Darklandia Read online

  “Don’t be frightened,” he said, with a smile. Though my father’s strange crinkled smile, the smile he inherited from my great-grandmother, always induced a slight sense of wonderment in me, today his smile looked gruesome. “Please, Sera, don’t look at me like that. I don’t want to hurt you. I want you to know the truth.”

  “The truth?” I replied, as my father’s sec-band flashed red.

  My vision went black as the power supply to my pod was cut off. My hour was up.

  The glass top on the pod made a squelching noise as it popped out and lifted away from me toward the ceiling. This darkroom only had three pods, one on either side of me, both in use. I followed the path of neon blue lights along the carpet toward the exit. I pushed a glowing button on the wall and the silver door slid open.

  The dim sunlight in the apartment lobby blinded me as I stepped out of the darkroom. The door slid shut behind me and I placed my wrist inside the circular hole in the wall to the left of the door. The titanium security band around my wrist flashed as the scanner verified my identity and that I had served my hour. The flashing green light meant go. My sec-band had never flashed red and I hoped it never did.

  I set off across the dim lobby of the building, now abandoned, it was once one of the first apartment complexes in New York to install a darkroom—before the war wiped out ninety percent of the population and this building became a graveyard for expensive furniture. I stepped out onto Broadway, trying not to think of the darklings that once lived in this building. Willing myself to forget the last memory I had of my father. Trying desperately not to ponder what he meant by “the truth”.

  I usually looked forward to my mandatory hour inside Darklandia, but after the rapture ceremony yesterday, and learning that the mayor’s rapture was not intended, I didn’t want to waste an hour reliving my father’s last words. I wanted to understand my grandmother’s last words.

  “It’s in the water rations.”

  Of course, the water rations were packed with all the essential vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients we needed to survive. We never ate tangible food.

  As my mother and I took turns sipping our rations last night, I contemplated the Felicity Festival that had already been scheduled for the following Saturday to rejoice my grandmother’s rapture. I didn’t know if my mother was also thinking of the upcoming festival. We stared at each other across the kitchen like a couple of dogs in a staring contest, raising our tumblers to our lips, never uttering a word about what Commissioner Baron did at the ceremony. Commissioner Greco Baron. Greco. Such an odd name.

  Georgia Fisk was not an odd name, but my grandmother certainly lived an odd life as a darkling. What did her last words mean? Did she know what was going to happen to the mayor? Were her words just the confused utterings of a senile darkling?

  Something told me they weren’t.

  The streets were almost unrecognizable from the pictures of Manhattan from 120 years ago, before the drought. The skyscrapers that once served as beacons for tired New Yorkers returning home from long plane rides were blown to bits during the Civil War when those skyscrapers served as lodestones for the rebels bombs. So much of the rebuilding effort, which was still eons from being completed, had been centered on providing citizens with easy access to Darklandia and rations while New York City’s history continued to crumble and blow away.

  The actual streets, once teeming with taxis and automobiles, were now empty, but for the occasional GAT: Guardian Angel Transport. These solar-powered mini-buses carried the angels to their designated patrol blocks and transported detainees to the Department of Felicity for evaluation. Our class received a tour of a GAT last year and we were allowed to strap each other into the detainee restraints.

  I walked along Broadway Avenue past One Times Square, glancing at another poster on the side of the building. This one depicted a young girl covering her face with her hands. The headline read, “Humility and Felicity go hand in hand.” The few pedestrians I passed on Broadway appeared as gray and blue blurs at the edges of my vision. We learned in Darkling History class two years ago that New York City was once the most densely populated city in the former United States of America. Then came the Civil War of 2072. Most metropolises were decimated and the population dwindled to less than ten percent of what it once was. The government finally defeated the rebels by uniting with Canadian and Central American forces to form a new nation: Atraxia.

