Carrick woke to a familiar, mumbling voice while someone shook his shoulder. “Time to get up, new guy. Can't be wasting moonlight.”
Carrick blinked, disoriented. He had no idea how long he'd been asleep. Since he’d lost the previous night's sleep on the journey to the camp, and he’d hardly slept after his beating in the interrogation cell, Carrick was desperately behind on rest. His head pounded as though he’d enjoyed a fantastic evening with an aggressive quantity of liquor. Sleep deprivation was a much less enjoyable drug than alcohol.
He rationalized all of this a minute or two after the fact. It took Carrick a bit to remember exactly where he was. Apple was trying to talk to him, but Carrick, disoriented, couldn’t quite understand the words.
Eventually Carrick got the gist that he needed to make his bed and follow downstairs. Being new, he was given the privilege of being one of the first to eat breakfast that morning.
Breakfast was unoffensive and tasteless, which was for the best, considering Carrick’s stomach roiled in response to the splitting pain in his head. He forced down a bowl of gelatinous, rehydrated egg topped with a little salt, powdered molasses, and a spice blend that might have been black pepper and cardamom. He drank a mug of the stimulant tea from the previous night, and after washing that down, knew that it was in his best interest to rehydrate with several more mugs full of icy water.
He felt better after getting food and water inside him, and the intense pain which the water provoked seemed to suppress his headache. He rolled his shoulders and hopped up and down a few times, trying to get the blood flowing.
Apple was one of the first wave of men to eat breakfast. Afterward, he pointed toward the door. “Come on, new guy. Don't spend all your energy right away. We don't have anything warm for the run to the crawler, but at least there's some heat in it. Just, uh, try to not get frostbitten before then.”
Carrick only nodded. He realized his only chance for survival in the short term was to follow exactly everything that Apple commanded. This was not a time for posturing and for showing that he would not be pushed around. This was a time for figuring out exactly how to be a productive member of what was essentially a new kind of Family.
“Later,” Apple said, “when you get more used to the work, you might go out by yourself, if you prefer it. A crawler can hold up to two people in the seats, and on very rare occasions when a big piece of treasure is found that two people can't quiet move on their own, sometimes a third person will wrap himself up as warm as he can and sit in the cargo hold, but that’s pretty goddamn risky. Never agree to it if anyone asks you until you know what you're getting yourself into. You get me?”
Carrick really didn't get it, but he nodded, confident that he would figure it out in time.
They stepped outside the barracks, and Carrick immediately saw what Apple meant by “wasting moonlight.” The time was not even remotely that of day. The sky was dark, and a gorgeous sweep of stars spread across the sky. A nearly full moon watched them from above. its beauty was lost on Carrick, for with the darkness came an intense chill like nothing had ever experienced before.
Even on the occasions when he had been required to walk around the town where the Family operated in the winter with very little protective clothing, that winter freeze was nothing like this. Winters in the town never dropped far below the point of freezing, but it had to be much colder than that here. The mucus in Carrick’s nose froze even as he breathed heavily in and out, and the tips of his ears and his nose burned. Even Carrick’s eyes felt as though they were freezing in his skull.
Apple pointed past the barracks toward the line of the Wasteland, in the opposite direction from the road leading into the camp. “Now, we're going to keep running in a straight direction,” he said. “Our crawler today will be number 17 Green. You'll recognize it because there'll be a big green glowing stripe of paint underneath the number 17. You’re gonna run to the right side of the cab, pull down the sleeve of your suit so your skin doesn't touch the bare metal, and yank open the handle. You'll jump in and slam the door behind you. You understand?”
Carrick swallowed hard, nodded, and took in a deep breath.
“Now!” roared Apple, and sprinted in that direction.
Carrick ran after him. He wore the shoes he’d arrived in. It only registered to him now. It seemed odd to Carrick that they had given him new clothes and underclothes, but had allowed Carrick to keep his shoes. They were fine loafers, wonderful for sauntering about town, but he wished that he'd had the forethought to switch them out for a pair of strong boots before the fateful job which had led to his arrest.
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There was no changing the past, however, so Carrick ran in wholly inadequate shoes across glare ice and wispy snow as he followed the deceptively elegant Apple. They passed between small buildings and lumps of things frozen under snow onto a tremendous lot of asphalt upon which was a looming fleet of slow, wide trucks, each blazed with luminescent paint in a combination of different colors and numbers, just as Apple had said.
