Breakpoint - Part 1 (Patreon)

Part One

Len

Waking up in freefall wasn't a common occurrence, but Len would be lying to himself if he thought this was the first time he'd done it. Third or fourth time, maybe.

It wasn't as though he was hurtling towards the earth with no protection. Hell, he wasn't even hurtling alone. He was strapped in with three other men into what seemed like a large yellow life raft of some kind, although he could tell from the wind rushing around them that they were descending downwards and that the edges of the raft were affixed to some kind of parachute.

'So we're falling,' Len thought to himself. 'That's a start.'

The parachute had slowed their descent so they weren't going crash down, but parachuting with a raft wasn't generally the softest of landings. The other men hadn't woken up yet, which gave Len a bit of time to size up the rest of his situation.

They weren't the only parachute he could see, a number of large crates dripping down around them, pontoons attached, so they wouldn't sink, which made Len look down over the edge of the raft to see a wide swath of ocean beneath them. At that point, he looked around him and to the horizon in nearly every direction was nothing but endless blue water, although he did see a retreating C-130 off in the distance, which he assumed they'd been thrown unceremoniously from a couple of minutes ago. The one exception to the limitless water was just a few miles off in one direction, there was a large island with what looked like an inactive volcano along one side of it, covered in lush, dense forest, probably no more than 60-70 square miles in total. It was literally the only thing they'd be able to get to before they died, so he was already thinking about how to gather up the crates and head over towards the island when he saw a small boat coming from the island towards their general vicinity, which only made sense when he thought about it. It looked like a pretty short range boat, though, which meant there was likely no way it would have fuel enough to get to somewhere populated. It felt like they were probably somewhere deep in the Pacific Ocean, but he'd know more after getting a look at the stars at night. That plane, he guessed was probably the only thing that ever passed by this island.

When the raft touched down on the water, the impact shook the other three men into consciousness, and Len could see utter confusion and shock on their faces, far more than he'd had. Clearly the Jumble had done a much more thorough number on them than it had on him, although he also had to admit it was possible that at least one of them played for The Other Team, something he meant professionally and not sexually.

“Who the hell are you?” one of the men said to him, a big bulky blonde Australian who looked like he was definitely more brawn than brains.

“Len.” He unfastened himself from the harness he'd been strapped in and started pulling the parachute up and onto the raft. The last thing he wanted was for it to get caught in the undercurrent and to drag them down before the little cigarette boat could reach them. “You?”

“Oxford,” the giant Ozzie said back to him, moving to help him in his task. At least the man knew enough to be useful instead of sitting around with his thumb up his ass. “Know where we are?”

“Nope.”

“Know how we got here?”

“Nope.”

“Some fucking help you are, mate,” Oxford grumbled. It immediately made Len think Oxford was Other Team potential. The obvious assumption was that they were all, literally, in the same boat, and that none of them would know anything, and by acting like someone else should know something, instead of deflecting attention from Oxford, it made Len turn the spotlight of suspicion back on the Aussie. “What're you two called, Frick and Frack?”

Len had to work not to smirk, as the other two men did look vaguely similar enough to maybe be brothers, Eastern European if Len had to guess, but that was a stab in the dark at best. Grizzled. Unshaven. Unpleasant. He'd known plenty of their kind over the years. Hell, he'd killed plenty of their kind over the years. By contrast, it was hard to hide his Midwestern heritage, although sometimes he got mistaken for German because of the blonde hair and the blue eyes. Very much a sharp contrast to the two somewhat similar looking men, who seemed to take offense to Oxford's comment.

“Vigo,” the first one, slightly taller and older, said.

“Dicu,” the second one, slightly shorter and younger, said, his accent much thicker than the other's. Hungarian, if Len had to guess. “I do not know this man, or either of you.” There was actually a better-than-average chance of that being true, although whether or not that had been true a week ago was anybody's guess.

“Bully for you,” Len said. “Grab an oar and let's start paddling over towards those crates. The boat's got to be coming to get us and them, so we might as well make it easier for them.”

“Who put you in charge?” Oxford asked indignantly.

“Nobody,” Len shot back. “But if you want to sit around being as useful as a vestigial tail, I'm sure the people on the island will look very kindly on that, don't you? I'm willing to work for my supper and get where we need to go with a little elbow grease.”

Oxford grumbled in response, but picked up one of the plastic oars and started help slowly move the raft over towards the nearest floating crate. There were about half a dozen of them and they had only gotten the raft over to the second of them when the sleek little white boat pulled up near them. There was a very well tanned dark haired man in a half-open luau shirt at the wheel of it, and a couple of good looking women in bikinis sitting in back, one blonde, one brunette, both tanned, busty and friendly looking. “You fellas need a hand?” the man said to them as one of the women, the blonde, tossed a tow line over to them. She was gorgeous and the bikini was doing very little to hide her sizable assets. She also looked familiar, and Len thought he might know her from somewhere, but it was also possible the whole thing was just evoking nostalgia in him. It almost looked like a commercial to sell someone a boat or a summer holiday, Len thought to himself.  “Secure that to the raft, and then buckle yourselves in, 'cause I ain't wasting much time out here if I can help it.”

The man didn't have to tell Len twice, and the other men seemed to fall in line quickly, making sure the tow line was wrapped around two separate anchor points and wouldn't just flip over if they started going too fast. Once the tow line was attached, they all strapped themselves back into the harnesses just before the boat started whipping out towards the rest of the crates.

One at a time, the boat would pull up alongside one of the floating crates, attach it to a tow line, then move on to the next, until the four remaining crates were part of the convoy, in addition to the raft and the two crates already attached to it.

Len glanced over and noticed that all the men on the raft were dressed exactly as he was, in a dark blue flightsuit with workman boots, and a white muscle t-shirt on beneath it, which he could tell as all of them had unzipped the flightsuits down because of the goddamn heat. It had to be late afternoon, and despite the ocean around them, it was ridiculously hot, the sun beating down on them not helping matters any. Of course, they'd been in an aircraft's belly less than fifteen minutes ago, and Len suspected it had been much cooler in there, not that he could remember.

As the boat zipped them over towards the island, Len could finally start to get a better sense of what the lay of the land was. The trees were thick and heavy almost right up to the sand line, but he could see hints of buildings just beyond the ridge of them, with a few parts that he expected were trails or roads. There was also a deck extending out from the island, although it was hard to make out, since it looked like someone had camouflaged it so that it wouldn't be recognizable easily by an orbital satellite unless someone was taking a serious look and studying the coastline for a while, all of which was highly unlikely for some random island in the middle of the South Pacific.

This, of course, made total sense. Whatever they were doing here, the people who had put them here, whoever the hell they were, didn't want anybody unexpected dropping by.

There were storm clouds gathering on the edge of vision, and Len suspected it would be upon them before any of them knew it. It made him glad they were being towed back to the island rather than having to paddle out to it. There wouldn't have been any guarantees that they would have made it before the storm would've overtaken them, and then it would've been anybody's guess if they'd had a shot getting ashore.

He knew a little about where they were heading, so he spent much of the short trip inward wondering which of his raftmates were Employees and which were Guests, like him. He had to suspect at least one of them was at least an Employee, if not Management, but these things were likely to be intentionally obfuscated, otherwise what was the point? Oxford felt like the most reasonable candidate to be Employee and not Guest, but he didn't want to lock into that too early based on initial impressions. The guy could've just been an uptight asshole, and the Jumble would make everything a bit more unpredictable upfront.

