“Help me move this,” she ordered, grabbing an edge of the concrete and pulling. “Jake, push from this side, Dax pull the same way I am.” I thought she was nuts, but slowly the slab slid across the scattered sand on the floor revealing a small opening in the wall. I crawled through, elbows scraping against the walls and pulled myself through on my stomach. I was quickly followed by Jake and the girl. “Now, we have to move it back in to place.” She said standing and dusting herself off.
“Are you nuts?” I queried. I was no physicist, but what she was asking was impossible. We had no leverage, no tools and certainly no tech to do the job. She laughed softly and pointed to the ground with the light stick. Barely visible was a rope, presumably attached to the back of the slab somewhere. I followed its line and could see that it ran through a series of well placed pulleys that ran along the adjacent wall.
“Come on, it won’t be that hard. The rope also brushes away the skid marks left in the sand, so no one will know that the slab moved. We’re not stupid you know.” She looked at me accusingly, but then cracked a smile. The stone moved back much more easily than I would have expected and I gave Blossom a respectful nod which she acknowledged before turning her back and continuing up a crumbling stairway that led out in to the dark back streets of the city.
We skirted around the lake bed, a once mighty shipping lane known as Lake Ontario that was now virtually empty of water traffic except for government patrols that ran from the Atlantic Ocean up to the pinnacles of Montreal and through a rather diminutive channel that lead to a small basin that served Toronto. Black marketers were a rarity, but not completely extinct, much to the displeasure of our leaders. The power grid didn’t expand out to the river, so we freely scuttled around the old board walk looking for abandoned dry cleaning bags, in hopes of securing some additional clothes before we headed to our next hiding spot.
We had about given up, when Jake noticed a light shining out the back door of a laundry. Many of the shops clung closely to the old shoreline which had originally given convenient, and illegal, access to the lake for dumping chemicals. Blossom peeked in the door. She was obviously used to such covert operations, as she came in low and curled herself in through the half-opened doorway without any sound or other disruption. A quick signal had us following her in to the shop where we found a wealth of options. We didn’t waste any time and grabbed a couple wash bags and stuffed them with necessities. The shop must have been a popular one, as both the clean and dirty laundry were plentiful. Being discerning, I took only clean clothes, but the two kids wadded through piles of clothes looking for the most desirable labels. I guess I couldn’t blame them, they’d been living off government issued outfits their entire lives, so who was I to begrudge them a bit of luxury? A shout out front of the building sent us scrambling out the back door and down the dark streets, our booty safely tucked away under our arms.
We arrived at a large culvert and took a moment to rest. It had been years since I’d been so active and my muscles were screaming and I felt clammy with sweat and fear.
“How much do you like what you’re wearing?” Blossom asked me with a haughtily raised eyebrow. I looked down at my jeans; faux-cotton, dark wash and my favourite Grateful Dead shirt. They weren’t designer clothes, but they were mine and I liked them.
“Enough, why?” I asked, suspicions forming in my head from the smell wafting out of the gated culvert.
“I’d change if I were you then.” She replied as she took off her purloined designer jacket. I watched as she sat to pull off her boots and turned away as she started stripping off her top. “Oh, for God’s sake…it’s not like you haven’t seem any of this before!” she snapped as she stripped down to just her camisole and underwear. I cast a quick glance at Jake and realized that he wasn’t enjoying the show but keeping his eyes on the wall, as he stripped himself down to his boxers. I was surprised by the lithe muscle he hid under his baggy clothes. How did an SK get to be in that kind of shape? It wasn’t my muscle tone that I was worried about, but I did have a bit of a problem. I hadn’t done laundry for a while and was missing an important part of my wardrobe. It hadn’t seemed that important when I pulled my jeans on over my naked body, but now it was definitely an issue.
“Dax? Hurry up man…now is not the time to be shy” prodded Jake with a smile. “Seriously, dude, let’s go. Patrols come around just before day break.”
