It’s Not Easy Making Money In The Apocalypse

It was dark, so I could only see their looming shadows as they came down the ally, but I was pretty sure that my stealthco had run out, and there was also nowhere to run. Since rescuing the girl, she had very little to say. I could feel her cold hand squeezing against my own, but otherwise, she seemed to be waiting for me.

“This is the location the power source leads to.” Cecelia suddenly spoke up.

“What?”

“It didn’t feed through the guardhouse as I thought, but right next to it,” Cecelia explained. “There should be some kind of entrance here.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Do you have any choice?” She responded.

I made an aggravated noise as I turned on my Perco’s light. Her words did make some sense. Didn’t we also use an alleyway to hide the route to my base? That was more out of necessity, but it was probable that this hidden underground location was placed adjacent to the guardhouse. They didn’t connect the guardhouse to the electrical grid, but if the rest of the location needed power, then the cable would run past the guardhouse, giving the impression they were on the same grid.

The light flashing on in the dark ally was enough to cause the beasts to freeze for a moment. This gave me a few precious seconds to look around the alleyway frantically. It all looked like brick and trash. 

“What are you looking for?” The girl next to me asked, her voice surprisingly calm given the situation.

“There should be a button, a switch, a latch… anything.” I hissed as I continued my search.

I looked around frantically, but there was nothing that stood out.

“Time to die!” A voice growled from behind me.

I only had one way out. That was to abandon this girl and disappear using world travel. I’d be safe in my world, and the monsters would be none the wiser. In a few hours when things settled down and they all went to sleep, I could return, waste one more of my Stealthco, and then return to the window to help Raven escape. It was only because of this ability of mine that I was confident I could escape this situation in the first place. However, I’d be leaving the girl for dead. In the end, I didn’t have a choice.

Click.

There was a grinding sound next to us. The girl had been looking too, and she had found some kind of button near the floor. It had caused a small panel to open. It wasn’t a doorway or stairs. It was some kind of chute. It looked just large enough for us to fit through, but something as large as a beast wouldn’t.

I flicked off the Perco. The beast’s eyes had been used to the light, and as soon as I shut it off, they were blinded by darkness again. I didn’t waste any time. I grabbed the girl’s hand and then immediately jumped for the chute. One of the beasts let out a scream, seemingly guessing we were about to escape. He swung his weapon wildly, which was some kind of mace-like object. It struck the ground where I had been standing, but a moment later I had plunged myself into complete darkness.

I was falling down some kind of metal shute. My body was cut on a few loose screws and metal, but I didn’t have much time to register the pain before I struck the end. I landed on something that was both hard and soft. I felt various crunches as my body struck it hard. A few moments later, something else soft but hard landed right on top of me.

I let out a groan instinctively as the girl scrambled up, her knee ended up in my gut as she worked her way to her feet. I slowly regained my breath, not moving from my spot. I was also listening above. I heard a few thuds, but there was no beast mutant coming down to join us. After a minute, I heard a rumble again as the door to the chute above us closed. I closed my eyes tightly. There was no going back up. It was a one-way trip now.

“What is this place?” I heard the girl speak a distance away.

As I sat up, I heard the sound of my Geiger going off. The radiation level was low, but I immediately injected one of my charges of Rad-R. I was low on Rad-B-Gone, and even if I did spray down the entire area, I wasn’t confident I’d get the sources of the radiation. At the very least, I could keep myself from gaining radiation too quickly, and then use my last doses to clean myself after. As for the girl, I’d offer it if we experienced more radiation. Most Wastelanders dealt with radiation daily, so I wasn’t willing to waste my drugs on her unless I had to.

Looking away from my Perco, I realized couldn’t see a thing in this darkness. The building might have been getting power, but nothing was turned on at the moment. I pointed my arm out so that the flashlight could illuminate the area under me. That’s when I let out a shout and scrambled up. I was still sore all over, but there was nothing like seeing you were laying on a mound of corpses to wake you up quickly. I jumped around a bit, shaking off the dust and scraps that were clinging to me.

The corpses were mostly desiccated. A few were already down to just the skeletons. However, piles of them had formed right there. No… I looked up to see that the pile peaked right where the shoot let out.

“A body chute…” I spoke my thoughts out loud.

“Where did you bring us?” The girl asked again.

“This is… some kind of underground research lab,” I explained. “From pre-outbreak… or maybe during an outbreak.”

I altered my words a bit as I thought about the letter I had read. Those guards had been stationed here while the outbreak was going on.

“These bodies… aren’t human.” She had kneeled and was looking at one of them.

“Hmm?” I shone the flashlight where she was staring, and she turned her head away, lowering her hood. “S-sorry, what were you saying?”

I must have flashed her in the face. I coughed, keeping the light closer to the ground.

“Only infected decay so slowly.” She explained. “Ferals.”

“They were testing on the MGV?” I frowned.

I was trying to remember everything that Katarina had told me about this world. The world hadn’t ended in war, famine, or some kind of meteor strike, but from a virus, simply known as the mutagenesis virus. It created zombies, although this world never developed the culture around zombies past the classical voodoo kind, so they called them ferals. Ferals could make crystals, which were used as energy to fuel the newly discovered magic. Just a look at my sister showed how powerful magic could be, and why they wanted a means of farming crystals.

 Those experiments got out of hand, the mutagenesis virus also evolved, affecting the plant life and turning it brown with low yields. The world was slowly overrun by ferals, the population was starving, and when the nuclear power plants began to have meltdowns, the world became irradiated too. Thus, the apocalypse took hold. An irradiated landscape could take 20,000 years to recover. Who knew how many ferals existed. As for the poor food yield, that was something that might never be fixed.

“What is the MGV?” The girl asked.

“Ah… nothing… it’s the virus that makes ferals.”

“Ferals are… made?”

“You didn’t know?”

She turned her shoulder to me. “We shouldn’t dally here. This is a dark place.”

I had lucked out when I first came to this world. Katarina was born in a colony. Colony people weren’t just more attractive than Wastelanders, they were better educated. Wastelanders may be tough, but that came with consequences. Since they fought for survival, things like education weren’t accessible for them. The colonists knew about the history of the world and taught it, but out in the wasteland where one lived day-by-day, those kinds of privileges weren’t possible.

If I hadn’t met an educated colonist, I might have not known the history of how this apocalypse came into being. It was funny how it all worked out. Even Cecelia had very little knowledge of the MGV. That wasn’t the focus of her particular military post.

“Yeah, fine, let’s get going.” I had enough of staring at bodies, so I turned and followed the girl.

Even though she didn’t have a light, she seemed to be getting around in the dark better than I did. She had found a doorway that exited from the room filled with bodies. With her back to me and her cloak up, she gave off a strange and mysterious aura. As we exited into the hallway, I heard the buzzer on my Geiger increase a bit. With a sigh, I decided to speak up.

“Did you need some Rad R?” I asked, as my light caught just the thing I was looking for.

“I don’t need Rad R.” She turned to me, her eyes glowing in her hood.

I went and flicked the switch near the door. There was a flickering as the lights began to turn on. As soon as they illuminated the girl’s face, she let out a cry, turning away. I had only gotten a glimpse at her for a moment, but from what I saw, she had blood-red eyes and strangely pale skin.

“Kill her!” Cecelia immediately spoke up.

“What?”

“She’s a mutant!”