The Undesirable (Undesirable Series) (2 page)

I just shook my head and headed out the door.

Once steeled for the unknown, I took the short walk from our small house to the square around 11:30 AM. I passed one of the two run down gas stations in town and shook my head. A broken, rusty sign still advertised gasoline at $7.99 a gallon. Wouldn’t that be a nice price? I tried to think of the last time I saw someone buy gas there, and couldn’t remember. Instead, I thought of something else: it had been two years since I’d seen anyone drive anything but a black Humvee.

Only members of The Party drove those. And they only bought gasoline from designated shops.

When I got to the center of town, a Party General stood on the front steps of City Hall with a riding crop in his gloved hand. He tapped it up and down as we assembled. I found a place in the back and noticed the members of the army ringing the square in a human chain. All wore identical mirrored sunglasses rimmed in silver. They cradled their machine guns.

Seconds later, one of the soldiers near the front of the group stepped out of line and raised a whistle to his lips. He blew on it three times. The sound startled all of us living in Harrison Corners. Apprehension thickened the air all around us. Instinct focused my eyes on The Party General. I didn’t know his name, but I sensed he held my future in his hands, right along with the future of my whole town.

“Silence!” he barked. His clipped accent told me he didn’t come from anywhere near Harrison Corners. “I demand silence.”

He got it. To my left, and my right, no one looked back at me. All the soldiers stood at attention, one hand on their brows. Their other hands held a gun at their sides. They sneered at us, hungry for blood.

“From now on, His Honorable Sir, our dear Supreme Leader, Maxwell Cooper, has the City of Harrison Corners under his direct jurisdiction.” The General yelled each word at us. “From now on, the army will be the direct representative of the Supreme Leader, Maxwell Cooper. What The Party says SHALL be followed.”

The soldier with the whistle blew it at us again, this time at a faster and louder chirp. The General pulled a folded white sheet from his front coat pocket and waved it open with a gloved hand.

My muscles twisted in my body like taffy. I could not remember when The War with Canada started; I knew the fight had to do with how little oil and gasoline we could buy or find. The conflict had always been there as some sort of distant aspect of life — something never touching our day-to-day lives.

“From now on, The Party and the Homeland Guard have direct control over the daily operations here in Harrison Corners,” thundered The General.

I scanned the crowd and saw everyone I knew in town. No one, except my comatose mother, dared to skip this. Everyone near me focused straight ahead and kept their hands at their sides. Their expressions stayed vacant as The General straightened his paper. The rows of people looked like corpses. Then I saw Fostino Sanchez standing five people down the row from me. The sight of him that morning stopped my heart.

Why was he staring at me again?

“Oh wow,” I murmured, unable to control myself. My face reddened when the man next to me nudged my arm with the pointy part of his elbow.

Fostino’s fine jaw and pointed Roman nose made him stand out from the group of students a year ahead of me in school. Regulations made those kids spend a fifth year of high school attending compulsory Party training in the Homeland Guard. That day in the square, I noticed once more his caramel skin, black shock of hair, gleaming white teeth, and the thick black eyebrows that framed his green eyes.

So interesting. So different. So very exotic. Just nineteen, and yet, so much more of an adult than me.

Then I felt that familiar, delicious twist in the center of my stomach…

Dozens of times, I’d watched him saunter through the halls of school and drill after class with the Homeland Guard. Even more times, I caught his gaze in the hallway or locked eyes with him as I laughed in the lunchroom. For months now, we’d played that game of chicken with each other, an obvious magnetism between us each time we glanced at each other or ran into the other.

We just never talked. Well, except for one time. He managed to say “hi” to me once in the lunch line before his friends called him away to Party drill. And that time, my heart sank to my feet as I watched him throw a muscled arm around the shoulders of some other girl in his group.

Fostino radiated popularity, athleticism, and confidence. I had none of those things.

My breath quickened some more and I licked my lips. I tried to pull my eyes away from him. Instead, something forced my attention to him like a magnet. My heartbeat throbbed in my ears. A small, slow, almost predatory smile spread out from Fostino’s lips, as if he could not keep stoic even during this important moment. Then, as soon as it came, his gaze disappeared. He shook his head.

