Undone: A Dystopian Fiction Novel (10 page)

              “Jenny?” I said, unable to mask the surprise and confused joy in my voice.

              It wasn’t like I was glad she was there, I would have much preferred her being safe somewhere else, but seeing someone I knew I could trust in the midst of so much uncertainty was a huge relief. Someone here was on our side.

              “I recognized you guys out there,” Jenny explained, “But I didn’t want be overheard.”

              Beth and Tyrsa embraced Jenny, all fighting tears. Rick wrapped his arms around Jenny and held her tight. She nearly disappeared in his huge arms.

“Is Darcy okay?” Rick asked, holding Jenny out at arms’ length.

Jenny nodded.

“She’s asleep.”

“Is she...okay? Being here?”

“Yeah. I don’t think Matt had expected to be dealing with kids at all, I don’t know why, but he isn’t such a monster that he thought about hurting her. He almost looked like a decent guy when he saw her. And since I’m a nurse, they really wanted me to come back with them, and they knew I wouldn’t go without Darcy.”

“You’re a nurse?” Beth asked.

“Almost,” Jenny corrected herself.

“What happened? How did they get to you?” Rick inquired, sitting down in one of the lawn chairs.

“They surrounded my car. We hadn’t gotten very far, it was still so early that it was dark outside, and one of the guys just ran in front of me. I had to stop. Then they were everywhere, beating on the windows, yelling. I thought about just driving over them, but then I saw the guns.”

Jenny’s lip quivered at the memory. She inhaled sharply and clenched her jaw.

“They took whatever we had in the car. And the car. They made us walk while one of them drove the car back here.”

“They didn’t drive when they came to loot us,” Lawrence remarked.

“They don’t always drive,” Jenny explained. “Saving fuel.”

“Do they have plans to leave eventually? Expand?”

“I don’t know. They don’t tell me things. I just do the first aid every night.”

She looked us over, and gestured for me to sit down.

“You look pretty bad,” she said. “Your face is covered in blood.”

I hadn’t seen myself, of course, since before the attack. Jenny moistened a paper towel with the water bottle and began to wipe my face. She got off as much of the blood as she could.

“Looks like it came from just one cut here,” she said, pushing my hair back from my forehead.

Some hairs had stuck in the wound and having them pulled away surprised me.

“Ow,” I said.

“Sorry.”

Jenny reached over to the first aid kit and opened it. She pulled out some cotton balls, a bottle of alcohol, and a bandage. The others stood around watching, their skin a bluish gray from the lantern. They looked a little like aliens watching over a surgery on an abductee. I winced as Jenny dabbed my cut with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball. It burned all the through the cut and even the slight fumes from the cotton irritated my eye.

“There’s a lot of bruising,” Jenny said. “Luckily, it isn’t so deep that you need stitches.”

“Have you had to do stitches?” I asked.

“Once,” Jenny replied. “One of the bait guys got slashed with a knife. It was pretty bad. Lucky for him, it was one of the closer houses so he didn’t have to walk far to come back and get patched up.”

“What happened to the guy who cut him?” Beth asked.

Jenny didn’t say anything for a moment. I watched her face as she frowned, concentrated, and lay a bandage across my forehead.

“Jenny?”

“They killed him,” Jenny replied briskly.

Of course they had. Still, hearing it out loud sent a shudder down my spine. It affirmed just how much danger we were in, despite the presence of handouts like clothes, food, and sleeping bags. Those were just a thin varnish over what the situation really was. To me, what was most terrifying about Matt and his friends were how
normal
they seemed. Take away their unusual environment and stick them in a more typical one, like a college campus, and they blended right in. There was nothing obviously psychotic about them. It was easy to look at them and make up excuses for why they were the way they were now, but the truth was that they could be anyone. They could be us, in the right situation.

But I couldn’t think about that now. It made me sympathetic towards Matt and his crew, and that was like gratitude. We were
not
the same. They were the enemy.

After I popped two Aspirins and a swig of water, Jenny examined Rick next. It looked like he had been hit with a blunt object, so he did not have any open wounds. The blood in his mouth was from getting punched, so Jenny gave him some water to gargle. When he spat into the paper cup she held out for him, the water was tinted pink.

