Stephen Blackmoore: All Bad Things

The tunnel fills fast with dust–plaster, drywall, brick, toxic shit you can’t breathe—but Samson doesn’t mind. Cyrus, though, is wheezing like a TB patient.

They found the tunnel while exploring a nearby apartment building that had collapsed into the water that had flooded Los Angeles during the apocalypse. When the nukes fell in the water off Long Beach, the blasts had blown the ocean all the way up the L.A. River and formed radioactive lakes and swamps where before there had been only concrete and yucca plants.

But the swamp in Hollywood had receded again decades back, so the building had long ago been looted of anything valuable—wiring, pipes, doorknobs. The only things still there were too big to move and too rusted to cut up, like the massive air conditioning units that had crashed through the ceiling long ago, or they were too labor–intensive and low–return for big–time scavengers to bother with.

Samson and Cyrus were not big time. They were hungry enough that tearing through the building’s drywall to get to the framing behind it seemed like a good idea, even though building timber didn’t pay much more than pounds of scrap on the ton. It was Samson who had punched through the wall of a back office and uncovered a stairwell leading down into a collapsed parking garage. And that’s where they found a tunnel that ended in a pair of rusted steel doors that even Samson’s sledgehammer couldn’t budge.

Cyrus wipes his eyes, winces. “Should have grabbed some goggles at the Market,” he says, coughing through the cloud of dust.

“You always say that when we blow things up,” Samson says.

“Yeah, well. Damn things are expensive.”

The dust clears enough as far as Samson’s concerned, and he heads down into the tunnel with a lantern, ignoring Cyrus yelling behind him. The blast has blown the hinges off one of the steel doors just the way they planned, and it hangs at a cockeyed angle. Samson grabs it with hands the size of Christmas hams and yanks the door down with a shriek of tearing metal.

He raises the lantern to look inside and gasps.

“What?” Cyrus says, running up behind him. “What is it?”

“Untouched,” Samson says, his voice a reverent whisper.

“This section must have been sealed off when the building above collapsed,” Cyrus says. He looks up at the ceiling, rotting acoustic tiles, exposed ductwork. “Nothing but mud and rubble up there as far back as I remember.” He runs a finger through the thick layer of dust on a counter.

“Never seen a place ain’t been looted before,” Samson says. He sees a sign made of glass tubes on the wall. “What’s this say?” He knows the sign is letters, but Samson can’t read.

“K O C T,” Cyrus says. “Cocked? The hell does that mean?”

Samson shrugs. A reflection in the lantern light catches his eye. “Hey. Think I found something.” He steps around a desk next to a door at the far side of the room. Shoves it out of the way for a better look.

“Bones,” he says. No meat on them. No smell, either. What little clothing left is rotted away except for buckles and plastic. Samson nudges the bones with a toe and spies a badly corroded pistol in the corpse’s hand.

Cyrus bends down, plucks a shiny buckle and a handful of metal buttons off the corpse. Looks the gun over, tosses it aside. “Man, if there’s more like this, we’re gonna be rich. This place is a gold mine.”

Samson has already moved on. He finds a gray metal box on the wall with a big red lever on one side. He’s seen these before. Never asked what they do. No point. Every time he’s pulled a lever, nothing’s happened.

So he’s surprised when he pulls this one and the lights come on.

“Holy Jesus monkey fucking Christ,” Cyrus says. “There’s power.”

Samson blinks at the lights in the ceiling. Most of them are dead, but the ones that work buzz like pissed–off wasps. He traces a metal conduit up to the ceiling from the box.

“It’s not a generator,” he says. “Gas in a generator would have gone bad a long time ago. Solar?”

“Has to be,” Cyrus says. “Can’t be nuclear. Let’s see what else this place has.”

“Miracle it’s still workin’,” Samson says. Something about this place feels off to him. Not bad, not wrong, just different. Special, maybe. He’s having a hard time seeing it the way Cyrus sees it, as a place to loot. There’s more here than just things. He can feel it.

“I want to know what this place used to be,” Samson says.

As it turns out, it used to be a television station called Knights of the Church Triumphant.

Samson’s heard of television stations, though he’s never seen a working television. They find a series of offices and a full studio with three cameras on a set with a big desk in front of a dusty map of the world with a big red stain covering most of it. Samson’s seen a few maps like it, pictures of distant places he’s convinced don’t really exist.

“’Nother body,” he says, bending down to look at the moldering bones. The skull is a shattered mess, and it doesn’t take the stain on the map behind it to tell them what happened.

“Somebody shot him,” Cyrus says.

“Bad way to go,” Samson says.

“You know a better one?”

Samson thinks for a second. Shrugs.

“I ain’t seen any other ways in or out of this place besides the tunnel,” Cyrus says. “You?”

“No. You think this was a bunker? Panic room?”

“Probably, yeah. Those steel doors were pretty thick. Explains the power.” He puts a hand against an air vent near the floor. “Ventilation too. This place was buttoned up tight.”

“How come they didn’t come out?” Samson says. “Think they ran out of food?”

Now it’s Cyrus’s turn to shrug. “Dunno. If they got power, some of this old stuff might still work. Keep looking. See if there’s anything we can load up and sell at the Market.”

“No,” Samson says.

“Whatta ya mean, ‘no’?”

“I don’t want to tell anyone about this place yet. If we sell stuff people ain’t seen in fifty years, they’re gonna wonder where we got it. I don’t want them to know. Not yet.”

“But—”

Samson leans over Cyrus, his face twisting into a frown. “I said, no .”

“Fine. Fine. We don’t tell anybody.” Cyrus shrinks back from Samson’s gaze. “But we’re gonna have to sometime.”

“When I’m ready,” Samson says.

There are mysteries here. Samson can feel them hidden just out of sight, but something tells him there are answers, too.

Three days later Samson finds them.

“And there was a great earthquake, and the moon turned red like blood and the sun turned black like sackcloth—”

Samson hits the stop button on the VCR, freezing the image of the blond man speaking on the screen, his arms outstretched, eyes wild.

“What’s sackcloth?”

“Dunno. Cloth you make a sack out of?” Cyrus says. “Come on, hit the button again. I want to see what he says next.”

They’d found the room full of old videotapes, labels faded, plastic pitted and worn, on their first day. They didn’t know what they were or how to use them until Cyrus found a sheet of instructions laminated in plastic stapled to the wall. Samson couldn’t read them, but Cyrus figured it out pretty fast. He popped a tape into one of the machines and they watched the video, transfixed as the Right Reverend James King came on, his voice scratchy through the old, degraded speakers, preaching something about end times and the sins of Communists. Given that he was sitting behind the desk in the studio in front of the giant wall map, they figured this was the guy they’d found who’d had his head blown off.