Remember Tomorrow

And then it went really crazy. It seemed like the whole pile of rocks around him had just been picked up and flicked over, like some force had turned the world upside down. He could remember the strangest sensation, in the blackness, of feeling an immense wave of motion wash over him, pushing him forward and then sideways as he hit a solid barrier that drove the breath from his body. He was tossed around like a branch in a dust storm, hitting the sides of the tunnel that was crumbling around him as he felt himself fall. He’d hit his head again and had the idea that he was blacking out and coming to, blacking out and coming to. How many times he had no idea. All he knew was that he had kept falling down until finally he hit water.

It wasn’t deep and it wasn’t moving fast, but he still hit it so hard that it felt like falling against another wall of rock. But this one gave under him and he found himself struggling not to breath, not to drag water down into his lungs as his descent slowed until he hit the floor of the river. Some part of his brain that was working despite himself wondered about the river. He’d figured there had to be a water table at some point, but not that it would be so deep. Stupe, how the brain does this when he should be thinking about staying alive.

The wave that had propelled him this far reached the water and the sluggish stream began to move faster, taking him with it. He had no idea which direction he was going in, only that he had to try to keep his head up and breathe in only when he could suck air into his lungs. Which would have been hard at the best of times, but he kept nodding in and out of consciousness from the blows to his skull.

The water seemed to fill the tunnel as it churned harder and faster, the force of it slamming against his body almost as hard as the rocks he’d been pelted with a short while before. There was less air, fewer pockets for him to gasp in quickly when he had the chance. The lights in his head began to glow more brightly, to move around in strange, dancing patterns. There was a humming in his ears, growing louder by the second, almost deafening. His lungs felt as though someone had tossed a torch of napalm into them. They were going to burst soon if he didn’t take another breath, yet he could feel he was still underwater.

So this was how it ended? He felt unimaginably weary and a lassitude descended on him. He didn’t care if he took in a lungful of water and drowned. Anything would be better than the awful burning in his chest.

J.B. relaxed and prepared to buy the farm. He exhaled and slipped blissfully out of consciousness.

He woke up with a head that felt like someone was pounding rocks on it and incredible pain everywhere else.

At least he was still alive.

He wanted to open his eyes, but was afraid of increasing the pain. He felt around him, slowly, with his fingertips. It was a muddy soil, slimy and slippery with a layer of water about two inches deep all around him. He could feel the water moving slowly past him in a trickle. It had to be dark where he was, as no great source of light penetrated his eyelids. And the water was flowing in a direction that took it from his legs up past his head. His legs felt particularly leaden. He flexed his calf and thigh muscles, which screamed protest at him. He stopped immediately, grateful for the sudden cessation. Then, steeling himself, he tried again.

From the resistance, he could tell that his legs were trapped from midthigh down and from the give, he knew that it wasn’t rock containing him, but mud. How the hell could he have gone through head and shoulders first and end up with his legs stuck so firmly? Trying to figure it out made his head spin and didn’t matter anyway. The fact was that he was stuck. Yeah, he had to have dislodged something as he came through the hole, and it fell around him, trapping him. Stupe thing was that he felt better for that, despite the fact that it did him no good.

Dark night, he needed to get the hell out of here before the water started to rush again, either sweeping him away or sweeping over him and drowning him once and for all. But he was so tired and it hurt so much. J.B. sank back into unconsciousness once more.

“FUCK’S SAKES, Sim, I don’t see what the problem is, here. Dammit, can’t Silborg or Denning see to their own damn problems?”

“Calm down, you’re starting to really bug the shit out of me.” The tall, broad-shouldered man called Sim cuffed his companion against the ear. It wasn’t hard enough to be meant with any malice, but despite his advancing years and graying beard and ponytail, Sim was still a strong man. The blow stung, making his companion wince.

“Fuck’s sakes, watch what you’re doing,” grumbled Hafler, who was smaller, skinnier and younger. He had a sharp, pointed face and his hair was cropped back apart from a thin Mahican stripe along the top of his skull. Both men were dressed in coarse linen trousers, plaid woolen shirts and heavy working boots. They were covered in splashes of mud, some old and dry, some more recent. Both had spent the day in their own sector, repairing and unblocking wells that had been damaged in the recent quake. The tremor had been felt all over their ville and while some were repairing houses and huts, they were part of the teams that had been sent to repair wells in the northern sector.

