The End Has Come

This time, she had been listening. Waiting. She thought the sound emanated from the leftmost of the sheds, which was the one closest to the sea. Another quick squeeze on her lume, and she saw that each shed had a small casement window about four feet off the ground. The three windows were not identical. They had obviously been constructed from whatever materials were available, then hinged to a custom-built window frame when the time came to install them in the sheds.

The one on that leftmost shed was propped open at the bottom.

As if in response to her light, Yana heard a brief intake of breath. The moaning stopped.

Silence.

She hadn’t seen anything that looked like a trap in her brief glimpses. Now, though, she palmed the lume and waited for her eyes to adapt. She moved her head from side to side, scanning — looking with her peripheral vision, which was sometimes better in the dark.

There. A faint silvery runnel reflected the glow of the night sky. Elongated, razor-thin, like when sunlight splayed along a length of spider-line: a tripwire strung across the bottom riser of the stairs.

All right, Yana thought. So if you saw that and wanted to avoid it, what would you do next? You’d drop down, right, over the edge on the opposite side?

Yana waited for the lighthouse beam and matched it with a quick flicker of her lume, peering down into that pit. The big flagstone at the far end of the pit had a funny, plasticky shine to it. And it was suspiciously clean, without the scraps of dead grass and litter of sand that marked the other flagstones. Plenty of birdshit, but some of the shit had a sort of funny, elongated splatter pattern.

The flagstone was on hinges. It was designed to drop whoever jumped down onto it into an oubliette. Or possibly into a pit of hungry tiger sharks and rotating knives, which would probably be more efficient in the long run, and probably just about as much fun. No need to haul any prisoners — or bodies — out of a hole in the ground that way. You’d save on rigging pulleys.

She checked again, but those were the only two traps she saw. The moaning had stopped completely, as if the moaner were biding their time, or simply playing dead.

Yana shrugged, checked her pack straps, made sure the lume’s loop was fast around her middle finger, and walked slowly down the stairs, pausing to step over the tripwire as gingerly as a cat walking through deep snow before testing the pit-bottom with one toe. It held. She shifted her weight onto it.

It held, still.

All right then, she thought, and lifted her trailing foot high over the wire.

She’d need something noisier than her crowbar to get through any of these doors quickly. Though she could probably shatter the frames. But that one down on the end, with the open window . . .

The window wouldn’t have been wide enough for her to wriggle through before the Eschaton. Hell, she wouldn’t have had the strength to boost herself up to it. She’d been a comfortable, wide-hipped graduate student then, and not the lean predator she was now. Yulianna had always been the skinny one — the hot one — back in the day, and Yana had been the smart one. Because most people were too blind to notice that her sister was just as smart as Yana was.

She missed that margin of safety. Hell — insulation, stored food — it was probably the reason she’d survived this long.

She flashed her lume again and inspected the window ledge for imbedded glass and razor blades and the like. She craned her neck to see upward, to check for any sign of, oh, something like a guillotine suspended on the other side of it. She poked the crowbar in, just to be sure.

Nothing.

“Lazy,” she said.

In fairness, she supposed, the bunker folks came in and out of this place every few minutes during the day. Even in the post-apocalyptic world, you wouldn’t want your toddlers playing around guillotines.

She hooked the window open with the crowbar and waited.

Nothing. Nothing but the sound of the sea.

“Hey,” she called softly through the window, with a preparatory glance toward the stair. If somebody in there were inclined to raise the alarm, she could hoof it out of here pretty quickly. She’d just have to remember to hurdle that tripwire. She could shine the light in and take a peek, but to see in she’d have to silhouette herself against the sky. And the light was a bullet-magnet, if the person inside were armed and inclined to open fire.

Talking was safer. It didn’t require line of sight.

“Hey,” she stage-whispered again, having the peculiar sensation that the darkness was listening. “Is there somebody hurt in there?”

A pause, and then a cautious voice. “Not badly hurt,” a woman replied. “I’m tied up, though. What’s your name?”

“Yana,” Yana said. “Yours?”

“Yulianna.”

Yana stopped dead, brought up sharp. It was her sister’s name.

This was not her sister’s voice or phrasing, though, and she forced herself to take a breath and continue on. “Are there any traps? If I come through the window?”