You watch through the window as we die. We’re clawing at the glass, framed like an exhibit. Silenced, on your side. For a moment I think your expression is impassive, then I realise it’s seeped with bitterness and grit. You’re forcing yourself to stay and witness my family’s demise.
ZACH
2055.
I skim through my tab as we glide through city streets. Today the smog is wildfire orange outside Darren’s car – the Mercedes gifted by his father. It presses against the windscreen, cloaking everything in our path; people leer out from it like ghouls. Inside we’re cool, swept by the icy breeze from the car’s inbuilt Airway.
I swipe away articles on the latest rats caught crossing from North Africa, India and even further afield. Over ten thousand washed up already this summer, they say. God knows why they’d want to come here. Our Augusts are pushing forty-five degrees. It’s hard to breathe outside, let alone walk more than a few metres without the sun stripping the sweat from your scalp. We see them now, outside the car. People collapsing in the street.
‘Slow down,’ Mikey says, rolling open his window. He launches a handful of ice cubes into the crowd. One hits a lady on the temple. She stops, confused, dropping her shopping bag. Most of them seem dazed – heat zombies. Some scrabble for the ice, hold it to their chests like holy relics. The boys laugh. I’m filming it on my tab.
We move on. I share the footage on Bubble, along with hundreds of other pranks we’ve done. The views on one from last week are rocketing. We made ice cream in my mum’s machine to give out for free in town. People love free ice cream, until they realise it’s laced with Tabasco.
We get out of the car to stretch our legs. The heat is stifling; it presses in at us from all directions. We have handheld Airways, sucking through the fetid air, filtering and cooling it into refreshing blades. Streetfolk regard us with resentment. I know they think we’re arrogant rich kids – but why should we suffer just because we can afford not to?
‘Excuse me? Excuse me, buddy?’ A man – middle aged – stooped. He’s looking directly at me with what takes me a moment to realise is deference. I feel a connection strike up against my will.
‘Yeah?’ I say.
‘Can I have a quick go on that?’ he asks, indicating my Airway. ‘Do you mind?’
Mikey steps in, all toothy grin. ‘Here, use mine.’ As he hands the man his Airway, he slips me a smirk and whispers, ‘Film this, Zach.’
I tap the button on my tab, hold it recording by my hip. The man is thanking us, fumbling with the unfamiliar device, beads of embarrassment mingling with the heat sweats running down his neck. He dials it on. The mouth of the Airway glows red. He has no idea Mikey has switched the function, until a roasting blast sears the anticipation right off his face.
He stumbles back, gasping, skin blotchy and flaring, unable to talk. Darren sniggers. Mikey grabs the Airway off him. ‘Sorry, mate, you must’ve flipped it onto heat mode,’ he says, struggling to keep a straight face.
I feel bad, and chuck him a bottle of Evian SelfCool from my bag as we leave. It bounces off his feet, where he’s collapsed on the pavement. Before I turn away, a woman runs to help him. He locks eyes with me again and that deference has turned to naked hurt.
•
We live in a private compound just outside the city. Anyone with a bit of money has had to fortify their property. It’s a walled oasis, all anthracite metal beams, plate glass walls and irrigated lawns. I slip my shoes off and pad over cool granite tiles to flop on the sofa. The room – like the rest of our house – is chilled by Airways mounted on every ceiling.
I see Mum on her sunbed out in the garden by the pool. Earbuds in, listening to some godawful old popstar, no doubt. We even have Airways outside, pumping out deliciously refrigerated air so we can relax beside the pool in comfort year-round.
Alone in the house, bored, I watch old videos of Dad on TV. He’s saved them in a playlist.
‘At the heart of this issue is freedom. Personal liberty. The freedoms that have been long fought for and hard won. Our society is built on freedom. These eco-zealots want to take that away from us. You should be free to choose where your energy comes from, what kind of car you drive, how often you go on holiday, what food you eat. I say enough is enough. If we’re going to survive, we must do so in a world worth living in. A free world.’
It’s from the mid-twenties, some debate show. He’s handsome, strong, charismatic. The people he’s arguing with don’t stand a chance; he can talk over them with the might of a tank and the eloquence of a preacher.
‘We have to be reasonable here. Even if the so-called “science” – which, by the way, no one agrees upon – is true, we shouldn’t have to sacrifice our present to prevent some unproven trouble in the future. Humans adapt. That’s how we dominated this planet. We simply cannot allow elitist bureaucrats to pour eye-watering sums of our money into this “net zero” guff, especially when their draconian policies will hurt the poorest of us hardest, all the while China is laughing and polluting as we wreck our economy to make diddly-squat of an impact. Trust me, there is no need to panic.’
It’s electric. Dick Talbot, my father, catches a note in the public mood and spins it into a symphony. He becomes the face of the climate critical movement. Threatened industries pay him handsomely to speak on TV, radio, social media and front ghost-written articles and books. Free market individualism is defended, and I’m born into a world where we can choose how we want to live out our lives.
