Chapter 33: Chapter 33
Chapter 33. The Dystopian Job
Leaving her General to his thoughts of power and weapons, Aster walked deliberately slowly as she left the Hall of Fallen Heroes. She was sure that Monroe would give her what she wanted from there, unless he changed his mind about letting her borrow Captain America's armor. But the other things, Leonard Samson's skeleton, and the Vampire Morbius's clothing and the files about both of them, were not things that he had use for.
As soon as she was far enough that she was sure she was out of earshot, she began jogging. There was probably enough time to do what she needed. But just barely. She ignored the occasional, gory 'decorations' that dotted the hallways of the palace. There was no time to look at them, much less do something about them. And what would she do about them anyways? Bury them? That would hardly help the dead. Aster had far more practical concerns. She needed to worry about the living.
In five minutes, she was at the large room where the carts and other powered vehicles used by the Maestro's guards and servants were kept. She did not need a cart, she needed one of the large forklifts. She knew how to use one, having had to bring pallets full of food to the kitchens on occasion, back when she had been a Betty. The Maestro had been short of help, since his descent into ever-worsening madness, and would not waste one of his guards or favorite sycophants on menial mechanical duty if he didn't have to. Most of the other Betty's had had little gift for learning to operate such equipment. Or else they had feigned incompetence, having learned, unlike Aster, to keep any intelligence they might have had under their hats. Not that it much mattered any more.
The soldiers from the Army of Darkness who had been put in charge of the carts gave her little trouble. Aster was the Hero Who Had Made The Darkness. Not to mention, the only bitch the Maestro had ever bowed to, and any number of other slightly alarming things. Certainly anyone who would stand up to a mob of would-be rapists all by herself, with only a single gun, was mad, if nothing else. At any rate, if she wanted a forklift, and pallets, to bring bags of salt to her truck, they weren't going to stop her.
She looked around for a moment. The forklifts were all different, mismatched models. Hardly surprising. They had been made before the War, and any machine that still worked was acceptable by the standards of the world Aster lived in. She picked a midsized machine, mottled reddish orange rust mixing with what had perhaps once been reddish orange paint. Twin prongs, that reminded the zookeeper in her of hemipenes such as a snake had, jutted out in front. Aster unplugged the umbilical like wire that connected the forklift to an outlet in the wall, turned the key inside experimentally, and the motor whirred noisily to life. The gears all changed with only a slight clunking noise. Not the quietest thing in the world, but it would do. Most adequately. The right tool to start screwing over that green bastard with. Aster grinned ferally, turned the forklift back off, and handed the key to the soldiers who had been directed to keep them charged.
"I'll take that one. And nine pallets. And some cargo netting, the sort with straps. " Aster told them. "That's all I'll have room for on my truck. And make sure they're in good condition. Salt is heavy."
She actually had room for more than that, even with the barrels of water on her truck, but she needed to save room for the artifacts from the Hall of Fallen Heroes. Plus one other thing. But she would not be able to get that until the very end. If it even existed.
Soon, the nine requested pallets were in a stack, the netting in a heap on top of them, and Aster got into the forklift. She took a few moments to refamiliarize herself with the controls, then slid the forks neatly into the slots of the lowermost pallet, and lifted them.
"I'll bring the forklift back in a few hours, when I'm done with it, and leave it to be charged up again." Aster told them. "We're going to need to load a lot of things in the next day or two, before we leave."
It had now been nearly 15 minutes since she had left General Monroe in the Hall of Fallen Heroes. Aster bit her lip nervously. How much time did she have? Three hours, perhaps. Four at the most. Thor's Hammer, and the weapons she had mentioned in the Maestro's armory would keep the General and the rest of the Army distracted for a while, but not forever. Sooner or later they would think of, and want, what she intended to take for herself. She had to be done, before that happened.
Twenty minutes. She went to the dining hall, found some of the soldiers from the Army of Darkness who had just finished eating and had not found anything else useful to do with themselves. Aster scolded them for standing around rather than doing something useful, and told them to come with her to the storage room where there were sacks of salt. She had to drive more slowly than she would have liked in the forklift, so they could keep up with her. The room was locked, but Aster made short work of that by the expedient of simply bashing the door down with the forklift.
Heavy equipment was so useful. A pity she wouldn't be able to take the forklift with her. But there would be no room for it on her truck. Not with the other things she needed to take. And it was questionable whether there would be any way to power it in Wisconsin anyways.
