Eden Box Set

by G. C. Julien

  “Wake up.”

  He shifts his position and groans but stiffens up when he realizes that the sun’s slowly coming up.

  “How long was I out?” he asks, but I’m too focused on Adam and his men to respond.

  It isn’t long before nautical dawn starts, and an orange strip emerges on the horizon behind the prison. I blow hot air on my fingers, only realizing then how cold I’ve been all night. Hopefully, the sun will bring some warmth.

  At last, when half the sun has pierced through the sky, a violet color spreads through the clouds like diluted paint on a canvas. Adam shouts something, but then, the whole crew goes quiet and they drop into crouched positions. I do the same, even though I’m far away.

  Did they see something? Did they see us, and now, they’re trying to hide?

  I look at Castor, who’s as confused as I am, his bulging eyes and wide nostrils expanding with every quick breath he takes. He rests his hairy hand over the log in front of us, trying to hold himself upright even though he’s now lying on his side.

  But Adam and his men aren’t looking at us. I can see them now, their muscular figures gaining a bit of color—beige cargo pants, blue jeans, multicolored T-shirts, and army-colored sweaters, all scraps they picked up from dead bodies along the road.

  Although I can’t see their faces, I know they’re not looking this way because a few of them are wearing baseball caps with their brims facing in the same direction… the prison.

  I follow their gaze and perch myself up a bit when I see something I thought I wouldn’t see for days, weeks, or even months.

  The front doors. Two massive gates at the front of the prison are slowly opening.

  Gabriel – Flashback

  I keep slipping in and out of consciousness with one hand behind my head and one over my belly. I’m lying on a thin piece of foam in the corner of the room filled with dozens of uniformed guys who, like me, want to catch a little shut-eye.

  I’ve spent the last twelve hours on my feet stationed in front of the White House like I’ve been doing for the last seven months. I don’t get it. Why aren’t we doing anything? How long are these women going to keep rioting?

  Some of our senior officers created temporary sleeping rooms for military personnel so we can recuperate after our shifts. I never thought I’d find myself sleeping in the White House, but if I’d had to imagine it, I wouldn’t have pictured myself lying on a piece of foam.

  A nice California king mattress, maybe.

  Food is supplied throughout the day, and they’re bringing it all in by helicopter, the same way they’re bringing men out who’ve been injured by gunshots, stab wounds, or even by rocks thrown over the barrier.

  The scary part in all this is that despite the armed forces opening fire a few times to get the women to back off, it hasn’t done anything. Dead bodies are piling up, and it’s only making things worse. The crowd is getting bigger and bigger. If you look at Washington from an aerial shot of the district (I saw a picture on one of my fellow marine’s phones), you can’t see any streets at all. All you see are multicolored shirts and small heads around square buildings. It looks like a bunch of Legos.

  If we don’t do something soon, we’re all dead.

  Someone beside me sits up in his bed, moves his shaved head from side to side, and cracks his neck, then hunches over his phone. It’s a little screen that’s barely visible in his two big hands. It looks ancient with its regular glass screen.

  “Holy Mother of—” he mumbles with a groggy voice, and a few heads turn his way.

  He flips his phone around to show the men who’ve woken up. A few jaws drop, and one man jumps off his foam mattress and plucks the phone right out of the marine’s hands.

  He lifts it to his face and his nose almost touches the phone. His eyes look yellow and blue because they’re reflecting the screen’s glow. He presses two fingers on the screen and wiggles them around, trying to zoom in and out of the picture.

  “This can’t be real,” he says, and a few guys behind him try to grab the phone.

  It’s passed around the room, waking up the few men who are left, and within seconds, everyone’s bickering back and forth. The phone finally ends up on my lap, and several marines huddle behind me to get a second look.

  It’s a satellite image of Washington DC. The White House looks like a tiny little white square surrounded by black and green dots spread out all over the South Lawn and Lafayette Square.

  “Is that us?” I say, but before anyone can answer, I realize these little dots are military personnel.

  “Zoom out!” someone says.

