Haverbrook: Episode One
This is the first episode in a new serial fiction series. Stay tuned each Friday for a new installment!
You may start to think this is a love story, but it’s not. It’s someone’s idea of Hell.
I was working at a small manufacturing company that made parts for personal service devices, and I was exactly one half of the marketing team. Nothing exciting about this job other than it allowed me to live indoors and eat.
Part of this job was to attend networking events and industry conferences to spread the word of the firm’s products. On this day, I was attending the Black Women’s Commercial Caucus. Through the years, I worked hard to subdue my innate shyness, but there was always still some amount of “psyching myself up” for any event. My performance at this event started rougher than usual, and I was working hard to rationalize an early escape.
This particular conference was known to last late into the evening with dinner, cocktails, afterparties. I knew I wasn’t going to have enough social energy to make it to the end, so I started to look for a graceful exit. One of the Caucus members, Gayle, must have noticed me eyeing the door, and she offered her apartment to stay the night since she wouldn’t be home until late. She had a direct teleport to her rooms, so once I accepted her offer, I was instantly in her bedroom.
At the time, I was not accustomed to teleports and would get decoherence induced vertigo. It passes in a few seconds, but for those seconds, there is a feeling of being outside of space and time. Not like being in a void, more like you are not rooted to anything around you. I imagine it’s how a ghost feels. Ten seconds later, I regained my bearings.
And teleports really make you have to pee. I look for a bathroom in the apartment, but there wasn’t one. Not unusual in teleport enabled buildings. The bathrooms are centralized with a teleport to take you there directly. But the teleport panel was confusing. I pressed a control that looked promising, but I ended up in the parking lot of a grocery store.
Ok, fine, I can use the grocery store’s bathroom and then bite the bullet and take a carshare home. I navigate through the cluster of people walking through the store’s massive automatic glass doors. Looking around after entering the store, I find a line a dozen women deep. I round the corner to see what the line was for – yes, it’s the women’s bathroom. I am defeated. I turn around to leave and weave my way through the dozens of people entering the store. I notice one particular man walking into the store. He’s an average looking guy, nothing remarkable about him, but he seems familiar. Not just in the sense that I’ve seen his face before, but that I know him. Like a long-lost friend that you, by chance, meet again. But I can’t place where I know him.
I’m probably staring at him too long, and he notices and walks up to me. “Hello there. Would you like to see my tent?” My instinct should have been to say, “hell no,” but all I said was, “Yeah.”
In the parking lot of the grocery store, he had set up his simple canvas “pup” tent. It was a bit wider, like it could accommodate three people. On the floor, he had layers of crumpled packing paper to insulate him from the cold ground. He said he loved sleeping outside on cold nights. I laid down in the tent next to him and stared at the tent’s ceiling for a few minutes. He and I laid there in silence. Then I blurted out, “I really have to pee.” To a stranger, maybe.
“You can use the bathroom in my apartment,” he offered. “It’s in that apartment block behind the store. Here’s the gate key and door key. You can sleep there too if you don’t want to go home tonight.”
I took his keys, and he pointed out which building was his and the apartment number. I crawled out of his tent and headed to his apartment. A chill ran through my bones as I walked to the ten-foot fence around the apartment block. Whoever designed the place had the forethought to outline the entrance gate in red neon and a large ‘exit’ sign. Even I could find it in the dark.
I found his building fairly quickly, despite the labyrinthian layout of the apartment block. The apartment was on the eighth floor; I used the elevator; I was in no mood for stairs. I finally stepped into his apartment and quickly looked around. I was relieved to see a bathroom in the unit. No teleports.
After availing myself of the facilities, I realized how distracted I had been by my full bladder because I never asked my new friend’s name. I was standing in his apartment, fingering his model jet planes about to crawl into his bed to sleep, not knowing what to call him when I saw him again.
That turned into a passing thought as I removed my shoes and crawled into the warm bed. The long night had caught up with me, and I was asleep before I could contemplate odd coincidences.
