Displaced Chapter 4 Part 1

 Chapter 4

The Displaced Tribes suffered a predictably tougher time arising for the following morning, entombed as they were. Their number were already well on their way to becoming a gloomy and miserably lot, like a sunflower raised in a locked shed. They affixed to their daily duties with grim despondence seeking some placid sliver of 'relief' somewhere inside the monotony of it all. Little Catha, however, was much the ball of inquisitive energy she always was. Even Lari felt the aches and pains of cave living more acutely than his younger partner did, and so directed the excitable girl the Traveller's way for a couple extra minutes snooze.

Granted a rare moment of silence, the Traveller took to his personal rituals of weapon maintenance, a routine and rigorous task that demanded the stripping and scrubbing of each individual component for every gun. (Typically he preferred to soak the extracted components in a water/Abraxo solution, but somehow the Traveller doubted anyone would appreciate him stealing a bucket of their precious water for rust cleaning duties.) Polishing site, wiping barrels, spraying oil, polishing stocks- there never was a lack of problems to solve when it came to keeping his almighty weapons prim and primed. The Traveller took to each task with a distinct precision, like a mathematician attacking a complex, but conceptually rudimentary, equation.

"Are you a solider?" Asked the little voice over his shoulder, belonging to Catha.

That ritual spell broke, dazing the Traveller momentarily whilst he struck some form of composure. "A wha- a Solider? For which military?"

Catha shrugged. "Any. None. Whichever."

"What you're thinking of is a 'Mercenary', Princess. Guns for hire, penny-soilder, that sort of thing. And no, I'm more of a- professional wanderer. All this 'maintenance' stuff is mostly just an... 'occupational necessity.'"

The girl scrunched up her nose. "Wandering isn't a job."

"Too true!" The Traveller smirked. "Wandering has paid me mountains more than any job I've ever actually signed up for. Although I suppose that's more the 'scavving' side of the hobby, selling off pilfered trinkets. Grave robbing, really."

"Is that your trade?" Catha asked with a genuine sincerity, undercutting the presumptive accusation that the Traveller assumed from that simple query.

He pondered that thought, chewing on his cheek a little as he did. Finally he said. "Not everyone has themselves a trade, little Chief."

She picked on that in her head, confused by it's substance. "Father said every tribal should adopt a trade."

"That doesn't surprise me."

"He said that everyone from childhood is taught to hunt and grow and cook, but a tradesmen learns how to hunt the most elusive and rewarding game, or work the toughest and least giving soil. 'Pick yourself a trade, and you will always be able find yourself'" She recited her father's words with a dreamy pride.

The man had to consciously resist the rolling of his own eyes. "And what's your trade?"

"M- my trade?" The girl blinked in a startle. "Well... um... my Trade is- wisdom? Yes, being the wise leader and... the delegator. 'The spine of the Tribe'. Sharing out idioms and advice to those who need to hear them; that's my trade. That's me, that's who I am." She nodded staunchly. 

This time he could not help himself." Look, No offence to the ex-Chief-"

"'Chief'." She snapped.

"What?"

Catha's emotion bricked up. "It's just 'Chief'. Not 'ex'"

"But I thought-" The Traveller paused. He took a proper look at the girl, lip curled under busy, nervous eyes. Fists clenched. He had struck an inadvertent nerve. "Never mind." 

They hovered in an awkward silence, the girl embarrassed by her own sudden outburst and the Traveller just eager to reclaim his solitude for a bit more maintenance work. At least in that rhythm he was not about to end up with his foot somehow in his own mouth.

"So did you meet the Doctor man yesterday?" Catha finally said once the buzzing bees in her chest started to settle.

Her brittle attempt to reset wormed its way under the Traveller's skin. He decided to throw her a bone. "Yes, I met Doctor Mauderlaine. Nice guy, if deeply misguided."

"What was up with him?" She asked.

"Hmm? I think intellectuals just tend to get a little eccentric when they're shacked up on their lonesome for so long without company. I think he still had most of his faculties, though."

"No I mean... what was up with his face?" The girl stuck out her tongue remembering the gross visage of a rotten, yet still walking, man.

