Flowertown

by S. G. Redling

CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The power was on at Dingle’s Market, and Ellie pushed open the door with force. She didn’t bother to check if anyone else was in the store. She marched, with Bing in tow, to the back of the store where Annabeth’s stool stood empty. Ellie banged on the counter.

  “Annabeth? Are you here? It’s Ellie Cauley.” Bing put his hand on her shoulder to quiet her, but she glared at him and he drew back. “I need to talk with you.”

  The curtains parted and Annabeth stepped through. “Ellie? And Bing? It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you, Bing. I didn’t expect to see you here. What’s going on?” Ellie gripped the counter, struggling to find the words to express the enormity of what she was feeling. Before she could utter a sound, the curtain parted again.

  “Rachel.” Ellie could hardly say the word.

  “Oh my gosh, Ellie, are you okay?”

  She could feel Bing move in more closely behind her. “Okay is probably not the word I would use,” she said. “Did you know our room was bugged?” Rachel said nothing. “Yeah, they have a recording of you and me talking about the stolen files and yet, oddly, Bing and I got arrested. They walked right past you.”

  “Do you think I—”

  “I don’t know, Rachel. You tell me. You told us about the code for the meeting and those people all got arrested too. How does that happen?”

  Rachel’s pale cheeks mottled with red as she stepped up to meet Ellie across the counter. “I don’t know, Ellie. I don’t know what you think I’m doing, but if you think I have any kind of pull in this shit hole,” she spit the profanity out, “you are very, very mistaken. Want proof?”

  She slammed a wrinkled sheet of paper on the counter.

  When Ellie didn’t move, Bing reached past her for the sheet. “What is it?”

  “It’s my test results.” Rachel spoke only to Ellie. “I’m not clear to go.”

  “That’s impossible.” Bing scanned the sheet.

  Annabeth put her arm around the girl, but she shook her off and leaned in closer to Ellie. “Nope, it’s all there. So whatever you think I did to you, however fucked you think you are, I assure you, I am ten times more fucked.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” Bing said.

  “Shut up, Bing. I can talk any way I want. I can use every fucking dirty word I know, and why not? It’s not like I’m ever getting out of this filthy, stinking shit hole. All I have to look forward to now is turning into another greasy, lazy, burned-out stoner nut job like my roommate.”

  Ellie stepped behind the counter and came close to her. Neither woman spoke. They stared at each other, Rachel bracing herself for whatever Ellie might say, but Ellie didn’t speak. She reached out and pulled Rachel tight in her arms, where the younger woman broke into hard, gasping sobs. Ellie cradled her, stroking her hair and whispering in her ear, letting Rachel cling to her until she couldn’t cry another tear.

  Annabeth waited until they had drawn apart to speak. “I think it’s time for all of you to learn what’s really going on in the zone. We need to be in this together or none of us will make it. I was just getting ready to show Rachel. Ellie, Bing, from what I’m hearing, I think you need to know as well. Lock the front door and come with me.”

  Bing hurried to the door and threw the bolt, then slipped through the curtain to join the rest in the crowded storeroom at the back of Dingle’s Market. The tiny space was cramped with cardboard boxes and loading pallets. Annabeth waited until Bing pulled the curtain, then headed back behind a wooden shelf holding cleaning supplies. On the floor, at the base of the shelf, was a pallet stacked with plastic-wrapped cases of canned vegetables.

  “Through here.”

  Rachel made a sound of surprise as the old woman lifted the loaded pallet as easily as if it weighed nothing. Annabeth laughed.

  “The cans are empty. My son made the hatch.” Beneath the pallet were steep, narrow steps to the basement of the market. Annabeth went first, tapping on the side of the step three times before entering. She waited until she heard three taps from within before stepping down. “This way.”

  The visitors were all wide-eyed as they followed the old woman into the cellar. At first there was nothing to see, just old beams and shelves stacked with more cans of food. Bing had to duck as they stepped through a small door and came out into a wide, low-ceilinged room strewn with cables and car batteries. On one wall hung two televisions, and beside them a young man scrolled through a computer screen. Two walls were covered in large sheets of paper, full of notes and newspaper clippings and photographs, and on the final wall, the wall the door led through, hung gun racks loaded with shotguns and pistols of every size, over boxes of bullets of every caliber.

