Undone: A Dystopian Fiction Novel (5 page)

I didn’t have many dreams in those days, I took each day as it came, but she was always there in my sights. She kept me getting up each morning, just so I could see her at breakfast. She was the reason I came home after class instead of wandering around campus or working on homework in some drafty coffee shop. She was my illumination, my spark, my endgame. I just wanted to hold her forever, but after a few moments, she gently broke from my arms and gave me an understanding smile.

“We should get some sleep,” she said. “It’s been a rough few days, and I know I just get more stressed if I’m not rested.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, though I already missed feeling her head on my shoulder. “Same here.”

Tyrsa smiled and got up. I listened to her run the water in the bathroom, brushing her teeth and washing her face by candlelight. As I waited for my turn, I thought about what Tyrsa had told me, and couldn’t help but think about my own father.

Tyrsa and I were opposite in that way: she had no mother, and I had no father. However, unlike Tyrsa’s mother, my father hadn’t wanted to leave. He had done all he could to stay, fighting the cancer that multiplied like rabbits in his body. Even though I only knew him for the first four years of my life, I remember him being strong, like athletic star-strong, but none of that had mattered to the illness. For a while, Mom took pictures of him constantly, to preserve his memory for me, but after a certain point, the pictures stopped. I always just imagined Dad going out like a movie star, muscular and healthy-looking. When I got older and saw what cancer did to peoples’ bodies, I knew that image of him wasn’t true. I was glad Mom had stopped taking pictures though. I preferred my false memory to the truth.

I decided against taking a shower that night. Standing up and washing felt like too much work, so I just brushed my teeth and splashed my face with a little warm water. Lawrence and Rick were already asleep, purring like two great cats. I got into the bottom bunk and stared at the wood frame above me, the mattress squeezing through the slats like puff pastry.

Tyrsa,
I thought, her name sparkling like water in my mind.
Tyrsa.

I woke the next morning to Lawrence shaking me, a toothbrush between his teeth and an angry expression on his face.

“Hey, dude,” he said when he saw my eyes open. “They’ve shut off the water. We don’t have any water.”

We checked Joe’s office, but found it empty. To our dismay, it looked like he had been robbed, but upon closer inspection, it was clear he had just freaked out. Nothing was missing; everything was just scattered on the floor and across his desk. There was a post-it note stuck to the wall under the TV. Beth read it aloud.

“Getting out of town. Utilities might be down. Call this number.”

Beth read the number and Rick dialed it into his phone. Tyrsa looked at me with a confused face and I shrugged. This was all very odd. When someone picked up, Rick hit the speakerphone button so we could all hear.

“Hi, we’re in an apartment, the building belongs to Joe Luck. He gave us this number. What’s with our water, why is it off?”

“Mr. Luck has not paid the bill,” a voice droned. “He is always late, and so we shut off the water until he pays this month and next.”

“But he’s gone!” Rick exclaimed. “There’s a state of emergency in effect, things are crazy here. What are we supposed to do without water?”

“I’m sorry, that’s not my problem.”

“Not your problem?” Rick exploded. “You know there’s a kid in this building, right? And an elderly woman!”

“Sir, I’m going to hang up.”

“The hell you are! We…”

We heard a click and then a long busy signal tone. Rick stared into the phone, shocked.

“They can’t do that!” Lawrence cried. “What is this, North Korea or something?”

“They can do it,” Tyrsa said quietly. “It happened in Detroit, remember? Human rights groups got involved. Some people didn’t have water for weeks.”

“We gotta call Joe,” Lawrence exclaimed. “He’s the one responsible for this. Why isn’t he paying? What’s going on?”

We searched the office for clues and found two phone numbers. One was for the office, and the other didn’t work. It just led us to a disconnected message.

“This is super sketchy,” Lawrence said, crossing his arms.

“I can’t believe Joe would do this to us,” Beth murmured. “Just…abandon us like this.”

We checked in with the other tenants and told them what we had learned. Mrs. Gaither said she called her son and he was coming to pick her up that day to take her back home with him to Indianapolis.

“Do you need anything till then?” Beth asked. “Water or anything?”

The old woman insisted she was fine, but Beth still left a plastic bag at her door with some cans of juice and a water bottle. Jenny opened her door only after we knocked several times, and she looked upset. Her eyes were pink from crying and we could hear Darcy whining incoherently from inside the apartment.

“The water got turned off,” Rick said. “Something to do with Joe. We called, and the lady said he didn’t pay. He’s gone. Just took off.”

