All Bad Things Read online

  Wasteland: Cults & Criminals – All Bad Things

  Stephen Blackmoore

  Copyright inXile entertainment inc. 2014

  Published by inXile entertainment inc.

  Publishing at Smashwords

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Legal Information

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About the Author

  Copyright 2014 inXile entertainment Inc., Wasteland, the Wasteland logos, and inxile entertainment and the inXile entertainment logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of inXile entertainment Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Copyright 2002 – 2014, inXile entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.

  Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. For more information contact the publisher, inXile entertainment Inc. at [email protected].

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.

  See http://wasteland.inxile–entertainment.com/store for additional products and information.

  ISBN: 978–1–941210–01–7

  –1–

  “Greatness comes from humble beginnings. One man can shake the Earth until it falls from the quaking.” – James King, Hour of the Church Triumphant, Season 1, Episode 12

  No one causes trouble in the Central Market. The snipers make sure of that.

  It’s been here for years, at least as long as Samson can remember, in the middle of a bombed–out five–story building on South Broadway, the roof torn out and all but the bottom floor destroyed. The walls–ringed at each floor by a few feet of rickety, crumbling cement and steel pipe that the two–man sniper patrols walk along, looking for trouble down below–seem held up by magic. The only concession to a roof is a series of badly stitched–together blue tarps that flap and snap in the wind high above. They keep the sun and the worst of the rain out, but just barely.

  The first time he was here, Luke Samson was five, maybe six years old, and running with some kids in a gang called the Leather Jerks, doing what they had to do to stay alive. Good days were running messages, picking pockets, bashing heads. Bad days–well, there were things some of the kids did that didn’t bear thinking about. By the time Samson had joined up he was already towering over kids twice his age, and nobody made him do anything he didn’t want to, but he’d seen things. The memories make his blood boil even now.

  But he’s not that little kid anymore. Six–foot–five, solid muscle, flaming red hair and a matted tangle of beard beneath eyes that people call crazy even on his good days.

  He steps to the head of the line, patient, calm. That’s what you do at the Central Market if you don’t want a bullet through your head. He towers over Bernie, a wiry man with jet–black hair slicked back with greasy pomade, the wrinkles in his nut–brown skin so deep you could toss bricks in and never fill them up. Bernie ticks a mark with a graphite disc onto parchment made from dog skin, tallying up the people who step through the gate.

  “Name?” Bernie says, his voice creaky like a rusty hinge.

  “You know me, old man,” Samson says.

  “Yeah, you know us,” Cyrus adds, poking his pock–marked face with the fringe of unruly brown hair out from behind Samson. For a moment Samson had forgotten Cyrus was with him. Loud when he wants to be, silent when he needs to be, it’s easy to forget he’s there sometimes. Until you suddenly have a knife in your throat.

  “Yeah, I know you,” Bernie says. “But do you know yourselves?” He cackles at a joke only he seems to understand. Laugh turns to cough, then to hocking a thick, phlegmy gob onto the cracked pavement.

  “The fuck does that mean?” Cyrus says, but the question has Samson stuck. Does he know himself? He’s been wondering that a lot lately. Not sure what he’s doing, not sure why he’s doing it. Maybe the real question isn’t what he’s doing, but who he is. His brow furrows and he can hear the clicking and clacking of bolts being rammed home, snipers taking position. He blinks, lost for a moment.

  “Meant nothin’ by it, Samson. Meant nothin’ by it.” Bernie is sweating, eyes wide, shaking.

  Samson blinks. “What happened?” he says. At least three snipers on the walls above have him in their crosshairs.

  “You got that murder look on your face, Sammy,” Cyrus whispers. “You chill? Tell me you’re chill.”

  “Yeah, I’m chill.” Murder look? That only happens when he’s angry. “I was just thinkin’ is all.”

  “We talked about that, man,” Cyrus says. “I do the thinkin’ for us. You know that.”

  “Yeah,” Samson says, slowly coming back to himself. “Uh, here.” He fishes a couple of pieces of scrap out of his pocket, chunks torn from a busted–up carburetor they scavenged out in Monterey Park, hands them over to Bernie. “That get us in?”

  Bernie takes them, looks them over carefully. “Shell casings would be better, but this’ll do.” He squints up at the snipers. “All good here, boys. All good.”

  The snipers stand down, go back to their patrols, but Samson can still feel their eyes on him.

  “Weapons in the box,” Bernie says. Samson puts his sledgehammer and shotgun into the plastic bin and takes his marker, a green rubber toy that’s so chewed up he can’t tell what it used to be. Cyrus does the same with his knives and pistol, and he grabs a pair of plastic dice threaded together through holes drilled in each. “You lose them tickets, you ain’t gettin’ these back.”

  “We remember,” Samson says, but he knows Bernie has to say that. One time he didn’t and there was an argument over a lost ticket. Guy got drilled by the snipers but not before he tossed a grenade into the Market and took out eight people.

  “And keep your elephant on a leash,” Bernie says. It takes a second for Samson to get that he’s talking to Cyrus.

