Darklandia (2 page)

A chill passed over my arms as my lips moved in unison with the mayor’s words, but I couldn’t hear myself over his booming voice and the chorus of the crowd.

“Remember the day Felicity won. Devote this day to the rising sun. Recall this day as most phenomenal. Never forget: Suffering is optional.”

A hush immediately fell over the square followed by a soft rattle of air in my grandmother’s chest. It was time.

I stood from my chair, ready to ease my grandmother to the front of the stage. As I slid past her, Grandmother’s gaze shifted toward me and she opened her mouth to speak. Her voice sounded thin and broken like the crackled glass of the hurricane lamp on my bedside table. I leaned forward, straining to hear her words over the roaring buzz of anticipation. I placed my ear right next to her lips and listened.

“It’s… water,” she said, her tongue and lips crackling with stickiness from not having drunk her water ration in days.

“Say it again, please, Grandmother.”

“It’s… in… the water rations.”

It’s in the water rations?

I stood from my chair and leaned closer to get a better look at her face. A dab of thick, white saliva accumulated at the corner of her mouth as her eyes rolled sideways. The slight rise and fall of her bony chest was no longer noticeable. I wheeled her forward to the front of the stage, surprised to see as many faces trained on me as there were on my grandmother. I wondered if Darla was out there watching me, cheering me on inside her head.

Mayor Hillstead approached my grandmother with the white linen sack in his hand. First, he took her pulse again then he slipped the sack over her head. The mayor pulled a small length of blue ribbon out of his coat pocket and draped it around the back of Grandmother’s neck. He yanked the ribbon as tight as he could before he tied it into a bow over her throat.

A memory of my grandmother flashed in my mind. Her hands trembled as she attempted to braid my hair. She tied the blue ribbon around the end of the braid so loosely that my braid came undone by the time I reached the school gates. My teacher scolded me for my messy hairstyle and my mother never allowed Grandmother to touch my hair again. But I’d never forget the smile on Grandmother’s face as she finished tying that ribbon around my braid. It was horrific.

“Let the countdown begin,” the mayor said into the microphone, and all eyes shifted to the screen above the stage.

Thirty. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight.

Grandmother’s breath sucked and pulled at the white fabric of the sack as she attempted to breathe. A wet spot appeared, but not over her mouth. Too far to the left to be her mouth. My fingers became possessed of a strange restlessness, an impulse to untie the ribbon around her neck.

Twenty-two. Twenty-one. Twenty.

Her hand twitched in her lap and, without thinking, I crouched next to her and grasped her fingers to stop the movement. Her skin was cool and dry against my hand.

Twelve. Eleven. Ten. Nine. Eight.

The tickle in my throat returned and I resisted the urge to clear my throat though I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. As if I were the one with the sack over my head.

Four. Three. Two. One.

A joyous sensation filled me and the tickle in my throat disappeared. Grandmother had been raptured.

I released my grandmother’s hand and Commissioner Baron was at my side. The large knife in his fist whooshed through the air and plunged into Mayor Hillstead’s chest, twice. The mayor’s eyebrows crinkled together in what must have been pain. Is that what my Grandmother’s face looked like beneath the sack? Mayor Hillstead’s wide eyes blinked several times before he collapsed.

Two raptures in one day. This must be good luck.

2

The corners of my father’s blue eyes crinkled as he smiled at me from across the park bench in Central Park. I tried not to stare at the fresh scar between his eyes as he handed me a glass bottle filled with a sparkling red liquid. I took the bottle and pressed it against my lips. The cold liquid slid over my tongue and down my throat lighting my mouth with tiny sparks. I spit out a mouthful all over the grass, my eyes watering as I choked on the bright sensation.

My father laughed as I coughed and wiped at my tears. “You get used to the fizz,” he said, reaching across the bench to wipe a bit of spittle from my chin. My father’s golden hair gleamed in the afternoon sunlight, still outshone by the joy that illuminated his face.

“What is it?” I asked. I had never drunk a liquid so painful and satisfying at once. All I had ever drunk, besides the water rations, was a bit of plain water, which tasted nothing like rations. Water rations tasted like salt, sugar, and metal with a good dose of bitterness.

