Lies and Legends

by Logan Keys

  “What do you mean? What kids?”

  He puts a hand to his face. He has to hunch because of his chains. “I dunno, any kids, just random kids. They put one hand over the left side of their face. It’s all the rage now. Started with them. I don’t know what it means but the guards don’t like it.”

  His hand is covering half his face, eye peeking through his fingers.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Something to do with the rebels, I gather. I mean, you should know. You’re… I mean I have no idea who you are. But the gesture, I’m not sure. They’re arresting anyone doing it. But now everyone is doing it. Too many to arrest. That er…group. The…”

  “The Skulls?”

  He hisses at me with a finger over his lips. “Don’t even say the name! I don’t have anything to do with it. You hear me! I am on your side!”

  “Ok. Not that it will help.”

  The door opens and the guards come in and unlock my new visitor. They drag him out and he screams, “Where are you taking me?”

  But he knows. The purge.

  He freaks out crying and moaning, “No no no.” Over and again.

  “Told you,” I say in a whisper. Nothing he would do mattered.

  A guard stops in front of me. “Karma wants to see you.”

  I glare up at the camera. “Does she?”

  Chapter 45

  Crystal

  The Cromwells haven’t changed whatsoever. That’s not true. Karma has had more work done. She looks like a high gloss painting but through a glowy filter. Not a real person. She barely moves to even breathe.

  Her eyes are now purple. Like Jeremy’s.

  Aw.

  Nostalgia.

  I want to spit into them.

  She doesn’t beat around the bush like her late husband. Once they force me into a seat across from her at the table, she says, “Tell me, Crystal. Is my son still alive?”

  I play confused.

  She holds some documents. Shaking them at me, she says, “Come now. I’ve found the pamphlets. Who is this Paper Prophet?”

  I try not to let my surprise show. Jeremy’s been writing, and from the looks of it, a lot. Goodman must have gotten to him. I relax knowing Goodman got away, and a fresh energy unfurls inside my worn body at the proof that the rebellion is still ongoing without me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  If her face could move, I bet her lip would quiver. I bet her fake eyes would cry. Instead, she just sits there pleased as punch no matter what she’s talking about. But I sense she’s pleading beneath the chemical washes and filled lips. “I need to know if my son still lives. Please.”

  “No,” I say as serious as I can. “Jeremy is no longer.” Because he’s not. Not like she knows him. “You can thank your husband for that.”

  “My husband is dead. And if you are telling the truth, my son is too. Bring it to me, Carolina.”

  The girl comes forward, she’s had more work done too. She’s slimmer, gotten rid of the rack, and she’s in an outfit like the guards, minus helmet.

  She turns to look at me and I flinch. One eye is mechanical. Over her left eye that had been hidden from me in profile, there’s now half a visor and a small shield of red. The eye itself is robotic.

  And now that she’s closer, I can see the coloring of her skin isn’t quite normal. She’s been purged.

  Karma motions at Carolina and my gaping. “Jeremy and my beloved husband were gone, Carolina decided to get some upgrades. She’s now my security advisor. She’s quite good.”

  She holds up a pamphlet and begins to read. “Anthem, patriots, wanderers of a lost city.”

  Jeremy’s words echo through me and I feel them shake me to my core.

  Karma continues, “There is hope in this ever-present darkness. While you were unaware, while you were sleeping still in your section beds, a hero has risen from the city of ash. A phoenix. Do we deserve her? In this fallen place, do we deserve to have such a champion of our cause? No. But she has come nevertheless. And, dear citizens of the blind, we can thank her. As she goes into the blackest of night without a care for herself, as she’s shed the glamour of society—traded silk scarf for scars, a testament to the duty she bears---would that we could cover our faces, not the side with scars, but the side without. The left. For it is in those scars that we find our freedom. In every wound, in every pain inflicted to our cause. In repayment from the city that she loves, proof that we recognize how she forges our way toward the light, with even the renting of her skin and her own blood as payment---too high a price...”

