“What’s the point of violence?” he asked, to no one in particular. “If you’re lucky, you get away with some stuff without much but a scratch, but then you run out and then what? Do it over again? It’s not smart. Not thought out. Like most ‘protests,’ whatever that means.”
Joe turned to Rick and pulled out some folded bills from his pocket.
“Here’s some cash for the locks. I asked Mrs. Gaither and the gal with the kid if they wanted you to install the deadbolt, and they said yes, so you can put those on whenever they say it’s convenient. The other tenants aren’t around. Maybe they were mixed up in all the trouble in town.”
Rick took the money eagerly, thanking Joe more times than necessary, and looking relieved. We watched the TV for a few more minutes, but the story had already changed to more bad news about the economy at large. Some politician was being interviewed coming out of his big house and trying to sound sympathetic about “the hard times folks are going through,” but it just sounded like noise.
What did he really know about sacrifice? Did he have to fill up his Escalade once every week instead of twice? Buy the less expensive organic chicken at the store?
People in this country would have you believe that any sort of adaptation to a lifestyle - even the most lavish lifestyles - was a “sacrifice,” but the way I see it is, until you have to choose between paying your rent on time or getting enough to eat, it isn’t really a sacrifice. Sacrifices have to hurt. You have to really feel like you’re losing something. And maybe it really did hurt that millionaire to not get season tickets to whatever sports team he loved that year. I guess we also have different opinions about what “hurting” really means, too.
We returned to our apartment feeling confused and a little scared. Rick was relatively cheerful, he had money in his pocket, but he was also worked up about what we had seen on the TV.
“Joe’s right about violence being pointless,” he said, taking his usual spot on the floor and pulling out the envelope of money he had been counting earlier. “It just makes everything worse for everyone.”
“I mean, I don’t support the violence, but what else can people really do?” Beth asked quietly, her eyes questioning. “I’ve never been so hungry that I would loot a store, but if I had kids or people who depended on me, what other choice would I have?”
“There’s just got to be another choice,” Rick insisted. “There’s always another choice.”
“Is there?” Lawrence pressed, leaning against the back of the couch with his arms hanging down. “Seriously. Think about it. No money, no food, no time. The system won’t help you. The soup kitchens are full. No one is hiring. What would you do, Rick?”
Rick was silent. He knew Lawrence was right, but he didn’t say anything. He just looked down at the envelope of cash he held and sighed.
“So I got the money,” he said, changing the subject. “For the electric bill.”
He held it out for Tyrsa.
“Sorry it took so long.”
Tyrsa took it from him without a word and disappeared into her bedroom to put it with the rest of the cash. She returned, licking the addressed envelope.
“Hopefully the lights go back on soon,” she remarked, lifting the envelope like she was toasting the room.
Beth still looked lost in thought. She sat on the floor, her back against the couch, knees up to her chest. I reached out and rubbed her back to comfort her, but she acted like she didn’t even feel my touch.
“What do we do when we run out of food?” she asked suddenly. “Are we going to have to start looting, too?”
I glanced at Rick and Lawrence -who were looking at Beth with concerned faces. Tyrsa returned from putting the envelope in the mail slot and Beth repeated her question.
“Our stockpile will run out eventually,” she said. “What are we going to do when that happens?”
We all looked to Tyrsa. She was the one who was supposed to have all the answers. She would put our minds at rest.
“Well,” Tyrsa began. “We have enough for a couple days. A week, if we stretch it out. And we can still go out and buy stuff, we just have to be careful and should probably do that pretty soon, before everything runs out.”
“So...like tomorrow?” Lawrence asked.
“Yeah.”
“We should all go. We’ll be safer in a group,” Rick suggested. “And in the morning.”
We agreed to head out as early as possible, when the stores first opened, and get as much as we could afford.
Rick went out with his tools and installed the locks on Mrs. Gaither’s door as well as the single mom’s, whose name we finally learned was Jenny. She had a little girl, about five, who she introduced as Darcy. Jenny seemed to take a liking to Rick and talked to him the whole time he installed the lock. She gave him ten dollars, which was all she said she could afford.
“That’s more than generous,” Rick insisted, breaking into a grin. “You girls stay safe, all right?”
Between what Rick got for installing the locks, and the cash the rest of us were able to scrounge up, we had around fifty dollars for our supply run.
Beth began to look more relaxed and cheerful. She brought out her sketchbook and drew happily in the living room for the rest of the early afternoon. Lawrence and Rick went off to find an open coffee shop or bar where they could charge their electronics and where Rick could look for advertised work on the bulletin boards. Left to entertain myself, I sat by Beth on the couch and thumbed through one of my textbooks.
Getting books for school made me feel like I was a spy trying to locate certain secret documents. I traveled to cheap bookstores, sifted through pages upon pages of Ebay and Amazon, copied chapters from library books so worn their pages were practically transparent, and tracked down former class participants to ask if they still had their copies. The book I held in my lap was one of the few full textbooks I had, as opposed to the binders of photocopied or even handwritten pages I put together. It was a lot of work compiling those binders, but the fifty to a hundred dollars I saved made it all worth it. With the money I hoarded from my unusual methods, I had been able to pay my share of the rent our first month in Bloomington and buy Tyrsa a pint of ice cream for her birthday, which had been in September. Now it was late October, almost Halloween, and all that saved money was gone.
