Sunfall Chapter 1

The first chapter from Sunfall:

 

When the sun rose in the morning, the city was awash with green; abandoned skyscrapers transformed into farming towers; microalgae facades putting the lie to the privation that defined the lives of the fringe dwellers.

 

The buildings were tailored to provide energy and food in times of drought and resource depletion. The population of the world was increasing at an exponential rate, while the benefits of late twenty-first century progress were affordable only to the archons of the citadels.  Pundits celebrated an age of promise and plenty, yet there was little hope for the twenty-second century on the wrong side of the citadel walls.

 

After the great implosion, unpaid debts rendered most Americans destitute while those who’d reaped the benefits retreated into walled cities where every comfort could be relished without needless reminders that others weren’t so fortunate.

 

Although the greenscaped buildings were located in the freezone, they did not belong to the inhabitants; rather, the promises were farmed for the benefit of the citadel citizens who were eager to expand. Each location was heavily guarded, to keep out any fringe dwellers presumptuous enough to lay claim to any cultivated crops.

 

Inhabitants of the freezones were given opportunities to purchase the food product at inflated prices. The higher cost was necessary to account for processing expenses since food had to be chemically treated to comply with safety protocols.

 

Rumor had it that everything fed to fringers was laced with a variety of medications designed to ensure complacency and sloth.  There was no proof of it, but Meg knew that rumor often had a habit of proving to be true.

 

Praised for her height, Meg would have preferred being small since a diminutive stature would have made it much easier to escape notice. ‘Good freezone stock,’ they called her, as if her willowy frame would ever be much use in hand-to hand combat. Besides, it was an age of remote exterminations, and default judgments that sentenced defiant populations to food and drug denial.

 

A fringer was only one removed from a pariah, and a pariah could never be trusted again. The state routinely waged war against recalcitrants and freelanders who, it was said, would murder every freezoner before the citadels were stormed.

 

Advertisements lauded the ‘age of tomorrow,’ but Meg knew it was an age of war and disease, of forced starvation as a cure for scarcity.  And it was the height of irony to call their overcrowded, unruly prison a freezone. At least freelanders didn’t owe allegiance to anyone but themselves. Freezoners lived at the behest of citadel masters who expected unflinching obedience.

 

Meg knew fringers deserved better, and that if it weren’t for the likes of her brother Cal peddling overpriced citadel mood enhancers to people desperate for deliverance, real or imagined.

 

She loved her brother but she hated what he’d become: a creature of the citadel, dispensing meds under the foolish assumption that one day he’d be invited to live in the citadel as a citizen with all the rights and privileges that came of full citizenship. He wasn’t one of them, yet Cal labored under the assumption he could earn acceptance into the ranks.

 

“They use you,” she told him, her face close to his. They were the same height, born only two minutes apart, and yet they couldn’t have been more different.

 

“You should be thanking me,” he answered, his gaze averted. “What do you think kept mom alive so long?” he demanded, disappearing to his room.

 

Meg never knew her father, but her mother had always been at her side; and now she was losing her. When it wasn’t delirium, it was shivers and convulsions. They’d all been drinking unfiltered water from the local cistern. Her mother was always sure to boil it, but boiling only killed the organisms. The poisons could never been filtered out, and thirty years of accumulating toxins was all her mother could withstand.

 

Cal brought their mother system stabilizers and desensitizers. He fed her heavy doses of Easy before realizing he had to balance that with equal doses of Bang.  Whatever symptom she revealed, he was ready with a cure; and yet her health deteriorated rapidly, her weakened state soon becoming virtually comatose. Moments of lucidity were few and far between, and Meg knew because she was almost always by her mother’s side.

 

Meg and her brother knew it was inevitable. Their mother Jess was going to die. Meg blamed forces beyond her control , and she blamed Cal. Cal blamed no one. He accepted fate.

 

“You’ll have to do something when she’s gone,” her brother remarked over supper.

 

“She’s not going anywhere,” she answered, aggrieved that he could speak of mother’s death after she’d prepared their meal. Taking care of both Cal and her mother never felt so thankless. Yet, she preferred life at home to the swagger and fury of the streets. The life of the freezoner was a forbidding one, desperation and violence the norm, but it was what she’d been given.

 

“Maybe it’s for the best,” remarked Cal.

 

“You want her gone,” she answered, convinced she was the only one who loved her mother.

 

“You want her for you,” he replied. “But what about her? How do you think she feels? She knows what you do for her but she wanted what was best for you. She knows she’s holding you back.”

 

“I wish I could do more.”

 

“And when she’s gone? What then? What happens to you?”

