Bebo

Przeczytaj rozdziały

	Verse 1
	Verse 1 I set the amplifier on the cement floor, and heard it crunch on the crushed glass that littered the space about my feet. It didn’t worry me that the shards might damage the equipment that my brother and I were setting up; no, he was more of a threat to the unsuspecting instruments around us than the glass was. My parents adopted Nicholas when I was five. He came in, a seven-year-old ball of hyper-active fury, and I immediately attached myself to him. His own mother had been a friend of my father’s for a long time, but she’d taken a dip off the edge of sanity eleven years earlier and Nicholas had been taken into the family. Although we’re not related by blood, he’s still my favourite sibling. When my other brother and sister left, he was the only one left to irritate after all. He’d changed so much since our childhood days then though. Red hair tumbled over his shoulders, and his incredibly blue eyes focussed on the cymbal he was tightening. A lollipop stuck out of one corner of his mouth, the sticks of more poking out of his breast pocket too. I can’t, even now, remember a time he hadn’t been seen eating one. Every jacket had one in a pocket, every pair of jeans had the used sticks stuck to them. It was a strange quirk, but after so much time spent with him I didn’t bat an eyelash. “Does that amp even work?” He asked me, giving the box an incredulous look. It was battered and mud splattered, but I flicked a switch, twanged the string of the guitar nearest to me and it sprang to life. A loud, thick sound came out clearly from the mesh of the speaker. “Sounds like it does to me.” I smiled at him, then turned to give the room a look over. Well, I say room. I mean something else entirely. We were on the ground-base level of an abandoned parking facility. It rose up for about eight levels, but we weren’t about to lug the sound equipment up more of the foul smelling stairs just for the view of a rotting city. Cities like ours had been abandoned all over the world, an entire civilisation left to sit and collect dust until the Consortium decreed it the right time to demolish part of it for more living space. Until that happened, it was for kids like us to use as a giant playground. “Are we done then?” Nicholas stretched, tendons in his back popping. “I need to pee.” I rolled my eyes at his blunt attitude, but started towards the exit anyway. From our position on the first floor, we could see out over the surrounding buildings. Crumbling bricks and mortar, faded shop signs. Evidence and livelihoods of people who’d come before us. Treasures could be found in those ghosts of the past, and I intended to find some before the concert that evening. Jogging down the stairs, Nicholas just behind me, I opened the old, woodworm-ridden door to the outside world. “I’m going hunting.” I announced as my brother headed for the trees nearby. He grunted in response, waving a hand over one shoulder to signal he understood. Ignoring him, I picked up my bag from the dusty wall I’d left it on and clambered over the nearest pile of rubble. I’d heard of people hunting for food, something I couldn’t imagine, but that wasn’t what I was setting out to do. The game I sought wasn’t alive. Methodically I counted the streets, working my way past the signs I knew I’d already explored and into the last street in the area I had to search. Ahead of me, at the end of the street, I could see the two main cities of the globe in the distance. One, a towering, sparkling wall of possibility with its glass and chrome buildings of silver. Silver City actually, so originally named. The other a maze of wood and old, salvaged bricks, building up like some strange contraption made up as its creator went along. I knew nothing of the first city, but the second was my home. Olsen, city of splinters. It was such a ramshackle structure because it was built as it was needed; a room added here, a house put up there, chimneys stuck out at odd angles. The most unorthodox thing to ever call itself a citadel. But I was outside its wooden walls, in the Old Sector. The abandoned zone that was only ventured into if you were desperate for some new building materials to add on to the skyline, or had to find something to sell at market to make sure your family wouldn’t fall short of taxes. Despite the laws and threats by the Consortium, I still wandered amongst the ruins regularly. And as before mentioned, most of the other teens of my city did too. Scouting a house that looked promising, I searched for an entrance. A broken back-garden gate and gaping doorway allowed me into a garage. The car was still there -its name pronouncing it a Mercedes- but its proud driver was long gone. No-one drove those vehicles any longer. Bicycles were the preferred method of transport around my wooden town, and I’d heard of gleaming silver things that used air to move in the Silver City, the only other form of transportation was the old air-powered bikes. I saw something in a book on a hunt before, a miracle in itself since books have always been difficult to come across, but I digress…the people that went before us called them motorbikes. But they used the old fuel of oil, petroleum, and the design was different. Our bikes had a large visor-screen that curved over the rider, and though there was the vague outline of wheels, they were only there in case the air-flow malfunctioned and the rider had to roll to a stop. All of the bikes were silver too, a stark contrast to the bright reds and blues, and sinister blacks, of their predecessors. They were only allowed out to us in Olsen when Silver City had moved the technology on to more exciting, stylish things, and since they couldn’t be used to navigate the small streets of Olsen they were used by the younger generation to explore the Old Sector. Moving past the old car, I opened the door into the house. I was met with same smell of dust and the atmosphere of something which once was a home, but had long since been left simply a house. The signs of a rushed exit were visible in certain places. Things were askew, baskets open, as though the original owners had packed their essentials and left hastily. The kitchen was dusty, but liveable. Glasses were still sat upside-down on the side from their cleansing, and when I opened a cupboard and looked past the haze of dust, packets of food were still