Quaranteam - Book Two (Ch. 05.5)

Intermission One - Topher

December 11 ^th , 2020 - Minneapolis

The buildings loomed large in his vision, even though several of them weren't lit up at all, capped with snow on top, the streets decently plowed but it was still cold as balls outside, and there wasn't anything Topher wanted so much as to go home. But that wasn't on the cards for him tonight. The military was slowly sweeping its way across downtown Minneapolis, and he wasn't sure how long it would be before they got to this building. And if the military beat him to the building, the task simply wouldn't get done, and he wasn't sure he could live with it if it didn't.

Most of the office buildings were locked up well, but they'd been sitting idle long enough now that it felt like they'd either been managed or they were itching to be broken into. It wasn't like Topher had set out to fall into a life of crime, but his new lifestyle wasn't easy to live with, especially since he hadn't hit the lottery like it seemed many of the other surviving men had. At least not yet anyway. He wasn't entirely sure what his life would look like in a month's time, but that was Future Topher's problem, and Today's Topher had more pressing concerns.

There should've been a guard in the lobby, but the last few months, lots of things that "should" have been happening had fallen by the wayside as the male population of the planet had dwindled rapidly. The elevators for the building were off, which meant he'd be trudging up the stairs, at least until after he figured out how to turn the elevators on.

Raiding office buildings was far different than raiding residential buildings. Topher had done his fair share of looting from the apartment highrises downtown, at least before the military had come by to do sweep-and-clears. Apartment highrises were actually trickier, because he had to gauge if they'd only done one sweep or two. The first sweeps were easy enough to spot - there were standard search & rescue markings in spray paint on the walls outside of each units, marking if there had been survivors or if there had been dead bodies to collect. Some of the tall buildings even had people still living in them, but for the most part, they'd been temporarily moved out so the insides could be adapted into the new living structures and then moved back in. Topher knew all about that. He was scheduled to be moved into one of the buildings in early January, which would be a nice change of pace than the shitty brokedown borderline livable house he and his nine partners were currently holed up in, practically tripping over one another any time they wanted to move from one room to another.

Topher still couldn't believe the odd arc of the last year of his life. This time last year, he'd been planning on how to best drop from college, not enrolling in the spring semester because he just didn't have the money to pay for classes. His plan was that he'd take a year off, work his ass off nonstop during that year, then come back again for the spring semester in 2021, switching back to part-time work so he could continue his education. He'd picked up two part-time jobs to pair with his full-time job, and by the time the lockdown had happened in March, he'd actually been a little thankful, because it meant he could sleep. After a week's worth of sleep, he'd started to get nervous, though. His money wasn't going to hold out forever, and when a week turned into a month, the panic began.

He wasn't living so desperately paycheck-to-paycheck that he didn't have some savings to tap into, but it wasn't as though he could just go in and pick up extra shifts at Burger King, when the management over at Burger King was simply like "no, we're closed. Nobody come in."

It was early May when he realized things were completely going to hell in a handbasket. He and his roommate had scraped together the month's rent, but Mister Davies, their landlord, hadn't come by to pick up the check on the 1^st. Or the 2^nd. Or the 3^rd. By the time the 10^th had rolled around, Topher had asked Joe, his roommate, whether they were just living there rent free from now on. It wouldn't be until September that they would learn definitively that Mister Davies had died in April, but by that point, they were already pretty sure that was what had happened. When the President and the Vice President both collapsed in early July, it was obvious that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, no matter how much the government was trying to keep it under wraps. The problem was clearly bad, but it would be another month and change before Topher started to understand just how bad.

Mid-September, there had been a knock on the door, and both Topher and Joe were tested and then immediately relocated, each given their own house to stay in, along with well-stocked fridges. The house wasn't anything fancy - a three-bedroom two-story a decent drive from downtown and still quite a bit of distance away from the University. It was over near the Mississippi River, in a district called Cooper, but not right along the river itself.

When they'd started bringing women for him to get paired up with, Topher had been a little taken aback, but couldn't find himself complaining too much - after all, the women he was being paired up with were massively out of his league. Shit, the first one they'd brought was a goddamn model and while she hadn't been all that interesting to talk to (on the first day, anyway), she was gorgeous, and the second delivery three days later had contained three more women, at least two of which were exactly the kind of personalities he'd been looking for his entire life. The third had been a little shy at first, but eventually opened up. What had surprised him the most, however, was that the second batch had also brought with them a check from the government, marked 'survival funds,' for a cool twenty-five thousand dollars. That had put him more at ease, at least for a little while.

By November, though, he was starting to get nervous again, even if he was having a remarkable amount of regular sex with women far outside of his league. His ninth partner, Abby, had shown up along with a letter from the government that in the first week of January, he and his new family unit - Team Moline - were going to be relocated again. The house was just too small for him, and they wanted to be sure they all had space to grow, especially as the government wanted to encourage him to have kids. Topher had only turned legal to drink in January, and now the government was suggesting to him that he start fathering kids. While most of the women in his Team had decent jobs and steady incomes, he still felt like he was a bit of dead weight for all of them, something they were struggling to keep him from thinking.

