Solitary (Salinas 2.0) Chapter 2 (Patreon)

The sun rose over ruined buildings that were falling apart into dirt. Trees and mushrooms and grass were already growing over most of them. Couple more years, and you wouldn’t know a town had been here at all. Some walls were holding up okay, with murals of the trees and… farms, maybe? Or the Garden of Eden. Smiling people picking fruit.

I looked at the murals a minute longer. People on there were painted all kinds of colors. Reds and blues and pinks and yellows, all fading to brown and sand as the paint peeled away. They were all smiling.

I couldn’t hear anyone. Couldn’t see anyone. I took a step out, then another. Nothing. Just birds in the distance. The grass and dirt rustling around. No music. No AC running. No cars. Which, in California, should be impossible. I looked around where I stood, mostly seeing what I wasn’t seeing. 

The roads had been paved, once, but they were already falling apart. Grass was growing up through the cracks in the concrete. Loads of small buildings, or what I thought were once small buildings, all falling apart. But it was all clustered together. Nowhere to park. In fact, I could only see one road big enough to get a car down. 

It was a ruin, but… I don’t know how to describe it. A ghost town built by people that didn’t know how towns worked. Everything all jumbled together. I walked forward a little bit further, and heard a soft thud from behind me. 

I spun, waiting to get jumped. Shouldn’t have bothered, it was just the door closing behind me. I remember the door I saw in the cell- solid steel, with a wheel in the middle. Like something off a boat. This was an ordinary wooden door that didn’t even have a doorknob. It closed, then fell off its hinges. Behind it was nothing much. Dirt, rubble, more little plants growing. No sign of Folsom. 

I figured I had lost it. People do, in solitary. You see all kinds of things that aren’t there. What else could it be? Still, beat being in the box.

The door I had come through was still green on this side. Green means go. Go meant explore. I took the green door as the middle of my mental map and started looking for landmarks. Not a whole lot in sight. 

I oriented on the sun. Sun rises in the east, right? So to the east was a small bunch of trees… I don’t know what you call that. About twenty trees. What made me pay attention to them was that they were bright orange and red, like it was fall. But it wasn’t, it was late July, so the trees shouldn’t be red. At least they looked nice.

Putting the back to the sun ment I was facing west. To the west were more broken down buildings. Not a whole lot over that way, but maybe I could find something good over there. Something to eat or drink or something. Maybe something I could sell. Copper pipe. Wire. Whatever. I looked for something I could remember. There was a big picture of an eye filled with stars on one wall. Couldn’t see it from very far, but it would do. 

I tried to picture a compass in my head. North-east-south-west. So if I’m facing west, that means north is to my right, and south is to my left. I looked right. This one was easy. Way, way in the distance were mountains. They looked very far off, but there wasn’t any smog or anything. I could just make out the tops of ‘em over the collapsing buildings. I shrugged at ‘em. Never been a mountain guy. Maybe I’d check ‘em out. Not today, though. None of the buildings up that way looked any more interesting than anywhere else from where I was standing, so I turned to the south.

The south was a little more interesting. Nothing really stood out, but the big, actually-usable-by-cars road ran south, so something was down that way. I stood on the road and tried to squint, but didn’t see much. Eventually, I climbed up onto one of the more solid looking roofs for a better view. Just at the edge of what I could see was a bar of hard light. Shimmering, bright orange shading up to white. I looked a while longer, until it clicked. Water. A big lake, or maybe even the ocean. South of me was some kind of water, but like the mountains, it was a really long way off.

Mountains to the north, water to the south, red trees to the east, starry eye to the west. Green door in the middle. Good to know where I was, but nowhere looked like a useful destination. Even before finding things I could sell, I had to find something to eat and drink. They hadn’t fed me much in the box. Empty city like this, people would have left something behind. It wasn’t stealing if it was left behind, right? 

