‘Of course I fell asleep, how could there be dramatic tension if I didn’t?’


    Rolling over with a groan, he checked the part of the bed he had set the girl on. There was only a hint of body heat left so either he had been out of it for a while or the girl had taken off the moment he conked out.


    ‘Probably a bit of both. This lack of light control is playing havoc on my sleep cycle.’


    Stretching a bit and shuffling off of the floor art he called a bed, he grabbed his notebook and plodded off to begin his ‘day’.


    ‘Gonna have to cut back on showers for a bit, nothing but quick wipe downs until we get the rationing back under control.’


    He wanted to kick his past self.


    As much fun as he had using the rationing numbers as a brainteaser to keep his mind active, actually living the rationing was terrible. While he could handle the food restriction so long as he kept relatively low energy, that was the easy part. He had yet to find a water tank of any description and even if this place had a recycler of some kind, water treatment took consumables. Ideally it was solar powered with UV or some other kind of energy-based filter and could last until he found it for maintenance. If that was the case, it was just a matter of keeping things running. Things rarely worked out that well though and if the filters or other consumables ran out before he could find _both_ the active ones and their replacements there wasn’t much that could be done. The toilets were all tank-less and the sinks didn’t have stoppers that he could find. The only thing he had found to hold water was small drinking glasses.


    They seemed like fancy kids cups so they had to be refilled three or four times to get enough water to satisfy after a meal, there just wasn''t enough to hold a significant amount of water. It would have to do if he couldn’t find anything, cycling through the cups was better than simply guessing, but it was impractical and possibly dangerous.


    The same reasoning went into why he continued to take showers and had let the girl take such a long one. With no natural bits or any way to make things, getting sick was pretty much a death sentence.


    If it was a forest or other natural setting and he could forage for medicinal plants it would be a different story, he could play more fast and loose with his estimate. Not so in this place. When your choices when sick are ‘drink lots of fluids and rest’ or ‘just die, I guess’, it’s a no brainer to pick the former.


    Right up till you hit that pesky water rationing problem and might die either way.


    It just seems to take less water over all to wash and keep clean than it does to risk it. Hopefully he could convince the girl that showers weren’t so bad next time. Maybe the quicker wipe downs would scare her less.


    The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    Either way, leaving water out in uncovered cups seemed counterproductive. It could work in a pinch as a warning system but the chance of getting sick went up. Hence the dilemma, they could either ‘suddenly run out of water’ or ‘suddenly get sick’.


    Terrible choices all around.


    Boiling could have been a good work around if he knew how the energy was getting supplied, but with the chance that the energy to boil the water was also what was used to clean it the first time, it was too much waste to attempt it.


    All of that to say, ‘if only I had more info I could make a better choice’.


    It kinda made up his mind for him at this point.


    Using the time he was cooking the thinkin-jacks to ponder his next moves was helpful, so long as he didn’t burn anything. It let him really contextualize the problem. He needed to find the water and power sources and they were most likely located in the one place he really didn’t want to go.


    But needs must and he now had a lover of cats relying on him as well!


    Maybe.


    Hard to say what she relied on or needed. But it might be him and that would be disappointing if he possibly let her down. So, stuffing his face and leaving the obligatory cat treat for said girl, he picked up the hot pan and made his way to the one place here he hadn’t really explored yet.


    ‘Maybe if the pans hot it will kill the zombies faster.’


    <hr>


    He wasn’t sure if the lack of zombies was a relief or a disappointment.


    Sure, not having to fight zombie horrors was a good thing, but now all his delaying just felt like excuses and he just looked dumb. Upside was that there wasn’t anyone who saw him being scared of nothing, so maybe he got away with it?


    Bonus, he even found something that could hold water!


    Ignoring that fact that it was built into the wall and seemed very much like a growth vat for zombie horrors, if he could find a way to get it holding water it might be enough to survive on until they could find another source.


    Done admiring his find and squishing the paranoia that seemed very justified right now, he made his way back to the desks he had found. Desks that actually seemed used and not the sterile display pieces he had been finding in the other rooms.


    He would need to gather up all the paperwork here and see if he could find what they were working on up till now. It might even let him know where everyone went. When he had taken a quick glance on the way in though it had seemed to be a different language to the wall labels. He couldn’t exactly sit and read anything here, the desks were too small, but if he got a good sampling he could take it back to his boss room and see about deciphering it as well.


    Grabbing as many loose pages that had pictures and poking through the books to see if any would help led him to a dusty old filing cabinet though.


    Well, not so dusty. There was very little dust anywhere to be fair. Whoever had been here had kept the place clean.


    This cabinet was clearly seldom used however. Tucked in a corner and piled with ‘extras’. Clearing off the extras, which appeared to be more paperwork, and testing the drawers proved to be pointless. It was locked tight and didn’t seem to want to move very much. Some investigations didn’t show any welding or outside bolts, so it was either really heavy or attached on the inside somehow.


    The investigation did turn up something far more interesting though. Investigating had found a lone page lost between the cabinet and its surroundings. With a great deal of coaxing, a bit of ingenuity and some cursing thrown in for good measure, he had managed to get the page out without damaging it too much. It was a good thing he did too.


    The dialect was off enough he might as well have been reading middle English, but he was reading it.


    “Well that’s not ominous or anything.”