And it was true, until he died.
Baker Thomas’ death was not a surprise in Ulee. “Alrea,” he said, standing behind his short, polished podium one Sunday, “has told me my life here is done, and that I shall join it in twenty-seven days.”
The Diseased began to arrive in the final seven days, arriving in groups of five and six, often in old trucks. They were silent, but there was a hunger in them, and the sheen of their bodies was stronger than those of the Diseased of Ulee. I came to view it as a reflection of their desire. These new men and women were here to see who Alrea would take and remake into the new Baker Thomas, just as we all were, but they also hoped that it would be one of them. Sally told me that a lot of them lived in communities with no Baker Thomas—a few had even been sent away from Ulee after the virus remade them—and to be turned into the new Thomas would mean they would inherit a substantial rise in living conditions. Who was to be chosen, however, was a question that the current Baker Thomas refused to elaborate upon it. When asked, his only response was that on the night of his passing, there would be a feast.
It was the biggest dinner Ulee had seen. We prepared for two hundred and fifty Diseased and human guests, but on the night, a sudden influx of a hundred Diseased saw the slave population of Ulee watching what was to be their food eaten by rows of thin, emancipated men and women. They were surrounded by hundreds of flame lit poles, and the thin sheen of sweat of each of them gave off the unhealthiest look I had ever seen. For the first time they looked like creatures, rather than humans, their capture and slavery of us explainable by their feral nature and the way they communicated in gestures from the wild too subtle, and in voices too low to have tone or emotion.
During this, Baker Thomas walked around them, talking very little, but trying to spend a little bit of time with everyone. Though I was busy in the kitchen, both Sally and I moving in an endless series of movements between the stove, the preparation boards, and the sink where the bowls and plates and knifes and forks were kept, I thought that there was something strange about Baker. It was as if there was a haze about him, a slight blur to his shape and voice, as if he were disintegrating before us; yet, in the same thought, there was now a feminine quality to him, as if the person he had been before was beginning to emerge.
Yet, when late into the night Baker Thomas motioned for quiet, all of that was gone. He was solid, confident, undeniably a man, and a man minutes from death.
The quiet that followed his request reached both Sally and I. It was in the crackle of the flames, the pop of the ham we were cooking, the slip of a dirty plate into the sink—our background noise became suddenly loud, deafening when compared to the silence outside. It drew both of us, dirty and tired, to the door of the kitchen. Behind us, the seventeen girls who assisted us followed. We stood in a huddle and watched as Baker Thomas stepped onto the centre table, his bare feet surrounded by dirty plates and the bones of chicken and pigs, and bowls of potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkin, and sauces.
He raised his left hand—
—and behind him, the main house exploded.
The roar of planes followed, the ground erupting in their wake as bombs hit. All of us—Sally, me, the girls, the Diseased—began running. In the aftermath of the next explosion I could hear screaming, and feel fire, but I had not even heard the plane, nor the bomb hit. I lost track of Sally, but caught a glimpse of her with other women running towards the slave houses. In the background, I could see that half were already on fire and the dam they bordered reflected the light maliciously. There would be dead in there: dead children, dead husbands, dead nobodies to the military, who were not interested in rescuing the people enslaved by the Diseased.
I did not think of this at the time. They were thoughts for the morning, as I walked tiredly across the empty fields, the sun a wet, bloody mess across the land in front of me. At the time of the attack, I simply ran. I left Ulee behind, running with Diseased and human into fields that I had not worked in for over two years. More bombs fell and the sky lit in a caricature of festivity. I was thrown, I stumbled, and in the brown and grey dress I wore, I somehow managed to escape the debris. It would be days before I realized that I had finally gained my freedom.
But that night, I ran. I ran until I was exhausted, and then walked until I fell, and slept on dirt until I was prodded awake.
I recoiled, but a man’s voice said, “It’s okay. It’s cool. It’s me, Octavia. It’s Sid.”
