Past Peak: A Story of the Near Future
The first sign we had in those early days was the lines. It started with the lines for gasoline: that was customary enough and had been done before. No one panicked when we went into gas rationing, two days a week for even numbered license plates, two days a week for odd, two for vanity plates and one day a week when no one was to get gasoline unless they had missed their regular day and their gas card had gone unswiped. It was a little inconvenient, but this echoed the seventies, as the local news helpfully pointed out with pictures comparing the lines of the current era and that one. In the first weeks, people in the gas lines would joke with each other; later, the mood tensed and tempers shortened. One day there was a shootout when someone line-jumped, and a mother from a nearby suburb died in the crossfire. After that incident I started filling up at odd hours, when fewer people might be out; I had always loved the deep early morning anyway, and three-thirty a.m. gas runs fit well into my sleep schedule.
The gas shortage was followed closely by a shortage of jobs, as businesses could not afford to pay for electricity and gas to ship products and still afford to pay workers. Of the three, only the workers were expendable. Job lines began appearing anywhere that looked like it might have work. It seemed odd at first to see middle-aged men and women in costly business suits standing in line for jobs cooking fast food or washing dishes, but we got used to it; and as the weeks wore on, the suits began to look bedraggled, a little frayed and wrinkled, a little more like they belonged.. Some of the prospective applicants had the more important pieces of their resumes written in big letters on signs that they could wave to get the attention of the management in the building. I noted these signs on my daily walk: one line twenty prospective workers deep at a Burger King contained three signs proclaiming “MA,” “MFA,” and “MSW.” Further down the line was an older, white-ponytailed man whose sign said “Ph.D Astronomy.”
I was in my third year as a court clerk, and this was a very good job to have, because the courts had become very busy. We didn't have enough money in our budget to hire on new staff, so those of us who were already employed found our workload escalating steadily. I didn't really mind, I liked my job and the longer hours were no hardship. The courthouse was only a half-mile walk from my one-bedroom walk-up apartment, so I stopped driving except on the rare occasions when I needed to go out of town.
It wasn't long after the appearance of the job lines that certain goods began to be scarce. Shoppers who still had a little money for luxuries lined up around the block at the rumor that the local grocery store had received a shipment of coffee; when the end of the line finally got into the store and saw empty shelves, the scene began to grow violent. The police arrived with one of the new microwave-based crowd dispersal units; the boy who was trampled as shoppers ran frenzied and in pain was brought to the regional hospital and eventually recovered.
Still we persevered, confident that our grandparents and great-grandparents had suffered far worse in the Depression. TV networks ran uplifting feel-good movies and game shows where anyone might become a millionaire, and we were placated. That was spring.
June brought a new horror to the city, as it was the beginning of the hottest summer on record. Our city had—used to have--a famously moderate climate, so most of us were unprepared for the heat wave. Electricity became intermittent as air conditioners struggled along. On some days there was no power to be had at all for dwellings and only a trickle for businesses other than the big chain stores. On days of extreme heat when there was no power, people who were too old or sick to make it to a store to cool off died in their homes with all the windows open to the sweltering asphalt. The EMTs and police officers bringing the bodies, bloated and stinking in the heat, from the doors of the high-rise buildings formed a grisly new kind of line. The obituary page in the local newspaper filled with lines: overheated, overheated.
In mid-July the days of no power came two in a row. The temperature was well over a hundred; in bars with generators and fuel to run them, we could watch the local meteorologist fry an egg on the sidewalk. The unemployed and the powerless took to sleeping in soaked-down sheets through the heat of the day and rising at night like a vampire horde. There was no shortage of liquor, some of it home-made, and the restless night-time mobs noised and fought until dawn.
Dogs all over the city had been abandoned, discarded by owners who could no longer afford them. The dogs congregated in the alleys behind buildings and in the public parks, patrolling the edges of the tent cities for whatever scraps of food might be given or stolen. Usually they didn't bother you, and their presence had become more and more ordinary since spring, but in the middle of the summer three cases of rabies were reported in the packs of evicted house-pets. Mothers began carrying baseball bats with them or not going outdoors at all.
The days without power were routine now; almost the whole city had gone nocturnal, lighting their midnight lives with candles or oil lamps. Restaurants began to adjust their hours, opening at dusk and closing up during the oppressive heat of midday. Ice had become a great luxury, and the trendy eateries with electricity contracts or generators had big neon signs touting the availability of “AC and I-C-E!” A trendy new bar opened to sell nothing but ice-water and chilled vodka; someone saw the real-estate heiress sipping drinks there. That bar was always cool inside, but they checked credit ratings at the door and under-700s weren't admitted. I could look in, but could not enter.
