“Can anyone think of any ways technology has made our lives easier today?”
“We’ve pretty much ended green house gas emissions,” said Julio.
“No one needs eye glasses any more,” Erin said.
“We can detect fetal abnormalities with genetic markers almost from day one,” said Felice.
“Yeah, all that’s true,” said Jermaine, “but…”
“But what?” Anthony pressed.
“The five hundred pound gorilla in the room anytime we talk about technology.” Jermaine held his hands up. “The nukes that popped off. The power plants that melted down. There’s an example of technology structuring our lives.” He smiled.
There were a few nervous titters of agreement, but most looked troubled by Jermaine’s remark because they knew his situation. Tricia looked very seriously at him.
“You’re right,” said Anthony, because Jermaine was. There was no escaping the facts. “We’re caught up in this thing, and we take it for granted.”
“And that,” said Jermaine, “is how we’ve been saying ideologies work all along.”
Anthony looked at the clock on the wall without making it obvious. He had a way of getting caught up in these conversations with his class and losing all track of time.
“Justin, I thought the class might be interested in your topic. Could you explain what it’s about?
“Yeah. I’m interested in the role children play in dystopian novels.”
“Run with that.”
“Well, some of the books we’ve read—The Long Walk, Battle Royale, Lord of the Flies—really bad things happen to kids. I think there’s a big difference between the way the authors of those books viewed children and children’s potential compared to, say, the way kids were portrayed in, I don’t know, Ordinary People or Catcher in the Rye.”
“What do you think it was about the twentieth-century that made these portrayals of children in these novels—the dystopian ones I mean—effective?”
“I’d say the same thing that made them effective in Separate Peace or Ordinary People. The idea of children being innocent. That adults want to shelter them from the harsh stuff.”
Anthony knew that what Justin said was true. The zombies had been driven back to the far corners of the globe and small, inhospitable pockets of their own continent. But there were things out there that no adult could protect a child from, things in the atmosphere, in the air around them.
“I don’t know…” Justin continued. “There’s just something diabolically sick and ingenious to me about casting kids as participants in these murderous dystopian games.”
“What do you…” Anthony addressed the class “…think King was going for when he wrote The Long Walk? Or Takami when he wrote Battle Royale? What is it about putting kids in situations where they basically have to kill each other, or hope all the others die, so they can live?”
“I don’t know if I can answer that question,” said Felice. “But one thing those particular novels have in common is that their games take place against the backdrop of pretty horrendous totalitarian governments. Even in The Running Man.”
“Good point. And those governments often control the daily lives of their citizens, yes? Let’s talk about the ways children are conceived and raised in some of these books, alright? Does anybody remember the picture Huxley painted of the future?”
Erin motioned and Anthony nodded to her. “In Brave New World humans are predestined and conditioned.”
“And how does that compare to us today?”
“I don’t think it does. We don’t have ‘class’ in the sense that it existed in Huxley’s novel, or even like the U.S. had in the twentieth century.”
“Well,” said Megan. “We do have prenatal screenings and abortion.”
“Yeah, but no one forces you to have an abortion.”
“Let’s not forget PL-422,” Tricia said.
No one who had been born and educated in New Harmony could forget it. PL-422 had been an extremely unpopular law that held sway for a short period of time in New Harmony, effectively making children with birth defects property of the state. Babies were taken from their parents and disappeared. There had been rumors that the kids were used in medical experiments. It was a stain on New Harmony’s history, and one its citizens never forgot.
“Yes, let’s not forget PL-422,” agreed Anthony. “And let’s thank goodness calmer heads prevailed.” The law was repealed after two years in effect. These days, almost all women chose to have abortions if defects were noted in-utero. “What else about children in these novels and New Harmony?”
“Well, no one tells us what our jobs are going to be,” said Justin. “Like in The Giver and its Ceremony of Twelve, or Anthem and the Council of Vocations.”
“No one tells us what we have to do because we’re all farmers again,” Tricia said.
“It’s like we’ve taken a major step back.”
“How do you mean, Maine?”
“Well, for most of human history people were farmers, right? Almost everybody worked in agriculture. And then the Industrial Revolution came along and freed people up from the land, and, well, here we are, like Trish said—farmers again.” Tricia smiled at Jermaine.
“That’s true, but I think if someone from the late twentieth century could see us now, they’d be shocked at some of the differences between our way of life and theirs’. Look at our educations for example. Most of you are, what, fifteen or sixteen? And the discussion we’re having—this is a sophisticated, high—level intellectual conversation. Back then, maybe you’d hear something like this in a graduate school seminar for students in their twenties or older.
Or the idea that your school day is balanced between intellectual endeavors and vocational training? And that each is accepted as equally valid and important? I think that would be an eye-opener to most visitors from the past.”
“No one tells us what we have to be,” said Megan, “but we all have to serve in the Defense Forces. That’s mandatory.”
“That just makes sense,” said Jermaine. Anthony knew the kid was disappointed. Jermaine’s health would keep him from enlisting and doing his two years.
