 1) (29 page)

Aug 25

Joseph

“Well, that’s suboptimal,” Richard said.

Joseph stayed silent. He was still stinging a little from Richard’s earlier tirade. Telling himself that it hadn’t been directed at him personally didn’t seem help much.

They were looking at the National Guard base. It had not handled the ash well. The old, flat-roofed buildings hadn’t been upgraded since Eisenhower. There was no sign of life or recent occupation, although tracks around the ruins of the buildings indicated that there had been activity.

“They’ll have taken up residence somewhere else. Where?” Richard continued.

“The airport hangars?” Joseph ventured. “They don’t have flat roofs, and hangars have to be built like a brick—uh, very strong.”

Richard nodded. “Good point.” He looked to Matt, who gave a thumbs-up and got back in the truck.

I wonder if he’ll charge us for mileage.
Joseph thought irrelevantly.

***

Bill

Bill took a sip of coffee. “Wow, this is bad,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” Chavez answered.

Bill shrugged. “And thanks. But you can’t tell me you’re drinking this because you like it.”

For the first time since he’d known her, Chavez smiled at him in a friendly way. “Not with a straight face, anyway. But it’s what we have. We’d have better stuff if you hadn’t cleaned out the Walgreens.”

“And on that subject,” Lieutenant Collins interrupted, “how about that dishing that you promised.”

Bill looked at him with appreciation.
Not really
G.I. by-the-book Joe, are you?
He settled back, took another sip of coffee, shuddered, and began to dish.

***

“… and that’s how I spent my summer vacation.” Bill finished.

Lieutenant Collins and Corporal Chavez stared at him with blank faces, their jaws hanging so far down they were in danger of becoming unhinged.

“Of all the—“ Chavez sputtered.

“You’ve got to be—” Collins huffed.

“Makes sense to me,” a third voice replied over them.

Lieutenant Collins and Corporal Chavez cut off what they’d been saying and turned to Private Stevenson in astonishment.

Stevenson looked at them and waved a hand toward Bill. “You think about all the tracks that we’ve been seeing that just petered out into thin air, the buildings that had been cleaned out without apparently
being opened. What better way than an interdimensional gate? Or a time machine?” Private Stevenson looked at Bill.

Bill shook his head. “Sorry, no time machine.”

Bill turned to Lieutenant Collins. “Look, we’d been intending to release this invention and collect our Nobel prizes eventually, but the eruption caught us by surprise. But it is an actual way out for people. We’ll be happy to turn everything over to the military. You can use it to save a lot more lives than we can.”

“No, we can’t. Not really,” Lieutenant Collins answered.

Bill’s eyebrows went up in surprise.

The lieutenant continued, “You’ve gotten a lot of info from your satellite TV, and it’s mostly
pretty good intel. But it’s nowhere near the complete picture. The military has much better and more hardened communications. I’m probably
not revealing any secrets by telling you that.”

Bill grinned and shook his head.

After a pause, Lieutenant Collins continued. “I’m not sure that there’s a USA left as such. There have been no official communications for several weeks. What we’ve been able to piece together is that Washington fell by the end of the second week. The president was unaccounted for, and they took too long to start succession proceedings. There were more attacks, and I don’t know how far down the chain of succession they ended up, but it’s possible that the White House janitor is now nominally
President.

“There are up to a dozen local despots who’ve declared independence over short-wave, and what concerns me is that they haven’t been shut down. That means that they are in
de facto
unsecured territory.

“The situation worldwide is bad and getting worse. There were nukes used in the Middle East, the BBC was right about that. But there were also nukes used in Pakistan, which wasn’t reported because by then the news reporting channels had broken down. Also the Koreas went nuclear. Russia and China have swallowed all their satellite states and are now taking gouges out of each other. It’ll stop when neither has the resources to continue. What’s telling is that already neither one has the resources to nuke the other. It’s truly
in the shitter.

“Meanwhile, we have no more resources than you to build or advertise the existence of this device, and I doubt anyone out there has the wherewithal to do anything with the information if we did.”

Lieutenant Collins’ face had a haunted look.

