by Lee Bradford
He never came right out and said the word ‘banishment,’ but the implications were clear enough.
Van Buren grinned. “You look like a terrific group of people, you really do. I’m certain it won’t come to that.” Ava came and whispered something into his ear. “Oh, yes, I nearly forgot. The forms you see being passed through the crowd are to be filled out by anyone fourteen years and older. Remember to list any applicable skills, no matter how insignificant they may seem. Tables with clerks are being set up on your way out to collect the documents.”
Buck received one and read it aloud with derision.
“‘Do you have any experience in the construction field?’ ‘Have you ever worked in a hospital?’”
Then Paul received a stack, and passed one to Susan and Autumn before handing them to a man behind him. “‘Have you served in the military?’” He looked over at Buck. “That’s a yes for you.”
“Here’s what I think of Van Buren’s work program.” Buck held the questionnaire about a foot from his chest and tore it in two and proceeded to tear the remainder into smaller and smaller pieces.
“Dad, are you crazy?” Susan scolded him.
“Those Nazi camps Van Buren seems to wear as a badge of honor used to have a sign that hung over the front gate with a message prisoners would see upon entering. It read, ‘Work will set you free,’ and it was just as much a lie as this program is. They don’t need the help. They need to keep us busy, keep us from snooping around. And I suggest each of you tear your sheet up too.” Buck snatched the one from Paul’s hand and tore it in two.
Paul yelped as though he’d been shot. He turned to the man behind him, but the stack had long since moved on.
“You’re gonna get us killed,” Paul snapped.
“I’m freeing you.”
Paul looked at Susan and Autumn, who had already gotten a pen.
“Let me borrow your back so I can fill this out,” Susan said, and somehow the words stung. “Don’t worry, you can get one on the way out.”
Not long after, they began pushing through the crowd toward the exit. Just as Van Buren had said, tables were manned by clerks collecting the forms. What he hadn’t told them about was the presence of soldiers behind them.
“If this isn’t a police state, I don’t know what is,” Buck spat.
But there was more than one stop before they’d be allowed to leave. Standing between the clerks and the soldiers were men in white lab coats holding auto-injectors.
Buck’s eyes went wide and Paul could tell he was thinking about that first painful injection they’d received.
“This way,” Autumn said, pulling them along. She pointed at one of the soldiers they recognized as Brett.
Susan and Autumn handed one of the clerks their papers and passed through to get a shot.
“What is it?” Paul asked the clerk, who looked on coldly.
“A vaccine against cholera. It has a nasty habit of breaking out when this many people live in such close proximity.” He searched Paul’s empty hands. “Your papers?”
“I didn’t get one.”
The clerk’s face dropped. “You can’t leave before you fill one out.”
Autumn and Susan were waving them on, but Paul could only shrug. A moment later, Brett showed up and whispered something in the clerk’s ear.
The clerk looked back at Paul and Buck. “All right, go ahead.”
They had no sooner passed through than a squat, mean-looking nurse pressed an injector against Paul’s arm and pulled the trigger. A blast of air was followed by a sharp pain. Buck was next and his face went white as the short nurse approached him. For the old man, the only thing more frightening than getting a shot was having it administered by someone so small.
“Grow a pair,” Paul shouted, watching Buck’s face contort with fear.
After that, they headed back to Ark One. Upon arriving, lines were already beginning to form in the mess hall for breakfast. Today would be the last time to grab a free meal and it seemed no one wanted to miss out.
“They’ll start imposing limits,” Buck predicted. His eyes found Susan. “You saw firsthand in Atlanta how people descended on grocery stores like a pack of wild animals. Mess with a man’s food and you bring out the beast.”
Autumn touched Paul’s arm. “Brett said they’d be posting guards to protect the kitchens during meals and after hours as well.”
“There’s been a shift,” Paul noted. “It wasn’t so apparent before, but now it’s become unmistakable.”
“A shift in power?” Susan asked him.
