Gold's Price Read online

  But he had never studied Chinese, and by the time he’d wished he had, it was far too late. He looked sourly at the surveillance pod, his warden. There were guns mounted on this thing, two serious-looking barrels, and other tube-like protuberances. Nothing pleasant, he was sure. The dog bounded up, sniffing. He raised his leg and pissed on the pod.

  The man smiled. Good dog. They turned and walked down, down the mountain.

  He reached the town towards sunset and approached it warily, watching the buildings from a stand of trees for a long time before deciding the town was empty. The town wasn’t much, basically a cluster of boxy buildings around a central crossroads where a two-lane highway crossed a local road. There had been a train at one point, long ago, but all that remained of it was the embankment of the rail bed, greened into a gentle hummock under tall grass. He sat and watched the town, chewing one of his last pieces of venison jerky thoughtfully.

  They had burned the town. Not too long ago. He had seen the smoke from the mountain, and here, up close, he saw the town, and turned it over in his mind. There were bullet holes in the adobe walls, and it looked like somebody had systematically stripped the tall, boxy structure (a warehouse, big-box store, drone repair shop?) of its cladding. And then burned it. Each house looked to have been fired on its own, no sign of a wildfire moving from house to house. Guessing, he told himself. What do you know about how fires move? The houses were close together, but there were some smaller structures, sheds, and garages that had escaped the fire.

  So someone attacked, looted, and burned the town. He thought about the boy, or the man, or their family, and how they had fed him for many winters. He sucked on his teeth and spat. He stood and called the dog with a whistle.

  Leaving the trees, he crossed a field, long gone over to grass, and reached the road. The road was crumbling. There were signs of the past, even here, though. The stump of a signpost jutted at an angle from the road. The sign was long gone, and the wood, an ancient, desiccated four-by-four, cut with a power tool at some point. A nice, clean cut made by a spinning blade. Taken for wood? Some other reason? To hide the name of this place? It had mattered to somebody, though, once.

  He walked on, into the town. The first building was the low adobe structure. A house, he thought on reaching it. This one had a row of neat holes stitching up its side at an angle, a few of which had spalled larger chunks off the plaster. Violence. A handgun of some kind, automatic from the spacing of the bullets, maybe. He hoped there weren’t any people around with those. He was unarmed, naturally, beyond what he’d been able to fashion on the mountain from stones, wood, and the odd bit of metal he had scrounged. He had a knife which he had found in the basement of the cabin when he moved in, but that was it. And it was old, had been old when he found it. But it was all he had that would keep an edge, one of his few treasures. He hoped he could avoid people, especially people with guns.

  He looked in a window. Charred timbers and weeds, coming up through the burned-out floor, now that the roof was gone. There might be some useful odds and ends he could find if he wanted to dig through the trash inside these buildings. He probably should, but some of that trash was bound to be bones, given what looked to have happened here. He didn’t want to root through bones. The dog was excited, sniffing everything. He whistled softly to it to keep it nearby.

  He saw something lying in the grass. Rusty metal, a long span. He knelt and brushed the grass and twigs away. His hand closed on a handle, and he pulled it free from the dirt. Two feet of rusty, pitted steel. An old word bubbled up in the surface of his mind. Machete. And then Spanish. He closed his eyes. He saw a girl, a teenager with a mohawk, the sides of her head browned by the sun, shaved close, grinning at him from her bicycle. He opened his eyes, and then she was gone. So. Not really a weapon but a tool. The handle was loose but could be mended. The steel was sound under the rust, but that could be scraped off. He hefted it, frowning.

  He was now armed, somewhat. Great. He called the dog again, softly, and it came bounding up. They looked more, moving from house to house, poking through piles of debris with the machete. It didn’t look to have been visited by anyone since the burning. That was months ago, so who knew what that meant. There hadn’t been many people around here to begin with. Less so ever since. He didn’t know whether he was pleased about this. A fire that size would have been seen, surely, for miles around. By somebody. Maybe.

