Infinity's Reach (17 page)

I’d heard some wicked stories out of Poplar Bluff—rumors mostly, about the ground opening up and swallowing people whole—and so I advised that we loop around to the south and catch the road where it dips south. Pilgrim agreed with me, and we started hiking across a set of low-lying hills there. We’d just got up to the top of the hills when the rain slacked up and we could see out ahead of us. I called for a break, and we sat down to catch a snack before we headed on.

“Ever been to Missouri before?” I asked Pilgrim, who was busy pulling hardtack from my backpack. She shook her head.

“Some of it’s pretty,” I said. “From what I remember, the south where we’re hiking starts off as rolling hills, then gets into some mountains with trees when you hit the Ozarks.”

“So why do they call you ‘Faithful’?” she asked, not looking up.

I was caught off guard. “She speaks!” I said, smiling. “I didn’t know you could talk.”

“Sure you did. I talked to you back there in Wickliffe,” she said.

“Yeah. Five days ago.” She didn’t answer. I stared at her, trying to decide what to make of her.

“Well since you were gracious enough to talk today, and I’m feeling in a good mood, I will tell you,” I said. “I had the misfortune to marry a woman who did not take the wedding vows as seriously as I did. I remembered vowing to love, honor and cherish till death do us part. She didn’t remember that part.”

“So she was unfaithful?”

I flinched, then sighed. “More than once. But I kept taking her back. Finally, she just stopped asking, and moved up to Illinois. That was about six months before Chicago got hit with a nuke.” I stood and stretched.

“Now I guess there’s no need to be faithful. ‘Til death.’ That’s what I promised.”

I expected her to say something in response, like “I’m sorry,” or “Wow, what a bitch,” but thankfully Pilgrim didn’t. Instead she kept it strictly business.

“Ever hear of a man called The Interpreter?” she asked.

“No, can’t say that I’ve ever heard of someone called The Interpreter,” I said finally. “Who is he?”

“Someone I’m supposed to meet,” she said. “He’s supposed to be west of St. Louis.”

“Well, we’re hell and gone west of St. Louis. Want to turn around?”

She shook her head. “My guide knew where we were supposed to go. I don’t.”

“So why are we still headed west?”

“My father is out there, far west. If I can’t find the House of the Interpreter, then I’ll just keep going west.”

A bell rang in my head. “Wait, are you looking for The Interpreter, or The House of the Interpreter?”

“House,” she said. “Why? What’s the difference?”

“I haven’t heard of The Interpreter, but every truck driver east of the Rockies has surely heard of the
House
of the Interpreter.”

“What is it?” she said, the first sign of excitement coming into her eyes.

“It’s a cathouse,” I said, laughing.

“A what?”

I laughed long and hard. “It’s a whorehouse in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Why in blue blazes do you want to go there?”

Her face got red. “I don’t know. All I know is that I’m supposed to meet someone there.”

“Evangelist?” I said. She looked up as if I’d torn a sheet from her personal diary. “Yeah, Evangelist,” I repeated. “You talk in your sleep.”

She paused, then nodded. “He was supposed to meet me there.”

“When did he tell you this?”

She looked back at me, suddenly serious. “Two years ago.”

I looked back at her as if she was crazy.

“And you think he’s been sitting there for two years, just waiting for you to arrive?”

She nodded. “You don’t know him. If you did, you wouldn’t have any doubts as to whether he’ll be there or not.”

I sighed. “All right. I ain’t gonna argue with you, that’s for sure. So we head for Hot Springs. Take us about six weeks, I imagine.” I stood. “Time to get moving.”

She packed up our food and I stood looking at the valley below us. A small creek ran through the middle of it, but there were no trees. The entire floor of the valley was muddy, and it had the same scorched look as the camp we’d passed through. In the center of the small valley was a short, squat building that looked vaguely familiar. As I looked at it, I saw movement, a bolt of red light, and a puff of smoke.

I frowned. “Hand me that monocular, would you, Pilgrim?” I waited a moment, not taking my eyes off the valley below us, while Pilgrim fished the monocular I carried out of the bottom of the pack. I raised it to my eyes and focused on the small building.

On the side of the building I could see letters I could almost make out. Around it, about 20 feet away, was a chain-link fence with rolled barbed wire that had been broken down. And again I saw movement.

“What is it?” Pilgrim asked me.

“Something’s down there,” I said. “I’m just trying to decide if it’s something we should investigate or something we should avoid.”

I followed the movement and saw something I couldn’t figure out. It looked like a tractor, smaller than a lawnmower, with a turret on the top. As I watched, it approached something lying on the ground and sent out an arm that extended to push something on the ground, testing it. It was checking out a dead rabbit.

“Some kind of machine down there,” I said. “It just killed a rabbit.”

“Machine? How did it kill a rabbit?”

I put my monocular down and looked at her. “Laser,” I said simply. “It’s got a laser.”

“Did it come out of that building?” she asked.

I looked again. “Nope. The building’s all locked up.” I saw another sign, this one on the fence and closer to us. I read: “Department of Defense. Poplar Bluff Armory.”

Bells went off again, and I turned back to Pilgrim.

“That’s an armory, Pilgrim,” I said. “An unopened, untouched armory. Do you know what they’ve got in there?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t know either, but I can imagine. Guns, obviously. But vehicles—tanks, trucks, Humvees, motorcycles. Body armor. Food maybe. Who knows what else. Supplies for hundreds—maybe thousands—of soldiers.”

She stared back at me blankly.

“That’s an awfully small building for that much stuff,” she said. “And have you forgotten our friend, the rabbit killer?”

