Unequal

by B. E. Sanderson

  UNEQUAL

  by B.E. Sanderson

  Copyright © 2018 – Beth Sanderson. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author/publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Printed in the United States of America

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is strictly coincidental.

  Edited by: ‘Pink Pencil’ Editing – J.S. Corcoran

  Any flaws or errors found within this manuscript are the fault of the author only. Her editor can only do so much in the face of her stubbornness.

  Acknowledgements:

  I’d like to thank my editor, Janet Corcoran, for all her hard work. I’d also like to thank Silver James and Deb Salisbury for pushing me to get this book finished, as well as for the support they’ve given throughout my self-publishing journey and through all the years I worked toward this day. Thanks also to all the people who supported and stood by me through the years. They know who they are.

  As always, special thanks to Hubs for tolerating this crazy life I’ve chosen, for encouraging me all along the way, and for being my CFO.

  Table of Contents

  All Titles by B.E. Sanderson:

  About the Author

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY- FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE END

  All Titles by B.E. Sanderson:

  Serial Crime Investigation Unit (S.C.I.U.)

  Dying Embers

  Fertile Ground

  Early Grave

  Once Upon a Djinn

  Wish in One Hand

  In Deep Wish

  Up Wish Creek

  Wish Hits the Fan

  Dennis Haggarty Mysteries

  Accidental Death

  Natural Causes

  Single Title

  Blood Flow

  Blink of an I

  Sleeping Ugly

  Unequal

  About the Author

  Minor conspiracy theorist and major hermit, slayer of fish and stacker of wood, pessimistic optimist and hopeful romantic, a veritable fount of useless knowledge, B.E. Sanderson spends her time reading, writing, gardening, and generally enjoying life with her husband and their cat.

  You can learn more and connect with B.E. at:

  The Writing Spectacle

  Outside the Box

  B.E. on Facebook

  B.E. on Twitter

  Or email her at: be.sanderson.writer@gmail.com

  If you enjoy reading Unequal, please consider leaving a review at your favorite vendor or at Goodreads.

  UNEQUAL

  ONE

  Rue Logan’s work boots squelched in the sticky, red mess. The puddle had grown from a few drops trickled off the edge of a gurney to a pool the size of an area rug. Moments before, those liters of blood had been pumping through the body of a healthy young man. At least, he’d been healthy until someone’s knife sunk into his flesh.

  Once they wheeled his corpse away, Rue stepped forward to clean up the mess made both by his leaking life and by the incompetence of the ones who were supposed to save him. As she pushed her bucket through the puddle, she hated the fact that this was the only part of the mess she was allowed do anything about.

  As she stood impotent, mop in hand, those supposed doctors and nurses attempted to staunch the blood flow to no avail. She longed to push them all aside. She knew how to create a simple tourniquet. She had the ability to hold a blood vessel silent while hands worked to repair damage. Her hands itched to do the work she had trained herself to do. Her fingers itched to save a life.

  She had tried once. A woman in the throes of a complicated birth. She’d pushed the doctor aside and began the work she had trained herself to do.

  He’d called security.

  After hours in a tiny room, playing dumb and weaving a skein of lies, they threatened to disappear her if she attempted to do any job but her own again. If the DOE wanted her to be a doctor, they would’ve made her one. The DOE certainly knew better than some janitor about who was best suited to administer treatment to the sick and needy.

  After she had been released, she learned both mother and child died.

  Jamming her mop into the bucket with more force than was necessary, Rue began the job she was assigned to do. With each slap of the mop, the floor became a shade lighter. As she removed liters of stained water from the floor, the blood filled her up to overflowing. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find her face flushed and her eyes red with someone else’s life.

  “Why do you put yourself through this?” Kyle asked her one day as he snuck her leftovers from the cafeteria. “Go home. Eat your rations. Accept this life as the one you were meant to live.”

  But she couldn’t. Accepting life was as good as it ever would be horrified her more than the idea of what would happen if she ever got caught.

  Uncle Howard had hidden himself well, but they caught him. No one knew about the hours he’d spent tinkering in the basement, designing an entire city out of discarded bits. Until the day her father went downstairs.

  Rue never found proof her father turned Uncle Howard in. She’d been told at the time her poor uncle was old enough to live on his own. After leaving the safety of her parent’s home, it would’ve been only a matter of time before the DOE caught up with him and discovered his inequality. Whether his disappearance came a week from then or a month or later, Rue never discovered.

  Father told her the DOE knew best and he was happy about it. Clearly, she was Unequal enough without her uncle’s influence. They were saving her from… Well, no one was certain what the fate of an Unequal was. Everyone just lived in fear of being disappeared.

  From then on, Rue’s father watched her for any sign she was becoming increasingly Unequal. He held her in front of the videoset for hours on end. Once she’d grown too large to hold, he taped her in place with long strips of sticky gray.

