Scarcity

by Robert Calbeck

  The soldiers had taken cover behind the lip of the roof and were periodically firing off bursts at Vika, but she was doing an admirable job of keeping them pinned down. As he watched, Michael and Tanya flew across the void between the buildings and landed sideways on the edge of an adjacent building. Michael stood up against the wall, parallel to the street, and kicked out a window. He and Tanya ducked inside just as bullets started pinging around them. Vika shot back, taking down another soldier before they resumed their suppressing fire at the roof. Michael poked his head out and motioned for Luthor to follow.

  The thought of jumping between buildings terrified Luthor. They were ten stories high!

  But he knew if he could crash a helicopter then the 126 would protect him from falling too. The guards had completely ignored him while Vika made their lives difficult. He probably had time to make the jump before they could react.

  Luthor’s heart thumped against his ribcage like helicopter rotors as he ran toward the edge of the roof. Damn damn damn! This better work! Timing his steps to leap he prepared to throw element 126, he got to the edge.

  And hesitated.

  His muscles seized up. He stopped running. He didn’t jump. It was just too high; it was just too far.

  “No Luthor!” Michael screamed.

  Luthor grabbed the top rail of the ladder to keep from falling the 10 stories to his death. Then he noticed that he was in the sights of two soldiers who had taken cover behind a large battery array. They stared at him, disbelieving looks obvious even through their masks. Luthor swore again and swung out onto the ladder to avoid their gunfire. Heart fluttering, he finally looked down. It felt like his stomach actually fell all the way to the trash-lined alley below. With shaking limbs, he quickly stepped down the rungs. He was never going to make it to the bottom without being shot. He pressed his body against the ladder to limit the size of his human target.

  He looked to the side and noticed an apartment window ajar. Still shaking, he grabbed two BOGs and in desperation, threw them against the window. He let go of the ladder and rolled awkwardly toward it. The 126 kept him firmly mounted to the wall. Even though he was on the side of building, 9 stories up, the artificial sensation of down still felt good. He pulled the window the rest of the way open, retrieved his 126, and climbed in.

  The apartment was filled with dirty, dusty, floral print furniture like some geriatric horror show. Two mite-ridden mattresses squatted in the middle of the floor. It looked like ten suburbians lived there, though no one seemed to be home. Luthor ran toward the door at the other end of the room. A rusty deadbolt held it securely closed. He glanced back and saw a rope hanging down outside the window and two booted feet dangling beside it. Luthor struggled frantically with the lock, but got it open and ran out into the hallway, slamming the door behind him. It splintered with 6mm rounds as he shut it.

  #

  “What the hell does he think he’s doing?” Michael shouted. They hid behind the concrete wall as bullets popped in. Slugs smashed through desks and paper flew into the air. Office employees screamed, ducking under their desks or running for the exit.

  “You know exactly what it was.” Tanya said. “He did the same thing on the boat! Now it’s finally going to get him killed.”

  “He was more scared of jumping than getting a bullet hole in his chest?” Michael pounded a fist on the floor. “I risked my life for that polluted son-of-a-bitch.”

  Luthor had no chance, he had half a dozen trained killers chasing him through an apartment. His cursed PTSD was going to accomplish what years of Chinese bullets and bombs had failed to do. It was going to kill Luthor Tenrel.

  “We have to help him.”

  “How exactly are we supposed to do that? I know you love him, but I sure as hell am not going to run back in there and get shot.”

  Tanya clenched her fists. She was not going to let him kill himself while she had the will to stop it. “Vika.” She said.

  #

  Luthor sprinted out into an empty hallway of closed doors, trying to ignore the pain in his ribs. He tried one. It was locked. No one would dare leave their apartment unlocked with all the suburban refugees looting everything that wasn’t bolted down.

