Past Peak: A Story of the Near Future

[AlienGirl]

Past Peak: A Story of the Near Future

The first sign we had in those early days was the lines. It started with the lines for gasoline: that was customary enough and had been done before. No one panicked when we went into gas rationing, two days a week for even numbered license plates, two days a week for odd, two for vanity plates and one day a week when no one was to get gasoline unless they had missed their regular day and their gas card had gone unswiped. It was a little inconvenient, but this echoed the seventies, as the local news helpfully pointed out with pictures comparing the lines of the current era and that one. In the first weeks, people in the gas lines would joke with each other; later, the mood tensed and tempers shortened. One day there was a shootout when someone line-jumped, and a mother from a nearby suburb died in the crossfire. After that incident I started filling up at odd hours, when fewer people might be out; I had always loved the deep early morning anyway, and three-thirty a.m. gas runs fit well into my sleep schedule.

The gas shortage was followed closely by a shortage of jobs, as businesses could not afford to pay for electricity and gas to ship products and still afford to pay workers. Of the three, only the workers were expendable. Job lines began appearing anywhere that looked like it might have work. It seemed odd at first to see middle-aged men and women in costly business suits standing in line for jobs cooking fast food or washing dishes, but we got used to it; and as the weeks wore on, the suits began to look bedraggled, a little frayed and wrinkled, a little more like they belonged.. Some of the prospective applicants had the more important pieces of their resumes written in big letters on signs that they could wave to get the attention of the management in the building. I noted these signs on my daily walk: one line twenty prospective workers deep at a Burger King contained three signs proclaiming “MA,” “MFA,” and “MSW.” Further down the line was an older, white-ponytailed man whose sign said “Ph.D Astronomy.”

I was in my third year as a court clerk, and this was a very good job to have, because the courts had become very busy. We didn't have enough money in our budget to hire on new staff, so those of us who were already employed found our workload escalating steadily. I didn't really mind, I liked my job and the longer hours were no hardship. The courthouse was only a half-mile walk from my one-bedroom walk-up apartment, so I stopped driving except on the rare occasions when I needed to go out of town.

It wasn't long after the appearance of the job lines that certain goods began to be scarce. Shoppers who still had a little money for luxuries lined up around the block at the rumor that the local grocery store had received a shipment of coffee; when the end of the line finally got into the store and saw empty shelves, the scene began to grow violent. The police arrived with one of the new microwave-based crowd dispersal units; the boy who was trampled as shoppers ran frenzied and in pain was brought to the regional hospital and eventually recovered.

Still we persevered, confident that our grandparents and great-grandparents had suffered far worse in the Depression. TV networks ran uplifting feel-good movies and game shows where anyone might become a millionaire, and we were placated. That was spring.


June brought a new horror to the city, as it was the beginning of the hottest summer on record. Our city had—used to have--a famously moderate climate, so most of us were unprepared for the heat wave. Electricity became intermittent as air conditioners struggled along. On some days there was no power to be had at all for dwellings and only a trickle for businesses other than the big chain stores. On days of extreme heat when there was no power, people who were too old or sick to make it to a store to cool off died in their homes with all the windows open to the sweltering asphalt. The EMTs and police officers bringing the bodies, bloated and stinking in the heat, from the doors of the high-rise buildings formed a grisly new kind of line. The obituary page in the local newspaper filled with lines: overheated, overheated.

In mid-July the days of no power came two in a row. The temperature was well over a hundred; in bars with generators and fuel to run them, we could watch the local meteorologist fry an egg on the sidewalk. The unemployed and the powerless took to sleeping in soaked-down sheets through the heat of the day and rising at night like a vampire horde. There was no shortage of liquor, some of it home-made, and the restless night-time mobs noised and fought until dawn.

Dogs all over the city had been abandoned, discarded by owners who could no longer afford them. The dogs congregated in the alleys behind buildings and in the public parks, patrolling the edges of the tent cities for whatever scraps of food might be given or stolen. Usually they didn't bother you, and their presence had become more and more ordinary since spring, but in the middle of the summer three cases of rabies were reported in the packs of evicted house-pets. Mothers began carrying baseball bats with them or not going outdoors at all.

The days without power were routine now; almost the whole city had gone nocturnal, lighting their midnight lives with candles or oil lamps. Restaurants began to adjust their hours, opening at dusk and closing up during the oppressive heat of midday. Ice had become a great luxury, and the trendy eateries with electricity contracts or generators had big neon signs touting the availability of “AC and I-C-E!” A trendy new bar opened to sell nothing but ice-water and chilled vodka; someone saw the real-estate heiress sipping drinks there. That bar was always cool inside, but they checked credit ratings at the door and under-700s weren't admitted. I could look in, but could not enter.

