Greenhaus Part 1: A Storm Brews (2 page)

Before he could weigh any other departments, he was drawn into the conversation at the table. “
So Mr. Blue Eye,” Brent Lee Bagwell started, “When you gonna turn that paperwork in?” he asked.

“
I think he’s scared to commit, BLB,” remarked Virgil Green, the elder statesman of the Annex 23. “Prolly gonna take some cushy job in Education or R & D or go back to the lines.”

“
Nah, he’ll grow food in Agri,” chided Brent Lee as he got ready to return to work, pulling his bright red hair back into a pony tail. “Or better yet, he’ll put on that white cloak of Medical and be here to clean us up at the end of the day.” The two glassmen high-fived each other and had a laugh at Jacob’s expense.

“
That would fulfill both of your fantasies wouldn’t it?” asked Jacob. “Sorry to break it to ya, but I’m Engineering orange for life, just waitin’ to turn it all in,” he informed them.

“
All joking aside, that’s great news. We are glad you are staying Jacob. You remind me a lot of your old man,” said Virgil, paying Jacob the highest possible compliment.

Though he still was weighing other options, Jacob didn
’t want to tell his coworkers that. He didn’t want them questioning his loyalty. Knowing his time was short before he returned to the beams for the rest of the day, he thought about the jobs in the departments mentioned by Virgil and Brent Lee. There were jobs in each department that interested him greatly, but also many that he knew he would hate. The biggest factor in his decision was that none of the potential jobs seemed more appealing and personally rewarding than his current profession in Engineering, where he helped those, who in his estimation, needed help the most.

There was a certain pride he took in his job, knowing after he finished a dome that others would be recruited from the Outside to leave their toxic world behind forever. They would get cleansed, educated, and given a job to do, a
purpose. They would be fed, given clean clothes, and live longer, more fulfilling lives, than their brief, natty existence on the Outside.

Another reason he loved his job was Article IV, Section 1 of the Green Constitution which stated:
Expansion shall not cease until all children of Mother Earth have returned to feed from Her bounty within the walls of our colony.
His job would forever be in high demand.

Jacob, along with all children of the
‘Haus and any new recruits, memorized the Green Constitution. Few could recite it as well as Jacob, which was part of the reason he felt the reminders placed throughout the ‘Haus to be unnecessary. Few understood the importance of its purpose as well as Jacob. It caused him to become sympathetic to those living on the Outside. Knowing folks even younger than him were out there, dying from terrible diseases caused by the toxicity of their world saddened him greatly, though that sentiment was not shared by everyone in the ‘Haus. Jacob took no joy in watching sick, feeble Outsiders stray too close to Greenhaus defenses and get zapped, evaporating into thin air. He preferred instead to build the annexes that would be used to house them, to heal them, to help them.

Life expectancy on the Outside was at best
half of what it was on the Inside. If Jacob’s schooling was correct, Outsiders rarely lived past thirty, if the term used to describe their existence could accurately be called ‘living’. Jacob was a fourth generation ‘Haus’r and might live to be sixty years old, a whole extra lifetime than those on the Outside. Some, those with cleaner bloodlines in the ‘Haus, had higher life expectancies than even a fourth generation Haus’r like Jacob, due to their deeper, cleaner roots.

Jacob knew the final bell would soo
n ring, ending his lunch break. He would have to focus on the beams, so his daydreams and thoughts of his future would soon cease until power down came. Most of the crew was ready to start working, but Jacob wanted to soak up every last second of his free time. He had some tidying up to do, but he procrastinated on that chore as well. He slowly gathered his recyclables, all but his food tray and thermos, and forced them all into his cylindrical return pod. Jacob opened the hatch on one of the many chutes labeled “Recycling”, marked by their green lids and three white arrows bent to loosely form a triangle, and placed his pod inside. He closed the chute and hit the launch button. Within minutes his personal pod would navigate the maze of pneumatic tubes and land at the Department of Recycling return center in Annex. Then it would be separated, tallied, and the gredits would automatically load onto the Embedded Personal Chip (EPC) in his forearm.

For Jacob, that was all the reminding he needed to live simply a
nd cleanly. Capitalism and corporations had been abolished by the Green Constitution, but the greed that plagued them was still intrinsic in some. Citizens could still obtain personal wealth but not from the ways of Old Earth that rewarded a salary in exchange for voluntary contract employment, giving higher salaries in proportion to the perceived difficulty of the job. In the ‘Haus, employment was no longer voluntary.

