CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Gunfire

Mike sat outside his home, on a small swing set he and his sister had outgrown substantially; his father kept in the backyard nonetheless, because when the day came that his children had grown and left the city, the memories of its involvement in his and his now-deceased partner's wedding photoshoot would be all that kept him from killing himself.

The young man slouched as he swung nonchalantly, his knees bent as his shoes dragged through the hard mud below his sneakers. The swings stood on a gentle grassy slope that extended as far as the eye could see on either side, reclining smoothly into the ebbing and bowing embrace of the muddy lake that Mike was staring into now. His mind was awash with a thousand toxic thoughts that corroded away at him. His young bones creaked with the whine of the iron chains that reached above him through his cold fingers.

The first painful thought was that he had no friends. He had, once upon a time, and truly it had not been so long ago - but it was long enough that he often found himself missing them greatly. Most of them had been transported out of the city, whether because they'd been assigned work outside of state or because there was a mandatory population redistribution. Others had died. So now, his relationship with his sister and father dissolving just the same, Mike found himself all but completely alone almost all of the time.

Most of the time he didn't mind it, but there were many brief moments that he did. The loneliness, the tightness that wound in his chest like the crank of a wailing music box, it was often so overwhelming that it was impossible for him to escape it. He found that, as the feelings had become more and more severe with passing months turning to years, any attempts to distract himself were futile; the whirlwind of thought was satiated only by surrendering wholey to it.

And so had begun the weighing of the poor swingset into the grassy hill, night after night.

The constant worrying and wallowing had begun to make him think more and more frequently about dying. He knew that one day death would come, and that it would not be so gentle as to approach him only in a dream, nor would it always be so far as it often felt, something quite far away, to remain naught more than a phrase: Memento Mori. Indeed, he had watched his father die - and he had seen the confusion and terror in the man's eyes when they ceased their frantic darting and had begun to dry. He read the daily reports in the drab library's papers, the one where he regretfully worked, of everyone who had died in the city since last week's printing. He had also come quite close to meeting death, himself, just under half a decade ago, when he'd grown so ill that it seemed all the blood in his body had stopped flowing entirely. In fact, he felt as though he ought not have lived through it at all, for the entire time he hadn't eaten, or drank, or slept. His body was in such gruesome stasis that he'd only finished half of what should have been his pubescent growth spurt. It was an illness that had plagued almost half of the citizens who lived here - before suddenly, one night, everyone had become well again.

During the current year, whether on the swings, in his bed, or on the swivelling chair he spun in at work, other thoughts had begun to creep into his head, and they were much less selfish: in the centre of his neighbourhood, towering white tents and wooden boxes had sprouted, and no one had seen them put up. They were behind a fence that stretched across it on every side, giving the current structures room to expand and for new mysterious containers to appear overnight. Citizens regarded it in groups regularly, painfully curious; clusters of rain-coated bodies below a damp grey sky.

Above everyone's heads, on a grand black sign stroked cleanly with white paint, towered an unfamiliar combination of letters to everyone who read it:

UIOK.

Not a soul could figure out what it meant. Mike had overheard many people, adults especially, who had tried: mumbling to one another in the supermarkets, stepping through puddles together on their way to work, or over coffee in the break room; every word spoken was an effort to decipher the mysterious Ewe-Eye-Oh-Kay.

"I fathom it might stand for "Unprecedented Interest in Our…" one of the young men at work had said, "In our…. hm."

"I predict it stands for "Unionized Impo… hm." Had said a tall, strong woman that pushed past Mike while getting off the subway.

"I'm thinking the damned letters don't mean nothing at all," said a man at the market, "I'll be damned if it's not just a ruse to distract us from something else."

Mike had his own inclinations to believe the man, as no meaningful progress seemed to have been made at the construction site. The white boxes were now reinforced with many fine, shining beams that seemed made of polished iron - a bizarre, metal exoskeleton with the meat and organs of the beasts remaining still a mystery. The citizens that lived close enough to transit to the park had begun to feel antsy and frustrated, as prior to this development, it had been a popular place to visit and relax. Elders would stroll down the paths and round the fountain (no longer spraying water into the air, but beautifully carved stone nonetheless). Parents, after their long shifts, would bring their lonely children to run and bounce through the fallen leaves and shrubs. Teens would collect and abuse their third-party substances under trees near the back, just behind the quilt-coated hobos that reclined on benches out of view of the paths.

