by RJ Crayton
He wasn’t sure. Was her place safe to talk? “What about the place we went last night?”
She paused to appraise him and then shook her head. “More people are in and out of there during the day.”
Lijah nodded, and she turned and started walking down the hallway. He followed her through the corridors and took the elevator down a level. They wandered until they found a unit in the far corner. He suspected it was one of the nicer ones.
Inside and they found a neatly decorated room with a sofa in the center draped with an afghan. Little dolls, tiny porcelain collectible things, peeked out from a display case. And on the table was a vase with fake flowers. He came in, and she motioned to the table.
He took a seat. “Nice place,” he said.
She nodded. “They have a decoration room for senior officers. They get to pick stuff they want. My mom used to have little figures like those, so I got a bunch. It seems silly to have this stuff, but it’s kinda nice. Makes you feel more at home.”
He bobbed his head in agreement, as he contemplated what he wanted to say. He supposed he ought to get the hard stuff out first. “I’m gay,” he said.
Her eyes widened and she leaned back in the chair, but didn’t say anything.
“Last night, I enjoyed the tour and I think you’re really nice, but I didn’t want to give you the wrong impression. I want to be your friend, and I just didn’t want any misunderstandings to undermine that.”
She placed her hand on her chin and stared. He proffered a weak smile and was just thankful that he was, in fact, gay and not making an excuse. She seemed good at reading people, and he’d hate to be in a position of lying to her. If he were straight, he still wouldn’t be interested. She looked like his sister. That was just creepy as hell, in a romantic sense.
In a friendship sense, it had made her easier to like. Easier for him to feel a kinship with. Perhaps that’s why she thought he liked her. He hadn’t intended to give that vibe, but he apparently had.
“So, the dudes you came with, the immunes? Were you a couple with one of those guys?”
She’d called them both immune. He wondered briefly if she thought Josh was immune. Only, that didn’t make sense, as his lack of immunity was the reason Josh was wanted for Facility One. “No, I wasn’t with either of them. We were just traveling together.”
“Alright,” she said, absentmindedly, and then she stood to leave. “Thanks for telling me.”
Lijah remained seated. “That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”
She raised an eyebrow and sat back down.
He looked around the room, looked for signs of listening devices but doubted he’d see any. He figured he might as well ask. “I know the cell we were in was monitored. Is your unit monitored?”
She laughed and shook her head. “No.” Her laughter quelled slightly and she said, “No, I’m in a listening-free room. At least for now. I bunked with your sister in a monitored suite for a couple of nights. But that was just because Alex wanted to keep an eye on her. Said she seemed antsy.”
She was. And with good reason. She got shipped off to Virginia for whatever it was they wanted with her. His mother had told him Elaan would be safe because their father would look out for her. But his mother put too much faith in his dad. The man had broken down earlier, and Lijah didn’t like to think his sister’s fate was completely dependent on his father keeping it together.
“My sister was just stressed about being here,” he said. “She’s a good person.”
Natalie seemed less than enthusiastic about this. She seemed not to like his sister. He didn’t want to go there right now. “I wanted to talk to you about Alex. How well do you know him?”
Natalie squinted distrustfully. “Well enough.” Her tone was defensive. “He’s been nothing but good to me.”
He shook his head, measured his words. “I’m not suggesting he isn’t,” he said. “It’s just I’m a little concerned about my mother.”
“Dr. Rhodes?”
He nodded. “Yes. She’s spending a lot of time with him, and he seems a bit controlling, a little overbearing.”
“He runs the facility. He likes being in charge,” she said, leaning in. “What type of things are you talking about?”
“Just that he seems to like her not to work with anyone else here,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow and practically scoffed. “I was there when we brought you guys in. I’m as good at keeping things under my hat as anybody, but let’s face it, the fewer people who talk to, umm, Dr. Rhodes, the better.”
Lijah screwed his mouth to the side. She sorta had a point. But it seemed more insidious than that. “OK, fine. Everyone else be damned. She should stay away from those people. What about me? You agree I should be able to see her.”
