Page 4 of All Your Days
“What’ll happen to the settlement?” I ask, my stomach clenching painfully, uncomfortably aware that Jacob saw whatever happened to Sarah. And he survived it.
“The Union’s being contacted as we speak. Armymen will be sent to deal with the infected to stop them from spreading their violence any further. In the meantime, the merchies will be allowed to rest here until they are recovered.”
I take a sip of the tea, but it’s too hot and it burns my tongue. I’m getting a bit sick of being burnt today. The thought brings me right back around to Jacob again, remembering how the sun had roasted me until he ripped me off the pile and saved my life, and the way he’d made my insides feel hot and my cheeks like fire.
And the way the antiseptic burnt when I finally made it to medical this afternoon.
I leave Moby more unsettled than I arrived. The merchies’ dramatic arrival has cracked open the safety of my life here in The Facility. We’re lucky here; Moby is always quick to remind me that out there, they don’t always have electricity, or water, or food to eat. That out there, all that matters is survival, and they can’t even test for rising infection levels like we do.
And then there ishim. Jacob.
The merchies stay for a week, which means he’s still here, too. He hangs around their caravans like an angry ghost. More than once I try to get near him, to say thank you again, but he just frowns at me until I leave again.
In the end, an infection takes Sarah. Not RRV13, the virus that plagues us all.Sepsis, I heard the doctors say, when I was delivering supplies from the Labs. Too far gone to treat.
Sarah’s funeral is held in the morning after her death. The merchies and the residents come together in the burial grounds behind the compound. We don’t actually bury bodies here—we burn them. But that’s the old name for it, from before, and it’s stuck. By the afternoon, the somber train of caravans and trailers leaves through the outer gates. Only, they leave something behind.
Someone.
Jacob.
Chapter one
Eli
The Year 2101 (Present Day)
The lights—somehow both brightand yet watery—flicker on with a loud buzz. The signal of a new day, but I’ve been awake in the dark for more than a while. Waiting in a half-sleep, like I was waiting to be switched on, too.
I slept like shit last night. I stayed up too late working on a drawing again—and it’s harder than normal to get up and start the day.Five, four, three, two…I count down in the way that Moby taught me to do whenever I have to do a task I don’t want to do.
One. I fling off the thin, scratchy blanket and begin my morning routine. It’s the same one, every single day. Shuffle the few steps to the toilet on the other side of the room and take a leak. Teeth are next at the small sink next to the toilet. The toothpaste tastes like shit, but at least I get some. Not every grunt is issued with toothpaste. It’s a luxury not usually for the likes of us—the residents of The Facility not deemed strong enough to be guards, or skilled enough to be craftsmen.
Grunts are the ones leftover. The ones needed to do the dirty jobs, the jobs that keep the whole place running. Got shit toshovel? Get a grunt. Heavy lifting? Grunt. Cold burns for fire management? Actually, I’m surprised they leave something as important as that to the grunts, but that job falls to us, too. Or at least, the other grunts.
I’m a Lab grunt. The Labs and Ags—the levels dedicated to the scientific research this entire place was created for—are mostly outside of the social order of The Facility. Us grunts working to help the doctors and scientists sent by the Union to save humanity get extra privileges.
According to Moby, before the world went to shit, The Facility actually had a different name. A proper name that was on the big sign outside the thick walls that keep us safe. Now it just says ‘Keep Out’. The official name was never written on any document that was allowed to see the light of day, so over the decades it was lost and now we just call it The Facility.
It was all a big secret back then. The place was originally built as a research centre, one of many hidden across the world and, at the time, the place was crawling with scientists studying different ways to sustain life on other planets. It seems so crazy to me. Sometimes I forget that there is a whole world out there, outside The Facility, even outside Australia—which is only fair because they seem to have forgotten about us, too.
Nowadays, the doctors and the scientists in the Labs are trying to find a cure to the infection spread through the red rains, and the Ags are trying to keep us alive until then with their hydroponic agriculture. Between them, they have five whole levels devoted to their research.
When the trials began, the scientists probably never imagined that they would be at the core of human survival here on earth. Or maybe they did. It’s a thought that I consider on my darker days. Maybe someone, somewherehadsuspected what was coming. And that was the real reason why they created this place—somewhere humanity could hole up safely for nearly a century in relative safety.
Relative, because it hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing for the residents of The Facility.
After the red rains fell, the old government wasn’t able to fight against the illness and the zombies it created. It created a domino effect they hadn’t been able to stop.
People were too sick or too scared to carry on as they had before. Doctors got sick faster than anyone else, and when that happened, Moby told me on one of his many long history lessons on slow days in the Labs, other sicknesses spread, too. ‘A total breakdown in societal infrastructure’ he called it, talking about things I’ve never heard of outside of his lectures. About ‘supermarkets’ and ‘electrical grids’ and ‘systemic global collapse’.
“It was all a house of cards, young Eli. And it all crumbled like wet cardboard.” Moby liked to say.
What he meant was, it was chaos.
Back then, because it had been a giant secret in the middle of nowhere, The Facility wasn’t hit by the first wave of refugees from the cities. They came eventually, though, and the residents always welcomed them. After all, survival was thepointof The Facility.
But the sudden growth in the population put a strain on the compound's resources. Especially when the government lost control of the country and civil war broke out, well, as much as it could with the population dying from the zombie plague.
