Scarcity

by Robert Calbeck

  Silence never lasted long in Anti. A volley of American cruise missiles blasted by, crushing the sound barrier in their wake. They’d sent them in as soon as they had confirmation that the missile defenses had been destroyed. Harmonizing with the sonic boom came the Chinese reply. A barely detectable whine, whistled the prelude of the artillery strike. A deafening explosion off their left flank became the herald of the familiar battle melody like a cymbal in Luthor’s ears.

  Stunned from the shockwave, Luthor looked up from the ground to see Garcia waving his arms frantically, trying to give them orders to defend against the counterattack. If only Luthor could hear him over the ringing that filled his head.

  #

  Aurora, IL, United States of the West

  “I still can’t believe you’re alive.” Qwiz said into a computer mic attached to Luthor’s old phone. His voice modulator disguised his voice so Stalker wouldn’t be able to identify him. It made him sound like an overweight demon. He had also taken digital precautions so the censors wouldn’t be able to find his location.

  “I figure if 100 million Chinese couldn’t manage it, what chance do a few guys in gelvar have?” The voice had not named itself but it could have only been Luthor. Qwiz knew if he was calling he would be worried about censors overhearing. Since Stalker’s men had blown up Luthor’s apartment, he had been considered a national security threat. “We also owe a great debt to our new friends.”

  After all the stories coming in from New York that week, it seemed all but certain he had died in the same gunfight that had killed ten others. Qwiz had agonized that he should have done more to save them. But they were alive. He hadn’t failed. His honor remained.

  “I called in and told them you were extremely dangerous. I hoped to get you extra protection from the Stalker.”

  “So that’s what your Vanguard call was about! I had been wondering. But who is the Stalker?”

  “I don’t know his true identity. It’s my codename for the diabolical man who seems to be behind everything. I think he works for the European Union.”

  “That’s what we had assumed too. But the men who kidnapped us were definitely American.”

  “He had someone he was communicating with here in the USW.”

  “What does that mean? I thought we weren’t getting along with Europe.”

  “I’m still working on that one. I’ve only been in the system for a few days. Maybe they want to share your research to use against China.”

  “Keep looking into it. Hopefully we can compare notes soon. Unfortunately, we have more pressing problems.”

  “I thought things were going well.”

  “We lost the laptop in the explosion.”

  Qwiz smiled to himself. “I have some good news for you then. I managed to save the research and the… substance. It’s in a safe place. Don’t worry.”

  “Fantastic!” Luthor shouted something away from the phone and a few people cheered. “We weren’t even sure you were alive until you called the station. You are remarkable; your father would be proud.”

  Qwiz blushed, he couldn’t help it. His father was a great man, even if his allegiance to a country as morally bankrupt as China was misplaced. “Thank you for warning me. They arrived minutes after you called. We barely escaped with our lives.”

  “Now for the hard part. We have to get to you.”

  “What is your plan?”

  “They think I’m an international terrorist remember? I’m not sure it’s smart for me to say over the phone.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  “I’m sure you can figure it out.”

  “I will do my best, but there are a lot of lies being spread about you. It is going to be hard to get any solid information to start from. The media is blaming you for everything from that New York helicopter crash to global warming.”

  Luthor laughed, “for once they got something right, I did blow up the helicopter.”

  How on earth did you manage that? I better not ask, it would reveal too much.

  “We are following up on a lead today. It’s in the suburbs...”

  “Is it really necessary to risk that?” Qwiz said. Nobody went to the suburbs anymore without twenty to fifty, gun-toting bodyguards to watch their back. Qwiz himself had not been to one since he had lived there as a child. carbon police didn’t even bother patrolling the ghost towns unless they were on a major train or food-shipping route. The only people that frequented suburbs were the ubiquitous scavenger companies, trying to salvage everything they could from the pre-Oil Crash era—that is, everything that hadn’t already been looted. And they did so with a private army. Squatters, looters, and Markless roamed the burbs in packs. The stories Qwiz had heard made him shiver. Supposedly, the rival gangs constantly hunted for food in the abandoned houses and raided other gangs’ food stores. Raids were supposedly bloody and frequent. Some well-armed gangs would hunt live food. Abandoned zoos and pets had transformed the streets into a wild game preserve, there were plenty of dogs and deer to go around.

  “We don’t see any other options.”

  “Be careful. Please.”

  “Always. We need to be on our way. We will call in a few days with an update. If something happens, our friends live outside an Italian restaurant.”

  “There have got to be a lot of those in New York.”

  “Sorry, I can’t risk the sensors finding our friends with anything more specific.”

  Qwiz ended the call, pulling up his email. His father had emailed again.

  #

  New York City, United States of the West

  “The pale horse still rides,” Roc said as they walked, gesturing at the poor Markless shuffling around the street. In every alley homeless clustered for warmth or companionship. They had replaced rats as the dominant species living in the gutters of New York City. They walked with the same purposeless, haunted expression Luthor had seen days before in the woman who had accosted him. Their desperation seemed to filter out into the street. Men and women held signs pleading for the smallest assistance, yet were certain they would not receive any.