Sid: tall, lean, his late forties fat worn away by hot days in the fields. Originally, he had lived in Utah, but after the death of his wife, had moved around a lot. He had been taken in a bus attack similar to mine. But now he stood before me, a backpack over his shoulders, the grey pants he had worn for years still in place, though he wore now a faded brown t-shirt with a cracked print of Los Angeles across it. Judging by its age, he had probably been taken in it.
“There’s not a lot left,” he said, watching me drink his water. “Nothing we built survived, and we pulled what we could out of the wreckage before we even discussed what we to do. That was us, by the by. Not the Diseased. There’s none of them left.”
“Why is there no one else with you?”
“‘Cause I’m the only one who left.” He took the water bottle back, did a slow shake of its remaining quarter, then shrugged and drank. Wiping his mouth, he said, “I never thought I’d see a bunch of slaves stay to rebuild the place that kept them, but there it is. They’re going to build it and wait for the new Baker Thomas to arrive. They said that would be better than trying the borders that they’d never get past.”
Why was I not surprised?
“Where were you headed?” I asked.
He was silent for a moment. Then shrugged again. “Nowhere in particular. Maybe Mexico. I just figure I got a chance to move, and one person off the main roads, he isn’t going to be noticed real easy. Two people off the road, even, really.”
It was an offer, and one that I took. There was nowhere for us to go, I believed, despite Sid’s words, but I did not want to go back.
As the sun rose high above us, Sid told me that the trucks were either gone or destroyed, and that beneath the debris of the attack had been dead men and women, friends and lovers and keepers. Sally, he said, had survived, but her family was gone, and the last he had seen of her she had been sitting by the dam, near the charred remains of her small house, still and silent. “It’s grief,” he said. We were walking across an empty field, the grass a dry, brittle yellow in the dirt. “That’s what has them all, the grief. I can understand it, but no Baker Thomas is going to make that better. He’ll probably make things worse, really.”
I did not immediately agree, and shrugged when he repeated the statement. I said, “Baker could be anyone. He could—”
“Understand?” Sid finished. He laughed. “If there’s a Diseased who becomes Baker Thomas after last night, the last thing he’ll feel sympathy for is humans.”
His statement remained in my head, when, two days later, we came across a boy who could not have been any older than fifteen. He lay in a ditch, wearing only khaki pants, and with scabbed cuts across his chest and face. In combination to being dehydrated and barely conscious, he was also Diseased.
“Help me,” he whispered as we approached him. “Please.”
“He’s dying,” Sid said.
Not yet, but in another day he would be.
“Come on.” Sid’s hand touched my shoulder, lightly. “There’s nothing to be had here. Further we get away, the better.”
There’s no telling what the Diseased will do
, his tone implied. Yet, I did not move.
The last thing a Diseased would feel is sympathy for humans. That is what Sid had said and it was true. No Diseased in Ulee would want to help us, not after what had happened, and I doubted that any adult Diseased would either. We were tools at best, a danger at worse. But the boy before us was not from Ulee and not fully grown. He was most likely an exile, a person that Alrea had recently taken and transformed and who, as a result, had been forced from his community.
I dropped into the ditch.
“Octavia.”
Sid’s voice held the tone of a parent, speaking to a child. I pulled the Diseased into a sitting position and said, “How long until we’re caught?”
“We stay off the roads, we’re careful—”
“Another two weeks, a month. Maybe we can hit Mexico and the Diseased there.”
Silence.
“Pass me the water.” I turned to look up at him. “Sid?”
“No.”
“He’ll die.”
“Good.”
“We’ll die.”
Again, Sid was silent.
“We need to survive,” I said. “We need to stay free. You know just as well as I do that we will get caught eventually. There’s no safety for us unless we make it. This boy here, he’s a chance at that. If we help him, take him in, and show him something different, we have a chance to make Alrea work for us. He’s new, a blank slate—”
“He’s Diseased.”
“Yes.” The boy behind me groaned and I held out my hand for the water. “But to the rest of the world, so are we.”
It was in the ravine that the Children of the Earth was born, though it was not until six months later that I painted the name onto a small sign and hung it outside the rebuilt red brick house in the centre of Ulee.