  “Sure, sure. All good.” Cyrus leads Samson past Bernie and into the Market.

  “The fuck’s an elephant?”

  “One of them things with the long noses,” Cyrus says. “I showed ‘em to you in that book a while back.”

  “Oh, right. Right. Did I really have my murder face on?”

  “Man, you so had your murder face on. Come on, let’s go sell some shit.”

  The sights and sounds of the Market are jarring. Multicolored string lights line every stall, recorded Mexican music whines through tinny speakers competing with an unseen drum circle somewhere in the back. But it’s the smells that hit Samson the hardest. Outside they compete with burning trash, swamp water, rotting vegetation, the occasional corpse, but in here it’s all hot metal, cooking meat, spices carted down from Gilroy. Samson stands there a moment with his eyes closed, just breathing it all in.

  Samson follows Cyrus as he makes his way over to Two–Ton Tess, an enormous Asian woman with jowls that flap when she talks and skin growths that look like barnacles on her forehead. Cyrus upends a bag of reading glasses they looted from a buried pharmacy last week. Samson is proud of that find. They’re in pretty good shape.

  “The fuck are these?” Tess asks, her voice wet, breath stinking like a dead rat.

  “You never seen glasses before? You wear ‘em on
your eyes,” Cyrus says. “You see better.”

  She peers through one lens, grunts. “Whatta ya want for ‘em? Got some Pruno the Russian boys brought over today. They say it tastes just like vodka.”

  “Horseshit. Whatta they know? Nobody’s made real vodka in thirty years,” Cyrus says. “Ten kilos of saltpeter, three of mercury fulminate.”

  Tess cackles, her jowls wiggling. “For this? Nobody wants to see better in this place, pencil–dick. What are they gonna look at, their festering boils? This gilded fucking paradise we call home? One kilo of saltpeter and a gram of fulminate.”

  “Nine and a kilo.”

  Samson watches the haggling go on for a few minutes before he gets restless and wanders off. He stops at Pedro’s Carniceria, his mouth watering at the smell of dog and rat cooking over a grill. He buys some possum on a stick with a chunk of scrap metal, then wanders back over to Cyrus as he’s finishing his negotiations.

  “Three kilos of saltpeter and five grams of the fulminate,” Tess says. “Final offer.”

  “Done,” Cyrus says.

  “Pick it up outside in the back,” Tess says. “And be careful carting it around. The fulminate’s in water, but it’ll still go up.”

  “That’s okay,” Cyrus says. “Sammy here’s carrying it.”

  ***

  “Fire in the hole,” Cyrus yells, touching a burning stick to the fuse while Samson shoves his fingers in his ears. The fuse goes fast, faster than either of them expects, but when the blast comes it’s less an explosion and more of a metallic pop.

  The tunnel fills fast with dust–plaster, drywall, brick, toxic shit you can’t breathe—but Samson doesn’t mind. Cyrus, though, is wheezing like a TB patient.

  They found the tunnel while exploring a nearby apartment building that had collapsed into the water that had flooded Los Angeles during the apocalypse. When the nukes fell in the water off Long Beach, the blasts had blown the ocean all the way up the L.A. River and formed radioactive lakes and swamps where before there had been only concrete and yucca plants.

  But the swamp in Hollywood had receded again decades back, so the building had long ago been looted of anything valuable—wiring, pipes, doorknobs. The only things still there were too big to move and too rusted to cut up, like the massive air conditioning units that had crashed through the ceiling long ago, or they were too labor–intensive and low–return for big–time scavengers to bother with.

  Samson and Cyrus were not big time. They were hungry enough that tearing through the building’s drywall to get to the framing behind it seemed like a good idea, even though building timber didn’t pay much more than pounds of scrap on the ton. It was Samson who had punched through the wall of a back office and uncovered a stairwell leading down into a collapsed parking garage. And that’s where they found a tunnel that ended in a pair of rusted steel doors that even Samson’s sledgehammer couldn’t budge.

  Cyrus wipes his eyes, winces. “Should have grabbed some goggles at the Market,” he says, coughing through the cloud of dust.

  “You always say that when we blow things up,” Samson says.

  “Yeah, well. Damn things are expensive.”

  The dust clears enough as far as Samson’s concerned, and he heads down into the tunnel with a lantern, ignoring Cyrus yelling behind him. The blast has blown the hinges off one of the steel doors just the way they planned, and it hangs at a cockeyed angle. Samson grabs it with hands the size of Christmas hams and yanks the door down with a shriek of tearing metal.

  He raises the lantern to look inside and gasps.

  “What?” Cyrus says, running up behind him. “What is it?”

  “Untouched,” Samson says, his voice a reverent whisper.

  –2–

  “And lo, did God Almighty command them, and they did break open the seal and unleash His Great and Terrible Retribution upon the land.” – James King, Hour of the Church Triumphant, Season 8, Episode 7

  “This section must have been sealed off when the building above collapsed,” Cyrus says. He looks up at the ceiling, rotting acoustic tiles, exposed ductwork. “Nothing but mud and rubble up there as far back as I remember.” He runs a finger through the thick layer of dust on a counter.

