I still don’t remember which ones got me.
At least two men and definitely one woman. But the rest is all messed up. I got slammed off my bike by one of those boxy delivery trucks, one that veered right into me at that stretch of cornfields between my grandma’s house and town. I remember people jumped out, they had a blanket and I thought they were going to help me, but they threw it over my head and stuffed it in my mouth and then they stabbed me. A needle, not a knife, but I didn’t know that then.
They used that needle a lot. All through the trip and here, too, at first. Wherever here is. I’m so sorry, don’t know that, either. I’m not outside much but all I’ve seen is miles of grass and far-off mountains and sometimes, some far-off cows.
Once, I saw a plane, way up high. But I flew twice with my dad, so I know: if anyone on that plane looked down, all they saw from that far up was nothing. Just squiggles and patches like a painted map.
I was mostly out of it in the back of that truck. I remember road noise, jounces, and water poured into my face. Maybe I was supposed to be drinking it. Oh, and someone’s bad breath and being told to rejoice, I was saved. Probably they said a lot more that I don’t remember, stuff like what got yelled at me day and night once I was here, or maybe like what I hear all the time in the open now that I’m all broken in.
Outbreed. Outvote. Outactivate.
Take back this country for Christ.
They really mean this. They aren’t kidding. There are way more of them than someone normal like I used to be could ever want to guess. And it wasn’t just the way things went in November 2016 and December 2017 that made this happen. They’ve been doing this for years, and for them, those were signs from the Lord. Proof of their righteous path.
I’ve learned that now. Just like I’ve learned that Jesus is always peach.
Back page now. Obvious, yeah, if you’re looking at this. No color here, just an outlined flock of lambs running into a pen, Very Happy Now That They Are Safe.
No color good. Can say more words.
One more thing from the back of that truck. The thing that saved me and I don’t know where it came from. Theater club, maybe. Creative writing class, maybe. Who knows. But wherever this thing came from, even half passed-out in the back of that truck I knew that to survive, I had to act. From that minute on, no matter what, no matter how hurt or scared, I had to be the best actress ever. A perfect actress. I had to be scared but also sometimes fight them a little, just enough so they didn’t suspect I was faking them. And I had to act perfectly beat down, every time I did get beat down.
Sometimes, acting perfectly beat down is less beat down than how beat down I am for real.
But I do it. I do it right. If I don’t I will never get out.
Here are the words I say. I wake up every day and tell myself, today, you have landed an amazing part. You’re soooo lucky to have this part, so many girls wanted this part, but none of them got it but you. You are getting to play the part of that famous girl who got kidnapped by the Take Back America-ers but unlike any other girl over all these years they’ve done this, this girl escaped. No matter what they did to her, no matter what she saw happen, she did everything right for a really long time. And when this girl did escape, it fired up all the right people, all over the world. Everyone got together, and all of those other BK girls she had to leave behind when she escaped, well, they got set free, too.
My BK girls.
I never say it out loud. Not even to the other BK girls here who really seem like friends to me. I just can’t know if they really are my friends. Thank you, Dad, for all the books, I know how these things go, it is way too easy to trust the wrong person.
I can’t trust my BK girls but I love them. I love them so much. They see me and I see them, even when we can’t cry even one single tear.
BK girls. BK is for Boko. As in, those Boko Haram guys who stole those girls.
Yeah, I know. Can’t happen here. This is America.
Right. Here I am.
Here is my word. I am telling you, it is happening here. It is happening to me.
I bet for the future movie, you want every sick detail. You want the rape-marriage parts and the brainwash parts and all the ways they hurt us while they’re telling us that we’re saved, and that the babies they take are the chosen warriors, and that Out There, everything is Godless. Sorry. Not enough paper. Not for all of that.
Hand shaking again. Sorry. Worse mess than before.
I was almost fourteen when those Boko Haram guys kidnapped those girls from their school and made them into slaves. It was horrible, they made those poor girls convert and marry them, and I remember thinking how I was the same age, but totally grateful I lived in America.
I remember how those kidnapped girls were all over the news. I also remember that even though the whole world was upset, those girls stayed missing, mostly. Missing or dead. The whole world being upset, didn’t change a thing for them.
No internet or cell phones here. None I could get to in a million years, anyway. But in this one single way I’m glad. Because I’m really, really scared that if I searched on those girls, I’d found out they’re still mostly missing or dead. Or worse, that those terrorist guys are all still doing what they do and most of the world has long since forgotten those girls, everyone busy with dealing with something else.
Or maybe just keeping their heads down. Hoping they won’t be next.
In this movie I’m starring in, playing the part of this kidnapped American girl, I’m going to make sure that in the end, every last girl is found. Here and over there. I’m going to make people want to do more than just be sad and move on, forgetting that me and my BK girls ever existed.
Those are my words for the end. The ones I say at night, before I go to sleep.
