He came to a door at the far end of the hallway and held up his palm to the Bio-Link ID reader. The door slid open, there were no knobs or hinges, and Maxon stepped into his office. The walls lit up around him. He sat at his desk and tapped the surface twice. An image of a computer screen and keyboard appeared on the surface of the desk. The screen looked as if it were embedded into the desk at a forty-five degree angle, when in fact it was a flat image. He put on a pair of glasses with silicon chips in each lens and typed in his password. Using the glasses he was able to navigate the pointer across the screen with his eyes. He navigated to the Central server site and logged in. He clicked on the tab labeled Upgrades. On the Upgrades page he clicked on the tab marked Wrecks and then beneath that Current Schedule. The schedule listed all the upcoming wrecks and what sector they were in. He saw that there was a wreck scheduled for later tonight, at midnight.
Maxon cursed under his breath. He hated midnight wrecks. Midnight wrecks meant that the house occupants refused to leave when notified they were being upgraded. They stayed in the house until the truck came, hoping to stand off. The situation could turn tricky in some cases with families standing in front of their houses, daring the truck to roll over them. Luckily, for Maxon, he never had to deal with that scenario as Lead Chief.
In the six years since he’s been Lead, Maxon had only overseen five midnight wreckings, and all of them went smoothly, or as smoothly as they could go without turning violent. Usually the aggression was limited to shouting and grandstanding, with the family threatening to cause bloodshed. In the end, however, knowing they were fighting a battle they could only lose, these people always stood down for the truck to do its job. Maxon understood that, for these people, the show of resistance was more important than actual sacrifice itself. If they proved to themselves that they tried to defend their homes it would alleviate any guilt they would feel of standing down. Once they moved into their new homes any thought of guilt quickly left them and their old homes would be forgotten and never missed. In Maxon’s view, it was only a weak sense of loyalty to the past that kept people in these outdated dwellings. Everyone desired to be moved into the new AutoHome, but some just didn’t know it. He knew it was his department’s job to educate them.
Only once did Maxon see a midnight wreck go violent, and that was when he was still a rookie. He must have been no more than a month into his new position, a position he attained after a rigorous evaluation, when the call went out for the trucks to roll. The Lead Chief at the time was a burly man named Canton, who used to always chew on the end of a toothpick and crack his knuckles with one hand when giving out orders. He told Maxon to suit up and get in the truck cab to drive. This was before automotive voice control so Maxon had to put in the key and shift the gear, a process that seems incomprehensible by today’s standards. It’s even more incomprehensible to Maxon that at one time all the wrecks used to be done by hand, but thankfully he didn’t grow up in that era.
A crew of six men was sent out. Canton didn’t think that any more was necessary. It was only a one level single occupancy and by protocol wouldn’t take more than two hours to wreck. The trucks ostensibly do all the work. The crew is mostly there to deal with disturbances. Maxon thought to himself that if it weren’t for the human element, he could be asleep in his bed tonight instead of having to suit up and go out into the night.
He remembered it was hot that particular night, stifling even. The humidity was thick and Maxon had begun to sweat as soon as he stepped outside. The internal temperature control of his suit worked hard to keep him at a bearable seventy degrees. No temperature control in the world though would be enough to fight off the heat they were about to feel that night.
The old woman who owned the house had lived there her whole life. The building was grotesquely out of date and an eyesore for the rest of the neighborhood which had already undergone upgrading. She inherited the house from her husband, who had died years earlier, and couldn’t be inclined to change a thing on or in it. In letters sent to the Council she wrote that the house was the only standing legacy of her dead husband, or something to that nature. They had no children, so the house, which apparently the husband built himself (they all seemed to build things themselves in the old days), was given over to the widow.
She refused to comply with any of the Council’s written orders until finally the midnight deadline approached and she would have to comply, whether she wanted to or not. They arrived at the house exactly two minutes before twelve. The house was completely dark and looked as if no one was home. Canton hopped off the truck and surveyed the area, holding his hand up to let the rest of the crew know if they should start unloading. He stood there, with his nose up, sniffing the air like a bloodhound on a trail. He spat onto the grass and cracked the knuckles on his right hand while he motioned with the left for the crew to come out. They dismounted and lined up along the edge of the grass. Canton grabbed a microphone from the side of the truck and spoke into it. His voice reverberated in the summer night air.
“Mrs. Delany, this is the Wrecking Crew. You have been ordered to vacate these premises as of midnight. Since you have failed to comply with any of the orders for relocation, we have no choice but to forcibly remove you. Please make your way out now.”
The lights in the house remained dark. There was no movement at all from the windows. Not a flutter of a drape or a movement of a shade. Canton spat onto the grass once more and twisted his neck to the side, cracking the joints there. He brought the microphone back up to his mouth. “Mrs. Delany, you’re only delaying the inevitable. We are here. There is no turning back now. You need to come on out and step aside. You may bring any personal items you feel necessary.”
There was still no sign of Mrs. Delany. Canton looked at his watch and gave an audible sign of frustration. “Do not make things more difficult for yourself. We won’t stand out here all night. We’ll give you another ten seconds and if you do not come out and stand aside we will come in by force.”
