Black Market Merchant

Chapter 23: Setting Up Base (2)
There was still a good amount of daylight remaining and the rooms were still bright enough to work in. So, Lisa decided to start organizing her new living space and fortify the entrances to the Powerhouse building first. The living space was going to take the most work. After all, who knows how long the rooms had become covered with dust and clutter. This clutter Lisa decided to use as part of the fortifications. It was going to be a bit tricky to turn this office place into a suitable living area.

The Powerhouse building is an industrial facility for the generation of electric power, definitely not a place designed to be lived in. Power stations are generally connected to an electrical grid which runs into the town and beyond. Many power stations contain one or more generators, a rotating machine that converts mechanical power into three-phase electric power. The relative motion between a magnetic field and a conductor, creates an electric current. The amount of electricity produced from a hydroelectric dam, such as this one, is normally measured in megawatts and kilowatts.

To make things simpler to understand one megawatt can power around one thousand homes. Then a kilowatt can produce one thousand megawatts. Lisa estimated from the dam’s huge size the electricity produced here could be a huge number of megawatts and potentially even kilowatts. This Powerhouse has four such generators and transformers just in this room alone, as well as the offices and control rooms above them.

As Lisa cleaned, she decided that she would continue exploring the many other rooms the next morning. Then search in more detail the other buildings and what they might have stored in them. Also, going down into the dam itself to the lower Powerhouse was a must. Lisa could then see how many other generators and transformer there were and whether or not getting this place running was possible. If so, then getting power running to the town was the next step and that was going to be something to worry about at a much later date.

Lisa took a break and looked around the office room that would become her headquarters. It looked like a typical cubical office. There were three sets of four cubicles in the middle of the room, with one managers office near the entrance. Just outside of the manager’s office was an old looking couch and a printer. Lisa opened the office door and found that the room only had a simple desk and an office rolling chair, along with several yellowed file cabinets.

The manager’s room walls only had two small windows. One was looking outside to the north an east, while the other faced the entrance to the office’s main room. Thinking for a moment she decided to toss out the cabinets and desk to bring in the couch to sleep on. It would be safer having to sleep in a smaller room.

As for the contents of the file cabinets, Lisa decided to look briefly through them before tossing them out. Apparently, this particular office dealt with employees pay checks, healthcare and other HR (Human Resources) duties. They were utterly useless to her.

Thanks to her monstrous strength from her cybernetic body, Lisa was able to carry the cabinets, along with the cumbersome desk, down to the bottom floor of the building. She stacked them on their side longways in front of the entrance on the west side. Even though it was locked it would be best to block it up since she had no intention of using that door.

Then looking through the other cubicles in the HR office, she found that everything else there was useless to her. Especially the cubicles, they were taking up too much space that she could possibly use later. Everything except for some blank printing paper, staplers, pens and pencils were carried out to block up entrances. Now that the room was empty, she decided to use that space to keep things she was going to get or needed.

Now on the third floor where her base is, there were four office rooms that looked exactly alike. Her base office and the one on the opposite side were the only undamaged rooms. Going into the next HR office, she found that it looked like the boss’s office, but only much nicer. The furniture here was, though dusty, very fancy and in good order. Taking and moving another couch from this boss’s office, Lisa carried it to her base and pushed it up next to the other couch. Now she had an extra wide ’bed’ to sleep on.

Lisa went back to the boss’s room and rummaged through the desk to find anything helpful. She was excited to find several keys that belonged to the Powerhouse building. The keys were even labeled explaining what they opened. The master key apparently opened all of the offices, storage rooms, and break room on all three floors. The next key she found opened the main control and auxiliary control room doors on the first floor. But since the main control room door was already busted down by her and the auxiliary control room had succumbed to water damages and from rust, the key was nearly useless.

Lisa then found three keys that would have opened the pump house, security building and maintenance buildings, but they too had little use. There were many other smaller silver keys that opened the lockers on the first-floor break room and file cabinets all over the Powerhouse, yet again useless. There was one golden key mixed in with them, but she couldn’t find out what it opened, as there was no label on this key. However, she decided to keep it for now and put it on her dog tags chain.

The final three keys she managed to find were much bigger and longer in design than the rest. One was labeled ‘Generating Facility Tunnel’, which likely opened the two large swinging doors to the tunnel going into the dam itself. The other two were labeled ‘Dam Start-Up’ and ‘Emergency Shut Off’ keys. Lisa recalled in the main control room at the far end computer was a large monitor. On each side of it were two locks that the keys looked like they could fit into. Apparently two people were needed to start and turn off the dam, but thankfully they were close enough together she could probably turn them on by herself.