Aster lowered the pallets that were stacked on the forklift, turned the machine off to save the battery, removed the cargo nets that were on top of the highest pallet, then dragged the topmost pallet to the ground. It landed with a clatter. Aster made a show of straightening it slightly with her foot, then she pointed at the sacks of salt.
"Load up these pallets for me." Aster said. "40 bags of salt, each."
"40 bags…" One of the soldiers looked dubiously at the pallet. "I think the pallet is too small for that."
Aster sighed. Gods preserve her from those who had never studied geometry.
"You stack them." Aster explained. She pointed at the pallet with her toe. "Make a bottom layer, three bags the long way here at this end, then also at the other end, and two bags the short way in the middle. Then do another layer on top of it, until you have five layers. That'll equal 40 bags. Make sure to fasten one of the nets around it, and strap it tight, so nothing falls off when I lift it. Then load up all the other pallets."
"How many will that be?" The soldier obvious was ignorant not only of geometry, but of math as well.
"360 bags total." Aster said, seething inside at the pointless questions. Time was going by fast, but she didn't dare appear impatient.
"That's a lot of salt." The soldier hefted one of the bags. "Can the trucks carry that much?"
It was, in fact, about seven tons of salt. A lot to load by hand, but rather little for the truck she had been given by General Monroe in exchange for extinguishing the lights in the palace the previous night.
"The truck will be fine." Aster assured him. She dusted off one of the bags. "I need you and your friends to load up these pallets for me. I have some other things to do, but I'll be back for them in an hour or so. Make sure they're ready by then."
Aster left the soldiers to their task. They did not ask her what she had to do, which was a relief, as she then would have had to think of a plausible lie. Certainly she would not tell them about the room she was going to. A room she knew about, that nobody else did.
Nobody, that was, except the Maestro. And he was not here. It was a room that he would not let anyone know about, and he would have killed Aster in an instant, if he ever suspected that she knew about it, and had seen what she had seen there. That somewhere inside the monster, was a wrinkled old man, probably weaker than she was. But the monster was too strong to type on the keyboard of a Pre-War computer, without wrecking it utterly, in much the same way he was too strong to have a woman, without ruining her. The Maestro apparently didn't much care what happened to the women he used, but he did care, it seemed, what happened to irreplaceable Pre-War equipment.
There had been a lot of things in that room, but there was one thing in particular that interested Aster.
A ring of keys, set onto one wall. Aster intended to commit a theft, and needed it to look like nothing had been stolen. That meant she could not force the door that guarded what she wanted to steal. And if there were any keys to that place, to the Maestro's treasure chamber, that she had only briefly glimpsed once, and they were anywhere other than on the Maestro's body, then they were surely on the ring in that secret Computer room. After all, the time she had seen the treasure chamber open, and gotten a glimpse of what was inside, hadn't one of the guards had that very ring of ornate looking keys in his hand, and then given it back to the Maestro, once the door was unlocked?
The Maestro, of course, was far too strong to use a key, without wrecking it, and likely the lock as well. It was why Aster had strong hopes that the keys would be in that room. Another tyrant, a more human one, would no doubt keep such important keys as the ones to his treasure chamber, on his body at all times.
But the Maestro? Keys were made of thin metal. Strong enough for an ordinary man, even a strong one like Daniel Wolfkiller. But for the Maestro, it would be barely stronger than paper. Easily bent or torn, or otherwise wrecked, so it would no longer work, and he'd have to go to the trouble and risk of having either the key or the lock replaced.
It had now been 30 minutes since Aster had left General Monroe. Aster jogged down the hallway, wishing she dared to run. But she could not arouse suspicions by appearing to be in too much of a hurry. It took five minutes to get to the room she wanted, the store room where she had hidden from the guards, so long ago. Aster turned on the lights and went inside. She was too large, now, to squeeze behind the shelves, but she was sure it was the same room. Pulling some dusty supplies off the lowest shelf, she could even see the vent on the wall. Aster wiped dust off the shelf, then crawled on her belly over it, and peered through the vent. Unfortunately she didn't have a flashlight, but the light from the store room went through the vent to a small degree. Surely that was the desk, and the blocky shape of the computer screen she had seen. It had to be.
She wiggled backwards and stood up, thinking of the layout of the palace. A map formed in her head. If the vent was by the floor in the store-room, but near the ceiling of the Maestro's secret computer room, then the room she wanted had to be down a nearby ramp, and to the left.
Aster left the store room and jogged down the ramp and to one side where the Maestro's secret room was.
Except there was nothing there. Or at least, not a doorway to the Maestro's secret Computer room. Just more storerooms, some with suspicious looking Pre-War jars of food on wooden shelves, some with bins full of sheets. Aster opened several of the doors in frustration, and actually kicked one of them.
