“Fine. It’s so blah and lonely here without you. There’s a new vacancy we can look at—”
“Uh, Ella—” He cringed, bracing himself.
“No! Don’t you say it. Don’t you dare!” Sometimes Ella seemed to know what he was going to say before he said it.
“They extended my contract. I can’t leave for two more months.”
“Tell them you quit,” Ella snapped.
Remembering how she had reacted during her first pregnancy, it was time for the unreasonable Ella. But he knew it was her wonky hormones. “I can’t quit. Not with the baby coming.” He chose his words wisely for all those listening. “Have you checked out our LSC account? We’re like super rich. You can have all the organic produce you want.”
“Duh, I already get all the organic produce I want because I’m pregnant.”
“Um, well, uh, start ordering diapers and rattles and stuff,” Justin quipped.
“It’s so weird,” she whispered. “There are no baby things on MeBuy.”
Why was he not surprised? You’d think they would at least offer baby items. Not everyone knew what he knew. Maybe baby items were too painful for all the childless parents, a reminder civilization had not recovered from the pandemic.
“I’ll ask around. What about the flea market in Zhetto?” Okay, he had built his way up to what he needed to say. The next part was going to totally freak her out. Careful. “Hey, you should go. It’s the rage. I can get you a Zhetto Bus Tour pass with our new zone ranking. I’ve been craving Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup. One of my coworkers said they sell it at the Lost and Found Stuff tent.” It was a stretch. Would she catch on to his double meaning?
“You want me to go to Zhetto with our baby?” Her voice continued to escalate. “You’re cuh-ray-zee. I wouldn’t even go there if I wasn’t pregnant. Wait—did you just say chicken noodle soup?”
Justin nodded slowly and forced his lips into a slight frown to remove the permanent smirk on his face. “Ye-ah, it would be so awesome if you found me a few cans. You can drone it to me. D-zone has drone delivery service.”
Ella looked like she was about to scream. She probably would have disconnected if she wasn’t so lonely. “Hey, have you contacted Scarlett?” He quickly changed the subject. The forlorn look on her face might give the cyber-spies something to report and profile her as a high-risk.
Sadness replaced her anger. “That’s so weird. I can’t find any Scarletts from California on CitChat.”
“Well, I have connections. I’ll look into it on my break.” His security clearance should be worth something.
“Thank you.” Ella finally smiled.
Okay, here goes. Hope she catches on. “I was thinking, let’s go to that bakery when I get back.”
Ella gave him a “what chu talkin’ ’bout, Willis” stare.
“You know, the one on the corner. I forget the name. Remember the grumpy dude with the cowboy hat? I think his name is Luther or Dean.”
“Ew, all I want to do is puke.” Ella glowered at his stupidity.
He wasn’t making any sense. “Bummer, a few seconds left of CitChatLive. So, like be a super-awesome Last State wife and find me some of that soup,” Justin stated firmly. Ella’s going to be furious with me when I get back. I’ll probably have to eat mayonnaise sandwiches for a freaking week.
“Whatever.” She rolled her eyes.
“I’m serious. We’ve got plenty of LS Credits. Think of it as a shopping spree. You can buy all the baby stuff you want. No budget.”
“Yes, master,” she sniped.
The MeDevice screen went black with twenty seconds to spare.
Chapter 8
Estella Marie Vasquez-Chen huffed about the tiny apartment. “Last State wife?” Since when had he started calling her that? Last State regarded women as property. Don’t tell me they brainwashed him already? How could he ask her to go to Zhetto? Zhetto had Infected Incidents all the time. And he hated chicken noodle soup. It was her favorite. Even weirder, she didn’t understand the comment about Luther and Dean’s bakery. They had never eaten there.
Her CitHealthTracker wristband beeped red, warning of rising blood pressure. She needed to calm down before they sent a team of medics and an ambulance. She put the kettle on. Chamomile tea usually calmed her anxiety. It was time for CitChat. If she postponed it any longer, they might think she was depressed and prescribe more MeTherapy.
