Remember Tomorrow

Moving from the antechamber to one of the dorms on another level, Mildred began to get a fuller picture of the redoubt, which seemed to be built on a smaller scale than some of the others in which they had landed. There were no levels with bays for transport beyond a few small wags and the levels seemed to be less spread out, with fewer rooms before they ascended. Mildred mentioned that and Ryan grinned.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t bring you this way just for fun,” he ventured. “Take a look in this room up here.” He led them into what had once been an office, indicating a room plan on the wall facing the door. It showed the full layout of the redoubt, with all the storage and habitation areas clearly marked. “It doesn’t look like this carried much in the way of heavy-duty equipment,” he remarked. “Mebbe it was just a kind of way station between two larger posts, carrying a few supplies and acting as some kind of lookout. Not many sec here and not many pickings for whoever got in here…unless it was them trying to get out.”

“I wondered about that—we both did,” Mildred added, catching Doc’s look. “If it was someone from outside coming in—”

“Don’t worry about that, Millie,” J.B. cut in. “Me and Jak took the top level. The main sec door is secured and we couldn’t find much in the way of damage to account for entry. No one can just hack their way in unless there’s been some kind of earth movement or they knew the sec code. And there’s only a few stress cracks in the tunnel walls near the top. If they knew the code, they haven’t been back for a long time. And if they were on their way out, they thought to close the door behind them.”

It was as close as the taciturn Armorer ever came to a joke and one of the longest speeches anyone had heard him make for some time. If nothing else, it signaled how relaxed he felt with the situation.

“So it’s okay for us to rest up here for a while before moving out,” Ryan stated. “But I wouldn’t want to hang around too long.”

“Why not?” Krysty asked. Her hair formed a titian-red halo around her head, even the cold blandness of the overhead neon was transformed into a warm glow of fire as it reflected the aura around her head. The curls and waves cascaded over her shoulders, running wild and free. This helped explain her question: the mutie genes running through her veins made her hair sensitive, and prehensile, responding to imminent danger by curling up protectively around her. The fact that it was so loose and free bespoke the complete lack of threat in the redoubt.

That hadn’t escaped the one-eyed man’s notice. “There might not be anyone around to harm us, but there are still some things I don’t trust.”

“I’m with you on that, boss man,” Mildred muttered, running her finger along the surface of the room plan and examining the gray residue that gathered on her fingertips. “Look at the dust on here,” she added.

Doc furrowed his brow. “Your logic escapes me, my dear woman. This has been uninhabited for a long while, I would guess. Naturally, there would be some kind of dust gathering.”

Krysty kissed her teeth, annoyed with herself at having missed the obvious. “Yeah, but this isn’t natural, is it, Doc? These redoubts have air conditioning and temperature and humidity control. They have some kind of weird antistatic device that keeps dust out of the atmosphere. So if there is dust, then it means that the air-filtration system isn’t working properly.”

“Exactly,” Ryan added. “If that part of it is down, then how do we know that our air is being recycled efficiently. How long will it last? Long enough, hopefully, to get some rest,” he continued, answering himself. “Mebbe it’s fine. I just don’t want to take chances.”

“Once more, I defer to your powers of observation,” Doc bowed. “Where we would be without you, I dread to think.”

“I could say the same about you,” Ryan answered with a grin. “So let’s eat, get rested and get moving.”

The companions left the room, taking another look at the one clear streak illuminating the plastic covering of the room plan beneath its tawdry layer of dust as they did so. Once they had ascended to a higher level in the redoubt and found a dorm that was relatively unscathed, they stripped down the equipment and bags that they carried, those things that were their lives and survival.

“Pity it has to be this shit again, but at least it keeps us going,” Krysty said sadly as she handed out the self-heats. The packages—cans or foil containers—contained within them all the nutrients they needed, heated by a mechanism within the packaging that was instigated by the act of opening. Unfortunately, the contents were tasteless and bland, the only traces of any flavor being colored by the chemicals that were used to preserve the contents. They were a last resort when there was nothing else to be found, but they did their job: they kept the companions alive and nourished.

The friends ate in silence, trying to keep their food down. It wasn’t easy. When they finished, Ryan was the first to his feet.

“I’m going to see if the showers are still working on this level. Mebbe it’ll wash away the taste of those fireblasted self-heats.”

Shower rooms were attached to each of the dorms and it took only a few moments for the one-eyed man to ascertain that the hot water systems and pumps were still in a roughly working order—roughly, because the temperature of the water fluctuated, despite the setting, and a couple of times the man had to be sharp enough to dodge red-hot or icy blasts of water as the old pumps faltered. Nonetheless, he felt refreshed when he emerged. Warning the others, he searched for fresh underwear in the dorm, hoping that whoever had looted the redoubt would have been looking for blasters and food, not clean clothing. They were lucky; there was enough for all of them.

It was a relaxed time; something they needed after the jump and before heading out into the unknown. They’d found one map in the redoubt, and perhaps they would find others if they looked in the morning, maps that might tell them where they had landed. But now, the only thing that mattered was to rest.

“I’ll take first watch,” Ryan announced. “Then we work it in shifts, alphabetical order,” he continued.

“Pray tell, friend Ryan, do I count as D for Doc, or T for Theophilus?” Doc questioned with a mischievous grin.

“Hell, I can’t remember the last time anyone called you anything but Doc,” Ryan laughed.

It answered the question and emphasized the relaxed mood. It was to prove an uneventful night, the only disturbance the changeover of watches. J.B. succeeded Jak, noticing that the albino youth seemed loathe to leave his post.

