I was so focused on the dog that I missed the approach of the first soldier, and she coughed, twice, before saying with a bored inflection, “ID, miss.”
With a weak smile, I handed her my driver’s license.
“Six months out of date.” She scanned it, anyhow. The photo that came up on her hand held was two years old, when my hair was shorter and I weighed more. “Do you have anything current on you? Perhaps with an infection scan taken in the last two weeks?”
“No.” The German Shepard was sniffing around my bag. “No. I’m sorry.”
“What do you do, Octavia?”
I wanted to nudge him away with my foot.
“Octavia?”
I met the soldier’s pale gaze and smiled, weakly. “I don’t do—dogs, they don’t like me. I’ve never—”
“He’s very well-trained. Do you have a job?”
“No.” I was suddenly on the verge of tears. “I was a student. Until a year ago. I was living with my boyfriend.”
“It’s okay.” A hint of sympathy creased the skin around her eyes. “When did you leave?”
My voice was barely a whisper: “This morning.”
“Got family in Jerome?”
I shook my head.
The solider pulled out a notepad from her pants and, with a pen, wrote quickly. Behind her, the German Shepard sniffed at the toilet, uninterested in me. “I’m giving you directions to a shelter in Jerome, Octavia. This is a special shelter. It’s just for women. It’s easy to find, just two blocks away from the bus depot, at the back of Saint Mary’s Cathedral. Are you Christian?”
“No.”
“Say you are.” Her eyes held mine. “I’ll call in a couple of days and ask for you there. I hope you answer.”
I took the sheet of paper and nodded, though I would not make it to Jerome.
The attack came as we were approaching the border checkpoint to New Mexico. I had not been questioned about my out of date license since the first stop, a result that I subscribed to the soldier, whose name had been scribbled at the bottom of her paper, Emma. I had the feeling, though I could not justify it, that she understood what I was going through; it was communal knowledge, shared experience, though how big that shared community was, I didn’t know. I would recognize it later, once I had enough distance from addiction and abuse, but then, I sat quietly in the back of the bus, alternating between sleep and feeling unwell. Sleep was not truly a relief from what I felt, but it was better than every third and fourth thought turning to meth. I was in such a twisting, light sleep when the shields of the bus lifted into a defensive position over the windows and the driver’s voice said, “We have a problem. I advise all passengers to remain calm and to attach their seat belts.”
Before us sat the next checkpoint, the building a mix of broken glass and dark, empty holes, while shattered barricades lay across the road. The gate through to the freeway was cut off by an overturned military truck, the green fabric roof striped away to reveal metal bones beneath.
The bus halted, gears reworked, and it began to reverse.
There was a crash on the left side.
It was sudden, shocking, and violent; passengers screamed; I screamed.
I grabbed hold of my bag and dropped to the floor as a second vehicle punched into the side of the bus. In response, it rocked. The plan to tip us was frighteningly obvious and the driver tried to pick up speed, his cursing bursting over the open microphone he had forgot to turn off. With the shields over the windows, I could not see what was happening, but I could
hear.
I could hear the frantic screech of tires in reverse: two sets, I thought, maybe a third. Difficult to tell. Impossible.
Yet.
Yet when there were three punches on the bus, I was not surprised. I could visualize the trucks they drove, the dents, the broken windshields, the hard growl of the engine. The screech of tires as they were reversed, as they revved, as they hit—
And hit.
And hit.
Until, with a groan, the bus tipped onto its side.
Before any of us could react, there was the sound of boots, followed by glass splintering. The door was smashed. Impossible, I thought—bullet proof, gas controlled, yet there it was, broken open with a hammer as if it were nothing more than ordinary glass. No human could do that. No healthy human. A figure dropped through the door and landed on the driver. There was a shot, a soft pop, but it wasn’t the intruder who died; stripped of the very gun he carried, fired into the mouth at point blank range, it was the driver who slumped to the floor and left us, his passengers, alone.
Alone, but for the tall figure of the Diseased, who stared at us. The hint of a cruel mouth was all I could see, and it widened with a toothy smile before he told us to stand.
