Chapter Text
The civil war had deserted this town long ago. Seven years later, it was still a mess, and Alex was making an effort to clean it up.
Or make it worse. Depending on how you looked at it.
The war had torn the town apart, sparing no regard for the people living there, nor their belongings, nor their property. It had stripped the town of everything it had once been and could ever be. Even its name was gone. The road signs on the adjoining highway had crumpled, their paint eroded by bombs and time. There was nothing left to give a name to the abandoned town, no one left to remember it.
Alex certainly didn't. He wasn't even thinking about it. He was thinking about his empty stomach, as well as the plan he had hatched to bag himself the first decent meal he'd had in six days. Said plan involved the delivery truck scheduled to drive past the town in exactly 21 minutes, as well as the trap he was setting up in the middle of the road.
Alex tossed a stack of traffic cones into the tottering pile of debris, and was greatly pleased when it didn't fall over. The barricade was growing taller than he was, and he wasn't a short guy. He'd thrown in anything that wasn't tied down: tyres, storage crates, a rusty see-saw, weathered furniture from a nearby derelict house (with windows he hadn't realized were broken until his bare foot had been pierced by several shards of glass), a bench, a few trash cans, some blown out bombshells, empty guns, a copy of Born Into The 2120’s - if it was junk, it went in the pile. He almost wished someone was around to appreciate his up-cycling efforts.
He tried dragging a broken down car (an old piece of crap with a gas engine) out to the barricade, but quickly realized he'd been too optimistic about the limits of his strength and had to drop it. He kicked it out of spite, and the trunk door popped open. It was hanging on by a single hinge, so he settled for snapping it off and throwing that on the pile instead. Another swift kick separated the car from its front bumper, which Alex tossed over his shoulder in the vague direction of the rest of the debris. It missed by a wide margin, bouncing off of the reinforced glass surface of the electric road. A confused leyline pulsed blue beneath the bumper, looking for a vehicle in need of power, finding nothing.
Intrigued by a bombed-out café and the surviving furniture within, Alex wandered inside, singing an old jaunty rock song to himself and bouncing along to a rhythm only he could hear.
“Just the two of us in Nothingtown~ Daa~ daa-da-da-daaa~”
He remembered the lyrics about as well as he remembered this part of the country. With some effort, he dragged a display cabinet out into the open.
“We’ll leave this town today! Aahh~ daa-da-da-daa-DA!”
On the beat, he flipped the cabinet up and onto the very top of the stack, and with that, his trap was complete. Alex was 90% sure that vehicles still drove on the right side of the road, but he had spread the barricade across both lanes, just to be safe. He was nothing if not thorough.
Satisfied, he pocketed his hands in his khaki shorts, and wandered back to the side of the road. When he returned, he was pulling the top half of a severed electricity pole along behind him, its one remaining aluminum arm scraping against the glass surface. With its fuses, transformers and transmission wires missing, it looked less like a power line and more like a makeshift axe.
He watched the truck approaching on the hazy horizon. Right on time.
Alex didn't remember delivery trucks looking so intimidating. The grate, exhaust pipes, and the cloud of noxious fumes tailing it were gone, replaced with a white, streamlined behemoth of a vehicle that moved with quiet, unnatural precision. The electric roads, powered by solar panels, kept the self-driving vehicle rolling along to its preset destination.
This information was as much as Alex had been able to discern after observing the trucks for a couple of days. Using the mental notes he'd taken of when the trucks would pass by the edge of town and how the new electric roads worked, he'd hatched a plan. His barricade, however, wouldn't quite be enough to bring it to fruition.
He looked to the road beneath him. It was constructed from hexagonal plates of reinforced glass, and was strong enough - Alex knew - to support the weight of all modern vehicles. Lifting a leg, he kicked his heel at the glass road. It certainly felt tough, and sounded like it too. Just to be sure, he tested it again by jumping up and down on it. Electricity pulsed through the leylines beneath him, glowing a pretty blue beneath the panes.
His experiment concluded that this thing was tough as fuck, and reminded him of something he'd been trying hard to ignore this past week. But that was impossible to do when reality was all around him.