  Would they have come looking? People were probably wary these days. Maybe they would have come to do what he was doing. Scavenging. Looking through burnt-out trash for useful things. He found a cup, a metal cup. Sports bottle, he thought, tasting the age of the words. It was blackened. He had found it in a burned-out house. Old, but it still held water.

  The town still had some plumbing, which amazed him. A spigot in a scarred adobe wall. He stared at it. It dripped. It had been a long time since he’d seen one. He could taste the metal tang in the water, could feel it splashing on his face and T-shirt. He blinked and the kid drinking from the hose was gone. Poof, like that. Gone. The house was gone. The little yard with the ornamental rocks and the cypress trees. Did this one work?

  It worked. He put his hand on the spigot, feeling the sun’s warmth in the round knob. A fleck of red paint nestled inside the spokes of the knob. He twisted it, and it turned easily. It coughed and spat, shaking on its long stem, and then water flowed, thick with an orange froth. He stepped back, and let the water run until it was clear. The dog bounded up, barking at the water. It bit and snapped at it. He kicked the dog away. The water could be bad or poisoned. The thoughts came to him, like this, unbidden.

  He shrugged. Who would want to poison this water? For what purpose? He was being foolish, and let the dog drink. He filled his water bag and washed his hands and face. He cleaned off the machete, then dried it with a scrap of curtain he found hanging in a window of a partially burned house.

  He and the dog searched more. They found scattered bones, picked clean by whatever birds or animals had flensed them. They were long and thin. So, maybe a woman. Or a man. Who knew? He was no expert. No forensic pathologist, he thought to himself. Quincy. Colombo. Dexter? No, Dexter had been the bad guy? Or maybe he was the good guy? It didn’t matter. He didn’t know this kind of stuff. It looked like a woman’s bones, though. They were long and thin.

  He camped that night, in a corner of a building whose roof had collapsed. He didn’t trust the ones that had not; all of them looked dangerous and ready to collapse. It was cool, but warmer than it had been on the mountain. In the cabin he and the dog would have been nice and snug, with a fire roaring on his hearth. He had built that damned fireplace, stone by stone, hauled up from the little creek. He had found clay in a bend in the river, and dragged buckets of it up to his cabin. He had found the red plastic bucket in a gully off one of the walking trails that circled the mountain. He had thought about bringing it, since it was still a good bucket, still strong, but it was bright red, which is why he had seen it. It couldn’t be hidden easily, so he had left it.

  He needed to stay hidden; he felt. Even if nobody was looking for him, who knew what was out here? Somebody had burned this village. There were bad people in the world. He knew that, beyond any doubt. It was best to avoid them, if you could. Stay away, don’t get involved in other people’s shit. It never ended well.

  It ends with you being stuck on a mountain for several hundred years. It ends with you camping in a burned-out village with a dog. It robs you. It snatches your life away from you and sets you on a path you didn’t want to go down, but you went down anyway. It changes you and everything. He looked out over the town, one last time. Nobody in sight. Just an empty, ruined town. A graveyard. Like most towns, he thought, now thinking of his little seaside town, his old house. Probably underwater.

  He spread the tarp on the ground. It was getting frayed, but it would keep the damp off them. He made his pack his pillow up against the wall and spread his blanket over him, kicking his feet underneath it. The
machete he lay nearby, just in case. It was dull. He could sharpen it tomorrow.

  The blanket was his pride and joy. It was a sandwich of two layers of buckskin, with a foil emergency blanket sewn inside. He had found the emergency blankets in a cabinet in the wreckage of the fire watchtower on the shoulder of the mountain. Most of that wreckage had rebuilt the cabin. The other emergency blankets were in the walls and ceiling of the cabin, sandwiched between plastic sheets that had made the roof of the fire watchtower. But he had saved one for the blanket. It had helped a little in the cabin, but in the blanket it was awesome. The winter was cold on the mountain. It was warmer here in the town than it would be in on the mountain. But he would have had the cabin and a roaring fire.

  He called the dog over to him and they cuddled under the blanket. This blanket was great, he thought. He tried to sleep, but couldn’t.

