Suffer The Children

“Open,” I demanded as I grabbed my ID card and headed for the door. It remained stubbornly closed. “I said, open!”

“I’m sorry Stephen, you appear to have forgotten your rebreather,” House responded in an irritating sing-song voice. “Please put on your mask and try again.”

“I don’t need the blasted mask, I’m not leaving the habitat!” I argued, but there was no point.

“I’m sorry, I cannot open the door unless you are wearing your mask. The weather today is

-24°f with smog clouds and a chance of acid rain. All citizens must wear suitable attire.”

I sighed and grabbed the helmet, shoving it over my head till the magnets connected with my body glove.

“Happy now?” I demanded. The door slid open.

“Have a nice day!” House chirped.

Great, now I was running late. The corridor seemed to sense my rancor, playing a scene of rain falling in a gray and gloomy forest. I made my way to the main hub, glad to notice others carrying their helmets too, all looking equally disgruntled about it.

I slid my ID into the lock and waited for Office to scan me.

“Hello, Stephen. You are seven minutes late. Would you like to leave an explanation on your account?” Office asked, sliding the door open smugly.

“Yes, I had an argument with House over the weather,” I replied, stomping into Office and dumping the helmet next to the coffee machine.

“I am sorry to hear that. The weather today is -24°f with heavy smog and a 60% chance of acid rain.”

“No shit,” I responded sarcastically.

“Smog and acid rain only, no excrement I’m afraid Stephen,” Office replied breezily, and I resisted beating my head against the wall. She would probably tell me I needed a helmet to do that, too.

I sat down at my desk and turned on the console, checking the different sectors of our habitat. Everything looked okay, there had been a fire in sector eight in the night, but not severe enough for House to wake me, so I probably didn’t need to investigate further. I poured myself a coffee and got to work.

The next few hours were spent adjusting sprinkler levels in the greenhouse, basic janitorial tasks. Office was irking me, playing some pan pipe music at a barely imperceptible level, and regularly squirting vanilla scent through her vents. She had the window set to a tropical beach scene, turquoise waves lapping against white sandy shoreline, swaying palm fronds overhead. I’m sure she was trying to ease my irritability, but it was having the opposite effect. It just reminded me how far away my next vacation day was.

A message popped up on the external server. That was unusual, we rarely had contact with the other habitats these days, since travel between them had been prohibited for quarantine purposes. I clicked the link, the video message filling my console.

I could see at once that things were not okay. The screen was filled with panicking people, running to plug holes in the habitat’s glass walls, screaming and calling out for help. A woman moved in front of the camera, her blue eyes wide with fear.

“This is Philadelphia Habitat, requesting aid from New York Habitat! Repeat, we need help now! We’ve been hit by a freak storm, hail the size of tennis balls! Habitat is breached and we request evacuation for the children immediately!”

She ran off screen, joining a crocodile of youngsters in rebreathers heading towards the emergency shelter.

“Office!”

“Yes, Stephen?”

“Get me the Commander on vid-call, now!”

“The Commander is in a meeting at the moment, Stephen. Would you like to record a message for him?”

“No! I need to speak to him immediately, it’s an emergency!”

“There is no need to shout, Stephen. I will attempt to contact the Commander now.”

Great, now I had offended Office as well as House. Today was just going great for me.

“Hello?” The Commander appeared on the console, looking grouchy. “What’s all this hullabaloo!”

“Sorry Sir, it’s an emergency. Philadelphia Habitat has requested immediate evacuation of their children, they’ve suffered a breach due to a storm.”

“You called me out of an important meeting because of some inclement weather?” The Commander blustered.

“Hardly, Sir. They’ve experienced major damage, they need our help immediately!”

“Hrumph. Well, I’m sorry to hear that, but really, what can we do? It’s an hour away, and we are understaffed as it is. I can’t just go sending a team out willy-nilly like this! Most irregular.”

“But Sir…”

“Not another word!” He ordered. “You’ll handle this yourself, Stephen. I’m sure it is all a big fuss over nothing. Why don’t you take out one of the vehicles and head on over, probably they just need a decent janitor to help with repairs.”

The screen went dead.

“The Commander has left the chat,” Office announced with a distinct air of ‘I-told-you-so’.

So, I was on my own with this. Typical. I headed for the door. “Open!” I demanded.

“I’m afraid…” Office started, and I grabbed my helmet.

“Yeah, yeah, rebreather, I know. Just bloody open already!”

The garage was three moving walkways from Office, so it was ten minutes before I found myself looking around the various public service vehicles, trying to figure which to take. The Ambulance was fastest, with its hovercraft ability, but I settled for an old school bus. Painted yellow, it was by far the largest vehicle in the garage, on its giant wheels raised up high, able to handle the broken roads and sinkholes with ease. I figured the extra time to travel there would be compensated by the number of people I could bring back. I wasn’t too sure the hovercraft was acid-rainproof, either.

