James Axler - Remember Tomorrow

“Bastard,” he hissed, slamming the body’s head back down. “More trouble than you’re worth. Let’s see what Xander has to say ’bout you.”

He poked his head over the lip of the well, staring down at the point of light below. “How you doing?” he yelled down.

“Nearly finished. Where’s that fucking rope?” Hafler shouted in reply.

Sim let an evil grin cross his face. “Can’t get that fucking knot you tied around that other bastard out,” he yelled. “Can’t get the rope down—you’ll have to climb up without it.” He chuckled as he listened to the stream of abuse that came up from the bottom of the well.

“That’ll teach you,” he said to himself before tossing the end of the rope down the well.

When Hafler had pulled himself up, they stood over the body looking down on it.

“Reckon we should just chill the fucker now?” Hafler asked. “It’d save us a lot of trouble.”

Sim hoicked up and spit on the Armorer. “Nah. Let’s see if he comes around first. Take him back and see what Xander says. I reckon he’ll be interested to know just how this fucker ended up down there.”

“Shit,” Hafler cursed, kicking J.B. again. “I know you’re right, but that means we’ve got to carry this son of a bitch back to the ville.”

Between them, the two men picked up the Armorer’s body and began the long haul back to the ville. The sun was still high, although beginning the long journey into night and the heat beat down on them. J.B. was out cold, a motionless deadweight. Hafler had hold of his legs while Sim had hold of his shoulders. The thin, rat-faced man cursed without pause, railing at the fate that had led him to be assigned to Sim, to have to cover someone else’s ass on the south sector, to find this motherfucker stupe at the bottom of a well and for him to actually have the audacity to be alive.

“That’s it, that’s enough,” Sim said, unceremoniously dropping the body onto the dirt and turning to face his companion. “I’ve had enough of you moaning all the fucking time, boy. You want this guy chilled, so we don’t have to drag him back? Okay, you chill him.” The big man took an old Colt .44 six-shot blaster from the back of his waistband. The blaster was vintage, but highly polished and well maintained. It was obviously more than just a weapon to Sim, it was an object of some pride. This was clear from the way he checked that it was fully loaded and handed it carefully to Hafler.

Hafler had his own blaster, but he knew what this piece of hardware meant to his companion and he took it almost nervously, a slight tremor in his hand.

“Don’t do that, boy, it might go off in the wrong direction,” Sim murmured in a calm voice.

“Nah…nah, I’m not using this,” Hafler said, shaking his head violently and handing back the blaster with something that approached urgency.

Sim took it, shrugged and pointed the barrel at the Armorer’s skull. “Whatever you say, boy. But you moan anymore and I’ll take him out right now. And you’ll have to explain to Xander why we didn’t bring him back for interrogation if he ever gets to find out.”

Hafler sucked in his breath. “Don’t be stupe. You know I wouldn’t want that…Okay, okay, I’ll keep it shut, right?” He managed a pathetic attempt at a smile.

Sim’s own grimace of a smile was broader: round one to him. “Good. Then just pick the fucker up and let’s get rolling.”

The two men picked up the Armorer as before and resumed their trek. Hafler couldn’t stop the muttering under his breath that came as second nature, but made sure it was low enough not to annoy Sim.

Gradually, the landscape changed a little. The scrub became a little denser as they hit the remains of an old, predark woodland. A few hardy specimens had survived and they provided what little cover there was for the small, reinforced sec post, dug down into a trench and reinforced to two feet above ground level.

“Hey, what you two assholes got there?” yelled the sec man in the trench, his head alone visible above the reinforcements.

“They got something?” a second voice queried, his head also appearing above the reinforcement. Whereas the first sec man had a lean face framed by long, greasy black hair, the second had a bullet head on which the hair was savagely cropped. He also had what looked like a cigar clamped in his jaws, billowing a foul smoke.

“How d’you know it was us, Deke?” Hafler whined.

“The man Upton here says assholes, can only mean you two,” Deke replied with a beatific grin.

“Fuck you,” Hafler grumbled, which only made Deke laugh harder.

Upton, who was as tall and rangy as the shape of his face suggested, scrambled out of the sec dugout to examine what the two men were carrying. He prodded the Armorer’s inert body with the end of the remade Sharps rifle he was carrying. “So where you find this one?” he asked mildly.

“Weirdest thing. We covered this well in south—”

“Silborg and Denning—lazy fucks,” Upton interjected, nodding wisely.

“Exactly,” Sim continued. “One of the wells was blocked and when we looked down it, what did we find but laughing boy, here. Fuck knows how he got there, but there he was, blocking the water flow.”

“Never seen him before and he don’t look like one of the scum,” Upton mused. “So not a mutie and not on convoy. A real little mystery.”

“Only until the bastard wakes up. Xander’ll get it out of him.”

“Yeah, but we’ll probably never get to know,” murmured Deke, who had clambered out of the dugout to join them and had his Lee-Enfield .303 slung casually over his shoulder. Out on this post, the men eschewed SMGs in favor of rifles with which they could pick off any threat at distance.

Sim shrugged. “Xander’s baron. Guess it’s his right to know and his right to tell us or not.”

“Mebbe…but I’m curious.”

“Curious chilled the cougar,” Hafler said solemnly. They all looked at him. “Something my mama used to say,” he added weakly.

“Really?” Deke asked innocently. “All she used to say to me was ‘more, more…harder, harder.’”

Three of the four men laughed hard. Hafler managed a weak smile. Because, unlike Upton and Sim, he knew that Deke was only being truthful.

“Fuck it, can’t stand around here all day. We’ve got meat to deliver before it goes off,” Sim said, gesturing to Hafler to pick up the Armorer’s feet. Bidding their farewells, they left the two sec men to return to their post in the dugout and carried on toward their ville.

Another half mile brought them to the outer defenses of the ville. Their path across the scrub crossed a couple of dirt tracks and then finally met up with an old two-lane blacktop that was scarred, pitted and twisted by the quakes and ravages of the nuclear winter, but was still basically traversable. It was used regularly by the convoys of traders that came in and out of their ville, both as a stop-off to rest awhile and as a trading post. When they came to the blacktop, they turned right and headed toward the ville, clearly visible now.

It was a squat ville, with buildings no bigger than two stories high, all either the remnants of the predark suburban development or constructions that had been erected around the existing buildings, cobbled together from whatever materials could be found or traded. It gave the ville a lopsided, nightmarish look. A settlement filled with strange angles, abutments were used to shore up buildings that otherwise may have collapsed. Everything was either brown or gray. Color faded quickly in the heat and dust, and even black soon washed out. A pall of smoke hung over the whole area, coming up from the businesses and homes beneath. Even this far out, a buzz of noise could be heard. It was never quiet.