Increasing wealth in this system was easy and Jacob was taught the tricks to do so by hi
s father. All that had to be done was to use less than the base necessities granted by the Sustainability Charts. Recycle everything. Conserve energy. The rules were simple, but many failed to grasp them, instead opting to mimic the wasteful civilization that preceded them.

Jacob hoped to pass these lessons on and considered how well his future career would coincide with the life of a family man. He pictured two boys, with sandy brown hair like his, but a slightly more muscular build. One had a set of gree
n eyes, like their mother, one a set of blue, but neither had the freakish look of Jacob’s eyes. He thought of the cleaner bloodline and potentially longer lifespan he would give them, cleaner and longer than he received from his parents.

After figurativel
y looking forward to the future and his days as a father, he started looking forward, literally through the glass of the break room wall. He stared through the commotion of coworkers getting ready for the second half of their day and into the empty tunnel on the eastern wall of the Annex 23. It was corrugated metal, covered with a hard, black plastic shell. The tunnel was used to deliver supplies to the unfinished annex and had little to block the entrance/exit. A heavy canvas curtain was the only thing separating those on shift from the Outsiders’ world and the numerous dangers it presented. Jacob took a long swig of his protein shake as he eyed the tunnel with suspicion. As he did he couldn’t help but wonder if those on the Outside were plotting an assault. He doubted they knew this area was so poorly defended and that they could walk right through the tunnel, unimpeded. He was certain if they knew, they would have already done so.

Unfinished annexes made prime targets for attacks. The exterior perimeter d
efenses stood guard against the threats out in wasteland. Unlike their counterparts around other sections of the ‘Haus, these defenses had no juice and offered no protection, remaining offline until power was wired to them.

Despite this apparent vulnerabil
ity, Jacob felt safe, because no attacks had occurred on this Annex or the others he had worked on. As the final bell sounded, he finished the last of his vegetable paste and protein shake, knowing that escape from a potential attack was just a whooshing door away.

Then Jacob looked in the opposite direction to pay homage to the objects that gave him his sense of security. The very things that kept the Outsiders at bay stood in a long row, their immense size shrinking as his eyes approached the horizon. Th
e towering tesla coils, sentinels of the city, stood watch around the clock. The blue glow of raw energy flowed through them, just like it did through wires and the domes above, daring anything from the Outside to step within their range.

Ella Stone lay prone in her bunker, peering through a gas mask into binoculars toward the behemoth city made of glass and steel that still held a bit of its blue glow from the night before. The large doe eyes focused on the tall coil towers t
hat stood in single file row along the outside perimeter of Glass City. While her hazel eyes stared at them, they returned a menacing stare of their own, tempting her, or anyone else to venture into range.

Her breath was loud, magnified by her jet black ga
s mask. The noise surrounded her in the small bunker; its vibrations shook her slightly. An external side-mounted filter held the coal that kept her air breathable enough. The row of defenses glow a soft blue, matching the blue that bathed the rest of the city. A massive metal sphere sat atop each of the conical coils shined the brightest, its immense weight and the heavy wire coil that carried its charge was supported by thick tubular steel rods and lattice-style construction towers. Feared by Ella and all of her kind, the coils were loaded with enough volts to make anything that wandered within 100 yards of the structure they surrounded, to disappear into thin air.              

Ella
’s head spun a quarter turn counterclockwise, checking the western wall of her confined space, counting the fourteen notches marked off, one for every person she watched take their final steps. Some were from her camp, some just wanderers. It was the preferred mode of suicide for anyone living through the late stages of the Sickness. The process always started the same with mild, flu like symptoms, except those afflicted with late stage Sickness never cured. Fatigue, boils, and lesions followed, accompanied by crippling pain and eventual blindness. Little was known about the causes, but one thing Ella knew for sure, the second stage meant the end was near. Once the pain became too much to bear, only one cure existed.

Fast and painless, one only had to wander
close enough to Glass City and the voltage running through the coils would handle the rest. It’s something, once witnessed, that can never be forgotten. Ella remembered all fourteen episodes vividly, the bodies disintegrating into a mist of blood, flesh, and bone, leaving just a stain where seconds before a living person stood. The fully charged blue rays changed the coil towers from innocent guardian of the city, into deadly assassin in a literal flash. The electric blue current patiently stalks its prey, circling the network of power lines. The stain and a burnt flesh smell is all that remains once the deed is done, something Ella promised herself she would never do no matter how great the pain.

