Harold; of the Apocalypse, new fiction chapter one

Harold sipped his coffee, a bluebird sang in the Maple tree, so close he could almost touch it. A warm, humid breeze, caused the curtains to billow out into the room, framing him in the tall, open window. His garden covered a city block, a patchwork quilt of vegetable plots, ponds and flowers. He’d been piecing his little empire together for years, buying each nearby house as it was abandoned, tearing it down, brick by brick, and walling himself off. He’d bought out the last neighbor six years ago.

His kingdom lay before him, peaceful and serene, water flowed through his artificial river system, teeming with life, the sand and charcoal bed, filtering and returning it to course back through again, supplying the water for the garden, and the house. He’d just finished his breakfast of steamed tilapia caught in that very stream, seasoned with herbs from one of a dozen window boxes, and complemented with fresh eggs from his free-range hens, roaming the yard below among his grove of vibrant fruit and nut trees.

He’d worked hard to make his life self-sustaining. He’d broken free from the grid long before things had changed forever, although it hadn’t been easy. He’d had to agree to continue paying them their blood money for the utilities he didn’t use, and the water too poisoned to drink, right up until the end, but now it was paying off.

From outside the wall, another blast sounded, rattling the windows as a giant orange cloud rose in the distance, over what was left of the city. It was the third large explosion this week, likely sabotage at another abandoned factory. He heard feet pounding past on the broken pavement in the street beyond his paradise, carrying destruction from one neighborhood to another, factions brutally fighting for dominance in the wide waste world that was left in the wake of the apocalypse.

But this, Harold knew, this violent upheaval was not the apocalypse.

The apocalypse had gone all but unnoticed, this was the recovery phase and it was going to get messier before it got better. He closed the window, just as a cloud of dust from the explosion, peppered the glass with fine bits of sand. He sighed, he’d need to power wash the siding again this afternoon. But, it was all going to be worth it.

Harold turned from the window and made his way deeper into the warren of rooms and hallways his “castle” had become as he’d joined bits and pieces of three of the original houses together, low voltage LED lighting blinked on, motion detectors lighting only the areas he needed at the moment.

His solar system would support more lighting, but he’d had a scare a few months back when he’d almost been discovered. The system had glitched, and the sound insulation on his generator hadn’t been enough to prevent a few curious souls from poking around, before he realized it and got it shut down. So now, he only used what he absolutely needed, the rest, automatically shut down when not in use.

Fortunately the snoopers hadn’t gotten in, his booby traps had triggered, causing mini-collapses of wall rubble, scaring off any would-be explorers. From the outside, Harold’s University, as he thought of it, looked like any other bombed out block, heaped with rubble. The walls ran over eighteen feet high and included the facades of the original townhomes, along with other rubble he’d allowed dumped there, long before the shit had hit the fan.

He’d spent months putting preventative measures in place to either scare away, or discourage invaders.

He walked along a twisting hall, pierced at intervals, by passages leading off in various directions, designed to confuse, or detain would-be intruders. He stopped at a corner and lifted a hidden, hinged panel in the wall, covered in tacked-on garbage, to reveal a keypad. He typed in a sequence of numbers and a door in the opposite wall slid open silently. The hall went dark as the lights came up in his library, an eerie green glow drifting out of the open door, which slid shut behind him as he stepped through.

His clanging steps echoed through the three-story tall space as he descended the spiraling metal stairs, a salvage project that had taken him two weeks to recover and install, through the use of rollers and winches. He’d managed to drag it from the back of one of the original houses, where it had served as a fire escape, in through a set of French doors and into this hall he’d created by removing two floors of the original house.

The walls were lined with shelves, over twenty feet high, filled with printed and digital data of all sorts. Before the organized world had become a thing, he’d hired teams of researchers and data entry techs to download, edit and print as much of the internet as possible, as the infrastructure was crumbling, unexplained, beneath their keyboards. Sites they had accessed the day before, would disappear, or appear scrambled, as the World Wide Web imploded, only to be replaced with a sanitized version of the same information, or not at all.