  He cursed himself for being so stupid. What kind of moron would be more afraid of jumping than bullets? He had no chance now. Who knew how many of those damn bastards were chasing him? They had guns, what did he have, 126? That, and his oh-so-wonderful fear of heights. First, he’d exposed his friends on the seabus, and now this. His inability to master his fear had endangered all their lives and now he would die for it. If only he could do it all over again, he would suck it up. He would swallow his fear and jump.

  But Luthor wasn’t ready to succumb to the inevitable. Not yet. He took the stairs at the end of the hall quickly, leaping down the last three of every flight. Some of the men had come in from the roof entrance and were only two stories above him. He ran faster; his ribs ached.

  Luthor had an idea. He ducked on the bottom stair of one of the levels and threw two bundles of 126 up, sticking them to the stairs above him. The wad held fast, looking like orange chewing gum. It’s going to be a little harder to run down the stairs when you suddenly weigh twice as much. He thought. Good luck! Moments later the rhythmic thud of descending footfalls became a cacophony of noise and cursing. Luthor couldn’t help but grin as he imagined trained soldiers falling down stairs on top of each other. It didn’t matter how well trained they might be, if they came across a change in gravity, they would fall. Luthor knew he was going to lose the two BOGs, but if it bought him enough extra seconds to save his life then it was worth it.

  At the bottom of the stairs there was another locked door. Luthor jerked the handle, but it would not budge. He didn’t see a locking mechanism anywhere. The men above him had started running again. He hadn’t slowed them as much as he hoped. Luthor sat on the bottom step with his feet facing the door. He threw a triple dose of 126 at the door. It instantly became down, and he plummeted toward it. His feet slammed the door with the force of a giant. His knees buckled, but so did the hinges. The door blasted outward with Luthor on top of it like a surf board. It landed on a slender patch of ground devoid of trash. A gaunt homeless woman with an even gaunter dog looked up at him in surprise.

  Luthor picked up the 126 and sprinted toward the street opposite the helicopter. Three soldiers exited moments later. Reaching the street, Luthor turned toward Vika’s apartment building. The door was locked. Frantic, he ran to the next building. It was locked too. He ducked into an alley as he heard more gun shots. Not looking to see how close they were, he hurdled trash piles and shoved vagrants out of the way.

  “Smog you, moron! Look where you’re going!” One grizzled old man shouted after him. Luthor had evidently smashed a whole village of suburban box-houses in his hurry.

  Luthor had been paying so much attention to not falling in the trash he hadn’t noticed a fence looming up ahead blocking his way. Its top was wrapped in barbwire. Luthor thought he would have to scale it with more 126, but decided to try the door next to the fence first. The door was open.

  He ran inside. Homeless crowded a small entryway; it was a rare opportunity for indoor shelter for them. An antiquated elevator stood at one end of the room with a highly graffitied sign that read “Out of Order.”

  “Cheapskates,” Luthor muttered. He knew as well as everyone else that it wasn’t broken, it was just disconnected from the power because the landlords didn’t want to pay the electricity bill to run a carbon-hog like an elevator. Next to the elevator was a sturdy metal fire-escape door. It was locked, though probably could be opened from the opposite side.

  “Back away everyone!” Luthor shouted in a commanding voice, waving his arms away from the door. The smelly suburbians obediently skittered away to the corners of the room like cockroaches. Luthor knew he had only seconds. It was a sturdier door than the last one, and he wanted to make sure he could knock it over. He threw all five of his remainin
g BOGs at the door, and instantly started falling toward it, feet first. Everyone in the room fell and slid toward the door. As Luthor braced for the impact he wondered what the poor people must think when sideways suddenly became down. The door blasted open, Luthor hitting it much harder than he expected. The shock jerked tendons in his ankles and knees. He crumpled against the open door without falling to the ground. He had ripped the deadbolt completely out of the frame as the door swung inward.

  “Stupid idea, Luthor,” he said to himself.

  “Mental note: you can’t support ten times your weight!” He separated the BOGs.

  He moved his legs around. While they were painful, it didn’t feel as if he’d splintered bone. Of course, it could just be the adrenaline, that’s what the smogging substance was for.