  I swipe two fingers toward each other on the screen, zooming out from the aerial view. I can see the little heads and multicolored shirts that are clogging up the streets of the entire district.

  “I’ve already seen this,” I say, but someone slaps me on the shoulder.

  “No, no, keep zooming.”

  I zoom out even farther until I can see cities, buildings, and landmarks that go way beyond the district. The words Alexandria, Arlington, and Greenbelt Park show up on the map now, and I nearly drop the phone.

  There are no more streets to be seen anywhere. They’re all filled with a bunch of colors, and they spread all the way outside of Washington DC. Even the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, the Arlington Bridge, and the 14th Street Bridge are completely clogged.

  I swipe back on the phone to exit the map and it takes me to a news article with a big black title at the top: New Estimated Count of Female Rioters Rises to Thirty-Four Million.

  CHAPTER 30 - LUCY

  Lucy – Present Day

  “D-d-don’t touch that, you wart-faced frog!” Mavis shouts.

  I flinch and pull away from the purple-leafed plant.

  I want to ask her, “why are you always in such a bad mood?” but keep my mouth shut. She’s leaning over her cauldron-looking soup pot (something she found in the prison’s old kitchen) and stirring a bunch of herbs and water that she threw in there. She looks like a witch with her long salt and pepper hair dangling over one shoulder and her pointed nose hovering over the brew. I almost laugh.

  Perula catches me smiling and says, “Don’t worry about her, child. Mavis lost her temper a long time ago.”

  Mavis grumbles something, but I can’t make it out. Maybe it’s some sort of witch language. She seems to like talking gibberish.

  I scan all the herbs with my eyes only, careful not to touch anything. I wonder which one they’ve been using during Eve’s meetings.

  “Do you guys make alcohol?” I ask, and Mavis’s cold eyes shoot up at me.

  “Aren’t you a little young to be asking that?” she says.

  I shrug. “I’m sixteen. I’ll be twenty-one in five years. What about you guys? What about the adults? Don’t you ever drink like you used to before this war happened?”

  Mavis squints one eye, then looks at her sister like she’s trying to figure out why I’m asking so many questions. I hope they don’t realize I’m trying to figure out what they made in those little cups. They don’t know I saw them, so there’s no way they’re onto me. Right?

  “The adults will, on occasion, have a glass of wine,” Perula says.

  I nod and keep making my way around the cabin. “Must feel nice, you know… With all the stress.”

  “Stress?” Perula asks, and I realize I might’ve gone too far. Eden is supposed to be a place of paradise without fear, stress, or anxiety. They’re probably wondering why I’m talking about stress.

  I shrug again. “I don’t know. I’m just saying. You know… with the war. A lot of people were killed. Kids died, too.”

  “That’s enough,” Mavis says sharply. “The past is behind us.”

  “Sorry,” I say and sit down on the stool beside Perula. I definitely crossed a line. Ever since entering Eden, no one talks about the war. No one talks about people they lost or anything. It’s like it never even happened. The only thing Eve wants to talk about is how bad men wer
e. How they’ve destroyed the world. Or how beautiful Eden is.

  But no one ever talks about their feelings in Eden. I miss that. I miss having my mom hold me against her and tell me that it’s okay to be scared. It’s okay to be sad, to feel hurt, and even, to get angry. I’ve never seen anyone get angry in Eden. I don’t understand. Sometimes, I feel crazy. Did I imagine the war? Did I imagine seeing women raped and beaten in the streets? What about when the bombs went off, and I felt Grandma’s house shake? Did I imagine that too? What about Eve’s little sister, Mila? Did I make the whole thing up in my head? Did I imagine she was shot in the throat and left dead in the street? Or, what about the time I saw a group of shirtless women jump on an old man who didn’t even do anything? He’d been walking with his dog, and the three women attacked him, beating him until he died.

  Was all of that in my head?

  My hands become clammy, and my heart beats fast.

  Maybe this is why we don’t talk about it. Maybe we’re not even supposed to think about it because all it does is make us feel horrible.

