by SD Tanner
It wasn’t as if she’d meant to escape from the town. After hearing a loud explosion, she’d been swept up in the crowd that had made a beeline for the gap in the fence. They’d been met by several people dressed in bulky metal gear and then driven to CaliTech. She’d escaped the town by accident and now this woman was asking for her help.
Jo gently touched her forearm. “I know it’s a lot to absorb.”
Continuing to stare at her mutely, she thought about her boys. She’d had two sons, one of which she’d both birthed and killed with her own hands. He’d been such a sunny child and he grew up to be a kind man. With his dark hair and dimpled smile, he’d brought joy to what was an otherwise ordinary life. She’d been sleeping when he’d launched into her room and onto her bed. With her fetish for pillows, he’d ended up clawing at the soft furnishings and not at her. It had given her time to tumble to the floor and scrabble under the bed for her shotgun. After she’d blasted several large holes in his torso, it was only then she’d realized she’d killed her youngest child. She’d run to her car and driven into the town at breakneck speed, only to learn the scene in her bedroom was being repeated everywhere.
“I killed my son,” she said flatly. It was the first time she’d spoken the words and she felt a hiccup of tears building inside of her chest.
“He wasn’t your son.”
“How do you know that? Maybe he just needed me.”
The large room was filled with people seated at long tables covered in guns and metal parts. She let Jo lead her to a corner of the room with comfortably padded chairs. “Don’t drive yourself crazy that way. People turned. He turned. If you’d let him kill you then you’d both be dead.”
She was usually known as a bossy woman who was more than a little strident. Her naturally demanding personality was probably the reason her husband had left her, not that she missed him. Running her own little business had shown her just how organized she could be and how irritatingly lazy he was. They’d argued for a few years, and then one day he’d simply packed and moved his few belongings into another woman’s home.
In front of her was a sea of constant movement and the noisy chatter inside of the large room was finally penetrating her foggy thoughts. Something landed on the floor with a loud clang and the sharp sound of cursing echoed around the room. In a tone of fraying tempers, two men were shouting at one another, making her scan the room looking for the fight.
“Dammit,” Jo muttered. Touching her arm distractedly, she added, “Give me a minute.”
Jo’s sturdily built frame strode down one of the long aisles between the tables, and wanting to see what was going on she followed her.
Approaching two older men, Jo boomed loudly, “You both need to calm down.”
“He just dropped an entire tray of circuit boards. Now we’ll have to send them back for testing. He’s a fucking idiot.”
“They were the wrong boards! And I didn’t drop them, I threw them!”
“Oh, well, that’s a great help, idiot!”
Both men were in their early fifties and neither looked capable of backing up their harsh words with any action.
Rolling her eyes, she muttered, “Pot, kettle, black.”
“What did you just say?” One of the angry men asked sharply.
Seeing his feeble glare reminded her of the drunks she used to deal with as a barmaid. They were never rational and always easy to manage. It didn’t take a genius to understand the production process they were following. For her own online business, she’d hand assembled accessories in bulk, and it had taught her how to work efficiently.
She returned his glare with a steely look of her own her. “You’re both being idiots.” Pointing at the far end of the line of tables, she said, “You need to change the layout of these tables. Supply lines should be set up at the top of each workstation. You need people dedicated to keeping the inventory organized so the supplies can be replenished as they’re used. The workstations should be sequenced to match the assembly process. And if you want to ramp production, you’ll need twenty four seven assignment of manpower, which means people need to work in shifts.”
Her words seemed to puncture the men’s’ angry postures and even Jo looked at her curiously. She shrugged at their enquiring expressions. “I ran my own small business. I made cheap accessories, so I had to make a lot of ‘em to pay the bills.”
Visibly relaxing, the angry man chuckled. “You’re hired.”
“I don’t rightly recall asking for a job,” she replied archly.
“There are a hundred or more people living outside of the walls and more seem to be arriving every day. We need a workforce,” Jo said plainly.
“I don’t think they’ll do anything on my say so.”
Jo gave her a tired smile. “Oh, I think they will. The navs help us source supplies including food, plus there’s a hospital here. I think you’ll find they’ll bite your hand off for the chance to work here.”
Having only walked through the main building and across the grounds to the production floor, she hadn’t seen everything CaliTech had to offer, but she was already impressed. The place buzzed with energy and she’d heard people laughing. It felt like months since she’d been relaxed enough to laugh and she supposed it had been. These people had a purpose and they were almost begging her to help them. She didn’t understand how they could possibly defeat the critters, but she could either wallow in her losses or do something useful with her time. What else was she going to do? Camp outside of CaliTech’s wall knowing that they needed her, or join them in their mad determination to win against the critters.
“I’ll need you to help me explain this to the others,” she replied firmly. “And anyone who works in here won’t have time to look for food, so they’ll need help with supplies. Plus, they’ll need to be assured that you’ll do what you can to protect them from the critters.”