  Annabeth held her hands out toward the scene. “Welcome to All You Want.”

  The three fanned out, still gaping. Ellie stood before the television sets, which were on with no volume. “What is this?”

  The kid at the computer didn’t look up from his screen. “This is everything you haven’t been seeing in Flowertown for the last three years.”

  “I told you they were censoring information.” Bing punched Ellie’s arm as they stared at the screens. “You said I was crazy.”

  “I stand corrected.”

  Annabeth stood beside them. “Oh, it’s more than censorship. We’re being fed quite a show. We don’t know how long it’s been going on, but we’ve been onto it for about two and a half years now. Remember when the cable went out for a couple of months and we lost all the upper channels?”

  “I remember,” Rachel said. “We used to get HBO and Showtime, and then it was nothing but home shopping and sports.”

  “It wasn’t just the movie channels we lost,” Annabeth said, and Bing nodded.

  “We lost the news channels too.”

  “That’s right, Bing. Nobody thought much of it at the time. But then we couldn’t even get the Sioux City news. It started coming in from Fort Dodge. Or so we thought.” Annabeth shook her head. “Turns out you can only hold twenty pounds of cow shit in a ten-pound bag for so long. Mistakes started happening. News bulletins would break in with different newspeople than we were seeing on the six o’clock broadcast. Different channel logos would flash on and off. Hell, even some sports scores were wrong.” Annabeth put her hand on the shoulders of the boy at the computer.

  “You all know my grandson, Matt, right?” He looked up. In his late teens, his eyes immediately went to Rachel. “Well, it was Matt and the Clark twins who figured out what to do. You know that Mindy Clark has never yet met a tree she couldn’t climb, and they managed to get up that cable pole and split that signal. They put some kind of gizmo on it that unscrambles the scramble. I never asked them to explain. All I know is that suddenly we’re watching a whole different set of newscasts than everybody else in Flowertown.”

  Bing stared at the boy as if he had become a unicorn. “You knew how to do that?”

  The boy shrugged. “Yeah. Wasn’t that hard once you knew what to look for. They scramble the signal every couple of months, you know, an automated security feature, but it usually only takes me a couple of hours to unscramble it.”

  Ellie stared at the screen, watching highlights from a basketball game. “So what is it we weren’t seeing? What were they blocking?”

  “That was the kicker,” Annabeth said, taking a seat on a bench near her grandson. “At first we didn’t see anything. We watched those newscasts side by side, night after night, and there was hardly any difference, except for the reporters, of course, and a few local stories. The commercials were different a lot of the times, but that’s to be expected. We thought maybe we had just gotten paranoid. It happens. And then the Senate hearings started.”

  Bing spoke up. “About the army funding. I saw it online one day in the morning. Of course, the Internet didn’t stay on long enough to actually read it.”

  “People thought it was costing too much to keep the army here. There were hearings, protests, special elections. And we never heard
a word about it.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ellie said, holding up her hand. “What about the newspapers? Mr. MacDonald gets all the papers, even the New York Times.” Matt Dingle snickered, and Annabeth shushed him as she rose to her feet once again.

  “You know that chili of mine you like so much, Ellie?” Ellie nodded and followed Annabeth to the first wall of notes and clippings. “Well, I order that special from Culvert’s Meats in Council Bluffs. And one day, in one of the boxes, I see that the packers lined the carton with a USA Today. I didn’t recognize the headline, and I read all the papers whenever I get a chance. Turns out this particular edition was one that didn’t get delivered to Mr. MacDonald.”

  “And? So we didn’t get a paper one day.”

  “Not just one day, Ellie. And not just one paper. This paper had a story in it about Feno Chemical coming close to filing bankruptcy. Well, I asked the folks at Culvert’s Meat real nicely if they wouldn’t mind to keep packing the chili the way they did, and wouldn’t you know, every time we got a paper in a carton that we hadn’t gotten at the newsstand, there was some sort of story about Feno or Barlay or the protests about the army being in Flowertown.”

