The Bokor

“Fifty years ago, the plague swept across the planet, turning its people into something other. Wheezing, groaning, never-dying monsters who only know hunger and crave human flesh. Doctors and scientists could not stop the spread, and the old governments refused to believe it was real.

“But the Bokor believed. She was a brilliant scientist and tried to reason with the leaders, but they refused to listen. So, she built a sanctuary for the healthy as the plague continued to spread. She gathered her family and as many people as she could to live in her haven, which she called Paradise. 

“Now, we’re all that’s left of humanity. These walls protect us from the infected still roaming the world, cannibalizing anything that comes across their path.” 

Throughout her story, the children who were circled around Angeline had been scooting ever closer, watching her wild gestures with open mouths. 

“Miss Angie?” one kid asked.

“Yes, Emmanuel?” 

“Why didn’t anyone else believe the plague was real if everybody was getting sick?”

Angeline smiled and answered, “Because the old governments were selfish, and by acknowledging a problem, they would need to fix it. They were lazy old men who wanted power. Unlike them, the Bokor cares about us. Look around you; none of this would be possible without her. We should all be grateful that we grew up in this time of prosperity.”

The clock tower clanged. One, two, then three times. 

“Okay class, time to head home,” Angeline shooed them off the threadbare carpet and out of her house. “Remember to ask your parents or grandparents about the plague and report back to me tomorrow.”

Even with fifty years of growth, Paradise was still a morphing society. Schools had been set up in living rooms because construction materials were limited. New construction was only done when either expansions to the residential sector or upgrades to the agricultural sector were needed. 

After the last kid left, Angeline sighed and closed the creaking door. It was nice to have the house to herself once in a while. Wandering into the compact kitchen, she pulled some oil from underneath the sink to grease the door’s hinges. 

While well-tended, the house was crumbling, little by little. Her family’s home was a tall, thin structure, identical to its neighbors. It had been hastily constructed fifty years ago with materials that were not meant to last. Angeline had put in for a home reinforcement with the Construction Bureau, but with the population growth, it was likely that they would veto her petition. Thus, she spent most of her spare time oiling hinges or fixing the roof or polishing the wooden furniture.

She had just fixed the leak in the roof—which would undoubtedly start dripping again in a month—when the sun set behind the high metal walls of Paradise. Her mother needed to come home soon from her gossip group. Curfew was at sundown, but the night patrolmen were lenient; only after last light would stragglers get arrested. 

Angeline’s mother threw open the door as the pink sky faded to violet. “Angie, darling!” she called and pulled her daughter into a fierce hug. 

(Angeline had spent many-an-hour trying to get her mother to call her by her full name, not that childish nickname:

“Please don’t call me that, mama.” 

“That’s what all your students call you.” 

“Mama, they can’t pronounce ‘Angeline.’”

She had learned that it was futile.)

Her mother pulled back with a full, pearly smile. “You will never believe what Susie said today. That night patrolman who lives off of the main road—you know him, don’t you?—just broke up with his girlfriend. Isn’t that great? Maybe I should set you two up.”

“I don’t need you messing with my love life, mama,” Angeline insisted, pouring two glasses of water and mixing in the powdered cosmopolitan. “We’re almost up to the Age of Paradise unit in class. Could you come in and talk about your experience before Paradise in a few days?”

“Sweetheart.” She gave Angeline a look. “You know I love you, and I raised you, but I’ve had enough of small children for one lifetime.”

“Please? A first-hand account would mean so much. I asked them to see what their family said on the matter, but I’m not sure how many of them have relatives who were alive back then.”

Her mother wasn’t listening. “You were such a whiny child. I think I have PTSD.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, mama.”

“You were always screaming. And running around the place naked. You know, I remember when you climbed--”

“Alright, I get it.”

“--on top of the fridge and--”

“Mama.” Angeline grabbed her mother’s shoulders, knocking the glazed look out of her eyes. Picking up the glass, Angeline stirred once more and thrust it into her mother’s waiting hand. One long swallow later, her mother was plopping herself onto the worn couch. 

They finished their cosmopolitans, gossiping and complaining and making small talk. Luckily, there was no more talk of Angeline’s relationship status. The sky was an inky blackness blanketing the city of Paradise before Angeline set her empty glass on the coffee table and made her leave. She fell asleep when her head hit the pillow. 

Morning seemed to come all too quickly. She had dreamt of a forest, though not like the ones in Paradise. A forest with trees so thick she wasn’t able to fit her arms around the base. A forest with foliage so dense only sparse showers of sunlight cut through the branches. A single silver bird had chirped at her from one of the top branches, looking at her with flaming eyes. It was a pleasant dream and made her long for the world of old. The world with endless deserts and salty oceans and mountains reaching up to the sun. She wanted to see it through her own eyes, not through torn, water-logged maps. 

