Acid Rain by R.D Rhodes (ebook reader txt) 📕

out of my bag and turned it on. I held the earphones at arms-length to see if anyone else could hear, they couldn’t, and I plugged them into my ears.

Minutes later the bus pulled out, passing the many faces at the stances, every fourth one portraying a fed-up, looking-for-a-fight, poverty-stricken look. I listened to Breed as bus after bus went by in the window and the bored conductors waved their arms.

The bus cut through the packed streets filled with the many wasted lives and dead souls and lost sheep, through the midst of that human traffic, and along the avenues of grey towers under the thin strips of grey sky. Builders in fluorescent-orange bobbed up and down the scaffolding on the buildings that were going up left, right and center as “THE ECONOMY WAS GROWING” and the government “WAS CREATING JOBS.”

God bless them, I thought. Their big wallets, pathetic little manifestos and one-dimensional visions. “Getting the economy growing,” for us, and “creating jobs.”

The earth was fucked. I could see it as clearly as I could see these cities expanding. Expanding because the world was run by something called an economy. This meant you made profit and lots of nice money. But to get this money you had to buy and sell things and those things all came from the earth. And God forbid an economy stops growing because that would mean a “recession” and recessions were “bad.” A recession meant that slaves don’t have jobs to go to and bosses to work for anymore, so the country stops getting rich and the rate of housing expansion slows down. You have to get trading and make lots of nice money, so you keep building houses and offices and coffee shops and all the other shit and once you’ve built them you just build some more, and the cities and towns expand and expand until one day the earth is a great big concrete ball. Without the earth we are dead, but fuck it, as long as politicians kept their five-year manifestos and looked good at the end of their stay in parliament, as long as they have their wee happy statistics to say that they have done this and that, then it’s all good.

And people fucked, bred, multiplied and got more houses. And sometimes the houses they were in were simply too small for them. It was very important for a couple to have at least a three-bedroom house to store all their shit and to have “plenty space.” And the TV supported all this madness. House in the country. New life in the country. Location Location Location. Is your house too small?

This was what we were meant to be doing. It was all good.

And the masses didn’t have to think about anything because they were all having their brains killed in work, and from the media, so everything was hunkey dory.

And just as I was thinking that, as if by some psychic power, an animated conversation burst over my head from a few rows behind. They were so loud that I took my earphones out, almost in disbelief,

“Oh, Cherie,” a voice chirped, “I widnae ken what to do without ma work. Ah’d be bored stiff.”

“Och no, ah love it. I get everyhin pied for me and don’t have to do anything. Ah get up late, hae my breakfast and watch Jeremy Kyle in ma PJ’s.”

“Ye’ll get bored wae that eventually though. Ah’d be bored aifter twa days.”

Then a kid on the back row decided that everyone liked Rihanna, and turned his music up full blast. The bus rode the concrete hills, stopping and starting at the traffic lights and winding through Glasgow while she sang “C’MON RUDE BOY BOY CAN YOU GET IT UP? TAKE IT TAKE IT TAKE IT TAKE IT! LET ME LOVE YOU!” I thought how appropriate it was though, it would have been the perfect soundtrack for the night before as they all went out to procreate and rubbed crotches in each other’s faces like the apes we were.

I turned up the volume on my earphones but I couldn’t blot the racket out. Noise blurred from all angles. I pulled them out. People were bastards.

I glanced up. Through the gap between the chairs in front, I saw a gossip magazine spread in a pair of hands. I winced. Where was this evolution I kept hearing about? I had nothing to divert my concentration onto either; the buildings blocked the world from my window. All modern cities with their modern architecture were exactly the same, once you’d seen one, you’d seen them all.

At last we broke clear, and the bus swung round the M9’s bends, as the buildings were replaced by miles of desolate farmland, spruce tree plantations and wind turbines scarring the hills. We stopped at Perth. People got on. People got off. Then back on the M9. As we drew closer to Inverness the paranoia came in waves. I tried to be logical. Tried not to focus on the CCTV cameras above us. Nirvana was still blasting into my ears as we arrived in the newest city in Britain.

Chapter 36

I looked all around the station but couldn’t see any police. I followed the line of people off and met Harry outside.

“Arite?”  His face was flushed and his black eyes were gleaming. His neck was hidden under his scarf, his hoody covering his shortened brown hair. He looked warm under the layers that puffed his upper body up.

“Your scabs are healing.” I observed. “Your lips too,” they had almost completely reverted to their full thinness, “I’m okay. How are you?”

“Good!” He turned his thin legs to walk down the street. “Nervous though. This is where I’m from. They might look here. I don’t want to spend too long, let’s just keep our heads low and get out quick. Actually, maybe you should keep behind