"It has to be here!" she growled under her breath. 40 minutes. She was wasting valuable time. She knew the room was there. She had seen it.
"Damn it all." She had to find it. Perhaps if she could see it better… Aster jogged quickly down the hall, flicking on the lights in every store room that seemed to be in a likely location. Then she went back up the ramp, to the store room on a higher floor, where she had originally seen the Maestro's computer room. Bending down, she looked through the vent, hoping to get a better look, now that the lights were on.
Except that they weren't on. The secret room was still nearly completely dark, the only light that which made it's way through the vent.
Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. To quote the book Alice in Wonderland. But she was Aster, not Alice. She knew that the room must be in the hallway down the ramp, and to the left. And she had turned on all the lights in every room in that section of hallway.
Yet the Maestro's secret room was dark.
It had now been nearly 45 minutes since she had left General Monroe's presence. She had to find that room, and find it fast.
Perhaps nobody else in Dystopia, who had not read as many books on as many subjects as Aster Aversa had, would have been able to find that room without resorting to breaking through the walls with a sledgehammer. But Aster had read all sorts of books. Books with pictures of optical illusions. Books about hidden rooms where fugitives had found safety. And magicians who performed clever tricks.
And jokes.
"When is a door not a door?" Aster muttered to herself. "When it's a jar!"
Very funny. She could not trust anything she saw in these two hallways. Very likely the color and size of the tiles on the floor and ceiling themselves were not to be trusted. Probably the Maestro had killed whatever architects and artists made this area for him, so they couldn't talk. Too bad for him that he had left that romance book in the tower chamber where the Betties had stayed. The one about a rather spoiled and dull woman who was swept off her feet by a roguish stage magician.
And those store rooms on the lower floor had had wooden shelves. Wooden ones with backs. Not metal ones, as there were everywhere else in the Maestro's palace.
Pacing the length of the hallway with her feet, which she trusted more than her eyes under these circumstances, would take too long. But now she knew what she needed. Once again, Aster went down the ramp to the lower floor. She looked in a few rooms, that were the right distance down the hallway, along the floor and walls.
Sure enough, one room had subtle scrape marks, both on the floor in front of one of the wooden shelves full of jars, and marks on the ceiling above it as well.
"When it's a jar." Aster whispered. She cautiously touched one of the jars. Sure enough, it was glued to the shelf below it. Which was not a shelf at all, but a curtain. Aster examined the shelf, and saw large handprints, the right size to be the Maestro's, in the dust in two areas where there were a few jars 'missing'. Lifting that entire heavy shelf was, of course, no problem for the Maestro. It would be as easy for him as lifting only one of the jars would have been for her, had they not been glued to the shelf. The forklift could no doubt handle the job, but it was back with the bags of salt, and even if she had had it, it wouldn't have fit through the door.
Still, as they said, the bigger they were, the harder they fell. Tall shelves were not all that stable, if they weren't mounted to the wall. And if there were a door behind the shelf, it could hardly be attached to the wall. Aster pulled hard on one of the higher shelves, and more easily than she would have thought, the whole thing tipped over. She was barely able to jump out of the way, before jars of century old peaches crashed onto the hard floor. A few of them broke loose from the ancient, brittle glue that had held them on the shelves, as well. They shattered with an alarmingly loud noise, and shards of glass and peach juice flew everywhere.
Aster got a little wet, and one small bit of glass drew a sharp, red line across her lower arm. She didn't care. She wanted to suck blood and sweetness off her own wrist, but worried about food poisoning, she instead merely wiped it off on the dark tunic of her Army uniform, and regarded the door in front of her. It wasn't even metal, just a cheap wooden door that had maybe once been painted green. Hell, from the state of the wood and the tarnish on the hinges, it looked like it might have been made before the War itself. Still, it made sense. Any door strong enough to seriously slow down determined attackers, armed with sledgehammer and explosives would probably be difficult for the old man she had seen to even open. The Maestro was counting on not being found when he was in his weakened state.
Aster did not have a sledgehammer, but the door looked frail, and her onerous training in the Army of Darkness had made her strong. Stretching her arms out slightly for balance, she raised her right leg, and kicked the door as hard as she could, near the knob.
With a rather pathetic crack, a whole section of the door near the knob broke off, and it swung open, revealing the dark chamber inside.