Only now, as a favor to Denning and Silborg, who had more damage in their sector to the south than the other three areas put together, Hafler and Sim were attending to the last well that was failing to bleed precious water into the storage tanks. It was hard enough keeping the ville watered as it was—they’d had to dig deep to find any water at all—without the wells blocking up from earth shifts.

This well was the most isolated and, as it was closest to the quake, the most likely to be badly damaged. Hafler was sure that this was why Silborg had asked them to take it on—that man would do anything to avoid work. Sim figured that someone had to do it, and as they’d finished their work, why not them? Besides, he had a similar opinion of Silborg and knew that he wouldn’t bother to do the job properly. Hafler was a born whiner, but at least he always did a good job.

The two men could see the well from several hundred yards away. Its lip was built up to a height of four feet from old brick and concrete built into a round wall, augmented by wattle and daub and some cement that they had managed to dredge up from a scavenger hunt to the prenuke villes nearby. Could have traded for it, but it was difficult to come by in a usable state and they didn’t want to skimp when building a wall around a well. Water was a precious commodity, the one thing in which they couldn’t trade.

The wall kept out any small mammals, stopping them from falling down and blocking the well. But the one thing they could do nothing about were the quakes. There had always been a few as the land was unstable, but never anything like yesterday’s. The damage had been widespread, if not too serious to repair quickly.

“You want to go down, give me a report?” Sim asked as they neared the lip.

Hafler sneered. “What’re you asking me for, Sim? You know an old fuck like you ain’t going down there when you can get someone younger—like me—to do it.”

Sim gave him a mirthless smile. “How did you guess?” he said, dripping with sarcasm.

“Yeah, real funny,” Hafler moaned. As they approached the lip of the well, he began to climb up, sitting astride the top. He held out his hand and Sim handed him a rope that he tied around his waist. Then he held out his hand again and the big man handed him a flashlight. Still without a word, Hafler solemnly tested it.

“Jeez!” Sim exclaimed. “It was okay half an hour ago.”

“Yeah, I know,” Hafler replied. “But who knows when these batteries will fuck up. And you’re not the one who’ll beat the end of the rope when they do.”

Sim sighed. “Just get your ass down there, will you?” he murmured, tying the rope around his own waist and bracing himself.

“Okay, just don’t even pretend that you’re letting me fall, right?”

“Would I do that?” Sim was the picture of injured innocence.

“You said that last time,” Hafler said as he disappeared from view.

Stooping, the big man picked up the excess coils of rope, paying them out as the thin man descended down the well. If there were repairs to be done, then they would have to go and get a wag with materials. If it was a blockage, then he would pitch the rope and join Hafler at the bottom, clearing the obstruction. Strictly speaking, someone should always stay up top, but it was quicker if they took a few risks. As long as Xander never found out.

Inside the well, Hafler descended at an even speed, clutching the rope with one hand and using the other to play the flash beam around the walls. This was one of the deepest wells and he started to feel closed in as the circle of sky above him grew smaller. His boots dug into the walls of the well, earth reinforced by stanchions and wattle and daub. It didn’t strike him as the best way to keep a well open, but given the scarcity of other materials, there wasn’t much of an option. Even so, the sweat spangled his top lip and ran down his brow as he tried not to think about the walls collapsing on him.

The beam of the flash swept lower as he descended. No sign of any collapse or instability yet. In fact, it seemed as though this well had stood up to the quake much better than any of the others they had attended to this day. In which case, what the hell could be blocking it?

For the closer he got to the bottom, the more he was sure that there actually was a problem with this well. He knew the sounds of water in the wells during different seasons and this should sound like a healthy stream. Instead, it sounded like a trickle. Something was stopping the water from flowing. He cursed to himself. It was too deep to spend too much time down here moving mud and unstable earth with any kind of comfort.