  Though I had never been outside Manhattan, our teachers showed us photos of bombed cities with body parts strewn across the streets like fallen leaves in Central Park—when Central Park had trees. Many cities across Atraxia still lay in ruin, still overrun with darklings. The rebels fought bitterly against the mandatory hours in Darklandia and the water rations. They had suffered for so long, they were sick with the idea that misery was a normal part of life.

  The long walk from the apartment building on Broadway to our apartment building on Cedar was my second favorite part of the day. I chose to serve my mandatory hours at the darkroom on Broadway because it had the least pods. I figured fewer pods meant fewer people to notice when I took a moment to compose myself after seeing my father in Darklandia.

  Most people used their hours to do the things darklings once did; to exorcize the urges propagated in their DNA over millions of years of suffering and unsupervised breeding. I used my mandatory hours trying to recreate a world where my father existed as he did two years ago. Though we weren’t supposed to discuss what happened inside Darklandia, my best friend Darla once admitted to me she had killed at least thirty people in her virtual life. She confessed this to me more than a year ago. I wondered what the total was up to now.

  The whirr of a surveillance camera made me look up. Knowing the Guardian Angels were watching us usually made me feel safe, but something felt different today. Like yesterday’s rapture changed everything. I wondered where Commissioner Baron was taken. Of course, he was probably already purified and safely tucked away in a leisure home by now—like my father. Only, my father didn’t murder anyone. My father was just another victim of the darkness.

  As I rounded the corner onto Cedar Street, my mind returned to the civil war and the water rations. I had to tell Darla about yesterday. I had to speak my grandmother’s words aloud before the words infected me with their mystery, with her misery.

  The air on Cedar Street smelled of soot and rubbing alcohol from the lifesaver factory across the street where VITALIS pharmaceuticals filled tiny glass vials with emergency rations. The vials themselves were made from melting down the glass bottles darklings had once tossed into dumps. Darklings were wasteful creatures, so much so the drought of 2031 never ended. If darklings hadn’t wasted so much of the Earth’s natural resources, poisoning the oceans and torching the sky with their toxic waste, we may never have created rations to adapt to this new water conscious environment. Of course, if the humans hadn’t trashed the Earth so thoroughly, the Civil War may never have been fought and Atraxia may never have been formed; we might all still be darklings.

  I shuddered at this thought as I passed the factory. The transparent glass vial with the word VITALIS etched onto the surface hung around my neck tied to a silver chain. One never knew when they would be caught somewhere without access to a ration dispenser, though sketchy places like that were becoming much less common. Pretty soon every street corner and every room in every building in New York would have a ration dispenser and lifesavers would be obsolete.

  I entered the concrete-block apartment building through the service door to the right of the entrance door. The wooden entrance door had been boarded off for more than seven months after the last attack of the rebels. The rebels had entered all the apartment buildings after nine o’clock curfew and painted a single red star on the front door of hundreds of apartments and darkrooms in the city.

  As I walked past the silver door of the darkroom in our apartment building, I could just barely glimpse the outline of a star etched into the surface from the
acid used to strip the paint. My mother sent a message to the Department of Community requesting to have the door replaced to “erase the dark reminder imprinted on its surface.” The request was denied within hours. Her subsequent request to the Department of Felicity never elicited a response.

  I climbed four flights of stairs to the third floor and, by the time I reached apartment 307, I had made my decision. No matter how thirsty or hungry I became tonight, I would not drink my water ration.

  I held my sec-band inside the security scanner to the right of the doorframe. The titanium band flashed with green light and the door to apartment 307 slid open. I stepped inside and found my mother seated in my father’s old armchair with a basket of yarn at her feet and a half-finished baby-blue scarf curled in her lap.

  “Good evening, Sera,” my mother said, without looking up from her busy fingers.

  “Good evening, Mother,” I replied, as I unzipped the front of my gray tunic, my school uniform, and hung it on the coatrack.

