It was awful outside – the fog had rolled in early and turned the air into big damp clotted clumps; failed cloudlettes that sank low over the streets and blocked eyes and made you gasp like an old man just to keep breathing if you walked fast.
I liked it. When it was nasty out like this nobody looked outside; nobody was outside. And that made it easy to crawl under the fence through the old service gate and into the back of the old junkyard.
Plenty of good things back here, guarded only by a nasty old bastard with a scrapgun. But he was old and fat and would be stuck in his office all night; sipping warm shit out of a mug. Why should he put his ass out there in the cold and damp? Weren’t there cameras for that?
Yes there were, and I knew where all of them were aimed at. So in the end everyone was happy.
Not like anyone was going to make proper use of this stuff anyways. Dead scutters piled six high; stacks of dismembered industrial electronics; hell, there were even old automobiles down there somewhere, buried deep down where their frail husks were shielded from the worst of the rusting air. This was worse than garbage. At least garbage had to get stuffed away first before it was safely forgotten.
A screwdriver. A chisel. A crowbar. A pick. And sometimes a rock.
It was amazing what you could persuade to come home with you. It was all a matter of finding the right place and the right angle to approach it from.
And the right footing.
I always forgot about the right footing. That night I always-forgot-about-it while I was balancing on a completely stable heap of corroded vending units, which suddenly weren’t there anymore and then took me with them someplace new.
When the floor stopped, it was dark. Proper dark, not the nice fuzzy fog that I’d been so happy to see earlier. The kind of dark that wouldn’t know what a light was if you showed one to it, and would probably eat it whole.
Nothing down here had seen the sun in a very long time, and for a long horrible minute I was sure – absolutely deadbolt-certain – that was going to include me. My ankle was broken or my arm was trapped or my spine was twisted or my airways were blocked and I was going to be down here for the rest of time, buried too deep to even rot.
One limb. Two limbs. Four limbs. All flexing, turning, twisting freely.
My chest moved. Oh, I could still breathe, I’d just forgotten to try.
Fuck. Thank fuck. But fuck.
***
My hopefully-temporary new home wasn’t big enough to stand up in, but I could still measure out paces if I hunched double. Not quite as roomy as my apartment, but closer than I wanted to admit. A little damper. And the smell was different; flatter, more metallic. No rot, no mould, no ratshit. Just the corroded air of ancient machines.
And a sound so low-pitched and gentle that I almost mistook it for a headache at first. Then I knew better: it was the junkyard, settling. Ten million tons of smelted and broken ore, crushing itself all around me.
The walls were uneven conglomerates of pressure-fused metals; forged under their own weight. No way out, but there was air after all – leaking in through wherever I’d come from.
I did an inventory. I’d lost the crowbar and the pick. I couldn’t find my chisel. My screwdriver’s entire pocket was torn away.
But I had a rock.
Right place, right angle. I just had to loo
I just had to feel for it.
It was tricky work; tapping around in the dark like that. Felt like a coalminer’s child from centuries past; crammed into a space nobody else would fit in and told to chip it bigger without being crushed. Every smack of stone-on-metal came after I’d spent minutes examining the whole wall I was aiming at.
It was one of my air vents. Theoretically, this was a way out. Pessimistically, it could also lead to me collapsing some or all of the openings that were letting me breathe.
It’s amazing how you can focus on a job when you think it’s all that’ll let you stay alive. I couldn’t have said how long I spent down there in the dark, but I can tell you that it felt like no time at all. I smacked through the last hinge, braced, lifted, heaved, tore, crawled forwards into freedom.
And into another wall.
There was still airflow, but I wasn’t out yet. I was inside something else. Something a little smaller and a little closer. The buzz of the junkyard was louder here; trapped in a tin box with me and… hmm…
My hands moved slowly, wary of sharp edges and grinding gears and whirling turbines and dog knew what else.
… trapped with me and a tiny generator. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, its access panel had a lightsource.
Most of the things I’d taken out of this place had been in pieces, and only worth anything when rendered down into smaller pieces yet. But I knew how to build if breaking wouldn’t cut it, and even if I’d never exactly done it in the dark, in REAL dark before, well.
Like I said, it’s amazing how you can focus.
And it wasn’t a very complicated generator. So I snapped this to that and spliced the other over and crossed my fingers and used my rock to flip the switch and hoped I wouldn’t explode.
With impossible, violent, furious force, nothing happened. It happened so hard that I almost fell over. It happened so loudly that I slapped my hands over my ears and whimpered, and when I uncurled I could still hear it ringing inside my head, and that was when I knew I was missing something that wasn’t nothing at all.
