Checking her watch again Lola ran from one home to the next, wary of any Poppers who might catch a glimpse of her. She could pretend to be one of them, but she hated that. Lola preferred to play at being an apparition in the Poppers’ world.
Only the most useless Poppers lived in Old Town now. Most of the city's population had slowly migrated to Nutri-Corp City to live in the corporation’s apartments, townhouses, luxury homes. Their citizens lived under the watchful eye of Nutri-Corp, gleeful to take their YUM and do as they were told.
In Old Town, there were only those whose tics were too much for Nutri-Corp City’s dwellers eyes to take. Old Town was infested with Poppers whose uncontrollable flapping, spinning, yelling, and so much more were too much for even the working man slob in Nutri-Corp City to tolerate. The rejected stayed in Old Town, nothing but castaways, unloved and not helped by anyone.
Lola stopped short by a house and pressed against a backyard fence. Lola looked up at the sky; the stars were appearing. She wished they wouldn’t. The stars were such lovely things, and she hated they bore witness to how ugly her world had become.
Listening, Lola stood still, wondering why the Poppers who lived in Old Town still kept their allegiance for Nutri-Corp. It made more sense to Lola that they would be against the Corp, living with the aftereffects of the YUM, but their faith in the Corp never wavered. They took their YUM, they believed in the Corp, and they spied for it like loyal dogs.
Hearing nothing in particular, Lola decided all was as clear. Sighing, she tapped her foot and felt a restless growl build in her throat. Life would be easier if she couldn’t remember the world before Nutri-Corp took it over.
If she couldn’t remember the past with its love, safety, and laughter, the hurt wouldn’t always be there, nudging her, poking her in the ribs. Lola felt every ounce of the pain of knowing the difference between what her life once was and what it had become. Every day, she felt not only the pain of losing her parents to Nutri-Corp but knowing that humanity was lost as well. Lola remembered what happy and safe felt like. Her sisters could scarcely remember it, and that was a festering thorn in Lola’s thoughts, too. They couldn’t understand her grief was not for herself but for them. She lived for nothing except to keep her sisters safe. They were the only thing left of the old world, where Lola remembered the feeling of happy.
“You taking YUM now?” a man's voice said, but with a joking tone.
Lola inwardly scolded herself for not paying closer attention. She should have smelled Danny before hearing him or seeing him. Danny always reeked of expensive cologne.
Turning to face him, Lola gave Danny the middle finger with both hands while making kissing noises.
“Hola, pendejo...” She said, wrapping her arms around him, while holding her breath. She hated the smell of his fancy colognes. The colognes smelled like Nutri-Corp money.
“I love you, too,” said Danny playfully. The two friends sat on a curb hidden by some shrubs on the side of the building where Lola would soon meet her sisters.
Opening her pack Lola started handing Danny containers full of food that she had brought with her from the Gardner camp. He quickly opened up the first one, filled with deer stew, and started eating it with his fingers.
Lola said nothing about this. She knew Danny spent most of his time starved not only for food but for warmth. Tenderness. Belonging. The soft cushion of safe was nonexistent in his life.
Danny was a human, a non-It in the world of Poppers. He was a secret only she and her sisters knew of.
Danny smiled as he chewed, relieved, Lola believed, to finally have the hum of hunger sedated. Lola lightly hit his knee with her fist marveling once again that the son of the Nutri-Corp CEO, who had not taken YUM for years, who sneaked out to eat real food, was her best friend. More than that, Lola knew. Danny felt like a brother.
“Remember…” Lola began.
“The first time,” Danny interrupted.
“You were so pathetic. A little boy hidden under a car with two fingers in...” Lola stopped and looked at Danny with the sparkle of love in her eyes.
“…a peanut butter jar.” Danny rolled his eyes, handing back the container now devoid of deer stew.
“You were so damn cute!” Lola said, remembering that Danny was such a fragile thing back then. Hiding from his mother.
The knowledge of a world filled with actual food stained Danny. He could not comply with his mother’s wishes nor conform to her ideals. He remembered what food was and could not let it go, no matter how much his mother had bribed him to take the YUM. He was so clever, Lola often thought, to know at such a young age what evil truly was and to recognize it in his own mother.