Despite how peeved she was with Justin, she slipped on one of his long-sleeve, button-up shirts over the copper-woven smock the doctor had ordered her to wear twenty-four-hours a day. Justin’s essence was the only thing keeping her together. She was all alone—and pregnant. Again. She recognized the depression attempting to take control. She would rather be angry than depressed. So, while the chamomile tea bag steeped, she steeped over his bizarre behavior.
Ella curled on the loveseat with her cup of tea and MeDevice and signed into the Prenatal app. She logged in her weight and the time she had taken her prenatal vitamins and then uploaded the selfie of her belly she had taken earlier—doctor’s orders.
She always started with the boring groups everyone was assigned to. She opened The Daily Health Challenge group. After pretending to read the article on plaque and periodontal disease, she liked it with a grinning emoticon. The Perfect Citizen was next. Today’s post was a long list of reminders of what she couldn’t do and included video clips of citizens caught in the act. Public humiliation seemed to be an effective tactic to control cits. She certainly didn’t want her face showing up on everyone’s MeDevice.
Next was her home state group. Every citizen was required to be a member of the state they had considered home before The Fall of America as Last State called it. She scrolled through the I’m From California posts. She had to be cautious. Justin had warned the only safe posts to click to avoid therapy were weather and food. She found a post talking about tomatoes and added a heart emoticon.
She forced herself to scroll through The Perfect Wife group. The posts were as repulsive as the group’s name. Under the pinned post titled “What did you do for your husband today?” Ella typed, Didn’t kill him. Her finger hovered over the enter key. She quickly deleted it.
She wanted to gag over the post: “A tidy home is a happy home.” The image looked like one of those ads from the fifties with the wife wearing an apron and heals while vacuuming in a fancy off-the-shoulder dinner party dress. She skimmed through the chauvinistic posts and found one to like. “When your husband comes home from work, greet him with his favorite beverage.”
Ella finally finished with the boring mandatory groups. She tapped on the I Love Cooking group, her favorite. She drooled over the recipes, adding yummy face emoticons to the ones she was in the mood for. Next, she scanned the I Love Reading group, randomly liking several romance novels she had never read. Justin had explained how the algorithm worked. She had to like a percentage of posts, or it looked like she was apathetic, which would require MeTherapy. But if she liked too many posts, it flagged her for therapy, too. She couldn’t handle another one of those MeTherapy webinars.
Today, the sweet spot of likes was ten percent of all posts in each group. Yesterday it had been twelve percent. In Justin’s daily morning text, he gave her the percentage of the day: I meditated ten minutes or twelve minutes. How he figured it out, she didn’t know. Justin and his secret codes. He was always coming up with something brilliant and off-the-wall. She giggled. She couldn’t stay mad at him for too long. Most of the time.
Done! Justin had warned MeDevice screens had visual access into people’s homes, even when the devices were off. She didn’t think it was possible. But, as loco as life had been since the Super Summer flu, she hadn’t ruled it out. She kept the device facedown when not in use. What about the Wi-Fi TV screen mounted to the wall? Could they see in? Paranoia swept over. Her wristband blinked for a few seconds until her blood pressure returned to normal. High blood pressure ran in her family, so she wasn’t as worried about
it as the doctors were.
It was time for her afternoon nap. “Temp Unit, sixty-five degrees,” she announced to the MeHome device. With her erratic hormones, she slept better in cooler temperatures. Ella snuggled under a sheet, relaxing to the calming tendrils of the chamomile tea.
***
Ella’s eyes sprung open. Sweat rolled down her forehead when she jolted up in the bed. Her heart thudded, racing with—terror. It was another one of those bad dreams she had been having since Justin had left. She stumbled to the bathroom. All she could do was stare into the mirror. Disoriented, she let herself sort of blank out. She melted into the void beyond the mirror. Where she saw things. Sometimes. It was something she had never confessed to anyone. She had stopped doing it the day it had shown her how baby Miguel was going to die. She thought it had been a message from the Devil.
She pleaded with Archangel Michael, please protect our child. A vague sense of drifting from her body overtook her. She flew into a light-wavering dimension beyond the mirror. She came to an endless hallway of records. A glowing hand shadowed by pearly-translucent angel wings led her to a medical lab lined with shelves. And on the shelves were . . .
