Flowertown (6 page)

“We live in a world where I can legally sell weed but I’ll be put in detention if I litter. Are you really looking for logic here?” They both knew the answer and sat together in silence until the last flashing light went out.

Ellie woke with a jolt when her leg cramped from its bent position in the easy chair. Swearing before her eyes were open, she threw herself to the floor trying to straighten out her suffering limb. The power was still out, the candles long burned out, and the room was black, but Ellie knew Bing’s space well enough to maneuver. She forced herself to stand, the cramp ripping through her calf muscle, her brain demanding her body put its weight evenly on both feet, knowing it would alleviate the spasm. It did, but it took several tooth-grinding moments before Ellie could breathe easily.

She couldn’t remember how she had wound up in the easy chair or how long she and Bing had sat up, looking out into nothing, talking about nothing. She could just make out Bing’s white socks sticking out from beside the plant-covered coffee table. Her mouth was so dry it hurt to swallow and her eyes felt swollen and hot. She wanted something to drink and knew Bing would have nothing in his apartment. He was like an air fern. Ellie sometimes wondered if he actually lived purely on pot.

Pulling her cell phone from her pocket, she unlocked the screen to use the light as a flashlight to navigate her way through the crowded living room. No sooner had she
pointed the screen ahead of her than the phone beeped. She had a text message.

“Are the phones working?” Bing said, his voice strong in the dark.

“Shit, Bing, you almost gave me a heart attack. Have you been awake this whole time?”

“No.” She saw him sit up between two small pot plants, his hair sticking up in every direction. “I was dreaming. I was dreaming the phones were working. Are they?”

“Mine is. Got a message.” She wasn’t going to tell him it was another dosage reminder.

“Is it for me?” Now Ellie could hear the sleep in her friend’s voice.

“Yeah, it’s from Santa Claus. He’s not coming this year.”

“Oh, okay.” He lay back down between the plants, even in sleep mindful of his cash crop. “I’ll check mine in a little bit.”

“Okay, Bing. Sleep tight.”

The emergency lights in the hallway were fading, their batteries unable to keep up with the regular usage from the power outages. Nobody seemed to be moving, and the only sounds Ellie could make out as she headed for the stairwell were the sounds of snores and coughs. The chaos of the night had faded, at least for the residents of her building. The stairs were pitch black and Ellie’s phone spilled light in a stingy little pool at her feet, but after the second flight, her body picked up the rhythm of the steps and she trotted down them without worry, all the way to the third floor. Silence greeted her in her hallway as well, and she didn’t bother looking at her feet as she felt her way by memory down the corridor. She smelled the bathrooms to her right
and knew that it was just a few paces, three doorways on her left, and she would be at her room. Her fingers trailed against the walls, feeling the doorjambs ticking off under her touch, but before she cleared the third and final doorway, she tripped over something in the hallway.

Ellie swore as she pitched forward and landed on the floor in front of her roommate. “What the hell are you doing out here?” Rachel drew her legs up to her chest, rubbing the shins Ellie had trampled. The emergency light down the hall flickered on, and even in the faint light, Ellie could see Rachel was in bad shape. She knelt down beside the girl and held her face between her hands. “Rachel? Can you hear me?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay.” Rachel’s face was cool and damp, her hair stuck in greasy clumps to her cheeks, and her breath was unspeakable. “I fell asleep out here. It was so hot in the room and I kept having to puke. I sat in the bathrooms for a while, but they’re so nasty.”

“Do you want to come back inside now? There’ll be more air inside than out here.” Rachel nodded and let Ellie pull her to her feet. Her clothes were damp to the touch, and a sour smell of copper and sweat wafted off of her with every move. Ellie led her to her bed and then hurried to open the window, wondering if she would ever get used to the smells of Flowertown. She wanted to light a cigarette; she wanted to set the mattress on fire—anything to combat the smell of sweat and vomit that filled the room. She shuddered to think what she would find when the lights came back on.

“Sorry about the smell. I didn’t make it to the bathroom the first time.”

