Country vs. City

In a Cooperative in the Country

Annie bolted out of bed and to the window, stumbling over piles of clothes and books. She knocked over her uniquely organized piles of clutter gathered as leering visitors to her bedside as she demanded her legs move faster and her eyesight focus sooner. Only black loomed before her, as visions of her dark bedroom pricked on the edges. This is it, her brain blared in terror as she threw back the curtain from the window.

They are going to take me away in the wee hours of the morning. Just as everyone said they did.

The noise that startled her out of sleep was the quiet hum of a truck and the jar of the front gate. Finally as her sight came into fullness, she spied the gate rumbling to a close.

But she recognized that it was only a delivery truck poking down the side street between the high wire fence and the Service Center. It coasted out of sight, making its way to the loading dock at the back of the building. The post workers, all Cooperative born, would be waiting at the loading dock to intercept the packages and letters for delivery, their arms crossed as they rested their backs against the building, sweat moistening their brows and running down the back of their shirts. Annie breathed out a sigh tinged with relief and glanced at the clock on her night stand. 4:30 AM. The delivery seemingly arrived earlier with each passing month.

Before returning to bed, hoping to treasure the last bits of the coziness and warmness in bed that all nonmorning people longed for, she surveyed the Primary administrative buildings to her left, the front gate directly before her, and the Service Center and the pond off to her right. Outside of the delivery truck, nothing stirred, and the Cooperative appeared abandoned, a ghostly shadow of itself during the daytime.

At the gate, in the check-in booth, was a lone guard. No one would be manning the checkin-checkout list at this time of the morning, but there was always a guard. And so at every corner of the fence, a lookout tower with armed sentries stood out among the trees. The lookout towers were operational every hour of every day, guarding the Cooperative members. Guarding the members in, though many had convinced themselves it was for their benefit.

Annie and the others always suspected a few select Primaries knew their Cooperative location. No one from without had any desire to plunder the Cooperative. There weren’t many valuables that anyone would want to steal anyway, besides the ones that could be whisked away at a moment’s notice at the Primaries’ bidding.

Annie allowed the linens of the curtain to slowly drift back into place. She returned to bed, a simple twin mattress barely an upgrade from a cot. In her own package from her Primary, a couple years ago, she relished receiving a mattress pad, which improved the comfort of her bed significantly.

Though she highly doubted she would be receiving any gifts or treats today. She pondered how long it had been since any correspondence or care packages. Six months? Maybe more.

She smiled despite this, her thoughts wandering to breakfast tomorrow…this morning. The Mess Hall would be alive with bustling, chattering, trading--the excitement was contagious on Delivery Days. Her History of the Ancients and Governance of the Primaries classes would be less meaningful than usual to Annie’s Late Year students, who found most things dull that adults wanted them to learn anyway. Chalk it up as a review day, if they were too wild to focus.

After cozying under the covers on her bed for what felt like hours, without any hints of drowsiness, Annie chalked up this night of sleep too, calling it at 5:46. She turned her attention to a last look over her lesson plans. A formality really, after a few years of teaching the same classes every year, she knew this material fairly well. But first, coffee.

The kitchen in her standard-issued unit was small but included all the necessary appliances--a small refrigerator, a range, a toaster, a microwave, a coffee maker. As she prepped her humble coffee maker of a four cup capacity, she admired her homemade decorations that brightened the tiny abode. She was hardly crafty or artsy--that was her friend Hannah. Hannah had helped her hang some cork boards after covering them in cheerful fabrics and ribbons of purples and pinks. Happy pictures of smiley faces stared back at her, like she and Rivah posing in their Off Cooperative work uniforms, she and Hannah singing a duet as Late Year students for some sort of educational competition, the three of them mid-laugh all in grown up bodies but tumbled together like teenagers on a floral sofa at Rivah’s unit.

“A redhead, a brunette, and a blonde walk into a bar,” Hannah had chirped in jest once as the three of them had entered a Late Year class together. She always was the most worldly-wise of the three. Annie and Rivah were vaguely aware of what a bar even was, both then and now.