A shadow of doubt crossed her face. “He won’t let you see her?”
This was tricky. He hadn’t been denied access to his mother on multiple occasions, and sick people generally should avoid others if they’re contagious, but he definitely had kept Lijah from seeing his mother. “Just today,” Lijah admitted. “He said she’s sick. But she wouldn’t care. She would still want to see me.”
Natalie digested the information, her fingers tapping on the table. “It seems kinda thin to me. I mean, if she’s sick, maybe she just needed rest. Maybe, he just wanted her to rest. You’re her kid. She’d see you, even if she’d be better off resting. Perhaps he just wanted to save her from having to make that choice.”
Lijah raised an eyebrow. “She’s a grown woman and she doesn’t need saving. I’ve found men who want to take away their women’s choices tend to be bad for them.” With that, he stood and said, “Thanks for listening.” Then he walked out of the apartment without looking back.
Chapter 23 - Elaan
They’d implanted a tracker under her skin. She’d heard of people using these to find their lost dogs. Even heard of parents ultra freaked about kidnapping and child abduction doing this. But it still seemed creepy and Big Brother.
Perhaps this was the time she lived in. Creepy, crazy people in charge, creating a false utopia full of immunes. Her father was now walking her across the greens of the campus to her dormitory. Kingston and Josh had been in the tagging area, but they left, going somewhere afterward. Elaan still hadn’t gotten a chance to talk to Josh, to find out what his father had told him. And she wasn’t clear on whether she’d be able to talk freely or not.
She leaned into her father. “So Dad, what is the deal here?”
He put his arm through hers, pointed at a tree nearby as if he were showing her some feature of it, and said, “It’s the place we thought. Only, cloning isn’t the end game. It’s just a potential strategy. They’re taking the material necessary to clone. However, as far as I know, they haven’t started yet. Thoreaux is obsessed with recreating the world the way God would’ve intended.”
Her father tipped his head in the other direction and then pointed, as if he was trying to draw her attention to something. It was just a building. “You’ll be put in the dorms here, all females, and you’ll get a chance to mingle with the guys in the evenings at dinner and during appointed social times. I don’t know what you recall about genetic diversity.”
She smiled and looked in the distance. “Not much.”
“Well,” he said. “We’ve discovered, as a species, we’re healthier if we’re genetically diverse. While Hitler would have opposed a mixing of the races, that mixing generally produces healthier people because they’ve got a wide genetic background to choose from, and they therefore are more likely to select the healthiest, best traits. Because Thoreaux wants to do things the natural way, he’s mapping the genetically most diverse candidates to pair them off and reproduce. They’ve only been here about three months doing this, but they’ve already got a handful of couples over in the married housing. His plan would be to pair off all the immunes and get immune and healthy genetically diverse children.”
Elaan almost frown
ed, but she saw a soldier walking by, staring at them. She stopped walking, turned and pointed to a building in that direction, and leaned into her father as if she was asking what it was. “And the immunes. They’re OK with this mating?”
“Those who know about it are. The initial immunes collected here were similar in faith to Thoreaux, so yes, they’re OK with it. Once mated, people move to another facility. The people here don’t all know what’s going on. For most people, it’s just safety. It was pretty bad for those who weren’t in protection units. People around them dying, food shortages. Here is stable, and most people like that. There are things they don’t like, I’m sure. But do the things they don’t like outweigh the things they do? That I don’t know.”
Her father started them moving again, guiding them toward a building. “Presuming people stay happy here, they may be happy to mate and move on to another happy place. I think that’s what Thoreaux wants, to lull the immunes here into contentment and then have them buy into his overall goal. You know the old expression about luring more people with honey than vinegar. This is his honey. But, if people don’t take to it, he has a backup plan. He’s collecting genetic information and samples for cloning. He can still go that route. He just isn’t dependent on originas.”
So now she got to be called an original. Seemed nuts. “Is there any way to escape?” she asked. “The campus seems pretty open.”