When the new President had gotten on the television in late November to inform the country just how dire straits the entire world was in, that was enough to make Topher want to crawl up into a ball and just disappear. He'd been noticing how many of his friends and former coworkers had just stopped answering their phones, and when the death toll was announced by President Pelosi, the reality had hit him in the face all at once. His friends were dead. His family was dead. And for some stupid fucking reason, he was still alive.

Him.

Who the fuck was he?

He wasn't going to cure cancer. He wasn't going to be the first person on Mars. He wasn't going to solve climate change. He'd just wanted to get through college and maybe eventually work his way up towards being the producer of a local nightly news show or something. He wasn't going to change the world with his life, and yet, somehow he'd survived where millions of other men hadn't.

When the relocation happened in January, he was being moved into the 4 Marq building at 400 Marquette Avenue South. It was a 20+ story skyscraper that was full of luxury apartments, which had immediately made Topher worry about it, because by the first of December, he was at nine partners, and the ten of them were bursting at the seams in the house they'd been assigned. But when he'd told the government rep who'd called him that the ten of them wouldn't be okay in some three bedroom apartment, the rep had told him that no, he and his family were getting an entire floor. That meant they would have a dozen or more bedrooms and several living rooms and bathrooms for them as a family. They were converting the building by knocking down some of the walls and opening the floor to be one interconnected unit, while still offering plenty of space so that people wouldn't feel so cramped in. When he asked how he was expected to pay for it, the rep had told him that it would be "handled."

Maybe that was why Topher had gotten so nervous after the phone call. It was the use of the word "handled" which had set off alarm bells inside of his head, because that meant "we don't know yet, but we don't want to tell you we don't know yet, so don't worry about it, even though maybe you should be worried about it."

So on the first of December, he'd decided to go wandering through the buildings of downtown Minneapolis, just to see which ones he could get into. They'd told him that he was very strongly resistant to DuoHalo, having been part of the pairings in September, so he didn't have any qualms about just strolling into any building he could, to see what was going on, what was locked up and what people had just forgotten about.

It turned out they'd forgotten about quite a lot.

The 365 Nicollet building had been the first thing he'd gone through, only to find it had already been both looted and scheduled for renovation and conversion, clearly being transformed into the Team Per Floor model that he'd heard about. So he'd headed over to the Soo Line Building, and while the renovations hadn't started yet, they were clearly getting ready to, and all the bodies and property had been taken away from the site.

That was when he decided to start moving into checking office buildings.

Now generally the buildings were all locked, but often times that was more of a general discouragement than an actual prevention of entry. Either a loading dock would be unlocked, or there'd be a side door that didn't latch properly, or even a window already smashed in around the corner, and pretty soon, most of Topher's days were getting spent looting office buildings.

Oh, he definitely set limits for himself, because he still had to carry stuff to his car then drive the car back to the house, and the last thing he wanted was someone from either the police or military to look over and see him with a carful of ill-gained plunder from some office building. But, as he learned on the first day, as long as he wasn't doing anything ridiculous, nobody seemed to give him much mind.

The other thing that boggled his mind was that once he was in one building, he basically had access to all of downtown. Because of the brutal cold winters in Minnesota, most of the buildings in downtown Minneapolis were connected, either by skyways or by underground tunnels, and for whatever reason, when everything had shut down in the spring, they'd left all the skyways and tunnels unlocked.

(He'd find out later that they had been locked up at first, but that search-and-rescue had simply unlocked them all and left them that way.)

It wasn't like Topher was looking to get rich - he just didn't know what to do with his days, and scouring through the businesses of downtown Minneapolis looking for plunder seemed as good as anything. He was still setting his sights small, though. He'd gotten a new laptop for everybody in the house, as well as picking up a couple of extra televisions.

Once he was inside of the building, he'd wandered from floor to floor, looking in at the endless rows of cubicles that lay silent and vacant, an entire world abandoned when its occupants had gone and died off. He'd been careful not to set off any alarms, but if there was ever a night when he was going to trip one, this would be it.

Tonight, he was in the U.S. Bank's local office in downtown Minneapolis.

The door from the stairwell to the floor their offices were located on was locked, so Topher took his time and went through the process of slowly picking it. When the pandemic had started, he'd needed to take up hobbies, so he'd decided he'd always wanted to learn how to pick a lock, and taught himself. Now he was using that skill very regularly.

He let himself out of the stairwell and into the fifth story offices, far above the vaults or safety deposit boxes. Mostly it was just a collection of cubicles, desks and computers, like so many other office towers he'd broken into. But today he was just after one thing and one thing in particular.

Topher moved down the hallway and started checking offices until he found one unlocked. After that, he turned on the computer and started sweeping around the desk, looking for little post-it notes or the like. It didn't take long before he found one, giving him the login and password to the computer, so he sat down and started to get to work.

He wasn't here to do any real harm, or even to get rich. No, he had much simpler goals that that. He just wanted to make his Visa bill disappear.

