I’ll say this for basement bomb shelters: they can take a beating. Time and plants had worked on it, but despite rust and corrosion, the trapdoor still opened without coming off in my hand.
Inside, it was musty, damp, and fetid. It was also pitch black, which was all I really cared about. I left the trapdoor open and let it air out a bit. With luck, I could slip down when the sunset tingling started, close the hatch for a bit, and emerge with a whole night ahead of me to get the lay of the land.
I just wished I had some drinkable water. I could charm water out of the air, especially with the high humidity, but I needed something in which to collect it. It’s amazing, the things we forget when we don’t have to worry about them. It never occurred to me to bring mundane food or water. I thought I was going to have an easy time of getting those in a civilized area. I never thought I might be stuck in a wilderness, however temporarily.
Sunset drove me into the basement; I shut the hatch above me and waited for my eyes to adjust. I assume they tried to adjust, but pitch black is still pitch black. Then the sun vanished below the horizon and the darkness rolled back from me, revealing lines, angles, features, all in the black and white of vampire sight. Faint glows of life were scattered everywhere—fungus, mold, some spiders and other insects.
The place had leaked a bit; brackish, mucky water covered the bottom four steps, at least. All the things that a basement collects—even the “survival” things Sasha and I had stowed down here—were gone to rot and corrosion. There might conceivably be some irradiated, vacuum-sealed, plastic-wrapped food packets that were still good, or a sealed bottle of water purification tablets, or other things. Possibly. But unlikely. Judging by the headstone, it was at least… well, it could be eighty-seven years since anyone had been down here. Maybe a hundred and eighty-seven. Time and water will destroy almost anything. Just look at the gap between South America and Africa.
I sat on the stairs, under the closed hatch, and let the prickling, stinging sensation of my sunset transformation do its work. I sweated muck, adding appreciably to the collection of unpleasant smells.
Finally, everything settled into place. The stinging diminished to tingling, then to itching, then faded altogether. I held my breath and kept holding it; no need, no urge to breathe. And no signs of my minor injuries, either. Even the bloodstains vanished, presumably sucked back into my skin.
Good. I opened the hatch and climbed out. The night air was good after the muggy rot of the basement. I closed the trapdoor again and looked around. The driveway was that way, the main gate beyond it, there, and the road down that way…
One thing to do first. I revisited the grave and looked at it. Tendrils uncoiled and swept down, sliding through grass and soil and stone. Anything? Anyone? Was there even a trace of someone still there, or was he already gone to wherever it is souls go?
Nothing. He really was gone.
I started walking.
The driveway was rubble amid grass and weeds. The main gate was steel, originally painted with an epoxy resin against rust. It wasn’t meant to go this long without maintenance; the gates were rusted through in places. One of the gate leaves simply fell outward when I pushed it. I don’t think I pushed it that hard, but I could be wrong.
As I trudged toward the main road, I spent some time on a cleaning spell. Obviously, my usual cleaning spell wasn’t going to work; or, rather, it would work, but it would take a lot longer to do its job. I could speed it up, but that would take a lot more effort. I didn’t feel like testing just how much that would cost me.
Was there another way? Yes, I thought so. The same basic pattern of a usual cleaning spell, of course, but drawing mechanical energy from the motion of walking. This could be directed through the spell to toss away little bits of grime, goo, and other material from me and my clothes. Since I don’t sweat at night, the farther I walked, the cleaner I would be.
I found a spot where I could draw lines in the dirt and stand inside a spell-circle. Casting a spell by visualization alone is always more difficult. In this magic-starved environment, I wanted every advantage I could get.
I could feel it working, albeit slowly. If anyone tried to follow me with a bloodhound, the dog was going to have a very easy time of it. Important thing to know if you’re running for your life and being tracked: Don’t use this spell.