The world had changed drastically since he’d been away. It was barely recognizable from how he remembered it in his childhood. The future had arrived, invaded and conquered his country, his home, all that he'd known. Everything outside this town was new, weird, and really, really scary. He had a feeling he wasn't going to like it much. But hey, at least it looked nice.
And now, he was going to punch a massive hole in it.
Alex double-checked the truck’s position first. He squinted at the horizon, trying to make out through the heat haze which lane the vehicle was on. Right? No, left. It turned a corner - no it was definitely in the right lane. At least that was one thing that remained the same. Even better, his safe bet had paid off. Alex side-stepped into the path of the oncoming truck.
It would be driving by in a matter of seconds now. He puffed out a breath.
“Welp,” he said to himself. “Here we go.”
He reared back the electric pole-slash-axe, and brought it down hard on the glass.
His aim had been good: the arm had landed at the edge of the glass hexagon and chipped its first layer. However, the second blow did more damage to his weapon than his target. He’d hoped it would last three hits at least, but the neck was already bent and cracking. He tossed it into the debris pile behind him and readied his preferred weapon set, one he knew he could rely on: his fists.
Without stopping to think about the havoc he was about to wreak upon his own bones, Alex pulled back a tightly clenched fist, and punched the dented glass. Beneath the spray of shards and blood, the blow had formed a neat crater in the surface. Alex grinned. His plan was actually working! A second strike splintered the cracks, as well as his knuckles.
He felt the ground beneath him rumble as the truck drew closer. He switched to using his other hand, balancing on his knee and striking with increasing urgency. Just when Alex thought he'd have to reduce his fists to bloody stumps to get the damn thing open, the glass hexagon gave way, exposing its inner workings to the air. Grinning with relief, he stepped back to check his work, and shook the pain, blood and glass shards from his twisted knuckles. He didn’t think to check the damage; it would clean itself up in time.
His trap was set, positioned in just the right place (sort of) that it would catch the truck’s front wheel. If it didn't, the barricade was tall enough to stall the truck, and throw the GPS auto-driver thingy (whatever it was called) into confusion, forcing it to stop the vehicle and alert the sleeping driver. Alex had observed several trucks passing through the area, at varying times of the day, carrying varying types of produce, manned by drivers of all kinds, and not one of them had been awake. He was hedging his bets that this one wouldn't be either, and wouldn't notice the massive, not at all man-made pile-up of war debris until he was on top of it.
It was a brilliant, fool-proof plan. Andy probably wouldn't think so, but he wasn't there, and what he didn't know couldn't hurt him.
Alex hopped behind a bullet hole-ridden wall, pressed his mangled hands into a towel he'd scavenged from the derelict café, and waited.
It was coming round the bend now. Alex could only estimate how fast it was going; he didn't have much of a grasp on metrics. What was the speed limit for this area? 100? 120? Whatever it was, it was fast enough, and that’s all he needed to know.
Alex chewed his bottom lip, and yelped when he tried to cross his fingers. His toes would have to do for now.
“Come on, come on…”
The truck turned the bend.
It was on the correct side of the road: a good start. The sleek, cutting edge tires fitted to electric vehicles were highly conducive, especially to naked electricity seeping out of a hole in the ground. Alex could seldom recall where he picked up these little nuggets of trivia, nor did he ponder on it; if he could use the information to put food in front of Andy, that's all that mattered to him. Now if the truck could just hit the target--
The closer it got, the less it looked like the tires were going to line up with the trap.
Alex let out a frustrated noise. “Aagh, please work! Please work, come on-!”
The front tires went straight past the hole.
Alex threw up his hands. “Aaww!”
He had no time to sulk before the truck collided head-on with the barricade.
