Undone: A Dystopian Fiction Novel (7 page)

“We’re almost home,” she said, her voice raspy. “We gotta get home.”

              The suburbs were no longer the violence-free oasis they used to be. People were preparing for a siege. Those who had stayed to guard their homes were boarding up their windows, pounding nails loudly, and stringing barbed wire over fences. Some men sat on their porches, shotguns in their lap. They leapt up when they saw us, all gory from the store, but relaxed when they recognized us.

              “Are you kids okay?” they called.

              “Yeah,” we replied, our voices weak and shaking.

              We walked up the front steps of the apartment. The blood felt cold on my skin, like a sticky layer of ice. All I wanted to do was scrub it off. I would scrub off all my skin if I had to. Rick and Beth gasped when we walked in the door.

              “Oh my god, what happened!” Beth cried, covering her mouth with her hand.

              “We’re fine,” Tyrsa said. “It’s not ours.”

              I ran to the bedroom and peeled off my clothes. I threw them on the ground in a bloody heap. My sweatshirt, jeans, socks, and shoes were all soaked. My T-shirt and underwear were not as bad, but still tinted pink. I stripped naked and, shivering, looked around for something to clean myself with. Lawrence entered, carrying a box of Wet Naps. Without saying anything, he handed them to me and closed the bedroom door before he removed his clothes as well. He was less soiled, but still had gotten bloodstains on his shirt and face. Shaking, I took a handful of Wet Naps and began to rub them on myself. The blood just smeared around at first, but after some more scrubbing, it began to come off. We threw the used napkins in a pile with the clothes.

I had never seen so much blood. No matter how many war movies or gore flicks you see, seeing blood in real life is always a total shock. There’s something about feeling it and smelling it that makes even the most jaded horror movie junkie shudder. Even it being someone else’s blood changes things. I had gotten a really bad cut when I was younger and had dropped a glass on my foot. It cut my big toe right on the first joint where the toe flexes, about two inches below the nail, and bled intensely for at least a minute. I had stuck my foot under the faucet in the shower to wash the blood off before I put on a bandage, but blood just kept streaming in the tub. Terrified, I just grabbed a towel and held it to my foot until the bleeding stopped. The policeman’s gunshot wound wouldn’t stop. Someone else’s blood scared me more than my own, because I was totally helpless. I didn’t know what he felt in those last moments, what he had felt when the bullet pierced his neck. Was he even aware of me bending over him, my hands wrapped around his neck? Did he know how much blood there was?

I couldn’t get the feeling of the blood off me, even after we had used nearly all the Wet Naps. I peered into the bathroom mirror, convinced I could still see traces of it inside my pores. What I would have given for a scalding hot shower. Tyrsa, Lawrence, and I took the clothes out to the yard to burn them. People were still running around the neighborhood, some carrying supplies, and some with scratches and bruises. We covered our mouths and noses as we watched the clothes burn. Since they were still damp from blood, Tyrsa poured a little propane gas over them before she lit the match, to make sure they caught a flame. The gas went up quickly in bright, thick flames, slowly nibbling away at the fabric, which turned black and frayed at the edges. We dug a hole and buried the Wet Naps, a small, crimson-stained mountain of them.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see someone die like that,” Tyrsa said quietly. “And then deciding that I would have to kill someone, too, if they came at me.”

“Which was weirder?” Lawrence asked. “Seeing someone die or thinking about killing someone?”

I thought it was a strange question, but Tyrsa looked thoughtful. She tapped one of the fire pit rocks back into place with her foot.

“Seeing someone die,” she said. “Just thinking about killing someone isn’t that weird, in the moment. If I had to actually do it, it would probably be harder, because I’d have to justify to myself and there would always be doubts about if that was really my only choice. My dad always told me to never hesitate if I really thought my life was in danger. He would have me practice shooting tin cans and imagining they were people with guns pointed at me. But they were still just cans. You can’t really “prepare” yourself, I guess.”

Tyrsa put her hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt. She watched the fire burn steadily, her eyes tired-looking.

“I didn’t like the idea of having a gun,” she mused. “My dad has a bunch. Part of his prepping. That’s the part that always seems crazy. The survivalists who are really unhinged, the ones that end up in the news because they’ve shot all their neighbors or something, they’re always the ones who were ready to kill. I wonder if after they pulled the trigger, they got snapped back into reality - even for just a second - and realized how horrible it is to watch someone die. That policeman...he didn’t look like he even knew where he was.”

When it came to surviving, I never factored in surviving other people. Before, the only real “enemy” was an empty wallet. Surviving just looked like choosing the cheap crackers, working jobs I didn’t like for too little pay, and having to be really clever about stretching out meals or buying school supplies. Now, looking around at people boarding up their doors and our own deadbolt locks, it was clear that the main fears now were human beings. When the clothes had burned up into tattered black rags, we nudged the remnants into a hole and filled it in. Inside, Rick and Beth had nailed the wooden planks against the windows. They blocked out the natural light, so we had to light candles, even though it was daytime. Rick went to see if Jenny wanted him to put up boards for her, too, but he returned with a note and a worried expression.

“She’s gone,” he said. “This was on her door.”

The note read that Jenny and Darcy had gotten a car and left early in the morning. She hadn’t wanted to disturb us and was sorry she had used up so many of our supplies by staying. 

“I’m going to my cousin’s in Kentucky,” the note continued. “He has a farm and it’ll be safer there.”

We all hoped she had gotten safely, but we weren’t especially optimistic. Rick crumpled up the note in frustration.

“She should have let us know,” he said. “We could have at least given her some supplies to take with her.”