The trip to Ulee was done silently, done under threat, and done in chains. We sat in the back of a rust eaten flat-bed truck as Texas passed in a hot wind, its desolate red and brown assuring us that there was no rescue coming.
Conversation with our captors was limited. They told us to move and to be quiet, but that was it. The first Diseased we had seen, Brent, the shadowed figure in the bus, was a tall, middle aged white man with sharp check bones and feverish blue eyes, and he served as a model for the others in his quick movements, his quiet, and the menace that emanated from him when he forced us out of the bus. It was enough to quell tears, to stop whispered conversation, and to assure anyone who thought about escaping that a much worse fate awaited them. Though worse depended on who you were. The hungry looks that the Diseased males gave women frightened me more than anything had in my life. I expected to be raped if I stayed or if I left.
Yet.
Yet, for the two nights we drove, I was not touched.
Ulee, upon approach, was a large, open field dominated by a red brick, square farmhouse. Around it, small houses, some of these being built still, looked like child soldiers ringed around a King. As the truck drove up the road I noticed that the people building the houses were not Diseased. They were normal, healthy. It confused me to note the permanence of the structures they were making, and I was appalled to count at least four prams—four babies—covered and sitting behind their working parents.
Outside the red brick house, we were pulled from the back of the truck, and put in a line before the veranda.
It was there that I met Baker Thomas.
“You know the name, I am sure,” he said; “but I am not the real Baker Thomas.” He looked just as I had seen him years before: black, one of the blackest men I had seen, his head shaved to smoothness, and without one hint that the virus was destroying him as it was the others. “There is a Baker Thomas in every Alrea community throughout the world. I cannot tell you why this is the case, other than that it is what Alrea decides. How it measures who has the right to lead, I cannot say. It is not based off gender, race, education, or age—I was a woman until I awoke to find myself going through these changes.”
He wore no shoes, but black pants and a simple white t-shirt, the sleeves rolled back to his forearms. There was nothing feminine about him.
“I know a lot of what I tell you will be resisted, initially,” he continued. “It may be hard to appreciate it now, but we are not your enemies, even though the chains you wear will not be leaving any time soon. I imagine that it does not help you to hear this, either, but I hate that you have to wear them. They are the tools of slaves and we here are not slave owners. Unfortunate circumstances have forced upon us violent methods to ensure that Alrea can grow. It must not be hunted, nor must it be treated as a virus; the world’s reaction to it has forced us to use methods we loathe to build our community. It may seem a sick joke when I say this, but a glance around you and you will convey the truth: Alrea and human work here in harmony. They live in peace. They are brothers and sisters.”
He stood and walked toward us, his bare feet crossing the red gravel as if it were soft grass. “Alrea does not father or mother children. It does not do this because it does not need to procreate, but rather because it exists continually around us. As I stand here talking to you, each one of you has become intimate with Alrea: it is the soil you stand upon, the air that you breath, it is in your skin, your lungs, and your brain.”
Baker Thomas stopped in front of me, but his gaze was for everyone from the bus. It was a strange gaze; a mix of sympathy and cruelty, one that understood the fear, but that understood its necessity and even, I believed, enjoyed it.
“In a moment, you are going to be taken away and lodged. In the morning, you will be given duties. If you fail to perform these, you will be punished; succeed and you will be rewarded. I wish that it was not this way, but it is. However, before you go, I will tell you a story, in the hope that you will better understand what is happening around you and how momentous it is. It is the story of how Alrea came to us.” He paused, waiting to see if anyone spoke. We didn’t. I did not know what to think, other than that I was in the company of madmen. “Alrea,” he said, finally, “first seeded outside Mbeya in Tanzania. The man who came into contact with it, Baker Thomas, was a man who looked and spoke like me; his name had been given to him during the three months that a British film crew had employed him to cater their stay. He kept it to be easily identifiable to rich Westerners, for that was how he earned a living. He was on his way to one such couple when a streak of fire lit the sky. Curious, he turned his bike towards the crash sight.
