With the expected publication date only one week away... so much to do... :panics a lot: ...here's the first chapter to tide you over until you can have the whole thing.
Unequal
Chapter
One
Rue Logan’s work boots squelched in the sticky, red
mess. The puddle had grown from a few
drops trickled off the edge of a gurney to a pool the size of an area rug. Moments before, those liters of blood had
been pumping through the body of a healthy young man. At least, he’d been healthy until someone’s knife
sunk into his flesh.
Once they wheeled his corpse away, Rue stepped forward
to clean up the mess made both by his leaking life and by the incompetence of
the ones who were supposed to save him.
As she pushed her bucket through the puddle, she hated the fact that
this was the only part of the mess she was allowed do anything about.
As she stood
impotent, mop in hand, those supposed doctors and nurses attempted to staunch
the blood flow to no avail. She longed
to push them all aside. She knew how to
create a simple tourniquet. She knew how
to hold a blood vessel silent while hands worked to repair damage. Her hands itched to do the work she had
trained herself to do. Her fingers
itched to save a life.
She had tried
once. A woman in the throes of a
complicated birth. She’d pushed the
doctor aside and began the work she knew how to do.
He’d called security.
After hours in a tiny room, playing dumb and weaving a
skein of lies, they threatened to disappear her if she attempted to do any job
but her own again. If the DOE thought she should’ve been a doctor, they would’ve made her
one, they said. The DOE certainly knew
better than some janitor about who was best suited to administer treatment to
the sick and needy.
After she had been released, she learned both mother and
child died.
Jamming her mop into the bucket with more force than was
necessary, Rue began the job she was assigned to do. With each slap of the mop, the floor became a
shade lighter. As she removed liters of stained
water from the floor, the blood filled her up to overflowing. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find her
face flushed and her eyes red with someone else’s life.
“Why do you put yourself through this?” Kyle asked her
one day as he snuck her leftovers from the cafeteria. “Go home.
Eat your rations. Accept this
life as the one you were meant to live.”
But she couldn’t.
Accepting that life was as good as it ever would be horrified her more
than the idea of what would happen if she ever got caught.
Uncle Howard had hidden himself well, but they caught
him. No one knew about the hours he’d
spent tinkering in the basement, designing an entire city out of discarded bits. Until the day her father went
downstairs.
Rue never found proof her father turned Uncle Howard
in. All she’s been told was the time had
come for her poor uncle to live on his own.
After that, it would’ve been only a matter of time before the DOE caught
up with him and discovered his inequality.
Whether a week from then or a month or later, Rue never knew.
Father told her the DOE knew best and he was happy about
it. Clearly, she was Unequal enough
without her uncle’s influence. They were
saving her from… Well, no one knew for sure what the fate of
the Unequal was. Everyone just knew they
didn’t want to be disappeared.
From that point on, Rue’s father watched her for any
sign she was becoming increasingly Unequal.
He held her in front of the videoset for hours on end. When she grew too large to hold, he taped her
in place with long strips of sticky gray.
“It’s for your own good.”
Hours later, when Rue and her mother were alone, her
mother would tell her, “He’s afraid.” Mother
didn’t need to say of what. Rue
knew. She was afraid of the same
things. She was simply more afraid of becoming like her peers.
She would march off every morning to be educated,
falling into step beside children who were far more Equal than she’d ever be. Their slack jaws and dull eyes gave her
greater nightmares than reading Dr. Jekyll before bed. But nothing sent terror through her faster
than the idea she would turn into one of them.
When grades came in, her papers would bleed red—marked not where her
answers were wrong but where her answers differed from everyone else’s. It wasn’t that Rue couldn’t mimic what the
teachers wanted. She simply couldn’t force
herself flow into the mold they’d cast for her.
“Citizen Janitor?” said a stern voice beside her. “Are you ill?”
Rue was, but not for the reason the nurse thought. She was sick to death of pretending she was
the same. She was tired of hiding her
light under a bushel, as she’d once read.
