The Farm

Chapter Three

Four Months Earlier

"Do you reckon we'd get away with closing early? The place is dead."

I looked up from the floor I was scrubbing to see Watt leaning against the canteen counter, chewing a small piece of plastic. I turned my attention back to the grubby grout and bleach-soaked scourer. 

"Probably not," I replied, concentrating on a black crack in one of the tiles, "but if you want to leave me to close up, that's fine." I didn't have to tell him twice, he was jamming his his arms into his coat sleeves and heading for the door before I'd even moved onto the next bit of flooring.

"Thanks, Bailey, you're a doll!" He grinned, activating the seals to let himself out.

"Cover your socks, Watt!" I yelled, catching sight of a stripe of yellow. Watt pulled up the tops of his floppy brown boots as he hopped around the corner. The doors hissed shut again, leaving me in near-silence, aside from the hum of fridges and air vents. I briefly considered shutting the canteen down for the night and heading home too, but it wasn't really worth the risk of being fired. Cleaning canteens and slopping up mystery meat wasn't a glamorous job, but it was sure as hell better than dealing with the sewers. 

As I lugged the bucket back to the kitchen I heard something heavy smack into the door, and I dropped to the floor out of instinct, flattening on the damp ceramic. The smell of bleach burned in my nostrils, my heartbeat was banging in my ears. I could see the alert button under the counter, but to reach it I'd have to get a bit closer to the front of the canteen, and I was shaking too badly to move.  Another loud thump struck the door, shortly followed by a series of thuds. Then a voice, a definitely human voice, shouted, "OI! Anyone at home?"

I slowly peeled myself off the floor and peered around the corner to see three people, all dressed in identical, black, floor-length hooded coats pressed against the glass door. Military. I smacked the access button with my still-shaking hand and the group fell into the canteen, with whoops and laughter. "Thank god!" A bearded man with a strong jaw slid into one of the booths, removing his hood to reveal a head of curly, blood-red hair. Another man dropped his coat and kicked it under the table, his hair a mass of locs in a mix of black and scarlet. 

"I don't know why we've walked all this way for the same gunge they serve back on the camp," he said to the woman he was with. She was only a little taller than me with her boots on, which was something of a surprise. I'd always been told I was too short to sign up, and I had never questioned it before. I mean, being tiny was unlikely to be an asset in a combat situation. She was getting her own coat off, revealing a uniform of a skintight black turtleneck and baggy black combat trousers, tucked into battered black boots. You'd have trouble seeing any of them on a dark night, that's for sure. The woman slid her huge mirrored sunglasses off her face to reveal a pixie-like bone structure which matched her haircut.

I made my way over to their booth as they all squashed into it, and pulled my scanner out of my back pocket. I'd have been lying if I'd said I wasn't intimidated by these soldiers in their sleek clothes. The woman ruffled up her short, straight, dirty-blonde and dyed-red hair, and gave me a slightly pitying look, taking in my shabby brown jeans and mossy-green vest, already turning weird colours from slamming myself down on the freshly-bleached floor. Compared to these three I felt incredibly ordinary, with my ginger hair piled on my head in a fuzzy mess from being covered up between home and the canteen. I sometimes wished I could pull off a casual scruffy bun, and that my loose strands might fall in comely tendrils around my face, but in reality I tended to look more like I'd been through a gale, a thorn bush and three feet of vent tubing on my way to work. My thought was interrupted when the woman opened her down-turned mouth to ask: