Citizen Second Class- Apocalypse Next

by Robert Chazz Chute

  I paused at a window and peered in at a glass case full of large men’s watches. My father and mother both wore large Army watches on their wrists. The watch faces were large and the hands and compass were glow-in-the-dark phosphorous. Each had a strap to cover the glow so their positions would not be given away while they went on night missions.

  I wondered what my parents would say if they could see these timepieces, each one a work of art in gold and silver with diamond accents. These watches were never meant to be worn by someone who walked with a rifle or cleaned a toilet.

  Behind me, two men in gray business suits met in the mall’s corridor. Their shoulders were so padded, I wondered if they could turn their heads and look to the side comfortably.

  “A man of means among the blessed!” the first exclaimed in a plummy accent.

  The second replied, “A person of substance among the blessed!”

  I was to learn that was a standard greeting among the upper class, at least within the Circle.

  Someone knocked on the glass from inside the store. Startled, I looked up to see a woman in a red striped apron wagging her finger at me.

  “We should go, Kismet. They know you aren’t here to shop.”

  I turned away, angry. I was only looking. What harm had I done? I hadn’t even stepped inside their store. And to be scolded by another servant who wore the same damned apron? I shifted quickly from hot embarrassment to cold anger.

  As Eye led me through the plaza and around a corner, I gasped. Two guards in deep blue uniforms wearing white gloves stood at the entrance to a grocery store unlike any I’d ever seen or imagined. Aisle after aisle of fully stocked shelves sat beyond polished glass. Leaves of various kinds of greens, bright orange and yellow peppers and apples were on display, not even in a vault. Brightly colored boxes and bottles sat on the shelves, just waiting to be scooped up without a thought to rationing.

  Most staggering, there was no line and all the customers in the store took so much they needed big wire carts, not little baskets or hemp bags. The shoppers literally took more than they could carry! The sight brought me close to tears. Grammy had told me about such things. I wished she were here to share the sight.

  Eye took my hand and pulled. “C’mon! I have to show you the best place in the whole Circle!”

  “That wasn’t it?”

  “This way.”

  We came to revolving doors that opened to a tunnel that led to a staircase. As soon as we stepped through, my ears popped. The air was moist and warm. I smelled greenery.

  At the top of the stairs, we were surrounded by trees, bushes and flowers. I looked around, bewildered at the tall oaks, ash and fir.

  Eye stepped under a maple tree and watched for my reaction. “Well?”

  “It’s a little like being home.”

  “Is it, really? Wanda said you were a lamb from a farm.”

  “Not really a farm but surrounded by woods.”

  She seemed disappointed. “Sometimes the trees die in here but they replace them right away so it always looks good.”

  Probably pulled out by the roots and transplanted whole from the woods I’d traveled through to get here, I thought.

  “You don’t like it? At Christmas, we got a couple of chestnuts from a tree over there.” She pointed. “We roasted them over an open fire, like in the Christmas carol. It didn’t really taste very good but it was fun to do.”

  As with the grocery store, Eye and I saw different things. To her, this oasis of nature within New Atlanta was a pleasant nature walk. I’d seen plenty of trees in my life. The Select’s arboretum would have been better used as a greenhouse to produce food.

  “Is there a section for … I don’t know. Tomatoes?”

  “We’ve got greenhouses and rooftop gardens all over the city and up along the railroad tracks,” Eye declared. “But this is the best.”

  As I took in the girl’s enthusiasm, it occurred to me that I was acting like what Grammy would describe as “a bit of a pill.”

  Eye stared at me expectantly.

  “It’s very nice,” I said. “Shall we explore the path?”

  “The arboretum winds around a bit under the helipads. After that, it’ll take us straight to Gate 15.”

  And so it did.

  When we got there, I put my hands over the girl’s eyes.

  Too late.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Gate 15 was a high and wide archway designed to allow the passage of big transport trucks. From the top of the stairs at the exit of the arboretum, we had a clear view of the street beyond the wall. A solitary CSS guard stood on the far side with a garden hose. The water pressure was insufficient to wash all the blood into the gutter.

