Five Days Dead (2 page)

The End is Coming

The walk into town wasn’t as troublesome as it might have been. It was mid-July and the sun was blistering, which kept animal life more interested in finding shade and water than stalking a lanky Indian walking a dead highway. He was lucky in that. While the valley might appear desolate, he knew it was home to an abundance of wildlife.

There were large herds of deer, elk and antelope that called the valley home, not to mention packs of coyote. Mountain lion and bear would occasionally come down out of the mountains. Then there were the domesticated animals that had been set free or escaped when the Rages began. Cattle and horse and wild pig, goats, sheep and lama, were a deadly nuisance you always had to be on the lookout for. If they spotted you, they didn’t always attack, sometimes they just shadowed you, waiting for an opening. Of the domesticated animals, Harley hated cats the most. There were just so damn many of them and since the Rages they had become cunning, ruthless little killers that borrowed a trait from their larger cousins. When it came to hunting humanity, housecats hunted in prides.

Insects hadn’t been impacted by the Rages as drastically as animal life, but sometimes there would be swarms that would devastate everything in its path.  Mosquitos and flies were the worst, but locust, bees and ants had killed their fair share. Humanity had pissed off pretty much every other living creature on the planet. Go figure.

Just outside of Price, a colony of prairie dogs lined the side of the road, standing on their hind legs and staring at Harley with their beady eyes as he passed. They yipped at him and he yipped back. He didn’t draw his sidearm and they didn’t give him a reason to, but he felt their hateful eyes on his back as he left them behind.             

He crested the last hill before reaching Price. The buttes and mesas around him were cast in amber as the sun dipped behind the mountains and night fell on Castle Valley. The lights were still on in Price, although Harley knew there were very few who still called the city home.

Price was less than 70 miles through the canyon to the megalopolis 95 percent of the population of the state called home. Unless you were a pilgrim, if you lived in the state of Utah you lived within one of the cities interlinked in the Utah Hub along a 300-mile stretch that followed the old I-15 interstate system. It was the same in every state in the nation and pretty much everywhere in the world. Society had huddled in the largest cities, which had linked with the next largest city and the next to create the Hubs.

In the United States, the Exodus from the countryside had begun before the Rages and was spurred when the Save the Earth Administration replaced the Environmental Protection Agency and became the most powerful arm of the U.S. government. One of SEA’s first initiatives was to push through the blueprint for Exodus. Under Exodus, those living in rural areas were offered government buyouts of their homes and property to move to the cities. The goal was to abandon the rural areas, to let the Earth reclaim the Wilderness humanity had stolen.

Nature responded with the Rages. Too little, too late, it might be said.

With the creation of the Department of Rail Transportation, the Department of Transportation and the federal highway system were eliminated. High-speed passenger and high-speed cargo rail lines replaced the interstate and people started to come in from the country and settle in the cities out of necessity.

The Exodus picked up a notch when the Right to Income Act became law and most of the population became happily unemployed. Why live in the country when you could live in the city with free income, housing and a Link connection? Harley had only been a boy then, but even sitting on the reservation watching the world pass them by, the Navajo could see that somebody was herding everyone together, whether they wanted to admit it or not. The Navajo had experience in such things.

Things really got rolling with the solving of the energy crisis. Free energy was a benefit of living in a Hub. Price was originally designed to be a part of the Utah Hub, but the mountain pass to link it to the rest of the Hub had proven more arduous than planned and eventually the high-speed rail through the canyon was shut down and Price finished dying. But it was still plugged into the fusion plant, so the power was always on, even when no one was home.

Of course, it didn’t really matter now. After the Federation replaced the United Nations and ratified the Declaration of Human Rights, energy was a right of life, along with income, education, medical care, housing and access to the Link. Now everyone was entitled to a powerband and you carried all the energy you would ever need right on your arm.

Yes sir, the world was a pretty “intrestin” place. Even in the Utah Hub, with a population of more than 25 million, you could walk for blocks and hardly see a soul. Most people spent their days and nights on the Link, living a virtual life that was far more exciting, far more stimulating than anything reality could offer. Reality, after all, was still a little messy. It was more than the Rages reshaping the climate of entire regions from one extreme to the other; it was more than every animal on the planet hungry for human blood. Reality took effort. Too damn much effort. 

Solving the energy problem of the world did have its side effects, like shaking the balance of power on the planet to its core and igniting the Energy Wars. A couple of billion dead later and China and most of the Middle East turned into a nuclear wasteland and things had settled down as the Founder Federation started to get a grip on power. Humanity enjoyed life in a utopia now, or Harley imagined most thought so. But not everyone. Some couldn’t help but feel that despite all of the technological wonders, things were unraveling, a little at a time, bit by bit, piece by piece.

Those were the people collectively called pilgrims. They would take advantage of what the world had to offer, but not directly. In the world, not of the world, they liked to say. No linktag implanted in their mind for them, thank you all the same. They linked through their eyeset, something they could take off and walk away from when they wanted. Then there were the real radicals, the ones who wouldn’t connect to the Link at all. The blinkers called them neands. They chose a hard life not connecting to the Link. It was difficult to live without the Link anymore, but they somehow made do in pockets all over the world. They were considered something of a cult, like the zombie Wrynd. Or the Catholics.

Pilgrims, neands and Wrynd were the outcasts of the New Age of Discovery and on most days they were Harley’s prey. He would just as easily prey on the blinkers or the legionnaires or even the Marshals and their deputies if the opportunity presented itself. Harley considered himself an opportunist and in this most “intrestin” of worlds, opportunities were plentiful.

