The latest chapter from ED Day, the online serialized novel about life in Sydney after a bird flu pandemic, is now up.
Go Here For That
Here's an excerpt :
When I first saw her, sitting in the aisle, reading by sunlight, I asked her, ”Are you okay?”
She nodded, gave me that amazing smile. Her teeth were almost black. With chocolate.
I asked her, “What are you doing in here?”
She waved the novel at me, pointed at the neat pyramid stack of dark chocolate KitKats she was working her way through and said, “The good chocolate, the stuff with lots of cocoa, it boosts your immune system. Did you know that? And that keeps you safe from the flu.”
“Yeah, but won’t you get sick from eating all that chocolate?” I said.
She thought about this for a moment, laughed, and then showed me one of the wrappers. Her smooth, clear and shiny fingernail pointed to the Use By date.
“You see that?” Kat asked me. “In a few months this will be no good to eat. And now that the air-conditioning is gone, and we’ve got this weird combo of sun-rain, sun-rain nearly every other day, this stuff won’t even last that long. The rats will get into it all eventually.”
“Yeah,” I said, “so what? There's plenty to eat."
Kat shook her head slowly at me, ate some chocolate.
“Yes, but that’s it then, isn’t it?” she said, not noticing, like I had, that the chocolate was all over lips. “We’ll never have these again, chocolate bars like these, I mean. Nobody is going to be making these anymore. Right? Someone might be able to hand make them, but they won't taste the same. They won't even look the same. These perfect chocolate bars, the exact same measure of ingredients in every single one, all exactly the same size, flavour, smell, the bright wrappers…they’ll be gone soon."
She stopped to finish eating another Kit Kat and then continued : "It’s not just the people who died. This, all this kind of…production, it’s gone now, too. And in a few months, or less, you won’t be able to eat this stuff anymore. I mean, this is it. Then it's all gone forever."
Kat frowned at me, flicked through a couple of pages of her novel, then looked back at me.
"I’m not crazy, you know."
I knew then she was right. "You mean the mass production thing, don't you?"
She nodded quickly, "Exactly. This is it. The last of the last. Then no more."
"No more delivery trucks," I said.
"Delivery trucks? There aren't any more factories, or enough people to work in them," Kat said. "Everything from now on, for a few years at least, if not forever, will have to be made by hand. Chocolate, our meals, then our clothes. The age of fast food, instant everything, is over."
Go Here To Read ED Day From The Beginning
