Echo

Chapter 1
2033 AD
    Scotty slipped out his front door unnoticed, easily overlooked if you failed to notice his ringworm and impetigo scars. Barely three and a half feet tall, even at six years old, it put him in the underdeveloped category, another result of the wicked fall his mother took while pregnant with him. The fall initiated his premature birth, keeping him in a grossly understaffed neo natal hospital unit where his tiny body contracted a number of skin diseases that left him scarred and disfigured.
    To add to his misery, his left eye muscles refused to fully develop allowing his eye to wander in its socket, giving him headaches, vision problems and disfiguring facial affects . The fact that his father continued to deny responsibility for his mother’s fall, illustrated the truth of his sister Abby’s claims. His mother married a full-blown leachy weasel.
    Scotty looked up and down the bleak empty hallway, dirty graffiti walls, a testimony to the futility of the lives packed like termites in the ugly utilitarian monstrosity he called home.
    He cautiously peeked in the stairwell. Seeing it empty, he scrambled down the cold metal stairs, his tiny worn sneakers masking his footfalls. Emerging from the gloom of the stairwell, he recoiled from the sudden glare of an unexpectedly sunny afternoon.
    Scooting around to the back of his building, he dodged empty beer cans, used condoms and piles of dog feces to hide in the big cardboard box he currently used as his fort. Yesterday, Chang Appliance, the largest Chinese appliance chain in the world, delivered something to an exceedingly lucky tenant in his building. He and his buddy, Germaine, quickly claimed the treasured empty box, dragging it to the back of their tenement in the giant public housing neighborhood of Short Hills, New Jersey, hoping they could hide it from the big guys. At least long enough to have some fun with it.
    Short Hills, formerly a bastion of affluent homes in the early part of the century, no longer boasted anyone that could afford them. As a result, the Socialized Democrat Party strengthened the urban renewal and eminent domain laws. When the real estate market for large expensive homes (the most visible trapping of despised capitalist pigs) collapsed, due to the exodus of the wealthy to more welcoming countries, the homes were appropriated. After removing the squatters and gangs, the bulldozers made way for what some called inevitable progress. The kind of progress that produced nasty government subsidized housing projects; pretty ironic for a state once known as, The Garden State .
    Now, New Jersey blossomed with one huge hideous urban ghetto after another. Just like many other states undergoing a similar renaissance. Not everyone agreed to call this progress. Like his mother.
    She remembered the stories her grandmother related to her about growing up on a working family farm with cows and hay barns and wide open meadows, replete with the simple harmonies of sunrise crows, twilight crickets and the exceptional fragrance of newly mowed grass and wild wood violets. His great grandmother would spend her summers as a child delving into the woods, looking for wild strawberry patches and black caps growing along the side of the road, probing water holes and brooks for magical polliwogs, turtles, minnows, even snakes that she invariably dragged back to the farmhouse, a favorite pastime.
    Instead, Scotty lived with the perpetual smells of hot air brakes, big rig exhaust and alley rat infested garbage. He got the sounds of gunshots and screams as the bullies of the neighborhood beat on their latest victim. His playground consisted of hot smelly asphalt and discarded cardboard boxes as his playthings.
    Luckily, his mom knew of a few areas that missed out on the progress. Like Sussex County. Full of rolling hills, mountains, packed trout streams and bucolic lakes. It even bragged some surviving timid black bears that penis challenged hunters failed to eradicated in their perpetual attempt to prove their manhood by putting food out for bears in the woods as they waited in trees with their weapons, shot-gunning them down, cubs and all.
    Hardly convenient, the wealthy found the remoteness objectionable, leaving no albatrosses for the government to tear down. The lack of access to mass transit, actually the reason the area stayed rural; undesirable to the masses for the same reason.
    An hour before dinner, Scotty’s parents started fighting again; the