Houston, 2030 Read online

  In 2013, the first year of the second Obama's presidency, another financial crisis arrived. It was named ‘GFC version 2.0,’ as some silly computer game. A game, of course, it was not. If the economists called the first GFC ‘the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,’ the GFC v 2.0 was simply ‘the worst financial crisis,’ ever. Half of the banks world-wide went bankrupt, the rest were nationalized. The business districts were deserted. Unemployment soared to 15 percent, then to 25, to 30, then to, unthinkable, 41. The TV news readily flashed the explanations: Peak Oil, Peak Gas, Peak Fish, then, a decisive: PEAK EVERYTHING. There were too many people on the planet, and the planet refused to provide for the humans any longer. The Americans finally got the message. Some would rush to install solar panels and rain water tanks, others converted back yards into vegetable patches and replaced cars with motor-scooters and bicycles. But it was too little, too late.

  By throwing in yet another desperate economic stimulus package, Obama's government managed to overcome the worst in the GFC v 2.0. Some other countries were less fortunate. A number of European economies: from Spain to Latvia, ceased to exist. The Central Africa lost most of the governments, and was in the state of anarchy and perpetual civil war, ruled by armed gangs of drug-addict teenagers. India reported fifty million dead from hunger; on the CNN news footage it looked more like half a billion dead. China, the second largest world economy, suffered major civil unrest, with riots hitting the streets of every major city. The Chinese government crushed the opposition with tanks, after shutting down the Internet and the mobile phone networks, – and reported ‘business as usual.’ The endless container ships with Chinese goods continued coming to the delivery points overseas, so the ‘minor human rights issues’ were immediately forgotten, even by the most inexorable human rights activists. Within a year, the world started recovering little-by-little, and the Americans became optimistic again.

  Then, in the winter of 2016, came the Meltdown. It was entirely unexpected to most. The presidential elections' campaign was in full swing, and none of the candidates wanted the bad news. The reports had been upbeat: the economy had been doing far better, stocks and industrial indexes had recovered, banks solidified… Quite naturally, there were few little concerns here and there. Yes, the unemployment was above 18 percent, but – on a three-year low. One American out of four received food stamps, but hey, the USA was a strong economy after all, and could afford having no hungry people around! To put it short: the bad times were over, bright future ahead!

  Then, out of nowhere, the crisis arrived, hitting like a cargo train. Some huge liquid natural gas plant blew up in Oman. The market overreacted, sending natural gas and oil prices through the roof. In accordance to the new tradition, it was called the ‘GFC v 3.0,’ but only for two or three weeks. Then, the new name was coined: the Meltdown. Within a month, all the world leading economies declared defaults. Bankruptcies of major corporations were on the news by several dozen a day. There were no more commercial airlines, no more car manufacturing, no more garbage collection, no more fuel at the gas stations, no more food on the supermarket shelves. Seemingly, some secret switch had been turned off – for the entire planet.

  To their utter surprise, the Americans discovered there was life after the Meltdown, but a very different life, as one might expect. The abundance was no more. The streets in Houston became dark at night – now and forever.

  Chapter 2

  Mark arrived home at quarter to eleven. William and Clarice, or Billy and Rissy, as everybody in the neighborhood started calling them recently, waited for Mark in front of a small TV. Tonight, the local station was showing Back to the Future II re-run. The rest of the house was quiet and dark – all the other family members had gone to bed.

  After four hours at the crime scene, Mark desperately wanted a shower. With an LED lantern in hand, he went into the downstairs bathroom. The central sewer system stopped working six and a half years ago, but Mark ran a length of PVC pipe, so the ‘gray water’ went into the back yard tank – for watering vegetables. The shower operated from a 50-gallon barrel installed on the roof. If the day was sunny, the water would be of almost-right temperature. He had to be careful to save the water: the procedure was nicknamed a ‘Submariner's Shower.’ Fifteen seconds of running water to wet the skin, then forty-five seconds to wash the soap off. At least, he would not need to save the soap: several families in the area had opened tiny soap factories, and the product, if not of the best quality, was now available at a reasonable price.

  On such a day, Mark would give almost anything for a shower like they used to be before the Meltdown: strong, long and hot. The last time he had one was eight, no, already nine years ago. Well after the Meltdown, but many still pretended it was life as usual. People drove private cars sometimes, the FBI could afford hiring motor-buses and charter planes, and few five-star hotels were happy to organize a conference. Two hundred or so mid-level FBI personnel were summoned to Houston from three states to participate in seminars and brainstorming sessions. The official target was to establish strategies for dealing with the evolving organized crime: bootlegged gasoline, slave labor, and so on. Mark did not remember much of what had been presented or decided; most of it became irrelevant within a year or so. Instead, his memory readily recalled the external attributes of ‘normalcy,’ all of them enjoyed for the entire week. The participants were dressed in strict business attire: classic FBI suites for men and ‘power-dresses’ for women. The restaurant served real beef steaks and real coffee, and the rooms were air-conditioned. But the most important hotel luxury: there were showers! Real showers, one could make as hot or as cold as needed, with fragrant shampoo and bath gel. You could stay under the shower for good half an hour, without worrying about suddenly running out of water.

