by Terry Persun
“Free will,” Bradley said, apparently to get them back to their conversation.
“I remember,” Keith said. “The choice to live in there or out here. The choice to live in this compound, or in the city surrounding Newcity, or in the houses outside the inner city. I get it. And each one has its routine.”
“Okay, so you understand that much,” Bradley said.
“In Newcity my awareness was dulled. Why?”
“To produce utopia? To create an army of workers who can't complain? Create a place where there's no crime, no violence? I'm not really sure what it is anymore. At one time it seemed like a good idea. Maybe it still is. There are plenty of people willing to hang their choices and their emotional extremes on the rack to enter into an easier life. I've considered it myself.” Bradley stared into the distance. “But I can't give this up.” He reached over and patted Keith's knee. “Now, let's get to you. I want to know all about the boy, the girl, and your dad.”
“There's not much to tell, really. Like I told you, my dad was an apparition. He said that he was there to warn me. He told me to be careful who I trust.” Keith shrugged. “As soon as Mom and the others came to get me, he faded into thin air. I figured it was another illusion.”
“He looked like your dad?”
“I don't remember my parents or my siblings. But it felt like my dad and he looked, well familiar, so I accepted my sense about it,”
Keith said. “My sense about Mom is different though. I feel no real emotional commitment to her.”
“You look a little like your dad. Same hair color, same shape to your face,” Bradley said.
“It was Dad.”
“How about the girl? None of the others ever mentioned a girl either.”
“She's beautiful. The boy told me that she was an angel, but…” Keith stopped to consider his words. “She… I don't know how to say this. Through her blouse, it appeared as though she had only one wing.”
“An angel with one wing? What could be the meaning of that?”
“The meaning?”
“If everything is pointing in the direction we think it is, the Newcity system created the boy with the bullet hole in his forehead as a symbol of each person's inner self, the damaged part, the part that is either dead or dying; I can't tell which one because the boy isn't actually dead. It could be the part that wants to die.”
“Then the angel?” Keith asked.
Bradley leaned back on his hands and took a breath. “What do you think it is?”
“If the boy is the damaged part, then the angel is the beautiful part,” Keith said after reflecting for a moment. “But then why one wing?”
“Exactly.” Bradley sat back up, rubbed his chin, then pulled the notebook from his pocket and jotted down a few notes. “What did she look like, specifically?”
“Dark hair, oval face. Her eyes were hazel or blue, something other than brown. I don't know if I really looked at her as closely as I did the boy. It's embarrassing to stare at someone so beautiful.” He raised a finger. “Ah, except at first when I thought she had a hump on her back. That was before the boy told me she was an angel. At first, the protrusion was sort of horrifying. I thought she was malformed.”
“Did she talk to you?”
“Very little. She told me to leave the doctor's home. Told me it would be all right.”
Bradley wrote a few more things. “Huh, you followed your wounded self and were comforted by your angel. Amazing.”
“It doesn't matter. I haven't seen them for a while. Or heard them.” Keith glimpsed Bradley peripherally.
“You tell me if you do,” he said.
“You think it'll happen again, don't you,” Keith said.
Bradley grinned. “We'll see, won't we? Now, about the boy?”
A breeze swept over the ground causing the grass to sway in waves. The trees whispered. Keith weighed his knowledge and memory of the boy. When he spoke, he let his voice rise as though he was asking a question of Bradley. “The boy was me?” And he was asking a question. He wanted to know if Bradley suspected that he was the boy with the bullet hole in his forehead.
Bradley turned the page in the notebook. “Do the others know this?”
“The escapees? Yes. Why?”
“We may have to move your tent already. I'm not sure how they're going to react. In fact, that's probably why they acted so strange when I came by with you. I sensed something was going on.” Then he shifted so that he was angled in Keith's direction. “So, all this time, the boy was you. It wasn't just a random image? That leads to more questions.”
“Let me stay with the others for now,” Keith said. “I'll be fine. Really. I'd like to be with them. They know what I've been through and I feel comfortable there. I don't feel threatened at all.”
“Some of them are still going through their paranoid stage. I wouldn't want anything to happen.”
“They're not dangerous. I'm sure you've never had anything go wrong,” Keith said.
Bradley nodded. “I don't know if I like this, but because you asked we'll try it out. So, fine, you can stay there. But I'll have someone walk through every once in a while to be sure nothing is amiss. I need to have you here. This is a leap beyond what we're used to. It may lead us to what's going on in there, in Newcity.” He held up his notebook. “I want to get more details. Our little talk here is only the beginning. I'll want to know when the boy first appeared and why you didn't recognize him in the first place. What route did you take to get out of Newcity? A lot of other things to cover.”