As the boat pulled them closer to shores, he saw that a handful of people had come out, diving into water to help pull the crates up onto the beach, dragging them up far enough to break them down and load them up onto the backs of a couple of small trucklike vehicles that clearly weren't actual trucks. The first give away was that they weren't gas powered. They seemed more like oversized golf carts to Len, something he immediately filed away for further study later.

The two women were tending to the boat as the man hopped off it, walking over to them, helping pull them onto the dock one at a time. Up close, Len could tell just how good the camouflage was – it would've easily been glossed over by automated satellite scans, and it was big enough to cover the boat when it wasn't in use. “C'mon fellas,” the man told them. “Let me welcome you to Honeywell Island, give you the dimestore tour and help you pick out your commodes.”

When Len started to try and get out of the boat, the last to get out, the blonde woman leaned down and offered him a hand, pulling him up onto the dock personally, instead of the man. She had a strong grip and tugged him to stand alongside of her, making sure he moved in close, her body almost right on top of his. “My name's Sally, big stack,” she said with a grin of pearly whites, leaning in so that he could feel her nipples, all stiff and tensed, through both his jumpsuit and her forest-green bikini top. “Once you get situated, drop me a line and maybe I can give you the extra special tour.” She licked her lips and swatted him on the ass as she scooted away. Len was definitely sure they'd encountered each other somewhere before, although he still couldn't quite place his finger on it.

“What the hell is this place?” Oxford asked, as Vigo and Dicu stretched their legs, as if maybe they'd been in cramped positions for a while. Nobody had anything with them to take out of the boat, so they were mostly just waiting for the carts to get loaded up.

“That's the million dollar question, one that I truly can't answer for you fellas,” the man said. “Didn't catch any of you boys names. They call me Tex.”

Len did his best not to laugh. If this guy was a Texan, then Len was the last son of a dying planet called Krypton. Sure, the man did a good impression of the accent and he certainly exuded Texan swagger, but there were enough little missteps along the way that Len would bet his last dollar that Tex was anything but Texan. Still, best not to call him out on it on the first day, especially since he was clearly the only person who seemed like he was self-identifying as Management.

“I'm Len, that's Oxford, Dicu and Vigo's the crabby one there in the back,” Len said, as Tex climbed into the driver's seat of a six seater doorless car that was waiting for them. “At least, that's what they told me in the raft, 'cause I don't know these guys from last week's dinner.”

“Can you remember last week's dinner, Len?” Tex asked him.

The fact that Tex knew enough to ask that question made Len even less comfortable. “...no.”

Tex tapped one of his massive fingers against his temple. “Keep that in mind. Everybody here's got that, to some extent. For some of us, it's nearly a completely blank slate. For others, it's only maybe ten to twenty percent missing. None of us remember how we got here, but we've pieced bits of it together over the last several years.”

“Pieced?” Oxford asked.

“Several years?” Vigo followed up.

“Sure,” Tex laughed. “We been here quite some time. Imprisoned, maybe, or maybe just forcibly vacationing. I know what you're thinking – what kind of prison doesn't have guards? Well, first, we're not entirely sure it is a prison. It probably is, but if it is, what did we do to get sent here? Who sent us here? How long are we here for? And if what we did was really so bad to get banished to somewhere in the South Pacific, why not just kill us off instead?”

“Well, you clearly know enough to come by and pick up new arrivals,” Dicu said, echoing Len's own thoughts.

“Didn't know there was going to be new arrivals until we saw the raft come down. Once a week, there's a supply drop, crates tossed out of a C-130 that doesn't have any markings and doesn't slow down. Usually it's food, booze, clothes, basic survival staples, but some of the time it includes new arrivals like you boys. My crew always makes sure to pull the supplies onto shore and drags 'em into the center of town, where people come and pick up what they want. Then once a month, we haul all the dropboxes back out to sea, attach a skyhook line and a balloon to them, and they pick up all the empty boxes for next month's shipments. Deflated rafts passengers are sent in too, along with the parachutes. There's always instructions on how they want it done the week before the pick up.”

Tex was driving them down a gravel path that clearly saw a decent amount of cart travel, as it had been cleared away and had plenty of clearance on either side, despite being in the middle of a goddamn tropical jungle.

“Who's 'they'?” Oxford asked.

“Shit, son, you tell me!” Tex laughed, reaching over and slapping Oxford on the back of the shoulder. “I been here two years now, and I'm no closer to that answer than I was when I got here. I've checked all the messages they've sent us dozens and dozens of times, trying to figure out who the fuck these cowboys are, but nothing about who they are other than a simple signatory – Management.”

“You aren't Management?” Len asked.

“If I was Management, boy, I'd either be telling you a whole lot more or a whole lot less,” Tex said, bringing the cart around a bend, keeping them in line with rest of the convoy. “I'm just an old hand who's learned how to look out for himself.”

“So what's in it for you hauling the boxes into town?” Len continued. “Why not pull them out of the water and just leave them there on the edge of the treeline?”

Tex grinned, pointing at Len. “You're the smart one of the bunch, I see. Well, we get first choice of all the stuff before we haul it back, so I take the best booze for my bar, but it also means we get books and albums before anybody else does. And making people go out to the dock just convinces more of them to dick around with the boat for a little bit before they realize it'd never make it to anywhere civilized. Most of my team are relative newcomers, still convinced they're going to find some clue about who's doing this in the drops, but shit, I gave up on that pipe dream a long time ago. Now, I'm just happy enough to lay out the welcome mat for the newcomers, give them the tour, put them up in lodging and make sure nobody's going to rock the boat.”

“What is this 'rock boat' of which you speak?” Dicu asked, the idiom clearly lost in translation, but Tex seemed more than happy to elaborate.

“Troublemakers don't last long around here. Sometimes they vanish in the middle of the night. Sometimes we find a dead body in the center of town. But you got yourself a bunch of spooks, spies, soldiers, mercs, madmen and mischief makers around here, so we don't even bother with police,” Tex said. “Problems have a way of sorting themselves out, even without much in the way of weaponry.”

“Noticed you don't carry a gun,” Oxford said.

“No guns anywhere on Honeywell,” Tex replied. “We've got machetes and knives and the like, but this ain't no wild west Annie Oakley gun show here. That'll take you boys a bit of getting used to, I imagine, since you all strike me as the sort of fellers who like to sleep with a gun underneath the pillow. But you'll learn. If you're killed at a distance, it's most likely gonna be a bow and arrow what done it.”

The cart pulled out of the jungle and into a clearing full of what looked like thirty or forty buildings, none more than three stories high, sprawling out towards the edge of the jungle in all directions. Above them, however, the tree cover was still basically intact, the trees bending inward to soak up all the available sunlight they could get, only small amounts of it dripping into the clearing in shafts and beams.

All of the architecture was stark and made of heavy concrete, although there were balconies scattered everywhere. The buildings themselves were likely sixty or seventy years old, as the heavy vines running along the sides of them implied they'd been here for quite some time. More than anything, however, what caught Len's eye was the excessive amounts of neon. Each building had its own neon sign – some labeled things like Residence Hall C or Commissary – but a handful of them in languages he couldn't read. Most of the buildings had more than one sign, though, with half a dozen on the most covered structure. The colors were a struggle for control and dominance over the eye, all of them casting enough light to suffuse the air with the prismatic shades. It was like Blade Runner, Miami Vice, Hong Kong and eighties Soviet propaganda photos had been thrown into the wash together, and this secluded jungle city was the end result.

