Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World
- Автор: Мосли Уолтер
- Год: 2001
- Язык: английский
- Год: Aspect / Warner Books
- ISBN: 978-0-446-52954-9
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World». Краткое содержание книги:
“Oh shit!” Jamey spat. He doubled over in the seat next to Harold.
“What’s wrong, Jamey?”
“Pain.”
“Sit up, man. Sit up.” Harold put a hand against his friend’s chest and jerked him up.
“Something wrong up there?” a man from behind asked.
“Just dropped his chip,” Harold said, glancing back. He saw the worried elderly man who sat behind them.
“Is he sick?” the old man asked.
“No. Dropped his chip. We got it. It’s okay.”
The man looked unconvinced but he still leaned back.
“You can’t let ’em know you’re hurting, Jamey. If you do they might kick us off.”
Jamey nodded, gritting his teeth against the pain.
The bus rolled out of the northern borders of New York onto the Canadian Highway. Harold watched closely over his friend, who tried his best to stay still under the waves of deep pain that wracked him at irregular intervals.
“The Russians are right,” someone behind said. “It’s probably one of those bio-tech companies made the plague. Break the corporations and burn the dead. If we want to survive that’s what we have to do too.”
“Yeah,” a woman agreed.
“It’s terrible,” someone else exclaimed.
Outside the window there was nothing but the dark outline of trees and pools of gray grasses under a quarter moon. Harold wondered how much Jamey weighed.
“Oh shit!” Jamey screamed.
He had been able to sleep for a couple of hours while the bus cruised down the unusually crowded highway, but now the pain brought him up to his feet.
“He’s got it!” the elderly man said to the young woman sitting next to him. “I told you, Gina. He’s got it.”
“Oh shit it hurts!” Jamey yelled. “Help me.”
“He ain’t got nuthin’,” Harold hissed at the couple. “He hurt himself in soccer is all. It’s a muscle.”
“You said he dropped his chip before.”
“Mind your own business before you get dropped,” Harold warned.
In his peripheral vision he saw a shadow slip down the stairs.
“Does he?” a woman asked. “Does he have it?”
“Have what? He don’t have nuthin’. There isn’t any plague,” Harold said.
Three men had gotten to their feet.
Harold wished that he had elected judo on Sports-Wednesday at high school instead of volleyball.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” Jamey chanted. He fell back down into his seat and then collapsed onto the floor.
“You better get him the fuck off’a this bus, man,” one of the standing men said. His tone was threatening but he didn’t advance.
Harold realized that Jamey had the invisible force field of communicability around him.
Everyone standing had to grab something to stay on their feet because the bus swerved and came to an abrupt halt. Harold stole a glance at Jamey, who was sprawled in the aisle, and then at the stairwell leading down.
The bus driver, a big-boned woman with red hair and deeply tanned skin, ascended to the cabin in three steps.
“What’s goin’ on up here?” she asked.
Harold simply stared.
“That guy has the plague,” someone said.
The bus driver took a step backward.
“He does?” she asked Harold.
“He’s sick,” Harold said. “But there hasn’t been any plague announced by the health board.”
“Half of Russia’s dead and he says there’s no plague,” one of the standing men said.
“They say the niggers don’t get it no way,” another man, of questionable race, said.
“All right, enough of that now,” the driver said. “It’s a punishable offense to slander race.”
“And look at what good it gets us,” the elderly man spat. The driver seemed to consider the senseless sentence. “I’m going to have to put him off the bus.”
“Who?” Harold asked.
“Your friend.”
“What for?”
“I got a hundred and fifty passengers on this bus, son. I’ve never carried even half that. They pulled out the lower seats, they broke the rules by making passengers stand while the bus is in motion. Something’s happening. I don’t know what it is but I can’t jeopardize this whole bus just ’cause the uppers aren’t talking.”
“I need my trunk,” Jamey whined. “I need my trunk.”
Getting off of the bus was fairly easy. The driver made Harold pull the trunk out of the top hatch. She told the passengers she was taking the precaution against further infection.
No one tried to bar the friends’ way. Scared faces of all races witnessed their departure. Harold saw that some of them had scars on their necks and faces, reminders of the striped flu.
“We got to take my trunk, Hair. Everything I got’s in there.”
“We’ll leave it in the trees, J,” Harold promised. “We’ll leave it in the trees and come back when you’re better.”
“Where we gonna go?”
“Looks like everybody from Plintheville’s leavin’. Look at all them cars and busses comin’ on the highway. They’re evacuating. They’re leaving their houses.”
“So?”
“We could hole up in an abandoned house until you get over that cramp.”
The walk through the woods was the hardest work that Harold had ever done. When he didn’t have to drag Jamey he supported his friend’s weight. It took them three hours to make it through the woods and hills to a tiny cul-de-sac of homes in what they assumed was Plintheville.
Harold left Jamey in the woods and watched one home for over an hour. The whole block seemed deserted, but Harold wanted to make sure. If the world wasn’t over he didn’t want to wish that it was from some corporate prison cell.
Just before dawn a bright blast lit up the southern sky. When Harold saw the iridescent mushroom cloud he was no longer worried about jail.
Jamey never moved from the couch in the sunken living room where Harold deposited him. He lay there and wasted away like billions of others were doing all across the globe.
For the first day Harold held his friend’s hand while watching ITV. Newscasters talked openly about the plague that ghostnet had been broadcasting for days. The pain and bloody stripes were associated with the striped flu. Doctors were saying that it was the secondary phase of the virus. They had known that the virus stayed in the nervous system but had no idea that it would return with such ferocity.
The nuclear strikes against New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles were minor news topics compared to the plague.
The disease was 100 percent fatal and everybody got it; everybody but people with at least 12.5 percent African Negro DNA.
For thirty-six hours Harold and Jamey watched the reports. Thousands of bodies were being thrown into rivers and the sea. Roving mobs of black and white ruffians were battling in the streets of the major American cities. Astonished Caucasians who survived the plague realized that there was a sizeable portion of Negro blood in their veins.
One newscaster ran a clip from Chicago’s Electro-Exposé which showed the towering figure of Cowled Death rising over a white man only to be stymied when the white man pulled open his shirt to reveal the words THE NIG IN ME: 12.5 %.
After two days all vid communication went blank.
Harold and Jamey spent the empty hours talking about their lives. Jamey told about his delinquent father and his mother’s sister who raised him. Harold thanked Jamey for letting him have Yasmine.
“She woulda gone for you in a minute,” Harold told his pain-wracked friend.