Chapter 1.

6:00 AM Channel 65 Northwestern Broadcast, January 10th 2040 

Over the better part of five years there have been a surprising amount for rebellions against the US protectorates, American controlled territories of the southern Pacific and political disputes with the Indonesian government over trade jurisdiction. Attempted peace summits have only led to America’s agricultural community becoming increasingly unhappy with current leadership. The recent discovery of geothermal farming and the affinity of many natives taking university classes abroad has led to a population spike in these areas as well as the rise of education never seen before. one of the most surprising developments in world history has occurred here especially now that the Scandinavian fishing industry has been failing its American customers and the waters in Alaska have experienced flash freezing. As a result of current dieting trends and the American palate for tropical fish in the case of sushi and other imported delicacies food supplies of the southern Pacific have become a highly sought out. Since the United States’ traditional hold on the food market has dissipated, there has been political instability for time. The government is still coping with these insecurities hoping that there will be a better outcome not only for the nations involved but for all the world. Many citizens have gone into underground hiding hoping for the worst with freezing temperatures with no snow in sight, leaving the plains cold and inhospitable. Our armed forces and secretary of agriculture continue to cope with the issues at hand. Here we are live on a blighted potato farm 20 miles from Boise, speaking with the last survivor of the latest frosted dry spell standing outside of a farm which has fed Americans for generations…

8:34 AM New York, N.Y., January 14th 2040

Somewhere within the infinite labyrinth of smog, swearing, and filth of the cumulative misery of the passerby, rolled along a large black SUV in it’s way to the bank. The wheels of the great vehicle rolled along the street which everyone crossed, but in the car was a powerful banker, cruising high above of whatever was outside. The skyline tickled the glassy-eyed sky which was blank. The sun gave light that could have mimicked a desk lamp, no one was burnt, but the women crowding the soup kitchens felt the bite stinging their skins, blistering them with small cuts after every pawing movements at doors that would close not long after they had arrived. Banking in the modern era, however, had become stunted due to a lack of crime, electronic payments were no longer safe and millions of dollars had been stolen from pharmaceutical companies all within a three months. Apart from the general scowl the woman wore, this change brought upon crows on her face, which for her age, dug their talons inside more than deep enough. Gray hairs had revealed themselves up from under her head of blonde-brown hair, which was thinning by the day, greeting the powerful woman with coils that sat on her pillow waiting to be discovered. 

There was agony on the streets. Food became hard to come by at least by western standards and the average national weight dropped by about ten pounds in a about a year. This fact by itself would have been good if not facilitated by soaring food prices, causing people with a scanty amount of food in reserve to starve. Children of all areas became more enthralled with the fantasy of becoming gang members or even better, masters of organized crime. Schools no longer fed the children. There was a coat of black over parts of various cities because of extended coal use and the demolishing of factories. These were done for free by guerilla drug squads in order to used the concrete for their own purposes and as barricades from the national guard, which had barely enough money to operate. Much like the police, the military was halted by the continuous and sudden onslaught of violent crime. Technology had not caught up with the changing weather patterns during the beginning stages of the frost and criminals had the incentive to devise methods for surviving the cold. There was no true leadership amongst their ranks so keeping a unit or a platoon well fed was not an issue but rather spreading methods of halting federal forces for one’s personal benefit, which was mostly facilitating the transport of crudely made drugs along state lines. 

It wasn’t entirely the fault of American currency spiraling like a hunk of shit down a porcelain bowl, but her children did take a large toll on her. Her usual lackadaisical and affluently influenced way of raising her children was to have them suck off the teat of a nanny that had kids at home, whom she loved much more than these sniveling bags of money and snot. Cassidy hated them, but she was bound by contract to receive handsome pay for herself and her daughter, who was left with no father. She also had to send money back home for her poor parents, who were stuck in working in a factory or any odd jobs they could find after it eventually went out of business. The children were loud and considerably stupid at least for most things that are relevant to the intelligence of a child. So stupid in fact that when she had tried to play a memory game with them, they became unequivocally stumped, even when there where only four or six cards on the table. Despite this, the maid still rocked them, nestled them within her slender arms, from the cradle up to now. During that time she did learn to tolerate their behavior and also set limits, making it very clear that she was a hired employee who was paid to care, and at the drop of a hat she would leave the eldest daughter to be chased, caught, and eventually beaten by her younger brother who was already forty pounds heavier than she. The boy did not have great role models. The emotional toddler grew into a child with even more problems. With a lack of attention from his mother and overbearing attention (he felt) which came from this strange poor woman, he became emotionally distant towards friends he had no business with. Everyone who was in his circle was obligated to give something, whether that be the permission to beat them or take responsibility for whatever he did. 

