Red Rover | gxg | Wattys 2023 Winner | ✔

(33) Night Lab

My first aisle search takes me to the windows. Light outside catches my attention. That next-door apartment block still has electricity, a haunting reminder that for all that's happened since Red Thursday, it's only been seven weeks. The grid here isn't down yet. The building's patchwork of homey yellow windows illuminates a laptop on the counter beside me. I bring it back to the charging station. Patrick and Oreo have already revived a different one. Patrick slips a hand over its USB port. It's so surreptitious, I can't even discern what he's doing before he unplugs something with a near-imperceptible flick. So that's how he gets into devices.

Sure enough, a few more clicks and a burst of typing takes him to the computer's desktop. Oreo leans over his shoulder as they take turns scrolling and clicking through its files. Searching for the photos that the media redacted fifteen years ago. Photos of the thing that set a ticking time bomb for this whole apocalypse. A name on a plinth at the bottom of the world.

Laptops drain our solar chargers much faster than phones do, so we don't have much time on each computer. After a brief conferral, Patrick lifts his head. "Does anyone here have cell service?"

Nobody does. This doesn't stop Patrick, who just shrugs and then goes down some computer rabbit hole with a snippet of code in a black box on the screen instead. Offline storage of the computer's online drives, from what I hear of the conversation.

The first laptop yields nothing. Patrick and Oreo switch to another and repeat the process. Ember kicks boxes out of the way to investigate a printer in one corner of the lab. Calico J finds what we're pretty sure is the last laptop. Five in total. Patrick and Oreo are faster this time, clearing the second laptop and starting on a third. The first solar charger is dangerously low. I check the door and walls for Redding-signals, then the windows on a nervous compulsion. I can't tell if the signals are stronger than before. At least there are no Sleepers here.

A curse from the laptop table: the first solar charger has died. Ditzy joins Ember at the printer. Both whoop as it whirrs to life. "We can print if we need to," calls Ember over her shoulder. "It's Bluetooth-enabled."

"And half-full battery," confirms Ditzy. "It put itself to sleep instead of dying."

I run into Calico J at the lab's far end. He's combing shelves for something that definitely isn't laptops.

"I'm looking for a dictionary," he says when I give him a quizzical look. "If they were doing translation work in here before Red Thursday, they probably have at least one."

I've never been more grateful for my teammates and their respective brains and skills. I add myself to Calico J's search. In a minute, Ember and Ditzy join us. We find a handful of papers with similar symbols to the ones Oreo's been studying, and then Ditzy hits the jackpot: a whole stapled stack with notes for translation. We're on our way back to the charging table when Patrick leaps to his feet, laptop in hand. Oreo scoot-races him to the printer. They found something. And in that moment, a flicker in my peripheral vision draws my eye to the windows.

A light in the building across from us goes out.

It's right at the bottom. Several long seconds later, another follows it, then all three on the same floor.

"Guys?" I say. "It's coming."

The printer whirrs to life. The blackout is speeding up. I tune in to the Redding. It's is on the move both across from and below us. It's in the pipes, pulsing up the tentacles it used to infiltrate this building. I run to another window and realize with a gut-clenching shock that the two buildings are connected. There's a catwalk between them. The moment the Redding reaches this, I feel it slither across towards us, doubling the amount in our walls.