Freedom/Hate (Freedom/Hate Series, Book 1)

by Kyle Andrews

  As Collin's anger remained on a constant simmer, Sophia enjoyed her show. In that moment, he couldn't understand how she could ignore what they were saying about her, but he was smart enough to know that the moment would pass for him. On any other day, he would probably be laughing right alongside her.

  He wondered if it was a part of the indoctrination, to have these shows spreading the message of the authorities, or if these shows were simply the result of the indoctrination. Were the writers and actors willing participants in the brainwashing of the people, or were they completely unaware of their role in it?

  They had to know. How could any adult look at what they were doing and not see what they were taking part in? How could any of them not know about the lies and misdirection? He didn't think it possible, and yet he'd met so many perfectly intelligent people who were completely oblivious to what was going on right in front of them. When the outrageous becomes the norm, people stop seeing it.

  The time for action wasn't now, it was fifty years earlier. Those people knew what was happening. They watched their freedoms being taken away and they allowed it to happen. They had weapons. They had information. They had the ability, but they sat on their hands. They let fear control their lives. They let smooth talkers woo them into believing that their best option was to sign away their rights. In doing so, they condemned future generations to... this.

  No matter how hard he tried to shake it, the image of Uly Jacobs' death stayed with Collin. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw that murder play out, as though he had been standing right there when it happened. He hated the people who did it, but he felt that odd kinship with them. They were him, in another life. Could he presume to call them evil when they never chose their jobs? All they chose was to not be hunted. To remain fed and clothed. To have their families spared the cost of rebellion. It was a pathetic cycle and the more times it repeated, the more ingrained on society it would become. How many people watched the death of Uly Jacobs without giving a second thought to him or his family? How many never thought to second guess the story presented on the news? To them, the facts were clear and the evil was obvious.

  His fist was balled and he was once again close to punching the refrigerator door. He didn't even realize that Sophia had walked into the kitchen. She was holding an empty glass and watching him pace. When he saw her, Collin nearly jumped.

  “You look like a caged lion,” Sophia said, moving toward the sink to fill her glass with water.

  “I feel like a caged lion,” Collin replied. “I feel useless. Foolish.”

  “I can understand the useless part. Not following you on the foolish part.”

  “Because I thought that this all meant something.”

  “It does mean something.”

  Collin wanted to argue with her until she saw things his way, but attacking Sophia wasn't the answer. He tried his best to bite his tongue, but he had to ask, “Why did people allow this to happen? They had to know.”

  “The same reason they had credit cards.”

  “Get now, pay later,” Collin nodded.

  “How many people care about leaving a mountain of debt behind when they die? They're done with it. They don't have to worry. That's someone else's problem.”

  Sophia took a drink of her water and then said, “You know this. Kicking it around your head again and again won't change the way things are.”

  “That's my problem. Nothing we do changes it. We wait. For what? Who is coming to help us?”

  “Who can help a people who can't help themselves?”

  “What are we doing to help ourselves?”

  She smiled at that question and said, “We used to fight back. People took up arms, and they were called criminals. Of course, they were. They broke unjust laws, but they were still laws. Some states fought back... Some even won. But in places like this, people didn't stand a chance.”

  “So they stopped fighting.”

  “They stopped lining up to get killed.”

  “They sold us out.”

  “They thought that the best way to win this war was covertly. I can't say that I disagreed.”

  “It didn't work out very well.”

  “No. I don't suppose it has.”

  “So why are we still waiting?”

  “Because overthrowing this government isn't enough. We can take out all of the people in charge, and we'd still be left with millions of people who won't like the idea of what comes next.”

  “So we sit by and do nothing?”

  “We wait for an opportunity.”

  “A miracle?”

  Sophia smiled and said, “Where did you hear a word like that?”

  “It's a common word.”

  “Not in the dictionary they have at school. It certainly doesn't make it past the internet filters. Yet it's a common word. A seed. An idea that no matter how hard they try, they can't quite quash. People might not realize what it means—what it really means. But there it is. Holding on. Waiting for its chance to mean something again.”

  “I'm tired of waiting to mean something.”

  “Maybe you're not the miracle.”

  Collin let those words sink in, trying to figure out what Sophia meant by them, and how it was supposed to make him feel better. She went back to the couch and to her sitcom.

  After a few moments had passed, Collin said to her, “You know that didn't help me, right? You have this way of sounding really helpful without actually being helpful.”

  “Or maybe I am helpful and you just don't realize it yet.”

  “No. You're really not. I'm pretty sure of it.”

  25

  It wasn't that dogs were entirely uncommon. Certainly, they were less common than they had been in the past. Their role in society had changed. Now, you were more likely to see dogs belonging to a building, rather than one family. Dog rations were not a part of the shopping list, so people would have to spare whatever food they could. A single family usually couldn't afford a dog of their own.

  Libby figured that the dog had escaped its building and started following her because it wanted her to feed it or lead it home. It picked the wrong person. Libby couldn't even lead herself home at the moment.