It’s why she was so passionate about history. Maybe if she studied it hard enough, she could fold into its pages and live a life outside the walls of Paradise. 

Angeline’s morning blurred into a checklist, as it did every morning: Put on her Standards. Make breakfast. Eat breakfast. Leave leftovers out for her mother. Tidy the house. Move the furniture. Get class materials out. Wake up her mother and kick her out before class started. 

After her mother left, still groggy, with a vague threat of asking the night patrolman over for dinner, her students trickled into her living room. They chattered amiably with each other about the new holo-novel in the library. Angeline had heard good things from Susie but hadn’t flipped through it yet. The old paper books were fine, but the kids enjoyed the moving pictures of holo-novels better. 

Angeline took roll, counting heads under her breath. She frowned as she came up one kid short of her normal fourteen.

“Who’s not here?” The class turned towards her.

“Emmanuel,” Yousef spoke. “I usually walk with him to school, but he wasn’t outside. I just thought he was already here.”

“Alright.” Angeline made a mental note to go to Emmanuel’s home to drop off the schoolwork he would miss. “Let’s get started then. We’re doing geometry this morning, who wants to come up and draw and name a shape.” 

She got a dozen raised hands and a very enthusiastic, “I do!”

Calling on a raised hand, she said, “Ria, come on up here?” Ria stood, her blonde bob swaying, and drew a pink lopsided square on the whiteboard. As she taught, colorful triangles and rectangles and stars bloomed in a rainbow of colors as she called up each child.

She flipped through a holo-novel before lunch. The ghostly projections floated through the air as she closed and reopened the holo-reader. Lunch was a rambunctious affair, which Angeline took outside. The children unpacked the food their parents provided and spilled it over themselves and whatever was closest, whether that be another child or Angeline’s furniture. She let the kids run around and play for a while after they finished eating to get the excess energy out. After which, she herded the kids back inside, much to their dismay. 

“Now,” Angeline started once everyone was sitting down again. “Who wants to share what they learned about the plague?”

She called on a hand straining in the air. “Yousef? You have the stage.”

Yousef stuttered at the beginning but got settled into telling the story of his grandfather, who was there when the plague broke out. He told of a woman who knocked on their door in the middle of the night and told the location of Paradise. How his great-grandmother got infected on the journey and turned into someone his grandfather couldn’t recognize. The first signs were fatigue and fever that turned into continuous chills. One day, she stopped shivering, her eyes turned dead, and she became hungry. His grandfather’s family left her on the side of the road and made it to Paradise the next day. 

There were a few more stories, but none were as interesting as Yousef’s. No one else had been that close to the plague. Ria had a great-great-grandfather in the United States Senate, an interesting perspective to the crisis, but she didn’t know much about the man because her family hated him. 

When the school day ended, and the class had all left, Angeline gathered up everything Emmanuel would need to get done before class tomorrow and walked towards his family’s home. 

Angeline turned onto Sixth Street and found the one labeled 1267 looking just as dreary as the rest of them. The only difference was the open door. She frowned. 

She walked up the steps and knocked on the door. “Hello?” she called. 

She heard sobbing, wet and sniffly, coming from inside and pushed the door open. A tall, dark-skinned woman being held by a man, as broad as she was tall, was the source of the noise. “Excuse me?” Angeline said. 

The woman lifted her face from the man’s chest, sniffing once, but the man spoke harshly, “Who are you?”

“I’m Angeline Dosou, Emmanuel’s teacher? He wasn’t in school today, so I—” The woman broke down crying again. 

“They didn’t even make it to school!” she wailed, thick tears rolling down her cheeks. 

“What?”

The woman sniffed again. “He didn’t come home from school today! We’ve looked everywhere!”

Emmanuel was missing, and she didn’t know what to do. Nobody went missing; at least Angeline had never heard of anyone going missing.

“Maybe he’s just skipped and stayed at the Rec Center all day?” The excuse sounded flimsy in her ears. “If not, I can go to the executive sector and see if the patrolmen can help look? In the meantime, why don’t you two stay here in case he comes home.”

She didn’t know what the protocol was for missing children. The old governments had reports to fill out and then the police would look into the matter, but this was Paradise. Nothing bad happened. 

“You would do that?” the woman said after looking up again. 

“Of course,” Angeline said in her softest tone. The one she used with inconsolable seven-year-olds. “I care about him, too.”

