The morning after the Scout Group’s expulsion, Tristan entered James’ room on the fifth floor of the Grand Library.
What a mess—was all he could say.
The first thing he saw was a makeshift bed, and beside that, a desk under the window. The bed was just a rectangular frame with cargo netting stretched over it. The desk had always been a part of the Library.
He went in, and eyed the books and notebooks on the rack beside the door, with loose leaves sticking out between the worn pages.
Boxes were piled on boxes in the corners of the room, and there was a chair beside the bed that was overloaded with used, unwashed clothes. Rags were scattered on the tile floor, perhaps meant to wipe the floor with.
He approached the desk. There was a typewriter with a veil of plastic draped over it to keep the dust out. Behind the typewriter, tin cans were filled with pens and pencils, and there were bottles of water scattered about in various states of fulfillment.
Beside the typewriter, there was a notebook left open.
He flipped through the pages, and found voluminous data about—Optimal Drying Time for Caimito Fruits? No, that’s not quite right… He racked his fingers across the documents in the bookshelves, and finally picked one out that looked especially clean.
If it was clean, then that meant it was something that James had often accessed.
Tristan squinted at the title—“A Study on the Human Propensity for Learning: Dianne’s Throwing Skill with a Prosthetic Arm.”
“This… No, no one’d write a dumb paper like this. James, you moron, what—”
He read the abstract, the introduction—RRL, methodology, results, conclusion—and it was all soundly-written, to the point that Tristan’s impression of James might have changed a bit.
But that didn’t change his purpose here.
Try as he might, though, Tristan couldn’t find anything useful. He couldn’t find anything incriminating against James.
He knew that man was a criminal through-and-through, but everyone seemed to be afflicted with some kind of halo effect. “He put us where we are today!” was what the others argued.
Well, that’s true, but they didn’t know—rather, they couldn’t believe—that such a man was a danger to everyone else.
After all, James was the one who killed Aurelia. She was a part of the Scout Group—and was his last true friend.
Still, as expected, the only things James had left behind were things useful to the community: a few design patterns for common tools, some simple machines like cranes, and some prototype maps of the surrounding areas. He had left no diaries, journals, nor even a to-do list.
“No good… The bastard didn’t even leave a note that she existed… Guess I’ll try the other one.”
He left James’s room with a scowl. Outside, two of his men loitered about, leaning on the wall of the administrative section’s corridor, sharing a cigarette.
“You two doing okay?” he asked them. The two pushed themselves off the wall in surprise.
“We’re okay, sir!”
“Good, good.”
Right next to James’s room was Karlson’s room. Upon entering, Tristan was taken aback by—a whole lot of nothing.
“Nobody could ever figure out what goes on in his head, but…”
There was nothing but a mattress on the floor, an exercise mat, a bunch of weights, and a pull-up bar on the side. He left, all at once unsurprised but disappointed.
***
Two days after the Scout Group’s expulsion, Tristan slumped down on his chair in his office in the College of Arts and Sciences. His hands to his head, he massaged his temples. That the air was thick with humidity and tobacco did not help. Members of the Guard Group darted left-to-right, right-to-left in his view, while those who managed to stay still were sorting through papers, guns, and ammunition on a grid of long tables in the space in front of him.
They did all their logistics here, and ever since he had kicked out James, who had unofficially occupied the position of Community Go-to Handyman, the community’s requests and petitions now went straight to him as well. The result was this scene straight out of an office from the 50’s.
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Another yellow paper landed in front of him. He took the page in his hands and squinted at the cursive handwriting. He immediately knew it was from George from Farming, but the content of the letter caused him to spit out his coffee. He stood up and grabbed his gun and backpack.
“Ramirez, Dale, Tuveria, with me!” he ordered.
The Sunken Garden and its food gardens were on one end of the Oval Road. On the other, there was the Lagoon shadowed by the university’s administrative hall. Tristan and his men went out to meet with George along the way there.
He was a frail old man with twice the decades in his years as James and Tristan, but thrice the decades in appearance, as his hair had already turned white, and his skin had already started to sag. He clasped his hands together in front of him, and he bowed a little each time he spoke.
“Oi, is this for real?” Tristan asked.
Mentally, George heard this as “Oi, you fuckin’ with me?” He quivered at the thought—he could be killed, or, worse, just like the Scout Group before him, expelled.
“I-it’s unfortunate, sir, but we discovered it like this just this morning!” George replied.
They stood before the Lagoon. This naturally-occuring pond, artificially expanded two decades ago to act as a reservoir for the university’s drainage system, had now become the community’s prime source of drinking, utility, and irrigation water.