  Chapter Three

  Gold climbed down with care as she had her “pack” slung across her back. She had stopped to gather it and a few items she had scavenged, and the drones had not objected, although she noticed them angling in for a better look at what she packed. A length of cable, steel she thought, but finely wrought and unrusted. Two dressed rabbits from yesterday’s hunt, wrapped in palm fronds. A few wood-and-metal tools she had been working on as a toolkit, which she had figured she would need. Her flashlight and phone, which had died weeks ago. The magazines and machine pistol she left in their hiding place. She didn’t want the drones to know about them. Her knife was in her pack and she had faced plenty of other crises with less. She climbed carefully, not betraying any of herself, any of her special abilities. She made a point of tying herself from perch to perch. She could never traverse the broken floors, which were just hunks of concrete clinging to the building’s metal frame, at speed, but still, she was careful to appear normal and not unique.

  She was unique here, though. It was obvious she was not from here, not from this place. Her clothes were different, her shoes, her pack itself, improvised from her tactical web harness and some scraps of plastic tarp she had found. More of a bag she could wear on her back, tied at the top with half of one of her boot laces. These items would be unique to these people. To this mind, behind the drones. If they were like Alpha, the AI they had met back in the California mountains, they would know her for a stranger. They may know already. She thought about this as she climbed. What, she thought, were the chances that this AI was like Alpha, omniscient and willful?

  The chances, she thought, were good. There was only one thing to do, though, and that was to find out. Alpha had brought her here, or Smoke had, or they were the same thing now, the same sort of thing. Smoke had strobed there at the last. He had flickered in and out of existence with a sound like soft ripping paper. He had been, she had realized, shuttling data back and forth between the two AIs. Then he had glowed white, a painful, bright, overexposed video kind of white, and came back to normal. Looking normal, at least.

  That, she reckoned, was some kind of incarnation, and not Smoke. It had spoken with Smoke’s voice, but the inflection had been weirdly off. She convinced herself, as she considered it carefully frame-by-frame in her memory, lying awake up in her perch, listening to the wind moan through the ruined city, that Smoke was dead, and this thing that wore his skin was some AI avatar instantiated into reality.

  How? Sorcery, clearly. She smiled to herself, remembering Silver and her need to know; to understand things. Smoke and Alpha had somehow merged. She knew it, could feel the rightness of this thought. Had not the Alpha image winked out? Hadn’t Smoke fluoresced with light? And then, he had looked at her, smiled, and she was here. If not sorcery, if not magic, then what? Somehow the demon had brought her here. She would have to thank him, she thought to herself. For freeing her. Right before I kill him. She smiled again.

  She reached the top of the bottom section of her building. She untied herself from her safety line and turned back to the drones. “There are stairs here. Too tight for you, in spots.” She pointed, showing the top of the stairwell.

  “WE FOLLOW FROM OUTSIDE.” The drones all blared at her. She blinked. “DO NOT FLEE OR HIDE,” they continued.

  She nodded. “You got it. See you downstairs.” She headed to the stairwell, shouldering her pack. She jogged down the stairs, flight after flight, not rushing. She took a break when she figured a human woman would. She walked a few more flights, traversed a section of a fallen wall. She looked through the hole, out into the sky. A drone was hovering ten feet away. She waved to it and headed down.

  At the bottom, as she emerged, she could hear the salvage team talking. She could smell them before she could see them though, as it was dark in the interior where the stairwell ended on the ground floor, into a kind of atrium or multi-story lobby space. It had been pretty nice once, but everything that would burn or could be smashed had been burned or smashed. Or both, she couldn’t tell.

  A crowd of seventy or eighty people were waiting for her, along with two of the drones. The drones babbled something in Chinese, or some Asian language, and everyone talked at once. It sounded like this had been going on for several minutes.

  Light spilled into the lobby from the huge gash in the building's skin. Outside, she could see the yellow body of the truck. Big, she realized, it was bigger than a tank, maybe three times as long and wide enough to dominate an entire street. The yellow paint looked lumpy and old, from what she could see as she approached the second-floor railing.

