Salinas ver. 2 (leaning towards calling it Solitary, but it's still TBD) Chapter 3 (Patreon)

The whole underground basement thing gave me some questions. Like, why did it exist? And why did everything in there seem to assume I’d be camping in the middle of nowhere? I haven’t even looked into most of the boxes, but Box #1, the very first one I was directed to by the tablet, was all camping and survival stuff. But I’m in a park, in a ruined city, with an intact hut. Camping seems dumb, even if I can’t find a toilet and they put the pump outside the hut. 

In solitary, you get a stainless steel thing that combines toilet, sink and water fountain all in one. There is even a shower built into the ceiling, going down to a drain in the corner. When you are in solitary, you are in. At least in Folsom. They didn’t let me out of my cell for a damned thing. I touched my stomach, full for the first time in what seemed like forever. Going to need to find somewhere to crap soon. I sure as hell don’t want to do it on the street like some damn bum.

Did I grab a little shovel or something? I did not. There were little shovels in there too. Damn. Guess the toilet thing just went way up on the priority list. 

I picked a nearby building to start checking out. It looked mostly collapsed, but in a rare flash of optimism, I decided that mostly collapsed meant a little okay. You don’t need to plug in a toilet, so it might still be running. In I went.

And straight back out again I went. That did not look at all safe. Completely empty, and I could see long cracks everywhere. Hell, there were mushrooms growing out of the damn concrete. Mushrooms! In concrete! That can’t be real. I poked at the outside of the building, aggressively. Felt like concrete. That was just too weird. 

I poked it a little more, then got out the machete and stabbed the wall a little bit. It sort of crunched like concrete, but it sort of didn’t. It came apart kind of like dirt once you started really digging into it. But it was, once, a big building. One corner was still standing; looked like it was four stories tall.

I hadn’t noticed before, but someone had taken out all the windows. No glass anywhere. I looked around at the other ruined buildings. No broken glass there either. Most of them had fallen down into heaps, barely recognizable as having been shops or apartment buildings or whatever. But no broken glass. No broken lights.

I kept moving through the ruins. No broken glass. No broken doors. Not a lot of doors, period. Not a lot of hinges for doors, though I could see where they had been attached. No ads, but a lot of murals of mostly cheerful things. Sometimes just inexplicable. There was a mural of a girl wearing a light blue dress. She had forty eyes and corn cobs for fingers, all looking up and reaching up like she was begging the sky for something. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know what for.

I really didn’t trust it, but I poked around the rubble next to the wall. It was a smaller building, and it looked like it only had a few big rooms. I’d guess a shop. No merchandise, though. No shelves, or chairs, or broken floor tiles. No floor tiles at all. I started working around the edges of the building. I wasn’t an expert in anything, but if you had a city, you had running water, right? Like, even in really bad cities, you had running water. And that meant pipes. And pipes were buried in the walls and in the ground. You couldn’t dig them out again without jackhammers. So somewhere, there were pipes.

It became an obsession to find something in the city that was… I couldn’t find the right word for it. Familiar. To find something where I knew it had to be. Every step I took felt like taking an extra step at the top of a flight of stairs.

I started trying to push around the rubble. Tossing bits to the side when they were small, shoving and sliding where they were bigger, sometimes just taking one bit of cement and bashing it into another to break it down. The walls crumbled into dirt and cement dust when I smashed ‘em. I found these thick bits of wood running through the cement. They kind of looked like bamboo, but different somehow. They were getting used like rebar, in the world’s worst cement walls. This didn’t make any damned sense!

I looked around the ruined city. I never worked construction, but I lived practically on top of the San Andreas fault. Call it the Californian in me, but big cement buildings should not collapse if you hit them with rocks. And they should have pipes in them. Wiring for lights and refrigerators. Sprinklers and fire alarms and hinges for the doors! And there shouldn’t be plants and damn mushrooms growing out of them. You could see little white fibers running through the broken bits of concrete. Whatever these ‘shrooms were, they were everywhere, and that included inside the still solid-looking walls. 

It took a lot of shoving around and breaking up, but I finally found a hole for a pipe. Sewage connection or water, I don’t know. I had a sudden spike of hope, because the hole had a load of red and brown stains around it. Rust, I was sure it was rust. I dove on the hole and stuck my hand in, trying to find iron or even plastic. 