A noisy crunch split the silent desert landscape as the pristine chassis met rust and decay. A jagged pylon lodged its pointy end into its side, cutting a nasty scratch across the surface and slowing the truck's progress to a crawl. The barricade screeched a cacophonous uproar of metal scraping across glass as it fought to keep the vehicle, and its determined CPU, at bay. Alex watched wide-eyed as the truck’s wheels spun madly against the road, fighting to regain traction, but the bumper Alex had stolen from the piece-of-junk diesel car he'd found had gotten lodged under the front wheel’s wing, and it was spinning in place, throwing the trunk off balance and edging it toward the trap--
A wheel connected with the power line. Electricity sparked with a mighty KRAK!
“Oh, YES!” Alex jumped up, watching with elated delirium as the back end of the truck was launched into the air. It landed hard, wheels spinning madly, trying to restore its balance but ultimately failing and veering off the road onto hard desert earth. “YES YES YES!” It was headed straight for a house. “YE- oohh…”
SKREEE-KRASH!
The emergency brakes had done all they could to soften the blow, screaming right up until impact. Alex waited for the creaking and crumbling noises to stop before chancing a peek at the chaos he’d wrought.
It was a fucking mess.
“Oops.”
Fumes seeped from the truck's engine, its hood engulfed in what remained of the toppled building. The chassis had suffered some nasty scrapes and dents along its sides, and its front had entirely buckled, peeling back to reveal its smoking innards. Alex didn’t know much about cars, especially not these fancy new eco-friendly electric models, but even he could tell the engine was totaled. The front seat airbag had been deployed on time, sparing the driver any injuries (Alex breathed a sigh of relief at that), but the bag was thrashing about, its still-expanding mass tugging from side to side as the driver fought to escape it.
However, most importantly, amidst all of the carnage, the truck's cargo had miraculously survived. Even better, the back door lock had come apart during the crash.
Alex couldn't have hoped for better luck.
Hoisting his backpack over his shoulders, he scurried to the cargo doors, threw them open and jumped inside, just in time for the driver to kick his door open and topple onto the desert floor with a shout.
He was an older man, with a bald patch and big scraggly ears, and far too many deliveries today to deal with this crap. He stumbled back to survey the damage to his vehicle. It didn’t take much investigation to conclude it was completely fucked. He cursed. Then he noticed the pile up of debris and the crack in the road. He cursed louder.
The driver fished in his pockets for his cell phone, and dialed his breakdown cover service. He was too busy yelling colorful language at the hold music to hear the careful rummaging going on in his vehicle's cargo. At last, the call went through, and he barely let the assistant finish their greeting before he cut in.
“I was never no good at math,” he grumbled, “but by my count, the war ended seven years ago, is that right?”
A confused silence from the other end.
“Uh. Yeah?”
“Then explain to me how in the hell I just ran into war debris in the middle of the freaking highway!!”
Alex booted an empty crate out of the cargo doors, being as careless as he liked. There was no way the driver would hear him over the sound of his own diatribe.
“What?! Speak up, I can’t hear you!” The driver strained to hear the assistant over the bad line, and Alex stifled a giggle as he stuffed his ill-gotten gains into his rucksack. “War-time recovery my ass! These roads should have been clear months ago!”
With two crates balanced in his arms and his backpack stuffed near to bursting, Alex peeked around the edge of the trunk. The old man had disappeared back into the front seat, rambling about how stupid it was that they expected him to be able to find his driver’s license in this wreck, and didn’t notice a thing as Alex slipped away. This was the one time he was glad he wasn’t wearing any shoes: his racing footsteps were silent as he made a beeline for cover behind the nearest building.
He didn’t stop to check if the driver had suspected anything. As soon as he was out of earshot, he let out the delirious laughter he’d been holding back, and did a little mid-jog jump for joy.
“No hard feelings, sir,” he said, fully aware he was talking only to himself. “A guy’s gotta eat!”
He’d taken everything he could carry, which, he was happy to find, was quite a lot. Bottled water that hadn’t been baked by the heat, protective clothing, proper footwear, gloves to hide their hands so no one would notice they weren’t chipped - everything they needed! Alex couldn’t stop smiling.
“Aah, this is great! This’ll be enough to keep us going for weeks. Andy’s gonna be so happy.”
Eager to see the look on his brother's face, Alex hurried back to their hideout as quickly as his injured feet could carry him.