“Knock knock.”

Bee can hear him behind the door, stumbling with the locks and knobs for a good ten seconds before the door finally swings open, revealing the nervous guy behind it.

“Uh… hi,” Kevin says, looking as if Bee just caught him in a bad time. But for the past two hours, that’s actually pretty much how he’s been looking like. Bee wonders if he’s been secretly feeling guilty for keeping her poster hostage.

Bee is about to step in but he closes the door on her, nearly breaking her nose. “Wha- - “

“Sorry,” the door opens again, narrow enough only to let Kevin himself out of the cabin before it gets locked. “Let’s… um, generators,” he points north, to a spot Bee can’t really see far across the yard, where all the mechanical buzzing Bee’s been hearing seems to be coming from.

A couple of neighbors begin to notice her presence; words must travel fast between the cabins. But this is understandable for a community, as far as Bee has experienced. They can’t just let a stranger roam around their terriroty freely with a possibility that their supplies could very much get stolen or their stock warehouse robbed overnight.

“I’m just gonna steal Jenna’s ramen, no worries!” Bee yells to a couple of ladies and their dogs behind the fence. “Just one cup, promise!” she adds. To her surprise, the ladies laugh instead of getting all mad or alarmed like she thought they’d be.

“Uh…why did you do that?”

Bee scoffs. “I don’t know. A little humor?”

“It’s… not like that around here, you know,” Kevin says, “You don’t have to be scared.”

“Whoa. Me? Scared?” Bee laughs. Kevin doesn’t say anything as they’re approaching a post-earthquake bump, where a barn-like cabin stands by itself. A structure built with a mix of salvaged woods and steels and tin cans stacked over one another, nothing out of the ordinary.

Kevin pulls a key that’s string-tied to the hip of his jeans before sticking it into a humongous, rusty padlock hanging on the door and then struggles for a while until a loud click is heard. The barn is open, and suddenly Bee feels that, maybe, there’s still a future after all for humanity.

“This is insane…”

Bee steps in carefully, standing before the massive giants lining up before her, all moving, smoking and whirring. These generators are clearly not factory-made; she can spot a motorbike exhaust attached on one of them, taped up plumbing pipes on another and even silver dining forks serving as rotating gears. Basically, top notch survival tech anyone would kill to have.

“Please don’t tell me you built all these.” Bee says, turning left when Kevin turns left. Some of these things are so huge the tip nearly touches the barn’s ceiling.

“Nah, I just help with the maintenance. I told you some guy just left them here- he and his friends built them for the community.”

“Why left them here? They could sell this and be rich or something!”

“Uh, the family program has electricity over there, so yeah.” Kevin says, as he opens another door inside the barn. “If you have a baby or like small kids, you can sign up to be listed as priorities. It’s still being tested, but it’s a very tempting program for young families.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard about it. But I thought that it might just be some other elitist bullshit.” Bee replies, while staring at the generator towering next to her. One of the levers has a plastic T-rex head for a knob, like those cheap mechanical pens from the merch shop in Jurassic Land. Who knows, maybe it is from Jurassic Land.

“Um hey, your generator’s over here,” Kevin calls from inside the room he just opened, which Bee soon find to be weirdly long and cramped; a narrow portion of the barn seemsingly sliced as a storage.

“How do you even move here…” Bee says, trying to keep her backpack from touching all the sticking blades and gears and wires poking around her to avoid unnecessary accidents.

“I usually crawl… especially through that spot.” Kevin cringes as he watches Bee desperately trying to reach him at the end of the room.

Bee takes off her backpack and pushes it awkwardly before her as she takes Kevin advice and decides to crawl on all fours. “That generator’s better be worth it.”

Kevin is already cranking on a lever she can’t see and a small light bulb on the work table behind him lights up. “Ok, it’s working,” he remarks.

But once Bee finally reaches him, she is immediately disappointed.

“Dude, that can’t be my generator,” Bee says, looking at a metal box the size of a mini fridge, sitting in front of Kevin. “So much for an anti-climax after you showed me those giants out there.”

Kevin seems nervous, “I thought this might suit you and your lifestyle…? I mean, you live alone, you move a lot, right? If there’s something more compact than this, I’ll give it to you.”

Bee contemplates. He’s right. How would she even haul one of those things out on the road? Unless she lives in this community to enjoy its juice, owning one will be absolutely impossible.

Kevin cranks the lever some more to turn off the demo light bulb behind him. After wearing her backpack on her shoulders again, Bee finally sits down, but not without knocking over some metal spare parts to the floor with her butt.

“Whoa- wuh- “

But Kevin has already scrambled behind her to collect the fallen pieces on the floor and is now picking all the small parts that clinks with one another like a bunch of wind chimes. He spends a good minute there without saying anything, just fiddling with them, probably trying to fix them.

“Did I break something…?” Bee tries to take a peek, afraid that she’s gonna have to say sorry anytime soon.

“No, it’s fine, they’re fragile like this. It’s fine,” Kevin mumbles, his hands fumbling to place them all together.

Bee watches him putting all the tiny copper blades side by side and screw them again in all the designated places. He then grabs something from the high stacks on his left, a tiny wooden mallet. He uses it to hit the blades one by one, at first sounding like he’s testing their positions, but the sounds eventually begins to appear like something else, almost like a tune. A familiar one at that, actually.

“Hold up. Mario’s theme?” Bee hasn’t heard that tune since forever. No more fun people on the internet to play it on their marimbas, no more internet to watch them. “It’s been a while, wow!”

Kevin smiles, a little embarrassed, but continues to play his Mario-medley using the funny-looking xylophone.

In her shed under the highway, Bee’s heard Arny playing drums with his cans before and all she wanted to do was throwing those cans out the window. But this Kevin make those metal scraps sound like some sophisticated acoustic shit. For a Mario’s theme, of course.

When the nostalgic medley nearly ends, suddenly Bee notices something peculiar on the ceiling: stuffed bears and picnic clothes being nailed and pressed there, even to the walls. Her gaze traces back along the high stacks of junk, where there are more blankets or another set of plush toys strangely stuck to the wall behind all those broken levers and bicycle parts.

“Oh, those bears?” Kevin notices her noticing. ”Yeah, I can explain- “

“No no. I know what’s going on here,” Bee stands up and notices how the floor beneath them is carpeted as well. “Wow.”

“Bee, this is just…”

“This is your effin recording studio, isn’t it?”