by Logan Keys
Even so, the question remains. And now I wonder if the doctor had tried to give me a clue. For there is other writing that demands attention. One word in script upon my arm.
Perhaps the doctor wanted it to mean more than a mere joke for Simon.
Even here, in this faux world, my arm glows brightly. It has all this time.
Like a beacon.
Light at the end of a darkly, perpetuating tunnel guiding me toward the answer. My only companion in this dark place is a word that someone placed like a label on my body, like a name.
Had he seen my future? Had he foreseen the two young men I’d come to know? Each affecting me differently, who I’d let lead me along----because I wasn’t sure who I was before, or what I wanted.
But I am now.
My name is Liza Randusky.
And I want revenge.
Chapter Two
Crystal
This part of the hospital is as cold as the steel in the toe of my boot come morning. I don't have much patience, and what I do have has been maxed out pacing the linoleum floors under bright yellow fluorescents waiting for the man of the hour.
With a pen in hand, Jeremy Writer will hopefully write... something... anything... and give life to our only chance at freedom.
Unfortunately, he's an artist.
Which means he'll sit staring at that pad of paper until it blurs. And he's done this for two months already. I've lost too much time, and hair, trying to light a fire under the ass of the voice of the uprising.
Jeremy's fasting, won't eat, won't speak, won't do a damned thing until it all pours out of him just right.
He shakes his head and puts his pen down, making me crack my knuckles.
Jeremy picks up his pen and puts it on the line. I hold my breath as he leans over and begins---and stops.
I stifle my growl of frustration.
Damned writers.
Just put something on the page already!
Chapter Three
Crystal
Goodman waits, as I wait, as we all wait, every one of the Skulls, both here and off the island. We sit on pause for the parchment our voice will write.
Goodman’s brows are pulled together, he doesn’t understand why we need Jeremy any more than anyone ever has. “Why can’t we just---”
I shake my head.
“But you’re our leader.”
“We’ve always needed the voice because we need the people. Before there aren’t any left to fight.”
Karma Cromwell is finishing what her husband started. Purging citizens. The lower parts of society first.
Goodman doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t have to. He won’t question my leadership, none of them ever have. I didn’t become the head of the Skulls because I was stronger or better or leader material. I lead because they follow and the following came first.
I don’t fight with them because we are set apart from the poor people trapped in Anthem City, under the thumb of the Authority, and losing lives and rights each day. No, I fight for freedom for every person, as one of them. As long as I keep my focus on that, we, as the rebellion, have never wavered from our goal.
“Be patient, Goodman.”
When he doesn’t budge, I stand straight and lift my chin. “Eyes up,” I say.
He rises and says, “Keep alert.”
“And stand your ground.”
Our motto.
It’s my job to keep my eyes on the end of the tunnel, and my job to help the citizens of Anthem be reborn into that light. Mine. I claim it. I own it with every fiber of my being.
I’ve never once questioned that purpose. Why would I?
They’d needed me.
I answered.
But if I’m honest, I have questioned my choices of late. Without letting Goodman or other Skulls know it, I’ve wearied of this last round waiting for Jeremy Writer.
I’m only pretending to have faith, hoping form will follow function. And that fact makes me hate Karma Cromwell even more than her dead husband if that’s possible. She can steal much from me, but belief in our cause, that I cannot abide.
The doctor approaches. “Jeremy asks for you.”
I nod, then turn and slap Goodman’s shoulder. “See? What did I tell you!”
He smiles, but it’s not very bright.
I head down the hallway after the doctor, but I’m not sure who I’m kidding.
Jeremy’s cell door is open, not that he’s held here. He’s being secretly cared for.
He sits in the same position he’s been in for what feels like forever, only there is a paper under his elbow. And it’s got writing on it!
I snatch up the page. “It’s short,” I say hoping my voice isn’t full of critique. A writer’s nemesis: criticism.
Jeremy waves me away and rises. He’s hunched over, like he’s one-hundred. He moves to the bed, eyes closed, and he lies on his cot, exhausted over the mere scribblings.
“You didn’t sign it.” I’m too distracted to do more than skim the words, not stringing them together.
No answer.
I grind my teeth, then begin to read again. With but a couple words, the anger bleeds out of me.
Only a few short sentences, and I go all light-headed.
Slowly, I re-read. Tears try to spring loose but I squint until I win the struggle.
Me.
Crystal.
Stone cold leader of the rebellion. The only resistance to the Authority who has crushed and purged each one of us almost to death.
I have to breathe through the burning in my eyes. I turn to find that Jeremy’s fallen asleep. His soft snoring makes my lips twitch.
Loot in hand, I leave the cell and return to where Goodman’s been in a squat position near the wall, weapon held.
He stands and asks, “Well? Did he scratch something down?”
I hand him the paper. He takes it, glancing downward, then back at me. “It's short.”
I nod with a grin, but lift his hand holding the page to place it in front of him.