  Bing nodded. “They’re controlling the information we get about the zone.”

  “But why?” Ellie asked. “It’s not like we can do anything about it. No matter what happens, we’re stuck here.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” Annabeth said. “We started stockpiling supplies. Of course, most of us hadn’t turned over all of our weapons. You know how it is on a farm, Rachel. There’s usually a secret stash of the necessities under the floorboards, right?” Rachel nodded. “And we all took to being very careful in our communications with each other and with our families on the outside. It stood to reason that if the news was being censored, our mail was being read.”

  Bing punched Ellie once more on the arm in triumph. Her complaint was shushed when they heard the door to the cellar opening. Annabeth’s grandson reached for the pistol sitting beside the computer until they all heard three soft raps. Everyone relaxed as Matt tapped three times on the floor, then someone came down the steps. Annabeth smiled when she saw who it was.

  “Ellie, I believe you know Olivia.” The med tech with the strawberry birthmark cleared the low door and stopped at the sight of the small crowd. Annabeth made introductions.

  Olivia didn’t bother with a greeting. “You haven’t been taking the pills, have you?”

  Ellie shook her head, too surprised to speak, and Bing nudged her. “You’re not taking your meds? Since when?”

  “Since my med check yesterday. The one that got me arrested.” Ellie pointed at Olivia. “The one that happened when the med center was closed. What was that?”

  Olivia moved past them to the wall of notes and tacked a set of prescription pages to the board. “I had to get a blood sample from you. I couldn’t do it through the regular channels, so I paged you using another tech’s code, one of Feno’s boys. We had to contact all of you, to see if the H had changed. Oh, and Marianne wanted me to apologize to you for being such a bitch. It’s the easiest way to tell if you’ve got it.”

  Ellie stared at her. “Am I supposed to understand what you’re talking about?”

  Olivia turned to Annabeth. “I’ve only got about fifteen minutes before I’ve got to get back. The timetable has been moved up. They’re making an announcement about the release. It’s the Es, just like I thought.”

  Annabeth folded her arms, a worried line on her forehead. “Could we be wrong about this? If it’s the Es, that’s an awful lot of people.”

  Olivia nodded. “It’s sixty-five percent of the locals. Ninety-eight percent of Feno. That doesn’t leave a lot of people behind. I think we’ve been right all along.”

  Rachel stepped closer to Olivia. “Are you talking QEH? The file codes? I’m a Q; what does that mean?”

  Olivia and Annabeth shared a serious look. “It means you’re staying here with the rest of us. The word is Saturday Feno is releasing everyone on the E with a clean bill of health.”

  Bing’s eyes grew wide as Olivia spoke. “You said ‘on the E.’ What does that mean?”

  “The E program. Equilibrium. It’s the name of the third phase of medications. Obviously the most successful.” She looked at Rachel. “You’re on Quantum, along with about sixteen percent of us, including me, Annabeth, and Matt. There are only a few Hs.”

  “Like me, right?” Ellie asked, and Olivia nodded. “Let me guess. Horizon.”

  “How did you know?”

  Ellie looked at Bing. “A very reliable source told me. He also mentioned that something is going down tomorrow, not Saturday.”

  “That’s the press conference.” Annabeth looked at a calendar taped to the wall. “In the clean rooms. They’re bringing in the national media. Now we know why, to announce the release of the Es.”

  “Well, according to Guy, something is going to happen on Thursday, and it sounded more serious than a press conference. And it sounded like I was going to be involved. Why would Horizon be singled out?”

  Olivia pulled out her phone and started texting while she spoke. “I’m going to be late. I’m calling in. I need to know everything you heard about tomorrow and I’ll tell you what I can.” She slid the phone back in her pocket and headed to the second wall of notes. She pulled a box out from a pile and rifled through looking for a folder.

  “How much do you know about the BTM scale?”