He'd prioritized; survival first, sciences second, history third, then as much of literature and art as they could get to. It might well be the only library left, certainly the largest. In one end of the hall, lay a series of massive printers, with stacks of empty toner cartridges, rising almost to the ceiling, where he’d spent months of sleepless nights, printing information, in an attempt to hard copy as much critical data as possible, a safeguard, against the eventual breakdown of his digital machines.

When he’d started, it had been a hardbound book collection, siphoned out of libraries that were still open, although harshly restricted. He’d managed to collect over five thousand volumes before coming to the conclusion that he would never get enough information fast enough that way. So, he’d switched tactics, gathering up as many terabyte hard drives as he dared, under the watchful eyes of the community, to store his downloaded contraband.

It was a never-ending process, but he’d been forced to stop when each login to the public internet had required a biometric scan and a location triangulation to prevent this very thing.

In the center of the room was a large library desk he’d recovered the night before they’d burned the central city library to the ground. Above it hung a mirror. He pulled down the flaps of his cap and practiced the useless idiot grin that let him pass through the streets outside unmolested.

He swung a heavy, layered cape over his shoulders, the finishing touch of his camouflage. It was designed to let him pass as a beggar, or blend into any pile of garbage he could crawl behind, if he needed to hide in plain sight.

Harold walked through the library to a shelf in one corner. He stopped, turned back and scanned the space, waiting. There was only silence and stillness. He reached into the shelf and pulled out a well-worn DVD case labeled “Idiocracy” and opened it. Inside, a wireless keypad had been installed. He tapped in another sequence and the shelf slid aside, revealing a dirt shaft, with a lumber ladder running down into it.

A cord above his head activated a series of trouble lights, running down the wall behind the ladder, he clicked it on. He closed Idiocracy and placed it back on the shelf, then swung out onto the ladder, as the shelf slid back to hide the hole above him, he descended into the shaft. Twelve feet exactly below the floor of the library, the ladder ended on a concrete floor. A low, round, tunnel led off to one side, where Harold had tapped into the storm sewer system.

Harold took a headlamp from a hook on the wall and put it on, switching on the light. It helped him see down here, and added to his idiot act up on the streets. From here, he had to move quickly and carefully. He gathered the packs that lay waiting at the base of the stairs and slung the straps of the two messenger bags across his body, then took off at a trot through the tunnel, hunching over, so that his shoulders just rubbed against the top of the tunnel, it was the best posture he’d discovered for making any time at all down here.

Above him, the ground occasionally rumbled, and twice he had to stop, as dust filtered through the light beam ahead of him to make sure he didn’t get trapped away from his castle in a caved in tunnel. It had almost happened once. He didn’t use that route anymore.

He made his way through three miles of sewer, through a series of locked grates, disguised as cave ins. He’d gotten lost down here for days more than once, which is why he never left the castle without food and water. You never knew. He’d since memorized most of the graffiti and other subtle markers so that he knew, for instance, that he was currently under 11th street and heading west.

Occasionally, he’d pass some poor soul, huddled in blankets, against the wall of the tunnel, and as he passed, he’d drop a wax paper wrapped bundle near their feet. Fresh bread and boiled eggs, enough to keep them alive for a day or two, was the best he could do most days. These were the hard core Non-coms that didn’t officially exist in the world above. This might be the only food they got and even it was illegal, Harold knew.

“Thanks Harold,” came a muffled voice, as he planted one of his packages. He wasn’t surprised, many people knew him in the city. But no one knew about the castle, he had to make sure that remained true. And no one could ever find out he wasn’t the idiot he pretended be in public. That was essential to his plan. He patted the bundled feet, wearing who knew how many layers of old socks and no shoes, and turned back into the tunnel.

