The One Percenters: The Ones Series, #1

By christine kilfoil

" Where is Michael?" With these words, siblings Ellen and Brendan must take on the brutal enforcers known as the ""Bluecoats." When Michael is arrested by authorities, Ellen and Brendan form a desperate plan to rescue him. The book highlights the fact that these teenagers live in a world of climate emergencies, global pandemics and economic inequities. It shows the strength of sibling loyalty and especially the capacity for teenagers to work together to overcome obstacles. In the end, it is a book about hope in the face of terror and the power of family loyalty and friendship.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: christine kilfoil
• Release date: Mar 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224401772

Book preview

Chapter 1 Ellen

They said everything had changed forever. This is the new normal, finger quotes in the air. Maybe so, maybe not. Who cared anyway? Ellen leaned her head back against the cold wall of the breakroom. She worked in the fast-food industry. Ellen sighed and blew air out her mouth, pouting her lips for effect. It was just what she did when she was bored or frustrated. Her brothers said she sounded like a horse snorting. Ok, Ellen, time to get back to work, she told herself. She picked up her brown ball cap and tucked her short, curly brown hair under it then reached down and rubbed her tired feet.

Her body was slim and wiry, but not in that toned look of the wealthy. Hers was the body of the underfed. Ellen’s skin was pale and dotted with delicate freckles. Her eyes were brown, and her nose had that Caucasian pointy feature that used to be called cute. Before everything changed, she might have been mistaken for the daisy-duke clad California girl. Now she wore the itchy uniform of the fast-food crew. It was yellow and brown and hung off her thin frame like a worn-out bedsheet.

Ellen hurried out of the small break room to the front of the restaurant. She punched back into her cash register. A line was forming already. She assumed the neutral expression of the service industry and listened while the overweight customer in front of her ordered food they didn’t need. What kind of donut would you like with your coffee? she asked mechanically, assuming a vacant smile, hoping it hid her sarcasm and distaste.

In six more hours, she would let herself into an ageing mansion in Orange County, California. It was huge; a shell of a house that once knew prosperity and arrogance. But this was not the playground of the real housewives anymore. Now it housed her mother and 5 siblings who had moved in after the property was abandoned by its once wealthy owners.

All in all, things were not so bad for them. They had food and shelter, such as it was. Ellen knew she had no right to complain. At least the pandemic was over, and the disease was under control.  No one died anymore, they might get sick, but it was survivable.

But no one had foreseen the repercussions of a worldwide pandemic and the crushing economic and political havoc it would unleash. The swift rise of the one percenters to assert their control over the major nations of the world had been both unexpected and unstoppable. There was no war, no fight, just resigned defeat of nations already weakened by death, disease and economic collapse.

This was her world now, so there was no point longing for the one she could still remember. Just focus on today, she told herself. It wasn’t that she was hopeless, just practical. She had responsibilities now. Once she arrived home Ellen would help her mother feed the younger children then go to her room to lie on her mattress and stare at the ceiling.

In the old days, before everything changed, she would have slunk off and buried herself in her phone, ignoring her mother as she rushed about her busy day. The franticness of her mother began to change when Ellen turned 13. It became desperate and terrified rather than busy and efficient. Her father stopped ranting and yelling about homework and table manners. He grew quiet and didn’t say much, except to cry.

Ellen was 17 now, her father was gone, and her mother was barely holding it together. Her Dad had left to look for work. Jobs were hard to come by and Ellen’s fast-food job supported the family now. Gone were the dreams of anything beyond survival.

When the family was younger, Ellen’s parents had encouraged their children to read the newspapers and discuss politics at the dinner table. That changed too. The news became something whispered behind closed doors that she was excluded from. Ellen had known things were changing. It was not hard to figure out. There is a look people get when hope is draining from their bodies.

The first real change for her happened when her school began to close every afternoon after lunchtime. There was no money to pay teachers all day. Initially, her mom had tried to teach her children at home to make up for the lost class time. Her efforts were spotty at best. The need to provide food and shelter trumped learning.

The gaps in their education made her mother sad and her father full of rage. He did not see how they could survive in the new world without a proper education. It was his answer to everything.

that had gone wrong. But university was unattainable for them now. Even if they could afford it, which they could not, it was not open to families like hers. They were not part of the one percenters and their supporters. Now, her goal now was to learn enough to satisfy the standards of a high school education, but even that was tough. There was talk of shutting the schools completely for the lower classes to save money.

The changes were hard and getting harder. There was no extra money for books. Even the beat-up second-hand books sold in the markets were out of reach. Her family had sold most of their valuable books for cash. Once treasured classics were all gone. The family read the worn copies of the books they were able to keep over and over.

Libraries were long gone now, having closed shortly after the pandemic hit its stride. The State of California had gone bankrupt in the chaos of the pandemic and power grab by the one percenters. Its finances had always been a bit shaky, so it didn’t take much to push it over the edge.  Libraries were one of the first things to be closed, after the shelters and food kitchens.

Occasionally, some do-gooder group of the still wealthy, feeling guilty for hoarding all the wealth for themselves, would come into her county and dump their unwanted items. Broken toys, worn and outdated clothes, things not good enough for their own children, but clearly good enough for the poor.

But books were still precious to Ellen. She would swallow her pride, put on her most grateful expression, and dig through the bins for books. Her mother, who had been the first to give up her pride in favour of helping her family survive, dug with her. Get the books, she would whisper, no one wants them, grab them all.

