Authors: Patrick Freivald
The unrelenting roar carried well through midday but
started to die toward sundown. News stations estimated the crowd at over a
hundred thousand people, less than the Fall Foliage Festival drew on a good year,
but this wasn’t spread out over a weekend, and the spontaneity left no time to
prepare. The mass of people were there all at the same time, with no food, no
water but muddy snow, and no bathrooms.
The news media gleefully reported the hardships of
the protestors. Every hotel booked, sometimes four to a room, and Wegmans,
Tops, and Walmart ran out of bread, milk, meat, charcoal, and bottled water.
Entrepreneurs emptied nearby towns and sold food and blankets out of the backs
of pickup trucks for exorbitant prices. By 7:00 pm the temperature dropped to eight
degrees, and the hospital couldn’t keep up with the hypothermia cases.
Wednesday morning brought reports of twenty-six
deaths; thirteen from the cold, nine from carbon monoxide poisoning when a
group of protesters ran a generator in their camper, three stabbings
as-yet-unsolved, and one suicide. The latter had hanged himself from a tree,
wearing a clapboard that read, “THE END IS HERE.” The President had ordered in
the National Guard; by Friday the crowd had faded to small, disjointed bands of
sign-holders, no more than a couple hundred people in all, huddled around fires
lit in metal drums.
Saturday at 5:30 am., Ani heard her mom banging
around the apartment. She triggered the “open” button, got out of the bath,
toweled off, and threw on a nightie. By the time she stepped into the living
room, her mom was gone. She reached for her phone to text her and realized for
the millionth time that she didn’t have it anymore.
Awesome.
Her appointment was at 9:00 am, so she played the
piano for a while, got dressed, and wandered down forty-five minutes early. As
she approached the lab, she heard low voices, deep in conversation. She stopped
and closed her eyes, shutting out the whine of the air circulation fans and the
deep shudder of the generators through the walls.
“Dammit, Rishi, she already suspects.”
Ani knew that voice.
Dr. Freeman.
Dr. Banerjee sounded nonplussed, as he always did.
“She does, but she can prove nothing, and until she can she has nothing to
object to.”
“At some point she’ll balk. Her daughter’s life is
only so good a motivational tool.”
“It’s only a matter of time before we don’t need
her anymore, and all of this can go away. It’s not my fault you wouldn’t
provide the funding—”
“What the hell did you think would happen?”
“I thought that I would receive a billion and a
half dollars to continue my research. Done is done, and in the future, if you
don’t wish me to pursue my own avenues of funding, give me the funding I need
to continue. They don’t have the means to reproduce it, so they are now
dependent—”
“I could have you arrested for treason.”
“But you won’t.”
Ani heard the anger in Dr. Freeman’s reply but not
the words, and then silence. She waited for them to continue. When they didn’t,
she walked toward the lab, taking care to make a little noise. By the time she
rounded the corner, they weren’t there.
Her checkup was perfunctory, same questions, same
samples, with the note that she’d gone three weeks without an injection, so
they gave her one just to be safe.
*
* *
The protest had died to near-nothing by Monday, so
Mr. Foster came in to teach Mike. The rest of them started on a class project
driven by a single question: What would the world look like with immortality
for the rich and powerful? They explored the social, economic, and political
ramifications, but also discussed how it might influence art, poetry,
literature, and even music. They researched other major historical shifts and
tried to make intelligent extrapolations based on what had happened before.
Tuesday afternoon, Mike approached Devon and gave
her a white envelope. While she opened it, he shuffled over to Ani and handed
her an identical one. She thanked him and opened it with a little trepidation.
Inside, red construction paper framed a pink
heart. BE MINE in thick block letters crossed the heart. She opened the card
and found a handwritten note, nothing like Mike’s pre-prom handwriting; “I love
you ani.” She smiled up at him.
“Thank you, Mike. I’m sorry I forgot.”
“It’s okay,” he said.
Devon plopped down next to her. They traded cards—identical
except for the name, even down to the lack of punctuation and capitalization; “I
love you devon.” And maybe he did.
“Typical man,” Devon said, her smirk a small
indication that at least for this moment she’d forgotten to hate Ani.
“Yup,” Ani said.
Not as bad as last time.
Despite herself, she couldn’t let it go. She nudged Devon in the ribs. “Did you
forget you’re supposed to hate me?”
“Anyone Mike loves can’t be all bad.” Her face
darkened. “But I still can’t forgive you.”
Ani nodded, a matter-of-fact answer to a
matter-of-fact statement. “Neither can I.”
Her scowl deepened. “How can you even live with
yourself?”
