by Masha Leyfer
“How...how much? We can handle a little extra,” my mother says quietly. But my father shakes his head.
“Not this time around. They’re raising it ten percent.” I slam my spoon down on the table.
“Ten percent? Are they crazy? That’s- that’s obscene!”
“Be quiet, Molly, you don’t want them to hear. Yes, maybe it is a little high, and-”
“A little?”
“-and we might have to sell...well a lot of things, and-”
“What if we don’t pay?”
“You know perfectly well what happens.” My father says. And I do.
Execution.
“There must be towns outside of CGB control. Somewhere we can go, someplace that-” I say, standing up and pushing my chair aside.
“There aren’t,” he cuts me off.
“How do you know that?” I ask, but before he can answer, my mother intervenes.
“Listen, Molly, I know it will be tough, but-”
“But nothing! They can’t do that! How many people in Hopetown can afford a ten percent increase in taxes? None! This is thousands of people that we’re talking about! Thousands of people that will starve or die because all their money is being sucked up, and for what? What is it paying for? Our health? Our town? It’s paying for the senators to get drunk. It’s all for nothing!”
“There’s nothing we can do, Molly.”
“And why not, Mom?”
“Because they have that right and that power. There is nothing we can do.”
“The right?” I sputter. “Really? They have the right? They have the right to make us starve? Because that’s exactly what’s going to happen if we don’t stand do something about this!”
My mother stands up and looks me in the eye.
“Would you rather be on the run for the rest of your life? Would you rather have nothing except for the feeling of hatred and the thirst for revenge? Would you rather find yourself alone and abandoned and realize that you wasted your entire life on an empty whim that ended up helping nobody? Do you want to find yourself in five years questioning and regretting every decision you ever made, wondering why you chose that path and cursing your own name? Would you rather die alone and completely empty inside, having left nothing behind except for stories of what not to do? Because that and only that is what awaits you if you do.” The vehemence in my mother’s usually gentle voice stuns me into submission.
“It’s just- it’s not right,” I mutter.
“Of course it’s not right, but it’s always been like this and it always will be like this, and there’s nothing, nothing at all that we can do to change it.” She smiles sourly. “We just have to learn to live with it.”
The rest of breakfast goes in silence. All of us are thinking about how we will survive the tax increase. I can’t help but think that this year might be our last.
“You alright, Molly?” my mother asks at the end.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m fine.” The lie tastes metallic and wrong on my tongue. “I just overreacted.”
“We’ll be fine,” she says emptily. I nod, equally as emptily.
“I’m time for me to go to work,” I say quietly. “You two be safe, all right?”
“Remember to eat lunch,” is all my father says in reply.
I head to work, empty-handed but full-minded. I have the length of Centre Street to brood on the tax increase.
I still can’t believe it. Ten percent.
They want us dead. They want us dead, otherwise they wouldn’t do this. How did this happen? How could we have ever let this happen?
The fact remains that, no matter what my mother wants me to believe, we won’t be fine. We aren’t fine. And yet we keep repeating to ourselves, to the world: I’m fine, I promise, I’m fine. We don’t believe it anymore. How could we? It’s the most common and the most acrid of lies. And yet, always those same words. Always the same lie, heavy with the weight of the truth it has managed to suppress. When will we stop?
I’m fine. I’m not okay. I’m fine. Help me. I’m fine. When will this end? I’m fine. What did I do to deserve this?
I walk into Thirty One. The bar smells like a bar should: a combination of the acrid smell of cigarettes, the sweet smell of alcohol, and the familiar smell of bile. I have to stop myself from coughing; the air is filled with smoke and dust and the desire to forget.
The head of the bar greets me by number.
“Number fifteen. You’re late.”
“I’m half an hour early, actually,” I mutter and pull my apron off the wall. I take my place behind the bar and wait for new customers to start flowing in. Most of them are already drunk, but my job is to pour out drinks, not question the customers’ life choices.
“Pour me some tequila, hon,” a man says. I can’t help but notice how his eyes skate over my body. I sigh and pour him a glass. I can’t do anything about the customers, and I can’t really do anything about this job, so all I do is pour the tequila that he wants. A couple of hours pass as more drunks stumble in and out of the bar. Some of them tell stories. Most of them are barely comprehensible and the ones that are are rarely worth listening to, but sometimes, somebody will come in with a real story of life before the Blast, and I’ll listen to those will great eagerness, trying to imagine what the world was like, and what my life could have been.
I listen to a pair of men talking in the corner.
“It’s been too long, Philip,” one of them says. “It can’t be much longer now.”
“You’re talking nonsense again,” the man who must be Philip replies. “How many times have you said the same thing and how many times have you been wrong?”
“Not wrong, just not on time,” the other man corrects him. “But you can feel it too, can’t you? That’s why you’re so afraid.”
“I’m not afraid. If anybody’s the coward here, it’s you, John. You can’t keep hiding behind the pretense of a future.”
“It’s no shame to be afraid of a little revolution,” John says taking a drink. My ears perk up at the word revolution and I lean farther over the counter. “And I’m sure as hell not hiding. Just waiting.”