And it was these teens who'd been alarmed one morning by the familiar screech of the PA system, inside the weathered yellow classrooms of the nearest Boarding School, weathered and defunded as it was and having submitted to its fate as a school for the poorest children -

"SQUAWK!" Came a feathery voice after the crackling PA's jingle. "ALERT! ALL 12TH YEAR TEENS ARE REQUIRED TO EXIT THEIR CLASSROOMS AND REPORT TO EXIT 'D'."

Mike looked warily at his classmates around him, his green eyes darting wildly below his shaggy black hair. They, too, seemed hesitant and frightened.

"On yours' way, then," warbled and popped the teacher's shrill voice from behind her mask. The woman didn't have a face; her head was a cube of matte black plastic with a front made of perforated foam. She looked like a cube-shaped speaker atop a slender, black-robed figure - and perhaps that's exactly what she was. Each of the teacher's had begun to don these peculiar disguises at the very beginning of the school year, and each of the students had agreed as a collective not to question it, which may or may not have done with the convenient disappearances of the youth who had inquired too persistently.

Each of the students rose from their desks and shuffled awkwardly out of the door - the first few peeked curiously around the wall before doing so. In a matter of a few short moments the halls were filled loosely with a collection of curious teens. The air was already heavy with the perspiration and breath of Mike's peers, and Mike could practically taste the hot breath of nervous whispers on all sides of him, murmured nervous assumptions being exchanged en masse.

"Mike!" Shouted a boy behind Mike, who almost felt his heart leap from his chest.

Mike turned to see him. It was an old acquaintance of his: an olive-skinned boy with rosewood-brown hair, his grey eyes wide with excitement and anticipation.

"Hey Aiden," Mike greeted him quietly.

"This must be about the new machines they've been installing!" Aiden rang, his voice squeaking with his belated hormonal adjustments. "Jasmine said she saw them bringing televisions into the school last night, through the aviary. She saw it from her bedroom window! It was the middle of the night, she said - I'm not sure why they did it then. But I'd bet any money that's what this is all about."

Mike glanced at him, cocking his eyebrow as the two walked together down the locker-lined walls.

"What's a television?" He asked.

Aiden looked shocked. "Oh, you've been poor that long?" He croaked inconsiderately, "Damn."

But he never answered Mike's question. In fact, the two didn't say another word to one another for the rest of their walk with the other students. Mike didn't mind, however, as out of everyone who had distanced themselves from him the past couple years, Aiden was one of the scrawny little prats he missed the least. After the youth turned a stone-walled corner and met the gazes of another crowd of students that had approached from the other side of the school, they turned together into an exceptionally long and wide hallway. Flickering yellow fluorescent tubes flickered eerily below the asbestos-stuffed pipes and tubes that made up the school's ceiling. At the hall's end were three pairs of wide, dark green doors, closed but not visibly locked, as they always were.

"Look!" Shouted a student just as the doors began to creak open. They were pointing to the wall at the left.

Through a large hole in the wall, the children nearest to it found themselves looking into a very dark room that appeared to be very far away, deep in an impossibly long cavern - flickering like great stars in the violet night sky, the walls of the faraway room were lined with squares of buzzing light, particles of colour that danced and shifted so quickly so as to make them seem white. From this distance they appeared as stars caught in venta-black picture frames, and Mike could barely comprehend what he might be looking at.

"TVs!" A boy cried.

Just as the exclamation met the young crowd's ears, the popping of gunfire shattered the air from far behind them.

The exit's green doors were open now, revealing dark and empty cargoes of three large trucks, their engines roaring against the sound of flying bullets. The teens pulled the bitter exhaust into their lungs as they screamed and fled, panicked, from the fire behind them.

Pushed with the pulling current of terrorized bodies into the backs of the trucks, Mike glanced behind him. Men in white suits wielding large firearms under their shoulders and over their shoulders, concealed now by the stitchwork lines of white and yellow smoke.

As the crowd of frightened 12th years stepped into the truck's maws, the truck's doors slammed loudly behind them. The screams peetered out slowly into panicked whispers and shouts - the air was already heavy and hot.

Through the crack of light that remained between the truck's doors, Mike saw the students who'd remained behind get shot to the ground. Their bodies fell through the school's doors, down from the ledge and onto the concrete lot below.

Thanks so much for reading! Please leave a review to let me know what you thought of this chapter - I know it feels quite different from the chapters it follows!