1850-01: A Survivor's Story (Part Five)
Pavel meets his new coworkers and starts his first day as a Nova Espero scavenger.
This is part of a series centered on Pavel Tzarkowski’s experiences as a survivor in early Nova Espero entitled “1850-01.” Follow this link to go to the series’ page.
Pavel’s eyes fluttered open to the clatter of bells outside. Ringing six times, they were a wake-up signal to Nova Espero’s slumbering populace. The cooks in the city commissaries had been up for around an hour, preparing the day’s breakfast for hungry workers. After breakfast, some would make their way towards scrap processing sites to pick apart the washing machines, refrigerators, and random bits of metal and wood brought in by the scavengers the night before. Others would bleach cans of food, sorting them by age, quality, and contents. Guards yawned as they walked their rounds throughout town and climbed atop the ramparts.
The dining room of the Gluesenkamp Family Barracks reminded Pavel of the archaic bed and breakfast he and Elizabeta had stayed at during their honeymoon. The walls were covered in ornate wood adornments that miraculously had survived the firestorms that immediately succeeded the War. The fireplace crackled with a small, marginally effective flame. Pavel felt the warmth on his cheeks and nose as his back shivered.
The food served was eclectic, but filling: apricot preserves, rye bread, canned pork, and beans of some variety with a glass of reconstituted powdered milk. The cooks at Gluesenkamp, residents themselves, were headed by a former sous chef who had a knack for presentation. Even this collection of what would have passed for prison food before the War was intentionally plated and prepared to seem a lot more appetizing than it actually was. Elizabeta, a spice fiend who had gone hungry for so long, swore she could taste red pepper in the pork.
Filip, though he was still fussing over Anna’s absence, found himself temporarily sated by the preserves and bread. The once-picky eater had learned the value in becoming a human garbage disposal, but occasionally something caught his fancy enough for him to truly savor it.
“Apricots are good!” he babbled, a small fleck of half-chewed bread splatting onto the miraculously unstained tablecloth. Pavel and Elizabeta couldn’t help but stifle a laugh. Filip had been responsible for a disproportionate number of the Tzarkowskis’ smiles over the past two years, and was likely the reason that they didn’t bear the permanent frowns characteristic of many survivors.
The Tzarkowskis returned to their suite, preparing themselves for the day ahead. Pavel helped Filip get dressed for daycare, sending him off to go “potty” before they headed out the door. Elizabeta put on the slightly-dressy – maybe a shade below business casual? – jeans and a collared shirt the Office of Survivor Services had given them on the way out from the Hospital. As Pavel put on his well-worn fatigue shirt and rumpled canvas pants, Elizabeta pulled him aside.
“Hey,” she whispered low enough so that Filip wouldn’t hear. “I love you, but don’t you dare leave me alone with them.” Elizabeta was not one for serious, heartfelt clichés. There was a half-joke, half-seriousness in her voice.
“I wouldn’t dare,” he replied, with a wink. He could still be smooth around her sometimes, or at least he thought so. She rolled her eyes and nervously laughed, sucking her lower lip into her teeth.
Kissing Elizabeta and Filip goodbye, Pavel stepped out of the Gluesenkamp Family Barracks onto Renzi Street. He was greeted by the ashy snowflakes that had come to dominate the region’s weather in the past two years. Even in the month of Deka, previously the heart of autumn, the weather was raw and uninviting. The air had been hovering just north or south of the freezing mark the past few days, meaning that old fire hydrants and light poles had a thin layer of bright gray frosting while the street was frigid and soaked.
Starting down Renzi, Pavel noted the other workers making their way to their shifts. They greeted their coworkers and neighbors, shoving their ungloved hands into their pockets to stave off the cold. They shared cigarettes and talked about the party that happened over the weekend, and how that cook over from Kells Street can really take a punch.
As they approached the major nodes of industry at the center of town – the Scavenger’s Union Hall, City Hall, the food processing plant, and the scrapyard – the narrow lanes of Nova Espero became clotted with the employees of the first shift. Members of scavenger patrols bunched up with one another like cliques of classmates before the school doors opened, waiting for their officers to emerge from their pre-dispatch meetings. Pavel, though he was nominally just another scavenger, had been told to go into the Union Hall to meet with his patrol.
Pavel politely squeezed through the tightly huddled, shivering assembly, breaching the three-story office building after some considerable effort. Blasted by a wave of surprisingly strong heat, he could feel the frost melting. Now he only shivered from nerves; he had been down this road many times before, but introductions to a new “work unit” or “guard patrol” or “labor detail” in successive settlements and survivor camps never got easier. A lifelong introvert, nothing froze Pavel up quite like breaking the ice.
