Broken Mirror: Apophis 2029 Read online

  I could not bring myself to waking the mother as she slept soundly in her bed, oblivious to what had befallen her child; I bit my lip raw wondering how to explain how I had failed to protect her daughter. Their father was out collecting firewood would be back by daybreak, so I kept my distance from the adolescent and everything she touched until nightfall. I left a note for their father, scribbled in charcoal of a burnt stick from the fire he had built that morning. I simply couldn't bear to watch the misery that would unfold when he read it come morning. I slipped away into the night that evening while they slept. The muffled gunshot I heard echo through their small valley in the early light of dawn still haunts me to this day.

  There have been moments in my life I wasn't exactly proud of, but I try to learn from my mistakes rather than ignore them. Far too many people who gave up all hope went crazy. I tried not to be one of them. There were more times than I can count when I honestly entertained the idea of putting that gun of mine to my head, but something kept me from it. I was stubborn, like my mother.

  Thorn and his odd cluster of rowdies had made a temporary home here in the industrial building, but hadn't quite mapped out the entire complex. There were still sections that had been blocked off by thick locked doors, but I was certainly willing to help with a bit of exploration if they needed me. As I slept, the elderly man, 'Roy' as Killroy had requested that he would rather be called, kept a keen eye on me through the night. If I had shown the slightest sign of symptoms, I am sure he would have personally escorted me down the hall and pushed me off the balcony with a very long pole.

  However, he checked me again in the morning with a minor exam; flashlight in the eyes and inspecting my gums, and a short verbal test to see how coherent I was. Apparently, he had some minor experience in the medical field. At least he was kind enough to rewrap my cut hand, which had begun to heal normally. Roy made sure to set some additional ground rules if I chose to stay with them there, noting the level of the water tank that fed the plumbing was low and to keep our showers sparse. Followed by instructions not to take food or rummage through any one else's stuff, and to immediately report anything unusual that could pose a danger. Pretty much all of it was common sense advice.

  The little boy had awoken and Thorn had brought him a plate of food to eat. He looked a bit under the weather as if he had a cold, which Felix later confirmed while we shared the gas stove. Haiti was in a pleasant mood, eager to check more floors as he wiped down a few metal pry bars with a soiled rag. He commented how it was 'just like Christmas' whenever they found a room with any amount of useful stash. Food of course was the top priority on the treasure list, but as the scavengers we had all become, each of us had our own set of values to the knick-knacks and equipment we might stumble upon. Basically, the end, if you couldn't eat it or use it for protection or could keep you warm,; it was usually considered worthless just weight.

  It was a vast change from being on the run. Here I could keep clean and dry nor and not be constrained by the limitations of what I could carry. Thorn helped me set my pack items out to dry on a makeshift clothesline in the hall and let me borrow a pair of rubber gloves to set them out, making sure I understood they would only be safe to handle once they had completely dried through. I understood their strict precautions; it was the only way they had survived this long.

  It was Roy's turn to get some shuteye after having kept vigil over me the night before while Felix kept guard in the main room with the boy. Serena and Thorn carried a few flashlights along with the hand made crowbars Haiti had supplied; who was my assigned partner during this excursion.

  They had actually only arrived here a short time ago, and there were still a few upper floors and the basement area below the shipping dock that were left on the list to be explored. A few were merely utility rooms that bore nothing but stagnant cleaning supplies and burnt out wiring. I was glad to hear they had yet to find any cadavers, assuming the entire complex had been abandoned after the asteroid hit. We could glimpse ragged desk calendars still set to that date as a ghostly reminder of our cursed past.

  Wire cutters and other tools were prized finds as were sealable containers. Discovering sanitary towels or even toilet paper rose to the level of luxury items, but truly useful articles such as bleach for sterilizing had long degraded since it only had the shelf life of a year or less. Medical alcohol was the only true alternative, but had limited uses. It was humbling to see just how many daily household items we used to take for granted in the past could disintegrate so quickly over the years. Our modern society had become far too over reliant on the conveyor belt of excess we lived by that everyone so readily abused.

  Remove global mass transit from the equation and life comes to a screeching halt. Many people died because they had absolutely no clue what to do if a meal did not come from a deli or in a frozen tray from a grocery store. City dwellers fared the worse. When water stopped flowing, toilets ceased to flush and sewers backed up onto the streets; the reeking stench of it would drift for miles, and only added to spreading illness.

  Frozen foods had rotted within days if not weeks with no power to keep anything refrigerated, and expired canned food was a crap shoot for botulism after several years. Fuel for small generators became a commodity, almost as much as it did for spare parts when they would begin to fail. Years later, everyone had used up the last of their stashes and was left to endure hardships far beyond their own wildest expectations.

  On the top floor, we broke into a sizeable office room belonging to the plant chief where we found money scattered around the floor. It was just useless paper at this point, not even worth burning fuel. I knew there were some people who resorted to using it in place of toilet paper; but money was incredibly dirty. Of course, old habits die hard and at first, paper currency was used for barter as it had always been before, without entirely realizing that they were handling in essence a reusable napkin that had been touched by countless individuals who may or may have not been exposed to the virus.

