The Midnight Stand (The Elysia Saga Book 1) (2 page)

Maxon walked down the hallway of the Office of Standard
Living, his black leather boots echoing on the newly polished tile. The tile
was replaced not three months ago and it was already starting to show signs of
wear in high traffic areas. Most likely it will have to be replaced again in a
month’s time. Maxon never remembered the tiles having to be replaced so often before.
It seemed there was always upgrading going on around the office. Once they
finished one thing, another section would need upgrading and so on. It was a
constant cycle, one that the Council deemed the cycle of living.

The hallway was metallic silver and brightly
lit, though no light fixtures were mounted anywhere on the walls or ceilings.
The light emanated from the walls themselves, casting a soft and evenly
dispersed glow throughout the whole building. The tile also glowed with soft
light. It was called Halo Lighting, one of the new innovations to come to
building manufacturing. It eliminated the need for costly and heat producing
incandescent bulbs, not to mention the buzzing and flickering fluorescents.

Maxon walked briskly, as if on the way to
perform an important act and, in many ways, he was. He wore his department
issued jumpsuit. The jumpsuit was white with not a wrinkle on it. His wife
insisted on running his jumpsuits through the press before he left every day.
Image was seventy percent of success she would cajole. The badge over his left
breast pocket had the department seal. Below the seal was written: Maxon
Wheeler, Wrecking Crew Lead Chief.  

He just came back from a meeting with the Director
of Wrecking, a meeting that went very well in Maxon’s view. The Director
commended Maxon for successfully overseeing a potentially complicated wreck on
an outdated school building. Whenever a public building is scheduled for
upgrading there is always the potential for trouble by a small group of people who
still struggle to accept the reality upgrading. They are dwindling in numbers,
but a small faction never fails to show up and protest. Maxon had anticipated
this and called for a barrier to be erected on each side of the street where
the building stood. He was worried about violent breakouts among the crowd, as
this had happened to him in the past, but this crowd seemed oddly subdued,
almost deflated, as if they knew their efforts meant little in influencing
anything. With each new upgrade there were less and less crowds showing up and
less and less screams of outrage.

He came to a door at the far end of the hallway
and held up his palm to the Bio-Link ID reader. The door slid open, there were
no knobs or hinges, and Maxon stepped into his office. The walls lit up around
him. He sat at his desk and tapped the surface twice. An image of a computer screen
and keyboard appeared on the surface of the desk. The screen looked as if it
were embedded into the desk at a forty-five degree angle, when in fact it was a
flat image. He put on a pair of glasses with silicon chips in each lens and typed
in his password. Using the glasses he was able to navigate the pointer across
the screen with his eyes. He navigated to the Central server site and logged in.
He clicked on the tab labeled Upgrades. On the Upgrades page he clicked on the
tab marked Wrecks and then beneath that Current Schedule. The schedule listed
all the upcoming wrecks and what sector they were in. He saw that there was a
wreck scheduled for later tonight, at midnight.

Maxon cursed under his breath. He hated midnight
wrecks. Midnight wrecks meant that the house occupants refused to leave when
notified they were being upgraded. They stayed in the house until the truck
came, hoping to stand off. The situation could turn tricky in some cases with
families standing in front of their houses, daring the truck to roll over them.
Luckily, for Maxon, he never had to deal with that scenario as Lead Chief.

In the six years since he’s been Lead, Maxon had
only overseen five midnight wreckings, and all of them went smoothly, or as
smoothly as they could go without turning violent. Usually the aggression was
limited to shouting and grandstanding, with the family threatening to cause
bloodshed. In the end, however, knowing they were fighting a battle they could
only lose, these people always stood down for the truck to do its job. Maxon
understood that, for these people, the show of resistance was more important
than actual sacrifice itself. If they proved to themselves that they tried to
defend their homes it would alleviate any guilt they would feel of standing
down. Once they moved into their new homes any thought of guilt quickly left
them and their old homes would be forgotten and never missed. In Maxon’s view, it
was only a weak sense of loyalty to the past that kept people in these outdated
dwellings. Everyone desired to be moved into the new AutoHome, but some just
didn’t know it. He knew it was his department’s job to educate them.

Only once did Maxon see a midnight wreck go
violent, and that was when he was still a rookie. He must have been no more
than a month into his new position, a position he attained after a rigorous
evaluation, when the call went out for the trucks to roll. The Lead Chief at
the time was a burly man named Canton, who used to always chew on the end of a
toothpick and crack his knuckles with one hand when giving out orders. He told
Maxon to suit up and get in the truck cab to drive. This was before automotive
voice control so Maxon had to put in the key and shift the gear, a process that
seems incomprehensible by today’s standards. It’s even more incomprehensible to
Maxon that at one time all the wrecks used to be done by hand, but thankfully
he didn’t grow up in that era.  

A crew of six men was sent out. Canton didn’t
think that any more was necessary. It was only a one level single occupancy and
by protocol wouldn’t take more than two hours to wreck. The trucks ostensibly
do all the work. The crew is mostly there to deal with disturbances. Maxon thought
to himself that if it weren’t for the human element, he could be asleep in his
bed tonight instead of having to suit up and go out into the night.

He remembered it was hot that particular night,
stifling even. The humidity was thick and Maxon had begun to sweat as soon as
he stepped outside. The internal temperature control of his suit worked hard to
keep him at a bearable seventy degrees. No temperature control in the world
though would be enough to fight off the heat they were about to feel that
night.

The old woman who owned the house had lived
there her whole life. The building was grotesquely out of date and an eyesore
for the rest of the neighborhood which had already undergone upgrading. She
inherited the house from her husband, who had died years earlier, and couldn’t
be inclined to change a thing on or in it. In letters sent to the Council she
wrote that the house was the only standing legacy of her dead husband, or
something to that nature. They had no children, so the house, which apparently
the husband built himself (they all seemed to build things themselves in the
old days), was given over to the widow.