  The angry homeless shouted obscenities to each other, wondering loudly what Luthor had done to cause the strange phenomenon. Luthor began limping up the stairs. His painful knees and badly rolled ankles screamed protest at his demand that they support him. Looking up he saw an unending staircase stretching up. There was no way he could climb that many steps fast enough to avoid being shot with messed up legs. And it was unlikely that any of the doors to the apartment floors would be unlocked.

  Luthor split his remaining 126 into 2 bundles. He threw one ahead of him, and started a pathetically slow jog toward it. His legs shot angry pains at him, but the gravity did most of the work for him as he climbed the next flight. It was more like running slightly down-hill than climbing steps. He reached his first BOG, grabbed it, and threw the other one ahead of him pulling him higher. It was a game of gravity leapfrog. He stumbled up the stairs, half falling, half jogging to each new gravity dimple.

  His relentless pursuers had entered the stairwell too. They were 4 floors below Luthor and his staggering gait. He ran much more slowly than they, but also did not tire thanks to 126. While they laboriously climbed flight after flight, Luthor ran down hill. He managed to keep the minimum safe distance to avoid getting shot. At the top he pushed open the door into another rooftop field of corn.

  He limped diagonally through the tall rows, hoping to stay out of sight. He quickly reached the edge of the rectangular roof and looked down onto a busy street. He was running out of options. His ankles and knees badly needed a rest and he didn’t have a gun. Jumping to another building would only buy time. That is if I can manage to actually make the jump this time. Luthor thought bitterly. In his condition they would inevitably catch him. Climbing down would be a death sentence. If only I hadn’t blown up the damn helicopter, maybe I could have tried to steal it.

  The helicopter.

  The crushing force of that much 126 still echoed in his memory. A force so intense and the gravitational field so wide, it had sucked in everyone on the roof and destroyed a 4000-horsepower helicopter. The very act of throwing it had sucked him toward it.

  He knew what he had to do, and it terrified him, almost as much as bullet holes in his sternum did. The odds of his crazy plan working were slim, since he had ditched two BOGs in the stairwell. He would probably end up splattered on the pavement. But then, he was guaranteed to be splattered with lead if he stayed. At least a crazy plan offered him a chance. He hoped Tanya and Michael would make it out safely. If he died, they could finish what he’d started.

  He heard the door open; men were breathing hard. Summoning all of his courage and delusion, Luthor smashed all his 126 together. He looked out at the four-lane street a dozen stories below. Hundreds of people gawked at the downed helicopter, blocking any semblance of traffic. Rescue teams had not yet arrived, but carps were swarming. Luthor knew he only had seconds. Sweat dripped from his face. Come on Luthor, this is your chance, he told himself. You wanted to conquer your fear. If you are too much of a pansy to try, then you will die.

  He took a deep breath, trying his best to imagine flat ground, and did the most petrifying thing he could think of: he jumped off the building, out into the street.

  He threw the 126 as far as he could at the same instant he jumped. The little orange ball sailed away from him, but he was caught in its gravity dimple. No longer restrained by the ground’s friction, nothing stopped the influence of the element’s gravity this time. Luthor was pulled in a great sailing arc across the street trailing the 126. He was sixty meters above the ground. It felt like flying. Luthor screamed in fear. His inner ear told him that down was in the direction of the 126, but he knew that the real down was asphalt. Asphalt was not soft. Luthor kept screaming. People looked up, pointing and shouting at the man flying across the street. Flying men were perhaps the only thing that could be more perplexing than a crashed, diesel-powered helicopter on the sidewalk. The 126, still itself subject to earth’s gravity, reached the top of its parabolic arc and turned down toward a rooftop filled with wheat. Luthor trailed behind it like the tail of a kite. The BOGs plopped in the middle of the small wheat field. So did Luthor, narrowly missing the twisting blades of a rooftop windmill. The plants and topsoil cushioned his fall, but he still hit hard. He rolled to a stop, and felt an ear of corn hit him in the back. It had been yanked off the other rooftop and followed him over. Every bone in his body ached. He had blood everywhere. He grabbed a patch of earth and kissed it, he had never been happier to not be falling.