Jenny’s hand flew to her mouth in shock.

“Do you guys need any water or anything?” Rick asked.

Jenny shook her head, but then froze. Tears filled her eyes, and she nodded.

“It’s okay,” Rick assured her. “We have plenty.”

Lawrence raided Joe’s mini fridge he kept in the office.

“It’s not like that asshole can get mad at us for it,” he said bitterly.

He found several fun-size water bottles, some cut-up vegetables, and a half-finished six-pack. We gave what we found to Jenny, and tried to gather clues as to where those two missing students had gone.

“Should we break in?” Lawrence asked tentatively.

“That doesn’t sound like a good idea,” I replied.

I put my ear against the door to listen for any movement. Silence.

“So, no notes or anything in the office? About them taking off?”

“Nope. And Joe didn’t know where they were before, remember?”

We all stood looking at the door, trying to decide what to do.

“I say we break in,” Rick announced. “They might have stored water in there. We’re going to need that for everyone, it’s an emergency. If they come back, they’ll just have to understand that.”

That made sense. Since Rick was the strongest and it had been his idea, he was responsible for kicking the door in. We stood back while he assessed what he was up against.

Luckily, the door was old, as was the rest of the house, so one strong kick to the frame was all Rick needed to break the latch. No one screamed or shouted from inside the apartment, so we knew for sure it was indeed unoccupied. We moved inside slowly, like cautious raccoons investigating an unfamiliar dumpster. The place looked very much like ours, except smaller. There was no couch, only two lumpy bean bag chairs, and an old TV set up on cinderblocks. Some empty chip bags and bottles littered the floor.

I went to the kitchen and opened all the cupboards, but there was nothing there. It was like someone else had already come through and taken anything that might have been useful. Out of curiosity, I tried the faucet. Nothing. Their electricity was off, too. When I opened the fridge, there was no cool gust and only three likely very moldy yogurt cups.

“Not much in the bedrooms,” Lawrence said, coming up behind me. “Two mattresses. Some textbooks. No clothes, either. Tyrsa says it looks like they might have bugged out.”

I hadn’t known the students very well, but I had seen them around a few times. They looked really young, like freshmen, and not like the sort of people who would take risks. Maybe they had been involved in the protests, or at least knew about them, and took off before things got really bad. That’s how bugging out was supposed to work. I wondered where they were, where they had gone, as we finished searching the apartment for anything useful. Beth found some first aid materials under the bathroom sink and we took them to add to our own stockpile.

Downstairs, we watched the TV in Joe’s office with Jenny. The stock market had just had its worst day in decades. It was strange to see people in suits freaking out. Would they be joining the looting soon? Wearing hundred dollar cologne and fighting over a crate of water in a grocery store? It was hard at first to sympathize with them, but I realized that just because someone wears nice clothes, it doesn’t mean they aren’t in trouble or desperate. Beth still had some very nice pieces of jewelry she had gotten as a child, but she had to eat ramen every night like the rest of us. Someone didn’t need to be in rags and “look” poor to be poor. Especially during these days when financial giants were tumbling down left and right, razing empires to the ground.

***

Protests had begun all across the state and were spreading across the country. The media had done a fine job of painting the students involved in the cafeteria riot as hungry, desperate children who were met with police brutality. They were held up as heroes, as justified rebels, who had gotten tired of being pushed down by “the man.” While I certainly understood the plight of broke young people, the story wasn’t that simple. I had been there at the riot. I had seen the six security guards facing down dozens of furious students. Sure, when things had gotten out of control in town, the police were a little rough, but could anyone really blame them? Because the media loved to simplify the truth and cast people as either heroes or villains, people were forced to choose sides. Angry debates were sparked in Washington D.C. and nothing productive was getting done. Not a real change from the usual.

We did learn something unsettling on the news, something that got our blood boiling. Apparently our situation with the electricity and water was not that unusual. Utilities and everyday services all across the country had started cutting people off. Grace periods were cut short. If you hadn’t paid or had a history of paying late or skipping payments altogether, they shut down your electricity and water.

“Cleaning out the system,” was the way they put it, which was a terrible PR decision.

They were only interested in the people with money, who were financially stable. That applied to very few people in the country anymore.

              Tyrsa went to the mailbox and returned with the check, which still sat untouched in the outgoing slot.

              “We might as well just keep this money,” she said bitterly, “If they’re not going to give us the time of day anyway.”