“I’m coming…I’ll be right there.” I dug around in my bag of stolen clothes and found a pair of shorts. My dead head shirt was just long enough to provide me with some cover as I changed. Once I was decently covered and had replaced my gun in the waistband, I stripped off the rest of my clothes and bundled them up in the center of the laundry bag and followed the kids in to the dark opening of the huge drainpipe. Another light stick kept the darkness at bay as we inched our way in to the sewer system. My insta-meal seemed like it wanted to complete a return trip; the stench of the waste made my stomach roil and lurch. I could feel muck squelching between my toes and slowly creep up over my ankles. I hoped that I wouldn’t need a snorkel. Blossom and Jake seemed impervious to the stench until I saw them look back to make sure I was still following. It could have been the light stick, but both of their faces seemed a distinct green colour in the pure white light. We carried on in silence, both to keep the echoes down in anticipation of the patrol and to keep from throwing up, a foregone conclusion as soon as one of us opened our mouths.
We walked for what seemed like hours, but in truth was likely only twenty minutes or so. I let out a cautious sigh of relief when the waste water levelled out just above my navel. Blossom, the smallest of us was covered almost up to her armpits. I marvelled at her resiliency, as her nose was probably a foot closer to the stench than mine was. Another ten minutes or so, several turns and one ladder later we arrived at a dry intersection of concrete drains. Exhausted from holding the bags and supplies over our heads, we dropped everything to the floor. I searched my emergency kit for Dry Blast, but there wasn’t any cleaner to be found.
“Don’t worry, there’s a tap about another five minutes away, where we can clean up” said Jake, still breathing through his mouth.
“Tap,” I queried, “as in running water-that kind of tap?” I guessed that it wasn’t completely impossible, but I was incredulous none the less. I hadn’t had a wet shower in, well, ever.
“Yeah,” smiled Blossom blissfully, “that kind of tap and the water is warm.” She said the word ‘warm’ the same way a horny teenager would say the word ‘hook up’. If I hadn’t reeked and felt so disgusting, I might have had an embarrassing reaction to her tone of voice.
It felt like twenty minutes before we reached the fabled tap. I didn’t believe it until I saw the water trickling out of it, steam only slightly visible in the warm tunnel. We were polite, despite the stench and let Blossom clean up first. The warm water hit the filth on her legs and instantly vaporized and invaded our desensitized nasal passages causing a fresh wave of nausea. I manfully choked and sputtered, my back firmly turned to the half dressed girl. I admit that it was hard not to look, not just because she had the lithe frame of runner, but because of the alluring beads of moisture that ran down her skin and trickled to the ground. Water wasn’t completely non-existent in our day to day lives, but it was neatly vacuum-packed and rationed, there was never enough to indulge in washing your face, let alone your whole body. I dragged my eyes away from the rivulets of moisture that enhanced the round youthfulness of her limbs and rummaged through my bag looking for my Dead Head shirt and jeans. They were safely ensconced among the clothes I had stolen and everything was dry. I had a sneaking suspicion that the fumes had permeated every thread of fabric and we would reek for days.
Jake and I shared the tap as we rinsed off as much of the grime as warm water alone would allow. I was mesmerised by the feel of the water coursing over my hands and trickling over my flesh, tickling my body hair and getting trapped in odd crevices and creases. It was a far cry from
the Dry Blast shower I had at the pod. I shouldn’t complain, the shower took thirty seconds at most and I left clean, dry and smelling pleasant. I could never have guessed that warm water would leave my skin so clean. It wasn’t until we had walked a bit further that I discovered that not drying those crooks and crannies could lead to chafing, but I was so happy to be clean, I almost didn’t mind the way my jeans clung to the back of my knees and other places.
The tunnel split in to three branches and seemed to narrow, Blossom didn’t hesitate in choosing the darker, narrower, left fork. Jake and I hunched over to avoid knocking our heads on the pipe joints and followed her silently, still worried about pursuit.
