Chapter 2: Routines
Even in the darkness of the hallway,
the safehouse doorway managed to look ominous. He braced himself for
an attack, ready to face down whatever threat presented itself.
The door stopped moving. Nothing
sprang out, there was no cry of triumph or rage, nothing at all. But
he didn't move. He just listened, eyes probing the darkness warily.
Idiot. He cursed himself. He
knew what safehouses looked like after they'd been found, and this
wasn't it. But that wasn't enough. He had to be sure. As far as he
was concerned, no room would ever be safe again until he'd checked it
himself.
He took one final look down the hall,
drew the ragged-bladed knife he kept on his belt, and stepped into
the darkness, closing the door with a snap, behind himself. A
thick smell filled his nostrils as he breathed in the unventilated
air, cringing at the concentration of his own, musty unwashed scent,
mixed with mildew and sweat, urine, and wood smoke, and even a little
long-gone food. He'd get used to it.
As quietly as he could, Garret set his
spear against one of the walls. In close quarters, blinded as he was
by the darkness, the nearly-six foot staff would be almost entirely
useless, and he'd had the bad experiences to prove it. Of course, a
knife wouldn't be much better against one of them, he thought as he
stepped forward but at least it was something.
As he walked, his foot fell on
something soft. He hesitated for an instance, but he knew what it
was. The old towel he used to cover the large gap at the bottom of
the door, right where it was supposed to be. He paused and kicked it
back against the panel, before reaching up to the strap of his
backpack, where he unhooked the little flashlight which dangled
there. Clutching it with one sweating hand, he slid the switch
forward and cast a sharp, white light into the little room.
The light seared his eyes after so
long in the darkness, but all he could do was to hope that any of
phantom threat sharing the room with him would be as stunned as he
was. It only took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but it felt far
longer. Slowly, the cluttered interior of the safehouse came into
focus.
It was empty.
He took a breath, then moved quickly
on. Lists of tasks were already running through his mind and he set
about completing them.
The door wasn't really sealed yet, and
he couldn't afford to give himself away, not now. Just the same, he
took a moment to check the narrow room thoroughly, more to show
himself that he was safe than anything else.
Then he turned off the light.
Garret hated not being able to see his
surroundings, hated being trapped with all the horrors his
imagination could concoct, but he fought it back as he reached
clumsily out and caught the heavy wood plank he'd rigged as a
makeshift deadbolt. Part of his mind screamed at him to turn the
light back on, but he trusted in all his senses, especially on bad
days like this one, and the sounds and smells told him that the room
was empty, told him he was alone, even if he couldn't bring himself
to trust the memory of a moment before.
He swung the board down until it was
cradled between the frame and the brackets he'd mounted on the inside
of the door itself. The key he'd used couldn't unlock it permanently,
it just locked again as soon as it shut, which suited him just fine,
but he would never trust his life to it entirely, not if he could
break in, as he had before he had a key. If they picked the lock, he
wanted something standing between them and himself while he slept.
When the door was as secured as he
could get it, he pulled his gloves off and felt his way to the top of
the frame, where a thick blanket was rolled tightly and tied with
twine. With fumbling hands, he worked the knots loose, pulling the
blanket down and hooking the loops tied along its edges to the screws
and nails hammered into the cement beside the door frame.
There was a slight sound in the room
with him; a tiny tap, like a drop of water falling from the ceiling,
or a tick of the building shifting on its rotten walls. He knew there
weren't any others in the safehouse, but it made no difference. He
whirled as soon as the blanket was down, the knife spinning through
his fingers until he was holding it readily, the bright glare of the
flashlight casting the room into sharp shadows again.
Garret breathed out slowly, almost
embarrassedly, when his eyes had adjusted again. He busied himself
with inspecting the covered door, taking care to keep the light
pointed away from the blanket and towels. Then he crossed to the
workbench, sheathed his knife, and carefully lit the crude stump of a
homemade candle using the lighter in his pocket.
