Strangers in the Night

by Flex, Raymond S

Once, when Mitts had been several shades of bored, he had sat down with a notepad and thought through just how many people, considering the supplies, and the space, the Restricted Area might be able to support. And for how long.

  He had come up with fifty people, more or less.

  And he estimated they would be able to survive for up to ten years.

  So, considering that there were only five of them in the Restricted Area, he drew the conclusion that they could get by for another century.

  If ‘getting by’ was all they had in mind.

  Mitts dressed himself in one of the many hand-me-down shirts his father had passed to him. He liked to wear them with a plain white t-shirt underneath, and with the sleeves rolled up to just above his elbow. Then he would leave the first few buttons undone too.

  His mother had done a good job adjusting some of his father’s jeans. Before, when his father had first passed Mitts clothes for him to wear, he had walked about the Compound dragging the cuffs of the trousers all over the floors.

  Mitts stepped into the kitchen and was, at once, overwhelmed by the sweet smell of something delicious cooking in one of the ovens.

  Already, Mitts could taste the congealing, powdered eggs and butter, the rising flour, catching at the back of his throat.

  All those smells, they reminded him of how things had been before.

  Of happier times . . .

  The air was warmed by the ovens. Mitts undid a couple more buttons of his shirt, so he further exposed the plain t-shirt he wore underneath.

  His father and Floo were sat at the large kitchen table, playing Snap with a well-thumbed deck of cards. Like always, Floo was wearing one of the dresses which their mother had sewn together from odds and ends. This one, Mitts could tell, had been salvaged from one—or several—pairs of jeans.

  Though Mitts’s mother’s earlier efforts had seemed a little shabby, she had got better with practice.

  Much better than his father, in any case.

  His father hadn’t changed his dress style in the seven years they’d been living in the Compound.

  To be fair, though, there really hadn’t been much opportunity for fashion experimentation—not for any of them.

  That all might be changing soon, though.

  If Mitts had his way.

  If everything went to plan.

  When Mitts glanced over to the oven, he saw his mother. A well-stained black apron was tied on tight about the front of her grey-blue, blouse.

  Underneath, she wore a pair of well-adjusted jeans which—Mitts couldn’t help noticing—bulged just a little at the seams.

  Over the years, all of them had seemed to embrace the Compound.

  They had all got a touch chubbier.

  It wasn’t like there was any exercise to be had, beyond running through the corridors.

  And since it was so easy to get bored, they sometimes ate as entertainment.

  Even Mitts seemed to have gained weight, though he tried to convert whatever fat stuck to him into muscle. He performed incessant press-ups, sit-ups, and those aforementioned runs through the corridors of the Restricted Area.

  Mitts’s mother looked back at him.

  She coloured a touch—blushing.

  “Oh,” she said, and then turned around to look at Mitts’s father and Floo. “We weren’t expecting you to be up and about so early.”

  Mitts guessed his family had got so used to his teenage sleeping patterns—Mitts would often sleep in the ‘daytime’—that they could plan around him.

  Without him noticing.

  What other top-secret operations might his family have planned without his knowledge?

  Whatever they were—if they did exist at all—they surely couldn’t be a patch on what he had planned . . .

  Although Mitts understood, from the books he read, that parents had a habit of calling teenagers out for sleeping in all day, his parents never did.

  He wondered if it might have something to do with his ‘condition’.

  With how he had seemingly ‘got over’ whatever ailment it was that he’d been suffering from.

  Maybe they thought Mitts’s lengthy sleeping patterns had to do with his miraculous recovery.

  But Mitts didn’t feel all that miraculous.

  All that special.

  Apart from the weird visions, the lucid dreams . . . that strange encounter he’d had seven years ago when he’d crawled through the air ducts, come face to face with that grey-purple hunk of flesh . . . he thought of himself as a reasonably normal kid.

  Though what did ‘reasonably normal’ even mean?

  As far as he knew, he might be the only eighteen-year-old kid on the planet.

  Now, that was a scary thought . . .

  Was there anything as scary as being unique?

  Mitts took up his place at the kitchen table, realising in short order why his mother had blushed.

  She was, of course, baking his birthday cake.

  His mother turned her back on the oven and pressed on a guilty smile. “Well,” she said, “it should only be ten minutes, I was hoping to have it on the table by the time you got out of bed.”

  Mitts glanced to his father and Floo.

  In that moment, Floo, kneeling up on her high stool so that she could get the best view of the surface, turned over a card and then immediately, with a slap which shook the entire table top, cried, “SNAP!”

  Mitts turned back to his mother, who was smiling again.

  “But,” she said, “I’d be surprised if anyone could sleep with that racket going on.”

  Mitts shrugged his shoulders. He had a few aches from the press-ups he’d done the night before.

  Whenever he did any serious thinking, he worked out.

  And he had had some serious thinking to do all right.

  Maybe he’d overdone it a little.