She refused to comply with any of the Council’s written
orders until finally the midnight deadline approached and she would have to
comply, whether she wanted to or not. They arrived at the house exactly two
minutes before twelve. The house was completely dark and looked as if no one
was home. Canton hopped off the truck and surveyed the area, holding his hand
up to let the rest of the crew know if they should start unloading. He stood
there, with his nose up, sniffing the air like a bloodhound on a trail. He spat
onto the grass and cracked the knuckles on his right hand while he motioned
with the left for the crew to come out. They dismounted and lined up along the
edge of the grass. Canton grabbed a microphone from the side of the truck and
spoke into it. His voice reverberated in the summer night air.

“Mrs. Delany, this is the Wrecking Crew. You
have been ordered to vacate these premises as of midnight. Since you have
failed to comply with any of the orders for relocation, we have no choice but to
forcibly remove you. Please make your way out now.”

The lights in the house remained dark. There was
no movement at all from the windows. Not a flutter of a drape or a movement of
a shade. Canton spat onto the grass once more and twisted his neck to the side,
cracking the joints there. He brought the microphone back up to his mouth. “Mrs.
Delany, you’re only delaying the inevitable. We are here. There is no turning
back now. You need to come on out and step aside. You may bring any personal
items you feel necessary.”

There was still no sign of Mrs. Delany. Canton
looked at his watch and gave an audible sign of frustration. “Do not make
things more difficult for yourself. We won’t stand out here all night. We’ll
give you another ten seconds and if you do not come out and stand aside we will
come in by force.”

Maxon was getting more nervous. Something about
the situation didn’t feel right to him. In all the wrecks he’d been on, no one
refused to come out and confront them. The stifling humidity was giving him a
headache. His helmet felt too tight all of a sudden and he was getting a ringing
in his ears. He was in desperate need of a drink. He tried to slosh saliva in
his mouth to wet his lips, but he couldn’t seem to produce any. Canton turned
to them. “All right boys, we’re going in. Grab the lock buster.”

A member of the crew pulled out a long metal
pole from the truck bed. It looked almost like a telescope. The rest of them
moved into position. The crew member with the lock buster, Damon, stood in
front of the door with it. He pressed the tip of the metal pole to the lock and
pushed it in. The device made an air noise, like a pneumatic pump, and blasted
a hole in the door, knocking out the lock. It happened in less than a second. A
single wisp of smoke drifted from the end of the pole.

Canton went in first, turning on his helmet’s
head lights to illuminate the room. It was pitch black in the house and ten
degrees cooler than outside, but it was still stifling and Maxon was struggling
to think straight with his helmet on. He wanted desperately to take it off and
be away from this place. To be back home with his wife.

As they moved further into the house a smell
began to come to their nostrils. It was a pungent, sweet smell, much like
rotting fruit left out on a counter. The smell was stronger in the middle of
the room and Maxon felt his stomach roll. His head spun and he fought to keep
his dinner from ending up on the floor.

The light from Canton’s flash beam answered
their question as to where the smell was coming from. In the corner of the room
seated in a chair was Mrs. Delany. She didn’t move and appeared to be looking
at them as they entered her home, but you couldn’t tell for sure because the
plastic bag over her head distorted her face. What was certain though was that
she was dead and, by the smell of it, had been for days. The bag was placed
around her head and secured at the neck with grey duct tape. Inside the bag
were crawling maggots slipping in and out of her nose and eyes. This was too
much for Maxon to handle and he doubled over and vomited on the pale blue rug
that covered the living room floor.  

“Compose yourself,” Canton snapped at Maxon.
“You’re a professional.”

Walking into a dead woman’s home while her body
decomposed on a rocker wasn’t part of his professional training, Maxon thought
to himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said in between coughs. He wiped
his mouth with his gloved hand and stood upright, back in position.

“If anyone can’t handle this I suggest you leave
now and prepare yourselves for a life of desk duty. Any takers?” Canton said,
eyeing them one by one. The men were silent; no one wanted to work a desk for
the rest of their term. “Good, now let’s get this body outta here and in a
containment bag. We still have work to do.”

Hayes, one of the crew members who had a head of
red hair and freckles all over his face, was the first to walk over to the body
and prove his worth.

“What happened here, Sir?” Hayes asked, wide
eyed.

“Looks like a suicide to me”, Canton said.
“Wouldn’t be the first either. A lot of these old timers would rather off themselves
than have to leave. Poor bastards. They just can’t see past their own noses”.

“What should we do with her?”

“We bag her and file a report with Census. They’ll
take her out of the system. At least this frees up a unit for someone who
actually wants it.”

“Do we...leave her as is?” Hayes asked, sounding
as if he was afraid to hear the answer.

“We just bag em’. Nothing else,” Canton replied.
Hayes nodded his head and moved closer to the body.

Someone, Maxon couldn’t remember who, came back
in with a disposal bag and started to unravel it. It was spread out on the
living room floor and the smell of hot vinyl wafted up from it. Hayes switched on
the power supply, which was located on the side of the bag. A low whirring
sound came on and the bag started to expand, much like an air mattress. Hayes
turned on the cooling unit and turned the temperature all the way down. An air
sound emitted from the bag, like the sound of gas escaping a pipe. Hayes looked
up at Canton with raised eyebrows. “A leak?” he asked, uncertain.

Canton bent down to inspect the bag. “There
shouldn’t be. This was part of a new shipment.” He turned the bag over and saw
the problem. “Here. Loose air nozzle. Put some sealant on it”.