Chapter 7 – In the Darkness

The air feels different out here, looser and easier to breathe. I wonder if the humans do anything, chemically, to what's within the District before dismissing that thought as paranoia. They don't need to, and while it feels a little better to be outside it's still a nerve-wracking experience, especially with what we plan on doing. I look around and feel as though I am being watched or hunted, even though we haven't done anything wrong yet. They will by the end of the night—be hunting for us. But for now, Joshua and I and this other poleepkwa I don't know, for now, we are innocent. And for a while, I don't care about the consequences.

By the time the sun came up after the human and I talked, I realized that I should have been prepared for something like this. He hadn't given me false hopes; he had said that he wanted to help us and the rest of my excitement had come from myself. Losing that feeling of hope when he told me how things really were hurt, but that wasn't his fault.

And as I walked away from where we had met I also understood that I had to re-establish contact with James. If my plans weren't going to work out, I would help him with his. As long as they didn't hurt humans directly, I would help him spread messages for our common goal.

So I searched (scavenged, really, just like the humans say) and found a can of Cat Food which I then offered as an apology, and it was a very weird moment, our roles reversed and me beginning to feel the wanting for some and wondering what else I could offer if he didn't accept it, trying to remember what exactly I had said and how angry I might have gotten him, but he took it and asked me some questions and, wanting to keep things simple and not let on more about the human, I simply said that I had waited all night and he hadn't shown up. He said something about humans being untrustworthy. I agreed.

But even as I agreed I was remembering that Brian Johnson had been his name. I wanted to check but had no way to. Perhaps by using Alec's radio? If he had a radio. He could have been lying, and even if he hadn't, there would be no way for me to ask a question of it. It was pointless.

And I fully understood for the first time that everything I had felt yesterday was meaningless. All that I had planned, everything I had imagined, wasn't going to happen. It was beside the point now, and the point was the situation and the situation was that we were trapped. Over and over again, my mind returned to this and I felt as though I were mentally smashing against a wall again and again.

It was a delayed reaction that had finally caught up with me.

We are not going to get out of here, and details about whether the human was telling the truth about his name, what his real name might be, how far he truly trusted me or even how much I could trust him were useless. What did matter was that I had to find a way to get out of here or make some kind of peace with the humans or that all of us as a whole find some kind of balance with them before our population gets too large or we get too desperate (if the rest of them are thinking or feeling what James and I are) and lose our reasoning and lash out or go crazy and make the humans angry or move us to someplace else or just start to systematically get rid of us somehow.

What mattered was that we had to get to the ship...but we can't, and it might not work, and here I am, back down on the ground again, walking dazed and unable to remember what just happened and nothing matters except controlling this frantic urge to run and smash through the wall of the District and run outside, get hit by a human vehicle or be shot maybe, it doesn't matter, I'm just as much of a detail, a number, statistic with an assigned name, CORY WILSON, as any of us are to the humans.

For some reason this realization, that I wasn't much of anything to them, always hit the hardest. I have always been me, and always will be, and yet I am nothing to them. The thought is unbearable.

Panic, a shrill echoing whine through my head.

...

I got control of myself after an hour or two when I ran into one of the stone walls in frustration. Nothing was hurt, and that was a relief, and the shock of what might have happened, the immediate soaking regret of what I had done, quelled everything else.

Staying uninjured is the number-one priority for survival. You lose your health, you lose everything. And nobody would care...no. No. That wasn't true. We care about each other.

And this is what matters, above all else. That we have each other, or rather, that everyone has someone. I can only feel that kind of connection with Joshua. Others can feel that sense of belonging, of being in the company of friends, for everyone, our species as a whole. While I don't have that feeling, I do know that I care about them. That's what matters.

I held on to that thought as I walked back to James' shack. He was in the same condition as I almost always used to be, a dose of Cat Food not far in the past. I peer into his eyes and see that they are dilated. A second passes before he recognizes me.

"Hello, Cory." His voice is slow and heavy, as though he was speaking through a thickness in his throat that required effort to get through. I sat down beside him. "Thanks for the Cat Food." I relaxed, and felt a dim sense of belonging, sitting next to him. As though we were brothers, reunited after a long time apart.

And then, slowly, because the moment seemed to require it, he began to speak. Softly, slowly, he unraveled his plan to me, and with the two of us sitting side by side in the darkness of his shack, him plotting and me listening, it sounded more mysterious, more important, more real, in a way, than it would actually be in real life.

The first thing he said was that he was very sorry, but he won't be able to go on this mission with us. The reason, he says, is that if MNU captures him again he would get in serious trouble, more than he had been in before, and MNU would know that he was planning against them, and this would be bad for everyone. He tells me that while he will be as dedicated to his cause as he always has been, from now on he will have to assume the role of the planner, the general, out of plain sight.

Within the shack, this seems reasonable.

Outside of it, in the daylight outside, what he had been "planning" didn't seem like much, but despite that, in the condition that I was in at the moment, with no other friends and no other plans, the thought of rebelling, even if by small measures like throwing rocks, took on the air of something much more epic and important. And so, even before he finished explaining why throwing rocks with messages on them would begin the change of everything and get us all we had dreamed of, I had agreed to take part in what he was planning. Because while my first attempt had failed, the idea of an uncompromisingly glorious future for us had caught hold within me.

For this "mission", as he liked to call it, James had talked and brought in two other poleepkwa he knew: a green one I didn't know, and Joshua.

I didn't want him to go. I didn't want him to know anything about James, either, but James had gotten to him somehow.

