There are four of us. gillian, lucy, oscar and me, all having put time in the stinken’ wars. Gillean and I have the two pistols. Taking both was a hard decision even though there’s been no trouble yet and we wouldn’t be far away. We have a clear line of sight and will check every few minutes.
We all have combat, search and rescue training and extensive multiple types of gun practice at shooting ranges. Our mission for the next week is to search a defined sector of our current location, facing the library to the left. Brownstones built in the early 20th century. We have a list of items divided into importance for our survival. More weapons is one. Food, laptops, anything electronic, batteries, chargers, no gas single transport like bikes, scooters, I put down a working drone with video capabilities, seeds, and possible space to colonize other areas since we’ve reached our saturation point, maybe surpassed it.
Jagger. In Gods Army for three years on ground, mostly infiltration of targeted buildings of defined enemies. Loved it and hated it. Fought PTSD but still have recurring nightmares, oddly not about the war I fought but another. I have seen some bizarre things during my tour and will get back on another entrée. I believe most of the rumors but disagree with the opinions of them.
Some of us were assigned to suppress the ongoing worldwide protests that the scientists started in a final act of desperation to save the planet but most of us joined them. We were given stun guns, tear gas grenades and pistols so after I switched sides, a few of us did search missions in empty buildings to clear out any dangerous elements before turning it into a safe zone for resisters during the night. What seemed like a piece of cake compared with what I had just left behind became a nightmare, all the built up stress and fears causing the PTSD from what we found. Not just the corpses from suicide parties but comatose heroine or Jackle junkies, weird hybrid cross breeds eating their remains, protesters engaging in all sorts of drug induced sexual acts, burnt out rooms where people had tried to have fires to cook god knows what, yeah, in other words end of times stuff that only ten years earlier could have been a streaming series, must see.
So, agreeing to do this caused it all to return having absolutely no idea on what we’d find. We hadn’t heard anything or seen anything while watching our target for three days from the roof and the Pogs had disappeared.
On the first day we were met with no resistance walking the forty yards to the first building. Nothing in sight, no sounds of drones, weather as good as it gets, partly hazy sun with intermittent banks of dark clouds always lingering smoke from fires from the fires south and west of us. Maybe the kid was right.
First off, I have to say, going into one of our own with gun drawn feels a bit surrealistic but more to the point, like de-ja-vu all over again, the stuff of my nightmares. Not in a cop way but in a military way against an unseen enemy, still not adequately defined. We wore our own respirator masks that desperately needed new filters.
The first floor of the building was or had been a combination upscale bookstore coffee house. So, we were in a part of the city past the downtown business district that had gone through what at the time was called gentrification, probably with the library as a central focus point with hard and soft landscape features for casual shopping. Everything seemed undisturbed, a desk in an office in the back with a box of what could have been crispy creams. No bodies, damage, or anything out of place, a photo of an evacuated store, intact. But we all recognized the smell of dead bodies The main room with the shelves of books looked like, after a good dusting, could open tomorrow. The Times newspaper on a table dated April fifteenth, 2030, around when the massive street revolt had begun. People were being told to evacuate after seeing what happened in Atlanta.
We knew that if there was anything it would be on the top floors. We took off our shoes, used hand signals and once on the second floor, divided into two units, each with a gun. The apartments all had three bedrooms and two baths. No electricity, no water, mold in places, a few cracked windows, one dead woman in bed and a child in an empty bathtub.
