“Because you’re the princess who lives in the castle.”
“Stuck in the castle, yes.”
“Eye, have you ever seen a dead body?”
“No.”
“I saw one the first day I was here. I’ve seen quite a few bodies.”
“What do their faces look like?”
“At the funeral parlor? Peaceful. The people who take care of that sort of thing make sure.”
“And … not at funerals?”
“The recently dead look drunk. One eye can go one way while the other wanders somewhere else.”
She smiled. “Really?”
I nodded.
“How did you see recently dead people who looked drunk?”
“Refugees, on the road outside of my hometown. There was a purge when a big caravan came north.”
“I didn’t hear about that.”
I shrugged. “I don’t think anyone was supposed to know. It never showed up on a screen but I saw it with my own eyes.”
As the silence stretched out between us, I became certain I’d been too honest. Eye felt the weight of this awkward pause. “Maybe I shouldn’t ask too many questions,” she said.
But at the mention of the dead, a need had already begun to grow within me. It felt like an ache over my heart, worse than a hunger pang. “Something’s been bothering me. We should … we should do something….”
I stopped and sat down abruptly. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.
“Kismet? Are you okay?”
I brought my head up from between my knees and managed a nod. “Gimme … a minute. T-t-triggered suh-suh-something.”
The night before, as the noise of screams and gunfire reached for me, I had retreated to my bed. I clamped my palms over my ears until I was sure the riot was over, immobilized by the noise rising above the wall. Still, the anguished cries of the mob grabbed at my heart. With each pulse, my chest felt tight, my breathing shallow and quick. As I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing the onslaught was over, I heard the distant rattle of machine guns.
At that moment, I wasn’t in the Circle anymore. I was back on the outskirts of Campbellford not far from my home, hiding in the brush, barely daring to breathe, waiting.
Grammy told me not to go but curiosity claimed me. I was drawn by that same rattle of machine gunfire.
Machine … gunfire.
It was almost as if the perpetrators themselves became machines: unfeeling, programmed, relentless and incapable of regret.
By the time I got there, the soldiers were leaving. Peering through thick branches, I glimpsed them. They wore the same uniform as my parents. From the woods, I heard one of them touch the muzzle and cry out as he burned his bare hand on the hot metal. The other soldiers laughed and crowed, “Noob!” as they climbed into a truck. They all carried backpacks, but these were not military-grade packs. I didn’t understand that at first.
I waited, not sure it was safe to emerge from my hiding place. If they’d left a single scout behind, I would have been shot and left for dead like the rest.
Eventually, I crawled toward the road, alert for any sound. My breathing came harder and faster. The wind sighed through the tree branches above me. I waited a bit longer but I could detect no evidence of a living person besides my own pounding heart.
I got up into a crouch and rushed forward, keeping low, scanning the forest and the road frantically.
The people who’d been shot were not on the road as I had expected. The bodies lay in the ditch. Surprised and horrified, I tripped and fell, rolling in amongst them, on top of them. I gasped as I came face-to-face with a girl no older than me. Her eyes were blank, staring up into nothing.
There were hundreds of bodies in that ditch. The massacre stretched in both directions.
I’d begun to struggle to my feet when I heard a vehicle approaching. If I’d scrambled up out of that ditch at that moment, I surely would have been seen. I turned my head just in time to see a green Jeep coming around the bend at a snail’s pace.
There was no choice. I went limp and lay with the dead. I couldn’t see the occupants of the Jeep as they passed but I already knew what they were doing. In a moment, my fear was confirmed. A moan rose from someone to my left. A woman, I think, though pain can make any cry pitch to a higher register.
The Jeep stopped and the driver shut off the engine. I heard the crunch of boots on gravel.
“Make sure,” someone ordered.
At a distance, machine guns rattle. Up close, the sound they make is more like an explosive bark.
The moaning stopped.
I listened for the crunch of gravel. The footsteps passed by slowly. The gunman must have been no more than a few feet away. I was almost sure he or she was just standing there, waiting for me to dare to open one eye, eager for me to panic and give myself away.
Eventually, I don’t know how long, the soldier got back into the Jeep. The engine started up and they crept away to search for more survivors.
I wish it had ended there, but there was more. The mass killing of the refugees in the caravan made me ashamed that my parents wore the same uniform. But what did uniforms matter when the people giving orders had become ruthless?
Service and saving lives, I thought. That’s what it was supposed to be about. Not murdering unarmed civilians.
I couldn’t bring myself to feel much moral superiority, though. My parents always sent a portion of their pay home to Grammy and me. The money was late that month and there were rumors that military families wouldn’t receive their payment until the next month.
The propapundits prattled on about cost savings and tight budgets. They didn’t mention our empty stomachs. One blamed us for not having enough of a financial cushion against “hiccups in income.” Another even told us to hold garage sales, as if we had anything left to sell, as if we had garages, as if anyone had any extra money to buy crap at a garage sale in the middle of winter.