Ani didn’t know what to say. She tried anyway. “As
opposed to what? Not living with myself?”
I killed a guy twelve days ago
and have to stop to even think about it.
Devon shared a black look with Sam from across the
room. “Always an option.”
“And that would solve what, exactly?”
Devon shrugged. “Nothing, I guess.”
“Would you do it, in my shoes?”
“I don’t know,” Devon said. “I can barely cope
with what I did, and I didn’t have a choice.”
“No,” Ani said. “You didn’t. I sometimes wonder
how much of a choice I had in most of this. More than you, sure. But how much
more? What else was I supposed to do?”
Devon rolled her eyes and grinned at the same
time. “Blame your mom?”
Ani grinned back. “Works for most kids, I’ve
heard.”
A shadow loomed over them. They looked up. Mike
smiled down at them. “Hi.” Before they could respond, he turned and sat,
squishing them both to the side and wrapping each of them with a massive arm. “I
love you.”
Ani snuggled into him, and after a moment so did
Devon.
“It’s weird,” Devon said.
“What’s that?”
“Hate’s so hard to hold on to when you’re being
snuggled.”
“I’ve found it hard to hold on to at all. So much
of life just doesn’t matter, and it’s not worth hating for.”
Mrs. Weller’s voice reminded them that they weren’t
alone. “Hatred is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it
injures the hated.”
“Who’s that?” Sam asked, still glowering from
across the room.
“Coretta Scott King. She was talking about the man
who murdered her husband.”
“Really?” Devon asked.
“Look it up.”
*
* *
That night, Ani sat at the piano, using it as a
writing bench. Six pages of handwriting comprised her write-up for history
class, and hidden amidst them a note for her mother, underlined.
Mom, Banerjee sold the serum to
Africa. Freeman knows. They’re going to get rid of you.
She kept the papers together and practiced Stravinsky
until her mom got home. Sarah walked in the door, kicked off her shoes, set
down her purse, and smiled at the cold ham and potatoes on the table.
“Sorry, sweetie, I already ate.”
Ani shrugged.
“No problem. Can you look at this for me?” She
handed her the stack of papers. “It’s due tomorrow.”
Her mom read the title aloud. “‘Term Limits in the
Age of Immortality,’ by Ani Romero.” She looked around the untidy apartment and
sighed. “Sure, why not.”
She read the paper, and Ani had to admire how she
didn’t react when she read through the fourth page. Once done, she gave
constructive feedback on her ideas and on what could be said better...and didn’t
say anything at all about the note.
Ani rewrote the paper and shredded the originals,
anticipating a stealthy conversation that didn’t come.
Chapter
33
Ani
snapped her eyes open when bath’s “open” tone dinged. Her ears popped as the
seal opened, as always, and she scrunched her brow in confusion as the lid slid
back. The lights weren’t on, and her alarm clock read 3:22 am. The red glow
wasn’t enough to pick out anything in the pitch-black room.
She grabbed the rim of the tub and lifted herself
out of the water. A hand on her chest stopped her. A fan roared in the
background, chilling the skin on her face and neck.
“Shh,” Sarah said, her voice almost too quiet to
hear over the fan. “Just listen. I need to go away for a week or so. They’re
going to ask where I went. That’s why I’m not telling you. Do you understand?”
“Only kind of.”
“That’s good enough. I need you to memorize a few
things for me, and
not tell them
, no matter what. Can you do that?”
She nodded.
“Bank of Castile, box 217148. Say it.”
“Bank of Castile, box 217148,” Ani murmured.
“Good. Canandaigua National Bank, Investment
Management Group. Account number 3951 111 340. Say it.”
“Canandaigua National, Investment Management. 3951
111 340.”
“Good. Don’t tell them. Bye, sweetie.”
By feel, Ani grabbed her wrist as she turned to
leave. “Wait! What are the numbers for?”
“If I don’t come back.”
“What do you mean?”
She felt the lips on her forehead, then cold
breath. “Say them again.”
“Castile, 217148. Canandaigua, 3951 111 340. I got
them.”
“Good. I love you.”
“I love—” The door closed.
Shit.
*
* *
She opened her eyes when the bell chimed and hit
the button to release the lid on the bath. Dr. Banerjee, Dr. Freeman, and a
half-dozen armed men stood above her, the latter with their weapons raised. She
knew faking surprise wouldn’t work—if they knew something was up, they’d have
watched the security feeds, and the infrared cameras would have picked up that Ani
and Sarah had had a conversation, even if the fan obscured the content.
She sat up, the slimy liquid sluicing off of her
naked body. “Good morning,” she said, for lack of a better greeting.
“Where did she go?” Dr. Banerjee asked.