“He found a crater, but nothing else. Whatever had hit the ground had disintegrated through atmospheric heat and impact. It surprised him that there was nothing, given that the crater was as large as a football field, and had left bent, broken, and burnt trees behind its black depression, but he was not an educated man, and did not give much thought to this. The ground inside that hole was cool and Baker walked around it, his eyes scanning the upturned dirt and broken branches for any sign of stone or aircraft. What he did not realize was that Alrea lay in the dirt, that its remains were scattered around him, barely sentient from the trauma that the destruction of its body had caused. What Alrea looked like before it impacted, as it drifted through space, I cannot tell you—that knowledge is lost to us even now, but we, all of us, know from where it came: Mars.
“Alrea was dying when Baker Thomas arrived and it reached out for him just as you or I would have reached for a saviour under similar conditions. On the charred dirt he stood on, Alrea crept through the breaks in his shoes and touched his skin. That was all it took. When Baker left the site later—it having now become surrounded by people, and with he himself being late already—what was left of Alrea had identified an illness in him and set about curing it. For Alrea to continue to exist, so must he, and within hours it had learned how Baker Thomas’ body functioned and begun not just to heal, but to strengthen, to push him down an evolutionary path that Alrea would continue to perfect in each of us.”
The Diseased listened as if they were in Church. The man before them was their preacher, their spiritual and emotional centre, their guide to what they were experiencing.
“Alrea is still in the ground,” their Baker Thomas said. “The Earth is a living, sentient being, and Alrea heals it, just as it healed the first man it came into contact with. It nourishes the soil, it purifies the water, it cleans the air, it strengthens the beings living upon it. The sickness that you see in us will not be present when Alrea has completed, when the planet, and those who live on it, have become a harmonic whole.”
A moment later, we were led away.
What affected me most deeply about being a slave in Ulee was not the beatings, nor the lack of independence, but how easily I adjusted to being owned.
It was slavery, no matter what Baker Thomas said. My time was organized, my duties given to me: my body no longer mine, but rather a tool that the Diseased owned. I made one attempt at escape, driven by the last sharp edge of meth withdrawal, but I was caught and returned to chains before the burnt orange of the morning had evaporated. Strung from a ceiling, I was beaten so badly that a month later the wounds on my back still wept on the fields. I resolved never to put myself in such a position again and within six months, I was promoted to the kitchen. It bothered me that I saw it as a promotion and a rise in my living conditions, and it bothered me that it did not bother me more.
For the next two years, my life was routine. At five, I began preparing breakfast, my duties split with Sally, a large white, middle aged woman originally from Philadelphia. “I could go back and be free,” she said, more than once, though she did not make an attempt to escape. She had a husband and a family in Ulee, humane allowances that the Diseased made chains from.
It was mostly just the pair of us in the kitchen, though holidays would see anywhere between five and ten women assigned to help prepare the large feasts that Baker Thomas promised. They were always women, too. I never saw one man work in the circular, red brick kitchen that we did. When I remarked on that, Sally, feeding wood into the stove, said, “It’s the Infection.”
A slave’s term for Alrea. In his Sunday services, Baker Thomas called it an insult and a slur.
“It divides us by gender,” Sally continued, feeding another piece of wood into the fire. “The Infection’s roles for us are based on that, and its definition of those roles are drawn from its first exposure to us. That’s why Baker Thomas is always a man. In his family and work, he was an authority and that’s the model that the Infection has used ever since as a leader. It’s the same reason why you and I cook. Why other women work in the factory to produce clothing. Why men do the building. Why—” she tossed the wood into the stove “—that was chopped by a man with an axe that a man made.”
The stove door shut loudly, the full stop in a statement I had no argument for.
Life in Ulee was a borderline existence. There were no more than fifty eight non-Diseased men, women, and children, and fifteen Diseased. It was kept deliberately small by Baker Thomas so that it could be self-sustained and not draw attention to itself. The compound had no government electricity or water, and relied on cheap solar powered generators that were shut down during the day to charge; hand pumps and fire provided the rest of the power, though none of this existed in the dorms—only the houses of the Diseased were wired. The small family houses had candles, but they sat in as much darkness as I did in the evening, due to their scarcity. Food was grown in two fields and small pens of chickens and pigs were kept around the kitchen, while further out, two hundred cattle grazed. Ulee was safe, ignored, nothing—that was what Baker Thomas wanted.