Madelyn's Mistake

by Ike Hamill

  Madelyn tried to control her frustration. It wasn’t easy. Cleo’s favorite tactic was to put words in Madelyn’s mouth and then wait for her to explode with anger.

  She spoke slowly. “Clearly, I wasn’t killed.” She swallowed hard and her ears popped. She flinched at the pain. “And, to tell the truth, I wouldn’t have saved them. Elijah was the one who wanted to rescue them, and he gave his life trying to do so. I was only helping him because I knew he wouldn’t give up until everyone else was out of the building.”

  “The building that you destroyed,” Cleo said.

  Madelyn didn’t respond.

  Cleo was clearly waiting for a response.

  “Was that a question?” Madelyn asked. She could sense the animosity of the room. She didn’t need to look up to see their folded arms and frowning faces.

  “Do you admit to destroying the building?” Cleo asked.

  “Indirectly. I suppose it was my fault. I knocked over the machine that appeared to cause the explosion.”

  “Exactly,” Cleo said. She shuffled the papers in front of herself. Madelyn could feel the cold sweat forming under her arms. The room was warm from all the citizens who had gathered to witness the trial, but Madelyn’s nerves accounted for the sweat. Now that she was seeing her actions through their eyes, she felt hard pressed to justify them.

  “And how is it that you escaped unscathed while everyone else perished?” Cleo asked.

  Madelyn looked down at herself. “Unscathed? From what I’m told, I was unconscious for a week. No thanks to you people, I’ve recovered enough to be put on trial. How do you figure I’m unscathed?”

  “You lived,” Cleo said. “Do you have anything else to offer in your defense.”

  Madelyn looked at the glowering eyes. She found Jacob and Harper. They were sympathetic, but didn’t offer much help. They didn’t have any information that might exonerate Madelyn. Amelia and the other young woman were gone—they had disappeared after their escape. Those two might have provided testimony.

  “I demand to be judged by my peers,” Madelyn said. She sat up straight and felt the pain in her back.

  “We are all your peers,” Cleo said.

  “No,” Madelyn said, shaking her head. “I look around and see young eyes. They understand the threats they live with every day, but they don’t know about the older demons. They don’t know what it was like when people turned against people. How could they?”

  She narrowed her eyes and scowled right back at the young people in the room. They had no right.

  “You will provide testimony or you will be judged,” Cleo said. “It’s your decision.”

  Madelyn nodded and set her jaw. When she spoke, she kept her voice low so that even the people in the front leaned forward to hear. “I will tell you my story of the The Option. If anyone here disputes it, you can judge me accordingly.”

  “Then tell it,” Cleo said.

  Chapter 31

  {Story}

  MY LAST DAY IN Detroit…

  I woke up with a familiar headache. I used to get them once or twice a week. It was the kind of headache that would make my right eye blurry. Any kind of movement would set off the pain.

  I set off slowly towards the bathroom to check my eyes and feel my head. Right on the back of my head was the sore spot. As long as there wasn’t too much blood, the spot wouldn’t show under my hair. I made the shower extra hot so it wouldn’t sting when the water hit it.

  Even now, I’m glad I never turned him in. It was bad enough to endure the blurry vision and the headaches. The shame would have killed me. Still, I knew that I had to do something about the injury before I went to work. I dressed quickly and hit the streets.

  Detroit was on the very southern edge of the world, and it was packed with people. We caught all the people migrating north away from the heat. My neighborhood was overrun with migrants. There were new faces every day.

  Out on the street, there was always a crowd. I had to stuff my hands down in my pockets to hold onto my keys and my ID. I caught the early train and got off at the last stop before the river. That was the nearest SPO. I remember actually smiling as I approached the place. There was no line whatsoever. In my whole adulthood, I could only remember a few times when people weren’t lined up for healthcare. I figured it was my lucky day.

  I was wrong.

  The door was locked.

  I rattled it and then cupped my hands against the glass to see inside. Everything was dark inside. I saw a woman wearing purple pajamas down near the platform, so I ran down to ask.

  “The SPO is closed?” I asked.

  “Para siempre,” she said.

  “¿Por qué?” I asked. I don’t know why I bothered. Her answer was long and I had no idea what she was saying. As I stared at her answer, I was lucky that someone else stepped in.

  “They closed all the SPOs,” she said. “This morning they declared an emergency shutdown and sent everyone home.”

  The bus arrived and pajama woman and the helpful woman both got on. I just stood there, blinking. We had all heard rumors that they wanted to shut down the health offices, but I never believed that it would happen. My tablet gave me the rest of the picture—people who were sick could either self-treat or head for hospice.

  I touched the back of my head again. The bump was sore, and I had almost certainly been concussed, but I wasn’t about to submit myself to the cull about it. I figured that I would just have to heal the old fashioned way.

  Back on the train, it was a short trip to work.