“No, Citizen Nurse.”
“Then get back to work before someone calls the DOE.”
The Department of Equalization was too busy to worry
about one daydreaming janitor, but Rue couldn’t take the chance that this,
combined with her previous infractions, could amount to enough of a reason to come
under their eternal vigilance.
She slapped her mop onto the already wet floor, raining
pink droplets across the nurse’s shoes.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, but the woman was already headed off to torment
some other person—most likely a patient.
Rue watched the thin figure stride along the hall, focused on something
ahead of her and nothing at all.
After three changes of water and two replaced mop heads,
the floor was as clean as it ever would be—the white tiles tinged slightly
pink, the grout tinged faintly brown.
Eventually, the pink would turn brown, too. In Rue’s world, the absence of light wasn’t
blackness. It was a dim shade of dingy
brown.
The emergency doors opened several times throughout her shift. Another ambulance bringing more carnage.
Another of the walking wounded seeking help.
Each wrecked body shoveled into the hospital’s gullet. Each person swallowed whole. Most who came through the emergency doors were
carried out the back of the building.
Where the unfortunate dead went from there, Rue didn’t want to think
about. Those who survived the excellent
treatment they received staggered home, only to return another day with a
different malady.
While she continued to slap her mop on the grimy floor
and grind her teeth in utter impotence.
At the end of the day, after hours of cleaning while she
ignored the screams around her, Rue slunk out the employee exit and around to
the side of the hospital. She slipped
through an impossibly narrow crevice between two oddly shaped brick additions
into a courtyard, long overgrown. Some
nights, she lay on the ground and looked up at the starless sky. Tonight, she was too tired to partake in even
that small wonder.
As the residents of her world were safe at their
assigned homes, eating their assigned rations and slumbering in their assigned
housing, Rue popped open one loose basement window and squirmed back inside the
building she hated during the day. As
impotent as she was from daybreak to nightfall, she was twice as effective in
the dark. In the dark, no one saw the
janitor from dayshift. No one wondered
why she slipped into patients’ rooms, adjusting the charts with a deft
hand. No one knew how many small mercies
she accomplished in the hours before exhaustion overtook her. No one would even think about it, because the
general populace wouldn’t consider the possibility any Citizen might risk
everything the way she did. Being caught
out as Unequal was the ultimate terror.
Rue pulled on a pair of scrubs she’d stolen from the
hospital laundry, smiling for the first time all day. Tonight, she would check on a mother on the
third floor and her baby on the fifth.
Neither one had been expected to live through their first night. This night made their fourth since they were
admitted. If everything went well, they
would be released before another evening passed.
Clipping on the false identification she’d created in a
different corner of the basement, she stepped toward the elevator she didn’t
dare use during the day. No more
‘Citizen Janitor Logan’. Now, Rue was Citizen
Doctor Mason and, despite the DOE’s insistence that all men were to be treated
as Equals, she would now receive a measure of respect not afforded to a
janitor.
She rode the elevator up to the lobby floor as
always. And as always, she expected to
step forth and blend into the crowd.
Every other night, she would leave the elevator, cross to the cafeteria,
and buy a coffee. Beverage in hand, she
would take the elevator once more, but this time heading upwards like any
respected Citizen would expect.
The doors opened and she took a step forward. The chest she ran into was a surprise, but
nothing she couldn’t overcome. She
mumbled an apology and pretended to look at her watch. Nothing out of the ordinary.
“Slumming, Citizen Doctor?” said a voice she recognized. “I didn’t know patients could be found in the
basement.”
Rue kept her eyes focused on a point behind the nurse’s
head, but the woman may have already recognized her from earlier. “Pressed the wrong floor,” she said, letting
the words slip out as tersely as she heard any other doctor speak. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have rounds.”
The nurse cleared her throat. “I was only making a jest,” she said as she
stepped aside. “Run along if you think
you’re so much better.”
She was so much
better, but Rue didn’t speak another word.
