Citizen Second Class- Apocalypse Next
Page 21
I held out my hand. “Evelyn Rossi, a person of means among the blessed.”
Grudgingly, she took my hand in hers and shook. “Kismet Beatriz, a person of substance.”
Eye was happy to have both her nannies’ attention, if only for a short time. She was also excited to see more of the world outside the Circle. “At the farm in Alaska, there are no walls. Mother says distance will do!”
Wanda leaned on Susan and me to lower herself to her knees to give Eye a long embrace. The pair whispered to each other for a while before the child kissed the old woman on the cheek. Both shed tears. They knew this would be the last time they saw each other.
Eye hugged Susan and me and rushed to get into the transport. As the helicopter blades whirred and began to gather speed, Kirk Rossi helped Wanda to her feet. He’d known his servant longer than he’d known his own mother. He gave her a firm handshake and said, “Goodbye, Wanda.”
Straining her voice above the din of the helicopter blades, I heard her say, “Juanita! My name is Juanita! I’m taking over your house and a refugee family is moving in! They’re originally from Mexico! Two girls, three boys, and the parents are women! They’re both mechanical engineers!”
Kirk Rossi had a weak heart. By the way, he paled at this news, I wondered if Juanita was saying goodbye or trying to kill him.
“Goodbye!” I told Evelyn. “No hard feelings.”
She sneered at me as she climbed aboard the helicopter.
“I think she might still have some hard feelings,” Susan observed dryly.
I smiled. “That’s a shame. We weren’t so different. She used to be a climber. She forgot what being outside the Circle was like,” I replied.
“Bull!” Juanita said as we waved to Eye. “Evelyn forgot how to be kind, if she ever knew.”
As we walked down the ramp from the Rossis’ helipad into the arboretum, we found residents enjoying the Circle’s park, picnicking along the man-made stream. The water looked crystal clear and inviting.
“Turns out there really was enough for everybody,” Susan said. “We’re all Utopians now.”
Juanita caught my look. “What’s the matter, Kismet? Underwear bunched up? Sneakers in a twist?”
“I don’t know. It’s just … Evelyn was Captain of the Guard. Now she’s flying off to New York, then Alaska. She still has her husband and Eye — ”
“And billions,” Susan added.
“Yeah! Doesn’t it feel like we let the bad guys get away?”
Juanita shook her head. “If we’d pulled a French Revolution number on the Select Few and sharpened our guillotine blades, the war would have kept going. We would have lost the war for hearts and minds.”
“Evelyn lost her post but other than that, she’s still got it all,” my sister giggled. “Hell, I’d marry a billionaire megalomaniac with a weak heart any day!”
“Not funny, Susan,” I said.
“Kinda funny.”
“Why are you the way you are?”
“Same as you, bad childhood.”
Juanita was not amused. “By showing mercy, we avoided becoming like them. I’ve lived with the Rossi family all my life. They thought of themselves as the pinnacles of the species, role models for the rest of us peons. You know the origin of the word peon, right? Pee on? To me, the Select Few are a terrible warning of how not to act. To be a human being, you don’t have to push everyone else down to prove your worth. Kirk was always too much like his father, too concerned with who was doing well, never wondering about who was doing the world any good. There’s a lot of hard road between doing well and doing good.”
“Maybe so,” I said, “but Evelyn will sleep on clean sheets for the rest of her life.”
“She didn’t win,” Juanita insisted. “I know my little girl. Eye is the future. She’ll rise. She may even become the queen of Alaska for all I know. I brought Eye up to be clever and to know the difference between right and wrong. She has what her mother never had. My girl won’t forget how good kindness feels.”
I wished I were not so skeptical. “You think it’ll stick?”
“She and I had a secret from when she was seven. I told her she was called Eye because she sees the way things are and how they should be. She’ll have the power to make things right. I predict that if she decides to have children, she won’t let Evelyn near them without supervision. She knows me so she knows who her mother and father are.”
As we exited the arboretum, my sister and I parted ways with Juanita. We walked in silence toward our new home. Lisa and Buddy would be waiting with Grammy. When we brought her to Atlanta, my grandmother often called Lisa by my name. Lisa’s presence was a comfort to Grammy when our duties called us elsewhere. Grammy loved her new home, her new rooftop garden and, most of all, air conditioning.
I should have been happy but I was still overwhelmed.
Reading my mood, Susan asked if I was okay.
“Sure. Just a lot to do to make the Circle work. We’ve got at least some CSS on our side. The way veterans get treated, it was inevitable some would join the rebellion.”
“We’re taking it back to the way things were. We’ll be fine. Cooperating is good business for the Select. They’ve got too much invested here to leave.”
I wanted to believe her. “I wish I had your confidence. How did you know things were going to work out?”
“It’s not like it was foretold in a prophecy or anything. For me, it was always simpler than that. The Select Few always claimed to be better at math. They weren’t.”
“How do you figure?”
“Simple. They are the Select Few. We are many. The numbers were always on our side. Grammy would say that we all just had to row in the same direction.”
“‘We are many.’ Maybe that should be our new motto.”
I have looked back on the day the Circle’s armory exploded many times. When I ponder that memory, the mixture of pain, terror, elation and sudden deafness … it’s all there, as fresh as yesterday. I remember the blinding brightness of the flames, visible even as I squeezed my eyes shut. The sudden wall of heat that followed the wave of sound felt like candles burning an inch from my skin. The smell of accelerant penetrated New Atlanta for weeks after the explosion.
As I stir these indelible recollections of the most important moment of my life, I don’t like myself. I like to think we redeemed ourselves. I allowed myself to feel the thrill of victory without becoming Evelyn. But I hated her and the Select Few so much, I see now how easy it would be to become like her. I don’t hate her anymore. I pity her, which is the one thing that would anger her most.
It was only after we allowed Evelyn and Kirk to go free that I understood the true mission of the Resistance. We weren’t trying to break the Circle. We were raising up anyone who needed help.
The Select Few told us that helping people was too hard. They wanted us to believe life was unfair and that was the natural order. They weren’t altogether wrong. Life is not fair. However, it is up to us to try to make it that way.
Sometimes I still squeeze my eyes tight and ask aloud, “Is this real?” When reality falls short of our dreams, we work together to make it real, to make things right. Just as we suspected all along, there was enough for everyone.
Don’t hope. Do. We are many.
Afterword
“I don’t try to describe the future.
I try to prevent it.”
~ Ray Bradbury
Thank you for reading Citizen Second Class. Authors and their books live and die by reviews. If you enjoyed this novel, please leave a review wherever you purchased it.
We are many. Are you one of us? If so, you’re invited to check out the author’s note through the Citizen Second Class tab and the merch at AllThatChazz.com.
Life is not fair. Make it that way.
~ RCC
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All Books by Robert Chazz Chute
~ DYSTOPIAN AND APOCALYPTIC FICTION ~
THE AFTER Life TRILOGY
INFERNO
PURGATORY
PARADISE
AFTER Life (Box Set)
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Amid Mortal Words
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This Plague of Days, Season 1
This Plague of Days, Season 2
This Plague of Days, Season 3
This Plague of Days, Omnibus Edition
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Robot Planet, The Complete Series
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Haunting Lessons, Book 1 of The Dimension War
Death Lessons, Book 2 of The Dimension War
Fierce Lessons, Book 3 of The Dimension War
Dream’s Dark Flight, Book 4 of The Dimension War
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