False Reclamation

TW: Racism, Transphobia, Ableism, Child Abuse, Blood and Gore

Screams reverberate throughout the convenience store, repurposed as a trading market, as my mind replays the gunshot over and over.

I clench a matte black handgun aligned with careful precision at the blown-apart skull of a boy with tawny skin who looks my age - fourteen - give or take a year. Crimson blood and pinkish-gray chunks of brain matter ooze out of a quarter-sized borehole exposing checkered tiles through the other end. The beige walls of the bathroom are coated unevenly with dark red dye. Tiny pieces of pale cranium are scattered across the floor. It looks like an artist spiraled into a fit of rage over her ineptitude and flung her paint bucket all over the stalls and urinals. I feel sick to my stomach and start to shake. I will the bile on its way up my esophagus back down to where it came from as I hear footsteps fade in behind me and feel pressure on my left shoulder.

“Well done, lad. That Other’ll be good for ya lesson tomorrow.”

Is this really something to celebrate? It has to be. We’re saving the world, right? I remind myself that kids who don’t obey their elders don’t grow up to become adults.

I turn to see Mr. Morgan, a bald, burly man with yellow teeth and cigarettes and moonshine on his breath, lumbering over me holding a sawed-off shotgun pointed lackadaisically at my feet. Two men named Pinker, a skinny young blonde man with a mustache, and Vinnie, a greying man with a wrinkly tense face, follow. Vinnie carries a rusty machete and proceeds to sever the head from the boy’s body with two wacks and a sawing motion. Blood sprays out of his neck onto my shoes. I can feel the bile trying to come up a second time. Pinker brandishes a small silver pre-invasion camera. He starts flashing pictures. Mr. Morgan slaps him.

“Ow!” Pinker raises his hand to his cheek.

“Oy! Not yet, ya bloke!”

“Sorry, Mr. Morgan!”

“It’s okay. I’ll teach yer sorry ass a lesson in my office tonight. Just me an’ you. Now, give the lad ‘ere a chance to collect the merchandise before ya start documentin’.” Mr. Morgan turns to me and gestures to the head. “Go on, lad.”

“S-sir? I don’t think-” I mumble. Mr. Morgan scowls and interrupts me.

“Do I need to have my way with ya tonight, too? Come on, pick it up! No one cares what ya think. Now, ya done this before, ya know what to do. No dilly-dallying.”

I take a deep breath and bend down to grab a bundle of hair. His lifeless eyes are staring at me. I stand up and bring the boy’s head next to my face as I fake a grin. Pinker snaps pictures.

They throw me a party that evening at the camp square. I forgot that it’s my birthday. One of the littluns, Nate, swings his arms up and down and snarls as he pretends to chase me like he’s a Flesh Ripper. I want to tell him to fuck off, but these kids look up to me. My best friend and bunkmate, Eli, a black-haired boy a year my elder, drinks moonshine at a table by himself. I try to sit by him, but he looks up at me with a stoic expression and sets his drink down as he stands up and walks into the woods. 

“Eli?”

He doesn’t answer. I almost yell out his name when I realize how weird that would look to everyone present at the party. I turn and see Vinnie sitting next to an elder who has his face smashed into a picnic table. I’m sure he’s dead.

“What did we do with the prisoners from the gas station?”

Vinnie leans back in his chair, stuffs his hands in his pockets, and responds like he’s paraphrasing from a script, “Same shit with any sympathizers. They can become one of us an’ save humanity from Others, or, if they resist, we kill em’. Win-win for the Fatherland. The less people pr’tectin’ those freaks, the better. They refused to convert, so you’ll have some more visual aids for your lesson tomorrow.” He cackles to himself.

“What about the boy’s body? We buried him, right?” I know the answer but, for some reason, I want to hear different.

Vinnie sits up. He seems offended by the question, as if it insulted his intelligence. “Listen here, JJ. You did the right thing by riddin’ this Earth of that scum. Don’t be goin’ off on this Humanitarian bullshit cryin’ ‘bout how we should treat people equal. Of course we ain’t gonna bury the fucker. We’ll dump the body off in The Outskirts and give the Flesh Rippers a treat.” He cackles again. I walk away to find Eli.

The moon’s reflection in the nearby lake is a large, oblong silver object glimmering bright enough to light the bank where Eli is sitting. I click off my flashlight and sit beside him.

“Aren’t you cold?”

Eli looks straight ahead. “Not as cold as you.”

I laugh, “I’m just doing what we’re supposed to. Vinnie says we’re going to save humanity.”

