Undone: A Dystopian Fiction Novel (4 page)

Beth noticed me watching her and shrugged.

              “I just wanted to see what it might look like. If it got bad,” she explained.

              “It looks…good?” I said, unsure if that was the right word to use.

              Beth laughed. She had a petite laugh, like a child’s. Sometimes it sounded like little bells.

              “Sometimes I start imagining bad things happening, and it helps if I draw it. It makes it more real. Easier to grasp, if that makes sense. Or else it just sits in my brain and gets bigger and scarier.”

              “That makes sense,” I reassured her.

              “See? Even if someone broke the window and tried to break down the door, they couldn’t really do too much damage,” Beth explained, pointing at her drawing. “It doesn’t look as bad as I thought it would.”

              Tyrsa, who had been in the kitchen, emerged with a loose notebook leaf in her hand. She had put her hair up in a ponytail and had a pencil stuck through the elastic band.

              “Ok, so I think I got a good list of what we should get at the store,” she announced, plopping herself down on the couch between Beth and I. “We want whatever is nutritious, cheap, and multipurpose.”

“Like beans and stuff?” I asked.

“Bleh,” Beth remarked.

              “Not
just
beans,” Tyrsa assured her. “God, that would be awful. I’m thinking tuna, veggies, canned fruit...that kind of thing. Like what we have already, but more of it. And lots of drinking water. We can never have enough water.”

              “How long are we preparing for?” Beth asked, leaning her head against Tyrsa’s shoulder and looking at the list.

              “As long as we possibly can, I guess,” Tyrsa mused. “I don’t really have any idea how long this ‘state of emergency’ will last, but we don’t want to come up way too short on essentials.”

              “What else is essential besides food?” I asked.

              “Like in our situation? Or in general?”

              “Both, I guess.”

              “Well, stuff we can use to protect ourselves, like the wooden boards we have. We’ve already got plenty of nails, a hammer...weapons are too expensive, but if we get some kind of fastener like a zip tie, we can fix a knife to the end of a broken broom handle to make a spear.”

              “Whoa.”

              “Yeah, the DIY weapons can be pretty intense. I read online about a kid who made a crossbow out of a PVC pipe.”

              I tried to think of the effort that would entail, but I couldn’t get a firm grasp on an image. The thought of having to use any of those weapons on an actual person was intimidating, especially if they were armed with a gun. The ideal scenario would be simply avoiding that kind of conflict altogether.

I excused myself from the living room and retreated to my bedroom. I suddenly felt very tired. I lay down on my bed, just intending to rest my eyes for a little while, but when I woke it was nearly pitch black. A faint glow came from the living room and I emerged to see the others had lit candles in place of electricity and were eating ramen noodles. I helped myself to a bowl and after I ate, went back to bed. I didn’t want to think about anything until I absolutely had to. That time would come soon enough. The next morning, to be precise, when we went on our emergency supply run.

***

We decided to go to the big grocery store - Marsh - first. That had not been hit in the riots and we were fairly confident it would be open. It was a bit of a longer walk, but it was a nice day and we felt safe all together. The first thing we noticed while walking was the police presence. Police cars and vans were parked along the street, bumper to bumper, and officers with their hands on their belts paced the sidewalks. There were not many people out, but whoever was around, kept their heads down. No one wanted to look suspicious or make any sudden movements. Since we were a group, we felt targeted, but we just kept walking, eyes forward, and tried to nod in the most upright way possible when the police eyed us as we passed. I hadn’t even realized I had been holding my breath until we passed the thickest clump of police and I let out a long sigh of relief.

“You okay, bud?” Lawrence asked, patting my back. “Little jumpy?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.”

There were a lot of security guards at the store. We were stopped at the door and everyone was frisked. The guard apologized a few times, but insisted it was necessary.

“Boss’ orders,” he explained. “We’re staying open normal hours, but we gotta be on the lookout for more looting.”

Cleared for entry, we headed towards the canned goods section to organize ourselves.

“Stick to the list,” Tyrsa instructed us. “You each have a copy. Beth and I will get the food, you guys get the rest, and then come find us, okay?”

I looked at the list to see what we were responsible for.

Batteries, bleach, garbage bags, bandages, duct tape, toilet paper. Got it.

We were familiar with the store, so it didn’t take long to locate the items. We argued about whether to get the cheapest brands or not, because as Rick insisted, cheaper would mean low-quality.

“We should get the medium-priced batteries,” Rick said. “Or we might end up with ones that die right away, and then we’d have to just get more, and that’s not saving money at all.”

Lawrence and I caved, and we chose a brand we were familiar with and knew lasted pretty long. We were taking advantage of a sale on toilet paper when a young woman approached us.

