by Elle Hill
He halted several feet in front of them. “Hi,” he said.
If she weren’t going to die soon, she would have given serious thought to writing a book about the oddity of politeness in the face of death.
“Hey,” Lynna responded in a small voice, eyes downcast.
“I want all seventy of us Tithes to discuss this situation rationally,” Blondie said, eyes unwavering and very blue. “We each might have some puzzle piece that fits together with someone else’s. Are you two up for a discussion?”
Really, she’d done more talking today than she had in the past two years. “What’s your name?” she asked him.
“Marcus,” he said, smiling. Although he had to have ten years on her, he put his hands behind his back, a young man reciting his lesson.
“From which town?”
“Adelanto.”
Just like the fat twin boys, no more than eight years old and still clinging to one another.
“Is that your real hair color?” Josh asked. When Lynna gasped, she added, “I’ve just never seen an adult with such light hair.”
Marcus smiled. “Both my parents had blond hair.”
She noticed the past tense. Were they dead, or did he already think of himself that way?
“Yeah, we’re willing to talk,” she said.
Marcus nodded before striding toward Emmel.
Ten or so minutes later, Marcus stopped before the elevators and, in his sonorous voice, called for everyone’s attention. A leader, this one. Thank heaven she’d never be accused of the same.
“Thanks for being willing to talk, everyone,” Marcus began. “No one here is interested in undermining Elovah’s plan.” Lynna snorted very quietly before darting a glance at Josh. “I’m just interested in learning more about our circumstances. I figure if Elovah didn’t want us to question everything, She wouldn’t have made us so curious.” He smiled very slightly. Several others, Josh noticed, couldn’t help but smile in return. “The first question is: Does anyone know anything about this place?”
The group sat in silence for several seconds. “Let me rephrase,” Marcus said. “Had anyone heard anything about bringing us Tithes anywhere but the desert?” The Book of Salvation ordered the people to “go into the desert, where they will enter into the realm of Elovah, their God.”
No one spoke.
Marcus nodded. “Okay. Does anyone know anything about this place? Any architects or HVAC folks?”
“This is an underground bunker,” the surly woman with crutches offered.
“What’s a bunker?” a young voice asked.
Josh was glad someone else had asked, even though the word sounded familiar. She could almost remember what it meant . . .
The woman shrugged. “An underground building meant to hold stuff.”
Ah. Right. “The Twelves built them to save people and supplies when tragedy struck,” Josh offered. Heads turned her way. “During war, I think, and to prepare for big events like, well, the Twelve. One this size, I think it was built by the Twelves’ warriors. They called themselves armadas, I think, or armies. Something like that.” As a scholar, she’d been way more interested in studying Twelve cultural rituals than fighting.
Crutch Woman snorted. “Didn’t they know Elovah could go anywhere, even underground?”
“They didn’t care about Elovah back then,” an older male voice called. “It says so in the Book of Wrath.”
“Okay,” Marcus said. “So this is an underground bunker meant to store people and survival supplies. When was it built?”
Josh shrugged. “Before the Twelve.”
Marcus raised his eyebrows at her. “So it’s a place to keep people long-term?”
Josh nodded.
“How long?”
She shrugged.
“As long as Elovah wants us to be here,” someone said.
“There’s, uh,” Lynna’s voice trailed off when everyone turned to her. She looked down at her cracked brown shoes. “Um, there’s a lot of food and first aid supplies in the kitchen. I don’t know how much we’d need for this many people, but there are a bunch of refrigerators and freezers and pantries.”
“So we have food for a while, and Eryl was right when he said the plumbing works?” Marcus looked at Josh again.
Josh nodded solemnly. “The toilets flush magnificently.”
“Good news.” He flashed a half-smile at her. “I suggest those of us who can start exploring. We can see what this place has stored. Since there are three doors—”
“Wait, wait, wait!” a diminutive older woman, her light-brown face tinged with the grayness of pain, called, rising slowly to her feet with waving hands. “We should all stay here and wait for Elovah. What happens if She comes and a bunch of you are treasure hunting?”
“Yeah,” a male voice, coming from behind the giant support beam, seconded.
“Hey,” Josh said loudly. “As Marcus said, Elovah made us curious. If She wanted us to be bunnies, She would have given us puffy white tails and better legs for hopping away when we’re scared.”
Marcus smiled again. “Elovah lets us make our decisions, right? If you can’t or don’t want to come explore, stay here. Who wants to explore?”
About a quarter of their hands rose, including Lynna’s. Josh wished she could join in, but even with the aspirin, her calves still quaked and her ankles burned.
Marcus assigned groups to explore the spaces behind each of the three doors. Lynna grinned at Josh before trotting off. Amazing how, at the end of their lives, these people could find the energy and desire to explore, to learn, to smile at one another.
