“Not much in the bedrooms,” Lawrence said, coming up behind me. “Two mattresses. Some textbooks. No clothes, either. Tyrsa says it looks like they might have bugged out.”
I hadn’t known the students very well, but I had seen them around a few times. They looked really young, like freshmen, and not like the sort of people who would take risks. Maybe they had been involved in the protests, or at least knew about them, and took off before things got really bad. That’s how bugging out was supposed to work. I wondered where they were, where they had gone, as we finished searching the apartment for anything useful. Beth found some first aid materials under the bathroom sink and we took them to add to our own stockpile.
Downstairs, we watched the TV in Joe’s office with Jenny. The stock market had just had its worst day in decades. It was strange to see people in suits freaking out. Would they be joining the looting soon? Wearing hundred dollar cologne and fighting over a crate of water in a grocery store? It was hard at first to sympathize with them, but I realized that just because someone wears nice clothes, it doesn’t mean they aren’t in trouble or desperate. Beth still had some very nice pieces of jewelry she had gotten as a child, but she had to eat ramen every night like the rest of us. Someone didn’t need to be in rags and “look” poor to be poor. Especially during these days when financial giants were tumbling down left and right, razing empires to the ground.
***
Protests had begun all across the state and were spreading across the country. The media had done a fine job of painting the students involved in the cafeteria riot as hungry, desperate children who were met with police brutality. They were held up as heroes, as justified rebels, who had gotten tired of being pushed down by “the man.” While I certainly understood the plight of broke young people, the story wasn’t that simple. I had been there at the riot. I had seen the six security guards facing down dozens of furious students. Sure, when things had gotten out of control in town, the police were a little rough, but could anyone really blame them? Because the media loved to simplify the truth and cast people as either heroes or villains, people were forced to choose sides. Angry debates were sparked in Washington D.C. and nothing productive was getting done. Not a real change from the usual.
We did learn something unsettling on the news, something that got our blood boiling. Apparently our situation with the electricity and water was not that unusual. Utilities and everyday services all across the country had started cutting people off. Grace periods were cut short. If you hadn’t paid or had a history of paying late or skipping payments altogether, they shut down your electricity and water.
“Cleaning out the system,” was the way they put it, which was a terrible PR decision.
They were only interested in the people with money, who were financially stable. That applied to very few people in the country anymore.
Tyrsa went to the mailbox and returned with the check, which still sat untouched in the outgoing slot.
“We might as well just keep this money,” she said bitterly, “If they’re not going to give us the time of day anyway.”
She tore the check into tiny little pieces and threw them in the trash. As if on a timer set to go off with Tyrsa’s statement, the lights in the office suddenly went out. Rick opened the mini fridge. It was dark inside.
“Well, crap,” he said.
I still don’t know what exactly triggered the beginning of chaos, but all of the services we had taken for granted started disappearing. First it was our electricity, then the water, the mail, and then the garbage trucks. It had probably been brewing for some time - the degradation of modern society is never just an in-the-blink-of-an-eye thing - but to people like me who weren’t really paying attention to anything but themselves, it happened all at once. I do know that the garbage services went on strike. It wasn’t just the unemployed who were struggling; there was a huge group known as the “underemployed.” The over qualified people who worked long, hard hours at jobs they hated and were not receiving what they needed in return. Bad health insurance, bad hourly pay, strict rules about vacations, sick days, what have you. To keep a job, people had to sacrifice some of their basic needs and couldn’t even really complain about it, for fear of being kicked out the door. Waste management was the first to get hit by the strikes. Inspired by the raw energy of the protests and looting, workers brushed the dirt from their hands, planted their feet, and refused to play along with the system.
Enough is enough. No more exploitation. Are you paying attention now?
It’s amazing how much trash five people can create in just seven days. We did our best to be as clean and tidy as possible, but without running water, we were eating off paper towels and paper plates. We could have used the water we had to wash our regular plates, but that would just be a waste. We needed that water for drinking. We bagged up all our trash at the end of each day and put it on the curb out of habit, but soon we discussed different ways to dispose of it. Burning it was one of the first suggestions, but it sounded disgusting and burning trash could release dangerous chemicals into the air. Besides, we couldn’t burn tin cans. We decided to bury it. We had a little plot of woods behind the building that seemed like the best spot. That same evening, Rick and I took two shovels - one from our stash and the other from Jenny - and spent two hours digging a large, deep hole. It wasn’t a particularly warm evening, but the work was hard for me and I quickly sweat through my T-shirt. The physical exercise combined with being slightly dehydrated and smelling the trash through the bags made me feel ill. When we decided the hole was big enough for the trash we had collected over the week, we threw the bags one on top of the other and completed the task of filling the hole in again.
Sweaty and reeking of dirt and trash, we went back inside. I poured a little water unto a towel and dabbed it under my arms and on my neck before applying a fresh layer of deodorant. It wasn’t much, but we washed the most important areas of our body when we could, just to stay human. Lawrence and the girls were struggling with not being able to wash their hair, which, being long, posed a more present problem than Rick’s and mine.
“I’m so gross,” Beth moaned, retying her hair into a ponytail. “So greasy.”
