James Axler – Zero City

“Or mebbe on top of mountain,” Jak added in wry humor, raking back his snowy white hair with stiff fingers.

Extracting himself from under the hood, J.B. laid aside the distributor cap. “Fair enough. No sense doing work if it isn’t necessary.”

Leading the way toward the exit tunnel, Ryan passed one of the many busted boxes scattered about and nudged it with his boot to shove it aside. The sagging sides split asunder, and a wealth of tiny cylinders came tumbling out.

“I’ll be damned,” he said aloud, bending to see what they were. The labels on the cans were badly faded but still readable. “Hash! This is corned-beef hash. Dozens of cans! Enough for months!”

Across the room, Mildred spun about. “Excellent!”

Dropping the power drill he had been inspecting, J.B. hurried over at a lope with Dean and Jak at his heels. Doc and Krysty walked over at a more leisurely pace.

Grabbing a can from the pile to show them, Ryan’s own elation faded when he saw the side and tops of the container bulging from massive internal pressure.

“Dammit, they’re spoiled,” he announced, dropping the container as if it were unclean on the outside. “Probably why they weren’t taken along by whoever cleaned this base out so efficiently. God alone knows how long they’ve been lying there.”

The rush slowed to a walk and the companions gathered around the deadly food, the happy smiles gone as quickly as they came.

“There’s so much,” Krysty said woodenly. The memory of what pan-fried hash tasted like surfaced in her memory, and she savagely killed the recollection. It was bad enough looking at the stuff without remembering how good corned beef was.

Swallowing twice to clear his mouth, Jak felt his stomach churn at the mere sight of the cans. “All bad?” he asked.

Ryan nudged another box with his boot, and more rounded cans spilled across the floor. “Seems to be,” he stated coldly. “One mouthful of this could chill an army.”

Kicking apart another box, J.B. sent cans rolling across the cold floor of the garage in every direction. “Shit!” he yelled, then stomped one flat. The thick contents gushed out like speckled mud, the salty meat streaked with vile greens and blues. That killed his anger and his appetite at the same time.

“Mebbe we could boil the cans without opening them first,” Dean suggested hopefully. “You know, to kill the germs and stuff inside.”

“Still be deadly,” Mildred explained sadly. “Toxicity is also a chemical composition, not just a bacteriological infection.”

“Oh. Nothing we can do to fix them?”

“No,” Ryan and Mildred said together.

His arms full of cloth, J.B. returned and threw an old tarp over the boxes and cans. “Out of sight, out of mind,” he stated.

“Mildred, how much do we have?” Krysty asked, putting some distance between herself and the rotting meat. The stench was ghastly, worse than the breath of a Louisiana vampire.

“Six cans of beans and a pound of rice. Enough food for two, maybe three days,” Mildred reported stolidly, the meager weight of her backpack not very reassuring. “After which we start boiling our belts.”

“Huh?” Dean said.

His father answered. “Remember that leather is edible, if cleaned sufficiently.” He surveyed the redhead in her bearskin coat. “We could stay alive off the soup that fur would make for at least a week.”

Registering disdain, Krysty glanced at her coat.

“Not hungry enough to eat boots,” Jak remarked.

“Not yet,” J.B. said. “Come on, let’s check outside. Been a while since I’ve been hunting.”

An entire stanza of a Walt Whitman poem came unbidden to mind, but Doc refrained the impulse. Literary allusions seemed pointless before the specter of starvation, the only enemy ever faced they couldn’t stop by force of arms.

Moments later, the companions reached the door to the redoubt. Twice the height of man and wide enough to allow a tank passage, the titanium steel was as perfect as the day it rolled out of the foundry. Nothing encountered could even scratch the resilient material.

Ryan tapped in the access code on the armored keypad. Nothing happened. Ryan tapped in the code more carefully. There was no lever, and, obediently, the portal rumbled aside, exposing a dark tunnel.