I was starting to feel the affects of being awake all night, I wasn’t as young as the other two, who seemed not to suffer at all and I was beyond delighted when we arrived at a snug maintenance room close to the surface of what I assumed was still the city.
“We can stay here and get some rest” explained the girl as she rearranged the clothing in her bag to make a fairly cosy mattress. She curled up on her makeshift bed and only her lower legs hung over. I looked at Jake and then down at my bag. We exchanged a smile. Our bags would have to suffice as extra large pillows. I redistributed the emergency blankets and despite the hard floor, fell asleep immediately.
Chapter 4 – Underground
It was impossible to tell what time it was, when I finally cracked open my eyes. I assumed it was fairly early as the gentle snores of the two rumbled through the chamber. I thought my eyes were deceiving me, as down the hall I could see a beam of light. A weight lifted off my chest and I realized that I had felt entombed spending so much time underground. It was unusual to go for more than a half a day without seeing daylight. I had no thought of danger as I headed to the shaft of sunlight, bags in hand. Being teenagers, I knew the kids would sleep on for a few more hours and I wanted to see what Reg had on the zip drive. I'd tell Jake and Blossom later, if it wasn't too horrible. I powered up my tablet, praying that the battery had recharged enough to fire up and search the drive. I drummed my fingers on the casing impatiently, as I watched the screen flicker and then go black. I growled in the back of my throat, frustrated, as usual, by the useless technology. I was tempted to dash the damn thing against the wall, but better sense prevailed and I dug through my bag looking for the solar generator. Hopefully the scant sunlight, trickling through several small holes in a manhole cover would provide enough energy to get the tablet running.
"Come on..." I muttered linking up the power cell and pressing the on button on the tablet. The screen flickered again and finally came to life. "Yes! Ha! Not so stupid, am I?" I asked the recalcitrant computer. My voice echoed down the tube and I could hear one of the kids turning over. I shook my head at my own thoughtlessness and worried a bit for my sanity. Tech always drove me crazy, why couldn't it just work the way it was supposed to?
I waited as patiently as I could for the OS to finish processing the start scripts and then slid the zip drive in to the port. There was only one file and it seemed small, only 5 gigabytes of information, but I hoped it provided some sort of clue about what I should do next. I tried to open the file, but only got a page, old school…what was it called? I pondered for a few minutes, after attempting to open the file several more times. DOS. Yeah, it was giving me a run prompt. How could I run the damned thing if I couldn’t open the file? I wracked my brain for everything that Reg had tried to show me about computers, but all I could see was his bloodied body lying in the wreckage of his office. What was it that he said? “Government, triads, Jake, paper.” All just the random thoughts of dying man, but those last two words, they didn’t have anything to do with Reg’s conspiracy theories. My mind started turning over information and I remembered Reg telling me about embedding programs in documents. I remembered Jake’s paper taking so long to load and Reg’s final words rang through my head. I fumbled around in my pockets looking for Jake’s zip drive. I pulled it out of my coat pocket and plugged it in to another port on my tablet and waited for the comforting beep of the computer telling me it knew there was a new device. The sound seemed loud, but there was still no movement from the other room. I wanted this opened and solved before the kids woke up. It would give them something to hope for, if I could just find a direction to go.
The run prompt popped up on my screen again and I stared at the mocking request. I tried to flip to Jake’s paper and open that, but the only response I got was that stupid screen. “Come on, man” I whispered “get it together, you can do this.” I wasn’t usually the type of person to talk to myself, but in my anxiousness and stress I felt better mumbling. I didn’t feel quite as alone with a human voice for company as I sat in a shaft of light, rendering me blind to the darkness that surrounded me. I knew the command had something to do with the drive; that if I could figure out which drive it was I might get the file to open. I systematically went through the drives: A:/, B:/ and so on. I started to despair when I typed in H:/ and nothing happened, but kept going, not knowing what else to do. When I hit Z:/, I almost threw the tablet against the wall in exasperation, but I yelled a really bad word instead.
