Saint

Saint had been driving since sunrise.

Two days past the last marker he knew. West, through country he'd never bothered with before. The road under his tires was old highway, cracked to hell, weeds shoving up through every seam. On both sides nothing but dead farmland and the burnt-out frames of houses he didn't slow down for.

Work had been thin all season. He'd run a short job out of Mercy week back, finished it, and instead of turning the truck around he'd just kept going. Some dumb piece of him wanted to see what was out here that nobody else bothered with.

So far the answer was: nothing.

The truck rattled under him. Window cracked an inch for the smoke. A hand-rolled cigarette burning down between his teeth, half-forgotten. Late sun cut sideways across the dash and made him squint.

"...wayfaring stranger..."

The radio on the dash had been pulling something in for the last hour. Some old recording, scratched to hell by six hundred years of bad copies. Saint had been listening with half an ear.

"...travelin' through this world of woe..."

Then it cut out.

Saint took the cigarette out of his mouth and slapped the side of the radio. Slapped it again. Got back a hiss and a fragment of the same voice, lower down the dial, before it died again.

"Fuck you," he said, calm, to nobody.

He almost missed the glint after that.

He'd been distracted, leaning over to smack the radio one more time, and when he looked up there was a flash of something low in the hillside off the south shoulder. Half-buried metal catching the late sun. He almost driven past it.

Saint braked, watching the hill.

Nothing moved.

The country out here didn't have raiders, because raiders needed somebody to rob. It didn't have travellers either. He hadn't seen another vehicle in days, hadn't seen a fire on the horizon at night, hadn't seen so much as a goat. Whatever the glint was, nobody had come for it in a long time.

Saint rolled the truck off the road and down into a dry creek bed behind a stand of dead scrub. Killed the engine. Got out and cut branches, threw them over the cab.

Sidearm, knife, crowbar. Light clipped to his shoulder. Wrap pulled up over his mouth against the dust.

Then he walked.

The glint turned out to be the snapped tip of an antenna mast, the rest of it crushed under what used to be a hillside. Saint stood squinting at the angle for a long minute. Then he looked down at his boots.

The earth around him was cracked. Long splits in the dirt, fresh, the broken edges still pale where they hadn't weathered yet. Something underneath had moved hard enough to break the slope above it. Days ago at most.

The fuck.

He found the hatch by walking the cracks.

A hard kilometer of climbing on loose rubble, the sun dropping while he worked. Saint almost broke his ankle twice. Whatever had shifted the hill had shoved enough of it off the top that he could get to the seam with the crowbar.

Saint stopped before he touched anything.

He'd worked salvage on plenty of pre-collapse bunkers. Cold-war shelters, military stuff, family panic rooms. Those were all stripped a hundred years before he was born, but this was different. This was sealed in a way nothing on the surface stayed sealed.

He could smell it through the wrap. Bad air, leaking up from the seam where the outer pressure had broken. The kind of smell that came out of a closed room where people had been dying slow.

Saint worked the crowbar in.

He hauled the slab back on its hinges, stood over the dark hole for a minute with the smell coming up at him, then dropped through.

Stairs. Going down further than his light reached.

Emergency lights flickered along the walls, every fifth one still alive. The walls were clean poured stone, nothing on the surface looked like this. The corridor at the bottom went on past where he could see.

The first body was at the foot of the stairs.

Then more. People in soft clothes, soft shoes curled against walls. A few in beds further down the hall. No wounds. Whatever had killed them came through the air, slow enough that some had time to lie down and some had time to run for the doors. Saint stepped over them without looking too long. Their faces bothered him a little. Clean, unmarked. None of them had the look of people who'd lived hard.

He worked the place for hours.

The sun went down outside.

Storerooms. Workshops. Whole rooms full of machines he didn't recognize. Sealed medical packs, water filters small enough to fit in his palm, tools he could only half name. He stopped twice just to lean against a wall and think about what he was looking at.

Saint found her last.

The medical wing was sealed off from the rest behind its own door with its own little hum of backup power running. Whatever had killed the others hadn't gotten in here. He had to cut through locks before the last one went with a Snap that echoed back down the corridor.

Inside, soft light and working machines. A few empty beds.

One that wasn't.

She was alive. He could tell from the small green numbers on the machine next to the bed, ticking over slow and steady.

That was the first thing.

The second thing was the rest of her. Skin smooth where his light caught it. No blotches, no scabs, no dirt worked into the creases of her hands. Mouth a little open and the teeth behind it all there. Hair flat on the pillow, clean.

The fuck is this.

Saint kept the gun on her while his head caught up. Checked the corners, the side rooms, the machines along the walls. Nothing else lived in here, just this girl.

He lowered the sidearm and walked to the bed slow. Stood over her with the light angled off her face.

"Hey," he said. "Hey. You hear me, girl?"

Nothing back.

He stood over her another minute, then he turned and walked out.

Saint started carrying things to the truck.

It took him the rest of the night and most of the next morning. He filled the bed of the rig with everything he could move. Crates of sealed supplies, tools, the small filters, a hard case full of something that looked like a surgeon's kit, two long boxes of dried food packs he didn't recognize the labels on. He worked until the light outside had come up grey and his shoulders were shaking from the weight.

He carried her last.