[AlienGirl]

1. (more)

The Redstaters started acting up in late July. They blamed the shortages and heat on a previously-thriving neighborhood in the eastern part of the city. By the Red ideology, the Market was free and the Free Market never failed except at the wrath of a vengeful God. Their preachers extrapolated from Gomorrah and proclaimed that the heat and hardship were the fault of the “gay part of town,” whose presence, they said, would doom the whole city to fire and brimstone. At first the preachers and their followers just talked; but then there were some firebombings, and though the police were said to have investigated, no arrests were ever made—except, of course, those unfortunate men detained for prostitution and sent to the faith-based reparative therapy work-prisons.

The Greens soon joined the Reds in the street. To the Greens, as well, the causes of our misfortune were obvious; the economic hardship was only a side-effect of climactic crisis brought on by the greed of generations. From the corners of the political scene poured the Browns, an amalgam of elements of La Raza and pieces of the far right that sat uneasily with the mainstream Reds. Some more buildings were bombed out, some slogans spray-painted on their walls. My grandmother's gravestone got knocked over and it cost $300 to have it scrubbed and restored to its place. Despite the efforts of Reds, Greens, and Browns, the heat wore on.

The Tribulation Force emerged from the Reds. In a decade past the first Tribs had been members of some kind of survivalist militia; they recruited heavily among the Reds, and soon they were a strong and constant presence in the city. Since the Army and the National Guard were still overseas and spread thin on a multi-fronted war, the Tribs became the volunteer contract for crowd control and civil order. For a block grant far smaller than that asked by the country's largest private security firm, the Tribs would keep the rabble off the streets and scoop up the unduly dissatisfied for useful incarceration in the for-profit prisons.

The Debt Relief Act was passed toward the beginning of August, just after the Tribs' contract had been awarded. The DRA allowed creditors to seize debtors who defaulted and require them to work to repay their debt. In practice, they sold the debt contracts to the work-prison companies, which put the debtors to work as contracted labor rented to other companies, at wages of pennies an hour, from which was deducted room and board. The companies had cheap and plentiful labor of all kinds, from doctors and lawyers to dishwashers and manual laborers; the prison corporations had a profit for the shareholders and a chance to proselytize for their charitable donors and faith boards; and the police no longer had to bother with rioters. All of the people who matter were satisfied.

The debt sweeps cleared the streets, in the minds of the fortunate gainfully-employed solid citizens, and the DRA was praised mightily in letters to the editor and telephone calls to the ubiquitous radio talk shows. Here and there a union fight erupted; these were quickly put down by the Tribs. Unions had been recruiting in job-lines, but after the rumors began of unionists permanently disappearing, and after the Tribs' Enforcement Division began paying by the tip for every unionist or traitor arrested, most workers would not even listen to the union recruiters for fear of winding up under Patriot's Arrest.

Still the heat blazed on through terrible August. Two of the unionists who had been arrested by the Tribs failed to come back on their release date; the Tribs' official explanation was that these men had moved out of state, but the families said there had been no word of this from the men, and dark rumors emerged of secret executions.

[AlienGirl]

2. (more)

In September milk and asparagus stopped arriving. I had planned a dinner for a few friends from the courthouse, and I searched in vain for the ingredients for alfredo sauce for the pasta and garlic-fried asparagus. Not even the chain grocers or the produce stand had asparagus, and the only milk I could find was the condensed kind. No one had an idea when shipments might start again. It was a distribution problem, the manager of one Wal-Mart told me, the warehouses couldn't get the stock to the urban stores. I made marinara and wilted spinach salad instead.

We coped with longer lines and more shortages. Paper goods were a hassle: the great pulp mills of the north ran no longer, and disposable paper goods made of cheap pulp were hardly worth shipping from overseas. Makeshift paper rags and toilet paper pounded out of old scraps of newspaper and bits and pieces of other paper, challenged the municipal sewer system. A pipe ruptured downtown, and the fetid stench of raw waste hung in the air for three weeks. Somehow the city eventually raised the money to buy gasoline to power the repair trucks. Using home-made paper in the pipes was declared a criminal offense by the Tribs, and after a few arrests and incarcerations in the thriving work-prisons, everyone learned to throw waste paper into a basket next to the toilet. In public restrooms these filthy wastebaskets overflowed onto the floor.