One day, his mother came home from a long day at the office, a short yet emotionally draining day at the office, usually she came home at night, but the sun dimly shone on her 24 inch tires before she drove into the subterranean parking complex of her building and almost let out a squeak--they had recently been buffed. Coming home she found her Tuscany-imported curtains ripped to shreds and on the floor with a blob of dull orange vomit all over them. The young woman tasked with their well-being had left, never to return. The boy met her in the hallway after he had found out that Cassidy was a single-mother through a conversation he had overheard. Once this information became known to him, the child berated her. Called her a cow and a clumsy bitch for tucking in his sheets too tight and watering down his apple juice when he wasn’t looking. At once he kicked her in the shin and when she bent down to clasp the bruise that was to form, he slapped her with unnatural strength. Somehow the soft hand of the child stung more than the calloused hands that had struck Cassidy in the past. Her fragile cheeks ebbed and she started to cry, asking the boy why he would do this. She loved him, in part, at least enough to believe this lie, for she thought that the calm behavior that proceeded the incident at hand was a sign of a closeness that was to emerge between nanny and boy. She was wrong and now being spat on by a boy who knew far too much about her personal problems. His mother did struggle in her marriage as well but somehow got by through nights at the office, wine, or male concubines which did not even bother to look at him when his mother skipped into her bedroom with them. The boy was drunk on rage and actual liquor. After climbing the top cupboard where he knew his mom kept the wine for those long nights, he took a chug of the bottle, when he tasted the liquid inside, he began to cry run around not being able to chase down the awful taste with gobs of spit. He had seen his mother late at night stumble into the kitchen, break open many a seal, drink, and whisper to him “I love you”, “Sweet dreams” or some other generic message to him that he did not believe for lack of a relationship with her. But at least he knew that this was better than the tight-lipped apathetic and condescending mother that he did get to see when she was cross for not being able to go to her office because of a national holiday or whenever his father came home. She never really told him or his father anything positive sober. He had grown sick of a life he did not even know so many other kids envied. Sick of not being able to tell his father that her mother brought in strange men into the house, sick of his dad beating his mother for no reason, sick of everything he was conditioned to believe about how the rich were to always grind down the poor below their heels. 

All this because of the trust his mother had placed in Cassidy for she had spoken against these things, yet paid her nanny far too little, meaning that because of this, the boy, had known a source of affection that he eventually realized was paid for. He listened to far too much for too long, he knew his world was propped up by people less than him and he hated it, though he did not process the lexicon to speak his frustrations, nor an ear that would listen. His sister was a saint. The child fumed at this knowing what he knew, the women did not speak outside her door for the ironic fear that she might understand them, but the child was too young. This is why he did not attack her for altruistic reasons but for a lack of emotional understanding. The boy was conditioned to believe that many of the things wrong with his life were not his own fault but rather the fault of one of his mother’s many servants, so when he drank from the bottle, he ran to the nanny, assaulted her, and asked her with tears in his eyes “Why didn’t you tell me mommy’s grape juice was so spicy?! This is why your daughter doesn’t love you! You bitch, it’s all your fault you make everything bad happen, I’ll kill you!”

