Barnabas Bopwright Saves the City by J. Marshall Freeman

Author:J. Marshall Freeman [Freeman, J. Marshall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781636791531
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2022-05-01T19:07:39+00:00

Chapter 43

Flying down the long, winding hill from Pastoral Park on a ridiculously effortless bicycle was, for Barnabas, somewhere between ultimate freedom and fundamental terror. Despite their insistence on making a quiet getaway, Hulo and Bulo were whooping like howler monkeys, weaving in and around each other, while Barnabas was hanging on for dear life. He could all too easily imagine hitting a pothole and flying over his handlebars to a messy death. But at the same time, he didn’t want to pump his brakes the whole way down like a loser and end up at the bottom ten minutes after the others.

Then Hulo was at his side. “Unclench, guy. It’s more dangerous to ride all tense like that. Drop your shoulders, open your chest, and look up. That’s it. Feel the road through your wheels. Breathe. Good.” And then Hulo pumped her legs like a charging rabbit and pulled ahead, swinging her feet up onto the handlebars in a terrifying show of nonchalance as she swerved in front of her sister.

With this bit of professional advice under his belt, Barnabas actually enjoyed the final leg of the descent. He wasn’t even the last to the bottom. Garlip, he saw, was still far behind him, and Barnabas stopped at the bottom to wait. Garlip rolled up a minute later, looking less than thrilled.

“That was exciting,” Barnabas said.

Garlip rolled his eyes. “Sometimes the performers forget that not everyone in the circus is a suicidal daredevil exhibitionist.”

They rode down the road holding hands as they caught up with the twins. For the first time in days, Barnabas felt like his life wasn’t totally hopeless. He had an actual gang. And they were all heading off to get the proof he needed to save the City.

“We’ll take the most direct route to Clouding Town,” said Hulo as they rode.

“Okay,” Barnabas agreed.

Bulo said, “Even though it doesn’t smell the best.”

The most direct route took them past high mountains of garbage, one after the other as far as Barnabas could see. The smell came in waves: chemical, biological, sour, and cloying. The kids batted at flies as they rode, and truck after truck passed them, turning off into one of countless trash yards to deposit yet more waste for the mountains.

Barnabas saw large processing plants where garbage rode wide conveyor belts to be sorted, but he didn’t see how they would ever get ahead of the City’s refuse, which just kept arriving. He thought about the shiny promise of products that fuelled the dreams of the Citizens. Automated delivery vans and drone units pulled up to every apartment every day with boxes of new clothes, gadgets, toys, and tools, all stuffed into the City’s hungry consumer mouth. And simultaneously, out the other end shot the discarded refuse of goods tossed aside because they were built to break in a year, because they’d gone out of fashion or had been “improved upon” with one more pointless feature. And the result was mountains of waste. Wasted plastic, wasted textiles, and wasted dreams.

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