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Ficlet: The Walk
Anchorage, 2040.
It's December in Anchorage and it's raining. There isn't a speck of snow to be seen and the air smells faintly of rot. A mold, greener than summer grass, is crawling all over everything. The newsfeeds say its an engineered strain, accidentally released by college students raiding a biotech lab somewhere in Asia. The government is saying the mold's no danger to anyone, but no one believes it. Walking down 6th Avenue, most of the people Henry Jorganson has met are wearing breathers. Everyone is swaddled in disposable plastic ponchos, against the tainted rain. Henry feels like a plastic ghost in his and is quietly amused by the fact that people refer to the ponchos as condom-coats. Use once and then recycle. The thought makes him grin beneath his mask.
His afternoon constitutional has brought him to the corner of 6th Avenue and A Street. The FBI building used to sit there, occupying the whole block before the Big Quake. Now it's just a concrete lot, overgrown with weeds and strewn with rubble.
There's a young fair-haired fellow on his hands and knees, vomiting his guts out. He smells foul, of stale urine and unwashed meat. The man looks up, betraying himself with the red biohazard troika tattooed on his forehead. He watched Henry with hopeless eyes before wiping his mouth and staggering to his feet. He totters away and Henry gives the fellow a wide berth.
A moment later, Henry pushes onward, crossing A Street. On the opposite side of 6th Avenue, stands the skeletal ruins of the museum. Like most of the city, it never recovered from the Big Quake, that hit the region back in Oh-Nineteen. One of the few buildings that did manage to bounce back rises before Henry. The Fifth Avenue Mall is little changed, structurally at least, from what it once was. But there are no shops inside the building now, just a warren of social service agencies: Disability, Health & Safety, Retirement. Bottom feeders living off the scraps that float down to them, from Wasilla and the SLC. Only these days the scraps are few and far between. Welfare agencies are out of favor with the politicians and the public. Nowadays, self-reliance is all.
Past the Mall, the cracked and broken streets are full of people. Bums asking for handouts, Civil War vets buys blank from a licensed dealer, a Pro-Lifer shoving waxy leaflets at anyone who gets to close. A street vendor has set up his cart in the middle of the avenue, selling questionable meat to people too hungry to wonder where it came from. A gaggle of oldies trudge by him, clutching tickets for Euthanasia in their claw-like hands.
Henry pushes on, leaving the Mall behind and reaching Town Square. Even in the good old bad old days of YouTube and Social Security, Town Square wasn't much of a park. Today, its concrete paths snake past dead brown lawns. At the west end, the burned out shell of the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts, the PAC, still manages to loom. Everyone says it will fall one day, but they said the same thing about the McLaughlin Building and it's still standing.
South of the park, across the scorched and cratered street, is the Federal Police Station. Henry can remember when the space was occupied by mom-and-pop stores. Covenant House used to sit on the corner. All gone now, replaced by the ugly, squat building. Concrete barricades block the entrances and the FedPols on guard, in their army surplus body armor, look like extras in a cheap sci-fi movie. No one walks in front of the FedPol station. The last bombing is still too fresh in the public's mind.
Henry pauses to fiddle with his mask. While he does, he notices another oldie trundling along. Hard to tell if its a man or a woman, beneath the shapeless green raincoat and gray hair. Henry thinks its a man, but its hard to tell. The oldie is pushing a wire cart in front of him, wheezing over the pushbar. Watching him stagger down the street, Henry thinks that there but for the grace of God goes I.
The thought makes his right arm itch and burn with phantom pain. Its the arm where they gave him the shots of Extension. The treatment was damned expensive, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. And, at least in his case, he got a batch of the real stuff. None of the knockoffs that gave people cancer or produced fatal autoimmune responses. No, Henry got the real deal and got to watch the world slide over the precipice.
Satisfied that his mask is secure, Henry starts walking again. He's in the wasteland now, among the shattered, rubble-strewn ruins of the West Side. All the buildings here, the ones still standing, were condemned ages ago. That hasn't stopped the squatters and ghosts from claiming them. No one cares.
Where 6th Avenues met L Street, the ground abruptly gives way. When the Big Quake hit, this whole section of downtown turned to jelly and slid into the Inlet. From this spot, Henry can look down and see the ruins of resturaunts and hotels. Beyond them, the Inlet lies flat and gray, mirroring the sky above. The wind blows off the water, cool and damp against Henry's exposed face.
He stands on the edge of the world for a long time, then reaches up with clammy fingers to remove the mask. He takes a deep breath and then another, thinking of engineered mold spores and toxic rain, then waits to see if anything will happen.