The yellow glow was easier on his eyes
than the white light, and the narrow room took on a sinister,
familiar look in the flickering light of the smoking candle. It was a
ragged, dirty looking place, his little den; the walls and concrete
ceiling were covered in a leprous patchwork of aged and dirty papers;
wires and cords ran hither and yon in a tangled, suspended network,
each with a specific purpose, – often tied into the building's
remaining systems – and every flat surface, from the adjustable,
sheet metal shelves to the wide workbench, were covered by the
thousands of relics of his last three years, like the detritus of the
forest floor outside. Tools, provisions, and half-finished projects
were scattered and mixed indistinguishably with trash and raw
materials. Wires, rope, and clothing hung from the towering shelves
like moss and vines, nearly obscuring the contents of every shelf but
the bottom one in the back, where a neatly-folded pile of blankets
and sheets served as a bed, raised on wooden planks to avoid the
occasional flood of rainwater through the building.
Garret looked over it all for a
moment, from the chipped and rusting enameled sink to the
char-crusted homemade stove, to the cluttered workbench, and he did
something he hadn't done in days. He smiled, and there was no cruelty
or bitterness in the look. The room would have appalled him years
ago, he knew, but he felt safe behind these thick walls and
barricades now, surrounded by his cameras and sensors and even the
occasional trap of his own. He inhaled deeply, taking in the waxy
smell of the candle as it mixed with the thick scent of his own
permeating stink and the that of the small, moldering space, with
something approaching relish as he looked around the place which had
become his sanctuary – his home.
Still breathing in the familiar place,
Garret unbuckled his backpack, set the radio on the bench, and
tiredly shrugged his way out of the straps of the pack. After wearing
it for so long he felt strange without it, not that he missed its
weight hauling down on him. He worked his shoulders for a moment,
listening to the pop and creak of his bones as he began his nightly
routine. He filled a plastic jar with water from a jug labeled
'Boiled Flood Water – Do Not Drink” in his childlike hand, and
began the process of removing the leafy branches from the velcro on
his clothes and pack, so he could save them for the morning. It was
good to have a routine, he thought. The last few days had been heavy
on planning and worrying, and light on the routines that kept him
sane.
When he was done, he pulled off his
outermost layer, and checked them for blood. After three years, it
was more of a ritual at this point than a real precaution. He'd found
plenty of records from during the war in that time: notes, logs,
messages, all written in plaintext because the soldiers knew better
than to trust their devices. They were jumbled messes of code,
jargon, and missing context, but he'd still managed to glean a few
things from the time. And from the contradictory orders, the
incoherent ramblings, and the hasty notes, written for a posterity
they never found, one fact had emerged. Whatever caused the collapse
was, amongst other things, fluid transmissible.
He'd had never seen it himself of
course, not even on the other survivors he'd met and lost over the
years. He wasn't even sure it was a risk in his case... but he'd
gotten in the habit of checking for contamination, and washing
whenever possible, and that had probably been for the best. After
all, even with those habits, he'd
long since passed the point where he actually felt dirty, and forcing
himself to wash when he had the chance had probably helped to keep
him alive.
He found one blood
spot on the sleeve of his sweatshirt. It didn't look like it had
soaked through, but he turned on the flashlight, and checked the
stained, coarse, blue and white material of his armor for any sign of
the blood, just the same.
It couldn't have
come from the other in the hallway, he decided. He'd been careful
with it, and the spots were too old besides.
No, it had to have
come from one of the ones he'd crossed earlier in the day, on his way
to the garden. There'd been a few dicey moments that morning, he
thought with a faraway look, but he'd done what he did best. He'd
survived. He'd always checked himself afterwards, of course, but
there hadn't been much time for careful inspection between all the
hiding and running and misdirection, and it was very possible that
he'd missed something.
Garret shook his
head and blew out his breath out slowly. He would never have risked
something like that for so little payout a year ago. Part of him said
that he hadn't been as desperate then, but that wasn't entirely true.
