Spare Parts
Part Nine
The level below that also left suggestions as to what happened there so long ago. Another small area was burned and broken up. The panels and chairs spoke to a working environment and Garrett could only guess that it was the communications hub of the bunker from what he remembered of his time spelunking in the ruins of the Tumor Queen’s bunker. As the girl came up behind him, she spoke, startling him if for only a moment, “This is where we came from, isn’t it? The Believers I mean.”
“What were you told as a child?”
The palsied girl shrugged as if she was being asked to recount how she accidently drank spoiled milk. “A lot of silly stories about some girl who had visions and led her people over the mountains to our divine grassland.”
“But you always assumed it was this place?”
“I asked my momma once and she told me never to talk about it again. Not like she was angry at me, but scared for me. Scared for herself to. They all believe this place is tainted, full of ghosts like all the old places are. That isn’t true though, is it?”
“Without having seen it all yet, I’d go as far as to assume your people came from here. Something happened, either people ran out of goods or people got tired of taking orders, maybe both, eventually the servants became the masters. Either during there time here or directly after that, they began worshipping that poster and living the simple life on purpose.”
“My momma died from a fever; a lot of people did that winter. I bet they wouldn’t have if we’d staid here.”
Garrett considered the girl and the staid in place mausoleum they were traipsing through, the one that would have to in some small way become her home, at least until the poison did its job in the laundry. “Maybe, but maybe not. It looked like the people here were running pretty short on some badly needed supplies, not to mention the convenient artificial light and distractions of their former lives. Medicine aside, without anyone with the knowledge to administer it properly, your mother may very well have died either way.”
The girl stopped following behind as Garrett reached the stairs for what he figured was the power plant for the bunker. “I know you know more. More than anyone I’ve ever known, it’s the way you look at people, at things, and the way you talk. If we staid down here, would my whole life have been carrying shit and water up and down a hill?”
“No. For all their shortcomings, those who drank it all up had technologies that allowed them to be more concerned about one another, when they chose to be. You would have likely been geared toward the sciences, given your obvious intelligence.”
“I’m not smart, I’m just not mean. But I bet these people would have left me alone at least. I bet I wouldn’t have been hurt here.”
Garrett considered the line of bullet holes in the tiles, the smashes and burnt consoles and living chamber above. Romanticism is just nostalgia with lipstick, both are equally as worthless in a clinch. Again though, hadn’t the girl lived enough of a life being wounded and reminded of her pain. “Likely as not, no. You probably would have been left well enough alone at least.”