After the third yank on the whipper snippers pull cord the machine screamed to life expelling a haze of bluey grey smoke that burned my nostrils. At the time it felt like a major success but really it was only the start of the job at hand. With twenty square meters of grass up to my knees and patched with nettles there was still a battle ahead of me.
I’ve always been someone who loved to stand back after a hard day’s work and see a finished product; I got that feeling as a landscaper. It fills me with pride to see a perfect retaining wall or a exquisitely trimmed hedge maze. The same can’t be said for hacking through this Amazonian back yard at 6 O’clock on a Friday night.
I put on my noise cancelling headphones which cost more than the whipper snipper and got to work whilst listening to an audio book of Isaac Asimov’s ‘Robots and Empire’. As the braided cord slashed through the dense green grass I couldn’t help but day dream of off world adventures, robots with a conscious and ultimately how mundane my own existence was. Growing up I’d always imagined a life where adventures were plenty, but then I grew up. I now plodded through my early thirties dreaming of an exciting life that was left far behind me.
TING! TING! TING! TING! TING!
My daydreaming had caused me to lazily drop the head of the machine. The cord slashed into the ground, but instead of cutting a deep gash into the soil a metallic tinging rang out over the cacophony of the whipper snipper. It’s not uncommon to find abandoned pieces of sheet metal in dilapidated backyards, but this sounded much thicker than a piece of 2 mil corrugation.
I set down the whipper snipper and removed my headphones, folding them up and tucking them neatly in my pocket. Not only did they have excellent sound quality they were also compact.
I knelt to peer at the hole I’d left in the ground. There was dirt covering something below. I prodded my finger into the earths wound and no more than one knuckle deep did I find I was touching cold steel. I tried to clear the surrounding dirt to find an edge to this metal, but it never came. It was perfectly smooth and even after clearing away two handfuls of dirt I still couldn’t find an edge to lift the metal from the ground. I had no idea what it could possibly be, but my curiosity was peaking and I had to find out.
I knew this lot of land had been abandoned for the past fifteen years. I’d driven past it countless times when going to and from jobs and no one had ever batted an eye at the dishevelled house or the overgrown jungle behind it. The council were paying me to mince up the grass out back to stop the risk of snakes in the summer. I figured no one would notice if I dug it up a little. I went to my truck and fetched a square bladed shovel. I put my headphones on again, this time choosing to play Back In Back by ACDC.
I found where I had made my first minor excavation and proceeded from there. I pressed the wide square edge of the shovel up to the metal below and used it to slice the soil from atop the metal. I was shocked. This long grass had all sprung up from only an inch of dirt. I was literally peeling this thin layer of dirt from the metal below in long sheets. I had taken almost three-square meters of the grass and soil away before the shovels blade clanged into something protruding from the metal, jarring my arm.
It was a ringed handle. My heart thumped in excitement.
I reached down, grabbed the ring and pulled. There was a hatch that opened a few degrees but was weighted down by some surrounding earth. After a quick shovel the hatch was cleared, and I tried again, this time lifting it past ninety degrees revealing a man hole size shaft made entirely from this smoothed metal. It had colouration's of stainless steel that had been repeatedly heated, showing patterns of metallic blue and yellow.
I paused. Surly this was just a council man hole leading to an underground wire conduit or something. Why am I getting so worked up about it?
I became self-conscious of the fact I thought I was making some amazing discovery. I shook my head and closed the hatch.
With music still pumping in my ears I returned the shovel and took to the whipper snipper once more. After another fifteen minutes my work was done, and the only evidence of my immature escapade was the few square meters of shovelled earth revealing the small metal bunker and hatch.
I was about to do my final pack up when my headphones went to static. I took them off and checked their blue tooth status, the neon blue light indicated they were still connected but my phone said otherwise. I returned them to my ears and found the static had ended and was replaced by a series of boops and beeps and then…
“Welcome to RTS Alpha 7. You are currently at Entrance Shaft 12. Upon entering please clean yourself at the allocated hygiene station and don the Alpha 7 uniform provided. We hope you enjoy your trip with us and thank you for choosing BupaCorp for your transportation needs.”