Barriers Read online

  Barriers

  A Novel

  PATRICK SKELTON

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Patrick Skelton

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Please visit the author at www.patrickskelton.com.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  ISBN: 9781730747557

  Acknowledgements

  For Jennifer—my wife and best friend. Your suggestions were perfect.

  A special thanks to the following people who read the manuscript and offered valuable feedback: Anna Chidiac, Lauri Kyler, Susie Hubacher, Jessica Hoffman, Cal Militaru, Marc Gegner, and Douglas Riggle.

  1

  October 2079

  Three hard knocks on the front door jolted Nathan awake. He jerked upright in bed and glanced at the clock on the nightstand: 3:35 a.m.

  He shook his wife. “It’s them, Sarah. They’ve come for Ian.”

  “What?” she said, her voice groggy. “At this hour?”

  Nathan reached for the baseball bat he kept under the bed, adrenaline surging through his body. “I wouldn’t put it past Barrier Admin to show up in the middle of the night to do their dirty work.” His heart pounded as he threw on his robe. “They might order other law-abiding citizens to roll over and keep quiet, but not me, Sarah. No one comes into my house and takes our son without a fight.”

  He darted to Ian’s room down the hall and stuck his head in the doorway. His son was awake in bed. “Dad, what’s going on? Who’s at the door?”

  “It’s ok, Ian. We’re here. Just stay quiet.” Sarah pushed past Nathan into the room and sat on the edge of Ian’s bed, gently brushing aside the hair on his forehead with trembling fingers. Nathan closed the bedroom door and made sure it was locked, then he dashed to the living room.

  More pounding on the front door.

  He gripped the baseball bat, his knuckles white. Looking through the peephole, he saw two large law enforcers in grey uniforms and a short bald man wearing a tie.

  “Get off my property. All of you,” Nathan shouted.

  “Open the door, Mr. Gallagher,” the bald man said, holding up a badge.

  Nathan couldn’t make out his full name, but he clearly saw the words “Relocation Representative” and “Barrier Administration.” Not good. Just as he suspected.

  “We just ran a LifeTracker scan and we know everyone is home,” the bald man went on. “Don’t make me have to use force to enter your house.”

  “You’re not coming in.”

  “Mr. Gallagher, if we need to use force, you will be arrested, and you and your wife can kiss your son’s visitation rights goodbye. I’ll give you one more chance to open the door.”

  The baseball bat shook in Nathan’s hands. Despite his overwhelming urge to die protecting his son, he knew he and Sarah had to be wise about this. They had talked about what they would do in this worst case scenario. But how could a parent fully prepare for a moment like this? If they didn’t cooperate they would never see Ian again. The fact of the matter was that Barrier Admin held the power. He was helpless to stop them.

  He threw the baseball bat across the room and looked back in the direction of Ian’s bedroom. He would find a way to get Ian back, he promised himself.

  He took a deep breath, disarmed the security system and opened the door.

  The men entered, both law enforcers aiming their guns at Nathan.

  “A smart decision, Mr. Gallagher,” the bald man said, pulling a SyncSheet from his pocket and scrolling with his pupils. “And now for the legalese.”

  The man rattled off a calloused court order that both he and Sarah had read several days ago. Next, he skimmed through a letter Barrier Admin had emailed them a month ago. “As you are aware,” the bald man went on, clearing his throat, “only healthy, natural-born Barrier residents with high economic earning potential are permitted to remain in the Barrier system, and thus share in its benefits. We regret to inform you that Ian—”

  “I’ve read the letter,” Nathan interrupted, his voice tense. “I don’t care what the court says. He might be a quadriplegic, but he’s a healthy kid with plenty of income earning potential. How can I convince you of that?”

  The man folded up the SyncSheet and slipped it back into his pocket. “You’ll have to file your grievances with Barrier Administration, Mr. Gallagher. My job is to relocate non-compliant Barrier residents to appropriate Sanctuaries, and I intend to do so. Any effort to obstruct the law will result in prosecution. Am I clear, Mr. Gallagher?”

