A pool of water from the lashing rain grew outside the long, shallow factory window, a mirror on the concrete. The pool reflected imposing floodlights, as the heavy drops exploded into expanding circles. The edges of the gathering water nudged out tentatively, reaching, like life wanting more. It was as if nature was amassing for an assault on the endless warehouse block. Something was creeping stealthily, manifesting like a secretly wished story.
The gargantuan factory was one of many in the complex they termed a factory city. State media called the sprawl of buildings ‘the beating heart of the economy’. They kept costs and prices low, and the world appreciated that. ‘Stack them high, sell them cheap,’ is the age-old cornerstone of commerce. Government ministers rubbed their hands as billions flooded into their coffers, like a dam of money had burst its banks and drenched them in wealth.
The fiercely drumming water on the rooftop echoed loudly across the tall space above Chi Yang. He had spent toiling years of his life checking a single part of a coffee maker for correct installation on the production line, and he was tired of it, very tired of it – like the oil in the machine of his body had evaporated and his bone-dry structure was straining to breaking point. His muscle memory made his body seem robotic, the way he positioned his arms, his hands and his eyes.
He was lucky to be near the window at least – he enjoyed a sliver of natural light from outside, but on his other flank was a long line of busy workers, heads down, eyes on product, minds numbed from never-ending repetition. Their spotless, bright yellow T-shirts and caps had lost any meaning for him other than reminding him he was property, it was a brand colour that seemed to swamp everything in the factory and beyond.
‘Work with honour’ is what they had been told, hundreds, if not thousands of times.
Chi’s glasses slipped off his head when he turned momentarily to the window. He had wanted to watch the rain descend for a private second or two. The glasses bounced comically off the conveyor and onto the floor. He felt an electric moment of panic but managed to move through the moment fast to recover.
“Number seventy-two, you are daydreaming. I saw you look at the window. You have a job to do, and you are failing your team today. One demerit deducted! You should know better, seventy-two!”
The amplified scolding was at high volume, so even teams beyond their line could witness his professional failure.
One demerit was having an hour’s worth of salary wiped clean off your pay. This hurt because it meant your slim margin for personal purchases was cut. It also meant you had failed to focus to the required level, which was a sin, to the corporation.
Chi pushed his glasses back onto his face, recovering as fast as he could. One coffee machine had passed him without his intervention, so the conveyor had to be reversed by one item. It was an embarrassment for everyone. It was not uncommon, as people were increasingly becoming tired. In these awkward moments, Chi thought of his wife for strength to continue.
Chi had married in the factory, lived in the factory, and since his conscripted arrival thirteen years ago, he had never ventured beyond the company’s high perimeter fences. That was forbidden by his supervisor, the officious Miss Wu, the hawkish line manager who despised problems to her ever-rising quotas. He had not been allowed a phone, and his remaining family could have all died for all he knew. The 75-hour weeks rolled by at the beginning, one day, one week, one month – they all tumbled into the next and then before he could pause for a breath, Chi realised he was much older, his skin was pale and he had no real voice anymore, just a squeak of submission now and again when instructions were issued curtly. In the first days after his arrival, he had suffered by asking questions, so he learned not to.
Chi’s eyes were failing, even with his strong glasses, and his hands were trembling as he pushed the same part into each half-assembled coffee machine base, on the slow conveyor. He dared to glance up at the camera fixed on him, one of thousands, strategically covering every angle in the factory. Someone had a job of staring at him, of reporting on him. He would have preferred that job, he speculated. He returned his gaze to the half-made skeletal shell of the coffee machine, edging into view, then the next, then the next, and considered, as he did daily, how he disliked coffee, the smell of it, and the dark, heavy, acidic taste. Coffee was one of the largest commodities on Earth, a morning drug for work efficiency, and it made sense for economies to thrive upon its energy, but he did not like it one bit. It tasted like hard work.