  “Did you talk with Gretchin?” Perula asks, looking up at her sister. “Eve said she’d come talk to us, and I haven’t seen her.”

  Who’s Gretchin? I wonder.

  Mavis nods and takes a whiff of her potion or whatever it is she’s making.

  “You explained to her what it looks like?” Perula presses.

  “Yes,” Mavis said sharply, saliva splashing into her cauldron.

  “I hope she finds it,” Perula says. “Our last plant is succumbing to the same disease.”

  “What plant?” I ask.

  Mavis’ eyes roll up toward her sister, almost like she’s warning her to keep her mouth shut.

  “A plant for my pain, child,” Perula says, but she doesn’t even make eye contact with me.

  I don’t believe her.

  After a few minutes pass, I get up, pretend to stretch my legs, and start making my way around the cabin again. I can feel Perula’s eyes on me, but I don’t care. She said the last plant was diseased, which means it should be sitting by itself somewhere, looking sick. This diseased plant might be what they’re using during their meetings. Why else would Mavis have looked up at Perula like that? Like she was upset?

  I run my fingers along the dusty shelves, and when I pull my finger back, it’s covered in gray muck. No wonder it always smells so stuffy in here. They don’t clean.

  There’re dirt and dried up leaves on the floorboards underneath the shelves, and when I reach the end of the cabin, I notice a spider the size of a golf ball weaving its sticky web in the corner of the room. When I’m about to cross behind Mavis to keep looking for the diseased plant, I see it. It’s hiding right in the corner behind some orange-flowered plant that’s sitting in a clay pot.

  This must be the plant they’re talking about. It has holes in its green, smooth-edged leaves and a few black balls that look like blueberries. One of the balls looks mushy like it’s rotten.

  “Lucy, let me show you something,” Perula says.

  I turn toward her, and she’s holding something that looks like a ginger root.

  “How about I start showing you what we use this for,” she says.

  I stare at her because this is the first time since I’ve become a Healer that Perula wants to show me something without me having to ask. I look back at the dying plant, remembering what it looks like so I can find it in the book the twins gave me: Magical Herbs. But Perula clears her throat and starts talking to me again, “Come on now, child. Have a seat.”

  She pats the stool beside her, her long fingernails clicking against the wood, and I can’t help but feel like she’s trying to keep me away from that plant.

  Lucy – Flashback

  My mom has her hand over my eyes, and she’s squeezing so hard I can feel my eyeballs moving around against her palm.

  “She’s almost ten,” I hear Aunty Eve say. “She’ll be exposed to this sooner or later.”

  My mom breathes out hard like she always does when she’s either annoyed or when she doesn’t get her way. She slowly peels her fingers from my eyes, and I look around the room.

  I think we’re in a warehouse, but it’s hard to tell. The windows are all covered with big pieces of wood, and long lights hang from the ceiling—the kind of lights you’d see in a big bulk store. I know this because my mom used to take me to Cosono all the time (according to my mom, it used to be called Cossco, or something). Every time we’d go, I’d sit in the cart, looking up at the gray tubes, and sometimes, if I got lucky, I’d see little birds flying around.

  This place looks like an empty Cosono. A bunch of gray plastic tables with black metal legs are spread out everywhere, and as we keep walking, the sound of our footsteps bounces off the walls. It’s huge in here.

  But I don’t pay much attention to the dirty white floor, the walls, or the high ceiling. Instead, I’m focused on all the women sitting at the tables… hunched over a bunch of guns.

  They’re big guns, too. The kind you’d see in video games. There’re a bunch of metal sounds all around me, and I can’t tell if they’re cleaning the guns or putting bullets in them.

  “Most of these women are ex-military,” Aunty Eve says, leaning toward my mom.

  There’s something different about her. Ever since Mila died, and ever since she killed that man, she’s been weird. Sometimes I wonder if her heart is broken. She’s smiling at my mom, but it doesn’t look real. It’s not the same smile she used to give her.

