[2] Stalled Engine: Concrete Echoes

Chapter 2: Concrete Echoes

The tower’s airlock hissed open and Jasper was instantly hit by a smog so intense he could still smell the fuel through his face mask. There was a distant roaring and coughing from engines going past the expressway.

He instinctively held his breath as a city bus, a giant rusted beast, thundered past with a wave of heat in its wake. He looked at the faces through the window, all poor and busy sweating profusely. They didn’t have the luxury of air conditioning, and the day’s temperature was still rising.

There were all kinds of people flowing around him. A woman stepped from a chauffeured sedan with a polished copper mask that hung gently from her ears. Office workers scurried by wearing identical N95 disposables with the company logo on the side. A young man biked through the gridlocked traffic with a simple gray cloth tied around his face, not tight enough to stop him from coughing.

He stuck his hand out to the road and flagged down a cab. The one that came was a monstrously long vehicle with a giant engine block rising out of its hood like a pimple about to burst. If it wasn’t painting in a bright, almost neon yellow, he wouldn’t have thought it was a cab.

“Dieselspan Tower,” he barked as he climbed into the back.