We turned on the radio to see if we could find any news about what was going on. Things were not good. A major riot had broken out in New York City, drawing the National Guard’s attention to the East Coast. Even though Indianapolis was still seeing occasional outbursts and the strikes were still going on, nothing “exciting” enough had caught the eye of the media, which in turn would result in help being sent. The same went for Bloomington. Nobody really cared about us. Most of the students had left or, like us, stayed under the radar, so no one was clamoring about human rights or aid. We were just another small town with a lot of poor, angry people and scared, angry cops.

“It’s like this place is an anarchy now,” Tyrsa said. “Everyone looking out for themselves as best they can, even if that means throwing away any law and order.”

Peeking through the slats in the window planks, I could see people still running down the street, carrying trash bags or even luggage. There were some police officers, too, many of them battered and bruised, their uniforms torn or blood-stained. They looked lost, like they had just abandoned their posts and ran. Who could blame them, really? The force had been outnumbered during the first student riot and at the grocery store. There would always be more civilians than police officers. When people were this desperate, chaos would always win.

A month went by, but it felt like I had aged ten years. Each day dragged on, like time was being slowly stretched like a rubber band, and each night was like the band snapped back and hit us in the face. The nights were full of fear and jolted us from the boredom of survival into the danger of survival. Night was when the looters came out.

The first break-in attempt occurred only a week after Jenny and Darcy left. The police presence was essentially non-existent at that point, at least in an organized sense. They might have still been around, but they had chosen to dress in street clothes to avoid being targeted, and were just as worried about getting enough water and food as everyone else was. The radio insisted that Bloomington was being run by the boys in blue, but it didn’t know what was going on. There was no media in town anymore. Local offices had been shut down and looted for anything useful. The police were just people. And people were dangerous.

The looter tried to come in through the backdoor. Rick had taken the deadbolt off of Jenny and Mrs. Gaither’s doors since they weren’t around to care anymore, and re-installed it at the back. At around eleven pm, we heard thumping. I had been asleep on the couch since seven pm, dozing off and on with nothing else to do, and heard the noise first. When I woke Rick and Lawrence, we identified the sound as coming from the backdoor.

“Is it the wind?” Lawrence suggested.

“I think someone is trying to break in,” Rick whispered hoarsely. 

“What do we do?” I asked. “Just sit here?”

“The lock should hold,” Rick assured us. “If it doesn’t, we’ll be waiting.”

Rick got his baseball bat while Lawrence and I held a wrench and a hammer, respectively. We stood in the dark hallway, depending solely on the element of surprise to give us the advantage if someone came bursting through the door. The thumping continued for a good ten minutes, and we could hear voices arguing outside. My heart pounded. I wrapped my fingers tighter around the handle of the hammer, trying to decide how hard I should bring it down on a human head. I thought about what Tyrsa had said, about how easy it was to think about killing someone, but then actually seeing them die would be hard. I didn’t really have a choice. The looters could be armed. It could come down to me or him. And I didn’t really
want
to kill anyone. It might just happen. I wasn’t consciously making that decision. I just had a hammer and a pounding heart and a home with friends I had to defend.

The thumping stopped. We stood in the dark, breathing hard, for another five minutes.

“Are they gone?” Lawrence whispered.

“I think so…” Rick said. “I don’t really want to check.”

“Is there another way they could be trying to get in?” I asked.

“Not that wouldn’t make noise, too.”

We relaxed a little, but not enough to go back to bed. We sat on the floor in the hall, our backs against the walls. It was nearly pitch-black, except for the street light which shone through a narrow crack in the boards we had put up in the front door window.

“Do you ever think things would have been better if we had moved somewhere else?” Lawrence asked suddenly.

“Like where?” I said.

“I don’t know. Anywhere else. Some other little town.”

“It would be the same there. At least, eventually. This economic collapse is everywhere. People were bound to snap. And it would be worse in a city. We’d probably be dead or living on the street or forced to join a gang.”

“That would at least be more interesting than what we’re doing now,” Lawrence said bitterly.

“Don’t be stupid,” Rick replied.

“It’s just so...
boring.
”

That was the hardest part of that month, which was not what I would have expected. We stayed in the house pretty much all day, except to cook our meals, and then at night, of course, we had to lock everything up and pray for dawn. Every day, it was just eating our rationed amount of food - three servings of beans and rice, one serving of canned vegetables, one serving of fruit, one tablespoon of peanut butter - and trying to entertain ourselves. We tried to mix things up. Some mornings we played cards. Other times we played writing games like Hangman or Pictionary. Then Beth led us all in a yoga session, since we wanted to stay somewhat active, even though we didn’t have very many calories to spare. When we started getting worried about our water, we put our heads together and built a rain barrel up on the roof. We traded some of our bottled water for the barrel with our shotgun-wielding neighbor, which was a risky move, but we had nothing else he wanted. To our great relief and joy, it rained that very same night, and we filled our thermoses with the rainwater and drank it through our LifeStraws.

“When it snows, we can boil it and it’ll be safe to drink,” Tyrsa said.

We had essentially given up on hopes of being rescued. All our focus was on making the life we had bearable. For all we knew, this was how it was going to be for a while.

Everything changed after the second break-in succeeded. It was an unusually cold night. We had no heat and for the first time that season, we all missed it. I lay in bed with socks on my feet and hands, wrapped in my blanket, and with a knit cap on my head. I could feel Rick moving above me, constantly shifting, trying to get comfortable. Lawrence was quiet, which meant he was awake, because he always snored.

He sighed.

“Does anyone else feel like their face is freezing off?” he asked.

“Even my balls are cold,” Rick responded.

I was attempting to arrange my blanket around me so no cold air could sneak in, when we heard the thumping again. At first we didn’t say anything, ears perked, hoping we had just imagined it. Then it happened again. A flashlight waved around the room and we all sat up.