“Hey, you’re Morgan, right?”

I looked at her more closely and recognized her as a girl from one of my classes.

“Yeah. And you’re...Kallie?”

“Yeah!”

She was one of the quiet students, but sweet. She carried a basket filled with canned soup and Oreos, and wore an IU t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I thought I saw a bruise on her cheek, but it might have been a shadow.

“Were you on campus yesterday? During the riot?” she asked.

“I was there when it started!” I exclaimed.

“Oh my god! Really?” Kallie’s eyes widened in excitement.

I told her what I had seen, feeling strangely proud of myself. Rick and Lawrence stood by, unintroduced, and picked at the plastic casing of the toilet paper rolls.

“Did you hear they’re probably going to cancel classes?” Kallie asked, lowering her voice as if it was a secret.

“No! Is it that bad over there?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been back. I’m living with my parents, and they barely let me out of the house today to go shopping.”

“Where did you hear about that?” Rick asked, sounding doubtful.

“I have a friend who works in the President’s office,” Kallie explained. “She said they’d been getting weird calls, like, threatening ones about more riots and protests. The police are all over, breaking up some of the activist groups, trying to weed out who was responsible for organizing what happened.”

“Geez,” Lawrence breathed.

“Yeah. Intense.”

Kallie sighed and looked into her basket.

“Well, I should get going. I told my parents I’d only be gone twenty minutes. Hopefully this all ends soon and things get back to normal.”

“Yeah.”

“See ya!”

We watched her leave. Lawrence began to nudge me jokingly in the ribs.

“She’s cute,” he remarked.

“Sure.”

“Don’t be weird. You can look at girls, you know. You’re not dating.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Rick called us back to task and we gathered the rest of the supplies. After we picked up the bandages, we circled back around the store and found Beth and Tyrsa in the sporting goods section. Tyrsa was deciding whether or not to buy a metal bat that was on sale.

“What do you guys think?” she asked. “Is it worth it?”

Rick took the bat from her and swung it in slow motion. He flexed his fingers on the handle.

“I like it,” he offered. “Could take out someone with a gun if we came at them fast enough with a good swing.”

“Good!” Tyrsa said. “So we have some options for weapons if that becomes necessary.”

She put the bat in the cart.

Between the two groups, we had a decent stockpile going on.

When we went to check out, I counted five police officers hovering by the exit, eyeing everyone closely. The cashiers all looked nervous. The teenager who scanned our items kept his eyes lowered and only glanced up when Beth said
hello
. He smiled back shyly before withdrawing again.

“Your total is sixty- eight dollars and seventy-five cents,” he murmured.

We didn’t have enough money.

We spent a few moments discussing what item to leave behind and decided on one of the battery packs. We had lots of candles and determined we probably had enough batteries for the flashlights and radio. That brought us down to a doable price and Tyrsa counted out the money we had collected the day before.

We carried the bags back home as quickly as we could, painfully aware of how vulnerable we were with our supplies right out in the open. It actually felt good this time around to pass through areas heavy with police; no one would dare try to mug us there. At the apartment, we unpacked our supplies and counted everything twice, and then three times.

“It feels good to be a bit more prepared,” Tyrsa remarked, running her fingers along the rows of colorful cans in the cupboard.

“Yeah,” Rick agreed, swinging the baseball bat around with one hand.

It had been non-verbally decided that the bat would be Rick’s weapon. It looked terrifying in his hands, capable of cracking someone’s skull with a single swing, like a walnut.

We got the wooden planks ready to be put up at a moment’s notice and talked about setting a few of them right outside the windows, hidden in the bushes, with nails poking out of them. I helped Tyrsa snap a broom handle in half and watched her duct-tape a steak knife to one end and smooth down the other so it wouldn’t accidentally poke her. We were lucky she already had a lot of random supplies with her. One of her few possessions was a toolbox complete with a hammer, a set of screwdrivers, lock-pick set, sandpaper, magnifying glass, and a terrifying-looking hunting knife.

“Present from my dad when I went to school,” she explained.

“The knife or the box?”

“Both.”

We were just beginning to relax about our unusual situation when there was knocking on the door, though it was really more like pounding. Lawrence dashed to the door and opened it to find Joe standing on the other side, an upset look on his face.

“Guys, there’s been more rioting,” he said. “Come look.”

Sure enough, the news was covering more instances of looting. This time it wasn’t mostly just students. Much larger groups had begun to descend on the bigger retail stores, like the one we had just visited. The news cameras caught shaky images of people grabbing whatever they could carry, trampling over each other, and fighting with policemen and security guards. Four people had been shot. A security guard had been hit over the head with a shovel someone had picked up from a rack. All schools - including Ivy Tech - had cancelled classes indefinitely.

