Jakub awoke in his bed and lifted the duvet. Sweat ran down his cheeks as he sat up. The humid summer morning air hung thickly in his room, and left Jakub feeling like being hugged by a sweaty man. It had not been a typical night, he couldn’t remember when he last slept through one in one go, but this had been the worst night he ever attempted to sleep through. Sleep was terrifying, the image of the day of disaster, the memory of the sound of the bang that blew away his childhood wholesale, exploded in his dreams, and had him sitting up straight in his bed regularly when all he wanted was to sleep soundly. And then there was the dead woman. Her face twisted from pain and fear. He would never ever sleep… Checking his alarm, it was still half an hour to sunrise -his usual wake time, he decided to get up. Jakub already had low noise tolerance when it came to his sleep. Even the slightest disturbances woke him, and the cacophony of birdsong that came with first light made further sleeping attempts a futility-, undeterred by the discomfort of progressing insomnia, he sat and listened -silence-.
A few years ago, he had decided that order was the one and paramount requirement for a quality life, it meant to him that when he set his alarm to a specific time, he would rise at that given time. His clock was set to 5:30 AM. Giving in to taking a nice shower ahead of schedule would just lead to him starting the next day even earlier, and eventually skip nightly sleep entirely. Much had changed recently, he was living in his own place in the outskirts of the city, still protected by the bell program, which meant that he didn’t have to worry about the radiation outside the safe zone. He had his own little garden patch just a minute distance away, by foot. His place was clean, almost obsessively so, though Jakub didn’t see it that way.
He went to the kitchen to make himself a coffee, as quietly as he could. His flatmates weren’t up yet, and he didn’t want to wake them. Who knows where Mary and John, they occupied the room at the other end of the living area, had been, and were up to last night. It wasn’t any of his business, yet he cared that they recovered well. Happy mates for a happy home, he thought. The coffee machine’s grinding and steaming came to an end. Jakub poured it into a thermos, and stored it, with a dash of real milk - an extravagant waste of money, his mother used to say, but to him, it just served as a reminder that he had ‘made it ’- in his backpack, put on his clothes, checked with a glance in the mirror, donned his cap and left for the garden.
He found that the morning hours were the most pleasant time to tend to his crops. It was convenient to work in the morning hours. The relative cool and quiet soothed his mood, and readied him for what the rest of the day entailed. The Tomatoes came first. The first batch he planted last year hadn’t done well, this year's yield promised to be an improvement, but much care needed to be taken. He went and checked the water level’s of his various dispensers next. Content with his inspection, he moved on. The potato pots required some light weeding, and he went to work. More and more, the garden had become an integral part of his life. He loved everything about it. The peace and quiet, the fresh food - He thanked god that industrial grade reprocessed food ‘it’s good for the environment, and OK for you’ was a thing of his past - and that it provided almost the entirety of his income these days, were all factors, to his thorough enjoyment of it. The Garden itself was barely more than a twenty by twenty meter patch of land framed in by a small stream, a walkway and two neighbouring parcels of land, neatly separated from his by small fences. The first thing Jakub had done when he bought the place was to span the entirety of it with a see through canopy to keep the occasional ‘bad water’ away from his plants. And he had been right in doing so, his crops flourished, and already he was harvesting enough produce to pay for his increasingly more civil lifestyle. It helped that he already had the arrangements in place to sell his premium ‘Black beauty’ brand to his former bosses.
He checked his rain water tank, last night had apparently brought a small shower, and with it the possibility of ‘bad water’ contaminating his supply, but nothing worrisome was there to see on the mounted geigercounter. He had had a prior incident where he inadvertently killed a bunch of his plants by irradiating them, and had learned the way. His current system had an extra tank where the rain flowed in first, and could be checked out before it entered the main water tank. Out here, the city’s bell shield couldn’t deflect the rain, but it hardly mattered. The terrifying nuclear winter storms had lessened over the decades, both in magnitude and frequency. The earth was repairing itself, and nowhere could Jakub feel this reassuring reality more than in his own personal Eden. He admired plants for their resilience. Sometimes he just sat on his bench and watched over the sprawling wilderness across the stream, right outside the bell zone. Nature recovered with a second wind that he had not thought possible just ten years ago. By now, the brush and grass growing on the other side had become thick enough to conceal even the old rusty double stacked wall of cars, that once had been used as a defensive perimeter during the early years after the bang. Jakub plucked some of his harvest and hung it to dry, picked up a batch that was ready for delivery and stowed it away in his pack, and made ready to leave. He had a couple of ‘deposits’ and pickups to take care of. It bothered him that he couldn’t spend more time in the garden, but the hour he already had, had been a blessing, and he didn’t feel too bad about going into the city. Now that he actually had a decent amount of money to spend on things not directly tied to his survival, he enjoyed the experience of shopping. Grocery shopping never failed to draw a big smile on his face, as he sometimes saw his own goods on display -with an almost criminal mark up-, he wasn’t relevant in the grand scheme of the big suppliers, but he knew without a doubt that he had the absolute best product, and so did his customers. Even the occasional racist remarks, that had been accompanying him his entire life, had started to lose their sting. As a young man, barely not a child any more, he had made it a habit to challenge any insult directed at him. Nowadays, he simply told Dan, which had done wonders for his reputation and cut down on irritating arguments in the streets with the efficiency of the best, organized small town crime had to offer. Loosing a fingernail or two, usually settled any matter of low concern, and Jakub was glad he himself didn’t have to resort to the method any more. He walked into Dan’s place, whistling, Life was good, no reason to be down about anything. People died all the time.
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It is a universally known rule of life, that nobody likes a whistler. Dan ‘the Don’ was no exception to this. He was a busy man, and there were a great many things he didn’t like. Among his minor annoyances were, cats - entitled furry things with claws and a bite that would bless its recipient with a nasty infection, dogs - more fur, remarkably stupid, and upstart drug dealers turned self-conscious. There were no major annoyances left in Dan’s life, he had seen to it, or so he thought. Something was grinding his gears, he couldn’t quite point a finger at it, but the feeling was there. His hands were shaking, his neckbeard itching. One didn’t become a respectable drug lord by ignoring a bad gut feeling. Maybe it had something to do with the dead lady the other day?
“Boss, you’ve got a visitor” The gruff voice of Manfred, his security guy, filled the silence in Dan’s office like a popping balloon at a funeral. Dan jolted back to life.
“Who is it?”
“Says’is name’s Jaboob or somethin’”
“Thank you, Manfred, send him in please.”
“Yes Sir”
Jakub. The kid that found the body. Perhaps he could give some satisfactory answers. Bright kid that boy.
“Manfred, why are you still here, stop staring at me and fetch the kid”
“Yes milord, sorry milord, will do milord” He muttered as he left.
Jakub, who had patiently been sitting in the foyer for half an hour, began to feel a little wary himself, as he saw the big grunt of a man that was Manfred stomp through the corridors like a steam engine - His pipe glowing and puffing to the heaving of his thunderous steps. Eyes fixed on Jakub.
“Get up, little baboon!”
A hand, twice the size of a regular one, and definitely made of solid steel grabbed his shoulder like a vice, and the human train that was Manfred puffed back to where he came from, dragging Jakub along.