Infraction

by Annie Oldham

  Inside is a small waiting area with a few chairs, an office set off by windowed partitions, and two exam rooms with open doors. A door between the exam rooms on the right and the office on the left stands open and all kinds of high-tech machinery loom in there. Every wall and every room has a window that lets in full, bright sunshine. The light warms me. We're on the second floor of the building, and I look out and see trees all around us. We must be on the back side of the building because I can't see the rest of the building or any of the yard below. All I can see are miles and miles of forest stretching into the horizon. With just a thin pane of glass between me and the wilderness, I feel almost free.

  Suddenly Dr. Benedict is standing behind me, and I turn to face him. His dark, flat eyes stare out the window.

  “Beautiful, isn't it?”

  I nod. Does he have any idea I've lived in it for the past few months, that it was my home because it's where I was with Jack?

  He coughs and turns away from the window to pull a digital tablet off his desk. “We'll try to keep this quick. I don't want to throw off your schedule too much. The agents like to keep you busy, and I make it a practice to stay out of the agents' way.”

  He puts his hand on the small of my back and guides me to the room with the machinery. I grab his hand.

  What's all this?

  “Just diagnostic equipment. I need to do a bone density scan. It's something I'm supposed to do with all the workers. If you've been living outside a designated city—which you have—your body may be malnourished. This will help me determine if I need to supplement your diet at all. Then after I'll just have to do a blood draw. Maybe an injection after that and we'll be done.”

  He says it with such unforced nonchalance that I'm put at ease. He sits me at a small table with a white machine on top of it. There's a space just the size and shape for a hand.

  “You just put your hand in there, like putting on a glove. Then the machine will scan the bones in your hand, like an x-ray. It will show me how dense your bones are.”

  As I slide my hand into the machine, Dr. Benedict sits down across from me and presses a few buttons. The machine whirs to life, and I tense for a moment. Dr. Benedict touches my other hand so softly I barely feel the tips of his fingers.

  “Don't worry. It doesn't hurt.”

  He presses one more button and a light shines out from the space where my hand is. Then it's over. The unease I felt ever since sitting down across from the agent fades as quickly as the light does. This can't tell them anything, can it? Maybe I'm just being paranoid.

  Dr. Benedict smiles. “All done with that. Now if you'll just come over here.”

  He stands and leads me to a chair with a small tray attached to either side. We had similar chairs in the colony, perfect for propping up an arm, inserting a needle, and drawing blood. I sit down and offer my arm. Dr. Benedict wraps a length of rubber above my elbow and ties it off with a snap. I flinch.

  “Sorry about that. I'm not good at that part.” His tone is so guilty and vulnerable that I can't help smiling at him. I rest a hand on his and nod. It's okay. I think he understands without me even having to spell it out because he smiles back at me and takes a deep breath.

  He places a small metal tray with a needle and four vials on the other arm of the chair. He removes the needle's protective cap. The sliver of metal glints in the light, and in my mind I see another needle: one that was meant not to take blood, but to take a life. I see two sleeping bodies in the dim room, their chests rising and falling in unison. I feel the summer heat from Dave's room, feel the sweat that beaded up on my forehead, feel the humidity like it was choking me. Mary's hair falls across her face, and her eyes twitch as she dreams. Her life would have allowed me to return to the ocean. Instead I chose to wander, and Jack chose it with me. I never regretted that decision, especially after Jack joined me. I had planned on going alone, finding my own place on the Burn, coming to grips with myself and my choices. Then he followed me, and I never expected to be so grateful to someone in all my life. The sudden reminder stirs something in me. Do I regret that decision now that Jack's not with me anymore, now that I'm trapped here?

  The memories catch in my throat and choke me, and I force myself to swallow them back down. I blink my eyes and look out the window where I'm separated from my freedom by a single pane of glass that seems such an insurmountable obstacle to cross. Do I regret it now?

  “You'll feel a prick for just a second.”

