The Captain looked at me and then back to his men. They pretty much shrugged. “Cap, you know most of us. We’re all from the Valley.” The older Sergeant First Class commented.
He nodded back to his men and raised his hands, “There you have it. That’s been our goal since Nevada. Get home. I’m not sure what’s between here and there, but I mean to get these men back to their families.”
I pursed my lips and stroked my beard and thought about his response. If I had anyone still in the Valley I wouldn’t have bothered with Winslow at all. Or Flagstaff for that matter. I wasn’t lying when I said if it didn’t serve my own ends I wouldn’t get involved. I wasn’t so ignorant to believe that I can defeat multitudes of space alien fucks bent on claiming Earth as their own all by myself. The other problem was Flagstaff was a shitshow. I needed time to get it up and running. It would be easier to tear it all down and build it up from scratch.
“Veep, how much time before the System slams the doors open to Earth?”
She bobbed into view for everyone, getting smarter at knowing when I wanted a private answer or a public one. “93 days and some change. Realistically you won’t see official immigrants for 3 to 5 days after full solar saturation.”
“Three months.” Captain Devers muttered to himself.
“Look, I’ll be honest, I need some help. I am being pulled in too many directions. I need to seek out a friend to the East. Went to Holbrook to find his kid. Then I want to hit the Valley and maybe some points in between.”
“You plan on going after Tucson?” Lieutenant Portnoy asked.
“If I have enough time, yeah. Got friends down there, too. But they can take care of themselves. I’m hoping if we establish enough contacts and settlements between here and there we can re-establish communication. You guys mostly out of Florence?”
“Yeah, why?” The young buck sergeant asked.
“That’s where we kept our worst inmates. Expect a shit show.”
“Fuck!” The look on his face spoke volumes. He saw what our least violent inmates were capable of. There’s going to be some real bad shitbirds down there.
“Christ, that’s probably what happened to Kingman.” Captain Devers saw the question on my face and answered before I asked, “Mad Max, Road Warrior, Cannibals.”
“You didn’t happen to take care of that?”
He looked at me and shook his head, “Nah, we barely made it out of there. Burned a lot of ammo.”
“Alright, you’re all over level twenty right now, I’m going to assume all of your men are in that range. This is what I suggest, you stay here for a week, maybe a week and a half, start sending your men through the local dungeons. While you’re doing that, help me with security here.”
The Captain walked back and forth with his arms crossed while considering the offer. His subordinates were also thinking hard on the offer. I could see the wheels spinning in his mind and knew I almost had him hooked, “I’ll even sweeten the deal, I’ll spend some of the hoarded city funds to upgrade your heavy equipment.”
Sergeant Anders was the first one to break, “Sir, there were those fancy TOW missiles we were talking about.”
“The artillery could use a full refit. They weren’t meant to cross a thousand miles of desert with no support.” The Lieutenant added.”
The Captain looked at them then back to me, his youngest Sergeant jumped in, “I wouldn’t mind getting the men leveled up some more and get their gear updated. The dungeons would be a good opportunity to do that.”
“Alright, alright. I’ll agree to that.” He stuck his hand out and I took it to seal the deal.
"Thank you, Captain, I’d also like to pick your brain on how I should proceed. I’m not too proud to admit I may be taking on more than I can chew. But I don’t back down once I start.”
He laughed and nodded, “Sure, let me get back to my men. I’ll have Jackson pick a couple squads to start patrolling your streets immediately.”
The soldiers walked away and I stood and stretched, mentally celebrating my small victory.
“So, that’s security, and the people seeing soldiers on the street will help ease their concerns.” Clarissa said next to me. “Oh, the new City Hall is ready.”
“Cool, let’s get this shit going.”
*****
The first problem was housing ten thousand people. Between monster attacks, general fuckery, and our battle with the former inmates most of the city had been smashed to bits. A small portion of the former downtown area that sat between the rail station and the new City Hall had survived. Clarissa’s former place of employment had not. We waffled back and forth on how best to get everyone into affordable housing and still leave room for food production.
In theory, with Flagstaff set to Bureaucratic governance it would already have several satellite cities it had absorbed into its own districts. The truth was Flagstaff was rather isolated, even before the System dropped on our heads. So it was basically a self contained island of green in a sea of reddish brown sand. Unfortunately I couldn’t change the governance to something more appropriate for the city. While that skimped us on all the primary functions a normal city needed to function, it gave us other options. One of those was to kind of custom design the apartment blocks we had decided on for housing.
We weren’t being any kind of architects or anything, what the interface did allow us to do was designate the size of a building to include how many floors, rooms, amenities and whatnot were built into it. Kind of like how I could customize the walls and defenses for SooHoo, I could customize large buildings for Flagstaff. Which is how we came to the solution that the previous city council would absolutely loathe.
