Chad Leito [New Rome Bagger Outlive (epub)

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Krass had created, and pried it open.He was surprised by how badly his arm smelled.The skin was pale, wrinkled, and his arm had shrunk slightly from not being used.His arm slipped out of the cast and he held it up to the light to examine it.Tessa, who was standing behind Mr.Krass, bit her lip.Baggs wiggled his fingers back and forth, standing up simultaneously.“How does eet feel, Meester Baggers?”“Good, doc.You did really well.”“You can move it, daddy?” Maggie asked.“Oh, yeah.”“Where are you going?” asked Tessa.Baggs had moved towards the door.“I’ve got to go to Greggor’s.I want to see if I can play.”“Do you think you can?”“Oh, yeah.My hand feels great.Sorry to rush out, Mr.Krass.See you tonight, Tessa.Girls.”“Bye, daddy,” Maggie and Olive said in unison.“Baggs, wait just a…” came Tessa’s voice, but Baggs didn’t wait to hear what she was going to say.He shut the door as though he hadn’t heard her and threw open the door to the stairwell.He was out of shape, but he ran up multiple flights of stairs until he came to the roof of Apartment Building 5160.He went out, shut the door behind him, and slid to a seated position with his back against the door.He didn’t mean to be rude to Tessa in leaving so abruptly, but he felt he had to get out of there.He didn’t want to scream in front of his children.Now, sitting alone and examining his hand, he didn’t scream, but instead began to hyperventilate.“I’m done.I’m done.We’re done.” He whispered to himself.The harsh light from the sun above did not flatter Baggs’s pale left hand.His suspicion had been right; Mr.Krass had not properly set the radius back into place.The misplaced bone stretched the skin on the underside of his forearm.He could indeed wiggle all of his fingers, but for some mechanical reason or another, the range of motion of his left thumb and pointer finger was limited to tiny back and forth motions.I will not be able to play piano at the required standard.Tessa, Maggie and Olive will starve.We will be like the McKesson family.Maybe they’ll shoot us too.Maybe they’ll kill my girls on the street before I die.Maybe I’ll hear their screams.Or maybe the bullets will go through their heads and there won’t be much hollering.“NO!” Baggs shouted.A crow took flight off the roof.Baggs panted for a moment, sweat running down his face.He supposed that he should at least try to play piano before thinking that all hope for his family was lost.Not all hope is lost—there’s always Outlive.Baggs shuddered.He tried to move the thumb on his left hand in small circles.The task was impossible.Maybe I can still play.I won’t know until I try.He stood up on trembling knees and walked over to the side of the roof.He took the fire escape down the side of the building and walked the back way, down the stinking alley and towards the suburbs that stood between his apartment and Greggor’s shop.As he walked, his hands were shaking so badly that it took him a long time to light his cigarette.2Baggs walked through London.After ten minutes of walking, he had calmed down some.There was a cool breeze blowing through the streets.He lit another cigarette; this time his hands weren’t shaking as much, and so it was easier to light.Smoking two cigarettes in a row was odd for Baggs, but he was remarkably stressed, and felt that the cigarettes were necessary.He knew that he would be upset later for not spacing his smokes out more, but didn’t really care.If I enter Outlive, I won’t have to worry about cigarette rationing anymore.Corpses don’t care much for nicotine.SHUT UP!These thoughts made his hands tremble again.He knew that if he entered Outlive he would have a better shot at making it than most people, because of his size, but that didn’t mean that the prospect was good.He looked at his deformed left wrist and wiggled his fingers.Since he began his walk, no magic had occurred and his left thumb and pointer finger still would not move more than slight wobbles back and forth.Baggs weaved in and out of the weeds that were taking over the road, and looked up at the high-rises that dominated the London scenery.Baggs was thirty-three years old.The year was 2082.Baggs inhaled smoke as he walked up the road.He was the only person on the street.He could hear helicopter blades clipping through the sky far away, and the hum of air conditioning units installed in the old windows of the surrounding apartments.Something about that moment made him feel surreal.He reflected on his society and life, trying to make sense of what could have brought him to this situation.He connected it all with something he had once read in the library.Baggs and Tessa spent a lot of time in the library with their daughters.The libraries in London were old, dusty, and unattractive, but contained a lot of readable material.Since Olive and Maggie couldn’t go to school (school was far too expensive for a family like the Baggers) Tessa and Baggs took on the responsibility of educating their daughters.The library was the ideal place to foster Olive’s and Maggie’s intellectual growth.It wasn’t hard for Baggs and Tessa to find time to take their daughters to the library; Tessa didn’t have a job, and Baggs’s piano concerts only took up three nights a week, if he was lucky.They taught Olive and Maggie to read, write, do basic arithmetic, and gave them history lessons.They usually spent the first few hours of a day roaming around the library, all of them reading what they each liked.Then, they’d come together at one of the tables in the middle and the parents would hold lessons for their daughters.While researching a history lesson for Olive and Maggie, Baggs had come across an article written in the late twentieth century in which the scholar predicted that computers would be smarter than humans in 2020.Baggs found this humorous in the same way that he found all the recent false predictions of the apocalypse (2000, 2012, 2020, 2041, 2050, 2066) humorous.Technological development had come to a standstill around 2030, and at that time computers were nowhere near as sophisticated as the human brain.Baggs liked to consider himself a bit of a scholar who didn’t have any degrees.He had only been in school until he was ten, but he continued his education outside of traditional academia, always finding himself most content and stimulated when learning something new.People were often taken off guard by his vast stores of knowledge, probably because his large stature and overtly masculine appearance came with certain prejudices.Baggs didn’t mind [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Pokrewne