  “Never seen a place ain’t been looted before,” Samson says. He sees a sign made of glass tubes on the wall. “What’s this say?” He knows the sign is letters, but Samson can’t read.

  “K O C T,” Cyrus says. “Cocked? The hell does that mean?”

  Samson shrugs. A reflection in the lantern light catches his eye. “Hey. Think I found something.” He steps around a desk next to a door at the far side of the room. Shoves it out of the way for a better look.

  “Bones,” he says. No meat on them. No smell, either. What little clothing left is rotted away except for buckles and plastic. Samson nudges the bones with a toe and spies a badly corroded pistol in the corpse’s hand.

  Cyrus bends down, plucks a shiny buckle and a handful of metal buttons off the corpse. Looks the gun over, tosses it aside. “Man, if there’s more like this, we’re gonna be rich. This place is a gold mine.”

  Samson has already moved on. He finds a gray metal box on the wall with a big red lever on one side. He’s seen these before. Never asked what they do. No point. Every time he’s pulled a lever, nothing’s happened.

  So he’s surprised when he pulls this one and the lights come on.

  “Holy Jesus monkey fucking Christ,” Cyrus says. “There’s power.”

  Samson blinks at the lights in the ceiling. Most of them are dead, but the ones that work buzz like pissed–off wasps. He traces a metal conduit up to the ceiling from the box.

  “It’s not a generator,” he says. “Gas in a generator would have gone bad a long time ago. Solar?”

  “Has to be,” Cyrus says. “Can’t be nuclear. Let’s see what else this place has.”

  “Miracle it’s still workin’,” Samson says. Something about this place feels off to him. Not bad, not wrong, just different. Special, maybe. He’s having a hard time seeing it the way Cyrus sees it, as a place to loot. There’s more here than just things. He can feel it.

  “I want to know what this place used to be,” Samson says.

  ***

  As it turns out, it used to be a television station called Knights of the Church Triumphant.

  Samson’s heard of television stations, though he’s never seen a working television. They find a series of offices and a full studio with three cameras on a set with a big desk in front of a dusty map of the world with a big red stain covering most of it. Samson’s seen a few maps like it, pictures of distant places he’s convinced don’t really exist.

  “‘Nother body,” he says, bending down to look at the moldering bones. The skull is a shattered mess, and it doesn’t take the stain on the map behind it to tell them what happened.

  “Somebody shot him,” Cyrus says.

  “Bad way to go,” Samson says.

  “You know a better one?”

  Samson thinks for a second. Shrugs.

  “I ain’t seen any other ways in or out of this place besides the tunnel,” Cyrus says. “You?”

  “No. You think this was a bunker? Panic room?”

  “Probably, yeah. Those steel doors were pretty thick. Explains the power.” He puts a hand against an air vent near the floor. “Ventilation too. This place was buttoned up tight.”

  “How come they didn’t come out?” Samson says. “Think they ran out of food?”

  Now it’s Cyrus’s turn to shrug. “Dunno. If they got power, some of this old stuff might still work. Keep looking. See if there’s anything we can load up and sell at the Market.”

  “No,” Samson says.

  “Whatta ya mean, ‘no’?”

  “I don’t want to tell anyone about this place yet. If we sell stuff people ain’t seen in fifty years, they’re gonna wonder where we got it. I don’t want them to know. Not yet.”

  “But—”

  Samson leans ove
r Cyrus, his face twisting into a frown. “I said, no.”

  “Fine. Fine. We don’t tell anybody.” Cyrus shrinks back from Samson’s gaze. “But we’re gonna have to sometime.”

  “When I’m ready,” Samson says.

  There are mysteries here. Samson can feel them hidden just out of sight, but something tells him there are answers, too.

  Three days later Samson finds them.

  ***

  “And there was a great earthquake, and the moon turned red like blood and the sun turned black like sackcloth—”

  Samson hits the stop button on the VCR, freezing the image of the blond man speaking on the screen, his arms outstretched, eyes wild.

  “What’s sackcloth?”

  “Dunno. Cloth you make a sack out of?” Cyrus says. “Come on, hit the button again. I want to see what he says next.”

  They’d found the room full of old videotapes, labels faded, plastic pitted and worn, on their first day. They didn’t know what they were or how to use them until Cyrus found a sheet of instructions laminated in plastic stapled to the wall. Samson couldn’t read them, but Cyrus figured it out pretty fast. He popped a tape into one of the machines and they watched the video, transfixed as the Right Reverend James King came on, his voice scratchy through the old, degraded speakers, preaching something about end times and the sins of Communists. Given that he was sitting behind the desk in the studio in front of the giant wall map, they figured this was the guy they’d found who’d had his head blown off.

  Each tape they watched was pretty much the same thing, though who King railed against changed from tape to tape. Communists, Washington Elites, Pinkos, Women’s Libbers, Reaganomics, Jimmy Carter, Sesame Street. Samson had never heard of any of these things before, but if James King were to be believed, they were responsible for the destruction of civilization.