Enter System, page 40
part #1 of Natural Laws Apocalypse Series
“Here,” he said. “Can we just trickle some into his mouth?”
“Best we can do for now, unless we can get our new Druid down here. I was talking with him and he's got some spells that might help. One called Hydrate, that allows him to add moisture to plants and animals. Helps speed growth, but I bet it would speed healing in this case.”
Marc cursed himself inwardly for not having traded spells with Reggie yet. He could've reversed his dehydrate curse to the same effect if he had.
“Ella? You're the quickest one here that's not doing anything else. Can you run back to the gates and see if Conner can find the Druid and send them down here?”
The man they'd been treating was clothed completely in grays and faded blacks, including a ski mask. Now Felicia slipped the mask up in order to give the man water and gasped.
“This is Natalie's father!” she said.
“Well, shit. I guess we know what happened. He was foraging and had an accident. That explains why he had so much food and drink with him too, he was probably going to bring it all home,” Marc said.
Felicia filled the cap with water and trickled a tiny bit between the man's lips. He coughed and choked, so Marc wasn't sure if they'd gotten any down into him. Felicia patiently tried again and again, getting at least a tiny bit of water into him. As she worked, Jeff came back over to Marc.
“No can do. It is Systemized, and that changed the lock. It's something a lot fancier than whatever was on there,” he said.
Marc desperately didn't want to complete the build cycle before he found out what was in here. He was pretty sure that the safe and its contents would be recycled if he did so.
That's it, I need to get a recycler down here and it can recycle the safe, hopefully without damaging the contents, he thought.
“Rob, we need to make a ramp. Is there enough debris around here that we can make one where you let the rope down?” Marc asked.
Rob looked around.
“Maybe, why a ramp?”
“Well, then we can carry him out of here on a stretcher or something. Plus, this safe? It's Systemized and Jeff can't pick it. I want a recycler down here to recycle the safe so we can see what's inside of it.”
“Ah, two birds and all that?” Rob said.
“Right, let's see if we can manage that, okay?”
He turned to Felicia.
“We're going to try to make a ramp. If we get one made, we can run off a stretcher and carry him out of here on it.”
“And the safe, I heard you,” she said. “Be quick though, the sooner we can get the Druid here or Natalie's dad back to the Safe Zone, the better.”
“Come on Rob, Jeff, let's make a ramp,” Marc said.
* * *
Marc and Rob started out by scooping debris up with their shields and carrying it over to Jeff, who'd stack it. Rob's shield wasn't very good for that purpose though, being round. Marc's rectangular one worked much better and Jeff was falling behind on stacking so Rob joined Jeff.
Less than half an hour later they had a ramp, just in time for the Druid to arrive. Ella led him down the ramp, looking at it with wide eyes. Also accompanying her was the new Combat Medic.
“Yup, we did that,” Jeff said, nodding towards the ramp.
Marc just shook his head.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “It's Natalie's father, if you've met her. He's been lost for days, evidently trapped down in this basement, pinned under a heavy metal safe. Felicia thinks he's badly dehydrated and doesn't want to risk her healing spells yet, she said they'll work much better if his body has resources to call on.”
“Yes,” the Combat Medic said, “healing spells partially draw on the reserves of the body, so if he has none, they could've killed him instead of healing him.”
“I'll see if my Hydration spell will work on a person,” the Druid added.
The two of them hurried away with Jeff leading them.
“Hey Rob, I'm going to rush back and get one of the recyclers. Probably the new one since it's faster and I can probably pull it on my own. Stand guard here? It's not part of the Safe Zone yet and there's been lots of coming and going, so...”
“You got it, Marc. I'll holler if I need help. With everyone in the other room, I think it won't be a problem.”
Marc hurried up the ramp, then jogged back to the Safe Zone. Conner came down as he saw Marc running.
“What's up?” he asked as Marc drew close.
“Need to get a recycler down there quickly,” Marc said.
Conner dropped into a jog alongside Marc.
“What for?”
“Well, the man we found? He was pinned under a metal safe, a huge one. I think it's a gun safe, and I think it's been Systemized. Jeff can't pick it because the lock was upgraded when it was Systemized, so I'll use a recycler to eat away the walls on it. I desperately want to know what's inside.”
“Guns, lots of them. If I'm not mistaken, that's Old Man Taggert's place. He was one of those survivalist preppers. Not the rational ones like your dad, more like one of those Doomsday Prepper ones.”
Marc stopped dead.
“My dad's a prepper?”
Conner chuckled.
“Do you think everybody with a gun keeps thousands of rounds of ammo per gun?”
“Yeah, don't they? I mean Felicia's family didn't but they mainly used shotguns and they normally had a thousand or more shells, right?”
“Take it from me, thousands of rounds is more than people need. Plus, all his food stores?”
“What food stores?”
“What do you mean?”
“My dad didn't have lots of food stores. Not that I know of anyhow.”
Conner slapped his forehead.
“Did he tell you what to do in case of emergency?”
“Yeah, he told me to take shelter in the basement under the garden shed.”
