Doomsday Pillars

Alex gathered his seven managers to conduct a meeting inside the command center. Their main agenda, the allocation of manpower in accordance to their jobs and living areas. In lieu with the principle of the fourth rule, ’Everyone must contribute’. Hence, everyone regardless of gender, between ages sixteen to sixty, unless disabled, must contribute to the community.

Other than the supervisory role, which was employed directly by its direct manager, there were two main roles within the community: the workers and the fighters.

Back in what now looked like a distant past, the peace made the ratio between civilian and security personnel was about 1:500, however in Doomsday’s era, Alex proposed a ratio of 6:4. Six workers and four fighters for every ten people.

Benny said, "Mr. Alex, based on my estimations, Bali will have been cleared of all zombies within a month or two. Shouldn’t we focus on rebuilding society with workers rather than conscripting more fighters?"

Alex could understand where Benny was coming from, the preparation for the first disaster went better than his previous life after all. "As I’ve explained in the Doomsday’s video, the threat will only increase. Soon enough, we won’t only be facing zombies, but monsters too. The zombies are just the beginning just like the tip of an iceberg."

As the last word exited Alex’s mouth, a memory flashed before him on how a group of elite sky realm warriors got devoured by a ten-meter monster. The screaming, the despair resounded in his mind, making him unconsciously shiver. "Remember to be cautious. Again, the upcoming threats will be more than it currently is. If we don’t prepare well, we’ll be wiped out by these monsters."

"Do you have a timeframe?" Major Sandi asked.

"Three months," Alex answered. "After the third month, more mutated zombies will appear in the streets and hordes of monsters with inhuman strength will show themselves. Without a proper foothold and preparation, we’ll all be wiped out. Therefore, before the third month arrives, we should gather everyone we can, not just in Bali, but all the islands in the east or further."

All the managers exchanged glances. Only four days had passed since Doomsday started, and all of them grew somewhat complacent because of the progress. However, the ominous information from Alex made them anxious again.

After that explanation, nobody argued about the ratio of workers against fighters in the meeting. For now, Alex intentionally left it at that because he planned to slowly increase the fighters’ ratio in the future.

Alex moved to the next part of the agenda and set the quota for the first batch of recruits to be at most thirty-five-thousand people. This large number of recruits would be handled by Major Sandi and although the Major was a high ranking officer in the police department and an experienced trainer for the police special forces, he considered it a challenge to train so many untrained people. Actually, Colonel Jaka, head of the police, had first been offered to train them, but he refused using his age as an excuse.

Major Sandi’s team was then assigned to coordinate with the Mahaguru Indra of Pencak Silat Society as well as its masters. Together, they were to handle the recruitment process and training. And under Alex’s requirements, he asked them to minimize firearm training not only because of limited bullets but in consideration of the future once the Pillars descended. The Pillars would house a lot of close combat artifacts and techniques, so it was better to start building the foundation early for the art of close combat.

The first course of the training would be Pencak Silat basic movements, offense, and defense techniques. Second would be weapons training namely; the art of the saber for assault, and spear and shield for defense.

Only those who had prior training in using firearms or showed talent would be given the chance to be in the firearm troops.

The third course was formation coordination. They would be trained with the basic five-men formation and some big group formations for offense or defense.

Alex ordered for this first batch to be ready within two weeks. He mentioned that this public security division’s purpose wasn’t to build an army but to serve as an introduction and form a militia. Hence, this division had the right to choose who were to stay as guards for the base. The actual combat force would be led by the military and gain experience mostly through combat encounters.

Once the recruitment process was finished, all the new fighters would be stationed in Antiga City, located in between the main base and Bay City.

Alex tasked Tony to recruit five-thousand workers to revitalize Antiga City into a fighter base and turn Bay City into a naval base as soon as possible. The expected residents there would be forty-thousand people, five-thousand workers and thirty-five-thousand fighters. This should solve the rising concerns of the main base’s being overcrowded.