  Bodies lay in the street. Two more were still slumped against the bars of the closed gate.

  Eye and I froze for a moment. The presence of bodies surprised her. It was not the sight of death that shocked me. It was the arrangement of the corpses that made me gasp.

  The protesters had been shot where they lay in the street. They used their bodies, their deaths, as a message to the Select. The corpses spelled out: EAT THE RICH.

  The emaciated girl who formed the bridge between the pillars of the H was probably no older than Eye. I guessed she’d died between her parents, her head cradled against her mother’s breast, her father dead at her feet.

  I covered the girl’s eyes and led her back the way we’d come. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have seen that.”

  Eye was quiet for some time. We dawdled amongst the arboretum’s trees. Eventually, she spoke. “Why would they do that? That doesn’t solve anything.”

  “I guess they were trying to shock someone’s conscience.”

  “But even if they did, it won’t help them! They’re beyond help! They’re dead! That was stupid.”

  I watched her for a moment and decided to hold my tongue. How could I explain sacrifice to someone who’d never experienced loss? How could I describe desperation to someone who’d never had a single pang of hunger? I may as well have explained magenta to someone blind since birth. Perhaps I should have tried, anyway, but the sight had me shaken up, too.

  With each of us weighed down by our thoughts, it was a long and quiet walk back to the narrow house. I hadn’t expected the protesters to make such a stark demonstration of their sorrow, their rage and their need.

  Eye went to her room and I busied myself with trying to appear useful. As I was about to help Wanda prepare dinner, Kirk and Evelyn called me into the small office off the dining room.

  He slouched behind the desk, disheveled in a wrinkled linen shirt. Evelyn stood against the barred front window, her arms crossed. In her dark blue uniform and bright white belt, shoulder strap and holster for her sidearm, she looked particularly severe. When she told me to sit in the chair opposite her husband, I felt like I was being ordered to take the witness stand. However, they had few questions. This was to be a monologue.

  “On my first day of officer training school,” Evelyn began, “each cadet was given a sheet of paper with a long list of instructions. Our instructor told us to read the whole sheet before we began. The first line asked you to write your name. The second was your serial number. After that, it was an odd bunch of requests. I don’t remember all the details now. Things like drawing a triangle and shouting your name to the rest of the unit. It wasn’t long before the first cadet shouted his name. I was a slow reader and feared that I would be left behind, that I would look foolish. Still, as ordered, I read the whole sheet of paper before I began to follow all the instructions.”

  Kirk interrupted his wife. “Eve, darling, is this really necessary?”

  She winced as she touched her forehead. “Kirk, you know this is a strain for me. Just let me get through it.”

  Scolded, his gaze wandered to the ornate tin ceiling.

  She continued, “I read the whole sheet, or thought I had. I would say I read to the bottom but didn’t really process what I was reading. I didn’t
understand why a couple of cadets snickered as I got up out of my chair, stood at attention and shouted my name. It was only at the end of the exercise that the instructor began screaming at us. The last line on the sheet told us to fill out items one and two and ignore the rest. I was embarrassed, of course. I swear I read it but I was in such a hurry, it just didn’t stick, do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “I can’t hear you!”

  “Yes, ma’am. I understand.”

  “I doubt you do. You see, what I was supposed to take from that exercise was a lesson in listening carefully to orders and following them to the letter. That’s not what I really learned, though. What I took away from that moment was I was not to trust anyone, not even my instructors. From that moment, it has always been difficult for me to trust anyone.”

  Kirk cleared his throat. “This is my wife’s roundabout way of asking why you took Eye to Gate 15 this afternoon.”

  “Eye loves the arboretum. She took me on a tour of some of the Circle today, just to familiarize me with where everything is. When we came out of the arboretum, we were at the far end and, well, we saw — ”

  “We know,” Kirk said. “It is not general knowledge what happened at Gate 15 last night and we would prefer it to stay that way. People are already on edge.”