  Paper money soon became a possible if not prime carrier of the virus that was quickly exchanged through many hands on an hourly basis. It was an oversight of logic that cost a lot of people their lives; and it wasn't until much later that people got a clue that they were helping to spread the taint among the survivors.

  The fact was that most people were left without anything that could be used for tender since most everything that related to currency was done through credit cards or implanted ID chips. All that digital information was wiped out in the EMP surge. With all the electronic money gone, a good many people who had once considered themselves well-off solely by the amount digital capital and the placement of the decimal points in their portfolios and bank accounts; suddenly found themselves destitute in the collapse, and where left to beg and scrape just like everyone else.

  It was a pitiful display to see how individuals who had valued themselves solely by their possessions let themselves be so entirely stripped of their character. Personally, I found it a fundamental disappointment in the human race as a whole to realize that so many people lived such shallow lives in our day and age. Many individuals with that type of mindset became even more erratic and mentally dangerous than the infected themselves, for there's nothing more dangerous than someone who has nothing left to lose.

  Within the chief’s own office, were an array of digital tablets stacked upon color-coded shelves; their lifeless screens made them expensive paperweights since printed data was rarely ever used. There was a hologram photo of the plant's boss and his family hanging on the wall. They looked like your typical upper class; domesticated trophy wife standing beside her overweight husband, their two children wearing identical school jumpsuits typical of the day. Their robotic nanny poised in the background merely as a status symbol to their peers.

  The quartz display on the wall that would have brandished his name was now blank, all the electronic devices were either destroyed from the EMP or merely dead batteries that had corroded and destr
oyed the innards of the devices. The only thing of notable value was a diagram of the factory levels hanging on the wall, which is where Haiti took a note of special interest.

  "Hey, Thorn, come take a look at this." Haiti motioned.

  We all followed in kind, wondering what it was we should be looking at. The holographic glass frame allowed a three dimensional image of the building's interior layout to be viewed at a variety of angles. Such laser engraved glass was typically used by contractors and architects for prestige since they were fragile and had little practical use in the field. Haiti pointed to an array of large circular structures located in the basement. What they were was not quite clear. It was an area they had not yet been able to access since that section was locked behind some very large secured doors.

  "Ah, that must be the area behind the bulk doors at the ass end of the lower dock, on the bottom level," Thorn responded, as he pointed to the hologram, "maybe its time we took a look down there," he suggested.

  We slowly made our way down from the top floor, prying open any locked doors we passed along the way to see what we could find. From what I saw, their crew had done a decent job of barricading the facility from the inside, allowing only for a single hidden entrance and an emergency escape by a coiled rope off the second story balcony. Their preparedness and foresight helped me feel a bit more comfortable, since they seemed to have a better grasp of sensible necessities than most groups of people I had ever met. Shit could go wrong in a heartbeat; we all knew that from experience.

  The lower dock angled in from the ground level, though any access via the storm shutters had been closed off. Several large hauling trucks were chaotically arranged within the garage, as if randomly parked and abandoned in a rush. Blocked behind them was a large set of sliding double doors running nearly the entire width of the sizeable carport. After initial inspection, it was clear the gates were disabled and could only be opened by the remote switch located in a small booth to its side. Without electricity, there was no way to operate it by hand. The doors were too large and the gears well sealed behind the thick barrier wall. Whatever was inside, was well protected.

  After mulling over our options, we rolled one of the trucks out of the way and Haiti came up with a workable plan to rig the access conduit by directly connecting a line to the electrical grid outside the lower building. It was the same fenced off area that I had almost climbed into when I was being chased outside the day before. Thorn finally got around to clarifying why he had taken the liberty of putting a few pop shots in my direction earlier in the courtyard; while humbling himself under my tempered and accusing glare.

  "I had an eye on you since you exited the forest, and the group of afflicted that were in pursuit. When you climbed over that wall I was trying to take out the Weepers whenever I had a clear shot, but saw you were about to run into the grid," he explained, "so I tried waving my laser sight in front of you as a warning not to go that way, but you were either ignoring the signal or didn't see it, so I placed a few warning shots at your feet as a final resort."

  I recalled seeing a few transformers and wired scaffolding beyond the fence there through the sheets of rain, but did not realize it was still active.

  "You mean that power grid is still live, but how?" I inquired, knowing that electrical lines everywhere had been down for years, especially so in a place this remote.

  "After a few weeks here we realized just how dangerous that section of the yard was, especially during electrical storms," Haiti answered for him over his shoulder, "it's like a lightning magnet, and anything in range of it gets fried. Ole' Thorn here kept you from being barbequed," he smiled at me with his cheesy grin while patting Thorn on the back.

  The mish-mash of steel and busted capacitors held residual electricity from any lightning strikes for weeks. Dangerous voltage would hum through the structure for days after being zapped by a thunderbolt. A few of the lights would still hum on, but most had been fried or popped from the frequent power spikes. They pried open the back access door to the grid area with a wooden rod to show me; pointing out a few smoking remnants of dead bodies of weepers that had recently wandered into that mess.

