They crashed at Gabriel’s bunker that night and returned to their motorbike in the morning. Wheeling it onto the road, they set off back the way they’d come, following the directions which Gabriel had mapped on Clara’s wrist terminal. He had configured their radios to his frequency, using his communications tower to boost the signal, but they kept the line quiet. She trusted his information; at the end of the day, what choice did he have? They knew where he lived, and he was in their debt. She wouldn’t really have smoked the man out of his home, but she knew that Andy had intimidated him enough to sell the threat.
By early afternoon, they reached a highway which cut through the mountainside, following a boulder-strewn river. Gradually, the highway became congested, with derelict vehicles, long abandoned. For once, Clara was grateful that they were riding a bike instead of sitting comfortably sitting inside their old jeep, as it allowed them to weave between the wrecks and maintain a good pace. She kept her eye out for un-sacavenged gas tanks, slipping back into old habits from the days when she and Andy were fuel jockeys. It was always a good idea to top up on the road.
Spotting a small pink car with its fuel cap still on, Clara stopped their bike and pried open the cap with her knife. She took a tube from their kit and fed it into the fuel tank, sucking on the other end until the liquid came spurting out, double checking that it tasted of petrol, not diesel, then fed the other end into their tank and filled her up. While she was jockeying, Andy searched a nearby lorry for supplies, filling the rucksack which Gabriel had graciously donated to them for their mission.
“Found some batteries,” he said.
“Nice haul,” Clara said, inspecting one of the batteries. An idea occurred to her. Clenching it in her hand, she felt the fizz of electricity building beneath her skin, activating her Augmentation’s Current Control module. She discharged the energy into the battery. At first, it felt warm, but it quickly grew too hot to touch. Dropping the battery onto the road, faint white smoke seeped through the seams. “Let me try that again.” Clara took another battery, expelling the smallest amount of energy she could muster into the cell. It grew warmer, but did not explode.
She repeated the process three more times, then replaced the battery with the one in her headlamp, checking the strength of the beam. It appeared to be fully charged. “Well, that’s going to be bloody useful.”
“Is it?”
“Think of the applications. What if I could do this to a power generator? Maybe an electric vehicle?”
Andy squinted in the sunlight. “Yeah, well, I can shoot things really good.”
“It’s not a competition, Andy. Though, if it was, I'd be winning.”
Starting the engine, Clara guided them down the congested highway for an hour. The morning sunlight shone at their backs, stretching jagged shadows out before them. Her radio crackled static. Gabriel must be trying to communicate something to them, however the mountainous walls surrounding the highway valley were blocking the signal. Within minutes of her radio crackling, Clara discovered a fuel station on the edge of the highway. Ahead, one side of the valley flattened out and the river flowed into a lake, around which an old town was built. Clara stopped their bike’s engine at the fuel station and listened out, observing the town with her binoculars. There were no sounds, no smoke stacks, no signs of life.
Andy wandered into the fuel station, but came out empty. “No booze,” he sulked.
“What a shame.” Clara gave her gear a once-over, recounting her submachine gun magazines, checking that her sidearm was loaded, and that her backpack contained the assortment of gadgets which she’d acquired over the recent months, neatly packed into their designated pouches for ease of retrieval. Clara scanned the area for a security camera lamppost, spotting the device which Gabriel had hacked at the back of the pumping stations, overlooking the highway. The camera’s lens glinted as it swivelled to point at her. Clara gave the camera the thumbs up.
“This way,” she said, heading over a bridge which led perpendicular to the highway towards the opposite wall of the valley. They went on foot, checking their surroundings, absorbing in the desolate silence. If a rock rolled down the cliff’s edge a mile away, Clara would hear it echo through the mountainous corridor. They could be sure they were alone. Crossing the river, the road ended in a large, flat concrete area. Cars were parked in rows, door to door. Most of the vehicles still had their tank caps intact. Remote spots like these were the last to be pillaged by fuel jockeys, but they wouldn’t last long as fuel supplies dwindled across the wasteland. Clara pinged the spot in her map and added a note about the fuel supplies–information which could be valuable to someone as trade–then approached the foot of the cliff.
A trickle of water fell over the mouth of a cave, dripping into a pool of mossy concrete. “Watch your step,” she said, turning her headlamp on and stepping towards the cave. Slimy green walls rose steeply around her, coming to a point high above her head. The contrast of illumination was stark. It was as though she was stepping through the cowl of a huge, dark entity. Clara turned around to check that it was still daylight outside. Sunlight cut across the mouth of the cave, like a portal to another world. Clara judged that, by mid-afternoon, the sun would rise over the valley behind them and shine into the mouth of the cave, but for now, the light of her headlamp would have to do.
