Lockdown

by Nick Kolakowski

  I’m a single woman so I need very little. I have a comfortable room with a bed and small kitchenette in an apartment complex. The toilets and showers are communal. It isn’t Trump Tower, but I’m alive. No rent due, no grocery bills because we are all fed enough, no cost for my education if I decide to start classes again. Felicia is very clear on her protection of women and children. For her, it’s personal. The consequences of abuse are fatal. The Pits, in fact.

  How did it all start? Might want to take that last bite of flauta. It’s going to sound like a cliché, but it all started with the poorest of the poor. Ain’t that always the way? You wanna know how to take the temperature of a nation? Check on the ones left at the bottom. They will let you know if you have motherfucking fever or not. That’s why no one bothered to notice or take action until it was too late. That would have never happened with Felicia. U.S. government-sponsored food was cheap, processed crap that looked barely edible, but governments around the world took the hard line that beggars couldn’t be choosers. Same went for healthcare and education available to a majority of the populations. All these kids around the globe fell ill. Most of them died. Protests and outrage dominated the news coverage, and committees looked for the source of the problem. Suits with red ties blamed it on the same reasons there were all those e-coli outbreaks with lettuce and spinach years past. The world called it a bunch of poor people getting sick and spreading their sickness to others.

  All it took was one elite boarding school and a shipment of organic milk and vegan sausages to change the tune of those in charge. Seventy-five kids, all sick, and taken to the best hospitals. Whatever was in that milk mutated since it killed those on government cheese.

  We now know the free-range, super-cared-for special cows giving the one percent milk, were drinking infected water from a pond located on their idyllic home. The same company also ran a beef processing plant with less-than-hygienic practices that hired illegals at an alarming rate. Turns out, whatever they used to process the beef and their vegan sausages was not fit for human handling. They were bringing in illegal immigrants because the desperate are considered expendable, and the company covered it up. Just like a damn conspiracy film. What did they play last month in the stadium? Some old-time one: “Erin Brockovich.” Yea, it was some Erin Brockovich shit going down. I shit you not.

  Mija, sometimes when your skin is closer to the color of shadow, that is exactly how you are treated.

  For days I lay in bed sweating, scared as hell to eat or drink anything. The situation worsened by the day and my anxiety threatened to take control over my every thought and movement. I didn’t want to shower for fear there was something in the water and it would inadvertently splash into my mouth. That is when I decided to get out. My parents passed, and no siblings made the choice easy for me. Life inside my home and mind was unbearable. I packed quickly and set off for Mexico because none of this was happening south of the border, or remote places that didn’t take part in the food scheme. I’d rather die on a beach in Mexico in a tequila and lime stupor, getting laid every night, or in Guadalajara at the feet of María Natividad Venegas de la Torre, a saint my Catholic father said we are related to. Anything besides a crowd of virus-carrying people fighting over a pack of toilet paper. Don’t they know that, by the time you shit your liver, you lose the ability to know how to use it?

  I made it just in time. The day I left, I took only what I could carry on my back. I knew my car would eventually have to be sold, or I’d have to sell the remaining gas in my tank. I needed to be swift on my feet so I could hide or run at a moment’s notice. The cartels took control of the camps at the border because the Americans were losing control everywhere else. Focus shifted to closing the cities. The cartels patrolled the area while those things were on the loose; infected animals also ran wild, biting and spreading death. People wanted to take whatever they had of value as rationing became difficult to enforce. Half the rich fucks fled to Europe, but many didn’t make it out once the rest of the world closed their borders. Even private planes had to turn back or be shot down before reaching foreign airspace.

  When I reached Mexico, I gave up my car, what little jewellery I had on me, showed a guard my family photo album to prove my ancestry, plus a printout of my DNA from a service that was popular at that time. Second-generation on my pop’s side and fourth on my mom’s side. After all this, I was free to cross into Mexico. They processed me and gave me the job of drone lookout. Mexican American by birth raised in a country that never made me forget I was Mexican first. My skin just a shade too dark to pass for anything but an invader, an inconvenience, like a cold sore, even though I was born there. Felicia welcomed me like a prodigal daughter.