The word echoed down the tubes of the sewer system and I heard a rustling in the maintenance room. I couldn’t see anything except a tall shadow that blocked out the shaft of light.
“Hey Dax, what’s up?” asked Jake, as the screen started to fade.
“Move!” I snapped, realizing that his shadow fell over the solar generator. He hopped back so quickly that I felt bad for scaring him. “Sorry, I’m just trying to get this file open. I found it at Reg’s last night. I can’t get the program to run.”
Jake cautiously stepped around my pool of light and looked over my shoulder, surveying the small screen.
“Your slash is the wrong way…you need a forward slash, not a backward slash.”
“What?” I asked dumbly staring at the screen.
“May I?” he queried, hand outstretched. I handed him the tablet and he looked at the myriad of ports. He tapped something in and I could hear the RAM chugging as it ran his command. He handed the tablet back to me and slid down the curve of the wall to sit. I looked at the screen “D:”. The file took its sweet time loading and by the time a new window opened we could hear Blossom up and about.
Both Jake and I leaned over the screen and watched as a panorama of still photos, audio files and videos flashed in rapid succession; the speed so fast, that I could barely take in the images and sounds. It seemed like a random selection of junk that Reg had pulled up off the net and I couldn’t help but feel a yawning sense of disappointment and hopelessness. I had given up everything and all I had to show was a hodgepodge of sound bites and images. The final image contained a quote printed over an image of a white haired gentleman in a tweed coat with a drooping moustache and serious, contemplative look, almost like he knew the photographer had some wrenching character flaw. Written over the image were these words:
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. ~Mark Twain
The image lasted longer than all the others and then slowly faded from the screen.
“That’s it!” yelled Jake, his voice bringing Blossom running. “It’s a clue, Dax.” I looked up at him, wondering if he’d lost his mind and was greeted by an ear to ear grin, quickly replaced by a puzzled frown. “Who’s that Mark Twain guy?”
“He’s an American author, but why do you think it’s a clue?” My mind was still trying to unscramble the deluge of information and I was stuck on images of wasted bodies being tossed carelessly into huge trenches and the vision of shorelines plunging into the sea, torn away by ferocious waves.
“What else could it be?” he said dancing in a wild circle, holding hands with the girl. She looked groggy and confused, but seemed to enjoy Jake’s enthusiastic jig. “That quote by tha
t guy…it means we need to go looking for the farmer.” Now that was a fairly big leap involving mental agility equivalent to that of a Mensa candidate, at least by my way of thinking. “Play it again. Watch this Bee,” he said jostling Blossom around a bit more, “you won’t believe it!”
Even I couldn’t deny his elated command and was curious to see if I could make any sense out of the file, watching it a second time. I typed in the run command and braced myself for the onslaught.
The images snapped and blurred and I struggled to see a pattern or logic. I caught a photo of a green pasture with a building, but before I could fully register it, the image had moved on to a black and white video of crops being sprayed with some sort of pesticide. The image shifted to a quick video byte from what looked like a TV commercial from early in the millennium. Potatoes? I couldn’t be sure; I wasn’t up on all my farm produce. Giving up on the file for a moment, I looked at the two kids, now in my charge. They stared raptly at the small display and I could see their eyes following the ever changing screen rapidly, taking in as much of the information as their young, agile brains would allow.
That’s when it went dark. Something or someone had cut off our light source and the screen slowly started fading, frozen on the image of a long bridge slowly collapsing under the barrage of ocean waves. A falling section of the bridge hung in mid air as the processor ceased to run and the screen went black. We were silent in the darkness, motionless in our sudden and unexpected fear. We heard the soft thud of a transport door closing and the shuffle of feet on the road up above. I slowly let out the breath I was holding and as quietly as possible felt around for the solar generator. I packed it up taking as much time and care as my rapidly beating heart would allow. Our eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, and I gestured the kids back to the maintenance room. As I turned to follow, I heard a voice coming from above me.
Last Farmer: Last Farmer Series - Book 1 Page 4