The buzz had stopped.
And while I sat there and tried to decide what THAT meant, a new sound came, curling up from all around me. Creaking and squealing and grunting, the metal was curling back. Pulling away. Walls became doors, and behind them, tunnels slowly flickered into light – burning, flickering, faint-as-the-sun light. I wanted to cover my eyes again.
I compromised and peeked through my fingers as I stumbled upright and onwards. The ceiling in here was obviously higher than I’d thought.
***
Whatever I’d started moving with that little generator, or how, it wasn’t finished.
Oh, the halls and tunnels and cramped guts I crawled through were still as damned death again, rock-solid, unflinching. But as my eyes got used to seeing again, I realized that the lights weren’t stable. They crawled ahead of me and they shut behind me, breaking in their sockets.
Something was moving me, ushering me. Herding me.
And at the end of the line, when the tunnel bent and corkscrewed in on itself into the nastiest crawlspace I’d ever seen before dropping into a knotted tangle of guts that could’ve been a complete ventilation hub long ago, I wasn’t surprised to see myself face to face with another generator.
A completely different generator of course. If the other one had been old, this was prehistoric. It might’ve run on gas for god’s sake. It was bone-dry. Dead-empty. A starved old monster, bones without skin or flesh.
I got it running anyways. And the world heaved when I wasn’t looking, and the way behind me wasn’t the one I’d come in through, and when I walked every footfall echoed through invisible pits and out through hidden channels and it came back as
CAN
YOU
HEAR
ME?
***
Every four steps. Eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two. Sixty-four. The question never changed.
It soaked up and down in me until it turned into vibrations I could pretend weren’t real, just impacts, just garbage, just noise, just trash.
Doors opened for me. Metal moved for me. Lights died for me. Air pumped for me.
And over and over it asked me as I shut it out, as I turned the switches and mended the wires and felt things moving far below.
CAN
YOU
HEAR
ME?
I dropped my rock. It fell down a grate that hadn’t been there, fell into oils that were draining away into hidden reservoirs for hidden reasons. I swore, fumbled, slammed my hand against the floor and a screwdriver fell out of it.
The next generator ran on coal. The next hall, the lights were a solid bar above me, unfailing, undying.
CAN
YOU
HEAR
ME?
It was hot down here, and getting hotter. I took off my jacket. I threw away my jacket. I tied my shirt around my waist and shuffled along in my drenched sports bra and wished I was wearing shorts and felt the plating of the floor beneath me steam against my beaten old shoes.
New vents opened above me. Dead fans rattled to life again.
I didn’t recognize the thing I was fixing. I fixed it.
CAN
YOU
HEAR
ME?
Light – real light, skylight, that soft glow that comes from pollution and fog and a nonstop city’s glow – was beaming down on me. Shafts were opening above my head, trickling with dewy moisture. Dead leaves and gravel showered down on me as gently as raindrops.
There was a door. A real door, with a handle.
I opened it.
Behind it was a rusted old room, every feature eaten by orange crust. And in its center, a little crumpled column, torn from a kind of vehicle older than my grandfather’s grandmother.
And in it were a pair of keys.
I reached out and turned them and I knew I shouldn’t have. But it was how it was.
The door was still open behind me, but I couldn’t see out of it. All the fog, and as my legs took me through and out I’d never, ever, ever been happier to see and feel and be bathed in anything and everything as much as that thing.
I was outside the junkyard. I was outside of the metal. I was outside and I was going to go home and I was going to eat my awful shitty breakfast and be happy and I was just realizing that the buzzing hadn’t stopped and it wasn’t in my head.
It was humming through my feet, through the sidewalk, through the street, through the wires overhead, through the smooth concrete walls around me.
I didn’t understand until it took its first step right over my head, slamming down through the street like it was damp paper.
CAN
YOU
SEE
ME?
***
Miraculously, the pants pocket I kept my flask in was still there. I’d lost my wallet, but right now I needed this more anyways. The world was already drunk and I had to catch up fast.
My legs weren’t working again yet. I dangled them over the craterous edge of one of the footprints and sat there in the middle of the road as I sipped.
It was out of sight by now. Not quite out of hearing, and definitely not out of mind. I could hear the faint rising sound of a lot of voices turning into one voice that was starting to panic.
There was definitely an opportunity here, I figured. A lot of running folks. A lot of abandoned things. A lot of stuff being thrown aside that nobody would ever expect to see again, and hey, if they wanted that, I could help them with it. The right place and the right angle.
But I wasn’t going anywhere until I finished this.