Driving the bus was strange, I realized I hadn’t left the Habitat in over a month. Even then it was just in the buggy, checking up on some drainage issues in sector six. I felt over-dressed in my bulky yellow protective suit and the heavy rebreather mask. As the Habitat disappeared into the smog behind me I found it more and more difficult to keep to the road, swerving to avoid burned out hulks of old cars and broken motorway bridges. The abandoned ruins of homes and businesses loomed on either side, almost as creepy as the frequent graveyards. I was spooked long before the storm front hit me.

‘Chance of acid rain,’ my arse! A great wall of sickly yellow slammed into the front of the bus, hissing where it hit the paintwork, sheet after sheet drumming down on the metal roof. It sounded like the 4 horses of the apocalypse riding over my head! Wind shook the bus from side to side like a toy, and visibility was near zero. I had to rely on the GPS overlay to see where the road turned and twisted ahead. If this was what had hit Philadelphia Habitat, no wonder they were in trouble. We hadn’t seen storms like this in almost a century.

The one-hour journey took almost three, despite pushing the bus beyond its capabilities. As I pulled up to the garage entrance of the Habitat I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

The dome of Philadelphia Habitat was just… gone. Completely caved in, jagged metal support struts jutting up towards the angry skies like an umbrella with the fabric torn away. It was impossible – the glass was bullet proof, for god’s sake. How had a storm taken it down like this?

The garage door opened as if it had been expecting me, and I drove inside. The vehicles were almost all missing, I presumed taken by the terrified residents in their attempts to escape. I hadn’t seen any on my way down from New York, but more likely they had headed for the Ocean City Habitat, it was a little closer and on the leeward side of the storm. I parked up and hurried towards the main hub, looking for survivors.

As I walked through the fog I saw bodies everywhere. It shocked me - so many people lying sprawled amid the wreckage, no helmets on. For the first time I felt grateful for the warnings House and Office had given. I wouldn’t go anywhere without my rebreather from now on! Plants lay overturned in the main hub, their leaves brown and curled, everywhere yellow puddles fizzed angrily. The lights were still on, but flickering and humming, sparks spraying down from torn cables.

I checked my heart locket monitor; the air was unsafe here, if the hail and acid rain hadn’t killed them, the smog clouds would have triggered allergic asthma in most of them. My heart beat hard against my ribcage as I picked my way through the wreckage towards the emergency shelter.

Each Habitat had been built along the same plans, and originally there had been talk of massive underground sections in case of warfare. But the simple fact was, the Habitats cost so much to build that the funding ran out. In the end each Habitat was fitted with just one shelter, with strict rules on who was allowed to access it. In the event of catastrophic failure, only the children were to be saved. If there were too many of those, only the kids 13-17 were given spaces. It sounds callous, but the younger ones wouldn’t have been able to survive without their parents so well. As I stepped over the smoldering bodies of adults, I steeled myself for what I might find.

Outside the shelter door a female lay sprawled, her head uncovered, long ginger hair clinging to her face. I nudged the body over, and reeled back in shock. It was the woman from the video, with the piercing blue eyes! I wondered what had happened to her rebreather? I didn’t have to wonder long – beside her, curled up in a ball, was a small child in an adult’s facemask. How brave… how foolish. The mask was useless on the toddler, too large to connect with her suit properly. I pressed my ID card against the shelter door, and punched in the emergency over-ride code.

The door opened slowly, hissing as the airlock broke. My heart locket monitor began beeping urgently – there was a dangerous level of methane in the shelter, I needed to move fast. Looking around at the terrified children, I beckoned to one of the oldest.

“You, I want you to help me get everyone organized. Smallest first, bigguns at the back, got it? Hold each other’s shoulders and follow me, we have to move fast, your suits aren’t built to handle the acid rain. Got it?”

The child nodded, it was hard to make out if they were male or female with the mask on. I could hear creaking in the habitat above, some of the walkways looked about to collapse. “Come on, now! Hurry, hurry, hurry!” I yelled as I stumbled back through the smog to the safety of the bus. The children piled on behind me, some of them crying, but for the most part too shocked to make a sound. As the last one boarded I closed the doors, eager to put as much distance between us and the horrors of Philadelphia Habitat as possible.

The journey back was harder. I was exhausted now, and hours of concentration and wearing the heavy suit had taken its toll. It was almost midnight by the time I pulled into the garage.

I stepped off the bus, cautioning the children to remain seated.

“Hello, Steven” Garage said pleasantly. “You have been out a long time.”

“Yes, yes I have. Can you call the Commander? Tell him I have a busload of orphaned kids who need quarantining.”

“I do not understand, Stephen.”

“Huh? What don’t you understand?”

“Where are the children, Stephen?”

“I told you already, on the bus! Just get the Commander, already!”

“Certainly. But Stephen, I detect no other humans within the garage. You are alone.”