Chapter 6: Day Tank
The thermometer by the vault door read thirty-nine degrees at midnight on the sixteenth day, and Claire wrote it down under the other nights like a stock price going the wrong way.
Night temps: 44, 43, 43, 41, 42, 40, 39.
Leon was asleep beside her, or pretending. She lay with the pad on her knees and the penlight in her teeth and did the sum she'd been doing in her head all week.
The vault held heat about as well as a cathedral. Two hundred people would have warmed it just by breathing; two people under four blankets made a small warm pocket, and outside it the brick drank the heat and gave nothing back. When the freeze came on the twenty-first, the woman on the radio said, it would find them. Thirty-five in here. Maybe less.
There was the space heater in the security office. Fifteen hundred watts. And there was the generator, which drank a gallon and a half an hour whatever you asked it to do, and sixteen gallons in its day tank.
Heater: 1.5 gal/hr. 16 gal = 10 hrs. Total. Ever.
She looked at that for a while and then wrote under it, Main tank?, and underlined it, and turned off the penlight.
In the morning Leon swallowed the last capsule of his course, the fortieth, with a ceremony she'd insisted on, which meant she clapped. He bowed from the waist without lifting his right arm. The skin around the wound had gone from red to a dull pink, and the lines toward his collarbone had faded on the third day of capsules and never come back.
"Sixty left," she said, and capped the bottle. "Don't get shot."
"I'll pass that on."
They ate crackers and talked about heat, and it turned into the kind of argument they were getting good at, where both of them were right.
Leon wanted to burn things. The building was full of things that would burn: desks, doors, the evidence room's shelves, a whole library upstairs if they could get to it. He'd build a stove out of the empty water drum, punch a flue, run it up the vent shaft. The shelter had a hand-cranked ventilator bolted to the wall by the door, a big gray blower with a handle like a coffee grinder, and the card said it moved two hundred cubic feet a minute when you cranked it.
"Smoke," Claire said. "In a sealed room."
"With a flue. And the blower."
"Which one of us cranks the blower all night?"
"We take turns."
"And when the flue leaks, we both fall asleep and don't wake up." She'd read the card on that too. It had a drawing of a family lying peacefully on their cots, and the caption had made her cold in a way the thermometer hadn't. "Leon, there's a tank. You told me the first day. The line from the main tank's crushed. That means there's a main tank."
"Under the back lot. Outside."
"Where it's point oh three now. I read the ramp yesterday. That's nothing. That's two hours out there for less than we got on the roof."
"Where the thing with the tractor-tire feet walks around."
She didn't have an answer to that. He'd come back from the cistern two days ago and drawn the footprint on the pad, life size, and it had run off the edge of the page. They hadn't let each other go down the service passage alone since. They went together, with the shotgun, and he'd strung a line of tin cans across the passage at ankle height twenty yards from the plank door so that anything walking up it in the dark would ring a bell.
The cans hadn't rung. That was something.
"Burning furniture gets us through the winter maybe," Claire said finally. "If we don't gas ourselves. A main tank full of diesel gets us heat, and the radio, and light, until spring. One trip outside."
"If it's full."
"So we find out."
He looked at her for a long time, then at the pad, then at her ankle, which she'd stopped wrapping two days ago and which only hurt when she forgot about it.
"We find out," he said. "We don't go out until we've done it on paper. All of it."
The generator room was at the very bottom of the building, below the garage, down a half flight of iron steps that rang under Leon's boots. He'd been in it every day since the first one, checking the sight glass, wiping the dust off the cage, and he had never really looked at the pipe.
He looked at it now with the flashlight while Claire held the pad.
The fuel line came in through the north wall, high up, a copper tube about as thick as his thumb. It ran along the wall and down to the day tank. Six feet of it lay under a steel steam pipe as fat as a tree trunk that had come off its brackets in the blast and dropped straight across it. The copper under it was flattened like a drinking straw somebody had chewed.
"We can't lift that," Claire said.
"No." He followed the line back to where it went through the wall. Beside it, higher still, was a window: a narrow basement window with wired glass, the bottom of it at the level of his head, set into a well that opened onto the back lot. Gray light came through it, and a drift of ash on the outside sill. "But we don't need the line. We need a hose from the tank to the day tank. In through there."
He'd been out in the back lot once, on the first day, and knew roughly where the tank was. There had been a steel lid flush with the asphalt near the kennel wall, painted yellow, with DIESEL stenciled on it. Fill pipe. Now there'd be ash on it and whatever had come down off the north end of the garage roof.
"Pump," Claire said.
"Maintenance bay. There's a hand pump for the oil drums, the kind you crank." He'd seen it when he was looking for a pry bar. "It's got a suction tube, maybe three feet."
"How deep's the tank?"
