I threw up my boot, kicked the disoriented mutant in the chest, and shoved him back into his comrades.
The Rubberface in the center went down, but the last one raised his rifle.
Thankfully, Natalie was faster.
The Scavenger raised her gun’s sight to her eyes, squeezed the trigger, and ripped her opponent apart with a swarm of bullets. Then, as his corpse collapsed to the ground, she turned her attention to the remaining Rubberface. Natalie squeezed the trigger once more, and his head exploded like a gore-filled balloon.
Once the coast was clear, I ran over to the dismembered mutant and ended his life with a quick swipe of my E-Tool.
“Not bad for a Pest Control Technician, eh?” I laughed as I stepped back and picked up my discarded shotgun.
“Not bad at all.” Natalie grinned. “You’re a natural Scavenger, Hunter. Even if you did have to feign weakness to get us out of the situation.”
“I didn’t get us out of the situation,” I noted, “you’re the one who had the idea to hold the nuclear reactor hostage. If you hadn’t done that, we’d both be bloody heaps on the ground right now. We make a good team.”
“Yes,” she nodded as she stared into my eyes for a second.
The Scavenger and I stepped over the corpses, slowly pulled open the door they’d emerged from, and then cautiously peeked inside.
Beyond the door was a massive room with off-white eggshell walls covered from head to toe in various equipment. Dark, cracked screens and gauges of every sort spread across the pale walls, while hundreds of buttons and switches were interspersed in between.
Metal desks with dark, twenty-ten era monitors were littered throughout the space, on top of a decrepit old carpet that appeared to have been gray at one point. There were phones all over the place, too, but those things were long past the point of usability.
This was it.
The control room.
“We’re in, Karla,” I announced as I holstered all my weapons. “What do I need to do to get this puppy back up and running?”
Finally, Karla’s voice sighed. I was starting to get worried about you guys.
“I appreciate the concern,” I mumbled, “but right now we just need to figure out how to restart the reactor.”
My father checked out the systems of the plant here in Dimension One, she explained. According to his analysis, there should be a “mainframe” computer. It’d be the one at the very center of the room.
I searched around until I saw what she was talking about. There, at the literal center of the space, was a circular desk with a single, large computer monitor at its center. The screen was apparently on, because it was currently showing one of those vintage “cgi pipe” screensavers.
“The computer’s already on,” I noted to both Karla and Natalie. “I bet they have some solar powered generators somewhere that’s powering everything, but I think the Rubberfaces were probably already trying to mess with the computer when we got here.”
I walked over to the desk, plopped myself down into the black rolling chair, and coughed as decades worth of dust sprayed up into the air. Once I was over the hacking fit, I moved the mouse and watched as the monitor sprang to life.
There were about a dozen different tabs open on the screen, a further indicator that the Rubberfaces were trying to restart this thing on their own. I shut them all down in a flash, and then chuckled at the background on the desktop.
It was this very power plant, back when it was still an active institution. Even better, the words “for a better future” were plastered across the bottom in comic sans writing.
The owner of this computer didn’t know just how right they were.
“Is this what the internet looks like?” Natalie questioned as she stared at the screen in awe. “We’ve found screens like this before in the Fallen Lands, but they’re always too broken to use. That, and we haven’t really mastered electricity yet.”
“Generators, Natalie,” I chuckled. “They’ll do wonders for you. But no, this isn’t the internet. I’m guessing these places run on their own network so they can’t be hacked by foreign governments or anything like that.”
Natalie stared at me blankly. “I didn’t understand a single word of what you just said.”
I figured as much.
“It’s not the internet,” I repeated, “but I’ll gladly show you that when—”
Suddenly, there was the sound of creaking hinges, and the door on the other side of the room began to open.
“Krakal?” a Rubberface voice asked calmly as a mutant swung open the door.
“Fuck!” Natalie hissed as she raised her AK-47. “I should have known there were more!”
The Scavenger squeezed off a round of bullets, and the metal swarm ripped through the Rubberface like a hot knife through butter. I could see there were several more of the mutants in the hallway on the other side of the door, though, and they recoiled in fear at the sight of their dead friend.
“Karla, walk me through this!” I ordered. “We’re under attack, so the quicker, the better!”
“I’ll hold them off,” Natalie growled as she kicked over a nearby desk. “Just get this reactor back online, and I’ll worry about these bastards.”
Tell me what you see, Hunter, Karla said calmly.
“Uhhh… ” I squinted at the screen as more gunshots rang out from my right. “There’s a bunch of folders… A ‘My Computer’ shortcut… And Minesweeper.”
Father says one of the folders should be entitled “Reactor Logs,” Karla replied. That’s the one that has the information you’ll need to put into the command prompt.
I dragged the cursor over to the folder in question, double clicked, and then began to forage through the files inside.
“Hunter?” Natalie called out. “How are we doing? There’s way more of these guys than I thought, and I’m almost out of ammo.”
“Working on it,” I promised the Scavenger, and then I pulled the shotgun over my shoulder. “Here, take these. You definitely need them more than me right now.”
I slid the shotgun over to her position, and I unholstered my pistol and did the same thing with it. Then I turned back to the computer and continued to look for anything that could help us.
My father says there’s a file somewhere in that folder that contains the most recent logs, the voice in my head started once more. If the plant really was turned off voluntarily, then it will have the sequence they used to shut it down. If you can find that—
“We can reverse it and turn it back on,” I finished. “But what about the sabotage? How on Earth do we do that?”
Suddenly, there was an empty clicking noise from Natalie’s barricade, and then I saw her rifle get tossed to the side. The next thing I knew, thunderous blasts from my shotgun echoed through the room.
Let’s get there first, Karla said, then we can worry about that.
Finally, after another minute or two of scrolling through the logs with my heart in my throat, I found it. The log was dated November tenth, twenty-nineteen, and it was the latest one I could find in the system.
That had to be it.
I double-clicked the log, and my screen lit up with a bunch of data I couldn’t make any hide nor hair of.
“I-I have no idea what I’m looking at, Karla,” I sighed. “It’s just a bunch of gibberish to me.”
Is there a sequence of data on the page that starts with “shutdown” or “close” or even “cease?”
I scanned up and down the logs until my eyes finally came to a line that began with the words “cease operations.”