“Next!”
One of the guards took her by the arm and led her down a hallway of sealed doors. A tiny box of a room and another chair, though not like any chair Sara had seen before: a menacing contraption of cracked red leather and steel, its back reclined at a forty-five-degree angle, with straps at the chest, feet, and wrists. Lurking above it, like the legs of a spider descending on silken threads, was an armature of gleaming metal instruments. The guard shoved her toward it.
“Sit down.”
He strapped her to the chair and departed. From without the room, the sound muffled by the thick walls, came a burst of ominously high-pitched sound. Was it screaming? Sara thought she might be ill. She would have been, if there had been anything in her stomach to come up. The last of her defenses were collapsing. She would beg. She would plead. She had no strength to resist.
The door opened behind her. A man stepped into her field of vision, dressed in a gray smock. He had a little round belly and clouded glasses perched at the tip of his nose and bushy eyebrows that curled like wings at the tips. Something about his face was kind, almost grandfatherly. Like the guard at the table, he was looking at a clipboard. He raised his eyes and smiled.
“Sara, is it?”
She nodded, tasting bile.
“I’m Dr. Verlyn.” He glanced at the straps, frowning as he shook his head. “Those people are idiots. I bet you’re famished. Let’s see if we can get you out of here.”
She experienced a flash of hope that he intended to release her, but as he drew a stool beside the chair, snapping on a pair of rubber gloves, she realized he meant something else. He placed his hand beneath her chin to open her jaw. He peered inside her mouth, then held up two fingers before her face.
“Follow with your eyes, please.”
Sara traced his fingers as they made a figure eight and pulled away. He took her pulse, then produced a stethoscope from the pocket of his smock and listened to her heart. He sat up straight and returned his attention to the clipboard, squinting through his glasses.
“Any health problems you’re aware of? Parasites, infection, night sweats, difficulty urinating?”
Sara shook her head.
“How about menstruation?” He was checking off boxes. “Any problems there? Excessive bleeding, for example.”
“No.”
“It says here you’re …” He paused, flipped through pages. “Twenty-one. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Ever been pregnant?”
Something clenched inside her.
“It’s a simple question.”
She shook her head. “No.”
If he detected her lie, he gave no sign. He let the clipboard fall to his lap. “Well, you appear to be in perfect health. Wonderful teeth, if you don’t mind my saying so. Nothing to be done there.”
Was she supposed to say thank you? Above her face the spider still loomed, gleaming ominously.
“Now then, let’s see if we can’t finish up quickly and get you on your way.”
Suddenly something changed. Sara sensed it in a quick hardening of his features, but not just there; it was as if the air of the room had undergone some subtle alteration. The doctor began vigorously pumping a pedal beneath her chair, producing a whirring sound, then reached above her face to draw down one of the spider’s legs. At its tip, spinning in time to his foot strokes, was a buzzing drill bit.
“This will be easier if you don’t move.”
Some minutes later, Sara found herself standing outside, clutching her meager belongings to her chest. When she’d started to scream, the doctor had given her a leather strap to bite on. On the pale skin of the inside of her forearm, first gouged and then cauterized in place, was a shiny metal tag, engraved with the same string of digits she’d seen on the paper: 94801. That’s who you are now, the doctor had explained, removing the strap, now with its embedded impressions of her teeth. He’d stripped off his gloves and stepped to the sink to wash his hands. Whoever you thought you were, you’re not that person anymore. You’re flatlander number 94801.
The semi was gone, replaced by an open-backed five-ton. Sara saw the words IOWA NATIONAL GUARD imprinted on the driver’s door—the first evidence of where she was. A guard motioned for Sara to board; a second guard was standing at the front of the cargo bay, his back braced against the cab, idly spinning his club on its leather strap. Some of the women were already there and a few of the men as well. Everyone was slumped on the benches, their faces carrying the stunned weight of all that had occurred.
She took a place beside one of the men, a young officer she knew as Lieutenant Eustace. He had been the scout who had brought them into Roswell. As she lowered herself to the bench, he angled his shorn head close to Sara’s.