Ah, Tithes, bound together by their different bodies, their shared fates. Freaks, scapegoats, smeared by their townspeople with good will so strong and oily they still stank of it. United by their shared ignorance and their common fear, they were true sisters and brothers of the spirit.
This may be why it took an entire ten minutes for the first fight to break out.
Josh stared at her boots, wishing she could take them off so her sweat-soaked feet could dry. Her head nodded upward when she heard a masculine voice shout, “Have you even listened to stories from the Bitoran?”
Three quarters of the way across the room, one young man with beige skin and floppy brown hair stood glaring at another man, this one a darker brown and sporting short-cropped black curls. Even from this distance, she could see the first man had clenched his hands into fists.
“Enough to know it doesn’t say a thing about bunkers!” the other man shouted. “They’re going to come back and bring us to the desert.”
“You’re an idiot to question Elovah’s words!” the first one blasted.
Oh, heaven.
Josh didn’t see whose fist flew first. A moment later, the duo locked themselves into that intimate tangle that is fist fighting. Their individual movements blurred, colors meshed.
She wished she could jump to her feet, rush across the way, separate the pair, and use her educated words to convince them fighting served no purpose, especially now, at the end of their existences. Her body was too broken, her words never quite eloquent enough, and she suddenly felt tired. Other people jumped into the fray to separate the two men.
Really? We’re facing the end of our lives, and you’re quibbling like children? She heard the words reverberate off the metal ceiling and realized somewhat hazily that she hadn’t bothered confining her thoughts to her head. People looked at her.
“I know you’re all scared to die . . .” she added.
“Only doubters would be afraid of the afterlife!” the young man with the floppy brown hair shouted. A narrow trickle of blood flowed from one of his nostrils.
“Then all of us are doubters,” she said. “We’re scared. We don’t know what’s going to happen to us, how we’re going to die. If we can believe Eryl, the only thing we know is we have at most a year in here. I think it’s probably a lot less.”
The room stewed in silence for a moment. Finally, a pal
e young woman, her hands and head shaking, quavered, “Maybe we won’t die.”
“It never says anything about dying in the Bitoran,” the bleeding antagonist pointed out.
He was right, but . . .
“No one ever sees the Tithes again. It does say that,” Josh said.
“Maybe,” the young woman began, “Elovah, you know, sends Her angels for us. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe we go right to heaven without dying or something.”
Josh tilted her head. “So we leave this plane of existence for a heavenly one? The difference between living and dying seems pretty academic to me.”
“Who says we go to heaven?” the surly woman with a crutch asked. “Maybe Elovah sits us down, all businesslike, listens to our pleas for our towns, and then sends us across the world to live out our lives.”
“If we were really destined to live a life of luxury in some faraway land, why wouldn’t everyone be lining up for this job?” Josh asked. “Instead, it falls on us freaks, those of us they don’t feel bad about losing.”
The room silenced so suddenly, she could hear the hiss of breath as she inhaled.
“I don’t want to die,” the other fighter, the one with curly hair and darker skin, confided. He rubbed reddened eyes. “I never wanted to come here.”
“What’s your name?” Josh asked with as much gentleness as she could muster.
“Len,” he said.
“All of us are scared, Len. Every one.”
“We’re the blessed ones . . .” someone began quietly.
Josh wasn’t the only one who laughed.
“We’re the trash they throw away,” Crutch Woman agreed.
“In Newberry,” a teenage girl said, “everyone knows the mayor’s daughter has some kind of blood disease. We knew she’d never become a Tithe.”
“Oh, come on,” a masculine voice argued. Josh couldn’t see him from her chair. “It says in the Book of Salvation Elovah knows every footstep in our path. We’re the blessed ones. She wouldn’t let such things happen to Her special people.”
Josh shook her head, but she didn’t speak. If he really needed to believe the sacrifice of his life was preordained and that he was as blessed as the town leaders professed, she didn’t want to take it from him.
“Jimson,” the woman in the tenth group, the one in the wheeled chair next to the giant, Emmel, snapped.
A few people looked shocked at her use of the profanity.
“We’re so blessed?” she spat. “Yeah? I worked management in my air conditioner factory. I had a great life with my wife, our kid. Then the accident at work, where I made everyone get out of the room so I could take the risk myself. Snapped my spine. My wife left me, took our daughter. And now, here I sit in this blasted chair, and what did my workers do to show their gratitude? Reported me to the city council.”
“But that’s what they’re supposed to do,” someone said.
The woman scowled at the voice’s owner. “Uh-huh. And everybody does it, right? It’s all equal opportunities for us incaps. If that’s Elovah’s plan, I’m sorry I’m a part of it.”
