Cistern

Chapter 1 - Days Gone Bye

Occasionally there can be felt a distant breeze of sorts. As if the old world were trying to creep into this desolate life we live now. Some of us down here welcome it, others shun. The origin source is too far for us to locate, too obscure for anyone to care for. A mile and a half down, and six years since The Flash, our prison keeps us confined. This occasional breeze is the only source of nature that reaches our skin, our homes, our new lives.

Booker could feel this breeze on dreadful nights. Or days. It was hard for him to tell anymore, with such a constant array of lights on the ceiling of the cavern he now calls home. He would rarely dare gaze upward towards them, for he could see several of them flicker at a time, making him reminisce on the time before The Flash. The look of the street lights in his old town, things he would continually overlook, he would now miss. Normally a light would signify hope of a kind, but these flickering bulbs hanging a mile above, to Booker, symbolized the life he lost. The loss of his family, his friends, his career, gone in the blink of an eye.

Booker now served on the energy committee, leaving his old life behind as a soldier. When you live in a city with a little over a couple hundred people residing in it, the options are limited to what one can do. As a colony you commit as much as you can to those precious valuables and resources you have. Electricity nor food are the scarce resource down in this hell-hole he lives in now, but water. Clean, purified water is their one commodity that is difficult to make and come by, and in order to ratio it, not only do they have to manage what they drink, but they are regularly forced to drink tainted water from a natural flowing stream that runs through part of their city.

A lesser looked-upon downside of The Flash was the amount of boredom it creates. Many relish in the luxury of old dvds, cds, and books that were taken to this Vault of theirs. There, however, is one resident of their new home that is not satisfied with these and has picked up their own hobby. Several days ago, a widowed mother of two was found murdered by the stream. Her carotid was slit and was left bleeding into our normal fountain of drinking water.

Their only police detective, if you could really call him that, was put on the case. Captain Jeremiah Brown was a police chief before The Flash, but a corrupt one at that. Even after relocating to our new home, bribes would come in for him to look away from theft of rations, bribes often in the form of sexual favors, water rations, and ammo. Everyone down here in The Vault was armed, but the rounds to ready themselves was more scarce. It has been several years since any raiders have attempted to force their way in their new home, and since, no one has felt the need to use these weapons, and have locked them up.

Whoever attacked this woman, detoured the firearm route and went straight for a bladed weapon. But her death is barely on anyone's mind, but the tainted water has more worried. The dwellers have had to dig deeper into their rations, and Booker has been sent into overtime on churning out clean water. There is an even deeper worry in his mind, for the purifier is slowly failing, falling apart, and losing a battle to unseen enemies and forces. Rust slowly builds, parts break and cannot be replaced, it is as if The Flash itself is coming back to finish its job. Radiation is slowly finding its way into portions of the city close to the dump.

That would not be much of a problem, having radiated trash and waste, if only it wasn't so close to our food production area. The fertilized waste is used to treat many crops, and if the radiation hits these crops, that will cut out much food to our disposal. Our canned and dried foods are located on the other side of the Vault luckily, yet that doesn't put many at ease.

There is still little progress on the murdered woman by the stream, though she is now cremated and the stream is slowly flushing itself out. Shouldn't be much longer before it can be in use again. It is good new on Booker, for the purifier doesn't have much time left in working condition. He optimistically gives it another year or so, but not much more. With no other murders, water problems solved momentarily, the dweller's main concern is this leaking radiation.