 

Meg didn’t like open-ended possibilities. She preferred the reassurance of expectation and duty. She wanted family and she wanted her plants. She was proud of her rooftop garden because it was hers and it was the only beautiful thing in her life that didn’t belong to someone else. It was her mother who’d hauled up the soil and who’d located the seeds; and it was Meg who planted them, nurturing the seedlings until more soil was needed. It was Cal who found the sprinkler system, which was hard to find in time of water shortage; and she was grateful for his surprising generosity. It was a pity he was usually so disconnected.

 

“What happens when I’m gone,” continued Cal. “How will you manage?”

 

Meg wanted Cal to shut his mouth, and yet she knew his concerns were valid. She didn’t know what would happen when Mom died, although there was every reason to hope she’d make a full recovery.

 

Finishing her meal in silence, she climbed the fire escape to the roof and to her garden, surrounded by juniper, hydrangia and lavender. The petunias were already in full bloom despite the oppressive city heat; though it was always too hot throughout the year.

 

Meg heard stories of ice and snow, but had yet to set eyes on such things. She wouldn’t have known it was too hot if her mother hadn’t explained how much the weather had turned over the years and how varying seasons became a year-long summer.

 

She’d learned to appreciate the rain because of her mother, and because it had been their good fortune to live just under the roof of their apartment complex, it was her mother’s practice to leave out pots to collect precipitation. Everyone had filters, although they were no use against the chem water that dribbled from the faucets and shower heads. They were supposed to be grateful for running water but Meg knew it was like death. It was why they collected water from the sky.

 

Meg expected another uneventful evening when Cal took her by the hand and led her to mother’s room.

 

Jess’ mouth was open, her hands resting on soiled bed sheets. The smell was sickening.

 

“We can’t leave her like this,” explained Meg as she loosened the sheet from the mattress.

 

“How long’s she been like this?” he asked, glowering as if she’d done something wrong.

 

“She’ll be fine,” answered Meg. “You’d best go. I have to change her.”

 

“She’s dead. Probably been dead for days. Or didn’t you notice?”

 

“Get out,” she answered. His words were like poison.

 

Cal was sitting by his mother’s side, his hand over hers. “She’s frozen. And there’s no heartbeat, or don’t you know about the heart?”

 

“I know more than you do,” she replied, panicked by the possibility her brother was right.

 

“You’ve been caring for a dead woman, Meg.”

 

“You never come in here. Why did you come in here? What do you know? She’s in my care. Not yours. And everything will be fine.”

 

Cal shook his head, a tear cresting near his eye lid.

 

“I didn’t think you cared about her,” she answered, startled by her brother’s unexpected display of emotion.

 

“You’re the one I worry about,” he answered, taking a hand to his mother’s forehead before standing.

 

“Mom,” she said, her mother’s hands in hers. They’d never before felt so cold. “You’ll be fine. Don’t leave us. We need you. We’ll always need you.”

 

As Cal placed his hand atop hers, she recoiled. But she wanted his hand, and she wanted him close. If only she didn’t feel she needed to hate him. If only she didn’t have to blame Cal for her mother’s ill-health.

 

“She was fine until you fed her all that poison,” she exclaimed.

 

“It’s this place that doomed her and we won’t survive either unless we get the hell out of here,” he explained.

 

“And where do we go?” she asked, convinced it was more of Cal’s empty talk of how he was going to take on the system, all of this while profiting from it. “Out to the lost cities?”

 

At least fringers lived in a protected zone. Beyond that, there was no certainty. Shunned by the citadels, the freelanders of the lost cities were probably reduced to cannibalism by now. She’d seen the newsfeeds and she knew those people were barely human.  The citadel was cruel but at least they provided water, food and clothing.

 

“Can’t be any worse than this,” suggested Cal.

 

But Meg could imagine worse. She’d frequently dreamed of war with the recalcitrants swallowing up their local freezone, streets carved out into bunkers and rooftops armed with distance missiles. There was always war because their enemies were so ruthless.

 

Meg listened for her mother’s breathing but heard nothing. Was this death, this loss of what made life tolerable? If mother were dead, what hope was left?

 

“I’ll have them pick her up in the morning,” he advised, standing over her.

 

The dead were routinely burned in the trash heaps on the outskirts of town, although trash was burned everywhere, plumes of smoke suffocating what little fresh air was left.

 

“She never wanted to leave,” answered Meg.

 

“Did you think we’d all be here forever?” replied Cal before walking from the room.

 

Meg couldn’t contemplate forever. It was all conjecture anyway. She wanted everything she’d lost. She wanted a mother and she wanted a father. And she wanted a life pregnant with possibility. What she had now was the prospect of disease, starvation and death from the poisons in the water and in the air.

 

Perhaps Cal was right. Her mother was better off a corpse. At least there was no more pretending there was hope of a better life.

 

About Baron

I'm a writer of novels and screenplays living in Los Angeles.
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