Berengaria's Best: The Ultimate Short Story Collection

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The hourly news report cascaded down a gigantic screen in a graceful rain of white characters over the trademark blood-red background of the National News. Huon read from across the square, his face set against the chill blowing in from the harbour.

Farmers in the western provinces were still protesting the new fertiliser laws.

Localised storms had done damage in a few smaller cities in the north east, no deaths. Clean up would last for at least a week, experts said.

Xan-Jin had won the Digital Football Championship for the third year running.

The general death toll continued to climb. Health officials could still only guess how the disease was being spread.

International travel continued to be largely restricted.

Parliament still couldn't decide if it was constitutional to draft Survivors into service with the dying and the dead. The subcommittee meeting on the topic had been postponed until the following week.

Local news to follow. . .

The square was virtually empty. It was almost eleven at night and the streets shone from a light drizzle the moistened the coats of the few people still out, rushing along on last minute business.

Huon waited until the next cycle of news ceased falling before rolling his shoulders and walking on.

He'd spoken with a few others and they'd told him the same thing. Go. Go and see what it's like. If you can handle it, volunteer. Many of us do. If you can't, jam your local representative's encrip box with messages describing what it's like in the hospitals in such vivid detail that their stomachs turn.

Vivid detail.

The hairs on Huon's neck stood on end and his steps slowed. An invisible iron band slithered around his chest like a snake, constricting his breathing as if it were determined to crush all of the air from his lungs.

For a moment, he could smell the ashy heat from the incinerators and underneath it, the slimy, gut-churning reek of black bile.

A shiver racked his slender frame.

Did he really agree that volunteering was a good idea for him, for any of them? Was that his own mind or the minds of all the new friends he'd made in the last seven months as a Survivor. Friends who now comprised his entire world after his old ones had abandoned him.

No one was forcing him to volunteer. Not now. Not yet. Next week, when the subcommittee met again, then maybe. Next week. That was days and days and days from now. Or next month, or next year, or. . . no one knew. No one knew anything.

Survivors had no representatives in the Palace of State or behind the walls of The Fortress where the judges and legal theorists sat. In the text and holo-cast forums they'd all agreed that they had to band together, make sure they weren't drafted, their rights abused. That was more important than sensitising the public and sponsoring Survivor Meet days in schools and sports centres.

Volunteer. Volunteer before they all were forced, even the ones who couldn't cope with it.

But did that mean it had to be tonight?

Huon looked up at the grey patches of cold sea-fog drifting by, swaddling the tall, slim buildings that soared twenty, thirty, forty floors above his head, blocking and fuzzing out the light from thousands of windows. He'd always found that feature of the city beautiful. The soft, floating sea fog. He lived too far away from the harbour to ever have his own building enveloped, but down here, it was an exciting thing to watch.