Dystopia chic and recycled fashion - Part 13
Jonas appears in Diez's dream as the surge attack elevates the Corridor's threat level
The woman stands at the edge of a circle of light. Jonas’ back is to her. When she reaches over to pick the object off the ground, the empty warehouse where they stand in their underwear fills with light. As she lifts up the black bag, leaves start to fall and cover the floor. She’s beside a tree in a forest. Birdcalls fill the air and the sun is almost blinding.
A smile maps her face as she looks inside the black bag. The sound of thunder overhead shakes the ground and when he hears it Jonas turns. The woman holds up a shiny, green apple.
Jonas’ face is covered by a gas mask. Before he can scream, the tree turns into a mushroom cloud.
Diez wakes from the dream, heart pounding. It takes a few moments for him to orient to where he is, where he is not. When he plants his feet on the ground he feels the warm snout of his rescue nuzzle against the back of his knee. He pats Duplo’s head and returns to the present.
He broke one of his own rules. He watched an episode featuring a contestant to whom he delivered last rights. The regret was heavy, like a clamp on his heart. Now he couldn’t shake it.
It was a production week, so Diez had to pace himself. By the end of his “ten and four” he was always spent. Ten days of media hits, four days off to rest.
Three days of confessions recorded for the show. Four days of preparation—two for the homilies and two days set aside for the fitness videos that were part of his content quota. Then three more production days before he could go home to his apartment and rest. He had his own assembly quota to fulfill in the four non-production days, but it was modest, nothing he could ever complain about out loud.
The manual assembly of the drone part he was assigned was one way he let his mind unwind. Where he turned inward, digested the busy days on the lot and the horror stories of human misery that was his burden, alone, to bear.
His grandma knitted. When he clipped together rotor parts for the drone, the clicks recalled to his memory the sound of her knitting needles clattering together rhythmically, like the claws of a cat drumming a linoleum floor.
He never would get used to the luxury. Dystopia chic is what they called it online. He'd landed softly into Corridor West. For a post-nuclear world where real nukes had taken out famous cities, he had it good. Massive swaths of humanity were ravaged by violence after the blackout; the in-between spaces, outside the walls. It was all like the terrible plot of one of the popular zombie shows that played before the world ended. Before the real horrors happened.
Diez’s penthouse apartment that overlooked the Bow River had a beautiful view of the Rockies. With its modern aesthetic, it didn't give a post-apocalyptic vibe. But he'd been fortunate in the property lottery.
The authorities were smart to preserve the best buildings in the corridor. With the population so thinned out and with a strong nuclear grid that kept the lights on, the people who fled the violence outside the walls to find haven behind the new order in Corridor West didn't have to live in tented refugee encampments that the science fictions imagined. They all had heating and plumbing. Wi-Fi and the world’s library of streaming content. Food boxes and recycled fashion. As long as they didn't miss their quota or mess around with the law, they could live in relative freedom.
Diez once overheard a crew member on the LA lot compare life in Corridor West to her childhood in Singapore. “Sure, there’s corporal punishment” she said as she rubbed her lip while she exhaled a blue vape cloud. “But there’s no garbage or homeless people.”
Or crime on the streets. It took an actual apocalypse to remove the encampments of fent-out zombies that used to roam the streets in the big cities like San Fran and L.A. That was the joke. Maybe it was just an observation, often repeated on the Loop when it passed through what used to be California.
If someone dropped into Diez’s apartment from the before times without a history lesson, they would perhaps think they landed in Utopia. It was a reality Diez couldn't quite come to terms with. There was a world of suffering—such a recent history of human misery. He walked through much of it personally. Through his role on the Game, he stared that suffering and heard its echoes almost every day. Yet he lived in such comfort and luxury.
He walked to the kitchen to make a fresh pot of coffee, feeding Duplo once the burr of the beans’ grind ripped the silence of his apartment in two. When he closed his eyes Jonas stared back at him, the gas mask he wore in the dream removed.
He already knew things could quickly shatter. Everyone did. So this was their collective compromise. Corridor West found a way, a balance after all the terror and disruption that made life some sort of good again.
In some ways it’s even better.
The coffee machine was done grinding now, as if the unthinkable thought silenced the machine’s scream. Diez felt a drop of shame land against his shoulder blade just above his rib cage. It slipped through the skin into his heart like a knife. He didn’t really mean it. But it was there.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.
And when that thought came, often on mornings like this, when the sun was slowly rising over the range of the Rockies and the clouds were edged with light, when Duplo quietly sat near his feet in the sunlight, he would start to hit the heavy bag until his knuckles bled.
Should he not still suffer in such a world? Should he not constantly feel pain?
As he hit the bag again and again, the question that tormented him on his days off started to subside. Fist knee fist elbow knee foot fist.
He stopped mid-punch when the art on the wall he faced morphed from the image of the School of Athens to a takeover. As the Renaissance fresco dissolved, a digital bulletin appeared. There was an attack on a supply convoy near Maskwacis. The Threat Level had been elevated to Red.
The Surge was active, again. The curfew would be in place until the corridor was back to Yellow.
As he digested the news of the attack he noticed the sharp pain in his heart ease.
Read the story that launched the world of The 49.
Contesting is now available on Amazon as an e-book and in paperback.
Contesting tells the story of Jonas, the man who was double-gamed.
It’s a fast-paced, exciting read for fans of The 49.