  Nathan swallowed hard, glaring at both law enforcers. They looked back with cold stares, guns still drawn.

  “I’m coming with Ian then,” Nathan said. “It’s dangerous in the Sanctuaries. They’re predicting another solar flare any day. My son needs to be with his father.”

  The man shook his head. “I can’t allow that, sir. You’ll be notified when visitation rights are granted.”

  Nathan took a step forward, struggling to hold himself in check. “You people are monsters.”

  “May I remind you, sir, Ian’s visitation rights will be revoked if you or your wife attempt to obstruct the law,” the man said, straightening his tie. “Now, would you please escort your son from his bedroom, or do we need to do that?”

  Nathan turned and rushed to Ian’s room, both law enforcers on his heels. Opening the door, he found Sarah on Ian’s bed, her arms wrapped tightly around his shoulders.

  “Stay away from my son,” she shouted at the enforcers.

  “Who are they, dad? What’s happening?” Ian’s voice quivered.

  The law enforcers peeled Sarah’s arms off of Ian as she shrieked and begged, “No…no…don’t take him!”

  Nathan lifted his son’s limp body from his bed and strapped him into his wheelchair, unable to look Sarah in the eye. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, Ian. Okay? This is just temporary. Your mother and I will come for you. I promise.”

  “But dad—”

  Nathan put his hands gently on his son’s shoulders. “Do you trust me, Ian?”

  Ian nodded.

  Nathan kissed his cheek, trying to hold back tears.

  He wheeled him into the living room as the law enforcers followed, escorting Sarah who continued to sob uncontrollably.

  “How can I trust that my son will receive the level of care he requires?” Nathan demanded.

  The bald man grabbed the handles of the wheelchair. “We’ll take it from here. Sanctuary Administration will see to his care.”

  The law enforcers released Sarah and led the way through the front door. She lunged forward and kissed Ian’s face before one of them pushed her away.

  Nathan held her as Ian craned his head, screaming, “Mom, dad, don’t let them take me! Please stop them…please!”

  Sarah collapsed in a heap on the floor, her face in her hands.

  Nathan clenched his fists, feeling powerless as they ripped his son from their home.

  2

  Three Weeks Later

  Nathan swiped his thumb at the downtown hover-rail terminal and boarded a tram headed to Sanctuary 87. He sank into a window seat, studying his ragged reflection in the glass. Dark circles shadowed his eyes and he could swear he had twice as much gray hair as he did three weeks ago. He just turned forty-six, but he felt like he’d aged five years since they took Ian. And he certainly looked it.

  As a boy around Ian’s age boarded and passed Nathan’s row, Nathan reminded himself to hang on to hope. At least his son was sti
ll permitted to have visitors. For the last ten days, he and Sarah took turns making the two-hundred-mile trek into the solar badlands, where Ian was imprisoned in a dingy fallout shelter converted into a hospital. The court order allowed only one parent per visit, and Nathan hated leaving his wife at home just as much as he hated her traveling to Sanctuary 87 without him.

  But that’s the way it was and there wasn’t much he or anyone else could do about it. Not yet, at least.

  He gazed out the window as the tram glided above its invisible track, bulleting past the city limits within three minutes. He caught a glimpse of the sign warning passengers they were leaving the Kansas City Barrier and they should adhere to safety protocols upon exiting the UV protected hover-rail. Squinting, he searched for the massive energy dome that sheltered his city from destructive solar flares, but could not see it.

  No surprise there, he hadn’t been able to spot the Barrier in weeks.

  Less than one percent of the world’s population could even detect Barrier domes with the naked eye, and Nathan had always prided himself in being one of the gifted. But the task required immense concentration, and his mind was two hundred miles away.