  “I feel a headache coming on,” Evelyn said in her arch British accent.

  I’d been amused by her pretense at first. I was beginning to hate it.

  “You’ve added to my headaches, Kismet. I wanted to introduce Eye to the complexities rather more slowly.”

  Complexities, I thought. That is a great euphemism.

  Kirk rose and put a hand on his wife’s shoulder but he spoke directly to me. “It’s the Circle versus the world. Every day, goods we need come to us by rail and the AUTONAVs. We are engaged in trade with various countries and regions. Several of those trade partners are, like us, surrounded by war zones. The Atlanta you lived in yesterday is a foreign country. Old Atlanta is an obstacle to the Circle sustaining itself, a barrier to our way of life. You’re new here. Don’t you like it? Isn’t it better than whatever you came from?”

  I nodded, careful to defer meekly, my gaze on the floor at their feet.

  “I’m not sure this arrangement is going to work out,” Evelyn said.

  “I don’t know what Eye told you, but we didn’t try to leave the Circle or anything — ”

  “Eye didn’t say anything about you. She didn’t say anything about what she saw outside Gate 15 but when I found her in her room crying, I checked her tracker and the surveillance cameras. I had a suspicion and it panned out immediately.”

  Despite her complaints, Evelyn’s smile betrayed her glee. She was pleased with herself for her quick sleuthing. The surveillance feeds were all routed to the house next door. She probably figured out where we went and what we saw in the span of a few minutes.

  “I saw you with my daughter,” Evelyn said.

  “Well, that is what Kismet already admitted to,” Kirk said. “And she did get her out of there quickly.”

  The look Evelyn gave her husband might as well have been the slash of a knife. He sat back down and went back to examining the ceiling.

  I don’t know whether she would have banished me back to what they considered a war zone. I didn’t find out because Eye let out a scream from upstairs.

  Evelyn and Kirk rushed for the door and I followed. They hadn’t fired me yet and I was genuinely concerned for Eye.

  At the top of the stairs, Kirk was flushed and panting. Evelyn got to her daughter first. She sat on her bed with one leg extended. She pointed, high up on her thigh. “It’s a spider!” she cried. “And it won’t come off!”

  Evelyn cursed. Kirk stood panting in the bedroom door. I looked at the insect and recognized it for what it was immediately. “It’s not a spider, honey. It’s a tick.”

  Evelyn cursed again. “My expertise is urban warfare. I haven’t had to deal with this. Kirk, call the doctor.”

  Eye moved to pull on the body of the tiny invader but I stayed her hand. “Don’t yank on it. It looks like it’s embedded fairly well. You don’t want to try to pull it out or you’ll leave the head under the skin.”

  “You’ve seen this before?” Evelyn asked.

  “A dozen times, at least,” I said. “There’s a couple of ways of dealing with it. One is with lotion and the other is with heat. If I can have a candle, a match, a jar and a needle, we’ll get that little thing right out.”

  Still pink and puffing, Kirk staggered to the stairs and bellowed for Wanda to bring the items.

  A few minutes later, I heated the end of the needle. Evelyn stood back, her hand to her forehead, obviously in some pain but watching me carefully.

  “Ticks are kind of like bed bugs,” I told Eye. “You can hit ’em with a hammer and they don’t much mind. My grandmother says the only virtue the little things possess is persistence in the face of adversity. To get this little nasty to pull his head out, you have to encourage him gently with a little heat on the rear end. We’re just going to give this bug’s butt a light spanking.”

  Eye smiled bravely as I applied the heated needle. The tick wriggled and began to pull out from sucking her blood. I tipped the insect into the glass jar and held it up for all to see. “There you are. All we need to do is clean the wound a little and your doctor can get this checked out.”

  The girl’s eyes went wide. “It’s out. Why do I need to see the doctor?”

  Evelyn looked worried but it was Kirk who blurted his fear. “We don’t want you to get Lyme disease, honey!”

