Draconian Law

Two starchly-pressed officers in black were at the door. They stood upright and composed and looked to her as if they were copy-pasted from the same mold. There was a uniformity that didn't just apply to their goverment-issued outfits. It was in their twin, calm stare, in the way their regular, even breaths came out and flared their nostrils a little. It unnerved her, it always had, and she found herself mentally making lists of how they were different, to reassure that they were people beneath those cool, calm faces. 

The one on the left was tall and trim, a little silver starting to show in the wings of his hair. His face was long and his cheekbones jutted out a little. He was older, and his jowls hung a little. He was smiling that little half-smile. There was a woman beside him. A rookie, probably, by how young she was. Her face reminded her of the moon. It was pale and smooth, and her eyes were like those lunar shadows. The tranquility betrayed nothing, except that it seemed like they were waiting for something, the way those eyes were trained on her.

She counted her breaths, and felt her armpits growing warm as they began to perspire. 

"Good evening, Miss Anderson. It seems you've violated T90-06, section A-3. 'Contemplation of violating the law.' If you'd be so kind as to voluntarily come with us, we'll escort you to the rehabilitation."

His voice was liquid smooth and calming. There didn't have to be any trouble. If she'd just come out and step into the car, things would be just fine. Everything would be just fine. 

Miss Sara Lee Anderson bit her cheeks and looked past them, to the regulation car that idled on the curb of the short, trim lawn that was shared between her and the fifteen other people who lived in this section's tower. It was sleek and white and unmarked. She twirled a strand of long, frazzled black hair along a finger, took another breath.

Then she looked the hanging-jowled man in his too-calm eyes and stated, "No."

She calmly shut the door in their faces. Just slowly enough to see the man turn his hand over, to enter a call-code on the machine attached to his wrist. She turned around and tried to panic as she walked into her kitchen, her breath coming in quick and fast jolts. She forced her mind to keep itself blank. She thought of the river that stretched itself around her childhood home, before it had been seized and before the black time had come. She thought of how nice the water had felt as she stood on the cool, rounded stones with river rushing around her knees. Her hands fumbled with a kitchen knife and she sat herself at her flimsy kitchen table. Overhead, the bare bulb felt like the light in an interrogation room. She stared at the pattern of regulated wallpaper meant to subdue the populace with its cheerful imagery. A clown petting a puppy, over and over and over. 

She was in the river outside of her house, the water was cool on her ankles. In her left hand, she gripped the knife unexpertly, and turned her wrist over, to expose a circular, blue, glossy eye-like device embedded on its belly. A series of wires spread around it in vein-like roots. She could hear the sound of birds in the trees overhead. Real birds, not the automated ones. In the distance, she can even hear her mother teasing her father, and their cheerful laughter. She puts the edge of the knife on the cool, solid surface of the eye, which stares dolefully up at her. The wind is cool, and the air smells like fresh laundry and fish and freedom. The future has never been brighter, never more filled with happiness. And then she's thinking nothing at all- the knife has bit her flesh and blood is already pooling out of her pale skin, a little at first and then a lot as it works its way jaggedly around the eye. She thinks of nothing at all but the bright white flashes of pain that makes the root-veins of the eye light up with electrical impulses as they move through the rest of her body. Blood mingles with oil as the the veins are split and the knife drops from her trembling hand. The sound is loud, but she can't hear it past the silent scream that has ripped her mouth open as far as it can go. She's staring at the pool of blood on her delicate wrist now, the eye floating in a sea of red, but her eyes are bulging and it doesn't take much to see that she herself is blind to what's taking place. Even as her unsteady, trembling hand scratches at the eye and, in one pull, rips it out of her flesh. She clutches it as she falls sideways, out of her grimy chair onto the grimy floor, her wrist burning as she writhes. 