Eli turns to me and tightens his face, “You really think killing people who look different than us is saving the world? Use your fucking brain, Julian. You’re being brainwashed. All they want is to groom kids like you and me.”

I widen my eyes and scoot an inch away from Eli, “What are you talking about? I think you’re wrong. I think we’re helping make the world a better place. Even Kage agrees with me. Y’know, ‘White is right. Survival of the fittest-’”

Eli quickly stands up and interrupts me, “My God, do you hear yourself? I honestly don’t think I can hang out with you- fuck, man. You should head back to the party. I’m going to bed. I don’t feel too good. See you in the morning.”

“Wait.”

“Julian. I don’t want to talk about this.”

“It’s not that. I just… sometimes I’m confused, you know? What if you’re right, and this is all one big stupid lie? I mean, are we really any better than Raiders? We steal stuff from people and kill them if we don’t like them. How is that any different? There’s no real difference, you know? We’re taught to hate people, and I’m starting to wonder if hating people is how we actually fix things. I mean, how did shooting up a settlement full of invalids help anything? How-”

He looks at me with the tired face of someone who knows these questions all too well and walks off toward the scout cabins.

I head back to the party and watch my elders, along with most of

the littluns, getting pissfaced drunk. I join them and wake up the following morning a few dozen yards from the main gravel road of the camp. The sun is still playing peekaboo over the horizon. I clamber on over to my cabin. Eli sits with Vern at the dining table, eating spam and tomatoes. Eli asks, “Long night?”

I wave at them and swing open the door to my room and fall into bed.

“Julian? You have your presentation with the littluns today, remember?”

I groan without lifting my face from the pillow. “The fuck do you mean- oh, shit.” I lay there for a moment and then sit up. Eli is standing at the door.

“I’ll get you some coffee.” He walks away, letting the door shut on its own.

I put on my nice clothes and head into the kitchen to sit beside Eli. “Do you remember anything from last night?” Vern is in his room.

Eli snorts, “That bad, huh? Well, they threw you a party-”

“No, I mean… do you remember our conversation at the lake?”

Eli drops his smile and promptly stands up from the table. He takes his empty cup of coffee and settles it into a translucent plastic bin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I just remembered I have an early class. See ya.” He grabs a green hoodie from our room and walks out the door. He must be mad at me because we have always had the same classes, and there are no morning classes for bigguns, only littluns, and he wasn’t the Scout Captain who taught early classes, I was. He also hates the color green.

I walk onto the stage of the makeshift auditorium and am met with asynchronous applause from a sea of littluns sitting in plastic chairs. Atop two white picnic tables lay sheets draped over spherical objects. I knew what was hiding under them. Behind the tables was a wheelchair with a pair of crutches leaning against it. I looked back at the sea of Littluns. Most of these kids weren’t even eight, and the oldest was ten. I saw one boy smiling at me, missing two teeth, and my heart dropped. Eli’s words from the night before reverberated in my mind, “All they want is to groom kids like you and me.” The class mentor, Kage, a boy only three years my elder, walks up to me.

“You’re late. Mr. Morgan will hear about this.”

“Do you think this is a good idea? Percival is only 6-”

“I’m sorry, do I need to let Mr. Morgan know you’re becoming soft like a sympathizer?”

I shake my head, trying not to lose my composure in front of the Littluns. “That won’t be necessary, sir. My allegiance is to the redevelopment efforts. Long live his superior greatness Johnson, unser Leuchtfeuer, unser Führer, der Verteidiger.” I give Kage a seig heil to look the part.

“Good. Now shut up and get this over with so I don’t have to be around these little shits any longer than I have to.” Kage goes and sits at a wooden desk positioned below the stage.

I nod and step toward the center of the stage. Why am I sweating so much?

“Good morning, littluns.”

A chorus of high-pitched voices squeak a drawn-out “Good morning, Scout Captain Morgan the second.” in various tones.

I hate being called that, but one of the lessons of the wasteland is that you rarely get your way. I was taken from my parents when I was very young, so young I can’t remember. Orphans are given their Reclamation Mentor’s last name. I’m surprised to see a boy in a green hoodie, Eli, staring at me from the back of the auditorium with his arms crossed.

I hesitate for a few seconds and look at the table for too long, according to Kage’s unsatisfied glance. I take a deep breath and walk toward it. Standing next to it, I begin, “The reclamation mission has three core values. Can anyone tell me what they are? You must recite it in the pure tongue for full credit.” A 9-year-old named Tristan in the front row raises his hand. I point to him.