She shook her hands as if she had just held some revolting reptile and made a face.
Rick rubbed a smear of dirt off his face with a paper towel and smiled. “Well, you look fine,” he assured her.
Beth rolled her eyes. “Yes, Rick, that’s what I was worried about,” she said sarcastically.
I chuckled to myself and turned on my phone. We all kept our electronics powered off to save as much battery as possible, but without a consistent power source, there was only so much we could do. I would turn my phone on for a few minutes each day to send Mom an “I’m still alive” text, but the process of turning the phone off and on was draining the battery. That was something else we had taken for granted: having fully-charged phones and laptops all the time. Without that, we felt cut off from the world. If we didn’t have the clock in the kitchen, we wouldn’t even know what time it was without going out of our way to find out.
When our electronics had completely died on the fourth day after the whole building’s power went out, we took everything to a coffee shop and charged there, but we got dirty looks from the employees, like we were stealing their electricity or something. We decided it would be best to hop from place to place, but those sorts of businesses were closing their doors so the owners could take off to safer parts. There hadn’t been any more big riots in days, but the quiet felt like the eye of the storm. There was something else brewing and no one wanted to be around when it hit.
“We need more water.”
Beth had gathered all the water bottles we had and organized them on the living room floor. We had twelve full bottles left, along with ten cans of pineapple juice.
“With cooking and the little washing we do, we’ll run out quickly,” she elaborated.
We all looked at each other, mirroring
anxiety and frustration. We had hoped things would go back to normal sooner than this, but going back to a store for supplies had always been a possibility at the back of our minds. Since there were no riots or violent protests, the National Guard hadn’t come to Bloomington. Some officers from Indianapolis arrived to support the local force, but it wasn’t as if they could reassure business owners or people with travel options to stay or to not go on strike. Just the possibility of more looting scared people off. Everyone was nervous and avoided populated areas. Like grocery stores.
“We shouldn’t all go,” Tyrsa said. “We need people to stay here and guard the apartment. There might be looters hanging around and waiting for people to leave home so they can break in.”
“Good point,” I said.
“Going to the store is more dangerous than staying,” Tyrsa continued. “We could draw straws to see who leaves. Pull names out of a hat or something. That way it’s fair.”
We all nodded. Beth tore a page from her sketchpad and ripped it into five strips. We all wrote our names and put them in a plastic mixing bowl Tyrsa got from the kitchen. She closed her eyes and reached her hand in.
“Three to go,” she said, “And two to stay. I’ll draw for who stays.”
Tyrsa rustled the paper strips in her fingers for a few seconds before pulling a name out.
“Beth,” she read.
More rustling.
“And Rick.”
Rick looked disappointed that he had to stay, but he didn’t say anything. We agreed to leave in the morning and get it over with. Tyrsa still had the cash from Rick for the electric bill we no longer planned to pay. She wrote a list of what we could buy besides water and more paper plates.
“Dry shampoo,” she said immediately. “I’ve used it before when I’ve been camping, and it works.”
“Thank God,” Beth sighed.
“And we should try to find some stuff to collect water for when it rains. We can’t just keep buying water, it’s not sustainable.”
Tyrsa scribbled away at her list. My stomach groaned, hungry after all the effort exerted burying the trash. We had been cooking our dinners outside over a fire pit we built. It was just a circle we drew and surrounded by rocks, but the little plot of forest supplied enough wood, and the dry autumn leaves and twigs provided ample tinder.
We boiled water and made luxurious meals like noodles, scrambled eggs in a bag, and rice-and-beans. Tonight was more ramen. After we ate, I went straight to bed, exhausted mentally and physically. I had started retiring earlier and earlier as the week had gone by. Even then, I never slept well, and would frequently wake from stress nightmares, clammy and out of breath. Hopefully this supply run would be the last one we’d have to take. I didn’t know how much longer I could take this on-the-verge-of-disaster lifestyle.
Chapter 6
“Oh my god, is that a gun?”
I stood in the doorway of Tyrsa and Beth’s bedroom, staring at the small handgun on Tyrsa’s bed. She quickly snatched it up.
“Yeah, don’t scream, though, Jesus,” she said, exasperated.
“Why do you have a gun?”
“To hunt squirrels,” she replied sarcastically. “Why do you think I have a gun, Morgan? So I don’t get killed or raped.”
“Okay, okay. It just surprised me.”
Tyrsa lifted her shirt and inserted the gun into a holster she had around her hips. She pulled her T-shirt back down to conceal it.
“My brother gave it to me. I haven’t thought about carrying it until now.”
It was nine am according to the kitchen clock and we were getting ready to go to the store. Lawrence was pacing around outside, smoking one of the cigarettes from his “emergency” pack. He only smoked during “emergencies,” which meant whenever he was really anxious, like before a final exam. Rick and Beth were in the living room playing chess, both cross-legged on the floor and still wearing their sleeping clothes.
“Do you really think it’s that dangerous in town?” I asked Tyrsa, lowering my voice.
“I don’t know, Morgan. And that’s the problem. We just don’t know what it’s like or what it could turn into. That’s why I like to be prepared for the worst.”
