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One of Those Mornings by Jon Yip
It was one of those mornings. It was one of those mornings where the bed seems so very comfortable and the rest of the world is just a big, gray, wet thing. It was one of those mornings where you think of just skipping work entirely for a day and then realizing that not only are you all out of vacation days, but you are six days behind schedule for the proposition that was due on Thursday. And it was one of those mornings where he had to stare groggily at the blinking "6:35" for a full minute before he realized the power had gone out in the middle of the night. It was one of those mornings fifty years from now.
Suddenly he realized that the power had gone out in the middle of the night.
He hoped that it might have gone out sometime around midnight so that the "6:36" that continued glaring on and off at him still could be fairly accurate, but then he remembered that he himself had went to sleep around 1:30 and he didn't recall that the power had gone off yet.
Thankfully, fifty years from now the houses do in fact make breakfast for you automatically, like they did in Back to the Future and all those other science-fiction movies. But they're not perfect.
His toast was fine, but his orange juice was lukewarm (he didn't think of it, but it was related to the fact that the power had gone out in the middle of the night and the refrigerator stopped) and his egg was slightly overcooked (simply because the machines fifty years from now aren't perfect and mess up just like they do now). He stuck them in a very old and worn paper bag (paper is very rare fifty years from now and is reused many times) and dove into his car (which is, of course, electric).
He heard a familiar clanking noise outside, near the front right wheel.
In his haste he had completely missed the young hoodlum that was prying the hubcaps off of his wheels with a crowbar again. This was the fifth time that week. Apathetically, he stepped back out of the car door and lightly kicked the youth with all his might. "Get out of here," he shouted. He picked up the crowbar that the kid had left behind and flung it in the kid's direction, then quickly replaced the now dented and nicked hubcap back onto the wheel. Without missing another beat, he hopped again into his car, started it up, and drove off.
The moment he reached the freeway he spat with disgust. Normally at this time the traffic was bad enough, but on this particular day it was very nasty, and it was also worse than usual because he usually got up early to beat the traffic and now that he was late he got stuck in the heavy time slot. For the next sixty-five minutes (which translated into three miles) all he did was honk the horn and swear. He would have walked, but the daytime friendly-fire factor was a bit too risky, especially since all the hospitals and clinics had been carpet-bombed by the Euro-allies and there would be nowhere to go in the not-so-unlikely case of a firearm accident. He tried to save time by ducking into the carpool lane, but everybody else cheated too and now it was as slow as all the other lanes.
Finally his exit came into view (or rather it came close enough for him to exit into, since it was actually "in view" for the whole trip). He turned but was closely cut off by a six-ton, eighteen passenger "SUV" (Sport Utility Vehicle) that was owned by a four-person family. The "SUV" blazed past him and then turned off of the exit onto his own lane. Too late, he watched his exit pass by without him driving on it. In a manic frenzy he slammed his forehead repeatedly on the steering wheel and cracked the windshield with his fist, fracturing two of his knuckles. "DAMN!" he exclaimed.
Calmed a little from his violent episode of rage, he quietly took the next exit, made a couple of illegal U-turns, and approached his original exit. This time, however, he made sure that he was in the correct lane early enough to avoid any late swerving. After the transition from the freeway back to local streets, the traffic became much milder.
Soon he pulled into the office parking lot and heard the comforting rat-tat-tat through the crack at the top of his window. He parked in his favorite spot, the area near the rear park of the building that had smoother gravel than the rest of the lot and also provided the best shrapnel cover from enemy pyra-shells.
His trusty, tried and true MP5 auto was strapped to the bottom of the front passenger seat. He reached down and removed it, and he also withdrew his Beretta semi-auto handgun from the glove compartment. While doing his habitual 12-point system-and-ammo check, he took three deep breaths; then he kicked his door open and charged into the fray.