“Quite the look,” Len said, as the cart pulled into what seemed like the town square, a couple of the carts that had followed them moving along side a raised stone circle.

“It was that way when we got here,” Tex replied.

“Even the signs?” Oxford asked.

“If one of them burns out, there's a replacement in the next shipment but I've never seen people asking for them on the request lists, so clearly somebody here's got a way to ask for things on the sly,” Tex said. “But I'll be damned if I can figure out how. Maybe the drop boxes have hidden storage compartments, although I feel like I've gone over every inch of them with a fine tooth comb. We've tried leaving notes asking for tools or medicines in the drop boxes, but they're mostly ignored, although occasionally they'll send large things upon request if we can convince them the need is great and that we can't cause too much trouble with them.” He glanced over his shoulder at the guys and girls who were starting to unload the carts, placing the boxes one at a time into the raised stone circle. The pontoons had been stripped of them, and all of them had been opened, so clearly Tex's people had taken some things from them before they'd gotten to the town center. “Look for boxes marked 'Len,' 'Oxford,' 'Dicu' and 'Vigo,'” he called out to the people, before turning back to them. “You'll each have a box worth of clothes packed for you in the shipment, stuff in your sizes. Might even be some of your original clothes; might not. See if any of it strikes a memory when you get a chance. Might help fill in some gaps. Has for some people. Not so much for most of us, though.”

“You said you run a bar 'round here?” Len asked, as Tex was watching all the crates get moved from the carts to their spaces along the inside of the circle, although sure enough, each of them had a large steamer trunk with their name stickered on the front brought over to them and loaded onto Tex's cart. There were a handful of people starting to come out of the buildings, heading over towards the boxes within the circle, so Len supposed it was for the best they didn't get a chance to try and scavenge their clothes from them. “How do people pay? There some local currency? Shells or something ridiculous like that?”

“Nobody pays for anything here,” Tex said. “Not really. I mean, there's some bartering going on here and there for specialized services like special cooking but for the most part, people are just happy to have something to do. So if you want to cook in the commissary, you go right ahead, just make enough for ten to twenty. Same's true for putting in some time in the mail room, working laundry detail or clean up and maintenance. You put in at least 10 hours each week in one of the common jobs, each month you can request one item that'll come in within a month or two – book or record. You can be broad or specific and generally those requests get delivered. We include all requests with a work log that goes into the monthly pickup they do. And they know if you did the work, so don't think you can lie and just get stuff for free. There's cameras all over the island, although nobody knows where they go. We tried breakin'em once, but they were just repaired the next day and the next supply drop was full of nothing but empty boxes and a note that said 'Stop that.' We had to conserve food like hell for the next month to adjust for an entire week's worth of missing food, and hunger'll drive folks into desperate shit. Ain't nobody messed with the cameras since, and people just do their work and get their stuff. But if you don't have any special requisitions and just want to eat whatever's been made for the day there? You can do that too. You want a drink? Come by the bar and I'll mix it up for you, no charge. The only currency I trade in is the only one that matters – information. You'll see a big neon sign over my place that says 'Tex's Bar.' Didn't ask for the sign – just showed up one day, so I guess whoever's running the show likes me doin' what I'm doin'.”

“That's all of it, Tex,” a black girl in a red bikini that didn't cover a whole lot said to him. Her hair was in a loose afro that she clearly had worked hard to keep from getting out of control. “Your boys got their boxes and we've got the circle filled out.” She had on sandals, but most of the people on Tex's team were wearing boots. “We're going to take the rest back to the bar while you finish playing welcoming committee.”

“Got it,” the big burly man said. “I won't be long.”

Behind the black girl, Sally gave Len a wave and blew him a kiss before turning to walk away from them, letting Len get a spectacular view of her toned ass beneath that green bikini bottom. She and the rest of Tex's people hopped back onto the two trucks and started heading towards the far side of the small town.

“How many people are here?” Oxford asked.

“You four will bring us up to sixty-seven, but who knows how long that count'll remain.”

“There's places for all of us to stay?” Vigo asked.

“There's one hundred residences here on Honeywell, give or take a few extras, each one with a king or queen sized bed, so I suppose max capacity's two hundred, though we've never even come close to that. I'll give you guys unassigned units, but if you don't like where you're staying, you can take any other open unit and just let me know, so we've got a directory of where everyone's shacking up. None of the doors on the island have any locks, so better get used to that.”

“None of them?” Len asked with a raised eyebrow.

“None that I've found,” Tex replied, “other than the bunker door.”

“The bunker door?” Vigo asked.

“There's a small heavy metal door up along the side of the volcano that nobody's ever been able to do anything with,” Tex laughed. “You're welcome to try and get it to open if you want, but in two years, nobody's gotten it to budge a millimeter. We call it the bunker door 'cause it reminds most of us of those old bomb shelter doors. Damn thing's impenetrable, and doesn't even seem to open from this side. If somebody's in there, they ain't come out that we've seen.”

“Were you the first here?” Len asked.

“Nope, but at this point, I think I've been here pretty close to the longest,” Tex replied. “Everybody who was here when I arrived has either died or disappeared. So I guess I'm the big winner or loser, depending on how you look at it.”

“Why the directory?” Oxford said. “If nothing matters all that much, why keep track of where folks is shackin' up?”

“Because it doesn't hurt to know where everyone is. Also, people hook up all the time, and when they do, they usually start sharing a living space, which lets people know to stop hitting on them,” Tex said with that ever-present wide grin on his face. “Lots of people around here choose to spend their time getting drunk and screwing, and who can blame 'em?”

“You got somebody, Tex?”

“Yup. Paulina, the brunette you saw in the boat with me when we picked you up. Been together about four months now. We'll see if it takes, but it's been pretty smooth sailing so far. She's Russian and I'm from the US of motherfuckin' A, but we ain't let that get in the way of nothin' yet.”

“Your first girl here on Honeywell?” Len asked.

“Sheeee-it, son,” Tex laughed. “My sixth. Most of the others are gone, one way or the other, although Jenny's still around. She's hooked up with Mayday these days I think.”

“You got somebody here calls himself Mayday?” Oxford asked in surprise.

“Well, we call him that, 'cause he's spent most of his time here trying to find some way to reach the outside world, all to no avail,” Tex said, his voice layered in amusement at the man's apparent futile efforts. “He's persistent, I'll give him that, but then again, so're most rashes. And shit, what's it to me how someone chooses to spend their time? He wants to wander the beaches praying to see a passing by boat or plane, that's his life to waste.”

“You said 'gone one way or the other,'” Len said pointedly. “What did you mean by that?”

“Couple of'em turned up dead, one stabbed and the other beaten.”

“Squabbles between inmates?”

“Maybe,” Tex said. “Or maybe the warden saw somethin' they didn't like, an' took'em out in the middle of the night, left the bodies out to convey a message to whoever'd been up to mischief with them. Never really certain. The other two went missing, which could mean any number of things.”

Len leaned against one of the concrete structures, tilting his head slightly. “Like what? Humor me...”

Tex shrugged, the question clearly no skin off his back. “Sometimes people go stir crazy, try and swim off the island. If we hear about it, we'll go try and find'em with the boat, but it's a big fuckin' ocean. And I suspect there's also a small contingent around here that knows a lot more than they're telling, the guys behind the guys, if you will. Secret Management. The wardens in inmates' clothing. I wish I could tell you I was one of'em, but I'm just a guy who tends to his bar and stays outta most folk's way. Not everybody who goes missing dies, that much I'm sure of. Just don't know much more beyond that. Maybe they make it off the island and back to the real world. Maybe they're here and beyond the hatch. Maybe it's something else entirely.”