 Like many schools, the contraband passed along on the blacktop by kids older than him went unnoticed by school supervisors and teachers. In short one of the child’s friends had a father who was a snuff addict, being rich and all. A friend of his had stumbled upon a snuff magazine which belonged to his father. At once he was intrigued by what he found--never in his life could he have known that women (who usually taught him or bossed him around) could be tied up naked. Very subtly the boy’s friend cut out pictures from outdated issues and sold them for quarters to his friends and because of this, Cassidy’s piece of work decided to grab one of his father’s leather belts and choke her with it once she bent down to grab her shin. The boy could not feel pain for he was more focussed on the alcohol burning his small throat and nose, conveniently numbing him of the blisters he was giving his palms. The woman managed to shake him off and fled the penthouse at once. His sister being awoken from a nap, rose and oo’ed at his brother, pointing her chubby finger at him, informing him of the punishment to come. He ripped out a handful of her blonde hair. As a result of this word spread around fast through Cassidy’s community, and after a while there were was no person willing to look after the pair of siblings. The mother was now forced to take care of her children herself and look after her boy, since he had been suspended until further notice after news of the incident broke out thanks to the family’s neighbors, who heard first-hand what had happened. This forced the banker woman to take care of her son--by herself. She had no patience with her son, and detested him for the spectacle he had made, but she concluded that he as a whole, was something only a mother could love. She had to take a lot of time from the office, making her more miserable and establishing a new relationship with her son, one that bordered emotional abuse, enforced by fear. 

…

The technological arm of the government tried to crack down heavily on these thefts, but the methods that the criminals were using remained a secret that only they would know for years to come. The winters had become much more harsh in the northern hemisphere of the world and at this time warm retirement homes for the elderly were in extremely high demand. Winter and even regular days that were more than a bit windy, both ate away at houses with poor insulation, and the flu became dangerously efficient. A bony sickle cut through the throats of every stalk it had brushed by. No cough, no sweat and sudden loss of memory followed because of mucus thickening in the lungs of children who could not get enough oxygen to their brains while they slept, leaving many with seizures, paraplegia, general handicaps, both mental and physical, which were sometimes followed with death. Doctors had revealed that even the most well fed of children had become atrophied before meaning an untimely demise. There were no quarantine procedures since the general climate of the nation had cooled and no one would find the cause--not for a very long time. Solutions were to move, or  The plague was not the issue, yet combined with so many troubles that the cold spell had brought, more pressure was being put on all the classes which lived under a sun that shone bright enough to nurture a natural abundance of food. The poor had suffered first--surprisingly enough--feeling the deaths of their children and most of anyone who had an initiative to move out of the financial situation they found themselves in. This type of mobility was always rare, but with the continuous cold, many businesses that gave employed people the money to be able to do this ran powerful ad campaigns that discouraged many. The cold had already taken many victims so something as little as even showing interest in a leadership position was reason for termination at a firm. The government had cut aid to the public in  order to fund the endeavor that was to find the cause of the sudden cold spell that was beating the working class with an iron bar. The research was started way before the change but now that there were reported cases of the higher tax bracket dying.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

The Dow had crashed twice in a year, a sign that the upper-crust of the country was either leaving or ringing out the last ounce of work that they could get out of the employees who still hadn’t gotten the hint that organized crime was far safer than jobs with such high demands. No one could brave the winter without governmental assistance, a luxury that had long ago been exhausted by an inflated elderly population, which was supported by a questionably fast rise of urbanization. This indicated a sign of change as mobsters could not get their hands on the construction business before the cost of labor had gone up, and then fallen again. The country was hungry and without the safety net that had met at least the basic needs of the people desperation and people swept the streets. The cost of gasoline had risen too high that street sweepers were being reinstated as people and many automated jobs were given back to the people since electricity was hard to come by during the never-ending winter. All the research that went into finding the cause of the cold with the intention of reversing it was fruitless. Crime rose and blamed the upper-class for the problems that were brought upon by the weather. The amber waves of grain turned into puddles on the ground, then ash that would be used to keep hungry farmers warm and alive for the time being. 

The family was still peering out the dark windows of the large car and pulled up to a glass covered building which shot up around brick colored apartments with chipping pain that scarcely covered dead mold within the groves that cement had found itself in. The sun still shone unenthusiastically through the storm clouds that indicated another layer of ice was to be frozen upon the slippery, hopelessly depressing gray sidewalk. The street still stank of shit and spoiled food. The SUV had entered the parking structure that was behind the street and the family stepped out. They entered the glass bank accompanied by armed guards, successfully getting inside from the rain and the tremendous noise of the traffic outside. The mother of the violent child lead her kids in with the swing of the door opened by a security guard who had known the family she had started their college fund, an amount  that would send any regular person into a rage. There was a sudden warmth that swept over them at the sight of the dull yellow clear the fluorescent lights which illuminated the bulletproof glass behind which the tellers greeted everyone with a smile, after all it was the bank which the mother had worked at. The cold of the outside had faded away, thawing the flesh of the escorted family and they were greeted by the comfort of smiling strangers and the fact that the smell of cigarettes had remained outside doors guarded by metal detectors. Everything was so fuzzy to them, not in memory but in the sense of feeling and how welcome they felt, exceeding the nerves that sat on their minds while they were at home with poor Cassidy. 