  I watch the needle slide in. The first vial fills with blood. I haven't seen much blood since Jack healed my feet, since Smitty died, since the raiders were blown out of the water by the helicopter. The second vial fills with blood. I close my eyes. Blood brings too many memories with it.

  “Are you feeling okay?”

  I nod my head.

  “Lightheaded, weak?”

  I nod again.

  “It's just the sight of blood.”

  You have no idea, I want to tell him. I've seen far too much of it.

  “You'll be okay in a minute.”

  Do I regret it now?

  Dr. Benedict pulls the needle out and puts a piece of gauze and some tape over the blood dot. “You're okay to stand?”

  I stand without help. I need to get rid of this weakness. If this is where I am because of the choices I've made, I need to own up to it. I need to be stronger. He consults his tablet.

  “Yes, I think we better do an injection. Just a one-time supplement to give you a quick boost.”

  I frown—the idea of being injected with some mystery serum nags at me—but I can't object. He's been kind to me. It's amazing what a little kindness will do.

  Dr. Benedict turns to a small fridge with a glass door. Inside are rows of vials labeled with numbers. He strokes the tablet screen a few more times and frowns. He looks at me out of the corner of his eyes. His sudden uneasiness magnifies the nagging, but what can I say? I'm paranoid of another needle? I'm fully aware how powerless I am.

  He rests a hand on the glass for just a moment and then opens the fridge and pulls out a small vial. He fills a syringe with the stuff and turns to me.

  He smiles, and the dimple on his left cheek deepens. “Just one more needle.”

  I swallow and nod. The needle slips in, and the medicine burns as it's pumped through my veins. I wince.

  “Sorry about that. I should have warned you.”

  I shake my head. It's nothing. It really isn't when I think about all the other types of pain I've faced. Dr. Benedict puts a bandage with ridiculous smiley faces over the injection site.

  “Now you might feel a little funny after this.”

  I grab his hand. Funny?

  “Headaches, nausea, dizziness, that sort of thing. If it gets really bad, tell an agent or one of the soldiers that you need to see me right away.”

  I almost laugh. Those are the side effects that just about anything can give you. He's probably obligated to tell me that. I'm ready to stand up again when Dr. Benedict steps closer. I smell trees and water again.

  “I mean it, Terra. Please come see me if you need to.”

  My eyes focus on his. The plea I hear isn't “if you need to,” it's “please come see me,” and the way he's looking at me doesn't refute it. Could he be just as lonely as everyone else here? But the thought rattles me so much that all I can do is nod.

  Chapter Seven

  A soldier waits for me outside the medical area. As soon as I step through the door, he points with his gun and I follow him. I'm momentarily blind after leaving the bright daylight of the medical area and settle back into the flickering lights of the hallway. The soldier leads me down several corridors, and I smell steam, sweat, and over-cooked vegetables and know we're nearing the cannery.

  He stops just outside the door and waits for me to go inside. As soon as I lose myself in the humidity, Madge squeezes my arm.

  “You okay?”

  I nod. I don't even know what time it is. With the concern on Madge's face
, I'm guessing I've been gone for a while.

  “I've been worried, Kai was worried, Jane was worried.”

  Jane? I ask.

  “The girl you share a cell with?”

  So that's her name. She hadn't told me.

  Madge smiles and leads me toward the agent's desk. “No, I guess she wouldn't. Takes her a while to warm up.” Madge laughs once, a little too loudly, and she glances up to the soldiers on the catwalk. She knows exactly where they are even though I haven't seen her watching them. “It should take me longer to warm up too, but I figure you'll either hurt me or you won't. You'll betray me or you won't. I might as well find out right off.”

  I hope I never betray her, even by accident. She's the first honest person I've come across here. Even Dr. Benedict with his kindness doesn't seem completely honest, and that worries me. I was so trusting in his care. Should I be more careful?

  Madge drifts away as I approach the desk. I offer my arm, and the agent scans my tracker. “Worker 7456, follow me.”

  She leads me through the pots that bubble and steam straight to Lily's jam pot.

  “We've had an opening here.”