              She tore the check into tiny little pieces and threw them in the trash. As if on a timer set to go off with Tyrsa’s statement, the lights in the office suddenly went out. Rick opened the mini fridge. It was dark inside.

              “Well, crap,” he said.

              I still don’t know what exactly triggered the beginning of chaos, but all of the services we had taken for granted started disappearing. First it was our electricity, then the water, the mail, and then the garbage trucks. It had probably been brewing for some time - the degradation of modern society is never just an in-the-blink-of-an-eye thing - but to people like me who weren’t really paying attention to anything but themselves, it happened all at once. I do know that the garbage services went on strike. It wasn’t just the unemployed who were struggling; there was a huge group known as the “underemployed.” The over qualified people who worked long, hard hours at jobs they hated and were not receiving what they needed in return. Bad health insurance, bad hourly pay, strict rules about vacations, sick days, what have you. To keep a job, people had to sacrifice some of their basic needs and couldn’t even really complain about it, for fear of being kicked out the door. Waste management was the first to get hit by the strikes. Inspired by the raw energy of the protests and looting, workers brushed the dirt from their hands, planted their feet, and refused to play along with the system.

Enough is enough. No more exploitation. Are you paying attention now?

It’s amazing how much trash five people can create in just seven days. We did our best to be as clean and tidy as possible, but without running water, we were eating off paper towels and paper plates. We could have used the water we had to wash our regular plates, but that would just be a waste. We needed that water for drinking. We bagged up all our trash at the end of each day and put it on the curb out of habit, but soon we discussed different ways to dispose of it. Burning it was one of the first suggestions, but it sounded disgusting and burning trash could release dangerous chemicals into the air. Besides, we couldn’t burn tin cans. We decided to bury it. We had a little plot of woods behind the building that seemed like the best spot. That same evening, Rick and I took two shovels - one from our stash and the other from Jenny - and spent two hours digging a large, deep hole. It wasn’t a particularly warm evening, but the work was hard for me and I quickly sweat through my T-shirt. The physical exercise combined with being slightly dehydrated and smelling the trash through the bags made me feel ill. When we decided the hole was big enough for the trash we had collected over the week, we threw the bags one on top of the other and completed the task of filling the hole in again.

Sweaty and reeking of dirt and trash, we went back inside. I poured a little water unto a towel and dabbed it under my arms and on my neck before applying a fresh layer of deodorant. It wasn’t much, but we washed the most important areas of our body when we could, just to stay human. Lawrence and the girls were struggling with not being able to wash their hair, which, being long, posed a more present problem than Rick’s and mine.

“I’m so gross,” Beth moaned, retying her hair into a ponytail. “So greasy.”

She shook her hands as if she had just held some revolting reptile and made a face.

Rick rubbed a smear of dirt off his face with a paper towel and smiled. “Well, you look fine,” he assured her.

Beth rolled her eyes. “Yes, Rick, that’s what I was worried about,” she said sarcastically.

I chuckled to myself and turned on my phone. We all kept our electronics powered off to save as much battery as possible, but without a consistent power source, there was only so much we could do. I would turn my phone on for a few minutes each day to send Mom an “I’m still alive” text, but the process of turning the phone off and on was draining the battery. That was something else we had taken for granted: having fully-charged phones and laptops all the time. Without that, we felt cut off from the world. If we didn’t have the clock in the kitchen, we wouldn’t even know what time it was without going out of our way to find out.

When our electronics had completely died on the fourth day after the whole building’s power went out, we took everything to a coffee shop and charged there, but we got dirty looks from the employees, like we were stealing their electricity or something. We decided it would be best to hop from place to place, but those sorts of businesses were closing their doors so the owners could take off to safer parts. There hadn’t been any more big riots in days, but the quiet felt like the eye of the storm. There was something else brewing and no one wanted to be around when it hit.

“We need more water.”

Beth had gathered all the water bottles we had and organized them on the living room floor. We had twelve full bottles left, along with ten cans of pineapple juice.

“With cooking and the little washing we do, we’ll run out quickly,” she elaborated.

We all looked at each other, mirroring anxiety and frustration. We had hoped things would go back to normal sooner than this, but going back to a store for supplies had always been a possibility at the back of our minds. Since there were no riots or violent protests, the National Guard hadn’t come to Bloomington. Some officers from Indianapolis arrived to support the local force, but it wasn’t as if they could reassure business owners or people with travel options to stay or to not go on strike. Just the possibility of more looting scared people off. Everyone was nervous and avoided populated areas. Like grocery stores.