“You’re going to have some nasty bumps,” Jenny informed him. “If you don’t already.”

She gingerly touched his head. Rick clenched his jaw, but didn’t complain. She gave him two Aspirins and then it was Lawrence’s turn. His lip had swollen severely since he didn’t have any ice, so there wasn’t much that Jenny could do besides clean and disinfect the split, and give him some painkillers.

“Does Darcy know what this...group is all about?” Tyrsa asked.

“No,” Jenny said, her voice relieved. “That’s the one thing I appreciate about being here; they don’t talk about their raids or anything with her around. And the girls all love her.”

“Girls? Like the guys’ girlfriends?”

“Ariel is the only girlfriend, and the only woman on the “leadership” team. Everyone else was forced to be here. They aren’t happy with the situation.”

That seems important to know,
I thought.

“What about men? Are there others besides who came out tonight?”

“Not really…” Jenny said, and her voice trailed off.

Her eyes took on a haunted look. She was still sitting in the lawn chair opposite Lawrence, with the rest of us standing around. Beth put her hand on Jenny’s shoulder.

“There were others,” Jenny said after a moment. “More bait guys. They didn’t make it after their first few raids. The guy who had to get stitches...he ended up getting shot.”

Rick, who was standing beside me, tensed his body a little and folded his arms.

“I think they aren’t bringing back a lot of guys because they don’t want their core group to be outnumbered by the people they’ve forced to be here,” Jenny hypothesized. “You probably didn’t look around too much out there, but most of them are girls.”

“Because girls won’t think to turn on Matt?” Tyrsa asked sarcastically.

“I guess. They haven’t, so far.”

Tyrsa frowned. We stood quietly for a few moments, mulling over what we had learned. A wave of exhaustion suddenly hit me and my legs felt like lead.

“We should go back,” Jenny said.

She picked up her flashlight and switched off the lanterns, leaving only the single beam of light. She walked us back to our spot, displaying an excellent memory as to where we were situated. She waited till we had all gotten into our sleeping bags before she left us, saying goodnight with a weak smile and a nod. When she was gone, I felt like I was in the ocean right after a shipwreck, the bodies in sleeping bags like pieces of rubble floating around me. The pain pills were starting to kick in, so the throbbing had dulled to a numb ache. I wondered what time it was. There was no longer any ticking clock in the kitchen. I felt homesick. All I wanted was to have that monotonous daily routine back. It was stable. Safe. So what if it was boring? Boring meant I wasn’t worried about dying. Wanting anything else but boredom during times like this was stupid.

I closed my eyes, but even with my exhaustion, I couldn’t relax. My eyes were doing that thing where even when they’re closed, they dart around under the eyelids. I became overly aware of what the darkness looked like, so much so that it was blinding. My body ached. Now that the pain in my head had lessened, other bruises and bumps from the attack surfaced. Lying on a concrete floor with only a thin layer of sleeping bag didn’t help either. My shoulder hurt, either from where the soda can had struck me, or from falling on the ground, or both. I turned over to my back, trying to adjust to a more comfortable position. Rick was on my left, also on his back. I glanced over at him to see if he was asleep. His eyes were wide open, but he might as well have been asleep, given how unresponsive he looked to the world around him. I had never seen him so completely lost within himself. It seemed like he never blinked. He just stared at the ceiling, the light from one of the nearby lanterns just barely illuminating his face.

Poor Rick.

It was clear that he had taken all the blame of our capture on himself. Was it because he was the biggest and the strongest? The oldest? I had never really thought about how I saw Rick, but it was true, I did consider him a leader, along with Tyrsa. Especially when it was just me, Lawrence, and Rick. He was like our big brother. I hoped he didn’t carry that guilt for very long, though if anything happened to any of us on a raid, it would completely break him.

We have to get out of here,
I thought.

There were no other options. Word about the looters must have spread, and everyone would be sitting up in their houses armed with whatever weapons they could find, ready for us. As the first ones in, Rick, Lawrence, and I wouldn’t stand a chance. And we had to think about the girls. Jenny hadn’t mentioned anything about Matt and his crew messing with her or the other women, but it was only a matter of time before that became a problem. It was inevitable. Even if either three of us survived long enough to see that happen, what could we do about it? How could we protect Tyrsa and Beth? And Jenny? And God help us, Darcy?