  As the tram entered the vast parched wasteland between the Kansas City Barrier and Sanctuary 87, Nathan’s eyes followed old I-70 in the distance, closely paralleling the hover-rail track. Desert shrubs had taken over, growing from its cracked, barely visible asphalt. Rusted frames of vehicles littered the ditches. The poor souls were at the wrong place at the wrong time when the first round of solar flares struck Earth forty-nine years ago.

  The initial coronal mass ejection was sudden and of apocalyptic magnitude according to climatologists and astronomers. Experts theorized that the sun had been assaulted by an unknown energy source, but none had come to a consensus as to what that energy source might have been. The subsequent flares had been far less severe, but steady and powerful enough to gradually cook the ozone layer over the span of five decades. Crops on six continents struggled to grow in the baked landscape, resulting in years of worldwide civil wars over food supply. The poles, for the most part, had been shown some mercy, due to the planet’s trajectory with the sun. Too bad no one wanted to live where temperatures were sub-zero most of the year.

  But the human race was safe again, the world had been told. Now that the Rankcon Intergovernmental Partnership owned the planet and graciously offered its proprietary solar barrier technology at a steep price. Rankcon’s agricultural Barriers protected the production of the world’s food supply. LifeTracker thumb chips and retina activated SyncSheets worked in tandem to keep track of the population’s daily activity, all but eliminating civil unrest. Automobiles and highways were gone for good, along with cell phones and FM radio. None were compatible with nonstop solar interference, or Rankcon’s agenda.

  If you wanted to coexist with the flares under a decimated ozone layer, have a career, and live in a home with a green backyard you could actually use without your skin getting scorched, you counted yourself lucky to be under the protection Rankcon offered. You kept your mouth shut, played by the rules, and paid your outrageous dues cheerfully.

  Or else.

  He took a deep breath as the tram flew past a parade of abandoned eighteen wheelers. The whole scene reminded him of where he was headed. Sanctuary 87 was a no-man’s-land the civilized world had discarded decades ago. Where his son was trapped and desperate for help.

  He leaned back and closed his eyes.

  He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in weeks.

  _____

  The tram slowed to a halt outside Sanctuary 87.

  Two border patrol officers in silver UV suits boarded. As the passenger manifest was reviewed, Nathan looked out his window and felt his stomach knot. Beyond an endless towering fence, a sea of concrete barracks littered the horizon, walls and roofs blackened from forty years of solar flares. Over two million legal U.S. citizens were imprisoned here, including Ian. He still couldn’t believe it had only been three weeks since Ian had been taken. It felt much, much longer.

  Twenty minutes later, the officers left and passengers began disembarking. Nathan lifted the hood of his UV jacket, grabbed his guitar case from the overhead compartment and stepped off the tram. Intense sunlight assaulted his face. He joined a moving line of bodies outside a windowless building marked Sanctuary Border Security. He entered and passed through a body scanner, swiping his thumb at a LifeTracker kiosk guarded by a pair of soldiers.

  “Enter the next area when the gate opens and stand still until your name is called,” one of them barked.

  The gate opened and closed behind him, and he entered a holding area where a few dozen fidgety people waited. After a long forty minutes, his name was called over a loudspeaker. He stepped through another gate and performed a second thumb and body scan. Questions were asked about his business in Sanctuary 87: How many hours did he intend to stay? Who was he visiting? Was he with the press? A search was made of his guitar case, with a quick peek into the sound hole of his guitar. Nathan pleaded with the guard to be careful. It was his father’s old pre-flare Martin D28, worth a pretty penny due to the scarcity of lumber. A guard reminded Nathan to put his visor and jacket back on and to return no later than 9 p.m. He’d have to undergo a similar process to leave.

  A metal door opened and Nathan passed through, entering a metropolis of concrete barracks and sun-scorched dirt roads. A large sweaty man stopped near him, stomping on a massive scorpion as it crossed between them.

  “You work for the Kansas City Tribune, right?” the man said, dragging his heel against the cracked dirt and leaving a black smear. “I’ve seen you here before with your press badge. I’m with American News.”