When I reached the junction of the drive and the main road, I realized there was more to my troubles than just time. The secondary highway was in very poor shape. It had fared better than the driveway, obviously; it had maintenance more recently, and was a proper road to begin with. Still, I’d have hated to take anything with a low suspension over it, and nothing short of a military vehicle was going to go faster than thirty miles an hour. I wanted a Jeep, maybe, or a Land Rover.
Maybe I
should
have brought Bronze
, I reflected. I could have used the emotional support. I wasn’t expecting to find that I missed the place so much, or that I missed my friend so deeply.
Something about this, the ruins of the house and the road, said something was wrong.
Maybe they’ve finally got those flying cars everyone wanted. Maybe they just use jet-boots. Or antigravity harnesses.
But I haven’t seen any, and I would have noticed flying people. I haven’t seen anything in the sky, not even a plane.
I started jogging down the old highway, then realized I was thinking in human terms again. I stepped it up to a full run, sprinting at racehorse speeds through the night, heading into town.
I passed a number of buildings, some I remembered, some built since I left. All of them were dilapidated, ruined, falling down, overgrown. I didn’t bother to stop and check through them; I wanted someplace where civilization might be in full swing, not an abandoned piece of Rust Belt City.
Arriving in town wasn’t a clear event. It was a gradual thing. More dilapidated buildings, generally covered in vegetation, appeared by the roadside as I progressed. Eventually, I wondered if I was still in the suburbs or if I’d made it into town proper. There were no street signs visible and no landmarks that I recognized.
I started investigating ruins, looking for clues. Houses, strip-malls, bank, gas station, highway overpass, car dealership…
I glanced at the sky; overcast. No help from the stars, then.
What I wanted was a newspaper with a convenient article on why all this was in ruins. If they ever make my life into a movie, I’m sure they’ll include one. I had to do it the hard way.
Libraries.
Back when I was working as a professor, I once had a student in computer science expound at length upon the uselessness of a big building full of books. A computer can store all that information, make it easier to access, faster to find, and can do it all in a space small enough to be easily carried around. The information could go with you, instead of forcing you to go to it.
I argued that although the data storage of a computer was useful, there was one fatal flaw. You take your computer to a desert island and you can’t get the information out of it. A book—that’s something you can hold in your hand. You can read a book with your naked eyes; you can’t do that with your digital media files. So, next time you’re in a power outage and wishing your computer worked, or that you could charge your batteries, get a candle or six and read a book.
Which brings me back to libraries. There was a tiny municipal library; I figured it would be quicker to search through, as well as more likely to have hardcopy records. The larger university library was going electronic, last time I looked. So I started with the municipal library.
It was much quicker to search. The roof had been broken by debris from the collapse of a neighboring building. The cumulative effects of sunshine, rain, plants, and animals had turned the place into a wastebasket. Many of the books were solid blocks of fiber, the pages merged together into lumps.
I hacked and kicked my way through the place anyway. I wanted to check the periodicals section, just in case it was a separate, sealed room. It wasn’t. Something had used it for a lair at some point, and shredded newspaper was apparently ideal for bedding.
That library probably hadn’t heard spoken language in a century. Pity it had to be such unbridled language. And so loud. Ghosts of librarians were doubtless invisibly shushing me.
All right. A quick run up to the university library was in order. That building was somewhat more modern than the downtown municipal library, and maybe it was still intact. Besides, being larger, it might have something salvageable—an encyclopedia would do. If it was in any way serviceable as a building, it might also do well as a base of operations in this world. I fully intended to loot everything.
As I sprinted along, I had time to wonder what happened. Did we finally nuke the place? Did global warming finally come true? Or did we just find a way off the planet? Come to that, is the whole world like this, or is this just a local thing?
I have a small mirror. I could look. But I think I won’t. Not yet.
Nothing bothered me on the way to the library. Well, there was a little confusion in finding the place; I didn’t exactly get lost, as such…
I found it, that’s the main thing. It looked pretty much intact. A lot of the university looked about the same: pretty much intact. There was a lot of overgrowth from the undergrowth. Ornamental trees now towered, their roots spreading under the churned-up bricks, for example. Ivy seemed everywhere, covering buildings with remarkable thoroughness.