I shuddered involuntarily.

Can’t think about that.

But I had to. The worst-case scenario was upon us, and I didn’t have the luxury of pushing things to the side just because they were disturbing. I closed my eyes and worried, anxiety carving a hole in my chest like a buzz saw. I opened my eyes again. I lay facing Tyrsa. It had happened by accident, believe it or not. One of the lanterns placed sporadically around the large room was close enough so that I could see her. Her eyes were closed, though I could tell by the crinkle in her forehead that she was awake. My heart swelled, but it wasn’t with love, at least not a love I had felt before. It was more of a sad feeling, like when you look at something you know might not always be with you.

Whatever happens,
I thought,
I’m not going anywhere without you.

I don’t know when I finally fell asleep, but my last thought wasn’t about Tyrsa or even what had just happened to us. It was about Mom. That thought blended into my dreams and I recalled a memory of shortly after my dad died, where she took a sheet of cookies out of the oven and started to cry. I imagined her doing that now. Just standing in the kitchen and crying.

              When I woke, it was bright inside the warehouse. There were skylights and sunshine blazed down through a thin layer of white clouds. When I tried to sit up, my body creaked like I was a thousand years old. Tyrsa was already up beside me, sitting cross-legged on her sleeping bag. She was looking at me, concerned.

              “Are you ok?” she asked.

              She lightly touched the bandage on my head.

              “Yeah,” I said.

              “Here, have some water.”

              I took the bottle from her and drank deeply.

              “What time is it? When did you get up?”

              “It’s eight am,” she said. “Ariel woke us up about an hour ago.”

              Tyrsa handed me a granola bar. I hadn’t thought about hunger since I had been so preoccupied, but seeing food made my empty stomach gnaw at itself. I unwrapped the granola hungrily.

              “It’s laundry day,” Tyrsa continued.

              “Have you seen Matt or Jamal or anyone?”

              “They’re sleeping somewhere else, I think. I haven’t seen them.”

              “Where are the others?” I asked, suddenly noticing Rick, Lawrence, and Beth weren’t with us.

              “Waiting in line to go to the bathroom.”

              She pointed towards the back of the warehouse and I saw a line of people guarded by Ariel and Dirk. One by one, they were taken outside and after a few minutes, came back in. Of course they wouldn’t be given any privacy outside. In the grand scope of our situation, it wasn’t the worst thing by far, but it still made rage rise up in my throat. I finished the granola bar, trying to make each bite last as long as possible.

              I hadn’t slept well. Even though I was sitting up, I dozed while everyone was busy with going in and out of the warehouse. I could hear voices, but they sounded like they were coming from underwater. They muddled together and broke into my dreams, but nothing they said made sense. I was jolted violently from my trance when Ariel snapped her fingers in my face.

              “Hey!” she said, frustrated. “Get up! Everyone’s gotta go pee before I leave!”

              I struggled to my feet, my head swimming. I followed her to the door, not really aware of what was happening. Dirk waited there, and when he grabbed me by the collar and pushed me outside into the cold sunshine, I woke fully. I noticed right away that there was a very thin layer of snow on the ground. It was crunchy and the fractals of ice cracked beneath my shoes.

              “Hurry up,” Dirk said from behind me.

              I glanced back at him. He was standing with his side to me, so he wasn’t looking directly at me, but could see my movements from the corner of his eye. I completed my business and was taken back inside. Ariel had gathered all the girls in the middle of the room and appeared to be giving them instructions. I noticed Jenny on the outside of the circle, with Darcy beside her. Darcy saw me and her eyes revealed recognition, but she didn’t greet me. Jenny must have told her to not show that she knew us. Rick and Lawrence were back in our assigned spot, eating breakfast. I went over to them, overhearing what Ariel was saying in passing.

              “You four with me,” she said. “You newbies stay here today,” Ariel added, indicating Beth and Tyrsa. “You need to prove yourself before you get to go on a trip.”