  “I am Gold,” she said, loud so they could hear. The drones whirred, then another string of words, flowing like water out over the crowd. She studied them as best she could. They were Asiatic but seemed not all Chinese. These people, and there were men and women both among them, were brown-skinned, high cheekbones, and slanted eyes. But they looked more Mongolian to her, Siberian, maybe, than Chinese. She was no expert on people from that part of the world, she admitted to herself. But she didn’t think they were the Chinese she was familiar with. Similar, maybe, but these looked more like Eskimos.

  They wore blue jumpsuits, which were ill-fitted in spots. Some Chinese stencils marked on them and some Arabic numerals. They looked like a janitor convention; she thought. And they looked angry. Angry janitors, she smiled to herself. They were muttering to each other. She saw they carried tools, many of them. Picks, shovels, rakes. One man carried a metal spike that looked to be over a yard long. Salvage tools, she thought, but it would hurt to get whacked by one of those.

  “I am not your enemy,” she said. “I’m just a stranger who wishes to speak with those who fly the drones.”

  One man, a small man with a pinched, angry face, spat some words up at her. She looked down on him. He carried a shovel, a garden spade, with a green plastic shaft. He shook it at her and bared his teeth at her. She smiled down at him. “I’m not your enemy,” she repeated. She looked up at the drone, hovering in the ruined lobby. “Tell them what I said please.”

  “FOLLOW TO VEHICLE,” it blared at her. It swung around and flew towards the two-story-high hole where the entrance had been, before something had blown it open. She followed, coming down the stairs. The drone warbled a siren, flashing blue and white lights, and the scavengers parted before her, then closed behind her as she passed through them, following her at a distance. They radiated malice. One of them, a tall man, taller than the rest, watched her carefully. His face twisted in anger and he spat. He made a shooing gesture at her. Aversion, she thought. Old as the hills.

  “What are you all so pissed off at me for?” she asked, hoping the drones would overhear. She needed to play the innocent, here, as much as possible. Whoever or whatever was flying the drones, it was in charge here, so she wanted to make sure it only saw what she wanted it to see. I’m just a stranger, passing through, don’t mind me, she thought. I have gear newer than anything in this place by several hundred or a thousand years, and I don’t speak the language. Nothing to see here. She stepped out into the light.

  The truck loomed up over her. I
ts paint was lumpy, and it was flaking in spots. Gold could see a red star, outlined in orange. The truck swiveled towards her, bearings whining as the entire upper carriage rotated to bring the front of the tank to face her. A girl, pale as milk, dangled her feet through the holes in a broad wire cage and regarded Gold with wide eyes. The cage was locked shut from the top, Gold saw. The girl was locked inside it.

  “They fear you because I told them you were a witch I had captured. With the drones,” the truck said, in perfect English, from a speaker in its grill. “It seemed close enough to the truth. Welcome to the People’s Restored Republic of China. You are most welcome.”

  Chapter Four

  He left the village at dawn, gnawing on a strip of his last piece of jerky. Soon he would need to find food and clean water, if there was such a thing anymore. Cleanish, then. He had been on the mountain a long time, which had several streams fed by the snowpack high above him. There would be water if he stayed close to the mountains, and he could hunt if he had to. Maybe. He called the dog to him and they left, following the road which led down through the foothill valleys, to the strip of highway he had glimpsed from his boulder back on the ridge. Trucks had driven that road, fast trucks. It was arrow-straight and went north. So that was, he decided, where he was going.

  He had found nothing to take with him from the village, except for what he had learned.

  They had burned the big warehouse. Fired, the word was, he thought, his inner pedant scolding him. Someone had used oil or gasoline inside it; he could see a metal jerry can inside the wreckage. It could have been there when it burned, but it looked like arson to him. There had been some sort of machinery inside, and in the corner he found the carapace of a walker, scorched and deformed, but recognizable. So, a drone repair shop, then. His wardens had lived here. Or his wardens' employees. Servants, more like. Guards. Not for the first time, he wondered at this. Why they had kept him on the mountain, and who had kept him there? Who had kept them here?