  “Lyme disease?” Eye echoed.

  Evelyn looked cross with her husband as tears began to well in their daughter’s eyes.

  “The doctor can check it out, but Lyme is unlikely,” I said, trying to sound confident for the girl’s benefit. “You get more ticks like this when the deer population is high so I’m surprised it made it into the arboretum. It’s the red ticks that are the worst. This is not a red tick.” I shook the jar and the insect rattled a little. “They’re nasty little vampires but you won’t turn into Dracula. And even if you did, the doctor has drugs for that, I’m sure, right, Mrs. Rossi?”

  She nodded. When she spoke, all pretense drained from her and the soft Georgian accent came through. “Don’t worry, sugar. We’ve got something for that if worse comes to worst.”

  “But it probably won’t,” I added. “Why don’t you go wash that leg and we’ll find something to put on it, okay?”

  Eye stood and, to my surprise, gave me a fierce hug. “Thanks, Kismet.”

  When she was gone, Evelyn cursed again. “It’s that damn arboretum. She’d go there every day if we let her!”

  “She’ll be okay,” I said. “Dozens of ticks, no Lyme disease so far. I’ve got a long winning streak with ticks. Used to pull ticks and porcupine quills out of dogs all the time.”

  Kirk laughed. “We didn’t know we were hiring a vet.”

  Evelyn gave a grudging smile.

  “Out in the Georgian woods, it’s a common thing. I picked up a lot from my sister and grandmother. No hospitals around Campbellford but we deal with small things in country ways.”

  “Oh, really? Any country medicine for a throbbing headache?” Evelyn asked.

  She was being sarcastic but I pretended the question was serious. “Wanda mentioned that you need a lot of quiet and to sit in a dark room sometimes. We had a neighbor down the road, Lisa Gott. She got migraines like that sometimes. If you catch it early enough, you can often shut it down before it gets going.”

  Evelyn looked up, suddenly interested. “How’s that?”

  “Plunge your arms into cold water. We didn’t have ice but Lisa used to have a stream out back of her place. When you feel the migraine coming, shove your arms into cold water. Sissy says it’s something about rerouting the blood so you don’t get too much in your head when blood vessels dilate. Worked for Lisa. Maybe it’ll work for you.”
/>   Evelyn nodded. “Thank you, Kismet. It may already be too late but I’ll try that right now.” She strode out of the room.

  Kirk stood awkwardly in the doorway. I handed him the jar. “Better have the doctor take a look at that to see if Eye will need any more treatment. Maybe the doctor should see her, too, I don’t know.”

  “To confirm your diagnosis?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Evelyn told me about Campbellford,” Kirk said. “I’m surprised you had any dogs. I thought they all got eaten.”

  “Used to have a lot of dogs around town. Then we had a couple of bad harvests followed by hard winter. We went through two famines.”

  He whispered to be sure no one else would hear. “The caravan massacre didn’t get you through?”

  “I didn’t know many people knew about the massacre outside of Campbellford. It wasn’t reported — ”

  “You think that tragedy only happened in your little town?” He gave a smile that reminded me of his wife. “Evelyn tells me things. With her work, we find out a lot of things regular people aren’t supposed to know.”

  He seemed very pleased with himself. I liked him even less.

  “The massacre got us through the first famine. It was the next winter when there were a lot fewer dogs in town. We worked together to try to survive, pooled our resources.”

  “That must have been hard,” he said lightly, perhaps deceptively so.

  “The day after Valentine’s Day we discovered that someone had pilfered our supplies. Until we could find the missing food, we had to take emergency measures. That’s when the dogs got eaten. We didn’t want to kill our own pets so we traded.”

  “Oh, God!”

  “That bought us another couple of days.”

  “Two days made a difference?”

  “There was a trail in the snow from where we stored the communal rations. That petered out in the woods, but it gave a direction. Some enterprising young person from town suspected a relative of the guy who was supposed to guard the stores that night. It was a nearby farmer.”