I walked towards the red trees, for no other reason than the sun was coming up behind them, and it had been the sun that called me through that door. It was a good few blocks; the trees were pretty huge. You could see them easily over the top of the ruined buildings. The buildings were clustered together, and so fallen in, I couldn’t really tell what they had been before.

It took me two blocks and a lot of irritation before I realized there were no signs. No street signs. No billboards. No signs over the doors. There were murals here and there, but they didn’t seem to mean much. Someone singing and people playing instruments around them. People doing things with string. I don’t know what they were doing, but they seemed happy about it. 

No advertising. Nike advertises. Walmart advertises. McDonalds advertises all the time. They got those huge golden arches on poles you can see from way down the highway, and another sign over the door and you can’t look around a Mickey D's without seeing those arches and branding everywhere. On the people. On the cups, on every scrap of paper and all the screens. Everywhere you go, businesses are screaming at you.

I advertised. All word of mouth, obviously, but you gotta let people know you are selling if you want them to come buying. Even meth can’t sell itself, and I had to earn to eat. Had to earn enough to get a place for me and Sharlyne. Wonder if she moved in with Carlos yet. 

I bet she did. Sharlyne never said anything but she always slept over at friends’ places. At my place. I remember that even when we were getting heated with each other, she would sleep on my Momma’s couch rather than go home. I don’t need to close my eyes to hear her crunching the plastic covered cushions as she tossed and turned all night. Waking up with her face smudged with yellow from the nicotine covering every inch of the room.

Momma smokes Virginia Slims. The whole room turns blue-gray as she watches her shows, sound way up, waiting for Walmart to call and schedule a shift. Seems like they hardly ever call. She just keeps filling those ashtrays, then yelling for me to empty ‘em and pick her up more smokes while I’m out. 

It was quiet here. Browns and greens and soft reds, and all the bright murals on the wall were fading into the background too. All these little buildings clustered together. I’m pretty sure some were apartment buildings, but not big ones. These looked more long and low, like once they were four or six stories tall, not forty. I’m just guessing. They had all fallen in. 

Were there coyotes in here? Or wolves or something? Should be, right? Coyotes can live basically anywhere. One day, people are gonna figure out the reason that coyotes howl at night is that they are talking to their cousins on the moon. I felt like howling. I don’t like walking too far from my car. Makes it hard to run if ops turn up. If someone decides you’re dealing on their turf. Well. I’m a long damn way from my car, wherever I am. 

The red trees made a little… I want to say park, but again, I don’t really know what to call it. There was all kinds of crap growing in there, and I didn’t recognize all of it. No grass. It kind of messed me up, but there was no grass. The park was all little shrubs and things growing between the wide-spaced trees. Some flowers scattered around, which I guess is nice, but so what? You can’t have concerts there. Nobody’s going to get a hot dog cart in there, or sell lemonade or whatever. So why do it?

I looked at it a while longer and just couldn’t figure it out. The plants weren’t in flower beds or anything, just scattered around. It was a goddamn mess. There was a path running through the middle of it- flat stones with gravel around it. Wasn’t enough to stop all the weeds. Some were still pushing through the little rocks. Guess Roundup wasn’t a thing here, or whatever people sprayed on their walkways. Carlos said they used Roundup when he worked landscaping. I don’t know what they sprayed on the fields where I was picking tomatoes.

Looked like there was a little dome or hut or something at the end of the path. I followed it into the mess. At the end of the flagstones was a big open area around a little adobe hut. “Big” in this case being about ten feet on any side of the dome shaped building, and the building looked like it could hold a mower, maybe some shovels and rakes and things, and not much else. 

The door wasn’t painted, but I wasn't sure what it was made out of either. Wasn’t steel, nor wood, and if it was plastic, it didn’t quite look or feel like any plastic I knew of. Not locked, so there was that. Just some kind of heavy latch thing. 