Hafler played the torch toward the base of the well, expecting to see a pile of mud and rock that needed digging out. The last thing he expected was to a see a man, covered in mud, blood and bruises, laying across the channel, his legs embedded in a small mudslide.

Hafler tugged the rope urgently. Sim put his head over the top, causing the rope to give and Hafler to jerk downward.

“What’s the problem? Kinda scary in the dark, is it?”

“Don’t fuck me around,” Hafler snapped. “Look at this.” He played the beam down again until it shone across the prone form of J. B. Dix.

“Shit,” Sim breathed. “How the hell did he get there? Come to that, who is he? Don’t look familiar to me.”

“Y’know what? I don’t care if he’s your fucking cousin. He’s the block in the well and we need to get him out.”

“Sure we can’t just leave him there?”

“Yeah, right—and have Xander ask us why the water’s dried up or why it’s diseased when this fucker rots?”

Sim sniffed. “Yeah, guess so. Tell you what, I’ll let you down, then you tie the rope round him and clear that mud jam around his legs while I pull him up.”

“Great plan,” Hafler muttered sarcastically, though in truth it was the only thing that could be done.

Sim lowered Hafler down until the small man was standing in the shallow stream. There was barely room to stand beside the prone body and it was hard for him to untie the rope, squat and tie it around the limp body in the confined space. But he did find out one thing…

“Take him up,” he yelled, tugging on the rope when it was secured around the prone man. “And guess what—the fucker’s alive,” he added, giving the unconscious J.B. a savage kick in the ribs to vent his anger at having to move him. The impact made the Armorer stir. “Yeah, and there’ll be more of that, you awkward fuck,” Hafler muttered.

He flattened himself to the side of the well while the body, jerking, was tugged past him. He had the flash fixed into his belt, shining downward, and the light from above was blocked by the prone figure, which kept bumping into the walls. Scatterings of earth and pebbles fell from the construction, dislodged from the body’s upward journey.

“Careful, you old fuck, or you’ll bring it down on me,” Hafler muttered to himself before turning his attention to the floor of the well. The water was now running more freely, although uncovering the Armorer’s legs had brought down a little more mud. The depth was up to the tops of his workboots and his wet feet told him that the boots weren’t in the good condition he’d thought they were. Ignoring this, Hafler set to work clearing the obstruction and shoring it up with the slabs of rock—dislodged by the arrival of J.B.—that had been used to form a channel in and out of the well, the smaller channel being on the outward flow, acting as a dam to build the water level. While he worked, he tried not to think about the fact that he was at the bottom of the well, without any lifeline to the land above.

Up top, Sim was straining, face reddened and veins popping on his neck, as he hauled J.B. toward the surface. He was older and less fit than he cared to imagine and was having problems getting the deadweight to the surface. As the body reached the top of the wall, it caught on the uneven surface, and Sim had to strain with every ounce, bracing his feet in the dusty soil that provided little grip, to get him over the lip.

The unconscious form flopped over the wall around the well and crashed to the ground, raising a cloud of dust as it hit the earth hard, feet and arms bouncing upward with the impact. A grunt escaped from the Armorer but as he was still comatose, it was a question of air being expelled rather than acknowledgment of pain. Sim drew several deep breaths, feeling his heart pound like a hammer as he tried to return to normal. Finally, he trusted his strength enough to walk over to the prone body and bend to retrieve the rope. He lifted J.B.’s head, looking at the battered and bloody face.

“Bastard,” he hissed, slamming the body’s head back down. “More trouble than you’re worth. Let’s see what Xander has to say ’bout you.”

He poked his head over the lip of the well, staring down at the point of light below. “How you doing?” he yelled down.

“Nearly finished. Where’s that fucking rope?” Hafler shouted in reply.

Sim let an evil grin cross his face. “Can’t get that fucking knot you tied around that other bastard out,” he yelled. “Can’t get the rope down—you’ll have to climb up without it.” He chuckled as he listened to the stream of abuse that came up from the bottom of the well.

“That’ll teach you,” he said to himself before tossing the end of the rope down the well.