"Oh! That's ghoulification for you. One of the dangers of excessive radiation exposure. The body starts to rot on the outside whilst the core operating systems are preserved... indefinitely as far as anyone is aware." The medical implications of such a strange immortality always tugged at the Traveller's wonder. Sometimes he had to remind himself that those are people suffering from such a bizarre condition, not aspiring test subjects. Catha actually reminded the Traveller of his own early years; frightfully curious about everything to the point of conjuring questions incessantly. Most found that sort of curiosity annoying, which was probably a contributing factor for his lacklustre popularity back home.

Catha shuddered. "So that can happen to me?" 

"Hey, don't worry about all that; you see this?" He flashed the curious wrist mounted computer screen that everyone in the tribe had snuck at least one curious glance at when they thought he was otherwise preoccupied. "Among other things, this here is a damn good Geiger Counter. That means it reacts to dense pockets of ionising radiation. I'm not going to lead you guys into any dead zones on accident, I can promise you that!"

The girl reached out curiously for the machine and the Traveller surrendered his arm for her fascination. She experimentally twisted the dials and pressed the buttons, and watched with unabashed awe as the green-scale screen flickered between 'Maps', 'logs' and 'inventories'. "This is incredible!" She zoomed out on a satellite image map of the entire state. "I recognise this; this looks just like the maps Lari makes only... bigger and better! And look at these notes! How many do you have on here?"

"Pfft. Thousands at this point. I really should do a clear out, but the ol' Pip Boy has a mean memory on her. She hasn't complained yet."

Her eyes glittered. "No memorising lessons, scrawling instructions in the dirt and on the backs of carboard scraps. I mean, can you imagine all the things you could do with this?"

Potential simmered in her tone, and the Traveller stoked. "I have a pretty solid grasp, but why don't you tell me what you would do with it?"

Catha blushed, released the arm she was just manhandling without a care. "What would I do? Well... I would write down every lesson that the foreman taught, the properties of all the crops and the length of every grow season; so that way everyone can be a grower, not just people with good memory. And- Oh! I would record all of the Seer's stories, so that we don't lose our pasts to slipping minds. I would store the stories of all the tribes, so that anyone could learn about what we did and who we were. So we could have proof that we were here!"

The Traveller raised his brow. "That all sounds pretty ambitious, little Chieftain. You'd make quite the avid chronicler."

"You asked what I would do and that's my answer." She poked out her tongue. "I just thought it might improve the tribes. You know, for the future." Catha frowned and glanced over at the various eye-sunken members of the Displaced tribes. "For our future."

"Do you think about this sort of stuff a lot?"

She nodded empathically. "Every Chieftain has to introduce substantial new ideas or gifts to the tribe during their lifetime. That is how they are remembered in our stories, for how they improved the way the modern tribe lives. Baccata taught us how to wrangle the wild irradiated wildlife, Sugi renewed fertilizer production methods quadrupling annual crop growth. And Cede-" Her voice caught in her throat. "Dad was the one who taught us how to hunt like warriors. Approaching against the wind so that the prey cannot catch our scent. Spending only a single bullet on a kill, to the heart or neck so that the meat is not bullet riddled. Cleaner ways to skin. He changed the way we lived."

Catha's gaze fell down to her clogs as stood there meekly, lost in the types of thoughts one does not freely speak. The Traveller ruffled her hair, startling the girl. "And so will you. But you're young yet, there's no need to rush yourself. Everyone here is in the middle of the greatest upheaval their clans have ever known. Simply rising to lead them, which I know you've got the confidence to do in you somewhere; that's going down in the history books whatever happens. No need to stress yourself out about it." With that he left to prepare for the day and Catha hung on at that place for a little while longer, considering the words he said and basking in that odd sense of nostalgia their exchange had left her with.

"Absolutely not! You will not to join the scout, I won't allow it!" The Old Seer's eyes disappeared beneath that caterpillar brow once again, and their deep creases spared no quarter.

Lari, perched beside his scowling partner, swallowed nervously. "Seer Pinac, I believe that Catha just desires to be the best Chief she can be, and with the palpable experience of scouting alongside a Pathfinder-"

"Do not start with that 'Pathfinding' nonsense again, that gibberish was all Cede's design and I will only respect it's name up to a point. Catha, you are our sole heir and you ran into the lap of mortal danger yesterday! Do you have any concept of how it would have effected the Tribes had anything irreversible become of you?"