“Couldja be any more cryptic, mate?” Oxford asked in annoyance.

“Dunno,” Tex shot back, a smug grin on his face. “Want me to give it a go?”

Tex brought the cart to a stop in front of a building with a green neon sign identifying it as “Residence Hall F.” There were a handful of carts parked out front, each connected to the wall by a thick cord.

“The carts are free for anyone to use?”

“Yep,” Tex responded. “Max speed of 35 kph, which is a little bit more than 20 miles an hour. They're full electric and fully rechargeable, so if you use one, just make sure you plug it in wherever it is you're going. Don't fuck around with'em otherwise. I know for certain that they take that shit seriously, and trying to muck around with civic utilities will definitely get you whacked. If it breaks, just send a message to central telling them where the car's broken down, and someone'll come and fix it. Vehicle maintenance is one of the public service teams you can work for if you want.”

“What do you mean 'message to central?'” Oxford asked.

“I'll show you, c'mon,” he said, getting out of the cart, rain starting to trickle down from the heavy foliage above. That storm Len had seen on the horizon was likely upon them now, although the dense trees prevented it from coming down too hard at once. He suspected their was a rainwater catcher somewhere on the island, which provided the drinking water. “All four of you should leave your bags here, and whichever of you decides you want one of these units can just get your bag when we come back down. Let's go.”

Tex led them inside of the building, the interior of which had a strange late 60s early 70s décor, although thankfully there wasn't a hint of shag carpet as far as the eye could see. There was also an unusual mix of nationalities in the styles, Polynesian influences blending into foundations from both sides of the Iron Curtain. The interiors were far, far newer than the building structures themselves.

“How come nobody wants these units?” Oxford said. “Something wrong with'em?”

“They're a little bit further from the center of town than most people like being, but other people prefer that sort of thing,” Tex replied. “Other than location, all the residential halls are basically built on the same template, just with a few tweaks here and there. Four units per floor, three floors per building. Two of the four units on the top floor of this building are taken, and one on the bottom, but all the rest are open. Here, we'll look at this one, and show you.”

He pushed open a door and led the four men into a sparsely decorated apartment. While most of the men were probably just admiring the décor, Len was doing a bit of heavy thinking. All of the furniture was custom-built – no mass market stuff, nothing produced in bulk. It was also likely all built on site, nothing having been shipped here except maybe the raw materials. The buildings themselves were likely also constructed the same way, although it was possible that there had been some large construction machines here, though that would've had to have been over half a century ago.

Len's read on the island was that it had maybe been a remote military base for either Russia, Germany or Japan during WWII, but that it had probably lay dormant after being abandoned once the war was over for a few decades. There had likely been a second wave of inhabitants, researchers or scientists in the late 1960s or early 1970s, who had retrofit the place to make it seem a little less foreboding, but there was only so much that could be done with the early brutalist architecture. The endless tiny cameras scattered all over the place, and the electrical grid the place seemed to be running on had to be very modern inventions, and with Tex saying he'd been here a bit more than two years, Len would estimate the third wave retrofits couldn't be more than five years old, tops.

What was most impressive about all of it was that nothing was discarded, just built on top of, adding and adding without ever removing, so everything just kept evolving, giving everything a very surreal but organic feel, despite the harsh edges of the buildings themselves. Even the jungle itself seemed to be doing what it could to incorporate and embrace the community, rather than resist it.

“All this could be yours!” Tex laughed, doing an impression of a game show host, sweeping one arm to show off the interior of the place. “Your own couch, dining room, kitchen and bedroom!”

“Is not truly ours if anyone can walk in any time,” Dicu grumbled. “Do not like idea of having no privacy in own home.”

“Like I said, boys, it's something you just gotta get used to,” Tex said with an apologetic shrug. “I mean, if it makes you feel any better, you could barricade your front door from the inside, since the doors open inward, but it's still no guarantee that someone won't get in anyway. Plus, y'know, no locks the windows either, although I suppose you could probably build latches on those if you really wanted. It just seems like more trouble than it's worth to me. What do you have that's worth stealing? Am I right?” he laughed.

“No phone?” Oxford asked, looking around the place in confusion. “I thought you said we should just contact central if there's a broken cart.”

“Well, I specifically phrased it as 'send a message,'” Tex said with a chuckle. “We've got a different approach to communication here on Honeywell.”

“No goddamn way,” Len muttered, walking over to the wall. “I don't know that I've ever fucking seen one of these in person.” He reached forward, placing his hand against one of the two clear pipes he found there, feeling it hum a little beneath his touch.

“Yeah, me neither, before I got here anyway,” Tex said, “but 'round these parts, it's the only communication system we got. No phones, no television, no computers, no radios. Just good old fashioned pneumatic tubes. Each housing unit's usually got between five and ten empty pill capsules in it. You ever need more, you can simply walk over to the mail office, or use your last one to request them to dispatch you a handful and they'll send you one every five minutes for half an hour, so you've got time to unload them and so they don't jam up the pipe. Some of the more updated systems only have one pipe for both send and receive but our system's a bit older than that. Left side is outgoing, right side is incoming.”

The two tubes each had a clear hatch over them, so that it was apparent there was nothing in them at the time. There was a box mounted on the wall next to it that he opened, taking one of the capsules out. They were hard cylindrical containers with rubber feet on either end to ensure a seal, but other than that, totally clear, maybe twice the length and diameter of the cardboard center of a roll of toilet paper.

“You put whatever is it you want in the capsule, you wrap one of these light blue sheets of paper around it with the name of the person or office you want it to go to in the little 'recipient' spot on one side, seal it up, toss it into the tube, close the hatch and away it goes, off to the mail room, who'll look at where the person is staying and then redirect it to their residence. Bob's your uncle. The art of letter writing lives again. Or you can just walk over and tell people things. That works too. But this is also how you file for media requests if you're doing public service work.”

“Everything fair game?” Len asked. “Nothing too edgy or revolutionary?”

“Sure seems that way,” Tex sighed, shrugging his shoulders a little bit. “You'll notice each unit here's got a record player in it, so all music'll show up on vinyl, for better or worse. That means if it ain' on vinyl, they ain't sendin' it, but seems like vinyl's amid a resurgence, so that helps. The more specific your request, the more of a chance you're going to be disappointed, but hell, sometimes they surprise us. Hell, just two months ago, we learned we'd been fucking ourselves for no good reason since we got here, and that was a goddamn game changer.”

Len grinned, tilting his head to one side. “Sounds like a hard earned lesson. What happened?”

“Well, we figured there was no point in asking for current news, right?” Tex said, rubbing the back of his neck in embarrassment. “Sure, couple of the fellas had asked for Playboy or Penthouse mags, and those had come, but they were generally just randomly chosen issues that had to be ten or twenty years old. Then Mayday decided he wanted to try and push, so he spent a full forty hours of a week doing as much service as he could – cooking, cleaning, the mailroom, groundskeeping, you name it, he did it. And for his request, he put 'a current US newspaper.' We figured he wasn't going to get shit, y'know? Just chalked it up to Mayday being dumbass ol' Mayday.”

“And?”