  The thin, sleeveless dress beneath the tunic clung to my back from the August heat. My morning ration had worn off and my sense of smell had returned. The stink of sweat and vitamins steamed off my skin and dress, neither of which had been washed in more than two weeks.

  “Our wash request was approved this morning,” my mother said, as I passed her on my way to our bedroom. “Sweet felicity.”

  The tickle in my throat returned as I thought, “It’s my stench that reminded her of this.” I shook my head trying to ward off my defiant thoughts as I entered the bedroom. Of course, she couldn’t smell me. I was being paranoid.

  My mother and I shared a twin bed. I used to sleep with Grandmother until my father was purified. Mother thought it would be better for me to sleep with her after that. She didn’t want Grandmother’s diseased thoughts to saturate me while I slept.

  That’s how it happened. If you spent too much time with a darkling, after a while their presence cast a shadow over your every thought. It happened to me four years ago when I was thirteen, after my body began to change. My ration dosage was adjusted, just like Darla’s was when she turned thirteen three months before I did, but the new dosage wasn’t strong enough. I began to see everything differently. The rations tasted like salty blood, which I could only stomach for a few seconds before I vomited them. Every time I vomited, the gloom became more solid; disorienting and smothering like a thick autumn fog. I considered rapturing myself or turning myself in to the Department of Felicity to be purified. Anything to make the blackness go away.

  My body fell softly onto the bed and I sighed at the coolness of the blanket against my skin. It was nearly eight o’clock but the sun hadn’t gone down. I desperately wanted a sip of water after my four-mile trek down Broadway, but I had to resist the urge. Maybe if I took a nap the thirst would go away.

  I closed my eyes and hoped my mother didn’t come in to collect the dirty laundry. The dim-red sunlight shining through the window penetrated the thin skin of my eyelids and swirled in my vision, a dance of light and shadow. The security camera propped in the ceiling corner above the window was pointed directly at me.

  I drew in a long, stuttered breath, a ragged breath, like Grandmother’s as she sucked against the fabric of the sack over her head. My heartbeat sped up as my thoughts grew bleaker. Just ten hours had passed since my morning ration and I was already becoming a darkling.

  My mother entered the room quietly. I opened my eyes to find her smiling face hovering above mine.

  “Are you sleeping?” she asked.

  Her smile made me uncomfortable. I wanted to say, “Obviously, Mother, I am not sleeping,” but that would be bad. I had never spoken to my mother like that before and it would be a surefire way to make my sec-band flash red.

  “It’s time for your ration,” she said then she left the room.

  The tickle in my throat had ripened into a painful lump. My joints ached, my body listless and heavy with dehydration as I heaved myself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. My eyes itched as the room darkened around me. The ration would make all these symptoms go away.

  It’s in the water rations.

  The lump in my throat doubled. I could hardly breathe as I imagined my grandmother’s crinkled smile and the thousands of people who would gather to celebrate her rapture at the Felicity Festival on Saturday. Then three words materialized in my mind. Three words I had never heard spoken aloud. Three words that curled inside my chest, like ribbons strangling my heart.

  I miss you.

  The coughing began slowly at first as I attempted to clear the painful swelling in my throat, but it quickly progressed into a fit so violent within seconds my face became hot and damp with real tears. Tiny lights sparked in my vision as the force of each cough exploded inside me.

  My mother stepped calmly into the bedroom and stared at me from the doorway. It was the same look she cast my father the day before he was detained—the day he unpinned the blue star from the lapel of his gray overcoat and tossed it down the garbage chute.

  I fell to my knees in front of the full-length mirror and willed myself not to look at my reflection. I didn’t want to see the change. I didn’t want to see my face transformed with this hideous sickness, this gruesome pain turning my insides into a burning chasm. Is this the same feeling that made the commissioner force the knife into the mayor’s chest?

  “I need water,” I whispered, even though my lifesaver dangled round my neck like a tantalizing oasis in this deserted apartment, even though I knew there was no water. Tomorrow was washday. No water until tomorrow, and even then it would only be the few gulps I could sneak while showering, well out of the view of the cameras.

