Page 45 of Omega’s Fealty

It looks empty and hopefully it is. There’s rarely anyone here this early.

The kids come after dark with spray cans and beer. Urban explorers usually wait for later in the day when they can get better photographs of light streaming in through the broken windows.

Occasionally, the factory will host a few of the homeless overnight but that’s not that often. The place is not that hospitable and it’s too far from the main stores and streets to be worth the walk.

I know all of this because I spent a month watching this place before I put one thing inside it.

I’ve always been a paranoid son of a bitch.

Right now, that’s the only reason I’m not in a cell or dead on parking lot gravel.

I go over the fence where the wire’s been cut and across the yard and in through the loading bay.

I sneak along the back, past the old canteen, and I can smell the two men in there, sleeping bags and old wine.

I go past them as silently as I can and through the door at the end that says OFFICES.

Beyond that is another corridor, and a maze of small rooms. I don’t know what they used to be. They’re a mess now: broken desks and chairs, and a floor covered in trash. The last room is as bad as the others. This one has a line of wood-backed bookshelves screwed to the wall. They are filled with rotten papers, boxes and broken binders.

The last bookshelf slides. I know this because I am the one that put it there, scavenging it from one of the other rooms and building it back up here to hide the small room behind it.

It’s not easy to move. If it were, it would be a shit hiding place. I need to reach down and find the little latch hidden on the bottom shelf that stops the entire thing from moving.

My hands are too cold to work it. It takes me three tries and by the third I’m swearing under my breath, standing in the dark with my forehead against the steel.

Then it turns and the shelf slides.

I slip into the space at the back, sliding the shelf back into place with the bar I installed on the back. I lock it in place before I do anything else.

The room is the size of a small garage. It has a concrete floor, concrete walls. There are no windows but there is a small vent that leads directly to the roof.

I have left a camp bed against one wall with a sleeping bag on it, still rolled. A folding table and camping chair. Two plastic crates. A shelf with cans and a lamp on the floor, plugged into a socket I wired myself off the line that still runs to the substation next door.

There’s a bugout duffel bag in the corner, still zipped.

I turn the lamp on and it works. No one has switched the power off yet.

I want to collapse onto the camp bed and just lie there and close my eyes but the last thing I need to do is get my sleeping bag wet.

I need to deal with my shit. Then I can sleep.

I drag the spare duffel across the floor, and then one of the crates until they are beside the camping chair in easy reach, then sink into the chair with a great deal of relief.

The chair is canvas. It’ll dry sooner or later.

The arm first.

I get my jacket off. It’s stiff with river and with blood so it takes me some time to shrug out of it.

Under it, my sweater is black down the left side and stuck to me. I cut it off with the knife from the crate rather than pull it over my head, and then I’m sitting there in the lamplight looking at the hole in my arm.

It’s not as bad as it felt.

The bullet went in, then out, through the meat on the outside of the arm, above the elbow. It missed the bone and any major blood vessels or I’d have been dead in the water. It’s stopped bleeding. It’s going to start again the minute I start messing with it.

The med kit is in the second crate. It’s not a first aid box from a pharmacy. It’s a fishing tackle box and I’ve been filling it for years, the way you do when you know that one day you’re going to need to sew yourself up and there won’t be anybody to call.

Gauze. Tape. Saline. Sutures I don’t trust myself to use one-handed. A bottle of the brown stuff that stings. Antibiotics with somebody else’s name on the box. And the stapler.