The Riser Saga Page 2

  People who had money were legally allowed to start taking Age-pro at eighteen, but people like us trailer-park-low-income types, usually started taking it when we were thirty. That’s when the National Insurance kicked in and pretty much anyone could afford it. And let’s face it, even people who had no money managed to find a way to get their hands on Age-pro. Who would want to miss out on immortality?

  Jason was gone before I could really appreciate the crooked little smile he always gave at the end of each report and was replaced with boring Carleton Gordan, news anchor for the last hundred years not looking a day over nineteen.

  Carleton droned on in his monotone, annoying voice, “Overpopulation has reached an all time high, and the death rate has dropped to a record low. The government commented this morning about its terraforming project on Mars, but no other word or solution has been made…”

  “Come on, eat your food before it gets cold.” Bruce pulled my attention away from the news.

  “Sure, thanks, Bruce.” I sat down at the rusty Formica-topped kitchen table where my waiting eggs rested. The smell finally reached my nose and my stomach grumbled in response.

  “You better hurry, sweetheart, that rich school of yours won’t tolerate tardiness from a trailer kid.” Mom came into the kitchen with her usual hostility toward the high school I went to. It was a private, richy-rich-school that we could never afford, but I worked at the ice-cream parlor off campus to pay the tuition that scholarships didn’t cover. She wanted me to go to the public school about ten miles away.

  But I physically couldn’t. And I couldn’t tell her why.

  The first time I realized that my control of dead things had a proximity limit was when I was on my way to my friend’s Aunt’s house twenty miles away.

  About five miles out, I got a call from my mother, screaming that Bruce had just dropped to the floor, dead. I cried hysterically until my friend’s parents turned the car around. I concentrated as hard as I could until I could feel Bruce’s black hole and brought him back to life. It was just shy of four miles away from the trailer park.

  I knew then that I could never go beyond a four-mile radius of my home, or Bruce would become a corpse again. Not only that, but in the few minutes that I let him die for a second time, his body began to decay, as if it knew the exact date when he died.

  Think if I left and let him die for good? He’d be a skeleton within minutes.

  Luckily, he’d only rotted a bit on his upper arm and leg, so no one seemed to notice. Gross!

  But this is my life, my existence, making sure all the dead things I’ve brought back to life stay fresh so my loved ones aren’t in excruciating emotional pain from their losses.

  When I found out that the public high school was outside my “safety zone” I looked for another school I could go to.

  Only one was exactly three miles away, Geoffrey Turner High School.

  A super elite, super expensive private school named after the Vice President of Population Control, which was pretty much the most powerful position in the world, even more than the President, since population was the world’s biggest concern today. He was the only man in the public eye who showed any sign of age. He was fifty when Fortski created Age-pro and Turner had been fifty ever since. I always tried to get a closer look at his wrinkles on the holo, but I think they did some kind of effect to hide most of them. He was a very distinguished man, always in a suit and tie, dark hair with flecks of white. His features were classic: straight nose, chiseled bone structure, strong chin.

  Mom cringed every time I mentioned the fact that we had the same grey eyes. Even the shape was the same. In fact, she’d cringe every time I mentioned his name. She said it was because he was creepy to look at, being old and all, and not to ever compare myself to him again. And that was about all she’d say on the matter, but I suspected there was more to it than that. Vice President Turner must have done something political over the years to piss Mom off. Even though she looked thirty, she was about to have her fiftieth birthday soon, and Geoffrey Turner had been in office for over two hundred years. That was a lot of time to do something that my mom could hold a grudge for.

  “Do you want to take the rest of your birthday cake for lunch?” Mom asked me as she was already packing it into my lunch box. I turned eighteen four days ago. I was the oldest in my senior class. It was always annoying starting the school year older than everyone else. By the end of the year everyone had caught up to me, but for some reason a year in high school was the equivalent of ten normal years. So for at least the first few months I’d be getting jokes and the condescending glares from all the seventeen-year-old seniors equating my “old” age to my intelligence or lack thereof according to them. I would say I couldn’t wait to graduate and get out, but I knew if I left, Bruce would be bones and I still didn’t think I could do that to my mother.

  Mom handed me my lunch as she kissed the top of my head affectionately. She gave me her usual wink and a smile. Her way of saying she loved me. My mom was pretty gorgeous considering the time she began taking Age-pro. Her hair was brown like mine, but her eyes were light hazel. Her skin was ivory in color with a smattering of freckles across her nose and her body was perfectly thin. She was thirty-one when she started Age-pro so she only had faint lines around her eyes, which I personally loved. Her face lit up when she laughed and the slight crinkles seemed to make her eyes sparkle. I used to think this was the reason my real father fell in love with her. I would sometimes imagine what he was like, what he looked like, what his voice sounded like. He died the day I was born and my mom didn’t have any pictures of him. She said it was too painful a reminder. He was the love of her life and she always said it killed her the day he died. For some reason the way she’d say it always sounded like she meant it literally. Maybe that’s why she ended up with Bruce, she picked the complete opposite of my father so she’d never be reminded of him again.