In the last year, in particular, as age began to drag on their energies, he witnessed workmates around him vanish one at a time. One day, they looked ill; the next day, they were gone. No explanation was ever given. The same happened when workers wished to resign or broke down mentally, they were marched away and never seen again. Most had out-of-control debt with the company, so they would never legally be able to leave without repaying, which was impossible. Employees learned it was not advisable to suggest leaving or resigning – there was a knowledge that to do so meant something very bad would happen, something dreadful, maybe death.
Chi’s wife of five years, Sue, was his only refuge and escape; they would talk, stare directly at each other, hold hands, kiss, and be fully alive in the tiny glimmers of light between the long cycles of dark. They used pencils to draw detailed illustrations of thick forests, exotic birds and animals – all from memory, and filed them on a shelf neatly in order of creation. The shelf was heavy and bowing in the middle, under the weight of the paper.
Like so many company couples, they lived in a small two-room apartment at the top deck of the factory – which made it convenient to come together at the end of each torturous shift, with only the two metal staircases to ascend. He always felt like a rodent returning to a den, the only safe hole to crawl back to amongst the threats and open-plan hell-scape of machines and eyes.
Marriage was encouraged at the factory, and once a month, there were light relief community nights and even rationed drinks offered at the Official Recreation Hall – so dating could occur with the blessing of management. Once a marriage was agreed, better quarters were issued, with money taken off their already meagre salaries as recompense. The only things to buy were from the factory on-site shops and food halls anyway, their salaries fed back into the company from each bi-weekly shopping trip.
The air-raid-like siren howled for the shift changeover, and Chi welcomed it as an opportunity to mask his chesty cough, before lumbering off toward the nearest staircase to the higher two decks. When he peered up to take in the factory design, he recognised it matched how prisons looked, bleak industrial layouts for human containment. Hundreds of uniform ‘cell doors’ hid apartment lives on decks one and two, while the floor was solely for work.
Miss Wu was waiting to sign him out as he followed the red line from his workstation to her desk, which was positioned near the stairs for efficiency.
“You look unwell,” she probed inquisitively.
When Supervisor Wu looked him up and down for weaknesses, he knew better than to disclose any discomfort.
Her hand was hovering over a form’s box to tick, with her gleaming silver pen with the company logo embossed on it.
“Oh, not at all, no. I am fine. Thank you for asking, Supervisor Wu, you are very kind”, and he forced a broad smile as a signal that he had nothing to add.
He had become used to conversing in English, as the Chinese transcript recorders had a glitch, so the workforce was told to talk in English only, because the software could still transcribe it. After a time, like everything on repeat, it became second nature.
She held his stare, assessing him critically, and then, with a curl of the lip, put her pen back on the desk, confident he would return the next day at least, and would not need replacing. He had been sick before, but that was in the earlier days of his employment, and he managed a day or two off without too much to deal with in the way of punishment and penalties. Times had changed since those earlier days, and he dared not risk disclosure of sickness with the current management policies. He was paranoid, with justification. Twenty per cent profit increases year-on-year demanded harder work and more sacrifices from them all.
Sue was waiting for him. She was changing out of the yellow T-shirt, throwing it into the laundry chute, and pulling on her dark blue nightdress when he lumbered through the door and removed his shoes. They were suspicious of potential surveillance in their quarters, but they were not the kind to gossip and curse anyway; that was something they had both been discouraged from at a young age by protective parents. It made them assume they were relatively safe. Instead of open slurs and complaints about their treatment, they had developed a subtle language in their eyes. Sue saw straightaway that he was physically suffering and began to busy herself making some soup without asking questions, it was the staple comfort food to soothe sore throats and boil away germs.
“The rain is heavy tonight,” he croaked. A neutral subject for anyone listening to log, without having to report up the chain. The rain was thundering on the metal roof above them.
“I’ve never heard it so heavy. Maybe it’s climate change?”
