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Left Behind

Chapter 2

-Tanis-

"Tanis!"

My ears perked up as I heard the call coming from behind me. I stopped welding, turning down the gas on the bottle next to me before pulling up my goggles and undid the leather shroud that protected my muzzle and whiskers. Turning around, I saw Tobie walk into my small stack where I worked and lived.

The badger was wearing his usual working clothes, a collection of scavenged and well worn pieces of clothing with protective patches of fabric sewn into the elbows and knees for added durability. His fur was brushed, but not necessarily clean, as was everyone's since soap and clean water were in short supply.

"What's up, Tobie?" I asked and stood up.

Tobie edged his way in, going around the various mounds of supplies and small projects I had been working on. "Mathias wanted to speak with you," he said as he steadied a pile of scrap I had set aside to melt down later into ingots to sell later in the week.

I groaned and rolled my eyes. "Doesn't Mathias know I'm working on the shielding for the generators?" I said and pointed back at the piece of metal I had been welding together. "If I don't finish this soon, everyone in the Lower Sanctum is going to get radiation sickness again."

Tobie rubbed his paws together and looked down. "Mathias said it was important and said that if you tried to say no that he can easily added another twenty days to your debt instead."

I was about to cuff Tobie across the ears, but it wouldn't have done any good. The badger was just a messenger after all and plus, Mathias was good on his threats.

"Fine," I growled and took off my welding gear, throwing them to the side, leaving just a light jacket on over my tank top.

It felt nice to get the heavy welding leathers off and to let my fur breathe a bit more, but the idea of talking to the weasel soured that bit of respite.

Before I left, I let a small puma, Ira, know that there were a few morsels in for him if he watched my shop while I was away. He was a good kit and I knew I could trust him.

With that, Tobie led me through the narrow and dirty streets of Sanctum, the barely holding together city made of shacks and old dilapidated ruins of sky scrapers that went up until they touched the ceiling. I looked up at the dark ceiling and was caught up for a moment wondering what was up above and beyond that metal framework of rust and girders. No one was alive still who remembered when there was a sky and I grew up hearing all kinds of fanciful tales of clouds and rain.

I shook my head. Day dreaming was for the young. I accepted my reality where there was no sun, but thousands of lanterns strung across the city for light. There was no rain, but the toxic acid that dripped from cracks in the ceiling. Our water was a sludge that had to run through a dozen filters and boilers before anyone would even consider drinking it. The air was stale and sometimes just plain toxic. It was the life I grew up with and had come to terms with the fact I would die in it as well.

Sanctum was the largest city I knew that existed. It was a relatively safe place with a working government of sort that kept the lights on and clean enough water flowing as long as it's citizens contributed, whether that was something as simple as cleaning, to being a mechanic or part of the city's security. Everyone was happy enough to live here, even me and I was essentially a slave.

Not everyone starts in Sanctum. Most don't. Beyond the city is a waste of darkness, pock marked by the occasional settlement. In that darkness are all kinds of horrors, whether they are raiders or worse things that had always been there. I didn't start in the city. I was a baby when my parents came to Sanctum, they didn't have the skills or the money to buy their way in, so they sold themselves to work for an overseer. Sadly, my parents died in a toxic explosion when I was five and I inherited their debt on top of what I had already owed. It boiled down to twenty years of service. I had three years left if I kept up my good work and that was if I was lucky too, Overseer Mathias was all too keen to create reasons to extend my debt.

Mathias worked out of one of the administrative buildings that littered the city. The building itself was in no better condition than any of those surrounding it, being made of rusted beams and cracked bricks, but it did house the people that somehow kept the city running as a whole.

I let Tobie know that I had it from there and went in. I didn't need to ask directions, I had been here enough times for various reasons.

Mathias' office was on the second floor and had a not very flattering view of what passed as the suburbs. He sat, hunched over a stack of plexi, since paper would just mold and melt in the air here.

"Tanis, good," Mathias, a short weasel with tan fur with a black mask said as he spotted me. He shoved aside his stacks of plexi to make room for him to fold his paws on the desk that seemed almost comically large for his size. "The net went out on tunnel four. I need you to go fix it."

I crossed my arms. "You called me in for this? Anyone can go look to see why it's down. Plus, tunnel four isn't over anything."

The tunnels were holes in the ceiling. Some were small, others like tunnel one, were massive and hung over the city. All of them spat out all kinds of things and so, using scavenged material, large generators were made that emitted a field that slowed down anything that fell through them. It was enough to get people out of the way of large debris or to make it so smaller debris didn't cause damage or kill someone. Tunnel four was outside the city and didn't endanger anyone, but occasionally dropped more valuable things and so, had its own net unlike other tunnels outside the city.

"I know that if anything fell right now, it would hurt anyone," Mathias snapped at me and pointed a dulled claw at my chest. "But, it's been a long time since something has come down it and I think it's overdue. The city can't afford to lose anything valuable"

"It's not on a schedule," I said back, not at all intimidated by the raised hackles and showing teeth display he put on. "Plus, it'll take me hours to get to the net's generator to even start troubleshooting."