The power-up, power-down cycle had now become routine. My days for power were Tuesday, Wednesday, and alternate Saturdays. Luckily my brother's cycle was Sunday, Monday, and every Friday and Saturday. He achieved the extra lights-on day because his homeowner's association had been able to negotiate a favorable contract. We took up living together in whichever home had power: I shared his two-bedroom house a few days a week, and he shared my tiny walk-up apartment. We both still had jobs; the courthouse had no end of work for me, and my brother was a website designer for a local company. We bought bread from the bakery thrift on my street, and bread in various forms—sandwiches, dumplings, even a broth made from over-toasted bread that tasted almost like thin beef broth—became our staple food.

The courthouse grew even busier as the heat dragged on into mid-September. I found myself privy to story after story of families fighting, of parents arrested and children removed to the safety of private faith-based group homes. A few of the teenagers—throwaways like the city's myriad dogs—were sentenced to reparative boot camps to be turned into heterosexuals. Some of those children stopped showing up for their dependency case hearings, and eventually their cases closed with the children in church custody. I dreaded learning about these, and I often wonder where these children went. My dearest hope is that someone took them somewhere safe—another city, or Europe or Australia, maybe, but I doubt very much that this happened.

October opened without relief from the heat. It was unseasonable, the local weatherman proclaimed from his green-screened pulpit, but by then everyone had become accustomed to the unseasonable and failed to be surprised. A late hurricane sulked offshore, giving not a hint about its future plans as it stalled for days, disrupting shipping and causing a brief run on cheap kitchen appliances at Target and Walgreen's. For their two or three days of power, people desperately needed their food processors and two-cup rice cookers, and they would be damned if they'd let a hurricane get in the way of that.

At the beginning of November, the lights all went out, all the way. Still the heat wrapped the city like an itchy wool blanket. Not even big chains had AC anymore, though generators and batteries still provided some limited power to the more fortunate. News from the rest of the world was now trickling into the city in dribs and drabs, no longer available by broadcast as other regions around the country lost power. What few broadcasts remained mostly ignored the things that loomed largest to us: joblessness, poverty, electricity loss, and how long it all would last. Instead the broadcast news focused luridly on the arrest of a celebrity's daughter and her experiences in prison. People who had just arrived in the city from elsewhere brought rumors with them: that the grinding shortages were everywhere, that nowhere survived the old life we remembered.

[AlienGirl]

3. (more)

The one rumor that we heard, over and over, from new arrivals and even obliquely hinted at in the broadcasts once in a while, was strange weather everywhere. The dog days of summer had not let go, and we continued to swelter. By now my brother had lost his job; without electricity, there was little need for web designers. The layoff was supposed to be temporary, just until the return of power and prosperity; but we knew better, and he moved full-time into my small apartment. We got on well enough there, as neither of us required much space or much privacy. I knew of many other people who had taken in strangers to help with their expenses and their work, and I imagine it must have been much more difficult for them.

The day the wind picked up, strong and from the west, it was a relief at first. Seeing opportunity, I soaped up our clothing in the bathtub and hastily washed a load of our laundry in the cold water. I hung the clothes out on our little balcony to flap in the wind and dry under the relentless sun. There had been rumors coming in about the weather: out-of-season hail in some places, tornadoes where there shouldn't be, drought so severe throughout the south that a new desert was opening up in parts of Alabama and Georgia. Still, all we'd had was the heat, the steamy, sickening heat, and we could not know which of the rumors were true, and how true. On that day my brother had gone out walking to look for work, and if there was no work to stand in a provisions line and get some food.

The wind picked up. Good, I thought, it would provide some relief from the sweltering stillness, and the clothes would dry faster in the breeze. But as I was thinking this, I heard a strange honking, screeing cacophony as a vast flock of frantic birds crossed the sky, flying west to east with the wind. I looked up uncomprehending into the blur of wings. Dogs began to howl, their voices carrying on the wind from the parks and the alleys below.

The thing that loomed over the western edge of the city made no sense to me at first. Of course my mind jumped initially to terrorism: a bomb must have gone off-- But what bomb, ever, could make a cloud that filled the whole sky like that? The cloud grew, a few straggling turkey vultures marginally preceding it. With the cloud came an unearthly howling noise, and eerie lightning flickered around its edges. Still it grew, hazing its way across the sky, and then it was here.