She jumped out of the vision. “Oh, my God!”
The image of jars sent her wrenching to the toilet—jars of fetuses. If pregnancies were so rare, she wondered why she hadn’t been hospitalized and monitored by a staff of around-the-clock nurses and doctors.
OMG! OMG! She waved away the hot flash, tore off the wristband monitor, and stepped into the cold shower, clothes and all. The last time she’d had a hot flash that intense the medics had arrived. Gradually, she made the water warmer and warmer, imagining the water taking her away, becoming it.
Justin was a good-hearted guy. Sure, he was a jerk at times, like when he insisted she do something she didn’t want to do. She thought back to those days in Sacramento when he had taught her to de-activate Zs with his silly antics. He had been teaching her for her own good. If he hadn’t, she wouldn’t have survived. He would never ever expect her to leave the safety of T-zone and risk the Zhetto on her own. Especially, since she was carrying their child.
Unless something was wrong. Terribly wrong.
Ella went over their conversation word by word. He had said their safeword-phrase. Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup meant danger. He couldn’t have forgotten; it had been his crazy idea in the first place.
And then, she understood.
The doctor had said she was in the proverbial 100 Club, for Last State had recorded less than a hundred pregnancies since the pandemic. There wasn’t a CitChat group for expectant mothers. It should have told her something since they had a group for nearly everything. Last State knew the baby wasn’t going to live. Worse, they didn’t want the baby to live. She understood the unspeakable truth as intensely as she mourned her departed parents.
An unexpected pain shot up her uterus and settled in her heart. She grabbed the jade crucifix around her neck, which she had bought on MeBuy last month. It looked exactly like the one she used to have. She whispered a string of Hail Marys. She prayed for the bravery she needed. Luther’s bakery. It was Justin’s cryptic way of telling her to find Dean and Luther. He wants me to escape to Boom Town.
How could she leave Last State? Wait, he had told her to go to the tent called Lost and Found Stuff. Another clue? What was she supposed to do, walk up to the clerk and ask, “Can you get me to Boom Town? Oh, and how much does it cost?”
Okay, okay, stay calm. She grabbed her MeDevice and texted, Hey, you. You’re right. Shopping for baby things sounds way fun. And I’ll look for your soup. Can you get me a visa to the Zhetto Market? Hope you don’t mind if I buy a new pair of jeans and a parasol before I go. Love you.
Seconds later, she received his response. On it! I was just checking it out. The Deluxe Package serves hors d’oeuvres. It comes with two Enforcers. And don’t worry about the money. Buy all the stuff you want. I got another bonus! Smirk emoticon.
She responded with a heart emoticon. Enforcers didn’t make her feel safer. They reminded her of the danger. She supposed Zhetto couldn’t be that dangerous. After all, they encourage Zoners to visit. Zhetto was supposed to be fun. Every month Last State had The Perfect Citizen Giveaway. As an incentive, only cits with zero infractions were entered. A Zhetto Market visa on one of those fancy tour buses probably cost a whole month’s salary. Hmm, Justin wasn’t worried about the cost. It was another clue something was wrong.
All she knew was, she had to get to the Zhetto Market. The wavering reflection lingering behind the mirror had shown her the answer was there, waiting for her. After everything that had happened since the Super Summer flu, and with a baby growing in her womb, she could not ignore the almost-paranormal warning, even if it went against her infallible Catholic beliefs. Because, life on Earth was evolving. Including her consciousness . . .
Chapter 9
Scarlett Lewis climbed to the cabin’s loft. She couldn’t put off leaving any longer. “Sweetie, I need to go. Remember what we talked about. You must be quiet as a mouse. Only go downstairs when you need the toilet. Here’s a hot thermos of tomato soup. And your favorite, dandelion salad with walnuts and vinaigrette dressing.” She set the food on the edge of the desk. “After lunch, you can have the cinnamon roll as a special treat.”
“Yum!” Twila eyed the homemade cinnamon roll, compliments of Shari.