I opened my eyes to faint sunlight, and the smell of coffee wafting down the hallway into the bedroom. Either my friend had returned or has an automatic coffee maker. I availed myself of the on-site toilet once more, before heading to the kitchen. As I walked down the hallway from the bathroom, I suddenly felt flustered. Like I was nervous to talk to him. Now suddenly, I felt uncomfortable? What would I even say to him? I’ll have to say something; I slept the night in his bed.
I rounded the corner into the open kitchen, and before I had a chance to say anything, he asked, “Did you sleep ok?”
“What’s your name?” I blurted out, real smooth.
With a little half-smile, he replied, “John. John Thorne. How do you take your coffee?”
“With lots of half & half, if you have it. I’m Amy, by the way. I was admiring your model jets last night,” I said, trying to prove myself a stunning conversationalist. Or at least not a flustered weirdo.
“It’s a hobby I’ve had since I was a kid. It ties in with my work – I design rockets for the Outer Frontier program.”
“So, you’re a rocket scientist?” I tried not to sound too impressed.
“Technically, I’m an engineer.”
“Oh, so just a rocket engineer. Not that smart then?” my attempt at a clever joke. And suddenly hoping it he didn’t take it the wrong way.
“No, not that smart,” that little half-smile again. Not a smirk, but a slight smile on his lips and a big smile with his eyes. John’s whole face was smiling at me.
“Where are we?” I asked, now finally getting to the relevant questions.
“Haverbrook.”
“That’s forty miles outside the city,” I said, sounding slightly more alarmed than I intended.
“I’ll call you a car if you need to get back to the city,” he offered as his attempt to calm my anxious tone.
“Yes, I need to get back. Thank you for letting me stay.”
“You’re welcome anytime,” he offered.
I got into the back seat of the carshare and wondered what I would do next. I had no reason to go back to John except this sense that I knew him. Except it never occurred to me when we were talking that I ask him how we might know each other. It’s as if it wasn’t important or I already knew the answer.
I tried not to ruminate on it the entire ride back to the city. Instead, I was thinking of the work I needed to do from my event last night. Last night seemed so distant.
The traffic entering the city was crawling. The carshare driver mentioned that there had been rioting overnight and that certain areas were still not safe. He could only get within a few miles of my drop off point, so I had to walk.
As I started walking, it was if I was passing into a ghost town. The phosphorus fires had turned the first few floors of buildings into vacant hulks. Vehicles left on the street were bare carcasses. The café tables on the street looked like a single touch would cause it to disintegrate into ash.
There were fire trucks parked on one block working to extinguish as still-burning fire. I caught the eye of one of the uniform officers to ask about the district where I lived, Silverton Square
“You don’t want to head into that area right now. There are fires still burning in Silverton Square and the Waverly District,” warned the officer. He patted my shoulder, perhaps reacting to my anxious expression. I turned to walk away, in a haze, unable to respond. I knew enough to understand his warning about the “fires still burning.”
Before I had to decide whether to venture home, I needed to visit the friendly caucus member’s apartment to pick up my purse and work file that I unintentionally abandoned when I teleported to Haverbrook. I took a left down one of the side streets, which wasn’t completely littered with charred debris.
As I neared Gayle, the caucus member’s apartment, I was relieved to see it was not in an area of unrest. I walked out of the apocalypse zone and rejoined civilization. When I arrived at her apartment, Gayle had my belongings collected and was busy collecting some things of her own.
“Hello, Amy, where did you go last night? When you weren’t here, I was concerned you were caught in the rioting.”
“No, I couldn’t make sense of your bathroom teleport and ended up in Haverbrook,” I explained, not going into detail about my overnight adventure.
“You should think about getting out of town for a while,” Gayle offered, making it seem like a routine excursion. “I’m going to Monmar for a retreat until this dies down. Where do you live?”
“Silverton Square.”
“I’m so sorry,” was Gayle’s only comment. “Is there somewhere else you can go?”
“Yes. Can I use your teleport?”
Sabina, this is wonderful! You truly have a way with words!