Ellie took a deep breath of outside air before turning back to the room. “Any place I shouldn’t step before the lights come back on?”

“Nah, I hit the garbage can. Bing cleaned it up for me.”

“Bing?” Ellie could imagine her friend doing a great number of things. Emptying a vomit bucket was not one of them.

“Yeah, he was really sweet to me.” The bed creaked as Rachel settled herself in, sitting up with her back against the wall. “He put a cold cloth on my head and everything.”

“You certainly have a way with him. All he does is leave Twinkies on my desk.”

Rachel laughed and groaned at the same time. “Oh please don’t talk about food. He brought me a whole box of Twinkies. Ugh. I almost threw up in his hands. At least it was better than that weird Japanese soup he was bringing me.”

“Oh, now that stuff is nasty.” Ellie sat back on her bed, facing her roommate. The sun was just thinking about coming up, and she could make out Rachel’s shape across the room. “First of all, the only thing Japanese about that crap is that it makes you want to lop off your own head with a samurai sword. He gets it off the dollar shelf, and he buys it by the case.”

“I know!” Rachel laughed again, and Ellie could see she held her stomach in pain but kept on laughing. “He keeps bringing it to me, and I swear it smells just like vomit.”

“I wish it smelled like vomit. He keeps a drawer full of it at work, and every time he heats it up, we have to evacuate the building.” Rachel’s laugh turned into a gagging cough that lasted long enough to make Ellie sit up straighter. “Rachel? Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” The word rasped in her throat and set off another round of choking. “I’m fine. It’s just these meds make my throat so dry and I can’t swallow anything.”

Ellie listened to her struggle to get her breath. “Are you sure it’s worth all this?”

“Absolutely.” Rachel sounded sure. “You have to see what I got in the mail today. I wish the lights would come on.” And like a wish granted, the electricity surged and the overhead fluorescents flickered to life. Rachel gasped in delight, as if she had made the magic happen, but Ellie, seeing her roommate’s face in the harsh light, gasped for a different reason. Rachel was gray. Her skin, her lips, even the flash of her gums and tongue when she smiled—she looked like a puppet made of dull putty. The only color on her face was the angry red blood in her eyes. She looked to Ellie like a dead thing, a giggling, smiling dead thing, and Ellie had to struggle not to react. If Rachel saw her effort, she made no sign of it. Instead she clapped and lunged forward on the bed to pull up a box from the floor.

“Look! Come over here. Aren’t these great?”

Ellie moved to sit beside Rachel, breathing through her mouth to avoid the swirl of odors around her. Rachel forgot her nausea as she pawed through the box and pulled out what looked like a big sequined sock. Laughing, she put her hands inside the elastic and drew them apart.

“See? It’s to go over my hairnet. Isn’t that funny? And look, there’s more.”

Ellie could only stare as Rachel pulled out a bedazzled face mask, ankle bracelet, and a rhinestone-studded box of bleach wipes. It would have been horrible if it hadn’t been making Rachel giggle like a little girl.

“And here’s the best part. Look at this picture!”

She pulled out a glossy eight-by-ten photo of a group of women, or at least Ellie guessed they were women, dressed in a grotesque and colorful version of the containment garb that was the final step to get a pass out of Flowertown.

In the first year of containment, everyone was hopeful when word got out it was possible to get a pass out of the zone. Once people realized what was involved to get that pass and saw what it actually entailed, the list to leave dropped dramatically. First you had to complete a medical check to prove your contamination levels were within acceptable limits. Then you had to undergo a minimum of four weeks of grueling chemical decontamination to lower the levels of HF-16 as much as possible. These levels would only hold, or more accurately the meds would only be tolerated, for forty-eight to seventy-two hours maximum. Even then, you had to wear protective garb to prevent as much skin and hair shedding as possible.