Apple dashed toward one in particular, apparently having memorized its location from the previous day. Carrick skidded on the frozen ground but somehow kept himself from falling. He moved around to the right side of the truck and did as Apple had instructed, pulling the sleeve of his right arm over his hand and using the protected portion to yank open the stiff latch of the truck door. As the engine was still off, the truck rested on the ground, and Carrick was able to simply step into the cab without having to pull himself up. Finally inside, he slammed the door behind him.
Apple was already keying the ignition. He jabbed at the button four times with a sausage-like finger, one of the many parts of him which seemed swollen and skinny at the same time. “Come on, come on,” he muttered.
Finally, the engine ignited with a spidery keening, and the antigrav modules dragged the truck slowly a few inches into the air. Heating coils began to vibrate inside Carrick’s seat and all around him, beginning the slow task of turning the inside of the cab into something other than a deep freezer.
“All right, all right,” muttered Apple. “That's the hardest part.”. He turned to Carrick, a big grin on his face. “We’ll be warm so long as we're in here.” He engaged the controls, and the truck rumbled through the numerous rows of the lot. Men all around them were also entering their vehicles, and, Carrick was fairly certain, some women, too. Though each prisoner's head was shaved, and malnourishment had robbed the prisoners of much of their muscle and fat, he seemed to notice some similarity to the female form in the prisoners approaching red-coded trucks.
Apple finally pulled the truck out of the lot altogether, and drove toward what Carrick had not previously noticed but now saw as a maw-like ramp leading downward into the ground. He looked beyond it, to the Wasteland stretching as far as the eye could see like an ocean of ice, snow and the occasional, crumbled remains of buildings.
Apple flipped on navigational lights that flooded the ground before them as they made a smooth descent down the ramp, which was wide enough for six of the trucks to move abreast, and tall enough that perhaps three could be stacked upon each other without scraping the roof of the tunnel. There were no lights illuminating the inside of the tunnel, but as darkness consumed them, the taillights of other tracks glowed like stars far beyond them.
“What on Earth are we doing?” asked Carrick. “I know prisoners in the Wasteland recover the artifacts of the Accident, but they built all of that on the surface, right? Why aren't we going out to find things that might be preserved in the ice?”
Apple snorted. “People who came long before you and me scraped up everything worth getting from the surface a long time ago. It turns out that a lot of the facilities dug far into the ground. There are all these tunnels, what almost seem like mazes. Almost like someone wanted poor fools like us to get lost down here.
“That's where we do our business these days. It's going to be a bit of a drive before we get to the site that I've been working on. I feel like we have it easier in some ways than the prisoners who had to work on the surface. It's warmer down here. Back in the old days, they'd have the prisoners walking around almost completely exposed, digging with power tools by hand, trying to rip stuff out of the ice. Was a much higher death rate back then, I understand. There's a bit of an oral history that gets passed down from one batch of prisoners to the other, you know? Some of them talk about prisoners who froze right to the ground, standing up and all alone.
“On the other hand, the quotas weren't as bad back then. The treasures have gotten scarcer as we keep grabbing the easiest stuff to find, and the government keeps wanting more, more, more.”
Carrick nodded. “And for the people in the other color groups, everyone has to fend for himself. That's got to be really scary for them.”
Apple sighed. “Yep.”
“Why don't the other groups work like Green group does?” Asked Carrick. “Where I come from, everybody does whatever they can for the guy in charge, and the guy in charge looks after everybody like they're his own kids.”
“Yeah, you were in one of those crime families.” Apple shrugged. “I guess they weren't able to keep you from getting thrown here.”
“They got me thrown in with the right group of people at least,” Carrick said quietly.
Apple laughed. “Well,” he said, “It’s contrary to most people's sensibilities to take something they rightfully earned, something they deserve, and give it to other people who didn't do the same work they did. If someone's too lazy or too stupid to fill their quota, maybe they shouldn't eat. That's the way the other groups look at it. If anyone survives, it's because they worked hard enough and they were smart enough to do it.”
“And so people go hungry, and that makes it harder for them to do their work the next day,” said Carrick.
“And then they die underground somewhere and eventually the truck is recalled with an autopilot routine,” Apple replied.
“Well,” said Carrick, “I'll tell you this freely, Apple. I want to rise as high as I can, all the way to the top. I'd never want someone to go hungry if I could help it, but everything I do is going to be for the sake of getting the most respect I can. I won't forget that you're the one who took me under your wing to begin with when I get there.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Apple amiably. “We’ll see if your talk about respect and all that holds up after a day or two where you're be lucky to see the sun for an hour a day.”
Carrick said nothing more for the remainder of their trip. The warmth of the cab, the silence, and the gentle motion of Apple’s driving quickly lulled Carrick into a doze. By the time Apple smacking him in the face to wake him, Carrick had no idea how much time had passed under the earth.