“What the hell is this place?” he whispered.
Before Sara could answer, the guard sparked to attention. “You,” he barked, gesturing at Eustace with the end of his club. “No talking.”
“Who are you people? Why won’t you tell us anything?”
“I said, keep quiet.”
Sara understood what was about to happen. It was the implied climax of the day’s design, the one demonstration of their powerlessness that had yet to be delivered.
“Yeah?” Eustace’s face lit with defiance, the last of his energy spitting from his lips. He knew what he was asking for; he didn’t care. “Go to hell, all of you.”
The guard took a long stride forward and, with a look of absolute boredom, brought the club crashing down on Eustace’s knees. Eustace rocked forward, clenching his teeth in barely contained agony. Nobody moved a muscle; everyone was gazing intently at the floor.
“Mother … fucker,” he gasped.
The guard spun the club around and backhanded the heavy end into Eustace’s nose. A wet exoskeletal crunch, like the sound of an insect stamped underfoot; a crimson spray arced into the air, spattering Sara across the face. Eustace’s head snapped back, his eyes fluttering in their sockets. He ran his tongue along the inside of his upper lip and spat a shard of a tooth away.
“I said … fuck … you.”
Blow after hammering blow: his face, his head, the bony joints of his hands. By the time Eustace toppled over, his eyes rolled back into his skull, his features crushed into a pulpy mass, blood had rained down on them all.
“Get used to it.” The guard paused to wipe his baton on his pant leg and dragged his eyes over the group. “It’s pretty much how we do things.”
As the truck pulled away, Sara drew Eustace toward her to cradle his ruined face in her lap. The man was barely conscious, his breath gurgling in his throat. Perhaps he would die; it seemed likely. And yet there was a feeling of victory in what he’d done. She bent at the neck and whispered into his ear:
“Thank you.”
Thus, in blood, it began.
“One People! One Director! One Homeland!”
How many times had Sara been forced to shout these words? With the morning roll call and the singing of the anthem complete, everyone dispersed to their designated transports. Sara helped Jackie up, then climbed aboard. She saw a new face, one she recognized: Constance Chou, Old Chou’s wife. They acknowledged each other with tight nods, but that was all. What had happened at the Colony had come to Sara in bits and pieces over the years. The story was no different from the others she’d heard and differed from the events at Roswell only by degree; in many ways, the greater shock had been that so many other islands of humanity had existed at all. By the time Sara arrived, the Colony’s survivors had already dispersed across the flatland. The number Sara heard was fifty-six. How easy it was for fifty-six people to be subsumed into the masses; with their chopped hair and identical tunics, everybody looked the same. Yet every now and then, a familiar face leapt out. She had glimpsed a woman she thought was Penny Darrell, and another who she swore was Belle Ramirez, Rey’s wife, though when Sara had called her name, the woman hadn’t answered. One morning in the ration line, her bowl had been
filled by a man she had seen many times without recognizing as Russell Curtis, her own cousin. He appeared so much older than the man Sara recalled that when their eyes met, it took her a moment to place him. For the better part of a year she had been housed in the same lodge as Karen Molyneau, Jimmy’s widow, and her two daughters, Alice and Avery. It was from Karen that Sara took the most information, including the names of the dead. Ian Patal, who had been killed defending the power station. Hollis’s sister-in-law, Leigh, and her baby, Dora, who had perished on the trip to the Homeland; Other Sandy, who had died shortly after arrival, Karen wasn’t sure how; Gloria and Sanjay Patal. As dark as this news was, Sara still regarded her year with Karen and her girls as a brief respite, a period in which she’d felt connected to the past. But they were always moving people around between the lodges, and one day the three of them were gone, strangers sleeping in the bunks where they had lain their heads for a year. Sara hadn’t seen them since.
