trail mix, guava and fudge ripple with hot fudge and malt
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Scum
Rating: G
Challenge: Trail Mix #12: tower, Fudge Ripple #30: disdain, Guava #14: the best is yet to come
Toppings/Extras: hot fudge, malt
Wordcount: 616
Summary: The PA of one of the most powerful men in the world contemplates.
Notes: This gives more of a glimpse into what the city’s like.
Malt Trick-or-Treat challenge: Lady Macbeth’s prompt-“The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.”
Adele Merritt stood at the window, staring outwards-and, more prominently, downwards. The skyscraper she was in was one of the tallest in the city, and she was right at the top. How hard she had worked to get there! The city had a very literal social ladder: from the penthouses and gardens of the very top to the slums of the bottom. They called them the lower levels, the slummy sprawl that began around the tenth floor. Around the tenth floor also hung the Smog, which was never predictable. All of the damn pollution had congealed into one colourful pea soup-thick cloud that clung to the bottom of the world, blotting her view of the ground level. Walkways criss-crossed in a never-ending and intricate web all the way down, glass tunnels that joined each skyscraper to the next.
It was just as well. The ground level was filth: nobody went down past the tenth floor if they had any sense. Beneath the curtain of the smog was a constant rat’s nest of crime, prostitution, drugs and death. Sometimes one of the uppers would go down there to film some documentary or something like that. Nobody was interested in sorting them out: they had pulled up the ladders and let the proles sort out their own lives.
Of course, though, crime wasn’t limited to the lower levels.
She couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder to where Horatio Newson was glaring at something on his wafer-thin computer screen, clicking impatiently every now and again. Occasionally his thick fingers would move to the screen itself and move things about with the touch-screen interface. Horatio wasn’t fat-he was too vain to be fat-but he was a swarthy man, and shrewd as ever, despite his constant childish tantrums.
At least while he was working, she was allowed respite from his abuse, although she didn’t really mind it: it rolled off of one’s skin after a while. She’d been hired as his PA because she had been the only one who hadn’t run out of the job interview crying. As usual, her brows were drawn severely together, pinching up her entire face. She had an alienesque neck and a large oval head to match, and her business suits were always pristine, with creases like knife blades.
For some reason, she couldn’t help but stare down towards the lower levels through her mascara, today of all days. Her birthday. She hadn’t told anyone, and didn’t mind that nobody remembered: she hated the attention, the disgusting toadying of the underclasses. Everyone in the building ran the other way when she came striding down the corridor with her sensible shoes clop-clopping, and that was how it should be, in her opinion. She had a glare that could burn through metal, and she was damn proud of it.
The lower levels. Scum. Everyone knew how much she hated them: anyone below floor forty, in fact, was invisible to her. Sometimes they would come up to the top and wander around with their patched-up jackets and uneven stubble. It made her feel ill. Her gaze flew along the city landscape towards another large tower that marked one of the city’s many ‘districts’: that one was called Hull. The worst of them all: the squalor reached up to floor fifty in many of the skyscrapers, and the ground floor there was a disgrace.
Not that she knew anything about it.
Pressing her thin lips so tightly together that they turned white and then disappeared, she turned and strode from the office with multiple clicks of her heels. Horatio took no notice: he was used to Adele’s peculiarities, as she was to his.