Undone: A Dystopian Fiction Novel

by Chad Evercroft

  “We don’t have much a choice, so that doesn’t really matter,” Rick said sneeringly.

  One eye was nearly swollen shut and when he spoke, I saw that his teeth were red with blood. His good eye burned with hate. Matt shrugged, and chuckled.

  “No, not much of a choice, but it just makes it easier for everyone if you don’t argue with us.”

  Chapter 9

  A young woman brought us sleeping bags and pointed to a pile of clothes in a large Tupperware set in the middle of the room.

  “One outfit per week,” she said. “When they get dirty, put them in a garbage bag for washing.”

  Matt winked at her as she walked away, but she didn’t respond. Her body language was exhausted, drooping, and she walked like she carried weights on her arms and legs.

  “That’s Mary,” he said. “Nice girl. Bit on the surly side.”

  I didn’t know if he expected a response, so I just nodded. Matt yawned and stretched his arms above his head.

  “Boy, I’m sleepy,” he remarked. “Like I said, the men sleep during the day, minus a few guards to make sure the girls don’t get in any trouble. Don’t think about trying to sneak out. It won’t work, trust me.”

  Matt patted his holsters. I swallowed hard, tasting iron.

  “Jamal’s girl will show you the ropes. Get you settled. Well, good night!”

  Matt sauntered off abruptly. The other members of his crew filtered away, casting warning looks in our direction. I noted that the twins went back towards the door and took their seats in two lawn chairs facing the room, their guns across their laps. I supposed if anyone were to run towards the doors, they would be met by a spray of bullets. Left alone, we all sat down, though it was more like collapsing, on the sleeping bags. The bags were thin and I still felt chilly. Even with the body heat that was generated by the number of people in the room, the warehouse was not insulated and most of the warmth just escaped right through the walls.

  “I’m sorry, guys,” Rick said, hanging his head in despair.

  “It’s not your fault, man,” Lawrence insisted. “We were way out numbered.”

  “They just snuck up on us,” Rick said, as if he hadn’t heard Lawrence. “We should have just stayed inside, drawn them out.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Tyrsa said. “Don’t think about it.”

  “I’m just glad no one got really hurt,” Beth added. “In a weird way, it’s good that they brought us here. If they just took our supplies and left us, it’d be like killing us. Or they might have just murdered us outright.”

  I nodded. Tyrsa looked at me. She reached out and gingerly touched my head. Her fingertips felt cold on my skin.

  “Are you ok? You don’t look so good.”

  “I’m afraid I might have a concussion,” I said. “My head is killing me.”

  Tyrsa parted her lips to speak, but suddenly stopped. She was looking at something behind me. I turned, and saw a woman approaching us. She wore skintight camo pants, black leg warmers, steel-toed boots, and an Ivy Tech sweatshirt. She walked like she was in charge.

  Jamal’s girlfriend? I wondered to myself.

  “Hi,” the woman said. “I’m Ariel.”

  She looked at us expectantly. For a moment, we didn’t know what she was waiting for.

  “Oh,” Tyrsa said, catching on. “I’m Tyrsa.”

  “Lawrence.”

  “Rick.”

  “Beth.”

  “Morgan.”

  Ariel nodded, looking at each of us intensely in the face as we spoke our names. She made me feel nervous. It felt like we had just joined some kind of army. That wasn’t very far from the truth, though, looking back at it.

  “So here’s how things work around here,” Ariel began, her voice commanding. “This is your spot. You do your sleeping and eating here. If you wanna have sex here, go ahead, we don’t care. Just don’t get anyone pregnant.”

  Weird, I thought.

  “You all get one outfit from the bin over there. One per week. An “outfit” means pants, socks, shirt, and coat or sweatshirt. Since you’re already wearing clothes right now, you get one sweatshirt or coat apiece. When those get dirty, you put them in the pile with the rest of them. Nothing is exclusively “yours” anymore. Same goes with the supplies that came with you.”

  “Came with us.” That were stolen, you mean, I thought bitterly.

  “Food is rationed out at the beginning of every week. Two thousand calories per person. If you think you need more, tough beans. If you actually get sick because it’s not enough, we’ll revisit your individual ration. And we’ll know if you’re faking it, so don’t even try.”

  Ariel was talking as if she was reading from a script. I wondered how many times she had done this speech before. Of the thirty or so people, how many were just like us and had essentially been kidnapped? How many had to be warned about trying to run away or trying to game the system?

  “For water, you each get a gallon a day. That’s for all your cooking and washing, too, so use it carefully. The bathrooms are outside. To go, you need to ask me or one of the guys you met tonight…”

  “Met” tonight. Like we had all been at a house party.

  “...to take you. Garbage goes in a bag and gets buried. That’s one of the girls’ jobs. Any questions?”

  We were all surprised she had asked us that. We glanced around at each other, trying to decide what kinds of questions would be acceptable. Questions like “Why” and “How dare you” would obviously not be a good idea.

  “What are the other jobs for girls?” Beth asked.

  I looked over at her, shocked she had been the first one to speak to Ariel. If she was scared, she hid it exceptionally well.