“It’s cherry soda,” my father replied, immediately recognizing the confusion in my face. “Cherries are a fruit. Soda is a drink infused with carbonation to give it that bubbly feeling.”

I stared at the bubbles inside the bottle as they floated up and accumulated at the surface of the red liquid—the cherry soda.

“Where did you get it?” I asked, as I fidgeted with the bottle, tipping it side to side, ushering more bubbles to the surface.

My father glanced around the park. Guardian Angels stood along the concrete path every one hundred yards. Their shiny silver helmets blocked the bright sunlight and kept their heads fresh with built-in cooling systems. The batons they carried were rumored to transform into guns, the things darklings used to kill each other, but I didn’t believe it. The angels were our protectors. They would never hurt us.

Still, my father appeared to be glancing at them as if he couldn’t answer my question in their presence.

“Sera, what would you say if I told you there’s a whole world outside Manhattan? A different world. A place where cherry soda runs like water from fountains and people are so happy that sometimes they cry.”

“They c—?” I stopped myself from repeating his last word. Now
I
glanced around at the angels wondering if they were listening.

“Real tears,” my father continued. “How does that make you feel?”

“Feel?”

Crying wasn’t allowed. Just thinking about it, the red eyes and nose, the frown, the tears burning tracks down cheeks… it was hideous. Of course, I was frightened. But saying the word aloud….

“Don’t be frightened,” he said, with a smile. Though my father’s strange crinkled smile, the smile he inherited from my great-grandmother, always induced a slight sense of wonderment in me, today his smile looked gruesome. “Please, Sera, don’t look at me like that. I don’t want to hurt you. I want you to know the truth.”

“The truth?” I replied, as my father’s sec-band flashed red.

My vision went black as the power supply to my pod was cut off. My hour was up.

The glass top on the pod made a squelching noise as it popped out and lifted away from me toward the ceiling. This darkroom only had three pods, one on either side of me, both in use. I followed the path of neon blue lights along the carpet toward the exit. I pushed a glowing button on the wall and the silver door slid open.

The dim sunlight in the apartment lobby blinded me as I stepped out of the darkroom. The door slid shut behind me and I placed my wrist inside the circular hole in the wall to the left of the door. The titanium security band around my wrist flashed as the scanner verified my identity and that I had served my hour. The flashing green light meant
go
. My sec-band had never flashed red and I hoped it never did.

I set off across the dim lobby of the building, now abandoned, it was once one of the first apartment complexes in New York to install a darkroom—before the war wiped out ninety percent of the population and this building became a graveyard for expensive furniture. I stepped out onto Broadway, trying not to think of the darklings that once lived in this building. Willing myself to forget the last memory I had of my father. Trying desperately not to ponder what he meant by “the truth”.

I usually looked forward to my mandatory hour inside Darklandia, but after the rapture ceremony yesterday, and learning that the mayor’s rapture was not intended, I didn’t want to waste an hour reliving my father’s last words. I wanted to understand my
grandmother’s
last words.

“It’s in the water rations.”

Of course, the water rations were packed with all the essential vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients we needed to survive. We never ate tangible food.

As my mother and I took turns sipping our rations last night, I contemplated the Felicity Festival that had already been scheduled for the following Saturday to rejoice my grandmother’s rapture. I didn’t know if my mother was also thinking of the upcoming festival. We stared at each other across the kitchen like a couple of dogs in a staring contest, raising our tumblers to our lips, never uttering a word about what Commissioner Baron did at the ceremony. Commissioner Greco Baron. Greco. Such an odd name.

Georgia Fisk was not an odd name, but my grandmother certainly lived an odd life as a darkling. What did her last words mean? Did she know what was going to happen to the mayor? Were her words just the confused utterings of a senile darkling?

Something told me they weren’t.