Danny entwined his arm with Lola’s. She felt her heart flutter and thought back to what could have happened to Danny if her sister Suzy hadn’t spotted the boy when they were out on a run with the Gardeners.
“I need to get back.” Danny stood up. He was taller now than Lola. “Madam has been extra edgy lately. She’s watching me all the time.” Danny sputtered, “I’m not sure how much longer I can fake it.”
Lola stood up as well taking in the details of Danny’s face, wanting to remember everything of him. The messy blond curls, eyes as green as spring grass. Lola took in these details while doing her best to think of something motherly to say, something that would give him hope. Something...
Lola had no answer to his statement and regretted it. Danny had been faking taking YUM for years now, with that he had been faking a small flicking motion with his thumb and pointer finger. Lola had taught him how to fake the tics. She had Danny master how to count the beats between each flick. If he could fake it, maybe Lola thought he’d be safe in the viper pit.
She had convinced herself she had taught him how to fake being a Popper for his own safety.
Danny wrinkled his nose then, blinking back tears, “I don’t know how much longer I can fake life.”
Lola understood, but again she had no answer. No way to solve this problem. “You can disappear, Danny. If you come with us.” She whispered mournfully with nothing but sorrow balancing on every syllable.
Danny gently pushed her away. Nodding, he said, “I know, but she’ll come for me. She’ll...”
Holding his hand, Lola pressed her forehead against his chest. “Same time in two days, okay? Try to stay longer.”
Danny patted Lola’s head, nuzzling his nose into her short, spiked hair. He responded with a soulful, “Yes, longer.”
The sound of movement in the alley startled both Lola and Danny who quickly squatted into some nearby shrubs. The two met eyes and, mirroring each other, gave the signal for “Listen.”
The sound was a slow shuffle. Something moved in the alley but at a snail's pace. Lola was first to peer over the shrubs in the sound's direction. She came back down with a look of repulsion coating her face. She shook her head to Danny, silently telling him not to look.
Danny never listened.
He raised his head, quickly, and caught sight of it. He came back down, his face wooden, unmoving. He crawled over to the side of the shrub for a better look.
Lola did nothing but sit; she didn’t want to see it again.
A Popper crawled down the street, its body vibrating with obscure and uncontrolled movements. Danny watched, disgusted not at the hideousness of the Popper but because he knew his mother’s company had birthed these things that were now more science-experiment-gone-wrong than anything resembling a human.
Daring to stand Danny watched the Popper slowly make its way down the blighted suburban street. He cringed as he watched each finger on its hands stiffen as if frozen then soften, while its head jerked from side to side; its back arched then relaxed and arched again.
Danny could see why it crawled. Its feet did not stop circling. There would be no way she could take a step. Danny guessed it was a woman. Her knees were bruised and scabbed over from crawling. The filth that clung to her had been there for years.
The Popper m
ust have seen Danny but could not react because of the constant back-and-forth motion of her head. How he wished he could grab her, purge her of the YUM, teach her to eat food again, show her a different path. Maybe she could be saved, brought back from the hellish state she was in.
Danny felt a pain in his chest when he saw the crawling Popper’s skin hung off her like dirty cleaning rags. When her head jerked, Danny saw she had no teeth. She was nothing more than a hollow twig. Was there a soul still in there? Did she have any thoughts left in her head?
“No clue where it’s going,” said Lola, breaking Danny’s train of thought. She didn’t bother to hide her disgust for what this thing had done to itself. Lola continued, knowing the empathy that Danny felt for these Its and not caring to voice her revulsion to spare his feelings, “She could have said no to YUM like the Gardeners did.”
“They have no choice,” answered Danny with a woeful look at Lola. He repeated, “They have no choice,” as if saying it twice made it true.
“There is always a choice,” Lola snapped back. Why didn’t Danny understand that? Lola continued with a deep inflection, “You made your choice.”
