Unequal

by B. E. Sanderson

  For some, she stole the chart and discovered the cause of death had been something any real doctor could’ve easily fixed. This time, she didn’t need to see the chart. The unfortunate baby had suffocated in its blankets or choked on its own sputum. Cyanotic children, especially ones already at risk, were the easiest to save and probably the ones who died most often.

  By this time the next day, little Baby Houston could face the same fate. Rue was powerless to stop it.

  She smacked her hand against the cinderblocks making the walls of her hidden home. The pain felt good. She balled up her fist and aimed, stopping millimeters short of actual contact. Breaking all the bones in her hand wouldn’t save the child. It would mark her as someone who needed investigating. A potential Unequal. She’d worked too many years to give herself up.

  Flexing her fingers, she caressed the gray, manmade stone. As unyielding as the rules she battered herself against every day but with more actual substance. The blocks had a purpose. They held up the structure above her. The Equality Laws supposedly held up the structure of civilization but, no matter how much Rue tried, she couldn’t see how they accomplished anything but destruction.

  With a half-shrug, Rue continued through her basement abode. The books she’d saved from being incinerated were stacked along one wall. Maybe she could find solace in their pages one more time. By the light of a single, small bulb, she sat down to read a medical text she’d read a dozen times before.

  After mere minutes, the words swam before her eyes. She blinked several times, but she couldn’t force the lines to make any sense. Not until a tear crawled down her cheek did she realize she was crying.

  Her assignment to the hospital had been a stroke of good luck. All her life she had wondered what made the human body run and laugh and breathe. Exploring the mysteries of life would have been her highest aspiration. The DOE hadn’t asked what she wished to do with her life, and they didn’t care. They made her a janitor. Nothing more, and nothing less. Especially since not much existed beneath her assigned occupation. Her job wasn’t to help keep people alive. Her job was to help clean up their deaths. For a short time, she comforted herself with the minor act of keeping the place germ-free so the patients could be healthier. Until she realized nobody else cared about things like germs.

  Learning such things weren’t part of the curriculum mandated by the DOE. Being aware of their existence made a person more educated and therefore Unequal.

  “Learn everything you can from everything around you,” her uncle would whisper in the darkness of his tiny, homemade city. “No one wants books, so wherever you can find one, take it. Devour it. Make it part of yourself and no one can ever take it away from you.”

  “Read it and get rid of it.” Her mother repeated this manta each time Rue was discovered with a book. If her father caught her, he would simply rip the volume away and toss it into the fireplace. Many nights, her treasured reading material helped heat their home.

  “Forget whatever was in those pages,” he’d say. “Forget it, Rue, or forget about your life. You have no other choice.”

  Mother always told her about days long before when her father loved to read. He would spend hours inhaling every written word his eyes could find. At the end of each day, her parents would sit in the dark, curled in one another’s arms, discussing everything they learned.

  After Rue was born, he had changed. He began caring what the DOE did and ordered. He began living in fear.

  Created with the idea of bringing about the equality of every man with his brother and every woman with her sister, the Department of Equalization was hailed as the crowning achievement of mankind. No more would anyone rise above his fellows. And if no one could rise above, no one could fall below.

  Every year since its inception, the DOE gained more powers under the law. Every mandate the politicians issued under its guise shaved a little sliver off the freedoms allowed to all men. Until one day, it was against the law for anyone to not be the same as anyone else. Those lawbreakers were declared Unequal.

  And the disappearing began.

  At the time, her parents had clung to one another and their love of knowledge. After Mother’s parents disappeared and young Howard came to live with them, they continued in silence and secrecy.

  Until Rue arrived.

  Her birth was never expected. It wasn’t heralded by anything close to harps and singing angels. She was born and presented to the DOE for her very first EQ test. She was found to be sound and without flaws. She was born Equal.

  It was the last EQ test she passed without some sort of deception.

  The second year she flunked the test. At the age of one, she was already walking and saying simple words. Her mother had been so proud. Her father had been beside himself with fear. Uncle Howard told her of the huge fight they had and how they blamed him for spending his free time talking to Rue.

  By the age of two, Howard had taught her enough to help her pass the test. Barely. After that, she didn’t need coaching to understand she had to pretend to be the same as all the other children. Howard made it into a game, and Rue excelled at games.

  Except games involving other children.

  And if the game involved her heart. This game she was playing now was the hardest of all because with every move, she fell in love with her patients and with every shift of the pieces, those patients could be taken away from her.

  Rue wiped her tears and went back to the book. Cyanosis… With nothing but the baby’s skin color to go on, she had no way to discern his true cause of death. Too many possible culprits existed—from a congenital defect in his tiny heart to negligence on the part of his nurses. After everything she’d seen the latter was probably true, but she couldn’t be certain.

  So much negligence. So little aptitude. And too many people died as a result.

  Her eyes became aching balls of sand, but the hours of reading couldn’t absolve her of the responsibility she felt. If she’d been in the pediatric ward at the time the baby stopped breathing, she might’ve saved him.

