“Just get her out!”
Chapter Three
There were no Guardians patrolling the thirtieth floor when Zack stepped into the corridor. The children had been rounded up, and once the lights were dimmed there was little to draw people out of their rooms. People retreated, cocooned themselves in their only private space until they were forced to venture out again for the next shift to work for the little that was on offer. Zack neared the end of the corridor and as he turned the corner he saw a pair of Guardians patrolling the lobby near the lifts. They ambled past the doors dressed in their white boiler suits with black epaulets. Both were wearing the black balaclava and cap that made them all look the same. Their Assisters swung behind them and it seemed they always had one hand resting on the handle, ready to strike. They noticed him and took a glance at each other, but continued on their patrol. Usually they didn’t bother you if you weren’t causing any trouble. They knew certain things had to happen after lights out. If you were causing trouble it was a different story.
The light illuminating the numbered buttons continued to descend until it settled on the final destination. Ground Floor. There was no choice to go any further because the final five buttons had been removed from use by a well-aimed butt of an Assister in the early days. Back then people still believed that they could find a way back to the old world, the way it was before the war had destroyed it. They rode the lifts up and down like lost souls somewhere between heaven and hell. They couldn’t accept that neither home nor family existed anymore. Many fights broke out during this time, mainly between people who already knew each other. Colleagues who had sat together at adjacent desks and who had conversed only days before became enemies in the fight to turn back time. That was what Leonard had called it in the first few hours. Then the Guardians came and everything changed.
When the first bomb fell, Zack had thought it a meteor. He even raced to Leonard’s office to tell him to watch. He remembered the meteor that had plummeted to Earth only a few years before in Russia, and afterwards those who had survived told their stories to an awestruck world. Leonard was already at the window when Zack swung through his door, his hands pressed up against the glass. By then the first signs of a cloud had already begun to form, mushrooming upwards in the distance. Leonard and Zack watched together as the sky lit up and the orange blaze tore a wound through their world. It was Leonard that shouted at Zack to get under the desk as the explosion rocked the skeleton of the building. The intensity of the burst grew until it stifled Leonard’s words. He sat crouched in front of Zack, his mouth screaming something inaudible, his words lost in the roar of the explosion. They waited there until the sound of the blast died down and the building rested. It was silence that took over as people waited in their hiding places gripped by fear, interrupted only by the occasional bang or smashing of glass as the city fell apart around them. Together Zack and Leonard stumbled to their feet to take their first look at what was left. Zack’s hearing was muffled and weak and he couldn’t hear what Leonard was saying to him. But he saw that their windows had stood firm. They had been rocked but not broken by the evil that had ripped through their city, now left on the brink of extinction.
At first nobody considered their homes or their family. It was the shock. They had been stunned into nothing more than gratitude for the sparing of their lives. It was only in the hours and days afterwards that reality swelled like the wave of a tsunami, surging forth to claim fresh victims. It was then that people started to realise that there was nothing and nobody else left, and that’s when people started to get scared. Night had descended upon them. The city that would in time become known as New Omega was covered in hot ash, without any hope for the break of another dawn.
The lift doors screeched open to reveal the ground floor lobby, a once-grand entrance to what at one point was the second tallest structure of the capital. There had been a pond here, and fish swam in it. People ate them within the first few days. Everybody was starving. There had been trees here too. The lobby became a sanctuary at first, always full, people from all floors hoping to catch a glimpse of nature, waiting for a saviour to show up and rush through the doors, to tell them there had been a mistake. They sat watching the greenery, motionless in the absence of breeze, trying to ignore the line of faceless Guardians who were all armed with their Assisters and positioned along the perimeter. Within the first year the trees died, and the lobby died with it. It became barren, infertile, and the loss destroyed the dreams of many. It was devoid of decent life, and when the final leaves fell from the trees a lot of people lost hope.
The Guardians were positioned as expected at the entrance to the sublevels as Zack exited the lift. Five subterranean floors that were supposed to be uninhabited, yet they were full of people who remained unaccounted for. When the explosions came the doors were locked and the lifts to the basement decommissioned. The sublevels became an unwanted appendage. People from outside rushed underground from the streets, a place to hide, they thought, until the dust settled and they could return to their homes. But the dust never did settle, and they never made it out. Some of the wealthiest traded their way into the building in the first few days of anarchy. But the rest stayed down there, becoming the underclass, irrespective of where they came from. They mourned in the cold and the dark, tended their wounds and burns the best they could, shivering under coats in corners that didn’t catch the nuclear breeze. But eventually a form of camaraderie took over. They found ways to trade with those above ground. Some braved the fallout and went outside, bringing in things like clothes and blankets from the shops that were not completely destroyed. Others smuggled in alcohol. Others traded the only thing they had, which was themselves, and this brought a steady stream of men from the upper levels once word got out. New Omega soon shut them in, boarded up the basement doors from the outside world. For their own safety they were told.
“Hey, Sam. Croft.” Croft always went by his last name. Zack got the impression that it made him feel more intimidating this way. Less human. Like it was necessary.
“Zack,” they both said in unison like a chorus line. “Coming down to savour the delights below deck again?” Croft smiled to reveal a set of ugly brown teeth through the hole in his balaclava. He chewed tobacco like a Texan cowboy and spat a glob onto a brown patch on the floor. It was against regulation. Zack took a step back.
“You know that’s not my style, Croft. I’m here to do business. Just like always.”
“Level B3 has some good business,” said Sam, nudging Croft in the side which resulted in them both sniggering, celebrating the joke with a high five. Sam was huge, stood at nearly six foot seven, and almost as wide. “Ask for Roxanna. Tell her I sent you.” There was a glint in his eye that Zack didn’t care for, made him think that there was some mutual agreement between him and Roxanna. He knew people had to survive, but he liked to think that people did it off their own bats, not off somebody else’s.