"I got you, you bastard!" Aster declared rather illogically. She did not have the Maestro himself, and it would be decades or maybe even never, before she would. She had only managed to break into a room that he thought nobody in the world knew about. Still, she would take what she could get, and the thrill of breaking into the room was rather like the thrill of bringing down an animal, after a good hunt.
Aster reached inside, penetrating the Maestro's private chambers with her bloody arm, and flicked on the lights, before ravishing it entirely and stepping inside.
The keys were there. Hanging right where she had last seen them.
"You're mine!" Teeth bared slightly, she reached up and seized the keys off the wall with a violent motion, like a thief viciously stealing fruit off a tree he had no right to. Aster held her breath involuntarily, as if she might somehow be caught in this act of theft, and in the silence, heard a humming noise, punctuated by a tinny rattle every few seconds.
What is that? She worried that perhaps it was some sort of mechanized weapon that the Maestro had left behind to guard his keys in his absence, and quickly looked around. But no, there was no motion that might hint at danger.
Cocking her head, Aster focused on the sound. It was coming from a rather drab looking metal box, perhaps not quite as high as her head, that had once been white, but now was so dirty it was nearly grey, and marked with rust.
What is that? She asked herself again. A pre-War refrigerator? For what? Snacks when the Maestro is in here, in his human form?
It seemed odd that the Maestro wouldn't simply bring food with him. He wasn't stupid. Unless he spent long periods of time in the room, so that food might spoil.
Curious, Aster pulled open the refrigerator. It was hard to see inside it, there was a long sort of light bulb inside, but it was burned out. She opened the door wider, so the light from the room could shine in, and didn't understand for a moment what she was seeing.
The refrigerator was filled with hundreds of tiny jars. Some clear, some brownish. Or perhaps they were tiny bottles, the size a doll would use. Aster picked one of them up and turned it over in her hands. She had always been fascinated by bottles, for some reason she didn't understand herself, and these bottles were almost like something that could have been made by fairies, if there were such a thing.
Then Aster remembered. She had seen bottles… or perhaps they were jars, like that before. Doctor Llewellyn had had them in his office. They were for medicines.
Aster took a deep breath, leaned down, and read the labels on the bottles. Lidocaine. Codeine. Morphine. Ampicillin. Amoxicillin. Other words that she wasn't sure of.
She straightened up. She knew those words. At least some of them. Painkillers and antibiotics.
And codeine.
Aster licked her lips, regarding a small brown bottle of the stuff. She had needed it once….
And still needed it…
There was a smell like sweet rust, somewhere deep in her nose, or her brain. The codeine had made her forget… forget what the Maestro and Paul Rasse had done to her. Forget that she never felt like a real person…
And the dreams had been divine. Pure mind made into material reality. Or at least, it had seemed real. More real than she felt when she was awake.
Aster thought about it. The Army could use this. The soldiers wounded in the war were suffering, missing limbs, some of them, and there was nothing but opium and damn little of that to give them. And they didn't dare use too much, if they simply kept them unconscious they wouldn't be able to eat or drink.
And there was so much of it… she could take a little. There would still be plenty for everyone else.
Her mouth was wet, and a trickle of drool ran down one side of her chin. Aster wiped it away absently, wondering why the Maestro kept what might be the last supply of these drugs (at least, this side of Iceland) locked away. It wasn't as if the Maestro would ever need them. Strong as Gammas were, they seldom got hurt and never got sick.
Something about the latter thought nagged at Aster's mind, but she didn't have time to think about it. Then she thought about Zack and Maria. It was true that there were a lot of the tiny little jars… but as many as there were, they were still finite in number. Someday they would run out, and what if the day after they ran out, one of them got hurt? Or she, herself, got hurt, and there was no help for it because she had wasted the codeine on dreams?
Slowly, as if the door to the refrigerator weighed hundreds of pounds, Aster closed it. It was true she was planning a theft, but it was a theft of necessity. She would not stoop to stealing merely to feed her own cravings. She had enough problems with not being able to control her own fears. Being unable to control her own addiction would make things worse.
Besides, once she told everyone else in the Army about the contents of this refrigerator, she would be even more of a Hero in their eyes. It was a lie, she knew. She was nothing but a miserable coward and a thief who had the unearned advantage of an undeserved education. But she needed the lie. Heroes weren't questioned, and she needed people not to question what she was going to be doing in the immediate future.
Turning firmly away from the refrigerator, Aster was about to leave, and then decided to look around to see what else might be in the room, that could be of use. After all, the Maestro had gone to a great deal of trouble to keep this room secret, and it had worked, at least against everyone except a too-small girl with a penchant for getting into out of the way places. But the Maestro had become more and more mad over the years. Perhaps when he had first built the palace, and the secret room, he had not planned on keeping young girls as Betties.