  Karma flips the paper and shows me the same girl from before. The one I’d seen, the one I’d longed to be, but she’s been redrawn alone. It’s the powerful fierce girl up close now, revealing a face that’s rugged---not as perfect as before---and her hand covers a side of her face, showing scars on the other, and no doubt hiding the perfect.

  The marks on her face… Scars like mine.

  I stare at the image in shock. The man from my cell, before, he’d said the kids in the city are doing this. Copying it. Covering half of their face. For me?

  Jeremy, he asks this of Anthem?

  For me.

  I don’t hear his mother, whatever it is that she says. I’m deaf to her nonsense. I’ve come up for air for the first in a very long time. I’m awash in emotions a decade old. Since losing Jeremy, since losing myself, I’ve been holding my breath. I couldn’t breathe. I just suffocated every single day.

  I come up for air because, underneath it all, I just wanted to know that he cared. I mean, the city needs me, and I need her, so we are a threesome.

  Anthem’s in trouble, but so was I. And so was Jeremy. Somehow he knew that. He knew I needed something, a reminder, and for Anthem to show that she loves me too.

  Before, he wrote things, and he chased Liza, and he loved her. I know that. I accepted it. But with this, I know now, just a little, maybe a lot, that he loves me too. But even better, Anthem… she is in love with me scars and all.

  Jeremy won’t come riding into Karma’s mansion on a white horse. That’s not his style. So, he wants to save me the best way he knows how. He’s a fatalist. He thinks we all deserve to die for this cause, it’s what makes his words so precious. It’s what makes people believe them. He will die for them. Are the words of a Martyr not the very reason we hear them so much more?

  Death was expected in this venture, but it’s life that surprises us, and we are living proof of human perseverance. We are survival incarnate.

  But he’d done what he does best… he wrote me back to life. He sent me his best gift: words.

  And they went out and spoke to Anthem. To her heart and soul. And now she is blessing me in return. I’m in a fog at the notion. Right now, I’m leagues under the sea of my own thoughts.

  As Karma has the guards take me to the balcony, I don’t feel their bruising grip. I no longer feel the fear of being purged into oblivion. I walk without fighting. I stand tall.

  As she shows me to the people of Anthem. Her proof of my capture, she thinks is a victory. And as she announces to them that the rebellion is over that the uprising is ended. As Karma talks, it is apparent that her voice falls on deaf ears.

  I look into the eyes of every person standing below, a crowd who do not even acknowledge Karma Cromwell. Instead, they keep their gaze focused on me. They watch for a sign. From me.

  I smile.

  Karma tries harder. Her hands glide through the air. She animates prettily. Her daughter is next to her, back ramrod straight. But they do not command attention.

  I do.

  My smile turns to a grin and I move closer to the balcony edge. These are my people. Every single one. I inch closer to them. Stories high.

  In the gunmetal dusk of the evening, they have come to see me. Dry eyed because they’ve spent their whole lives crying out until they are husks, they shuffle through the ash of a burning world… to see me. And now... a paper prophet reminds them to shuffle
toward a new dawn.

  I send them that. I send empowerment. Even bound and shackled, I send my people freedom. Because I can do that. Because Karma can never take it away with her abuse.

  Trying to regain focus, Carolina attempts to speak. “Resistance is futile, citizens. The rebellion has ended.”

  I can’t help it. I start to laugh. Not giggles. Not snorts. I belly laugh with my head thrown back. I take deep gasping breaths of air. The first air I’ve sucked this deeply into my lungs in what feels like forever and I laugh, and I laugh.

  Even when the guards strike me. Even when Karma asks Carolina to use a club on me until I fall to my knees. Not even when they beat me down do I stop. Still, I wheeze and laugh.

