by Ray Verola
Copyright © 2018 by Ray Verola
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Print ISBN: 978-1-54393-557-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-54393-558-5
For all those who have helped me along the way.
And to everyone who reads this book.
Thank you.
The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear.
—Mahatma Gandhi
Contents
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1
May 2075
Capital City (the former Washington, DC), Northeast Sector
Where the hell am I?
Taylor Morris felt totally disoriented, and his body didn’t work right. He couldn’t open his eyes, couldn’t feel his legs.
Did I fall asleep in the middle of a street?
An icy line of terror shot up the base of his spine to the back of his head and shocked him halfway back to reality. The last thing he remembered was having dinner with two new friends who were helping him work through the toughest time of his life. He’d been hitting the Serenity too hard these days, but he’d never been as out of it as he seemed to be right now.
He lay facedown on something hard. The firmest mattress ever? Possibly. But the smell? Asphalt. Pavement? Could be. The left side of his face was scratched up and stung like hell. He tasted the metallic tang of blood in his mouth. The air felt heavy and reeked of rotting garbage.
He forced his eyes open but saw nothing but pitch-black. He struggled to raise his head and felt nauseous as his world spun in the eerie quiet. He heard a gurgling deep in his abdomen, followed by a burning in his throat. He managed to raise his head just before projectile vomiting. His head fell back to the pavement. Lucky for him, the force of his heaving had sent the vomit far from where his head slammed back into the blacktop, or else he’d be resting in his own foul-smelling retch.
What the hell is happening? Have I finally hit rock bottom?
He labored to take a deep breath. As he’d suffered with moderate asthma since childhood, the tightness in his chest was not an unfamiliar feeling. He relaxed his shoulder muscles and began to inhale and exhale slowly, as he’d done so many times. It brought a small degree of calm to the hurricane in his head, and the tension in his chest eased slightly.
Taylor’s eyes now seemed to be the only part of him that worked. He scanned the area as his vision adjusted to the darkness. He was planted in the middle of a road, a row of small storage garages on each side of the spot to which he was anchored. He recognized this dead-end street. Hardly any cars, let alone people, traversed this isolated part of town after dark. Since becoming homeless a few days ago, he remembered scrounging for food in the nearby garbage cans one afternoon.
A slight breeze blew the smell of his vomit back to him. He gagged but recovered quickly, relieved that he didn’t have enough food in his stomach to throw up again.
He braced his left hand on the ground and attempted to get to his feet, but the hand felt numb, like it wasn’t there. No dice. He dug his fingernails into the unyielding pavement and managed to raise his torso a few inches, but his hand slipped, causing his face to slam into the road once again, opening a gash over his right eyebrow. He groaned. Blood oozed into his eye; he tried to blink the irritation away without success.
Need to calm down, Taylor. You’ve been in tough spots before and come through with flying colors. A deep breath. Buck up, man. You’ve got to get up and reach the sidewalk.
Using both hands this time, he raised his chest. Everything was still spinning.
“Damn this shit,” he muttered.
Could this be the end? I know I’ve screwed up, but this is no way for my life to end. This is no way for any life to end.
A wave of disappointment washed over him as his life involuntarily played at fast-forward speed on the movie screen inside his brain. All the good times, followed by the mistakes that pushed him from a successful executive—“the luckiest man alive” he’d once called himself—to where he was right now.
Fight off the self-pity, Taylor. Sure you’ve made a mess of things, but you can still get it together. As long as a person’s aboveground and breathing, there’s always hope. One step at a time. You can do it. First, you’ve got to get out of the road before someone runs you over.
I won’t give up.
A tingling feeling returned to his arms. Using only his upper extremities, he crawled toward the sidewalk. But he froze when two bright lights broke through the inky blackness.
He squinted. The lights were the headlights of a personal transport vehicle, parked about fifty yards away at the end of the dead-end road.
How did that PTV get there? It doesn’t matter—I’m rescued!
Taylor expected a driver to storm out of the PTV and give him holy hell for the sheer lunacy of his lying in the middle of the road at night.
He held a hand high to make certain the driver had seen him. “Help! Help!” he yelled. The red hood and grillwork of the PTV looked strangely familiar.
Then the engine revved—and the PTV started barreling toward him, angrily kicking up road dust.
I’m a goner.
Taylor’s eyes opened wide as dinner plates. He unsteadily struggled to his feet and let loose a guttural scream.
Just as the front bumper of the PTV was almost close enough for him to touch, he made a desperate leap toward the sidewalk. The PTV missed him by inches, speeding by with a high-pitched hiss he could hear and feel. Taylor landed on his side and bounced off the sidewalk into a wooden green garage door badly in need of a new paint job. His right arm was scratched by tiny, faded green paint chips. He moaned at the fiery pain all over his body.
