Guard Duty nosleep

Guard duty

The break room is done in two tone tiles, set off center to each other. The refrigerator is stainless steel. There are five particle board tables on steel pipe stands, and blue plastic chairs with holes drilled into the backs. There are four and a half cabinets, a formica counter top and three coffee pots. There are two waist to ceiling windows looking out to the fenced off parking lot, two others, floor to ceiling, into the hallway. There is a dishwasher and four stacks of styrofoam cups. A flat screen monitor faces the length of the room, mounted to the wall opposite the sink. The microwave oven flashes nothing. A left hand jog into the hallway ends at a room of cubicles and desktop computers all locked down. The passwords are each a mystery. The mezzanine beyond this contains a spiral staircase and a high countered reception desk. Upstairs offices are alternately locked and empty. There are forty six rolling back chairs in the building upstairs and down, and there are three office supply closets. Exiting the break room and turning right, leads to a set of restrooms, and a bank of lockers, where a notice posted in two languages instructs employees to keep their hands clean. Beside the Lockers are a pair of vending machines, food and drink emptied out. Past the vending machines, there is the shop floor with extruders, lathes, cylinder molds, a three axis mill, half a dozen five hundred gallon hoppers for polymer beads. Twenty eight industrial vacuum hoses hook into a singe central vacuum system. Yellow polystyrene drums sit at the machines, marked for emergency use only. Green painted lines on the glossed concrete direct workers around forklift traffic lanes. Thermostats run on faint battery power, reminding indifferent air conditioners of the steadily rising temperature. The clock on the wall is wrong. The guard has finished mopping the hallway floor, and sets up a wet floor caution marker without grin or irony. His cough, worse, or better, is persisting, its portents are unknown to him. His hand has stopped bleeding, and he intends to change the bandage. He was owner of three bottles of dish soap at the start of his shift, and has yet to break the seal on the last of these. The first aid room is down a set of bandages, and some scotch tape is missing. He clears the shelf of methanol gel, twelve ounce plastic pouches, and carries them back to the shop floor, past the restroom, past the bank of lockers. He steps over the discarded canister of an ABC chemical fire extinguisher. The guard doesn't look over his shoulder, doesn't glance to his right, doesn't acknowledge the faces looking into the break room. He doesn't listen to the wailing the doesn't banging on the glass; too tired to be startled. There is nothing outside to listen for, there have been no cars in the past six days, and he has not seen the neighbors in two. His is the only car parked outside, was. The smell of burnt gasoline is gone now, but the fire would have been put out within a few hours in any case. The stars and moon have been obscured since dusk, and he lights his way with a dull flame. He has elected to save the flashlight, the last of its batteries. The half again dozen doors are locked and secure, all but the back which is broken. Nothing has bothered it yet, and he has braced it with unbolted bathroom doors and watches it pensively, while crossing the shop floor. His shoes squeak on the vinyl impregnated concrete, and he dwells briefly on the two written warnings he has already endured for breaking dress code. His sneakers are more comfortable for walking twelve hour shifts over industrial parking lots. He has traded out his uniform three days earlier, after tearing the trousers for the second time, and now sports the drab grey jump suit of an extrusion press operator, the only clothing to fit him from the lockers. There were no other shoes, though he'd not have traded his own for any reason but necessity. He wears leather work gloves, and has surrounded his forearms, neck and head with polymer panels and tubes, makeshift riot armor concocted days ago, and well worth its effort in the four incursions since. Slung like a rifle on his shoulder he carries a snow shovel, previously employed for sifting polymer beads, and will try to even out the bent blade when he has a moment free. Trials and multiple searches through the rooms and cabinets have left him with three dozen flammable green spray cans of Silicon machine lubricant. His hip sports a wide blade of sheet metal in a cardboard sheath. He wears a bandoleer, fashioned of duct tape, and an old shirt, and carries a compliment of the green cans. He has less of these, having now dispensed most of them in multiple sorties against the enemy, the figures outside. He has a dozen canisters left, and mounts a lighter to one with tape. Down a dark corridor is a warehouse of freestanding shelves, a dozen rows wide and two stories high. Pallets of polymer cylinders and reinforced boxes of pellets lay waiting for workers who will never return for a shift. There are hundreds of orders outstanding, and product sits waiting in the wings for a fleet of trucks to disperse it to all points of interest. The forklift is run out of fuel and sits discarded on the shop floor, a pallet hoisted up and in transit, but far shy of its destination. He moved several hundred of these early on, and stacked them pyramid style to block up windows, to barricade doors, to secure his fortress long enough for him to eat the rest of the