Paul shook his head. “No. A shift in policy. They don’t feel the need to keep us bloated on pleasant distractions anymore. Win us over playing Mr. Nice Guy.”
Buck couldn’t agree more. “From here on in, it’ll only get worse.”
Chapter 18
Brett’s apparently noble attempt to get Paul and Buck scratched off the workforce didn’t pan out as well as expected. Far from excluding them, their failure to hand in the proper documents earmarked them for a special, even distasteful, job.
The news came the following morning with an abrupt knock on the door of their room. Craig was the messenger and he informed them that they needed to report to the engineering section for garbage collection and disposal duties. While Paul had attempted to maintain his composure, Buck had flown into a tirade, belting out a greatest hits of curse words, many invented by the old man on the spot.
Thankfully, word from Craig hadn’t nearly been as harsh for the girls. Susan and Autumn were asked to report to the infirmary. Susan, with her limited medical experience—the first six months of a failed nursing degree—would assist doctors in prepping and administering future inoculations. For her part, Autumn would join her mother as a nurse’s aide.
Either one of those would’ve suited Paul just fine and he understood right away they weren’t simply being punished for failing to fill in the form. They had been singled out for sticking their nose where it didn’t belong.
Choosing to accept their fate, the two men made their way to the engineering wing without so much as a coffee or muffin for breakfast. True to Buck’s prediction, dozens if not hundreds had tried the day before to sneak extra dinner rolls, pieces of fruit and in some cases saltine crackers. In nearly every case, soldiers stationed by the lunch line exits had been there to search them as they left. Those caught pocketing extra food were simply given a warning, but it was clear the penalties would become far more severe as time went on.
The two arrived about fifteen minutes later and found a man in dark blue coveralls, with short hair and a handsome face, waiting to greet them. Wearing an orange hard hat and a frown, this guy was all business and no pleasure right from the start. After two failed attempts at a joke, Paul had to admit Chief Engineer Richard Hardy had about the same sense of humor as a nest of wasps.
He handed each of them a pair of bright yellow coveralls, yellow gloves and a matching hard hat.
“I heard the two of you are trouble, so I’m gonna make this real simple,” Hardy told them. He sounded like a New Yorker. “The darker the coveralls, the higher the rank. Sorta like karate belts, except we don’t do white. Work hard and do as you’re told and you’ll be paid, maybe even promoted. Mouth off or break the rules and you’ll discover all the different ways I can make your lives a living hell. We understand each other?”
Paul nodded while Buck glared in defiance.
Afterward, he brought them to a room where they changed. Initially Paul had simply pulled the yellow coveralls over his brown slacks and beige tunic until Buck had let him know he was making a terrible mistake.
“You ever work with garbage before, Rock Star?”
“I’m happy to say that I haven’t.”
Buck laughed. “You artsy-fartsy types kill me. Well, let me put it to you this way. You got one set of clothes in here and you’re wearing ’em. You keep those on and I guarantee by the end of your shift you’ll smell worse than a donkey’s beh
ind.”
“So what do you recommend, oh garbage guru?”
Buck grinned. “I suggest we don’t wear a thing underneath these coveralls and stash our clothes in one of those.” He pointed to a wall of small metal lockers. Paul followed Buck’s suggestion and dropped his pants.
“What the heck are you doing?”
“What? You said we should get undressed.”
“Yeah, in the bathroom. Not right in front of me.” Buck was shaking his head in disgust.
“Get over it,” Paul shot back. “You’re about to see a lot worse than this.”
Once dressed, the two men stood facing one another.
“I feel like a giant chicken,” Paul said.
“You look like one,” Buck offered.
“If I hadn’t let you rip that paper of mine, I could’ve been teaching a music class or something useful instead of getting stuck on garbage patrol.”
“That’s funny. This place needs a music teacher about as much as they need another litter of nippleless cats.”
“Well, you never know.”
Buck’s face didn’t show an ounce of doubt. “Trust me, I know.”
