Page 5 of Trade (After the End #7)

Chapter Three

For the next few weeks, I have nightmares about bombed-out buildings and bones half-buried in gray dust. I wake up hyperventilating, my sheet tangled in my legs, my skin sweaty against the plastic mattress.

I cry silently in my bunk until someone turns the overhead light on, then dress and shuffle with the other women to the elevators to go to work. My entire life has changed, but I still have to report to the atrium at nine o’clock and prune and mulch and act like people’s problems are real.

A rake is missing. Alan the intern claims it must’ve been stolen. Reginald accuses Alan of misplacing it and then lying to cover his ass.

Someone has been stowing fertilizer under the arbor vitae, presumably because they’re too lazy to return it to storage. Judith feels this is an affront to AP’s solemn duty as stewards of the future.

It’s all so stupid and petty. It always was, but I thought I was very important, didn’t I? Like I was some protector of the peace and common good and not a referee of squabbling children.

If I think about the lottery, I panic, so to soothe itself, my brain returns compulsively to Bennett, building a timeline in my head, searching for clues to exactly when it started.

Everything was fine at Christmas, wasn’t it? There’s a woman in Facilities who makes flowers out of paper, and he had her make me a hibiscus out of a page from Michael Pollen’s The Botany of Desire.

I was mad that he did that to one of Dad’s books, but the thought was sweet, so I didn’t let on that I was upset.

I’m sure he knew I was mad about it anyway.

He always complains that I expect too much from people, and no one could possibly live up to my standards.

Was the hibiscus the straw that broke the camel’s back?

Did he have a flower made for Meghan, too? Was she just happy to get it?

Or was it so much more basic than that? Was it how, even though I weigh the same as I did when we married, my ass is still somehow wider, and everything that used to bounce now sags?

Am I boring?

When did he stop loving me?

Did he ever?

I tried so, so hard to catch his eye. I thought I’d won life when he kissed me that first time in the access ducts. I’d been picked. I was safe and loved and everything was going to be okay forever.

Did he feel like he won too? Because I was Don Walker’s daughter, and he wanted to be head of a department one day?

Does he hate me? You have to hate someone to do this to them, right?

I know a part of him has always been jealous of me.

No matter that everyone likes him better, that everyone wants to impress him, at the end of the day, they come to me when there’s a problem, and it eats at him, even though he pretends it doesn’t.

Does he hate it enough to want me dead?

For the past few weeks, he’s been hiding in his office with the door shut, and when he comes and goes, he makes sure he’s flanked by underlings.

He needn’t bother. If I opened my mouth to talk to him, nothing but sawdust would come out.

Ever since that day in Neil’s office, I’ve felt like my insides have been ripped out and replaced with something dead and dry, like I’m a scarecrow from the Before.

I thought I was a person—a woman, a wife—but I’m not. I’m credits. How many barrels of fuel am I worth? How many truckloads of food?

I know what my husband would trade me for. She walks past me every morning, careful not to look my way as she exaggerates a waddle, even though her belly isn’t much bigger than mine after Thanksgiving dinner.

I’m deep in self-pity and quasi-panic in the atrium, watering an acacia tree, when the alarm I’ve been dreading finally goes off. The emergency lights flash, but the siren doesn’t sound.

Lottery.

My stomach bottoms out, and the air in my lungs whooshes out. I’m not ready. I need more time to prepare.

How do you prepare for this?

I turn off the hose and peel off my gloves with numb fingers, my conditioning taking over. There are procedures for every alarm—fire, gas leak, grunt riot, quadrant evacuation—and my body can do each step without thinking.

I clear my materials from the walkway and shut off the water valve while wishful thinking stumbles around my brain like a drunk. Maybe Administration is just testing the system. They always run tests and forget to tell the departments.

“Attention. This is Command. At this time, all residents must proceed to the Assembly Hall.” The intercom crackles, and a staticky recording allows the first administrator to speak from the grave.

It’s the lottery announcement, and it’s real. If it were a false alarm, Communications would come on immediately to say so. My dad’s voice echoes in my head. Panic is enemy number one in the bunker. Freaked out people open doors. They stampede.

A hysterical moan escapes my lips before I can smother it down. I glance left and right, but no one noticed. Everyone’s worried about themselves. A lot of unmarried women work in AP.