“She didn’t tell me.”
Dr. Banerjee raised a hand, and the soldiers
choked up their weapons. Her heart caught in her throat.
“Really,” she said. “She said she couldn’t tell
me, because you’d make me talk.”
“You talked about something.” He turned to the
sergeant. “Take her to the bite tank and hold her until I’m ready to speak to
her. No meds.”
“Yes, sir.”
He turned back to her. “You can cooperate, and
things will be hard; or you can fight, and things will be much worse. Decide
now.”
“I have nothing to hide,” she lied.
They gave her no privacy as she toweled off and
got dressed. She walked out and turned toward the lab, the sergeant at her
side. Five soldiers marched behind them, weapons at the ready. He led her
through the lab, swiping his card and scanning his thumb at each checkpoint,
down four flights of stairs she’d never seen before, and into a long corridor.
The sergeant wrinkled his nose, but she couldn’t
smell anything. As they stepped out into the hall, the moans started. Corpses,
dozens of them to a cell, slammed up against the bars, reaching for her escorts
in blind, mindless hunger.
Ani put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God. Who
are these people?”
“They aren’t people,” the sergeant said. “They’re
like you.”
That ended the conversation. He led them through a
long corridor lined with cells, and then another, and another.
There must be
hundreds of them. Thousands.
They went down another two flights of stairs, arriving
at a thick metal door with bars on its windows. He punched in a code on the
keypad. The door popped open.
A rifle butt propelled her forward. She caught
herself before her head hit the concrete floor. She rolled over and sat up just
in time for the door to slam. She looked around.
A steel grate protected two fluorescent bulbs in
the gray concrete ceiling, and another, this one padlocked, protected a keypad
on the concrete wall next to the door. A lone security camera, also in a metal
cage, covered everything from above the door. The otherwise-featureless room
held nothing but her.
She waited for Dr. Banerjee to come. And she
waited some more. Minutes passed. Hours. Days. She had no idea how long she’d
been waiting, standing in the center of the room. And yet, no one came.
She spent the time composing a four-part, wordless
a capella
, a moaning, dark tribute to the thousands of victims she’d
passed on the way to this cell. One bass, two baritones, one soprano, it had no
use for the middling half-measures of tenor or alto.
At some point the window on the door opened,
revealing the top half of Dr. Banerjee’s impassive, brown face. “Are you ready
to talk yet?”
She looked up at him and said nothing.
He closed the window, and she went back to her
composition, filling in the gaps with other melodies. Four parts became eight,
and then sixteen. She played the symphony again and again in her mind, feeding
the crushing solitude with music.
He came back six more times, but even as her
hunger grew she fed it into the music, increasing the intricacy, adding parts,
intertwining harmonies and melodies into a baroque flurry, the chaos of a
winter blizzard more than the ordered destruction of a hurricane.
The seventh time the door opened, a little girl
stumbled inside before it slammed closed. No more than ten years old, in a blue
dress that didn’t quite meet her knees, the brunette stared at Ani in stark
terror.
“Hi,” Ani said. “I’m Ani.” Her gut twisted in
response, and she forced it down.
The girl shrieked and recoiled into the corner,
cowering in a fetal position. Ani shifted back until she occupied the opposite
corner.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
The girl sniffed and lashed out with accusing
brown eyes. “That’s what they said you’d say. But they said it wouldn’t take
long.”
Ani didn’t know how to respond. “I’m Ani. Nice to
meet you.”
“Shaylah.” Her face softened the slightest bit,
but her eyes still held terror.
“What do you like to do, Shaylah?”
She cried, for minutes or hours Ani wasn’t sure.
When she finally stopped, Ani realized she was asleep, curled into a ball in
the corner. Ani felt a twinge of need as she looked at the tiny, sleeping form,
so she closed her eyes. The girl interrupted her composition.
“I have to pee.”
Ani opened her eyes but had nothing to offer. “Pick
a corner, I guess.”
The girl cried again, hiked up her dress, and
squatted in the corner. Ani couldn’t smell it and was glad for it. As the girl—no,
Shaylah
—crawled back to her corner, she locked eyes with Ani.
“Why am I here?”
Ani shrugged.
Her face twisted into a mask of anguish, and she
bawled. “You...you have to know. Why? Why me?”
Ani thought she knew the first answer.
You’re
here because they think I’ll break before I eat you
. She wasn’t sure if
they were right, but she had nothing to tell them anyway. As to the second, she
had no idea who this little girl was or why she’d been chosen for such a grisly
fate.
She shrugged again. The girl, apparently out of
tears, huddled in the corner and stared at the floor.
“I’m hungry.”