  “I used to,” Nathan said. “They let me go several weeks ago.” His recent job termination was still a sore topic, one he wasn’t in the mood for discussing, especially with a complete stranger.

  “The boss has me covering another story about a reporter who never came home,” the man rattled on. “Sanctuary police found him in a ditch covered with scorpions, and his neck was twisted like a pretzel. Whoever did it cut out his LifeTracker chip and probably bartered it for a week’s rations.”

  “Wow, that’s horrible.”

  “It’s downright vile, if you ask me. And the social justice activists want us to sympathize with these criminals? We’d be out of our minds to allow anyone in the Sanctuaries anywhere near our Barrier cities. It’s just not worth the risk.”

  He wished Nathan good luck with whatever he was doing here, then disappeared into the maze of barracks. The man was right about one thing: LifeTracker chips extracted from Barrier residents were worth their weight in gold in the Sanctuaries. It meant the perpetrator stood a small chance of getting past border security with someone else’s chip in his thumb, and slipping into the nearest Barrier city unnoticed.

  A boy on a tricycle taxi emerged from an alley and Nathan flagged him down. The bike squealed and came to a stop against Nathan’s shoes. A tattered brown jumpsuit covered the boy’s legs and torso, and the blistered tip of his nose protruded from a rag swaddled around his face and neck.

  “Where you headed, mister?” the boy said.

  “Quadrant Three Hospital.”

  “Jump on.”

  Nathan climbed into the backseat and the tricycle sped off with a jolt.

  “You should be wearing an approved UV jacket and visor,” Nathan said. “You know they’re free here, right?”

  “Can’t stand wearing those stupid things,” the boy shouted as they weaved in and out of alleys, past one concrete barrack after another. Each structure housed six to eight people and all were identical: 13x20 feet; no windows; a tiny slab in the back with a stone oven.

  “Why not?” Nathan asked.

  “Too stiff in the arms to steer and I can’t see where I’m going with those visors.”

  “Ah.”

  Foolish kid. There were millions just like him, making skin cancer in the Sanctuaries as c
ommon as scorpion stings.

  “My friends call me Smoldering Samuel. Want to know why?” the boy said.

  “Why?”

  “Plain and simple. I’m the fastest taxi cyclist in Sanctuary 87. I make the ground smolder.”

  Nathan gripped the seat as the tricycle bounced over a pothole, then swerved around a gigantic scorpion. “I see.”

  Samuel pedaled for fifteen more minutes, dodging several stray dogs that looked like they hadn’t eaten in months. He pulled up to the fence surrounding the hospital. “Well, that’ll be five dollars,” Samuel said, holding out his SmartScanner.

  Nathan pressed his thumb on the screen and added a generous tip.

  Samuel’s eyes lit up. “That’ll buy me and my mom three days rations. Thank you, sir.”

  “I’m at least double your weight, little man,” Nathan said, patting him on the shoulder. “You earned every penny.”

  “Well, this job is just temporary,” Samuel replied, still grinning over the tip. “My brother works in the Barrier maintenance program. He says that’s the only way out of here. He’s away right now repairing the New York City Barrier after that last flare, and if he does a good job, he might get selected to live there. When he comes back, he’ll be real pleased with my tips. That’ll show him I can work hard and do what he does, and then I can live there with him. He’s going to tell his boss about me.”

  “I’m sure your brother will be proud of you, Samuel,” Nathan said. “Keep at it.”

  Samuel shoved the SmartScanner into his pocket and grabbed the handlebars. “Well, gotta get going. Vegetable truck’s on the way and the line gets long fast.”

  Nathan watched the boy speed off and vanish behind a barrack. Unfortunately, most of his earnings would be siphoned from his account to cover the scanner’s monthly maintenance fees.

  Nathan approached the Quadrant Three Hospital—a massive, windowless concrete bunker with big metal double-doors that dared visitors to enter. A group of bearded men stood near the gated entrance. UV hoods were pulled low, concealing their eyes.