Second floor same but with telltale signs of current use. When entering apartments, we first watched for an ambush then searched all the places to hide. In two, dirty footprints, a lingering scent of cannabis, maybe used beds and toilets. Fuck the Rich written on a wall mirror in lipstick another room trashed. So, it had been searched at one time. Graffiti over walls and mirrors. The AI god speaks, THE ALIENS WILL SAVE US, CANCEL HUMANS, in a common bathroom, toilet paper draped over stalls and light fixtures.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
As we went up, the smell got worse. Heat rises. On the third floor, we found the first door open at the top of the stairway, the scene reminding me of a few places in Mexico that had been swept before we got there. By the looks of things, it was a suicide party, with clothes, some bloody, noticeable drug paraphernalia and bottles of alcohol scattered around but no corpses. I wanted to go in but it was too much of a risk without upgraded filters so scanned area for detail. There were two e-guns, a large blade, broken glasses, probably blood smeared over a few hanging pictures. It was weird that the bodies weren’t there since the smell was so strong. Didn’t make sense.
We followed a trail of blood down the hallway and the same for one more of the large apartments. The third one was locked. It was clean so we went through it looking for anything on the list or useful. We heard gillian laughing looking into a large closet. Another weird thing, an unopened candy bar machine, completely stocked with product. Why would anyone go to the trouble of hiding it and not just break into it! Maybe they thought it was safe in there from something in the air or good storage but man!
Aside from that, the residents were pretty hardcore survivalists and as far as I was concerned, the stuff from this apartment, entirely worth the trip. We took from one large walk in closet, two solar lanterns, a night vision monocular, eight solar LED tube lights, one propane coffee maker, two fire starters, whistles, and pepper spray but the one thing on top of my wish list that gave me a jolt of hope, two brand new 8W hand held radios with rechargeable batteries! We left a lot of stuff that we need to come back for including two heavy duty sleeping bags, blankets, a tote with two brand new queen sized sets of flannel sheets and extra-large pillows. That and a lot of the kitchen stuff unless we decide to commandeer the downstairs for our own use.
We were about to leave the building when oscar slowed down, appeared thoughtful, pointed towards the kitchen. We followed him towards the back near a walk-in freezer was a bolted door. His intuition paid off in spades! We just stared with open mouths at the treasure. Who would have thought that beneath an upscale café and once million dollar apartments in what must have been one of the pricier neighborhoods of the world, we’d find state of the art 3D printing technology dedicated to 3D-printed firearms! Holy wollapalooza!
Four printers with a full range of capabilities, two fully enclosed meaning you could print high-strength filament materials right from the get-go, no modifications or upgrades needed and one with a touchscreen LCD screen, user friendly with perhaps blueprints at the ready! We’re all out of the loop having missed a lot of the upgrades but from what we could see, at least two with CAD software with instructions to create custom gun designs and replicate existing firearms. And the cabinets lined up against the back wall were full of parts made that could be for bullets and magazines, round cases, whatever and shelves full of spools of what looked like composite filament.
When we got back, and slowly unloaded our booty, we took our time describing everything while placing the items slowly on the table, kind of making a show of it, saving the surprise in the basement for second to the last while placing two printed Clocks and magazines down and the last which we knew would receive the majority of accolades by all, one large sack of goodies from, oops, a broken vending machine and two large totes found in the, oops, locked walk in, of bulk high grade dark chocolate.
That night we had our own meeting of minds on our first limited recon or scouting expedition since all were excited about this current one and the possible rewards of future ones. The topics of discussion ranged from cleaning up today's target for multiple use, adding a few more to the team along with the extra protection discovered today, a few to explore the potential use of the e-printing lab, an expanded list of needs like clothes which was an oversight on our part and working with Zenith on storage of inventory.
But it was the overall impressions we had on what we found and how we felt that was the most interesting. As gillian pointed out, we had been gone for up to three critical years and then some right to the streets so our learning curve is steep. As in the Civil War and Revolutionary War, an infrastructure of an underground of cheap weapons production seems to have taken place as well as the purchase of survival goods including solar tech in anticipation of the grid going down. All of that we could use. The portable solar arrays, batteries, converters, and other tech like that is on the top of our list. One person had their foldable array hanging out the window.
And then there is the mystery of the absent corpses leaving their clothes behind. By the smell, it had to be recent but how, why and who? And why not the woman and child? Some joking about the Zombie apocalypse but even they keep their clothes on, right?!