“Säubere die Erde, stelle Gerechtigkeit wieder her, befreie das Vaterland.”

“Correct. Cleanse the Earth, restore justice, liberate the Fatherland. And we follow those laws as the Holy Book of our Lord and Savior Nole Ksum says in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever…” I pause for a moment and begin to reconsider everything. I realize that the only reason I’m doing any of this is to belong somewhere. “…is Aryan and pledges allegiance to the redevelopment efforts shall not perish but have eternal life.”

A 7-year-old named Dakota stands up and yells, “That’s not what it says! The doomsdayers showed me!” Kage stands up and hits a button on his desk. Sirens blare, summoning two wiry mechanized machines to drop from the ceiling on either side of the auditorium. A spotlight shines on Dakota. The machines maneuver to the boy and stop in front of him. “I didn’t mean it!” They vaporize him with an invisible laser and float back up to the ceiling. The sirens stop. Everyone claps. Dakota no longer exists, and any mention of his name is now illegal, punishable by the same fate.

“As Reclaimer Scouts, our role is to aid our elders in upholding those values. It is important that we tell an adult if we see anybody using these.” I gesture to the wheelchair and the crutches. I gulp and move to the table. “We also want to report any impure skin or gender nonconformity-” I lift the sheet from the table to my right, unveiling three heads of non-white people, one of which is the boy I killed yesterday. Next to his head is a brown head with masculine features and loop earrings. The auditorium is a mix of gasps and cheers. This isn’t right; this can’t be right. “On the other hand, if a person has pure skin and isn’t hiding any Others,“ I remove the sheet from the table to my right, exposing the head of a white prisoner, “then they are okay. Although these people were pure skinned and conformists, they were hiding Others, so we gave them the chance to fix the error of their ways or die. They chose death.”

I look to the back of the auditorium and see that Eli is gone. 

I can’t do this anymore. I look out over the sea of faces and start yelling what I should have a long time ago, “It’s all a lie! People aren’t your enemy just because they look different than us!” Sirens blare again. The machines drop from the ceiling again, and a spotlight shines on me. The machines start moving toward the stage as I move backwards. “The Others are no different than us!” Kage wraps his arms around my neck but I duck and elbow his nose to stagger him. I kick him in the groin. He goes to the ground, groping his testicles in pain as I continue shouting to the kids, “You don’t have to listen to them!” The machines hop up on to the stage as I prepare to be vaporized.

Thunder cracks inside the auditorium as one of the robots falls with electrical currents jetting out of its back. The upright machine spins toward the audience as the kids scatter from the room. I see Eli standing in the back row in the same place, but he is now aiming a scoped rifle at the remaining robot. It falls backward as Elis shoots at it. It gets up again and jumps off the stage, racing down the aisle toward Eli. He fires again but misses. Eli backs away as the robot closes in. He drops the rifle and unholsters his handgun. He fires, and the robot stops moving. The red light where it’s face would be goes out.

Eli raises a radio to his face from his belt and says, “Eli to fire team, green light.” He lowers the radio and looks at me. “Julian, follow me if you want to live.” He opens the double doors out of the auditorium to the camp square. The ear-piercing shrieks of Flesh Rippers drown the air, followed by screaming and then shouting and then shooting. I run with Eli past a dozen men shooting at a Flesh Ripper as it claws a dead man’s abdomen open, the bullets ricocheting off of its exoskeleton.

Eli guides me through the forest and then along a curvy road that leads into an old town that Scouts are forbidden to access. Go figure that the fables of Brutes occupying these streets are lies. The only creatures down here are sheepish dogs chasing rats. We walk through the entrance of an ancient library and are greeted by a hunched-over old lady holding an Uzi sideways. She relaxes upon seeing Eli and asks, “That him?”

Eli nods.

“They’re waiting for you.”

The dusty lady pulls a lever that slides a bookshelf away from the wall, exposing a hidden room. Eli and I walk down the narrow steps, making 90-degree turns every seventh step until a flood of light emits at the bottom of the dim staircase. I step into the room. I’m shocked to see a dozen kids, Other and white, although I now understand that they are all human, wearing rags and worn garments. They’re preoccupied until Eli grunts, signaling his presence, and they all look at us.

A yellow boy wearing goggles whispers to a brown boy on crutches, “That’s gotta be him.”

A black woman with long braids slightly older than both me and Eli looks up from a clipboard and steps toward me. “Welcome home, Julian. Welcome to the Humanitarians.”