He’s my fucking hero.
Nowadays he only needs to make the occasional public appearance. He was rewarded handsomely for his hard work, and grows those rewards through canny investments, always driving for more. He never stops networking, so most of the time it’s just me and Mum (a successful culinary influencer in her own right) at home.
Until you arrive.
LARA
You’ve never known hunger. Not the kind that gnaws through your stomach and saps your brainpower. Not the kind you have to take to bed, before it greets you with a bite in the morning. Not the kind my people know, Zach.
But even your caste has begun to feel the – if not collapse – then tremors in your food supply. Price hikes, empty shelves, ugly produce, no matter how far you pay to get things shipped. I hear some of you are shelling out to have hydroponic units installed in your properties, fostering a reliable crop to your programmed demands, under sterile lights, calibrated temperatures and automated irrigation.
I observe your family from a distance for months, following, discovering. I see the pictures your mother posts of the meals she makes, or orders. I see the videos you share of the locals you humiliate, or torture. I see your father’s appearances on the news blaming the cesspit this country’s become on the ‘hoards of migrants flooding our borders’. He never calls us rats, at least not publicly. In private, I’m not so sure.
Then I see you up close. I’m watching as you play that cruel trick on the man with your handheld heater. I run to him as you walk away, hold his hand as he pants on the pavement, anoint his head with the water you discarded.
In that moment I hate you. Before, in my eyes, you’d just been a child. An offshoot of a soulless father and vapid mother. But now I know the insidiousness of your clan, I realise you deserve everything my people have planned.
•
An eighteen-wheeler comes over on the ferry from Calais. It docks in Dover, but doesn’t make it a mile before coming to a halt. The port is gridlocked, lorries packed in like bricks. It’s the hottest day of the year – so far. A record in Kent. Some of the vehicles were stopped by customs, others by the melting road surface. The gridlock lasts three days. The driver has to abandon his truck and sleep in the lobby of a nearby hotel.
When the dock finally clears, the driver returns to his vehicle, moving it on to the checkpoint. The man there to take it over is pissed at the delay. He grabs the keys, hauls himself up behind the wheel and sets off. He never asks what he’s delivering – that’s not his job. But this time he can smell it.
He steers the truck into a layby. Then he switches off the engine and walks away into the woods. He never checks his cargo.
It’s not discovered until the following week, after the heatwave has been broken by thunderous downpour. Ramblers report it to police. Police uncover the bodies. Twenty-nine humans – men, women and infants. The stench makes the officers retch. They find fingers raw from prising at the truck doors, throats parched as desert rock, skin a papery crust. Flies growing fat on boiled flesh.
You may think of those bodies as rats. But six of them were my family.
•
You answer the door to me. Maybe there’s a hint of recognition, a face glimpsed on the crowded street.
‘There’s a problem with your Hydropod connection,’ I say. ‘I’ve come to fix it.’
Your eyes flick down to my breasts before you shrug and let me in. Then you wander off to your teenage pursuits, playing video games, masturbating or plotting more ways to humiliate the desperate.
My feet pace across the granite tiles, as I gaze in awe at this domestic cathedral. I can’t help myself. I’m jealous. Your rooms are more like those of an art gallery than a dwelling – spacious, minimal, glistening with the sheen of money. I pass through the living room and into the kitchen.
‘Who are you?’
I’m startled. I thought we were alone in the house.
The woman approaches me with suspicion. Your mother – Jules.
‘My name’s Lara,’ I say. ‘I’ve been sent to fix your Hydropod.’
She frowns. ‘I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.’
‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘It’s working fine for you?’
‘It is.’
‘That’s great. Then the issue is just the network connection. For our remote monitoring, you see. Fault detection, over-the-air updates, that kind of thing.’
I wait. Her flawless features are unreadable. A bead of sweat rolls down my spine, despite your precision-cooled kitchen. She nods. ‘OK, it’s this way.’
Jules leads me through to the pantry where the hydroponic unit is housed. Clearly uninterested in bestowing any more of her time on me, she drifts off. But before she goes, I ask her to share the property’s network details. She obliges, making my job a whole lot easier. I tap them into my tab. I’m in, and ready to play my role in the action we’ve been planning for months.
I climb into the moulded white booth, a cavern of light and vertical planting. The door sealed, I’m safe in the calibrated environment, independent from the rest of the house. You’ll forget that I’m here. I’ll wait till the sun sets, and your daddy comes home. Then it’s time to make you pay.
ZACH
I wake from stifling dreams to crushing heat. In the darkness I fling off the covers, a dead weight. Flip the pillow, roll over, but it’s no good – my head is radiating like a furnace. Something’s wrong. We’ve had hot nights before, but nothing like this. It shouldn’t be like this in our house.
I go over to my windows. They’re shut. Wave my hand by the sensor. Nothing. ‘Windows, open,’ I say. Nothing.