Goodman reads, nodding once, then twice. He does like me and re-reads. Hand fisted over his mouth, emotion blows like wildfire across his features. When he finishes, paper shaking in his grip, he doesn’t look at me, he stares instead down the hallway.
This is why Goodman is my new number two. What does he see down there? The future. That’s what.
Despite an obvious fight, he breaks down. Goodman cries tears I won’t allow myself. It feels like it’s my release too, watching him.
Goodman has a family back in Anthem. A wife and daughter. He wants freedom for his legacy.
We all want that for him. I bet his dreams are filled with the hope that one day he could give them a real life, one without lines for rations, without his wife careful of her every word, or wearing gray. One where she wouldn’t be purged or executed just for being married to a Skull.
If the Guards ever found out…
After this passes, Goodman wipes his eyes, clearly embarrassed. He seems complete. Not tired, not weary as we have been for over a year. He looks revived.
Good.
Then Jeremy did exactly what I knew he would. His words have life. And they breathe it into every person who will listen to them.
“He didn’t sign it,” Goodman says. “He needs to sign it.” He lifts the paper and shakes it at me. “It won’t matter what it says if they don’t know it’s from him.”
“We could write the Skulls?”
He sighs. “That isn’t enough and you know it.”
I sigh back at him. “Jeremy won’t sign it. He doesn’t want his mother to know he’s still alive.”
But I take the paper and head back to his cell. “Jeremy,” I say trying to sound like the leader that I am. “I need you to sign this. It’s meaningless without them knowing you’re alive.”
“I am?” He sits up and rubs his eyes. His voice comes like another person speaks through him now, and I try not to let it show how that bothers me.
Hands in his lap, posture defeated. “I am,” he repeats as if convincing himself. “But not as myself.”
It’s what I’ve felt about him too, but I keep hoping…
I grab the pen and try to hand it to him, holding the paper flat on his desk. “Then, a new you.”
He doesn’t move. Jeremy stares at me bewildered as he has since waking.
Now that he’s talking, I continue, “The people are ready once again, Jeremy, this is the push they need. Maybe just a little longer and we will have to return home.”
He cuts a hand through the air. “Not yet, Crystal. I’m not ready to go back, maybe never. If you could only understand how close I am to becoming one of those… things. I sense it. They work like a little hive of psychopaths, and whenever they are near, it buzzes in my brain, it tries to take hold of me. Can you imagine in Anthem how many of them are there, all working together like little insects for my family? I’ll become a Guard. I’ll march with them. I’ll kill innocent people all in the name of my family’s rotten-to-the-core ideals. Everything my father ever dreamed of!” Jeremy pauses to breathe. He’s panting like he’s run a mile and I fight the urge to grab onto him. “I can’t do that. Can you see? If you need to leave, then go. But I’m staying.”
Jeremy fades away at times. The purging, the zombie blood, it takes him from us as often as he is here. He will just… sleep while standing or sitting. It’s spooky and horrific. And he’s right. I fear that one day he will look at me and not be Jeremy ever again.
The doctor interrupts us. “Feeling better? I see you’ve been writing.”
He checks Jeremy’s eyes with a pen light. The purple is much darker than it used to be.
“Not better but not worse,” Jeremy says.
I show the doctor the paper. His emotions are harder to see, but when he finishes, I sense a subtle shift.
He hands it back to me gently as if it will break. “You’ll send this to the people?”
“Yes.”
We sit in silence for a moment. Perhaps it is an unspoken dream we share because it’s too gushy to talk about out loud. Freedom is like that. Young and old. Near and far. Tangible and hidden in the rubble, all at the same time.
In the shadow of possible true freedom, one becomes very quiet, like a chastised child whose respect needs maturing.
Jeremy lays back again, his eyes turning from the purple I love, the purple I dream about, they go even darker if possible when they start to leave us.
“I don’t know why you need me, Crystal. I am only one man,” Jeremy says.
“Most prophets were but one man,” the doctor says.
It’s too much. Far too much for a mere teenaged man.
A single tear falls to the floor, and the doctor and I pretend that we don’t see it before we stare at the moisture where it lands. We listen to the weary voice of the uprising, whispering desperate last words before he goes into that place he returns less and less from, “But this one is made of paper. Don’t you two see that I’m burning away?”
And he doesn’t come back after that. He stares off, his emotions clearing to blankness, and he rests.
At least in these spells he has that… escape.
Chapter Four
Crystal
Goodman walks with me to the ship. We’ve got a window of maybe ten minutes for my second in command to get on board and hide between the Guard’s shifts.
“When will you be taking this trip with me, you think?” Goodman asks.
“I’m not sure.” I glance back at the building.
Bodega Island is a beautiful place except for the drab compound, and electric shields newly erected to keep all the sick kids inside. Surrounded by falsely enticing green waters, teaming with sharks who swarm anything living in their unfished oceans.
“He needs me,” I say.
Goodman nods, but I can tell that he doesn’t understand. How can they?
I’m supposed to be with my rebels, my people. Instead, I’ve joined Jeremy in his exile, and I’ve practically joined him in his mental grave.