Annie rubbed the pad of her thumb over each of the photos before her. She longed to return to those days not yet having the reality of their adult lives stuffing them down deep into an acceptance of their fates. Life was simpler back then.

After packing her canvas tote bag for her classes later that day, she headed outside with her mug of mammoth aspirations. She smiled as she thought of Rivah and Hannah teasing her about her monstrous coffee mugs. Hannah had remarked to her on an Off Day hangout, hunting through Annie’s kitchen cabinets, “Don’t you have any normal people mugs floating around here somewhere?”

Annie’s unit had a lovely front porch, with a cedar rocking chair, slender but sturdy. She sat reflectively for several minutes, watching the sky blur from dark hues of blue, gradually making its way to a light shade of periwinkle. A splash of orange here, and a splash of red there. The trees were beginning to trade in their green tresses for their autumnal ones. The first bits of sunshine crept over the hill and burst onto the porch, as she sipped her coffee, with two sugars and a healthy pour of hazelnut cream.

Surrounded by the forest, enjoying morning coffee on her unit’s front porch while watching the sunrise, thinking of an evening of time well spent with Rivah and Hannah later today, yes, this would be a most pleasant way for one to spend the rest of her life. If not for the waiting.

The world came alive with the sounds of the birds and insects all about her, heightening her mind to all that she didn’t know but needed to. She would need to learn the forest animals and plants by sight. She would need to know which were best for eating, which were poisonous or otherwise harmful to her. The thought of catching animals and killing them made her squeamish, but if it would be necessary for survival, she would do it.

She ceased rocking, realizing that she had been aggressively rocking her chair and clutching the rails tighter than necessary. Her knuckles were white, and she was breathing heavily for her early morning habit before classes. She was still shaky from her abrupt awakening this morning.

She needed to request to move as far away from the front gate as possible, to a unit on the back lot. No more waiting idly by, leaving her future to its natural course.

If she could move closer to the forest, it would be a start at least. Because one day, it would not be a delivery truck, but a transport one. And it would be coming for her.

In the City

Knee high black boots pounded the pavement, as the young woman hurried away from the city with its haze of neon lights and revelry of the early morning partiers. The night life in her city was just vamping up, but she was done with it, and everything else. She shivered, her heart racing. Her hair of varying degrees of dyed blondes and light browns, swept back in a ponytail, swung back and forth with each stride. Was it rage propelling her away? Or fear? She decided it was a bit of both.

Stomping away fast, the suggestion started at the back of her brain as it always did with a whisper before it spread throughout all her thoughts like an invasive vine, the fear wrapping and strangling her consciousness. She was coming upon the bridge that would cross from the city where she worked, socialized if one could call it that, and generally lived out her miserable existence in a smaller (see cheaper) neighborhood where she slept and bided her time before returning to hell the next day.

The smaller neighborhood even more unideal for it was surrounded by marshes. Thankfully with the arrival of cooler weather, most of the mosquitoes were dead.

She shoved her hands in her pockets, not only to keep warm on this crisp autumn eve but because they were shaking with the thoughts swirling in her head. She tried to force the thoughts out and away from her, but the haze of the ominous suggestion descended around her. She could not allow it to paralyze her here on the bridge.

Once a month or so, she’d spy a rogue scrounger here who hadn’t been chased away by enforcers, begging or otherwise annoying bypassers while in some intoxicated or drug-induced state. She could handle any scrounger and tell him where to go, but she could not express that same sentiment to the suggestions, dark and seductive, worming their way through her brain.

The cloud was not in her brain alone. A mist snaked its way around the bridge piers. And there standing at the base of a pier with his feet mired a foot deep in the marshbed was the old scrounger of dark complexion from the woods. The one who stared at her then and continued to stare at her now. He haunted her, appearing here and there throughout the city. The man with the hat.

She blinked and rubbed her eyes. The apparition was gone.