The medical teams of Barlay Pharma assured Congress that the measures were sufficient, but after three reported, and baseless, contamination claims, seventeen states completely banned the admission of any Flowertown émigrés. Strict measures were put in place to monitor the location and containment of anyone with a pass, and as the years went on and rumors grew, more and more cities closed their doors to admission. Many states claimed economic hardship, since special chemical toilets and showers had to be installed, as well as electronic monitoring devices to ensure a Flowertownian didn’t, as Bing put it, “go on a killer pee spree.” Even if family members were willing to shoulder the financial burden to install the precautions in their own
homes, state governments across the country produced legislation to block it. At this point, anyone willing to undergo the horror of temporary decontamination had few choices. San Francisco had three hotels with accommodations. Chicago had one. Both Disney parks had a limited area, and of course Las Vegas opened its arms with seven casinos that met the Nevada EPA safety restrictions. That’s why Rachel’s sister had opted to get married in Las Vegas.

Rachel laughed as she slipped on the paper respirator mask that someone had decorated with full red lips. Her death pallor only made the cartoon grin more ghastly, and Ellie had to dig deep not to recoil. Rachel pulled the spangled hairnet on and slipped the sparkly ankle bracelet over her wrist.

“I told Mom I wouldn’t be able to take these out with me, but she said they made two dozen of them. And they’ve all got different colored paper suits too. Mine is pink, since that’s my favorite color. Abby’s is white since she’s the bride. They’re all going to wear them so I don’t stand out. Isn’t that sweet?”

It was all Ellie could do not to scream. She knew Rachel’s family hadn’t seen her in the clean rooms since she started the detox. The webcam on her computer hadn’t worked in months, and Ellie could only imagine what Rachel’s mother and sisters would say when they saw her, even in her contamination suit. Bing had told her two weeks ago to keep her mouth shut on the topic. Rachel wanted to see her sisters more than anything in the world, and for her, the decon process was worth any agony. For Rachel, the silly sparkly versions of the ugly containment garb showed playful camaraderie with her family. To Ellie, it was a scene from a nightmare.

Rachel was laughing under her mask, waving the bracelet around under the lights trying to make it sparkle. “Only three more days, Ellie. Three more days and I’ll be in Las Vega—” She bent over, choking on her words and covering her mask with her hands. Ellie thought she was getting sick again until she saw the blood dripping through her fingers. Rachel coughed, still covering her face.

“Rachel. Rachel? What’s happening?” She tried to get the girl to turn, but Rachel curled up tight on the bed, clutching the mask. “Are you throwing up blood?” Rachel shook her head and looked up at Ellie with wide, frightened eyes. The mask had turned completely red, making the cartoon lips black behind her fingers. Ellie grabbed a T-shirt from the floor and held it under Rachel’s mouth. “Let me see. Move your hands.”

Keeping her head down so the blood dripped into the mask, Rachel peeled the paper off her face. Blood and saliva dripped in a thick ribbon into her hands and Rachel stared into the wet mess. With her free hand, she poked a finger into the gore, then looked up at Ellie with tears in her eyes. “How bad does it look?”

She pulled back her lips in a terrible smile, revealing a bloody gap where a front tooth had been. Ellie wiped blood off her chin with the shirt, not wanting to look into those desperate eyes. “Well, honey, tell your mom to make you a mask with a big toothy grin.” Something between a laugh and a sob blew out of Rachel’s mouth, showering Ellie in blood and spit. Horrified, Rachel moved to wipe it off but had her hands full of the bloody mask and couldn’t figure out what to do.

“It’s okay, honey. Just…it’s okay.” She put her arms around the filthy, bloody girl and let the tears and spit and blood soak her shirt. It didn’t matter, she told herself. It was an army shirt, and she didn’t know anyone in the army anymore.

Ellie waited until she heard Rachel’s breathing even out before she lit her cigarette. The blood-soaked clothes and pillowcase were balled up in the corner by the door, Ellie promising to launder them, which she knew meant pitching them in the dumpster behind the building. Rachel had held the tooth in her palm for a long moment, afraid and willing to let Ellie decide its fate. Ellie had palmed the tooth and focused on getting the girl into bed to hopefully sleep off even a shade of her dreadful pallor. Rachel had sighed on her way to sleep, her breath raspy, her muscles twitching, but she finally lay quiet.