Chapter 2 Rise of the One Percenters

Her Mom was smart. She had been a lawyer, but no one had money for that anymore. Even worse, she had been a government lawyer paid by the federal government. She had had a big office and an even bigger pension. Each day she would rise and put on a smart pantsuit or skirt and sweater and tuck her shoulder-length curly hair behind her ears and head out the door. All that was gone.

The United States Government was bankrupt, done, all used up. The only thing left in Washington was debt, and there was plenty of that. There was a small cabal in charge now, staying in power with sham elections held every few years to allow the ruling class to pretend the United States still had democracy. The Constitution? Rule of Law? They didn’t mean anything to those at the bottom.  Human rights were the luxury of wealthy nations. And America was not a wealthy nation anymore.

Government was made up of a small incestuous club of sleaze balls and strivers from each state. They were sent to Washington to build up their personal wealth by consolidating whatever power they could grab. But the real power wasn't in a nation anymore, the US, like most nations, was run by the one percenters, the real ruling class, the Ones as they were known. They were a mysterious group of the super-rich who had joined together during the pandemic to quietly merge their power, while nation’s leaders struggled to battle the virus.

It was a true oligarchy now, made up of a ruling class of the top one percent, mainly financiers, owners of social media platforms, shopping platforms and search engines, the seriously wealthy. Entry to this oligarchy had one calling card, money and power and the two went together like Oreos and milk. They had no allegiance to any nation, and their only goal was to control citizens and bleed each nation of its wealth and its hope for a future.

There had been signs that no one paid enough attention to.  Mysterious spy pods floating over the US and Canada were occasionally spotted and shot down.  While a few joked about an alien invasion, most shrugged off concerns and got back to their lives. 

No one put together the super-rich, who were ridiculed for using their technology and wealth to take vanity trips to the moon, had darker motives at play.  Using the spy pods, they were learning each nation’s weakness and testing defences and resolve.  By the time leaders understood who was behind the pods, it was too late to stop.

Chapter 3 Small Beacons of Resistance

Ellen had been a bit late getting home from work today. She had been paid and, although she needed every penny for her family, she stopped at the internet warehouse to read the beacons once a month. It was the only way anyone could find out what was really happening in the world. The media was controlled by the Ones, and citizens were told what to think. But the internet had proven to be as uncontrollable as it had always been before everything changed.

Small internet cafes had morphed into giant internet service centres. Former supermarkets were filled with rows of tables and desks where internet time could be rented by the minute. It was the safest way to get news of what was happening because it was too hard to trace the transient users in the warehouses. Efforts had been made to shut them down, but it had not worked.

It was still risky, and not uncommon to see someone dragged screaming from their computer and handed over to the guards waiting for them at the entrance. But if one was careful, it was possible to spend a few precious minutes accessing the beacons.

Ellen had been born careful. Her mother described her as a cautious and watchful kid, hyper-vigilant and anxious. These were skills that served her well in the new world, where having one eye always over your shoulder kept you safer. Knowing who was watching you could mean the difference between survival or disappearing forever, especially for teens.

The cyber world was jammed with blogs now called beacons. The beacons were random and anonymous blogs that captured the despair and rage of the times. In the past, blogs tended to be narcissistic and self-indulgent chronologies about mindless details of the average person’s day. People set up pages and posted pictures of themselves eating lunch, going for a walk, or buying a toothbrush. Nothing was too insignificant to post about. Everyone could be a celebrity on the internet, at least in their own minds.

The beacons were far removed from this former reality. The beacons told the real story about how bad things really were. Cities were bankrupt along with the states and countries, propped up with the help of the Ones, but freedom and sovereignty were the price. The horse and wagon were making a comeback due to gas shortages and high prices.

In her own state of California, things were dire. There were food shortages caused by supply chain issues, daily power outages and water conservation. Electricity was controlled and power was turned off after eight o’clock at night to conserve energy. Ice boxes, candles and propane (assuming you could get your hands on it) were back in vogue.

Ellen read the beacons with a sick feeling of despair. She wanted to look away, but she needed information. She had not only herself to worry about, but her younger siblings, who only knew this ugly world. It was hard to be part of the losing generation. Generation Mislaid, they were called.

It was a polite way of calling them what they were, losers, in every sense of the word. They were called the generation that would not do as well as their parents. Ellen scoffed at that assumption. How about doing as well as my great-great-grandparents? she thought. That would be something to aim for. Progress was regressive apparently.

Her favourite beacon was based in Canada. It was written by a Canadian teen with the handle The Bottom 1%. His beacon was the right mix of anger and cynicism that appealed to Ellen, who felt much the same way. Things were rough in the US, but the speed at which Canada had moved from democracy to a police state was staggering.

The Canadians had closed the borders. No one got in and no one got out now. Canadians had quickly adopted the right to bear arms with gusto, after years of feeling superior that they were not like those gun-toting Americans. Anyone trying to cross the borders without the proper paperwork was shot on sight.

Rather than the government slowly falling apart, Canada had grown into a tight web of rules and regulations controlling every aspect of a citizen’s life: where you lived, what you ate, even when and where you could go each day. Conditions were harsh, more like work camps, and citizens had to work to earn their keep.

Ellen thought about what she had read today. It was worrying. There had always been reports of kids going missing, sent away on ships and never seen again. But the beacons she had read lately were reporting larger and larger numbers of the missing. The beacons posted desperate pleas from teens looking to find a missing friend or sibling.

Ellen closed the beacon she had been reading with a feeling of dread. She had 5 siblings, lots of chances for one of them to become lost. She didn’t want to think about this anymore. It was too much. What was the point anyway? Things had