The End Has Come

The blind eye of the robot lighthouse swept past once, twice, while Yana held as still as a toad that hopes not to be noticed. She thought, over and over like a short penitent prayer: I am stone. The illumination within the bunker never flickered. No hue, no cry. No sign of life.

They were probably in there enjoying a pleasant supper of hot soup and bread, she thought bitterly — a mistake. Her stomach growled, and she felt faint. She waited for one more pass of the light, gathered herself, and when the welcome darkness embraced her again, sprinted toward the back of the bunker, running not by sight but by the remembered outlines of the land.

She made it. Pressed against the base of the bunker, she paused and listened intently for alarms and excursions. Nothing. Had the infrared sensors given out long ago, along with everything else? Had she been skulking for no reason?

Or was it simply that no one was watching them, and all the artificial systems had long since degraded, ground down, and failed?

She knew the bunker wasn’t deserted. She’d seen shapes moving around it as recently as her last scouting visit, a mere few days ago. But they went inside at night, sealed themselves up. And that was why night was the safest time for her to strike.

She didn’t expect to break in. The bunker was pre-Eschaton tech, and she might have about as much luck prying a clam open with her torn and ragged fingernails. It’d be safer to try to swim out to those aquaculture rigs, and that was nearly certain death. But her careful spying had revealed that while the bunker was probably impregnable by any means within Yana’s reach, the people who lived there didn’t store everything within its walls.

There were outbuildings. Low, dug-in, camouflaged with rocks so they looked like part of the outcropping the bunker was built into; they huddled behind it like so many slanting boulders. There, by those storage sheds — there, Yana thought she could probably break in. And there was food there. She’d seen men rolling the barrels of mussels from the aquaculture rigs along the beach, hoisting them up the bluff with pulleys and cables. She’d seen them hauling up baskets of seaweed, too. And more mysterious large, soft-looking sacks of things, all carried from small boats moored far out to sea — too far to swim.

She imagined flour, bacon. Oatmeal. Sugar.

Her stomach growled again. She swallowed the bitter bilious flavor of her hunger and propped her hands on her knees.

There was a little more light here. It filtered down from the floodlights above, and the dark sky was brightening. Not with dawn, not yet. With rich drapes and swirls of electric green and arctic blue aurora.

Sprinting — and potentially falling — wasn’t worth it, here. By the glow of the Northern Lights, Yana picked her way along the edge of the path that led from the bunker’s great steel door around to its rear. She didn’t walk on the path because it was scattered thickly with bivalve shells — clam, oyster, mussel — and she knew they would crackle and crunch under her feet.

She moved crouched over, as much to get her eyes closer to the ground as to disguise her silhouette. It was a good thing, too, because it kept her from tripping into the trench beside the entrance to the sheds. There were three of them, side by side, two-thirds buried underground and then more earth and stones heaped on the roofs.

She drew up sharply, found the stone steps leading down, and paused. If she, herself, were going to set a booby trap, this is where she would do it.

Someone moaned in the darkness below.

Yana froze. She felt like a damned startled rabbit. For an instant, she thought bitterly of what it had been like to walk tall, mostly fearless. To have a full belly and time to think, read, plan. Then she acknowledged the thought, let it pass through, and refocused her attention on the actual, critical, possibly life-threatening matter at hand.

There was a person in the darkness below.

And that person was hurt.

Well, most likely. She could construct all sorts of conspiracy theories and worries about decoys and traps, but Occam’s razor suggested that somebody else had been attracted by the presence of food, and had either triggered a trap or just — in the dark — stumbled into the gaping hole in the ground.

Yana risked bending down, dropping her hand below the line of the ground, and squeezing her fingers tightly, briefly, on the activator of her minilume. It glowed with a pleasant cool light, illuminating a bare pit or trench paved in flagstones and featuring a fieldstone retaining wall to keep it from collapsing in on itself. On the far side were the doorways to the three sheds or root cellars. They were all closed.

Yana heard the moan again.