The governor had declared a state of emergency.

“This is insane,” Joe kept saying over and over again.

“Did the mail guy come?” Tyrsa asked suddenly, turning to Joe.

He looked at her for a moment as if he didn’t understand her question.

“Um,” he finally said, kind of shaking his head, “I don’t know.”

Tyrsa went out to the hallway. The rest of us continued watching the television, our former relief gradually escalating into tight knots of fear.

Tyrsa returned, cursing under her breath.

“He didn’t come,” she told us. “So yeah, still no electricity.”

Oh, yeah,
I thought.

Weird how that had been something that could have slipped my mind. It just went to prove how stressful the situation at large had become. Joe shooed us out of his office, muttering something about having to make phone calls. He seemed to be fighting panic. We shuffled back to our apartment and all sat around the living room. Rick held his head in his hands. Lawrence frowned and kept picking imaginary fuzz off his shirt sleeve. The battery-operated clock we had hanging in the kitchen ticked at an excruciating volume.

Tock. Tock. Tock.

“Should we leave?” Beth said suddenly.

We all looked at her, not sure of what we had just heard.

“What do you mean?” Rick asked.

“Leave. Get out of the city.”

“How? We don’t have a car!” Lawrence reminded everyone.

“We find one somehow.”

“
Steal
one
?”
I asked, dumbfounded.

Beth’s face tightened with anxiety and she ground her teeth together.

“I don’t know!” she cried. “But we do something! We get out somehow! It can’t be safe to just hang around here and wait for people to break down the doors!”

“She’s right,” Rick interjected sternly. “We find a way. We get a bunch of bikes or something. Travel at night.”

“That’s crazy,” I said.

“Crazier than whatever we’re doing now?” Rick asked pointedly.

“Yes!” I replied.

Beth and Rick started talking at once and I raised my voice to match theirs. No one could understand each other, but we just kept talking until Tyrsa broke in.

“Hang on! Everyone, just chill!” she cried.

She held her hands out, waiting for silence. We shut our mouths and waited. She started again, quietly, but firmly.

“It’s too dangerous to leave. My dad told me about this. He said that if there’s looting and people shooting each other and craziness like this, it’s already too late to leave. We try to steal a car, we get shot. Even if we did manage to pull it off, we get carjacked right away. We run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. And those are the
best
scenarios. If we try walking or biking, we’re just asking for trouble. What you’re talking about is called bugging-out, and not even the right kind of bugging-out. You’re only supposed to go if you know exactly where you’re headed, how long it’s going to take to get there, and if you have supplies there. All our supplies are here. We have some security measures in place. Our safest bet is just hunker down here, avoid going to town, and wait it out. More police will come. The National Guard. They’ll bring tanks and tear gas and whatever else they need to stop this city from tearing itself apart. We’ll be okay here. Okay? Does this make sense?”

We all nodded. Tyrsa sounded so rational, so in control. I even felt calm enough to call Mom to update her on what’s going on. She picked up the phone after just two rings.

“I was wondering when you would call,” she said, her tone a little exasperated.

“Have you been watching the news?”
              “Yes. I’ve been worried!”

“Sorry.”

I sat outside on the steps. It had gotten cooler, windier, and felt more like autumn. We had one tree in the yard, and its leaves had very gradually changed from green to red and yellow, from its tips, to where the leaves attached at the branches. It looked like the tree had slowly caught on fire.

“You weren’t involved in any of this, were you?” Mom asked.

“God, Mom, of course not.”

“Well, I didn’t think so, but so many were students.”

“Yeah. But you know me. I like to stay out of trouble.”

“That’s true.”

There was a pause in our conversation. It felt weird, like we both might have had something to say, but were avoiding it. I rubbed my nose.

“So, we’re not going to try to go anywhere,” I said, finally. “It’s not really safe to travel, and we don’t have a car or anything.”

“Okay, if you think that’s really the safest option.”
              “Tyrsa said it was, and she’s really the only one who knows what she’s talking about. Her dad is a prepper and taught her a ton.”

“Oh.”

Mom sounded surprised. I waited to see if she would say anything about the whole prepping thing, but she didn’t. I sort of wished she would. I don’t know what I expected. Something along the lines of, “You’ll listen to Tyrsa, but you won’t listen to me?” would have made sense, but that was too aggressive for Mom. If she really felt bad about it, she’d just mop around, maybe send a passive-aggressive email. I had never openly rejected her prepping tendencies, but I certainly didn’t encourage them. Besides, what she did wasn’t truly prepping. It was just reading about some new potential epidemic and buying a bunch of surgical masks.