My fingers came back dusty brown- wood. It felt like wood and smelled like seaweed and mushrooms. What pipe had been in there was gone now. It was all dust.

It took me a little while to come back to myself, sprawled over the rubble. Then I wondered if I really had come back to myself, or if this was another wave of crazy creeping through. I’m not looking up at the clouds, blocking the sun with my hand. I’m looking at the unpainted concrete ceiling of my little box, blocking the fluorescent light humming overhead. I’m not hearing the birds chirping and insects buzzing, it’s Joe G. four doors down, having one of his screaming fits.

I let my head roll to the side. It hurt to stare up at the light, whatever it was. I just lay there, trying not to put the pieces together. It was never going to make a picture- I was missing too much. 

Where there are people, there is garbage. There are cigarette buts, gum stuck to the sidewalk, and stickers put up by street teams advertising some band you don’t care about playing at a club you’ve never heard of. And even if you did want to see a show, the encore ended three years ago and the club went out of business the next morning. 

I helped Uncle Lee clean out Grandma Bobbi’s trailer after she died. Just an old single wide and she had never been rich but we filled his pickup AND Cousin Joey’s van AND Momma’s 1999 Buick LeSabre three times over. We were doing laps to the empty lot where we were divvying up the stuff. We wanted to do it at the trailer, but there was some argument with the trailer park manager about rent and the only way we could get out of paying what was owed was to clean out the trailer that day.

Even a crappy old single wide was jammed full of stuff. Every nook and cranny of it. But there wasn’t any ‘stuff’ here. Everything was gone, except what was in the hut, the murals, and the collapsing walls. Give it a couple more years, and it would just be the hut and a load of mounds scattered around. I don’t know how long it would take to become smooth land again, but I bet it would eventually.

Momma bought that car for two thousand dollars on a thirty percent interest loan because her credit was no good. Her credit score was so bad, she said, she didn’t have any credit at all. She wanted to work more, save money, pay her bills on time. She worried every day about paying her bills. It ate her up. But Walmart never gave her enough hours, and nobody wanted to hire an ‘old lady.’ 

Momma can’t be above forty, maybe forty five. Maybe it’s all the Virginia Slims withering her, making her old. Maybe it's waiting in the chair, watching her shows. I don’t know why I was thinking about her now. She had a house full of stuff too. We were broke as hell, but we had stuff. So what happened to all these people’s stuff?

I stared at the rubble across the street long enough to finally notice something that should have been obvious, but my eyes kept skipping over it. Plants were growing in the rubble. Mushrooms, but more than that- grass. There were some little bushes too, but mostly it was grass and short, stubby little plants. I really don’t know anything about plants, so I don’t know what they were, except for a few dandelions. 

No hoses, but lots of plants growing. It must rain here a good bit. So we aren’t in Southern California. But it doesn’t feel like northern California either. None of those dense forests or that rich farmland. Folsom is northeast of San Francisco, about half way to Reno. Funnily enough, the closest city was actually Sacrimento. Capital of California, but everyone has to check their phones to figure out where it is. I’m told Folsom is next to a lake, though I never saw it. 

Could this be Folsom in the past? Or the future? Or a different world or something? I don’t think the geography quite lines up, but the idea kept circling through my head. That I had never left Folsom.

I sighed and sat up on the rubble. There was a plant next to me, short thing, barely a couple inches tall with thick-ish leaves. Can’t say it looked like much. I gave it a little pat. It was growing fine in the rubble. Reckon I could do the same. Even if I was about to crap down a hole to nowhere, without a single sheet of TP handy.

I made my way back to the hut, and kept going a bit. South, towards the lake. If I remember correctly, Folsom was southwest of the lake it was next to, so if this lake was south of me then I couldn’t still be in Folsom, right? But the notion was still on me, so I decided to press on in that direction. The decision very nearly cost me a broken leg. 

I was barely ten yards past the hut when the ground suddenly dipped twenty feet sharply down. Clearly not natural, and clearly covered up entirely by the wild growing plants and shrubs. I slid a bit, grabbed on to some shrubs, damn near smashed my ankle on some rocks, but I stayed upright. At the bottom of the slope was another overgrown path, which led to a cut in the slope. A little more looking around found a roll up door. It was covered with dust and was a bit overgrown, but the door was solid.