There seemed to be little else in the room, other than a machine that made coffee, and a threadbare bathrobe hung on a hook, the same one she had seen the Maestro wearing when he had been in the shape of a rather ugly old man. Other than that, there was just the chair, and the pre-War Computer. Aster thought about spitting or peeing on the robe, but turning away from the codeine had made her mouth dry, and her bladder seemed empty as well. She was about to leave, when she mentally slapped herself in the face.
The Computer.
Aster knew what a Computer was, of course. She had read pre-War books and magazines about them. But she had never used one, and the one she had seen the Maestro using in this room, was the only one she knew of that still worked. As such, she really hadn't thought of it being of much use, other than as a historical artificact. rather like the objects in the Hall of Fallen Heroes, but with less weapons potential.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. She berated herself mentally. What was the Computer, except a form of a book or a file? A source of knowledge. Of power, and perhaps fear. Many of the artifacts in the Hall of Fallen heroes had file cabinets below them, with documents about the Heroes, that the curious of Dystopia could read (or have read to them, if they were illiterate as many were), so as to learn about the Powers of the Heroes that the Maestro had defeated. And their Powers had not saved them from the Maestro, so what chance would mere ordinary humans have? The knowledge inspired fear.
And that was how the Maestro wanted people to think. He ruled through fear, as much as strength.
And fear was something Aster knew all about. Since the Maestro had put her in a cage, she had had very few moments without fear. And she knew it not only in herself, but in others, when she saw it.
And now, she smelled fear, not in herself, but in the Maestro. It was such a unique experience, so unbelievable, that perhaps only someone with Aster's experience in watching and understanding animals of all sorts, even the human sort, would have recognized the signs of it enough to believe it.
Why hide, you bastard? She thought. Why hide? Why hide yourself, and this room, and this Computer? Why, unless you are afraid? You may be mad, you may be the devil himself as I once thought, but you are NOT stupid. If you are afraid, it's because there's something you're afraid of. Some way to defeat you. You stupid, ugly, fuck.
There was, in her, the thrill of the hunt. She imagined, as she had before, being a strong, immortal, female Vampire. Much faster and stronger and more deadly than weak little merely human Aster Aversa. Ripping the Maestro's fat, ugly throat out with her teeth, and letting the green blood gush down her throat, like water from a fountain. Then again, probably blood that color would taste awful. But she could enjoy watching it, and let it splash onto her skin like that… who had that crazy royal woman been that she had once read about? Bathory something or the other.
Not that that would be all that enjoyable, either. Fantasizing about bathing in the Maestro's blood might be satisfying, but the reality was that it would probably be sticky and dirty and smell bad. A nice hot bubble bath was just the thing for her. A good leisurely soak, not like the short, cold showers that were all she had gotten since she had left the Maestro's palace.
Besides, although thinking about being a Vampire was fun, and she might be curious to try it for a short while, she didn't think she would want to be one permanently. From what she had read about the Vampire, Michael Morbius, he had a hard time controlling himself, and was often attacking people, and sometimes even killing them. That did not sound good. Aster certainly didn't want to attack Zack or his sister or anyone else in the Army of Darkness. At least not to kill them. Kicking them when they were disagreeable and stupid to knock sense into their heads was about as violent as she wanted to get with them. Killing them was out. They were not, after all, the Maestro. Not even General Monroe, as sociopathic as he was. Nor could she really advocate letting the Vampire, Morbius continue to kill people, either. She would have to do something about that. She wasn't sure what, though she had several ideas. But that was a worry for the future. There were plenty of other things she needed to worry about, such as getting to Milwaukee in the first place, before she needed to deal with that particular problem.
50 minutes. Or perhaps 55. Aster had read enough about Computers in pre-War books and magazines that she knew it was the plain, metal box-thing set in the shadows under the desk that was actually the Computer itself, rather than the more impressive looking TV screen or keyboard. That held the books and files. Aster had read once that a Computer could hold the equivalent of hundreds or even thousands of books. She wasn't quite sure she believed it, as she didn't understand how writing could be made that small in the first place, or how a Computer would be able to read writing that tiny. The little she had read on the subject made little sense, talking about magnets and hard drives and other things she had no experience with. But Aster was practical. She didn't need to know how it worked. She only needed to know that it DID work. She could figure out HOW later. Surely there had to be books about it, somewhere in Wisconsin.