  He massaged his left upper arm, feeling a little knot just below the bicep.

  “You’re looking buff,” his father put in.

  Feeling a touch distracted, off in his own little world, as he found himself more and more these days, Mitts put on the best polite smile he could muster, and said, “Yeah, I don’t want to turn into a blob, or anything.”

  His father laid a card down, and—as a result—Floo hammered down her palm on top of it, declaring, again, “SNAP!”

  “It’s one thing turning into a ‘blob’,” his father replied, “it’s another to try and buff yourself up into some sort of superhero.”

  Mitts sniffed a laugh. He wondered if—perhaps—his father might’ve taken that as an underhanded jibe at his weight gain over these seven years.

  But that was the truth.

  Whereas before, his father had been just like him—skinny as a pole, not a scrap of extra fat on him—his father had grown consistently podgier as the years passed by.

  So much so that he now wore the waistband of his jeans slung beneath his burgeoning gut.

  Mitts’s mother, over at the oven, announced that the cake was ready for serving.

  And then she made the same non-joke she had made every single birthday since they had resided in the Compound. The one about them having to imagine candles because they had none.

  But Mitts was done with imagining.

  He was done with the Compound.

  With the Restricted Area.

  Now was the time to move on.

  To get back out into the real world.

  As Mitts’s mother laid the cake before him, as his family all sang him happy birthday, Mitts found his gaze wandering. Over to the kitchen doorway.

  He saw him there.

  Heinmein.

  Lurking.

  Just like the early days, Heinmein refused to use crutches. But, for some reason, when Mitts had observed Heinmein out in the corridors, he noted that he no longer had the same difficulties walking.

  In fact, when Mitts did observe him walking about the corridors of the Restricted Area, he noticed that Heinmein now had a fairly normal gait. />
  His cleanliness, too, had improved.

  Mitts didn’t feel anywhere near as hostile toward him as he had in the early days.

  For whatever purpose, Heinmein had attempted to cure him.

  And whether Heinmein had fed him some sort of unintended miracle cure, or if there had been some other factor in play, Mitts had to give Heinmein some credit for at least attempting to save his life.

  And, to tell the truth, that knowledge rankled him.

  How was Mitts ever supposed to repay a gesture like that?

  When the singing reached its climax, and then gave way to clapping, Mitts realised he was still staring at the doorway.

  Still staring at Heinmein.

  And that Heinmein was clapping along.

  Mitts turned back to his birthday cake.

  As he cut the cake, he thought about how Heinmein was the only one who could possibly have an inkling of what he had planned.

  Heinmein was the only one who could possibly stop him.

  * * *

  Mitts waited until the fluorescent strip lights had faded down in their imitation of night. He flipped on his torch as he always did. He shone its yellowish circle of light into the gloom.

  Normally, he would lie propped up in bed reading into the early hours. Seeing as he had worked his way through all the novels his family had brought into the Compound in the first place, he had started to make a habit of digging into a small room toward the edge of the Restricted Area.

  One which had a series of manuals; technical handbooks.

  At first, when Mitts had set foot across the threshold of that room, breathed in the slightly acrid smell of glue from book bindings, felt the cool tingle of the air conditioning up against his skin, it had been like he was trespassing.

  For some reason—sometimes—he felt his mind swimming back to those earlier fears.

  Back when he had thought that at any second a group of heavily armed security personnel might come busting in through the blast doors.

  Bringing them all down in a rain of semi-automatic rifle fire.

  Actually, when Mitts had thought about his feelings in crossing over into that room in more detail, he realised that he had believed it to be a part of the Restricted Area kept under close guard by Heinmein.

  He supposed that Heinmein frequently visited the room, for tips on whatever problem he might have been facing that particular day.

  Having said that, though, Mitts had never actually come upon Heinmein on his frequent visits to the impromptu library.

  And neither had Heinmein said anything to Mitts about his visits here.

  So Mitts thought himself in the clear.

  Over the time he had resided in the Compound, he had gone through manuals detailing electrical engineering, basic plumbing and other skills which he never would’ve been capable of learning off his father.

  Back home—back in another life—his father had been an accountant.

  There wasn’t much use for accountants now.

  Once Mitts had grappled with those skills, he turned his attention to the books on physics, chemistry, biology; all of those subjects which’d bored him to death at school, but which now, in the Compound, with no other stimuli, seemed fascinating.

  One of the books had even contained a map of the Compound itself.

  He had torn out the page and shoved it into his jeans pocket.

  Mitts grasped the rubber grip of his torch tightly, feeling the texture of the rubber squeeze against his skin. He shone the light over the latest book he had been leafing through:

  A Practical Introduction to Machine Coding

  It was one of the last books in the library.

  It’d only taken him seven years to get through a thousand, or so, books.