Trying to hide their embarrassment, they returned to the spot where they’d met Chief Engineer Hardy and found a handful of men and women in yellow coveralls already gathered. Hardy was busy giving them his ‘no-nonsense’ speech.
On the far side of the atrium, government types in suits were chatting and laughing.
“Get a load of that.” Buck pointed.
Paul looked, wondering which of Buck’s arbitrary rules they had broken.
“Seems mighty hard to swallow getting called to task by the dictator, I mean director, when those bureaucrats are living the easy life.” Underneath his bushy white beard, Buck’s cheeks were turning red with anger. “First they burned our clothes and forced us to dress like a bunch of Hungarian peasants. Now they’re sending us to clean up garbage while they live the high life. If they wanna class war, I’m more than happy to give them one.”
Chief Engineer Hardy appeared next to them and shoved a mop into their hands.
“You were wrong, Buck,” Paul said, eyeing the wooden pole in his hands as though it was a foreign object. “Apparently we aren’t only garbage collectors, we’re janitors too.”
Buck groaned. “This keeps getting better.”
Chapter 19
The rest of that morning and afternoon they spent performing a humiliating list of cleanup duties—mopping the atriums in Arks One, Two and Three, emptying trash cans into large plastic bins set to be incinerated. Lucky for them, another group of maintenance workers in yellow coveralls took the garbage to be burned, but the responsibilities around here were on strict rotation and it would only be a question of time before that particularly nasty job fell to them.
By one p.m., Paul was staring to walk funny. Not simply on account of the growing tightness in his lower back. His feet were throbbing with pain. That was the last place he had expected to hurt. Funny how we took our bodies for granted, barely aware of muscle and bone until one or both began crying out in agony.
In spite of the physical discomfort, Paul felt he was dealing fairly well with the situation. Sure, he hated being conscripted into probably the worst job the complex had to offer, but he kept reminding himself how it sure beat the alternative: starvation or, better yet, exile.
Buck, on the other hand, was managing his new role with about as much grace as a spoiled child. But unlike Paul, it hadn’t been the manual labor that got to him. The old guy took pride in his physical prowess and his ability to work with his hands. He had built most of the barn in back of his property as well as the bunker beneath it all on his own. No, Buck’s sore spot right now was his pride and he made no bones about expressing his displeasure.
Dumping a trash can into one of the large plastic bins, Buck whacked it against the side of the container with a loud boom. “You may not mind being a prisoner in this glorified excuse for a bunker, but I’m gonna tell you something, Paul. I’ve just about had it.” He tossed the trash can back in place. It skittered across the floor and slammed against the wall. Paul went over and set it back in its place.
Paul returned to the other side of the wide corridor, where he was doing the same thing. “I’m no more a fan of this than you are, but stop being such a baby about it.”
Buck ignored him. “Saw Jeb during that fifteen-minute excuse for a lunch break they give us. He’s been put on maintenance too. Noticing a pattern yet, Paul? Speak out against the tyranny and they send you off to do hard labor.” Buck pushed the bin a few feet and stopped to empty another trash bin. This one was by a set of bathrooms. Out came the can, boom, boom, boom against the side of the bin, then a grunt from Buck. Something was apparently stuck at the bottom. He reached in and pulled it out and convulsed with a fit of disgust when he saw it was a woman’s used sanitary napkin.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake.”
Paul grabbed his belly with laughter. Living with two women, he was no longer shocked by such things. “I think you may have found your calling, Buck.”
The old man threw him a look. “So Jeb mentioned that Earl Mullins and his family left last night.”
Still on the other side of the hallway, Paul stopped what he was doing. “Really?”
The grin on Buck’s face stretched from ear to ear. “Who knows, maybe he refused to work. Gave ’em the finger. Either way you slice it, Earl musta figured he was better off taking his chances on the outside.”
