A Small Gray Dot

He was wearing glasses with the thickest lenses I’d ever seen, and stared at me with what might’ve been a smile since the corners of his mouth seemed to give an upward twitch. He mumbled something that sounded vaguely like “thank you” and shut the door without further conversation. That didn’t bother me. I didn’t want to talk to him, either.

I headed back to the entrance, and that’s when I discovered how easy it was to get lost in Blue Heaven.

Chapter Sixteen

WHEN I GOT TO THE CORNER AND STARTED UP the street, I thought I must’ve turned the wrong way because the sign displayed a different name than the street I’d come down.

I was irritated but also baffled because I’d never gotten that turned around before. But, since I was pissed at the guards at the time, I figured I’d not paid proper attention to which way I turned. I stood there for a moment trying to remember. Perhaps I’d turned left instead of right.

I reversed directions and went back the other way. Doing that didn’t afford a correction, and I spent the afternoon trying to find my way out.

The place was dingy and depressing. The overhead, ever-present haze didn’t help, but some of this was due to the fact that the year before, major power outages began cropping up everywhere, so some folk had taken to using wood- and coal-burning stoves and fireplaces as a backup means of heating and cooking. The smoke left the buildings covered in a layer of grime and soot.

So far, the outages had been temporary but there was no rhyme or reason for them. In some places, they lasted for days and the fear was that they might become permanent.

That part wasn’t any different from everywhere else, though the place looked dirtier than the rest of the city. There, they attempted to keep things semi-clean and the streets in repair. Or they did where people still lived.

Some of the Blue Heaven structures were already coming apart with fascia falling off, holes appearing in roofs, and siding that sagged. A lot of the lawns were unkempt. It was one of the newer subdivisions, developed only a couple of years before the Event so I thought that was pretty fast deterioration after only seven years and some months. If you didn’t notice the tendrils of smoke coming from an occasional chimney or see a furtive movement at a curtained window, you might’ve supposed that, as in the case of my parents’ neighborhood, you were in one of the sections of the city that had been totally abandoned. Again, I found myself puzzled as to why it was a gated community. It didn’t appear to be the kind of place that usually was.

The first thing I learned was that most of the people were neither friendly nor helpful. There weren’t many out, and the first two I attempted to stop and ask for directions behaved as though they were deaf and wearing blinders. They ignored my friendly “Hello”.

My greeting died on my lips as they swung past me at a fast clip. I didn’t try to catch them. I shrugged and kept going.

I’d gone another couple of blocks when I heard somebody coming up behind me. I turned around to see a woman carrying a shopping bag in one hand. When I spoke and started to ask her for directions, she looked startled then her face tightened and she clutched the bag to her chest. Without saying a word, she swung around and scrambled off in the opposite direction.

Too startled to call after her, I watched her go. She moved fast for a woman of her apparent age of around sixty-five. I didn’t chase after her. Maybe she was simply nervous because I was a stranger and running behind her would likely scare her even more, though, I didn’t consider myself to be all that intimidating.

I was clean-shaven, and the hair that became salt and pepper overnight had, over time, become an all over silvery gray. My knit cap didn’t completely cover it and the gray broadcast to the world that I was an older man. That should’ve been a plus; you know, kind of reassuring since it was more of the younger men who were into mugging old ladies on the street than older ones. Unlike those boneheads at the guardhouse, I wasn’t all big and bulky, but maybe my height put her off. I guess it could’ve been the slightly crooked nose or maybe it was the faded black jeans and worn leather jacket, or my much less than pristine sneakers. Or, judging by her apparent age, maybe she was old school and was skittish around black guys.

Mystified, I shook my head and moved on.

I knocked on several doors but nobody answered, so I gave it up. I rambled around for what felt like hours though my watch disagreed and indicated it had only been one, and after walking up and down a number of streets in the neighborhood – some more than once – I ran up on Semptor Labs.