A figment of her imagination, but she shivered despite herself. Gripping the guardrails, she was soon across the bridge, but not out of danger, the fog of her mind continuing with her and nearly smothering her until she reached her destination.

No scroungers, no enforcers, no anyone in sight. This part of the city seemed to be a ghost town at this hour. She logged that insight away for future keeping while forcing one foot in front of the other.

The ten story apartment building where she lived may have looked like it had been abandoned long ago, another casualty to the Great Collapse some forty years ago. But despite its outward rundown, shabby appearance, it had the best technology available in the greater metropolitan area. And a pretty denarius it was for the rent, which she could barely afford. She wished she didn’t have to be slumming it outside the city--the high tech apartments inside the city limits already had been repaired and played their part of future opulence. Here though, she appeared--and felt--every bit still in the throes of economic collapse.

Deciding in favor of the stairs over the elevator, she instantly regretted that decision. The effort it took to mount the stairs did drive down the fear, but the rage from before returned, her blood pressure rising as she moved up each stair. Reaching her apartment on the fourth floor, she pressed her finger on the sensor of the control panel before punching in the four digit code.

As she threw open the door after the beep signaled its unlocking, she checked her hand-held device one last time. With no messages to report, she hurled it across the room, and it exploded in a fireworks’ burst of parts against the wall. Her gray and white tabby who had been peacefully curled up on the lone sofa took a dive under the coffee table for shelter. She threw herself onto the sofa, screaming indiscernible words into the decorative pillow that lived there, before likewise hurtling the pillow in the same direction as her hand-held device.

She decided to make use of her fury to tidy up the apartment, as she cursed her roommate, that incessant slob who left a pile of dirty dishes sitting near the sink. He was still carousing without any worry of repercussions to his career or relationships. Tears welled up in her eyes, but she willed them away. After several minutes of dishwashing, and yes, throwing away dirty tissues left on the coffee table, she collapsed on the sofa, exhausted from the temper tantrum.

Taking in the whole of her apartment from the sofa scarcely provided any solace to her, looking like it had been vacated by scroungers several weeks before. It hardly seemed lived in at all. No photographs or art on the walls, no real food of substance in any of the cabinets, no notes of affection posted for a loved one to see.

“Computer, what time is it?” she thought to ask her voice-activated computer, which managed her apartment and everything in it, from alerting her to her smoke detector’s batteries needing changing to regulating the thermostat to ordering light bulbs to any other apartment business she thankfully need not attend to.

“It is 4:30,” the female computerized voice answered her.

“Oh, God, great!” she moaned before letting loose a new string of curses. Her cat, which had tentatively thought all was safe, cowered again underneath the coffee table.

Her thoughts of her classes the next day brought nothing but anger bubbling to the surface. Her spoiled students, who lived better than she in the city, with no worries to their finances. She was the first generation under the new system; they already had established investments, set for life by their parents. She hated every one of those entitled brats.

It occurred to her that her roommate could have left a message with the apartment computer, so she asked, “Any messages?”

“You have two messages. First message, Thursday at 7:16 pm…”

A familiar bubbly voice, but one she found endlessly annoying, clicked on the line, “This is Rivah. Thomas asked me to call you. He wants to talk to you about your project tomorrow morning before your classes. Could you be at his office by 8:30--”

She rolled her eyes and yelled at the ceiling, “Ugh, erase!”

“Second message, Thursday at 8:09 pm…”

Another female voice, deep and sultry, unmistakable. “Hi, this is Hannah.” A pause. “Look, I know we haven’t talked in a while. But I have a client interested in your investment.” Another pause, she could sense the hesitancy in Hannah’s voice. “This might be a good business venture for us both. It’s an opportunity that you don’t want to let pass you by, Ann, so let’s get together and hammer out the details. I’ll be in touch.”

After erasing the second message, Ann snorted to herself. To hell with that. She wouldn’t be discussing any “business opportunities” with that bitch.