A Kid Tinkering in the Garage

It is all going to work out. It has to, right? That’s all it’s going to come down to. It’s all gonna work out, eventually. I just need to give it time. That’s what I tell myself every morning I awaken in this hellscape. And every day proves to be just a little better than the day prior. Or, at the very least, a little less bad. At the rate things are going, I don’t know if the world will ever be the way they once were, back before. But all of us who remain, around here at least, we’re learning. We’re getting used to it. And that’s what gives me hope. Not faith in some return to a world gone by. But belief that the world yet to come is going to be fine.

I don’t live in the city, thank goodness for that. From what I’ve heard about that place from unreliable sources, the Event basically made things go to hell. Gangs putting up borders and causing violence were and when those borders clash. All the normal people forced to join up or leave. I’m not cut out for that gang life. My whole life I’ve lived in the city. But, a couple years before things went to crap, I moved out here. Not because I dislike the city. I love that place. I moved out here across the river and down the road for college. And the event barely hit us. Directly, that is. The whole power grid shutting down thing definitely impacted us, too. And given that this town is basically connected to the outside world by an interstate and a train line meant the Event isolated us completely. But the explosions around here were only in those two areas. Which meant only dumb people who saw the explosions coming and ran towards them got killed. Which is to say, a lot of the college kids, because being night when it happened and college being what it is, half the student body was drunk, about a third was high. This is a place that pretty regularly has people trying to touch moving trains, you really think they aren’t gonna try to get the best view of the end of the world.

Then the darkness crept in. The emptiness. There was only so much food that didn’t need electricity to keep fresh. Or so the college kids thought. Many college students who’d only been exposed to violence through the media and jokes struck out to achieve some false concept of conquest. The townies got violent at that, and with one another’s perceived flaws, and lashed out at any and all. That first year was chaos, to be sure. Quite probably worse than in the city, though I don’t know. Not many people were able to flee the city back in those days. Then, eighteen months into the whole time, everything changed.

See, it all started with Mitchell. He was a buddy of mine, sort of. Only in the sense that we had some classes together, though. He was some genius kid, a sophomore, already well on his way to an engineering major. He barely survived the first few months, but with the help of a couple networks of study groups, we all did. Twenty-three of us in all, but how we came to be a crew is a rather intricate yet boring story for another time. Mitchell spent the first month of the chaos hiding in the science building on campus, subsisting on the experimental test animals. A diet of undercooked mice. It is exactly as disgusting as it sounds, but it did mean he had a consistent food source without need for foraging that whole time. Putting him in a better position than a lot of us. To be fair, we all thought he was dead for a month and a half. No one went to look for him, because no one had seen him. Due to the whole not having to forage thing. Then, after forty days living underground, he ventured out. Made the mistake of heading to the dorms. Electronic locks meant his normal methods of entry wouldn’t work. And everyone was watching. It took him an extra few seconds to unlatch the door from the inside, feeding a wire around the frame. He was smart enough to rush to his room. That didn’t end up mattering. He’d already been seen.

It turns out, he was about halfway through shaving when people came knocking. Demanding to know what he was up to. Where he was. How he was alive. He opened the window and climbed out with his backpack full. Dropping from the third floor into the trees below, he crashed through the branches and hit the ground. Fortunately the branches slowed his fall enough to not get seriously injured by the ground. It was at this point, when he was running through the quad half shaven, half dressed, with a clearly bulging backpack hefted over one shoulder, that one of our group spotted him. Allison, a freshman who was also in engineering, was on a scrounging job for Louise, who had found a lead on where we could finally get some coffee beans. She got his attention. Got him to follow. Somehow.

“Come on,” she told him, “There’s a whole bunch of us holing up together. Tim and Louise organized it.”

“Of course they did,” he evidently replied. Allison also conveyed to me that he sighed and rolled his eyes at our involvement in the whole plan.

She led him down into town. Most of the students were too afraid of the townies to follow. THose that weren’t had better things to do. Following one of our routes through town that avoided the few groups of violently anti-intruder townies, the pair made their way to the frat house we’d set up as our main base. Louise and I greeted them at the back door, hurrying them in. “Did you get the coffee,” Louise asked Allison immediately.

“No, this dingus distracted me by running half naked through campus,” she said with a smile.

I chuckled. “Glad to see you’re not dead yet,” I joked at Mitchell. He didn’t laugh, probably because of the close calls today. Or throughout the months.