Danny turned then, looking at Lola with love, kindness, and, most of all, patience. He put his hand on Lola’s head giving her a light tap, picked up his knapsack full of food, and briskly walked away.
Completely annoyed with Danny, Lola watched him rush away and break into a run. Like Lola, he was fast, and someday Lola knew that would matter.
Lola checked her watch. Time to meet her sisters. She wondered which one of the two would be late.
Chapter Two
Suzy
Pushing the hair out of her eyes, Suzy sniffed the air. Old Town smelled different from the Garden. The Garden smelled of dirt, damp, sweat, and calm. Old Town had a lingering smell that was a mixture of sadness and bad dreams.
Suzy had sat in the branches of a tree at the side of the Old Town library for what seemed like only seconds, but she was sure it was longer. Time was one of those things that didn’t work for her. Seconds could be hours. Hours could be days. Something would feel like an hour but only be minutes.
Time wasn’t important to Suzy, so she never put much thought into it. To Suzy, time was this thing that people worried about when they shouldn’t. Time was something the old world invented, and now that the old world was gone, shouldn’t time go with it?
Scooting down a large branch, Suzy paid no attention to the fact her dress rode up and soon she might give the squirrels a show. She always wore dresses, even when she shouldn’t, like now up in a tree. Decorum was something Suzy didn’t worry about either.
Her big sister Lola had said nothing to her about her dress when they left the Gardeners’ camp for Old Town this morning, and she was glad about that. Suzy was better in a dress. Pants felt too long, too tight on her, as if they were holding her in, not allowing her to move, to breathe. Suzy couldn’t handle the confinement of pants, shorts, all those things felt as if they tied her legs together.
Taking one last, studious look around before her next move, Suzy wanted to make sure no Poppers watched as she stretched herself from the tree to the top of the cement wall that surrounded the library. Standing on the wall, she stretched her arms way above her and tightrope-walked the wall to the side of the library and onto a windowsill. She remembered what had happened before she’d climbed the tree.
“She’ll be safe inside,” Lola had told Jen and given Suzy a nervous smile.
“Are you sure?” Jen had held Suzy’s hand tightly that day. Jen always held Suzy’s hand in a tight, fierce grip, but that day, Suzy remembered, Jen was especially nervous.
“Yes,” answered Lola. “I broke this window last week. It leads to the employee bathroom. Nobody has checked on why the window is broken. There are no guards. The library is empty. I triple-checked.”
“Triple checked,” Jen had repeated and let go of Suzy’s hand. Jen nagged at Suzy, “Be extra quiet. If we don’t come back, what do you do?” Jen’s face contorted with worry.
Long ago, her sisters had decided that Suzy could not be trusted to wander Old Town while they gathered what resources they could for the Gardeners. Suzy could not be trusted to be cautious. She would start humming, singing, playing in dirt, talking to inanimate objects like chairs without regard to her situation at the time or her surroundings. Suzy was a “daydreamer.” Daydreamers were better kept away from Old Town.
Lola wanted to leave Suzy with the Gardeners while she and Jen went on these trips, but Jen couldn’t bear it. The Gardeners were their friends, yes, but not family. They could trust no one to care for Suzy but themselves.
That’s when they compromised. When the sisters were out gleaning Old Town, the library, a place the Poppers never bothered with, was Suzy’s babysitter.
Now standing in the employee bathroom, Suzy sniffed the air again. The bathroom with its broken window smelled like Old town, but she knew the smell would change once she opened the door. Then, she would smell books.
Reaching for the doorknob Suzy stopped herself. A whiff of different hit the surrounding air.
She turned, seeing him in her thoughts before the sight of Danny entered her gaze.
“Little sister,” he said with a grin balancing on his words.
Danny sat on the windowsill, smiling at Suzy.
“Did you read it?” Suzy asked eagerly. She had given Danny a copy of Frankenstein from the library and made him promise to read it.
“Yes, and no” Danny answered. He folded his arms over his chest and smirked at the young girl.