"But nothing did!" Catha stamped her foot.

"Because of the Traveller! You cannot rely on the talents of a passer-by to pull you out of every hole you dig for yourself. It's irresponsible!" Pinac spat a thick wad of saliva onto the rocks. "Your father taught you better than that. I taught you better!"

Lari jumped back in whilst Pinac was preoccupied hacking up another ball of phlegm. "But she would be scouting alongside me and the Traveller; we wouldn't allow her to get into danger,  Seer Pinac. We promise!"

"Save your honey!" The old man fumed. "Since entering this cave you've encountered hoards of giant toxic wasps, have you not? And monstrous mutant men? Who knows what other dangers lie ahead? Dangers you can't possible predict, let alone 'promise' our Chieftain-to-be's protection from. No, I shall hear nothing more. Catha will stay with the Tribes and that is the last word."

"But Seer Pinac-"

"I have said my last word boy! Lest you wish to challenge the council of a sitting seer I suggest you hush your mouth. Now!" The old man stood with the spine of a white-woolly mammoth silencing both dissenting children with the flame of his glare. Recognising defeat, Lari tried to offer Catha a consolatory smile, but the girl had already resigned to sulk off by the children's tents. Even a Chieftain's daughter could recognise the keen taste of humility.

Without the sky to track the time, the Traveller and Lari took to pressing forward through the new caves of the mountain from the moment they were both ready with the intent of progressing straight through the caves until they came out the otherside. The Mutants had absconded with all of their burning braziers when they left, leaving the boys largely blinded as they navigated sharp-rock tunnels far too deep in the earth for any sliver of natural light. The Traveller's Pip-Boy screen glowed enough to offer a slight film of lush green so the pair could just about see in front of them, but the effect was hardly adequate for safely crossing uneven rock floors. They had to move slowly and more carefully than they had before, and even with that added level of precaution, the Traveller still ended slipping down one sharp drop in the floor and tumbling down into a fresh cavern that had been literally right in front of their faces if only depth perception had any weight against the sheer dark.

The new cave was spacious and breathable, and seemed to stretch on far into the distance before and behind them. Most peculiar of all, however, was the way in which the walls of the tunnel caught the light from his Pip-boy. That wrist-light seemed to bounce and curve in a way that made the walls of this new cave seem perfectly rounded. 

No- they were perfectly rounded! The Traveller ran his hand along the tunnel's smoothed stone carefully chiselled and carved with man made tools. A very familiar shape if his memory served well. He angled the wrist computer to shine on the floor of the tunnel, and found the glare of metal tracks gleaning back at him, confirming his suspicions.

"We're in a subway!" The Traveller breathed with disbelief.

Lari scratched at his ear. "What is that?"

The absurd nature of it all forced a chuckle out of the Traveller. "This tunnel was cut through the mountain for transportation. Trains carrying people and goods had to travel along this which means... it means the ravings of your half-drunk Prospector were true! I'll be damned."

The boy shrugged. "Of course he was telling the truth. Pinac said so."

Long dead train tracks glittered in the dark as the two explorers followed it's snaking trail towards the south of the mountains. Trains were a big deal out in the middle of nowhere states before the war, especially in the middle of potential dead zones like the major deserts.  But those tunnels were not often carved directly through the middle of mountains very often as far as the Traveller had seen. No, in order to secure a tunnel that deep into the earth would take a herculean effort of careful engineering to ensure the whole thing would not fall apart at the first shifting of the earth. He was no architect himself, but just running his fingers across the stonework of the walls or pressing his ear to the tunnels walls told soundly enough about how sturdy everything was. Great pains went into building those tunnels to the utmost standards of code. 

Once the twisting tunnel broke a corner that ended with a glint of light, anticipation twisted around his guts. Only to sink like a stone into mild disappointment once the two of them drew close enough to recognise the duller constant pulse of a synthetic lamp. it was a train station, god knows how deep underground, powered by the grace of a miniature fusion reactor, no doubt, and thus still glowing in the dark, even two hundred years after opening hours. That disappointment further coiled up into frustration once they closed in closer to the station and discovered that on the other end of the station their tunnel already had an occupant. A huge tube-liked train, wedged tightly against the diameter of their tunnel, effectively blocking the duo's progress down the train line and, ideally, out of the mountain.