“Why is all this so important?”
“There are millions of people in there.” He swept his hand out in front of him. “This would be gone. Much of the country is farmland as it is, growing food for the Newcity drones. The Earth can't handle more people out here. We almost destroyed it once.” Bradley stared into the distance. When he faced Keith again, his eyes were squinted, his jaw set and stern. “I won't let that happen again.”
Keith felt a different energy come from Bradley, and was uncomfortable with it. The sensation reminded him of when he woke with the premonition of dread. The feeling was strong and had its own nuances. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't pinpoint its origin. “Can we return to camp now?”
Bradley stood. “Can you keep this to yourself for a little while longer?”
“I think so,” Keith said, although he hadn't truly decided how he was going to handle his newfound concern. He just sensed that he could assert his way through the Newcity escapees easier than he could the people in the main compound.
Bradley's face shifted into a smile too abruptly and quickly to be real. “I'll walk you back.”
They approached the escapee tents from the path. Everyone there had separated into small groups of twos and threes, each group with a different pile of items in front of them: leaves, several kinds of wood, small sprigs from bushes or trees. Keith jerked his head in their direction, questioning Bradley.
“We encourage them to explore their surroundings, to take notes in their notebooks, to get to know how amazing the outside world can be,” Bradley explained. “It's sort of a learning process, but it also keeps them occupied as they're going through the different stages of integration. In fact, that's what our conversation was supposed to be about, you studying the area. I forgot to tell you.” He stopped for a moment and put his hand on Keith's forearm to hold him back a moment. “Their nature keeps them from mingling with the main group. Like children going through stages, they'll only wander so far before they want to come back. It's hard on them when we move the compound to another location. Unless they're ready to integrate, they have to get used to the new surroundings.”
“Why do you have to relocate?”
“I'm sure you can guess,” Bradley said. “And from what you just told me, it might get worse. We may have to act sooner than I thought.”
Keith wanted to ask what he meant by act, but decided that was for another time. He'd probably find out soon
enough.
They walked the short distance past the tents, each group shying from Bradley as they maneuvered by. At the main path, Bradley shook Keith's hand. “Go ahead and explore the area, see what nature has to offer. We'll send someone with a food table for lunch, so you don't have to worry about that. Just spend some time getting used to the place, and to your neighbors.”
Keith agreed, then turned back to the escapees. Their attention spans didn't appear to be so short to him until the groups rotated through, changing which pile of items they surrounded.
After Bradley was far enough down the path, Keith headed for his tent. Inside, he took a moment to spread his towel out to dry and place his bath items inside the pack again. He was almost through when a scratching came to his tent flap and Stacy's voice asking, “May I come inside?”
Chapter 11
Keith slid up into a cross-legged position on the tent floor and told Stacy that she could enter. The flap pushed in. Stacy's pale arm was the first thing Keith saw. She crawled into the tent and sat opposite Keith with her legs together and tucked to the side. “I won't get too close,” she said, “but we do have to keep our voices down so they don't carry. I wouldn't want any of the outsiders to hear us.”
“The outsiders or the other escapees?” he said, thinking particularly of Ben.
“Ben knows I'm here, if that's what you mean.”
Keith waited. She had come to talk with him. Fine, he'd give her space to talk. There was nothing more he needed to say to her until he knew what this was about.
Stacy looked as though she were in deep thought, her lips pressed together and twitching. She peered over her shoulder suspiciously at the tent flap before addressing him. “Okay. Here it is. We think you were sent here to save us.”
Keith kept his feelings of surprise to himself by not showing any reaction. His breathing became shallow, but he doubted she'd notice that.
Stacy took a deep breath. “Well, not all of us,” she nodded to herself, “but most.”
“What are you trying to say exactly?” Keith said.
“Ben and one or two others seem to think that the system is still controlling you and that you're here as a beacon and that they're coming to kill us.”
“I thought you said he knew you were here.”
“He does,” she said.
“So, why would the system want to kill you?”
Her eyes looked down at a spot between them. “So we don't kill it.”
Keith shook his head and scrunched his face in question.
“That's what Bradley is planning,” she said.
“How would you know that?
“Tonight, I'll come for you and show you.”
“And the rest of you,” he asked, “how do you think I'm going to save you?”
“We believe that millions of lives are at stake. Not just ours.” Stacy placed her hand on Keith's knee. “We need to warn them. I don't think they want to kill us. They want to stop Bradley and the others from killing them. We'll just get in the way. You are our savior; perhaps you're theirs as well. Some of us believe that a few at a time will escape until we're all free. But we're not free until we're away from Bradley.”
“How many of you came out together? A few at a time, or one?”