  “What are you talking about?” Luthor said. He didn’t see any horses. The rickshaws clogging the street were all being pulled by men on foot or bicycle. There wasn’t a car to be seen, so he couldn’t be referring to horse-power either.

  “The fourth horsemen of the apocalypse.”

  “Oh, another Bible thing,” Luthor said dismissively. He enjoyed Roc’s company, but Luthor could have done with less religious prattling.

  “I wouldn’t say it is just a ‘Bible thing’ any more, Luthor. At this point it is history.”

  Tanya sidled up between them, listening intently. He didn’t know if she was waxing religious again or what, but she hung on the man’s every word. “History?”

  Damn it, Tanya, now he is going to start preaching.

  Sure enough, Roc pulled out a little leather-bound Bible and flipped to the back of it, though he did not read. “The four horsemen of the apocalypse come from the sixth chapter of Revelation. They represent the beginning of God’s judgment of humanity and are heralds of the end times. This is another point where I disagree with the Catholic Church. I believe these horsemen have already come, and that the last of them, Death—who rides the pale horse— hasn’t yet left. You can see his remnants with the dying and suffering people here in the city.”

  “What were the other horsemen?” Michael asked, looking intrigued. Michael had never shown any interest in God before. But that was the effect Roc had on people, it was hard not to listen to him. He made too much sense and the purposefulness with which he led his life was infectious, even if misguided.

  “Chapter six says the first horsemen came on a white horse, bent on conquest. The Church always believed that the horse was white to represent a conquering king. In biblical days, a victorious king would always ride home on a white horse. But I have come to think that the white actually represented Antarctica and that the conqueror was not a king
, but China taking over the Titan Dome oil field. That is the event that triggered everything else.”

  Luthor raised an eyebrow. What the old man said did sound like history, not the religious blather of the bullhorn touting nut-jobs he’d heard in college—particularly since Roc disagreed with the rest of the Church. No one who disagreed with the Church could be totally wrong.

  “That makes more sense than most of the poster-waving I have seen. But it still sounds like coincidence to me.”

  “That is what my brothers who still serve in the Church say. They hotly disagree with me, saying that the rider must conquer the whole world. They say of the many areas China conquered, that one happened to be white doesn’t seem like prophesy. They say it seems like a rather generous coincidence.”

  “But you believe it,” Tanya said.

  “Yes. When taken with the rest of the horsemen and what actually happened in history, it fits perfectly.”

  “What’s the next horseman?” Michael asked.

  “That’s easy,” said Thaddeus, “it’s War.” The priest had brought him along for protection, leaving DeShawn as leader of the Tony’s group. He acted as if he were trying to impress Roc with everything he said.

  “Yes, the bible tells us the next horse is red. The rider—War— was given the power to take peace from the earth. It is rather hard to discount that World War III took place on a scale that would have been unimaginable to any other generation in history. I would say peace was indeed taken from the whole Earth.”

  Luthor nodded, he certainly could attest to that. Upwards of 300 million people were killed just from the bombs and bullets. It made World War II look like a single battle, and World War I look like a bar fight. The war had raged from the Arctic Circle to the South Pole and the location of every oil field and power station in-between. Not a single country had been able to remain neutral. Those that tried had been swallowed up by the Coalition or the Chinese Block.

  Tanya prodded Roc to continue, and though Luthor said nothing, he too found himself strangely interested in hearing the rest of Roc’s strange, but compelling interpretations of the Bible.

  “The third horseman came riding on a black horse. This is the horse of Famine. The scripture says this rider would announce that a loaf of bread would cost a day’s wages. The church has said that it was black because it is the color of death. But I believe the black represents oil. Since we had no oil, and the allied governments had outlawed all other types of fossil fuels, we didn’t have sufficient energy to grow enough food. Most of it we did grow went to the war effort, leaving the rest of the population on the brink of starvation. It was simple, brutal, supply and demand. Scarcity of oil inexorably led to high prices on everything else.”

  “The Culling,” Michael said. Father Roc nodded soberly.

  Tanya shuddered. “I only had one loaf of bread a week.”

  “Poor baby,” Michael said, “imagine life on the street!”

  “You,” Tanya’s voice quivered, “you were on the street?”

  “Yeah, I was.” Michael said stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. Luthor had never heard him talk about his childhood before. He jabbed a long finger in Tanya’s face, “my mom became a prostitute trying to feed us and then starved to death. I didn’t have a Dad to help, he was just some one-night stand. Don’t talk to me about how bad it was for you, Miss College. At least you had some food.”

  “How did you survive?” she asked, a tear rolling down her cheek.