Mathias settled and put on a sly grin that put me on edge. "You better hurry," he said and clicked his claws on his desk one aft the other. "If anything comes down before you fix it, it's going on top of your debt."

I clenched my fist tight enough to feel my claws dig into my palm. How I wanted to wring that skinny neck, but that would only make things worse, so I sagged my shoulders and let out a defeated sigh. "Fine. I'll get to it. I'll need someone to finish the shielding I had been working on, though."

"You can finish that when you're done with the net," Mathias said and dismissed me with an infuriating flick of his wrist.

I stormed out of the building and went back to my shop. Ira was waiting there for me and was proud to announce that no one had stolen any of my stuff. The small kit jumped around me excitedly as I paid him with a small pouch of jerky. He took it and ran off, clutching it to his chest as if it were the most valuable thing in the world.

It didn't take long to get my stuff together. I kept most of my tools in a pack that I slung across my back. I only had to grab a few spools of high voltage wires and a solder kit in case I needed that.

"Heard you're heading out to tunnel 4's net?" Tobie was there when I left my shack. He had a weak smile on. No doubt he felt bad that he had to act as messenger for Mathias.

"Yeah," I said and brushed past him. He quickly turned and jogged next to me, wringing his hands together.

"Need any help?" He asked meekly.

I knew what he was doing, trying to get on my good side and take him along. Tobie was often looked down on or just ignored which made it hard for him to get jobs to pay off his debt that he had gotten as a cub, just like me. He still had eight years. So, he wanted to be able to claim some credit if he helped me out in any way. There also the fact that I knew he had a huge crush on me. I was one of the few that didn't straight up disregard him or be mean to him. He latched on to that bit of kindness and was like a lost puppy, he just needed to be a canine and he would literally be that. It also didn't help that I had slept with him one after a night of drinking. No doubt he wanted to share my bed.

I thought as I walked and looked over at Tobie. He was a good head taller than me and I felt that weight of my pack, filled with all kinds of tools. I guess he could be good for something.

"Carry this for me," I said and unslung my pack from my shoulder and held it out to him.

He took it right away and put it on, his meekness replaced with a giddiness that was hard not to be a little infected by.

At least I had company as we headed out of the thinning suburbs and into the waste. Sanctum didn't have walls, those just took too many supplies to build, so it had a moat instead that could be crossed at one of seven bridges. The guards at the bridge closest to my shack knew me and didn't say anything when Tobie and I crossed.

Tobie peered over the rail of the bridge and shuddered. I didn't bother looking. It was just blackness. The moat was mostly made from a natural fault line. This part went down hundreds of feet at least. No one had actually taken the time to measure just how far down it went because as far as everyone was concerned, it was far enough.

Once outside the city, it got dark fast. There was little reason to light the landscape outside the city for more than a few hundred yards and so beyond that was just darkness. Luckily tunnel four was important enough that the path to it was lit and had a patrol that went out every so often to keep the lights running and scavengers away from anything that came down.

The path went for a few miles and the journey to it from my shack in the city took about two hours. I was relieved to see that nothing had crashed into the ground beneath the tunnel and that the generator, a large pylon structure, was intact and didn't go out because it blew up or something ridiculous.

"Let's go see what's wrong," I said and walked over to the base of the generator. Tobie kept quiet and walked behind me. He hated be outside the city. If memory served right, he had been chased to the city by one of the Beasts that lived out there in the dark. He didn't really speak of it, but it made him wary of the darkness that was only a few dozen yards away from us.

I, on the other hand was fine with it all. Beasts almost never got close to the city, preferring to stay well and far away from the guns we had there. So, I walked up to the pylon and let Tobie be my lookout.

The generator had a crude display on its side and I powered that up and was met with a simple error. There was a ground from the main power supply to the field generator. Most likely an old wire or something that needed replacing, so I put in the command to power down the whole thing.

There was a slight hum in the air I didn't really notice until it was gone, letting me know the generator had no power going to it. I'd hate to get electrocuted out here.

I then went to the other side of the pylon and whistled to get Tobie's attention. His small ears were as perked as possible as he gazed all around us. My whistle made him jump and he quickly trotted over.

"I need a number two philips," I said to him and he dug out the correct screwdriver for me from the pack. I used it to undo the few screws of a panel, most were missing, and pulled the panel off.

There was the smell of burnt plastic and I saw the short right away. It was exactly what I though, a burnt out wire that was obviously to small for the amount of voltage that was going though it. It was a miracle that the whole generator hadn't caught fire and burnt down.

Using some more tools that Tobie got from the pack for me, I pulled out the old wire and began to install the newer, higher rated wire I had brought with me. I also made sure to make a mental not about how much wire I used because using my own supplies for job meant Mathias owed me more time off my debt.

Once the job was done, I screwed the panel back into place and went back to the display. It remained on, drawing power from its own internal source even though main power was turned off, allowing me to hit the on button.

"How long does it take to turn on?" Tobie asked me from behind.

"Who knows," I shrugged. "These things are built from all kinds of junk, could be a few moments or a few hours. Why?"

Tobie tapped me on the shoulder and pointed up.

I looked up and my heart skipped a beat.