“If anything changes, I’ll let you know,” I said. “Don’t worry, okay?”

“Can’t make promises,” Mom replied.

I could hear her smile in her voice and it softened my heart.

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too.”

I sat outside with the phone in my lap for a little while. The air smelled rich, like warm earth and sweet grass. It was almost like things had gone back to normal, and the town so close by was not swarmed with police officers and jumpy civilians.

The rest of the day went by slowly, but I didn’t mind. I worked on some homework I would probably not be required to turn in while Beth, Tyrsa, and Rick played cards. Lawrence, who was used to spending his days going on deliveries or watching TV shows on his computer, tried to read but quickly got bored with his book. He watched the card game until he was able to jump in, and then played until the sunlight started to fade. We lit a few candles around the apartment, adding more as the darkness crept in. When we could no longer put off our hunger, we made omelets and fried potatoes. 

When everyone got tired of playing cards, we started heading to bed, but Tyrsa remained curled up on the couch. She had her feet tucked up under her and leaned against the cushiony arm of the sofa, staring into nothingness. The others retreated to their rooms, but I sat on the opposite end, crossed my legs, and pretended to be occupied with my phone. It was very quiet. Occasionally, we could hear what sounded like fire crackers, and what we feared was gunfire. Sometimes, car headlights would shine through the narrow slants of the wooden planks across the windows, casting slices of light in the dark room. They seemed impossibly bright compared to the candlelight I had gotten used to as the only source of evening illumination.

Tyrsa sighed, and then laughed a little.

“Having these candles around like this reminds me of when I was little,” she began.

“Oh?”

“My dad had this thing where after a certain time, we’d turn off all the lights to save on electricity. We’d light candles and pretend we were camping. In the winter, we’d light a fire in the fireplace and roast marshmallows. I never knew it was because we were strapped for cash. My dad made it seem like just a fun thing we did every night. It was our routine.”

She smiled at the candles, remembering. The flame reflected back in her eyes, giving them a glossy sheen.

“What did your mom say when you told her what’s going on?” Tyrsa asked, breaking her nostalgia.

“Oh, she sounded really worried. She tries to hide it, but I think she’s really scared. I used to get really frustrated about her whole thing with climate change, but I’m starting to think it’s a way for her to distract herself from her other fears. In a sense, flooding and droughts and storms are less scary than mobs or gangs. They’re...bigger, but easier to understand, if that makes sense. When people turn bad, it’s different.”

Tyrsa nodded, looking at me intently. She looked like she knew I had more to say, so I continued.

“My mom has so much fear. It seems like it paralyzes her. She wants to get prepared, get emergency supplies and stuff like we do, but she can’t get organized. She can’t break it down into manageable parts.”

“My mom was the same way,” Tyrsa said. “With fear. That’s why she left. She couldn’t handle my dad’s prepping because it meant she had to think about all the things that could go wrong. I don’t know why some people just can’t figure out how to balance it.”

Tyrsa’s voice was laced with anger. She paused for a moment and I thought she had finished speaking, but she kept going.

“I actually don’t really know why she left,” she said softly.

I suddenly felt very close to Tyrsa. I had never heard her talk about her mom, at least not beyond the bald facts. I wanted to scoot over closer to her, but I stayed where I was, listening earnestly.

“My dad never really tried to explain it. He just said she was scared about the prepping. For a long time, I didn’t know what he was talking about, because the prepping wasn’t really on my radar as anything unusual. We just had a room with cans and stuff that we weren’t supposed to use. It wasn’t like my dad was obsessed with buying guns and building barbwire fences. When I got older, met more people, I figured out that people had different sorts of lives. Maybe my mom wanted that kind of life instead of what we had. That just made me mad.”

“Because your sort of life wasn’t good enough?” I asked.

“Basically. I loved my dad and brother to death. I couldn’t imagine why she would want to leave us. I still can’t really imagine it.”

I thought I heard tears in Tyrsa’s voice, but her eyes were still just reflecting the candlelight, glossy and clear. She shifted her weight so her body was facing me, one foot still tucked under her.

“I’ve really tried, Morgan,” she whispered. “But I can’t do it.”

I couldn’t keep my distance any longer. I moved towards her and she let me put my arms around her. She laid her head on my shoulder and I could feel her take deep, shuddering breaths. She must have known that I loved her. I had loved her from the moment I saw her. It was as if instead of a heart, she had a piece of live coal that radiated warmth through her whole body, which made her eyes smoky, and burned life through her fingertips. Whenever she touched me - a casual hug goodbye or a friendly high-five - her heat soaked into me and made me feel alive.