  “I’m a two,” Rachel said, and Olivia cracked her first smile.

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me? What about you?”

  Bing answered quickly. “Four.”

  “Me too.”

  Ellie looked around the group. “What am I?” Olivia looked at her in disbelief.

  Rachel shook her head. “Ellie never pays attention to anything.”

  “Well, you’d better pay attention to this.” Olivia opened the file. “You’re a six on the BTM scale, Ellie. That’s a scale of one to seven. None of us knew exactly what that meant when we got classified, and we still don’t know everything. It was a psychological profiling tool named after Byrd, Tabor, and Marcum, the three doctors Feno brought in when quarantine turned long-term.”

  “Classifying people by their psychological profiles,” Bing said. “Like they do in hostage situations or prisoner of war interrogations. I’ve read about this.”

  “Exactly.” Olivia flipped through the file, looking for something. “It didn’t seem that important at the time. I mean, hell, they were running forty tests a week on us. What difference did another one make? The doctors were working undercover as lab techs and file clerks, just mixed in the general population. Then Dr. Tabor, the T in BTM, apparently changed his mind about the program and tried to contact the federal government. He said their findings were being used unethically, and he wanted a full-scale investigation.”

  She pulled a picture out of the folder. “Unfortunately, he waited too long to make his request. By then the censors were in place and the complaint never got filed. Or if it did, it got buried. He knew he’d been found out and started sneaking information to local techs like me and Marianne. It wasn’t much, but he told us to watch the changes in medications. That they were tailoring the new rounds of meds not just to your physical requirements, but to your psych profile too. He said it was all very aboveboard except that he and his team had hand-selected a group of people to be what Feno referred to as their ‘fail-safe’ should anything go wrong.”

  Ellie seemed to be the only person in the room not understanding what she was hearing. “Why are you telling us this?”

  Olivia held the photo to her chest. “As far as we can tell, the BTM breaks people down into three groups. Ones and twos are classified as docile, obedient even. People who don’t struggle under changes in authority.”

  “I’m not docile,” Rachel said. “Am I?”

  Bing smiled at her as Olivia continued. “The majority of the population is three through fiv
e: moderately civil, frustrated, but generally working at a functioning level.”

  “And now we get to my tribe, right?” Ellie folded her arms. “The dreaded sixes and sevens. Tell me what fun surprises we have for the team.”

  “Sixes and sevens are at the extreme end of the spectrum. Tendencies to violence, anger issues, compulsive behavior. Generally antisocial.” Olivia was the only one looking at Ellie. She could feel her throat tighten as she asked the next question.

  “So should I assume we were the subject of Dr. Tabor’s concern?”

  Olivia nodded. “It took us a while to cross-reference everything. All of the files are kept on paper, not on any computer we could find. Feno is paranoid about being hacked, and for good reason. Matt’s already been in their personnel records twice. We began to notice, when the QEH meds were assigned, that most of the H meds were given to sixes and sevens. The doses were always changing and the blood tests were classified. Then, about six months ago, we saw another trend. Sixes and sevens in the H class were being blue-tagged. Just about every one of you is.”

  Bing put his arm around Ellie, who had grown very pale. “What are you saying to her? That she’s being poisoned? That Horizon is killing her?”

  “No—at least we don’t think so. We think Horizon contains certain psychotropic compounds that might exacerbate preexisting tendencies.”

  Ellie gripped Bing’s arm. “Want to try that in English for the rest of us?”

  Olivia nodded. “We think they might be chemically inciting you to violence. That once the majority of residents have been cleared, H-sixes and H-sevens will react violently enough that Feno will be justified in clamping down on us in a stronger and more permanent fashion.”

  Annabeth sighed. “We think if the remaining group is small enough, when the world thinks enough people have been saved, Feno will move those of us they can’t cure to a more contained area, maybe even just a compound, until they can dispose of us and make Flowertown disappear.”

  “And they think they’re going to blame that on me?” Ellie asked. “That I’m just going to do what they say? I wasn’t handpicked by anybody. I don’t care how they classify me.”