  “It’s for your own good.”

  Hours later, when Rue and her mother were alone, her mother would tell her, “He’s afraid.” Mother didn’t need to say of what. Rue knew. She feared the same things. She was simply more afraid of becoming like her peers.

  She would march off every morning to be educated, falling into step beside children who were far more Equal than she’d ever be. Their slack jaws and dull eyes gave her greater nightmares than reading Dr. Jekyll before bed. But nothing sent terror through her faster than the idea she would turn into one of them.

  Her school papers would always bleed red—marked not where her answers were wrong but where her answers differed from everyone else’s. It wasn’t that Rue couldn’t mimic what the teachers wanted. She simply couldn’t force herself flow into the mold they’d cast for her.

  “Citizen Janitor?” said a stern voice beside her. “Are you ill?”

  Rue was, but not for the reason the nurse assumed. She was sick to death of pretending she
was the same. She was tired of hiding her light under a bushel, as she’d once read.

  “No, Citizen Nurse.”

  “Then get back to work before someone calls the DOE.”

  The Department of Equalization was too busy to worry about one daydreaming janitor, but Rue couldn’t take the chance this, combined with her previous infractions, might amount to enough of a reason to come under their eternal vigilance.

  She slapped her mop onto the already wet floor, raining pink droplets across the nurse’s shoes. “Sorry,” she mumbled, but the woman was already headed off to torment some other person—most likely a patient. Rue watched the thin figure stride along the hall, focused on something ahead of her and nothing at all.

  After three changes of water and two replaced mop heads, the floor was as clean as it ever would be—the white tiles tinged slightly pink, the grout tinged faintly brown. Eventually, the pink would turn brown, too. In Rue’s world, the absence of light wasn’t blackness. It was a dim shade of dingy brown.

  The emergency doors opened several times throughout her shift. Another ambulance bringing more carnage. Another of the walking wounded seeking help. Each wrecked body shoveled into the hospital’s gullet. Each person swallowed whole. Most who came through the emergency doors were carried out the back of the building. Where the unfortunate dead went from there, Rue didn’t want to consider. Those who survived the excellent treatment they received staggered home, only to return another day with a different malady.

  While she continued to slap her mop on the grimy floor and grind her teeth in utter impotence.

  At the end of the day, after hours of cleaning while she ignored the screams around her, Rue slunk out the employee exit and around to the side of the hospital. She slipped through an impossibly narrow crevice between two oddly shaped brick additions into a courtyard, long overgrown. Some nights, she lay on the ground and looked up at the starless sky. Tonight, she was too tired to partake in even that small wonder.

  As the residents of her world were safe at their assigned homes, eating their assigned rations and slumbering in their assigned housing, Rue popped open one loose basement window and squirmed back inside the building she hated during the day. As impotent as she was from daybreak to nightfall, she was twice as effective in the dark. In the dark, no one saw the janitor from dayshift. No one wondered why she slipped into patients’ rooms, adjusting the charts with a deft hand. No one knew how many small mercies she accomplished in the hours before exhaustion overtook her. No one would consider such an undertaking, because the general populace couldn’t fathom the possibility any Citizen might risk everything the way she did. Being caught out as Unequal was the ultimate terror.

  Rue pulled on a pair of scrubs she’d stolen from the hospital laundry, smiling for the first time all day. Tonight, she would check on a mother on the third floor and her baby on the fifth. Neither one had been expected to live through their first night. This night made their fourth since they were admitted. If everything went well, they would be released before another evening passed.

  Clipping on the false identification she’d created in a different corner of the basement, she stepped toward the elevator she didn’t dare use during the day. No more ‘Citizen Janitor Logan’. At night, Rue was Citizen Doctor Mason and, despite the DOE’s insistence all men were to be treated as Equals, she would receive a measure of respect not afforded to a janitor.

  She rode the elevator up to the lobby floor as always. And as always, she expected to step forth and blend into the crowd. Every other night, she would leave the elevator, cross to the cafeteria, and buy a coffee. Beverage in hand, she would take the elevator once more, but this time heading upwards as though she were any other respected Citizen.

  The doors opened and she took a step forward. The chest she ran into was a surprise, but nothing she couldn’t overcome. She mumbled an apology and pretended to look at her watch. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  “Slumming, Citizen Doctor?” said a voice she recognized. “I wasn’t aware patients could be found in the basement.”

  Rue kept her eyes focused on a point behind the nurse’s head, but the woman may have already recognized her from earlier. “Pressed the wrong floor.” She let the words slip out as tersely as she heard any other doctor speak. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have rounds.”

  The nurse cleared her throat. “I was only making a jest.” She stepped aside. “If you’re so much better, run along and do your job.”