“I’m sorry.”
The girl shivered in the corner—it must have been
cold—for a long time. At some point she fell asleep again, then woke and peed
and fell asleep again. Tracking each movement with her ears against her own
will, Ani kept her eyes closed, trying not to think about the growing hunger in
her gut. She drowned it with music, but the girl intruded.
“You have any food?”
Ani kept her eyes closed. “No.”
The scent of her invaded Ani’s nostrils, sweat and
meat and marrow and brains. She didn’t breathe and somehow it didn’t matter.
The heat of Shaylah’s tiny, innocent body, impossible to feel, called to her.
Her eyes snapped open as the window on the door
slid aside. Dr. Banerjee ignored Shaylah as she beat on the door, begging to be
let out, crying for food, for water. Fists bloody, she collapsed to the floor,
and he turned his gaze to Ani.
“It’s been six days. Thirteen since your last
injection. At some point you will succumb, and Shaylah will die. Or, if you
tell us where your mother went, we will free her, and you can go back to your
friends.”
Ani refused to look at the girl. “I don’t know.
She didn’t tell me.”
A slot opened in the bottom of the door, and a
water bottle rolled in. Shaylah grabbed it, tore off the cap, and chugged it
down.
“Yes, you do.” The window closed.
He came back twice more, with water for Shaylah.
Each time, Ani gave him nothing. She had nothing to give.
*
* *
Drool pattered her blouse. The warm thing across
the room sang to her without sound or words, the music of blood and warmth and
hunger. She knew nothing but that she wanted it and that she couldn’t take it.
Shouldn’t.
Shouldn’t and couldn’t weren’t
the same. A mewling, pathetic part of her cried out, screamed to her to
remember Mike and prom and death and pain, but it was weak and it drowned in
her hunger. She stumbled forward, then fell back against the wall.
No. Yes. Please!
The man appeared again, hot and alive behind the
door. He said things, asked questions, but she didn’t know his words. Cold
steel kept her from him, wouldn’t let her crush and break him and suck out the
sweet insides. Denied, she turned to the warm thing.
That could be eaten. Nothing stood between them.
Nothing would stop her. Nothing could. She moaned, twitched, fell to her knees.
HER NAME IS SHAYLAH.
She shrieked, and the inner voice recoiled.
Please don’t do this.
She crawled forward. The warm thing made a noise,
something small and sad and scared.
She’s just a little girl.
She slid forward, hand then knees then hand. The
warm thing cried out, cowered, pissed itself.
You don’t have to.
Another hand, another knee, and the warm thing was
in reach.
Her name is—
Her hands reached out, her arms twisted. Something
cracked, and she sighed in release. Nothing had ever tasted so good; nothing
had felt so very right. She gorged, happy for the first time, overcome with
joy.
*
* *
Ani’s eyes snapped open, then closed against the
fluorescent brilliance. She tried to sit up and couldn’t move. Restraints held
her to a gurney.
A hand ran across her scalp, cold but comforting,
and something blocked the light. She opened her eyes to a silhouette surrounded
by radiance.
“Mom?”
“I’m here, sweetie.”
She shuddered in anguish, unable to cry.
I
killed her.
The thought strangled her, and she gasped against it, tried to
bury it, tried to hide it behind something, anything.
HER NAME IS SHAYLAH.
She drowned in grief, and couldn’t shed a single tear.
“They won’t hurt you anymore,” her mom said. “I’m
so, so sorry. I had no idea what they’d do.”
She couldn’t bring herself to think about it. She
couldn’t not. She breathed, because she could, and asked the only thing she
thought of. “Where were you?”
“She won’t say,” Dr. Banerjee’s disembodied voice
answered. “She didn’t tell you; she won’t tell us.”
Ani lolled her head to the right, and there he
was. She struggled, tried in vain to snap her bonds and tear him apart, crush
him, annihilate him.
“I hate you,” she spat.
He ignored her and instead turned to Sarah. “As
you can see, she’s no worse for the wear. If you both behave yourselves, we can
continue as we were. But know this, your insubordinate behavior will not be
tolerated again. You will do exactly as told, or your daughter and her friends
will join those below.”
Her mom shook her head. “I won’t give you the
serum. It’s the last bargaining chip I have.”
Ani shrieked. “No! Mom, you can’t—”
She smoothed her hand over Ani’s bald head. “Shh...
we have to do what’s necessary, sweetie. Our options have run out.”
Ani snarled and struggled against her bonds,
snapped and raged against her inhuman captors. In a small instant she caught
the determined, furious look in her mother’s eyes. Something wasn’t as it
seemed. There would be a reckoning. She calmed, lay still.