When Hafler had pulled himself up, they stood over the body looking down on it.

“Reckon we should just chill the fucker now?” Hafler asked. “It’d save us a lot of trouble.”

Sim hoicked up and spit on the Armorer. “Nah. Let’s see if he comes around first. Take him back and see what Xander says. I reckon he’ll be interested to know just how this fucker ended up down there.”

“Shit,” Hafler cursed, kicking J.B. again. “I know you’re right, but that means we’ve got to carry this son of a bitch back to the ville.”

Between them, the two men picked up the Armorer’s body and began the long haul back to the ville. The sun was still high, although beginning the long journey into night and the heat beat down on them. J.B. was out cold, a motionless deadweight. Hafler had hold of his legs while Sim had hold of his shoulders. The thin, rat-faced man cursed without pause, railing at the fate that had led him to be assigned to Sim, to have to cover someone else’s ass on the south sector, to find this motherfucker stupe at the bottom of a well and for him to actually have the audacity to be alive.

“That’s it, that’s enough,” Sim said, unceremoniously dropping the body onto the dirt and turning to face his companion. “I’ve had enough of you moaning all the fucking time, boy. You want this guy chilled, so we don’t have to drag him back? Okay, you chill him.” The big man took an old Colt .44 six-shot blaster from the back of his waistband. The blaster was vintage, but highly polished and well maintained. It was obviously more than just a weapon to Sim, it was an object of some pride. This was clear from the way he checked that it was fully loaded and handed it carefully to Hafler.

Hafler had his own blaster, but he knew what this piece of hardware meant to his companion and he took it almost nervously, a slight tremor in his hand.

“Don’t do that, boy, it might go off in the wrong direction,” Sim murmured in a calm voice.

“Nah…nah, I’m not using this,” Hafler said, shaking his head violently and handing back the blaster with something that approached urgency.

Sim took it, shrugged and pointed the barrel at the Armorer’s skull. “Whatever you say, boy. But you moan anymore and I’ll take him out right now. And you’ll have to explain to Xander why we didn’t bring him back for interrogation if he ever gets to find out.”

Hafler sucked in his breath. “Don’t be stupe. You know I wouldn’t want that…Okay, okay, I’ll keep it shut, right?” He managed a pathetic attempt at a smile.

Sim’s own grimace of a smile was broader: round one to him. “Good. Then just pick the fucker up and let’s get rolling.”

The two men picked up the Armorer as before and resumed their trek. Hafler couldn’t stop the muttering under his breath that came as second nature, but made sure it was low enough not to annoy Sim.

Gradually, the landscape changed a little. The scrub became a little denser as they hit the remains of an old, predark woodland. A few hardy specimens had survived and they provided what little cover there was for the small, reinforced sec post, dug down into a trench and reinforced to two feet above ground level.

“Hey, what you two assholes got there?” yelled the sec man in the trench, his head alone visible above the reinforcements.

“They got something?” a second voice queried, his head also appearing above the reinforcement. Whereas the first sec man had a lean face framed by long, greasy black hair, the second had a bullet head on which the hair was savagely cropped. He also had what looked like a cigar clamped in his jaws, billowing a foul smoke.

“How d’you know it was us, Deke?” Hafler whined.

“The man Upton here says assholes, can only mean you two,” Deke replied with a beatific grin.

“Fuck you,” Hafler grumbled, which only made Deke laugh harder.

Upton, who was as tall and rangy as the shape of his face suggested, scrambled out of the sec dugout to examine what the two men were carrying. He prodded the Armorer’s inert body with the end of the remade Sharps rifle he was carrying. “So where you find this one?” he asked mildly.

“Weirdest thing. We covered this well in south—”

“Silborg and Denning—lazy fucks,” Upton interjected, nodding wisely.

“Exactly,” Sim continued. “One of the wells was blocked and when we looked down it, what did we find but laughing boy, here. Fuck knows how he got there, but there he was, blocking the water flow.”

“Never seen him before and he don’t look like one of the scum,” Upton mused. “So not a mutie and not on convoy. A real little mystery.”

“Only until the bastard wakes up. Xander’ll get it out of him.”

