Original Fiction: The Anarchist's Almanac, Episode 3
*In today's episode, Dax's training and the introduction of the Anarchist's Almanac, plus more troubling news. *
If you haven't read the rest, episode 1 is here, episode 2 is here
When they reached the barn, Joshua and Darian climbed a ladder to a raised platform in the center of the structure. Dax took his place at one corner. An obstacle course had been laid out around the barn for training purposes.
From their perch on the platform, Joshua and Darian could control various hazards that Dax needed to avoid to complete the course. He had finally made it through safe for the first time just a few days before and had been running the course solo every chance he got.
Joshua took the stopwatch that John had handed him earlier from his pocket and raised his right hand up.
He dropped his hand quickly to signal Dax and started the clock.
He draped the lanyard around his neck and grabbed a long rope, prepared to unleash “the reaper." Dax scrambled up and over the first wall obstacle, then jumped through a window frame set up in a mock wall. He rolled under an empty metal bed frame and moved to the door of the room, where he paused.
As Dax moved through the room, Darian peppered the space with projectiles from a retrofitted paintball gun. The small, solid, wooden beads moved faster and stung more if you got hit than paintballs. But they were far from lethal. Dax avoided them all.
“The Reaper” was a heavy, life-sized dummy of a Magistrate robot, which would swing down, pendulum style somewhere during Dax’s passage through the next few obstacles. If he timed it right, the Reaper would sweep past, no harm done.
However, if he didn’t, all two hundred pounds of the punishing dummy would slam into him, as it had several times before, once almost breaking his ribs.
Dax grinned up at his father then ran through the door. Instead of heading straight across the hall and through the next door into a mock dining room, Dax turned right, ran to the end of the small hall and leaped up, hauling himself through a two foot square frame, representing an attic opening. He scrambled across the open rafters of the next two rooms, saving at least fifteen seconds of dodging and rolling.
He dropped down and now faced the largest open area, the “garage” of the mock house, the last opportunity for Joshua to unleash the Reaper.
Joshua maneuvered the ropes and pulleys to put the dummy in position. Dax stood, back to the wall breathing steadily. After about three seconds, he bolted through the door and turned an immediate left. Joshua knew Dax had to run straight across the open floor of the garage and he held the rope lightly, ready to release it.
From the corner of his eye, Joshua caught Dax bolting out onto the floor, and he released the Reaper.
As it swung downward, on a perfectly timed collision course with his son, Dax did the unexpected. He leaped and landed flat on his belly, gliding across the remainder of the floor. He rolled onto his back about halfway across and smiled up at the Reaper as it swung past, mere inches from him.
Dax slammed into the opposite wall, scrambled up and through another window and cleared the course.
“What the heck?” Darian laughed. There, against the wall, was a wooden framed dolly with casters under it. “Oh, he burned you, Josh! Way to go Dax! Let me see his time.” Darian reached for the watch.
“No, it’s irrelevant. He did not pass the drill. The drill was to use the parts of the course, there won’t be a dolly just lying around!" Joshua grabbed the watch in his fist and stormed down the ladder and across the barn.
His son met him halfway, expecting congratulations.
“You think this is a joke Dax? Do you?”
Joshua brushed past Dax and into the garage area, he picked up the dolly, “You think you can just place things like this in an actual escape? Huh? Do you? Answer me! If you think for one second I am going to let you cheat your training and then go on that run, you are dead wrong!”
“I didn’t put it there. In fact, I didn’t know it was there. I was planning to run out and dodge back when the Reaper swung through, then I saw it! I swear!” Dax said.
Joshua stopped. His voice was very low when he continued. “Now you want to add lying to the rest of this?” He looked his son in the eye.
“It’s not a lie,” a voice from the other side of the barn said. “I was working on the pulley system this morning. I left it there.”
A slight man, with glasses was walking toward them. Eugene was the genius behind much of the tribe’s creature comforts, but Joshua also knew him to be an honest man.
Joshua deflated. He looked at his son and instantly knew that what Eugene was saying was exactly what had happened.
“I’m sorry, son. I really thought… Well done. You did it. You’ve taught me that you’re ready today. You have my blessing.”
In the time it took Joshua to speak his apology, he watched Dax go from defeated to excited. He knew how much it meant to his son to have earned his respect. He hugged him, and tousled his hair. “Well done son. I didn’t see that coming!”
“Dude! That was amazing!” Darian said, slapping Dax’s extended hand. “You set a new course record!”
Dax took the stop watch and grinned. “Beat you by two whole seconds, dad! So, you need any pointers?”
A single blast from an air horn sounded and the men got still, stepping well clear of the barn’s doorway.
Outside in the yard, everyone moved under overhead cover and the sound of a drone approaching could be heard growing louder as the aircraft passed over. A moment later, a second blast indicated the all-clear and everyone returned to what they had been doing before the air horn. This had happened at least once a day lately.
They had taken to selecting only Settling camps that had heavy overhead cover, such as carports and thick foliage. This house had a deep wrap around porch, large heavy trees, a carport and a barn. In some cases, they were forced to rely on camouflage netting to hide vehicles and generators.