crackers and gum and starve to death, alone in the shadows. He does not expect to be let down. He laments foregoing his usual pre-shift stop at the bar, who's hours he missed by a pair of minutes after lingering too long at the Chinese buffet. He still has the packet of soy, absconded in his shirt pocket, and keeps it put away. Outside the winds howl against trees seemingly fashioned of rubber. Against the cloud cover something distant glows and flickers orange. Climbing back atop the roof he finds the view unremarkable, and unchanged. The rains will begin within the hour. The power grid for the extended area has gone down and all but a distant microwave tower, red lights blinking, is darkness. He thinks again on the cages of propane tanks, two dozen ten gallon cylinders delivered only a fortnight ago, and how he might get at them. He could hook them into the backup generator, if given a ten minute window. They sit just beyond the outer edge of the loading dock rain cover, and next to the underground hatch marked Tornado Shelter in yellow paint, and all this past a sea of figures wailing at him and at nothing. Their hell is uncertain, and they are his. He returns to his dwelling, fixed at the base of the roof access ladder, and looks over his work. His pliers are giving out, and soon also will his supply of coat hangers, but until then he has some several handfuls fashioned into whatever darts can put the figures down, if only by the clustered dozen. There are still five extinguisher canisters left, and he contemplates what else he can load up ahead of their pressure release. He has found no nails or sharps or screws. He leans his head back and examines the vacuum tubes that run the gambit of the ceiling, and then returns to the ground floor. He walks into the office climbing a desk and un-slings his shovel. The ceiling tiles release a thin dust when shattered, and he coughs through through a filtered mask, though he coughed already, and then he coughs again. He hooks the shovel over the brackets and drops down from the desk along with a six grid section, now bent in places, but intact and usable. He flings refuse from waste baskets and packs the brackets into the space. They are aluminum, easily sharpened. There are six thousand eight hundred twenty two and a half ceiling tiles, fifteen thousand odd lengths of bracket. More than he can fashioned into darts. The plastic bin drags behind him, and he sits at the top of the stairs waiting to begin working, forgetting himself. He eats a bag of cheese flavored puffed corn at a mark of one hundred seventy calories. He discards the packaging and moves through another. he is saving the water for medicinal uses, and still trying to conceive of a filter system for waste water. Boiling uses precious methanol gel, or otherwise he will need to burn the cabinet doors, and being particle board they surely are impregnated with poison. He drinks flavored bottled beverages, soda of all kinds. The tea was the first thing to go. He made some coffee, but having left it in the break room for two days too long, it had played host to a strain of rainbow colored mold, and ruined the machines. He eats a pinch of salt and washes it down with a sip from a can of soda at ten calories. He grimaces and chews a teaspoon of ground coffee, and soon washes this down, the raw caffeine it keeps him dry and irritable and up. He has been up for the last two days, and has, despite his fortifications, nowhere to hide. The doors are secured, so far as he can accomplish, but the shop is vast and has any number of entry points which could give way, as many have. He sleeps hard, and if he nods off now, and if the barricades fail, and if they get in, and if they surround him, and if they catch him laying down on the job, and if they take hold of him, and if they carry him off, and if he awakens in the darkness, and if he feels their hands on him, and if he smells their breath, and if there is never any light again, and if he is defenseless, and if he goes down without fighting, he goes down screaming with no blame but his own. He cannot afford another black mark. He saves the majority of the sugar in its cardboard can. The dry powdered creamer likewise, and they sit together in conference with the water, being soluble both of them, or as much as the cheap stuff can be. He is saving it for last; is saving it for an emergency. The emergency lighting has gone out, save for the exit lights. He has pooled batteries from these and keeps one running to see his food by. There are yet many more bags of corn product, and still a cinnamon roll, stale but the last. With his stomach full of sugar and carbohydrates, he sits on the floor and reclines against the cot. The cot, brought in from the nurse's room, is grey synthetic fiber woven into a durable bolt of cloth, and he sits at the foot of this. The invalid on it has not moved except to take shallow breaths in five days. He lays damp cloths over her forehead, and tries again to feed the woman something, but she does not respond. He trades out her bandages again, tying them to her limbs with the upholstery of some office chairs. She is has been bitten by something, some beast, and her eyes are swelling now. He does not try to open them. He does not know the woman. He has not otherwise met the woman, except for the day when she climbed the fence and begged him to let her inside. She ran from something that day, and it followed her. 

Submitted February 09, 2016 at 03:04AM by th9joker http://ift.tt/1K8lCVg nosleep