“Half of us. Five or six at a time,” she said. “Always, someone would have to sacrifice getting caught so that the rest of us could make it. But, you came out alone.”
“Bradley never mentioned that.”
“He wouldn't.”
Keith didn't want to be anyone's savior. The whole idea felt wrong to him. But there was no reason to tell Stacy that, not yet. He needed to understand more about what was going on before he could act at all. “Why doesn't he kill escapees a few at a time as they come out? He appears to know where they'll be taken. Wouldn't that be easier than trying to destroy Newcity?”
“Two reasons,” she said. “First, he believes others might be escaping through other parts of the building and that eventually everyone will leave at once. He's fearful of what would happen if Newcity poured that many paranoid schizophrenics into the world. And second, he needs our help. They're a small band of dissidents. What can they do alone?”
Keith listened quietly while Stacy explained how she and the others escaped by following the boy with the bullet hole in his forehead. How he wound them through the complex, often running into maintenance crews completing minor repairs. Because they were traveling in a group, the Newcity Police became suspicious and eventually attempted to arrest them. That's when one or two of the others fell back and were apprehended. “So that we could escape,” she said.
It didn't take much thought at all for Keith to guess that the system's illusion, the boy, had followed paths that he must have laid while running through his morning reports. He wanted to reject the idea, but it was so clear to him at that moment. “No,” he said.
“What is it?” Stacy sat upright and looked around even though there was nothing to see but the inside of the tent.
“You've got to go now,” Keith said.
“Are you all right?”
“I have to be alone, that's all.”
Stacy's passivity wouldn't allow her to resist his wishes and he knew it. She made her way out of the tent in a rush, the flap sending a breeze over him as she exited.
The system had used him to find a way out for the others. It also used him to create an escape route for himself. His consciousness, or subconsciousness, as it would seem, linked directly with that of the Newcity system. If he was still hearing the boy with the bullet hole in his forehead, that meant that he was still connected to the system. He must be. In which case, Ben was more likely to be right than Stacy. Newcity would know where he was as long as there was contact. But he hadn't seen nor heard the boy or the angel for a few hours now. Perhaps the connection had finally broken off.
Keith took out his notebook and jotted down some of the possibilities of what might be going on. He didn't outright reject what Stacy had told him, but did recognize that she probably wasn't thinking very clearly, that the escapees would keep to a simple conclusion. Since he looked like the boy with the bullet hole in his forehead, she automatically saw him as their leader. He led them out of Newcity after all, so why not lead them away from here as well? It made sense.
Bradley, on the other hand, appeared open and trustworthy one second and mysteriously vague the next. There was nothing simple about him. Keith had sensed an anxious anger under the surface of the man's outward congeniality and didn't know what to think of it. Then there was Sam and how frightened he appeared to be, yet curious about Keith's difference. Had Sam been an escapee at one time? Had he been integrated?
Keith jotted down the questions so that he could go over them later as he got more clues as to the truth. It could be, he wrote, that Stacy, like the rest of the escapees, was merely exercising her paranoia. Ben mistrusted Keith, where she mistrusted Bradley. The simplest possibility, clearly, was that Bradley was telling the truth and that he was helping the escapees to integrate. His uneasiness at times could be from all the responsibility he was forced to handle. As Stacy had put it, the outside world couldn't handle an inrush of millions of paranoid schizophrenics.
It wasn't long before people from the main group brought tables and set them up for lunch. Sam retrieved Keith from his tent, by standing outside and softly requesting him to come out and join the others.
Keith put his notebook and pen into his pocket and crawled out. His body felt sore from lying on the mat. He noticed each ache separately: the tightness in his hip and shoulder, a crick in his neck from leaning on his side while holding his head straight. The air temperature, as soon as he got outside the tent, dropped ten degrees, and he rubbed his hands over his arms.
“I'll have someone bring a jacket or sweater for you,” Sam said. “I'm sorry I didn't think of it earlier.”
“Thank you,” Keith said.
The others had lined up and were placing fruit and bread ont
o plates. There were a pot of soup and what looked like cornbread as well.
“You should get something to eat,” Sam said. He stood close to Keith and his voice was low.
Keith turned to him and asked, “Were you an escapee?”
Sam smiled and lowered his eyes. “No. But I appreciate your thinking so. I'm just more passive than the others. When you're born out here, it's a choice. This is what I choose. Bradley always tells me how lucky I am to be able to choose what others are forced to experience.”
“Would it matter if you didn't know the difference?” Keith whispered.
“Yes. It does to me now. Maybe if I were in Newcity I wouldn't be able to concentrate enough to know the difference, but knowing what I know out here, it matters a lot.”