“Best to get some rest, Jak,” he said softly as he sought to relieve him.

“If can rest with nightmares,” Jak replied. “Always bad after jump. Not able to really rest until on outside, when need to be triple red.” Jak shrugged as he walked away and left J.B. to his post. Not for the first time, one of the companions found themselves wondering what really went on behind Jak’s impassive exterior.

Krysty snuggled in next to Ryan, feeling the warmth of his hard, muscular body. It was a rare occasion when they got to be this close, with this much security around them. He responded to her touch and moved in to fit closer to her. They didn’t talk as they joined together. They had a closeness that Ryan had never known with anyone else. Love was a word that had little value in the world in which they lived, but if there was anything between them, it was love.

Across the dorm, the same thing was happening for Mildred and J.B. For Millie it was a difficult thing. She had known the predark world and had some inclination of what the word love had come to mean. J.B. was from a different world—one into which she had fitted rather than buy the farm, but still one that was alien to all she had learned in her formative years. It wasn’t often that there arose the opportunity to stop and think about it—only occasions such as this. As she lay with J.B. nestling against her, she did stop to think about it. It was just as well that there was so little time, as any amount spent pondering on this would be enough to drive her insane. Mebbe she was insane. How else could you get by in this world?

It wasn’t a pleasant thought on which to drift into a—mercifully dreamless—sleep. If only the same could be said for Doc, who murmured and muttered to himself, twisting and turning beneath the sheets as his mind replayed incidents from his past, confusing the three centuries into which the man had been mercilessly born, dragged and thrown. Images and people, half-memories blended into fictions, wild dreams from the edges of reason: all these assailed him as he slept.

And so they passed the night, each in their own cocoon of silence.

“TIME TO GET TO IT, people,” Ryan said as he rose from his bed. He left the dorm to find Mildred, who had taken last watch and had been glad of the wakefulness to keep her darkest thoughts at bay.

“Five o’clock and all’s well,” she said with a grin as Ryan came into view.

The one-eyed man looked at his wrist chron. “It’s past eight,” he replied in a puzzled tone.

Mildred shook her head, rubbing her eyes as she did. “Forget it Ryan, it was just some old joke that would have been funny if you were as old as me. What’s the agenda?” she added, without giving him time to respond to her previous comment.

“Eat—if we can face more self-heats—then try and find something that’ll tell us where we are when we hit the surface. Mebbe even take another chance with that shower system. Last chance we may get to stay clean for some time.”

“Y’know, even the thought of a self-heat and getting scalded is good right now,” Mildred answered with another shake of the head. “I can’t believe I just said that.”

Ryan laughed. It wasn’t often that the one-eyed man had the opportunity to do that. Far, far too often there was nothing whatsoever to give him cause for laughter. But these snatched few moments, underground and secure, gave them all time to relax momentarily, just enough to stop their minds snapping with the tension of living outside.

After breakfast Ryan and J.B. mounted their own small recce of the office units in the redoubt, leaving the others to shower and get ready to leave. Neither man knew if he would find what he were looking for, and both would have been grateful for just a sign.

“Ryan, back here,” J.B. called after a short while, sticking his head through the doorway of an office unit where Ryan was breaking open a filing cabinet. The comp terminal stood useless on the desk, long since fused and failed. “I’ve got a comp that works and is tied in to what Mildred calls the mainframe.”

Ryan left his task and followed his comrade along the corridor to the office in which he had been scavenging. Finding remnants of what had been before was always a problem: much of the information in all the redoubts had been stored on computer, but these were erratic now, prone to either break down, be broken, or be inaccessible to people a century or more on who don’t have a password. There was some paper information, but then it is a matter of hoping that it could be found or that it hadn’t been destroyed by looters or by the original inhabitants before they bought the farm.

To find a comp terminal working anywhere other than a low-level, sealed chamber was rare; one that was still connected to the redoubt’s mainframe comp was even more rare.

Maybe they were about to get lucky for once.

The two men hunched over the desk, the terminal casting a glow over their faces, shadows and light accentuating the crags of Ryan’s weathered face and the lines of worry and battle that etched the Armorer’s visage. Their mouths were set in grim concentration. There was nothing to be happy about until they actually found some useful information.

“Got it,” J.B. declared in triumph as he managed to call up an outline map of the area surrounding the redoubt. A couple more keys punched and the map pulled back to reveal the larger area.

From the outline, they could see that they were in the middle of what had been Arkansas before the nukecaust. There was a large town within a day’s walking distance to the northwest of the redoubt.

“Worth checking it out?” J.B. queried.

“Old villes like that are never totally deserted. Usually some kind of life attaches itself. We just have to be triple red until we find out what kind it is.” Ryan paused, his brow furrowed in concentration. Eventually, he added, “Arkansas—that name’s familiar. We ever come this way with Trader?”

J.B. blew threw his pursed lips as he racked his memory. “Think we might have at one time. Weird land up there, part dust and part sand. Gets real dry and then they have monsoons that sweep everything away. Yeah,” he said suddenly, snapping his fingers, “there was that time when one of the wags got driven off the road in a mudslide after one of the rains. We had to chain War Wag One to it and pull the bastard back onto the blacktop. Trader cursed all the while about the fuel it was taking, then cursed about losing the wag when we said he should just leave it if he felt like that.”

Ryan smiled wryly. “Came out with some shit about a rock and a hard place.”

“Yeah, and you told him that he wouldn’t be having this trouble if there had been some rocks and a hard place ’stead of all that mud.”