  She thought about the dog as she started to walk through the lobby in Sim's building. It didn't approach her, but it didn't look scared of her. It watched her, but it didn't seem threatening. If she didn't know any better, she would have thought that the dog knew something that she didn't. It followed her until she reached her destination and then it just sat there until she opened the front door. Once she was inside, the dog just walked away.

  Of course, she knew that dogs weren't capable of the sort of thought that she was attributing to it. It was most likely looking for food, not harboring secrets. Her mind was playing tricks on her; making her suspicious of everyone and everything. She needed to calm herself down and straighten out her mind. Maybe she could make sense of this situation if she could just put some space between herself and the chaos.

  Sim lived on the twenty-third floor, in a building that hadn't had a working elevator since long before she was born. As she climbed the stairs, Libby remembered why she rarely visited his apartment. Her legs were about ready to give out. She couldn't remember the last time she had eaten anything. By the time she reached the eleventh floor, she was dizzy and weak.

  She had to stop and rest on the fourteenth floor. Sitting alone in the stairwell, she felt alone for the first time all day. Nobody knew she was there. There were no other people around that she had to hide from. It was quiet. Peaceful.

  The white florescent light in the stairwell was humming. If she sat very still, it was the only thing that she could hear. If she focused on that sound alone, every other thought that had been pounding away at her brain that day could be shifted to the background.

  Libby nearly fell asleep as she sat there. She could feel her mind slipping away from her, but she had to pull herself out of it. As tempting as it was to stop moving and slee
p for the night, she knew that the stairs would be full of people come morning. She didn't want to be caught in that situation. She needed to get to Sim's apartment.

  Fighting every muscle in her body, and using every ounce of energy that she could muster, Libby grabbed onto the handrail and pulled herself to her feet. She started climbing again. It was a long walk. The stairs felt like they would keep going upward without end. The climbing became hypnotic. By the time she reached Sim's floor, she wasn't even paying attention to where she was anymore. She passed his floor without realizing it, and was forced to backtrack—cursing herself as she did it.

  She eventually stepped into the hallway on Sim's floor. The lingering scent of someone's dinner was hanging in the air. Soup, maybe. Tomato. The kind with far too many herbs added to it, making it taste remarkably like the thin, watery tomato sauce that they gave people to put on their pasta. She hated soup in general, and that soup more than others. Still, her stomach ached for it.

  She could hear TVs on in apartments as she walked past them. She could imagine her image appearing on those TVs, and people looking through their peepholes, realizing who she was and calling every emergency number they could think of.

  It might have been an irrational thought, but she had been through too much that day to feel comfortable or safe as long as she was in the open. The closer she got to Sim's apartment, the more desperate the grew.

  She let out a breath of relief as she knocked on his door. At last it was all over and she could close her eyes for the night. But Libby's life simply could not allow for things to be that easy. There was no answer to her knock.

  Libby knocked again and waited for Sim to come to the door, figuring that he might be in the shower and didn't hear her. Again, there was no answer. For ten minutes, Libby waited. She knocked on the door from time to time, hoping that the he would answer, but he didn't. Sim wasn't home.

  Curfew began a long time ago, so he should have been there. There was no good reason for him to not be home, but fate seemed to enjoy making Libby suffer.

  She slumped down onto the floor by his door. Her body wouldn't let her to walk back down the stairs, and the law wouldn't allow her to leave the building. She was stuck and alone. There was nothing that she could do about it, so she decided to give in. It didn't matter if people saw her or heard her in the hallway. Whatever was going to happen would happen. As soon as she accepted that, Libby fell asleep.

  Just as she dozed off, she saw Uly's head exploding into a bright red cloud of blood, but the sound that went with it wasn't the bang of the gun. It was the sound of his skull breaking apart and everything that had once been inside being torn into thousands of tiny pieces. It was a wet, sloppy sound—somewhere between an egg cracking and a melon being ripped open.

  It lasted a fraction of a second from her perspective, but she must have been asleep for longer than that. When she gasped herself awake, Sim's hand was on her shoulder. It was a soft, familiar touch that brought warmth to her shivering body for the first time since the world fell to pieces around her.

  She was breathing heavily, and glanced down at her clothes to see if she was covered in pieces of Uly. Of course, she wasn't. The notion seemed more irrational as her dream faded from mind.

  Sim was squatting in front of her, staring at her as though he was still waiting for her to wake up. He didn't say anything to her until her eyes met his and she threw her arms around him.

  “You're here,” he said, putting an arm around her and holding her tight.

  “I didn't know where else to go. My apartment—Uly...” she didn't even know how to begin explaining it all.

  “I know. I saw it all on the news,” Sim told her, and then pushed her away so that he could look her in the eyes. He asked her, “Did you know? Are you a part of it?”

  The way he asked the question gave Libby no clue whether he was asking out of worry for her, or out of suspicion. For a split second, Libby was offended that this was his first question to her, after everything that she had been through that day. Then she realized that it had to be. It would have been her first question to him too.