  I find someone in the crowd from my place on the ground. I can see through the balcony’s decorative ledge to a little girl who pushes her way forward. She comes to the front boldly. She stands ahead of her parents. She stares through me with eyes of the next generation. One who won’t be so easily turned into sheep.

  She covers half of her face.

  Chapter 46

  Liza

  I can pinpoint the exact moment where my life changed forever, but I go further back than that. Before all of the things that should shape a girl, I stop the madness, then I guide it forward again by years, but in a new direction. I play piano for the Queen of England and my father watches me compose through my formative years before making my debut at the freshest part of sixteen.

  He does not die.

  And I never end up on the island.

  After a long session of playing in our foyer, I go into the sunny dancing room, where my mother stands at the ballet bar warming up. And I watch her. This time, I don’t notice the judgmental side of my life-giver, instead, I will her to dance, while she still can. And I just enjoy the lithe creature my mother was… is.

  She's older, but her lines are perfect, her posture erect to the point of strangeness.

  When a body is too straight, you notice how impossible the position of that strain is.

  I feel the heat of the old yellow sun through the big windows, and the birds are outside screeching their joy. It is a place where I count my blessings. I don’t hold anything against these two anymore. They were what they were. And the world falling apart was not their fault.

  Inevitably, I have to wake up, and when I do, I’m back on the island. Cold, damp, and alone, I’m right where Cory has placed me.

  It could be a day it could be years. Isolation has squelched my humanity. It has corroded my sense of time.

  But even worse.

  It has deadened my sense of purpose.

  Chapter 47

  Liza

  Camp Bodega…

  Why this part of my life?

  I know why. Because I gave up on that island. Just as Phillip had before me. And Cory sees my failure at Bodega, my soft grip I’d held on my life, he sees the reminder as a sort of punishment.

  Memories have taken hold until I am living them again. I am not Liza anymore. Not this version. I’m her. The one who gave up hope. She embraced death.

  He’s fascinated by that, and he takes me back there all over again.

  Bodega slowly fills with people I once knew, it takes root until I believe that I am there, and not somewhere in the wilds of America headed for Anthem. I can’t recall that this is a dream of his making, or even who “he” is after a time. Eventually, I am unaware that reality ever existed.

  I never left the island.

  Sometimes Cory makes up things to create a world that scares me. But the worst times are when they are my life relived. They just simply send me back to the real memory…

  Bodega isn’t the empty place anymore, it’s alive and flowing with familiar faces. I rise from my bunk. My hair is short, my smock is small. I’m smaller.

  Everything is the same….

  My friend Lucy runs up to the glass divider and pounds her fists on it emphatically. I’m alive, and she’s happy to see it.

  “I thought you were a goner!” she calls.

  We both have to stand close to the vents to hear one another. Her side of the compound is where they keep the hyper-contagious people with the super-cancer. We’ve joked a few times about how it sounds heroic, or like a bad vigilante. “Super-cancer!” Dun dun dun duh!

  But it’s airborne and aggressive. On my side, we have the more regular brand.

  “I almost was,” I tell her.

  Caleb glances over at me from his bunk next to hers where he’s straightening his sheet. His vivid green eyes are serious. “Serious” is Caleb’s default. He returns my wave, but there’s a question in it. His perception is on target as usual. He’s asking without words, Were you really almost a goner?

  I nod that I was.

  For a moment, he and Lucy speak in sign language to one another, then she flutters her hands in the air out of frustration before merely talking instead, facing away from the vent so her words are difficult to make out. Caleb can read lips, but she has to talk more slowly when he does, so she toggles between both forms of communication, depending on how quickly she wants to get her point across.

  Who would’ve thought that you could find love in a place like this? If anyone would, though, it’s Lucy. Sweet Luce, with freckles and chocolate eyes, and that big gap between her two front teeth that’s as charming as a dimple. Lucy, who fell in love with a deaf boy, turning him “puppy dog” in an instant. Her hair, she says, had been bright red, and the sprung tresses are easy to picture; an unruly mop, constantly in the way. She sometimes lifts a hand over her smooth scalp as if the gesture’s ingrained.