Climbing onto her bed, back against the wall once more, Ellie lit her cigarette and watched color return to the room as the sun made its way over the building. She didn’t unclench her left fist, the tooth scraping and sliding against her sweating palm. Of course she would throw the tooth away. What else was she going to do with it? Put it under the pillow and give Rachel a quarter? Make a necklace out of it? It was nothing but a dead ganglion of enamel and useless calcium, but somehow the thought of tossing it into the
same garbage can as old cigarette butts and tampon wrappers seemed indecent.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and still unwilling to let loose the tooth, Ellie tucked the cigarette in her mouth and reached awkwardly across her body to fish the phone from her left pocket with her right hand. Smoke from the cigarette drifted into Ellie’s tired eyes so that by the time she got to the phone, she was swearing. When she saw the text, she nearly threw the damn thing out the window.

Med check. 11 a.m.

“Fuck you,” Ellie whispered to the phone. Another med check? She thought the whole idea of quality of life treatment was to let her die in peace, not drag her in and out of the med center every day. It wasn’t going to be easy keeping this a secret if she was constantly being paged. At the very least, she wanted to make sure Rachel got her pass out of Flowertown before telling her the bad news. If there was one thing Rachel did not need, it was anyone vying for her share of sympathy. Ellie blew out a thick ribbon of smoke that caught a sunbeam, sparkling over her roommate’s face. Rachel had turned over, fetal position, facing Ellie, her hair greasy against her cheek. The sunlight did little to improve her color, and Ellie very much wanted to get high at that moment to keep from imagining that color on her own face in the coming months. She had a vague memory of leaving her weed at Bing’s last night and swore once more.

There was nothing to do but head to work. She didn’t want to wake Bing; she only wanted to get high to not have to do any of the things she wasted her days with. The sharp edge of Rachel’s perfect white tooth lodged itself in a wrinkle in her palm. Ellie wanted to squeeze it and crush it to
dust and fling that dust in the face of everyone and everything that had made such a fucking mess of her life. Her life and Rachel’s and Bing’s and all of Iowa’s. She wanted to load the tooth into a gun and shoot it into the face of the next person who walked by her in a Feno uniform. She wanted the tooth to explode like the buildings last night, leaving a crater of waste and destruction in the heart of the earth itself.

She wanted to get high. She wanted to not want anything.

Rachel muttered in her sleep, her hand struggling under the pillowcase, so Ellie slipped off the bed and pulled on her sneakers. Of all the things she did not want, she did not want to see Rachel’s face when the lost tooth was remembered in the mirror. Slipping the tooth into her pocket, she grabbed her cigarettes, badge, and phone and headed out the door.

Flowertown was silent at this hour. Even the damage from the night before didn’t prompt anyone to get an early start to the day. Ellie thought she could still smell traces of the wet burned wood, but over the stench of the decontaminants in the runoff gutters, it was hard to tell. She had learned long ago not to take too many deep breaths in the spill zone. It didn’t matter what the source was, odds were good it stank, so Ellie lit a cigarette and wandered down the empty streets toward the records office. It wasn’t even seven yet and the offices wouldn’t open until eight, but Ellie felt a prickling in her spine and nervousness in her muscles that made walking better than sitting. If this were her old life, this would have been her body’s signal to her to run. She would have put on her sports bra and her expensive
Nikes and run along the lake in Chicago. She would have let the heat and the breath and pounding clear her head and refresh her body, feeding her lungs and muscles, sweat cleansing her skin. Now the hardest work her lungs did was dragging in the heavy clouds of a variety of smokes; the fastest her legs pumped was on ambling strolls like this one. She felt like a perpetually cocked gun that had begun to rust.