“We’ve been continuing to operate as the National Guard because it’s what we swore to do, and because frankly
no-one has any better idea. But there have been questions about whether we should just dissolve the platoon. You’ve seen the people in the hangar. Those are people that we’ve found as we’ve been patrolling, who didn’t have anywhere to go and were slowly
starving to death. We’re doing what we can, but we’re pretty limited.

“In terms of local intel, there’s nothing left that you could call a viable community for at least fifteen hundred miles from Yellowstone. Beyond that, what we’ve been able to get indicates that people are turtling, and closing their borders. Refugees have been shot and killed trying to get through barricades. I figure we’d have to go right to the East or West Coast to have any chance of finding anywhere that would take us and our refugee group. We could force our way in somewhere, given our firepower, but that doesn’t sit well with me. It wouldn’t do anything but spread the misery. Oddly
enough, we’re likely
better off right here as long as the scavenging holds out. Which is why we’re pretty pissed about your group beating us to everything.”

Lieutenant Collins straightened up and turned to face Bill squarely. “Look, Bill, you tell a good story. I’m having a little trouble with it. I’d like to believe you, but you may simply be a good talker trying to work his way out of being shot. I’ll have to discuss this with my people.”

Lieutenant Collins looked at his watch, then turned to Chavez and Stevenson. “Take Mr Rustad to a room and make him comfortable. But make sure he stays put.”

Aug 25

Richard

“We’ve found him,” Charlie announced. Everyone crowded around him to look at the tablet. The video image showed Bill, lying on a wooden bench in a windowless room. As they watched, he looked up, smiled, and waved. Then he motioned to the camera to come closer.

Charlie lowered the pole-cam by dead reckoning until it hovered two feet in front of Bill’s face. This put it below the bed of the truck, where they were all standing. They looked down through the gate and they could see Bill’s face, live, smiling at them around the camera from another universe.

Richard jumped down from the truck, went over to the small gate, and whispered through it to Bill, “We can get you out. We have a six-foot gate.”

Bill shook his head and said in a low voice, “That’s fine, but I don’t want to disappear. I think we have a good possibility of getting these guys to join us. And they’ve got civilian refugees that they’re trying to care for. I can give you details on all that later. Listen, could you send someone back to Rivendell to get a big bag of my coffee?”

Richard looked at him in confusion. “Are you shitting me?”

Bill shushed him. “Look, we want these guys on our side. The coffee will be both a peace offering and an implied statement that I could have left any time.”

Richard thought about that for a second, then said, “Done.”

He turned to Joseph. “Get Rivendell on the radio. Tell them to send Crazy Al over with a bag of Nabob. Tell him it has to arrive undamaged or we take away his dirt bike privileges. Again.”

Joseph nodded and picked up the walkie-talkie.

Crazy Al had been given that name for good reason. Back in the real world, he had been a motocross, enduro, stunt, dirt, and anything else biker. If it could be done on two wheels and an engine, Crazy Al was there. He was also the best mechanic they had, so they tolerated his habits with the stricture that if he broke it, he had to fix it.

But if a pony express delivery was needed, he was their man.

It took very little time before Crazy Al appeared over the horizon, going at a speed that would have been nerve-wracking on pavement. On the prairie, he skipped from bump to bump, off the ground more often than touching it. The bike bounced back and forth from front to back wheel, but Al, up on the foot-pegs, was steady as a rock.

He came in at full speed and hit the front binders. Doing a nose wheelie for the last fifty yards, he came to a precise stop in front of the group.

Richard asked, “What took you?”

Al grinned, handed Richard his backpack, and left in a spray of dirt.

Richard opened the backpack and took out a large foil bag of coffee. He motioned to Charlie, who opened the six-foot gate. Richard handed the bag through to a waiting Bill, and they closed the gate.

***

Bill

The door opened with a bang. “
Good
morning, honored guest. Rise and shine!”

Bill opened one bleary eye to see Corporal Chavez glaring down at him. She was obviously enjoying this moment.

Block. Parry. Riposte
. Bill sat up, reached under the hard wooden bench on which he’d barely slept— Chavez stepped back while reaching for her sidearm— and pulled out a large foil bag, prominently labeled
NABOB Full City Dark
. He handed it to her and said, “Give this to your boss. Let me know when coffee is ready.”