  “Well, after my mom died trying to keep my sister and I alive, shit got real hard. Sister got fucked for a living too. They paid her in food and she shared some with me. I spent my days wandering around the sewers hunting rats for us. I was lucky to get one, because everyone else was doing the same smogging thing.”

  Tanya didn’t say anything more, but tears flowed freely down both sides of her face.

  “When I turned 18, they held one more draft, I volunteered quick. I thought I might get some food and some warmth. Right after I finished basic, the war was over. Fine with me. I got the GI bill to pay for school even though I never fought. My sister? She died of AIDS she got from some prick who paid extra to forgo the condom.”

  “I’m so sorry, Michael.”

  Michael scowled. “What was that last horseman again Roc, wasn’t it the brown horse of bullshit?”

  “There is no need for that,” said Roc, furrowing his brows, “just because you had a worse situation does not invalidate someone else’s experience.”

  “I didn’t know, Michael.” Tanya said, “I never meant to hurt you.”

  Luthor decided to redirect the conversation. Even the Bible was better than bickering.

  Even Michael didn’t know true desperation and Luthor wasn’t about to enlighten them. “Tell us about the last horseman, Roc.”

  They started walking again. After a long pause the priest continued. “The last horsemen, in my opinion, is the most convincing of all. His name is Death, and he rode a pale horse. It says in the Scripture he is given the power to kill by sword, famine, and plague.”

  “What about guns and explosives?” Luthor said.

  “The sword has been a euphemism for all weapons of war for thousands of years,” said Roc without a hint of sarcasm. “Tell me Luthor, how many people died in the midst of the Oil Crash, the Culling, and war? Total.”

  “I have heard estimates between 2 Billion and 2.5 Billion.”

  “Exactly. The prophesy says the pale horseman will kill one quarter of the Earth’s population. Before the war the population was about 8.5 Billion. A quarter of that would be between 2 to 2.5 billion.”

  “And people died from the war, starvation, or the plague,” Michael said, looking genuinely impressed. “I saw it. People dropping from the plague and not getting up again— smogging rat fleas. Or they would just give up looking for food and lay down to die. Priest, I have to admit, that is a compelling coincidence.”

  “For me, at a certain point, too many coincidences add up for them to remain mere coincidences anymore.”

  It was a bit hard to swallow as mere coincidence. But truthfully, if Luthor himself had predicted the end of the world, he might have predicted something similar. Of course, Roc said that Revelation was probably written almost 2000 years ago; who was to say that they would have had the same sensibilities.

  They continued their walk north. After several hours Michael brought up a conversation that had been shelved the night before. “You never did tell us who you thought the Beast was. We have all day now and I’m bored. How about another sermon?”

  “If you wish. What the Church never considered was that the Beast might not be a person. The scripture does personify the Beast, but it wouldn’t be the first time the scripture did that about something that wasn’t a person. For example, the Old Testament often described the entire nation of Israel as an adulterous woman.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. What is the Beast then? China? Oil? Girl Scout cookies?”

  “I think the Beast isn’t a group of people, or a thing. I think it is an idea.” Roc said dramatically. “In today’s world, we don’t bow down and worship people as much as ideas or philosophies. People worship the idea of wealth or worldly success and spend their whole life chasing them. We worship the idea of romantic love and are often willing to betray our loved ones to chase after it in an affair. We worship our political philosophies to the point of demonizing anyone who doesn’t share them.”

  “Lame Roc. The Beast is politics?” Michael said.

  “No, Politics are inherently divisive. The Beast is an idea; an idea that has to be universally accepted. The scripture says almost everyone will worship it. It also has to be associated with CPI or else it wouldn’t be the Mark of the Beast. So what idea does everyone believe that connects to the chip in your right hands?”

  Realization flushed across Tanya’s face. “You think the Beast is the idea of global warming.”

  “Yes. Or perhaps more specifically, the fear of man-made cl
imate change.”

  “But climate change is scientifically proven!” Michael said. “The carbon regulations have saved this planet from flooding. How could something true be the Beast?”

  “Who ever said that the Beast couldn’t be true? It just has to be worshipped. Being true would make it more compelling to worship, don’t you think?”

  “But people don’t worship science,” Michael said.

  “They don’t?” Roc asked. “In ancient times, worship took the form of sacrifices. People would sacrifice animals, wealth, and sometimes even their own children to appease angry gods and stop them from destroying the Earth. Worship doesn’t have to be singing hymns or bowing to a statue. Our world worshipped the Beast by sacrificing everything to stop climate change—just as if they were trying to appease an angry god. Paris 2, carbon enforcement, CPI, banning of coal and natural gas, all of it was sacrificed to fight climate change despite the hardships they imposed on people. And they did it to stop the earth from being destroyed, just like in ancient times. It sounds like worship to me.”

  “But those things were necessary.”

  “Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t,” Roc said. “That is irrelevant. The important thing is that each of those things set up a situation where we fought World War III in Antarctica.”