  “Thanks, Mom. I better go. I have to work at the shop after school today. I took a shift for Jenny,” I told her between mouthfuls as I shoveled down a few more bites of Bruce’s eggs. “I’ll see you around seven.” I kissed her cheek and ran out the door.

  The flimsy aluminum door slapped shut behind me as I left the trailer.

  I made my way to the Hover-Shuttle waiting area just outside the park. The Hover-Shuttle came every five minutes or so and could take you pretty much anywhere in the larger city of Los Angeles. The trailer park was pretty dead at the moment. Most of the people who lived there had blue-collar jobs that required getting up at the crack of dawn. I resigned myself to working at the ice-cream shop for the rest of my life if I didn’t figure out what to do about Bruce. And that could be a very long time, an eternity possibly. An eternity of working retail! I hoped at some point I could be honest with my mom and make her understand what I did and let Bruce rest in peace. Yeah right.

  I reached the designated steel bench to wait for the Hover-Shuttle. The waiting area itself was circular like a fifteen-foot bulls-eye made of grey asphalt. A few seconds later, I could hear the whizzing sound of the Hover-Shuttle coming my way. Closer and closer the rectangular metal box buzzed toward me. It was clunky and old, but most things that came to the trailer park were. Society pretty much wanted to pretend we didn’t exist, so when it came to public works and transportation we were last on the list of repairs. That’s what happens when there are twenty-seven billion people on the planet and over half of them are rich and demand their needs come first. The other half of us does all the menial work and shut our mouths. No one wants to stir the pot in fear that the National Insurance for Age-pro would be cut. As it stood we had to wait until we were thirty. If the government decided to cut the funding, they could push that limit to forty or even fifty!

  The orange-yellow glow and the whirling of ducted fans from the belly of the Hover-Shuttle lowered to the center of the waiting area. The propulsion fans ran on hydrogen fuel cell technology, so to kill two birds with one stone, there were containe
rs under the vehicles collecting the steam and water from the cells and then later to dump it in recycling plants. There the plants would send the water to all sorts of places from drinking water distribution facilities to watering tanks located in most suburban neighborhoods for their greens. Anywhere and everywhere they could use it.

  The metal on the shuttle was chipped and dented giving the appearance of a beat up refrigerator. The passenger door lowered to the ground with a loud CLUNK and turned into a set of grated metal steps. Skipping two at a time, I climbed up the stairs and entered.

  The interior wasn’t much nicer than the exterior. The seats were arranged like any public transportation: two rows of two-seaters with a middle aisle in between. There was only one other passenger besides me: a businessman, suit and tie, reading from his electronic reader, keeping to himself. I sat down near the front. The driver waited a few moments as if someone from the trailer park would come running up the stairs at any second. Or maybe he just counted to ten in his head at every stop. Whatever it was, at some invisible marker of time, he closed the door of the craft and we were off.

  The humming sound of the Hover-Shuttle was almost deafening as we sailed toward Geoffrey Turner High School, the next stop. I looked out the window as we traveled and admired the landscape. Where the trailer park was stark and devoid of much vegetation, once outside its perimeter, the ground became lush with bright green grass and a field of California Oaks. Once the International Law of 2142 was passed requiring the planting of a tree every twenty feet, most places decided to re-plant near extinct trees like the California Oak. The law was passed as soon as everyone realized the down sides to Age-pro. Overpopulation. This basically meant we’d run out of oxygen if we didn’t start evening out the balance of the world. More people meant more things, which meant more natural resources being drained, trees being one of the highest for paper alone. The first law to be passed was in 2068 that outlawed anything printed on paper. Electronic reading devices were already a popular luxury item back then, but they soon became a requirement if you ever intended to read anything. Only e-books were legal. But it just wasn’t enough. There just wasn’t enough plant life on the Earth to sustain the amount of people inhabiting it so they had to make planting more trees a worldwide law. It was hard for me to imagine living on this planet without the amount of trees we had now. I loved trees. I loved getting lost in the forest with a good book or to just sit under the shade and have a moment to myself.

  The Hover-Shuttle flew past the oak forest and I could see my high school drawing near. It looked like something from a fairytale: early 1800’s architecture (re-created of course: the school was only twenty-years-old) made entirely of brick and mortar, iron-wrought gates and ivy growing up the sides of the school like veins pumping life into the building.

  I just wished the people inside it were as nice and the building was to look at. Being poor in a rich school didn’t exactly lend itself to making friends. I had two people who were brave enough to socialize with the “leech” as I was so fondly referred to. And I truly considered them friends. Bill and Nancy. Bill was a sweetheart. He was loyal and simple in the kind of way that made it nice to be around him. He was also easy on the eyes with his perfectly messy brown hair, well-muscled body (I think the guy had a ten-pack if that’s possible!) and a boyish face with long eyelashes. In the entire high school, his family was the richest by far! That was why they didn’t give him much of a hard time hanging around with me. The one thing the rich kids had in common was the hierarchy of elitism. And since Bill could buy and sell almost everyone that attended Geoffrey Turner High, he’d get his usual kiss ass line of admirers every day whether I was with him or not. I always felt safest when I was with Bill since the worst kind of behavior I’d experience from the true nasties of the school was a total ignorance of my existence. When I wasn’t with him it was an entirely different story. That’s when the claws came out.