Lari saw a mythical wonder in that vestige of the dead world left behind, like an archaeologist pulling back the curtain over some perfectly preserved ancient table spread, whereas the Traveller simply saw glitzy kitsch. The Traveller carried himself and Lari up onto the station platform, with the boy only wincing a little when his throbbing arm hoisted was hoisted upon. 

That tomb-like station was alight with blinking fluorescent billboards demonising some kind of 'Red Menace' and colourful glossy ceramic tiles unnaturally preserved due to the merit of their deep construction. Some measure of that gloss was actually a coat of grime slickened over the polish, but the aesthetic was still far more lavish than anything the boy could have imagined. Stories of the old world passed down by Seers typically lingered on the majesty of a world lush with green forests and crystal blue waters, whilst admonishing the hedonistic excess of those that burnt it all away. But in the face, that same luxury twinkled with a rich grace that easily eclipsed such prejudices.

"Was all the world like this once?" The boy asked with through lips that refused to shut.

"You as well? I'm not as old as you and the girl think I am, you know." The Traveller teased with a wink. "I've picked through some old-world train stations in my day, but from what I can tell they're not usually this well preserved. But even in their ruin, I don't think many of them were even nearly this lush." He pointedly poked at a wrought-steel black bench rimmed with gentle golden leaf, expecting the paint to peel off and pouting when it did not so much as scratch. "I don't know who this station was built for, but I get the feeling it wasn't the general populace."

The tube-like tunnel in which the train track ran was built incredibly tightly around the carriages that were designed to shoot through it. Such that as The Traveller approached the two-hundred year old broken down train sticking out the end of their only way further south, he found barely half the width of a normal man between the train sides and the tunnel wall. Checking the area maps on his wrist computer, taking northern tunnels seemed like prohibitively longer alternative. Perhaps weeks of straight walking, and even then under the assumption that none of the northern walls had collapsed in on themselves. Whereas if the southern routes continued straight, they could be less than half an hour from the surface again. (How had that damned prospector made this trip all on his own?) Only the very rear carriage of the train poked out from the tunnel to line up with the station platform. With the jutting drivers cabin poking out behind that.

Climbing aboard the jarred open door to the cramped Driver's cabin, the Traveller and Lari discovered that the actual connecting door leading into the rear-most passenger carriage was rusted shut with a copper abrasion that seemed to run the length of the door, melding the metal with the frame.

"This is going to be a headache." The man grumbled. "Lari, give me some space to work, will you? I'm going to have to jimmy this door off it's hinges. As soon as I can find those hinges. Do these doors have hinges?" 

Whilst the Traveller wrestled against a rigid train door, Lari allowed his curiosity to drag him through a gallery of old world opulence as he explored that underground station. A staircase leading up from the platform opened onto another similarly immaculate hallway featuring walls imbedded with empty dim-light tanks of aquatic fauna suspended in still waters. Pinac told stories of containers like those; mini ecosystems designed to contain fish in a living diorama of their stolen homes, back when the world still contained aquatics. The box looked sad as it was, lit up with plastic pirate ships and rock formations, wreathed in frills to the amusement of an empty box adorning an abandoned train station.

Those halls led onto a grand underground promenade writhe with two floors of unmanned terminals and rows of kiosks, all of which must have served at least a hundred people concurrent in their prime. Newspaper stands with stapled up newspaper bundles each proudly lauding ancient events in faraway places with strange names like 'Anchorage' and 'Pennsylvania' dating every other week up until October, a special branch of 'RobCo' robotics now littered with rusted hunks of military green metal, the likes of which Pinac said would once walk and talk like men. And with the largest and loudest displays, in the middle of the promenade, was one open front store dedicated solely to the sale of a simply obscene number of firearms. The Tribes had made do with old hand-me down Hunting Rifles ever since the Fire, and even when the Doves and other tribes came they bought with them mostly spears and clubs. Lari could never even imagine any other breed of weapon before the Traveller rolled up with a rucksack full of death dealers, but even his arsenal paled in comparison to the displayed garrison of that store front.

