It wasn’t that the days were long, though they were, or that he wasn’t getting enough sleep, though he certainly wasn’t getting the doctor’s recommended amount of rest in the few fitful hours he spend coughing in bed each night. The issue, he’d decided, was something altogether outside of himself.
The state of the wide world, most of which he’d never seen, was to blame in some vague way. During the sleepless heaving that punctuated the wee hours of the morning, he was certain that the exhaustion wasn’t his own doing.
The morning before the explosion, Paul was miserable again. Scraping the crud from the corners of his eyes and tearing a threadbare sock on his snarling, yellow toenails, he cursed his meager fortune.
The singular light in the bathroom flickered, buzzed, died. Paul sighed at the prospect of another task to contend with, and added it to the arbitrary mental list of home improvements he’d never get around to making. The water ran into the sink with a dingy, rust-tinted splash, and he wondered for a moment how much metal he’d ingested from these pipes, how many parts per million were simple, elemental iron. He brushed his teeth with the discolored water and hacked chunks of cigarettes past into the drain.
The mild sciatica hadn’t subsided in more than a decade, and as he yanked his trousers up over his hips, that too familiar wince crossed his pocked, aging face. Wallet and keys in tow, he thought about the last time he’d been happy, way back when Anna still found him handsome, and tucked the trusty flashlight she’d given him into his breast pocket.
Paul scoffed at the emotion’s place among the well-to-do, as far away from his plighted station as a yacht and a million dollar mansion. The door clicked shut behind him, a jiggle of the knob providing placebo protection against intruders, and he made his way down the trash-strewn steps toward the bus stop unaware that he’d never return.
The little white machine punched his card and began counting the scraps he’d be receiving on the next round of payroll. Through the office, down the stairs, and carefully descending a ladder that felt more treacherous with each passing year, Paul began his duties.
The Works, as they were known to most, didn’t require much human intervention, and Paul’s social status reflected the invisibility of his occupation. He spent most days pacing around the pipe-lined tunnels checking gauges already being monitored elsewhere, occasionally turning a valve or pulling a lever to keep the city’s amenities uninterrupted. Sometimes, when the cameras were on the fritz, he slept.
When the alarms intruded into his eardrums, Paul’s body jerked in reactive terror. The wheel’s of his chair skidded against the painted green, heat tempered floor and his feet slid from the brushed steel desk that was supposed to serve as a workstation. He tumbled out of his doze and onto the floor, knocking a temple against the cement.
Bleary eyed, ears screaming, a trickle of blood emerging from a tear in the papery skin of his face, Paul staggered to his feet. Scanning the control panel mounted above the desk, he tried to make sense of the spiking numbers and ignore the assaulting alarm.
There was supposed to be some readout, instructions from upstairs detailing the emergency and what the grunt in the tunnels was supposed to do about it. There was no such information, and as Paul tasted blood at the corner of his mouth, he expected to feel some kind of panic. Instead, he met the coppery taste on his tongue with a familiar hopelessness.
Disconnected from the guidance at the top of the ladder, the incessant howl of the emergency system transforming into cacophonous white noise, Paul tried to take action with obligatory urgency. He moved from console to console, hurrying down lengths of interconnected tunnel that constituted the heart of the Works. The few monitors and gauges meant nothing, and his lower back screamed with each lurching jog from one panel to the next.
Rounding another monotonous corner, Paul spotted a sputtering hose flapping against an aluminum panel a few yards ahead and turned instinctively to the mandated tool bin placed at each major intersection.
As he hauled the massive crescent wrench from its bracket inside the bin, agony cascaded from ankle to shoulder blade and Paul dropped to his knees with a guttural shout. Mind clarified by pain, he remembered an ancient bit of training, a manual fragment from his earliest days in the tunnels some twenty years back. A special coolant, dangerous, flammable and known to cause gradual nerve damage, running in small purple lines through a select few areas of the Works’ primary operations sector. Fundamental systems only.
By law, the barely visible hoses had an emergency cutoff valve every nine feet, but required the cumbersome tool Paul was trying to use for a cane as he stumbled to his feet, a new chemical taste mixing with the blood in his mouth.
Paul found the valve and planted his feet. After three attempts, he hoisted the wrench to his shoulder and flinched under its weight.
For a moment, the alarm that had drifted into unbearable background noise sputtered erratically. Silence and darkness fell simultaneously throughout the tunnels, and Paul felt his senses stripped away. Slowly, quietly, he pulled the flashlight from his pocket, clicked the button, and secured it between his teeth. He fitted the wrench’s jaws around the safety valve with a wince.
The first spark from the electrical box was small, but took over the meager beam of the flashlight to illuminate the blood that had trickled down Paul’s neck, staining his collar and soaking into his shirt. The next was bigger, more violent.
Paul yanked on the wrench and laughed as his grip slipped. He spoke out loud to the empty, gas filled tunnels.
“Does it even matter?”
Paul put a hand on his aching hip and reached for the wrench, fire consuming the tunnels, the Works, and beyond.