I straighten up and drape my gloves neatly over one of the acacia’s branches. I need to pull it together. No matter what happens, I’m still in charge of operations. My people look to me. They don’t lose it when the alarm goes off. I can’t either.

Maybe Cecily has it wrong. It’s been business as usual in the bunker.

People whisper when I walk by in the cafeteria, but there have been no signs of unrest—no curfew called, no limits on meeting size.

One in six hundred fifty-eight. That’s a 0.

15 percent chance. Those are good odds. Great odds, even.

I join the throng shuffling out of the atrium.

Several of my workers catch my eye. I give them what I hope is a reassuring nod.

A few smirk, making no effort to hide their spite.

Not everyone likes me. That’s fine. When you make decisions about resource allotment, especially water, you make enemies. Dad drilled that home early on.

We take the elevators in batches of twelve, the process moving like clockwork as it always does. When we reach the lowest floor, I walk calmly down the corridor leading to the Assembly Hall. At the end, I turn right out of habit. A hand snags my jumpsuit sleeve.

“This way, ma’am.” A guard directs me to the left.

That’s right. Unmarried women to the left. I’m unmarried now. I force myself to smile at the guard. He’s only doing his job.

“Thank you,” I say. He won’t meet my eye. A flush creeps out of his collar and up his neck. Is he thinking about the lottery? Is he picturing it? Picturing me? Outside?

I want to shrink myself, disappear in my coveralls, but there’s no spare room. Uniforms are designed to fit snugly. For safety.

My mouth tastes like stomach acid. I hurry to catch up to my elevator group. I don’t want to be alone. I can’t do this alone.

A few yards along, we’re all forced to halt, blocked from going forward by a line of guards. Reality breaks over me. It feels like when your ears pop, and suddenly, the whole world is aggressively loud.

This is happening.

I’m not a married woman anymore. My husband cheated on me with Meghan with the long brown hair, even though a few days before he broke the news, he was between my thighs, staring soulfully up at me with his ice-blue eyes that I always thought were the clearest windows, telling me he loved me.

All the while, Meghan was pregnant with his baby—in these times, a true miracle, a gift from God—and she wants to raise the baby in a traditional two-parent family, so I’m out of the quarters I’ve lived in my whole life and in this herd of women.

We’re so valuable that we’re currency.

We’re so worthless, we can be chucked outside.

The men cannot make up their minds what we are. You can see it in the guards. They hold us back, but respectfully.

Amy crowds in beside me, and my heart lifts a little to see a friendly face.

“You panicking?” she asks.

“If you pass out, they just carry you,” Sheila from the Bursar’s Office offers helpfully. She’s crowded at my back.

“Do you want some of this?” Peg Struthers whispers, nodding down at the brownie wrapped in brown paper she’s holding low between us. Despite all the bodies pressed around me, I can smell the marijuana. “It should kick in before they shove you out the doors.”

“Hey, pass me some,” Amy says.

“Hook me up, too,” Sheila whispers.

“Over here.” Dana from Recreation snaps and holds open her palm.

The brownie disappears in a matter of seconds.

“Last chance,” Peg mutters to me. I shake my head.

I’ve never ingested marijuana. How did she even get it? Our yields are rigorously accounted for. Medical needs it for palliative care, and when I trade it, it’s always for materials AP can’t do without.

“Relax, boss lady,” Patsy, one of my techs, says, bumping my shoulder with hers.

“For the next half hour or so, the rules don’t apply to you.

Punch a guard. Kick him in the balls. Call the Head Administrator a fascist motherfucker.

You can do whatever you want, and after the lottery, if you make it back inside, you’ll have a clean slate. ”

“Rations and a half for life, too,” Dana says.

“If you make it back,” Peg adds.

Dana frowns at her. “Almost everybody comes back.”

The group falls silent, except for an occasional cough or sob. As we wait, the sharp stench of fear thickens in the air.

“What are we waiting for?” I finally break and ask.

“The Commander has to run his mouth a while, doesn’t he?” Patsy answers.

Oh, yeah. They don’t bring the unmarried women in until after Neil has spoken. Somehow, it’s never the same speech twice, even though he goes on longer and longer every time and always says the same thing.