Rank-and-filers like Sergio had to wonder if these natterings of brittle, fatigued leadership were signs of doom, crack-brained utopian delusion (as he had been told, and often, by losers in the street). (“Word in the street—”)
He had to keep his mind on one thing at a time if he wanted to stay alive in the pitch blackness of the abandoned aircraft plant, which stood in partial ruins over a 3-mile-wide underground lake of Chromium-6-tainted water. The ruined plant (abandoned by Lockheed Martin in 1991) tried to maim and kill him via rusted railings that detached when leaned on, stairsteps that fell away into the abyss when you let down your full weight on them, random holes in the flooring where pipes and conduits or elevators or stairwells had been removed, etc. Even if he just stepped into a shallow hole and broke an ankle, like one of his short-term volunteers had done, it could mean days of misery before anyone came looking for him (that was one chirpy volunteer’s first and last ELADATL experience).
They would only have a few week’s use of this plant until it was razed to make way for the many bulldozed acres that were to release Chromium-6-laden soil to the winds for a couple of years until the developers figured out how to put a big-box shopping mall on the site. And when the leadership, minis and maxis both, found out about a plant’s “availability,” they always called in the forward team. Sergio was the forward team.
Given the shortage of members (who usually could be found reading angry spoken-word poetry in Long Beach coffeehouses, or singing sad versions of sones huastecos on the sidewalks of Koreatown, or defecting to the Food Not Bombs collective in Highland Park, or making clever online comments about the latest movies rather than actually putting in hours of labor), particularly on the graveyard shift that was his specialty, this forward team was Sergio alone.
But they said someone would come.
They didn’t say for sure who it was that killed Sergio on a night like this. They denied the rumors that it was an internal ELADATL security squad sent by one faction to take out a suspected member of the other faction, or an FBI Cointelpro-style provocateur playing that role. Most likely, they said, it was a psychopathic loner who read too many Conan the Barbarian comic books while listening to Classic Rock who chopped Sergio to pieces with a machete, who waited till Sergio was busy hammering, welding four hours straight, dragging scavenged steel frames into a circular pattern laid out on the ground floor in advance, concentric constellations of blue LED lights casting a distant pale glow like distant stars made of ice chips, reaching above his head to climb back up the ladder, when out of the dark he heard the faint indication of a footstep—
That was one of his repeating nightmares, which Sergio replayed and discussed in his mind while measuring out great concentric circles in charcoal on dank concrete (lit at crucial intervals by solar-powered lights stolen from the front yards of helpful homeowners across the state of California—ELADATL officially thanks them here for supporting the next new era economy). He didn’t know that his assassination was actually in writing somewhere—it had gone past the whisper campaign and moved through the final planning stages; he thought it was only in his imagination that he was going to be killed doing his clandestine duty for the people of California and the underclasses of the Americas (North and South), but what if his paranoia—that distant ticking or those slight sounds from odd corners of the pitch-black great hall of the generator room, deep inside the cavernous building—was a killer actually making his way stealthily toward him across the vast dark space.
Sergio did his best to remind himself that he was just paranoid, as usual; you had to keep your wits sharp to survive the usual dangers of any postindustrial wasteland. A little voice at the back of his mind suggested that perhaps the minis had tipped off some malevolent Homeland Security death squad that Sergio represented the maxis’ best hopes in their effort to take over the entire ELADATL organization and replace the leadership with radicals who represented a direct attack on the capitalist 1% that ruled America with fascist force backed by NDAA legislation and endless piddly-assed laws against everything and your mother. Municipal ordinances, local laws, institutional regulations, state codes and federal legislation against terrorism and conspiracy and thinking, rules about everything from where and how you could walk the earth and chew gum at the same time, draw breath and how long, not to mention which verbal expression might be allowable when they towed your car from the 30-minute parking zone. God forbid if you showed up at the collective meeting and ever forgot Roberts Rules of Order, and—
What was that sound?
He could swear he heard a dry tick, like the steel blade of a machete accidentally scraping on cement.
Hopefully it was nothing, because he still had the front carapace of the dirigible to weld into place in the five hours left before dawn, if he was going to be ready by the time Swirling had said he was going to arrive with a carload of potential investors for the movie (if they were that kind of investors) or the dirigible fleet (if they were those other, harder-to-find investors). The aluminum conduit, thermostat and drain cocks, brass tubing, blower unit housing, cold air ducts and coolant lines that Sergio welded, bolted, drilled, hacksawed, ground, sanded, engineered, framed, scaffolded, lifted, pulleyed, swung, chained, tied, hammered, sledged, screwed, fused, wired, electrified, cantilevered, extended, raised, oxy-acetylene-torched, arc-welded, stapled, grommeted, tacked, maneuvered, moved, hurled, spun, forced, handled, sorted, joined, expoxy’d, Super Glued, powered up, connected, hot-wired, grounded, ionized, jerry-rigged, and banged together would have to look visually impressive so as to impress the hell out of motion picture producers, on the one hand; and it would need to have an actual chance of getting off the ground, in order to meet the requirements of the outlaw capitalists captivated by strange dreams of lighter-than-air solar-powered or self-charging airships on the other. In short, he had one night in which to make ELADATL happen—or not. Others put in a similar predicament might have been resentful. Sergio certainly was.
But he had work to do. He was doing it!
What was that?
Did a couple of the distant LED lights just flicker, out there beyond the perimeter of darkness?
Anyway, how could he see anything, green spots in his eyes after welding the concentric circles of the hull into place, and the gangways too, laid out and welded along port and starboard. By that time, Sergio was glistening with sweat, his skin blackened by carbon dust and fiberglass insulation dust and ancient dust. His hair bristled through the goggle straps; strands of black hair hung in his face, his forehead smeared where he’d brushed it repeatedly away. He figured he probably needed a haircut.
They said he’d never seen it coming. He was so engrossed in his work, as usual—building an entire dirigible by himself (or the representation of one, according to the movie faction)—that he hadn’t even heard the figure zigzagging through the emptiness of the great hall toward him as he bent over the framing, electrode holder in a thickly gloved fist. Occasionally, he’d jump up, rush over to the portable generator and shut it off.
Sergio would grab the big 25-watt HID rechargeable spotlight and furiously swing the 20,000,000-candlepower beam in great arcs in every direction to verify that he was totally alone. As the vast shadows of building materials, framing and debris leaped wildly back and forth, he felt alone in this strange endeavor—not just in some existential sense but, more importantly, there at the base of the ladder. Darkness shuddered and wobbled in big clouds in all directions above him, but the great hall, with its various foundation struts and structures scattered across the floor resolved into shaky definition under the white spotlight. Then he switched it off, giving his eyes a moment to readjust to the darkness, reaching upward—
That is—he heard the slight—
Too late—