  Of course. Who knows how long Lily will be in solitary confinement, and the government still needs its jam.

  “The instructions are on this sheet.” She points to a piece of paper in plastic tacked to the side of the huge heating element. “Follow these instructions exactly and there won't be any problems. Understood?”

  I nod. She eyes me for a moment longer. I hate the way the agents do that—look down their noses like they're contemplating spraying you with bleach and wiping you away. I study her chin so she doesn't see the loathing in my eyes. The pores on her chin are big and she has several small blood vessels close to the surface. A sheen of sweat makes her shiny. Whenever I'd seen the agents before, they looked perfect. Perfectly made-up, perfectly coifed, perfectly dressed. But looking at her up-close gives me a different view. She's a person—a horrible, rotten person, maybe more of a machine emotionally—but a person nonetheless.

  “Get to work.” She turns and clicks away on the ubiquitous heels. Seriously, do they all have identical shoes?

  I turn to the instruction sheet. “Measure 25 lbs of berries, mash in the pot, and bring to a boil with 1 box pectin.”

  I look around and see a huge box of blackberries. Next to it is a large silver scale, but there's nothing to put the berries in to move them to the scale. I remember Lily's purple hands. I dig into the box, gathering handful after handful of berries and moving them to the scale. I've seen the technology available here. Not quite as advanced as in the colony, but capable of making all this production automated. Yet they still want me to measure berries with my bare hands. Everything they do is designed to make me feel so beat down that I have no strength left for anything else. No strength for rebellion. That's what they're doing here. I don't know why it took me two days to realize it. I should have clued in during detox, one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. But why? What do they hope to gain from treating us this way?

  I measure all the berries and then find a huge potato masher with a long handle. I squish it down into the berries again and again until streams of sweat trickle down my forehead. I swipe at it with the back of a hand and smear berry juice across my face. It wasn't this hot yesterday, but now I feel like the sweat pours out of me and my insides are starting to burn. It must be smashing the berries. Shucking the corn wasn't as strenuous.

  I open a box of pectin. As I dump it in, I feel eyes on me, boring into my back, into my skull, into my hands as they study my work. I don't look up. I don't know if I'm being watched by soldiers or agents or both, and frankly, I don't care. I'm trying to do this so carefully because I know if I mess up, they'll pounce.

  Next step: “Add 50 lbs of sugar.” Here's where Lily stumbled. A mountain of sugar bags stands to the right of the pot. I reach for the top one, but it's at head level, and it's too heavy for me to heave off the top without smashing it into myself or dropping it on my feet. Instead I go for one at shoulder level, and I have to tug and pull until it inches free of the others. My arms are already aching by the time I heft it under one arm and bring it to the pot.

  Why don't they have one of the men doing this job? Why are they making a girl of my size or a woman of Lily's age carry around fifty pound bags of anything? I wonder if they secretly (or not so secretly) want us to mess up. It goes along with what I've been realizing. They must get some twisted pleasure in punishing us. My mind rapid-fires through the images of a boot in a face, a boat blown out of the water, the way the agent watched as Lily was dragged away, like it was the best entertainment she'd seen in years. It makes me want to vomit.

  I manage to open the bag and get it to the pot with only a few spilled granules—too small for the soldiers patrolling the catwalk to notice. The eyes are still on me, and I brush my shoes over the sugar, sweeping it under the heating element. The sugar falls into the pot with a soft shushing sound. I watch every granule, and it looks like snow: beautiful, sparkling, and sharp somehow. The sugar glistens as it disappears into the warming fruit, like snow melting. I don't realize my eyes have glazed over until I feel the empty bag compressing under my grip. How long have I been standing here with just a brown bag in my hands? I try to shake the fuzziness out of my head, but it clings. Maybe this is the beginning of one of those side-effect headaches Dr. Benedict warned me about.

  Huge bubbles rise to the surface and pop with loud squelches. I stir the jam constantly—the instructions say five minutes, and I'll cook it to the second—bringing the enormous paddle around the side of the pot. I switch hands to give my right arm a rest when the intercom crackles on.