              Lawrence was eating from a can of tuna with his fingers, looking bedraggled. His shoulder-length hair stuck up in every direction and his eyes were bloodshot. He nodded at me in greeting when I sat down beside him. Rick didn’t look much better; he looked like he hadn’t slept at all. He nibbled at a granola bar and pretended not to be listening to Ariel. She gave some more instructions before the group broke up. Beth and Tyrsa helped stuff armfuls of musty clothes into garbage bags before stepping to the side. The laundry group left shortly afterwards, carrying the bags of dirty clothes. I could see some blood-stained clothing through the opaque material. With Ariel and four girls gone, there were ten of us left, not counting crew members. I took stock of what was going on in the warehouse. Matt, Jamal, Tim, and the twins all slept in the room Jenny had treated us in, so they wouldn’t be disturbed. The guy with the shaved head, Dirk, was assigned as a guard. Ariel said a few words to him on her way out the door. He nodded. When she was gone, he strode over to Rick, Lawrence, and I.

              “You, in the sleeping room,” he said shortly, gesturing with his gun. “Take your sleeping bags and water.”

              His gun was an AK-47. I hadn’t seen one up close until the night before, and in the light of day, it almost looked fake. I didn’t want to get into a situation where that was tested. Rick, Lawrence, and I obeyed immediately and took our sleeping bags into the smaller back room. I glanced back at Beth and Tyrsa. They looked worried, and very small, like kids. Inside the back room, the crew were all sleeping soundly. Some were even snoring. It smelled like cigarette smoke and old sweat. Some playing cards lay unattended on the floor.

              “Don’t even think about trying anything,” Dirk said right before he closed the door. “If you come out before Matt or one of the others, you’re getting the butt of this gun in your face.”

             
Nice.

             
“What if we have to piss?” Rick asked, his voice hard as stone.

              “Wake one of them up.”

              “They probably won’t like that.”

              “Not my problem.”

              We set up our sleeping bags in the corner closest to the door so we could sit with our backs to the wall. We noticed that the first aid kit was gone.

             
Probably didn’t want us improvising some kind of weapon,
I thought.
They do think of everything.

              I unscrewed the cap from my water and took a long drink. Lawrence’s eyes darted around the room, examining each sleeping body, to make sure they were really asleep and not able to overhear.

              “Hello,” he whispered, testing his volume.

              Nobody moved. Lawrence turned to Rick and I, and mouthed the word “Fuck.” His lip had turned deep purple and was so puffy it transformed his face. They had put paper up on the wide, back windows of the room to make it darker, but I could still see everyone much clearer than the night before. We all looked pretty rough.

“We have to get out,” I whispered, my voice barely audible.

“How?”

“I don’t know...on the raid, turn on them right after we break in, take them by surprise.”

“They won’t give us guns, and we can’t take the six of them down with hatchets or whatever they give us. Sticks, probably.”

“Then...when we have to pee...it’s one guard per guy, right? Whip around real quick, hit them with the stream, punch them out, take their gun?”

It would have sounded like a joke in less horrible situations, but Lawrence was dead serious. We were grasping at straws.

“Someone will hear,” Rick said hopelessly. “And it would still be one guy against at least five. I’m sure Ariel has a gun.”

Any idea we thought of was way too risky. The crew always kept together; even if we managed to get it down to one-on-one, we’d still have to face a whole bunch of them later. The crew was vigilant and inherently suspicious; they knew none of us wanted to be here, so they made trying to escape a death sentence. They were so confident they let three new guys in the same room with their leaders sleeping, because what were we going to do? Try to choke one of them out? He would wake up, start flailing around, and wake everyone else up. If we tried to leave without any of them leading the way, Dirk would stop us cold in our tracks. I rested my head in my hands and took a deep breath.

Just try to stay alive,
I thought.
That’s the only doable plan. Survive.

Despite my agonized thoughts, I did manage to doze off. My body was so strained that sleep was its only way to try and recover. I drifted in and out, sometimes almost falling asleep for real, and then snapping back to consciousness. I didn’t want the time to go by quickly. Time was our only friend. It gave us space to wrack our brains for escape ideas and widened the gap between being relatively safe in this room, and out on a raid playing a worm on a hook, just waiting to be gobbled up. Not knowing exactly how much time was passing made me extremely nervous. I would jolt awake and be terrified that hours had passed. I started measuring where a certain beam of light was on the floor and was relieved when I checked it. It was not moving. The beam had just begun to inch back when the door opened a crack. We froze.

