by Kyle Andrews
Mek slowed the van and pulled into an underground garage. As he drove in circles that led downward, he told the others, “They haven't allocated any drones yet. We should have a little bit of time before they find us in here.”
“What happens when they do find us?” Collin asked.
“We should be gone by then,” Mek answered. “Can you run?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not really.”
“Then I'll manage. What about the girl?”
The van came to a stop and Mek turned around, examining the girl who was sitting next to Collin. He then looked back to Tracy for her input.
“I say we leave her,” Tracy told him. “She isn't one of us. She'll be fine.”
“If they believed that she wasn't one of us, she wouldn't have been in the back of that car,” Collin argued. “If we leave her, she'll be taken.”
Mek nodded to Tracy, just slightly. He was voicing his agreement with Collin. Tracy didn't have anything to say after that.
Collin turned toward the girl next to him and asked her, “Do you want to stay here and take your chances, or do you want to come with us?”
The girl looked at him with what appeared to be a mixture of disbelief and fear that he would shoot her in the head right then and there.
“I don't know what will happen to you when we get where we're going,” he told her. “That's not my call. But until we get there, you'll be safe. That much I can promise.”
“If she sees where we're going...” Tracy started, but stopped herself. She either didn't know what would happen to the girl, or she knew and didn't want to say anything in front of the girl. Either way, it wasn't reassuring.
The girl didn't say anything. She stared at the seat in front of her, too terrified to move or speak. She was just a little kid, drawn into something that she had no business being involved with.
“We have to go,” Mek told them, opening his door and starting to move out.
Tracy moved past the girl and opened the door to let herself out as well. Collin waited for a moment. He wasn't sure what he wanted the girl to decide. There were no good options in their world.
After giving her a few seconds to make up her mind, he decided to take her silence as her final decision. He moved past her and stepped out of the van. His legs were killing him, but he didn't let it slow him down.
After one last look back to the girl, he started to walk away from the van. She stopped him by grabbing his arm. It hurt like a hundred daggers, but he swallowed the pain and turned toward her.
She didn't look at him. She just took his hand and held onto it tightly as she climbed out of the van.
6
Justin had walked through streets full of chaos and destruction, listening to the howls of monstrous human beings in the distance as they ruined someone else's life for no good reason. If war had finally broken out, it would mean something. Hearing those cries in the distance would be a sign that the world was changing. But not this. This was a sign that aside from those loyal to the government's system and those sympathetic to Freedom's cause, there was another type of human being. A type who didn't care what happened to the world or anyone in it. The kind who thrived on ugliness and pain. The kind who, in his estimation, deserved to die, because they sure as hell weren't the people that he was fighting for.
As for the loyalists... Well, there would come a time when they would have to decide their own fate.
War was coming. Once the fires of that night burned out and those animals had had their fun, the authorities would be forced to address the Freedom situation. They would hunt down the rebels, and the rebels would be forced to fight back. Justin longed for that day now. He wanted to charge into the HAND building and plant the flag of Freedom in its lobby. He wanted to make them pay for what they had done to him.
He stood in the dark, abandoned street that led to the Garden. The buildings around him were crumbling. The few people he saw were crumbling almost as badly. He was close to home. He could walk right through the doors and be surrounded by his own people, in the safety of his base. But as he stood there, looking down the street in front of him, it didn't feel like going home anymore. It felt like wading ever deeper into an ocean of darkness. It felt like he would drown if he took one step closer to that place.
Where were his people when Libby's blood was pooling on the ground around her? Why had other bases sent people to fight for their cause, while Aaron only sent a handful of people to watch? Why hadn't they declared their war that night, and shown the world what they were capable of?
Justin couldn't go back to that place. Not that night. Maybe not ever. He couldn't lock himself away in a secret hideout once again, telling himself that they stood for something when the truth was that all they really did was cower in whatever holes they could find around the city, hiding from the people in charge.
He turned and walked away from the Garden, down the dark street which seemed to grow darker by the second. Creeping around the edges of that darkness, there was red. Wet, oozing red, pooling into every crevice of his mind. There was no looking away from it. There was no escaping it. The red was consuming him, drowning him, carrying him toward some unknown place. 'Don't think. Just do,' was what his coaches always told him.
They taught him not to question their strategy. Never deviate from the plan that he was given. To just turn off whatever voice inside of his head that might try to guide him in a better direction and obey his orders.
There was nobody telling him what to do on that night, but Justin let go of everything that he felt he was supposed to do and everyplace he was supposed to go. He listened to the darkness and the darkness alone.
Eventually, he wound up standing in front of that old building where he used to play as a child, with Uly and Libby. It was old even back then, falling apart inside. Dangerous.
Thinking back, it seemed so silly to Justin, how concerned he had been with their safety back when they were kids. How he was worried that one of them would fall and break their neck. Two out of three of them were dead now. His entire world was gone. Everything that was. Everything that he hoped would be.
