The Mercy Journals (5 page)

When I
was
certain it was time to leave, I was on a bus headed south to the Mexican border, and Jennifer and the boys had moved back to the base. She had no way to reach the cabin by herself.

A whisper of warning.
No thinking about the past.
I smacked myself in the head in the change room. Put my uniform on. Ruby’s presence had already, after only one night together, made a chink in my armour.

Velma snapped her fingers in front of my face. Hey. Pretty boy. Here’s your scanner.

Larry, who works in vehicle reclamation, came out of the can wearing his bright yellow jacket with reflector tape and our unit name, Transpo—Squad B. He looks like the bloodhound version of a human being—baggy flesh, enormous eyes, grey face. He doesn’t look well. Maybe heart disease, maybe cancer—the blood isn’t moving where it should, but you’d think he didn’t have a care in the world.

Quincy. You’re looking kind of cheery. What happened, you get laid? Zipping up his fly.

I couldn’t help grinning ear to ear.

No way. Really?

Just pulling one of your three legs, you over-privileged bastard, I said.

Always with the gimp card.

At least he’s got a card to play, Velma said.

Well, Sunshine, Larry clapped his hands, we men have got work to do.

Nail ‘em to the wall, boys.

Don’t you love it when she calls us boys? I opened the door.

Our shift starts early so we can catch overnighters and charge them double. It’s like hunting, but it’s only mice we’re after. My job is to walk past every vehicle parked within my
territory once an hour and scan the licence plates. The scanner relays data to city hall, which tracks each plate hourly and bills the user. These days the hourly fee for parking is equal to the average person’s hourly wage. If a citizen fails to pay parking fees, the vehicle is ticketed and impounded, and their driving privileges are revoked for a month. After four infractions, the penalty is loss of driving privileges for three years.

My job also includes ensuring the vehicles parked in my territory adhere to the latest regulations. When OneWorld came into being, most vehicles were Phevs, Bevs, or hybrids that used various combinations of hydrogen, solar, and electric batteries or fuel cells, with some gasoline or bio-diesel fuel, although some drivers still had luxury models with powerful engines run solely on fossil fuels. These models were banned immediately, but people got fuel on the black market and continued to drive them, either to circumvent charges to their ration cards or to avoid the limits to the speed or distance they could drive. A big part of parking enforcement in those days involved tagging and impounding these vehicles and disenfranchising the transgressors. That particular excitement has diminished over the years since most of the illegal vehicles have been impounded and OneWorld is transitioning to government-owned Shuvs. We still catch the occasional transgressor, though, someone who has installed an illegal engine in an approved body or attached a counterfeit licence plate to an illegal model.

I like to keep my territory clean and orderly. I enjoy catching cheaters. I think of them as people who would steal
food from a baby, people who would take my last breath of air without blinking.

Between eight and nine a.m., the streets are full of people going to work, running errands, taking their kids to school. No one is in a hurry, and the city unfolds the way I imagine a medieval town would have—people greeting each other, picking up food, flirting, yawning, waking up as they go—colours faded, buildings ramshackle. Vehicle traffic is less with each passing year. Fewer people, more bicycles. The Canton laid off twenty percent of us in the last two years. I’m lucky to still have my job.

I was making a final round before lunch when an unusual matte sheen on a vehicle caught my eye. I took my key out, got down on my good knee, stuck my prosthesis out to the side, and scratched the solar paint under the bumper. Sure enough, old paint showed through—robin’s egg blue. I went and rubbed the tailpipe with my thumb. The soot smelled acrid and metallic. I popped the hood. I don’t know how the guy that drove this thing got here without being swarmed because that engine would have sounded louder than any other vehicle around today. I quickly closed the hood and examined the edges of the licence plate. Counterfeit.

I went to the stash box at the end of the block, unlocked it, got out a boot, came back, and clamped it on. Scanned the plate. The parking was paid. I sent in a tow request and moved down the street. I was about four or five cars down the road when I heard the boot being shaken and someone yell, What the fuck!