Menacing black-metal cannons with backpack mounts that looked too cumbersome even for two men to carry, sleeker looking hand pistols that would neatly in the palm of Lari's hand should he reach for one, all crafted to a standard arguably unbecoming for such blunt instruments. Cede said there was a reason why only the best of the hunters were permitted to use mechanical weapons, they were shortcuts to power for the weak and lazy, and those who take shortcuts never learn to respect the weight of that power. Of course, then the man named him 'Pathfinder' and shoved a rifle in his hands. Rules are easier written than abided. Lari let such moral compunctions rest aside as he picked up one silvery handgun free behind the central counter of the empty gun store.

Lari inspected the gun curiously, studying it's rigid angles, the lock of the slide when you pulled the trigger, the little stop that need to be disengaged to slot that slide back into place. A simple enough mechanism, actually somewhat less hands-on than the bolt action slugger he was used to. No one had been kind enough to paint the required ammunition on the stock- or 'grip' as The Traveller had told him it was called for handguns, so Lari had to just eye-ball whichever box of calibres looked right from the glass display-box stored next to the store counter, before he lifted up the display lid to grab some. 

A red sired blared into the life in the roof of the gun store the moment he lifted the glass lid of the ammo display case, followed by a delayed echo as alarms all up and down the promenade drowned the whole station in synthetic wailing and red blinking warning lights.

The bright flood lamps of the promenade shut-off, dousing the room in a blanket of darkness cut only by blinking flashes of warning red. Lari froze like a Radstag in crosshairs, alarm seizing his motor functions whilst his head flushed with the heat of finding yourself in the middle of a sizzling pan of activity.

Then came a groan. Guttural and animal, like some rabid dog waking with an aching hunger, from somewhere behind Lari. Deeper in the store, grumbling from the direction of the back storage rooms.

Icy chills blossomed up Lari's spine sending tendrils wriggling through every nerve as his eyes locked dead with the wide-open doorway behind the counter, emitting the groans of a waking hound. Unlit and unyielding as the back rooms were, the boy's mind could only conjure phantoms of some slobbering savage mutt to fit those heaving growls.

Lari backed slowly from around the counter, edging himself out of store one deliberate step at a time, only for every hair on his neck to shoot rigid as fresh hisses and spits began to bleed out from everywhere. Filling the air between each siren wail.

Behind the walls, above the ceiling, beneath the floor tiles. As though he had slipped and dropped directly into the dead of a rattlers den, the boy was surrounded by the undeniably lethal sounds of encroaching predators.

Just about managing to work his fingers, the boy clumsily slid one of the ammunition clips into his tiny pistol and held the silver weapon aloft with jittery hands. Nerves darting his eye from flashing red shadow to shadow, unable to spot the danger that sounded close enough to reach out and wring at his neck.

Finally he spotted a shape; melding with the shadows across the promenade and lurching on the mezzanine floor above the shop stands. The form of a man, laboured and deliberate, staggered up and collapsed onto the guard railings.

It slumped and then slipped, over those railings where the form fell like a brick. It dropped for a full storey and crashed hard onto the solid floor in an inelegant, unliving, crumpled mess.

Lari's composure slipped, instinct urged his to rush over to the injured man's aid even as the hisses, groans and sirens reached a dangerous, deafening crescendo, but before that impulse could override his reason- the mess stirred.

First its limbs popped back into place, bones snapping back into their slots, then the human-like body laboriously pulled itself back to his feet. Gait slumped, legs twisted, but miraculously stood upright, albeit wobblily so.

The emancipated silhouette rose between blinks of red, before catching sight, or perhaps scent, across the promenade of the boy. Those limbs went rigid once more, its jaw slacked. And in a burst of movement the thing began to charge his way, arms flailing.

Lari's gut collapsed and he forgot everything. The ammunition he was fishing for, the gun in his hands- his flight response overwrote all of that in a single overwhelming stab of instinct and the boy turned heel. 

He fled back for the hall heading for the stairs towards the station, even as through flashes of red lucidity more silhouette shapes came crawling out from under kiosks and collapsing off their mezzanine rails in sickening thuds, as their raucous howls joined the din.

The boy's legs were tough and primed, but still the pitter-pattern of fleshy feet sprinting across floor just seemed to grow closer and closer. Lari could smell the putrid breath of some panting beast trickling up the nape of his neck, spurring him even faster. 

Then it leapt.