“And... in the next package, there was a copy of the July 22rd, 2007 edition of The Cincinnati Enquirer, full and uncut. It was even a Sunday edition, with the funny pages and everything. Our guess is that it's a couple months old. He didn't want to share at first, but after reading the whole thing for a couple of days, he decided it was fine to share, so it's been passed around. Since then, every week, we've gotten some kind of newspaper or magazine, all summer of 2007, some English, some Russian, some German, some French, some Japanese, some in Mandarin, some in Arabic, a couple in Farsi... So our guess is that it's probably either autumn or early winter of 2007. That jibe with what you boys can and can't remember?”

“I remember,” Dicu said, “day I was taken, was November 2nd, 2007. That was maybe two weeks ago? Since capture, time grows... fuzzy.”

“Good,” Tex said, snapping his fingers, pointing at the man. “Good. That's good. That's useful. Mid November, 2007. That lines up with what we've been able to figure out. I dunno why they won't just give us a calendar set to today's date, but maybe they like the level of mystery and suspense they can keep us all in.”

“Controlling the flow of information is always something you can leverage,” Len said. “C'mon. We all know that. Let's not pretend like we don't have some basic knowledge about where we've all come from and why we're all probably here.”

“The fuck you mean, cowboy?” Oxford said to him, annoyance plain on the Australian's face. The more and more Oxford talked, the more certain Len was that the man was an Employee, and not a Guest. He didn't strike Len as smart enough to be Management, though.

“We're all operators and troubleshooters of some kind. I may not remember where I came from or who I used to work for, but there's enough tradecraft floating around inside this brain of mine that bubbles up to the surface so naturally that I think being a spy's second nature to me. Like breathing. Probably been that way for half my life. So if you lot want to pretend that you're not here – either directly or indirectly – because of our day jobs in some regard,” Len said. “That's fine. You go on and do that and see how far it gets you. But you won't catch me trying to downplay my own abilities. We're all spooks here, ain't that right, Tex?”

Tex smirked but nodded in his direction. “That's about right, Len,” he confirmed. “Everyone on this island is either ex-military, ex-intelligence or, most commonly, both. We think. Not everyone remembers their past very well. We've got a handful of people with some pretty nasty brainfry, or at least they claim to. Seems pretty genuine to me, but, like you said, we're all operators of some kind, and I wouldn't put it past anyone to spin tall tales in order to keep their past private. But something like that's hard to keep up as a long game. So, any of you feel like you want to bunk up here?”

“I want to see all my options before I make any decisions,” Oxford said. “I'm betting we're all the same.”

While Dicu and Vigo nodded, Len offered a shrug. “Nah, no need for me to keep looking around. I think I'll bunk up here, although I'll take one of the units on the third floor rather than down here on ground level.”

“Any reason?” Tex asked him.

“What can I say? I like a nice view, and being a bit away from town center appeals to me.”

“Then you should take unit three. One and four are both taken already, and while the view from two's okay, you'll get a better looksee from three,” Tex said. “Go get your bag and I'll meet you up there. I'm just gonna send a message to the hub, marking you as here.”

“Right. Be up in just a second. C'mon boys,” Len said with a grin. “I'll walk you back to the cart.”

The four of them walked out of the unit, letting the door swing closed behind them as they headed to the cart. “You think you're Mister Cool, don't you?” Oxford said, giving a shove to the center of Len's back. “I got my fuckin' eye on you, boy.”

Len didn't flinch at the push, shrugging it off as they arrived at the cart, taking his trunk off the back of it before sighing, turning to look at Oxford. “You trying to get your ass whipped?”

Oxford clearly took that as provocation, adopting a fighting stance. “C'mon, pretty boy. You've got a face that looks like ain't seen a propah fight its entire life.”

Len shook his head a little, pushing his trunk over to one side. “I'm willing to let you back down with no harm no foul, Oxford,” Len told him, a resignation to his voice. The amped up muscle bound Goliath had been itching for a fight from the moment he'd woken up, and it hadn't taken much in the way of nudging to get it turned onto Len. “I'm ser–”

Mid-sentence, Len saw a cannonball of a fist chugging his way and so he simply leaned to one side, reached up, grabbed onto Oxford's wrists and instead of providing resistance, yanking him with even more force, adding to the energy already in the swing, pulling the man forward and off balance. Oxford stumbled forward, bringing his feet out to try and regain his balance before turning back to look at Len, who was still looking as casual and relaxed as he had before.

The punch hadn't worked, so Oxford decided to charge Len, both of his arms wide, deciding to use his size to make sure Len couldn't move left or right to escape the grapple. Which, of course, was why Len didn't go left or right, but instead rolled onto his back, tensing up his right hand to punch the Australian in the kidney as he sailed over Len's body resting comfortably on his back on the paved road, the giant crumpling when he landed, his arms cradling to prevent his face from hitting the pavement too harshly.

Len flipped himself back up and onto his feet, making the movement look graceful, not even winded or bothered as he looked over to Oxford, shaking his head. “Done yet? Or do we need to keep this going a bit longer?”

Oxford growled as he stood up, his arm folded protectively over the spot where Len had just hit him. “You watch yourself,” the man said. “I know where you sleep now, and you can't exactly lock your doors, can you?”

“You're right, I can't,” Len said with a confident smile. “Of course, you can't exactly fly when I throw you off my third story balcony, can you?” He glanced around the area a bit. “I could probably make sure the small of your back hit that metal railing over there. Decent enough chance to break your spine, and even if it doesn't, gonna take you a hell of a lot of time to heal up to try again. And that entire time you're healing up, I can wander up to you and end your life in between heartbeats.”

“Taking on an injured man?” Oxford said in anger. “Real fucking fair.”

“You were one planning on coming after him in his sleep,” Dicu said to him, apparently amused at how quickly Oxford was trying to play the aggrieved party.

“Shut the fuck up, Commie!” Oxford moved to hop into the front passenger's seat of the cart, the one Len had sat in on the ride over, as if that was some minor victory for him.

“Is all talk, no stick,” Dicu said to Len in amusement, jerking his head to Oxford behind him, as they both laughed. “See you around.”

“Maybe we can all meet up at Tex's bar tomorrow,” Vigo said. “Doesn't hurt to have a few friends in a new place.”

“Well, let's not go crazy throwing around words like 'friend' so quickly,” Len chuckled. “But sure, I'm game for drinks tomorrow night. Take care of yourselves, fellas. And watch your backs around that guy. I'm betting he works here and isn't just a guest.”

Len grabbed his trunk and yanked it towards the stairwell, walking up the stairs which were easily the most barren part of the building, each of the stairs almost too sharp at the corners, certainly far more dangerous that would be in a modern building. He made his way to the third floor and saw the hallway ran back and forth, a door on either end, and two doors offset in the middle. The door to his place, which was marked by a huge sharp metal 3 on the door from shoulder height to knee height, almost taking up most of the metal doorway. True to Tex's word, while there was a handle and a latch, there was no lock or keyhole. He opened the door and hauled his trunk inside of the apartment, finding Tex standing there over by the pipes.

“This place look good to you? Just want to be sure before I send the message to central,” Tex said to him, holding the capsule in his hand, clearly having already written the note. Len almost wanted to tell the man he'd changed his mind, since he'd already done the work, but the view looking out over the city's bed of neon from his third story window was too good to pass up.

“Yeah, it'll do,” Len said. “If I don't like it, I can always move after a few days. Plenty of other open places you said.”