Once inside the cover of shadows, Andy sighed and put his back to the cave’s wall, draining the final drops of his hip flask. “That’s better.”
“Still hungover?” Clara asked.
“Always.”
A solid metal wall cut through the cave, a huge circular door at its centre, into which was engraved the words: ‘Alpine Vaults’. The vault door was locked in place on slab-like brackets, hydraulic pistons poised to shift its massive weight. Clara shone her headlamp over the walls, searching for a control panel. She found it fixed into the earth like a steel podium, left of the vault door, right where Gabriel had said it would be. Withdrawing the dimachaeron device from her bag, Clara fixed the cable adapter which Gabriel had provided to its underside,and felt around the underside of the control panel for a port, then plugged in the dimachaeron device.
The small metallic dome hummed happily, tickling her hand with electronic energy. A minute passed and nothing happened, then a claxon startled her. The alarm pulsed to the rhythm of two rotating red bulbs at each corner of the metal wall. Exotic buzzing noises came from within the door as complex locking mechanisms stretched their sleep-weary joints. Pistons hissed. Five times, bolts inside the vault door thudded open like a sledgehammer striking steel, then the door rotated on its hinges and rolled over. Clara peeked into the space beyond. A sterile air filled her nostrils, leaking out of the vault into the wasteland.
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Clara unplugged the dimachaeron, severing Gabriel’s connection to the vault. Andy held his shotgun at the ready. “Remind me…” he said.
“Salvage. There could be a lot of it in here. I don’t even know where to start… Rations, fuel, ammunition, electronics.”
“An armoury?”
“According to the schematics Gabriel drew up, yeah. Fully stocked.”
Andy’s eyes widened.
“We’re treating this as a reconnaissance,” Clara said. “We’ll fill our bags and our pockets. Feel free to grab anything you can carry, but the main objective is to take stock. Inventory everything that’s inside the vault, then figure out a way to get it out. If the loot is as good as I think it will be, we’ll want to get our hands on a van or a lorry and clear a path through the road down here.” She turned on the stock-mounted flashlight taped to her submachine gun. “This could be it, Andy. We might be in for an early retirement, or at the very least, we clear the vault out and make it our base of operations.”
Andy was silent, glancing at the red bulbs, still spinning inside their cages above the doorway. Clara had thought he’d be more excited, she struggled to know what Andy was thinking sometimes. What motivated him beyond booze and violence? Perhaps nothing. But he’d follow her anywhere, even into the pitch black bowels of the earth.
“Come on,” she said. “It’ll be fun.”
“Sure.”
The walls of the chamber beyond glistened as their torchlight shone over them. Carved out of the cave itself, a metal walkway delved underground for ten metres, then spread out, forming the floor atop which was a small building about the size of a garden shed. A few fold-up chairs were propped up on the walkway with discarded bottles lying at their legs. Clara’s flashlight reflected off a strip of yellow–the patch of an old worker’s jacket draped over the railing. She checked over the side of the walkway for bodies, but couldn’t smell anything which suggested decay. Reaching the shed, she shone her headlamp through the grimy window, but struggled to see inside.
“Beer,” Andy said, shining his headlamp on the bottles. “Hob-gobbin’.” He held up the bottle for Clara to see. The label displayed a goblin-like character spitting a gob of phlegm. “Probably pre-cat. Long out of date. Don’t think this was recent.”
Clara jumped as a claxon sounded behind her. She spun on the vault door atop the walkway, gun poised. The pistons hissed and began to revolve the door. Her mind raced. Who had closed the doors? Was it Gabriel, or was it an automatic security system? They could run up the stairs and get outside now, but possibly be locked out forever. Or they could stay inside, explore the vault, and figure out a way to escape later.
In the distance beyond the cave, the blue sky disappeared from sight as the door rotated back into place, shutting them in darkness. For a moment, the claxon still sounded outside, its howl reduced to a faint hum, then a silence fell over Clara like none she had ever felt before. Her heart beated in her brain. She listened to the rustle of her clothes as she extended her arm towards the small encased room. A single drop of liquid splash over a rock like the ringing of a service bell. The chamber had three buttons on its side, which glowed with faint electrical light. “An elevator shaft?” Clara asked.