  It was a waste of time. I probably should have turned around right then and gone home. Trying to concentrate on anything was completely fruitless. There was a mountain of survey data my company collected on grocery purchasing patterns. If someone bought a particular brand of fabric softener, what type of produce would they purchase and how often. The whole thing sounds absurd now.

  And people at work seemed to know that there had been a shift. Some fuse had been lit and the people gathered in the kitchen area seemed to be killing time, waiting for the explosion. It wasn’t just about the closing of the SPOs. There were rumors that all the groceries were going exclusive. Random people off the street would be turned away unless they had a membership. The signs were clear. If people couldn’t get healthcare or food, they would all die off pretty quick.

  I stood on the outskirts of the group as they argued.

  “We still have rights,” one woman said. “We should band together and take the courthouse. We should demand that the government does something. They’re supposed to represent us.”

  “You know how that works, right?” a man asked. This guy was equal parts smug and cynical. Every time he opened his mouth, he sounded like he thought he was explaining calculus to a toddler. “The volume of your voice is only amplified by the size of your wallet. They don’t care what the majority wants. The majority doesn’t pay the bills.”

  Another man added his opinion. “I heard that half of the reps are Optioners.”

  That brought a chorus of rebuttals. The smug guy summed up the popular opinion. “Believe me, if they had enough money to take the Option, they wouldn’t be messing around with local government.”

  I slipped away after that. I had to check on my own backup plan.

  # # # # #

  I got off the phone with my contractor and felt a little better. I had taken my inheritance and what little savings I had hidden from my husband and used it all on a secret project. Work in the Alaskan territory was cheap back then. Tons of people had moved up there and were looking for an honest way to earn a wage.

  I managed to employ a guy nearly full-time to convert my grandmother’s cabin. He had a whole sub-level excavated and installed everything I would need to retire there. And I had managed to keep the whole thing secret from Austin. That place was the only reason I was able to get up and face a new day. I knew that I had a secret hideout to run to if everything went bad.

  By noon, my idea of running away wa
s ruined.

  I joined the others in the conference room where everyone was watching the news.

  They had cut off the rapid transport.

  Too many people were fleeing north, and the government was worried that there wouldn’t be enough of us left to keep the services running. Apparently, it didn’t occur to them that their exclusive grocery stores wouldn’t do them any good if there was nobody around to drive the trucks or stock the shelves. Our company was only tangentially involved with food distribution, but we learned that we had all been designated as crucial support. Even if they hadn’t shut the rapid transport, we weren’t allowed to travel.

  I nearly fell down.

  I tried to do the math in my head. Using the transport, the trip to my grandmother’s cabin would take a full day. It was about eight hours on the transport and another eight taking the roads up to the cabin. Without the transport, I had no idea. All I had to go on was my father’s old story from when he was a kid. He said it would take a week to get to Edmonton, and I figured it had to be at least twice that far. And that was if I somehow found a car and got around the blockades. Now that I had been designated as crucial support, I would be turned back if I tried to go farther than Ann Arbor.

  I had to get out of there.

  I figured that even if I had to walk around the blockades, I had to find a way north. My grandmother’s cabin had been the only thing keeping me sane those months since my father died. If I couldn’t get up there, I might as well submit to the cull.

  I walked most of the way home. The trains were packed with people. My head was throbbing at one point, so I stopped to lean against a pole. The bus happened to pull up right then. I got on. I rode until I saw streets that I recognized, then I got back off.

  There was a group of people in front of a bodega. When I saw that they all had guns tucked into their belts, I wanted to run, but something made me slow down to listen. The guy who was talking couldn’t have been more than a meter tall. He was literally standing on the shoulders of two giant men, just so people could see him.

  “They want to eliminate us because we take up the resources they would hoard for themselves. They know that the water is going away. They know that the very spin of the planet is going to change. You watch, in a few years, the Earth’s axis will tilt towards the sun. Half of our planet will be forever in darkness and covered in ice. That’s why they sent out all those colonists. They’ve known that this has been coming for decades.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I stood on my toes and yelled at the guy. “Who is they?” I asked.

  The people turned back to me and then looked forward at their tiny leader.

  “The Optioners,” he said. “I can’t tell you if they planned this, or only predicted it, but they’ve known. They made themselves impervious to aging, and now they know that they have to clear out the rest of us. We’re the mold on their sandwich. We’re in the infection that keeps this place forever sick. Us regular people are a disease that needs to be cured.”

  The crowd erupted with cheers at that. I have no idea why his revelation got them so excited. It seemed to me that he was laying the blame for our current situation right back on us, but his audience loved it.

  “Now what are we going to do about it?” the little man asked.

  “Kill them all!” someone shouted. This notion was repeated a dozen times by the ravenous group.

  A couple of people on the outskirts of the group ran. It was the only way I knew that something was about to happen. I began to back away. I was just lucky that I put some distance between myself and the others before the bullets began to fly.