  And if you’d saved his life, a tiny voice in her head said, you would’ve damned yourself.

  Since she’d started her quest, the quandary had rattled around in her mind so long and so frequent it had become an old acquaintance. To save those who most needed saving, she had to risk letting someone see she wasn’t a simple janitor. Except, if anyone discovered who she really was, she would be labeled Unequal and they would make her disappear. Like all the rest.

  Where any of them were disappeared to was anyone’s guess. And guess they did. The topic was a regular conversation piece in the hospital’s cafeteria. It had once been bandied about her schoolyard. The general consensus was saying someone was disappeared equated to saying they were dead. None of the Unequal ever reappeared. They were simply gone. And if they weren’t dead, then where could they be?

  A small, wind-up alarm jangled from her bedside. She blinked her eyes and closed the textbook. She had two hours in which to sleep before the start of her janitorial shift. Missing her night’s work might cause her patients harm. Missing her assigned occupation would mean finding out first hand where the disappeared went.

  Minutes before the alarm would’ve shrieked again, Rue lifted herself from a sleep she never fully dropped into. Pulling on her coveralls and her work-boots took every ounce of strength she had. One wistful look at the empty carafe she didn’t have coffee grounds for and she began climbing the stairs to start her assigned day.

  Upon reaching the utility offices, Rue noted the rest of the cleaning crew already in the midst of preparing for the day’s work. Barely enough room existed to stand between the bodies and the buckets and the brooms as they awaited their assignments.

  “Citizen Janitor Logan.” Their supervisor ticked her name off on his keypad. “Fourth floor.”

  The idea of dragging herself up all those stairs was almost more than she could bear. Refusing, though, wasn’t an option. She could either do her job or cla
im to be ill. Her knowledge about the caregivers around the place made her certain she didn’t want any of them trying to cure her. She’d probably end up actually sick.

  The idea of the DOE’s doctors made her nauseous. And if the nausea didn’t get her, the work assignment would. After a nasty problem with the wiring, the only thing the fourth floor was good for was storage. Piles of boxes covered in dust would really make her ill. Of all the maladies for a janitor to have, a dust allergy was the worst. Not that the DOE cared. Allergies were not something the Equal ever admitted to having.

  “Fourth floor?” she asked.

  “Is there a problem with your assignment?”

  “No, sir. Just checking.”

  “Then get a move on.”

  She loitered around waiting to see which of her fellow Citizen Janitors would get the Emergency Room assignment. As expected, the newest member of the crew got the supposed worst assignment. He should be easy to persuade. Because she had to trade assignments, and not merely to escape her allergies. If she was cleaning upstairs, she couldn’t intervene downstairs where they needed her most.

  She cornered the last person in the room. He was dragging his feet, as she expected. “Citizen Janitor… Killip, is it?” He turned his bleary eyes and blank expression toward her. “It’s your name, right?”

  His head moved in a barely perceptible nod.

  “You’re new to the staff?” Another nod. “Well…” A quick lie to trade assignments wasn’t alien to Rue, but for some reason—or lack of sleep—she couldn’t think. “Take the fourth floor. I’ve got Emergency.”

  “Not supposed to trade,” he said with a grunt. “Besides, why ya want to?”

  “You’re new and I’m not.” It wasn’t really an answer, but the boy didn’t look smart enough to see through the lame argument. “Go before the Citizen Supervisor assigns us both to the morg… the body room.”

  He blinked twice, but he didn’t catch her slip. These days, no one referred to the body room as a morgue, except in her medical texts. Using antiquated and educated words anywhere near the janitorial station would put a big, flashing sign over her head. UNEQUAL.

  After he shuffled off toward the stairs, she released a small sigh of relief. Too many slips so close together didn’t bode well. First the duty nurse and then the woman in pediatrics… Those failures underscored her need to remember all her mistakes. Remembered mistakes were ones a person didn’t soon make again. Failures were something Rue never repeated.

  Failure meant death.

  Unfortunately, death was the order of that day. Somewhere on the other side of the city, a long-distance transport had crashed, spilling bodies out onto the roadway at more than a hundred clicks per hour. So many were injured the city’s only other hospital—the one nearest the wreck—had to be filled to bursting for the gore to overflow into this medical facility. Emergency was full from the moment she arrived pushing her bucket with its sticky red wheels to the instant she finally gave up and left nine hours later.

  Throughout it all, Rue ached to provide assistance. At one point, she threw down her mop and stepped into the mess. While no one was looking, she actually managed to accomplish something. The young man would still lose his leg but thanks to Rue, he would live. For at least another day. Nightshift would come and she could work to ensure he lived a little longer.

  The thrill of working Emergency had as short a life as most of those mangled commuters. A true Citizen Doctor noticed her bent over the mangled limb and threatened to call security. After he ordered her to step aside and she wouldn’t, he threatened to report her to the DOE. Security was scary enough. The DOE frightened her to the last bone cell.