He had lived alone for a long time, since his parents died. But he had never truly been alone before. He had never felt the world around him the way that he did that night—like his back was exposed to the enemy and there was nobody left to cover him. Oh, he had allies. He had friends. But his family was dead.
He stood in the doorway of that building, looking inside. The floor had started to cave in. Water was dripping somewhere inside the building and he couldn't understand why. The water had been turned off years ago. He tried to think of the last time it rained, but he couldn't remember. He wouldn't have remembered even if it had rained just the day before. What had happened hours earlier now seemed like another lifetime to him. His own memories were like video clips that he'd seen on TV at some point.
He wasn't sure what he expected to find when he went to that building. As he stood in its doorway, he felt nothing. Libby wasn't in there anymore. Uly wasn't either. The conversations they'd had and the games they played were gone, without so much as an echo of their laughter or a footprint in the dust. There was nothing for him to find there, and pretending that there was would only make things harder. He needed to stop trying to hold onto what he had lost, because it was as useless as trying to hold water in his hands.
It was long past curfew, but the city was still alive. In the distance, the chaos was raging on, but on the street where Justin stood, there was no looting or burning buildings. Those who took advantage of the break from the rules that night were simply walking the streets or sitting on their front steps, taking in the night air.
Three blocks away, Libby's old apartment building stood in ruins, having been blown up and burned by HAND in their attempt to depict Uly as a crazed terrorist.
Justin could close his eyes and walk the path that led to that building. He wanted to let go of what he once had and what had slipped
through his fingers, but he found himself walking that path anyway. Maybe it was more out of habit than believing that he could recapture the past. Or maybe it was harder than he thought to let go. Either way, he walked those streets, passing by people as he went along, and looking at their faces to see if he knew them. He had walked those streets for as long as he could remember, so he would have thought that the people would be familiar to him, but they weren't.
From two blocks away, he could see the apartment building and the rubble that had fallen from it onto the sidewalk. Nobody had cleaned up the mess in the month since Uly's death.
A month. He still couldn't believe that it had only been that long. If a handful of weeks could take so much from him, what would the months or years ahead rob him of? What more did he have to give?
There was someone sitting on the front steps of the apartment building as Justin approached. In the darkness, it was hard to make out who this person was, but as he got closer he recognized Libby's boyfriend, Sim. He had his head buried in his hands. His shirt was still covered in her blood. He wasn't crying. He wasn't moving. He wasn't doing anything.
As Justin neared the steps, his foot slid on debris that had fallen on the sidewalk. Sim looked up at Justin's face. It seemed to take him a moment or two to realize who he was looking at. Once he recognized Justin, he turned his eyes away and said, “She's dead.”
The way he said it was so distant. So detached. If he felt anything at all, it wasn't being expressed on his face or in his voice.
“I know,” Justin told him, and he sounded just as detached as Sim.
Sim looked across the street at one of the other buildings. He opened his mouth as though he was going to say something, but no words came out. What was there to say?
Justin didn't sit on the steps next to Sim. He stood beside them, trying to figure out how much Sim could really feel, buried beneath the emotional stabilizers that were mixed into the supplements that every good citizen was ordered to take. For their own safety, of course.
Justin hadn't been a good citizen in years. He couldn't remember what he could and could not feel while he was on those drugs. All he could remember was coming off of them and feeling as though his eyes were opening for the first time.
Could Sim truly understand what it was to lose someone? Could he grasp the concept of love when he'd been deprived of true, raw emotion for his entire life? Or was he just going through the motions of loss?
“She never wanted me to come here,” Sim told Justin, breaking the silence between them.
Justin looked at Sim. He didn't say anything, he just waited for Sim to keep talking or fall silent once again. He watched Sim's face for some hint of emotion, but it was empty.
“I used to think that it was because she didn't want people in her territory. Like she was protective of what she had and didn't want people invading that space,” Sim said. “I respected that. I understood it, you know? I thought that she needed something that was just hers, where she didn't have to worry about what other people thought. I even thought it was kinda cute. But now...”
Sim took a deep breath and looked down at his hands. They had been washed, but he rubbed his palms as though he could still feel Libby's blood on them.
After a few moments, Sim looked up at Justin again and said, “We shouldn't even be here. She was a traitor. Uly too. That's the reason why she didn't want me coming here. It wasn't cute, it was treason. Everything she did and said. She was a liar.”
Justin's instinct was to grab Sim by the neck and make him regret badmouthing the people that he cared about. What did he know about anything? He was a mindless drone who sold out his own freedom because his master told him to. He was weak and pathetic, and he wasn't worthy of speaking their names.
But Justin didn't allow any of that to show. He simply turned and looked up at the building where Libby and Uly once lived. He had been there so often that he might as well have lived there himself. But it was nothing but rubble now. It didn't look or feel like the place he'd once known.