“Try the buttons,” Andy said.
Clara pressed each of them in turn, but nothing happened. Unslinging her backpack, she withdrew a crank-bar and jammed it into the gap in the doors, cranking it to open them a fraction. Once it was wide enough to squeeze through the gap, she peered inside. The shaft dropped a dozen metres or so to the roof of an elevator. A small access ladder was built into an alcove. Clara repacked the crank and slung her submachine gun over her shoulder, then climbed onto the ladder. The air was cold and still, yet a chill breeze ran through her body. She shivered, air from her lungs condensing in her headlamp’s glare. Reaching the elevator’s roof, she searched for a roof panel while Andy caught up.
Suddenly, the elevator shuddered to life. Its cables creaked as its wheels spun, tugging it upwards. One of the buttons she’d pressed on the control panel must finally have activated. It was only a short distance to the roof. The opening which they’d made in the chamber’s doorway wasn’t wide enough to jump through. In a matter of seconds, they’d be crushed against the roof of the shaft.
Andy’s revolver boomed, deafening in the tight space. Sparks flashed at his feet, then he bent and tore a panel off and leapt inside. Clara jumped after, kicking him in the head as she fell through. Losing her balance, she fell on her back in a daze.
“Sorry,” she started to say, then realised they were not alone. The person she had kicked lay beneath her, but it wasn’t Andy, because Andy stood above her pinning a man to the wall, the barrel of his shotgun jammed into the man’s chest while he pushed the muzzle of his revolver sidelong into the skull of another.
“Don’t shoot,” the man with the shotgun barrel digging into his ribcage said. “Don’t shoot me. Please don’t shoot me.” He repeated the phrase hysterically, shaking his hands in the air. The man who Andy trained his revolver on was mute.
A weapon clicked behind Clara’s head, chambering a round. Clara’s heart raced. She placed her hands beneath her, ready to pounce if the situation escalated. “Friendly,” she said, looking up at the woman holding the gun. Her eyes were wide and frightened, flickering from Clara to Andy. “We’re not enemies. We’re friendly.”
“Then lower your fucking guns.” The woman’s voice was awash with panic. The rifle shook in her hands, finger half squeezing the trigger.
The man who Clara had landed on crawled out from beneath her. He looked up at Andy holding his comrades at gunpoint, then at Clara sat opposite him. The people in the elevator were all wearing a similar white uniform with blue arm bands. Their boots were black and shiney leather, their weapons as clean and unscratched as if they’d just come off the factory line.
“Who are you?” the man sat opposite her said. His hand not-too-subtly drifted towards a sidearm at his waist.
“My name’s Clara. This is Andy.” Her mind raced to catch up with the situation. “We’re explorers. We thought this vault was empty, so we came to have a look.”
“You came from outside?” the man asked, picking a square-like military cap off the elevator floor and setting it on his head. He got to his feet. Clara did the same, keeping one eye on the woman pointing a rifle at her.
“We did.”
The man stared at her, a deep scowl pitting his eyes. His face was slightly wrinkled with age, but he did not bear the signs of fatigue. He didn’t have any visible scars, none of them had. The men were clean shaven, the woman’s hair was tied in a neat bun. They smelled faintly of chemicals. “You came through the vault door?”
Clara nodded. “I didn’t mean to intrude. We didn’t think the vault was occupied.”
Andy grumbled under his breath.
The man in the military cap looked him up and down. “You survived the apocalypse?”
“Apocalypses,” Andy corrected unhelpfully.
“Truce?” Clara said, holding her arms up, motioning for Andy to lower his weapons. The man with the cap nodded, and the woman beside Clara lowered her rifle. The man whom Andy had pinned with his shotgun shuddered with relief as Andy released him, but his eyes remained wide and frightened. The atmosphere balanced on a knife’s edge. However, with their weapons lowered, if things suddenly escalated, Clara and Andy would have the advantage of speed in the tight space able to activate their Augmentation’s powers in a flicker. Static tickled her fingers, eager to be released, but she contained the energy and pressed her heartbeat into submission, controlling her breathing. “Sorry for making you jump like that. We didn’t mean you any harm.”
Clara smiled, but her levity was not reciprocated. The older man glared at her, eyes flittering over her apparel. His head turned to Andy, who returned the stare in his usual blank, sociopathic manner. The man looked away, preferring to address Clara. “My name is Gary. Please tell me, what is the world like now? Has anyone else survived?”