Here I am. Already at the bottom of this second side, down in the grass beneath the little lambs’ feet.
I’ll fold this sad piece of paper into a tiny strip. I’ll stuff that strip back through the hole in the hem of this awful nightgown, and I’ll pretend to wake up and ask to go pee. At the five-month mark, you can get away with that.
Are you reading this? If you are, you’ll know I played this part of mine perfectly—the girl who did not get scared of her words. She did not burn them or stuff them in the muck.
You will know that me and my BK girls existed. That all of this really did happen. Because here, in the beginning and in the end, these words are mine, and I will believe that you will hear them. I will believe you will never forget.
• EVIDENCE • Redacted • 2/10/21 •
ISN’T LIFE GREAT?
Don D’Ammassa
Alice needed to go shopping. She hated the thought of it, but they were out of milk and bread and low on just about everything else. It was pointless to make up a list in advance because you could never predict what would be on the shelves and what would not. There hadn’t been any lettuce since the autumn, and it had been months since she had last seen ground beef or bacon. Alice made a short list anyway, if only to delay the moment when she would have to go out.
She was dismayed to discover that her car had less than a quarter of a tank of gas left. Ever since the invasion of Iran, gas had steadily increased in price almost from day to day. The last time she had added any—she couldn’t afford to actually fill the tank—it had just passed ten dollars per gallon.
The house next door was still empty. The gay couple who had lived there were now confined to the state’s newest Behavioral Correction Facility. At the first corner, she turned left even though the grocery store was to her right. The more direct route would take her through one of the so-called Patriot neighborhoods and without the appropriate flag-embossed sticker, she’d be taking too great a chance. One of the neighbors had decided to risk it two weeks earlier and she’d been dragged from her car, beaten and raped. The police had admonished her for provoking the assault.
She threaded her way through Loyalist neighborhoods until she reached t
he main road. There was a grocery store there, but the placard in its window was Patriot rather than Loyalist and they would not have served her. There were more pedestrians here and most of them were armed, a change that had followed the Open Carry Executive Order. There were new posters on the telephone poles proclaiming major advances in the Pacific War. Everyone knew that South Korea had fallen and Japan was suing for peace, but it was considered seditious to admit it openly.
She passed the closed fire station—budget cuts had been deep this year—and the new police compound with its expanded detention area. She wondered if Old Mrs. Grant had been able to get her granddaughter released. Tiffany had been held there for six months without a hearing, and that had been last year. The courts were backlogged and since the President had suspended habeas corpus—not to mention posse comitatus—the number of pending cases had increased by an order of magnitude.
A small military convoy rumbled past as the armed guard checked her plate number against his list and let her enter the parking lot. Alice carefully engaged the alarm and got out, tightly clutching her handbag. There were so many homeless people nowadays, and many of them survived by purse snatching and even more violent assault. She walked briskly to the door, passing the newspaper vending machines, which were naturally quite empty. Both of the city’s dailies had been shut down for sedition two years earlier, and the government news sheet that had replaced them had not shown up for a couple of months.
There were a dozen or so other shoppers. There was no conversation and no one initiated eye contact. Alice took a carriage and headed for the produce section. This was always the least well stocked. The repercussions from the mass arrests of migrant workers had been dramatic and enduring. Almost everything available here was locally grown, and it was too early in the growing season for there to be much that hadn’t come from a greenhouse. Still no lettuce, although surprisingly there were some carrots. Alice took two packages, which was the per-customer limit.
There was ample milk and other dairy products, thanks to the large concentration of dairy farms nearby. Orange juice had disappeared long since but there was still apple and grape, though they were very expensive. She chose a few other items but avoided canned meats. The scale-back of FDA regulations had led to a rash of illnesses and even a few deaths over the past two years and almost no one ate anything that wasn’t thoroughly cooked. Their water purifier was broken again, so she picked up some bottled water.
She stopped to read the bulletin board. There was another voluntary immunization clinic coming up. Alice wondered how many people could afford to pay the five hundred dollars per child expense even if they wanted to. The World Health Organization had been subsidizing distribution of vaccines until the United Nations was ordered out of its New York City headquarters. They were now in Geneva. As far as Alice knew, the US was still a member but a new ambassador had not been named after the previous one’s resignation.
The cashier was new, but Alice couldn’t remember ever seeing the same person at the register even twice. The adjusted minimum wage was so low that no one could actually survive now that food stamps were no longer distributed. The total was higher than she had expected. The sales tax had been raised again, and the special temporary border security tax supposedly financing the southern wall was still in force.
Alice loaded the groceries into the trunk so that they couldn’t be seen by passersby, then crossed the street to the coffee shop that had replaced the now defunct Starbucks. The new place only served Christians, but she had a forged Methodist Congregation member card. She ordered a latte but drank it quickly because the two armed men sitting at the next table were openly ogling her. The adjacent park had disappeared under enormous piles of coal. The Coal Employment & Enhancement Act had required all municipalities above a certain population size to purchase coal on a sliding scale, even if they had no facilities that could make use of it.
