The Collector #3

They say you never forget your first, and on that score, at least, they don’t lie. Nobody sent me to collect my first. I carried no warrant from the Guild because there was no Guild. Not then. What we had in those days was the freedom of madness and despair.

I decided to lean into my particular madness when the rivers ran dry. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The summer of ‘23, I think it started. Or maybe ‘24. Doesn’t matter now exactly when. Might as well say it kicked off hundreds of years ago when Stevenson warmed up his steam engine. Or even a God’s age before that, when Prometheus stole the secrets of fire from Olympus.

For me, though, it started when the rivers dried up, which was definitely 23 or ‘24.

Or, I dunno, maybe a little later.

It’s all the Before Times now, and they’re as lost to us as coffee beans and labradoodles.

I do remember that it wasn’t the first black summer. Might have been the second or third. Maybe even the fourth.

There wasn’t a fifth because nothing was left to burn by then. So let’s split the difference and say I collected my first Sooty in the summer of the dead rivers and the last trees.

I was a long way from the gates of New York back then. Other side of the world, in fact. And the Sooty I set out to collect wasn’t just any old carbon collaborator. He was the original sooty. The Alpha version.

Sooty Canavan, they called him.

Weird dude. Loved to dress up in hi-vis and smear himself in coal dust.

I know, right?

Looking back on it now, it’s weird to think of how fucking weird these guys were, how far out there they got, dragging us along with them before we all fell off the edge of a dying world.

So, Sooty Canavan. Bright orange waistcoat and shameless blackface. Got the picture?

No. You don’t.

What you don’t get is just how different things were back then. Fresh coffee and labradoodles, right? A world full of wonders we don’t have any more. Even then, when things were changing so quickly.

Example?

When I left the city that last time, I had wheels. I literally rolled on this sooty-faced motherfucker. I wouldn’t get too excited if I were you, though. I didn’t burn my name in the road with a chrome-plated monster bike or anything. I had a little scooter, battery-powered and topped up each day from a solar sheet, during the worst of the UV storms, when stepping out into the sun all but guaranteed melanomas boiling up all over your body. The sheet did double duty as a tent to protect the user, and a power source for the lighter electric vehicles we were falling back to in those days.

I already had a solar sheet. Everyone did. But the scooter I crowd-funded, which was a thing you could do in those days before they locked down the internet. Or what was left of it, anyway.

It started as a joke. Gallows humour, I guess. I dunno why I offered to hunt down Canavan and make him pay for the labradoodles.

No, wait. We still had them at that time. Must have been the penguins died off that year when the ice sheets failed.

Anyway, it was totes obvs, as we used to say back then, that all we had left were apocalicious doomlulz, and for mine, I promised to roast old Sooty over a coal fire if someone would pay for my carbon offsets and travelling expenses.

It was a joke. Mostly. I was tired and probably drunk late at night when I made it. We were all drunk all the time when things started coming apart. But I’ll be damned if my e-wallet wasn’t filled with thousands of tiny donations in the morning. More than enough for a second-hand scooter, a bag full of protein bars (top-shelf whey protein too, in those days, not the pre-chewed insect bars you get from The Welfare these days), and enough water vouchers to carry me all the way there.

It was a helluva thing, in those days anyway, killing a man. Or it had been. I guess as things changed, we changed with them. I don’t know that I meant to kill Canavan as I left the city for that last time. But I knew that I could, and that was the difference.

At the very least, I meant to settle up with him.

The Gateway Bridge was reason enough.

It wasn’t a bridge anymore. Hadn’t been for a while. When that Doomsday Glacier melted— I think it was called Thwaites until everyone just started calling it the Doomsday one—anyway, when it melted, that’s when shit went sideways. Hard. And that’s why so people live on the bridge now.

Okay. Fine. Fact check me, then. Not that many I guess. Maybe a couple thousand or so. A lot less than the couple of million who used to live in that city, but also a lot more than the grand total of none who made their homes on the Gateway when I was young.

The water came up fast when that fucking glacier checked out on us. Three months after the first stories ran, the lowlands on either side were drowned forever. It cut off the approaches and made the Gateway useless for anything beyond keeping your toes dry. So that’s what peeps did. They moved up there. It was only supposed to be temporary, like sitting on your roof in the middle of a flash flood. But flash floods recede, and this one didn’t.

The tang of salt and the heady stench of rotting mangrove was thick in the air as I paid my toll to the bridge keeper and started pushing the scooter uphill. No sense wasting battery yet. As always happens, the richest and most powerful occupants had staked the highest ground, leaving the Gateway's approaches and lower slopes to the poorest and least consequential. The human stink was as bad here as the smell of rot and genesis coming off the inundated lands below. I picked my way through a crazy maze of rude makeshift shelters and tattered tents, all strung together with whatever people could still find among the ruins.

There was still some sense of community, though. Noticeboards announced water rationing schedules and locations for clean water collection points. Barter posts detailed items available for trade, including rare and precious spaces for shelter. Alerts about potential dangers stood out in bright red text, warnings of infiltrators and raiders, sitting next to announcements of community meetings and skill-sharing classes.

The higher I climbed, the less of that there was. A hundred metres short of the crest, I had to pay another toll, about five times the price of entry below, to pass through the Gateway (see what they did there?). This solid wall of shipping containers formed a steel curtain across the six lanes of freeway, fencing off the luckiest inhabitants if not exactly protecting them from the outside world. Behind the container wall, I passed through an apocalyptic fantasy world of tiny homes and repurposed containers - but always under guard.

No stopping here unless you wanted to draw the attention of the snipers on top of the guard towers.

I didn’t. So I paid my toll and passed through the second steel barrier before descending through a mirror image of the weird, medieval village on the other side, a shanty town fashioned from old tarps and disintegrating plastic sheets draped over frames of scrap wood and metal scaffolding.

Scattered throughout were fragments of old appliances and vehicles, their original forms barely recognizable beneath adaptation layers. Old tires served as foundations, providing insulation from the ground, while bricks and concrete blocks fortified others. Glass panes and plexiglass, salvaged from the ruins, had been repurposed into makeshift windows. And everywhere you turned, weapons followed you.

The eyes behind the iron sights were not friendly.

I wondered how many of them had once voted for Sooty Canavan.