“Why?” asked Julio. “Does anybody really think Zed is going to make a comeback?”
Jermaine shook his head. “No. But if he does, we’ll be ready for him this time.”
“At least we’re not training to kill each other these days,” Justin said. “That’s progress, isn’t it?”
“Sure it is,” Anthony said. “Were there any similarities in the dystopian books we’ve read to our society?”
“I was thinking maybe…” Maxwell said. “Maybe in the relationships between men and women.”
“How so?” encouraged Anthony.
“I can’t think of all the examples, but in Brave New World? Promiscuity is compulsory. And Rand has a City Palace of Mating in Anthem.”
“And that compares to today how?”
“Well, we don’t really have marriage anymore. I mean, some people—especially from the older generation—they cling to it as an institution. But most people my age—we don’t expect to get married and grow old with someone, or even to be with the same person for a long period of time.”
“We don’t place the same premium on monogamy that people did thirty or forty years ago,” said Felice.
“And that’s a reflection of our times,” said Julio. “If we’re going to make it as a species, we have to make babies. Marriage was an ideology in the twentieth-century.”
“I think you’re right,” said Anthony. “Most of us come from families where there haven’t been the traditional mom and dad. Has that affected us negatively? I don’t think so. We’ve read about, or talked to, people who remember first-hand how children who came from families like most of our own were viewed back then. With pity, right? With fingers crossed that they’d turn out okay. And here we are.”
“Another thing we have in common with the kids in those books?”
Jermaine said. “None of us is spared.” He was talking about the radiation in the air. “We don’t get as much of a chance to be kids anymore.” Jermaine delivered his next sentence quietly, firmly. “We are the dystopian future.” The way he said it was grim, resigned, but he said it with a smile on his wan, worn face.
Anthony didn’t know how to reply to that, so he didn’t.
“Yes, but…”
“Follow that but, Megan.”
“It goes back to Freire’s idea that we’re unfinished beings—that human beings are unfinished beings.” Megan reached back to their readings from the beginning of the term. “We’re conditioned, but we’re not determined, right? So the ideologies we inhabit affect us, okay, but they don’t dictate what we do—what choices we make.”
“That’s what Freire said.” Anthony smiled at her, encouraging her.
“He also talked a lot about hope.” Megan didn’t speak to Anthony but to the horseshoe of students. “He said we were constantly in a state of becoming. That we were ‘ever incomplete,’ but that that shouldn’t frustrate us. It’s the whole reason for our hope. Freire said hope let’s us think of a future we want to see, and then struggle towards that future.”
“Was that a struggle for individuals?” Anthony challenged her.
“No,” Megan said, and Anthony halfheartedly thought if only he were a few years younger and not her teacher… “I mean, yes, its individuals who choose to struggle, but they do it together.”
“There,” said Julio, “is an example of a non-antagonistic dualism.”
“Very nice,” approved Anthony.
“Freire said that hope—to take options, okay?” Megan said. “The name of this course, right? And when we realize that we’re conditioned and not determined, that we’re unfinished beings, we can—how did he put it? He described it as ‘a permanent process of hope-filled search.’ That’s what Freire thought education was. A ‘hope-filled’ search.”
“Which is why,” Anthony was cognizant of the time, “when you all leave for the break today, you won’t kid yourselves that you’re on vacation from learning, from education. You’ll be out in the fields working, or training in boot, but you’re learning the whole time, just in a different setting. Listen, we’ve got five minutes, and I want to ask Julio to share his topic with us.
“Julio, you’re interested in estranged labor and dehumanization in Philip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, right?”
* * *
When MacKenzie opened his eyes, Little Red was staring down at him.
“Am I—am I in hell?”
“That depends.” Little Red didn’t blink. “I want you to think about why you’re here…”
It all came to him at once: the pain in his body from a hundred gouges; memories of hanging in the barbed net; knowledge of what had gotten him there in the first place.
“…and when you’ve done that, if you’ve got anything to say, say it.”
MacKenzie looked into the eyes of the girl above him and knew she was the reason he was still breathing. She had taken him out into the woods and strung him up, yes, but the reason he was still here feeling anything was she had also cut him down. He felt gratitude.
“I was wrong…” MacKenzie wet his lips. They weren’t as dry as he thought they would be. How long had he hung there without water? “What I did was wrong. I’m sorry. I need to get back…to apologize.”
He was sincere. Little Red was sure of that. She reached down with her slim arm and he took it, his larger hand wrapping around her sleeved forearm. She pulled him up to a seated position. MacKenzie gasped with pain but he was alive, and he knew he was going to remain that way.
“I cleaned you up as best I could.” She said it as MacKenzie looked down at his bandaged torso. Red had cut his pants off and pulled new ones on him while he was out cold. There was a tube disappearing into his arm. He followed the tube to a bag that hung off a branch.
“IV. Your second, Mac. You were pretty dehydrated.”
“Red. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I’ll never…”
“I know.”
His feet were bare, but his boots were placed neatly next to the blanket upon which he lay, a pair of fresh socks on top of them. He remembered the mass of zombies that had been clawing at his bare toes. MacKenzie looked around. He and Red were still out in the woods, but this wasn’t where his punishment had been meted out.
