Pilgrimage of the Nine-ites

The glaring rays of the sun fell at a slight angle on the powdered steppes. Everything withered under its eye, save for a slice of deep valley cutting through the hills. While offering some relief from the heat, it was still bone dry in the shade; the small band of travelers was easy to spot by the lazy cloud of dust that followed them.

Hawkins slowly moved his way from the rear of the column – past the woman, child, and man ahead of him – until he trudged along at Julia’s shoulder. She glanced back at him, missing a pace when she saw his face. His eyes darted quickly up into the hills.

“Bandits? Soldiers?” she asked, trying to scan the stunted tree-line that marked the top of the valley from the corner of her eyes.

“I’m not sure,” Hawkins said. He started to raise the canteen, shook it, and let it fall at his side. “They’ve been following us for the past couple of miles. Too patient for bandits. To patient for soldiers, for that matter. Maybe just someone curious.”

Julia turned her attention back ahead of them, her shoulders sagging, her face drawn. “How many someones?” she asked.

Hawkins shrugged. “More than one, less than a dozen.”

The exact number was eight, as they found out an hour later. The sun was lower in the sky, the shadows deeper, as the small band of five travelers exited the valley to find a troupe of soldiers on horseback barring their way. Behind the soldiers stretched the low scrub of a prairie desert.

One soldier stood out from the rest, his desert camouflage uniform slightly more ornate than the other soldiers. He smiled and let out a low whistle.

“Well now Sergeant, what do you suppose we have here?” he asked. He leaned casually in the saddle, his gloved hand resting on the butt of a pistol that was strapped to his belt.

The man directly to his right seemed to ponder the question. “Well, sir, I reckon travelers.”

The leader of the men nodded. “Now, I would guess you have it to rights there, Sergeant. But now: coming from where, and where going to?”

“I couldn’t guess at the former sir. As to the latter, some mythic bunker, perchance?”

The leader nodded. “Perchance indeed. Let’s hear it from the source, shall we? Who speaks for you folks?”

Julia shuffled forward a step and waited. The leader took his hand off the pistol butt and leaned forward, smiled.

“Well, well. All right then, where are you folks from?”

“Up near the big city,” Julia said. “Not the glowing one, the gray one.”

“That’s a fair spell away. What were you doing up there?”

Julia shrugged. “We had all been wandering for a while, from various places. We found ourselves in the same place and decided to travel together.”

The leader nodded. “Trust is a bit of a rare commodity these days. You Nine-ites?”

Julia looked up at him, her face a question mark.

The leader sighed. “Lost souls wandering the wastelands in search of a legendary bunker – Bunker 9 – filled with food and water and tech and toilet paper. Ring a bell?”

Julia shook her head. The motion seemed to unbalance her, and she started to fall. Hawkins caught her and lowered her gently to the ground.

“She said she has family a few days south of here. We were going to try and join up with them, make a go of it down there,” Hawkins said. He started to unscrew the top to the canteen, but a click from above stopped him. He turned and stared up into the leader’s gun barrel.

“Set it down,” the leader said, his voice gone cold. As Hawkins did, some of the tension left the leader’s body. He gestured towards Julia with the gun. “What’s the matter with her?”

“This land makes her sick,” Hawkins said. He glanced down at Julia, his face strained. “She’s been getting progressively worse since we left the gray city.”

The leader re-holstered his gun and dismounted. “Yeah, it will do that, for sure. OK, enough chit-chat. By the power vested in me by the provisional governor of the Territory of Barren Sands, I’m going to have to confiscate any water or food you might be carrying. Call it contamination suspicion. My men will be passing a plate around you old-church style. More like a bag, really. I recommend you do not resist.”

He started to step over Julia… and stopped, his eyes drawn to something around her neck. He point at it. “I’ll take that heart-shaped locket and chain as well.”

“No,” Julia said. She slowly rose to her feet.

“Excuse me?” the leader said. The jokes and demands of the soldiers died out.

Julia looked frantically around at all of them, her hand tightly clutching the locket. “It is mine.”

The leader held out his hand. “And now it’s mine, girl. Gimme.”

The movement was fast. One moment Julia’s hand was idle at her side, the next she held a small-bladed knife out in front of her, anger in her eyes.

The soldiers cried out as one and quickly burnished their weapons, but the leader motioned them to stand down with his hand. He stared at Julia in silence for several heartbeats before speaking.