Inside was a spiral staircase going down. Something was written on the wall- some kind of language I didn’t recognize. It looked something like letters and something like the Coke font and something like… I don’t know. They weren’t hieroglyphics or anything, but I don’t know what they actually were. 

Down I went. There were light fixtures on the wall, but no switches. And they didn’t work anyhow. The inside of the hut was pretty well lit regardless. There was something that looked like a little skylight at the top of the dome but it was sending light all around the inside of the hut and down the stairs too. Seemed like more light coming in than such a small hole should be able to manage. No idea how that worked, but I’d take it. No door at the bottom of the steps, just a big open room and a load of boxes on shelves. Each one neatly labeled in a language I couldn’t read. They did have pictures on them. I just didn’t recognize what they were pictures of. 

It was a pretty big basement. More of those non-functional lights on the walls, but I could see okay with the light from the skylight. The room was sorted into four sections- brown, blue and green took up a third of the room each, and right by the stairs was a smaller area with boxes marked in a reddish-orange color. Kind of the same color as the leaves on the trees in this park. 

There was a little screed at the bottom of the stairs, and it was still displaying something. I poked it. The screen lit up for a fraction of a second, and a rough looking picture of the screen being shaken popped up. I took a closer look at it, and it was more like a phone-sized tablet mounted on the wall. I could lift it off. Looked kind of cheap, honestly, but maybe it was worth something. I picked it up and shook it. And then the whole thing lit up for me.

More words, and now it was talking to me. The screen was kind of crap. My phone, the one I had before Folsom, had a way better screen. This was completely low rez and janky looking. It wasn’t flickering or glitching, it just looked faded and not sharp. And then it turned off again. I shook it again, longer this time. It switched back on. I hunted around and, yep, something blinking up on the top right corner. Must be a battery thing. I shook it. And kept shaking it. Eventually it stopped blinking, but I still got the sense that it was on 1%.

I flashed it around, trying to use it as a flashlight. The screen wasn’t remotely bright enough. Still no sign of a lightswitch anywhere. I thought it over a minute, and went and checked one of the not-working lights. Just had to lift it off a couple of pegs and then shake it. The whole thing was a rectangle shape the size of half a brick. I shook it for a minute and put it back. It glowed a nice white color. The light wasn’t super bright, but it was decent. There were five other lights scattered around the room. It could be bright as Hell in here, if you wanted it to be. Or not, if you didn’t.

I looked back at the screen and nearly dropped it. For some reason, it was way brighter in the light. I rocked it back and forth- bright in the light, dimmer in the dark. Pretty sure screens are meant to work the opposite way. I played with it a little longer, then shrugged. They had barely fed me in solitary. I had been walking and exploring for a little bit. I could do with a meal and something to drink. 

Hunger stabbed my belly like long needles. Yeah. I needed to eat. I wanted fruit. Canned peaches. Canned pineapple. An actual apple, though I can’t imagine anything fresh still being good. Maybe this place had super preservatives. No Roundup, but they could keep their food fresh forever. 

The tablet kept chirping at me, then changed. A picture popped up of a cartoon figure pointing at its ears, then shaking its head. I tapped on it. The device went silent, but the picture changed again. It was a block of text, and next to that, a picture of a book with a figure looking at it and shaking their head. I tapped the picture. 

Three cartoon figures popped up. Real simple, basic looking. One was brown and ripped. Big guy, but had a very chill, can-do vibe. Not like blue. Slender and the way they posed with their hands said they were going to be a sarcastic, high maintenance jerk. Last one was green, and they exhausted me more than Blue. They looked so chipper. Their little cartoon hands were thrown up into the air in a ‘Yaay!’ pose, and I don’t think I ever did that pose even when I was a kid. 

They all started waving at me. I waved back. I don’t think they saw me. I didn’t see anything that looked like a camera on the tablet. Pretty cheap thing, whatever it was. 