Louise was upset about the lack of coffee, though she held it back. I smiled trying to calm her. “Allison’s probably tired. If you’re worried about it being gone tomorrow, Rob’s about to go out looking for entertainment options, I’m sure he’d be fine grabbing the coffee instead.”

Louise realized what I was doing and took a deep breath. “That’d probably be good. We’ve got a few things we need to take care of before we will really want boardgames.”

“True, while half of us are addicted to coffee,” I reply with a wry smile.

“Really? Only half?” Allison joked. Both Louise and I looked at her with slight disappointment. We could joke about that, because we didn’t leave the coffee behind, get tired, and force another of us to go on a dangerous job we’d signed up for.

She sighed, nodded, and said, “I’ll show Mitchell around.” Together they headed into the house. I went to find Rob before he left, but that’s not important to this story.

For the first couple of days, Mitchell did his best to help when he could. He didn’t eat much, he didn’t talk much, and he didn’t go out much, but he made food, cleaned up, and marveled at what we were doing. Then, after three days, he went out for a day. He came back with a duffel bag and a backpack full of stuff. Ignoring us and walking through the house, he went to the garage where we had dumped all the tech that wasted space in the house. Closing the door behind him, Mitchell sat in the garage day in and day out. He didn’t ever leave that garage. He insisted he had an idea. He wouldn’t tell us what his idea was, or why, or how it would help anyone. All he’d say whenever any of us asked about his insane tinkering and his garage stay was, “Trust me. I’ve got an idea.” Then he’d smile wide at us and keep right on tinkering. We’d figured he’d lost his mind, like many people had when things started blowing up. But he didn’t cause too much of a problem or take up too many resources we cared about, and a couple of people from one of the study groups really liked him, so we kept him around.

Thank goodness we did, too. See, in that garage with all the scrap, he hadn’t been wasting away in denial. He’d been tinkering. Building. And after a year of tinkering, he finally was ready. He dragged his odd machine to the attic, shoved half of it out the window, leaving the other half inside. He broke the floor of the attic and messed with some wires. Then, he went down stairs and asked us if there was anything he could do to help out. Then, as evening came, we began to head back towards our cots. To retire for the evening. He headed up to the attic, though. And from above, we all heard him shout, “Let there be light!” like the cringy doofus kid he was. Then, like the brilliant genius he was, about half of the frat house’s lights came on.

Our reactions were rather unflattering, so I try my best to forget them, though if I recall correctly, they involved quite a lot of cursing and scurrying about to turn off lights. When Mitchell came back down the stairs, Jen, a junior art major who I knew through a complicated series of events involving a fake horse and some weed, laid into him. “The hell was that, Mitchell,” she shouted at the kid.

Not getting the subtle cues at the chaos, Mitchell explained. “Well, when everything went down, I was in shock. And when you guys finally helped me to get here, I realized that you were all overworking yourselves. And I realized that part of the reason why was the food situation. I figured if I could get the fridges working again, things’d be easier for you. So I used a bunch of the junk in the garage and some stuff I scavenged from the science building to make a solar generator with a capacitor system that could power the house for about a week. It’s going to have some kinks to work out, of course, but it should work.”

“No, numbnuts, I’m talking about not telling us first,” Jen shot back, gesturing around at the people frantically turning off lights. “So this didn’t happen.”

“Oh,” Mitchell realized at that moment what he’d done wrong, “Dramatic Flair?” he offered up as the answer. It was technically the correct answer, but it didn’t exactly calm Jen down.

I stepped in for the guy. “Come on, Jen, he wasn’t thinking, he was just doing. You of all people gotta understand that.”

Jen shot her glare at me for a moment. I held her gaze with a cocked eyebrow and a smirk. We both knew what I was talking about and she knew I’d won before she’d even looked at me. “Ugh,” she practically spat out, “Fine. Next time, think, though.”

I walked over to Mitchell. “Sorry about Jen, she’s just worried,” I told him. After a pause, I added, “She’s also generally right.”

“I know, I was just so excited,” Mitchell began.

I shook my head. “I got you. But instead of being defensive or upset with yourself, let’s put your genius mind to the next step. Like what you would need to make more of those.” Because, unlike Jen and Mitchell, I rarely act without thinking. And from the moment I realized what that big machine Mitchell was setting up in the attic was, my mind was already turning. That’s why I didn’t tell people. I wanted the lights to come on. I wanted everyone around to know what Mitchell had achieved. I wanted all of them to know that everything was going to be fine. That everything was going to work out. And the fact that we were the center of that feeling, that was just a bonus.