  For the past couple of years, Mitts had been reading up on computer skills. Learning all the basics. Several times, he had stolen into those emptied rooms which contained dozens of computers. And although all of them had been dead—there was no power allocated to those rooms, and the computers’ circuitry had been long ago fried—he would practise the lines of code in the books, his fingers flurrying over the keypad as he copied the written commands.

  Committing them to memory.

  The way Mitts liked to think of it, computer programming—for him—was sort of like constantly completing a three-dimensional puzzle within his own mind.

  And it was a perfect means of removing his focus from the present.

  From the Compound.

  From the Restricted Area.

  Mitts turned the circle of light onto his camp bed. Onto his sports bag—the same one he had arrived here with all those years ago.

  The one which, back in school, he had used to store his PE kit.

  He shovelled up the three or four books on computers into the bag. He laid them on top of the clothes he had already bundled in there.

  Only when he looked around the room—what had served as his bedroom for the past seven years—did he realise that he had nothing else left to pack.

  That everything which was his in the world was now nestled within that sad, little, plump sports bag.

  Mitts breathed in.

  Then out.

  It might be the last time—for a long time—that he got to breathe the air like a normal human being.

  He glanced down to his bedside table, to where he had left the folded-up note.

  He turned away from it quickly. He didn’t want to dwell on the contents of his scrawled handwriting within.

  He needed to have his mind straight.

  His plan depended on him being able to think straight.

  On him not getting carried away.

  Decided, he glanced upward.

  To the ventilation hatch.

  And then he went to work with the screwdriver.

  * * *

  Following the map he pictured in his mind, the supplementary section of one of those books about the Compound, Mitts dragged himself through the air vents. He counted the openings as he went, dropping down through the third one on his left.

  He wasn’t subtle about opening the ventilation hatch.

  He tucked his knee back into his chest and then kicked out.

  The hatch busted open.

  It clattered down into the room below.

  Each year he’d done it, getting through the air vents had been a successively more difficult squeeze for Mitts. And today, he had found it the toughest so far.

  That had been another factor in his decision.

  What might happen when he was too large to fit through the air vents at all?

  Then the only way out of the Restricted Area would be through the blast doors. Although Mitts knew that he simply had to get out, he wasn’t prepared to put his family at risk while doing so.

  If he died right now—if he got poisoned—then he would be the only one harmed.

  For some reason, he didn’t think that was going to happen.

  He liked to believe—because of his sickness; because he’d almost died—that he was stronger than the others.

  Better able to resist.

  At least these night-time visits outside of the Restricted Area, into the wider Compound, didn’t seem to have left any lasting damage on him.

  Nothing Heinmein, in seven years of weekly check-ups, had observed, in any case.

  Mitts shone his torch around.

  It was a windowless room, just as it had been marked on the plan.

  He had peered in here before, but hadn’t yet visited . . . thus why he’d had to bust through the ventilation hatch.

  The room consisted of a simple wooden bench down the middle, much like the changing rooms which Mitts had been forced to use back at school, for PE.

  Instead of there being lockers placed all around, and a slight scent of soap lather and mud from the showers, the air stank strongly of disinfectant.

  He wondered if that had been the odour he’d smelled all that time ago.

  The motivating factor for him wanting
to explore the ventilation hatch.

  He studied the room.

  He noted the showerhead-like devices which hung down from the ceiling.

  He supposed that was where the disinfectant came from.

  A spray.

  He guessed the spray system was running off some kind of backup unit. There was no other explanation for it to still be functioning after all these years.

  In all his explorations of the Compound at night, he had never come across another soul.

  Not even bodies.

  The whole Compound was deserted.

  At least as far as he could make out.

  Mitts observed the white, semi-transparent overalls which hung down off the hooks which surrounded the room. He trod along, looking to the eerie masks which accompanied them.

  They had those chrome, gasmask mouthpieces.

  The ones Mitts had seen in a few films.

  The ones he had seen in diagram form in several of the manuals he’d read through.

  Mitts removed one of the suits off its peg. As he brought it close to him, the smell of disinfectant was almost unbearable. He had a strong urge to simply drop the suit.

  To allow it to slide through his fingers.

  But he held on.

  Within his own mind, Mitts went through the steps of using the suit.

  First, there was the zip.

  He undid it all the way.

  And then he located the little computer panel around the back of the suit.

  This was the part he was most unsure of.

  He tapped the Power button.

  A green energy bar blinked on.

  Full.

  Mitts stood, his face illuminated by the bright-green display.

  He looked about the other suits in the room.

  He wondered if they were all charged up too.

  He tried out the few suits nearest to him.

  All had their energy bars at full.

  Working quickly, he snaffled the battery packs off the suits. He slotted them into his sports bag which hung down off his shoulder. He made sure to take all of them that he could.

  With the combined battery power, he hoped to survive for months outside the Compound.

  That done, Mitts stuffed a couple of the suits into his sports bag, seeing as they didn’t occupy too much space. If he snagged a hole in the suit he was wearing, it would be simpler to ditch it and put on a fresh one than to try and mend the damage.