She was beginning to suffer from early stage symptoms: fevers, night sweats, and the occasional coughing or sneezing of blood, but many lived in this stage for a decade or more. Even so, she did her best to hide the symptoms from the Elders, who may choos
e to reassign her to another position in the camp if they knew of her condition. More than anything else, Ella loved being a spotter and since there was no telling how long the first stage lasted, it was easy to keep her symptoms under wraps given her extended time in isolation.

Her biggest problem was staying interested, since she already knew the routine of the Insiders well, it rarely varied. After becoming bored with the towers, Ella fixed her eyes on several men, laughing it up while stuffing their face
s, wishing she could deliver the lot of them to the blue ray of death. She would enjoy adding those notches to the total. Laughter was a rare commodity on the Outside and every time she spied the men doing it, she imagined they were mocking her and her kind. The rage burnt white hot inside her.

Ella scratched her head where the straps from her gas mask itched, yet another thing that irked her. The objects of Ella
’s hatred weren’t limited to the laughter of men she didn’t know or an itchy head. A million other little things could trigger the worst of tantrums. The list was exhaustive: the food Insiders ate, the supplies they horded, their bright colorful world, ability to breathe clean air, drink clean water, eat uncontaminated food and on and on. Ella believed if the flowers and wildlife on the Inside could talk, they too, would mock her.

Ella
’s doe like hazel eyes floated around some more, looking for something to hold her attention. She trained her binoculars on the scaffolding that rested eight stories above the small glass room where the men ate. Focusing specifically on the giant suction cups that supported the scaffolding, Ella hoped that if she stared long and hard enough, she could cause the whole setup to collapse and crush the men as they consumed their midday meal.

Ella was not alone in this manner of thought. The prevailing theory among the camps of the Masked everywhere was to hate the Oppressors. The indoctrination of these beliefs begins at birth and continues onward. Though Masked everywhere sh
ared similar beliefs, Ella’s hatred and contempt was more intense than most, her fits of rage at the smallest things, just one negative byproduct. It ran deep in Ella’s blood and was a major reason she was made a spotter, to keep her volatile personality isolated for days at a time on scouting missions.

The amenities she saw the Oppressors
enjoying were things she and her kind would never possess. If she was lucky, she’d get one good meal a day and a snack or two. Sometimes enough hands weren’t available to hunt insects and at other times the tuber gardens yielded nothing. 

After pushing off her mask, she took a big swig from her canteen. This water tasted slightly less metallic than at other times, and she wished she could remember which stream she collec
ted it from. Clean water existed only in her dreams, or on the Inside, but some tasted better than others. This went down smooth, with little aftertaste, the best she had swallowed in some time. Boiling water helped remove the disease and toxicity when things could be spared to burn, but fires were a rare luxury in minicamps. 

Her current minicamp was led by Elder May Stone, the short, troll
-ish woman who had a soft spot for Ella. The most recent roll call returned only nineteen names, but at its peak the Stone camp had twenty-seven. The rest made their final trek, the trip to end it all. She expected the ranks of the living to drop by a few more and soon. Several Stone campers were in the Sickness’ late stages, as were several others from the allied minicamps in the region that shared the fortified base. Ella pleaded with each and every one of them not to do it while she was on duty, even though she understood wanting the pain to end. The tortuous screams that drifted through the fortress haunted her dreams, but she still preferred not to witness it, even though the lessened burden was rejoiced more than the loss of life was mourned. As cruel as it sounds, it was one less mouth to feed, one less body to carry and care for, a concept Ella learned early on. Being the youngest spotter in the allied camp, she still had a lot to learn. Only eighteen, but likely over halfway through her lifespan, her clock was ticking. She was bound and determined to make her mark, to leave a lasting legacy that would be remembered generations later, but had yet to figure out how.

Her eyes began to ache and a headache formed behind them, so she put down her binoculars for a break. The monotony of her job caused intense boredom. She passed the time by twirling a braid around her fin
ger, waiting for something exciting to happen. What she really wanted to do was get out and roam, but that was dangerous and prohibited. Her report to the Elders was due soon and she had to vacate the bunker before the looming power down brought the Rangers out to scour the fields.