Didn’t take a lot of figuring to figure out what was going on here. I’d wondered how they expected people to get those big crates up a spiral staircase. I was still fiddling with the giant garage-door when it hit me- they were prepared for just one person to turn up, but they were expecting a lot of people to turn up. That’s what this place was. It was set up for a whole bunch of people to come and get supplies. Why they were separated into color coded sections, I don’t know. 

The door was rigged for two or more people to lift. Figured. Time to go back inside and figure out just what all this was for. The lake would keep.

First thing I did inside was shake all the lights. The inside of the rolling door wasn’t hidden or anything, I just hadn’t spotted it in the dim space between the shelves. Interestingly, there were a few orange-red crates just in front of it too. But what there was the most of was brown crates. I had tagged this as the Brown Zone earlier, which raised an interesting point. If Red was “keep you alive right this minute,” why did the people who built this place figure the Brown chests were the next most important thing? It was getting on towards sunset. I’d spend the night here. Since there were no big jobs to do, I sat out in the ‘park’ and used the afternoon sunlight to play with the tablet some more. 

It had remembered where I left off. The next thing it wanted to show me how to do was set up a tent. Which, again, hut. But I didn’t have anything else to do, so why not? I went back in, grabbed a tent out of one of the chests, and set it up per the instructions. 

I’m just going to say it- it’s weird. It’s a weird tent. The cloth felt like some kind of nylon or other plastic fabric. It was long and low, wide enough for two, maybe, with a sort of front area that was covered by another bit of cloth. No zippers, but there were tie-offs where the fabric overlapped to keep water and wind out. 

I wondered why the shape looked so weirdly familiar, when it clicked. Pasta. It looked like the pasta from Applebees when I took Sharlyne out on a date that one time. The pasta tasted bad. I kind of knew it would. But Applebees was in the same shopping plaza as the Walmart my mom worked at, so I could borrow Momma’s car, get Sharlyne, have dinner, pick up Momma after work, then we would all head back to Momma’s place. 

Well. Whatever. It was pretty okay as tents went. There was a little sheet of that plasticky cloth stuff that the tablet said to roll out on the floor, then a soft spongy thing that inflated on its own, then some quilts that felt light but got uncomfortably hot if I left them on my lap for too long. You would be damn warm and comfortable in there, even in crappy weather. Lastly, haul the chest with the supplies into the front-covered-tent bit. It was like a tiny covered porch for the tent, that also tied shut. 

The chests were made from the same weird wood/plastic material as the door to the hut, just thinner and lighter. The poles holding up the tent felt more like thin bamboo or some other wood-thing, but were stiff and light like aluminum. Plastic-wood tent pegs. Glass jars with metal screw tops. And buildings that collapsed if you looked at ‘em funny. 

Tying it all together was a tablet that was set up for people who might be deaf, or illiterate, or coming in any numbers from a single person to hundreds of people. Whatever else these people were, they were thoughtful. Looking at the tent, I felt kind of guilty. I came over, and now I’m eating their food and stealing their stuff. Somebody ever took my food? It would be on sight. And I really didn’t want to fight with whoever left all this.

I looked around the messy park and up at the trees with red leaves. Why red? It didn’t feel like fall. Nothing else looked like its leaves were turning. Nothing else had red leaves. The one spot in the whole ruined city that had red trees-

The idea hit me with a jolt, making me jump to my feet. The only place in the city with red trees, and the whole city was falling down and falling apart. The buildings were crumbling and turning into dirt. Stuff was already growing on the collapsed buildings. They wanted a place people could find easily. Even if everything got overgrown, or even turned into a forest. Trees lived for hundreds of years, right? And they dropped seeds and whatever. Someone would see the red, and come looking. The hut wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t like I found a secret hatch or something. Hell, the door wasn’t even locked! 

The people who built this place knew someone would come, but they didn’t know who and they didn’t know when. So they set things up as best they could to make sure whoever did find it, would make it out okay. 

They weren’t leaving it for themselves. They would have hidden it or locked it up if they were. They were leaving it for whoever found it and needed it. I’ve heard of people leaving jugs of water in the desert for illegals to drink as they try to come in. Never heard of anything like this though. 

I know why there is nothing in the city- they stripped everything out. Everything. They must have rigged the buildings to collapse, or known that whatever was coming would make them collapse. Except now I have to ask, who were ‘they,’ exactly? And what could have been so terrible that you had to take everything and leave a survival package for whoever came next?