“Did you?”
Marc shook his head.
“Oh damn, I hope that stuff is still good and not all gone yet. I figured you had it tucked away around here somewhere after you told me he was your dad.”
“Crap, I've never actually been down in that basement. You're telling me it's full of goods?”
“I never actually saw it, but we did talk about it. He wanted the police to know that he had lots of guns but that the whole family was trained with them so when we ran into each other at the range, he let me know and asked me to spread the word to the others officers that wouldn't freak out about it.”
“Well, I guess I know what tomorrow's task will be,” Marc said.
“Or you could just expand that way and claim the house, leave everything intact.”
“I can't, the System recycles anything in the area I'm claiming and I only get raw materials,” Marc said.
“In that case, yes, I think I know what you should do tomorrow,” Conner said, “For now, do you need a hand with this recycler? It's close enough to the walls that I should be able to help you out without abrogating my duty.”
“Please, quicker is better. Rob's standing guard, but it's outside the Safe Zone until I do something about Natalie's father. Probably just bringing him into the Safe Zone and registering him as a guest would clear the area to be claimed. But once I claim it, the safe would be gone.”
“Do Systemized items go away like that too?” Conner asked.
“You know, I've got no idea. Maybe not? But I'd rather not risk it, especially if it is loaded with guns. We keep them in the Safe Zone and train people on them. They can be used as defense, so long as they're kept in here they won't deteriorate and we can use them indefinitely.”
“Or offer them to people with System tokens that demonstrate they know how to use them maybe,” Conner offered. “They'd be bound to last longer if they're Systemized, right? And they might encourage more people to go outside the walls.”
“Sure, maybe that too. Either way, we need to get them first,” Marc said.
“And here we are. I'll guard with Rob while you take care of that, help escort you all back to the Safe Zone once you're done,” Conner said.
Marc dragged the recycler down the ramp, feeling it shift under him as he did so.
Maybe come back up as quickly as I can, especially if I've got a full load on the back? he thought. Because I've got no desire to find out what it feels like to be buried under rubble if it collapses on me. If I'm that interested, I'll ask Natalie's father. Or maybe not, I don't imagine he'll want to talk about that much.
When he got the recycler into the other room, he found Natalie's father sitting up. His leg and ankle were splinted and he was arguing about having to leave, to get back to his family. Evidently he wasn't quite coherent because it took several repetitions for Felicia to get through to him that at least part of his family was safe already.
The Druid shook his head.
“Only time is going to take it from here. I can put him to sleep if you can arrange for someone to carry him back to the Safe Zone. I've got nothing for incoherence.”
The Combat Medic agreed and Marc knew that Felicia didn't either.
“Rob can carry him. Conner's here with me and he can stay and stand guard until I'm ready to go,” Marc said.
Felicia looked over at him.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I don't know how long this should take. I don't think it'll take long, but there's no reason to wait when you can get him back to the infirmary in the Safe Zone and let his family know we found him.”
“I'll stay with them also,” Jeff said. “Safety in numbers and all that.”
Ella stepped up alongside him, expressing her opinion without saying a word.
“Alright then,” Felicia said. “Let me go get Rob.”
As she left, Marc started up the recycler. There was an extension that allowed contact to be made with the machine without it having to butt up against what it was trying to work on, so he used that.
Because that will probably give me the finest touch I can get here, he thought.
As he started to edge the extension towards the metal, Jeff stopped him.
“Do the door, Marc. If you can just dissolve the locking mechanism with the recycler we can swing the door open and you won't have to eat away a whole wall of it. Should be quicker, and less contact means endangering the contents less too, right?”
Marc immediately pulled the recycler over to where he could get the extension to the door and started working on the metal where he thought the locking bolt would be.
In the end, there were four locking bolts and the door shuddered open shakily on its hinges with four gaping holes along its edges when Marc finished. When it did open, he whistled. The bottom of the safe had apparently been stacked with spam cans of ammunition, although they'd tumbled all over the place.
Fortunately there was a shelf about midway up the safe that had kept those tumbling cans from smashing into the guns that were on the top of the safe. AK-47s lined the top, jumbled from the safe's fall, but looking intact and functional.
As a matter of fact, they don't look like they've been deteriorating with everything else. No rust, no tarnish, no dried, cracked wooden stocks. They look like they might've just been bought, treated for storage and tucked away here.
Marc looked back at the safe itself.
“I wonder if that's what having the safe Systemized did?” he mused aloud. “It doesn't look like these have been deteriorating at all, so maybe keeping things in a Systemized container keeps them from deteriorating?”
“So, the Safe Zone is just one massive Systemized container?” Jeff said. “Since whatever we bring in stops deteriorating?”
Marc shook his head.
“I've got no clue, but I wonder if things like this are available in the shop? Or if we could make them with our System tokens? That, however, is a question for a later date. For now, we've got to salvage this stuff. We can't take the safe, the ramp would never support it, but everything else? Maybe we can load it onto the back of the recycler and haul it out that way?”