Uninterested in reading, I looked over to see what Beth drew. She had been focusing mostly on pencil sketches lately, since pencils were cheap and she was reserving her paints for large projects.
As I watched her hand move, an image of a building revealed itself. Beth added steps and a door, and I suddenly recognized it as our apartment. I was about to say something when I noticed she was drawing wooden boards in our window. The glass in the window was shattered, with some jagged pieces still clinging to the frame, and the door had splintery nicks in it like someone had been striking it with an axe.
Beth noticed me watching her and shrugged.
“I just wanted to see what it might look like. If it got bad,” she explained.
“It looks…good?” I said, unsure if that was the right word to use.
Beth laughed. She had a petite laugh, like a child’s. Sometimes it sounded like little bells.
“Sometimes I start imagining bad things happening, and it helps if I draw it. It makes it more real. Easier to grasp, if that makes sense. Or else it just sits in my brain and gets bigger and scarier.”
“That makes sense,” I reassured her.
“See? Even if someone broke the window and tried to break down the door, they couldn’t really do too much damage,” Beth explained, pointing at her drawing. “It doesn’t look as bad as I thought it would.”
Tyrsa, who had been in the kitchen, emerged with a loose notebook leaf in her hand. She had put her hair up in a ponytail and had a pencil stuck through the elastic band.
“Ok, so I think I got a good list of what we should get at the store,” she announced, plopping herself down on the couch between Beth and
I. “We want whatever is nutritious, cheap, and multipurpose.”
“Like beans and stuff?” I asked.
“Bleh,” Beth remarked.
“Not just beans,” Tyrsa assured her. “God, that would be awful. I’m thinking tuna, veggies, canned fruit...that kind of thing. Like what we have already, but more of it. And lots of drinking water. We can never have enough water.”
“How long are we preparing for?” Beth asked, leaning her head against Tyrsa’s shoulder and looking at the list.
“As long as we possibly can, I guess,” Tyrsa mused. “I don’t really have any idea how long this ‘state of emergency’ will last, but we don’t want to come up way too short on essentials.”
“What else is essential besides food?” I asked.
“Like in our situation? Or in general?”
“Both, I guess.”
“Well, stuff we can use to protect ourselves, like the wooden boards we have. We’ve already got plenty of nails, a hammer...weapons are too expensive, but if we get some kind of fastener like a zip tie, we can fix a knife to the end of a broken broom handle to make a spear.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah, the DIY weapons can be pretty intense. I read online about a kid who made a crossbow out of a PVC pipe.”
I tried to think of the effort that would entail, but I couldn’t get a firm grasp on an image. The thought of having to use any of those weapons on an actual person was intimidating, especially if they were armed with a gun. The ideal scenario would be simply avoiding that kind of conflict altogether.
I excused myself from the living room and retreated to my bedroom. I suddenly felt very tired. I lay down on my bed, just intending to rest my eyes for a little while, but when I woke it was nearly pitch black. A faint glow came from the living room and I emerged to see the others had lit candles in place of electricity and were eating ramen noodles. I helped myself to a bowl and after I ate, went back to bed. I didn’t want to think about anything until I absolutely had to. That time would come soon enough. The next morning, to be precise, when we went on our emergency supply run.
***
We decided to go to the big grocery store - Marsh - first. That had not been hit in the riots and we were fairly confident it would be open. It was a bit of a longer walk, but it was a nice day and we felt safe all together. The first thing we noticed while walking was the police presence. Police cars and vans were parked along the street, bumper to bumper, and officers with their hands on their belts paced the sidewalks. There were not many people out, but whoever was around, kept their heads down. No one wanted to look suspicious or make any sudden movements. Since we were a group, we felt targeted, but we just kept walking, eyes forward, and tried to nod in the most upright way possible when the police eyed us as we passed. I hadn’t even realized I had been holding my breath until we passed the thickest clump of police and I let out a long sigh of relief.
“You okay, bud?” Lawrence asked, patting my back. “Little jumpy?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.”
There were a lot of security guards at the store. We were stopped at the door and everyone was frisked. The guard apologized a few times, but insisted it was necessary.
“Boss’ orders,” he explained. “We’re staying open normal hours, but we gotta be on the lookout for more looting.”
Cleared for entry, we headed towards the canned goods section to organize ourselves.
“Stick to the list,” Tyrsa instructed us. “You each have a copy. Beth and I will get the food, you guys get the rest, and then come find us, okay?”
I looked at the list to see what we were responsible for.
Batteries, bleach, garbage bags, bandages, duct tape, toilet paper. Got it.
We were familiar with the store, so it didn’t take long to locate the items. We argued about whether to get the cheapest brands or not, because as Rick insisted, cheaper would mean low-quality.