  “No. I didn't know what was going on until right before he died. I was angry and that's why I left the hospital.”

  “You didn't go to HAND?”

  “I didn't know what I was doing. I was... I needed to think. I needed to figure things out.”

  “Figure what out? You found out that he was a member of Hate and you went for a walk?”

  “It wasn't like that.”

  This wasn't going the way she imagined it. The tone of Sim's voice made it sound like she was a criminal. Instead of finding safety and comfort, she was being accused.

  Libby got to her feet, telling Sim, “I shouldn't have come here,” as she started to push past him, toward the stairwell.

  She didn't know why she expected safety and comfort from him. She should have known better. There was nobody to take care of her.

  “Libby, where are you going?” Sim asked, in a tone that sounded less accusatory than it did apologetic. He was coming after her.

  She shook her head and told him the truth, “I don't know.”

  The only thing that she did know was that she needed to get out of there. She felt like a fool for being there in the first place. For thinking that she could lean on Sim. For thinking that there was a such thing as solace.

  He grabbed her arm and turned her around, looking her in the eyes once again. His look soon softened and he pulled her close to him, holding her head to his chest. He kissed her on the head.

  Sim didn't apologize to her or argue with her. He just held her. She couldn't even tell whether he was trying to comfort her or himself, but she grabbed a fistful of his shirt and held onto it as tightly as she could. In that moment, her guard went down and everything she had witnessed began to catch up to her. She felt tears burning in her eyes and falling down her cheeks, but she tried to hide them from Sim. She wasn't the type of girl who cried often. She didn't want to be that type of girl. But more than that, she didn't want him to think of her that way.

  They stood silent in that embrace for a long time. She would have stayed there all night, but Sim eventually moved toward his door and unlocked it. He took her inside the dark apartment, lit only by the moonlight that was shining through large windows in his living room. He brought her to the couch so that she could sit down. Once she was seated, he stood over her. She could tell that he wanted to say something, but he couldn't decide on what.

  Usually, he would be making an off-color joke by now, but instead, he wiped a tear from her face with his thumb and asked her, “Are you hungry?”

  “I haven't eaten all day.”

  He walked into the kitchen and started looking for food. As he searched, and the mood between them settled into something more comfortable

  He asked her, “What happened? Tell me everything.”

  “I don't know. Everything just got away from me,” she replied. Her heart tightened as she remembered, “Amanda has cancer.”

  “Is she okay?” Sim replied, pausing for only a moment before he resumed the search for food.

  Libby wished that she could answer that question. The last time she saw Amanda, they were both still in shock over the diagnosis. She had no idea where Amanda was or how she was dealing with any of this. Silence was the only answer that she could give Sim.

  “I'm sure she's all right,” Sim said, trying his best to sound sympathetic, though it didn't come easily to him.

  He was strong. A fighter. He wasn't one to sit around and talk about emotions. That he was even trying made Libby appreciate him more.

  Odds were, Amanda was fine. Buildings burned down often enough. There was temporary housing available to those who were displaced. She would have medical care too. Even if the police were holding her for questioning, she would get a roof over her head and food in her stomach. At least, that's what Libby was counting on. She had to hold onto the hope that someone was taking care of Amanda, an
d someone would take care of her. She just needed to figure out how. That's where Sim came in.

  “I need help,” she told him.

  “Yeah,” Sim replied, with a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

  “I'm scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “What they'll think.”

  “Tell the truth.”

  Sim walked to the couch with two plates. Each had two slices of cold pizza on it. Libby stared at the food in awe.

  “You get pizza?” she asked him.

  “You don't?”

  By the time he finished asking that question, her mouth was too full to form an answer. She hadn't tasted pizza in years, and the fact that she was starving made it taste even better.

  Sim didn't appear to be as hungry as she was. He watched her eat and asked her, “Why did you come here?”

  Libby paused, wondering if she'd been foolish to think that he cared about her. Of course she had. They were high school kids. Obviously, he was just interested in having a good time. Dragging him into this mess was a mistake. She shouldn't have assumed that he would want to see her or help her. Odds were, he would want her as far away from him as possible.

  She swallowed her food and put her plate down. As she started to get up she told him, “I shouldn't have. I'm sorry.”

  “No. Lib...” he started, pulling her back down to the couch. “I mean, why not go to the authorities? The longer you wait, the more guilty you look.”

  “I'm not guilty at all.”

  “I know that. You know that. So what are you running from?”

  She couldn't answer the question in any rational way, so with a shrug she told him, “I'm just running.”

  His look softened. He seemed to get it and to feel for her. He put his hand on her cheek and held it there for a moment, trying his best to comfort her.

  When that didn't work, he dumped his two slices of pizza onto her plate and said, “You need it more than I do.”

  Libby didn't argue. She probably should have taken her time and savored each bite of pizza, but she couldn't slow herself down. She practically inhaled all four slices.