Wasteware 01

01: Preparedness is Next to Godliness

The bombs fell five years ago. Five years nine days to be exact. Making the date Jan 1st, the ringing in of a New Year. The residents of Carbon Block hadn't celebrated the New Year since Cloud Cover. In fact, for the past five years, holidays came and went without too much of a passing thought. People thought they didn’t have much to celebrate about.

Amaya Reeves did not include herself among those people. She reasoned that the residents of Carbon Block were still alive, were safe, and could very well could be the last surviving members of the human race. They were lucky and that was reason enough to celebrate each and every day.

For the first time since the clouds came, everyone agreed with her. It was the first New Year’s Eve since the end of the world there was a party. The mess hall was packed with almost all 370 residents of the Block. Excitement was in the air. A genuine happiness not felt since a lifetime passed engulfed the atmosphere and the whole block was energized with it. It was a drug in which you couldn’t help but partake in. It swirled around, luring you in, until you were smiling, laughing, and chasing it through the block, trying desperately to stay part of it for as long as you could. People were so joyous of the possibility that the future would hold something bright that secret stashes of alcohol, once reserved solely for moments of the deepest depression, had been brought out for toasts. They were happening right and left, for reasons large and small.

A few indulged a little too much. The infirmary would be doling out aspirin in the morning like there was an endless supply. Even the security team, there in an official capacity, a presence to keep things in line, couldn’t help but get swept up in the moment.

Despite the excitement trying desperately to hold Amaya within its grasp, she was relieved that she had pulled the early shift and was able to retire with plans of catching a few hours of sleep.

It was 23:11 when she walked into her room. The red light of her clock shined on through the total darkness, eerily reminiscent of that fateful night years ago. So many in the block had come to see those numbers as a bad omen of dark things to come. Amaya couldn’t say those numbers didn’t have a meaning for her. Every human in the block had some introspective feelings when they saw that time. For her though, it wasn’t bad omens, it was a reminder that things could change in a moment. Each moment held the power for a person to make a change, significant or mundane. In this particular moment, the mundane change Amaya was wanting was a change of clothes.

Someone had other plans for her. Just as she slid the top half of her jumpsuit down, revealing the white tank top underneath, the sharp sound of hard knuckles against harder metal rang through the room.

She pressed the button on the brushed metal intercom panel next to the door and spoke into the speaker. “Slide your card.”

A moment later a computerized voice announced the visitor on the other side of the door as Sergeant Elliot James Preston. She opened the door and saw him standing in the hallway carrying a bottle of dark liquid and two glasses.

“You can’t spend New Year’s alone Reeves,” he announced, letting himself into the room. At six foot two, he stood a full ten inches taller than Amaya and overshadowed her body as he walked by. Amaya sensed the slightest scent of whiskey on him as he passed. She could tell by the small change in aroma that this smell wasn’t coming from the bottle, but from Preston himself. He had started without her.

“You rather I spend it with a bottle like you?” she delivered wittily to him pulling the top half of her jumpsuit up quickly. Her slender fingers buttoned it from the neck down. He took a seat at the round table in her room his muscular frame dwarfing the standard issue chair. She couldn’t help the smile from creeping onto her face at the sight of him.

“Ouch,” he mocked picking up on the quip.

“I’ll spend New Year’s with you Preston, but only because you brought the whiskey.”

He nodded his approval and poured two glasses of the liquor, the scent of old wood drifting through the air, carrying with it the excitement of the night. Amaya breathed in the aroma as she moved across the room to join him. His strong hand carefully slid the glass across the faux wood surface. She took the glass from him, their fingers grazing gently. An exhalation and a smile of content grew on Amaya's face as she let the scent overpower her.

Elliot reciprocated with a smile of his own, one of those big smiles with perfectly white teeth behind it that made you disgustingly jealous. His secret was not one of impeccable oral hygiene. No, his perfect smile was world-class implants. Amaya knew Preston in his days before perfect teeth and had been with him during the mission that gave him the need for dental work.

Eight years earlier, on that same mission, Preston suffered a broken nose; Amaya a fractured cheekbone and orbital ridge. Then there were the scars. More than the two of them could add up with all of their digits. Once they had been extracted Preston had been given a smile that surpassed his previous one. No small task in Amaya’s opinion. She had loved that pre-implant smile of his.