She heard gunfire on the drive back, quite a lot of it, and breathed a sigh of relief once she was sure it originated nowhere near her home. A police surveillance drone flew overhead while she was unloading the car. It hovered for a few seconds, but the operator never challenged her. Even so, she was breathing heavily when she was finally inside the house.
Bob got home a half hour later than usual. He carpooled part of the way and walked the last two miles, following the discontinued bus route and crossing the now abandoned Amtrak right of way. There used to be a shorter way but the bridge over the river had been closed for safety reasons the previous year and both ends were blocked by barbed wire barricades. He worked for a small manufacturer who relied on government military contracts, so his job was safe enough, although he hadn’t had a raise in three years and his benefits package had been dramatically reduced.
He waved a greeting, obviously tired, and turned on the television. The government channel came on first, by law, but it was not yet mandatory to watch it and he switched over to one that featured vintage television shows. Alice brought him a beer, the only actual luxury they allowed themselves.
“Hard day?” she asked.
“Yeah. We lost two people today. One of the supervisors was arrested for disturbing the peace. He got into an argument in a bar about the suspension of the Supreme Court. And Fred Nashawaty is going to be deported.”
Alice frowned. “But Fred was born here, and so were his parents.”
Bob nodded. “His grandmother was an immigrant, and naturalized, but she came from Syria. She was Christian, but under the Terrorist Association Act, her citizenship was retroactively revoked. All of her descendants are technically illegals now.”
“That’s awful!”
Bob shrugged. “Fortunately, if that’s the word for it, business is down a bit. NATO members are no longer buying military parts from us.” The President had withdrawn from NATO when it refused to join in the Iranian War. “If the trend continues, they’ll cut back our pay in accordance with the Defense Wage Adjustment Act.”
“I wish Congress would stand up to the administration more often. That was a horrible law and you could tell they didn’t want to vote for it.”
“Well, after what happened after the midterms, what do you expect? A third of the Senate and a quarter of the House all arrested for Disloyalty under the Domestic Security Executive Order.”
The doorbell rang. They both stiffened, then Alice started for the reinforced closet that was the closest they could come to having a safe room. Bob retrieved his handgun from inside a vase and cautiously went to the door.
“Who is it?” he called out.
“Olsen Letter Delivery.” Bob had never heard of them, but ever since the Post Office had been abolished, numerous small delivery services had sprung up.
“Leave it on the doorstep.”
“You have to pay for it first.”
Bob opened the peephole and looked out. A tired-looking man in a uniform stood just outside. “Who’s it from?”
“City council.”
Bob swore. It was against the law to decline to accept any governmental communication. “How much?”
“Two dollars.” Bob swore again, but he extracted the bills from his wallet, unlocked the door cautiously, and traded it for the thin envelope. The delivery man turned back toward the armored van that awaited him, a body armored sniper in the roof turret.
The letter was routine and really didn’t apply to them, since they had no children. Home schoolers were now required to include certain subjects in their curricula that had been optional previously. Following the privatization of all public schools, a very large number of parents had either chosen to take over the job themselves, or had been forced to because they could not afford the high attendance fees required by the Charter Network. The new requirements included Revised American and World History, Understanding Climate Variations, Creation Science, and Philosophy of Government.
Bob tossed it into a wastebasket.
After dinner, Alice turned on their aging computer. She rarely used it a
nymore. The Digital Priority Act had allocated so many resources to corporate users that it took as long as ten minutes to load some sites. The Pornography and Fake News Control Act had installed filters so stringent that many innocuous sites were no longer even accessible. She did most of her clothes shopping online, but even that had become less viable since the government had decreed that sales of used items were illegal unless the item in question was no longer available from the original manufacturer.
Much to her surprise, she had one email. Most of her friends no longer used electronic communications because Homeland Security monitored it tightly and had a rather all-inclusive definition of what constituted a domestic threat.
The message was from her mother. Alice’s sister Paige had been indicted for murder following the discovery of her illegal abortion, even though doctors had determined that the fetus was non-viable. The message was terse and neutral in tone because it was not a good idea to be known as having pro-choice inclinations, but Alice knew her mother had to be devastated.
She was on the verge of tears when she angrily turned the computer off. Tired as he was, Bob felt a surge of sympathy and went over to put his arm around her shoulders. She told him the news and the dam burst as she itemized every way in which the day had been horrible.
When she was done, Bob sighed. “Look at it this way, hon. We’ve pretty much sunk as low as a nation as it is possible to go. I’m sure brighter times are coming.”
Bob was right. Less than an hour later, two Chinese nuclear devices detonated over the city and brightened up their lives dramatically, if rather briefly.
Welcome to Dystopia Page 27