  “Cleaning, first aid, garbage, any cooking that needs to be done, and laundry.”

  “How is the laundry done?” Tyrsa asked.

  “There’s a laundromat that still works,” Ariel explained. “We still have to use coins, which is why we only wash everything when we have to. Any other questions?”

  Lawrence automatically raised his hand, but fearing that it might appear mocking, hastily lowered it and just spoke.

  “Can...can I ask how long you guys have been here?”

  Ariel seemed to be mulling over whether or not to reveal that information. She frowned at Lawrence, trying to assess his motivation. She must have decided answering wouldn’t do any harm, because she responded after a few seconds.

  “Three weeks,” she replied. “At least that we’ve been in the warehouse. Before that, we were in a dorm, but then decided we needed more people.”

  Three weeks. In just three weeks, a new kind of society had been created to replace the old one. So there was never really such a thing as “true” anarchy. There would always be leaders and followers, or at least people not well-equipped enough to fight against the leaders, so they had to follow or die. I wondered if Matt’s crew, including Ariel, had been responsible for the more organized riots at Ivy Tech and around town. It would make sense. They seemed like those kinds of people. The young woman from before - Mary - returned with a box of food and water. Ariel said a few more things about how the warehouse worked, like what time the girls were supposed to wake up, that sort of thing. Before she left, she told Rick, Lawrence, and I what our jobs would be.

  “Right now, you’re the bait,” she said bluntly. “When it’s dark, most of the boys go out to find supplies. That can mean breaking into houses. As the bait, you guys go first, so if the homeowner is waiting, they attack you first. This distracts them, and then the other guys jump in. Basically, it’s what you probably experienced tonight.”

  “Yes, very clever,” Rick muttered.

  If Ariel heard him, she chose to not respond.

  “So that’s it. See you in the morning.”

  She began to walk off briskly.

  “Wait!” Tyrsa cried. “I think the boys are really hurt. Can we get some Aspirin or something to clean them up?”

  Ariel turn
ed and looked at us for what felt like the first time. Before, her eyes had been distant, so even while she talked to us, it was like she was talking to a video camera. She scanned our faces, examining the wounds, before nodding.

  “Sure,” she said. “Someone will come around.”

  Alone again, we began to take a closer look at our new “home.” Many were wrapped up in their sleeping bags asleep, but others were sitting up in small groups and talking. Everyone looked either our age, younger, or a little older. I wondered what happened to the people who were looted and were “too old” for Matt and his crew. Did they kill them? Leave them alone? I didn’t want to linger on those thoughts. I looked around for anyone I might recognize in the warehouse, but there was no one among the few groups sitting up. Beth began to rifle through the box to see what we had been given.

  “Tuna, turkey, peas, granola bars…” she murmured. “At least they’re giving us nutritious stuff.”

  No one responded. It was hard to feel any gratitude towards the people who had ripped us violently from our home and taken all our supplies. Feeling gratitude was the beginning of Stockholm Syndrome. I’d read about it, about how people would torture their prisoners, and then do something “nice” like giving them a glass of water, and the person who was being tortured would be so screwed up in the head they’d start to feel grateful for tiny, tiny things that were really just methods for manipulation. I didn’t really think Beth would get Stockholm Syndrome though; she was just trying to find a silver lining to the black cloud we found ourselves under. Thinking made my head hurt.

  Where is that first aid? I thought anxiously.

  As if to add insult to injury, the lights went out. Some small lanterns were turned on, breaking the pitch darkness with blue light, but no one reacted. This must be on the schedule. As my eyes adjusted, I could see the groups that had been sitting up settling down in their sleeping bags. I was afraid to try and sleep. I felt Tyrsa move closer to me and run her fingers through my hair. My heart skipped a beat before I realized she was just getting a closer look at my head wound.

  “I’m going to find Ariel,” she said, her tone determined.

  “Are you nuts? That’s way too dangerous. I’ll be fine,” I assured her.

  “It could get infected!” Tyrsa insisted.

  She was right. I struggled inwardly with the fear of approaching our captors and the fear of infection. Thankfully, I wasn’t forced to choose. Someone with a flashlight came our way and a female voice spoke.

  “Are you the guys who need first aid?”

  “Yeah,” Rick said, clambering to his feet. “We need help.”

  The woman hesitated for a moment, shining the light around to see our faces.

  “This way,” she said.

  We followed her as closely as we could, gingerly stepping over sleeping bags and boxes. I looked around for Matt or any of the other men, but I couldn’t see them in the dark. As far as I knew, the twins were still stationed by the door, guns drawn.

  We were led into a small storage room with a few chairs. The shelves were bare except for a single first aid kit, a bottle of water, and some paper cups. That made sense; we wouldn’t be led to the main supply room. That would make it more probable for us to try to escape, supplies in tow. The woman turned on a larger lantern set it on the ground, filling the room with a soft glow. We could see each other’s faces more clearly now, and when I turned to the woman, I immediately recognized her. It was Jenny.

  Chapter 10

  “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.”