“I will say I was surprised to find you alone.” He was leaning back in the chair comfortably. He twirled the glass smoothly with his right hand. His left arm was thrown over the back of the chair, stretching the material of his shirt taunt, exposing the muscular form beneath it. “Jace couldn’t have found someone better to spend the night with.”

Abruptly Amaya averted her eyes from his bicep to meet his gaze. Hoping he hadn’t caught her staring, she smirked at him. “You’re right on that count but I called it in early tonight.”

“And you let me in?”

His phrase was more of a statement than a question, but she answered it just the same. “I told you. You brought the whiskey.”

He flashed that big smile again and let out a short but hearty laugh. “Fair enough.”

“So, what are we toasting to?” She picked up the glass, a strong scent of allspice and cellars wafting from it.

“To finally having something to do!”

She nodded in agreement and clinked their glasses, doing their best not to slosh the brown liquid over the sides of the glass tumblers. It was warm going down, full of the stuff that warms the world, numbs the pain, and makes people forget.

“It’s about damn time,” she responded to his toast. “We sure could use some fresh air in this sardine can of ours.”

They spent the next half an hour in a candid conversation about the next day. Preston was the person on the squad Amaya was unquestionably closest to, sans her father. The hardest moments of both of their lives had been a shared experience. While that sometimes made facing each other hard, it also bonded them in a way few humans would ever know. She could open up to him in ways she never would to the other guys on the team. He knew she was nervous, she knew he was too. They both shared the same excitement and knew tomorrow would probably not live up to everyone’s expectations, but it would be something. After three years of going through the motions, the team desperately needed something.

“It’s midnight,” Amaya said to him, catching the digital display out of the corner of her eye. He turned to look at the clock, standing as he confirmed what she had seen. Preston took her arm in his hand, bringing her smaller frame up with its chair with gentle guidance. In a tradition that neither knew the origins of, he gave her a kiss. His lips were warm and tasted slightly of whiskey, the scent on him stronger than before.

“Happy New Year, Amaya,” he whispered.

“Happy New Year, El,” she replied, resting her forehead on his brawny chest. Being this close to him was wonderful, but also filled her with a painful sadness. A longing for the things that were, but could never be again.

He held her for a moment before silently recovering his things and leaving her room.

When Amaya woke up in the morning she went through the motions of getting ready while her thoughts swam in a pool of reflection of the last five years. It seemed natural to her to have a certain level of apprehension about breaching the surface. The only outside information they had received since cloud cover came from some monitoring equipment the facility had above ground. No radio transmissions. No data packets. They could not even get a signal from their own satellites. What had remained functional gave them nothing more than what boiled down to radiation levels and weather reports.

Extremely perverse weather reports.

Even five years after the bombs dropped things outside appeared to be erratic as ever. Any feelings of hope that the earth was righting herself continued to be shattered when the report came in each day. The weather was unpredictable and extreme. Gale-force winds and violent lightning storms ran rampant. There were few periods of rain, separated by months of burning hot temperature and blisteringly dry air.

For a while, there had been one surviving camera outside the block which was still functional. It had been mounted on a street lamp looking out towards the nearest city, but it mysteriously went out 19 months ago. The last image it showed was of the same blood-red sky that had appeared after the smoke cleared five months after cloud cover.

Could have changed in 19 months? The residents of the block had a betting pool going. Amaya was a firm believer that it was still red, and would have put her rations on it, had she been a betting woman.

It took 4 years and 43 days after cloud cover before the monitoring equipment registered a drop in radiation that approached the very high end of the “fairly safe” level. Despite many debates, they didn’t immediately go out. They opted for prudence and monitored those levels to see if they would stay where they were.

They did.

Then they waited for a good weather pattern. Well, as good of a weather pattern as they were likely to get. It was hot and dry, but not unreasonable, and there had been no sudden storms in the past three months. They could wait around for better conditions that might never come or take their chances.

The risk was deemed acceptable, and a select group was going up with the hope of answering the questions that occupied the collective minds of those trapped in the titanium and cement coffin that was called Carbon Block.

What was going on out there?

They speculated, dreamed, and fantasized about this moment. Would it be all they had hoped?