Maxon was getting more nervous. Something about the situation didn’t feel right to him. In all the wrecks he’d been on, no one refused to come out and confront them. The stifling humidity was giving him a headache. His helmet felt too tight all of a sudden and he was getting a ringing in his ears. He was in desperate need of a drink. He tried to slosh saliva in his mouth to wet his lips, but he couldn’t seem to produce any. Canton turned to them. “All right boys, we’re going in. Grab the lock buster.”
A member of the crew pulled out a long metal pole from the truck bed. It looked almost like a telescope. The rest of them moved into position. The crew member with the lock buster, Damon, stood in front of the door with it. He pressed the tip of the metal pole to the lock and pushed it in. The device made an air noise, like a pneumatic pump, and blasted a hole in the door, knocking out the lock. It happened in less than a second. A single wisp of smoke drifted from the end of the pole.
Canton went in first, turning on his helmet’s head lights to illuminate the room. It was pitch black in the house and ten degrees cooler than outside, but it was still stifling and Maxon was struggling to think straight with his helmet on. He wanted desperately to take it off and be away from this place. To be back home with his wife.
As they moved further into the house a smell began to come to their nostrils. It was a pungent, sweet smell, much like rotting fruit left out on a counter. The smell was stronger in the middle of the room and Maxon felt his stomach roll. His head spun and he fought to keep his dinner from ending up on the floor.
The light from Canton’s flash beam answered their question as to where the smell was coming from. In the corner of the room seated in a chair was Mrs. Delany. She didn’t move and appeared to be looking at them as they entered her home, but you couldn’t tell for sure because the plastic bag over her head distorted her face. What was certain though was that she was dead and, by the smell of it, had been for days. The bag was placed around her head and secured at the neck with grey duct t
ape. Inside the bag were crawling maggots slipping in and out of her nose and eyes. This was too much for Maxon to handle and he doubled over and vomited on the pale blue rug that covered the living room floor.
“Compose yourself,” Canton snapped at Maxon. “You’re a professional.”
Walking into a dead woman’s home while her body decomposed on a rocker wasn’t part of his professional training, Maxon thought to himself.
“I’m sorry,” he said in between coughs. He wiped his mouth with his gloved hand and stood upright, back in position.
“If anyone can’t handle this I suggest you leave now and prepare yourselves for a life of desk duty. Any takers?” Canton said, eyeing them one by one. The men were silent; no one wanted to work a desk for the rest of their term. “Good, now let’s get this body outta here and in a containment bag. We still have work to do.”
Hayes, one of the crew members who had a head of red hair and freckles all over his face, was the first to walk over to the body and prove his worth.
“What happened here, Sir?” Hayes asked, wide eyed.
“Looks like a suicide to me”, Canton said. “Wouldn’t be the first either. A lot of these old timers would rather off themselves than have to leave. Poor bastards. They just can’t see past their own noses”.
“What should we do with her?”
“We bag her and file a report with Census. They’ll take her out of the system. At least this frees up a unit for someone who actually wants it.”
“Do we…leave her as is?” Hayes asked, sounding as if he was afraid to hear the answer.
“We just bag em’. Nothing else,” Canton replied. Hayes nodded his head and moved closer to the body.
Someone, Maxon couldn’t remember who, came back in with a disposal bag and started to unravel it. It was spread out on the living room floor and the smell of hot vinyl wafted up from it. Hayes switched on the power supply, which was located on the side of the bag. A low whirring sound came on and the bag started to expand, much like an air mattress. Hayes turned on the cooling unit and turned the temperature all the way down. An air sound emitted from the bag, like the sound of gas escaping a pipe. Hayes looked up at Canton with raised eyebrows. “A leak?” he asked, uncertain.
Canton bent down to inspect the bag. “There shouldn’t be. This was part of a new shipment.” He turned the bag over and saw the problem. “Here. Loose air nozzle. Put some sealant on it”.
Sy, the country boy, pulled a small tube of rubber sealant from his utility pouch. Sy was the crew’s handyman and all around fixer. He had a knack with putting things back together quickly. He wore a bandanna around his head and had dirty blond hair that came down to his shoulders. He bent down and applied the sealant to the loose nozzle.
As this was happening, Maxon noticed something odd about the chair Mrs. Delany was sitting on. From the light that was shining from their helmets he could make out what looked like wires running down the back of the chair and going off into the darkness. He covered his nose with the crook of his arm and moved closer to the body. He saw three wires, one red, one blue and one green, coming out of the bottom of the chair. He followed their path along the floor until they reached the wall and started to climb up. The wires were held to the wall by pieces of duct tape. They ended on top of the window molding attached to a small black box that was partially obscured by the hanging drape.
Maxon knew what the box was and its purpose. The blinking red light in the center of it told him all he needed to know. Everything at that point seemed to happen very fast. He remembered it almost like a series of images.