  She stepped away and resumed pushing the pools of blood from one end of the floor to the other. What saved her from screaming at the fools around her was the knowledge she could slip back later in the dark to do what others couldn’t. None of it was their fault. They were ill trained. The equality of all things left these people handicapped. They needed to be better than equal, above the average. Their patients needed them to be smarter and quicker than a janitor could ever be.

  At the end of shift, most of the commuters had been removed to either the body room or shuffled into patient rooms, their trip to the back of the building postponed to another day. Rue’s mops and rags had removed most of the blood. Buckets of pink water were poured down the drains. The color tinged her hands and her boots. It soaked into the bottoms of her pant legs and the edges of her sleeves.

  Staggering down the stairs, Rue prepared herself for the choice she had to make. She needed sleep. Dozens of people upstairs needed her help. Some of them might die in the hours she stole for her own needs. But if she didn’t take those hours, others could die because of a mistake made by her deprived brain.

  In the end, she decided to sleep first—for an hour at most—and work later. One way or another, she had to do both.

  Unfortunately, the decision wasn’t in her hands.

  As she stepped into her makeshift room, a figure rose from her bed. “Good evening. I’m guessing you’re the little janitor who enjoys playing doctor.”

  THREE

  Rue swallowed hard. Her first mistake. By the time she found the words she needed to say, it would already be too late for any of them to seem truthful.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked, trying in vain to save herself despite the realization it was pointless. “I came down here to get…”

  The excuse dried up in her mouth as the man flicked on her little bedside lamp.

  “This isn’t any place the hospital employees are liable to come. Not unless they already know what’s here. Or unless the person who’s residing here told you to come down.” He picked up Rue’s journal and flipped through a couple of pages. “The person who wrote this doesn’t seem likely to let anyone in on her little secret.”

  “I don’t understand what—”

  “Let’s cut to the chase, Logan.” He threw her notebook on her makeshift bed. “You’re not in your assigned housing, sleeping in your assigned bed or eating your assigned meals. You’re not thinking your assigned thoughts.” With a pointed glance toward her hoarded texts, he shook his head. “And you’re reading books one would assume are beyond your skills. Hell, some of these things are way beyond my skills, and I’m definitely not Equal.”

  His words fell like hammer blows until his final admission. “You’re not—”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then you’re—”

  “Unequal?” He shrugged. “I guess I am, but I don’t appreciate the terms they use. I’m a person, like you.”

  He waved at the notebook he’d so carelessly tossed. “Sorry for touching your things without permission, but I had to see if you were who we heard you are.”

  “I don’t understand. Who did you hear I was? And who did you hear it from?”

  He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “The rumor is you’re something out of the ordinary, but I can’t tell you who the rumor came from. Let’s just say there are people in your world who would rather remain in your world, if you catch my meaning.”

  Rue did. Anyone who had any information about her differences was required by law to report them. If the DOE found out about her inequality on their own, they’d hunt down anyone who might’ve kept her secret. The authorities explained it was to maintain order. She suspected it was to hang on to their control.

  “The duty nurse in pediatrics.” From the glimmer in the stranger’s eyes, Rue’s slight suspicion might be right. But there were so many possibilities, she couldn’t be certain. “Or the older nurse in the elevator.”

  “The nurse in the elevator? Skinny, appears as if she’s been down a rough road? If she’s who I assume you mean, stay away from her.” His eyes narrowed. “Unless she’s already guessed what you’re doing. We wouldn’t want that.”

  “I don’t think she’s guessed anything. If she had, wouldn’t the DOE already be here?”

 
His shoulder lifted. “One can never tell. Sometimes, they lay in wait until they have more evidence. Sometimes, they’ll let someone continue with their lawbreaking until they fuck up.”

  “What…? What do you mean?”

  “Right now, you’re helping them. Not everyone is stupid enough to believe this system works. Sometimes, they let the obviously Unequal slip through the cracks. Until something goes wrong. Then they swoop in and use those Unequal as an example.”

  As he spoke the words, she could see where he was going. The year before, an Unequal was caught and tried in public. For weeks after, people were reporting their fellow Citizens to the DOE in droves—despite nothing being particularly Unequal about the person in question. During the whole witch-hunt, she kept her hands to herself and a mop handle firmly in place. She didn’t blink wrong for fear of getting reported.

  “But,” he said, “no matter how much your actions might aid them, the DOE will disappear you if enough people report your actions. They have to.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. This whole scene reminded her of a cat playing with its prey. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because we need you to keep doing what you’re doing.” He tapped the end of his nose with one finger. “At least, until we need you for ourselves.”

  This was all too surreal. She could almost convince herself the interplay was a product of her sleep-deprived brain. She’d read about such things in the texts, but those instances had occurred after much longer stretches of exhaustion than she’d subjected herself to. Maybe it was stress.

  Maybe it’s neither and the man in front of you is real.

  “Who are you? And why are you here?”

  “Better you don’t know who I am for now.” He shrugged. “Suffice it to say, I’m here because we can help you. We can save you, as long as you aren’t too far along in the DOE’s system.”

  “Too far along?”

  “Once you get caught,” he said his eyes grim and his voice grimmer. “Don’t get caught. I can’t help you then.”