The air is pressing close against me. Sweat glues my t-shirt to my back. I stagger out from my bedroom. Mum is on the landing, red-faced, faint. I try to call out to her, but her grip on the bannister fails. She collapses down the staircase.
My own hands are shaking. They’re red too. Everything is red. Hot air gusts against my neck and I look up. The mouth of the Airway mounted on the ceiling is glowing.
‘Fuck.’ Dad, he’s seen it too. His feet thump across the landing, down the stairs. His vest is soaked through.
I go after him. My knees give way. The air is a little cooler at the floor, through my hands on the tiles. I gulp it in like a landed fish. I see Dad clamber over the heap of Mum’s body at the bottom of the stairs. I follow.
He’s bashing the home’s control screen, muttering and swearing. On the ground floor, every Airway I see is pulsing red. ‘What’s happened?’ I ask. The words wrench my throat as if they were lodged bones.
He ignores me, tapping at his tab now. ‘Nothing getting through…’
Every movement makes my skin slick, sweat-sodden pyjamas weighing me down. Each gulp of breath is hotter than the last. I’m reduced to a panting dog.
Dad strides to the front door. Locked. He presses his fingerprint against the sensor. Still locked. Tries the voice command. Nothing. He kicks it and swears as toes meet armoured steel.
I haul myself into the kitchen. Flop against the sink. Turn on the tap ready for the merciful flow. Steaming water scolds my face. ‘Shit!’ I cry. ‘Cold! Cold!’ The tap doesn’t respond. I slide down the cabinet, sobbing.
Crawling across the floor – the only movement I can manage now is crawling – I see Dad trying the patio doors, the windows, anything, but nothing. He launches a chair at the glass, but it bounces off, useless. Reinforced. Now he’s staggering like a boar shot with a dart gun. Gasping and panting, he flings open the bathroom door. ‘Fuck!’ he yells as he finds the taps in there set to boiling temperatures too. Then I see him squat over the toilet bowl, sloshing his face with palmfuls of its contents.
How has our house turned against us? Why?
I claw my way back to the kitchen, my vision beginning to blur and sway. I grasp the metal legs of a stool at the breakfast bar, attempt to hurl it at the crimson gape of the Airway above. It barely leaves my grip, clattering across the floor. I join it.
And as I rest my searing cheek against the tiles, I see you creeping out of your hidey hole.
LARA
I can’t resist. I have to see how this ends. Tearing some leafy stems from the nearest plant, I dip them in the water trough and wrap them round my head to keep me cool. Then I leave the Hydropod, stepping out into the furnace your home has become, and locking the unit behind me.
I see you on the kitchen floor, a prone curl, like a fleck of snot or a beach worm. You look more like a child than how I’ve come to perceive you. My breath rasps hot against my mask of leaves. I can’t stay here long.
Your eye rolls up as I approach. There’s no surprise or sorrow in it, only rage. ‘Wh… why?’ you croak.
Perhaps you think I’m an eco-terrorist, here to punish you for your lives of high consumption and casual destruction. A radical idealist who believes taking out those at the top will spill their spoils to those down below. A jealous anti-capitalist on a mission to blow up everything your society has built.
You would be wrong. I am every one of those things, and more.
Your daddy didn’t just get rich from acting the corporate shill for the crumbling titans of pollution. He partnered with the money men. He made the investments. As he championed the freedom to choose, the freedom to pollute, the freedom to cook our world alive, he helped seed the industries that would rise up to feed on its carcass. He could pick his winners - Airways, Hydropods… and illicit transportation. Once whole continents became inhospitable, the men he funded were there waiting to smuggle desperate populations across ever more hostile borders. They called us rats fleeing sinking ships, but the captains of the ships that picked us up got rich indeed. Your father continued to spread lies and sow division, making the crossings ever more treacherous – and expensive. Many never reached their destination. They died like my relatives, poisoned by heat in the back of abandoned lorries, but their drivers still pocketed the cash. Cash that trickled back upstream into your deep pockets. Cash to be gorged on, or gambled on the weather markets, or ploughed into weaponry start-ups, booming from the social unrest.
‘You see, Zach,’ I say. ‘Families like yours have been in the driving seat for far too long. If this world is going to survive, we’re going to have to take that wheel by force.’
With that I leave you. You crawl, huffing and puffing, behind me. Jules and Dick join you, in a delirious scramble to catch me. But you’re all far too weak. I’m out the door, unlocked by my tab just for me, and out onto your Airway-chilled patio. You hammer on the glass of your grand front room window, choking, sweating, bleeding. I back away, dipping my feet in your pool, feeling cold at the sight of this grotesque family portrait, framed just for me.
‘Burn’ is a nightmare vision of the future headed our way. For similarly bleak reflections of our present, treat yourself to the rest of the stories in Everyone Is Awful, available in print, digital and audiobook: