“Hot pipe,” Dean exclaimed, “how can they be that slack!”
Danny smiled slowly. “It’s like that here. No one much ever comes to Charity, right? So there’s only ever problems with out-of-hand drunks, and they either get chilled or beaten, and are too fucked to really be a threat.”
Dean shook his head. “Shit, what a way to run a ville.”
“Be thankful this bit is this easy,” Danny replied. ‘”Cause the raid on the convoy sure as shit won’t. I’d say Baron Al is so paranoid about outsiders that he’ll have sec hyped up on jolt and armed one for ten.” Dean shrugged. “So let’s do the easy bit.” The two young men waited for a couple of minutes until the “drunk” at the back of the old industrial building got to his feet with an ease that belied his apparent state, and began to wander around the front of the building via the far side from where Dean and Danny waited.
“They’ll talk awhile, but not long, I’d guess, just in case Baron Al comes calling,” Danny whispered. “Let’s go.”
Dean followed Danny as the young man moved out of the shelter of the building beside their target and slipped across the gap constituted by the alleyway until they were at the back of the building that housed the old tech.
Looking up at the outside of the building, Dean could see that the old two-story industrial block had only one apparent exit at the rear: a door on the upper story that could be accessed by an old metal fire escape. All the windows had been covered with sheets of corrugated iron or metal salvaged from other parts of the industrial area, and these had been welded into place over the previously open areas. Even the door at the top of the fire escape had been covered and welded, on closer inspection. On the lower story, the windows had been filled in with brick and concrete block from rubble, and the huge double doors that would, in the days before skydark, have been where wags picked up whatever the building produced were now welded shut, with large metal girders across the join between the doors. The two young men were at the rear of the building, listening for any sign of the sec guard approaching, and Dean couldn’t for the life of him work out how Danny could get into the building.
Danny grinned, looking at Dean, and said, “Trust me on this, dude.”
He went down on his knees at the juncture where the bottom of the wall disappeared into the earth.
“Should still be here,” he muttered to himself as he burrowed in the dust. “Got it!” he added triumphantly as he pulled a concealed ring from beneath the topsoil. Turning to Dean he said, “Got to do this carefully, in case we leave too little on top when we go in.”
“What the hell is it?” the younger Cawdor asked, helping Danny to carefully lift what appeared to be a narrow trapdoor.
“Access shaft,” Danny replied. “This gets us down into the basement of the building, where the generators are. I think it must have been for maintenance at one point, but it was mostly forgotten. See, my dad was thorough and made a good recce of the whole place when Baron Al put him in charge, but I don’t think he ever reported everything he found. This was always kept covered, and it looks like it hasn’t been disturbed since.”
“Be triple hard to cover when we go down, though,” Dean pointed out as Danny slipped into the narrow causeway. “The ring’s gonna stick out when the sec comes back.”
“Have to trust that,” Danny said simply. “There isn’t any other way to get in, and with a bit of luck they won’t notice it. Hell, they don’t know it’s there, it’s at ground level and they have no idea what it’s for. We just try and keep as much soil on top as possible.”
With which, he started to slide between the partially opened trapdoor and the ground, trying to keep the trapdoor as level as possible and so keep the covering layer of soil intact.