  “All workers report to the yard.”

  All the cannery workers drop their utensils and file toward the doors. I can't just leave the jam, can I? Soldiers descend from the catwalk and follow behind, shepherding us toward the door. One sweeps by me and stops. I never noticed before, but his mask makes him look like a giant insect.

  “Report to the yard,” he barks.

  I break my gaze from the bulbous insect eyes and gesture to the jam.

  “Not my problem.” He points toward the door with his gun.

  I look back at the boiling fruit. I wasn't a success by any definition of the word when I tried food prep for a vocation, but I'm pretty sure the jam will be ruined if I leave it now.

  “Get moving, worker!” The insect has a stinger and it jabs the hard tip into my ribs.

  I wince and clutch my side. I turn off the heating element. I want nothing more than to glare at the insect, but that will just get me in trouble and my eyes are tearing from the pain in my side, so I glare at the floor instead.

  I slowly make my way down the halls with all the other women. I've never seen so many of us in the halls at once, and I'm lost amidst the blank eyes, limp hair, and identical uniforms. I look for anyone familiar—Kai's dark hair, Madge's red curls, even Jane's stringy blond locks. No one. I'm adrift in an ocean of hopelessness.

  As we filter down the hall, the flickering lights put off too much heat and I'm sweating again. Where did I put my water bottle? I must have left it in the cannery. My mouth is so dry my tongue stump feels swollen, and I roll it around to get some saliva moving. I lift the neck of my shirt up to wipe the sweat from my eyes. None of the insect soldiers are nearby, so I rest my hand on the cool wall for just a moment.

  As I watch the women in front of me, suddenly their heads change and elongate. Horns rise up out of their hair, and the mooing starts at my left, but then circles around behind me and to my right, then gallops down the hall in front of me, and I'm in a cattle chute, surrounded by stamping bovine.

  I shake my head, trying to erase the image. When I open my eyes, willing myself to see the other women, the cows are still there—a rainbow of colors this time, not just browns and blacks and whites—and one of the insects is charging up to me with his stinger brandished.

  I cower aga
inst the wall. I try to push down the panic rising in my throat, but I don't want to be trampled in such a narrow space, and I don't want to be stung again. Then the insect surprises me. It doesn't sting me but grabs me by one arm and hauls me upright. It yanks me down the hall toward a light so bright I have to cover my eyes. I'm drenched in sweat, and I feel like I'm going to fly right into the center of the sun.

  It drags me outside, and my eyelids flutter as I try to assemble the pictures in front of me. The mooing has quieted, and over there the cows are mutating back into women. The sunlight burns down on us like it's much too close. A huge fence separates the yard in two, women on one side and men on the other. Focus, Terra. Knowing where the men are means something, but what? I rub my eyes. Men. Jack.

  I strain against the insect's grip on my arm. The insect. If the cows have become women again, is the insect still ready to sting me? I look at it, and the shiny bulbous eyes melt back into the black mask, and all that's pointed at me is a gun. It's amazing how harmless it looks compared to a mutant scorpion's stinger.

  What is wrong with me? I rub my eyes, trying to make all the white spots floating in my vision disappear. I blink as my eyes fill with tears from the bright sun. What was I even thinking about before I watched the insect turn back into a soldier? And why am I so calm about what I saw?

  I look at the fence and see a familiar halo of brown hair, familiar hazel eyes. Jack stands maybe thirty feet from me. He's so close I feel like I could just reach out and touch him, but the soldier's clamp above my elbow won't let me move.

  “Hold still, worker. There'll be an announcement, and then you need to see the doctor.”

  Dr. Benedict? Why would I need to see him?

  A hush falls over the crowded yard as an agent—the same agent who captured me and Jack in the woods—stands at a microphone. He's trying to keep his face solemn, but there's an annoying smirk playing with his lips. He's sucking on another one of those mint candies. I squint at him. He looks taller than the last time I saw him.