A few blocks further on, he stopped at the base of a vertical shaft and looked up. Sunlight filtered down through the keyhole in the manhole cover above. Everything seemed quiet. He climbed up and paused, his ear against the metal plate above. Nothing moved.

Harold pushed up and crawled out of the manhole, inside a giant Rhododendron in the city’s central park. He’d long ago forgotten who the park had originally been named for and like all parks in the “organized world” the sign over its entrance, read only “Park”. Just as the city, was called city #346932, and the river that ran through it was also designated with a serial number, it was all a part of Total Equality, the apocalypse.

It hadn’t come with a bang. There were no volcanoes, or nuclear explosions, or meteors. There hadn’t been a revolution at all, really, just a silent assimilation, as people everywhere quietly succumbed to Real Think, the government proscribed thought programming that allowed everyone to reach Consensus, eliminating the need for personal opinions, debate, or inequality.

The really insidious part was that, in a way, it had been their own idea, to think as one. There’d been no prohibitions, just a subtle shifting, through media and public opinion, of long held preferences, until there were just no more disagreements of any magnitude.

You might think they would have opposed the loss of freedom, but the key was, the substitution of almost unlimited “choice”, creating the illusion of freedom, inside the most totalitarian, prison without walls, ever devised. It was genius, Harold thought. He’d seen it coming.

Over the course of a decade, the national identities and causes that had once been celebrated were quietly erased. And a population, fed by the new universal basic income , known as UBI, and bonuses, no longer struggled or lacked for anything. They had everything they wanted.

Those who wanted more could get it through a most ingenious system, enforcing conformity. Without lifting a single finger to prohibit behaviors, the organized world had replaced courts and policemen with your neighbors themselves. Tasked with the job of ensuring conformity, and enticed by the promise of luxury bonuses for successfully gaining consensus, they became the most exacting of judges.

Those who chose not to conform, the “noncoms” were simply cut off. First, their basic income was dropped to a survival level, at which point most noncoms simply gave in. For those who were more stubborn, their living standard was further squeezed until they either conformed, or were eliminated from the system altogether and left to their own devices, a horrible fate in a world where the means of production have been co-opted and controlled by a non-state run by your very own neighbors.

Harold had found a loophole.

At some point in the re-education of society, it had become clear that some citizens lacked the mental capacity to truly conform. But, their lack of capacity also made it unlikely they would rock the boat. Thus, a special needs class of non-com had been born. They still received benefits, but were not expected to fulfill a work quota, or turn in conformity reviews, making them essentially untouchable. At first, he’d felt guilty about pretending to have a debilitating condition that was all too real for some, but, unlike the handicapped parking spaces he could remember from his childhood, there was seemingly no limit to the UBI handouts, and since he was hurting no one, and it allowed him to remain who he was, he played dumb.

Harold pulled the purple square on the lanyard around his neck, up from under the layered cape and let it dangle down his front, marking him as a “Non-Conforming Special Needs Citizen” commonly known as a “Nonnie”.

Harold stumbled out of the bushes and into the park, with a shuffling gate he’d developed to go along with his Nonnie persona. “Hey, Howard.” He mumbled, waving with a smile too large, at an older black gentleman on a concrete bench, playing chess against an unseen opponent. Howard was retired. As a conforming citizen, he received his full allotment of UBI, and was only required to turn in one conformity review per quarter. He played chess in the park every day the weather was nice enough.

“Hey Nonnie no!” came a voice from the street, followed by a rude laugh. Bart, assigned as a pedestrian conformity specialist was stationed on this corner and never missed an opportunity to make fun of Harold and others who were unfortunate enough to cross his path. He’d been warned that this didn’t conform, but even in the organized world, who your father was still mattered. He was protected.

Harold made his way through the park and turned into an alley about a half a block down 12th street. He entered the first door on his left, crossed a narrow hall and knocked twice, then once, then twice again. There was a flash of light from the peephole, followed by a click and the door knob turned. The door swung in, Harold held his breath. Would today be the day he was found out?