One of the things he hadn't realized when he'd been younger was that credit cards were, basically, predatory practices that had just been decriminalized. The idea was that you were encouraged to be spending money you didn't have, paying interest into some faceless company that couldn't give a shit about your well-being, specifically so they could make you give them more money than something was worth. When he'd looked into how much money he'd been paying into credit cards to pay off "interest" as opposed to things he'd actually paid for, he realized the company was literally just using him as a revenue stream.

So he figured, if there was going to be anything good out of this pandemic, the risk of getting this albatross out from around his neck would be more than worth it.

The desktop computer fired up easily enough, and with the login and password he'd found on the post-it note, he was inside the bank's system very easily. It took him far longer to figure out how to void out his account than it did anything else, and he was just wrapping up when a flashlight flicked on, pointing directly at his face.

"Hands up," a man's voice barked at him. "You're not supposed to be in here."

Topher put his hands up with a shrug. "I'm not supposed to be alive either, but that isn't stopping the fucking bank from charging me eighteen percent interest when I can't be making money," he sighed. "I'm not here robbing anybody. I'm not hurting anybody. I'm just trying to get this fucking yoke off of my neck. Lemme put my hands down and nobody'll even know I was here."

"You can't just make debt vanish," the guard said, walking over towards Topher, not lowering the flashlight but his tone softening a little.

"Yeah, I know," Topher said. "It took me a bit to figure that out. But you know what I can do from here? I can move the debt over to somebody else. Somebody who's dead. And then it's not in my name and it's not my problem anymore and I'm not paying this stupid fucking interest when I can't work for a living."

The guard turned off the flashlight, and Topher could get a look at him now, seeing the guy wasn't that much older than he was. "Aren't they gonna track it to you?"

Topher laughed, rolling his eyes, lowering his hands. "Why would they even think to look? I mean, c'mon man. The government's moved me around once already, and they're moving me again in January. Maybe they're going to do this for us anyway, and they just haven't gotten around to it yet. All I know is that I managed to rack up about twenty grand in credit card debt, mostly for food and gas, and I've probably paid like thirty five grand just to keep that initial twenty grand from getting out of hand. Not paying it off, just keeping it from spiraling out of control. I'm not murdering anybody. I'm not stealing from somebody else's pocket. I'm just making sure this nameless, faceless demon gets off my back and I can start living for myself again."

The guard's face scrunched up for a long moment before he spoke again. "Can you fix mine too?"

Half an hour later, two Visa charge accounts fully paid off, Topher was making his way back out of the building again. During the time when he'd been fixing their credit, Topher had gotten to know Brian, the guard, a little bit, and it had been nice having another guy to talk to about the crazy shit they'd both been enduring as survivors.

Brian's house was only four women so far, and they'd just started arriving two weeks ago. While Topher had had months to come to grips with the weird changes, Brian had been completely in the dark until the President's speech. He'd still been coming to work, patrolling the building although mostly sticking to the main bank area, not bothering with any of the upstairs offices. The only reason he'd even noticed was that Topher had forgotten to pull the stairwell door shut, and Brian had been trudging up to the roof to go and have a smoke in the little nestled area near the doorway.

He'd told Topher that it was like living in a ghost town for eight hours a day, and that he'd actually been excited to have something different going on. Most of the time, he simply hung out in the bank lobby and watched Netflix on his phone. The conversation continued as Brian walked Topher back through the skyway over towards the building he'd come in through, and by the end of it, they'd exchanged phone numbers and Topher felt like he'd made a new friend.

"You mean they're all unlocked?" Brian asked him about the skyways. "Like, I could just walk ten or fifteen blocks without going outside?"

"Well, some of the buildings are starting to get people in them again," Topher said. "So they probably won't stay that way for long. Most of the time it's just people coming into their office to pick up shit and take it home - photos from their desks, paperwork they didn't think they would need to have access to at home or even just throw out shit they've left in the company fridge back in March. Cleaners have generally already handled those, but sometimes you can't be too sure."

"So, I'm guessing you're going to go back to school in the fall then?" Brian asked him.

"I dunno," Topher admitted. "Maybe? I'm still not entirely sure I can afford it."

"You didn't watch the special after the President's speech, did you?"

"Some of it," Topher said. "I wasn't listening when it was focused on that dude in his mansion, but when they were talking about the high rise conversions, I paid a lot of attention, since apparently that's gonna be me next month."

"Oh yeah? Which one are they moving you into?"

"4 Marq," he said. "I think we're supposed to be Floor 11 or 12. Something like that."

"Hey, cool, we can be neighbors," Brian said. "I'm getting moved into Floor 5 of that building, although it sounds like it's way too much space for just the five of us."

"They've got more women coming for you, man," Topher said. "Just like they've got more coming for me. I told them nine was plenty, but they assured me I'm going to get brought up to a dozen once I get moved into the new place, so I can't imagine they're just stopping at four for you, especially if they're putting you in a high rise and giving you a whole floor. You're, what, about thirty or so?"

"Yeah, and been married for three years now. Kit and I were happy, just the two of us, but the government seemed convinced that we needed more women to keep me alive, and as angry as Kit was about it at first, when she came home with Katya, our first new partner, man the two of them couldn't wait to team up on me. I felt like the luckiest man on Earth."