The island is quiet, and without the politics of the city. Anthem, walled away from America only a short half hour trip from where we are now.
I see it in Goodman’s eyes, the worry. Do they think I’ve given up?
I look at the paper in his hand.
Not after today, they won’t.
“Will you be okay?” he asks me, awkwardly.
I can’t help but smile. “Will you?” I ask. “If you make certain that everyone in Anthem with eyes sees this, and every person with ears, hears the words of Jeremy Writer returned, I’ll be just fine.”
Goodman reads the words once more. “He never signed it, though.”
He waits… for me. The leader. To do something.
“Give it to me.” Goodman hands it over. “Pen?”
I sign it with a flourish and he reads the words as I do, “The Paper Prophet.”
Chapter Five
Dallas
Tommy’s rejection hurt a lot when I was a mere ten-year-old figuring out my feelings. Being sixteen, following him to join the army after the world fell, and our families were both dead, his rejection was ten times harder to stomach. But I’d grown used to my solemn neighbor, the boy next door, hero. And eventually I understood the brooding behind those big brown eyes wasn’t anything to do with me after all.
Some of us ask for the beatings to stop.
Tommy challenged the world to just try it.
Maybe that’s what happens when you are loved. You feel secure in your fight with all the things that are wrong with the world. You want to fix them.
Or… you die trying.
The thing is, everyone waits for the next best thing, but I was always opposite. I had Tommy. I got away from my father. I didn’t care about what was next.
He was the one who’d pushed us to leave the farm. It was him who said we couldn’t stay.
I never really understood why not.
Traveling to the coast, we’d joined the Underground in California, not far from where I stand right this moment.
I’d offered to go on watch that last day before the Underground had shipped off. I’d wanted to give Tommy space and blow off some steam. I knew us being together and traveling day after day, we’d eventually have that same struggle as before. Me crushing on him, him blowing off my flirts.
Tommy being Tommy, dreaming Tommy-sized dreams.
Me getting my feelings good and hurt because they didn’t include me.
He didn’t want to be together, and I couldn’t seem to quit.
My neighbor was a friend first, then a crush, and lastly, he was my knight in shining armor. My Lancelot. It wasn’t fair to him, but it was a cruel world for me already, and I wasn’t about to give up on my happy ending.
But looking back now, with these grown eyes, it’s all I can do not to kick myself in the ass. The past self that is. She’s not seeing what’s clearly in front of her: Tommy wanted me to save myself.
He wanted Daisy to be her own prince charming and realize her value.
To stand strong.
And now, too bad he can’t see that after all this time… I finally have.
Chapter Six
Dallas
That first day with the Underground, not far from where I stand now, changed everything. The guys I was with were cordial, but nice enough to show a newbie like me the ropes. I was even dressed in army fatigues, a real soldier… for a day.
They’d coughed behind their hands when the jokes turned raunchy and were good natured for strangers and adults. No one was inappropriate.
It was like being around a bunch of Tommy’s. The good guys. They didn’t treat me like a kid or anything.
But I was a crack shot. Far better than most. I always was a better shot than Tommy, even.
The Underground’s soldiers took me serious after I’d taken out a few zombies at thirty yards dead to rights.
When they realized I could take care of myself,
they’d left me on a hill for my first round of guard duty. I was so proud of being a part of the fight I never stopped to question if it was a good idea. If I was ready. Or even if I should run and tell Tommy that, “Hey! Look at me. I’m a real soldier, too.”
And when my shift was up, I’d headed back for camp, alone. It was then that I’d run into a soldier on the way, or at least I’d thought he was. His fatigues looked a little worn, outdated, and he wasn’t haircut and shaved like the rest of the Underground men, but he’d been nice enough, smiled a safe looking smile.
He was carrying a bunch of stuff, juggling, dropping, and laughing a charming laugh at his own antics.
I’d offered to help.
His voice was warm and welcoming. Like a good ole boy. “Well thank you, missy. This was getting heavy, you better believe it.”
I had been used to being brushed off so often that I’d blushed and eaten the seemingly benign attention right out of his hand. Even so distracted as to not notice we’d gone the opposite way of the Underground’s camp. He’d kept saying, “It’s just ahead.” And we’d walked and walked into the wilds with our burdens.
Evil men are supposed to attack you, snatch you off the street, try to get you to find a puppy, or offer you candy. The one that lets you press through all your gut instincts and warning signs, that lets you choose to step right into his trap, that’s the one that should frighten you the most.
Because later, when he has you in his grasp, he wants you to doubt more than the world around you, he wants you to doubt yourself.
When we’d gotten close to a truck, his men had jumped out, ambushed me. They’d beat my face in with the butt of my own weapon.
Then the guy, the one I’d followed, he’d cut my arm, a deeper cut than necessary. He’d used it to smear all around, on my boots, then drained a bunch of it into one puddle large enough that you’d think, “This person didn’t live.”
The “soldier” had then ripped off his jacket, grinning at me like a fool.
“Toby,” one of his guys had called over to him.