Page 3 of All Your Days (Mayhem Manuscripts Season One: 1nf3ction #4)

Chapter one

Eli

The lights—somehow both bright and 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 to shovel? 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, somewhere had suspected 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 the point of 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.

In the end, the New Australian Union made peace with the Federation of Australia to the west, carving up the country. It took a while to establish their authority, but when they did, the Union began to recover settlements and refugees were redistributed.

Surprisingly, The Facility’s biggest threat wasn’t the refugees, or the raiders, or the competing governments or even the desert around us.

No. It was the water. Specifically, a malfunction in the water treatment system thirty-five years ago, that saw every resident of The Facility drinking contaminated water—how the virus is spread.

And so now, not only is our community divided into the commanders and the scientists, the guards and the craftsmen, and the grunts at the very bottom of the ladder, we have the carriers, the infected, and the immune.

Infection with RRV13 means that a person—or animal—can turn at any moment, depending on their rate of infection.

So each morning every resident has to provide a blood sample to the guards for checks.

For the grunts and craftsmen who live in the mud homes outside the main building, they provide their samples before they can leave their designated area.

Us residents living in the main building have more freedom depending on our residential level.

Largely because higher ranked residents, like the commander and the guard leadership and the scientists, live in home-style suites, rather than the pod-style bunks us lower ranked residents live in.

They only have to provide their samples before entering the Command, Lab, or Ag levels for the day.

Guards and grunts lucky enough to live within the main building have to provide their sample before their pod is unlocked for the day.

Which is why, after my shower—which is timed with an automatic shutoff to prevent water waste—I get dressed in my durable, dark blue grunt uniform and prepare my sample.

It’s a simple process, a prick to the finger and fill the small vial.

It’s less blood than it seems, just enough that when the guards shine their special light through it, they can check the colour.

Too dark, means too high an infection and you’re sent to the lower levels for the safety of all the residents.

And later, I get to wash every single vial in the compound.

For now I put the vial in the window of my door and keep myself busy while I wait. I straighten my bed, and reorganise my drawing supplies, making a mental note that I need to make some more charcoal pencils whenever I have the time. I make sure I have all the drawings I’ll need for the day.

I hate this wait. The sitting. The silence.

So I move to the small mirror hanging above the sink.

Until I grew into my body, I’d been invisible.

Then boom something happened and I became pretty.

That’s what they call me. Pretty . My brown eyes and brown hair are all normal to me, but it’s hard to miss people's reactions to me. Especially when the men I’m screwing around with love to tell me that I’m so pretty they forget I’m a man. Like that’s a fucking compliment.

I’m also not entirely unaware that my face is part of the reason why Moby insists on having me in the Labs with him.

To protect me.

There've been close calls over the years, with visitors from the Union who’ve gotten a little too insistent in their admiration of me, wanting to whisk me away. Thanks, but no thanks.

It’s why I’ve stopped messing around with the armymen.

It seems safer. Which means I’ve become an expert at dodging the expectations of residents I hook up with.

It always starts off casual but then they end up getting the wrong idea.

They end up wanting more— even when they were the one to insist that they aren’t into men and they ‘didn’t usually do this’.

But more is just not something I’m able to give them.

It’s exhausting. Which is why I haven’t hooked up in a while.

Well, that and because he’s always there.

The guard with dark eyes, that always seems to be watching me. My very own ghost.

Jacob .

At least he’s never stationed in the Labs.

Not that I’ve been aware of where he’s stationed.

It’s just something I’ve noticed, against my will.

Like I’ve noticed he mainly gets posted on watch duty, or on the supply runs to other settlements and trading posts.

It’s normal to get to know the routines of residents on similar rotations to you.

Granted, sometimes I’ve had to do some digging.

Not because I care—not after Jacob made it clear he wasn’t interested in anything other than lurking in the corner of my eye.

I was just trying to understand, so I knew when to expect him to be around.

Finding out the information isn’t always easy.

It can be hard to ask questions without drawing attention to the situation.

Harder still was covering how upset I was when I found out he volunteered for the supply run job five years ago, using his experience travelling with the merchies as leverage. So far, no one’s noticed how anxious I get whenever he’s gone.