He turned and opened his mouth to alert the crew, but Canton was already signaling to Hayes and Sy to pick up the body. A sound escaped Maxon’s throat just as they lifted Mrs. Delany off the chair. The red light on the window device turned green and then the world turned white for a brief second and Maxon felt himself being flung against the floor. After that he didn’t remember much.
There was smoke and heat and screaming and sirens. Someone had pulled Maxon out of the house and when he came to he was lying on the lawn with an oxygen mask over his face. He was looking up at the night sky. He remembered it was full of stars, so many that it seemed to cover him like a blanket. He sat up and where Mrs. Delany’s house used to be now stood a pile of smoldering wreckage. They had succeeded in demolishing the house after all. In the files of official documents that would be all that mattered, that the job was done. They would get full credit for that. No asterisk would be place next to the entry under Eleanor Delany. It would simply read “wrecked”.
Miraculously, the entire crew survived the explosion, but several men were severely wounded. Hayes lost an arm and was blinded in one eye. Canton lost his leg and his job as Lead. One year later Maxon took over the position.
The weight of responsibility was not lost on Maxon as he mulled over that nights impending wreck, reading over the case file. His job was to get the wreck done in a safe and timely manner, with few or no altercations, but there were too many factors that could come into play. How could he know each one? How could anyone have known that Mrs. Delany’s husband had boxes of contraband explosive in the basement or that he had taught his wife to wire homemade bombs? It was enough what ifs to keep Maxon thinking until roll out, but there was more work to be done tonight and contemplation was a luxury not afforded to people in his position.
Chapter 4
It was twenty to nine. Harley finished the bottle of Scotch and was now rummaging in an old trunk that was stored under his bed. The trunk was solid oak and polished to a high shine. It was his grandfather’s trunk and everything in it belonged to him. He found what he was looking for under a pile of old linens that were once white but now gray.
He laid the object on top of the bed and closed the trunk. He wanted to preserve everything in it if he could, but that wasn’t going to be possible. This one thing though, he had to take. It was the Medal of Honor his grandfather had received from his service during the Mid-East War, well before Harley was even born. Harley took the medal in his hands. It was heavy, made of solid gold with an embossed eagle at the top of it and the word Valor written below. He placed it around his neck and looked at himself in the mirror, feeling the gold star with his fingers.
He remembered some of the stories his grandfather told of it. He described it as being trapped in the mouth of hell. Harley could remember sitting cross legged on the living room floor, his chin propped in his hands as he looked up at his grandfather smoking his pipe and recanting story after story. His grandfather never liked to turn on the television. He called it the moron screen. He saw it as the state’s weapon against human thinking. In many ways he was right. As a child, though, Harley never understood his grandfather’s militant rejection of all things technological and even thought it crazy. He came to understand it years later when it was already too late and when everyone was already gone.
His father, Daniel, never got it. He was part of the movement that created all this - at least he supported it when it started to gain momentum. The Committee he called it. He even went to some of the planning meetings and think tank sessions. “Just to see what they were all about,” he’d say. They met once a week every Wednesday and when he came home he’d talk about all the good that the group was doing and all the things they had planned, the new toys they were developing. How they were going to change the way everyone in the world lived and worked. He also spoke of Henry Ellis, the mysterious brainpower behind it all. He called him a genius and a social revolutionary.
Harley was nine when his father signed him and his mother up to join what was then known as The Project, an experimental living community. That’s what they promoted themselves as anyway. That’s how they persuaded his father to support them. Daniel worked for the research company that was behind the Project. It was clear to Harley that his father was merely used by them to get something they wanted, someone in fact. The memory was still too vivid for him to bear and tears started to well at t
he corners of his eyes.
He put down the medal and rummaged in the trunk some more, tossing aside old papers and clothes until he came across the book. He pulled it out and examined it. The binding had come loose and it was covered with stains. The book was banned and being caught with it meant immediate eradication. Only a few copies ever existed and those copies were passed around by a small group of people who tried very early on to counter the movement. Ancil introduced him to several of those early members, two of whom helped to keep him safe after the standoff.
Harley opened the book and flipped through a few of its brittle pages, not turning too fast for fear of ripping them. It was more of a manual really, one that someone handwrote and copied. It was a text on home defense, each page outlining different methods of making homemade explosives, detonators, and even hand guns. Why he still had this thing hidden away in a trunk he didn’t know. If Sara ever found it she most likely would report him directly to the Council, labeling him as a danger.
Even just holding it gave Harley a sense of unease. He shouldn’t be holding this book. It was like a ticking time bomb in his hands, set to go off at a moment’s notice. The diagrams in it looked complicated, full of dimensions and chemical equations, but he felt he knew enough about the simpler diagrams to copy them for his needs. He wouldn’t need to do that much to be honest. Since he received the final letter two weeks ago, Harley was slowly putting plans together for this night. He made daily visits to the abandoned junk yards off on the edge of the sector where a bit of the old world still existed. He took home anything he could find; metal canisters, PVC tubing, electrical wiring, old spark plugs and stock piled them in the basement.
The Midnight Stand (The Elysia Saga Book 1) Page 2