I decided to use the South Korean model of building new cities. What that meant is towering apartment buildings, four of them, built around a central square that housed a park and other amenities. The buildings would be twenty stories high and house roughly 250 families of four. So, we could theoretically cram one thousand people into a single building. There would be four of these buildings in a block that took up a square kilometer of total space. At the center would be a small outdoor market with a job board. It was an incredibly efficient use of space, which when your entire country is either large hills or mountains, you need to make good use of the little flat land you have. It just so happened that Flagstaff was built at the bottom of a large mountain.
We decided to build the first Korean apartment block centered on the first Kiosk. This first block would be rent free and prioritized families. Some people were slightly upset when their impromptu shelters started dissolving as the System broke down the surrounding buildings to recycle it into the apartment buildings. It took three whole days for the process to complete on such a large project, but it was worth it. Already it was more than the previous Mayor had done for the people here, and I hadn’t even gotten started.
Once the issue of housing had been largely laid to rest we tackled food production. Again, options were rather limited. A Bureaucratic city was supposed to rely on it’s agricultural districts to supply the lion's share of food. I could still plot out Large Farms which would occupy 1 km sq. plots of land and have housing and facilities adequate to supporting the people that would do the work. We discussed whether or not to place them inside or outside the walls. The terrain to the south was much flatter and conducive to farming, that’s to say that the hills were more uniform and of a shallower grade. We also decided to include a few Large Ranches on the off chance someone brought back a breeding pair of cattle or pigs. I situated the buildout so that the farm houses would always be closest to the City Wall.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
All in all we had about 60 farm plots stretching out along the I-17 to the south of the city. I was assured by Veep the increased speed of plant growth would allow us to sufficiently feed the people that stayed behind. A posting was placed on the Job Boards in the center plaza of all the apartment blocks and near the two System Kiosks advertising an lend lease system for ultimate ownership of someone who was willing to work a plot of land for five years. For that five years all profit would belong to the City. Twenty percent was set aside for buying the plot, another twenty as to pay for equipment and hired workers, and another twenty percent was set aside as a final payout for completing the contract. If at any time you broke the contract you would forfeit all potential earnings and be evicted from the property. The other forty percent went to the city to help pay for the security force that we had yet to marshall.
We decided to turn the second Kiosk into the primary adventurer’s stop. It was closer to the highway junction that led out into the wild where the best dungeons were located. A massive guild hall was constructed within a quarter mile of the Kiosk, allowing a large thoroughfare for any vehicles to park and navigate to get serviced by the Kiosk, which was when I noticed the Garage option in the build menu. It seemed to be an extension of the Kiosk that required an operator but provided more efficient repair and refit options. We decided to plant that on the opposite side of the Guild Hall centered a market and crafting facilities around the second Kiosk. This had been implemented on our third day, and seeing how many people were flocking to the farms we decided to institute the same lend lease policy on the crafting and garage facilities.
Food, Housing, and Adventuring pretty much settled we moved on to defense and special projects. On the defensive end I worked with Captain Devers to improve our defensive posture and implemented several of his suggestions to include narrowing the inner roads down to one lane. We didn’t tear up the roads, we just created barriers that only allow one vehicle to pass comfortably, any large vehicles would only be allowed into the adventurer’s quarter and directed to a motor pool area for storage until they left. We placed alternating thick barriers along the roads entering the city so that all vehicles would be required to slow and work around them. Longer vehicles such as tractor trailers would be required to request permission to enter and be subjected to an extremely invasive search. Then they would be guided to the motor pool. Concrete pill boxes with gun slits and large plasma cannons were mounted at the top of the gates giving them long reaching clear firing lines which were cleared of trees and obstructions for a quartermile from the wall.
Our second project was repairing and rerouting the roads leading into and out of our territory. Flagstaff roads were notoriously shitty. Potholes appeared before the old ones could be repaired and it seemed like a never ending fight. So all the roads were rebuilt by the System. Lanes were marked and illuminated from within the paving. Sturdy lamp posts sprouted up marking the edges of the highway and shone with just the right intensity and color to make you think it was daytime at night. Flagstaff’s territory stretched for 25 km in each direction from the city center. Every major road within our new territory was redone in this manner. We basically had a perfect road all the way to Winona heading in Winslow’s direction, the Arizona Snowbowl to the North, and nearly to Munds Park in the South. Each road ended in a checkpoint that could be manned once we had the proper staff in place to do so.