  After Mexico sealed off its borders, so did everywhere else. The Americans left on their own with no allies. If not for Mexico or Canada, all would be lost on this continent. Without the cartels led by our narco queen, chaos would rule. She has brought the underworld to our world, which has made the difference to millions of people. The developing worlds have been given the space to truly develop. All of Felicia’s guns, goons and money created a well-oiled machine made for a part of the world on the brink of collapse.

  Mexico, and South America on a whole, have never been more at peace or successful. Bounty abounds. Fun Fact: Central America is home to one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Production rivals India. They have plants all over. No, not recreational drugs, but shit for the shits, headaches, antibiotics, to name a few. All in our brown hands, including the priceless drug to kill those silent virus motherfuckers. Believe that. A teacher from Guatemala sick of seeing her children suffer created a test and a cure. Felicia wasted no time bringing this woman to the border and giving her a blank check to recreate her discovery. All the foreign-owned maquiladoras were seized and repurposed to bring hope to the world.

  Felicia Garcia brokered deals with the rest of the world to maintain the balance between life and death. Sure, it is a ruthless rule of law that will pluck your heart out with bare fingers, but the rules are very clear. You work, you pay your dues, you don’t fuck with anyone’s shit, you’re all good. Stealing, rape, murder (unless sanctioned by a Jefa) is strictly forbidden. When the shortages hit, the cartels set up a food-for-weapons trade. A dead man doesn’t need a weapon, and a weapon can’t grow maize. Hunger won in the end. Felicia has created a space where only she has the firepower.

  But there is a freedom in this. I feel safe. It’s far from perfect, but it’s all we have: A dystopian tale of rotting flesh, heat and salvation in an unlikely place. The cartel goes for the better-feared-than-loved philosophy. Snitches don’t get stitches. They are rewarded, so keep your eyes open and your hands to yourself.

  We love Felicia because she has reinvested everything back into the country. Look to the sky, that building over there. A banner with her dark brown eyes looking down upon her flock like the blessed La Virgen, but with gold earrings and red lipstick, hair long and blowing in the wind. One hand carries a torch. Its flames burn bright with small viruses dying as they touch the flames. In the other a banner with the image of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Thick vertical scars on her exposed wrists show us that she, too, is a survivor who has bled. She knows sorrow—can’t you see it in her eyes? She is one of us. If only Diego Rivera were alive to paint a great mural in her honor. She is the Miguel Hidalgo of our time.

  North. What about up North? Canada shut its border, but had a harder time fighting the mutants with no wall. The cold months kept them somewhat safe, as the mutants couldn’t withstand the volatile storms of winter. Hell returned with spring. The warmer weather brought animals out to feast on the decomposing bodies until they fell. When the liquid rot seeped into the ground, or washed away with the melting snow, who knew where the virus would find sanctuary? What is laughable is some of the American politicians actually thought the Canadians would allow them to run The States from within their country, not that there was anything to run. America itself was a liv
ing dead thing.

  I don’t know how many are left in what used to be the U.S. The flow of healthy humans has slowed in recent months—lucky for you. I’ve heard rumors there are some who live in remote areas like the mountains, living off the land and what healthy animals are left. We had a few enter, stating the Native American reservations are boltholes that remain safe; everyone who isn’t a member of a tribe is turned away, good for them. Maybe the land will heal itself and they can reclaim it. I’m not too smart, no fancy degree yet, but I think it belongs to them anyway.

  The virus spread exponentially through the U.S. until nothing remained. We watched from the outside, thanking the Gods and Felicia for taking us into their bosom for protection. That is why we owe Felicia our loyalty. Respect her claws as sharp as those of the eagle perched on a nopal cactus. While we work, we recite her Mantra: Love the Cartel and the Cartel will love you back. ¡ Viva La Raza!

  Let’s get back to work. We have a world to fix.

