Carol pulls a thick binder off a shelf and thumps it down on the table as the TV flashes through its collection of tropes. “I can’t believe we’re gonna keep using this Old Gov bullshit for all our messaging,” she says, flipping through the binder’s tabbed and laminated pages. “Why can’t we just say it straight?”
Abram chuckles in spite of himself. “If we ‘said it straight’ people might actually understand us. Can’t have that.”
Carol glances back at him. “Huh?”
“It’s right there in the title.” He jabs a thumb toward the binder, which looks like a manual for some vintage industrial machinery. “Leveraging Euphemism for the Prevention of Overcomprehension.”
Carol examines the binder’s cover. “I’ll say it again—huh?”
He zips up his pack. “Forget it. I’m sure this is just a test run anyway.” He moves toward the door.
A voice cuts through the background music, methodical and grim: “Everything happens for a reason. Everything has its place.”
On the TV, a gorilla paces in a zoo enclosure.
“Man is the only creature who questions his.”
The gorilla fades to a badly lit photo of a man’s face.
Abram’s face.
Carol’s eyes widen and she looks at Abram. “Well that one was clear en—”
Abram cracks a fist into her temple. She sinks to the floor.
“What the fuck!” Nora shouts.
Abram snatches a gun out of Carol’s belt and tosses it to Nora. “You know how to use that, right?”
Nora opens her mouth to reply, then a shot of a goldfish swimming in a tiny tank fades to a photo of Nora sitting on the floor of her cell, scowling at the camera, and she goes quiet.
“What the hell is this?” Julie whispers as a goldfinch in a cage fades to a dim shot of her strapped into the torture chair.
“Suffering comes when man climbs out of his place. When he resists his nature and rejects his role.”
Sprout is staring at her unconscious nanny and whimpering. Abram hefts his pack over his shoulder and grabs his daughter’s hand. “Move,” he says to everyone in the room, and then he’s gone.
We hesitate, trying to catch up with this turn of events, but a groan from Carol breaks the shock and we move. Before I close the cabin’s door, I glance back at the TV and see my own face looking back at me. I don’t remember this photo being taken, but my memory is porous even when I haven’t been shocked in and out of consciousness. Despite the harsh light of the flash, I look convincingly alive. My skin is pale but lacks the purple tint of the Nearly Living. My eyes are thoroughly normal. Brown like mud, like shit, like ninety-six percent of the world’s population last time such things were tallied. This is what I wanted, isn’t it? To be just another man living out his lifespan in a world where children suffer and women are beaten and wild animals sit at all the desks?
“When nails escape their holes,” the TV says, “the house falls apart. Find them and bring them back.”
A single frame of the Axiom logo flickers over my face, the screen glares red, and that grating alert tone rings out in the empty shed. Then regular programming resumes.
Happy kids on tire swings.
The green glass of Freedom Tower shining over a young New York.
A writhing worm.
I FIDGET IN THE FRONT seat as we flee the camp at a painfully relaxed idle. It’s like trying to play dead while a bear gnaws on my skull. I notice a few soldiers emerging from their tents and shining flashlights into each other’s faces, but by the time the search gains any momentum we’re already to the exit. I see the glow of a television flickering inside the guard’s tent and I tense, then I see the guard himself still standing outside, halfway through his cigarette. He nods to Abram and waves us through.
“Thank God for bad habits,” Julie mumbles, watching his cloud of smoke recede in the rear window.
Once we’re out of view of the camp, Abram hits the gas. The old engine rattles and backfires and the truck roars forward, spitting clumps of dead leaves behind us. Instead of going back up the hill to the freeway, he takes a road that runs alongside it, hidden from aerial eyes by a thick ceiling of trees.
“Where are we going?” Julie says, leaning into the front seat.
“I’ll figure that out later,” Abram says. “Right now we just need some distance.”
Julie nods. “Stay on this road; it’s the only one out here that’s cleared. Good cover for about five miles and then we can jump on the freeway.”
“Abram,” Nora says to the back of his head. “That stuff on the TV . . . was that really the LOTUS Feed?”
“It was the Feed we all know and love, it just has new producers.”
“So our pictures . . . that ‘arrest warrant’ or whatever it was . . .”
Abram nods. “It just went nationwide. You’re officially outlaws.”
The rough pavement fills the truck with a steady rushing noise like the cabin of an airliner. Abram’s daughter looks very frightened, wedged between Julie and Nora, and I wonder how much of this she understands.
“How did they do it?” Julie says after a minute of grim silence.
“Do what?”
“Fed TV, Fed FM . . . people have been trying to get ahold of the Feed ever since BABL went online, what, nineteen years ago?”