That sense security that the children had felt would prove to be short-lived that morning as soon as the family had heard the metal detectors go off for the first time in three years, the first time being when and old woman had brought in a fragment of a silver dollar that her husband supposedly left her. They never did know if she had struck it rich or if pneumonia had taken her either way, not much of Elaine was seen after she ended up in Florida before the temperature change had really began to take hold. Sometimes these things go without saying. They were followed unknowingly by two pickup trucks, sun-worn pale paint job and as shabby as another car that happened to be on the same street that held the SUV. There was no way the family could have known however there was still intuition left in the family but not enough to save them for what was about to come. It was because of this form of intuition that was inconsistent with their intelligence that they also knew what had happened to the security guard who had smiled at them for the last time moments before as his body hit the floor and the thump of his chest made a wet sound on the damp carpet in the front of the lobby. Then what seemed like men wearing trash bags not only on their heads but all over their person half ran-half walked in with guns in their hands. Yet they did not use these, for they carried large seemingly homemade knives and cut the throats of the guards that were responsible for what got through the detectors. There was no real need to hurry because as soon as the security guard fell to the floor there was another teller who had died at the hands of the ringleader for refusing to give up the password to the silent alarm and it was an intern who punched in the key to silence the only sliver of hope we had at least at the time to get out safely--she had just learned the code that day. Once the perpetrators had learned this from a shrieking teller, they cleaved a dagger into her flat stomach, and cut up a bit past where her sternum ended, The Yugoslavian Method. She dropped to the floor weeping, saw her grimace attributed to her pain, and cried even more, her boyfriend had to move on now.

Fear which the violent boy was so used to giving other people shot up and ran into the deepest corners of his mind in an instant, the security guard and the sense of him were shattered by three men whom they had never known, nor would they ever see again. But this time there had been so much movement by the men that older mark that they had tracked in with their boots had gotten all over the marble floor of the bank and there was nothing but grime and tears on the floor all accompanied by shattered cell phones courtesy of the men in plastic. By nature no one could have anticipated how real the encounter would turn out to be. No one had any solutions, and everyone had something to be afraid of. The sister persisted in getting out and not letting the perpetrators see another day of sunlight despite the fact that hail started to fall, obscuring the mockery of light which the sun gave. The ice fell from an ink smeared sky and poured seemingly without end outside of the glass building, scratching the surface of the new structure. This area had not seen hale in fifty years. 

…

The perpetrators were not normal but spoke like they were and the divide was only apparent in the people that they would kill. There were five or six of them, with so much movement and fear there was scarcely a person that remembered the quantity of killers that killed the guards with such ease. These were still young men as they spoke through a battery powered voice changer that thinly veneered the exact pitch of their language No holds were barred for the men, they were crazy enough to kill as many people as they needed and had made their message clear the first few seconds after they rushed the doors. The silent alarms did not ring and the magnetic attachment that was installed into the car keys of everyone who had access to this prestigious bank were not needed by the bagged men, they had infiltrated the system in someway that was not known to anyone else. The plastic bags were to obscure heat profiles that might have been generated by infra-red security cameras, which were also offline. The footage that the current shift of security guards were watching was recycled from five years ago and had its colors fixed to match the resolution of the current models. Not that this would have mattered since there was another man in plastic waiting to assassinate the watcher as soon as he heard any screams. Such an operation was financed by all-American drug cartels. During the snow storms and the cold which killed many of the crops that were grown in the northern part of the country. So many people who were hellbent on not making an honest living during the advent of the frost had resorted to domestically producing cheap and often times very dangerous versions of black tar heroin using albuterol, a common breathing agent used for inhalers. In order to combat pneumonia and other diseases that came with the severe and non-uniform cold, the government in a last ditch effort to keep farmers breathing, borrowed money and bought the resources to make the chemical and began shipping inhalers out. Criminals got wind of this information and devised a plan to convert the gas into desomorphine and black tar heroin by liquifying it in breweries they had taken over. Most railroads operated under crime syndicates and could distribute the drugs very quickly. Suicide was becoming popular as many people saw no way out of the crisis, this phenomenon spread throughout China as well and other places that could not get Canadian or Russian fertilizer to jumpstart their poor farmland. Knowing that the end was near many people experimented with drugs to brave out the cold, since continuing to barely make ends meet for food over and over again made no sense.

