Before setting out on this little expedition, Elsie had assured me that the venue would be both safe and free of gunshots.
The streets leading up to the venue proved her a big fat liar.
The very moment we entered what I assumed was one of the main streets leading to the downtown area, the air became alive with the sounds of gunfire. Loud and obnoxious and terrible out in the far distance. A few were so far away that you would have had to be a superhuman of high level to pick them up. But a couple were disturbingly close. One of them even shattering the window of a storefront we passed.
The bodega was placed in a small, ancient building made of wood and old decaying plaster. The exterior had been a colorful light blue, once upon a time, but now the paint was falling down in crumpled fistfuls of dried, stale stuffing.
The window had not been down for a full minute, before a pair of sour-looking white guys in heavy trench coats rushed in and kicked in the remaining glass with what must have been steel-toed boots.
Green coat then fumbled about his backpack for a small crowbar. Using it like a club and swatting away the few remaining edged panels with gusto. Red coat didn’t bother. Leaping into the gap, only to get his fat head stuck between a pair of solid iron bars which had not been visible to them up to that point.
Red coat cursed, but his head was well and truly lodged in. To make matters worse, Green coat didn’t seem like he’d be helping anytime soon.
He fumbled in his backpack once more. Perhaps looking for some tool he could use to weld his way past the bars, when a resounding crack bit through the gunshots.
Read coat fell backwards. His skull now a much brighter shade of red than his attire as blood flowed freely from his deformed face.
More gunshots rang out from the store and Green coat fell over backwards. His own chest leaking that red liquid, so that the streams intermixed in the blackness of the night.
Two pedestrians took pictures with their phones. One of then snickered. But none of them so much as paused their stride. Their eyes glazing over the soon to be corpses as if they were no more than pieces of furniture someone had thrown out.
The storeowner, or the person I assumed was the storeowner, soon came out as well.
I had thought… or hoped, that he was in the process of calling the police. Instead, he scanned the streets and shooed away what few people were outside. Once he was sure the cameras were off, he loaded the gun again in one swift motion and put three bullets on each man. Two in the chest, close to the heart and one in the face. Between their eyes.
Only then did he pull out his phone and dial 911. My ears picking up bits of the conversation that suggested he was pinning the whole thing on a gangbang shooting.
“HOLY SHIT!” I barked out. “That guy just killed two people out in the open!”
I yelled once I’d picked up my jaw from the floor.
“He just killed them right there!”
“Yes. Cecil. I know. I have eyes.” James Robertson groaned.
“Now now James. Cecil is right. This should not be commonplace. Not this soon in any case. And not here in what’s supposed to be the first world. You could at least pretend to be a bit more upset.” Carlyle chastised.
“The first world.” James snorted. “People in North Korea are eating better.”
That truth was plain to see.
What few sidewalks were bereft of soiled, overflowing bags of garbage and human refuse, were filled to the brim with people. Some were in tents, but most were huddled together in sleeping bags or ripped-up comforters. Their colors having long since been extinguished in favor of yellow and brown stains and burn marks.
Yet as bad as their situation looked, it somehow managed to smell worse. I had cranked down the window only half a centimeter and only for half a moment, but that had been more than enough for the stink of raw, unwashed humanity to overwhelm me. My mouth now making choking sounds as I my mind reeled and my eyes swam.
‘Sweet Buddha! What the frick was that!?’ I asked myself. ‘How is it possible that it smells even worse than the Digestive Pools? How is it that literal monsters being dissolved into their basic parts managed to smell less bad? Frick me! The bloody roaches don’t smell this bad!’
I looked again and noted even more alarming aspects in the crowd. Such as the way the people who were still dressed like… well… people… went about their walks without ever looking at those laying on the road. Their eyes seeming to avert themselves and gaze upwards or downwards or sideways so as to magically keep themselves free of the suffering around them.
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When I stared in turn, I began to notice other things as well.
Like the fact that there were almost no fat people on the street. Now, that was kinda weird, because obesity had been a problem even back in Canada. Not to the extent that I kept hearing about in the states, but it was still noticeable.
If I were being honest, I was more or less expecting one in every ten people down here to be obese. With maybe one in ten of those being like those guys I saw on the weight loss reality TV shows where they hunkered down on a treadmill for a week.
But no.
The people I saw, the ones walking around anyway, were all fit as a fiddle. In fact, most of them looked like they ran marathons on the regular and their faces had that telltale glow of abnormal healthiness that could only have come from one place.
“Hey Mr. Robertson… Caryle. When you said that the food had helped a lot and that it had become pretty popular… what uh… to what degree are we talking about?”
“Let’s just say the FDA is VERY interested in how we grow the stuff and where and leave it at that.” He replied curtly.