The ride to the biodiesel plant took them along the river, through a maze of squalid lodges to the industrial zone at the north edge of the flatlands. The day gave no promise of improvement; a bitter wind spit kernels of rain into their faces. The air was ripe with the stenches of the flatland, pooling animal waste and a compressed and filthy humanity and, behind it, like a curtain of scent, the dark earthiness of the river. They passed through a juggernaut of checkpoints, fences opening and closing, the cols with their clipboards and pens and inexhaustible appetite for paperwork and the structures of authority waving them through. The far side of the river gave onto open floodplain, denuded and colorless, the crops long picked for winter; to the east, ascending in steps above the river, rose the Hilltop, where all the redeyes lived, and at its apex the Capitol Dome, capped with its crown of gold. It was said that this structure, and those surrounding it, had at one time been a university, which was a kind of school, though with only the Sanctuary for comparison, Sara had difficulty absorbing this fact. Sara had never been up the hill, let alone inside the Dome. Some workers were allowed inside, gardeners and plumbers and kitchen help, and of course the attendants, who were women selected to serve the Director and his staff of redeyes. Everybody said the attendants were the lucky ones, that they lived in luxury with good food and hot water and soft beds to sleep in, but the information was all secondhand. No attendant had ever returned to the flatland; once they went in, the Dome became their lives.
“Get a look at that,” Jackie murmured.
Sara’s thoughts had wandered off, her awareness blunted by the cold. They were cutting away from the river on the access road; to the north, beyond the boundaries of the Homeland, Sara could make out the shape of the cranes spiking through the treetops like a pair of huge, skeletal birds. The Project, it was called: a decades-long undertaking to erect a massive steel-and-concrete structure of unknown purpose. Flatlanders who worked there, nearly all of them men, were searched each day going to and coming from the site; even to talk about what they did there was regarded as treason and could get you sent to the feedlot, though rumors abounded. One theory would hold sway for a time before yielding to another and then to a third, the first eventually reemerging to start the cycle anew. Even the men who worked there, when they could be convinced to speak of it at all, did not appear to know what they were constructing. There was talk of mazelike hallways, vast chambers, foot-thick doors of solid steel. Some claimed it was a monument to the Director, others that it was a factory. A few claimed it was nothing at all, merely a distraction concocted by the redeyes to keep the flatlanders occupied. A fourth hypothesis, one that had gained currency in recent months, was that the Project was an emergency bunker. Should the Director’s mysterious power to keep the virals at bay ever fail, the structure could serve as a refuge for the population. Whatever it was, the work appeared to be approaching completion; fewer and fewer men would board the transports to the site each morning, and they were all older, most having worked there for years.
But the cranes weren’t the object of Jackie’s attention. As the five-ton drew toward the last guardhouse, Sara saw two words imprinted on the perimeter wall, painted in broad, dripping strokes of white:
SERGIO LIVES!
A pair of flatlanders were dousing long-armed brushes in buckets of soapy water, preparing to scrub it off. A col stood beside them with a rifle cradled over his chest. He glowered as the transport passed, meeting Sara’s eye for an icy instant. She looked away.
“Fisher, you see anything that interests you?”
The voice belonged to one of the two cols riding in the back of the truck, a trim man of twenty-five or so, who went by the name Vale.
“No, sir.”
For the final five minutes of the ride, she kept her eyes glued to the floor. Sergio, Sara thought. Who was Sergio? The name, rarely spoken in the open, possessed an almost incantatory power: Sergio, leader of the insurgency, bomber of markets and police stations and guardhouses, who, with his unseen fellows, seemed to glide like ghosts through the Homeland, igniting weapons of destruction. Sara understood the words on the fence to be a kind of taunt. We were here, they said, we stood right where you are standing now, we are everywhere among you. Sergio’s methods were marked by an almost incomprehensible cruelty. The insurgents’ targets were anywhere the cols might gather, a program of assassination and disruption, but if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, your presence made no difference. A man or woman would open their coat to reveal the rows of dynamite strapped to their chest, and that would be the end of you. And always, in the final instant, as their thumb found the trigger on the detonator, sending themselves and anyone within the blast radius into oblivion, they would utter these two words: Sergio lives.