“All of that’s a given,” Jo replied with a curt nod.
Surveying the room, she added, “And this lot will either need to work for me or clear off.” She gave the man a sharp look. “And that means you too, honey. There won’t be any tantrums on my watch.”
Giving her a mock salute, the man bowed his head slightly. “Yes, ma’am.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Hey ho, hey ho (Survivors)
Annalese
“What do you think?” She asked.
The man gave her a sour look and replied, “I think they’re fucking crazy.”
“I dunno,” another man chimed in. “They’re offerin’ to keep us in food ‘n stuff providin’ we work for ‘em.”
“It’s freakin’ nuts. They’ve got no fuckin’ army, so how in the hell are they gonna defeat them things?”
She eyed them thoughtfully. They’d been invited into the CaliTech fortress and fed a hot meal and coffee. Once they’d eaten and were feeling comfortable, Christine had explained what they needed and was now asking them to work for her. She couldn’t say she knew Christine, but she’d seen her around the small town they’d lived in and had always nodded to one another.
There were over a hundred people sitting inside of the large cafeteria and she didn’t know half of them. Another group had arrived several days earlier with a squad of the heavily armored Navigators. They were from Albuquerque and they’d also been held prisoner, telling a similar story to the one she’d experienced. Life in her small town had been confusing. No one could work out what was really going on, but since escaping she’d learned other than the people in CaliTech, the entire country had the same tale to tell. Seeming to be in control of the situation, the people living at CaliTech hadn’t been locked up, starved and held prisoner.
A man in an electric wheelchair was making his way around the room. Wheeling himself between the groups of people sitting at the tables, he was shaking hands and smiling as widely as his damaged face would allow. He appeared to be in command of CaliTech and she wondered what he had that made him their leader.
The man next to her was pi
cking food from between his teeth and she sighed. The high tech and well-managed site made him look like a Neanderthal, and she’d be surprised if they could find any use for him.
Jabbing him with her elbow, she said sharply, “Cut it out. You look disgusting.” He rolled his eyes at her and removed his grubby pinky finger from his mouth. “You need to sharpen yourself up or the only job you’ll get is as the janitor.”
“I never said I was gonna work for ‘em.”
“You’re gonna work for them,” she replied sternly. Looking around the table, she huffed irritably. “We all will.”
Chad
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a meal that had been cooked in a real kitchen. After surviving the town, he’d tightened the notches on his belt by three inches, but now he unbuckled it by several well-worn holes. His wife had always been on at him to drink less beer and to eat more salad. Recalling her nagging voice brought an image of her dead face into sharp focus, and he shook his head as if his brain were an etch-a-sketch that could be cleared with a vigorous shake.
Chairs were scraping along the floor as everyone stood to leave the cafeteria and follow their self-appointed tour guide. He didn’t know Christine, but he followed the pack while she led them outside of the building and across the sparse lawn. After queuing to enter the next building, he stood at the back of a huge room. Long tables filled with metal parts stretched out in front of him, leading to a glassed room at the far end of the enormous space. He’d worked as a car mechanic since he was a teen and none of this was new to him. Nowadays most cars contained complex electronic parts and he’d regularly used a computer to perform diagnostics. It hadn’t been that way when he’d started work, but over the twenty years, he’d been progressively trained to service the modern vehicles.
An older man was speaking in a flat tone of voice. “CaliTech was designed to be capable of building weapons and nav gear from scratch, so we’re an all-purpose kinda site. We’re repurposing some of our other gear and raw materials to make the guns and baby bots, so we have another area assembling the metal components. All of the guns and baby bots follow the same design. There’s the mechanical parts, the electronics and the software that drives them. The baby bots have additional components such as cameras, communications and, in some cases, bombs. You won’t be expected to assemble anything that goes bang. The engineers will do the final assembly for those bots.”
Given how things had turned out, he considered himself lucky to be alive. Not really listening closely, he already knew that if they wanted him to work then he would. It wasn’t as if he had anything better to do with his time, and staying busy gave him less time to remember his wife’s dead face.
John
He’d been a banker before Albuquerque had turned into the worst city in the world. His parents had worked hard to help him earn his accounting qualification and he’d repaid them every cent and more. Working hard appealed to him, but given the world had ended this wasn’t what he’d expected to be doing. Christine and the people from CaliTech had given them a hot meal and then led them to a huge production floor. At the mention of guns and robots, his brain had skipped a beat and he wondered whether he was hallucinating. It wouldn’t have surprised him. After being locked up inside of the bank office, starved and then unable to leave the city, he wasn’t sure he was entirely sane anymore.
For the past few days, he’d been camping outside of the walls of CaliTech and this was the first time he’d been on the other side. A few of the people had snuck inside, only to be escorted out again by the armored guardians. It was like being invited behind the hallowed walls of the Whitehouse and he studied the CaliTech people curiously. They were all well fed and appeared largely unaffected by the disaster, which was more than he could say for the survivors outside of its walls.