Next, Lisa looked through the other two water damaged office rooms. Only the metal framework of the desks, cubicles and chairs remained. The holes in their roofs were so bad it appeared to look like Swiss cheese. Even the floors of these rooms were dangerous and likely leaked to the rooms below. She took the rusting metal parts out from these rooms and piled them in front of the other exit doors on the north and eastern sides of the building.

Then going down to the second floor, Lisa did another check of the Control Room. Apart from the computers, monitors and electrical wires, there wasn’t anything else of interest in here. Satisfied, she went on to the only other two rooms on this floor. This was because the big, tall double doors on the south wall prevented another room from existing. On the east side were the locker rooms for employees to change into their uniforms or store their personal belongings during work hours. There were several uniforms in decent condition, with nearly no dry rot, still hanging inside on their hooks. She was even excited to see numerous safety helmets were laying around here too. These would be needed for when she got people to work for her on the dam in the future. Especially the uniforms that were labeled to be electrocution proof. Safety first!

Going to the western room, Lisa found that the room had been also badly damaged by water leaking from the floor above. Fortunately, the other half was in moderate condition. Doing a quick glance of the molding box’s stored here, she found they were stocked full of PPEs, (personal protection equipment). Rubber aprons, rubber and latex gloves, rubber boots, rubber jackets and rubber pants were all still in their plastic packaging. In addition to the helmets she found earlier, these were a super lucky find!

Finally, she started checking the first-floor extra rooms. These were much smaller than the upper level rooms, but more numerous. The eastern side room was actually a break room and in it used to be a food and drink vending machines, but they had been raided long ago. Besides the three tables and chairs around them, there was nothing worthwhile here. The first-floor northern rooms contained nothing special. Two of the four rooms were completely empty. It looked like, judging from the oil stains and tire marks, that the rooms once stored the forklifts she had seen rusting away outside. The other two had electric Gator transport vehicles in them and of course they had dead batteries.

The last room was the auxiliary control room. Everything in here was so ruined that she doubted they could even be used for spare parts for the main control room. It wasn’t even worth looking around this room anyway, thanks to all the damages.

The last thing Lisa wanted to check before the sun went down was the hallway shaft leading to the bowels of the dam. Seeing the lock and chain holding the two big swinging doors in place, Lisa had to use the key she found earlier to open it. When she opened the big metal doors the hinges creaked as they scrapped heavily on the concrete floor. She winced hearing it as it was painfully loud and grated terribly in her ears.

Immediately a cold damp wind came rushing out of the shaft, almost blowing her Yankees hat off her head. The silent blackness of the unlit shaft was very intimidating, like some monster’s gapping jaws. She shivered slightly seeing all this.

”I hope I don’t have to go in there often to fix anything in the dark. Its spooky.” Lisa spoke quietly to herself.

Lisa then closed the doors, mainly just to ease her mind, and headed towards the southern entrance after locking it up again. It was too dark to explore the tunnel just yet. She hadn’t blocked up this area yet, even though it was the largest entrance to the building. Luckily even if she did close the two big sliding doors, there was still a smaller door built into the left sliding door to exit from.

Looking out at the property and maintenance building, she figured no one would have any reason to come here. There was need to block the gates or fortify the maintenance building yet. So, closing the doors and locking them up with the chain would be fine for now.

The sun had long ago slinked behind the mountain to the west. This meant that it was dinner time and the time to prepare to sleep. Going upstairs Lisa finally took off her coffin and the crate of food she’d been given and put them in the office next to the couches. Taking out the pot, corn and potatoes, she decided to cook some stew.

Then she ran into a small problem. Where was she supposed to cook? The water wasn’t an issue, the dam was holding millions of gallons of river water. Yet if she lit the fire indoors, she would damage the floors and fill the building with smoke. Her only plausible opinion was to cook outside in the parking lot. Even though this would potentially expose her to anyone looking her way, the dam was far away from the town buildings. So, the chances of being spotted were low. After eating and cleaning up herself in the river some, Lisa was quite tired and ready to sleep. The couches were comfortable and even though she had no blankets, the small office room wasn’t all that cold. So far, her first day living here was a success.