“No I haven’t forgotten him,” I said. “But if I’m right, this’ll not only get us resupplied but will make us rich beyond our dreams.”

“I don’t want to be rich. I want to get to Camp Zion.”

“Well, put it this way. It’s enough equipment for us to take back the Muddy, maybe even St. Louis.”

“Who is us?”

I looked down, embarrassed. “Us, meaning the United States. The good guys. I may be self serving, but I haven’t forgotten I’m an American.”

“So you still haven’t told me where all this stuff is.”

“It’s
underground
,” I hissed at her. “It’s right under your feet.”

It took a minute for what I was saying to register with Pilgrim. Then I saw the light click on.

“So what do we have to do to get past our friend?”

“Well, I’ve been figuring,” I said. “That critter either uses a motion sensor or a heat sensor to target with. If it’s a motion sensor, we got problems. Chances are, we’ll have to shoot it, and I suspect that it’s armored. There might even be more of them out there.

“But if I were building it, I’d be more likely to make it with a heat sensor. That way if a paper bag blows into the valley, it won’t use up all its laser shots shooting at something just rolling along the ground. A human body—heck, even an animal, as we saw—puts off heat. That’s likely what it’s shooting at.”

“So how do we test your theory?”

We crept down to the bottom of the hill. There were a few trees and a ravine at the bottom of the hill. I had Pilgrim climb a tree to watch where the rabbit killer was. When it got over where we were, I lobbed a few rocks out of the ravine toward the robot. The first one was short, the second one rolled past the front of the robot, and the third ended up hitting the robot right on top of the turret. In none of the cases did the robot respond.

“Now comes the hard part,” I told Pilgrim after she climbed down from the tree. We stripped down as far as we could; me to my t-shirt and jeans, she to her halter top and fatigue trousers. Then we entered the ravine and found a mud bank. We covered ourselves with the smelly mud from head to toe. At one point, I had to cover her back and the back of her legs and head, and she did the same for me.

“I hope they have showers in there,” she said.

“If not, we’ll come out for another bath in the creek,” I said.

We checked each other over, head to toe, to make sure there was no skin showing, then slowly climbed the bank and walked toward the valley and our rabbit-killer friend.

“Sure hope this works,” she said.

“It’ll work,” I said, but doubted my own words.

We had walked maybe forty feet before we saw the robot. And when we saw it, we also saw that it was not alone. Three more robots were patrolling at a farther distance. Each apparently had its own territory to cover.

We walked slowly toward it, instinctively holding our breath as we got closer and closer. I looked around as we walked and saw birds, deer, a horse and several rabbits that had been killed by the robots. Then I saw the skeleton of two people not five feet from the entrance. They’d been there at least a year or two, and their uniform marked them as Coalition soldiers.

“We still don’t know if the robots were left here by the U.S. to protect its own armory, or by the Coalition to keep us from accessing it,” Pilgrim said.

“Does it matter?” I asked. “If this don’t work, these guys’ll kill us either way.”

“It does matter,” she said. “Because if they’re from the U.S., I bet there’ll be a way to turn them off inside.”

“I like the way you think, girl.” She frowned at me, and I corrected myself. “Uh, Pilgrim. But to tell you the truth, you don’t look much like a boy dressed like that.”

I indicated her muddy, wet clothes, which clung to her body. She blanched, and then changed the subject.

“How are you going to get past the electronic lock?” she asked.

“What electronic--,” I said, then saw what she was motioning toward. The door had a keypad on it, ready for me to add the right combination of letters and numbers. I frowned. I could try a hundred combinations and still be wrong, and by that time, our skin would dry out and our rabbit-killers would be looking for us.

“I—I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.

She stepped up to the keypad and pushed the buttons. Nothing happened. I noticed that the screen above the keypad was blank. Instinctively I pulled on the door. The lock clicked and the door pulled open freely.

“A victim of the EMP, I guess,” I said to her. I looked behind us at the robots, which circled aimlessly in the yard, still looking for another victim.

“Come on, let’s get inside,” I said, and she followed me into the darkness.  
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21. BURIED TREASURE

MACK HAWLEY: OUTSIDE POPLAR BLUFF, MO: DAY 1571

The space inside the metal door was small—less than 10 feet by 10 feet—and there weren’t much to see. I was torn between leaving the door open for light and closing it to keep out those robots. In the end, I left it open a crack and looked around.

There was a desk, more like a duty station, that had some papers on a clipboard, a small radio and a light switch in front of it on the wall. I flipped the switch and tried the radio, already knowing that both would be dead. Behind us we saw another hatch with a wheel for locking it closed. We looked at each other.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said to Pilgrim. “If there’s such great stuff down there, how did they get it down this itty bitty hole? Well, from my way of thinking, this isn’t the only entrance. The others are hidden around here somewhere, possibly quite a ways from here.”

“That’s not what I was thinking,” she said. “I was thinking, how are we going to see what’s there when there’s no light? Do you have a flashlight?”

I shook my head. “I have one in my backpack, but the batteries are dead. And that backpack is back at the creek with the rest of our stuff.”

“I guess you want me to climb down there in the dark,” Pilgrim said, her face grim.

“Nope, that’s my job. I’m hoping that at the very bottom of this shaft there’s an emergency generator. If they were smart, they would have put it there to protect it from things like The Event. I plan on climbing down there and seeing if I can turn it on. You wait here.”

“And you are planning on doing this in the dark?”

I shook my head again. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the one thing I’d decided to carry, holding it up for her to see.

“This was my daddy’s,” I said, letting her see the brass cigarette lighter I held. It featured a Marine insignia on its side. “He carried it through the Pacific in World War II. He was quite the smoker. Died of lung cancer 20 years ago. I never go without it.”