Several people gasped at the blasphemy. Maybe some waited for a ball of fire to fry the woman. But, after all, they were doomed anyway, right?
“What’s an incap?” Josh asked.
The scowl swiveled her way. “Doesn’t every town call us that? You know: ‘incapacitated citizens’?”
“Never heard it,” Josh said.
“Our mayor calls us ‘ICs,’ thinks he’s being cute. You know, all homey with us lowly people. We regular folks call us incaps, right, Trenny?”
“Yep,” a tall, broad woman sitting in a nearby chair confirmed, arms folded across her mountainous chest.
“How do you think we’re going to die?” a small voice asked.
Everyone looked at the source of the question, one of the two fat boys from Adelanto. His brother had crossed his legs before him on the couch and now stared at his shoes.
Incaps, these kids. Too fat. Freaks. The walking dead.
“I don’t think we’re going to die, baby,” a feminine voice soothed. “Elovah’s just gonna take us to a better place. You know, like it says in the Bitoran? A place where the ground seeps with water and food blooms under each footstep.”
“Let’s not lie to the kids,” Josh snapped. “The least—”
“It does say that in the Book of Salvation!”
“Yeah, I know. I spent my whole life with imrabi. I’ve read the Bitoran more times than I have hairs on my head. But we’re all we have right now. I’d like to think we owe each other the truth. Here’s what we know, little boy: We don’t know. The Bitoran says nothing about the Tithe except one person per town per year for seven years. The seven are led into the desert and Elovah’s realm. Some say it’s to plead with Her for lenience, but that’s only one interpretation. Most older scholars call it what I see it as: a sacrifice to appease Elovah’s anger. But whatever, it’s what soothes Her wrath over humanity’s past and current follies. And, as we’ve said, these people are—” She used finger quotes. “—‘blessed to speak with their Almighty Creator.’ That’s it. It’s a small paragraph in chapter eighteen of the Book of Salvation.”
Everyone stared at her, eyes wide. “You got to read the Bitoran?” the last speaker gasped.
Josh sat back, face creased downward. “Of course I did. They don’t—didn’t keep books from me just because I’m an orphan.”
The crazy, would-be Barstownian escapee raised his hand as if in a classroom.
Startled into a wry smile, Josh pointed at him to speak.
“I’m from Barstow, too, and we workers don’t get to read the Bitoran. The minnabi say it’s because we won’t come to services if we do.”
“What?” Josh asked.
“Yeah,” the woman in the chair, the one who had lost the use of her legs in a factory accident, confirmed. “Our minnabi tell us it’s because we don’t have the training to interpret it.”
“Huh,” Crutch Woman said. “In Apple Valley, they tell us if we read the Bitoran on our own, we’ll splinter over the details like the Twelves did. They say we need to remain united in Elovah’s word.”
The few non-imrabi Josh had known hadn’t read the book, but she always assumed it was because of the occasionally flowery language combined with the populace’s general lack of literacy.
“The Bitoran doesn’t say anything about individuals not getting to read it,” she said slowly. How could she not know laypeople weren’t allowed to read their holy book? Sure, she’d been isolated among the imrabi, but that isolated?
“In Hesperia,” a male voice called out—Josh didn’t bother raising her head to meet his eyes—“we have to petition the council to learn to read. Most of us couldn’t read it if we wanted to.”
A couple of people wordlessly agreed. Whether or not they were from Hesperia, too, somewhere, laws existed that forbade reading. Forbade reading? How could this be, and why didn’t she know about it? Had she become so immersed in her studies, she ignored the world outside the rab’ri’s walls? Then again, how could she know? The few tidbits of information she heard about the other towns came from rumor, material imports, and her beloved books. The Bitoran explicitly stated the ten desert towns must remain “separate in space and united in purpose.” It’d never occurred to her that laws would vary town to town.
People still stared at her with curiosity, maybe a couple with resentment. Josh, the well-read incap. Funny how even among the freaks she was an oddity.
How might she have ended up had her parents decided to keep her? Probably still a Tithe, but would she have been literate, let alone a scholar? None of the imrabi doted on her, but all treated her with courtesy or respect, one or two with distant affection. After news of her condition had spread, they had wordlessly taken away her mops and dusting cloths and assigned her to work in the library. She’d thrived in the world of books, had discovered a passion for organizing the library and stuffing her head full of inform
ation.
Before today, she’d never considered her short life blessed.
The arrival of Marcus’ group crumpled the tense silence. “We found rooms of endless machinery,” he announced, blond curls shining, cheeks flushed like a true explorer’s. “A number of smaller rooms held tools and supplies we don’t yet know the use of.”
“And lots of cleaning supplies,” a young man volunteered.
Keeping their dungeon gleaming—not at the top of her to-do list.