Walking down the hall, Pavel quickly found the door to room 109, what appeared to be a former training room of some kind. He was sure it was the right room, but he found it empty.
Taking a seat at one of those somehow universally uncomfortable desk-chair hybrids, Pavel scanned the room. The walls were bare, save for a few pre-War employee training posters. Free of windows and therefore further insulated from the cold, 109 was the kind of warm and stuffy place that could very well lull a bored trainee to sleep during their after-lunch course. He hoped that the sanatorium was just as warm, and that Anna was comfortable in bed with the stuffed swamp demon she had inexplicably managed to keep with her throughout the past two years.
Pavel was jarred awake from his musings by the opening of the door. His blood pressure spiked from the unknown entity entering the room. One after another the scavengers laughed at each other’s inside jokes – the worst thing you can hear on the first day. Established connections were impossible to break into. Would he forever be an outsider in this pre-existing cadre?
One of the faces, however, caught his eye. Pavel stopped shivering.
Thank God. A life preserver.
“Pavel?” the man with light brown hair that formed a lowercase m-shaped outline on the top of his head. “Holy shit, Pavel!”
Cornelius Atwater had been a professor of history five years Pavel’s senior. Seemingly carved out of marble, the handsome and unfailingly witty “Corny” had been Pavel’s favorite in the department. When Pavel arrived as a wide-eyed graduate student at the Imperial University, Dr. Atwater had taken a shine to the mute, shivering waif that ended up at his doorstep.
Taking him under his wing, Dr. Atwater helped build Pavel into a more confident academic, if not more a confident man. Even the affable, brilliant, bestseller-writing Atwater could not accomplish that. Pavel, despite years of therapy and his best efforts, always had some sort of resentment towards people like Corny – why did things always seem to go their way, so effortlessly? – but he was not immune from Dr. Atwater’s spell. He loved the man.
Atwater, still his usual, backslapping self, yanked Pavel into an embrace.
“How the hell are ya? You know,” sweeping his arms around the room, “considering everything.”
“I’m doing… I’m doing okay,” Pavel meekly replied.
“Oh God, how are…” Corny clinched his eyes shut and smacked his palm to his forehead. Corny was many things but not subtle. “Elizabeta… and Anna and Fre- Filip! Filip! How are they?” Two years after the War, there was a sort of taboo about asking people about loved ones. It too frequently reminded them of some much-too-recent tragedy. Corny had always felt himself somewhat immune to social niceties and norms; it was strangely reassuring to see that hadn’t changed.
“They’re here,” Pavel stammered. “Anna’s sick, but she’s getting help, at least.”
Corny at least knew well enough not to probe further. “I’m sorry to hear that, Pavel. She’ll pull through. She’s a tough kid,” he said, clapping Pavel’s shoulders.
“Everyone!” Dr. Atwater shouted. Wrapping his arm across Pavel’s back, Corny introduced him to the others in the unit.
“Pleasure to meet you,” said Kara Beck, a forty-something former electrical engineer with auburn hair threaded with gray. “You’re not Elizabeta Tzarkowski’s Pavel are you?”
“I am actually,” Pavel said, a short chuckle escaping his lips.
“She was always such a pain in the ass,” Kara continued. “I hope she’s doing well.”
Next was Frederic Boulanger. A stocky, red-headed man with thinning hair and an incomprehensibly thick beard, Frederic had been a farmer-come-scientist for the Agriculture Ministry prior to the War. He gave Pavel a firm handshake and a gruff “bonjour.”
Last in this compact unit was Lieutenant Antonio Suarez. An imposing figure – Pavel could have sworn he had to duck to get through the door – Suarez was a man of sharp, severe features with deep purple bags under his eyes. Meticulously cropped jet-black hair covered his scalp, and in an age where razors were hard to come by, he was impeccably clean-shaven.
“Hey boss!” Corny barked.
“Dr. Atwater,” he started in a tone that could be charitably described as resigned. “Dr. Beck, Mr. Boulanger, nice to see you.” His eyes shifted over to Pavel.
“Ah, Dr. Tzarkowski, welcome. I’m not one for icebreakers, so we’ll just get into the meat of the assignment.”
Deferential to authority to a fault, Pavel had just found his new favorite novo, one that really spoke his language.
“Dr. Beck, I assume you’ve brought your materials with you?”
