“What about us girls?” Peggy asked.
“The women will be distributing supplies. Work boots is first on the list, so we’re not running around in booties all the time. More coveralls. Sheets and blankets. You’re on that list, Peg. On the dock, handing out work boots first.”
Matt kept scrolling.
“A bunch more will be getting the kitchens up and running. Most of that will be stocking all the kitchenware and supplies for now. Some food, too. Everything will be cold until they get the power up, but at least it won’t be MREs.
“Ah. Here’s an interesting note. The hospital is first. For power, for water, for sewer. For getting people moved out into the inflatable houses. They want to get the hospital operational as a hospital right off. So Gary, you’re up for that right off. They’re putting a temporary hospital staff together. Looks like they gave you Dwayne and Rachel as your team.”
“What about me?” Jessica asked.
“Motor pool. Over by the powerplant. That’s where all the electric trucks and buses are headquartered.”
“Makes sense.”
At that point, everybody got a priority alert from their communicator. When Matt touched his, he was surprised to get an icon in the lower right of his vision. It had an object distance from his eye of about two feet, so he touched the apparent location of the icon with his right index finger. A heads-up display sprang up over his vision. He could still see through it, but he could read it as well.
“Hey, this is cool. I didn’t even know they did that,” he said to no one in particular.
Everyone else was doing the same thing, with various comments.
Matt selected the Work Assignment icon, which had an alert icon next to it, and it gave him his assignment and reporting. Report to the dock at six-thirty - half an hour before dawn, about fifteen minutes from now - and pick up his work boots, then stand by for a bus to his work site building temporary housing. It also told him to bring water and lunch.
“Oh, shoot,” Peggy said. “I have to go.”
“Us, too,” Stacy Jasic said.
“Let’s go,” Tracy Jasic said.
Matt grabbed a bite out of his supplies box, tucked an MRE and three water bottles into the pockets of his coverall, then headed down to the dock. It was semi-organized bedlam, and very crowded. He backtracked and went out the front door of the hospital, then walked around the building to the receiving dock in the back.
Hundreds of men milled around on the dock and on the ground around a container truck. A couple of dozen women were pulling shoe boxes out of the container truck, each taking half a dozen at a time.
“I got some elevens here. Who’s an eleven?” one asked.
Men held up their hands and she passed them back through the crowd. Everybody was pretty well behaved, all in all. Then again, Stan Twardowski, the retired World Authority Police sergeant major, and Jim Faletti, the dock foreman, and their crews, stood by watching the process.
“Recycle the plastic. We have a limited amount until the refinery is up, so let’s not waste anything. There’s a recycle container right there,” Faletti called out on a bullhorn. Two spaces down in the dock area, a forty-cubic-yard container waited.
Whenever some twelves came out, Matt held up his hand. He got a box on the third try, then headed away from the dock area and took a seat on the grass. Inside the plastic box was a pair of size twelve work boots. Inside each was a pair of socks. As he pulled the socks out, he found that one boot also contained a folding knife and the other contained one of those fold-up toolkit things that had pliers, scissors, screwdrivers and such.
“Nice.”
Matt tucked the knife in one pocket and the folding tool in another and stuffed the extra pair of socks in a third, then put on socks and boots. He considered the booties for a moment. They were plastic and could go in the recycling bin as well, but they might be nice to use as slippers after a day working, so he folded them up and tucked them into a zippered pocket on the coverall.
Matt walked over to the recycling container. It felt good to have real shoes on again, for the first time since he’d left Carolina.
“Flatten the box and lid, please,” a dock worker there repeatedly said to the continuous stream of men walking up to the container with their empty boxes.
Matt popped the corners and flattened the box and lid and tossed them in, which got him a nod from the dock worker. That done, he consulted his Work Assignment page in the communicator’s heads-up display. The mustering point for his work crew was the side portico of the hospital, what would eventually be the emergency entrance.
A number of people were already there, some from his group and some from others, perhaps a hundred in all. A continuous stream of people were walking around from the dock. There was an electric bus there.
“Check in when you get here. Once we have a full bus of complete crews, we’ll run them over to their worksites and come back for the next load.”
Matt checked in with the heads-up display and settled down on the edge of the portico floor to wait.
They were on the second bus trip. The bus had left with the first crews and come back in ten minutes. The site just wasn’t that large.
“OK. I got Horner group, Chen-Jasic group, Stanton group, and Suzuki group. Everybody on the bus.”
Once they were on the bus, they moved off into the residential