Sure, finding supplies had been easier, but then he'd had very little
in terms of a useful and accessible stockpile. It had taken every day
of the last few years to get where he was now, and there had been
many long and hungry days and nights back then. He'd gone days,
sometimes weeks without a scrap of real food, and had slept for
scarce minutes at a time out, exposed in the ruins. But still, there
had been something different then.
He thought for a
moment, looking at the backpack. No, he decided finally, the problem
wasn't the fact that between the others and people like him,
everything of value had been squirreled away... it was that he was
loosing hope.
There's nothing
left to do.
His face took on
an expression that was almost a smile. The last few days had been
hard, between the planning and the preparation, and the payoff was
hardly worth it, but it had been something.
He didn't know who
had built the rooftop garden. It had been quite impressive really,
raised beds built from second-hand, paint-peeling lumber and filled
with pounds and pounds of soil. Getting to it had been hard, and
taken a fair bit of planning, but he couldn't keep watching the
campus from on high, stealing glances at it, wondering if today would
be the day someone or something had picked it clean.
Of course, if
there was one thing he'd learned the hard way over the years, it was
that even his best plans faild during their implementation, and
between the six overlapping traps and the weirdly-alert patrols,
things had gone bad very fast.
He gave the
backpack an annoyed look.
Maybe it had been
stupid, going after the garden maybe he had let boredom and
lack of purpose overcome his better judgment. Or maybe he'd gathered
food when food was scarce, and broken, however briefly, from a
dangerous routine – after all, the others were just as good at
pattern recognition as the unchanged survivors. Better, even.
The little
routines keep you sane. The big ones get you killed.
What mattered in
the end was that he'd survived, and gotten something to show for all
that work, so if he made it through tonight, it might not be worth
it, but it'd have to be good enough.
And with that, he
closed that line of thought.
Having a pack full
of fresh food was one of those little luxuries Garret treasured, but
he'd spent too much time thinking about blood and contamination, so
he made himself clean up before he handled the food.
One of the nice
things about this safehouse, and one of the things he normally looked
for when scouting a new location, was the sink. Specifically, its
drain. Having a means to dispose of waste without alerting the others
was important enough, but he'd been here long enough to have rigged
up a crude shower some time before. It wasn't much, just plastic
tubing and a lever valve connected to an old cooler on a high shelf,
but he liked having running water when he needed it, and the folded
length of stiff residential wire he'd used to mount it to the wall
made it somewhat adjustable, so he could use it as a sink or shower.
He adjusted the
faucet, filled the cooler with boiled floodwater and tested the flow
through the tube.
The armor he wore
beneath his clothes didn't look like much: the overlapping sheets and
sections he'd made for flexibility had left the fibered edges frayed
and sharp, rounded since with tape, covering the uneven strands he'd
had to sever with bolt cutters and occasionally a hatchet. The
material he'd used, however, more than made up for the ugly results.
His eyes flickered
involuntarily to the remains of a CDF greatcoat hanging half from a
shelf onto the workbench as he unlaced the different parts of his
armor in a detached, automatic sort of way. Even after hacking and
cutting enough material from it to cover himself thoroughly, there
was still a few feet left, for the protective coat had been designed
to cover the armor frame of a Civil Defense Force trooper. Not that
it had done much good, judging from the ruined frame lying half
buried out in the woods which it had been wrapped around. The
dirt-stained, blue and white patterned reactive armorcloth had been
long dead when he dug it out; the usually-flexible material was
designed to stiffen upon impact, flexing until it was strong enough
to stop most bullets and certainly shrapnel, but the damage it had
received, and the long months or years it had spent lying in the mud,
had killed its onboard power, leaving it stuck somewhere in-between.