Wanting as always to be smack in the middle of the excitement Amaya had tried to get on the team that was going to the surface. Like many of her best-laid plans, this one had failed. Having her father and his best friend in positions above her meant she frequently didn’t get what she wanted. Instead, Amaya would be providing tactical support from the Throne Room for the big outing.

It sounded big and important, but without any satellite coverage, it meant little more than listening in on the radio conversations and monitoring video feeds. Always trying to be the optimist she took small comfort that she was at least part of today’s mission and wasn’t stuck walking the grid in the block like Barnes and his team.

Maintaining a guard rota was one of the many boring tasks that fell to the security team. The first year after the bombs had been interesting as people came to grips, or didn’t with the isolation from and destruction of the outside world. Those left in the block had acclimated to that realist, and the sec team's jobs had been pretty boring since then.

They went through all the motions of maintaining order of course. Security clearances were still enforced; some things were still on a need-to-know basis after all. Admittedly it was not as strict as it had been before. There were no higher-ups to check up on them. No one to send clearance updates, new reports, or top-secret memos.

Some of the scientists gave up their research. Who needed a cure for cancer when the human population was almost gone? Others stepped it up, most notably the geneticists. They saw a future in genetic modifications, cloning, and radiation resistance, amongst other things.

Amaya stayed off boredom by spending some of her free time with Jace Anderson, one of the scientists in the block. He was a few years younger than her, but the two of them got along well. Unlike a lot of his counterparts, he didn’t look down on the security team. He was always eager to talk about his experiments and never hesitated to break his language down for her so she could understand. If the world had not changed as it had, she could have seen him pursuing teaching, he had a knack for it.

Most of the scientists tended to look at the security team as grunts and talk over their heads at every chance they got. They didn’t really see a need for security now. If wasn’t for the firearms, the scientists and not the sec squad would have been the ones going to the surface today. They were smart men in some aspects, tactical intelligence was not always a skill they possessed.

The members of the block did come to a compromise of sorts regarding the day’s mission. The scientists would get to do some exploring of their own today, but only after the team secured an area of about 4 city blocks.

Amaya arrived at the Throne Room that morning to find Preston busy checking the radio equipment. He was testing each and every headset for audio clarity and microphone performance, and making sure the video cameras were transmitting to the proper channels. The last thing they wanted was for the team to be stuck outside the block with no way to communicate with them. Amaya watched him as she crossed the room to the seat next to him. His hazel eyes were focused on setting channels, his head cocked to the side, listening for his own voice to echo through each earpiece.

The fluorescent lights here were less forgiving than the softer lights in Amaya's room and she noticed that his hair desperately needed to be cut. He had pieces of it sticking out over his ears like straw poking out from the Scarecrows hat in The Wizard of Oz. Amaya wondered how silly it was going to look if he didn’t cut it soon. She laughed out loud at the thought of him with a big dirty blond fuzz ball on his head. Preston turned towards her; his eyebrow cocked at the laughter, but continued his testing.

“You need a haircut,” she whispered to him.

“I know,” he said into one of the microphones, listening for the transmittal in his earpiece. “You’ve been too busy with Jace to give me one.

“Here you go with the Jace thing again,” she said into another mic. He made some quick adjustments and then motioned for her to pick up another. “I don’t spend all of my free time with him you know. If you want a haircut, just ask, I’ll give you one.”

Again he motioned for the next microphone.

“There are three of these left and I’m not going to talk about Jace in all of them,” she persisted.

He played with the filters some more.

She continued her one-sided conversation. “So are you ready for today?”

He nodded and took the microphone from her hand.

“Are you?” He said into another.

“Of course I am,” Amaya announced into the last mic. And she was. They had been over the plan of action many times before. Once her dad and the rest of his team got back from the armory, they would go over it again. It wasn’t cleanliness, but preparedness that is next to godliness. The person most prepared was more likely to live another day, getting one step closer to immortality. For what is immortality but not dying?

And Amaya wasn’t dead yet, so for the time being she considered herself immortal. She immersed herself fully into the moment, enjoying the apprehension and excitement that existed within it. She stretched it out as long as she could, for there was a sense of darkness in the background she couldn’t shake. Something from a bad dream reaching out to try to spoil the moment. She chalked it up to nerves; a manifestation of the unknown about to be known working its way into her consciousness. She tried to shake it off, and as if on cue Preston winked at her, bringing her back into the light, and gave her a camera to test.