The transport pulled up to the plant, and the workers disembarked. A yeasty odor hung in the air. Four more trucks of workers pulled in behind them. Sara and Jackie were assigned to the grinders, as were most of the women. Why this should be so, Sara had never understood—the job was neither more nor less arduous than anything else—but that’s how things were done. Corn would be mashed, then combined with fungal enzymes and fermented to make fuel. The smell was so intense that it seemed to be part of Sara’s very skin, though she had to admit there were far worse jobs: tending the hogs, or working at the waste treatment plant or slurry pens. They got into line to check in with the foreman, tied their kerchiefs around their faces, then made their way through the cavernous space to their workstations. The corn was stored in large bins with spouts at the bottom; from these openings they would retrieve one bushel at a time and load it into the grinders, where rotating paddles pummeled the kernels into meal. As the moisture in the corn was released it formed a gluey paste, which adhered to the interior walls of the grinder; it was the operator’s job to dislodge it, a task requiring great dexterity and quickness, as the paddles did not stop rotating. The difficulty was compounded by the cold, which made even the simplest movements feel sluggish and imprecise.
Sara set to work. The day that loomed ahead would pass in a kind of trance. It was a skill she’d acquired as the years had passed, employing the hypnotic rhythms of work to drain her mind of thought. Not to think: that was the goal. To occupy a purely biological state, her senses absorbing only the most immediate physical data: the whir of the grinder’s paddles, the stink of fermenting corn, the nubbin of cold emptiness in her belly where the measly bowl of watery gruel that passed for breakfast had long since been absorbed. For these twelve hours, she was flatlander no. 94801, nothing less or more. The real Sara, the one who thought and felt and remembered—Sara Fisher, First Nurse, citizen of the Colony, daughter of Joe and Kate Fisher and sister of Michael; beloved of Hollis, friend to many, mother of one—was hidden away in a folded slip of paper, tucked like a talisman in her pocket.
She did her best to keep an eye on Jackie. The woman had her worried; a cough like hers was nothing good. In the flatlands a person didn’t really have friends, not in the way that Sara had known friendship. There were faces you knew a
nd people you trusted more than others, but that was the extent of it. You didn’t talk about yourself, because you weren’t really anybody, or your hopes, since you had none. But with Jackie she had allowed her defenses to drop. They had formed a mutual pact, an unstated pledge to watch out for each other.
At noon they were given a fifteen-minute break, just enough time to race to the latrine—a wooden platform suspended above a ditch, with holes to squat over—and gobble another bowl of gruel. There was no place to sit, so you ate standing up or on the ground, using your fingers for a spoon, then got in a second line for water, which was dispensed with a ladle that all the women shared. All the while they were watched by the cols, who stood to the side, twirling their sticks. Their official title was Human Resources Officers, but nobody ever called them that in the flatland. The word was short for “collaborators.” Nearly all were men but there were some women, often the cruelest of the lot. One female col, whom they called Whistler for the deep cleft in her upper lip, a congenital deformity that gave her voice a distinctive, reedlike sound, seemed to take special delight in inventing new and subtle ways to inflict discomfort. It was her habit to single out one person, most often a woman, as if she were performing an experiment. Whistler set her sights on you and the next thing you knew you would be pulled out of the latrine line for a pat-down just when it was your turn, or assigned some impossible and pointless job, or switched to a different crew just as your break was coming. The only thing you could do was take it, gritting your teeth through the misery of your aching bladder or empty stomach or exhausted limbs, knowing that soon Whistler’s attention would pass to another, though this only made things worse and seemed to be the point of the entire exercise; you found yourself wishing for the suffering to befall somebody else, and thus you became complicit, part of the system, a cog in a wheel of torment that never stopped turning.
She looked for Jackie at the break, but the woman was nowhere to be seen. Sara moved quickly through grinding stations, searching for her friend. The foreman’s whistle would blow at any moment, summoning them back to work. She had nearly given up when she turned a corner to find Jackie sitting on the ground, her face damp with sweat, her kerchief balled to her mouth.
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