Salinas Chapter 3 (Patreon)

I wasn’t that lucky. I got to enjoy my orange jumpsuit a while longer. 

The bag was sealed and I do mean sealed. Rolled up like a dry bag, with the opening held shut with magnets or some damn thing, I don’t know what. I opened the bag. This managed, despite the strong competition, to be a top five worst decision I have made since… well, since.

I will put this plainly. I have served three combat tours, seen awful things, spent almost ten years in prison, and the inside of that backpack was still the nastiest, grossest damn thing I have ever seen. I saw a grenade hit a pig ‘manure’ lagoon once. This was worse. 

On the other hand, I really, really needed supplies, and a good backpack was always a good idea. It was clearly very good, because it kept all that foulness on the inside without leaking or disintegrating for however long it had been since the owner got a hatchet in the neck. I’d have to clean it somehow, but that meant water and soap. I sealed it back up, dropped the backpack and started searching the apartment. 

The results were… sad, I guess. Reminded me of homes that had been evacuated just before the bombs fell. A good sized apartment. A living room with a little dining area and what I am pretty sure was a kitchen. Another couple of rooms coming off the livingroom. They still had their doors shut, though. 

The kitchen area was pretty tiny. There was a sink and a long chest filled with awful, reeking sludge. I reckon it had to have been a refrigerator, once upon a time. There was only a single round puck on top of a stone counter, which I didn’t know the use of. Maybe a cooktop, or a hot plate? There was nothing that looked like an oven or a stove. 

There was something that sure looked like bar soap. Pretty nasty looking too, but more in the way it was all dried out and rock hard. Like the very worst sort of cracked and peeled skin. I didn’t want to try the faucet just yet. I didn’t trust the pipes. I checked the cabinets instead. Glory be- it looked like food. Ancient, turned to dust, food. Didn’t recognize the language on the labels. A lot of ‘em didn’t have labels, just dots and lines all jumbled together, printed directly on the box or bag.

I sighed. Maybe there would be canned food somewhere. Though if it was me, I’d have put every bit of canned food in my backpack. So. Something to look forward to under all that sludge, I guess. I kept searching.

Nothing that grabbed me in the living room. The furniture looked in a bad way. I don’t know if rats had been at it or if it was just time passing, but I wouldn’t care to sleep on the sofa, and I sure wasn’t going to risk my rear on any of the chairs. 

The scratch on my ribs was still leaking a bit, dribbling plasma down my side. It encouraged caution. Come to think of it, if there was any medicine, I wouldn’t be able to tell what it was from the label, and it might well be expired anyhow. Always knew optimism was for fools.

I didn’t see any picture frames, nor a television. Nothing of that sort at all, in fact. There were a few things I didn’t recognize, none much bigger than the tip of my thumb. Was this… were these people more, I don’t remember the words. Did they have better stuff than us? Like, ten, twenty, thirty versions ahead on phone design or whatever?

The word popped up in my head after a minute. No idea why I had forgotten it. Not like it was a strange word or a strange idea. Technologically advanced. I was starting to think they were more technologically advanced. Seems prison left more of a mark on me than I thought, and I already thought it marked me up good.

Well. No time like the present to make changes, right? Right. 

No pictures on the walls. No art anywhere that I noticed. Lots of those little thumb-tip sized glassy bumps, or patches of oddly dappled paint. It looked like some kind of sticker had peeled off or something, but I could see patterns of dots and lines and blobs that still darkened the once off-white paint. Similar to the stuff in the cabinet. 

I looked around the apartment again, trying to take it all in. Grey, dense, wall to wall carpet. Clearly some kind of nylon or plastic or something. Dark navy sofa. Dark wood for the chairs and what I’m going to call the dining room table. Might have sat four around it. Dark wood more or less everywhere, all in the exact same shade. Like a hotel room, maybe? Wasn’t fancy dark wood. Felt cheap and stained to make it dark.

Even for a technically-not-yet-ex-con, this place looked nasty as Hell. I’d lived in worse places, but there was something about the combination of boring and empty that said nothing good happened here even when people lived here.

I looked over at the body with the hatchet lodged in its neck. Then I carefully worked the machete free from the side of the pack. The cord holding it in place seemed to be plastic, as was the handle and sheath. Blade was probably a lost-

The blade was perfect. Literally perfect, not a speck of rust on it. I checked the blade. Not a hint of a burr. It popped a hair off the back of my arm no problem. Not sure it was shaving sharp but it was close. Damn. Wouldn’t have thought stainless steel could manage that, but whoever these people were, they made good steel.

Armed, I made my way into the other rooms. Closed doors? Could be anything in there. I eased open the door on my left, machete ready. Bedroom. Nice view of the apartment building across the street. Not very big. Bed that would hold two comfortably, a big dresser, and one of those thumb tip lumps sticking out of the wall where I would have expected a mirror, or a picture or something. Not even side tables. Dresser, bed, knob-thing, that was it. 

I crouched down, trying to look under the bed. Solid to the floor. Guessing there was storage under there. I’d search later, but I wanted to clear the other room first.