He didn't know. Claire took the pad back and drew it while he watched: the asphalt, a cylinder under it, the fill pipe sticking up. "If the top's three feet down and it's a big tank, five feet tall, you need eight feet of tube to get to the bottom. More to get it up and out."
"Radiator hoses. The cruisers have got them. And there's a garden hose in the kennel." He was starting to see it. "We pump it up into the jerry cans, carry the cans in through the garage, pour them in here. Two cans. Five gallons each."
"That's a lot of trips across an open lot." She was frowning at her drawing. Then she stopped frowning, and tapped the pen on the generator room, and then on the tank. "Leon. How far below the lot are we standing?"
He looked up at the window. "Ten feet? More."
"And the tank's three feet below the lot."
"So?"
"So the tank's above us." She was grinning now, the way she had over the filter, the way she did when the world turned out to obey rules. "That's how the line worked. Nobody pumped it. It ran downhill. If we get a hose from the bottom of that tank to in here and get it full, it'll siphon. All by itself. For as long as there's diesel."
He stared at the drawing. Then at her.
"You're a genius," he said.
"I passed physics."
"You're a genius who passed physics."
They spent the rest of the day building it on the generator room floor. Two radiator hoses from the cruisers, a length of the kennel's green garden hose, a short piece of copper pipe from the boiler room to join them, and hose clamps off the cruisers' heater lines, tightened down with a screwdriver until Claire's knuckles went white. At the generator end, a ball valve out of the boiler room so they could turn it off. At the tank end, the oil pump, to prime it. He made her draw the whole thing twice and walk him through it, and then he walked her through it, and they found two mistakes and fixed them.
Before they went to sleep he took a length of electrical conduit from the evidence room and taped a ruler to the end of it.
"For the dip," he said.
"How romantic."
"I'll get you flowers on the way back."
They went out at noon on the eighteenth day through the gap at the top of the ramp, Leon first with the shotgun and its last four shells, Claire behind with the launcher and the hose coiled over her shoulder like a lariat.
The back lot was a field of gray. The ash had crusted in the damp and the cold, and it crunched now instead of squeaking. The north end of the garage roof lay across the lot in slabs. The kennel wall still stood, and near its foot, under a hump of ash and a broken slab the size of a door, Leon's flashlight found a corner of yellow paint.
Claire read the meter. "Point oh three." Ninety minutes, she told him. She was counting this time.
The slab took both of them and the pry bar and ten minutes, an inch at a time, and when it finally tipped over the noise made them both freeze. Nothing moved in the lot. On the next street a burned shape stood in the road with its head tilted, and after a while it dragged itself away.
The cap was seized. Leon put the pry bar through the lugs and leaned until she saw his shoulder hitch, and it gave with a squeal of rust, and the smell of diesel came up out of the dark. It was the best thing she'd smelled since the peaches.
He fed the conduit down until it touched bottom and drew it up into the light. Wet to twenty-two inches. A plate on the fill pipe said 1000 GAL. She did it on her knee: call the tank five feet across, and twenty-two inches of a five-foot cylinder was nearly a third of it.
"Three hundred," she said. "About three hundred gallons. Two hundred hours."
"Let's go get them."
She went down into the window well on her stomach, knocked the wired glass out of its frame with the pry bar and fed the hose through to the generator room. Above her Leon worked the suction end down the fill pipe, bolted on the oil pump, and cranked.
The pump shrieked. It had sat in the maintenance bay for years and it complained on every turn, a high iron squeal that went out across the lot and came back off the slabs. Claire lay with her cheek on the cold sill and her hand on the hose. "Nothing," she called. "Keep going. Nothing." Then a gurgle, deep in the rubber, and the hose stiffened under her palm, and down in the dark of the generator room she heard diesel begin to pour.
"Stop! Leon, stop cranking, it's running on its own!"
The shrieking stopped. In the quiet she could hear it, a thin steady trickle into the day tank ten feet below her, running downhill the way it was supposed to. She laughed out loud.
Then the sill shivered under her cheek.
A thump, deep and slow, came up through the brick. Then another. She lifted her head. On the next street the burned shape had come back, moving fast for one of them, nearly running, and two more came out of a doorway behind it, and all of them were going south. Away from the lot.
"Claire." Leon's voice was very calm. "Get out of the well."
She scrambled up. He hauled her the last foot by the back of her jacket, and she turned and saw it come round the end of the kennel wall forty yards away.
It was a man's shape, nine feet tall. It had burned like the others, black and split from head to foot, but the fire hadn't made it any smaller. Something that had once been a long coat had melted into the skin of its shoulders. Its bare blistered head swung toward the fill pipe, toward where the shrieking had been, and one of its hands had split along the fingers into something long and jointed that dragged a groove through the ash.
