Short Story/ Chapter 1

Chapter One
         The man grunted, he was only a short way from the middle districts where the air and denizens were slightly more livable when his knee began to recommend that he pause to rest. After a few more steps the recommendation became a demand and he slowed his pace. He limped down the street, eyes flitting back and forth, searching for a good spot to rest. He noticed a shady looking character standing off alone against the wall to his left and, farther down the wall, a group of three  men who didn’t look like the type he would enjoy meeting in a dark alley. Of course, he reflected, it wasn’t very likely that he would see many reputable people in the manufacturing district. He berated himself for his thoughtless elitism, reputable, who was he to judge the character of these men without even speaking to them? While he had worked in manufacturing he had met many men and women more worthy of repute than any of the pompous leeches who ruled the working classes from the upper districts in the East. He reminded himself that he was, technically, a pompous leech now, but that didn’t stop him from hating everything about the city’s social dynamics and those who, whether they fanatically upheld the structure or grudgingly accepted it, supported its continued existence.
         The man angled his steps to the brick wall on his right; he folded his arms and leaned against the cleanest spot he could find. His knee approved. Thus situated, he began to observe the group more closely. Two of them wore rough, homespun clothes that barely clung to their emaciated frames.  They were short, just over five feet if he was any judge, and, as he watched them, he noticed that they twitched and glanced around anxiously every few seconds. The third man was larger; maybe six feet tall with plenty of mass, it was impossible to tell if he was obese or muscular due to his large coat and the fact that he faced his friends opposite the observer. As the man watched he reevaluated his observation of them as friends, you don’t look at friends the way the two runts looked at the larger man. 
         The big man clapped both of the smaller men on the back; they nodded feverishly then shook hands with the larger man, one of the runts dropped something as they shook hands and let out a high pitched, forced sounding laugh as he bent over to retrieve whatever he’d dropped. He stood again and nodded to the large man then the two departed, heading west. The large man watched them leave then spat on the ground and shook his head, muttering something under his breath. He glanced around nervously and the observer barely managed to avert his eyes in time to avoid making eye contact. One tries to avoid eye contact on the west side of town; especially with large, he now saw not fat but muscular, dangerous looking men. The observer pushed off of his wall and continued following the road east, possibly at a slightly accelerated pace.
         He walked until he’d put a mile or so between him and his encounter then paused to rest and reflect on what he had observed. He hadn’t been so different from the smaller men, possibly a few tiers higher in the intelligence complex, but really no different. He had scrounged to survive just as those two apparently had.  He wasn’t as short as them but, like all people who grew up in the western districts, he was below “average” height, the average being determined by a survey of the eastern districts where the average height was generally higher, by at least half a foot, than that of the other districts due to their more nutritious/ edible diet. The man chuckled again at how incompetent the leeches were, any good evil overlord organization would determine the average by the lower citizens and have the rich people be superhumanly tall, everyone would be happier that way. His mind slid into a less humorous tone as he thought of how else he may be similar to those men, he had avoided the drugs, they appeared to have failed there. He didn’t blame them; life was hard in manufacturing, too hard for some people to handle on their own, too hard for some to handle even with the drugs.
         The prevailing westerly wind carried the stench of the manufacturing district to his nose and eventually to the rest of the city; waking him from his reverie and making him wonder what idiot allowed the construction of the upper class districts downwind of the lower districts. The city was old, hundreds of years old; apparently the leeches had always been incompetent. The wealthy don’t have to adapt. Wealth equals power, so long as it doesn’t cost them their wealth and the lower classes remain ignorant, they can survive being stupid. His thoughts, however pessimistic they seemed, gave him hope. He wasn’t ignorant and he had been raised in a manufacturing home. He smiled. Rulers remain in power only so long as they can control the minds of their subjects, he was free. His pessimism worked against itself when it told him that he wasn’t unique; that some, if not many, of the manufacturing workers had come to the same realizations as he had, that the ruling class no longer deserved their respect and lamblike behavior. He smiled and inhaled deeply through his nose, the airborne pollutants burned into his nasal cavities and made his eyes water. He laughed like he hadn’t since his youth; change, the only hope for change that his city had seen in centuries, was blowing in from the West. It smelled like shit.