  “Get up,” my mother commanded. The way she said it made me want to cry, really cry. I looked up and she was still smiling as she glanced at the angels in the sky, the security camera. “Time to drink your ration, Sera.”

  I finally glanced at my reflection and clapped my hand over my mouth. My face was puffy and damp, my skin and eyes a violent red. Wisps of light-brown hair fell from the braid that hugged the back of my head and dangled down my back as limp and listless as my body. I pushed myself off the floor, avoiding the urge to glance at the camera, expecting my sec-band to flash red at any moment, and followed my mother into the kitchen.

  Kitchens were once the most used room in a typical American home, but they were hardly used anymore in Atraxia. Our cupboards were stocked with boxes of unused toiletries. My father hoarded bars of soap, toothpaste, and laundry soap for years, certain that one day the Department of Community would cut off our supply of goods without warning.

  I stepped toward the steel ration dispenser protruding from the wall under a cabinet full of bottles of bleach. I held my glass under the tap and placed my right thumb over the blinking blue sensor on the neck of the dispenser. It took three seconds for the sensor to recognize my thumbprint and dispense the ration, which had been prescribed just for me, into my cup. It sputtered out, a viscous, greenish-blue fluid plopping into my cup and filling it halfway.

  Grandmother once told me the darklings had a saying about a glass being half-full or half-empty. They used it to motivate each other to think positive thoughts, to be cheerful in the face of adversity. What would my grandmother think of this glass? Half full or half-empty?

  My hand trembled as I raised the ration to my lips. Though my mother stood behind me, I could feel her watching. I could feel the angels watching. Smile for the Angels.

  I forced a quick smile before I gulped my water ration. The thick liquid soothed the aching folds of my throat, but the salty, metallic flavor immediately reminded me of blood. I clamped my lips together tightly and covered my mouth to keep from spitting it out.

  “Go to bed,” my mother said, taking the glass from my hand and using a grimy rag to wipe the inner surface. Everything in this apartment was grimy the day before washday.

  I trudged toward our bedroom then stopped in the middle of the living room. “M
ay I sleep in Grandmother’s bed… now that she’s gone?”

  My mother stared at me from the kitchen, her hand still working circles inside the glass as if the filthy rag could wash away three weeks of ration residue.

  “You may,” Mother replied, and I tried not to smile too wide. I tried not to smile like a darkling.

  I slipped into my grandmother’s bedroom and closed the door. Leaning against the doorframe in the darkness I could hear my mother setting the glass on the counter, flipping the light switch in the kitchen, and closing our—her—bedroom door.

  The rations worked their magic in my blood. The heaviness lifted. My throat and joints no longer ached. Just as I had transformed into something monstrous in front of my mother’s mirror, now I was changing into something else. The sharp edges rounded, the flaws buffed out, the streaks wiped clean. I was being purified.

  I burst out of my grandmother’s bedroom and raced to the lavatory, closing the door softly behind me, and vomited my ration into the steel sink.

  Sweet felicity, it felt good.

  3

  My grandmother’s stiff bed sheets scratched my skin and made me itch all night. The pain in my throat had returned as soon as I vomited my ration and it only got worse when joined by a massive pounding inside my skull and roaring hunger pangs in my belly. Is this what darklings felt like when the drought and famine were at their peak?

  I never fell asleep. Every time I began to drift off, a sound would startle me: the crumpling of the sheets, the whoosh of my feet sliding across the mattress, my heartbeat. It all sounded so vulgar. I tried not to worry about what my face would look like in the morning after an entire night of lost sleep, but my thoughts were out of control. On multiple occasions, I considered sneaking out of bed to drink my ration, but it would look too suspicious: accessing my rations after curfew on a school night. Besides, I wanted to know what it felt like—what my grandmother had experienced— in her final days, in her final seconds.