They were getting closer to the building. Her father stopped, releasing her arm, and knelt down, it appeared, to tie his shoe. The thing was, his shoe was already tied. He actually untied it, and she assumed he would tie it again. “There’s a perimeter fence,” he said. “This area includes about twenty acres that they’ve enclosed. The fencing isn’t electric or anything, but it does have barbed wire at the top. It’s to keep out the average person, or keep in those of us staying here. I’m not sure when they built it, or why they spared the manpower to do it, but it does its job of providing a barrier. It’s monitored with cameras, and of course, you immunes are tracked, so even if you left, they could find you.”
She raised her hand, feeling the Band-Aid at the crook of her neck. It was an odd place to put the tracker, she thought.
“They’d prefer you not be able to easily cut it out yourself,” her father said as he stood. “Near so many sensitive veins means you need to be very good with a scalpel and mirror or you need help. So, there’ll be no lone wolf removals. And we’re almost there. Look cheery, dear.”
She looked up and noticed they were about twenty feet from a brick building that said “Ladies Suites.” Indeed, they were almost there. She smiled, hoping she looked cheery enough.
Chapter 24 - Elaan
Elaan and her father walked into the building, where they found a small entryway that had a front desk on the right side. A pleasant looking middle-aged woman with a round, cheerful face and auburn hair fixed in a bun was sitting behind a reception desk. To the left of the desk was a door that must have led to the remainder of the building.
“And who do we have here?” the woman asked in an unnaturally high and happy pitch.
“Elaan Woodson,” her father said, stepping closer to the desk. “She needs to check in.”
The woman smiled broadly at Elaan. “Oh, you’re gonna love it here,” she said. From her desk, she grabbed a small device about the size of a cell phone but clearly wasn’t. “Step closer and turn to your side,” she said.
Elaan looked at her father, wondering if she should comply. He nodded, and she stepped closer, and turned so her body was perpendicular with the desk. The woman raised the device near Elaan’s neck, where the tracker had been implanted.
The receptionist checked the screen. “Everything seems to be in order, Elaan.” Her voice didn’t have the drawl the earlier soldier’s did, so Elaan figured she wasn’t a native of the South. The woman looked at Elaan’s father and said, “I’ll take it from here. Thank you, Dr. Woodson.”
He nodded, then turned to leave. “Wait,” Elaan said. “Dad, where are you going?”
Before he could answer, receptionist lady said, “Men are not allowed in the women’s dormitory. You’ll get a handbook when the tour is finished.”
“You’ll be fine,” her father said. “I’ll be back to see you tonight, during visiting hours.”
Visiting hours. It sounded like a prison. She wondered briefly what the hell was with this place. She wanted to bolt, but the device in her neck apparently made her quite trackable.
She watched her father depart and turned back to the woman. “So this is the dorm?”
The woman nodded, then moved out from behind the desk. She pulled open a drawer, grabbed a walkie talkie, and spoke into it. “This is Melinda Pace. I’m going to be leaving the front desk to integrate an immune.”
Elaan’s ears perked up; she didn’t like what she’d heard. A normal thing to say would have been “show Elaan around” or “get her set up in a room.” However, “integrate an immune” sounded ridiculously creepy.
A voice crackled back over her walkie. “Got it. I’ll send a soldier to fill in.”
The woman nodded, and looked at Elaan. “I’m Ms. Pace,” she said, even though the introduction seemed a bit late. “Let’s go.”
Waving a keycard in front of a reader on the door, there was a click and then Ms. Pace opened the door and held it for Elaan. On the other side of the room was a big lounge area. There were sofas, vending machines, plush chairs, a foosball table, air hockey, and a couple of round tables that looked like they’d be good for cards. It reminded her of some of the college common rooms they’d seen when they’d gone on a summer college tour before Lijah’s senior year.
“Usually, there are people lounging about, but there are classes today, so everyone is at them,” Ms. Pace said.
“Classes?”