“Yes sir,” she replied. Kara smoothed out a chart of Hegeliopolis’ old inner core, including what was now Nova Espero and the immediate surroundings. Circled in red marker was the Empire’s electrical engineering institute, around a half mile to the east.
“We’ll move in this way,” Suarez gestured out the City’s southern gate, moving eastward along Echevarria Street. “The Guard cleared it a few days ago, so it should still be good to go into the building… Dr. Beck?” She smoothed out another map, this one of the institute’s electrical engineering building. “We’ll make our way down the main corridor here, down this staircase, and into the library.”
Scanning his eyes across the members of the squad, Suarez continued. “The Public Health unit said the basement wasn’t too bad, but there was plenty of mildew. So I’d wear your mask if I was you.”
“I have lists of documents we’ll be looking for,” Dr. Beck said, handing each member of the unit a piece of paper with a series of journal volumes, schematics, and books. These were certainly out of Dr. Tzarkowski’s wheelhouse: The Hegelio-Ferrian Journal of Electrical Systems Management, Solar Power in the Northern Territories: A Study of Low-Sunlight Photovoltaic Power Generation, “Standardizing Modular Substations in Rural Vetludo.” Though if Pavel knew anything, it was how to find a supposedly unfindable item in a library.
“Sound good?” Suarez asked, looking at the assembled crew. No one responded.
“Good. Let’s head over to the armory.”
Lieutenant Suarez, Corny, Pavel, Kara, and Frederic made their way out the front door of the union hall. The snow was picking up now, leaving a light film of white on the pavement below interrupted only by bootprints and the thin tiremarks of passing bicycles. The scavengers had all left for the armory after participating in likely identical meetings to Pavel’s, save for the comfort of a warm classroom.
The armory itself abutted the City’s outer walls. A strangely castle-like structure, heavy stonework flowed downwards over a pointed, lancet archway, ushering in guards and scavengers alike.
The four juniors waited as their senior walked up to the armory desk and gave the attendant officer his information. “4th Scavengers Company, Platoon 403, Lieutenant Antonio Suarez.”
“Hey Tony, how’re ya doing?” the lieutenant behind the rank responded.
“Fair to middling,” Suarez coughed.
The corporal went further into the building. Peering over the counter, Pavel watched him going into what was presumably the kennel, unlocking a cage, and pulling out a massive black bag.
Lugging it onto the counter, he grunted.
“Did you sign in?”
Suarez merely motioned to the nearby ledger sheet.
“Alright, all good Tony. Safe travels.”
Emerging from the armory, the four watched as Suarez dumped the bag on a nearby bench and unzipped it. He pulled out a submachine gun and two magazines, handing them to Atwater; a revolver and several additional rounds of ammunition to Beck; a pump-action shotgun with a half-full bandolier of shells to Frederic; and finally, a carbine with a cracked, wooden stock to Pavel.
“Do you know how to shoot one of these things?” Suarez asked Pavel.
“Of course,” he replied. There was no way a member of the pre-War intelligentsia would have made it in this world with his fists alone. He had been on enough “combat details” to know how guns worked and where to point them.
“Okay,” the lieutenant said skeptically. “Load it.”
Pavel hefted the rifle under his armpit, gripping the magazine in his left hand. He placed it tenderly into the catch at first, then smacked the heel of his palm into the bottom until he heard a click. By pure instinct, he pulled the bolt back to chamber the first round, as he had done in tense situations a hundred times over in the past two years.
“Hey dickhead,” a guard shouted a few yards away. “No rounds in the chamber inside the walls, clear the fucking chamber!”
“S-sorry!” Pavel stammered. The other members of Platoon 403 stifled their laughter as Pavel released the magazine onto the cold concrete below, shaking as he attempted to clear the round.
“Don’t worry about the guards,” Atwater said sardonically. “They’re just assholes. Don’t think that they’re above you.”
Platoon 403 made their way towards the gate, flung open for the exiting guards and scavengers. Stopping on a sidewalk just beyond the parapets, Pavel cautiously reloaded his rifle, waiting to do so until he saw the others do the same.
The snow was coming down harder now. The flakes dampened the laughter of guards cracking jokes with one another, officers barking orders, and the clicking and beeping of radios coming online. Behind him were the city, its warm beds, and its bright lights. Ahead were cold, darkened corners, and the blinding, gray-white void.
This is Part Five of a series centered on Pavel Tzarkowski’s experiences as a survivor in early Nova Espero entitled “1850-01.” Follow this link to read Part Six.