Could Dirk hear us from the other side of the wall? I had assumed it was thick concrete, but what if it wasn’t thick enough? My heart pounding, I got up to see what Dirk wanted, but was instead met by Beth peering through the opening, her eyes huge. She gestured violently for me to come out. I turned to Rick and Lawrence and made the same motion. We looked at the sleeping forms of Matt and the others, holding our breath. Nobody moved. Just snoring and heavy breathing. We crept out as quickly and quietly as possible, closing the door behind us. When I turned, I saw that Beth’s hand was covered in blood up to the wrist, and that she gripped one of her art knives. My mouth fell open. I looked to the floor and saw Dirk’s crumpled body in a pool of blood, his jugular cut cleanly all the way across.

“What the hell!” Rick whispered.

              His voice was still too loud and Lawrence nudged him in the ribs.

              “What happened?” Rick mouthed.

              “No time,” Beth whispered back. “Just go.”

              We noticed the warehouse was empty, except for flat sleeping bags and some boxes. All the girls had fled. We didn’t need to be told twice. We sprinted across the warehouse and out the door, closing it quietly behind us. Tyrsa, Jenny, and Darcy were outside waiting for us. Jenny had a black backpack while Tyrsa carried what must have been Dirk’s gun. I hadn’t even noticed that it hadn’t been with his body. Darcy’s mouth fell open when she saw Beth’s bloody hand, but she just gripped her mother’s hand tighter and was quiet.

              “Where are we going?” I asked.

              “Don’t know yet,” Tyrsa said curtly. “Anywhere. Just far away from here. Who knows when the others will be back?”

              “They took a car,” Jenny interjected. “It won’t be long.”

              We took off. I ran like the devil was chasing me. We ran in the opposite direction of the laundromat towards who knows what. It didn’t matter, as long as it was away from the inferno of rage that was bound to erupt from that warehouse. When we couldn’t sprint anymore, we slowed to a more bearable jog.

              “How did you get that knife?” I asked Beth, out of breath.

              “Hid it inside my sock before they broke in the apartment,” Beth replied. “They didn’t think to search there. They almost found it when they looked in my boots, but it’s so small, they just missed it.”

              “Holy shit,” Lawrence breathed hoarsely. “How did you get so close to him without him freaking out?”

              “I had the knife in my sleeve and just walked up with a water bottle. He wasn’t suspicious at all. He put his gun to the side and when he reached out…I covered his mouth so he wouldn’t make noise. He bled out so fast...”

              “Whoa,” Lawrence said. “Didn’t even see it coming.”

              “That’s what happens when you underestimate women,” Tyrsa said triumphantly.

              I looked over at her and couldn’t help but smile at the fire in her eyes

              “Where did everyone else go?” Rick asked.

              “Just scattered,” Tyrsa said. “When they saw Dirk fall, they just ran. It was like they had been preparing for that moment. They moved so fast, and so quietly. Grabbing boxes and water…”

              “Did you know she was going to do that?” I asked Tyrsa. “Stab him?”

              Tyrsa nodded. “She told me. I said I would do it, but Beth said I would raise his suspicions right away.”

              “You are kind of a troublemaker,” I joked.

              I was high on adrenaline. We were far from being safe, but I felt free, like I was a puppet who had just gotten his strings cut. We had a chance.

              “We need to get out of town,” Rick said.

              By now, he was carrying Darcy on his back. She wrapped her small arms around his neck and held on tight, her face buried against him. She was exhausted.

              “Where to? We need some kind of destination,” I said.

              “My dad’s farm,” Tyra said suddenly. “It’s the closest place we’ve got.”

              “Isn’t that in Texas?” Lawrence asked.

              “I didn’t say it was “close,” but last we heard, it was safe. We can’t go back east, it’s just as bad there.”

              We all stopped walking and put our heads together. We needed a car and gas. Who knows what was still open or still standing along the way, and besides, we didn’t have any money. We also needed weapons. We could easily run into more looters beside Matt, looters who would kill us on sight, and we assumed Matt and his crew would be after us after what we had done. We needed to be ready for them. We needed food and water, too.