“Yes,” she said. “We want everyone to have an understanding about the new world order, about what caused the disease, about how we can combat it by restarting things in places like this. Usually, we have a couple of different classes going on at once, and people rotate. But for classes about the world order, we prefer to do one big unit in the large lecture hall.”
“So, it’s like a college,” Elaan asked, scrunching up her nose.
Ms. Pace chuckled. “Yes,” she said. “In its structure. The immunes in this commune are all in the seventeen to twenty-four age range. We do have a commune where we have older immunes, who help care for some of the younger immunes. But here, we try to structure it like the environment you’d normally be going into.”
They walked through the room to the opposite end and then up a flight of stairs. The second floor was a hallway with several doors off it. “These are the dorm rooms,” she said. “Getting along with others is an important skill, so we try to ensure everyone has a roommate.”
Ms. Pace walked down the hall briskly and stopped a little past the midway point. “This is your room. It’s coded to your tracking device. If you’re within two feet of the door, it will open for you. Your roommate’s name is Ki.”
“Key?”
“Yes. It’s spelled K-I. It’s Japanese, I think. She’s already set up. There’s a bed that’s made up, and that will be Ki’s. Yours will be the one with fresh linen folded on top. I believe there are some clothes also included, in a plastic vacuum-sealed bag. There should be three pairs, standard issue. It helps when people are viewed as similar. Their individuality shines when we get to know them as people, not based on what clothes they’re wearing. And I believe there’s a handbook, too.”
Elaan stepped to the door and heard an unlocking sound. Opening the door revealed a typical dorm room. There were two beds, one on each side. The right side of the room was clearly in use. The bed was made, its desk had a notebook and pencil atop it, and there was even a photograph in a frame on the desk. The left side of the room was barren, except for the linens and clothes Ms. Pace mentioned would be there.
“Probably a good idea to get your bed made and put your t
hings away.” The older woman glanced at her watch. “Everyone else should be back in about half an hour. Also probably a good idea to take a look at the handbook.”
Elaan nodded. The woman turned to leave, but a pressing question compelled Elaan to stop her. “Where are my things?” The woman looked at her as if she had two heads. “I didn’t have them when I came in the van. But I thought someone had brought my stuff. I had a backpack in Illinois. I wanted to have it back. It had my clothes and stuff in it.”
Melinda Pace smiled brightly and gave a nod that she seemed to hope would placate Elaan. “Dear, you don’t need those things. Everything you could want will be provided here.”
Elaan pointed to a photo on the desk on the opposite side of the room. “She has personal things,” she said. “And I’d like some of mine, too.”
Ms. Pace shook her head. “That’s not personal.” Elaan raised an eyebrow, and the woman dipped her head in acquiescence. “Well, yes, it’s personal. But it’s not something Ki brought with her. That’s a picture of David. That’s her suggested partner. Ki is twenty, and she and David will be eligible to move to the other housing unit in a month. But she likes to keep a picture of him. That kind of personal attachment is definitely encouraged. It’s all in your handbook.”
Elaan frowned. She didn’t want to read a handbook, and she didn’t want to be stuck here. “What about Josh? And Amadu? I was transferred here with them.”
“Boys’ dormitory,” Ms. Pace said, her toned clipped. “It’s all in the handbook, dear. At the end of the handbook is a sheet you need to sign. It’s a pledge. Take today to get acclimated and read your handbook. I’ll collect your signed pledge in the morning. Now, I need to get back to my desk.” Without a glance backward, she continued down the hall. Elaan took a step toward her but realized it was pointless. Ms. Pace had given all she would give. Elaan closed the door and then went to the bed with a plastic-covered mattress on it. She sat, and looked at the linens, the plastic-wrapped clothes, and finally a soft-cover red book that looked like a cheap manual. It was the size of printer paper and had probably been photocopied by Ms. Pace. It was bound with plastic pieces that went through rectangular holes in the paper. “Charlottesville Immune Compound (CIC) handbook.”