  With his adrenaline rush fading, he pulled apart the 126, painfully crawled to the edge of the roof, and peered out of the wheat. Across the street he saw three figures in black pop out of the corn field. They looked down on the side of the building and then moved to search the adjacent structures. They were looking in the wrong places! The corn stalks had been tall enough to block his flight. None of them so much as glanced across the street where he hid. Who would imagine a man jumping thirty meters across the road? They evidently did not.

  Luthor struggled back to the crushed patch of wheat where he had landed. He lay down and passed out.

  END OF PART I

  PART II:

  NEW YORK

  Chapter 15:

  Sixteen Years Ago

  Luthor scratched the back of his hand. A pink scar stared back at him. A small bead of blood bloomed up from the middle of it. Mental note: quit scratching it or it’ll never heal. It was still odd knowing that there was a miniature transmitter in there, constantly broadcasting his presence and just waiting to be scanned. It had been almost two years since the Paris 2 protocols had gone into effect. Since that time no one had been able to buy or sell anything without a CPI scan, and paper money had been completely abolished in the developed world.

  Though to be fair, paper money had gone the way of the dinosaurs well before Paris 2. It had done so when the UN rebranded itself as the Carbon Enforcement Coalition and established the new currency of carbon credits. The goal of the policy had been to curb carbon emissions by directly influencing the market. Everything bought or sold was required to have Dollar value and a carbon credit value. If the Coalition wanted to lower emissions, it could simply lower the number of carbon credits in Circulation.

  What few people predicted was the effect of a second required currency on world markets. There were far fewer carbon credits flowing around the economy than dollars and euros. People could have millions in the bank, but without carbon credits to go with those dollars, they couldn’t buy bread. It hadn’t taken long before the value of carbon credits dwarfed every other currency. Regular currencies tanked in value and people began exchanging dollars for credits at exorbitant rates. Lucrative crypto-currencies virtually disappeared overnight. Inflation exponentially climbed as people emptied their savings and retirements to buy the elusive credits. Luthor didn’t know what the exchange rate finally reached, but had seen people taking briefcases of cash to banks to exchange them. The Credit had long since become the only currency that mattered, which worked well now that everyone had a CPI chip. Perhaps that was their plan all along.

  Luthor looked across campus to see yet another raucous protest. He wondered which extremist group had commandeered the Loop
this time. Yesterday the 2180ers had whipped a crowd into a frenzy and stormed downtown. The demagogues had been warning about the looming Oil Crash and that coal could save us. The morons had tried to light city hall on fire with flaming flags. Sure, banning coal had been a difficult decision to make, particularly in the USA. They were too coal-dependent for it to be an easy transition. Energy prices ballooned, which exacerbated the problem of the exponentially rising price of gasoline.

  Just because it was hard, didn’t mean it wasn’t necessary. CO2 emissions had to be lowered if the planet was going to survive. The Paris 2 computer models were unequivocal in the amount of time left to change course. If mankind didn’t slash emissions in five years it would be too late to be able to turn the climate around in time. It meant that everyone was going to have to make sacrifices—big ones— not light the world on fire. Banning coal was just one such sacrifice. Why couldn’t they understand that? Besides, they still had oil if they really wanted to burn something. Oil was too hard-wired into the infrastructure for the government to ban it too.

  Chaz walked with Luthor to their next class. They were close enough to hear the bullhorn wielding man doing his best to incite another riot. He was spouting wild rhetoric about how CPI chips and carbon regulations were ushering in the “End Times”. Not another 2180 rally then. The burgeoning crowd held the same signs Luthor had been seeing for the last few years in similar gatherings. “The End is Here,” was raised on posters next to “CPI = 666” and “Revelation 13:16-17.”