  Bill and I met randomly sophomore year when I rounded a corner and slammed into his six-foot wall of a body. His stuff flew, my stuff flew, it was a mess. But the most tragic part about it was I broke my electronic reader, a lightning bolt shaped crack straight down the middle. Electronic readers weren’t cheap mind you, I had to work double shifts at the ice-cream shop just to buy mine. I nearly cried between gulps of apologies. I thought I’d be crucified right then and there for daring to touch the precious Bill Merryweather, let alone knocking him on his butt. And without an electronic reader I’d have been kicked out of school for sure. I couldn’t count the amount of times the school informed me, “Geoffrey Turner High is not a charity. If you can’t purchase your own items, you will be excused.”

  Jill Forester (the ringleader of my torment for the last four years) was the first to kneel down and try to help Bill up, sending nasty glares at me about five times a second. Her hair was as black as her heart and bright green eyes that made her cruelly beautiful. Why are all the mean girls gorgeous?! She was thin and perfect and she knew it.

  When she saw my broken reader she simply smirked and said, “Karma.”

  Karma, this! I wanted to say, but held my tongue and apologized to Bill again.

  “You should be sorry.” Jill couldn’t help herself.

  If ever I wanted to smack someone it was in that moment. But Bill did something I’ll never forget. He shrugged Jill off and stood up. That alone caused a dramatic gasp from the crowd. He offered me his hand and smiled in a way that said, don’t listen to her. No harm, no foul, I’m fine. I took his hand and he lifted me to my feet. He picked up my reader, handed it to me and genuinely looked like he was sorry. The group surrounding us already started to close in on Bill, shutting off any conversation, until I was standing alone in the middle of the hall with my broken reader. Later that day when I sat down in Geometry class there was a brand new, state of the art, grossly expensive, electronic reader lying on my desk with a card. The card simply said, “Sorry about your reader. Hope this will work for you. Bill.” My heart stopped. No one had ever done something like that for me before, especially someone as popular as Bill. He was really sticking his neck out on the social line for me. It was the nicest thing I had ever owned and still own to this day. I knew he had a ton of money and buying a reader was probably like spending a penny to him, but it was a kindness he was in no way obligated to do, and genuinely came from the goodness of his heart. Ever since then we’ve been close friends, despite Jill’s agony over the union.

  My friendship with Nancy was a different story. She was considered upper middle class which was still super rich compared to me, but not rich enough to give her the same respect that Bill had. We met freshman year when we were forced to be lab partners in Biology. She wasn’t happy about it. I was new and everyone knew I lived in the trailer park before I even arrived on campus. That put me in the below filth category on everyone’s radar though no one would openly admit this for fear of looking like the prejudiced jerks they were. I knew they’d come up with a “real” reason for hating me later, but as for the moment of my arrival, it would just be an unsaid loathing toward me. Nancy did the usual: rolled her gorgeous blue eyes and flipped her long locks of blonde hair, in annoyance of my presence, audibly grunting exasperation, all for the pleasure of the rest of the class. Just another perfectly beautiful mean girl. When the teacher handed out the dead frogs we were supposed to cut up, her face turned greener than their corpses. For me it was a room full of black swirling holes.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  Nancy tried to ignore the fact that I even spoke to her, but after a few moments she shook her head. “I don’t think I can do it.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was afraid if I said anything she’d guffaw and tell me to shut up anyway, but as rude as she was to me, I could still see how much the frogs were upsetting her.

  Then she spoke. Her voice barely audible, her face growing paler by the second, “I had a pet frog that just died… Jimmy.”

  She said it with such emotion and
heartache, all my feelings of annoyance toward her melted away.

  “I don’t think I can cut into him.” Even though her voice was a whisper her eyes were screaming with panic and anguish.

  That was when I decided to use my gift. There was no way I could let this poor girl cut into what she saw as her pet.

  “We won’t be cutting anything today,” I said and I popped every single frog back into existence.

  It was pure and utter chaos. There were jumping frogs everywhere: on the desks, on the students, on the stools, on the floor. Screams and laughter mixed together like a symphony of bedlam. The teacher tried to wrangle the frogs into the garbage receptor, but since I controlled the frogs, that didn’t happen.

  “Open the windows,” I said very calmly to Nancy, whose expression had done a complete turn around. There were tears of joy streaming down her face: joy and relief. Whether she knew exactly what I was doing or not, she didn’t say, but she knew I was somehow responsible and she nodded and walked to the windows, opening them wide.