  At first I didn’t know why anyone was shooting. Then I saw that the Civilian Guard had pulled up on the side street. They didn’t order the people to disperse or give any warning. They simply opened fire.

  I turned and ran.

  # # # # #

  I got back to my place out of breath and with a pounding head. Without medical assistance, I still hadn’t recovered fully from the bruises of the night before.

  “What are you doing home?” Austin asked.

  I could have asked him the same, but I wouldn’t. Almost nothing made him angrier than a question in response to a question.

  “They shut down work for the day because of the trains,” I said. I kept moving towards the kitchen. As long as I didn’t make a big deal of the lie, I figured I might get away with it.

  “I heard you’re crucial now,” he said. He followed me to the kitchen. He stood in the doorway. I was cornered.

  I bent to open a cabinet. “Yes. They said that. Can’t leave Detroit without a travel visa. I never thought that predicting the shopping patterns of shut-ins was that important.”

  I tried to smile at him as I stood, but the expression wouldn’t stick to my face. I could see the trouble brewing. The same way my grandmother used to say that her knee would act up when there was rain coming, I could feel Austin’s storm throbbing in the lump on the back of my head.

  “You know what happens when someone is designated crucial?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “I’ll have mandatory work attendance. I have to report travel and illness. I was crucial once before.” Years earlier, I had been crucial during the food shortages. It was hell. I tried to hide that in my casual response.

  “It also means that if you decide to take off, they can investigate your family,” he said.

  I shrugged. “That’s only if I take off. Not a big deal for me. I’m not going anywhere.”

  As far as he knew, that should have been true. My brother moved to Narsaq. My father was dead. Austin was my only family, and I had been extremely careful to hide the existence of my grandmother’s cabin.

  “What about your underwear?” he asked.

  I was so stunned by the randomness of the question that I didn’t even see the swing. His heavy ring hit me just above the ear. My headache rolled back in.

  “My what?” I asked, covering up. My eyes landed on all the things in the kitchen I could use as a weapon. That’s now how we worked though. I would never escalate with Austin. He was clearly the type of man one didn’t want to escalate with.

  His voice was quiet and controlled when he responded. This was the tone that meant business. Play time was over. The next hit would leave me unconscious.

  “All of your good underwear is in the drawer. Your mediocre underwear is in the hamper. You’ve been saving your good underwear for something. Are you planning a trip? Because the only time you save up your good underwear is when you’re going on a trip.”

  I just stood and blinked. I didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t something I had consciously done, but he was completely right. I had saved all my good clothes, knowing that any day I would pack it all up and jump on the rapid transport for the north. He had seen right through me.

  “You caught me,” I said. “I was actually going to put the order in today, but then all this chaos started. I was planning on ordering new underwear and throwing out the mediocre stuff, so I was using it for the last time.” This was an absurd excuse, but it was an equally absurd conversation. I think that the only reason he didn’t press his inquest was because he wanted to stretch out the torture.

  He didn’t reply. He backed out of the kitchen and left me there to wonder how I would get away.

  # # # # #

  “So you must have known about the SPO closures for a while,” I said as I sat down. Austin had already started eating.

  “I knew it was coming, but it was a surprise that they got it done so quickly. There are usually a lot of delays when it comes to government operations,” he said. Austin worked for an insurance company. Elective medical was a tiny percentage of their business, but he seemed pretty connected to news about the industry.

  “What do you think people are going to do?”

  He laughed. “They’re going to die. That’s the whole point. There are plenty of people like us who have no health issues. We’ll
live a long time before our health becomes a problem. With my connections, I’ll be able to get us med-kits when the time comes. The strong survive. It’s the only way we’re going to get back to a healthy population.”

  “The strong and the rich survive,” I said.

  “If I had the money, I would take the Option. I know you’ve got your moral objections, but come on—if we had that much money I think your mind would change pretty quick.”

  “It’s not natural,” I said.

  “Natural? Everything evolves, Maddie. As a species, we’ve found a way to grab at perfection. We have an obligation to take any advantage we can find. That’s only natural. We’ll get there. I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve yet.”

  He spoke like we were in agreement on the topic.

  “What about food?” I asked. We had belonged to a grocery at one point, but we had cut back when the rent went up.

  He smiled. “Trust me, I’ll have a card by the end of the week. We can get some decent meat once we sign up.”

  I nodded. I didn’t trust him, but I wasn’t about to say so. He looked at me while he ate. The corner of his mouth turned. He had a secret.

  “I got rid of the car today,” he said.

  A couple of things clicked into place for me when he said that. I nearly dropped my fork. First, I suddenly had an idea of why he was so confident that he would be able to get a grocery membership. He had probably taken the proceeds from selling the car and bought into one of those group deals. At most, he could have gotten a year’s subscription for our car. The second thing, the more shocking thing, was what it meant for me.

  “How will you get to work?” I asked.

  He smiled again. There was something cold and triumphant in that smile. I began to believe that he had figured me out. “I’m working from home,” he said.