Sue spoke softly. Everything about her was slight, soft and delicate, her thin frame, her concave cheeks and small mouth – and yet, she was the strongest heart he had ever encountered. There was steel in her that could only be realised with time spent with her. She tied her shoulder-length, black, straight hair into a knot to avoid it flapping around as she cooked. In minutes, the room was full of scent and flavour and had the comfort of a home.
As he sat on the low stool before the square ground-hugging table, he held his head in his hands for a moment and rubbed his eye sockets as if trying to find the right frequency in his mind.
She presented the two deep black bowls on the table, and sat opposite, placing crusty bread scraps between their bowls for dipping.
“Sue…” he began, scratching his throat.
It felt like a different kind of conversation was about to emerge, something unfamiliar to them both.
“I think…” he continued awkwardly, almost crying.
She put her finger up to her small, round lips to stop him silently from continuing.
“Eat your soup, or it will go cold, my love…” she instructed him and nodded at him, a whole conversation in her expression that he understood.
The rain seemed to respond, hammering the roof harder.
As they resigned to slurping the hot broth, the apartment lights flickered out, and the ever-present buzz of electricity that seemed to hang in the air throughout the enormous factory, abruptly stopped.
“No electricity! A power cut?”
“It looks like it… But, it might be a test, to see how we react.”
They stood up in synch, abandoning their soup in the dark and moved toward the door. Outside in the open, cavernous factory, there were no lights, the conveyers had stopped, and the workers stood, fidgeting and bewildered by the interruption. The factory had never switched off in over 60 years.
Chi took in the seemingly endless length of the factory from above on the highest deck, it never ceased to amaze him, the sheer size of the place. They both noticed that the little red lights upon the wall-mounted cameras were dead.
Below them, Supervisor Wu was shouting at the stupefied night-shift workers hovering next to the conveyor line, but it was hard to know what she was saying – she had no working mic or amplified voice. Indeed, she appeared vaguely panicked. Chi had never seen her lose her composure. It was stirring. He momentarily forgot his discomfort and broke out an excited smile, catching his partner’s bright eyes through the gloom.
Sue pointed at the long rectangular window. There was water flowing outside, no longer a series of puddles joining up, it looked as if a newly formed river was gathering momentum. There were steep, tree-less, gully-ridden hills nearby beyond the tall razor wire-topped fences, they must have been channelling the rain through the factory grounds. The water was only a few inches deep, yet it had significant power behind it. There were spiralling eddies and diamond-glints on frothing crests, where water impacted railings, and where the concrete was uneven.
“That’s why the power is out… This is… A real chance,” asserted Sue, finding bravery deep in the well of her soul.
It was obvious, this was an emerging natural disaster, a violent and sudden flash flood that had taken the company completely by surprise.
“I was going to say earlier…” confessed Chi, “I can’t keep going on like this. I have to leave. WE… Have to leave.”
She nodded furiously in agreement, and Chi noticed she was trembling with the dense gravity of the moment.
She spoke quickly: “This is God helping us… I prayed to him. I asked him to see outside one more time, to see trees or animals, I prayed, and this is his answer.”
She clutched hold of her tiny silver crucifix that had been concealed on a necklace under her nightdress. Her faith had kept her strong under the weight of the regime in the factory; her thoughts of a listening guardian kept her grounded and sustained her as a pilot light of hope. As a Christian, she was a rarity. Most citizens in China were atheists or had a cocktail of Eastern religions for bespoke worship. Christians were a Western offshoot, an oddity. Her American stepmother had nurtured her faith, and it had taken root in her, like an anchor for positive perception.
She motioned back to the apartment: “I’ll get the rucksack, the one in the cupboard we had as a reward… I’ll put tins and water bottles in, and some spare clothes, and then, we must go…”
“Yes, yes!”
She scurried back into the apartment but was back with Chi at the top of the stairs in under a minute, rucksack on her back and two transparent ponchos grasped in her trembling fist. She offered one to Chi. She had dragged their shoes across the door threshold with her foot. Haste was required.