  Yes, it was a great week. By the last day of the event, Mark almost convinced himself the life would somehow revert to ‘normal,’ how it used to be before the Meltdown. Then, the holiday was over, and the reality was back. On the way home, he stopped at the Houston downtown flea market to exchange his formal black suite for two second-hand school uniforms. His daughters, Samantha and Pamela, were about to go to school, and needed those far more urgently than he would ever need his suite. Mark was right: he had no need for a black suite ever since.

  A bit refreshed, Mark returned to the sitting room and started on a cold dinner Clarice had set up for him. Today, they had tofu steak with veggies and boiled corn on the cob.

  “On the evening news, Dad. Another double murder, right?” William started. Quite as Mark expected, the camera girl had delivered the footage. “Apparently, you have been starring again. Ris said: you, Sergeant Alex and that CSI girl – all looked very cool! Like some real detectives from the CSI Miami! But frankly, it will take you a long while to become as good as those pros on TV.” William had never been good at making jokes, but it did not prevent him from trying.

  “In Venezuela,” Mark replied a bit off-topic, “did you meet a soldier engineer named Nick Hobson?”

  “You mean: personally? No. But the name rings a bell. I think he left before my time. Stepped on a mine or something like this.”

  William wiped the remnants of his left eye with the short stump of his left arm, then made a futile attempt to reach his empty right eye socket with the same stump. His right arm was amputated through the shoulder, and there was no stump at all.

  William had always been fiercely independent. On his fifth birthday, the boy solemnly declared that he should not be called ‘Willy,’ or ‘Billy,’ or ‘baby B’ or anything like it. “I'm going to school,” he explained the stunned parents: “I'm no baby no more!” ‘Bill’ – the absolute minimum he was willing to accept from now on, even from Mom and Dad.

  Two years ago, Mark and Mary were outraged, when William walked in one day and announced that his girlfriend Clarice was pregnant, and therefore they had decided to get married. William politely refused all conversations about possibly making an abortion.
It was not like Mark wanted to press the issue. By the State law of 2025, an interruption of a healthy pregnancy was illegal. Being an FBI agent, he would not send his potential daughter-in-law to a black market medic, which left the only option to have the procedure done in one of the states which had not passed the same drastic legislation. After studying the Internet for a while, Mark discovered that the closest place in which abortions were both legal and relatively safe was in California.

  Mark and Mary soon learned that it was too late for an abortion anyway, as Clarice was expecting in under three months. “Why the hell you have been quiet for half a year?” Mary asked back then.

  “It's not like I can't predict what you two may say,” William replied, “remember, I am not asking your permission, or anything. We will be married, regardless. And if you don't like Clarice to live here, we can find a place of our own.”

  William's fiancée was an orphan, who lost both parents and two brothers in the 2023 avian flu epidemic, and lived with some distant relatives, practically serving them as an unpaid housemaid. Mark felt pity for her and gave his approval, but thinking at the time this would be the worst decision ever. The eldest son's early marriage did not fit well with Mark's expectations. William was truly gifted and could make an outstanding career, even in the difficult post-Meltdown times.

  A little wedding ceremony was held, and Clarice, with her drum-like tummy, had moved in. She proved to be pretty cheerful and easy-going, and a decent cook. Most importantly, despite Mark's initial concerns, Clarice and Mary got along quite well. Two months after the wedding, Clarice gave birth to a healthy boy, who was named David, after Mary's father. Soon later, William received his draft orders for the Corps of Engineers and was sent to the boot camp in Fort Worth. Mark remembered how William bade them good-byes, standing next to a military motor-bus, holding little Davy on his arms and smiling. “Three years in the USACE – no big deal,” he kept on saying. “The Engineers – is not like in the damn Infantry! Don't you worry. I'll be back in one piece.” How could one expect that very soon the young man would have no eyes to see his son and no arms to hold him?

  Upon the initial training in Fort Worth, William was deployed to Venezuela. The United States had to protect the remaining operational oilfields from the attacks of the local resurgence groups. On the fourth month of his deployment, William had an accident while disarming a booby-trap installed on a wellhead. His helmet and bullet-proof vest saved the engineer's life, but he was badly wounded by the fragments. He was evacuated to a floating hospital docked in Caracas – modified from a former cruise liner USNS Santa Lucia, christened in the military the Dumpster-of-Caribbean. It was specifically dedicated for the conscript soldiers with serious injuries. Those, who would not be able to return to the active duty, and thus became an unwanted burden for the Army. Only ‘cost-effective’ treatment was administered on board, a bit like in the World War I field hospitals: radical mutilating surgeries, no antibiotics, and no rehab. The expensive modern methods were reserved to the other hospitals – for whose lucky soldiers with light injuries who could be reused at the battlefield.

