Transit/Chicago
by Miranda Phaal (Photo: Kyle Chong)
The roads are dangerous. Sometimes people try to leave, desperate people, who for whatever reason need something the GA’s can’t provide. They never come back.
I’ve started seeing dark houses from my window, and it seems there are more of them every month. I know better than to ask though. I wouldn’t get an answer, and besides, I already know.
Mother and Father are scared. You wouldn’t see it, looking at them. They go about their day as if nothing has changed, willfully ignoring the fact that everything has. The office is simply the kitchen annex, and dinners with friends and co-workers have changed venue to vidconferences over Halo, as school has for me and Quinn. But every so often, I catch Mother’s worried glance as she watches Quinn, or the note of tension in Father’s voice, which he quickly corrects. They’re trying to be strong for us, but we’re family. You can’t hide anything from family.
We had a dog named Briar, but Father said it would be cruel to keep her. “She wouldn’t understand it,” he said. “Dogs don’t think like people.” We didn’t have the medicine to put her to sleep, however, so we just let her outside. She was so happy... Now we never talk about her, like we never look at the welded locks on the doors. Surprisingly, though, it’s the little things that keep us from settling into this routine of careful silences and averted glances. The clocks strike noon and midnight alike in darkness, and we’ve all come to revere and resent the various alarms that tell us to wake, sleep, eat, work, learn, play, turn on the news.
The news is always the same, however. It’s day 257 of year 2 of of the “Purification” — what everyone but the newscasters and politicians calls the Quarantine. The Exodome is doing it’s job; the infection has not spread to other cities. The President tells us we’re heroes. Hang in there everyone, she says, just 17 years and 108 more days to go. And in other news, internal crime rates remain near-zero. “Well of course there’s no crime under the Dome,” Father said once, “There’s no human contact.” I used to think I could hear a hint of disappointment in the newscaster’s voice at that point; the violent stories used earn them ratings after all. But now, with everyone locked in their houses all day, the television networks have no trouble getting viewers.
Even so, nothing compares to the spike on Day Zero. All of us saw the news that day, because those whom the warnings didn’t reach were the first to die. The story unfolded in chaotic pieces, thrown together as soon as the shock began to subside. The Transit Virus, as we naively called it in the beginning, attacked the city like a living body, spreading along the roads as if through blood vessels. Downtown, the great beating heart, was hit hardest, the nine-to-five pulse of traffic grinding to a halt, leaving a wasteland of empty skyscrapers. Whoever couldn’t work over the net now has to get by on the government aid plan, and we all rely on the Guardian Angels for food and supplies. Travel was outlawed immediately, and it was a mere six hours before the city was sealed under the Exodome.
The whole country gripped religion tightly after Day Zero, because the Transit Virus wasn’t a virus at all. No one could explain it; people just crumbled like old cheese where they stood. Scientists have tried to study it, collecting the remains along with various other samples, but there’s nothing there, no matter how close they look. So they built the Exodome to block out all light, to sterilize the air and water, to contain the virus. That was as far as science went. Unsurprisingly, it left most people feeling cold.
Of course there were preachings of Judgement and Doom, of swarms of locusts and rivers of blood, but those never came, and in their hearts, few believed that they would. Since we couldn’t bring ourselves to believe we had been punished, we had to believe in our salvation. The sky is the only truly safe place now, drones and copters the only form of transport, and Halo and the Guardian Angels are no coincidence.
I don’t talk about religion with my friends anymore. It’s an uncomfortable topic when the underlying suspicion is that if you don’t believe in God and His angels, then you don’t believe that there’s hope for us to be saved, or even, perhaps, that we deserve to be saved.
I believe we deserve to be saved. But I’m not sure what will be left to save after the twenty years of quarantine are over. I don’t think we’ll be like other people, not after living in darkness and isolation for two decades. Chat logs and vidconferences are no substitute for human contact, and footage of the world outside as it carries on without us is cold comfort.
It’s worse for the younger ones. At least I had most of a normal childhood. Quinn, though, is already starting to forget things: how bright the sun is, what grass smells like, how it feels to run as fast as she can, screaming at the top of her lungs simply because there’s open space before her and fresh air all around.
I’d nearly forgotten that my friend Petra lives across the street from us. I only remembered when I saw her house go dark yesterday. Maybe their power went out, and the GA’s will be coming to fix the wires any day now. But maybe not. I’ve thought about going over to check on her, about sneaking through the dog door that was only half-heartedly boarded up, my foot hitting pavement for the first time in years. My first breath of fresh air, even if it’s filtered. Petra’s house would be a straight shot, and really not that far. Just across the road.