“Zed?”
“You don’t have to worry about them.” She dismissed his concern.
“Where are we?”
“I carried you, after I cut you down. How are you feeling?”
“Pretty bad. But better…”
“We’ll start walking in a little while.”
“Yeah.”
Little Red was rarely caught off guard, and therefore she had to give the two women who emerged from the trees mental points for having come up on her unawares. Red knew them for what they were as soon as they appeared: road agents, bandits. The pair was scruffy, their clothes disheveled, hair grown out, not groomed.
“Well,” said the first one, and Red noticed the woman was bereft of any teeth. “We could commence with the pleasantries.”
“Or we could just skip all that,” contended the second one, the taller of the two, “and you could just give us all your shit.”
“What we’ve got is what you see.” Little Red was calm. She knew exactly where her Noveske N4 was, leaning against a tree a few yards away. There was a round chambered and the safety was on. “Take what you will.”
“Oh, we will take, little cunny.” The first flashed a toothless grin.
“Hey, he bit?” The second one leveled the barrel of her shotgun at MacKenzie. He stirred uneasily.
“No, he wasn’t bit. I found him like this.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. Little Red rested a comforting hand on MacKenzie’s bandaged shoulder. He could feel the warmth in that small hand. He could feel the danger. He could also see the four inch push dagger sheathed in its wrist holster on the underside of her forearm.
“Been awhile since we had a man,” the one mentioned to the other, “hasn’t it Connie?”
“Has been, Shazz.”
Little Red had dealt with their type before. She believed she knew something of how they thought, of what life in the wilds and abandoned cities did to a person. They weren’t going to let her and MacKenzie live if they had their way. They’d kill her and Mac. Maybe eat them both if that was their thing. Maybe rape them both too before or after they’d killed them. Maybe before and after. The only thing that surprised Red was that these two were women. They were usually men.
“I know I’m not in a position to ask…” Little Red started to say.
“I can think of a few positions I’d like to see you in, little cunny,” leered the toothless one.
“…but I’m wondering how you found us?”
“Heard the shot,” said Connie.
“Uh-huh.” When Little Red had freed an unconscious MacKenzie from his net, she’d taken out all the zombies with her knives. She was cutting him down when a late comer staggered out of the woods. Red had been extricating Mac from the net, and as good as she was close up with a sharp edge, she hadn’t wanted to go that route with the thing when she was supporting Mac. Instead she’d drawn her Stechkin and put a 9mm in its forehead. That would have been the shot these women had heard.
Little Red was pretty sure they hadn’t seen the two dozen dead zombies. They’d have been reluctant to confront her if they’d seen that. Or maybe they had seen them, but they were just crazy like that.
“What happened to you, asshole?”
Connie meant the question for Mac. Little Red noticed the way the two women dismissed her. She was small and young. People who didn’t know her tended to dismiss her as little more than a child, to disregard her, almost always to their detriment. Though the N4 was propped up against a tree out of reach, Red had blades on her forearms and ankles, a
cross her chest and in each boot.
“Who fucking cares?” the one without teeth asked rhetorically. “So long as his dick still works. Hey, asshole, does it? Your dick still work?”
Little Red tried to put herself in their shoes. If she eked out an existence in the wilds, would she have walked out into the open with Mac or whomever she was with, just revealing the both of them like that? Or would she have had a third party somewhere nearby, on the down low?
“Please don’t hurt us…” MacKenzie’s fear was genuine. Red gripped his shoulder tighter.
As if to confirm her hunch, Red heard the snap of a twig somewhere behind her in the trees. She noticed the way the woman Connie looked that way, the look she gave to the person in the woods.
So there were three then…
“Oh, we’re going to hurt you alright,” the one without teeth promised Mac. “But you at least will get to feel some pleasure before you meet your end. This one,” she stepped close to Little Red, reached out and touched her short hair, noting the chop sticks embedded there, “you a real redhead, cunny?”
Too close.
“All over, huh?”
“Mac,” Little Red said calmly. “Down.”
MacKenzie threw himself backwards and rolled over, burying his face in his hands and his arms in the dirt and leaves and pine needles. There was a grunt and a gun shot followed by five more in rapid succession.
When he looked up, Little Red had retrieved her N4 and had it up to her shoulder. She was sighting down the barrel into the trees, waiting for something to show itself.
The woman who had touched Red’s hair was on her knees, hissing past the tongue that jutted out of her toothless mouth, staring down at her entrails, her stomach opened up by the hooked karambit Red kept on her ankle. One of the chop sticks from Red’s head was buried in her chest. The second woman was dead, arms and legs splayed, a bullet from Red’s Stechkin between her eyes.
“There.” Red breathed and triggered a burst from the N4. MacKenzie jerked involuntarily and whipped his head around in time to see a third woman off in the distance collapse between the trunks.
“Shit, Red. You move faster than anyone I’ve ever seen.”
Resurrection (Eden Book 3) Page 5