That said, it wasn’t as if anyone could just turn on a faucet.
All they had was a single 500W pump, so there was a ration of 35 liters of sand-filtered water per person per day, while the rest went to supply the gardens.
That pump was now broken.
“Don’t you have spare parts?” Tristan asked, scratching his head.
“A-ah, well, you see—”
“Just say it.”
“Right! We’ve run out of the thing that we need!”
“Which is?”
“Inverters!”
The pump ran on batteries, which were in turn charged by solar panels. They had a near-infinite stock of batteries to replace any that reached the end of their life, not to mention possessing certain techniques for reviving dying lead-acid batteries.
On the other hand, inverters didn’t die off as quickly as batteries, but they did need to be eventually replaced—with the exact rating as the last one, or else they’d need to modify the system just to make sure things didn’t explode in weird places.
“Alright, I’ll… put someone up to that job, I guess,” Tristan said.
He and his men left without another word. “James had left a protocol for in case the pump broke down, so we should be fine for a couple of days,” he thought to himself, making him reflexively scoff, to the surprise of some of his men. “That man’s influence is everywhere, I swear to god…”
***
—Three days since the expulsion of the Scout Group…
It started with the broken pump.
Within 24 hours, Tristan had gotten inundated with requests from nearly every group from Diliman. Aside from the Farming Group’s broken pump, which was a top priority, the Medical Group was blowing the whistle on a shortage of antibiotics, and the Crafting Group was reaching the end of their gun oil supply.
In short, the Diliman community was now on the verge of running out of food, medical supplies, and functioning guns.
One of Tristan’s lieutenants stopped in front of his desk and stood straight.
“Boss! The group we sent to the Quezon Medical Center’s returned!” he reported.
“Ah, good—results?”
“Boss—they reported being blocked by a horde.”
“Don’t tell me…”
“After opening fire, they deemed the horde too overwhelming, and quickly retreated and returned.”
Tristan’s pencil snapped in his hand. “IDIOTS!” shouted as he sprung up from his seat and threw a clipboard against the floor. His subordinates all paused, stunned at his tantrum.
“That’s the third time just today!” he continued. “Shooting bullets off when it’s obvious that it won’t do a damn!”
So now they were running low on ammunition, too.
Tristan assembled his lieutenants and the squad leaders and lectured them with some verbal abuse thrown in.
***
Later that night, the lieutenant that had reported to Tristan was doing his rounds, patrolling with a handful of his men.
“I hope Boss Clay gets his mind off things tonight. Don’t you think so too, boss?” one of his men said.
“Heh, yeah,” he replied. “Things aren’t looking too good.”
Their flashlights, though powerful, wouldn’t pierce farther than 50 meters into the dark. The lieutenant took the lead and swept his flashlight left and right as often as he could. The three others behind him did the same, covering all possible angles. The guy at the rear wore a bell, which, though somewhat degrading to him, helped the patrol team to stop themselves from getting too far.
Above all, they kept chatting. If someone stopped speaking, everyone would stop and look for them.
Like this, the Guard Group did early evening patrols between Diliman’s important facilities, looking for any residents who had incidentally fallen asleep somewhere, or who were on a nightly adventure behind the bushes. Eventually, the patrols, too, would retire, and each building would lock up for the rest of the night, turning into a fortress with exactly seven days of supply.
“Come to think of it,” the lieutenant continued. “How’s your girlfriend, Sonny?”
No reply.
The lieutenant turned around to look for his subordinate. He remembered nothing after that.
***
“Oh, Sonny and friends—hey, where’s Boss Charlie?” the sentry at the Library’s steps asked the returning patrol.
“Huh, hasn’t he passed through here?” Sonny replied.
***
—Four days since the expulsion of the Scout Group…
Tristan buried his face in his hands.
“Sir?”
“Just… let me think.”
The temporarily-appointed lieutenant stood straight in front of his desk, waiting for new orders. The one he replaced—as well as every other lieutenant whom Tristan regularly relied on—was gone.
Absent. MIA. Disappeared.
Incidentally, those four were also the ones tasked with bringing back the needed supplies.
“Today of all days…”
The water stores had already gone dry sooner than expected. The Farming Group had just been retasked with water transport, so now there was a convoy of 10 guys on bicycles going back and forth a kilometer stretch of the Oval Road. It didn’t help that the Library was uphill of the Lagoon.
As he despaired over the situation, several of his men trooped into the College of Arts and Sciences, aiming for the faculty room that housed his office.