  Rue was so much better, but she didn’t speak another word. She simply brushed past the offensive, little person and went on her carefully orchestrated way. Too bad she couldn’t manage the people around her as easily.

  “Citizen Doctor Mason,” the young girl on nightshift said as Rue entered the third floor station.

  “Citizen Nurse,” she answered. Actual doctors, she had learned, never addressed anyone beneath them by their names. Occupation mattered. Names did not. “The chart for Citizen Mother Houston.”

  The redhead’s pale skin grew pink. “She’s no longer with us.”

  “On the floor or in the hospital?” Rue didn’t want to the obvious answer to be true.

  “She passed onto the next existence this morning.”

  “And her baby?” Rue’s voice shook. She shouldn’t be asking questions. She should just accept the death of the woman and hope the premature infant lived long enough without his mother to be placed into some kind of home. She shouldn’t care. But she couldn’t help herself. They were her patients, and she wasn’t ready to accept whatever fate chose for them.

  “How would I know?” the nurse said. “We don’t have babies on this floor.”

  Rue sucked in one deep breath and held it. Raising her voice to this person wouldn’t do anyone a damn bit of good. She reminded herself the girl was a product of her environment, of this world they all lived in. She let out her breath in a long, slow whoosh. “I realize the babies are housed elsewhere, but the charts are connected for a reason, Citizen Nurse. The child’s welfare is directly tied to its mother’s.”

  “You’ll have to call up to the fifth floor. They would have more…”

  She didn’t bother listening to the rest. Her feet were already dragging her toward the elevator again. Lingering there was wasted time when she could be up two floors in less than a minute.

  “Citizen Doctor… Mason is it?” asked the pudgy woman at the fifth floor station. “Who are you inquiring after?”

  “Citizen Baby Houston. He was in intensive infant care. His mother… She died this morning…”

  “He died.” The duty nurse’s voice was without a trace of regret.

  “Died? How? Before I left, he was improving—” Except Rue, as Logan or Mason, wasn’t supposed to be on this floor. Not that it mattered. She wasn’t really supposed to be anywhere.

  “I don’t have a clue about it.” The nurse pulled a clipboard from the wall and scanned down a list of the recently deceased. “Says here… At the time the night nurse tried to give him his morning feeding, he was dead.” She shrugged. “Nothing to be done, so we sent him off to the body room.”

  “Let me see the chart.” Rue snatched the offensive thing away before the woman could react. Everything in it was exactly as the nurse had indicated, with one exception. The name on the chart wasn’t Houston. “You must really need a time off interval.”

  The woman didn’t look up from her work, which amounted to checking boxes on forms Rue suspected had never been read. “I don’t see how my work schedule has any bearing—”

  “The name on this chart. It isn’t Houston. Either you are lax in your work.” She slapped the chart down in front of the nurse. “Or you are unable to read. In either case, the DOE might be interested in your performance tonight.” Rue hated using the DOE to put fear in others, especially since she was so afraid of them herself, but she was so disgusted with the woman’s uncaring laziness, she couldn’t help herself.

  “Report me if you have to,” said
the nurse. “Lord knows disappeared can’t be worse than this godforsaken place.”

  Rue’s hands clenched at her sides where the nurse couldn’t see. Showing any emotion right then would get her in trouble. She’d already escaped one near miss at the elevator she didn’t need another unfortunate encounter. It wouldn’t do that poor baby any good, and it wouldn’t help the dozens of other patients who needed her.

  “Thank you.” She tried to keep the frustration from her voice. She must not have succeeded because the infant care nurse raised one eyebrow.

  “Babies are born every day. Mothers die every day,” the woman said. “Why should these two be more important than the others? We’re all Equal.”

  Which meant none of them were important enough to care about or mourn. Hell, the poor mother probably hadn’t been allowed to hold her own child. The child would never be allowed to mourn his mother. Birth, death, illness, health. In the eyes of the Equality Laws, they were all the same. Equal.

  TWO

  A quick trip to the room where Baby Houston lay with his fellow, tiny inmates and a quicker examination told her he would be fine. As long as no one else screwed anything up. Frustrated by the whole encounter, Rue made short work of her rounds in order to escape the insanity sooner.

  None of her other patients seemed better or worse. None of them needed her as badly as the mother who had slipped beyond her reach or the babe she wasn’t allowed to care for. Usually at the end of attending to her regular patients, she would scan through the new intakes. Right then, she didn’t have the heart to take on any additional pain.

  Instead, she took the stairs down to what she considered on particularly bad nights as her hole. If she could’ve pulled dirt in over herself, she would’ve. Over the past few years, there had been too many like Citizen Houston and her poor unnamed child, too many similar to the dead baby whose chart the nurse had given her by mistake. Dead and gone, or moved beyond her reach.