I started to catch some of Lawrence’s anxiety thinking about what “the worst” could be. Would we walk into the middle of another riot? Would the store be cleaned out? Would we be looking at a scenario where we didn’t have any water? What if the police were really on edge and we looked at them the wrong way? It was impossible to distract myself from those fears as we started to walk into town. It was the first really cold day. Without my phone, I didn’t have any real idea of what the temperature was, but the wind made me shiver through my light sweatshirt. Lawrence puffed like a dragon on the end of his cigarette before tossing it on the ground and stomping it out.
He coughed.
“Ok, let’s do this,” he murmured. “We got this.”
The police were everywhere. There were more than before and I could tell by reading their uniform tags that many of them were from Indianapolis. They lined the streets and paced in front of stores, fingers resting on the triggers of their rifles. The tension in the air was so thick it almost made me choke. We were put in a line to enter the store while one-by-one the police frisked the crowd before we were allowed in. It felt like we were entering some kind of prison camp. Everyone had to take out their wallets and show their IDs and either credit cards or cash. If they could not produce an ID or way they planned to pay for goods, they were sent away. Most people went off without a fight, but sometimes they tried to argue or sneak past.
The consequence for disobedience was swift and unmerciful. It seemed like the police were carrying every possible weapon they could be issued. Tasers, batons, rifles, handguns, handcuffs...a middle-aged man who had tried to plead with the police to be let into the store, to find someone else to pay for water for him, was thrown to the ground and handcuffed, his shoulders stretched much farther back than they were designed to. He let out an agonizing cry, but no one dared come to his aid. He was pulled to his feet and dragged off to a police van. Our state of emergency had become a police state.
I glanced at Tyrsa. She looked nervous, her little handgun no doubt burning a hole in her skin. Right before her turn, the man in front of her was revealed to be carrying a hunting knife, and he freaked out. He grabbed at it and was immediately tackled by three large police officers. They pushed into Tyrsa, nearly knocking her over. A female police officer rushed to her rescue and motioned for her to go inside. Tyrsa was not frisked. I watched her enter the store, relief washing over me.
So far so good.
Lawrence and I had our IDs and money examined, were thoroughly and roughly frisked, and sent inside without another look. Tyrsa was waiting for us by the carts.
“This is really messed up,” she said. “You know what this is, right? On the surface, it makes sense. You only let people into a store if you know they can pay; that way, you don’t have this group that’s almost guaranteed to try to steal stuff. But if you go deeper, it’s systematic survival of the fittest. Only an “elite” gets to have access to food and water. Everyone else is just left in the street. It criminalizes poverty.”
Lawrence and I looked at each other. It was disturbing. It also justified not helping anyone else, like that guy outside who had planned on begging for money.
“But what else can they do?” Tyrsa added, sounding hopeless. “How else do you control a crowd on the edge of panic?”
At least the store was still relatively well-stocked. That was another good thing that limiting the number of people in the store did. If things got worse, the truck services might shut down, which would mean no new supplies would come into town. It would be like an apocalypse movie where all the shelves are completely bare and the few ragtag survivors are picking through rubble. For now, we had some selection, and we needed to take advantage of it.
The first thing we needed was water. That was what was lacking in th
e store. We managed to snatch up two crates - which was all we could afford - and Tyrsa went looking for equipment to build some kind of rain collector in case we ran out of water before things got better.
“I didn’t think I’d ever look forward to snow,” she remarked when she came back with spigot and a packet of screws. “We can melt that and use the LifeStraws to drink it.”
Since we hadn’t been able to shower in a week and it didn’t look like we’d be getting our water turned on anytime soon, we stocked up on Wet Naps and even found some dry shampoo. We lingered in the body wash section for a few minutes, just opening the bottles and smelling them, the sweet and flowery fragrances intoxicating our senses. It felt so good to smell something besides trash and body odor.
“Okay, we should get going,” Tyrsa said, pulling us away.
“Aw,” Lawrence said, putting on a faux whine.
We found our way to the last checkout, where there was a long line of impatient, sad-eyed customers. In total, there were only three cashiers. They must have been really desperate for money to choose to work still. Or maybe they didn’t really have a choice, in the true sense. All three cashiers were middle-aged, in their late 40’s or 50’s. They worked impressively fast, scanning items one after the other, not looking up, and tapping their fingers so fast on the register, it looked like a blur.
“That’ll be forty-five dollars and fifty-eight cents,” the cashier told the man a few people in front of us.
He hesitated, his fingers in his wallet. He looked back at the line of people and then back at his wallet.
“Sir? Did you hear me?”
For a brief moment, it was like the world froze. Everyone stood staring at the man and cashier. Then like a rabid dog, he grabbed his bag with both arms and charged towards the doors. He didn’t make it far. A police officer stepped in his way, using his chest as a barrier. The man smashed into him, spilling cans everywhere, and was immediately thrown to the ground. He failed in his attempt to run, but he had caused a distraction. People who had been waiting in line started to run, too, and the police couldn’t stop them all.
Undone: A Dystopian Fiction Novel Page 5