Nothing moved on Price Main Street, but he hadn’t expected anything else. Most of the street lights were still working and as Harley walked down the middle of the road, his dusty cowboy boots clicked, clicked on the asphalt. In the distance, a coyote cried, and Harley put his hand on his sidearm. There were still a lot of critters in the city and the night belonged to them. It would be best to find a place to sleep. He had planned to find a vehicle and keep moving, but it had been a long walk into town and a night’s rest would do him good.

There were still a number of cars parked along the road and in driveways on the side streets. Finding something that would run shouldn’t be too hard, but it would be better in the morning. There were a lot of cats in the city and they would be on the prowl. While dogs didn’t seem to be affected by the Rages, cats definitely were. Harley guessed the Rages answered the question as to which animal was truly man’s best friend. He remembered his mom used to have a couple of cats around the house when he was a boy, back before the Rages. He didn’t care for them much then either. You could just look at them and tell they were a shifty lot.

He could feel there were people in a number of houses. Those still occupied seemed to radiate a tired, but steady pulse of life that had been ripped away from those abandoned. They just looked forlorn and fragile, waiting for nature to turn them to dust. There were more homes deserted than occupied. When most people left in the Exodus, they didn’t bother taking their cars. They were of little use in the Hub. If you needed to go anywhere, you used mass transit. Some people had a pod, electric cars to bop from commuters to home and back, but for most people even the transit was more than they needed. They didn’t have a job to go to, could order anything they wanted from the Link and explore the universe from their living room. Why did they need to go anywhere?  The automobiles parked in driveways and along the streets of this dead city were useless in the Hub. With any luck, he would be able to find something he could run with his powerband or maybe even an old truck or motorcycle that ran on NG. They were rare, but Castle Valley was rich in natural gas, so a lot of people drove NG vehicles long after they fell out of favor in the rest of the world.

Harley considered taking a side street and breaking into a home for the night but kept walking down Main instead. From the shadows of the alleyways, he could see dark shapes flitting here and there and knew there were cats on the prowl. They would stay clear of him until there were enough to overwhelm him, but he knew that may not take long. A Rage was building up around him. He picked up his pace.

Price, before the world had changed, and the final nail hammered into its coffin, had been an energy town. Coal had been its heartbeat for more than 160 years. When the government finally pulled the plug on the coal industry, when the last coal-fired power plant closed and the last coal miner climbed out of the mine with his face black from coal dust, Price, like so many towns, began to die. The cities of Eastern Utah had survived longer than some because natural gas had been an alternative and the communities held on, but they were living on life support. When a college student finally cracked the mystery of cold fusion, solving the energy crisis for the world, Price and cities like her gasped their last breath. While there might still be people living here, the city had long ago stopped being anything like a city. Now it was just a corpse, waiting for the wind and the elements to scatter its remains.

Ahead of him Harley heard more coyotes howl and behind him he saw the first of the cats dare to slither out from the shadows and onto the street. They were herding him, the creatures of the Rages. He drew his blaster and picked up his pace, jogging lightly down the middle of the road.

There was a hotel at the top of a hill as Main Street led out of town. Its lights were still working, although part of it looked like it had been destroyed by a storm. Harley turned left and tried the front door to the lobby. It was unlocked and he walked inside just before the first cat dared to leap toward him. He scowled at it and went towards the reception desk. It was hard to know if the hotel was truly deserted or not, so he waited for a few minutes at the desk and walked behind the counter to peer in one of the offices. The attendant’s desk was bare and coated with dust. The hotel was his for the taking then. There wasn’t a way to access a room since he didn’t have the hotel’s Link account, but he didn’t worry about opening the door. His boot worked fairly well.

He came back around the counter and looked out the glass doorway. There were 50 or more mangy cats peering through the window at him and behind them he could see the glowing eyes of a dozen coyote. They didn’t look too happy with him, and several of the cats tried to push their way through. The door didn’t budge, but Harley took a chair from the lobby and wedged it shut, just in case. The cats screamed at him as he walked away.

The hotel was only three stories, so he took the stairs to the top, looking for a nice suite with a view of the city. The hallway lights were all still working and it was strange to think he was the only one inside. While it smelled a little musty, everything seemed fine, and he could hear the air conditioning softly humming through the building.

He adjusted the saddlebag across his shoulder and tried the first door on his left, surprised to find it unlocked. He opened the door and stepped inside. The room was not empty. There was a kitchenette on his left and a desk and chair on his right. A king size bed occupied the center of the room and sitting on the bed, looking disheveled and with a bloody scar on her right temple was a young woman in uniform. She was pointing a pulse rifle at his chest.

Harley sighed. “I’ll try the next room.”

“Stay right there or I’ll blast you.” The woman’s voice was shaking as were her hands on the rifle.

“I’d rather you didn’t.” She looked scared, and Harley had some experience in scared. He had been the cause of it, and he had been the victim of it. Looking at this slim, dirty woman with hair that looked like it may have served as a nest for mice, with sunken eyes floating in a sea of black, he would say this woman was a good deal past scared and all the way into terrified. “Do you mind if I drop my bags? It’s been a long day.”

The woman nodded and shifted in bed, thought about standing but apparently didn’t have the energy for it. She pointed the gun at his holster. “Drop the gun and sword while you’re at it.”

Harley looked the woman in the eyes and after a moment she looked away. “I don’t think I will.”

She aimed the rifle at his chest as he slipped the saddlebag and backpack from his shoulders with a sigh and went to sit on a chair by the desk in the corner. He turned the chair to face her as he sat down, and his back ached with relief. He reclined and crossed his legs in front of him and tried to smile but found that he could not. That was usually the case.