  "It lit them up like a match," Haiti gleamed, as if it had been a spectacle to behold, "Eh! Don't touch nuth'in, girl!" he warned as he quickly lifted my arm away with the wood pole from contacting the metal handrail just outside the hatch, "It'll still give you a good zap," he cautioned. I didn't want to get cooked, so I took a step back at his lead.

  Though the storm had passed I could still hear a low hum coming from the Grid and could feel it in the ground at my feet. This place was still juiced, and we worked out a way to make use of it. We went back upstairs and pulled out all the excess wiring, tying together any conduits we could find. Felix came along to help us, while giving helpful instructions not to bother with anything below a certain gauge of thickness. After several hours of work, we had pieced together a cable starting from the access panel in the garage that led all the way to the outer hatch where Felix stood alone; decked out in black rubber gloves, thick dark goggles and a makeshift handle from a broken broomstick. I could tell he was not feeling so keen about being at the charged end, his stuttered speech gave that away.

  "Ah, okay, you ah, you guys ready down there?" he shouted down the hall to Serena, who in turn gave me the verbal signal that I relayed to Thorn all the way down to the garage where Haiti stood waiting.

  The dark skinned islander had previously wired up the conduits under the panel. With a final shrug of his shoulders, he turned and gave us a thumbs up; hoping he had gotten the polarity right. Felix made the connection and angry sparks shot out the stray bits of wire down the line, we all jumped back, as did Haiti when the panel in front of him erupted like fireworks.

  "Ah! Eee, Stop! STOP ya ginger headed freak!" the black man screamed as he fell back, shielding his face, "Telk him to only make contact in short taps!" he instructed Thorn to relay up the line as we followed in turn, shouting the orders back to Felix, who sat there nervously at the smoking end of the hot cable, trying his best not to choke on the burning rubber from its tips.

  Following his advice, the crackle of sparks shot down the wire where Haiti had fixed the connection in haste. With a clank and squeaking of metal and grinding of dry gears, the colossal doors began to part. After resisting a few feet, the creaking metal began to stall and Haiti yelled back for Felix to halt. Felix disconnected the power cable and resealed the outer door, and we all in turn made our way back down to the garage where he was waiting. The group of us gathered close to peer into the dark narrow gap beyond.

  Thorn snatched his rifle as did Haiti, who grabbed his favorite shotgun while stuffing a large machete in the back of his belt. Serena donned a pistol, though she did not appear too worried about needing to use it. She contended that if this area had been sealed off like this for the past several years, then there likely was not anything left alive inside. We decided to take our weapons just the same.

  My solar light had fully charged from sitting out on the balcony the entire afternoon, and we let Felix go back to clean the rank of soot and burnt scraps of rubber from his hands. The four of us could handle this alone, and we really didn't like the idea of calling it a night leaving this door cracked open without knowing what was on the other side. The trailer beds in the outer dock suggested that there was something big in there. We doubled checked our gear and ventured into the still air with light steps. An eerie silence greeted us as we made our way inside, the kicking of every small pebble echoed off distant walls shrouded in the darkness beyond the reach of our lights.

  The ramp-way extended just a little farther into the basement until it leveled off. Within, we were faced with half a dozen tall stainless steel doors arranged in a semicircle. High above I could make out a set of conveyor rails, their hooked chains retracted onto thick spools. It was a real mystery as to what they were for? None of us had seen anything like it before.

  "What the fuck is this place?"
Serena blurted out, reflecting everyone's added dismay.

  Thorn wandered off to inspect one of the large rounded doors, and tapped on a glass plate located next to one. There was a similar box next to each of the six sealed doors. Using the butt of his rifle, he tapped the glass hard once, smashing it in on his second try. He looked at us and shrugged just before depressing the large red button that it had been protecting beneath the broken glass.

  We were startled when its frame lit up and a loud siren wailed with flashing red lights above the door where he stood. Some sort of emergency back up power connected to it was still in operation and we took several steps back as the silver door slid out then folded up like a submarine hatch as thick steam seeped out around its edges. With a hiss, the thick door jolted to a halt, and after a moment of shock, we dared to peek inside.

  A dim blue light pulsated around a sizeable central dome, its edged speckled with polished silver bars. I was completely baffled, and by the look on Serena's face, so was she. Haiti ventured to step inside to get a better look at the device, brushing aside the mist of ozone with his hands. It took him a while to determine a hint of what it might be as he shined his flashlight into every crevice for a clue to how it worked.

  "What is it?" Thorn finally inquired with impatience as he squeezed up next to him. Haiti tucked his finger under his chin in though for a moment before speaking his mind.

  "Ya know, if ya ask me, I would swear this was a hydrogen generator," he exclaimed, tapping the side of the cone, "and this here is the coil." as it made a metallic 'thunk' similar to a water-filled tank when one of the many silver rings he wore touched the outer plate, "Them there are magnetic coils around the edge," he mentioned while pointing at the polished plates, "when engaged, this thing lifts itself up on a magnetic field so it can spin at high velocity while ionized water is injected from below ...or above, I can't tell which." he corrected himself while standing on his toes to inspect the top of the cone.