James Axler – Exile to Hell

Though she was anxious to begin work, Brigid maintained a steady pace. She walked through the long, broad corridors of the division, past scores of sealed doorways that led into hundreds of chambers and antechambers. All of them were filled with the relics of vanished cities and long-dead people. The quiet air smelled of dust and time time past, time present, time future and time wasted.

Many of the rooms were strictly off limits to anyone not holding a “Q” clearance. When she had been granted her Quatro designation, Lakesh himself had taken her on a guided tour of a few of the storerooms. Most were crammed to the ceiling with shelves upon shelves of a vast number of books and bound volumes of magazines and technical manuals that had been printed on nonbiodegradable stock. There were trunks of clothing, crates of paintings, pieces of statuary and sculpturein short, anything and everything that had survived the nukecaust more or less intact. As far as Brigid was concerned, a lot of it had little or no historical value. In her unvoiced opinion, an item that was junk two hundred years ago was still junk, even if it had weathered the nuking and the skydark.

There had been too much to absorb, so after a while, Brigid stopped trying. Lakesh had told her, voice full of pride, that the Cobaltville archives contained a greater volume of predark artifacts than any other ville in the network.

One room had remained frozen in her memory, howevera dark, musty room with disembodied heads glaring down from the walls. African elephants, African buffalo and rhinoceros, wolf, bison, lion, tiger and bear. They were specimens of animals killed and preserved by so-called predark sportsmen. Many of the species were extinct, and had been endangered even before the first mushroom cloud had billowed up from embassy row in Washington, D.C.

Some of the animals that survived the slaughter of hunters and freezing temperatures of skydark had mutated into grotesque imitations of their progenitors. Of those, the first two or three generations of mutant animals had run toward polyploidism, a doubling or tripling of the chromosome complement. For a time, gargantuan buffalo and panthers and even snakes had roamed the Deathlands, but their increased size had greatly reduced their lifespans. Only a few of the giant varieties existed any longer, or so she had been told. Since she had never been more than ten miles away from the ville, she had no idea if that was a scientific fact or merely wishful thinking.

Brigid entered her work area, the chemically treated rainbow insignia on her bodysuit allowing her to pass through the invisible photoelectric field without activating alarms. There was a long row of computer stations, half-enclosed by partitions, all facing a long, blank wall. Hidden behind the stone-and-steel-reinforced wall was a bank of sophisticated mainframe computers, the heart and brains of the division’s data base. Lakesh was waiting, standing by her workstation, holding her day’s work in one liver-spotted hand.

“How are you today, Brigid?” he asked.

Brigid forced a smile. “Fine, sir,” she said, and reached for the bulging file folder in his hand.

Lakesh was a long-nosed, wizened cadaver of a man. He wore thick-lensed glasses with a hearing aid attached to the right earpiece. No one knew his actual age, but he was old, old, old. He was the oldest man Brigid had ever known or even seen.

He also made her extremely nervous on some days. He purposely made their hands touch when she took the file from him. His skin was cold, clammy, almost as if ice water flowed through him. Brigid sat down before her console. Lakesh lingered, as he usually did, behind her chair.

“Nothing too complicated today,” he said. His voice was thin, reedy, as though instead of a larynx, he had a pair of roots rubbing together inside his throat. “Editing down and consolidating a series of reports on the causes of the Bosnian war.”

“Simple, is it?” she replied, still forcing her smile. The instant she said it, she regretted it.

Lakesh was utterly, absolutely and thoroughly devoted to his art. History was his obsession, his reason for breathing, and he lived only to record it for posterity. His rheumy blue eyes widened, and she knew she had inadvertently pressed his lecture-mode button.