inside. Pasta, tins of beans, packets of potato snacks. All nearly seventy years out of date. Passing on from the kitchen, I entered the lounge area. Sofas and chairs lay, the only sagging occupants of the leisure room. A fading mirror reflected a scruffy boy of sixteen, blonde hair ruffled but still –I like to believe- stylish, and freckles dotted across his face from the sun. Me. It was a mirror my Mother was sure to like, I vowed to come back with a bigger bag and fetch it for her sometime soon. In the corner was a television, and I ignored the mirror to smile triumphantly. The only thing the ‘television’ things would do, when any of us finally managed to get them to work, was fuzz irritatingly. White and black dots of nothing spiralling across the screen. But it wasn’t the television contraption that I was pleased with, it was the slim machine beneath it. It said ‘DVD’ on it, but since we had no way of knowing what that stood for, we simply referred to them as ‘players’. Some of them could be used to play the precious silver disks we sometimes came upon. And from that…from that we got music. This was illegal from my birth and long before. Music, instruments, books…motion pictures my grandmother had referred to as ‘films’; they were all banned. Sugar and grease-based products were prohibited and a fixed diet and daily routine were put into place. All and any freedom of speech was crushed, obliterated, and anything you said had to be considered carefully. If you said the wrong thing, even once, you’d be sent to re-education like Nicholas’s mother. Beyond that, the Consortium weren’t afraid to deal out death. And that was life. But still, somehow, I’d been given a taste of the wonder called music, and from that point onward loved it. The silver disks that contained the music, and the players that played them, were hard to find after many had been destroyed. There was an armistice , and everyone had been forced to hand them in. My grandmother could remember the day they came for hers. They took her Rock collection, she’d said, and her i-pod had been taken from her even after she’d hidden it under the bed. Her brother had had to hand in his guitar, and the radios were taken from her house. They burnt all the books too, anything that wasn’t an instruction leaflet, cookery book or something of that sort was charred to ash. I suppose by writing this now I’m breaking the law myself, but I’ve had my fair share of law-breaking already. They’d have me shot if they caught me either way. Personal views, interpretations, arguments were decimated. Any that appeared in the years afterward were crushed like tiny bugs under the foot of the Consortium. So, you might ask, what were my brother and I doing setting up instruments for a concert if they’re as illegal as the lollipops Nicholas constantly sucks on? Well, I might answer that we were well and truly breaking the rules. As was I, might I add, by sneaking around the old house and stealing the lingering players. Thankfully, though the players played music and ‘films’, they were left to families as without disks they were quite useless. The Consortium simply didn’t have the space, time or money to spend on getting rid of the masses of outlawed products. We could only assume that they were all left to rot somewhere in some huge landfill, and we searched for them. No-one had found them to date. There was a large group of us who came to the concerts that were occasionally thrown. The concert we were, incidentally, setting up. Our audience was an underground following of art-lovers, rule breakers and general rebels. Nicholas played the guitar, the man down the street learnt from his father, and taught a few kids. He was taken for re-education a few months later, but his spirit lived on in the teenagers that played his instrument. It was a memorial concert we prepared for that day. For him, for Billie Joe and all the other expressionists who were taken by the Consortium for no good reason. We called ourselves the children of the revolution, bohemians of music and rhyme. The Consortium hates our guts as much as we hate theirs. My watch told me I’d lingered long enough in the house, and though upstairs called to me, I resisted and slipped the player into my shoulder bag. I crept back into the garage, past the car and out of the door-less back exit. It was waiting for me in the street. They call them NM Elevens, but the rest of us call them Mincers. They had that name for a reason I knew only to well. The sleek metallic bodywork shone in the grey light of a cloudy day, and the whirring of mechanics was easily distinguished over the squawk of the crows that could be heard occasionally over the Old Sector. It didn’t resemble anything living, just a mass of smooth metal with crab-like legs and arms with various instruments to fear on their ends. The small camera built into its framework blinked at me, the lens zooming in to pick up my face. I hid it hastily, knowing that once I was recognised I’d be taken away by the Consortium the next day. However, I soon realised that was the least of my worries as the creature took my movement as a signal to charge. With a yelp I stumbled over the rubble in the garden and through a hole in the back fence. I heard it smash through behind me, legs digging into the ground like shovels, unearthing the long-undisturbed soil. I sped through overgrown hedges and lawns, stumbled over the occasional dilapidated garden gnome and got lost in the maze of city suburbs. I saw my path, and zigzagged through alleys I knew from early childhood toward the area I knew Nick would still be waiting for me in. “Nick! Nicholas! Start up the bike!” I screamed, praying to whatever deity was laughing at me right then that he would hear me. No reply came, and as I got closer and still couldn’t see him, I began to panic. “Nick! Damnit! For God’s sake start the damn bike!” The angelic sound of the air engine gusted into life, and I almost cried as I sped around the corner. Nick was sat on the bike, ready, with his helmet on and a space left for me. Pushing myself to faster with a last reserve of shit-scared energy, I launched myself onto the bike, almost knocking it, myself and my brother over, but it stabilised itself and he revved the throttle. Mincers were fast, but air bikes were faster. And for that I thanked my fat nerd of a god.
Sprawdź tę historię >>>