The tears are coming now, heavily, and she dry heaves. Her stomach has been empty for a very long time, with her regulated allotment of weekly food rotting in the pantries. She could have sold it for a fortune, maybe. Slowly, trembling, she pushes herself up to a sitting position. Blood has already deeply stained the front of her blouse, beyond repair, and she rips the skirts of her dress to make a bandage. Its an unruly ball that absorbs the blood fast, too fast. There's too much of it. She stands and stumbles to the cabinet, takes out a dusty spray can, and lets the bandage and eye drop to the floor. There is a gaping hole where the eye used to be. It's a red crater with black veins and wires poking out of it, with white tendon peeking through the red flesh. She aims with shaking fingers and sprays and screams. The white foam burns and fizzes. But the blood stops and she stands in her kitchen, surrounded and covered in blood, the eye staring up at her. 

Now that she is free to think, no thoughts come. All there is is the primal instinct to flee, to preserve herself. She doesn't have much time. Bleeding, shaking, she works her way through her small house. Past the few things she's collected in her ten years here. Flimsy things, things that stared blankly at her as she passed. They had meant a lot, earlier that day. Now the only thing she grabbed was her coat, as she stumbled out the backdoor and into the night.

It was the alloted time for evening dinner, and ever dining room light was on. No one was outside. The back lawn was as simple and as straight forward as the front, and past it was a road, and then a lawn that was precisely the same as her front lawn, and a tower or houses that was the same as the one she'd stumbled out of. She had been lucky to live on the first floor. It had been thanks to her parents meager connections, which was more than what most had. 

There were no cars on the road. It was curfew, and she was blindly walking a maze in which all the paths were the same. She didn't know where she was going. But when she found herself climbing the spiraling stairs that wound its way around a tower and on the doorstep of a co-worked, she wasn't surprised. 

Numbly, she knocked on the door with her left hand. There was a long pause, and then the scuffing of a chair being pushed back. The door opened, and she was illuminated a little, despite the shadow the man before her cast. He wasn't tall, but he looked kind, with his white hair and gently gleaming bald spot. 

"Sara Lee? What are you doing out? It's dinner time." 

She didn't reply. Her voice had been scared away since she'd applied the foam bandage. He seemed to understand this and looked furtively at the road below. There were no gleaming eyes in the shadows, as far as he could see, and the silence of the night was serenely oppressive. He stepped to the side and shut the door behind her. 

She stood numbly in the entrance hall, pale and empty. Her blood had left most of her, leaving a pretty trail of red pearls form her house to his. Dimly, she knew he knew it. Dimly, she knew she'd signed his death warrant. But he didn't seem to mind as he shuffled her into a chair in the kitchen that looked precisely like hers and began to make her coffee, with a radio playing in the background, a static voice listing off the latest announcements and news feeds. The remnants of his half eaten dinner still on his table. 

She stared at the half-eaten meat of some hybrid clone they'd created in some lab off the coast of Portugal and her stomach sickly flopped over itself, weakly. She choked down a dry-wretch; she was weirdly concerned with how rude it'd be to vomit blood all over his meal. 

He placed a warm mug between her hands and she help it limply there, and began to cry. This seemed to startle him, like nothing else had yet, and he stood there uncomfortably before kneeling- slowly, with much creaking in his knees, beside her, and began to speak in slow, calming words. There was a sort of rhythm to them, and she knew he was singing her a lullaby. 

"You are weeping, little girl, darling girl. You are weary, little girl, darling girl... Be sad no longer. There is love for you in the heart of the Father... Little girl, darling girl..."

He was tone deaf and his voice shook, and the lyrics came out in a jumble, stumbling over one another, but she scarcely cared. He had wrapped his arms around her, gently, and he was rocking her back and forth. Her head lolled into his shoulder and she cried deep, rib rattling sobs. He thought she'd die, they shook her small frame so, he thought she'd shake her heart right out of place. 

Neither one was sure when she ceased to cry, whether it was a handful of minutes or hours, but her weeping turned to whimpers and eventually to quiet breaths. She slept on the old man's shoulders, and he lifted her up and lay her in his bed. 

She did not stir and he watched her for a moment and thought her beautiful. And how strange that thought was! For she was broken and weak and destroyed, a frail little girl in an oversized coat, but he'd seen the bandage and he knew she'd done a brave thing. A badge of honor in this world where valor was a fairytale. 

It was only right that his smile was sad as he fondly brushed a piece of lank hair from her sweat soaked brow and lifted the phone from its receiver and pressed the only button it offered. 

"She's here."