Holy God.

“From this day forward, no one leaves Harrison Corners without correct papers!” The General yelled. I snapped my head back to toward the front. “The government will issue mandatory papers. We will not give them to Undesirables!”

I shuddered at his words. Everyone knew Undesirables included the sick, the old, people who couldn’t work, and traitors. For months, news reports on the 4-D TV had described how terrible it was to be one. No one wanted that distinction. No one.

Another chirp came from the whistle. 

“All able bodied men and women will now work for The War Effort,” he continued. I wondered if The General’s voice could get louder or more strained. Seconds later, he proved it would. “Work will begin in the factory Monday morning, and will be six days a week from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM. Sundays will be a day of rest. From now on, Harrison Corners will contribute shirts to The War Effort! Do you understand? You will all strive to be exemplary workers.”

Our town already had the factory structure for shirt making, having once been the headquarters for Coleman Athletic. People in Harrison Corners talked about Coleman Athletic like a marker of prosperity from some distant, better era, like maybe the Roaring Twenties. The main factory, after all, shut down during the original Great Recession. I heard people say the factory closed the same year the sheriff’s office foreclosed on the 200
th
home in 18 months. Of course, that happened more than four decades ago. I shut my eyes and blocked the memory from my mind. No more thinking about the past.

The General shook his fist in the air to emphasize his next point. “All government rules must be followed to perfection. No exceptions.”

Behind The General, two of the soldiers unfurled a huge American flag almost as tall as the two stories of City Hall. Instead of horizontally, they hung the flag so the stripes flew vertically and the stars made up the top. Black stripes replaced the red. I had never seen the flag that way before.

My nostrils flared a little as the sight set my teeth on edge.

“Work begins on Monday. Everyone will participate, even school aged children. You will all meet back here for a mandatory count before you devote your energy to The War Effort. All of this for the great favor of our Supreme Leader!” He saluted. “All Hail the Supreme Leader!”

“All hail the Supreme Leader!” we repeated back to him in our loudest voices. Then the whistle sounded again.

“Dismissed!” screamed one of the soldiers. No one moved.

One speech, one meeting, and everything changed. I used to love the end of winter, the cusp of April against the blush of spring. In the past, it brought me so much hope. After that day, I hated it. Hope left my town and my country. I wondered if we would ever get it back.

For the next three days, I sat at home and stared at the 4-D TV — the only way to pass the time. The TV had four channels: two for news and two for government approved movies. One morning, a channel showed a three-hour film about greedy Canadians throttling the Keystone pipeline in an effort to sabotage everyone else. Another day, a miniseries drama set in Canada told me how arrogant Canadian people acted when it came to money and power. After a while, it overwhelmed me. Seconds became minutes. Minutes turned to hours. Hours lasted an eternity.

  On the fourth day, the 4-DTV stopped working. Again.  

Two hours after I tried to turn it on, a short man I didn’t recognize came to the shack we called home and went through every room. He carried a crate and flashed a badge at me when I opened the door. He forced his way in before I knew what he had done. Fifteen minutes passed before he came back to the front door with a full crate.

“You can’t keep this stuff,” he said when he saw the surprise on my face. Inside the crate lay two cell phones, a stereo, an old CD player, a DVD player, my mother’s iPod, an e-book reader, and two automatic alarms. “It’s illegal. As of now. The state now owns all electronics except that 4-D TV.”

“What?” I leaned against the wall and gaped at the loot he held between both of his hands. Then I nodded at the 4-D TV. “Do you know when the outage on the TV will be over? I turned it on today and just got that government screen that says we’re going through another sporadic outage on the signal.”

He shifted his weight. “No. Don’t ask questions.” His robotic voice spit out the words to an explanation as if he’d said them a few hundred times before. “Outages are for our protection. The Canadians jammed the signals, using radio waves and cell phone towers and satellites against us. We can’t have that. So we also have to take this stuff.”