The weather-proof ponchos were well used. Every two days, workers were permitted a supervised park visit outside, but still within the complex. The park was simple in layout, and each corner had an armed guard posted. It had artificial grass and simple benches, and for something to look at, there were strange, grey corporate art pieces. Apart from the morning roll call and group exercises, it was the only time they were allowed beyond the factory doors. Whatever the weather, it was fresh air that kept them just sane enough to carry on.
Chi felt a sharp pang of horror about leaving the apartment forever, it had been the only place he had felt pleasure and belonging in his long time at the factory. He had good company there, but that had nothing to do with the apartment – he knew that. He blinked away the notion. They had a real chance; they must take it.
“Tread softly, if Supervisor Wu sees us before we reach the doors, I don’t know what we will do…”
There were guards assigned to the floor, but they had been called away or deserted their stations. That was another first in the factory.
With ponchos pulled over their heads and bodies, the pair crept down the stairs with light but fast footfalls. The visibility was poor, yet the ponchos shone a little, giving them away.
When they reached the factory floor, the confused workers on the conveyor line stared blankly at them, exposing the couple’s crude attempt to flee. Miss Wu twirled around to catch the two deserters face-to-face, as they skulked from the stairs, heads bowed, as if that would render them invisible.
“What are you doing? There is no authorised exit!” she screeched, pointing back at the stairs,
“Return to your apartment at once!”
Chi and Sue’s hearts pounded with terror, but the situation demanded defiance. Chi was very ill, he knew well enough that he would be ‘disappeared’ if he returned to his designated home as instructed.
“Are you going to try to stop us, Supervisor Wu?”
He could sense in the dark her rage manifest toward him, her energies rising and spiking with his insolence.
“Get back, NOW!” she roared.
Chi looked at her pleadingly, transfixed in her hard glare until he felt Sue squeeze his hand firmly, to bring him round, to be braver. The doors to the outside were so close.
“Goodbye, Miss Wu…” he offered in an apologetic tone, and started to walk to the exit, stepping so carefully he resembled a cat evading a close predator.
“Run,” whispered Sue, and they changed gear into a sprint.
Wu instinctively gave chase, screeching commands in their ears, swinging her arms violently. How dare they!
The onlooking workers watched with fascination. It was like witnessing a demigod’s power wash away. Without the terror induced by surrounding guards and cameras, Wu became little more than a loud, obnoxious human. One by one, they meandered away from their workstations at the conveyor and the half-finished coffee makers. The workflow was dead.
The closed double doors continued to spout fanning water into the warehouse. The water splayed and frothed as it forced its way through thin gaps.
Wu was enraged beyond rationality. There was no longer a chain of command, and she needed instinctively to assert herself. She emanated a warrior-like cry, grabbed Sue’s hair in a rough clump and yanked it, her mouth contorted with genuine rage. As Sue stumbled backwards with a puppy-esque yelp, she pushed out with one hand, and the supervisor lost her footing, twisting her ankle and spinning. Wu head-dived against the conveyor’s hard edge with a decisive ‘thunk’. Unconscious, she crumpled into a ball on the factory floor, punctuating her demise with a splash.
“Leave her!” said Chi, feeling a power in his voice for the first time. Wu had assaulted his wife, a line had been crossed.
The water was steadily rising. The chance for escape had become a face-off with death.
“When the doors open, we need something to take us out on the water, it’s too much to swim it now,” said Chi.
Sue responded by overturning the supervisor’s table to create a makeshift raft.
“Will it float?” she pondered.
“I don’t know. Maybe not, especially with both of us on it.”
She was already working on a solution: “Take the packaging foam from that shelf and stick it to the desk with tape, it’s mostly air, it will be buoyant!”