He felt a burn of resentment. These people had been quarantined somewhere safe while the country had disintegrated into nothing more than a prison. It didn’t seem fair to him that they’d been spared the trauma he and the others had endured. Chewing on his thumb, he listened to the woman called Christine.
“The guns and bots are needed now, so we’ll be working around the clock to build them. That means you’ll be required to work in shifts. Each shift will be eight hours and when you’re done, you’ll be fed a hot meal. This job comes with three squares, but you’ll need to return to your camps to sleep.”
A man raised his hand. “Who’s gonna train us?”
Christine nodded. “Fair question. The engineers have broken the assembly process down so each step is simple. Some of you will be assigned to the workshop to make the metal parts, others will work on assembly, and some of you will be fitters and testers. All you’ll need to know is how to do your one step.”
He supposed it could work, but they must be desperate to take such an oddball collection of people and use them this way. Although he might have a full belly now, the past few months had taught him not to take that for granted, and if he had to work for his supper then he would.
Alice
She didn’t care what they wanted her to do providing they didn’t ask her to leave. Surviving in Albuquerque had considerably sharpened her outlook on life. Her parents had always told her she was spoiled, but until she’d lived in a tiny room for almost a month with virtually nothing to eat, she’d never appreciated just how good her old life had been. She’d been in the city shopping with her friends when the department store had erupted into manic violence. Someone had grabbed her hand, leading her to the office area on the second floor, which was where she’d stayed for the next month. With over twenty of them inside of the open plan floor, they’d been sealed in by a sticky transparent goo and only ten of them had survived.
The woman was leading them out of the large room and across the grounds to another smaller building set apart from the others. Apparently, they were making ammunition in this one, and some of them would be assigned to work there. She didn’t care. Whatever they asked of her, she would do unquestioningly. She was only nineteen years old and she didn’t want to die.
Ryan and Binkin
The site was surreal and he felt vaguely detached from everyone around him. The woman called Christine was leading them to the gates so they could return to their camps. A man called Bill had told them to live in small groups and every camp had been given weapons capable of killing the critters should any of them turn. He’d taken a different path by setting up a platform for himself and Binkin, hidden high in the trees.
It was the offer of a free meal that had initially caught his attention, and he’d followed the crowd of over a hundred people into the site. Having listened to what they wanted he wasn’t interested. He knew how to hunt, and although the critters had stripped the land of people, there was plenty of wildlife around him. It seemed they preferred human flesh.
He hadn’t arrived by any of the buses, but had been hiding in the Sequoia National Forest for two months, and had observed the comings and goings inside of the large site. In his time, he’d been a soldier with the army, but had been honorably discharged due to a back injury. Since then he’d drifted from one job to the next, preferring not to work again until he ran out of money. He’d been camping at the Park on one of his regular breaks between jobs when the critters had first appeared. Seeing no reason to move, he’d watched CaliTech trying to control the situation, but decided not to get involved. It was only when the newly arrived campers pitched one of their tents near his tree that he’d paid any attention to them. By pretending to be one of the new arrivals, he’d heard about the free meal and followed the crowd.
Eyeing the trim woman leading them, he decided none of this was his problem, and he leaned down to scratch Binkin behind his soft ear, making him wag his tail with joy.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Flawed sight (Steve)
The host appeared to be broken and he restlessly scanned her mind, trying to understand what she was seeing. Buildings stood starkly against the grey sky with the sea to her
left. Ahead of her were large men carrying weapons and their enemy was popping their heads above a wall and firing at them. A collection of symbols surrounded the scene, and when he scanned his host’s mind, he learned they summarized the status of the player. Music was playing steadily and he couldn’t understand where it was coming from. Every so often, a voice would cut through the music to issue orders. His host appeared to be jerkily moving with the soldiers, but she didn’t seem to know what she was doing.
He suspected his host wasn’t where she thought she was. According to her mind, she didn’t recognize the buildings or the men. She was dismissing the entire situation as unimportant, and although bullets were firing through her, she didn’t think her life was in any danger. When he inquired, it became clear she didn’t think the situation was real. In her mind, it was only a game. Not understanding what a game was, he inquired again, and learned it was something the humans played to occupy their time.
Earlier she’d seen a thousand of the metal men in the city, but when he sent his weapons to deal with the threat there’d been nothing there. The only metal men he’d found were near the edge of the barrier around the city, and there’d been far less than a thousand of them.
Something was wrong. His host was feeding him incorrect information. Clearly, something was broken inside of her mind and she couldn’t be relied upon. She had failed and he could no longer use her to find the metal men.
Drifting out of her mind, he attached himself to his many weapons. Scenes flashed at a rapid rate and he quickly assessed their status. All was well. The humans were stored and ready to be collected as soon as he issued the order. There was nothing stopping him from calling the engines other than a minor risk associated with the metal men. No other primaries had reported finding them in their domains and he didn’t think they represented a substantial threat. They appeared to be an isolated risk.