“Then why are we here?” Justin asked, allowing no emotion at all to slip through his lips.
Sim smiled and shook his head. He said, “Because we are idiots.”
Sim got to his feet and brushed off his pants. He turned to look at the building, the same way that Justin was looking at it. He paused as he did this, as though there were some emotional connection to that place for him. But how could there be? What could he possibly feel toward a place that he'd never been inside of.
As he looked up at the building, Sim told Justin, “I saw her die. I held her in my arms. I listened to her last words...”
Tears started to fall from Sim's eyes. He wiped them away, but they were quickly replaced by more. He turned away from Justin, hiding his face.
“I loved her,” Sim said and then smiled at the absurdity of that comment. “I loved her even when I knew what she was. Why would I still care about her?”
He turned toward Justin now, waiting for a response. But what was Justin supposed to tell him? Was he supposed to make Sim feel better about a situation that never should have happened in the first place? Was he supposed to tell him that he still loved her because deep down, even Sim had to know that what Libby believed in was right? Every human being knew that freedom was the God-given right of every person. The question wasn't a matter of why Sim would still love Libby, it was a matter of why Libby would have still cared about Sim.
How could she have cared about someone who ignored the truth? How could she have loved someone who believed in oppression? Who sat back and allowed himself to be abused by a corrupt government? Sim had a lot of nerve wondering how he could have loved Libby, when the truth was that Libby was a better person than Sim could ever hope to be. She was a good person who didn't deserve to die, and the way that Sim was talking about her made Justin want to smash his face into the ground.
Libby deserved to love someone better than that. She deserved to be loved by someone better than that. But she would never know what true love was now, because people like Sim sat by and allowed the authorities to get away with anything they wanted.
Justin swallowed his bitterness and told Sim, “We mourn the people we knew. The people we loved.”
“Even if those people weren't real,” Sim agreed. He then said, “That's messed up.”
“I concur.”
“So, how do we convince ourselves that those people didn't exist? How do I get my brain to understand that the way she looked at me, or the way she sounded on the phone... The way she smelled...” Sim started to tear up again. He said, “She came to me. She was scared. She was running because she was scared and she needed my help. Why would she do that if she was one of them?”
“Are you doubting what HAND says?” Justin asked, pretending to be genuinely appalled by the idea.
“No. Yes. No, I don't know what I'm saying. I'm just saying that it doesn't make sense. Why would she ask for my help? Why would she go with Bey?”
“Who is Bey?” Justin asked, pretending not to see the image of the first person he'd ever killed splashed across his brain the moment that Sim mentioned the name. He could practically feel the pain of Bey's knife cutting into him. In his head, Bey's face became the face of every member of the government that had murdered Libby and he wished that he could kill Bey all over again.
Sim was about to respond to Justin, but he stopped himself. He shook his head and said, “It doesn't matter. He's dead. Libby's dead. None of it matters anymore.”
As Sim finished saying those words, he started to walk away from Justin. He looked as though he was giving up on the entire subject. As though he could lock his memories up in the past and never have to deal with them again.
Justin watched Sim walk away. He hated Sim, while at the same time, he pitied the boy who was trying to make sense out of the absurd. He knew that Sim wouldn't be able to turn off those feelings as easily as he might like, and he was glad. Maybe a little bit of suffering would wake Sim
up.
The question that Justin had been pondering moments before walked away with Sim. Could he truly love? Could he truly mourn? Justin hoped so. Libby deserved both.
7
Rose never did find a car to bring her back to the Garden. Even if she managed to come across another car, parked in another dark alley, she wouldn't have trusted herself to drive. She was feeling lightheaded after her attack. Her head was aching. Her mouth was dry. Her stomach was growling. While those last two symptoms might not have been caused by her head being slammed on the hard ground, she hoped that they were at least partly responsible for her dizziness. Otherwise, her concussion was much worse than she had at first believed.
She walked through the streets at a much slower pace than she would have normally walked. She passed looters and muggers. Fortunately, they were all distracted by other targets and didn't seem to notice her. She managed to make her way through the city, into the abandoned section of town where the Garden was located.
Walking through the darkness of those streets was difficult. She kept believing that she saw another person out of the corner of her eye—and maybe she did. But when she turned to get a better look, the person was always gone. It wasn't a great neighborhood. She had been attacked before. She'd always been able to defend herself or run to safety. But if someone came after her on that night, she wasn't convinced that she would be able to stop them. Though she held her gun tightly in her hand, she had no faith in her ability to hit a target.
The night air was cold, and Rose couldn't stop shivering as she walked along the street. She was worried that the chattering of her teeth would alert someone to her presence, but then she realized that she was being silly. The dragging of her feet would do the job long before anyone would be able to hear her teeth.
Whatever was happening in the rest of the city might as well have been a million miles away from her at that point. There were no businesses or homes to loot. There were no people worth mugging.