They set about building the raft hastily, as the water spread and rose about them. It felt like a team-bonding exercise, like the mandatory ones they held annually on the company grounds. Outside, through the window, the choppy flood produced a body. It was a guard’s water-bloated corpse tumbling in the current. The meaning of people was changing.
“I’m not sure if I’ll survive this… I feel weak. Sue, listen, you should leave alone. You have a better chance on your own.”
She stopped taping the foam to the upturned desk for a moment long enough to look him in the eye with a meaning he understood.
“Together!” she commanded, almost irritated at his lack of fight and faith.
He was panting, dizzy and now coughed freely as he worked; a cough with a force that surprised Sue. He had been concealing it well until that moment.
To their relief, the raft was floating on the rising water, so they clambered on top of it. It wobbled, but it did not sink. Sue’s nightdress was soaked, as were his work trousers. They shivered in the darkness with the sound of water filling the hangar-like room.
“Don’t let go… I can use this work rules manual as a paddle, it’s big enough. It’ll work, I think!” shouted Chi, trying to wrestle the flow of incoming water.
The doors broke open, letting the flood intrude without resistance to explore the warehouse internally. They gripped the thin table legs on the corners as their desk spun about the surface water in the factory, bumping off machines. Chi balanced himself on his knees and worked with the chunky manual to make headway to the open doors. There were coffee machine parts in turbulent whirlpools, spiralling and dancing upon the liquid stage. Most of the workers had fled up the stairs to be above the situation. Sue caught sight of them evenly lining the rails of the staircase, as if their conveyor-belt formation was permanent, wherever they went together.
Wu’s body, with its yellow T-shirt and bloodied head, bobbed past them toward the conveyor. Even in death, she was compelled to be at her station, face down in the murky water.
Leaving the warehouse felt surreal. More bodies rolled by, joined by thousands of products from the different factory buildings. It was an apocalyptic sea of half-made things and death. A degree of moonlight illuminated the gushing water, glimmering off glass and plastic items in the frenzied flood.
“If we get separated,” Sue said, “Find me at the forest’s edge. It’s five miles beyond the factory gates. I remember it from when I was brought here in the truck all those years ago. I will look for you until I find you, I promise.”
He nodded. They worked well together, and they had a plan now. Her idea also proved she really did love him and wanted to be with him even if they were separated. He could never ask such deep questions in the factory – they just accepted they were together and that was the best thing to be in the circumstances. It gave him some much-needed strength.
The water took them quickly in its determined flow, so they bounced in the direction of the flood toward the factory’s external gates. They glided on the water fast, rushing past the rows of towering factory blocks. The factories each bore images of the item they produced, for making food blenders, televisions, vacuum cleaners, all the things a happy home could not do without. A two-seater electric cart, one assigned to management no doubt, circled around them in the flow. It was like nature had sent them a battering ram. The cart smashed cleanly open the wire fence panelling just before they reached it, clearing the way for their exit.
“God’s hand…” confirmed Sue, in awe.
There was one tower guard they spied above the perimeter fence, but he stood as helpless as anyone inside the factory, unable to communicate, to act, or to prevent the two from floating out beyond the factory’s fences into the shroud of night.
With a flurry of waves and a surge of power, they were gone, out of sight and out of reach.
The table sped like a bobsleigh through the valley beyond, directed by a determined one-way tide. As two fragile beings, they were in no position to disagree with the will of the ferocious waves. Eventually, the rage of the floodwater began to tire, and they glided into a protruding muddy outcrop. They took the opportunity and messily decanted themselves, hobbling away from the water’s edge to anywhere that resembled safety. As they alighted their makeshift craft, the table seemed to decide to carry on its journey without them, making its own bolt for freedom, drifting into nothingness with the reduced, lazy current.
“Over there!” pointed Sue, propping Chi up on her shoulder as he threw down the work rules manual he had been clutching so tightly. Shivering violently, they scrambled toward what appeared to be the underside of a large boulder, under a further canopy of a cliff. Their breath was visible in plumes, and the rain was weaker but still falling loosely.