We were living hand-to-mouth. That’s why I couldn’t just run home to Grammy. I stayed in that blood-soaked ditch and scrabbled through the pockets and the backpacks of the dead as long as I dared. I found food and jewelry. Afraid someone else would come along, I took what I could find of value and hid it in the woods. Then, weeping and disgusted with myself, I went back to gather more of whatever I could salvage.
To each victim, I whispered, over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
That still wasn’t the worst of it. As I hid in the forest that day, going through my cache of treasures stolen from the dead, I heard voices on the road. At first, I thought the soldiers had returned. I was wrong. Others had heard the gunfire. I’d only been the first to investigate. I crept forward one last time to see people I recognized from town hurrying down the road. Through the woods, the townspeople came in droves. It seemed that most of Campellford came to bear witness to the carnage.
They weren’t witnesses. A few stood in silence and turned away. Most scrambled down into the pit to crawl through the corpses, to find their own treasure. We were so desperate, we became a town of grave robbers.
We didn’t see any government money for my parents’ work for three months that winter. What I stole helped get us through. Not everybody made it. I heard of four suicides that Christmas, people who could not stomach what we had become.
I managed to sell some jewelry to keep Grammy and me alive. We ate the refugees’ food. Knowing where those meals came from, every morsel tasted like ashes.
And still, that was not the worst of what came to be called the Campbellford Caravan Massacre. The worst came later, after the government checks began to arrive again. People from town didn’t whisper about the cans of spam and dehydrated food rations anymore. We nodded to each other in the street. Each encounter was a silent message: You’re a survivor. You’re still here so you must be complicit.
The soldiers had done the deed and taken their finder’s fee in loot. We were the vultures who swept in to pick the dead clean.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Mr. Dobbs, the sweet neighbor who’d once given me a ride on one of his ponies, said we should not be grateful to the people in the caravan.
“We should be proud to be strong, to do what it took to survive.” He ate his beloved ponies so I guess he was true to his word.
“Our government is looking out for us,” he said. “Those foreigners would have done the same. Financial realities being what they were, those soldiers did their duty and they saved us. Shot them and saved us. Saved the town!”
I fixed him with a hard stare. “You do remember there were little kids in that ditch, right?”
“Their parents shouldn’t have brought them up this way.”
“How bad would things have to be before you abandoned your home and walked to another country?” I asked. “Can you imagine how bad — ”
Dobbs interrupted me, “It was us or them, Kismet! Would you rather be dead?” His tone hardened and grew louder. “You know how bad the harvest was, what with the drought we had! You comin’ at me on your high horse, you’re missing the simplest thing: To survive, we do what we must. There ain’t enough for everybody.”
“There would be if some weren’t so greedy.”
He waved me away. “Got a tragedy? It happens. Find what good you can and never let a good tragedy go to waste. Then, move on and get over it.”
I noticed he was not debating right or wrong anymore. Staring into his face — so smug, so sure — my stomach folded and twisted in revulsion. “If things are that bad here, maybe we should have joined their caravan and went out looking for a better life.”
My neighbor leaned on the fence and looked away to the horizon for a long time. For a second, I thought I’d gotten through to him. However, when he looked back at me, he said, “I’m sure it was hard for our troops — ”
“I heard them laughing as they walked away!”
“In these situations, you have to make hard choices. Sometimes you have to think a certain way. Hating and laughing, it’s all the same: a way to cope so you do what you must.”
Dobbs spoke as if he were imparting wisdom as he twiddled with the crucifix that hung from his neck. I wondered if the crucifix was his or was it a remnant from his raid on the ditch?
“You learn all that in church, Mr. Dobbs?”
His face fell and he let out a tired sigh. “You don’t understand war, Kismet.”
“Funny you say that because I am in one. We all are.”
Grammy said Dobbs talked that way to protect himself, to deny his self-loathing. I didn’t care to hear any rationalizations. I began to hate Dobbs and so I was changed, too. I would never be grateful nor glad about what happened to the caravan.
That was two winters ago. The next winter, for a second time, the military pay stopped coming. Determined to avoid another massacre perpetrated on our behalf, the whole town worked together to ration our food.
Dobbs committed a crime against all of Campbellford then. I’ve told myself a million times since, I did what I had to do.
Listening to the familiar rattle of gunfire from Gate 15, I felt like I was creeping through the woods near Campbellford again.
The parrots in their perches would not show mercy. They would not fire over the heads of the demonstrators to warn them. Weapons are forged in fire. Through the heat of desperation, fear, greed or hatred, we had all become weapons.
Machine guns spit death. The soldiers in Campbellford were no different from the people atop the Circle’s walls. They had all become machines. Before the Select Few rose to power, we had tools. We produced useful things. Now all our machines seemed to produce were fear and hate.
As I lay on my little cot in the attic of the narrow house and listened to the riot, the sounds were too familiar. I felt the gears of the State grinding people into pulp again. I tried to block out the visions of hundreds of dead. Still, their cries found me. Even high in the sultry attic deep within the safety of New Atlanta, the mob’s shouts of anger and pain formed one voice that whispered through me.
