Archer Avery, Chief of Police (comethearchers) wrote in remains_rpg, @ 2015-06-01 05:13:00 |
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Entry tags: | # 2018 [06] june, archer avery, graham frost |
Before the Storm
Who: Archer and Graham
Where: Capitol roof
What: They have no idea that in a few hours' time, there’s blobs a-comin’. So they’re just two guys in a quiet moment.
When: Monday, dawn
Full nights of sleep were never going to be high on Archer Avery’s priority list. Taking care of himself…? Well, he was trying. Unlike the night he and O’Brien found out they’d been bumped up the ladder a few rungs to Chief of Police and Deputy Chief, Archer hadn’t purposely avoided a rest period and hadn’t ‘forgotten’ about food. There simply wasn’t time for him to pace the halls of the Capitol or to take on unnecessary patrols. He’d had that scant handful of hours to get his head on straight after he’d taken the oath and that was it: Archer began walking a very careful balance between the steep learning curve of running the police and not running himself ragged the way he might have before coming to Austin. Before the apocalypse, before deciding to transfer from the NYPD, before getting shot. He wasn’t going to become that workaholic robot again. He wasn’t.
Yet there was so much fucking work to do. Archer didn’t realize how much policy Grady had actually been responsible for, had already decided to start looking at the stats on raider activity in the area whenever he had enough time to devote to it. He had responsibilities to Justice, to all of the men and women under his command, to all of the people in the city. The force he had was lacking in manpower -- currently down two high-ranking officers -- and the old regs for promotion just weren’t going to cut it. From this vantage point, he could see places where Grady might have been a little too harsh, places where he might have been a little too lazy, and he understood better how Grady and Roccolini had clashed sometimes. Realizing that, the chief told Bran it was his responsibility to make sure Archer neither got complacent nor tilted at windmills so much that he forgot about fighting the monsters right in front of them. He didn’t want to end up the way their predecessors did… and he still didn’t have a good reason for why they were out there in the first place, for Grady to get infected, for Roccolini to get killed. That information was nowhere in his new office. Grady wasn’t a big fan of writing things down. It made the learning curve that much steeper.
Today, Archer didn’t bother trying to go back to sleep when he snapped awake in the predawn darkness. Whatever he’d been dreaming, it had left him feeling unsettled, heart like a wrecking ball in his chest. It pushed him to ease out of bed, rolling first one shoulder, then the other. He dressed quickly, shoved on his boots without doing up the laces, and grabbed his duty piece and tactical vest before detouring into the kitchen. It wasn’t a day for making sure he got in a clean shave and it sure as hell wasn’t a day for analyzing his dreams to figure out what nightmare had nearly caught him this time around. Fuck that. Escape was preferable. So he did, and the kitchen was indeed the first logical stop.
He couldn’t say he was especially hungry, but he brought some water to boil and browsed the supplies. He had some MREs in his quarters still. Shelf life on those was about three years. Supposed to be discarded after five. He remembered that from his ROTC days, though there had been some updates since back then. Occasionally, some of the Meals, Ready-to-Eat came through the transports to here; he could see a few on the shelf now. Military fare. Given what all they had in them, he was surprised more folks didn’t take them. Then again, none of the ones that came through sounded all that great. He and Ads used what they could in beefing up dishes they cooked for the others and no one was the wiser that it started out as dehydrated stuff that some service folks called Meals, Rarely Edible. Archer snagged one without looking at the label and tucked it into a large pocket. He’d eat later, if he thought of it. Split it with Bran, maybe. Or get -- or make -- ‘real’ food and put this in the office for a rainy day. Another officer might need a meal.
He hadn’t seen any coffee around and he remembered -- vividly -- Graham complaining on the freenet about not having any tea. Archer also remembered with far too much detail the swampy quality of the ‘tea’ given to him and Bran by the mayor. Neither of those had so much as a sip, and his deputy had sneered at the stuff. The best Archer would do for now was deftly pluck a leaf from Adelaide’s hardy mint plant (sorry, Ads) and chop it up, using a spoon to grind the small pieces into the bottom of a slightly battered mug to get as much out of the mint as possible. Then he took the water he boiled and poured some over top. Not quite tea but he had something hot to drink that hopefully his brain would associate with being awake. It was only after he did this that he realized he should have checked the MRE pouch for a drink packet. Well, no sense opening it the fuck up if he didn’t mean to eat any of it yet.
Letting it ‘steep’ a little and cool, Archer did up the laces of his boots, tucked his short-sleeved pale blue-grey work shirt into his dark sand-colored cargos, and strapped on his military-grade tactical vest. This one was tan in color; he had another that was black. His plan today was to be out and about the city, take one of the vehicles and check on a few things this afternoon, and it was a case of wanting to blend in more than stand out. It might take a while for him to be able to get out there, but he’d laid out his clothes and equipment the night before nevertheless. The vest held weapons and other important tools -- and had that stupid chief’s badge pinned to it, over his heart, shined up and carrying no trace of Grady gore -- and he was carrying on his hip today, in addition to another holster on the vest.
Archer was fucking ready for this day.
He took a few minutes, while he had them, and brought his mug of what-the-fuck-ever up onto the roof, as dawn streaked lazily over the sky. Huh. Today looked like it might be shaping up to be a little cloudy. Maybe more than a little. It’d been awhile since they had rain. Archer rested more of his weight on his right leg as he looked out over the crumbling ruins of Austin’s architecture and waited for the day to really begin.