Garret had seen
the potential in a lightweight, strong but still-somewhat-flexible
material almost immediately, however, and, though it had taken a fair
amount of time and labor, the end result was well worth it. After so
long, he couldn't hazard a guess as to the number of times it had
saved his life, whether from one of their attacks, or from something
as small as a rusted piece of metal or a bad fall.
His eyes trailed
around the room as he pulled the piece which covered his shoulders
over his head, and began unlacing a sheet which hinged around his
upper torso. The signature blue and white of the CDF showed in many
places around the little room, scattered at random amongst the
civilian goods, blankets, soap, tools, cleaning agents and
pesticides.
The supplies the
CDF had distributed during the war had kept him alive in the
aftermath, providing him with at least some nutrient-rich food and
medicine in a time when he was surviving on tiny scraps of raw meat,
leaves pulled from trees, and blades of grass. He'd found some of the
plastic cases and foil-wrapped packs on the wrecked CDF vehicles and
armor frames on the edge of his territory, and in some homes, but
getting most of it had required a withdrawal from one of the others'
stockpiles, as they had seen the value in the rations as clearly as
he had, and had the manpower to hoard them. Doing so had saved his
life in the long term, though, thinking back, he decided he'd prefer
not to have them as mad at him again as they had been after that.
Without
the bulk of the clothes and armor, his lean build looked less
rawboned and dangerous and more sickly and starved, all protruding
bones and bandy muscle, nearly lost beneath the many interwoven scars
which nearly covered him almost from head to toe.
He opened the faucet and washed up as
quickly and quietly as he could.
He knew he'd changed in many ways over
the last few years, both mentally and physically. Some of them were
hard to gauge for a man who'd been alone for years and had no mirror,
for the others seemed to take offense at the sight of their own image
and went out of their way to destroy them, but he didn't need one to
track most of the ways this place had altered him.
He might not have been able to see his
face except for what he could make out in the glossy screen of an old
phone, or the polished blade of a knife, but he knew there were
clawmarks across it, where a creature with long fingernails had tried
to blind him after knocking him to the ground, and that his nose had
a slight jut in the middle, where it had been broken twice, once when
another survivor leveled him with a crude club, and again when one of
the others, a Generation-3 or 4 modded soldier punched him
straight-on, almost knocking him unconscious. One of his teeth, a
molar on the bottom right was missing, pulled out by someone he'd
known, after it became impacted, while a top incisor was chipped from
where he'd bitten someone else on the arm, though he couldn't
remember why.
He looked down at his calloused and
dirt-ground hands. The ring and middle finger of his right hand were
each slightly crooked, the first and second bones broken and mis-set
after one of them stomped on the digits to force him to release his
grip on his spear. His arms and torso were the worst though, covered
in interlacing scars from a dozen different sources; brush, thorns,
broken glass, rusty nails, even knife, saw, and shiv wounds, and many
more which he couldn't identify, all overlapping each other until
even the time of their making was obscured. Over them, slightly
lighter, were the wide swathes of callused skin rubbed raw by the
armor and healed again and again over the years since he started
wearing it, trading the many little hurts for a handful of larger,
less dangerous ones.
His legs were barely any better, and
one knee still twinged painfully whenever he stressed it, a memento
from a fast exit from the third floor of a building.
He shrugged as the water ran out and
he tilted the cooler to drain it. He might not have been in the best
of conditions, but he'd survived it all, and, luck permitting, he'd
continue to for some time yet.
He rummaged through the over-filled
shelves, and produced a set of fresh clothes surprisingly quickly.
The jeans were patched and stitched a long time ago, not his best
work if he was honest, but they were comfortable. The sweatshirt was
thicker, and smelled marginally cleaner. All in all, he felt better
than he had in days.
He hung his armor above the bed, on a
handful of hooks fashioned from age-greened copper wire, where he'd
be able to pull it on fairly quickly during the night. Some of the
straps and lacing might be difficult, but he'd managed in the past.
After so long, it was like tying his boots.