He smiled at her and lay back down. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her staring at the bag in her hand. The guard at the door was also staring. Bill was pretty sure he could have walked right out at that moment, and no one would have noticed.

Chavez turned and, with the bag still held out in front of her like a live bomb, walked slowly out the door. The guard closed the door without once looking at Bill.

Game, set, match,
He thought with satisfaction, and closed his eyes.

***

There was a knock, and Corporal Chavez opened the door. “When you’re ready, the lieutenant would like to see you.”

“Ready now,” Bill replied, and stood up.
Much better.

When they got to Lieutenant Collins’ office, he sat in his desk chair, slumped back, slowly sipping a coffee. The expression on his face said, in a way no words could, that this was not the same crap as yesterday.

Stevenson stood near the desk, holding a cup as well. He looked almost afraid to taste it.

Chavez saluted the lieutenant and made a beeline for the coffee pot. She poured one for Bill, one for herself, and one for the guard that had accompanied them. The look on the guard’s face said he’d marry her right there.

“I gave the rest of the coffee to the men,” Lieutenant Collins said. “Right now, if you ran for president, they’d all vote for you.”

Bill grinned. “Same thing I do every night. Try to take over the world.”

Lieutenant Collins sighed. “I’m not even going to ask. About the reference, I mean. The coffee, I will ask about. Starting with, is there more?”

“Craptons,” Bill said. “As I’ve said on more than one occasion, I live not only
for
coffee, but
on
coffee. Plus we have the stuff from the Walgreens, if you just want coffee
.
” That got a laugh from everyone.

Lieutenant Collins got serious. “Okay, Bill, I haven’t missed that you getting the coffee means you could have left by the same method. So I’m prepared to negotiate seriously. What are you looking for?”

“We don’t really
have anything in the way of demands, lieutenant,” Bill replied. “Most of us would prefer to go back to the way things used to be. Failing that, we just want to survive. And save as many other people as we can find.”

“Do you still consider yourselves Americans?” Lieutenant Collins asked.

“Until someone tells us different,” Bill answered. “We’re not trying to secede, if that’s what you mean. But it also doesn’t mean we want to limit rescue to Americans. If we can get to the citizens of any other countries, that’s good too.”

“What about coming back to this side if and when?”

Bill thought about that for a moment. “Best case, everything clears up, the weather washes most of the ash away, and ecosystems aren’t too badly
damaged. We’d still be faced with a social and technological breakdown a couple of years deep. Our geology major gave us her guess that up to half the global population will be dead before we dig ourselves out.”

Lieutenant Collins didn’t look surprised at this statement.

Bill continued, “Worst case, the climate doesn’t recover for decades. We end up with sub-arctic tundra and muskeg down to the tropics. In that case we could be back to pre-industrial-era populations.

“We might be able to come back within our lifetimes, but I’m not going to depend on it, and I’m certainly
not willing to push it.”

Lieutenant Collins considered that for a few moments. “We have a geologist in the refugee group, and he said something very similar.” He thought for a moment. “I’m going to make this optional for the troops. They can have an honorable discharge, effective immediately, or they can continue to serve. If they choose the latter, we’ll be on indefinite detached duty, protecting the last known outpost of America. Until and unless we find others, then it’s up for renegotiation. Good?”

Bill smiled. “Good. I don’t think we’ll need a general vote since we’ve always taken in anyone we find, but you’ll want to confirm your status with the Planning Committee.”

“Good enough. So how do we proceed?”

“Well, travel is easier on this side, so we drive to our warehouse, and they’ll let us through there.” Bill turned and looked up. “You good with that, Richard?”

A voice came from a camera suspended in the air in the corner of the room, “Sounds good. See you there.” The camera disappeared.

Bill turned to look at Lieutenant Collins, whose eyes were wide.

“Wow,” the lieutenant said. “It’s been theoretical until now. That’s how they found you?”

Bill nodded. He noticed that Private Stevenson was grinning from ear to ear.
Some people just get it.