Short story I'm working on. Felt like writing again, so I just... wrote. Any feeding backs woulding being greating thanking youing. ::))
Aiden hated working by candle light, but it was all he had.
The light from the nearly spent candle allowed him to see enough, but not as much as he would have liked.
Paper, old computer tablets, some pens and pencils. His colleagues and he had given up using the tablets in favor of paper. It had become increasingly harder to charge them, then infeasible.
He only had a few hours to finish, but he wasn’t convinced he would succeed. The task that he had been given was daunting at best.
Power the facility.
He heard the door open, somebody stepped into the room.
“You here Aiden?"
“Need something Brody?"
A soft whir then a buzz.
“Just came to tell you we’re trying the generator again.”
“It’s not going to work. I wish it would, but it’s too old."
The room lit up, the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling flickered to life. The sounds of computers booting, blinking lights, then darkness. He blinked, an image of the dusty room still in his head. The old computers and rusty metal.
“It almost worked.”
“Almost,” Aiden pushed the stack of papers away and lay his head down.
“If you’d pause work on your project, and help us with the generator, we’d have it working in a few hours.”
“Then what? It’s not enough power.”
“We could power the lights, the computers. Your work would go much faster.”
A siren, yelling.
Aiden ran to the door, dodging the rows of tables from memory.
“Where is that coming from?”
Glow sticks placed along the wall, making the hallway easier to navigate. The light from the glow sticks allowed him to see that Brody wasn‘t looking great. His hair was messy and his cloths unwashed, but he doubted he looked much better.
“I would guess something happened with generator.”
“Well. We should check.”
They made their way to the basement stairwell, the closer they got, the more commotion. People running, pushing, shouting.
Aiden grabbed a young man by the shoulder, “what is going on?”
“The reactor caught fire. The whole building could go with it. We’re evacuating.”
He let him go and turned to Brody, “what do we do?”
“Do you think you can do anything? If it’s on fire, what is there to do?”
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do, but I have to make sure of that.”
Smoke had begun pouring from the stairwell.
The world around them had become quiet. The hand powered siren no longer blared and the people had all evacuated.
He went down the stairs, holding tightly to the railing.
Some pressed against his back, he turned, and something was shoved into his chest.
A mask.
“You, idiot.”
He put on the mask, the filter allowing him to breath.
“If you wanted to die, it would have been easier to jump from the roof.”
“I’ve thought about it.”
They made their way down, deeper into the heart of the facility.
At the bottom of the stairs, the room opened up. The great behemoth sat in the middle. An enormous block, pipes wires connecting it to the building. A table sat to the left, covered in the equipment used to monitor it.
The generator was massive, and very much on fire.
If it had not been creating so much smoke, the fire would have easily lit the as if it were day.
“So what do we do?”
Aiden walked to the row of computers that controlled it.
“Computers.”
“Yes, those are computers, good job.”
“Why would you control a generator with something that needs power to run?”
“I’ll make sure to ask the people who built this place, next time I see them.”
“There’s nothing we can do, is there.”
Brody slapped his back, “no. You knew that, but you always have to make sure.”
“Well. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Outside, the others had gathered.
With a quick head count, he was relieved they had all made it out fine.
There had been 16 of them at first. Two of them were lost in the city, one was taken by sickness.
A strange virus had struck. Aiden could only guess that their immune systems were not prepared for the alien infection. Though most recovered fully, they had lost a friend.
The 13 survivors now huddled around a fire, watching their home burn.
Brody walked off, away from the others. He had never liked crowds.
Aiden joined him, “now what?”
He smiled, “I don’t have a clue. Without the facility, what is there to do?”
Looking out over the city and up at the sunless sky.
The facility had been built atop a hill, overlooking a city. His people didn’t even know the name of the city, if it had one.
They had arrived here, nearly 2 years ago.
“It looks like we’ll need to go into the city.”
This place, it was so much like their own, but it was not.
Whoever had built it, had spoken countries they had never heard of, events that had never happened, yet the things they researched were the same.
The commutation tunnel, the windows and even that damn marionette.
He gave Aiden a nod, and walked to the group.
“We need to go into the city,” he said, “we need more people. If only Aiden and I went... we need more people."
A woman stood, “I’ll come.”
Nobody else stood.
“Only one person? You’re all fools. The city is dangerous, yes, but if we just sit here, we’re going to die. We barely have food, we’re low on water.”
A man stood, “last time we went there, we lost two people. We didn’t lose more because we left, we ran. There has to be something else.”
“What do you suggest, we start the commutation tunnel? We’ve been trying to do that for the past two years. Where has that gotten us? Without a home. The damn facility is going to burn down.”
Discord
Light Style