  William later told Mark how he begged the medics to save at least his left arm, but always-busy and chronically sleep-deprived Dumpster personnel did not listen to such exotic requests from their less-than-lucky patients. In the triage room, one of the doctors bluntly told the wounded engineer to shut up and get ready to live the rest of his life without both arms. On William's question what quality of life it was supposed to be, the reply followed that the goddamn quality of life of the goddamn stupid privates, who kept goddamn blowing themselves up on the goddamn booby-traps in the goddamn Venezuela jungles, – just today did not make it into the floating hospital's priority list. Goddamn sorry!

  “This is what we call a quick radical treatment, dude. You might even like it this way,” the military surgeon assured William ninety minutes later. “Quick is always better. Your stitches will be out in under a week, and you will be ready to go. Believe me, nobody of my amputees had ever complained!” Then, despite his further protests, William was heavily sedated and wheeled into an operation room, where the surgery team amputated both his arms, leaving only a short useless stump on the left side. They removed his damaged right eye ball completely; the less mangled left eye was cleansed, plastered, and left to resolve by itself. About a month later, William discovered that the left eye remnants were not entirely useless and retained capability to distinguish between light and darkness. As the second doctor predicted, William was not too upset about the drastic surgery. After the operation, he learned that the floating hospital's single operation theater handled no less than twenty life-saving operations a day. Every extra minute spent on him by the team might cost somebody's life. Besides, he was explained that without antibiotics and other expensive drugs, his mangled arms had a snowball-chance-in-hell anyway.

  Still on board the ship, William received what was called the official Dumpster-pack: a second-hand military uniform, a Purple Heart, and his honorable discharge papers. Two weeks later, the Dumpster-of-Caribbean safely crossed the sea and offloaded six hundred brand-new war amputees in Galveston.

  “What about this Nick Hobson?” Clarice kissed William in the ear and started pouring Mark some flower tea.

  “Nick Hobson. The dead body on TV – he was killed in the woods, along with yet unknown girl, that's all,” Mark was too tired and mentally wasted for a conversation about the serial killer case, “better tell me, how your day has been.”

  “Oh, today it was excellent! We got two hundred and fifty-three dollars all together! Our personal record,” Clarice replied, mercifully leaving the serial killer subject. “Billy is getting pretty good at this collection business. Today, we did the market first. Weekdays, in the morning, it's the best place to shake the bucket. We stood there for about four hours. Then, somebody told us there would be some charity food. We ran to the Salvations' kitchen, were a bit late, and missed the veggies, but got ourselves some soup for lunch. I volunteered to do the dishes, as usual. Then – we had to do the Loop, but not much. With my tummy, it is a bit difficult to do a lot of walking…” Now she was seven months pregnant, and her tummy was large indeed.

  Despite his horrific injuries, William adjusted amazingly well, and it would not be possible without Clarice. Mark vividly remembered the day Clarice phoned him at work. “William just called,” she fired: “He is on a hospital ship. Santa Lucia!”

  “On a hospital ship? What happened?”

  “He is fine! The surgery went all-right. He had both arms amputated.”

  “What? Clarice! Amputated? What do you mean: both arms?”

  “Yeah, both arms are gone. He says, all the way to the shoulders.”

  “Shit! I am sorry, Clarice…” Mark was horrified with the news.

  “Why ‘shit’? Why ‘sorry’?” Clarice did not sound sad or even concerned, “it's wonderful! The hospital ship leaves Caracas sometimes next week. William will be home – very soon! Alive! Oh, Mark! I am so happy!”

  “Happy? But – the arms?” So stupid, he thought. Why the hell she was so happy?

  “Oh, the arms – no big deal. Arms or no arms – I don't give a damn! People live with no arms, with no legs! Besides, they make people prosthetic arms, yeah? God helps, we'll figure this part out somehow…”

  Ten days later she received an SMS: the Santa Lucia arrives at noon tomorrow, relatives may come and collect the ‘vets.’ Through the end of the XXth century, the word ‘vet’ almost universally meant an ‘animal doctor.’ After all, an animal clinic one would find at every shopping mall, while the word ‘veteran’ had some historical connotations, like those Vietnam War veterans, or even more distant: like Les Invalides from the Napoleonic Wars. Everybody was so politically correct before the Meltdown! You should not call somebody ‘crippled,’ or even ‘handicapped,’ but had to say: ‘mobility-challenged.’ A blind person should be called ‘perception-impaired,’ and an imbecile child – ‘differen
tly-able.’ But as all the small and large wars of the XXIst Century progressed, filling dilapidated cities with disabled ex-soldiers, the word ‘vet’ more and more crept into the street talk, meaning ‘disabled veteran’ or ‘war amputee.’ A black joke was around: ‘vet’ is an abbreviation of ‘soldier.’

  Clarice was re-telling the story of her trip to Galveston several times since. The motor-bus service between the Sheldon-Res area and Galveston was still running last year, but the last remaining motor-bus already approached the end of its useful life. Clarice was unlucky: the motor-bus stopped a couple of times, and the driver had fix something in the engine. When they arrived to Galveston, it was well after midday. “I ran to the port like mad,” Clarice recalled: “At the Wharf Street, – holy crap! The entire street was full of vets on crutches! Like, everybody was missing a leg! So I was in the port past one-thirty! Too bloody late.”