He looked up to see the rear lights of the PTV turn bright red as it screeched to a sto
p at the corner. After a minute or so, the vehicle turned right and disappeared.
Taylor propped himself up against the garage door and took a moment to catch his breath. As the adrenaline started to fade, he shivered. How could the driver not have seen me? He brushed paint chips from his skin.
And then it hit him: this was no accident.
Blacking out at dinner with two new friends, waking up in the middle of the road more hungover than ever—and then recognizing the distinctive grille of the red PTV belonging to those same friends, just before the attempt to run him over. The PTV had to have been parked on the dead-end side of the street from before he’d awakened from whatever had knocked him out.
Although too much Serenity had probably destroyed some of his brain cells, he was still smart enough to piece together the jigsaw puzzle of this evening. The clues had been there all the time.
The unmistakable conclusion: his new friends had drugged him, left him in the middle of the road, and tried to kill him tonight.
2
Three months earlier
Taylor Morris knew he shouldn’t have done it, but he did it anyway. His intuition had warned him, but he ignored the warning and now was dealing with his stomach doing backflips. This shouldn’t have been a big deal, but somehow it might turn into one.
For the better part of the past year, he’d resisted the periodic invitations of Sophia Ross—the prickly, whip-smart president of RobotWorld and his immediate supervisor—to go to the Cap City bar, a popular local watering hole, for a “quick drink” after work. But today, he’d finally relented.
After all, performance evaluations were due soon and turning down the repeated requests of his boss might not be the wisest career move. Especially since, for some reason, he had the feeling Sophia was souring on him, even though many in the company—including Sophia—acknowledged him as the most competent executive at RW. One prominent online newsmagazine had recently termed him “the head of the best sales department of the fastest-growing company in the world.”
Well, actually, Taylor had suspected a reason for Sophia’s souring. For the past three months or so, he had been diligently working on an attempt to “re-find” himself and “get back what he’d lost.” What he’d lost, he believed, was his true self. The losing began when he accepted a sales job at RobotWorld five years earlier at the age of twenty-seven. Then one morning three months ago, he’d awakened in his bed with the sun streaming in his eyes and a clear thought that he was tired of being an actor in somebody else’s play. It was just that simple—and just that complicated.
Prior to working at RW, Taylor had never been too shy to express his opinion and be completely, sometimes brutally, honest. It was a quality he’d gotten from his deceased father, and it was the only weakness he’d ever displayed as a salesman.
But in trying to shoehorn his honesty into the regimented RobotWorld culture, Taylor had suppressed some of his natural personality in an attempt to project himself as the ultimate team player. He believed at the time that such concessions were part of getting older and getting to the top of the corporate ladder. He’d done so well in becoming a team player that, in a little over four years, he managed to rise to the top position of head sales manager. But despite his career success, becoming less of the person he really thought he was grated on him like a pebble in the shoe of a marathon runner.
For the past three months, Taylor hadn’t acted like most of the other executives at RobotWorld, who would glad-hand Sophia Ross and endorse her every move. That was at the heart of why Taylor didn’t want to be at this bar alone with her. The real Taylor sought to always be himself no matter what. A wise career move? Time would tell.
Initially, Sophia had told Taylor that she loved his newly found, unvarnished directness. But that was almost ninety days prior—and it seemed like an eternity ago. It appeared to Taylor that his boss’s opinion of him had recently changed, and not in a positive way.
As he entered the crowded, dimly-lit bar, Taylor spotted Sophia waving at him from a booth in the back. She sat alone, nursing a vodka on the rocks. The contrast between her long, naturally curly red hair and her alabaster skin made her stand out in any crowd. As usual, she didn’t appear to have fussed much with her luxurious hair, which was combed straight back. It fell to below her shoulders, setting off her pleasing round face. She had changed out of the informal uniform of gray shirt and gray pants that all RW employees wore at work into a solid dark blue pantsuit. Despite her striking face and figure, Sophia didn’t have anyone special in her life. The joke around the office, though never repeated in her presence, was that she was married to RW.
The Cap City wasn’t big—its telescreen advertisements called the bar “cozy”—with a ten-foot-wide aisle separating tables with white tablecloths and plush, dark-red leather booths on one side and a long bar on the other. The place had a peculiar odor, most likely due to the combination of the sweat of a standing-room-only, alcohol-fueled crowd of humanity, the marijuana/tobacco smoke haze hanging in the air, and the heavy-duty disinfectant used in many public places these days. To Taylor, the offensive smell seemed not unlike that of a poorly-maintained public restroom. The walls, consisting of black walnut-grooved acoustic panels, were bare except for ten large telescreens.
Taylor ran a hand through his longish, jet-black hair as he started what turned out to be a slow trek through the crowd to get to Sophia’s table. He stood five feet eleven, weighed about one hundred ninety-five pounds, and had a little bulge in his stomach, but a good chest and shoulders. He’d been a champion high school wrestler back in the day, but he now had the look of an athlete who’d let his body go a little since his glory days.