“What?” Suzy rolled her eyes, shaking her head from side to side. She blew her bangs, which always seemed to be in her face, out of her eyes. Danny looked at her feet and smiled when he saw she was barefoot. Suzy knew her feet were disgustingly dirty, and she knew as well in Danny’s eyes she was more a woodland sprite from one of her books than a human.
When Danny’s eyes rested on Suzy, he couldn’t help but think of his own little sister, Dolly. Dolly always sat prettily, somewhere near Madam. Dolly was more a Nutri-Corp trophy than Madam’s daughter.
“A pretty dolly to sit on a shelf,” his mother had often said with one of her large, luminous smiles. Dolly had no tics, and Madam believed Dolly was the grand success of Nutri-Corp.
Setting thoughts of Dolly aside, Danny said, “I’ve been reading as best I can.” Suzy’s eyes rolled almost to the back of her head, and he added, “Because of Madam, I have to hide the book. I read when I can sneak the time.”
Suzy walked up to the window then and gave Danny a huge smile that quickly turned into a scowl as she pointed her finger at him.
“Next time,” she scolded, “you come here and read. She can’t see you here. Reading, is important. Why can’t anybody see that?” She raised her hands, aggravated with, it seemed, the entire world.
“Yes, I promise,” said Danny, giving Suzy a sarcastic salute. “Now, I need to find Lola. I’m starving.”
“Cool,” responded Suzy and raised her eyebrows at Danny. “What about Jen? You gonna find her?” She wiggled her eyebrows at him with a ridiculous smirk.
At the mention of Jen’s name, Danny’s cheeks turned a light red, his eyes glimmered a bit, but he shrugged off the emotion and answered, “I’ve tried. She’s hiding.”
Suzy turned and walked to the bathroom door. Over her shoulder, she said, “Sooner or later she’ll come out.” She opened the door and headed into the library.
Suzy’s favorite spot in the library was an old couch that sat in the center of a sunken area surrounded by high bookcases. It was her bird's nest, a place she could sink into without worry. The couch smelled of dust and neglect, but that didn’t bother Suzy. She focused on the smell of the book in her hand instead.
In the summer, the library remained cool, and in the winter with a coat she was warm. The library had no power. The lights, computers, and such had gone dark long ago, but Suzy didn’t care. The way to turn on a book was to o
pen it.
Her sisters had found the perfect babysitter for her. In the library, Suzy’s love of books blossomed.
Opening her pack, Suzy got busy returning books to their correct places on the shelves. She was the self-appointed Gardener librarian. Suzy brought books to those who would not venture to Old Town for fear of being caught by Nutri-Corp or worse--being caught by The Hunt.
Suzy put a book on engineering back in place, ignoring the shiver that ran up the back of her arms. The Hunt was something she didn’t allow herself to think about. When The Hunt came to mind, it was by accident.
Turning, Suzy huffed in anger at herself. A smile followed when she told herself those thoughts didn’t need to happen here. The library was safe.
Rubbing her dusty hands against her already dirty dress, Suzy pulled out a list of Gardener book requests from her pocket. It was time to get to work.
Walking among the library aisles, she would occasionally glimpse her couch. The couch looked so welcoming. Suzy knew if her sisters would allow it she could spend days here. All she needed was some rations, a light blanket, a flashlight, and maybe extra batteries.
Then, she could sink into a book without thought of the outside world. That was her favorite thing to do. To read was to forget everything else. Worries could not find Suzy when she was in a book.
Suzy’s bare feet padded towards the library’s front desk. There she kept a list of which Gardeners had read which books. She was careful not to bring the same book back to the specific Gardener, unless requested.
Toes with chipped pink polish and knees almost black from filth peeked out from under her dress as she curled her legs underneath her and settled into the desk chair. She felt around in the top desk drawer for her list and her favorite pen.
Pen in hand Suzy blew at her bangs for the thousandth time that day. The bangs always landed right back in her eyes. She had decided long ago there was no fixing her bangs. They’d always be in her eyes no matter what. Maybe, Suzy thought, I’ll get a buzz cut when I’m older and look like Lola. Then, her bangs would finally be out of the way.
Garden : A Dystopian Horror Novel Page 2