“Waiting for what? The revolution? You’ve seen how the previous attempts have gone. There’s a reason people aren’t trying it anymore.”
“The executions,” John mutters. “Not this time, Philip. The air is thick with revolution. We’ll get it this time.”
“You’re insane, John. Insane.”
“Number fifteen.” I force my energy away from eavesdropping on the conversation and towards the crooked face of my colleague.
“What?” I say, with perhaps a bit more vehemence than I intended.
“We have a drunk in the bathroom,” the other bartender says - there are four of us on duty right now. “Come over here. We’re drawing straws.”
Sometimes we have particularly, well, not well-off customers and they start vomiting in the bathroom. So in the interest of so-called fairness, we draw a short straw for who will drag them outside and clean up the vomit. I sigh as I pick a straw from the clammy hand of my coworker. I unclasp my fingers and wrinkle my nose at the short straw in my hand. Everyone looks at me.
“Guess it’s you this time.”
“Guess it is,” I say, and smile sourly. I have particularly bad luck with the straws. I should have a one in four chance, but in reality, it ends up being more one in two.
I guess my luck just isn’t cut out for this world.
Miserably, I walk over to the bathroom. The door is half open, letting out the noises and the smells. I breathe in as much clean air as I can and walk into the bathroom.
“Sir?” The man on the floor continues vomiting. I sigh and roll up my sleeves. “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”
The man doesn’t react. He only vomits once more. I swallow bile of my own and grab his collar. I need to get back out into fresh air before my breath runs out.
“All right, let’s go, it’s time-�
�� I stop. Through the walls of the bar, I hear a noise.
It’s a bell.
It’s Hopetown’s alarm bell.
CHAPTER 2
I grab the drunk and run back out into the bar. People are already running outside. I join them. Hopetown has survived so much. What could possibly be important enough to ring the alarm bell?
I drag the drunk on my shoulder. I run, as fast as I possibly can. Too slow. The man weighs me down and both of our weights are too much to carry. Too slow. I have to reach the alarm tower before...
I run past the Gate and gasp. It is being closed. There are several men slowly pulling the lever. The Gate comes down in short bursts, creaking in protest while it does. I can’t stop myself from gaping as we go past. The Gate has remained open for more than a decade. The Gate isn’t afraid of anything. Anything.
“Hey! What’s going on?” I ask one of the men closing the Gate.
“They’re telling everyone to go to the bomb shelter,” he barks curtly. “Hurry up.” I gasp again. The bomb shelter. Sweet Jesus, are they nuking us again? None of us will survive if they….
I run down the drunk-filled streets as fast as I can to the bomb shelter. It is eerily quiet as everyone filters through. I search for my parents and meet them at the door.
“Mom! Dad! Are you alright?” I say as quietly as I can, careful not to disturb the religious silence of dejection. I push the drunk into the hands of a guard and let him be escorted inside.
“Molly, there you are! Thank goodness!” All of our voices are muted.
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. They’re just telling everyone to get inside. Someone said that there’s something coming from the forest,” my father says, his gray eyes showing concern in my presence for the first time in many years. Something coming from the forest? I think. Well, that can’t be bombs. That’s a start.
Suddenly, I hear a noise tear apart the silence. A noise I haven’t heard for years, and never expected to hear again. Everyone looks up.
“Is that...a motor?” It can’t be.
“I think it is,” my mother whispers quietly. My jaw drops. A mix of relief, excitement, and exasperation surges through me. Our last electric snow plow crashed years ago. But coming from the forest is a motor vehicle.
A motor vehicle.
That one phrase means so much. It means hope and danger and a chance of something different. My heart pounds even faster than it already is. So much rushes through my head, that I begin to feel dizzy.
“Is someone going to meet them?” I ask.
“Meet them? We’re hiding from them!”
“Wait, Dad, you’re telling me that a motor vehicle, something that is extremely rare nowadays, something that we couldn’t keep alive in Hopetown, is coming out of the forest,” I pause to listen. “And that sound like more than one, if I’m not mistaken, which is more than we’ve seen in the last thirteen years, and nobody wants to know what’s going on?”
“Well...yes.”
I throw my hands up in exasperation. I shoot a glance in the direction of the sound. Nobody is going to meet them, true. But I can’t miss this. I could go myself. But...nobody knows who or what they are. Nobody knows if the motors are benevolent or malintending. Could I face them alone? Almost definitely not. What’s the worst case scenario? I could die. So that’s pretty bad.
Then again, if I don’t find out what the motors are, I might as well die now. I make a decision.
“Screw it!” I spit out. “Then I’m going!”
“What? Molly! What are you thinking?”
“I’m definitely thinking something, I’ll tell you that.”
“No! Molly, are you mad?” My mother grabs my hand.
“Yes,” I respond, freeing my hand. “And you know why? Because this dump has only gotten worse and worse over the last thirteen years. They call it Hopetown, but there has been no hope here. Ever,” I shout in a burst of passion, drawing looks from the rest of the townspeople. “How can you pass up the first chance at hope we’ve had since the Blast?”
