The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [115]
"Look!" Beyond the mist, there was a shimmering disturbance, a ghostly white plume against the black sky, almost invisible. Paul's eyes were shining bright through his faceplate. "It's a nitrogen geyser. Like on Triton!" His little burst of laughter, pure joy, scared me a little bit.
Connie's voice rasped in the earphones. "So, what's the scoop? How long can we make it?"
I said, "Eight weeks on the capsule supplies. More if... "
I turned away from the geyser, turned left, towards where the Staff Quarters had been. Not a sign of anything. Twenty feet of structure, forty feet of birm, the hotel foundation. All gone. Where the storerooms had been, there was what looked like a crumpled pile of metal, some of it blue. My Camry maybe?
Paul was still staring at the geyser, lips moving. Telling himself what? I stepped forward, looking beyond him, at the jagged edge of the remaining concrete wall and the smooth curve of the partially exposed capsule. Have to do something about that. Try to cover it up with dirt or something.
What'll we use for fucking shovels?
Why didn't we put some tools in the capsule?
There was a hump in the landscape beyond it, level with the capsule, holding its own bit of concrete floor, its own little piece of wall, with a wide, corrugated metal door. My heart seemed to pulse in my chest, the proverbial skipped beat. Okay.
I hopped down, dropping heavily to the ground, almost falling. Why did I expect lowered gravity? Because I'm in a fucking spacesuit? Maybe I thought I was on the Moon. I trudged heavily over to the thing and tried climbing up onto its porch. Shit. Maybe I can reach the bottom edge of the door from here and It was stuck, coming up on one side only, and I imagined the screech of frozen wheels and rails. Silence. It only went up a couple of inches, then stuck fast but I could shine my helmet lights underneath and see inside.
"Well, shit-fire!"
Connie said, "Scott?"
I made my own little maniac's laugh.
"Scottie?"
I turned to face Paul again, and was gratified to see I'd gotten his attention. "Looks like the Cat bay made it through. I guess we've got ourselves a vacuum-adapted halftrack."
He got laboriously down off the capsule's porch and started lumbering toward me, teetering, barely able to keep his feet. "Some of our supplies were pretty much indestructible. Air tanks. That kind of thing."
"So?"
He said, "I bet there's a lot of crap down in the gully we can salvage."
When I looked that way, I could see, beyond the mist, another ghostly nitrogen geyser, and a third one beyond that, made tiny in the distance. This, I thought, is really pretty God-damned cool.
Not much more after that.
The Robinson Crusoe thing. The Swiss Family Robinson thing. The Farnham's Freehold thing. Not quite the Island in a Sea of Time thing, eh? No Nantucket for us.
I awoke the next morning, bladder bursting, with Maryanne's taste in my mouth, Maryanne curled up beside me, sound asleep and softly snoring just as the sun was coming up like a fat pink balloon over the mountains.
I got up, stretching, creaking, stiff as hell from sleeping on the cold, cold ground, wondering why the fuck the Gods had left me a fifty-something-year-old man. Surely...
I found a little gap in the boma, already pushed open by someone else, staggered down the hillside a little way, and could wait no longer, turned and started pissing merrily away. Jonas was there, a few yards off, pissing himself, and when he caught me watching, smirked, and said, "Deep, too."
There was a commotion from the slope below, and when I turned to look, there was an enormous fat woman striding along, breasts bounding up and down, belly roll wriggling. Lot of nice muscle in those haunches.
Paulie was scuttling along beside her, walking half-crabwise. "Olga. Olga, please. I didn't mean ..."
She stopped and turned suddenly, planted her feet solidly about eighteen inches apart, one forward