…

The shock overwhelmed the details in the minds of the customers who had now turned into hostages. They were at any whim of  laziness the criminals felt and whether or not they would have spent the effort to cut up another person. They came up from the street with blood on their knives already and their firearms were strapped so close to their chests that no sound came from them despite running recklessly through the doors and opening up the windpipes of the security force. All of the electronic functions of the building had ceased to operate and the vault doors swung open. More people made noise and even more died. The criminals urged for quiet while they ransacked the bank and extorted the other employees with psychological warfare to a degree where many of the employees pleaded for the thieves to take them out instead, for fear that the banking organization would terminate their ability to work, forcing them to starve out in the cold. 

There was an elderly woman, not Elaine, but much like her and seemingly clearly not as cool headed or as sharp. She had had a phone for years but simply looked too old to trigger any questioning by the bank robbers and was not obligated to show the phone, not like she remembered but then again no one would in such a scenario. Regardless, the mother of the violent child very quietly urged anyone of the surviving victims to check to see if they had any new cellphones. The thieves had installed devices that emitted waves which served the purpose of a Faraday sleeve, a piece of fabric that prevents wireless devices form detecting or communicating with each other, no communication was to leave the building. However newer unreleased cell phone models now came with an option to bypass this, hooked up to illegally installed towers which just so happened to transmit signals to major cities. There was hope for the captives yet. Under the lights that shone a disgusting yellow, the woman banker eventually found a way to slip the cellular device out of the old woman’s pocket. Slowly they whispered prayers and acted as if they were only consoling each other with their hands still up on their heads. Just as the phone was coming out of the pocket of the older women, one of the smaller guards walked up to the women and greeted her face with a padded knee. From the impact the phone that could have saved the survivors flew out. No sooner than the phone hit the ground that a gloved hand reached inside a sweatshirt and yanked out a magnum model pistol from under the collar that housed it. There were to be no survivors. The theives had not yet seen the release of these highly classified models and quickly released the capabilities of the new devices. They relayed the information to their ringleader and upon a short discussion, a gloved hand reached inside a sweatshirt and yanked out a magnum model pistol from under the collar that housed it. The prayers of these brave women were not long enough for a God that is too busy, because after the banker had dropped the phone the floor produced a sound not of a phone falling but this time it was another body like the one of the security guard whose mouth was stuck in a half grin, still lying in blood. A round entered the banker’s brain and fell just like all the other familiar faces that had greeted them before. The children were battered yet not sparred for the thieves had a limited amount of time now. The bank could only be obscured by dark invisible light and the dark tint of its own exterior for much longer as the lack of activity would eventually be noticed by others outside and eventually lead to disrupting the heist by calling for backup. This was no longer the money of the poor, for all the resources of that tier of society had been depleted long ago. It was alright for the men to kill everyone but with every head dropped twenty seconds were sparred. Just when people began to take notice of the lack of noise and activity the money was loaded into the pickup trucks that followed the black SUV from all around the city. They had strategically placed themselves farther so as to not attract as much attention from cameras or other passerby. The heist took less than half an hour during crunch time so not much movement was expected out of the heavy glass doors of the building. 

The large lobby remained empty and from the outside this seemed the case most the time since guards were more preoccupied with the corridors that guarded the richest of the more affluent. Nonetheless, the legend still proved true on that day. The banker’s family could not take their riches with them. The acts of the thieves did not go unrewarded and the spoils now belonged to them as they drove off in separate directions. They had no organized color scheme so it would have been difficult for anybody to take notice of. What could have been mistaken for contractor’s trucks carried a large sum of the total sum of cash on The Eastern Seaboard. It would be another fifteen minutes before more people would curiously peer in and enter the vaults that held the massacre. The trucks may have been caught on some video, but by then the were far and painted with a fresh coat of vinyl and tires that squeaked when they braked on smooth rain pattered roads.