If the battery ran out, would it save my information, or did I have to go back to the beginning? Just to be on the safe side, I shook it for a couple of minutes. The hunger was really starting to gnaw on me now. The screen changed. A orange-red person popped up, then a picture with two orange-red people, three, five, ten, more and more. All arranged on a grid. I tapped the one-red-guy picture, and it snapped back to the Brown, Blue, Green trio. 

My hand to God, these cartoons were giving me a pitying look. At least Brown was being a bro about it. Had that… “Damn, that’s rough bro, want to go lift weights about it?” energy I saw in the really serious meatheads. Blue looked like I had confirmed that I was the loser she always thought I was, and Green was on some “I can fix him!” trip. 

The screen flickered. It did that every time it changed- it was quick, but it was a little flicker every time something new came up. No way you could watch Netflix on this, you would go insane. One of the boxes in the orange-red area was displayed, with a big arrow pointing at it. The label on it was highlighted. There was a picture of… I don’t know what I was looking at. Same cartoony style as Brown, Blue and Green, but I don’t know what this was supposed to be. 

I found the crate and opened it. First thing I saw was jars. Some of the jars had food in ‘em, others had powders. Then there were light pots and pans, cheap things with folding handles. A few bundles of cloth. A green sack with a blue circle stamped on it. Sticks. What looked like a folding saw, axes, machetes, loads of stuff. Emergency supplies. They were the “What is the very first thing a solo person might need” supplies. 

I looked back at the tablet. The picture flashed a couple times. I tapped it. The crate opened, and the contents were laid out. A little orange figure was next to the different parts. Shivering? Grab this cloth here. Which, yeah, does look like a blanket. Wet? Same cloth. Hmm. Raining? Make a shelter with this other cloth here. Except I’m in a not too hot, not too cold adobe hut right now, so… no. Bleeding? Broken leg? Use the green bag with the big blue dot. Yeah, it all checks out. 

Didn’t need a cartoon to tell me to eat what was in the jar. The water one was… different. Apparently, I was supposed to use the little plastic scoop in one of the white-powder jars and put exactly one scoop into a full jar of water. Shake it up well, then drink. Each step had its own picture, you had to keep tapping through to get them all. Cute. Now where was I supposed to get water from? Because I didn’t see a tap anywhere in here. Maybe there was a hose hookup for the garden outside somewhere. Sometimes those were locked, though, to keep bums from drinking the water.

I sighed and grabbed a food jar. It was layered. Looked like some kind of lentils at the bottom, a lot of vegetables in the middle, and a lot of something white on top. Tofu? Cheese? Didn’t look moldy or anything. No bread or fruit. None of the other jars looked any better, and I was hungry. 

I’d need water if I was going to eat that. No way I could digest it all, or even swallow it all, without water. No water in the box. Seemed like an odd thing to forget. I went looking.

Didn’t find a hose hookup outside. Did find a pump around the side of the building. It took a long time to get working. I followed the instructions from the tablet and mixed one scoop of the powder in with the jar full of water. I had kind of hoped it would be Kool-Aid or something, but it just tasted chemical. Didn’t matter. The food was better than anything I had eaten in ages. 

I sat out on the ground in that overgrown garden and let the sun soak in. Not sure what the hell I was feeling. Just sitting out there and letting the sun soak in. Then the bugs got into my food and kind of ruined the moment but even as I was fighting them off, I was smiling.

There was a sack on a sling in the box. Backpack would have been better, but I’d take it anyhow. I loaded up the sling with a jar of water, a jar of food, a tarp (in case it did rain,) and whatever other odds and ends I could cram in there. Didn’t think I’d need an ax or saw, but the machete was a must. No guns, which sucked and kind of freaked me out but I guess I don’t need to add Illegal Possession of a Firearm to my Escape from Federal Custody. Maybe it was a magic door to Canada or something. I didn’t overthink. I’d be back later. 

Time to go out and keep exploring. I’d spent enough time in the dark.