An hour. Aster pulled the wires out of the back of the Computer. She left them dangling there. From what she had read about Computers, they all used the same few sorts of standard wires. There would surely be other such wires of the same type, somewhere in Wisconsin. Just as there had to be books about how the Computers worked., somewhere in that state. There had to be. She had to believe that.
She needed to get going. Aster looked around for something to protect the Computer with, and her eyes fell again on the threadbare, dingy bathrobe hanging from the back of the door. That might once have been green. The same one she had seen a rather ugly old man wearing. At least, before he had taken it off and turned into a monster. She still couldn't figure out how that worked, and it bothered her as much as the problem of a hammer that couldn't be lifted. Was the Maestro magic in some way, like Thor's hammer?
Perhaps, but then, if he was magic, himself, then why wouldn't he be able to lift the hammer?
The implications of the Maestro somehow having magical powers, in addition to everything else he had, were too depressing to think about. Besides, if he were magic, then why would he had needed a frightened, 16 year old apprentice Zookeeper to try unsuccessfully to stop the miscarriage of his son? Surely he would have been able to do something himself, and something successful at that, if he were magic.
Besides, from what Aster knew about it, Gammas, such as the Maestro, were made by a bomb. Bombs weren't magic, they were made by science.
But then, a mocking voice said in her head as she ducked back through the door of the room with her two prizes, What was it that Pre-War author, what was his name, Heinlein something, said in a book? Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic? Perhaps the Maestro's science and Thor's magic all amount to the same thing in the end. Gift's you'll never have, and can never defeat.
Well, maybe she couldn't. But maybe she didn't have to. All she had to do was get away. And even if she couldn't defeat all the magic and science that had existed before the War, perhaps the Vampire Morbius, could. Supposedly he was a Vampire that had somehow been made by science, rather than magic. But if it all came to the same thing, then that wouldn't make any difference in the end, then, would it?
Feeling rather self-satisfied with that line of reasoning, Aster found her way back to the storage room where she had ordered some soldiers to load the 9 pallets she had brought with bags of salt. It had now been an hour since she had left General Monroe. The soldiers in the room were just finishing loading the last pallet and fastening the netting around it as she walked in. One of them noticed the large, cloth wrapped bundle under her arm.
"What's that?" He pointed a dirty finger.
"It's the Maestro's Computer." Aster said in a tone that was deliberately even smugger than she felt. "You go tell General Monroe that. He'll be interested. You tell him that I saw it working a few years ago, and if it still works, I'm going to figure out how, when we get to the Destination."
The soldier frowned. "Do you think I should give it to the General?" He half reached for the bundle.
Aster stepped back and turned slightly, to protect the device. "You just tell him I have it. If he wants it himself, I'll give it to him. Not to you."
Aster did not think that General Monroe would take the Computer away from her. At least, not in the sense of not letting her use it. Possibly he would demand that one of the trusted officers in the Army of Darkness take actual physical possession of it. That was alright. Though it would make little sense, since nobody in the Army was likely to know any more about how to get the thing to work than she did, Aster did not care who actually owned the Computer so long as she could try to use it, and find out what secrets the Maestro might have written inside it.
In the meantime, the mere knowledge that Aster had the Maestro's Computer would give General Monroe (and several other people who were sure to learn about it on the rumor vine in short order) one more thing to think about. One more distraction, so that they might not notice what she was going to be up to in the next few hours.
Aster slid the Computer gently under the seat of the motorized forklift. The bathrobe rasped over rusty metal, and she could smell the rust in the air, but she was sure the cloth would protect the inside of the computer from any sort of dirt or dust on the ancient machine. She licked her lips in satisfaction once it was underneath. It fit snugly, and was well protected there.
"I'm going to load up the salt into my truck." Aster told them. "It'll take a while, I've got other things to do, as well. Like checking on those two children. Just leave the pallets lying here, and the door open. And if anyone else wants salt, to take to the Destination, there's plenty more here for them, too."
By now, of course, most of the members of the Army of Darkness had learned by gossip what Aster had told General Monroe. That salt was far less common in Wisconsin, than New York, and had had time to think through just how many things salt was used for, and how it might be something valuable to take along.
That was fine. Aster was greedy, but she didn't mind sharing, as long as she got what she needed. Of course, what she needed next was going to be far more than what some might consider her fair share of things, but that was not her fault. If she didn't get what she needed, they would all be doomed.
She hopped on the forklift and turned the key that started the battery powered motor. It hummed loudly and shook slightly, and Aster worried a bit for the Computer, and actually reached down to touch it, but decided it was probably safe. After all, sometime back before the War, Computers must have been transported on cars, or trains, or boats, and the trip could not have been perfectly smooth. Besides, if being on a forklift for a few hours would somehow break it, it would never make the trip to Wisconsin anyways, so there was no point in worrying about it.
