I put this here for access later and to share the beginnings of my sequel to "Disowned."
1
There struck
a chord of horrible terror, momentously moving through Jamal. The feeling quickly
lessened in intensity, yet from this feeling he knew that something
terrible had occurred. The whole world around him, which was
essentially just his apartment building, shook, with a mighty shake.
A white light had contracted his pupils and caused him a moment of
blindness before the fear had hit him. There followed, with this
light, the shake, that shook the entire building he lived in. It
wasn't an earthquake, it was some sort of massive explosion.
To
discover the source of it all, Jamal got out of his cringed position
on his bed, and walked cautiously over to the window. He
couldn't observe any source of the awful discommode. He knew it was
something out there, somewhere, close, but not close enough to
entirely obliterate the building he lived in.
The thought
occurred to him to reach the roof of his apartment to further
investigate the source. Before he could even do this, he heard the
sound of jets speeding across the sky. He moved back to the window
and saw nothing of them. He realized they must have either been
friend or foe. As soon as he
looked down to the street beneath the window a green gas could be
seen ascending into the air. Foe, surely. Would it reach him? What
would it do to anyone that came into contact with it? Now he was even
more afraid, more afraid than he had ever been in his life. There was
obviously an attack on American soil. He knew if he was going to
live, he had to do something, he had to act. As quickly as he could
he ran into his parent bedroom, opened the main closet and took a gas
mask off the closet wall. There was three of them, one for each of
the person's in his family.
Jamal
was a spire thirteen. They always said he looked younger than he
appeared. Of course, this was due to his facial complexion, of boyish
young looks. He was an African American. Both of his parents were
black. He was raised in a city just outside of Los Angels.
He
had been home alone. It was only for two hours, and his mother and
father where sure he could survive that long alone. Especially, since
he was under the care of the ubiquitous artificial home intelligence
security system, known as Alan.
Right
now, the electricity had blacked out, and in knowing this there was
no sense of turning to Alan for any pertinent surveillance data.
“Alan, have your rebooted yet.” Jamal asked the AI system? He
talked into his wrist. He looked down at his wrist-tool. The tool was
a flexible screen that could wrap around the wrist and provided the
user with connection to everything and everyone, practically.
As he did this he held the mask in his hands. Weapons, he
needed something to protect himself further than just the mask
provision of protection. Unfortunately
all of the weapons where locked up in his parents bedroom.
This was a no go. If only he could access the security system through
Alan he might be able to get hold of some weapon. He had no idea if
he would encounter enemies. He was unsure if he wanted to leave the
apartment or if he was going to stay. His prior goal returned. Plan:
make it to the roof of the apartment, to avoid the rise of the gas,
if he could.
“Alan?”
He looked at his wrist-tool
again. All the signals were down. For one, Alan's communication
network had gone offline.
“Alan? Reboot!”
A man's
voice came out of the side speaker of the wrist-tool, “Service
offline. Emergency service only.”
Should I call 911?
Jamal thought to himself. No. Everyone was probably doing that.
Who should I call first? Maybe phone my mother or father at work?
Would they still be alive, or would they have died in the explosion?
Jamal pressed the air-filter-mask to his
face. While looking at his wrist-device for any indication the systems had
rebooted he made his way up the stairs to the roof. He lived only six
flights below the roof. Once on the roof his mouth opened, gasping.
He took a deep breath and made his way to the edge of the roof. He
looked over the small layer of edge-wall, and towards the mush-room
cloud rising in the distances. Nuked? The whole inner city
of LA?
2
The green gas had risen a few floors above the building, but it was
no where near reaching the roof. Including his mask, with this known,
he felt safer. He heard the sound of more jets darting through the
skies in the distance, but could not put a location to them. They
where loud and fast, that's all he could tell.
Jamal circled around the roofs edge looking down to the streets. There were morbid screams, and other horrid sounds.
His mother was okay, he thought to himself. She had to be. She worked at a Boutique a few blocks from the apartment. As long as she hadn't been exposed to the gas, yes, she would be okay.
Charles Hall. Lived out in the outskirts of LA, in a run down
small two floor shanty His home was no more than a decrepit shack. He
had a son named Mark Hall.
Charles lost a leg in a
pulverizing car accident. His wife died. He drinks booze. As he is
disabled he counts on his son to do the chores. He doesn't have a
fancy wrist-tool. However, his son calls up deliveries of products to
which a robot services attends. He has a Tv and a satellite system,
but Charles doesn't use them often. He rather drink and listen to
classic rock music.
His
shanty is in want, for several decades, of a new paint over. From
inside to outside the walls are grey painted wood. There is some small areas
where the walls have cracked white paint, other than that the house
lacks all color. It appears as a sickly animal might, with hinges
drooping, and nails skewered like jagged teeth, in the walls. The
doors to the shanty creaked with a heavy cry. They were left open all
the time so all sorts of insects made their way into the home. Bugs
of all sorts hunkered down under furniture and nestled in corners
of the walls. It wasn't infrequent that Mark had too put out of house
a snake or lizard, but more frequently he felt the pestering of
smaller intruders.
Uses shotgun.
They
live on a meager government insurance payment. UBI?
C. works at bar
on night-shift. Sleeps most of the day, and gets drunk on the
weekends.
Does he have a prosthetic or not?
Alan and the arachnoid, spider-android. Brings him to an underground city.