“Yeah, but we’ll probably never get to know,” murmured Deke, who had clambered out of the dugout to join them and had his Lee-Enfield .303 slung casually over his shoulder. Out on this post, the men eschewed SMGs in favor of rifles with which they could pick off any threat at distance.

Sim shrugged. “Xander’s baron. Guess it’s his right to know and his right to tell us or not.”

“Mebbe…but I’m curious.”

“Curious chilled the cougar,” Hafler said solemnly. They all looked at him. “Something my mama used to say,” he added weakly.

“Really?” Deke asked innocently. “All she used to say to me was ‘more, more…harder, harder.’”

Three of the four men laughed hard. Hafler managed a weak smile. Because, unlike Upton and Sim, he knew that Deke was only being truthful.

“Fuck it, can’t stand around here all day. We’ve got meat to deliver before it goes off,” Sim said, gesturing to Hafler to pick up the Armorer’s feet. Bidding their farewells, they left the two sec men to return to their post in the dugout and carried on toward their ville.

Another half mile brought them to the outer defenses of the ville. Their path across the scrub crossed a couple of dirt tracks and then finally met up with an old two-lane blacktop that was scarred, pitted and twisted by the quakes and ravages of the nuclear winter, but was still basically traversable. It was used regularly by the convoys of traders that came in and out of their ville, both as a stop-off to rest awhile and as a trading post. When they came to the blacktop, they turned right and headed toward the ville, clearly visible now.

It was a squat ville, with buildings no bigger than two stories high, all either the remnants of the predark suburban development or constructions that had been erected around the existing buildings, cobbled together from whatever materials could be found or traded. It gave the ville a lopsided, nightmarish look. A settlement filled with strange angles, abutments were used to shore up buildings that otherwise may have collapsed. Everything was either brown or gray. Color faded quickly in the heat and dust, and even black soon washed out. A pall of smoke hung over the whole area, coming up from the businesses and homes beneath. Even this far out, a buzz of noise could be heard. It was never quiet.

Encircling the ville, broken only on the blacktop by two heavily reinforced steel and concrete bunker houses that acted as sec posts, was a barrier of old barbed wire. Sharp fragments of steel and metal glittered here and there up to a height of eight feet. It had taken a long time to erect the fence. Sim still shivered at the memories of being on the construction crews. Some of the men had fallen onto the wire while putting it together, and were either sliced to ribbons by the metal and glass and bought the farm through blood loss, or died slowly and painfully from the poisons carried on the old barbed wire.

They approached the sec posts, grim and forbidding. You couldn’t see if they were occupied or by how many men, but anyone inside could see you coming from a distance of several miles.

Sim and Hafler were only about a half mile away and they were known to the sec crews. So, as with the earlier sec post, they were greeted by sec men who came out to meet them. All three sec men were dressed in dusty combat fatigues, carrying AK-47s. All walked in the same way, as though they were still wary, even though they knew the approaching duo. The only differences were their heights and builds.

“Who’s that?” asked one of them, shorter and rounder than the others. “I don’t recognize him.”

“You wouldn’t,” Sim began, the weariness evident in his voice as he told the story once again. They were waved through the sec post and they gratefully entered the boundaries of the ville, marked by a banner that hung limp in the still air, strung between the two sec posts. Its lettering was faded against the bleached-out cloth, but still readable.

Duma.

Sim and Hafler had seen it so many times they didn’t even acknowledge it as they passed under, continuing their trudge toward the heart of the ville.

The noise grew from a buzz to a clamor as they entered the area of population. The ville was built around a system of tracks and roads hacked into the dust bowl, radiating either side of the blacktop, which cut through the ville. From one end of Duma you could see clearly the sec posts guarding the road leading out on the other end. Dwellings and businesses were one and the same, with everyone trying to hustle something from where they lived and slept. Most had signs outside selling goods and commodities of all kinds, some were bars and some were gaudy houses. There was no division between the trade area and the living area, and children ran wild among the streets, trying to steal trinkets and dried fruits and meats from their displays. Adults chased them and beat them if they caught them.