Something was falling down the tunnel.

"Fuck," I cursed and looked at the display. It simply said that it was on. There was no indication that it was warming up or if the field was on.

I looked back up at whatever was falling. It was still way up there and impossible to tell what it was in the bad lighting. The ceiling was almost a mile up as so anything that fell took a long time to reach the ground, which gave me hope, but also strung the suspense along as well.

"Oh my," Tobie gasped. "It's a human."

I squinted and after a few more moments of falling closer, I saw that he was right.

I felt a little bit of sadness at the sight.

It wasn't super common for a body to come down from a tunnel, just an occasional thing, but it always got me wondering about what was above and what kind of life the individual lived. How did they end up falling down a tunnel to us. There was also the fact that I wasn't sure the net was even on to catch it. A body wasn't as valuable as a piece of tech or straight up food, but the mushroom farms always needed more fertilizer. I really didn't want to have to scrape pieces of meat off the ground to avoid having Mathias add more to my debt.

"Get under the generator," I said and pushed Tobie back. It was impossible to tell where it was going to land, but it was going to be close and I didn't want it to be on top of us.

It was a harrowing minute or so and I was preparing for the splat. However, just moments before it would have gone past the field, I heard the hum of the net coming on and saw the body begin to slow more and more before I was set almost gently on the dirt about a hundred feet away from us face down.

Tobie and I approached the body. It was a man. I could tell that much. There were a few humans who lived in Sanctum and had met enough to know that this was a male. His clothes were a lot better than what I had on minus a hole in the back where there was a blood stain.

"Must have been killed and tossed down here to hide the evidence," I said as I kneeled down next to him and reached out to take his jacket. He didn't need it... except that he did.

The man groaned as I touched him.

"Fuck!" Tobie screamed. "He's alive."

I jumped back and the man fell silent. I had to take a moment to let my heart slow down while Tobie was pacing all around, doing the opposite. I wasn't sure how the idea came up in my head, but I pointed at Tobie, who stopped dead in his tracks, hands curled in his head fur.

"Pick him up, we'll take him to doctor Badat. She owes me a favor."

Tobie looked between me and the unconscious man. "You crazy? We can't just bring him into Sanctum. He'll have to pay his entrance with a debt and you can't just decide that for him."

I pursed my lips. "We can't just leave him. He'll die."

Tobie seemed to be stuck in a moral dilemma. He kept looking back and forth before groaning and going over to the man. He gingerly slid his paws under the prone form and lifted him up, cradling him as if he were a baby. The man groaned some more, but stayed motionless.

I then took off the coat I was wearing, which was nothing more than a few pieces of rags sewn together into the shape of a coat and covered his face and upper body. I shivered a little now that I was only in a tank top.

"If he doesn't make any noise as we get back into Sanctum, we can say he's dead and we're bringing him to the farms." I nodded as I spoke as if that would make it any more feasible a plan.

My confidence seemed to have been enough though because Tobie nodded back with a tight lip.

The man did stop moaning after a bit and by the time we reached the bridge, it was as easy as just walking in. A few of them had seen the man fall from the tunnel as well and had assumed that we were in fact just bringing a body to be turned into fertilizer, which was a huge relief. Doctor Badat on the other hand didn't let me go so easily when we brought the unconscious man into her clinic.

The wild dog growled at me. "What are you thinking, smuggling this man in here," she said as she paced around the back room she had ushered me into. Tobie was left outside and was no doubt deep in his thought and being stressed enough to lose fur.

"What was I supposed to do?" I asked and shrugged. "I couldn't just leave him there to die."

"Of course not," she shot back. "But you can't just sneak him in. He needs to be processed just like any other new arrival. He needs to pay, either with money he doesn't have or with debt."

"It's too late now," I said, getting flustered. "I can't just waltz into some admin building and just tell them I snuck this guy in but decided to change my mind. They'd stack years on me for this."

"And they'd shut down my clinic for even letting you in," Badat sighed, some of the anger draining from the tall dog. "I do owe you for when you fixed my equipment." She then shot me a look that could kill. "But we are more than even after this."

"Yeah. Yeah," I quickly nodded. "I'll do whatever you want for this."

That seemed to satisfy her and he waved a hand at me. "Get out and let me work. Go home and do whatever it was that you were doing. I wasted enough time yelling at you." She then began to strip the clothes off the man and pulled out all kinds of bandages and bottles of liquid.

Clearly dismissed, I stepped out and let the doctor do her magic. I found Tobie near the front of the clinic in the waiting room. There were a few others there, but it was relatively empty.

The badger got up when he saw me and gave a weak smile.

"Not a word to anyone," I said to him and he zipped his lips with his fingers.

"Though, what do we do now, Tanis?" He asked as we left the clinic and entered the busy street.

"Gotta let Mathias know that the net is fixed," I explained. "I'll tell him that nothing was lost during the time it was down and if I'm lucky, he wouldn't have gotten word that our stranger fell out of the tunnel."

"And..." Tobie said shyly. "You'll let him know that I helped?"

I grinned and rubbed Tobie's head. He leaned into the touch. "Yeah, I'll let him know you helped."