The streets were almost unrecognizable from the pictures of Manhattan from 120 years ago, before the drought. The skyscrapers that once served as beacons for tired New Yorkers returning home from long plane rides were blown to bits during the Civil War when those skyscrapers served as lodestones for the rebels bombs. So much of the rebuilding effort, which was still eons from being completed, had been centered on providing citizens with easy access to Darklandia and rations while New York City’s history continued to crumble and blow away.

The actual streets, once teeming with taxis and automobiles, were now empty, but for the occasional GAT: Guardian Angel Transport. These solar-powered mini-buses carried the angels to their designated patrol blocks and transported detainees to the Department of Felicity for evaluation. Our class received a tour of a GAT last year and we were allowed to strap each other into the detainee restraints.

I walked along Broadway Avenue past One Times Square, glancing at another poster on the side of the building. This one depicted a young girl covering her face with her hands. The headline read, “Humility and Felicity go hand in hand.” The few pedestrians I passed on Broadway appeared as gray and blue blurs at the edges of my vision. We learned in Darkling History class two years ago that New York City was once the most densely populated city in the former United States of America. Then came the Civil War of 2072. Most metropolises were decimated and the population dwindled to less than ten percent of what it once was. The government finally defeated the rebels by uniting with Canadian and Central American forces to form a new nation: Atraxia.

Though I had never been outside Manhattan, our teachers showed us photos of bombed cities with body parts strewn across the streets like fallen leaves in Central Park—when Central Park had trees. Many cities across Atraxia still lay in ruin, still overrun with darklings. The rebels fought bitterly against the mandatory hours in Darklandia and the water rations. They had suffered for so long, they were sick with the idea that misery was a normal part of life.

The long walk from the apartment building on Broadway to our apartment building on Cedar was my second favorite part of the day. I chose to serve my mandatory hours at the darkroom on Broadway because it had the least pods. I figured fewer pods meant fewer people to notice when I took a moment to compose myself after seeing my father in Darklandia.

Most people used their hours to do the things darklings once did; to exorcize the urges propagated in their DNA over millions of years of suffering and unsupervised breeding. I used my mandatory hours trying to recreate a world where my father existed as he did two years ago. Though we weren’t supposed to discuss what happened inside Darklandia, my best friend Darla once admitted to me she had killed at least thirty people in her virtual life. She confessed this to me more than a year ago. I wondered what the total was up to now.

The whirr of a surveillance camera made me look up. Knowing the Guardian Angels were watching us usually made me feel safe, but something felt different today. Like yesterday’s rapture changed everything. I wondered where Commissioner Baron was taken. Of course, he was probably already purified and safely tucked away in a leisure home by now—like my father. Only, my father didn’t murder anyone. My father was just another victim of the darkness.

As I rounded the corner onto Cedar Street, my mind returned to the civil war and the water rations. I had to tell Darla about yesterday. I had to speak my grandmother’s words aloud before the words infected me with their mystery, with her misery.

The air on Cedar Street smelled of soot and rubbing alcohol from the lifesaver factory across the street where VITALIS pharmaceuticals filled tiny glass vials with emergency rations. The vials themselves were made from melting down the glass bottles darklings had once tossed into dumps. Darklings were wasteful creatures, so much so the drought of 2031 never ended. If darklings hadn’t wasted so much of the Earth’s natural resources, poisoning the oceans and torching the sky with their toxic waste, we may never have created rations to adapt to this new water conscious environment. Of course, if the humans hadn’t trashed the Earth so thoroughly, the Civil War may never have been fought and Atraxia may never have been formed; we might all still be darklings.

I shuddered at this thought as I passed the factory. The transparent glass vial with the word VITALIS etched onto the surface hung around my neck tied to a silver chain. One never knew when they would be caught somewhere without access to a ration dispenser, though sketchy places like that were becoming much less common. Pretty soon every street corner and every room in every building in New York would have a ration dispenser and lifesavers would be obsolete.

I entered the concrete-block apartment building through the service door to the right of the entrance door. The wooden entrance door had been boarded off for more than seven months after the last attack of the rebels. The rebels had entered all the apartment buildings after nine o’clock curfew and painted a single red star on the front door of hundreds of apartments and darkrooms in the city.