After the harrowing bus rides, which amounted to three in total, all of them seeming to take the arranging of a small military campaign and making her feel frustratingly slow and vulnerable, along with the long walks in between, Julia made it back home again early in the morning, before the sun had even risen.
She had expected people to be there waiting for her when she returned, to burst out of the house threatening her and then to take her away, but instead her house was comfortingly familiar, even with the front door ajar and the garage left open. The neighbourhood as a whole was eerily quiet. Inside the house, surprisingly, nothing was missing or destroyed or altered in any way. The Big Brother poster watched Julia unwelcomingly as she entered. It was indeed a shock to find no one there at all. Julia thought of the strange day and night she'd been through, and wondered again if she exaggerated the whole thing and caused herself all that suffering. It had easily been the longest day of her entire life.
In any case, Julia immediately went to close the garage and push her couch against the front door as a barricade, just in case. To hell with the 'hidden' camera. She ate whatever food she could find in her kitchen and then changed her clothes, which had large splotches of hairdye on them, into softer clothes that she could sleep in. She washed her frightfully dyed face until it was almost clean, stuck her head under the tap to get rid of the excess dye and the rust from the roof of that old building, dried herself off and went straight to bed.
Worn down to her very edges with tiredness, and exhausted from the whole episode, she went to sleep straight away.
A few hours passed peacefully enough and then Julia regretfully woke up completely of her own accord at some time towards midday, because, she supposed from the loud sounds of birds in the front yard. Still very tired, she lay in bed, trying to relax and hoping that her easeful sleep would come back again. She was just starting to drift off, when, instead of going back to sleep, she heard a soft, concerning sound from the next room like something slowly sliding across the carpet; concentrating as hard as she could, she tried to decide what that it was.
Was it the movement of the couch-barricade in the living room? Was there someone there, carefully sliding the door open?
The noise went on for a few more moments and then stopped, a little bit too abruptly. With her usual vigilance, and keeping the events of her recent history firmly in mind, Julia didn't wait for further evidence and immediately jumped to the worst conclusion. In a familiar state of panic, she climbed silently out of bed, put on some shoes, went to her bedroom window and promptly jumped out of it. The drop from the window wasn't high, but the backyard was a little boxed in area, and there was no way out apart from over the fence, since, of course, her neighbour's flats were both joined to hers at the sides, and she had no back door that she could subtly sneak through, apart from the sliding windows of her living room. She did consider using them to burst in on the intruders, brandishing her garden rake out of sheer fury, but in the end Julia decided better of it. Suppose they were armed?
Julia had landed right in the middle of a small flower garden, crushing some of her lilies. From here, she edged her way along the back wall of her house, past her living room windows, which thankfully had the curtains drawn, and then stopped under the kitchen window where she thought she could listen to hear if there was someone inside. The window was open a little bit and she thought she could hear movement, but she couldn't be sure.
A few moments passed before her suspicions were confirmed. She heard someone who sounded male whisper, "I can't find her.", another person responding: "Well, cover the house and look harder. An informant told us that she was heading home by bus, and then surveillance saw her in this room about five hours ago."
Julia felt her heart pound with all her worries ignited again. She wondered who the informant was, and hoped it hadn't been the prole man. She'd liked him, he'd been so helpful- and she'd given him her bike!
"Our informant was a blonde prole man with a beard." Whispered the voice as if in an after thought.
Ah, so there really was no escape! No one to trust.
Julia sank into lonely dejection, there, squatted pathetically under her kitchen window. Such a destined wretch as her, washed headlong from the board, of friends, of hope, of all bereft, she considered going back inside and just doing what these sinister researchers asked her to. Then she thought of the text she'd gotten more than twenty-four hours ago, the one that had been sent as a warning before any of this happened. With the thought that at least somewhere in the world, Julia had one friend - and also the more practical thought that the prophetic text wouldn't have been sent for no reason if these people were harmless - she got up, ran to the fence, and with much effort, managed to scramble over it and into her neighbour's backyard.
Luckily there was no one there to yell at Julia, to ask her what the heck she was doing there in their backyard. The yard was almost identical to Julia's, except that they had a garden chair where Julia had her lilies, and a lemon tree in the centre, which concealed Julia a little bit from the view of the tinted sliding windows of the house. Thinking that she needed to get as far away from those intruders as she could, Julia pushed on and jumped over another fence.
The same again. There were no bushes to hide in and no way out, apart from through a stranger's house, so Julia pushed on and jumped a few more fences, getting progressively better at it as she went. She worked up a kind of rhythm. None of her neighbours were there, although through the window of the third house, she thought she saw a confused looking young face watching her. She also passed a dog that was so old and lazy it didn't move, but just eyed her with boredom as she ran past and launched herself at another fence. She finally reached one fence, which had, on the other side, a crosshatched metal sheet, covered in grape vines and taller than the top of the fence itself, so that it loomed over the others, and bent from the weight of the vines. Just looking at it, Julia could tell that it would be a very difficult one to get over. She climbed up, gripping the wooden planks that supported the sheet of the fence. She made it to the top, but the metal and the vines proved a particular problem as they caught at her pants leg as she climbed over. She frantically managed to free herself, but heard a shout from the distance, and, from the height that she was at, awkwardly visible at what was probably the top of the tallest fence in the neighbourhood, perched up there precariously, like some kind of bizarre bird or cat, she looked over and saw her own backyard with a number of intruders standing in it and pointing over at her. Then they started running.
In a moment of panic, Julia fell off the fence and hit her head on the ground with a heavy thud.
Like the fence had been, the backyard she was in was much different to the others. Along with being larger, with a lush garden, rather than just lawn and a few meager plants, there was a sizable, fancy veranda, on which a pretty woman in a long sundress was reclining on a deckchair, and started up in alarm on seeing Julia, a stranger in her property, plummet from the fence. The back of the house looked different as well- more ornamented than Julia's plain white flat.
Julia didn't stop to wonder why this was, though. Nor did she pay attention to the concerned woman who was coming over from her expansive veranda to see if she was alright. Julia was too concerned with the fact that, somehow, in the fall from the fence, she had become a man!