Went back into the medical wing and pulled the lines out of her arm careful, the way he'd watched a back-alley doctor do it once in Mercy. The machines didn't scream when he disconnected them. He wrapped her in a sheet from one of the empty beds, then in his own coat over that, then he lifted her.

Carried her up the stairs, one arm under her knees, the other behind her shoulders. Turned sideways through the hatch.

Saint laid her down on the back seat on folded canvas, tucked the coat tighter around her, stood there with his hand on the door frame.

The fuck am I doing.

He shut the door soft and walked around to the driver's side. Got in. Lit a fresh cigarette and sat with it between his teeth for a long minute, looking through the windshield at the dark hill where the hatch was.

Looked back at her in the mirror.

"Alright, girl," he said, quiet. "Let's see what the fuck you are."

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Pump Six sat at the bottom of a dead valley, built around an old fuel station. Forty people, give or take. Walls of stacked tires and rebar, a working well behind the pumps. Saint had heard the name once or twice in Mercy as a place that sometimes traded fair.

Two weeks back, he'd pulled the truck up to the gate looking to swap a crate of nine-mil rounds for water and dried meat.

A young man on the wall with a beat-up rifle had called down. "What you want."

"Trade," Saint said. "Ammo for food and water."

Long pause, then the gate opened.

Inside was worse than the outside. Half the place was coughing. People sitting against walls with their faces wet, two bodies under a tarp by the back wall waiting to be burned. The kid running things couldn't have been over twenty. Lean, dark-eyed, coughing into a folded rag between sentences. Tev, he called himself.

Saint took one long look around the yard, turned his head a fraction toward the passenger side, and said low: "Girl. No. We're not doin' this. Trade and we're gone."

He turned back to Tev, did the trade fast.

He was wasting his breath and he knew it before he finished the sentence. She was staying. She was going to fix these people, or try, and there wasn't a thing he could say that was going to move her off it. He'd figured that out about her in the first week.

Three days.

Saint stayed by the truck most of it with his sidearm in his lap, chewing through his stash of cigarettes twice as fast as normal. Watched the gate, watched anyone who got near the sick room. He didn't help. By the third evening people were sitting up on their own and drinking water without throwing it back up. Tev paid what he could – a sack of dried beans, two more jugs of water, a half-tin of clean salt. Shook her hand at the gate.

"Pass through, we got water for you," he said. "That's what I got."

Saint grunted. Climbed in and they drove off.

Ten days later they were coming back from the east pass.

Clean little job. They'd escorted a wire-runner named Och and his two donkeys out to the trade post at Kettle Bridge – copper wire and a sack of old batteries. Och paid them in twenty-four rounds of nine-mil and four days of dried food. Easy money. Saint was in a decent mood by his standards. The cigarette in his teeth had been there since sunrise.

The road back ran past Pump Six.

He smelled it before he saw it. Saint slowed the truck without thinking. His hand went up to pull the wrap over his face.

Then he saw the gate.

A woman was nailed to the gate. Wrists punched through with long iron spikes into the boards. Her stomach was open, what had been inside her wasn't there anymore. Flies on her in a moving black coat. She'd been there a day or two. Hard to tell in the heat.

Saint braked.

He knew her face. He'd watched her carry water across the yard two weeks back, one of the ones who'd been on her feet again by the third day. He'd nodded at her once when she walked past the truck.

The gate was half opened and Saint could see straight in.

The yard was different. The well had a chain across it now, padlocked, with a man Saint didn't recognize sitting next to it on a stool, eating something out of a tin. Past him, against the back wall where the burning tarp had been, there was a wider pit. Saint could see the edge of it from here. He could see the bodies in it.

The people moving around the yard weren't the people from before. Bigger men, better fed, wearing pieces of mismatched armor. Two of them had a woman of twenty-something roped between them by the wrists, walking her toward one of the back buildings barefoot. Saint knew her face too. One of the kids who'd been on a cot.

Then Tev climbed up onto the wall above the gate.

Color in his face, eating well. A long knife hung off his hip that he hadn't had two weeks ago. He squinted down at the truck, and when he saw who it was, his face opened up. He grinned.

"Hey! Hey, doc! Look at you, you came back!" He waved both arms over his head. "Come in, come in!"

Saint didn't answer.

Tev scrambled down. Leaned over the top of the gate easy, right next to the dead woman, like she wasn't there. He glanced at her once, sideways, almost fond.

"Yeah, sorry about Mira there. She got mouthy." He shrugged. "She'll come down tonight, we're not animals."

He thumped the gate with his palm, friendly.

"Listen, you come on in. You got safe road through here, both of you. I told you. Pass through whenever, water's free. I keep my word on that." He nodded at the truck, at the passenger side. "Doc, you saved my people. You're ours now, nobody here touches you. Nobody. I'll cut a man's hand off myself if he forgets that. I told you I remember faces."

He scratched his jaw with the back of his hand. Looked happy.

"You wanna trade? We got nice stuff now. Silver, knives. Couple of the girls if you're buyin'. Whatever you want."

Saint took the cigarette out of his mouth. Tapped ash out the window. Looked at the woman on the gate, at the pit at the back. Looked at Tev.

His face didn't change.

He turned his head a little toward the cab. Spoke quiet, around the cigarette, almost gentle.

"Welcome to the surface, girl."

.