It came on at a walk. It didn't need to hurry.
Leon put the shotgun to his left shoulder and fired. The slug rocked it back a step. He racked and fired again, and it rocked again, and came on. He let the shotgun drop on its sling and drew the pistol and put six rounds into its face, and she saw every one of them hit, and it shook its head like a horse bothered by flies.
Twenty yards. He wasn't moving. He stood between it and her the way he'd stood in the pharmacy doorway, the shotgun back up, two shells left in it.
Claire got the launcher up. The flame round was the one she'd been saving, and she'd known for four days what she was saving it for.
"Leon, down."
He went flat in the ash and she fired over him. The round burst against its chest and wrapped it in fire. It stopped dead and made a sound she felt in her teeth, a huge cracked bellow, and swung the bladed hand through the space where Leon's head had been, and lurched sideways into the slabs, beating at itself.
They ran. Her ankle screamed and she ran on it anyway, his arm round her waist, across the lot and through the gap, and he heaved the filing cabinets back, and behind them something hit the cruiser in the mouth of the ramp so hard the car slid three feet up the concrete.
They stood with their backs to the wall at the bottom of the ramp and waited for it to come through.
It hit the cruiser once more. Then the bellowing moved off north, toward the river or the ruins or wherever it went, and the thumping faded through the soles of her boots until she couldn't tell it from her own heart.
It was an hour before they went back out, because a hose lay across the lot and it was the only thing keeping three hundred gallons on the right side of the wall.
The hose was fine. The thing had walked within a yard of it and never noticed. Leon put his palm on it and felt it cold and full and faintly trembling, and nodded to Claire, and watched her let out a breath.
They kicked ash over it from the fill pipe to the window well until there was nothing to see but a faint ridge in the gray. They rolled the third cruiser down from its space in neutral and wedged it into the ramp behind the other two, and built the filing cabinets up in front of it. By the end his shoulder had gone hot and tight round the edges, and he didn't mention it, and he saw her see that and decide not to mention it either.
Down in the generator room the day tank showed full to the top line. Claire closed the ball valve, filled both jerry cans, closed it again, and sat on the iron steps with the pad.
DIESEL. Main tank ~275 gal (siphon, valve in gen room). Day tank 30. Cans 10. = ~200 hrs.
Dose: C 0.05, L 0.05. TOTAL C 0.37, L 0.32 + day 1.
Ammo: L 22 rds 9mm, shotgun 2 shells. C 1 round (acid).
BIG ONE: 9 ft. Slug and 9mm do nothing. Fire does something. Hunts by SOUND (pump). Went north.
She looked at that last line for a while, and then added: Pump is loud. Never again from outside.
That night, for the first time since the first night, they were warm.
He ran the generator from nine to eleven, when it was dark enough that nobody on the ridge would see exhaust from the stack on the side of the building, and the space heater sat at the foot of the mattresses glowing orange and smelling of hot dust. The thermometer by the door barely moved. But under the blankets, and for a foot or two above them, the air went from cold to cool to something close to soft, and Claire took off her jacket, then the gray sweatshirt, and lay in her T-shirt with her bare arms on top of the blanket and laughed at herself.
"Look at you," Leon said. "Decadent."
"Shut up. I forgot I had arms."
"They're nice arms."
She turned her head on the pillow and looked at him for a long moment, and the heater ticked, and he found he didn't have a joke for whatever was in her face.
"You shot it six times in the face," she said finally. "And it shook its head at you."
"I noticed."
"And you just stood there. I thought I was going to watch it take your head off." She found his hand on the blanket. "Don't stand in front of things like that."
"You fired a grenade over my head."
"Over it. Not at it."
"I'll try to remember the difference." He brought her hand up and kissed her knuckles, and she made a small surprised sound, and then they were kissing properly, warm for once, unhurried, her fingers in his hair. When the generator cut out at eleven they both noticed the silence, and neither of them stopped.
Afterwards she slept with her back against his chest and his arm over her, the way they'd slept since the sixth night, and he lay awake for a while listening to the vault cool and tick.
It was some time after two when he felt her shiver.
The vault was cold again by then; the heat went out of the air fast without the heater. He pulled the blanket up over her bare shoulder. She shivered again, harder, a long shudder that went right through her and into him, and then again, her teeth starting to click.
He put his hand on her arm. Her skin was hot.
"Claire."
"Mm." She curled tighter. "Cold."
He turned the lantern on low. She was flushed across the cheekbones and her hair was stuck to her forehead with sweat, and she was shaking under three blankets as if she were lying in snow. When he put his palm on her forehead it burned.
She opened her eyes at the light and squinted at him, and he tipped the lantern toward her face, and the whites of her eyes had gone red.