Darkness fell suddenly as the cloud blotted out the sky. With scouring force, a wind of fine, silty dust hit me and I fell choking onto my deck. It was all around, a terrible frothy mud of wind, whipping through the newly-washed clothes and into my still-open door. I couldn't open my eyes long enough to see my doorway, though I knew it must only be a couple of feet behind me. Coughing, I turned around and groped in what I hoped would be the right direction. Success—my hand touched what I knew was my thresh-hold. I stumbled forward, sidewise to the wind, and half-crawled, half-fell into the safety of home. I slammed the door shut with my feet, knowing my arms would not be strong enough to close it against the howling wind.

I was sprawled in a semi-circular wedge of dust on my living-room floor. Outside I heard the wind still whipping. Dull thumps now and then marked something blowing away or breaking. Outside my window was a grimy midnight in the middle of the day; I watched this murky wind for an hour before I finally lit a candle. My mind went to desert storms, winds kicking up the barren sands of Mars. In the ring of light from the candle I could see dust still hanging in the air, dust so fine it hardly settled, and I was seized again by a fit of coughing. I worried about my brother, lost out there in the mucky air. There was not much else to do, so I slept, hoping I would awaken to clear sky and my brother's return.

My brother did not come home on the second day, and the wind and dust were still whipping outside. I only knew by my clock and my empty stomach that it must be morning; the window still looked out into gritty darkness. I slept again.

On the third day of the storm, the wind slowed and a rind of light appeared on the western horizon. It was pale, sickly, brownish light, as though morning had been dipped in strong tea, but it was light. The air cleared slowly over that third day, although a haze of dust would remain in the air. The skyline so beloved of photographers was forever hazed, but the sunsets would be marvelous, and we all had the idle time to enjoy them. My brother returned home late that pale morning. He came home with dust caked into his clothes and hair, and his voice was hoarse as he told me of waiting out the dust storm under an abandoned car.

[AlienGirl]

4. (more)

A couple of weeks later, my neighbor died of cholera. We discovered this after the smell of rot and death from her apartment became intolerable and I called the dreaded Tribs to get it checked. The Tribs who carried the corpse down the stairs wore old biocontainment suits, masks and all. They cordoned off her doorway and posted quarantine warnings, but late that night the sound of looters rifling through her apartment awakened me. That same week several blocks were quarantined when more than half their residents contracted cholera. There was a rumor about the city water supply, so everyone bleached and boiled their tapwater before drinking it.

December remained unseasonably warm, and their was no rain, though the dust storms had subsided. The sky was clear blue and the mild weather, in another time, would have drawn throngs of tourists. Only a few out-of-towners trickled in. One beautiful Saturday morning we awoke to a city on fire. The rainless weeks had parched structures and lawns to tinder, and someone's cooking fire or boiling fire must have spread. Great billows of smoke hung low in the air, dropping an ash flurry. Home water pressure went slack as municipal resources poured into preserving what little remained unburned. Many unemployed men earned a day's wage on the fire-line, and eventually, as the flames crept closer to downtown, prisoners on work crews were brought out to help. The pale gaunt men in their bright pink uniforms worked side-by-side with their free neighbors, and eventually the fire was beaten down. Not a single fireman was lost in the entire operation, as all of the truly dangerous work was done by the numerous and expendable prisoners.

The political violence of the past summer had been quelled a little by the constant presence of the Tribulation Force and the visibility of the fate of those arrested. The last Green riots had been before the dust fell; the Reds and Browns had banded together with the Tribs.

Across the city, people had become accustomed to our new way of life, and a peace of sorts fell by the last days of December. A new year began, and the old days, the days of cars and TV and electric lights, really were gone forever. A new, dimmer era had begun and we huddled around our campfires, never again to fly.

[librechik]

5. the generally excellent quality of writing here at DU never ceases to amaze me

we're n too bad at prognostication, either, so it seems

Great work, AG!

[Aristus]

6. Wow.

Just, wow, Tucker... :thumbsup:

[gateley]

7. Wow. I'm going to come to this forum more often -- absolutely amazing! nt

[inna]

8. +1!

This is my first visit here, I didn't even know about this sub-forum.

What's interesting is that the thread has not been archived (thankfully!), even though it was posted 2 months ago!

In GD it usually takes a couple of days for a thread to be "archived" ( = blocked from commenting on, which is unfortunate IMO).

[gateley]

9. I only found it because the OP linked to it in another thread that

was on the Latest Page. Kismet! This is like a whole new world of DU!