I scanned the next plate without turning around.

Hey! You! Did you put the boot on me?

I didn’t respond.

You. Asshole. Did you boot me? Am I a ghost? Did I fucking up and die and no one told me? This piece of shit life.

The voice was getting closer.

It struck me as familiar in a déjà vu kind of way. I turned and faced him. In these kinds of situations, the Krav Maga comes in handy. When I turned, he stopped. The guy was covered in hair—beard down to his armpits, greying hair down to his elbows. He had a dirty face, blue eyes burning at me. His clothes were dark and dusty, maybe black, maybe charcoal grey, maybe brown, but his shoes were polished and expensive. He must’ve kept some good pairs from the old days, and he’d recently oiled the leather.

You’re driving an illegal model, sir. And you might want to keep your voice down. The public doesn’t take kindly to these types of infractions.

Though the crises seem to be on the wane, people are still volatile. No doubt everything will be different in the future and, in any case, I don’t want to paint a picture of humanity gone to the dark side—it wasn’t like those old Hollywood movies about the future where everyone starts turning into killers and eating each other—mostly people help each other, pool their efforts, try to survive together, but there have been incidents where mobs suddenly coalesce and kill someone who they think is breaking the new environmental laws.

I don’t agree with it. Obviously I believe that civil society is our only hope, yet I understand what drives the rage. People still remember when individual citizens were allowed to consume as much as they wanted as long as they could pay. People still remember the impotence of knowing that the environment
we all depended on for survival was being destroyed by people wanting more—more money, more security, more control, more stuff—and we remember our own anxiety as we ourselves did things that contributed to our destruction. We remember when we realized that we relied for survival on a system that was killing us. It’s not like our fates aren’t all bound together. And everyone lost someone close in the die-off. So now, when someone breaks the new laws, people aren’t always reasonable.

The bearded guy took a long bead on me.

What is this life to me? he said. Surviving to survive? I don’t give a flying fuck about what the public thinks, now do I?

Larry pulled up, which meant that certain things were out of my hands. He unrolled his window and pointed his thumb at the infractor.

Is he giving you a hard time?

Reclaimers like Larry are armed. A couple of passersby stopped and watched the three of us.

I looked at the infractor, and he looked right back at me. Was he just an aggressive prick or was there something else? People were starting to gather to see what the commotion was. I thought he understood that his life was in my hands. He didn’t flinch, yet neither did he take the next step.

We were just discussing, Larry, what we’d like to do to people who cheat the system. We’re incensed. We’re just incensed.

Yeah, well, how do you think we got here in the first place? A lot of assholes in our species, let’s face it, Larry said as he leaned out of the driver’s side window. Comes with the territory, he said. Natural selection never got rid of ’em, so we have to. He pulled ahead and backed the truck up at an angle to the booted vehicle.

Everybody references evolution these days. I guess coming face to face with extinction does that. If the last half a century showed us anything, it’s that human behaviour is not as malleable as we might have thought. It’s like our species is on a boat so enormous that no matter how hard we turn the wheel, it takes centuries to register a change in direction, and meanwhile everything around the ship changes a million times over.

Larry got out and took the boot off, lay down on the road, and looked under the vehicle. More people gathered.

Larry, my friend, I said by way of a hint that we might be finding ourselves in a situation, I want to get back to the office for lunch.

He came out from under, sized up the gathering group, and grinned. Yeah, Allen, now that you mention it, I’m bloody hungry too. Why don’t you two hop in, and I’ll give you a ride?

A young guy, shaved head, medium height, built, called out from the crowd, Who’s he, then? and jerked his head
toward the infractor who still faced me. And why’s he—he jerked his head toward Larry—looking under that vehicle?

The questioner had me stumped. Usually infractors are aware of the danger they’re in and slink away as fast as possible. I’d never been in this position before, and I had no idea what to answer—A friend? A passerby? A beggar? I didn’t think the crowd would buy any of those.