I should have known from that time when he had found James so quickly. If he hadn't known him, he wouldn't have found him that fast. He had been waiting for me to wake up in the morning. And he had taken me straight to his shack.

A secret partnership, between James and Joshua. And neither of them had told me.

Perhaps they had thought I would protest, and I certainly felt like it now. My first instinct was to say that Joshua was too young, but he wasn't, really. He was old enough by now to make his own decisions, and with his "parents"—who wouldn't be able to stop him completely anyway—gone, apparently, I couldn't either. So I said nothing.

It was a simple choice for him, and for James too, for James had an unswerving passion for what he was doing. For me, having Joshua along, putting a friend of mine in danger, as well as doing something that would hurt the humans—even though there was a good reason behind it—meant that I was crossing over from being completely pure. I had always thought of myself as being good. Now I still was, but putting a friend of mine in danger would mean compromising that a bit.

Well, I told myself in the space of time between when James and I had met up with Joshua and the other poleepkwa (whom I now did not want to know, considering what I was leading him into), you can't expect to accomplish something as big as this without making some hard decisions.

And so, after that seemingly endless restless period of time, I met the two of them at another section of the barrier with a hole. They were carrying rocks which I attached a message to, painstakingly written out on salvaged pieces of paper, with a pen I had found once somewhere during hours of endless walking, and secured them to the rocks with ties made from rope and string: LET US GO.

Where would we go? It didn't matter. Not for now—questions as to what we would actually do with our freedom if we got it were for the future. Let someone else figure out. Or let me figure it out...but not now. Now was the time for action. We would handle the later details as they occurred.

In the darkness we found parked cars in empty places. The three of us shared the load of the rocks, four or five each, all with the same message, and we did the first few of them exactly right, just the way that James had told us to.

When we found a car that would become our target we would hide in the nearest alley while Joshua would slowly creep over to wait at the other end, watching carefully. I would watch the other end, my nerves humming with anticipation, while the third poleepkwa, would boldly run out into the night and heave his rock through the windshield of the car.

The crashing sound would always seem too loud to go unnoticed in the stillness of the night, but we always got away and ran, followed Joshua to the next safe place to hide, feeling terror and anxiety and also a maniac, joyful glee at what we were doing, striking back, enjoying the destruction and thought of the damage we must be causing to the humans.

And then, at the end of one alley, what greeted us was not a car but a store, different than the Grocery Store I had seen before, which greeted the eye with signs and a few windows. This was a building, perhaps not a store, which presented no excitement to the humans that must pass by in the day. This one only had a plain sign on top which we could not read, a large, open parking lot uninterrupted by the machines which the Grocery Store had, and several wide sheets of glass beyond which lay darkness and the outline of a few unfamiliar shapes.

The three of us stood looking at this store from the shadows for a long time before approaching it, intimidated by the way that it seemed to coolly stand, indifferent to our presence, a change from the small, weak cars that had given themselves over to us so easily earlier. This was the real thing. This was a real thing. To damage this structure would mean more effect and greater risks than the cars we had wounded earlier.

To step forward, to follow the green poleepkwa who gathered up his courage first and ran across the parking lot before us, was a mistake, but it was a mistake that I made consciously. I'll admit to that. I have made mistakes in the past, and can excuse most of them as the fault of the Cat Food or the poleepkwa I was with. Not this time. This time I was totally in control, conscious enough to realize that I was very likely going to end up regretting what I was doing even as I tore across the parking lot, rocks in hand.

And so, even as I appeared to lose myself in the initial destruction of the store windows, I was still there the whole time, aware enough to hold onto my one remaining rock and use it as a club to smash the remaining window rather than throwing it like I had thrown the ones before. And as we progressed to the real damage, stepping through broken frames and into the store and began to smash and overturn the objects that we found inside, I had the sense of mind enough both to feel the sting of the fragments of glass in my feet and to set the rock carefully on the ground, with the words printed on its paper facing outward, so that the humans would know who had upset the balance of their world and understand why.

It was in this feeling, a strange sobriety in the wake of madness unfolding, that I heard the sound outside, a sound not of sirens but of footsteps, of rubber slapping against cement, a few or a crowd of humans making their way towards us in the darkness. How well can humans see during their night? Well enough to get here, though there were no lights outside. How well can they hear? Well enough to receive the noisy crashing we had created and forgotten about due to our earlier luck and know what it meant.

I dropped the chair that I was holding.

They would find us. That was clear. Even if we ran now they would find us, and in the darkness they would not be able to read the message on the rock; the context of our actions would be lost and we would instead be seen purely as what they thought of us as; what they had been trained to be afraid of: mindless creatures that would hurt them.

I grabbed Joshua, who had stayed close to me this whole time, and though I did not know or want to know him I swear that I yelled a warning as loud as I could to the third poleepkwa before running for another exit, a side door that I had seen and noted when we first came in. I don't know if he tried to make his way out or if he was too wrapped up in the moment of exhilaration to recognize the danger outside.

With Joshua's hand in mind I realized what a colossal mistake I had made and promised myself that I would do whatever it took to get him out. We reached the door and after I managed to get it open, clumsily wrapping both of my hands around the slick metal sphere, we ran out into the night, still together.

We met one human in the darkness, a nightmare lurching shadow of a figure that jumped out and tried to tackle me to the ground as I ran. I pushed him aside without thinking, punched him instinctively in the stomach when he tried to hold on to my arm, and kept running for the safety of the District and its stone walls that would shelter us.