  “What day is it today?” she asks, not meaning the actual day, and she laughs when I’m unable to decide. “It’s a Dorothy, then,” she says. “Homesick… ?”

  Earlier in our confinement, I’d explained my father’s surmising that every occasion could be summed up by a Broadway play. Simple really. Each one conveys a certain thing; has an overture and a story. Dorothy just wanted to go home, while Fiddler on the Roof was a common one for us here, being in a sort of holocaust ourselves.

  “Jekyll and Hyde?” Lucy snaps her fingers with a giggle at my shrug in answer. “That’s brill!”

  Fits quite well for today, actually. I’ve become two people since the zombie attack: that same fearful one who keeps looking over her shoulder, versus the more curious one, still picking at the scab of memory. Was it sensationalizing on my part that had given the thing speech? Should I feel sorry for those poor beasts trapped inside rotting corpses?

  Now, Caleb’s gazing over Lucy’s head at me. I’m uncomfortable with his moody, soulful glances. A thinker is Caleb.

  We’re all terminal, my expression tries to convey, so if I die now or later, who’s to care?

  Caleb tilts his head in reply, I care. Be safe, Liza.

  Truth is, as sad as it sounds, staying alive is high on my list of things to do. I’ve proven that on more than one occasion.

  With a soft smile, I’ve conceded his point. Lucy continues on in an animated chirp and Caleb returns to watch her, features slowly metamorphosing from caring to intimate.

  Back in our old life, Lucy would have been that girl standing in front of school, applying lip gloss over and over, perfecting each trace. She’d probably flirt with the boys, instead of staying stiff-backed and completely unnoticed.

  Conversely, I was home-schooled and pale because of my mother’s umbrellas, and my life before would have put a nice wedge between me and someone as enjoyable as Lucy. But… that was the old world and isn’t the new world so much brighter? If there’s anything to thank the End for, it’s my first true friend.

  Caleb works out in his cell, and in another life, they’d have been the popular kids, both charming. His hearing was perfect before the cancer, but no matter how much Lucy tries, he’s never attempted to speak, for fear of what he’d sound like. His silent treatment is a part of him now, and a balance to Lucy’s being a chatterbox.

  Lucy and Caleb
are a year younger than me, both fifteen. The most unlikely of friends, all three of us, now the remnants of a decayed society; sons and daughters of yesterday’s kings and queens, ripped from their sovereign hands like a pied piper had come in the night. Our parents are all dead, and what’s left of their progeny rots away as prisoners of the Authority.

  Caleb stares pointedly beyond my shoulder at two guards who’ve appeared at the end of the hall, their stillness menacing, strange, and inhuman. As peculiar as they are unsettling, they give edge to the rumors that they’re trained zombies. Batons in hand already, visors impenetrable but somehow conveying their genuine dislike, these guards are never seen outside of their outfits and helmets. Under that high black collar, long sleeves, and gloves, not a speck of skin is shown. They do speak, however, albeit rarely, but it’s robotic.

  The Authority does something to their guards. Hard to guess what, but my nightmares provide enough vivid imaginings.

  Statues, watching, waiting. Most prisoners would run away, scurry like rats to another room, or back to their bunks. But not us. We stay where we are, chins up, and stare right back at them.

  I’m afraid of the undead, but the Authority is another matter entirely.

  It’s a wonder what we must look like with our shaved heads, missing eyebrows, pointy cheeks, and bruises. We aren’t far from zombies ourselves.

  This angers me. Have these guards no pity?

  My message is clear: I am not a nobody. I’m the daughter of a great dancer and a world-renowned composer. They may be dead, but I am very much alive. My name is Liza Randusky, and I come from a long line of somebodies.

  Lucy and Caleb send similar messages through their own eyes and stances. Though we be children of the damned, we rise up, even if it is only in our hearts.