After that reassignment, Alex calculated there should be around forty-six-thousand people left in the Star Base. However, since he was expecting thousands more survivors would arrive daily in the upcoming days, he knew overcrowding would be an issue again, so Alex needed to quickly sort them out. Excluding the children and elders, there should be about twenty-eight-thousand workers ready to be assigned jobs.

Alex gave Tony ten more thousand workers to become builders and steelworkers. He tasked the manager to finish building the remaining two hundred warehouses as soon as possible. Alex purposefully assigned more builders for faster manual labor because the electronic construction machineries were destroyed by the EMP.

Although there were still more tasks that needed to be done outside the base, housing the refugees took priority over other building projects. He was expecting these two hundred warehouses would be finished in three to four weeks, therefore at the moment, he had Tony set up several big tents as temporary living arrangements for the refugees who wouldn’t be able to get a place yet.

Jane was given seven-thousand people to be farmers because it only made sense as more people arrived, larger crop yields in larger farms were needed. Fortunately, it wouldn’t be hard to find seven-thousand farmhands with the current base’s demographic. After all, many Bali locals were farmers. She was also given the task to expand the crop variety, so they’d eat not just potatoes. Jane raised concerns about poultry and dairy products and Alex gave her the go signal to coordinate with the research division.

The medical and research division led by Doctor Rachel was given the task to recruit all survivors with any kind of medical or scientific experiences. Right now, she was managing eighty doctors and nurses, and even though that was barely enough to run one medical center, Alex asked her to send a few medical teams to the survival posts, thinning further her already scarce. To remedy that, however, Alex gave her the permission to recruit dozens more medical students to become a medical assistant. As for research scientists, they were far and few in between. She had managed to find a few of them, so they were tasked with researching the mutated animals, the zombies’ anatomy and learning more about what the spirit stones were.

Benny led the administration division and his daily task mostly centered around profiling each survivor with a brief interview, providing an identification card, housing and giving out the food vouchers. He was the lead manager of the information center, which had the job of reconciling missing relatives and friends. The information center would’ve been an easy job, but without a computer or the internet, the complexity became a hundred times harder. Fortunately, Benny’s passions lied with helping the people. So, he had been given an additional five hundred people to help sort out the activities.

Devita was assigned the last more than ten thousand people for her supply division. Her division’s main goal was to make sure every resource they received was distributed evenly; therefore, her division had the most subdivisions compared to the others, which were namely: the helpers, the cooks, the traders, and the scavengers.

Her division would handle the logistics, the kitchen, the main dining and the market. Each person who had an identification would receive two food vouchers each day. That meant roughly a hundred-thousand mouths to feed each day. With the food supplies Alex had prepared, he expected it to last around six months. However, since more people would arrive here sooner or later, they’d pretty much burn through their stockpile eventually. Therefore, this division needed to come up with creative meals out of dry or canned foods and to find more supplies.

This was where the scavengers teams would come in. These scavengers would scour various supplies inside abandoned cities. They had to be accompanied by fighters whenever they set out and the scavengers would search following this priority list: foods, medical supplies, ammunition and gasoline.

Four-thousand were to be assigned to the scavengers team. And with the help of Barry, the navy engineer, all survivors with mechanical skills would be tasked to fix and maintain all upcoming functional electrical equipment including the vehicles. With the electronic supplies that Alex already had prepared before the EMP, Alex hoped to find more vehicles that would work, especially boats.

For the kitchen department, Devita only assigned five-hundred cooks and whatever was left, would be assigned as helpers to whichever subdivisions needed more manpower. The helpers main task would be logistics.

As for traders, they wouldn’t be needed until everything was established. All daily necessities like something to eat, to wear and to sleep had already been prepared for free by the base, eventually though, Alex would create a market and barter area but not now. A blueprint was enough.

The meeting ended, however, there was one person who appeared to have been left out of the initiative. That person was Agung, the ex-governor; he wasn’t quite sure what to do with his division of almost 10,000 children and elders in this base.