Getting into the library wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. The front doors were hard to find behind the ivy, and I discovered that the ivy wasn’t regular ivy; it had small thorns all along its length. Annoying, but a point to consider; I wasn’t about to just grab handfuls and rip them down. I carefully cut away the mass of vegetation from the overhang in front of the doors.
The doorframes seemed okay, but the clear plastic that made up the majority of the main entry, while unbroken, was a milky, discolored white. I couldn’t get anything to budge when I tried each of the four front doors.
Well, that’s fine, too.
Tempting as it was to just kick the thing in, I managed to restrain myself. It was a bad day, what with one thing and another, and I think I deserve some kudos for keeping my calm.
A bit of fiddling with my tendrils told me that, while the metal frame might be mostly intact, the locking mechanism was in a less pristine condition. I tried to open it, but the corrosion had frozen what components it hadn’t destroyed outright. So, with considerable nicety and care, I put the tip of my sword in between the door and the jamb and simply sliced through the locking bolt.
The door didn’t want to swing on its hinges, but I insisted.
I stepped into the entry area, closed the door neatly behind me, and simply pushed open the inner doors. This library was musty, smelling of some damp and dust, but nothing like the disaster zone of the other one. I immediately headed straight to the periodicals.
It was a coffee shop.
I backed out and checked the signs. Yep, they rearranged things while I was out. Why does nothing stay the same? I look away for a century and bam, everything’s different.
I joke, now. But, immortality problems… someday, will that
not
be a joke?
Okay. I have a library. It’s a start. Now that I know what I’m dealing with, in general, I can go back and be much more prepared.
I left the library and started scavenging. What I wanted to do was build an arch—not an enchanted, magical arch, necessarily, but an arch that would serve very well as a locus for the gate. I wound up with a large chunk of reinforced concrete for the base, with some rusted reinforcing bar sticking out of it. I cut strips from what used to be someone’s car—it took me a few tries to find one with metal bodywork; most of them were plastic or fiberglass or something—and started braiding those together.
It took a while, but I can be patient when absolutely necessary. Besides, it gave me more time to think about how I was going to get enough energy to even start the thing. I could build a spell structure from my own energies easily enough, but actually activating the thing would require scooping up enough local magic to make it run.
Think of a clear, plastic bucket. Take it to the beach and fill it with sand. No problem, right? The magical environment of Karvalen is a beach. Now, take that empty bucket to someone’s house. Sweep the floor until you’ve filled the bucket. Not so easy now, is it? That’s my local magical environment, except I don’t even have a broom!
There didn’t seem to be any other options, though. I hadn’t seen anything worth biting, much less bleeding. Not a dog, not a deer, not a cat—not even a squirrel or bird.
Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any animal life around here at all.
I thought back.
No, I saw some things out at the house. Movement, at least. There was a frog in the pool. And I heard something scamper away when I… landed by the pool. So, there
are
animals, just not on campus.
It was a mystery, and I didn’t like it. Mysterious things can get me killed, and I’m against that.
When I had the main structure of my arch constructed, I debated on where to put it. I eventually hauled the concrete block I was using as a base over to the library and slid it in through the door. I didn’t feel comfortable bringing it all the way inside; I wasn’t certain the floors would hold it after all this time. I set the thing up in the entryway area, instead.
For what remained of the night, I drew on the concrete block, scratching the lines of power into it, muttering incantations, and connecting everything together to form a basic gate spell. Perhaps more important, it was a
specific
gate spell. It wasn’t going to ask me where I wanted to go; I built that in. It was pre-aimed, so to speak, for the archway in my mountain. Other gates might reach this one, but this one would only and always try to go to the arch under the mountain. It would save a little bit on power, and even a little bit might be important.