Turning the corner onto Avenue Four, Ellie saw a line of army trucks in front of a storage facility, back flaps open, soldiers humping cartons from the building into their holds. Instinctively she searched the men for Guy, then wondered if he would still be reporting for duty. Would the explosions last night hold up his transfer to Feno? Would they change his mind about his decision, if such a change of heart were allowed? She hadn’t bothered to worry about his safety last night. Guy was the sort of man who always charged into the center of a fray and came swaggering out with just enough scars to look cool.

Ellie stood in the middle of the street and lit a cigarette. The soldiers ignored her, if they saw her at all, and she wondered if any of the men she watched had learned, like Guy, they were infected. She wondered if any of them even suspected such a thing was possible. As her fingers once again found the tooth in her pocket, she tried to imagine the fury and the shock these men, these boys, would feel learning the sacred protection meds they so worshipped had forsaken them, razing their haven and bringing them down to the unclean level of the stained Flowertownians they so nobly protected.

“Fuck.” Ellie pulled her finger from her pocket. She had squeezed the tooth so tightly a jagged corner had broken
the skin on the pad of her thumb. Ignoring the long-neglected instinct of hygiene and sanitary concern, she stuck her thumb in her mouth and sucked off the blood. At this point, infection from Rachel’s tooth was the least of her problems. She knew she should pitch it, but again, tossing away a piece of young Rachel’s body like trash disturbed her.

For the first time in years, Ellie wanted to run. She couldn’t remember feeling so agitated and restless. Then she remembered this was the first morning she could recall she hadn’t smoked weed upon waking. It was a mistake she didn’t plan on making again, because awake and hyper at seven in the morning in Flowertown was an abysmal state to be in. The bar on Sixth and Eighth would be open; there were no blue laws around here. But even as she headed in that direction, she knew she wouldn’t drink. The more she woke up, the louder the sounds of the soldiers working around her, the danker the smell of the runoff channels, the clearer Ellie felt her mind becoming.

She passed the soldiers on the corner, meeting each of their stares. They didn’t interrupt their work but followed her with their eyes. She made a wide berth of the trucks but stopped at the corner, watching. They were loading unmarked plastic tubs from the storage building into the trucks. At first Ellie couldn’t think what seemed so strange about the activity until she realized that, in all the time she had watched soldiers working around storage facilities, she had never seen tubs loaded
out
of buildings. She supposed they had to be moved out at some point, for distribution or trash removal or something, but this was the first time she had seen soldiers stacking tubs in trucks rather than tossing them out.

She almost walked up and asked the nearest soldier what they were doing, but caught herself. This sober-in-the-morning thing was making her feel like she had in high school the first time she had snuck a bottle of wine. It was tampering with her decision-making ability. Nobody talked to the soldiers in Flowertown. And not just when they were on duty. There were unofficially segregated bars, diners, even picnic tables where the stained and the clean never met. Ellie supposed there were other pairings like her and Guy and nobody came right out and pronounced a division, but for the residents of Flowertown, the coppery smell of protection meds could not be separated from the drab green or bright red of security force uniforms. Those penny-scented greens and reds were the only ones allowed to own and carry guns, and for the hundreds of country people imprisoned within the zone, giving up their weapons had been a sore spot indeed.

A soldier noticed how long Ellie had been standing and staring and headed her way. She held his stare, taking a deep drag off her cigarette as he approached. There was nothing illegal about standing on the corner, but it was obviously making the men uncomfortable. She waited until he was within five feet of her, his hand resting on his sidearm. Just as he opened his mouth to speak, she flicked her cigarette at his feet and laughed, turning her back on him. She could hear his breath and imagined the glances his fellow soldiers gave her. Just another nut job wandering the streets, they were probably saying. Or maybe not. Maybe those explosions last night had put their nerves on high alert. Ellie made a point of not turning to look back, knowing without
a doubt she was being watched until she turned the corner on the next block.

