Pavel scratched the back of his head. “I definitely can’t help you. It is necessary to talk with Trofimych. Only you don’t count on much: gasoline, food and cartridges are the main resources now, but there aren’t enough hands, so, you see, it will give you the opportunity to earn money. Talk to him first… Will you have tea? Pavel went to the bedside table in the corner and turned on the electric kettle. I was a little surprised by the presence of electricity, because the rest of the city had been de-energized for a long time.
– No thanks, Pash, somehow it’s not up to tea parties now. Where do you get electricity from? Are the generators working?
– Well, as you wish, but for the last week we have been doing nothing but chasing teas. He sat down again at the front table. – And we have electricity from the power plant. Ours recently took control of it. I can’t say more, I don’t know how everything works there.
– Well, thanks for the information, I said, and Pavel looked at the fighters with weapons sitting in the far corner of the checkpoint and, nodding to them, waved his hand in my direction.
– Kostyan, let's go to Trofimych and grab sugar from Romych there, tell me, I asked. – Kostyan, when he got up from his chair, surprised me with his size. A hefty fat kid under two meters tall, throwing a short on a belt behind his back, headed towards the door, nodding me to follow him.
The shelter area looked very clean. People were scurrying around with carts stuffed with bricks, some kind of boards and plywood. People settled here for a long time, and work was in full swing. Almost everyone had a weapon, mostly pistols and rifles, but there were also large-caliber automatic weapons.
I walked about 200 meters deep into the shelter between long rows of warehouses and found myself in front of a three-story office building, which, apparently, used to house the administration. Outside, the building was given a very neat look by the siding with which it was sheathed, but inside the repair has not been done since Soviet times. The orange paint on the walls was cracked, the plaster had chipped in many places, and the ceiling was a dirty gray. There was a strong smell of welding, and at the very entrance there was a small wooden booth, the windows in which were so covered with dust that they almost completely lost their transparency.
There were several closed doors on the first floor. I approached the stairs leading to the second floor. Beneath it was a large workbench, next to which was a guy in contact glasses. He was enthusiastically soldering something, listening to music from a small tape recorder.
– Hello, Romaha! – Greeted him accompanying me a big man. Then he turned to me, pointing to the stairs to the second floor. – Climb up and immediately to the right. There’s such a brown door there … – Having lost interest in me, the big man went to Roman, who was sitting under the stairs, and I, as I was told, went up to the second floor, and, finding a brown door there, knocked on it.
– Yes Yes! Come in! – a voice came from the other side of the door, and you, having easily opened it, entered the room. It was a rather spacious office with a very high ceiling and walls that were once pasted over with mosaic tiles, but now painted brown right on top of it. From the furniture in the office there was a wardrobe, a folding bed, several chairs and two desks littered with papers. Behind one of them sat a man who looked about forty-five years old. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt that was obviously not the freshest, and black pants with large pockets on the sides. A bald head shone, but the lack of hair on the top of his head was more than compensated for by a thick beard framing his face. He looked up, gave me a quick look, then gestured to a chair on the other side of the table and continued to quickly write something down on paper.