  By Alex DiFrancesco

  There are times that it still flickers out of control. I have a certain way of dressing—jeans not sagging but not tight, loose black t-shirt, black cycle boots—that serves as a kind of camouflage particular to the Outpost. There’s no way to pin those things down, not out here, not where every other person in these dark saloons with the puke and piss gutters under the bar looks the same way. It softens the uncertainty of not always being sure when the change will come on.

  I’ve mostly been able to feel it coming on. If my limbic brain has ever done anything for me, it’s that. In the dimness of the Outpost, with my knowledge and my camouflage, there’s time for me to get out when I have to, to be just another anonymous face.

  The times it surprises me don’t come frequently. They’re not so seldom that I think they’ve ceased, but rare enough that I am sometimes imprudent. Like that night in The Sputter. Keegan was drunk and drooling, and his lack of control made me feel strong. In no time I would have him handing over the keys to his ship, which could travel longer distances than my old cycle, and his transit papers, and I would be piloting out of this pisshole of an outpost. There might be some theft reports, but more than likely no one would believe that it wasn’t the sorry drunk’s own fault he’d been robbed. The fangs probably wouldn’t follow up, and, anyway, I’d be long gone. But there were too many people in The Sputter. I should have known. Good as I am at controlling the change, there are still times it flickers out of control.

  For me, the initial sensation is a feeling like static electricity at my edges. My skin suddenly feels like it doesn’t have a distinct end point—I am all possibility. I feel blurred, like someone who has moved too soon in one of these old photographs you still see sometimes in junk shops down on Patterson Row. I can feel my body strain and push in different spots, mostly my chest and between my legs, but also the bones of my hands and jaw. Things that would move me to tears are suddenly less oppressive. A shift comes into my brain like a gentle wave. Suddenly, the way people speak, the way their hands and eyes move have subtle yet greater meaning to me. Or less. The tide brings words to me, or takes them away as if caught in an undertow.

  “Whassa matter, sweetie?” Keegan said, leaning towards me. The smell of the booze on his breath mixed up with the smell from his rotted-out teeth was too much to bear. Without waiting for an answer, he leaned in for a kiss. No segue, nothing. A classy guy. I leaned back and he fell forward, his face colliding with my left shoulder, just as his hand reached up for my left breast.

  “Bathroom,” I managed, pushing away and sliding off of my barstool. My change takes fifteen minutes at most. It was better to be long out of there when it happened.

  I headed towards the bathrooms, figuring I’d fake that way, then turn and sneak out the front when Keegan wasn’t expecting me to. I suppose it was curiosity that made me linger, looking about. I was searching for whoever had precipitated the change. Whoever had overridden my years of careful training with biological frequencies they probably didn’t even understand they were putting out. Sometimes my change is sexual (and often appallingly heterosexual), so I looked for the sort of woman I’d be attracted to. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a single female in The Sputter that I’d want to take home with me. Who could it be, then?

  I had just about given up on the search when two burly men who had been part-hugging and part-wrestling each other broke apart, and I glimpsed a face: smooth, tan skin and delicate features—a small, celestial nose, two perfectly symmetrical almond-shaped eyes, slightly downturned lips. The person’s hair was short and spiky and a light brown that was almost blond. Not the sort of face you’d expect in that kind of place, ordinarily, but even more so when it was a face you recognized the way I did. And the way those almond-shaped eyes were trained on me, I knew that ey hadn’t forgotten me, either.

  A blurred feeling began to pulse along my edges. My breasts became tight; I felt the tingle of thickening hairs in my pores. I had to get out of there.

  Breaking the gaze between us, I made for the door, the heels of my boots striking the floor beneath me.

  Ducking down the alley behind The Sputter, I paused to catch my breath and collect myself. This was not going to be a normal change, I knew already. Part of it was seeing em. Ey’d been in the state that ey only used to reserve for private moments, moments when we were alone together. Or perhaps it was eir form when ey were there alone with others, and I thought ey only trusted me enough to be that way. Maybe having me think that form was reserved for the times we were alone was just as much of a con as the rest of it had been, like the con I’d just been running on Keegan. It was certainly easier to think of it that way now, after all that had happened.

