Gods of Anthem (3 page)

The cafeteria is quiet. Some of the nearby prisoners are watching me to make sure I’ve not turned. They blur into a sea of grey smocks, bald heads, and wide eyes that are every color but grey.

My table of girls go back to talking amongst themselves. The arguments that usually ensue begin.

“I’m telling you, they say that Anthem’s just like how it used to be. The old days. They’ve got everything there,” Deborah says. “Real food, too, not like this slop.”

Mimi shakes her head and talks with pudding still in her mouth. “Nuh-uh. It’s noffing like how ith used to be.” She swallows. “It’s … well … I dunno how to explain it.”

Sharon scoffs. “How would you know? You weren’t born before it happened.”

“Yes I was.”

Sharon shrugs and turns to me. “What about you, Liza? What do you think Anthem is like?”

I’m still staring at my full lunch tray, trying to stay awake. I so rarely eat anymore. We hear rumors of what it’s like in the last standing city back on the mainland—some bad, some good. But even if it is how it was before, I try not to think about it.

That word “before.” Before the undead. Before we got sick. Before Bodega, and being forced by the Authority into a concentration camp on a man-made island to protect what’s left of the world … which isn’t much.

They wait for my answer.

I rise with a noise of derision, tray in hand. “Does it matter? Are any of you planning a visit?”

Mimi looks down, and I feel low for making light of their guesses.

“But—”

“I’m going.” I cut them off, but then I pause and turn back. “What was her name?”

“Who?”

“The last girl from our section who passed.”

Sharon frowns. “She was so new, I never got a name.”

“Abigail.”

At a table near ours, a boy sits playing with his food. “Her name was Abigail.”

He meets my eyes, his gaze the saddest of gazes. I nod. “I’ll add it to the wall.”

He seems grateful. His expression doesn’t change, but there’s the sense he’s glad someone will do something for her. We don’t get to have funerals at Bodega. We don’t even get to say goodbye.

A
long, cold corridor leads me back to my bunk, to what counts for a home. With arms wrapped around myself, I try to get warm. You’d think being an island Bodega would be sunny. But with the electrical storms, the warmth comes and goes. On any given day it can be over a hundred degrees, then suddenly drop below zero with even bits of ice on the ground.

It’s the nature of what’s left of our world.

Two guards appear at the end of the hall, batons in hand, their stillness menacing, strange, and inhuman. Their visors are impenetrable but somehow still convey genuine dislike. They’re never seen outside of their outfits and helmets. Under that high black collar, long sleeves, and gloves, not a speck of skin is shown. They do speak, however, albeit rarely.

The Authority does something to their guards. Hard to imagine what that might mean, but my nightmares provide enough vivid imaginings.

Most prisoners run away, scurry like rats to another room, or back to their bunks. But not me. I stay where I am, chin up, and stare right back at them.

It’s a wonder what we must look like with our pointy cheeks and bruises. We aren’t far from being zombies ourselves.

My message is clear:
I am not a
nobody. I’m the daughter of a great dancer and
a world-renowned composer. They may be dead, but I
am very much alive. My name is Liza Randusky, and
I come from a long line of somebodies.

The guards move on; their place isn’t with us. We’re the lost souls, and they don’t have souls anymore.

The janitor, Desi,
is making his rounds. He’s pushing a mop, dreads swaying with his lofty gait, head bobbing to a tune only he knows.

The walk of the healthy is so peculiar here. Add to that the bushy hair of a man who doesn’t have poison in his veins, and the set of broad shoulders only true of a person who’s eating and keeping it down. He’s as tall as two of Mimi.

Desi has earbuds in and is whistling loudly a happy tune that strikes me in the homesick bone. He pulls out one earbud to ask me to guess the song.

I whistle the rest when I’m sure that no one else is around. There’s trouble for talking to him—isolation, or worse.

“I forget that you’re a fellow music lover,” Desi says. “Ah, why so down, Miss Leeza?”

My eyes shift to the side. “Just not feeling well.”

“Ah, well you-ah-in for a sooprise, den. Don’t let the concrete fool you, pretty. Dis be a magical island where gels like you get better.”

“You’ve been saying that since I got here, Des.”

He laughs and winks at me before going back to mopping. “It’s hard being right all the time,” he calls back to me.

The
bunks surrounding mine are mostly empty; the one above it, made recently so. Melony’s dead. She’s been dead for three weeks. Her bunk’s without an assigned prisoner yet, so I can see out through the window whenever.

Her name’s there, etched into the wall beneath the ledge, still fresh. I take some time with my plastic knife to scratch A-b-i-g-a-i-l.

When I back away, there are too many to read in one sitting.

Every prisoner from this section who’s come and gone, they fill the eastern wall. All of them lost. All forgotten, except for here.

Someday, probably soon, I’ll join them.

I climb up into the bunk to get closer to the window. It’s approaching night, so the orange sky is ablaze in twilight’s eternal fire, like the sky’s been lit with a match; whorls and wisps flow like water down the drain of a bathtub. But every once in a while the orange smoke moves to show a clear sky beyond.

The sky’s abuse wasn’t the worst of it.

What we did to one another … now that was something.

After the undead outbreak, the Earth seemed infected, too, turning more violent to reflect our own violence. Death built like a tidal wave of red, and with our weapons of mass destruction … we destroyed, swinging at anything that moved.

Mother Nature had responded to our little party, and the universe had front row tickets to the chaos. Storms brewed with increased intensity, and the sky turned every color in the spectrum as we tore it to bits. Earth answered each disaster, tit for tat. Beloved pets mauled their owners, and stories akin to
Old Yeller
piled up in every neighborhood.

People soon forgot about the beautiful places that once existed. But they didn’t care. They were too busy dying.

The cold window feels good against my face. The moon’s risen, and it bears a ring around it tonight. It’s the brightest I’ve seen in a long while, and a color of orange that’s alien. The sight makes me slump my shoulders, like the moon’s given up so we should, too … until a cloud slides out of the way and a glowing blue-white perfection takes my breath away.

There it is. I place a hand to the window while it fades back to orange. It does see me, I think.

Mimi’s leaning over
me when my eyes open. Her small face swims in the red haze of the flashing lights and her delicate features are tight with fear. The alarms sound to match my fast heartbeat.

“Liza,” she says, and I nod.

Echoed screams swell between the pulsing buzz that’s felt through the metal frame of my bed. Feet thunder through the corridors in our direction, and next we’ll all be rounded up like cattle to identify the outbreak.

Her tiny, frozen hand on mine jolts me to my feet, and I gesture for Mimi to follow me up the ladder to the empty bunk above.

She hides under the thin blue blanket while I watch the chaos.

No monsters yet in the crowd. Prisoners flow like a school of frightened fish, darting in a seemingly synchronized design through our section. Across from us, Sharon holds a rosary near her mouth, chanting so fast the words blur together. “Hailmaryfullofgrace … theLordiswiththee …”

Her rocking form is mesmerizing; the litany, calming.

A man appears in our doorway, and I brace against the dance up my spine. That strange way he pauses—predatory, stalking.

Red lights hide his blood-soaked smock, and the strobe amplifies his drunken sway. His head swivels to scan the girls who flock like chickens, instinctively, and stupidly, into corners where they’ll be trapped. He stumbles toward them with a sucking noise, eyes shifting without focus.