Ella was adventurous by nature and her unfamiliarity with the surrounding area called her to explore. The Stone camp only recently settled in the area, their previous location was routed by a troop of raiders to the north. Rumors
of cleaner air and water to the south brought them here. After setting up their new minicamp, they found allies willing to share the makeshift fortress of old cars, trucks, buses, and scrap. Ella put her desires aside and started to pack her bag for the two hour stroll back to the base camp that provided cover and an easily defensible position for her and her allies. Home to over a hundred in total, the maze of bent and twisted metal contained a cot with her name on it under one of the many small canvas tents that littered the grounds in and around the fortress.

While having a large group helped them defend their home turf, there was no safety in numbers for Ella or the other spotters, where isolation and stealth allowed them to spy on the enemy. Ella
’s three day turn in the bunker would end only hours after the midday meal of the men and her observation report would help the Elders plot their next move, which as Ella always hoped, was an attack on the Oppressors. Unable to read or write, she had to verbally dictate her findings to Elder May Stone. Even without these abilities, she had a great memory and knew the routine of those she watched: when they arrived, when they ate, when they left, when the power was switched off. She had synchronized their routine with her internal body clock, doing so unconsciously as a survival mechanism to decrease the risk of being caught as she came and went between her bunker and the fortress.

Ella butted the binoculars back up to the lenses of her mask and watched as the men
finished their meals. Ella despised the men she was watching, taking their laughter as a slight to her and her people. Though she could not hear what they were saying, Ella often imagined being in these conversations, another way to spell the boredom. As they were eating, the hypothetical conversations taking place in her head were only interrupted by the growling of her stomach. It was a constant struggle to silence her empty belly, so to distract herself from the hunger pangs she continued these conversations in her head, the topics dark, and the tones of the men unflattering.

“
Bill I can’t wait until we finish this project, think of all the extra room we will have!” exclaimed this imaginary character in an evil voice followed by a sinister laugh.

“
I know Roger, me either. The funny thing is we don’t even need more space, but it’s good to know we can take what we want and there isn’t really anything the Masked can do about it, ha ha!” All the voices sounded the same in her head, even if the names were always changing and generic. All their comments were snide in nature and their laughs dry and sinister, a way for her to dehumanize those she wished to attack.

In addition to watching the men and women on the Inside and observing their routine, she had to keep
a look out for the Rangers once the power was cut. Ella knew that Sickness or war would take most of them in death, but the Rangers would take the rest alive. It was one of the few things she feared, because those taken, were never seen or heard from again.

The Rangers modus operandi was another of the many things that angered Ella. They never had the gall to attack the Masked fortress where the greatest strength was congregated, but instead, focused their attention on smaller camps and individuals that s
trayed too far from the pack. This refusal to meet the Masked on the battlefield in a full scale war, preferring instead to stay behind their fortress of glass and steel, safely protected by the electric current running through the steel coils, bothered Ella greatly, more than anything else the Oppressors did.
Why can’t they just meet us on the battlefield?

With no visible sun, it would be hard for her to tell the time of day were it not for her internal clock set by the observed routine of those she watche
d. The yellow disk floated somewhere in the sky, but was hard to spot on days like today when the haze and clouds were thicker than normal, and the fury of the skies told her a storm was brewing.

The power would soon be cut and the blue glow running throu
gh the lines, into the steel towers, and covering every inch of the domed tops of Glass City would cease for roughly five hours. Crews of men then cleaned the glass and performed maintenance on the coils and power lines, while the Rangers swept the field, checking the burned out hulls of vehicles disabled by EMP blasts, another key defense mechanism. Ella frequently thought to herself, “
If I ever had charge of my own camp, it would be now that I would attack.”

Even from her prone position,
lying in her small bunker just atop a hill 2,000 or so feet from the gleaming colony, she was not safe during the power down. The Rangers would surely spot her, as they had Jesslyn Cloud, the spotter who watched just a bit too long. Ella was careful, where Jesslyn had been careless, and she paid the ultimate price. Ella would not expose herself and become an easy target the way Jesslyn had.

Her internal clock was telling her it was time to go, before the Rangers emerged like blue roaches from Glass City. She crawled from h
er position, grabbed her rifle and used the butt end to drive the stakes that held her camo covering flush with the ground, to conceal the entrance. Ella did not mind moving her position around the hills if necessary, but the bunker provided more cover than the camo netting she used to cover her in other places, so she mostly spied from here and wanted to keep the location hidden from her enemies.

After securing the bunker, she high tailed it to the other side of the hill, out of sight of any who could be w
atching her from Glass City. She ran in a full sprint for as long as she could, vigorously pumping her arms and legs while she grasped her bullet-less rifle with a white knuckle grip. She ran until her breath was gone and she knew it was safe.