As he worked, the shrill, three-note
alarm sounded in his ear and he stopped to listen carefully. He knew
from the pattern that it was the one he'd left near the body of the
other he'd killed an hour or so ago, and, by the way it was
repeating, he was pretty sure he knew which direction it was going,
but he had to be sure.
The beep pattern sounded continuously
for several long minutes, and he waited, until, finally the alarm
notes began to stop and go, the space between them growing as the
sensor struggled to spot the vanishing form. It was moving away.
He breathed a sigh of relief. If it
had been coming toward him, its pattern would have started haltingly
and ended abruptly, as it walked towards the sensor and then stepped
outside its view, not the other way around.
He unpacked his backpack quickly after
that, scattering most of the day's loot around the shelves and
workbench in a system of organization only he could understand. There
wasn't much, mostly just incidental things he'd picked up on his way,
but passing through an unexplored area always seemed to yield
something he couldn't find in his own territory.
Then he came to the old CDF case he'd
been keeping the food inside. The inside smelled a bit like the raw
meat he sometimes brought back, but right now, it was full of
vegetables, mostly peppers and slightly unripe tomatoes, though there
was a pair of little cucumbers and a few yellow beans there too. He
looked happily at the little feast for a brief moment, before sitting
on the bed and tearing in, eating the raw vegetables as slowly as he
could manage, picking out any seeds where he could, setting them
inside the lid of the plastic box.
He looked at the seeds as he ate;
twenty or so mismatched little things, floating on a bit of liquid in
the lid of the box. With any luck, some of them would grow in his own
scattered gardens. His plants didn't do as well, hidden as they were
inside cars and rooms and gutters and drainpipes, but then again, he
never lost whole crops to the others, or to other survivors for that
matter.
When he'd finished the last pepper,
Garret repacked his backpack for the morning, or in case something
found him during the night, laid out his weapons where he could reach
them easily, his knife under his pillow, his spear lying across the
ground, pointing towards the door so he could bring it up quickly
should one of them somehow burst into the room. He set his pack at
the foot of his bed and peeled the remains of his boots back off,
wiggling his toes through the threadbare socks as he inspected the
soles of the tattered footwear for any leaks or cracks that could
make tricks like leaving bloody prints a deadly mistake. He even
checked his armor, made sure he knew exactly where it would be,
before returning to the bed with the candle, his radio, and what he
suspected to be the last uncorrupted phone in the entire world.
The single plate of smooth black glass
was cracked in the middle, but it still worked, and somehow managed
to hold a charge after all this time, though never a very good one.
Most of the software took too much power to use, and he could never
justify the expense of charging it enough for them, but sanity often
came with a cost all its own, he thought, looking around the papers
clinging to the celling and walls, exhaustively marked with notes
about the words printed there, and he'd kept it charged well enough
to run one particular program.
He drew another cabled earbud from his
pocket and plugged it in, taping the power icon and watching the dead
glass come to life, the screen managing a degree of depth and realism
which was uncanny, even after the damage it had suffered. His fingers
moved automatically, opening an old textbook and keying the text rec
software to read it aloud.
Garret snuffed the candle between his
finger and thumb as the reader began, pulling a blanket over himself
as he rested back comfortably. He didn't care much about which book
it read, there were only four of them – the last surviving copies,
as far as he knew – and he'd listened to them all so many times
that he'd long since stopped hearing the words. It was the voice he
listened to. When he closed his eyes in the darkness, the dim screen
of the phone feebly lighting the room, he could almost pretend that
it was another person talking to him, that they were having a
conversation; that he wasn't alone.
The reading was good, for something
that hadn't been recorded in advance. The words flowed naturally, in
a neutral, forgettable sort of way, with only the occasional pause or
jarring change of inflection, but after hearing them so many times,
he'd grown to expect them, like a song sung in a certain voice.
Between the thick walls of the
safehouse muffling the noise outside, and the steady voice in his
ear, Garret could almost pretend he was someplace else. Someplace
safe.
***

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