“What you got in there that’s so precious to you, hmm? A picture? A lock of hair? Must be pretty important if it’s worth dying for.”

Julia just stared at him in silence. The leader stared back, started nodding.

“Fair enough. We all carry around pieces of something vital to who we are, to remember who we were. To spark who we will be.” He laughed and remounted his horse. “Keep it. I’m still going to need that food and water though. Pick it up Sergeant. We have places to be by sundown!”

#

Midday on the third day after leaving the soldiers, they came upon the rabbit ears. At this point, Julia had been riding a thrown-together stretcher for two days. Hawkins was on one end, the other man – Samuel – on the other. Julia had ridden silently, steeling herself against the pain as she propped herself up occasionally and point out directions.

Thirst was a constant traveling companion.

At one point, Hawkins stopped walking, his eyes on the near horizon, where two shards of sandstone stretched up out of a hill. Like two rabbit ears. At the base of the hill lay a small, rundown collection of buildings, the fencing around them torn and littering the ground.

“This it?” Hawkins asked. Julia rose to her feet, her face lighting up as she spied the rock formation. She started running for the buildings, yelling “Chloe!” Hawkins and the rest followed at a slower pace.

At first, there was nothing; no sound, no movement. Then a face peered out of the rubble, then two, three. Shrieks of joy erupted from the ruined buildings, and by the time the rest of the group joined them, Julia was frantically hugging a woman and two small children, tears flowing from them all.

One of the children – a small girl clutching a dirty doll – broke from the group and disappeared into the buildings. She returned with two canteens full of water, which were quickly consumed by the travelers.

“Everyone, this is Chloe and our children, Anna and Zeke.”

“A to Z,” the boy said to laughter. Julia looked towards a pile of scrap leaning against one of the buildings. “Is he…”

“Still there, not a peep,” Chloe said. With Hawkins steadying her, Julia went over to the pile and started peeling off layers of scrap. After three or four, she uncovered the shape of a dog, its metal flanks pockmarked but still shining in the sun.

“Let’s hope this works,” Julia said, retrieving the heart-shaped locket from the chain around her neck. She tapped a spot on the dog’s chest, and a small drawer slid open. On a tray inside rested a locket similar in size and shape to the one in Julia’s hand. She swapped the two and tapped the drawer to close it.

The effect was instantaneous. The dog shuddered briefly, whimpered a few times, and then smoothly glided to its feet. Its eyelids slid back to reveal pulsing light blue lights. It turned its head towards Julia.

“It appear you were successful. It is good to see you, Julia,” the dog said, its voice a smooth, gender-neutral medium pitch.

“It’s good to see you, too,” Julia said. “Read ‘Bunker9.data’?”

The dog’s eyes dimmed for a second, brightened.

“I now have sufficient power to do so. File is intact. And it is what we expected when we downloaded it from this facility.”

“And fried your power source in the bargain.”

“A power surge that I should have anticipated. My apologies. I am running a systems check, but additional damage appears to be minimal.”

“Well, that’s good news,” Julia said. She grabbed her head with an unsteady hand and sank slowly to the ground. Chloe rushed over to her.

“She’s been sick since the city. It’s this land,” Hawkins said.

“Actually, it is not,” said the dog. “Finding the gray city was easy. In order to find her way back to me again, she had to rely on the power source to guide her. It had limited means to do so.”

“Limited means?” Chloe asked.

“Radiation spikes,” said the dog.

“She has radiation sickness?” Hawkins asked.

“Yes. I am afraid it is beyond my limited Medoc abilities to repair. I am sorry, Julia.”

Julia smiled weakly and waved the apology away. “Show me.”

A round area on the dog’s chest started to glow. Presently, a dazzling cone of light grew from the area, solidifying into a 3D grid that hovered in the air just before the dog. Hawkins approached it, comparing it several times to the hills around them. A large red “X” pulsed in a mountainous area at the far edge of the grid.

“Is that…” Hawkins began.

“The map to Bunker 9,” the dog said.

#

They started out several days later, well-rested from the facility’s relative lavish accommodations of moldy cots, brackish water from the buried cistern, and the dwindling supply of stale-but-edible MREs. With a metal dog leading the way, they walked slowly into the hills, the dust from their shoes lingering long past the point where they disappeared. It settled softly, blanketing a pile of rocks, a cross hammered into the ground near the end of it.

Dangling from one of the arms of the cross was a thin chain and a heart-shaped locket.

END