“Draw, daydream, whatever you do, absolutely no singing and talking. If you’re good, no schoolwork for the next three days,” Scarlett rambled like an overly protective mother leaving her child alone for the first time. She had kept Twila a secret. She wanted to confide to Shari but had decided against it. She didn’t know whom to trust these days.
“Ooh, this is going to be so much fun. This is the best playroom in the whole wide world!” Twila exclaimed.
The loft, which was above the kitchen, looked like someone had intended on turning it into a library. It was stacked with a wall of heavy plastic tubs full of vintage books; unfortunately, the books were far too advanced for Twila. Scarlett had renovated the roughly twelve-by-eight-foot loft into a playroom, complete with a hiding place thanks to the bushy-palm tree she had retrieved from the living room.
The fake tree sat in the corner next to the old-fashioned metal desk. Twila was small enough to hide in the corner behind the bush. No one would spot her unless they were looking for a child. Next to the tubs, she had added a folding cot and had covered it with colorful pillows and blankets scavenged from the empty cabins. The idea was to make the loft a fun place for Twila since she spent most of her time in hiding.
“I need another hug.” Scarlett dashed back to Twila. She was such a terrible mother for leaving Twila alone so often.
“I’ll be okay. I’m worried for you,” the child said in a low tone.
Twila’s warning startled her. “Is something bad going to happen?” Scarlett pressed.
Twila shrugged. “Something bad is always happening.” She sat at the desk and flipped the notebook to a blank page. Twila was more interested in choosing one of the three crayons left in the desk’s upper drawer than talking.
“Twila, I need to know if you see anything bad.” It irritated Scarlett when the child didn’t take her gifts seriously. If something was going to happen, she would feign illness and cancel the trip. As it was, Shari hadn’t gone to the November market after a Hummer of Enforcers had shown up at the lodge, searching for the mother and child who had gone missing from the fairgrounds. That had been nearly six weeks ago. With any luck, Last State would assume they had died or had defected back to the Lost States of America.
“Oh, Mommy, you always worry too much.” Twila frowned and dropped the crayons. She tilted her head back and pressed the clear star-shaped quartz to her forehead. It was the same Merkaba Twila had used to save them the day of the horde attack at Last Chance. Twila had smuggled it through quarantine by tying it to the nape of her neck with her hair. Clever.
A few s
econds later, Twila gave up. “Nothing. I’m not a fortune teller. It’s like I feel peoples’ thoughts and feelings. Sometimes I see things just before they happen. And sometimes one of my spirit guides whispers a message to me. But I only hear them when I’m listening.”
“Then, listen more often.” It was all Scarlett said. A scolding would be of no use today.
Interesting, Twila had more than one spirit guide. The only one Scarlett had known about was the Silver Lady. Scarlett was still uncomfortable with all this esoteric metaphysical business. She didn’t understand how it could be possible: the spontaneous knowing and connecting to peoples’ thoughts. However, she had learned to keep an open mind and pay heed to any sudden thoughts whether they came from her restless mind or the cosmos.
She kissed the top of Twila’s honey-golden hair. “Well, if you get a bad feeling, try to contact me in your mind.” Scarlett couldn’t always tell the difference between excitement and danger. The anxiety levels were similar, which had her constantly questioning her decisions. She focused internally and sent Twila a blast of happy energy to test the child.
“Ooh, thank you. I feel all bubbly inside.” Twila giggled. “I love happiness. Why doesn’t it last longer?” Twila started sketching a set of purple fairy wings.
Scarlett smiled as she climbed down the loft’s built-in ladder, wishing she knew the answer to that one. Twila was right; she was in full-fledge worry mode, nervous about accompanying Shari to the open-air market in the northern panhandle of Texas. Anything could happen. Something as simple as car trouble could spell doom for them.
Besides leaving Twila, she worried her new RFID chip might not work. Shari had inserted a CitChip, which she had liberated from Zac’s secret room in the lodge’s cellar. Apparently, Zac always had fake CitChip identities on hand. Drones routinely scanned Zhetto for rebels. The chip would work for a flyover scan. However, it wouldn’t hold up if she were taken in for questioning.
Only The Dead Don't Die (Book 3): Last State Page 8