“We must hold each other until dawn, for the warmth…” demanded Sue, wrapping herself around his frail, wheezing torso.
The night remained a relentless ordeal, the rain infecting everything everywhere, accompanied intermittently by a thunderclap and a flash to reassert the weather’s supreme authority.
Chi awoke the next morning in a significant degree of pain and discomfort, with Sue’s arms still wrapped around him tightly. His morning thought was not that he was free, but that he was with her. That alone was something.
As his eyes unglued, he breathed fresh air, and although cold, it had an intoxicating quality.
Far beyond where they were curled into the wet earth was an arresting landscape, lit up by the bright morning sunshine. Where they had expected a thick alpine forest, there were long rows of evenly spaced graves, marked with simple yellow crosses, as far as the eye could see. The receding, still water of the flood revealed parts of a road like an artery in the giant graveyard – it was the road directly leading from the factory city.
“The trees, they’re gone…” said Sue, in mild shock. “It’s as if they have been turned into graves. This is where workers end their journey, Chi. It was all true, they work you till you die, or kill you to replace you… I never wanted to believe it, you know. It’s too much to believe…”
She felt sick, and the crucifix against her skin, for once, felt as if it was rubbing her as another physical nuisance to endure.
Chi was first to notice the man approaching, and realised a rifle barrel was pointed at his brow. It was a young guard, in factory yellow overalls, moving stealthily toward the pair from the way they had come the night before. It could have been that tower guard they noticed. Behind him, there was his dappled brown and white horse grazing on what it could dig out of the mud with its nose, but the man seemed to be alone.
When comfortably in earshot, the stranger started with his commands: “Kneel, both of you… Show me your hands. Or I will shoot you.”
He was edgy and twitchy, like someone new to a job. Perhaps he was hired to hunt them as more experienced guards were no longer available.
Chi and Sue had come too far and had nothing left to lose.
“Can I ask you? Do you think you have a strong mind, or a weak mind?” asked Chi.
“I said kneel!” he yelled, trying hard to deepen his voice.
“Does a strong mind do what it’s told, or do what it wants?”
“Kneel….”
“No,” answered Sue, not even bothering to ungrasp her partner’s shoulder.
The young man didn’t expect that. He assumed a gun would be persuasion enough.
In the morning’s light, it was clear there were other factory complexes on the horizon. It was so basic; graves, factories, mud and nothing else. Was there nowhere they could escape to?
The corpses delivered by the flood were now beginning to shed the distinct odour of death into the moist air.
Chi closed his eyes but did not move either. He was too tired to do anything.
“It’s money, you know? It’s just about money…For someone else, not for you,” he sighed.
The guard lowered his rifle and shook himself out of protocol, like these unexpected reactions had blown his intentions hard off the rails. What was he supposed to do if this harmless couple did not comply? He was told they were very dangerous, but he knew that was not true, just by looking at them. He wasn’t prepared to kill them; it only dawned on him in that very second that he would never pull the trigger as he was asked to earlier in his briefing, if they refused to comply.
The sun decided to shine fiercer, and the heat at least warmed them. There seemed to be a pause for reassessment. The three of them could only stand on the saturated ground and listen to each other breathing, as if breathing and listening were a final refuge to hide in, when they had instructions that they were not prepared to obey.
“Will you help us, please?” asked Sue in her tiny voice. She was holding the crucifix again, and he noticed. Her thumb and finger were gently cradling the miniature figurine of Christ.
A small brown bird landed nearby, as if it wanted to greet them to ease them into a new reality. It was a final confirmation for Sue, and she felt that constant hidden light inside her instantly grow and fill her heart.
The man slung his rifle over one shoulder, groaned with a sense of both defeat and relief, and glanced back at his horse.
“Yes,” he said, matter-of-factly, “Yes, I will…”
The End
Dystopian Days 