  And then, whenever I try to talk to her, it’s like she doesn’t want to hear anything I have to say. She’s too busy with all the thoughts in her head. Too busy to care about anything other than revenge. Because that’s all she ever wants to talk about: revenge.

  After she killed Jason, Mom said we had to leave Grandma’s. Probably because if anyone found out, or if any of the neighbors saw it happen, they’d call the police. Aunty Eve says the police won’t come chasing us in Arlington because they’re too busy with all the riots going on in Washington DC.

  But I don’t think my mom expected things to get this bad in Arlington, too. The rioters are here now, trying to make their way to the president. And he’s so stubborn because all he keeps saying on TV is that he refuses to give in to any demands that the rioters are making. He doesn’t want to leave the White House, either, because he says presidents stand their ground.

  I think he’s being stupid, but that’s just me.

  “So, what’s the plan, here, Eve?” my mom asks. She’s staring Aunty Eve right in the face. “I have a daughter. I can’t just pick up a machine gun and charge toward the White House.”

  “We’re not going to be stupid about it,” Aunty Eve says. “See that woman over there?”

  I follow my mom’s eyes and Aunty Eve’s finger. A woman sits by herself in front of a bunch of wires, metal pieces, and plastic. Her blond hair is tied back in a ponytail, a few wrinkles around her eyes, and big arms full of muscles. She’s wearing some kind of military uniform. It looks like she’s trying to build something. A bomb, maybe?

  “That’s Zoey,” Eve says, and she’s smiling like she’s proud of it.

  Who’s Zoey, anyways?

  My mom must be wondering the same thing because she’s giving Aunty Eve the stink-eye like she does to me when I’m hiding something. It’s a look that says, Just spit it out already.

  “Zoey’s been contracted through the armed forces to assist with dozens of extremely covert operations. She’s one of America’s most sought-after—”

  “What’s your point, Eve?” my mom says. “Does she make bombs? Is that it? Are we going to bomb the damn White House?”

  Aunty Eve smirks in a way I’ve never seen her do before. “We have plenty of people who can make bombs, O. This isn’t about bombs. She’s building a nuclear EMP device.”

  My mom bursts out laughing but not because she thought Aunty Eve made a joke. She’s laughing the way she does when she doesn’t know how else to re
act. A few women across the giant room look at us, and my mom shakes her head and pinches the top of her nose.

  “Are you guys insane?” my mom whispers. She’s hunched forward, and I can tell she’s upset. “You want to build a fucking…” but she looks at me and apologizes for swearing. “You want to build a device that could destroy the entire country?”

  Aunty Eve’s eyes go flat like she’s bored or something. “You need to step outside of the rainbow, O.”

  My mom points a finger at her face. “Don’t you tell me—”

  But Aunty Eve points one right back, almost poking my mom in the eye. “No! Don’t you tell me anything. This is what Mila would’ve wanted.”

  My mom nods, and I can tell she’s being careful about what she’s going to say next. “This isn’t about Mila, Eve. I’m devastated about what happened, too. And I don’t agree with President Price or any of what’s going on—but this is absolute destruction we’re talking about.”

  Aunty Eve lifts her chin, looking like she has no emotion at all, and says, “I’d rather die fighting than stand around doing nothing.”

  My mom grabs my hand and pulls me away from Aunty Eve.

  “Come on, honey,” she says, but right before we walk away, some lady with a long black braid down her back almost bumps into us.

  She grins from ear to ear. “Oh, I’m sorry. I almost ran into you there.” She stares at my mom, then at me, before saying. “I’m Bethany Lee, what’s your name, sweetheart?”

  “Lucy,” I say. I know that name. Aunty Eve’s talked about Bethany so many times. She says she’s the leader of a huge underground resistance group. I won’t lie, I’m a bit intimidated by her. If she’s the leader, she must be pretty tough.

  “I’m Ophelia,” my mom says. She’s trying to be nice, but I can tell she’s in a bad mood now.

  “Ophelia,” Bethany repeats, and she shakes my mom’s hand. “I’ve heard so much about you. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”