“Sure are,” Tex replied, slotting the capsule into the chamber before closing the door on the pipe. A moment or so later, the capsule made a fwoomp noise as it shot down the tube and towards wherever the hell the main sorting center was. “You need to find me, I'm in one of the four units above my bar, number 2. You can also just put Tex's Bar and it'll make it to me.”

“Got it,” Len said to him. “I'll try not to be too much trouble, and maybe I'll be by the bar tomorrow to take a look at this place of yours.”

“Oh, you'll be trouble, friend,” Tex said, with a chuckle. “You're all trouble, one way or the other, in the end.” He moved to the door, stopping to look back, a devilish twinkle in his eyes. “But then again, so I am. Be seeing you, friend.”

And then he headed out, letting the door closed behind him, giving Len a chance to explore the space that was going to be his home, such as it was. True to Tex's word, none of the doors had locks on them in any way. Not the front door, not the bathroom door, nothing. The unit had a small living room with a couch and two chairs, a kitchen, a small dining area including a table and four chairs, a bathroom with a very elegant if spartan glass enclosed walk-in shower including a pair of large towels, and a bedroom with a king sized bed. The bedroom also had two hampers and a note over them that read 'Laundry is picked up and dropped off the day after the weekly supply drop.' That made a certain amount of sense, that everything on the island was timed around the one singular event they could always predict.

There weren't any clothes in his unit, but he could see little tiny markers that someone had lived in here at some point, the silverware not entirely aligned perfectly, a Britta filter in the fridge that was half filled. Nothing that seemed too recent, but nothing that he would have pegged as more than a few months old. Maybe Tex really was telling the truth and people did come and go a bunch.

From the living room, he heard a thwoomp sound and he couldn't help but chuckle a little. It wasn't anything he'd expected about this island, but it certainly did have a very satisfying tone to it when a capsule arrived. He moved over to the tube marked “receiving” and opened the compartment, taking out a capsule before closing the door back up.

The capsules reminded him a bit of the old cylinders that he vaguely remembered his mom using at a bank drive through what felt like lifetimes ago, and maybe the warm sense of delight he felt was associated with that, he thought to himself as he took a moment to figure out how to open the damn thing. The address part simply read “Len,” so he had to assume he was unique with that name on the island, not that that surprised him in any way.

Opening the capsule he found a single folded sheet of paper, and it was certainly seeped in perfume, because a blast of citrus and floral notes practically blasted him in a face when he opened the capsule. He unfolded the sheet of paper and saw a short note in elegant cursive handwriting.

Come join me for a drink soon as you can. Above Tex's bar. Floor 3, unit 4. Sally

Beneath her name, she'd drawn a heart. The woman was laying it on thick, but he'd expected someone to upon his arrival. The first assault, then. He unpacked his trunk, hanging his clothes up, most completely unfamiliar to him, but he lingered on one luau shirt in particular, a sky blue and white, patterned with orchids all over it. There was a memory associated with it, he could feel it clawing at the back of his skull, and as he held the shirt longer, it came back to him.

Scarab had just finished its first mission with its newest member, Harry, a milk run that had absolutely gone tits up within minutes of deployment, but Harry, as nervous as the rookie had been, had held together and shown that while he might sound like a wreck, he was still able to keep his head about him, and had been an excellent addition to Scarab.

As a thank you for being able to see the good among the slightly scrambled impression that Harry had given off, Harry had given him a shirt, this shirt, the one he now held. “Because you've always seemed too cool for school, boss,” Harry had said to him in that posh English accent that he hadn't managed to shake himself of quite yet.

The memory fell apart as quickly as it had come together, but it was good to know that he still had enough core retention that he could recognize his teammates should he see them again. He took off the jumpsuit, put on a pair of khaki shorts and the shirt, just because he felt like if he kept it on, maybe it would rip more of his lost memories from the fog.

Len didn't see any reason not to go see Sally tonight, especially since she was on the way of where he'd intended to go, anyway.

The storm was certainly in full swing above them, and the rain was seeping down in strands and gushes, the heavy tree coverage above making it impossible to tell how the water might drip down, so Len did his best to sprint over to one of the carts, climbing into it. Thankfully, the charging area was covered, and the carts themselves mostly had little canopies atop of them. He unplugged the cable, hung it up on the charging station and then started to back the vehicle out. It reminded him of a golf cart, more than anything.

As he drove down the path, suddenly balls of light sprung to life around him, and he realized that the automated streetlights must have been kicking in, giving the path more illumination, something it certainly needed as the rain continued to dominate the landscape.

One thing he noticed as he approached Tex's bar was that the charging station next to the bar itself was already completely full, a number of carts having moved to line the wall next to it, and it took Len a few minutes to find a place where he could safely put his cart without blocking anyone else's path in or out, which was good, because it gave him an excuse to be around the back side of Tex's bar.

The back side of the building had a dumpster for refuse and an area for composting, so it was clear they made sure to waste as little as possible on Honeywell Island. He made a point of wandering over to the dumpster like he was going to throw away the letter Sally had sent him, but mostly that was just an excuse to look behind the left corner of the number. Either he'd find a letter or letters scrawled there, or nothing.

He'd mostly expected to see an M scratched into the metal surface, but instead he found an R, which surprised him, but at least he knew who to look for now. Next to the R, he quickly scratched a deep L, then tossed the paper from Sally into the dumpster and moved it forward again. He suspected he might have been seen in his actions, but that was okay. Some things they'd expected to get caught in, and this was one of them. It wasn't a huge amount of information anyway, and nothing that Management shouldn't already know, if they'd been paying attention.

There was a stairwell leading up along the backside of the building, with no entry points on the first or second floor, just a doorway leading into the third story, where four apartments lay. Len wondered a little bit if the benefits of being right by Tex's outweighed the downside of Tex's being just downstairs. If it was even a halfway decent bar, the noise level would certainly get out of hand every now and again, and that would make a regular sleep schedule damn near impossible. He was tempted to peek into the unit that belonged to Tex himself, but the man was certainly smart enough not to leave things out and about.

While the faux Texan had certainly done his best to paint himself as a common man of the land, Len wasn't buying into the whole act, although he felt like Tex had been too consistent in his story to actually be Management or even an Employee. He wasn't entirely in the ally column yet, but the man felt like he was likely on the side of angels.

When Len reached the door of unit four, he found himself wondering about the etiquette of a place like this, considering the doors couldn't be locked, but common courtesy still won out and he knocked on the door with two sharp raps.

“C'mon in,” Sally's voice said from inside. “Of course it's open.”

He opened the door and stepped into the hallway, closing the door behind him before walking into Sally's living room. The layout in this unit was mirror flipped from his own, the kitchen and dining room on the right instead of the left. Standing in the dining room, Sally had put her blonde mane up into a bun, and somewhere along the way ditched her bikini top, leaving her very generous breasts exposed to his eyes, clearly defined tanlines on her flesh revealing that she didn't usually walk around without it on, large brown aerola the size of teacups with hardened dark nubs in the center.

“Thought you might be hungry, so I grabbed a couple of bowls of chicken fettuccine Alfredo from the mess hall, as well as a bottle of red wine and a bottle of vodka from Tex's,” she said with a laugh. “I'll take them back tomorrow morning. He won't even notice they're missing, he's got so much booze down there. Did you poke your head in yet?”

“Not yet,” Len said, shaking his head. “Looks like it's quite the happening joint.”