“Excuse me,” Taylor mumbled over and over as he slipped past and around body after body in the raucous, mostly male, mostly overweight, mostly middle-aged crowd.
He came to a full stop halfway toward Sophia. A skinny sixtyish man with a pointy nose and wispy gray hair blocked his path. Their eyes met. The man smiled broadly, revealing a mouth with no teeth. “I won twenty bucks on the last play,” he said. “It’s my lucky day.”
“Way to go,” Taylor said. “Please let me get around. . .”
“Sure, buddy,” the old man said, as he squeezed his back against the belly of another bar patron whose eyes were glued to a telescreen. “Life is good,” the old man said. “Today’s my lucky day.”
Taylor continued his slogging through the crowd and thought, My guess is you haven’t had too many lucky days, friend.
All the telescreens in the bar were showing the latest Manglecon game. Officially, Manglecon was called New American Football, a sport largely based on the now-defunct National Football League. But most fans knew it as Manglecon. Taylor hated this brutal sport. It was a more violent version of the old NFL, played mainly by the underclass of all races for the entertainment of the masses. The game was a society-wide obsession, or so it seemed. The derogatory nickname of Manglecon was coined by a sports reporter who’d written, “Those who play it get their bodies mangled and their brains concussed.” With the advent of easy-bet via telescreen, not only every game but every play had big money riding on it. Nowadays, easy-bet was one of the few ways for most people to get some quick cash, even though the online betting parlors seemed to be the only ones showing a profit at the end of each game. Although even much of their monetary gain was siphoned off in the form of a government tax.
The on-field participants of Manglecon knew the dangers of the sport, but ignored the risks because of their apparent love of violence, competition, and the huge salaries. The lightweight, high-tech padding worn by the players resembled the old NFL protection and was supposed to shield participants from physical harm due to player collisions. Instead, it turned players into more devastatingly effective missiles to launch into one another. Taylor thought the constant, well-publicized directives from the hapless football commissioner to make Manglecon safer ill
ustrated his most favorite and least favorite law of the universe: the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Taylor continued to slowly push his way to the back of the bar, and he smirked as the rowdy, shabbily dressed crowd around him cheered wildly at a vicious collision that left one player from each team motionless on the field. Within five seconds after the players hit the turf, two automated stretchers were on the scene to scrape each combatant off the field and to the stadium infirmary. The action resumed immediately, without interruption. Taylor laughed to himself as almost all in the bar, in a bizarre group movement in unison, swiped their individual debit cards over the small telescreens directly in front of them to easy-bet on the success or failure of the next play.
The congestion in the aisle caused Taylor to come to another full stop.
A young man in a white T-shirt, who had jagged black lightning-bolt tattoos covering both arms, looked at Taylor with rheumy blue eyes and a worried expression. The guy’s upper body was swaying side to side, and he appeared to be at least two years under the current legal drinking age of sixteen. “You look like a smart guy, mister. I badly need a winner. Who do you like on the next play?”
Taylor detected a strong smell of alcohol on the young man’s breath and more than a hint of desperation in his voice. He probably needs to win, or he doesn’t eat tonight. Unfortunately, there were a lot of kids living on their own these days, usually on the streets. From out of the corner of his mouth, Taylor said, “Sorry, pal. No clue. I don’t follow these teams.” Unsaid was the fact that he didn’t follow any teams. Taylor felt a twinge of sorrow for this kid. He thought about offering him a small credit from his wrist computer, but this guy would most likely spend any financial assistance on beer. Plus, there were so many kids like this one; if Taylor gave a credit to each one on the street, his bank account would be depleted in a day. Taylor saw an opening in the sea of bodies. He had to move quickly. “Good luck,” he said sincerely to the young man as he angled his body sideways to glide past a few more bar patrons.
Life for people in the former United States of America—and, indeed, the world—had changed drastically over the past forty-five years. A relatively small percentage of the planet’s population had survived World War III, which had begun in 2030 and ended five years later. Most of the former America was now a vast, unpopulated wasteland according to government pronouncements, as was much of the rest of the world due to the lingering nuclear and biological fallout from the war. Who’d won? Nobody. There were only losers. The only place where significant numbers of humans had survived in the former North America was now known as the Northeast Sector, an area of land that included the former Washington, DC (now called Capital City) and a sliver of what had been the Northern Virginia suburbs at its southernmost border. The Northeast Sector extended north to include parts of eastern Maryland, eastern Pennsylvania, western New Jersey, and a slice of southeast New York state. As most of the area outside the Northeast Sector was supposedly unfit for human survival (again, according to the government), the authorities maintained strict border control—no one allowed to go in or out, as the oft-repeated line on the telescreen went. It was for “the greater good of the people”—another phrase used by the government ad nauseam.