Read The Book of Levi for Free Online Page A

evening Elizabeth sat behind her desk, speaking into a recording device: ‘We must maintain control at a government level,’ she said. ‘Lobby groups must be curtailed where they threaten the good of the city.’
    She stopped the recording device and stared out at the rain.

Chapter 4
    Damien woke up with a pretty, young woman asleep on his chest but with Elizabeth Dawson on his mind. He listened to the quiet rhythm of the girl’s breathing. He felt it soft upon his breast. He stared up at the ceiling and he thought.
    What was it about Elizabeth that intrigued him so? Obviously she was beautiful. But there was something else. Some hidden presence was there. Some dark and secret thing lurked inside of her and he wanted to prize it out like a pearl from its shell. He was mad at himself. She had offered him the means to get close to her but he had refused. Was it too late? Probably not . . . but what was he thinking? He must resist. He knew that. Sure, he was a businessman in a world that only had rudimentary business but, even so, he couldn’t be involved with the Dawson family. They were well known for their political connections and he didn’t want to align with any particular political group. All he wanted to do was increase his earnings by increasing the number of citizens with the means to purchase. He needed consumers. He needed people with money or the equivalent. He checked himself. He was putting the horse before the cart. Even if all of the citizens of Corporate City had the means to buy endless products, what would they buy? He needed product first. And for this he needed raw material and many more factories and distribution centres; all of these things he must have before a consumer even entered the market. It was all so far away. Just a dream. Unless . . .
    That Woodford guy. He had heard that he was a smart one. He had purportedly fashioned a rudimentary telescope from smelted recycled glass. He had heard that he had made a short range walkie-talkie when he was only in his teens and that, not long after, he had been invited to the local museum, where he had turned a pile of bones, hitherto stored in a box in the dim recesses of the building, that the superintendent of the place had suspected might be important, into a full skeleton of a Tyrannosaur. This specimen was incredible as the only one of its kind known in existence after the lootings and destruction immediately after the bombs of a hundred years ago. It was a physical challenge to the growing theory, espoused just over a decade ago, that the Earth had only come into existence in the last two hundred years.
    He should have spoken with Woodford. He realised that now. He should have spoken with Woodford at the party but, as usual, his natural distaste for competition had stopped him.
    The same thoughts dogged him later that morning as he entered the business section of his skyscraper apartment and looked at the map of an imaginary future Corporate City plastered across the wall. He had had an artist draw it there and it had been well drawn. He called it his ‘wish map’. It showed the city centre and its surrounds as Damien would like it to be. Stretching out towards what he had dubbed the Parramatta Line, a series of factories was drawn, just on the edge of the wasteland. It showed the city centre and then, fanning out away from it was the arable land, before the radiation affected wasteland. From Palm Beach in the north to Parramatta in the west to Kernel in the south, all dotted with factories that he imagined producing everything from motor cars to canned goods. He envisioned a city population catching some form of public transport to work in these factories. He imagined them earning enough money to buy the goods produced. He imagined a basic economy. Not this two-status, hotchpotch that existed now. And in his wildest imaginings, he dreamed of international trade; of imports and exports: of real ‘big business’.
    The more he thought, the more