“Molly, please, use your head!”
“I am!”
“No, you’re not! You can’t do this! You’re not even a legal adult yet!” My mother shouts desperately. I give her a look. What’s a legal adult? And what am I then? An illegal adult? Hopetown doesn’t even have real laws! My thoughts jump around my mind in an incomprehensible tangle, and the only thing I understand is that I need to find out what the motors are.
“Nobody else is going,” my father pleads with me in a desperate last attempt.
“Exactly,” I growl, and run back before they can say something else. I can feel the eyes of everyone who is still outside pressing into my back, but nobody tries to stop me. Who cares if I die anyway?
The Gate is almost closed when I reach it. I duck under it and run out. One of the guard shouts something at me, but I ignore him and in a moment, the Gate thuds shut behind me, throwing clumps of snow at my back. Whether or not the townspeople want to let me back in is their decision now.
I can hear the motors clearer now. There is no mistaking the sound. I run until the road turns into a forest path and wait.
The forest is dark and I can’t see what’s inside, so I can’t help but be afraid. Excited, but afraid.
My hands are shaking from the fear and the anticipation. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I have the distinct feeling that I shouldn’t be doing it, but I have to. I stare out into the forest with my hands clenched into fists so that they don’t shake.
What comes out of the forest knocks the breath out of me. For the fourth time that day, I gasp, despite myself. I watch in awe as one, then two, then four snowmobiles emerge from the forest. I have never seen so many of them in one place. I quickly bite my lip to keep my mouth closed and put my hands on my hips, trying to exude an air of authority. I’m not sure how well it is working, especially with my wine and vomit stained apron still tied around my waist, but I try my best.
The power of the snowmobiles raises the ungroomed snow from the ground. My eyebrows coat with a thin layer of ice and my hair rises behind me. All of the unknown visitors are wearing helmets and protective glasses, so I can’t see their faces. Their anonymity seems like a shield, and I am suddenly very conscious of what I look like.
The faceless rider in front continues driving until the mobile stands only a few centimeters in front of me. I hold my ground, although I am realistically terrified that it will keep driving straight through me. I can see my face reflected in the lenses of his dark glasses, and I’m glad that it doesn’t look frightened. The rider pulls his glasses up and I see that it is a relatively good-looking young man in his early twenties.
“And who exactly are you, then?” He asks me.
Well.
So much for courtesy.
But two can play this game.
“You’re not in the position to ask questions,” I reply coldly. “Now let me ask: who are you?”
“The less you know, the better,” he replies, adopting my cold tone. I raise my eyebrows.
“Are you inviting a fight?” I challenge him. He rolls his eyes and my anger sparks inside of me, although his reaction is perfectly reasonable. If we were to fight, I would lose, and he knows that.
“Just step aside and let us in, before anybody gets hurt.” He revs his snowmobile a few millimeters forward. I don’t budge.
“Tell me who you are.” I lean forward and place my hand on the handlebar, “And why you’re here, and I’ll decide whether or not I want to let you in.”
I am surprised that I haven’t faltered yet and I’m even more surprised that the snowmobiles haven’t run me through. The adrenaline rush of seeing motorized vehicles and more importantly, other people, people who could be anyone, cancels out the fear.
The young man doesn’t answer me. Instead, he throws a hand toward the back. The young woman on the last snowmobile hops off and walks up to me. She lowers her glasses and looks in
to my eyes. I frown, but don’t break eye contact. There is something oddly mesmerizing about the blueness of her eyes. What is going on? I feel like she is analyzing me, but how can she do that just by looking at me?
After several seconds, she seems to make a decision, although I’m not sure what about. She steps back and nods at the man in the front.
“We are the Rebellion,” he says drawing himself up to his full height so that he looks down on me. “And we just want lodging.”
The Rebellion.
I stop breathing.
The Rebellion.
Here. In Hopetown.
I let go of the handlebar and step back for the first time.
The Rebellion that I’ve idolized for years, the Rebellion that I considered the last speck of hope in the world, the Rebellion that was almost a myth, and now, here they are, in front of me, as real as the fearful tremors in my hands.
How can that be? What does the Rebellion want in Hopetown? I don’t believe it, I decide. It’s too perfect to be true. Things like this simply don’t happen.
But...what if just this once, it did?
My mind floods with emotions I can barely identify, but all I know is that my mind is begging for something, something more, anything more, and more was just dropped at my feet. More has arrived in the form of the Rebellion.
“The Rebellion,” I stammer, “But I thought…”
“You thought what?” The young man says, taking advantage of my hesitation to lean forward and close the last few centimeters between us.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I guess just something… different.”
“Well, here we are. Are you going to let us in or not?”
“Um...yes,” I say forgetting myself. “Wait, no.” I grab the handlebar again in a vain attempt to reassert dominance. It is too late, of course. He can already see that he’s won.
“You can stay one day, and then you leave. And you don’t touch anything while you’re here. One complaint, and I will personally slit all your throats. Are we clear?”
“All right.”
“Do you doubt me?”
He looks at me critically, then decides.