Paul wasn’t sure why the old man was smiling. Sure, Buck hated authority of any kind, but for Earl to risk his family’s safety like that seemed reckless, maybe even criminal. The last rad meter he’d seen had shown levels still clearly in the red. Given that, their departure was hardly cause for celebration.
Perhaps seeing the objection on Paul’s face, Buck said, “You can’t stomp on a man’s rights and expect him to sit back and take it.”
“Well, you’re arguing from principle, but Earl just doomed his wife and kids.”
“I had a feeling you’d say that. Sometimes a principle is worth dying for.”
Paul gave that one a moment to sink in. “I suppose that shows you were wrong about one thing.”
Buck’s eyebrow perked up. “Really? And what’s that?”
“If Earl and his family were allowed to leave, then this place isn’t a prison at all.”
Buck didn’t like that one and went back to his trash collection.
Not long after, they moved to the second floor of the administrative building. A meeting had been underway between the few members of Congress who’d made it to the complex. Since the Ark’s blast doors had sealed shut behind them five days ago, not a soul had arrived and only Earl and his family had left.
Paul and Buck had been instructed by Chief Engineer Hardy to wait outside for the meeting to end. Once everyone left, they would clean up.
Far from a heated exchange, Paul was shocked by what they heard going on behind those closed doors. Lots of old men cackling over poorly told dirty jokes. Soon after the doors swung open and a wave of political types and their assistants came streaming out. A young man in a sharp suit emerged brandishing a paper coffee cup and an obnoxious laugh. He was sidling up to a grey-haired guy who must have been a congressman. As they passed, the kid held out his coffee cup for Buck to take. Buck’s eyes narrowed as the kid let the cup go. It hit the ground with a hollow pop, coffee splashing over the feet of all three men. The procession stopped.
“What are you, some kind of an idiot?” the kid asked, surveying the damage. “I was handing you my cup and now you made a mess.”
A sort of calm came over Buck. “No, you made a mess. You’re a big boy, can’t you throw out your own trash?”
“Excuse me?”
The congressman stepped in to prevent the situation from escalating.
Buck stuck out a hand and pushed him away. “Let your son fight his own battles. He’s got a mouth on him, writing
checks I’m sure his diapered backside can’t cash.”
Some of the congressmen chuckled.
The young assistant was half Buck’s size, but his face was three times as red. Winding up, the kid swung a wild fist at Buck, who raised one of his giant forearms to block it.
“Thank you,” Buck said and with that the blood drained from the assistant’s face. One of Buck’s giant paws clamped around his tie while the other curled into a fist and struck with the speed of a coiled serpent.
Buck’s first punch made the assistant’s knees give out. He drooped, Buck holding him up by the tie.
Like the early heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson, Buck didn’t want this to be over too soon. The next blow landed into the mouthy assistant’s gut, knocking the wind out of him and satisfaction bloomed on Buck’s face as the arrogant twenty-something crumpled to his feet. It would only be later that Buck would complain about the pain where Finch’s bullet had punched a hole below his collar bone during their struggle in Atlanta.
Predictably, the hallway erupted into chaos, but what they hadn’t counted on were the two Secret Service agents who jumped on both of them, slapping Buck and Paul in handcuffs.
Chapter 20
That defiant look was still on Buck’s face when both men were marched into the director’s office. Dark and velvety, the room was spacious and filled with antiques. Van Buren was apparently something of a collector. On the wall were old paintings, many of them from the old masters. Paul wasn’t quite educated enough to know them by name, but several he’d seen gracing the pages of many a coffee-table book. In one corner stood the armor of a twelfth-century knight. Not the full plate stuff you saw in museums. This was a suit of chain mail. The frayed white robe draped over it was emblazoned with a faded red cross.
“Once belonged to Sir Achard of Montmerle,” Van Buren said from behind them. He was standing in the doorway, leaning casually against the frame. “He defended Jerusalem before it was taken back by Saladin in 1187. He’d sworn an oath to protect pilgrims traveling through the Holy Land from the west.”