On most mornings he would have some of his co-workers out making last rounds to give him cover fire, but today he found himself to be the only one in the parking lot from his division; everyone else had already made it inside to start work, which made it doubly difficult for him to make the 90-meter clearing to the sliding-door entrance. Relishing the last few seconds of safe cover behind his open car door, he took his final 3-point double-check, another two breaths, then slammed the door shut, locked it ("bleep bleep") and bolted to the northeast trashbin while emptying three-quarters of his first clip from the barrel of his MP5. Sixty meters south was the gigantic mound of sand and dirt where the Euro-ally platoon staked their county fort. They returned fire, but he luckily had made it behind the trashbin in time. He popped up momentarily above the bin to take a few potshots at the enemy troop. Pop pop pop! Right before he crouched back down again he saw one stationary gunner go down. "Hmm," he said to himself. One out of three at this distance wasn't too shabby.
In the distance he heard the "clink clink" of guns reloading. He took the opportunity and sprinted out from behind the bin for the long dash to the office entrance. With his left hand he fired short bursts from the MP5, taking out two more gunners and infantry man. Moments later, the Euros completed their reload and suddenly a fast-moving trail of machine-gun impacts chased closely behind his heels. He used the last of his handgun ammunition on the oil-drums behind their two stolen Panzer tanks, hoping to set off the occasional firestorm that could wipe out up to half of the nest. Sometimes he had seen his co-workers make the shot, but this time it didn't happen. Brushing away his thoughts of disappointment, he took one more burst shot at the largest clump of infantry, then put all of his energy into running. He was halfway there, but the gunfire around him was getting denser and more rapid.
A thought dawned on him; he might not make it. He reflexively dialed his cell phone (which, fifty years from now, is literally a cell) and called the office.
"Boss? Boss!" he said, still running. "Help, I need some help here!" A bullet grazed the bottom of his shoe. "Backup, quick," he said. He stopped running when he heard the clinking again from the enemy; he turned and fired a steady stream of lead at the infantry. Glancing up for a moment, he caught something small in the corner of his eye, something tumbling through the air. It was a grenade.
He was about to cut back to the bin when, from the office window above, an assualt rifle was extended. It was his boss.
As his boss began shooting at the Euro base, he resumed his running. By now he could hear the popping of gunfire and the whizzing of bullets all around his ears. Suddenly he felt a strong, vibrating quake behind him, and seconds later a shower of crumbled cement and burning garbage fell down around him. The grenade had exploded. He looked back and saw that the trashbin had been reduced to a smoldering heap of nothing.
Now he was only about ten seconds from the entrance. He emptied the remainder of his MP5 clip over his back without looking, and then heard a violent explosion. Quickly glancing over his shoulder, he saw that his boss had hit the drums. Half the fort was up in smoke and another quarter was in flames.
He was at the steps that led to the entrance. He bounded up them three at a time until he felt a searing, pulsing pain in his left ankle. A look down at his feet told him that he had been shot; there was a flow of blood from his feet spilling down the steps, his trousers were ripped at the bottom of the leg, and the pain he felt at his ankle was almost unbearable. Wincing at every move, he pulled up his pant leg expecting to see a bloody, mangled, half-inch bullet hole, but he discovered that he had not really been shot; he had just forgotten to take the pins out of his new pair of trousers and one of the pins had torn a gash in his leg when he took the long, high steps. It was quite painful.
The rest of the Euro platoon that hadn't died in the blast either went to stop the fire or feebly took a few last shots with their revolvers. Removing the all the pins from his pants, he limped up the steps to the sliding doors when he felt another pain from his right leg. It wasn't as acute or sharp as the pain in his left ankle, so he guessed that another pin had just pricked him lightly.
He lifted up his right pant leg to remove the last pin and saw that a shotgun tip had gone straight through his lower leg and had left a bleeding quarter-inch hole in his flesh. It didn't hurt that much, and he usually took a bullet at least once every couple of weeks or so, so he cleaned up and hobbled inside. He took his timecard from his inside coat pocket and inserted it into the check-in machine. Ka-ching!
After the slow trip up three flights of stairs (the elevator had been destroyed by a stray Sidewinder missile down the shaft), he sat down in his cubicle and flicked on his computer work console. "Welcome," it said.
He sighed. Time for another day of work. Over the wall of his cubicle, the head of his annoying work-neighbor, Jack, popped up. "Damn, man," said Jack. "You look awful. Rough morning, eh?"
"Tell me about it," he replied. "Traffic was terrible." Then he turned back to his console to begin his work.
© 2001 by Jon Yip