They started unloading the safe, discovering that there were twenty-seven AK-47s, each of them equipped with a sling, a bayonet, and ten magazines. For ammunition there were sixty-three unopened spam cans full of ammo. Marc thought there were probably four hundred and forty rounds per can since there were two numbers on the lid of each can. One was 7.62, which he knew was the ammunition for a standard AK-47, the other number was four hundred and forty. The rest of the print on the cans was in a foreign language, Marc thought it was Russian, but he couldn't be sure since it wasn't any language he knew. There were a number of loose rounds in the safe also, apparently from the one opened ammo can they found.
That was all in the main compartment of the safe. On the right was another compartment, separated from the guns by a thin metal wall that showed some dents from the abuse. On the other side were scattered MREs, probably once piled, but the forty-eight meals, ready to eat were now mingled with a small scattering of combat knives, seven of those, and some smaller lock boxes which were a lot heavier than they looked.
It took almost an hour to get everything loaded and tied down on the back of the recycler and once it was, Marc really didn't want to trust the ramp with the recycler. He chuckled as he realized he had the perfect solution.
Dragging the recycler towards the ramp, he then moved it to the side, brought it to the wall and adjusted the angle on the front. Setting it to lean up, he then pushed the recycler up against the wall of the basement and started to cut his own ramp out to the street.
The rest met him when he got up to ground level twenty minutes later. He'd had to keep moving the blocks of dirt that the machine produced, stacking them along the ramp as they moved up. The machine wasn't moving quickly already just due to the contents of the safe, and he didn't want to slow it any more. Once he got back to ground level it took the small group less than ten minutes to get back to the Safe Zone.
* * *
When he'd gotten the recycler and its load back to the Safe Zone Marc faced a new problem, where to put it. The apartment complex he'd recently built had lockable doors, so he selected one of those to store everything. With only a few people knowing what had been there, and the load getting transferred into the apartment after it was dark out and there wasn't anyone to see them, he hoped it would stay a secret. Once it was all in there he turned to Jeff.
“Go ahead, I know you were waiting patiently,” Marc said.
Jeff hadn't been being patient. Since they'd found the lock boxes he'd been fidgeting and started to say something several times. Now he dropped to his knees, the lock boxes on the table in front of him. His lock picks appeared in his hand as if by magic when he pulled them out of his inventory.
He's good at that, Marc thought as Jeff opened the three locks in under a minute total.
“And...” Jeff said, throwing open the first box.
Inside were a mess of older looking coins. Dimes, quarters, half dollars, and large dollar coins, all of them in clear plastic tubes. Jeff grinned as he picked one up.
“Junk silver,” he said. “Coins made in 1964 and earlier were ninety percent silver and it looks like all of these are those.”
He moved to the next box and opened it to reveal a hint of gold. A large number of gold bullion rounds inhabited the box, each in its own plastic sleeve.
Jeff's grin grew bigger.
“We all know what that is,” he said.
Then he flipped the lid on the last box.
“Well shit, now I feel bad for the guy,” Jeff said.
The last box contained a bunch of photocopied documents and a stack of photos. The photos were of middle aged people and younger ones as well. The younger ones had little messages on the back addressed to 'Grandpa'.
Marc shook his head.
“And we've got no idea what happened to this guy?” he asked.
Conner shook his head.
“I would've thought he'd be the type to do well in this kind of situation, well, a disaster type situation anyhow, but who knows. The fact that you said the safe was Systemized means he was around when it started. Other than that?”
Conner just shrugged.
Marc had felt that way himself up to level five. Now he felt more remorse over the loss of a man who looked like he might've been valuable to have around. Plus just the general remorse from the massive loss of life that occurred.
And expanding the Safe Zone is how I'm trying to cut down on that loss of life. I've got an expansion waiting, so this one's for you Old Man Taggert. Maybe we'll find you somewhere also, or save one of your relatives or something.
His step was hurried as he headed back to the gymnasium and pressed 'continue' on the build screen. He moved to the doors leading outside and stepped out, waiting to watch the material flow through the Safe Zone and for the expansion to commence.
* * *
Chapter Thirty
When the wait grew to more than the thirty seconds he'd anticipated, Marc groaned. His notification light had started flashing, but he'd been going to wait to check it until after things were underway, having only seen it happen the very first time, he wanted to watch the changes all happen again with the larger expansion.
Due to the quality of the core used in the expansion process, you have one additional Perk to add to your Safe Zone. Choose:
1 - Power slots for the Safe Zone will be increased by 1 per core used in this Safe Zone
2 – Phantom Guards. These guards are not good fighters, but at the first sign of invaders they will sound an alert that will be heard throughout the entire Safe Zone alerting the inhabitants to the location in question. They will then take defensive actions throughout the fight, attempting to prevent invaders from entering the Safe Zone. Sufficient guards will be generated to allow one guard per 100' of wall. As the Safe Zone expands, more guards will be generated to maintain this density.
Marc bit his lip, thinking.
I should go and ask everyone else, or at least Felicia, about what to pick. It's already been so long since I tried to initiate this expansion though, hours even, he thought.