My final project was to re-establish communications with the region. Turned out that was one of the things a Bureaucratic city was good for, need strong communications infrastructure to get that propaganda out there after all. The telescopes of Lowell observatory were replaced with a Regional Communications Network that provided 200 km radius expansion to network connectivity. Basically anyone within our network could communicate with anyone on any other network within 200km of Flagstaff, which included much of Phoenix to the South, Kingman in the West, nearly to the New Mexico border in the East as well as the Utah border in the North. I could pretty much communicate with all of northern Arizona and down to the only place that really mattered in the entire state, Phoenix.
Junipher was able to reconnect with her father and I found a slew of messages from Phil that I would read later. Right now I was sitting in the conference room for the rebuild City Hall with Clarissa, Captain Devers, and Gregor.
“Alright, I think we’ve done good. The apartment blocks are almost finished, people are diving dungeons, the farms are getting leased and food production should start becoming pretty regular in the next few weeks, and we can now communicate with most of the state.”
“It’s a far cry better than what Mayor Blevins achieved, to think she was sitting on so much wealth and what all it could do for us.” Clarissa shook her head and tensed her shoulders.
“Aye, ye done good so far. I have a proposition for ye, Karl.” Gregor leaned back and rapped his knuckles on the table in a nervous pattern.
“Oh? What’s on your mind, Gregor?” I asked genuinely curious.
"I want to take about a quarter of my people and settle them halfway between here and SooHoo.” He always referred to the settlement by it’s System recognized name.
“Ok? Why’s that?”
“Well, you see, I want access to the metal resources between here and there of course. When we migrated this direction I took the time to map all the ore deposits and nodes on our path of travel. There aren’t a lot of dungeons between us, lots of field camps and beasties, but not much in the dungeon department.”
“Ok, so minimal risk for great gain? You move the material to whichever city is closest and since they are both mine, I get the tax on all sales. I like where your head’s at.”
“Exactly! It’s a win for both of us. And it continues satisfying the terms of our sanctuary contract. I may eventually pull the majority of my people to this location, but I want to give them time to rest before moving them again.”
“Alright, sounds like a plan. John? What you have for me?”I asked Captain Devers, in the past week we had developed good rapport and were now on a first name basis.
“So, all of my men have broken into their advanced classes and we’re pretty much ready to head south. Though I have a soldier that I was going to field promote until he confided that he’s interested in sticking around here. He’s interested in heading up the Sheriff’s department. He was an MP that got sucked into my infantry platoons when we fled Nevada. So, you know, he’s already got some law enforcement background.”
“And you don’t feel negatively about me poaching this man? I honestly haven’t liked anyone for the position.”
“No, not at all, like I said, we’re operating like a traditional citizen militia. If a whole Bradley or Abrams crew wanted to brake off and take the vehicle I wouldn’t stop them, I barely have enough men to run the guns I have.”
“That’s good, none of the former police stuck around when the Red Bands arrived. That or they are all dead.” Clarissa added with a frown.
“Send his file over to Clarissa and we’ll interview him later.” I commented, “Clarissa, where are we on filling the other positions, we really need that City Planner to unlock the better development options.”
“Got a guy for the Agriculture Minister's position. So weird using that term, by the way.” Everyone chuckled and she continued, “He was one of the few old timers that survived the initialization process, he was almost 80. He had Mastered farming and animal husbandry, and every other skill related to farming or ranching was in the high end of Expert. So Mr. Gonzalez was happy to take the position.”
“Wow, I’m close to hitting Master Pistol Marksmanship, but it still feels like a long way off. I’m glad we found someone of his experience. What about the Finance Minister and the Treasury Director?”
“Nope.” She shook her head and shrugged as soon as she saw the protest forming on my lips.
“There has to be a freaking accountant out there somewhere!?” I exclaimed in disbelief. "Sorry, I’m not yelling at you, it’s just, fuck man. I need to get moving.”
She smiled sweetly and shrugged again, “No problem, as you know, the position you placed me in gives me the latitude to access… personal histories… of our residents.” She was referring to the trick I pulled on the inmates that John’s people had caught, “Everyone we’ve interviewed thus far has been far more corrupt than I’m willing to allow in control of such things.”
“Fuck me sideways.” I grumbled, “What about the City Planner?” This position didn’t sound as fancy as the others, though it was far more important. This person pretty much had sole control over how the city grew.”
“Umm, well, I have someone who might satisfy the position, though she’s absolutely terrified of you.”
“Is that uncommon these days?” John asked and everyone chuckled.
“Well, yes and no, you see, Karl already knows this person and has a particular history with her.” Clarissa added and began to fidget.
“Ok, now I’m curious, who are we talking about?”
Clarissa pressed a button on the keyboard at her position and a holographic display resolved into the smiling face of someone I didn’t think I would ever see again. I stared at the display in utter disbelief for several long moments. “Former Deputy Warden of ASPC Winslow, Kaibab, Kristy Herrerra. Fuck me.”