The boy’s name was Lydon, though he did not tell me that until three nights later, when Sid and I had returned to the community with him. He spoke quietly and hesitantly and asked why I decided to return here to the ruins. I told him, simply, that there was nowhere else to go. “I wish I had a home to go back too,” he said, the fire we had built reflecting his narrow, sick face. “They hit me when Alrea touched me; hit me and threw stones at me and beat me. I don’t think they wanted to kill me, but they didn’t—they didn’t want me there.”
Home.
Was I really returning home? Was Ulee where I thought my place was? The idea was such a horrible one that I barely slept through the night.
Beneath the sun the next day I told myself that home had never been a sanctuary for me, so I lacked the sense of security and safety that others associated with it, and this was why I was able to view Ulee as a home. But a part of me had not been happy when the destroyed buildings, torn up fields, and gravesites appeared on our arrival. Destroyed were the things I worked for, the things I contributed to, and it saddened me as much as it angered me to know that I had been forced to do this. The contradiction was not one that I could come to terms with: I felt sadness for what had happened, I felt guilt for feeling my sadness and not anger, and the two were irreconcilable with each other. I think that if I could have left in the morning and gone elsewhere to make a life, I would have done it without a backward glance, much as Sid had before.
There was, however, nowhere else to go; nor were we safe in Ulee, either. Of the fifty-eight slaves that had been owned by Baker Thomas, only seven remained to greet us. Two of the seven were children, and one would not live the week out. “There were more,” Sid murmured as we made our way down to the dam, approaching the two men and three women. “At least two dozen! I would never have—I would have forced them to come with me if I had known that so few would be left. They’re just waiting here to be taken like that!”
Sally was there, nursing the child that would live. It was not her own, but the daughter of a Singaporean couple who had died in the attack. Still holding the girl, both of them wrapped in a dirty blanket, Sally, with dark, baggy eyes, and a sag to her skin that was a mix of fatigue and grief, took me to the graves of her husband and children after we arrived. “Kaoi’s parents are behind my family,” Sally said, her voice bordering on a monotone. She rocked the baby without thought. “This is all I’ve done. I’ve buried the dead. The others that left—they think there’s somewhere to go, they think there’s nothing. We’ve buried everything we were.”
“Yes,” I said quietly, looking at the crudely erected gravestones. “We have.”
She did not question me and I did not elaborate. Her grief allowed for nothing different at the moment.
After the second child, a white boy who had been burnt horribly in the attack, was buried, I stood in front of them in the graveyard and told them my plan. “We have to make something different.” I had rehearsed what I wanted to say. If I had had a pen and paper I would even have written it down. “We can’t go back to New York or Chicago, or anywhere else where we lived. We have only what we stand upon.”
“We can’t be anything else here,” said Louis. He was Hispanic, thin, and with a receding hairline. “There’s no freedom for us until we’re dead!”
“There are no laws here.” I met each gaze before me. “The Diseased don’t have a right to own us, and we don’t have a right to kill them. The only right that either of us has is the one that comes from living on the same planet. We have the right of community. We are a community and we must start acting like one if we wish to live differently than before. We can do that here. We can create a community to make our voices heard. We can begin change.”
It was not easy in the first month, and I thought, on more than one occasion, that I had been wrong. After my speech I was not warmly greeted, nor cheered; the others were wary, disbelieving and at times hostile to the idea. There were arguments, and once, I stopped a fight between Sid and Louis. Afterward, I told them that “We were change” and said that what we were experiencing was the first of it. The hardest thing, however, was to embrace it myself. I was reluctant to alter the vision in my head, the vision of a community in which both Diseased and human existed without class, weapons, and violence. In defense of that vision, I clashed with Sid in the first week over the creation of a wall around our community. “It’s a good defense,” he said.
“It will convey to others that we are closed off to them.”
“Diseased will run in here and take us if we don’t have some kind of defense,” he insisted. “They don’t care about your philosophy yet.”