Any new building they did had to either be underground, or inside of larger structures, to keep the changes from showing up in the drone fly overs.
Joshua spent the afternoon with Dax, going over some aerial views and a 3d model of the supply depot he would be headed to in a few days, on an old computer tablet. He felt bad for putting his son through so much, but every time he looked at Dax, he saw the twin brother that the boy had grown up with until four years ago.
He was even more determined not to lose his only remaining son.
They drilled every possible scenario, and Joshua made sure Dax understood where every acceptable hiding place and exit were. Even though he would accompany the team on this run, he was unwilling to take chances.
After dinner that evening, he met with Eugene, John, Adam and Darian. The five of them formed a sort of unofficial leadership team for the tribe. All major decisions were arrived at by the whole group through a caucus system, ironically, to ensure they had consensus. No one was to be coerced or convinced against their will to do anything.
Every time he thought of how the Covenant Council used those words to mean something different, it pissed him off.
The four men represented the group at large. Eugene brought mechanical knowledge and expertise; Adam served to protect the spirit of the group; John was the communications and high tech expert, and Darian was the leader of most foraging and supply parties. He was a natural due to his training as a spy hunter during the Abdication.
Darian understood how the Council worked. Joshua, had been the founder of the group and served as its sole leader for the first year. It felt good to have men he could trust to help shoulder the load.
They gathered in a small shed behind the barn that had been outfitted with the equipment necessary to access the Anarchist’s Almanac, an old-school Internet of sorts, run by the dwellers. It was operated on pre-Abdication early twenty-first century binary computers that had been discarded years ago.
Their network piggybacked on Council technology, but remained hidden, due to the Consensus’ use of quantum computers that really had no way of even seeing these old machines.
“We need to contact Kevin. Maybe he’s heard something about Holdenville, “ Joshua said.
John fired up the machines required to access the Anarchist’s Almanac and consulted a folded card for today’s rolling cipher for the password. Within a minute, they were online and able to check the message boards and interactive satellite mapping for new alerts.
There was a large yellow flashing exclamation point over Holdenville.
John selected it and a message box appeared.
At 8:45 am CST, Consensus activity was observed in the areas immediately surrounding Holdenville. Several squads of Consensus Seekers were observed conducting house to house searches, and a group of tree Magistrates set fire to the grain elevator there, which housed a 3d printer and machine shop.
No other signs of damage were noticed, but the area should be considered “Aware”.
“Aware” was the code word the dwellers used for areas that had been bugged with cameras or microphones. The Consensus had used such setups as traps, often waiting to record dweller behaviors for weeks at a time before descending to take them away.
Losing the facility at Holdenville would be a blow to their tribe, since Eugene and John had been planning to complete the rest of the parts required to convert the large transport truck from traditional electric to solar power on this next stay.
“Sounds like Holdenville may be out,” John said.
He clicked out of the warning and navigated to a message board, searching for new threads about the Holdenville incident. It seemed that no one had been brave enough to check the location yet. They needed to know the extent of the damage and whether Holdenville should be removed from the Settling rotation.
Darian was the first to say what they were all thinking, “Someone has to confirm the damage. We’re closest at the moment, so I guess we need to head over there tonight. Can we get drone footage of the area?”
John tapped into another network and sent an encrypted message that was replied to almost immediately by Kevin.
“He asks if we’re okay, he was one of the watchers on that Reaper scan this morning.”
Kevin was a former dweller who had volunteered to infiltrate the Consensus and feed information out. As a member of a regional tech team, it fell to him occasionally, to observe Reaper operations via cameras built into the machines, to ensure they followed the established protocol.
The Consensus was all about rules, even if they changed them so often you couldn’t keep up.
John replied that everyone was fine and asked about the footage.
“He’s sending something over. He says there were no troops scheduled to remain in the area, and he hasn’t seen anything on any of his scans.”
A video appeared on the monitor. It was a moving aerial view of Holdenville, shot from one of the drones. It showed a Reaper exiting the grain elevator, just before billowing black clouds of smoke flooded out of the structure.
The drone swept in close, apparently picked up the Reaper, then circled away in a widening arc, giving them a good view of the surrounding area. John paused the image at several points. If there were Consensus Seeker troops nearby, they were well concealed, which was not typical.
The Consensus tended to assume a technological superiority over the dwellers that made them unaware of the dweller's capabilities when it came to observing Consensus movements. It was almost as if they believed they were invisible, or just too big for dwellers to matter.
“Tell him we’re headed over there and would appreciate it if he kept his eyes and ears open for anything, “ Joshua said.
Adam had been silent up to this point. “You sure that’s a good idea, Joshua? I’m getting a pretty strong urging to ask you not to go.”
No one considered Adam a psychic, but his premonitions had been right on too many occasions to ignore completely.
Just finished reading the first three episodes. Very enjoyable story. I'm looking forward to the next chapter.
thanks! Much appreciated. Be sure to follow my blog to get my updates in your feed.
Steemon Steemian
Thanks, I plan on it.