It's December in Anchorage and it's raining. There isn't a speck of snow to be seen and the air smells faintly of rot. A mold, greener than summer grass, is crawling all over everything. The newsfeeds say its an engineered strain, accidentally released by college students raiding a biotech lab somewhere in Asia. The government is saying the mold's no danger to anyone, but no one believes it. Walking down 6th Avenue, most of the people Henry Jorganson has met are wearing breathers. Everyone is swaddled in disposable plastic ponchos, against the tainted rain. Henry feels like a plastic ghost in his and is quietly amused by the fact that people refer to the ponchos as condom-coats. Use once and then recycle. The thought makes him grin beneath his mask.
His afternoon constitutional has brought him to the corner of 6th Avenue and A Street. The FBI building used to sit there, occupying the whole block before the Big Quake. Now it's just a concrete lot, overgrown with weeds and strewn with rubble.
There's a young fair-haired fellow on his hands and knees, vomiting his guts out. He smells foul, of stale urine and unwashed meat. The man looks up, betraying himself with the red biohazard troika tattooed on his forehead. He watched Henry with hopeless eyes before wiping his mouth and staggering to his feet. He totters away and Henry gives the fellow a wide berth.
A moment later, Henry pushes onward, crossing A Street. On the opposite side of 6th Avenue, stands the skeletal ruins of the museum. Like most of the city, it never recovered from the Big Quake, that hit the region back in Oh-Nineteen. One of the few buildings that did manage to bounce back rises before Henry. The Fifth Avenue Mall is little changed, structurally at least, from what it once was. But there are no shops inside the building now, just a warren of social service agencies: Disability, Health & Safety, Retirement. Bottom feeders living off the scraps that float down to them, from Wasilla and the SLC. Only these days the scraps are few and far between. Welfare agencies are out of favor with the politicians and the public. Nowadays, self-reliance is all.
Past the Mall, the cracked and broken streets are full of people. Bums asking for handouts, Civil War vets buys blank from a licensed dealer, a Pro-Lifer shoving waxy leaflets at anyone who gets to close. A street vendor has set up his cart in the middle of the avenue, selling questionable meat to people too hungry to wonder where it came from. A gaggle of oldies trudge by him, clutching tickets for Euthanasia in their claw-like hands.
Henry pushes on, leaving the Mall behind and reaching Town Square. Even in the good old bad old days of YouTube and Social Security, Town Square wasn't much of a park. Today, its concrete paths snake past dead brown lawns. At the west end, the burned out shell of the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts, the PAC, still manages to loom. Everyone says it will fall one day, but they said the same thing about the McLaughlin Building and it's still standing.
South of the park, across the scorched and cratered street, is the Federal Police Station. Henry can remember when the space was occupied by mom-and-pop stores. Covenant House used to sit on the corner. All gone now, replaced by the ugly, squat building. Concrete barricades block the entrances and the FedPols on guard, in their army surplus body armor, look like extras in a cheap sci-fi movie. No one walks in front of the FedPol station. The last bombing is still too fresh in the public's mind.
Henry pauses to fiddle with his mask. While he does, he notices another oldie trundling along. Hard to tell if its a man or a woman, beneath the shapeless green raincoat and gray hair. Henry thinks its a man, but its hard to tell. The oldie is pushing a wire cart in front of him, wheezing over the pushbar. Watching him stagger down the street, Henry thinks that there but for the grace of God goes I.
The thought makes his right arm itch and burn with phantom pain. Its the arm where they gave him the shots of Extension. The treatment was damned expensive, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. And, at least in his case, he got a batch of the real stuff. None of the knockoffs that gave people cancer or produced fatal autoimmune responses. No, Henry got the real deal and got to watch the world slide over the precipice.
Satisfied that his mask is secure, Henry starts walking again. He's in the wasteland now, among the shattered, rubble-strewn ruins of the West Side. All the buildings here, the ones still standing, were condemned ages ago. That hasn't stopped the squatters and ghosts from claiming them. No one cares.
Where 6th Avenues met L Street, the ground abruptly gives way. When the Big Quake hit, this whole section of downtown turned to jelly and slid into the Inlet. From this spot, Henry can look down and see the ruins of resturaunts and hotels. Beyond them, the Inlet lies flat and gray, mirroring the sky above. The wind blows off the water, cool and damp against Henry's exposed face.
He stands on the edge of the world for a long time, then reaches up with clammy fingers to remove the mask. He takes a deep breath and then another, thinking of engineered mold spores and toxic rain, then waits to see if anything will happen.