“We should get the medium-priced batteries,” Rick said. “Or we might end up with ones that die right away, and then we’d have to just get more, and that’s not saving money at all.”
Lawrence and I caved, and we chose a brand we were familiar with and knew lasted pretty long. We were taking advantage of a sale on toilet paper when a young woman approached us.
“Hey, you’re Morgan, right?”
I looked at her more closely and recognized her as a girl from one of my classes.
“Yeah. And you’re...Kallie?”
“Yeah!”
She was one of the quiet students, but sweet. She carried a basket filled with canned soup and Oreos, and wore an IU t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I thought I saw a bruise on her cheek, but it might have been a shadow.
“Were you on campus yesterday? During the riot?” she asked.
“I was there when it started!” I exclaimed.
“Oh my god! Really?” Kallie’s eyes widened in excitement.
I told her what I had seen, feeling strangely proud of myself. Rick and Lawrence stood by, unintroduced, and picked at the plastic casing of the toilet paper rolls.
“Did you hear they’re probably going to cancel classes?” Kallie asked, lowering her voice as if it was a secret.
“No! Is it that bad over there?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been back. I’m living with my parents, and they barely let me out of the house today to go shopping.”
“Where did you hear about that?” Rick asked, sounding doubtful.
“I have a friend who works in the President’s office,” Kallie explained. “She said they’d been getting weird calls, like, threatening ones about more riots and protests. The police are all over, breaking up some of the activist groups, trying to weed out who was responsible for organizing what happened.”
“Geez,” Lawrence breathed.
“Yeah. Intense.”
Kallie sighed and looked into her basket.
“Well, I should get going. I told my parents I’d only be gone twenty minutes. Hopefully this all ends soon and things get back to normal.”
“Yeah.”
“See ya!”
We watched her leave. Lawrence began to nudge me jokingly in the ribs.
“She’s cute,” he remarked.
“Sure.”
“Don’t be weird. You can look at girls, you know. You’re not dating.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Rick called us back to task and we gathered the rest of the supplies. After we picked up the bandages, we circled back around the store and found Beth and Tyrsa in the sporting goods section. Tyrsa was deciding whether or not to buy a metal bat that was on sale.
“What do you guys think?” she asked. “Is it worth it?”
Rick took the bat from her and swung it in slow motion. He flexed his fingers on the handle.
“I like it,” he offered. “Could take out someone with a gun if we came at them fast enough with a good swing.”
“Good!” Tyrsa said. “So we have some options for weapons if that becomes necessary.”
She put the bat in the cart.
Between the two groups, we had a decent stockpile going on.
When we went to check out, I counted five police officers hovering by the exit, eyeing everyone closely. The cashiers all looked nervous. The teenager who scanned our items kept his eyes lowered and only glanced up when Beth said hello. He smiled back shyly before withdrawing again.
“Your total is sixty- eight dollars and seventy-five cents,” he murmured.
We didn’t have enough money.
Chapter 4
We spent a few moments discussing what item to leave behind and decided on one of the battery packs. We had lots of candles and determined we probably had enough batteries for the flashlights and radio. That brought us down to a doable price and Tyrsa counted out the money we had collected the day before.
We carried the bags back home as quickly as we could, painfully aware of how vulnerable we were with our supplies right out in the ope
n. It actually felt good this time around to pass through areas heavy with police; no one would dare try to mug us there. At the apartment, we unpacked our supplies and counted everything twice, and then three times.
“It feels good to be a bit more prepared,” Tyrsa remarked, running her fingers along the rows of colorful cans in the cupboard.
“Yeah,” Rick agreed, swinging the baseball bat around with one hand.
It had been non-verbally decided that the bat would be Rick’s weapon. It looked terrifying in his hands, capable of cracking someone’s skull with a single swing, like a walnut.
We got the wooden planks ready to be put up at a moment’s notice and talked about setting a few of them right outside the windows, hidden in the bushes, with nails poking out of them. I helped Tyrsa snap a broom handle in half and watched her duct-tape a steak knife to one end and smooth down the other so it wouldn’t accidentally poke her. We were lucky she already had a lot of random supplies with her. One of her few possessions was a toolbox complete with a hammer, a set of screwdrivers, lock-pick set, sandpaper, magnifying glass, and a terrifying-looking hunting knife.
“Present from my dad when I went to school,” she explained.
“The knife or the box?”
“Both.”
We were just beginning to relax about our unusual situation when there was knocking on the door, though it was really more like pounding. Lawrence dashed to the door and opened it to find Joe standing on the other side, an upset look on his face.
“Guys, there’s been more rioting,” he said. “Come look.”
Sure enough, the news was covering more instances of looting. This time it wasn’t mostly just students. Much larger groups had begun to descend on the bigger retail stores, like the one we had just visited. The news cameras caught shaky images of people grabbing whatever they could carry, trampling over each other, and fighting with policemen and security guards. Four people had been shot. A security guard had been hit over the head with a shovel someone had picked up from a rack. All schools - including Ivy Tech - had cancelled classes indefinitely.
The governor had declared a state of emergency.
Undone: A Dystopian Fiction Novel Page 3