“But half those things haven’t worked in years. I don’t remember a time when we even tried to turn on those cell phones. The CD player and stuff — my mom owned that as a kid. She told me that stuff was junk.”

“Doesn’t matter.” I didn’t offer a response, so he plowed through to his next point. “If you find other electronics in your house, you must hand them over at The Count. You will find two Hologram Watches on the bed in the first room. The face stands up when you read it and they run on a solar battery. The internal alarm will wake you up each morning. You must wear it at all times. No exceptions.” Then he gave me a quick nod and pushed his way out the front door.

My mother stared at the wall behind the chrome kitchen stove from her place at the kitchen table. She didn’t react, even after I sighed. I walked over to her towered over her shrunken body. She looked like she’d break if I grabbed her arm. “Did you hear what he said? Did you see what he just did?”

“It doesn’t really matter. We can’t use it anyway because most of it needs the Internet to work.” She shrugged and slurred her words. “I can’t remember the last time we had the Internet. Three years ago?” She took a sip from her glass. I almost saw the vodka slide down her narrow neck. “Yes, I think it was three years ago when the outage started.” Her hollow eyes shifted from the table to me. “Just leave me alone, Charlotte, okay?” Her grating voice struggled to form the words. “Leave me alone.”

I blinked at her a few minutes before I walked away. She had always neglected me. Why did I think she would change? Every day she sat at the small metal table in our kitchen staring at the last vodka bottle we owned, willing it to fill back up with the elixir she needed to blot out the miserable life we led. I gave up on her a long time ago.

Outside the house, tanks and Humvees rumbled by every half hour or so. Each sound served as a reminder of what had changed around me. At night, we heard nothing. That’s when I slipped out of the house and took walks; I didn’t think as my feet found the dirt path from our house to the small street. We lived on the outskirts of Harrison Corners, so I would see the town lights glowing in the distance, about a quarter mile from the front door.

On most nights, I wouldn’t walk to the center of town. That path was too dangerous and too risky for just me. The Party only allowed us out at night in prearranged pairs, anyway. The soldiers couldn’t see me defy the rules. Instead, I hiked left toward the overgrown farm fields that no one planted anymore. Two years ago, the rules changed for farmers in our area. No more planting or farming for these families.

During these evening walks, the stalks of the remaining plants and the sway of the leaves in the breeze comforted me. They reminded me of the life we all once lived. Most nights, I picked a spot off the road and walked into the crops. I just wanted to disappear.

I strolled past the old plants and the earth found its way through the crevices in my sandals. Sometimes I walked in circles, hidden from street view in the overgrown plants. On those nights, I walked a mile or two before getting tired. Other times, I sat down in a small clearing of the field. Every night, the stars fanned like freckles across the sky.

Alone with my thoughts, I reflected on the reasons we got here. I remembered the past.

The month I turned ten years old, then Speaker of the House Maxwell Cooper went on a modern whistle stop tour. He told people in city after city he had no faith in President Mary Anne Phillips, and that it had been a mistake to elect the senior senator from Washington State as the first female president of the US. He said she didn’t know how to handle the oil barons and greedy cartels controlling foreign governments.

I thought a lot about the day he roared in town for the Harrison Corners stop. June. One hundred degrees. A crowd of at least 500 people. My mother had the weirdest grimace on her face as she and I stood in the back of the crowd listening to the stump speech. Maxwell Cooper stood on an elevated platform at the train station, surrounded in red, white, and blue bunting. I guess someone found it at the Coleman Athletic and trucked it out for the occasion.

A man next to me spoke over my head to my mother. “I’m glad someone’s got their head on straight,” he muttered as he chewed on a piece of grass. “Instead of the crazy lady who’s in office right now. Cooper is an Ohio boy, you know. Born down across the river from Point Pleasant.” 

Everyone cheered when Cooper stepped up to the microphone. The band behind him trumpeted a few patriotic bars. He appeared to be in his early 50s, with an unnatural tan that glowed even in the shade. His white hair still had flecks of black in it and his face grew red when he yelled.