“Coward.”
The dead in the ditch had whispered the same word. That’s why, on his last leave at home, my father taught me about lucid dreaming in an attempt to banish the ghosts from my mind.
“I just want to be numb to it all, Daddy!”
“No, you don’t. When you don’t feel anything, you won’t be you anymore.”
“It hurts, though. In my heart and in my head, I swear it hurts like a real thing, something with sharp teeth and claws. Whatever it is, it’s been with me since I fell into that ditch. It came back with me. In my dreams, I can almost see it. Each night, just before I do see it, I wake up screaming.”
Daddy nodded. “I know what you’re talking about. It comes in many forms, but I’ve seen that thing. I think it’s the fear of what we could become.”
“What is it?”
“You becoming something other than human, something worse.”
“Like a machine,” I said.
“You just have to sit with that fear a while. Give it time and you’ll make sense of it. They say pain lets you know you’re alive but that’s a shitty way to look at it. I say, your fear means you still care.”
“I don’t want to care this much. I feel … “ I didn’t want to admit what I felt but Daddy knew.
“Guilty. You feel guilty for being alive.” He took me in his arms. “I’m glad you’re alive.”
“So what do I do?”
“Soldiers get PTSD, but civilians in war zones get it worse, lots of times. The drugs we take for it can be hard to find so the Army taught us about lucid dreaming. When the nightmares come, it gives us an escape hatch, somewhere to go to when that pain and fear won’t let you alone.”
“How does it help?”
Daddy smiled. “It’s called lucid dreaming, not lucid nightmares. It helps you take control so nothing chases you when you’re feeling helpless.”
I had not mastered lucid dreaming. The nightmares still came sometimes. The corpses in the ditch sometimes rose from their mass grave — an open grave, easy pickings for vultures and unfeeling machines — and every face turned to me in silent condemnation.
I had survived at the expense of hundreds of innocents.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Kismet?”
“Huh? Yes, Eye?”
“You looked like you were a thousand miles away for a while!”
“Not quite that far … never far enough.”
“You muttered some things. You said we should do something.”
“No, oh, yes!”
I had a question in my mind that needed an answer. In a way, I had a chance to go back to that ditch and maybe find a better way this time.
“Your mother doesn’t want you going outside the wall. What if we were to go by Gate 15 and see what we can see? Safely, from this side?”
There is nothing so seductive as limits on what a child can and can’t do. Going up to that barrier obviously appealed to her.
“I know a shortcut,” Eye said. “Through my favorite place.”
She waved for me to follow her and I did so on unsteady legs. We soon turned into a pedestrian shopping mall. The walls were glass and what I saw there made me gasp. It was as if I had stepped into a time machine. In every window, products I’d never seen in person were for sale.
Stern gray suits adorned mannequins, each with their plastic heads turned away. I imagined them looking off to a rich and hopeful future. Colorful, splashy dresses came next, but these were draped over real women. Each model was an impossibly tall Caucasian but with the epicanthic eye folds common to Asian women.
As I peered beyond the glass, handsome young men stood
behind the counters at the stores selling women’s fashion. It seemed that only beautiful young women worked in the stores selling men’s clothes. I saw few customers.
“Eye? How do people make money?”
“What do you mean?”
“No one outside the wall has money to buy this stuff. Where does it all come from and how does anyone manage to buy it?”
Eye took a lot of things for granted, especially what she thought I should already know. “You know why I’m learning Chinese and Portuguese? Because China is where everything comes from. Dad makes most of his money out of his investments in Brazil. Why?”
“No reason,” I said. “I’m made in America, that’s all.”
“That used to be a thing, didn’t it?” Eye replied.
Perhaps to ease the tension, she broke out her best fancy British accent. “Mother says I should be grateful I don’t have to study Hindi and Urdu. If India and Pakistan hadn’t neutralized each other, I’d have to learn to speak the languages of their economies, too. I asked her, why not just use Google translate? She says that sets the bar too low.”
“Speaking of setting the bar too low,” I ventured, “I appreciate you showing me the city but I’m supposed to be helping you, too.”
The girl looked skeptical. She said, “How can you help me?”
I heard: How could someone like you help me?
“Your mother mentioned working on vocabulary. Let me suggest more precision in language. India and Pakistan did not ‘neutralize’ each other. They shot nuclear missiles at each other.”
“That did neutralize them, didn’t it?”
“Nuclear strikes, tactical or not, is an issue close to my heart, Eye. The India-Pakistan war lasted a few minutes and killed about a billion people.”
She leaned in conspiratorially. “We don’t talk like that here.” As if to explain everything, she added, “Foreigners are foreign.”
“Oh.”
She patted me on the shoulder. “If you want to fly under the radar here, you have to be more careful what you say and how you say it. As Mother says, not every thought needs to be spoken. Maybe we can go through a dictionary site, though.”
Citizen Second Class- Apocalypse Next Page 13