  As these thoughts ran through my head, I felt the usual pain as my breasts receded into the flat, taut chest muscles they’d been long before I hit puberty, before my body began to shift like a dying supernova giving birth to a wealth of new elements. But the muscles never tightened and rose the way they did in the typical change. I felt my chest become a flat plane with a slight depression in the middle.

  The stomach muscles never came, either, that hyper-masculine washboard that draws lingering stares and invites fingers to trace over it. The bones of my hands were aching and stretching, but not devolving into the painful elongations they were capable of. My fear, the fear I had felt so often when I first met em, when this third change began to present itself in moments of closeness, began to dissipate as I thought of the change as what it had come to represent for me. My form, my true form.

  The buzz and haze at the edges of my skin became full-fledged electricity. I could feel myself losing tone, my body elongating into that beautiful midway place that was somehow the point where I had always longed to arrive. The pleasure sensations began to pop in my brain left and right, and I knew I had to get back to my cycle before I became drunk on them, and it was unsafe for me to pilot the back roads.

  I straightened and tossed my hair out of my eyes. Dark brown and curled, I kept it a messy shoulder-length appropriate for a man or a woman. I felt that shorter was too male and longer was too female. Certainly that was a generalization, but there in Hezama Outpost, where I didn’t have the luxury of leaving, my shaggy curls were another layer of protection like my loose jeans, t-shirt, and cycle boots. They might buy me an extra thirty seconds in any given situation that could mean life or death.

  Life or death. Sounds pretty dramatic. But imagine a place like the Outpost, if you haven’t already been in one. Imagine a saloon like The Sputter. Imagine a guy like Keegan. And then you imagine the big-breasted woman who’s wooing him and reaching for his keys turning into a washboard-stomached man. And you think that all the way through to see how good it goes over. Or imagine another kind of person we get in the Outpost, the kind of person who would love nothing more than for all of this to transpire, but would never admit it to themselves or anyone else. And then maybe you’ll realize why I was out there in that alley trying to get it together enough to get on
my cycle and get the hell out.

  Someone started stumbling towards me then, a burly man dressed much the same as me and everybody else in that filthy saloon. The pleasant static of my transformation jolted into a shock of electricity as my fight-or-flight instincts kicked in. He was coming straight for me. Keegan? Some other guy who had seen too much of what was happening? I tried to steady myself internally despite being torn inside and out in fifteen directions, despite the heady buzz that was flooding my mind as I shifted to my favorite and least easily achieved state. I rooted my boots in the ground, ready to kick out at the first opportunity.

  Then he leaned to the side and started puking his guts out. Some kind of prima donna too good for the puke gutter, it seemed. Fight became flight, and I pushed around him and out to the front of The Sputter, where my cycle was parked in a row of others in various states of disrepair.

  I kicked it into gear and pulled away from the saloon. The only danger now was that I might get too spun out on the good feelings in my brain and have an accident. But I felt back in control. And as I cruised just above the ground, the sounds of my old cycle rumbling beneath me helped put me in the mindset that I was exactly where I should be. That I was reaching a state of exactly who I was. The wind blew back my hair (I never did get used to wearing a helmet) and I felt my body’s stretchings and achings become gentle shiftings, motions towards a blissful center. I almost forgot about those almond-shaped eyes peering at me through the dim light in The Sputter.

  Fai.

  I felt a twinge in a part of me that the changes didn’t usually effect.

  I left home when I was fourteen by the grace of stolen travel papers, and it wasn’t until I was twenty-two that the official letter caught up to tell me my parents were dead and the shack on the wild edge of the Hezama Outpost was mine now. Who knows how long that letter had been floating out there, lost between all my moves and all the shambles of official channels. I never got the details of what took both of them out at once, and considering what they put me through before I left, I never did care. I assumed it was the lingering Illness, that they were some of its last casualties. I still shudder when I think of the shack full of the faith-healers and demon drivers that were meant to “cure” me from whatever spirits they claimed had hold of me when the shifts began. And those are only the tip-of-the-iceberg memories.