Dingle’s Market was open, of course. Annabeth Dingle never slept a night and so never bothered to close her little market. Ellie knew lots of people who claimed to have trouble sleeping since the spill, but she believed Annabeth when she said she never slept more than fifteen minutes at a time. Ellie had witnessed more than once Annabeth propped up on her padded stool in front of the curtain to the market’s office, her black and silver hair slipping like a visor over her eyes as her head nodded in quick rabbit dreams. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes at the most, and Annabeth would raise her head refreshed and alert. Well into her seventies, Annabeth often said it was a cruel irony that now that she no longer needed sleep, she was stuck in Flowertown with nothing to do.

Ellie wasn’t certain if she was catching Annabeth in one of her naps or if the old woman was reading the magazine folded in her lap. Either way, she kept her steps quiet, liking the feel of Dingle’s Market. Of all the markets in the zone, Dingle’s still felt like outside. The shelves held nothing the other markets didn’t carry, and today they were even barer than usual, but there was something about the way the shelves huddled together and the handwritten signs popped up like subtitles that maintained the illusion of a small-town market. She didn’t want anything, although she could feel her stomach growling, but ran her fingers along a row of cereal boxes, waiting to see if Annabeth would awaken.

Ellie turned the corner, past a nearly empty display of oyster crackers, and continued her stroll down the canned food aisle. Great gaps in the selection made the wall of
shelves look like a giant checkerboard, small piles of canned spinach and sauerkraut separated by open spaces that had once held more desirable vegetables. Demand for canned hominy had obviously tapered off long before the run on canned corn, despite the two-for-one special advertised on the sign. Ellie did grab two cans of chili with beans, knowing they wouldn’t last long. She didn’t know how Annabeth always managed to keep it in stock, but when it came to canned chili, Dingle’s was often the only game in town. Seeing even more gaps in the shelves before her, Ellie grabbed two more cans, tucking them up under her arm.

She headed to the front of the store to grab a basket, deciding to try to find something that Rachel might be able to keep down later, when she heard voices coming from within the curtained office. Ellie peered around a pile of toilet paper value packs. It was early for anyone to be in Dingle’s, even with Annabeth’s famous round-the-clock service, and Ellie paused when she saw that the old woman still had not moved from her napping position. The voices were low, whispering, and Ellie could hear something being slid across the floor and the sound of cabinets being latched. It was probably just deliverymen bringing in some much-needed stock, she told herself. And it was probably just the novelty of sobriety that was making her stand perfectly still, eclipsed by the toilet paper, not daring to breathe. So much for weed making you paranoid, she thought.

The voices quieted down and Ellie listened for the sound of the back door opening, but as she stared at the unmoving curtain, Annabeth raised her head, looking for all the world as if they had been in the middle of a conversation.

“You’re up early, Ellie. Got the munchies?”

Ellie dropped the cans into the plastic basket and headed toward the counter in the back. “Couldn’t sleep. You know how that is.” Whoever was in the back room had fallen silent. Annabeth took the basket from Ellie and began punching in numbers on the old-fashioned cash register.

“Oh, I know all right. How’s Rachel doing? Did she get her pass yet?” A small metallic clink sounded behind the curtain, but the older woman made no sign of hearing it. Ellie tried not to stare at the curtain.

“Not doing so well. Can’t keep anything down.”

“Well now, why don’t you grab one of those boxes of oyster crackers and take them back to her? My treat.” Ellie turned and grabbed a box and, as she turned back, noticed the curtain flutter then fall still. Annabeth smiled and put the crackers in the bag. “Poor little thing can’t afford to lose any weight. She must want to get to that wedding awful bad.”

“I think it’s as much Vegas as anything else.” Ellie handed her the debit card. “That and getting out of Flowertown.”

Annabeth’s mouth twitched as she swiped the card, but it came up a smile when she looked up. “I can see why a girl would want that. Who wouldn’t?”

Ellie took her card and her groceries and headed back out into the street. She kept reminding herself that she was not high. She was awake and clear minded so there was no doubt about what she knew she had seen. Behind Annabeth, under the curtain, peeking out near the doorframe, had been a box of bullets.