Riding the forklift was far faster than walking or even jogging would have been. But Aster did not take the pallet of salt to her truck. Instead, she took a circuitous route, deliberately choosing to avoid areas such as the kitchen or baths, where other members of the Army were. Once she had gotten to a point where she didn't feel she was likely to encounter anyone else, she took the forklift deeper into the palace, to a rather unremarkable looking set of double doors. At least, they were unremarkable looking from the outside, or would have been had it not been for a large bloodstain on the floor. Several guards had been killed here by the Army, and there had not yet been time for anyone in the Army to find out what they had been guarding behind those doors.
Aster did not need to find out. She already knew. She had seen those unremarkable doors open more than once. Back when she had been a Betty. And her knowledge gave her a few short hours to do what she needed. Before anyone else in the Army had time to find out what was inside those dull looking doors.
The Maestro displayed his trophies in full view of the public. His symbols of fear. But he always hid his real treasures.
Aster left the forklift on, merely shifting it into the neutral gear, stepped out of it into the hallway, and took out the ring of keys she had stolen from the Maestro's secret room. There were over 20 of them. Probably each of them led to someplace valuable, and she wished she knew where all of them led to and could have every treasure and secret they guarded, but for now, she would be satisfied with only one of them working.
She had no way of knowing if any of them would work, of course. Other than to try them. Picking a key at random, she tried to put it into the lock.
It didn't fit.
Aster sighed in annoyance, slid the key around the ring, and methodically tried the next one.
Again, it didn't fit.
The next two keys fit, but wouldn't turn in the lock. Aster yanked them back out, and tried two more keys, one that wouldn't turn, and one that was far too small.
Damn it. She swore to herself. One of them has to work!
The seventh key fit and turned easily.
Aster breathed heavily, her heart pounding excitedly in her chest. She felt as if she were stalking an elusive deer, as she had so many years ago, and was about to loose an arrow right into it's heart. The smell of rust and grease from the ancient forklift was still in her nose, like blood and musk. Gasping slightly, she parted the doors, just enough to see if what she had glimpsed only a few times as a Betty was still hidden inside.
There was the barest gleam, reflected from the light of the hallways, and Aster licked her lips in voluptuous satisfaction.
It was still there. In the name of every God who might still be looking down on the human vermin that had survived the War, it was still there.
Aster sighed again, not in annoyance, but a nearly sensual satisfaction, and flung the two doors open wide. This, then, was the Maestro's treasure chamber. The storage room for most of the wealth he had taxed and stolen from the residents of Dystopia for over a century.
The light reflecting off the treasure made her want to blink, but her eyes seemed paralyzed, the pupils dilated and the lids glued open. She was helpless to stop looking from one pile of wealth to another. There were stacks of coins and precious metal bars, and coils of copper wire and buckets and boxes of jewelry and loose gems.
And the smell of rust, like blood, was still in her nose.
Aster looked again at the stacks of treasure. Everything that the humans in Dystopia had worked to earn, over a century, only to have it stolen by the Maestro. She was reminded of something she had read in one of her books once. The one that she thought was about the God of Trains. About a fat, evil ruler seizing people who were exhausted with the work they had done to grow a few grains of rice, and squeezing the people until the blood ran out of them, and squeezing the grains of rice until they turned into gems.
There was the smell of grease, like rancid meat, and Aster looked again at the treasure, and thought about it. She ran one finger over a pile of silver coins that would have filled ten bathtubs like the one she had used as a child.
It was dusty.
Aster thought about that. The Maestro had treasure… more than she even realized… but really, what did he ever need to spend it on? He took whatever he needed. Or whatever he merely wanted. Food. Women. Zoo animals. The best minds and the best works of art that still existed in Dystopia. The Maestro was the strongest one there was, and nobody could prevent him from simply taking anything he wanted. So he had no need to pay money for anything, like regular, weak, human beings.
So why did he even have all the treasure, locked up in an obscure room? Aster wondered about that. It seemed rather pointless to have money you never were going to spend, it was rather like having food you never intended to eat, or… Aster was forced to use a masculine analogy… for a man to have a woman around that he never intended to fuck. It was like the fable she had read once, of a miser who buried all his gold and intended for nothing but to save it forever and hold it once in a while. The gold had then been stolen, as Aster intended to do with this gold, and a wiser neighbor had told him that for all the use he was making of his wealth, he would have been just as well off with a gold painted rock.