“It's nice for folks to have someplace to gather and swap stories, not that a whole lot happens here on Honeywell,” she said, setting the bowls at two place settings on the table. “You want wine, vodka or both?”

“Wine's fine,” he said, moving to take a seat. “Looks like you were pretty confident I was going to show up.”

“If you didn't, then I'd have been losing my touch, and we can't have that, now can we?” she giggled, pouring him a glass of wine before pouring one for herself. “So how much do you remember of before here?”

“Not much,” Len lied. “Tex said most people lose between twenty and eighty percent of their memory, so I guess I'm closer to the eighty.”

“Well, sooner or later it'll all start coming back to you, I imagine,” she said, starting to eat, clearly not standing on ceremony or saying grace. “I get little flashes of my old life here and there. I guess I was a pilot or something, not that there's anything to pilot here.”

'Yes, you were,' Len thought to himself.

“So you work with Tex at the bar?” he asked her.

“Mmm. Some of the time. I'm also one of the ranchers, tending to the chickens and pigs that we're raising. There's plenty of wildlife on the island, too, but it helps to keep some in captivity that we can always turn to for fresh meat,” she said. “They send some in dry ice sometimes, but keeping things chilled around here isn't exactly the easiest proposition. Shit, I think that's why Tex's is so popular. He's got the industrial strength ice machine, so you can always swing by for a cold drink.”

“Even in a place with no money, it's good to have a stranglehold on the market,” Len laughed.

“Well, each of our fridges has an ice maker in it, but they aren't all in the best of shape, and they can't do all that much at a time.”

“Where's all the power come from?”

“Combination of wind, water and thermal power,” Sally told him. “There are some wind turbines up on the mountain, and there are some water turbines that charge batteries off the ocean currents, but we're pretty certain there's also some sort of heat to power conversion going on in the mountain, which we think used to be a volcano. Maybe still is. Nobody's sure. As long as it works, people are incentivized not to care too much.”

The two ate dinner while very cautiously trying to ply the other for information about their backgrounds, Len giving up nothing while Sally kept trying to hint at kernels of information about herself that he knew were patently untrue.

In between bites became a game, where Sally seemed increasingly more and more direct about Len's past, making wild stabs in the dark, which Len would simply bat aside, neither confirming nor denying, something that seemed to annoy her but only made her want to press more. Being evasive came naturally to Len, and he found amusement in seeing her progressively try harder and harder to pin him down on anything.

On top of the digging, Sally also seemed to be pushing her level of flirting into overdrive, at times pressing her arms forward and together to make her massive tits swell towards his eyeline even more, as he did his best to remain calm and neutral.

As soon as they'd finished dinner, Sally came by and picked up his bowl, taking both his and hers into the kitchen, tossing them into the sink before turning on the water to let them soak for a while. Then she made her way back towards the dining area, making her way to stand behind Len, her hands rubbing over his shoulders. “C'mon, Len,” she purred. “You gotta give me something even if I gotta fuck it out of you... Not that it would be that unpleasant of a task.”

“I'm just afraid I don't have anything all that interesting to tell you, Sally,” he said, reaching behind his chair to grab hold of one of her thighs, sliding his fingertips up and down along that smooth tanned flesh. “But you can try and squeeze me for more, if you want.”

“Let's go to the bedroom, then,” she said, pulling away from him, tugging on his shirt, making him get up with her movement, as the two of them headed into the bedroom, but there wasn't even a door to close between the bedroom and the rest of the apartment. In fact, Len was noticing that there were, in fact, no internal doors anywhere in Sally's place, a marked change from his own place.

He unbuttoned his shirt on the way to the bedroom, tossing it onto a chair as she tugged down her bikini bottoms, kicking them to one side. She had a small blonde stripe of hair above her pussy, and the tan lines on her breasts had matching patterns on her hips and ass, not completely pale but certainly much lighter than the rest of her flesh, which obviously saw more than its fair share of sunbathing. She also pulled the scrunchy from her hair, letting the bun fall into a massive cascade of lionish blond hair around her shoulders as Len stepped out of his shoes, tugging off his socks. Len reached down and unbuttoned his shorts and dropped them and his boxers, leaving him naked in the bedroom with Sally, who licked her lips, looking him over.

“Whoever the hell you are, you're a fine looking specimen, Len,” Sally told him. “And I'm certain that cock of yours has done more than its share of damage over the years.”

“I don't think I'm giving anything away by telling you it's done alright,” he said to her, watching her slowly crawl up and onto the bed, looking back over her shoulder at him. “How do you want me?”

“I want you as hard as you can fucking give me,” she said, slowly backing up until her knees were at the edge of the bed. “I want you to hammer the shit out of my pussy. I want you to slamfuck me until I can't even get up in the morning, I feel so fucking bowlegged.” She reached back and slid two fingers to spread the folds of her snatch open for him. “What the fuck are you waiting for?”

Len grinned, stepping over towards the edge of the bed, lining the head of his cock up against her cunt before both of his hands clamped down on her hips as he shoved inside of her, finding her wet and eager for him, a deep, sweltering moan burbling out of her lips, a shiver running up her back as her head dropped down, her hand clenching a fistful of the sheets in her slender fingers.

“Fuck yeah, you fucking motherfucker,” she howled. “Yes yes yes fuck yes fuck fuck I want you to fucking break me open!”

His hands on her hips set a stuttering rhythm, the draw backs a bit slow only to be interrupted by hard and crushing thrusts forward, his hips smacking into her body hard enough to make her asscheeks jiggle a bit, her large tits swaying beneath her, clapping against one another as he kept on punching his dick inside of her with corkscrew shoves.

“Pound it daddy!” she whined and whimpered. “Harder harder harder!”

She was getting quite loud and vocal, and Len almost wondered if she was trying to put on a bit of a show for anyone standing outside of the bar downstairs, seeing the window was open, knowing full well the sound of it would float down to patrons not inside of the place, even with the heavy rainfall obscuring it a bit.

“Fuck daddy! I'm gonna cum! Fuck! I'm gonna cum! Oh fuck oh fuck oh shit oh holy fuck fuck fuck fuck I'm fucking cumming! Holy fucking shit I'm fucking cumming!” Her own fingers were rubbing down on her clit, but she was also using them to flick against his balls every so often, and when she clamped down, she squeezed tight on his shaft, and there was only so much he could do, so he let her body begin to milk his own orgasm out of him. He wasn't sure how long it had been since the last time he'd had an orgasm, but clearly it had been a while, because it felt like he was pouring a ridiculous amount of jism inside of her, feeling it ooze out around the edges of her twat and trickle a little onto his balls. When he pulled back, he could feel a heavy drizzle of it start to pour out from her before she slumped forward onto her belly, as he moved to lay down beside of her.

After a moment, she moved to shift until her head was resting on his arm, her tits pressed up against his chest, her arm barring across his body, preventing him from getting up. “Sorry if I made a bit of a mess. I'm guessing it's been quite a while for me, so maybe I was pretty backed up.”

She sighed, covering her eyes with the flesh of his bicep. “You're really not going to give me anything to work with, are you?”

“I'll tell you one thing, I guess,” Len said, deciding to be a little generous. “We were on different sides of the same op once. Back in Kosovo, when there were five or six sides all fighting at once, nobody really knowing who to consider an ally or an enemy. But back then you were going by Anika, and you were definitely working on behalf of the SVR. I won't tell anybody, but I can't imagine Russian spies are especially popular around here, considering how enthusiastically violent you lot were back then. Still are, I guess.”

