Lazarus Rising

1.6 Risers

The sky had taken on the grey pallor of a dying world. The temperature had dropped and a leaden stillness consumed the air, leaving it dull and inert. Standing on the roof of her block Cheyenne waited until her aero had slipped across the roof and been neatly stacked up in the line of the other aero's before slinging her kit bag over her shoulder and heading down the stairs to her flat. At the entrance to the passageway on her floor the intense smell of chlorine told her that the cleaning operative was down there. As she approached him she could hear his irregular breathless snorts as he worked. He was pushing the mop to and fro across the cracked linoleum floor, working his way backward along the narrow passageway towards her.

'Hello,' she called ahead of her.

He paused, lifting his bald head slightly, then hearing her boots clicking across the floor, he stood up, turned and watched her walk toward him.

The blue boiler suit marked him out as a low grade Riser. Blue for low, orange for medium, white for high grade - like the Risers who worked in the manufacturing plants at Axten. Cheyenne figured he'd maybe been in his late fortes when he died, a squat, powerful man who'd probably had a family. The patchy skin of his face sagged off his skull under its own weight, the sure sign of an older Riser who had now gone past his prime. Across one cheek, just below his cheekbone, ran a long ragged gash. The open wound revealed part of his upper teeth, a compressed row of blackened dominos that Cheyenne always found difficult to not to stare at.

He grunted at her, shuffled back to allow her through and watched her with a strange, distant, childlike look that seemed irreconcilable with his age. He reeked of death. Cheyenne knew it would be his time soon. She wondered if he knew what awaited him.

'Thanks,' she managed a smile.

Unresponsive he turned away from her, swirled his mop in his bucket, slopped a pool of water onto the floor and head down began to make his way back up the passage swinging the mop in his short muscular arms as he went.

Her flat was two rooms, a galley kitchen and a small wash room. When she'd fallen out with her aunt, Haydens had organised it for her. She couldn't have afforded it otherwise, not on what Sector19 paid her. The Rossitti twins had secured her the couch that converted into a bed and the low DC table had been left by arrangement as the room had once been a safe house used by Sector19 for potential informants.

She took off her jacket and hung it on a rail by her other two carefully pressed suits. Grabbing a bottle and some ice she filled up a tumbler and took a long draught of the fiery liquid. Standing by the window she tilted her head forward until she'd rested her weight on her forehead. With the glass acting like a cooling compress on her temple, she watched the street six floors below her as the ragged city inhabitants scuttled two and fro.

The nomenclature, Riser, covered the panoply of terms for the enslaved dead. There was also a collective name for the living. They were known by a slang term -they were the Litost, those who had the unbearable self-awareness of the misery of being alive and worse still, the awareness of what awaited them when they died. But to use the term Litost in public was to risk censure or even worse. The street below contained a shadow that was left of the Litost in New Europa.

Most Risers would now be at work in the factories and would return at dusk -for the Litost it was a time to get out and do your chores while the streets were relatively quiet. The fewer Risers you came in contact with the less chance you had of picking up an inflection. Not true as it happened but it gave the Litost someone to blame when the Codex could not be talked about openly. Down below, they moved quickly through the streets, scarfs wrapped around heads, biological masks covering their mouths and noses, nervously fingering lucky charms and packets of Poppers in their pockets. Hoods pulled down low over their heads as the final barrier against the unseen infections they raced, like rats in a maze, urgent, afraid and confused by the uncertainty of their own mortality.