She lifted one bar of gold in her hand. It was about twice the size of a brick, and surprisingly heavy. Probably as heavy as one of the bags of salt, although it was far smaller. That was alright. She had deliberately told the soldiers to underload the pallets. They could handle twice as much weight as was actually on them. They would have to.
Thoughtfully, she blew dust off the bar, thinking again about the book with the God of Trains in it. She pressed her lips against cold metal. Unlike the rust, it had no real smell, but there was a bad feeling in the pit of Aster's stomach, as if the gold were covered with blood, and she just couldn't see it. There had been a man in that book, Francis something or the other, who had played a game of tennis, in a rather perverse way. He hadn't even cared about how many points he got. In fact, he might have even lost the game, Aster couldn't remember. But the point of the way he played was that he wasn't playing to win, he was playing to make things as hard as possible for the person he was playing against.
No, the Maestro didn't need the money, Aster decided. He wasn't taxing and stealing from the people in Dystopia to make himself richer.
He was doing it to make everyone else poorer.
Aster got back onto her forklift, feeling better about what she was about to do. True, she was sort of stealing from the Army of Darkness, and taking more than her fair share of the loot from the Maestro's palace, but she was mostly stealing from the Maestro. And he had stolen it in the first place, anyways, and didn't even really need it, so it wasn't exactly like stealing. He deserved it.
The way the Wolfkiller did? A mocking voice in her head, asked.
But that wasn't really right. Daniel Wolfkiller had just had offensive manners. And Aster had only been a kid, then. Maybe it hadn't been right to sneak around in his private room and steal his bottle, but that didn't mean it wasn't right to steal from the Maestro.
The Maestro was evil.
Besides, Aster needed the gold.
A lot of it.
Very badly.
She thought about her dead father, hanging from the ceiling, and her dead sister, whose body was lost in the mountain of corpses on one side of the Maestro's palace. And the severed hand she had seen only the previous night. And the woman, Patricia Miller, who she had killed. And a six year old boy who had been the main course at one of the Maestro's dinners. And other people she didn't know, and never would, who had starved in anonymity over the decades after the War. All the lives, spent and drained away so the Maestro could have a pile of metal he didn't even need. Hell, he probably didn't even care enough to look at it, the way Aster liked looking at the color and sparkle of pre-War bottles.
It was blood money. All blood money. Ironic, or perhaps even suitable, given what she intended to use it for.
It had now been an hour and fifteen minutes since Aster had left General Monroe. She had no more time to dwell on the morality of what she was doing. She knew what had to be done, to save them all, and had made up her mind about it a long time ago.
Aster drove the forklift through the double doors, and turned off the motor, to save the batteries. She loosened the cargo netting slightly, and lifted several bags off the pallet. Then she began stacking gold bars in the center of the pallet, Neatly. This had to be done, just right.
60 bars of gold made a pile about as large as two bags of salt. Aster surround the bars with bags of salt all around the outside, then stacked ten bags in a single layer on top of them. When she was done, the gold could not be seen, and the pallet looked just like it had before. The gold was as hidden as an embryo in a womb.
That left her with two extra bags of salt, however. That would not do. She couldn't leave evidence behind.
She lifted the two bags, wincing as the weight was starting to get heavy, putting them on top of the pallet. They could not stay there, of course. Aster restarted the pallet jack and rolled down several hallways, until she came to a bathroom. She took one of the bags of salt, and tossed it against one wall. Then she did it with the second one. Possibly they would be found. Probably nobody would think anything of it. The Maestro's palace was in such a chaotic state that the 18 bags of salt she needed to hide were hardly likely to draw comment. Or even a second thought.
She drove her pallet jack out to her truck, which was backed up against a loading dock on one side of the Maestro's palace. There was a large combination lock on it. Aster got off the pallet jack again, spun the dial with numbers she had memorized, and opened the back.
She drove the pallet jack inside, lowered it's burden to the bottom of her truck, backed out, and snapped the lock back shut.
It was now an hour and 40 minutes since she had left General Monroe.
She had 8 more pallets of salt that she needed to hide gold on.
It would take at least three hours.
Sooner or later General Monroe would probably start wondering what Aster was up to. She knew that the General didn't trust her, and the damnable thing was that he was actually right not to trust her. What she was doing was wrong, and a betrayal of the Army of Darkness. But it still had to be done.
Three more hours, Aster thought to herself.
It seemed like far too much time.
Too much time in which to be noticed…
….and not nearly enough time to do the job.