This room… I’m going to call it the bathroom. It was sealed concrete. There was something that looked like a showerhead built into the ceiling on one end, a bit of a sloped floor to a drain, and something that looked like one of those squat toilets you see in… well a lot of places. Bit of a fancied up hole in the floor, but everyone calls it a toilet so that’s what it is. Set into the wall under the shower was a shelf with a few plastic bottles on it. I’d guess shampoo or something, but who knows. 

And that was it. That was everything in the bathroom. Not a shower curtain, not a curtain rod, not toilet paper, nor paper holder. No toothbrushes, or toothpaste, nor cup to hold ‘em. Not even a sink. I’d never seen such a bathroom. It managed to be worse than prison. Didn’t know that was possible, but today was a good day for impossible things.

It was also time to try the water. I was pretty damn thirsty. It had been a long time since dinner, and I was worn out by the morning. I was on the top floor of an apartment building and there hadn’t been a water tank on the roof. City water, then, running through pipes in who knows what condition. Let’s not even imagine the state of any pumps that might be needed to get the water up here. Not a lot of reason to think the plumbing worked. Which wasn’t actually as worrying as the thought that it would work. 

Rushing water through long empty pipes. Noisy. All kinds of banging. Who knows what was listening to the noise. Drawn to it. Hungered by it.

Well, I’d die pretty quick if I didn’t drink something. I’d have to take the chance at some point, and I really wanted that backpack, along with whatever was in it. 

I hauled the pack under the shower and dumped it out. God the stench! The slime! How had it not dried out yet? Was the bag that water tight? I could see some solid things mixed in there, but I was gagging so hard, my eyes watered. Could barely see. I staggered back to the doorway. I’d have to make a mask or something before I ran back to the knob and tried the shower.

There was something in that thought… I blinked away the tears and forced myself to look at the back wall of the shower area. Looked around the whole room. No knobs for hot and cold. Nothing at all that looked like controls for the shower.

I went into the kitchen. There was a sink, a faucet for the water… and no controls there either. I ran my hand under the faucet, just in case it was automatic or something. It was not. 

I tried to steady my breathing, but it was hard. My heart was beating like a whole damn drumline, never mind a drum. The only controls anywhere that I had seen were the buttons on the elevator and the door handle. Except the door handle didn’t turn. You just pushed or pulled it. Ram bar on the door to the fire escape. Other than that, basically nothing. 

These freaks didn’t use physical controls unless they had literally no other alternative. I’d bet cash those buttons by the elevator had been there for decades and weren’t hooked up to anything anymore. The ram bar was there specifically in case of fires and power outages. Same with the doors- no keyholes, ‘cause there were no keys. 

I checked the door to the apartment. I did a chin-up on it and checked the top of the door. It was steel, with a bolt that came out of the top and bottom from the inside of the door. Way more secure than any place I ever lived voluntarily. So how did they get in and out of the apartment? Or do anything in the apartment? 

If this apartment was ‘normal’ for the city, minus the corpse, then everything ran on some system I didn’t have. Something on their phones or it was voice controlled or something. I tried to breathe through the fear. Deep breaths. Slow breaths. Still had a body to search. Might be what I need there. 

I went over to the corpse. It had gone all leathery. Much drier than what had been in the backpack. Still not exactly nice to touch. I’ve been around enough corpses. Moved enough of them. I’m credited with making a few, but at that range, I couldn’t hardly see what I was aiming at. Maybe I was the one to put ‘em down.

Frisked the body. Took off anything that still looked solid, which didn’t include clothes for some damn reason. The body was covered in dried on black horribleness. Like it was dipped in tar, but spread thin. Removed the hatchet. Removed a bracelet. Removed his shoes, then realized that they weren’t really shoes but that horrible tar-stuff, just thicker under his feet. That was a bad moment.

I looked over the bracelet. Braided steel with a simple clasp. Looked decent, actually. I tried it- fit my wrist just fine. No beeps or boops sounded. I tried waving it over the faucet. Nothing happened.

I searched the body again, looking for something. I flipped it over. Horribly light. Bodies get that way when they’re dehydrated. There was something sticking out of it’s half-on neck. It was stuck on pretty good, probably on account of the black tar stuff that went all the way up to the hairline. 

I gave whatever it was a good yank and it pulled away with a schlorp sound I could happily forget. Little nubbin came away surprisingly clean. Smaller than I originally thought. Could have sworn it was the size of a walnut when I was grabbing the back of his neck. Now a little stainless steel ball the size of a single pea rested on my hand. 

I damn near dropped it when it started vibrating. It was like a phone alarm. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. Then it stopped for a few seconds, and repeated the vibrations again. It was the only still active piece of technology I had come across so far. This gave me a fairly terrible idea. I’d like to blame the insanity of my time in the box, combined with fear and dehydration, for this decision. Truthfully, though, I’ve just never been very smart, and I’ve been told by many I have poor impulse control. 

A smart person wouldn’t press the vibrating silver pea to the back of their neck, right?