She simply brushed past the offensive, little person and went on her
carefully orchestrated way. Too bad she
couldn’t manage the people around her as easily.
“Citizen Doctor Mason,” the young girl on nightshift
said as Rue entered the third floor station.
“Citizen Nurse,” she answered. Actual doctors, she had learned, never
addressed anyone beneath them by their names.
Occupation mattered. Names did
not. “The chart for Citizen Mother
Houston.”
The redhead’s pale skin grew pink. “She’s no longer with us.”
“On the floor or in the hospital?” Rue didn’t want to
think about the obvious answer.
“She passed onto the next existence this morning.”
“And her baby?”
Rue’s voice shook. She shouldn’t
be asking questions. She should just
accept the death of the woman and hope the premature infant lived long enough
without his mother to be placed into some kind of home. She shouldn’t care. But she couldn’t help
herself. They were her patients, and she
wasn’t ready to accept whatever fate chose for them.
“How would I know?” the nurse said. “We don’t have babies on this floor.”
Rue sucked in one deep breath and held it. Raising her voice to this person wouldn’t do anyone
a damn bit of good. She reminded herself
the girl was a product of her environment, of this world they all lived in. She let out her breath in a long, slow
whoosh. “I realize that, but the charts
are connected for a reason, Citizen Nurse.
The child’s welfare is directly tied to its mother’s.”
“You’ll have to call up to five. They would know more…”
She didn’t bother listening to the rest. Her feet were already dragging her toward the
elevator again. Lingering there was wasted
time when she could be up two floors in less than a minute.
“Citizen Doctor… Mason, is it?” said the pudgy woman at
the fifth floor station. “Who are you
inquiring after?”
“Citizen Baby Houston.
He was in intensive infant care.
His mother… She died this
morning…”
“He died,” the duty nurse said without a trace of regret.
“Died? How? He was improving when I left—” Except Rue, even as Citizen Doctor Mason,
wasn’t supposed to be on this floor. Not
that it mattered. She wasn’t really supposed
to be anywhere.
“I don’t know anything about that.” The nurse pulled a clipboard from the wall
and scanned down a list of the recently deceased. “Says here he was blue when the night nurse tried
to give him his morning feeding.” She
shrugged. “Nothing to be done, so we
sent him off to the body room.”
“Let me see the chart,” Rue said, snatching the offensive
thing away before the woman could react.
Everything in it was exactly as the nurse had said, with one
exception. The name on the chart wasn’t
Houston. “You must really need a time
off interval.”
The woman didn’t look up from her work, which amounted
to checking boxes on forms Rue suspected had never been read. “I don’t see how
my work schedule has any bearing—”
“The name on this chart.
It isn’t Houston. Either you are
lax in your work,” she said, slapping the chart down in front of the nurse, “or
you are unable to read. In either case,
the DOE might be interested in your performance tonight.” Rue hated using the DOE to put fear in
others, especially when she was so afraid of them herself, but she was so
disgusted with the woman’s uncaring laziness, she couldn’t help herself.
“Report me if you have to,” said the nurse. “Lord knows disappeared can’t be worse than
this godforsaken place.”
Rue’s hands clenched at her sides where the nurse
couldn’t see. Showing any emotion right then
would get her in trouble. She’d already
escaped one near miss at the elevator, she didn’t need another unfortunate
encounter. It wouldn’t do that poor baby
any good, and it wouldn’t help the dozens of other patients who needed her.
“Thank you,” she said, trying to keep the frustration
from her voice. She must not have
succeeded because the infant care nurse raised one eyebrow.
“Babies are born every day. Mothers die every day,” the woman said. “Why should these two be more important that
the others? We’re all Equal.”
Which meant none of them were important enough to care
about or mourn. Hell, she didn’t even
know if the poor mother had been allowed to hold her own child. She did know the child would never be allowed
to mourn his mother. Birth, death,
illness, health. In the eyes of the Equality Laws,
they were all the same. Equal.
Hope you enjoyed it. Won't be long now, good lord willin' and the creek don't rise.
