1
They spent the rest of the day tending the wounded, clearing away the dead, and resting. They slept that night in the Marauders’ rooms.
The next morning they began the long task of exploring the complex and cataloguing its contents. There were quite a few surprises.
One cavernous room in the basement was filled with barrels of fuel for the three large generators the Marauders had been using to power the central portion of the complex. There were also a few barrels of a different kind of fuel for the experimental cars in the various hangars ringing the complex. Most of these vehicles had been irreparably damaged by the Cataclysm or the Marauders or simply time and disuse, but a handful still worked.
While stripping down Emily’s room preparatory to burning her clothes and furnishings and personal items along with those of the rest of the Marauders, they discovered a small secret room behind her bed that was packed with weapons of much better quality than the swords and spears she allotted her underlings. Among these weapons were a nail-gun, a sniper rifle, a plasma rifle, and a boxy silver gun so large only Adam could lift it without getting a hernia. On the side of this latter item Emily had written in lipstick “Big Fuckin’ Gun 3000!” Adam later tested it on one of the inoperative jet-cars. The car was reduced to a million tiny pieces embedded in the hangar wall, and the muzzle-flash left spots hovering in Adam’s vision for over an hour.
On the west side of the complex they found a hangar that had been converted into stables. There were over a hundred horses in there, including the ones stolen from Adam, Maggie, and Anna’s RV in Sweetwater. Adam was shocked that the animals were so healthy and well-groomed. Anna told him not to be.
“Girls love horses,” she explained. “Even psychotic would‑be queens.”
A huge walk-in freezer next to the kitchen contained enough food to feed everyone in the complex for years. And Asparagus Sam, who revealed his true name to be Samuel Dolenz, was only too happy to cook that food once he was sure no one was going to kill him. His happiness blossomed into ecstasy when he learned that most of Yoyodyne’s new residents preferred much healthier meals than those demanded by the Marauders.
And new residents it had, for although Adam and company planned to escort many of the abducted women back to their homes, twenty-eight of the women had seen their homes destroyed and their families slaughtered by the Marauders. Having nowhere else to go, they decided to stay right there. Which worked out perfectly, because Yoyodyne, with its vast stock of fuel and weapons and other items that would be disastrous in the wrong hands, needed caretakers who would guard and use and distribute those items wisely and well.
Late on the day after they defeated the Marauders, they buried their dead in the woods beyond the fence, including Freud’s various pieces and Granite’s head and shoulders, which they found resting on a shelf above the Annihilator’s bed. They dumped the Marauders’ bodies into a mass grave beside the lake of ooze.
Shortly after dawn the next day, Adam, Maggie, Anna, Dagmar, and Kukalukl (who was now fully healed except for a hairless ring around his neck) set out on foot along the train tracks to see if they could determine where Emily went.
The track was over four miles long, and they didn’t reach the terminus until mid-afternoon. There they found the train-car sitting at a turn-around next to a cinderblock guardhouse. A flight of stairs behind the guardhouse led up to a small corrugated metal building containing boxes of clothes and toiletries and food and weapons. Some of these boxes were open, and socks and necklaces and tubes of lipstick lay scattered about the floor, as if someone had pulled items from the boxes in a mad rush. Two dust-free rectangles on the floor showed where a pair of suitcases or large bags had stood until recently. On one wall, Emily had written “THIS WORLD IS MINE!” in purple spray-paint. The spray-can lay on the floor beneath the message, next to a much larger dust-free patch. Three wheel‑tracks, seemingly from a wedge-shaped vehicle, extended from this patch to the wide roll-up door.
Outside the shed they found themselves in open grassland that stretched away north, west, and east. To the south were the woods that ringed Yoyodyne. A mile due west stood a lone, rusting electricity pylon, its broken black lines trailing in the high grass like guy-ropes. The mountains loomed to the north, larger and clearer now than when Adam and the others had seen them a few days ago.
After hunting around for a while, they finally found a trio of wheel-tracks barely visible in the dry dirt beneath the grass. The tracks led northeast.
Kukalukl sniffed at them.
“Too old for a scent. Back in that building, though, I detected traces of burned fuel.”
“A fuel-powered vehicle like those we found at Yoyodyne?” said Adam.
“Almost certainly.”
“Then we have no hope of catching up to her.” He gazed northeast across the plain. “Not right now, at any rate.”
After figuring out how to operate the turn-around, they crammed themselves upon the train car and rode it back to Yoyodyne. The return trip took only half an hour.