Him? Larry answered for me. Just some nutcase who wants to change the world. Larry opened the driver’s side door, lowered the hook, got out his jack, and went around to the front of the offending vehicle. Hop in, boys, he said to us, but the young guy moved between us and the truck and the crowd followed. The questioner looked at the infractor’s feet.

Those are some fancy shoes, he said in a hyper-loud voice, playing to the crowd. How’s he want to change the world then? He asked me the question.

The infractor had been looking at me the whole time. I figured he was crazy, but when you looked at him, looked him in the eye, he didn’t seem crazy.

You can go, the young man said to me, nodding at my uniform.

It would start as a beating. There was no predicting how far it would go. Climate vigilantism was not prosecuted yet. The government wasn’t strong enough, and the rage was too strong. Someone in the crowd yelled out, Cheaters are killers! and in response another voice called out, Absolute adherence!

You’re wrong, I started to say. This man is not the driver of that car. He’s … Here I tripped up. I had no plausible explanation for him.

Who the hell are
you
? the infractor yelled at the young man. His voice was louder than the young man’s by a factor of ten. Everyone went quiet.

One of the new fascists? You posturing skinhead scum! Who the hell … The questioner launched himself at the infractor and punched him in the jaw with a force that sent his head cracking back, then rammed him to the ground with his shoulder. The questioner took a step back, then kicked him in the stomach. The infractor groaned. The crowd moved in. I don’t know why I got involved because the infractor seemed not to care what happened to himself. Maybe it was because I was standing so close or because Ruby had just opened me up like an oyster shucker, but I went in and punched the questioner in the head. I got him in a plumb, my forearms on either side of his neck, hands clasped behind his head, and kneed him a couple of times in the liver. I whispered, Get lost now or I’m going to kill you. He nodded.

Several people in the crowd had begun to kick the infractor, but I landed a few more blows and pulled him back to his feet. The crowd backed off, but no more than a couple of feet.

I stood beside him and shouted to them, You’re wrong—you’re dead wrong about him. Larry heard me and started to drive gingerly into the crowd. I locked elbows with the infractor and held my arm out to push the crowd back.

We reached the truck, and Larry popped the passenger door. I pushed the infractor in ahead of me, but had difficulty climbing up with my leg. By the time Larry ordered the infractor to lean out and give me a hand, the questioner had come back with something to prove. He threw a punch at the back of my head. My endocrine went into hyper-drive. I unleashed on him, this time making sure he wasn’t getting back up. I tried not to kill him but I know I broke bones and teeth. When I turned back to the truck door, Larry reached past the infractor and yanked me in. I started to tremble top to bottom and stared out the side window as we drove away. Tears ran down my cheeks, yet even then, in that stressed state, I sensed something about the guy in the middle seat. There was something about him. The bulk of him next to me felt different from other people.

Larry took us to the impound lot. I stayed in the truck, working to bring myself back in. He brought us two cups of hot sweet tea. My mom always told me to drink something, any liquid, to stop tears when I was a kid.

I had a scratch on my check, a sore scalp, and sore ribs. The infractor had a bloody nose, a swollen eye, scraped hands, and probably bruised or broken ribs. We got out of the truck. Larry unloaded the vehicle and returned to us.

You can say goodbye to ever driving again. He demanded the infractor’s identity card, keyed in the particulars. The infractor watched closely.

You want a drive to the office? Larry asked me.

Sure. Yeah.

And how about you? Larry looked at the infractor.

He nodded.

I cleaned up in the office washroom and let Velma confirm my companion’s information and tell him what to expect by way of penalty. He was still hanging around the front door when I came out. He’d wiped his bloody nose on his sleeve.

Sorry for giving you a hard time, he said.

Yeah, well. Times are hard.

I have nowhere to go.

No home?

The wife kicked me out. I gave her everything and then, “my behaviour was maladaptive.” Just as everything was going to shit.

That’s a long time ago, man. You’re milking it a bit, aren’t you?

I can’t get hooked up.

Why not?

I’m an outlaw.

I shrugged and turned to go for lunch. I was hungry.