“Don’t you worry. It’s not a bad thing or anything. Again, I cannot put any more stress on how important feeding the people of the world is. It is true that some or most of the western governments have blocked our food shipments and it is true that most of the food we grow is going towards less fortunate regimes, but the more food we drop into those countries, the more food is available for the rest of the populace. At cheaper prices too. This…”
His right hand left the steering wheel for a second as he waved.
“This is not as bad as it seems. Again, there were food riots and mass civil unrest back in the original timeline. The food situation here may be precarious, and that may be affecting the job situation and the overall health of the city, but this is Detroit. It wasn’t much better ten or five years ago.”
“Oh my goodness!” Casper yelled in faux-incredulity. “Carlyle telling the truth! Must not be a day that ends in y.”
“Shut up Casper.” James groaned. “You aren’t making things better.”
“Yes, because Cecil was never going to realize that magic food is always better than regular food and that it comes as a shock to people not used to magic food.” Casper spoke again. Then he looked at me.
“Don’t worry your pretty little head Cecil. Carlyle and James have it all under control. They claim this was always going to happen you see. Only much more slowly since the original timeline didn’t have you. They claim that it will all be fine and dandy so long as they can step up production and give all these people jobs. They point at how the rates of infectious diseases and things like Alzheimer’s or heart diseases or cancer have taken a nosedive and say it is all for the good. They point at everyone now being buff and pretty and tell you ignore the addiction because it doesn’t affect people with Cores and because it will not affect anyone who manages to grow a Core.”
He rolled his eyes.
“As far as we know that is. Ignore what your lying eyes are telling you and focus on the nice party and Elsie’s pretty dress.”
“Hey!” Elsie complained. “What are you trying to say about my dress?”
Casper ignored her.
“It might get better.” He allowed. “It might not. Last time, there were only about 7000 people with Cores worth a damn. Make sure you see what your actions have led to and think for yourself. That’s all you can hope for right now.”
“Well aren’t you a ray of sunshine.” Carlyle quipped. “Perhaps you can entertain us by discussing how the economy is going over by the rust belt with all those dust storms. Or perhaps you can bring up how the suicide rates have gone up and how many people are getting their homes foreclosed. Are you going to blame those things on us too? Or are you going to mention how much work we’ve done to keep soup kitchens stocked and people in their homes? Are you going to mention the relief funds and the banks we’ve bought out to re-negotiate those mortgages and keep people housed? Hmn? Are you going to mention the new re-enforced complexes we’re building and the condos we’re flogging for pennies on the dollar so that people aren’t helpless when the monsters come?”
Carlyle narrowed his eyes. Something I could see from the rear-view mirror.
“I never said this would be a walk in the park, Casper. Not once. I am out there negotiating with people I despise on the regular and pretending that I give a monkey’s wet fart about what they think to keep the damn world running. You say things are bad? Of course they are you imbecile! It’s the literal low decline of society leading to the end of the world! What were you expecting! A few sharp drops in living standards, followed by a slow recovery?”
He made to spit, but then seemed to realize he was still in his expensive Jag.
“Well then. Take a good hard look, because this is what the best possible scenario looks like. My original plan had us hoarding preserved food for ourselves and leaving most of the states to the dogs and the roaming biker bandit gangs and the freaking cannibals! At least the people you see out there are alive Casper. At least they’re not eating each other! At least their bellies aren’t distended and they can still find something to put on the table every now and then! Now stop complaining. If you have a better plan, then I’m all ears! Please. I beg you. I will pay you billions for a better solution right now, with my dead wife as my witness. But if you don’t have anything useful to say, then you can shut your trap and go back to town. I’ll call you when we’re ready to be picked up.”
Casper stared at him from his awkward position on the middle seat in the back.
Then he nodded stiffly and disappeared with a rush of displaced air.
“I swear, that guy gets more melodramatic by the day.” Carlyle scoffed derisively. “As if I could be held responsible for all of society’s woes?”
I gave Elsie a sideways look, but otherwise said nothing.
Instead choosing to keep peering outside. My eyes finding the window just in time to see a car pull up to a group of clustered tents. Whereupon someone in the back threw out a bucket full of dirty brown water all over the huddled masses.
The car sped off, but only for a second or so. Someone in the crowd had apparently taken offense and they had chosen that time to pull out a freaking AK out of who-knows-where.
Five of the shots went into the rear window. Puncturing and sending splatters of blood throughout the inside of the vehicle. Two more found the wheels and the driver soon lost control. Crashing the beat-up van into a light post and smashing the frontal compartment.
A few dozen people rose up from their collection of belongings and made haste towards the car. Looting blood-stained clothes and wallets and even more guns from the occupants, before going back to pick up their things and scampering in all directions.
James had averted his eyes.
Carlyle hadn’t even taken his eyes off the road in the first place.