She seemed to tense up against him, biting her bottom lip. “Tell me something, Len. Fuck. Tell me anything. You don't know what they're capable of if I come back with nothing, if I come back empty handed. I need to have gotten something out of this,” she said, a dire desperation undercutting her voice. “Anything. Even the smallest thing.”

He sighed a little bit and nodded. “Alright, one tiny bit of information, but hell, it's probably something they already know anyway. Up until 2001, I played for the Americans.”

She exhaled, a touch of relief seeming to wash across her face. “Thank you. Thank you for that. It's something. It'll be enough. It has to be enough. Anyway, you can sleep here tonight, and we can talk about it some more tomorrow.”

That wasn't going to be an option, but he didn't know it when he drifted off to sleep.

Rin

Supply drop days were always the most chaotic day of the week. Rin liked to think of them as Wednesdays, but that was just because it amused her, not because she had any real inclination that they were on actually being done on Wednesdays. It also meant that there was a chance for new arrivals in terms of people, and she smiled to herself when she saw Tex heading towards the carts, rushing out towards the boat.

It was the point where the village was the most active, with people coming from all the parts of the island to go through the weekly drop, and see what was in it. That also granted her the most freedom to move around the island without anyone noticing, since people would tend to congregate around the town center to get early picks of the new things.

Considering the supply drops were every seven days, she marked this drop as the third drop post the one she'd arrived with, which meant she'd been on Honeywell Island for about a month now. She understood why everyone wanted to rush out – they wanted to make sure they didn't miss any odd or unusual items that arrived, although most of those were in the special request crates, each item of which had a nametag attached to it. Tex's crew very much ensured that those items went to the correct people, and Rin had learned that while Tex's authority wasn't really backed by anything, it was respected by pretty much everyone. Maybe it was just because the guy was so nice.

When Tex and his team had run out, Rin used this particular moment to let herself do a thorough search of Tex's bar without anyone in it. It wasn't as though she was looking for anything to steal, but Tex had the lay of the land better than anyone else on the island, and if the man kept anything private, he would've kept it in his bar, which was only truly empty when they were running for the pickup.

The bar was decorated with all sorts of odds and ends, things that had clearly been scavenged from all sorts of parts of the island, including a couple of German war medals, some old 1960s photographs of Asian scientists of some kind and a number of cheesecake posters of both women and men plastered. The pool table saw regular use, as did the dart board, and Tex's was the only place with an actual jukebox player. Whenever people were done with records, they would take them to the archives, and Tex made a weekly trip every week, seeing what he wanted to add or remove from his previous jukebox.

Rin did a quick sweep of the bar, looking for any obvious hiding spots, but nothing immediately came to mind, and before she knew it, she could hear the sounds of carts returning to the area, so she decided she needed to split, ducking out the back door.

From the corner, she peeked around and smiled a little, seeing Tex with a handful of newcomers, recognizing her boss, Len, as one of them. There were plenty of holes in her memory, but there was no way she was ever going to forget how he'd pulled her ass out of the fire during that shootout in Pakistan when they'd first met. They'd been fast friends ever since, her and the rest of the members of Scarab.

Seeing Len warmed her heart, because he'd always the one with the big plans, and it had been his idea for them all to show up on Honeywell Island in the first place. Of course, they had be captured individually, and when she showed up to find the place behind Max's bar with no visible markings, she knew it meant she was the first to be on site. So she committed to watching, studying and learning.

She didn't want Len to spot her yet, so once Tex took the cart of new arrivals off to find places for them to live, she headed into the town square, determined to blend in, just another Guest looking through the scraps that Management had given them for the week.

Most of the things were being sorted accordingly, but there were several things just sort of tossed in for good measure, clothes of a size to fit several people, most of which Rin didn't care about, but she saw there were pairs of socks, which she grabbed, because she'd lost a few pairs since her arrival, having used them for practical applications beyond covering her feet.

After grabbing socks, she went to put in a shift over at the canteen's kitchen, cooking up some fried rice as well as whipping up some vegetable stir fry, setting them in the buffet style serve yourself containers for people to put out. A bit towards the end of the shift, she saw Sally walking in, picking up two bowlfuls of the chicken fettuccine Alfredo, heading back out and across the street to her place above Tex's bar.

Rin didn't often spend nights at Tex's, but tonight seemed like it would be a good place to hang out, maybe make contact with Len, if they could get away with it discretely. After her shift, she headed over to Tex's place, not wearing anything fancy, but as a single woman who hadn't hooked up yet with anyone for more than a night here or there, the men didn't need her to be wearing anything fancy.

“Heya Rin,” Tex said to her as she headed into the bar, which was packed, at least half the island's population hanging out there tonight, although that seemed like it happened more often that not on supply days, people discussing the new stuff that had come in, as well as the new people. “Haven't seen Danil around, if that's what you're worried about. He's probably still smarting from you shooting him down a few days ago. Went pretty hard at him, didn't you?”

“He had his hand on my ass uninvited, Tex,” she laughed at him. “He's lucky I just sprained his wrist. I probably should've broken the whole fucking arm, but I was feeling generous.”

“Hey, you don't gotta tell me twice!” Tex said, holding up his hands in mock surrender, a bar rag in one of them. “I know well enough to not touch unless I'm invited. Get you a drink?”

“Just a screwdriver,” she said as the man laughed.

“What are you, a 1980s sorority girl?” he asked her.

“Sure, don't you recognize me? I was the spokeswoman for Kappa Gamma Fuckoff,” she smirked. She'd actually been in a sorority in college, but she wasn't going to give up that piece of information without someone doing some serious digging. Most of the people on Honeywell knew that she was Asian, although they didn't know which country she was from, most of them thinking she was either Chinese or Korean. In fact, she was Asian-American, having grown up in San Diego, but she spoke Mandarian, Cantonese, Korean and Japanese fluently, and it was enough to let pass as from any one of those regions, especially since she'd spent so much time studying them.

At some point in the night, a redhead who perhaps too on the nose called herself Ginger pulled a handful of people out of the bar and into the rain, where they could all hear the sound of Sally getting well and truly fucked senseless a few floors up, something Sally had clearly wanted them all to hear. After Sally orgasmed loud and genuinely enough to make more than a few of the women jealous, everyone filed back into the bar to spend the rest of their evening.

Technically, there was always someone working at Tex's, so the bar was always open, but by two or three in the morning, it had died down, and Rin and Tex were the only two still hanging around, swapping tales about some of the greatest meals they'd ever had. Given enough time, the two of them always defaulted to talking about food or restaurants. The rain had finally dwindled down to a light drizzle, meaning it would be easier for her to get back to her place without getting too wet.

It became clear that Len wasn't going to be showing up tonight, so Rin decided to pack it in and headed towards the front of the bar, stopping in the doorway, clicking her tongue with a slight shake of her head. “Well, fuck,” she said. “Hey Tex, grab the ladder and a shovel will you?”

Hanging from a lightpost out in front of the bar was Sally's lifeless nude body, a large F carved onto her collarbone. Whatever it was she was supposed to have been doing tonight, Sally clearly hadn't done it well enough.

Tex brought the ladder and the shovel to the front of the bar before he saw her body, sighing, shaking his head. “Fucking hell. I always thought she was an Employee, but I guess even they aren't immune to someone calling them out when they fuck up,” Tex said. “C'mon, let's get her down before too many people see.”