With a tearful thank you, Angeline left the couple to their grief. She paced down the road. Average citizens didn’t just show up in the executive sector. It was reserved for the Bureaus and the Bokor and her council. The gates of the executive sector stood imposingly in front of Angeline. Taking a deep breath, she pressed the buzzer. 

A tinny voice came from the speaker. “State your business.”

“Um, I’m Angeline Dosou. I’m the Basics teacher for sector six.”

“State your business.” the voice repeated with more force. 

“One of my students is missing, I was hoping some patrolmen would help me search.”

A pause. “What is the student’s name?”

“Emmanuel Louis.”

Another pause. Then, “Come in.” 

Angeline’s breath caught in her throat. The giant metal gates opened with a low groan. The courtyard of the executive sector was circular with cobbled stone leading a path around a garden in the center. There were patches of grass greener than any she had ever seen. Pink and purple flowers bloomed in perfectly manicured patterns throughout the garden. Identical, flat-topped building surrounded the courtyard, yet a tall spire of a building reached towards the sky in the middle of them. The gate closed behind her. 

A whistling noise and something hard hit the back of her head. As Angeline fell onto the gleaming stones, her vision went dark. 

She was somewhere soft and floaty before a headache at the base of her skull woke her. It was an incessant, dull pound, thumping to the rhythm of her heart. Angeline blinked. 

It was dark out, but pale moonlight shone above her. It smelled damp and earthy just like the park did after it rained. Leaves rustling in the breeze and the far off hoot of an owl created an eerie euphony of sound. Tall, dark shadows rose up all around her. She didn’t recognize anything. She pushed herself off the ground, dead leaves crunching under her hands. 

“Hello? Is anyone there?” The darkness didn’t answer. She screamed, “Hello! Can anyone hear me!” 

A gurgling sound came from her left. She called again; then, a low moan. She walked towards it. A breeze floated through the trees, bringing with it the stench of something rotten. The moan sounded closer this time. Angeline’s foot collided with something on the ground. It was a fox, judging from the bushy tail and tall ears, and it was dead. She squinted at the body and gasped. One leg had been ripped clean off, and its ribcage had been split open, leaving a trail of intestines and a glistening puddle of blood underneath. 

A hunched figure, silhouetted by moonlight, came into view as she looked up. Something dark dripped from its fingertips. It rambled towards her, arms outstretched, and groaned loudly. The scent of rot came over her once again. The figure was one of the infected. 

Angeline screamed and ran. The lumbering beast followed, faster than she had first thought with the agility to match. Her standards weren’t made for running; the long grey skirt ripped as it caught on a low branch, and the matching slip-ons fell off one-by-one. Her socked feet struck the ground in time with her labored breathing. Angeline was fading, but the creature behind her could go on forever. Something glinted in the trees ahead. 

Angeline didn’t know what happened. One moment, she was being chased by one of the infected, then there was a hollow thud and the sound of the creature falling into the leaves. A crossbow bolt stuck out of its back, impaling it all the way through. 

“You okay down there?” Angeline looked up. There was a man perched in the tree, the crossbow glinting silver. He dropped to the forest floor. 

“Um.” She took a step back. “Yes?”

“Don’t worry, I come in peace.” He grinned and looked her up and down, taking in her grey shirt and torn skirt. “You’re one of the banished, ain'tcha?”

“What do you mean ‘one of the banished?’”

He laughed, “Well, with that prim accent, you’re definitely from Paradise.”

Angeline’s brow furrowed. He had an accent, not her. 

“Come with me,” he said. “I’ll take you to the Outskirts and explain on the way. You’re probably confused.”

Deciding between the strange man with a crossbow or whatever else was lurking behind the trees, Angeline followed him deeper into the forest. 

“The Outskirts is our hideout from the creepers,” he explained. “There’s a lot o’ different folk: those born in the forest, like me, or the one’s we find wanderin’ the place, like you. We don’t get too many from Paradise. They keep it locked up tight over there. Those we do get found something they shouldn’t’ve.”

Angeline could feel his scrutinizing gaze on the side of her face. She stepped over a root and pretended not to notice. 

“What did you find out?”

“Nothing! I’m just a teacher.” 

“Ah, so you’re the one who teaches the chidlings that wishy-washy about how the Bokor saved humanity?”

“I guess,” she mumbled. 

He smiled, all teeth. “Then, I guess it’s my turn to teach the teacher.” He stopped walking and turned towards her. “The Bokor didn’t save humanity; she destroyed it. She wanted power, so she threatened the old governments. If she got the run o’ the world, she wouldn’t release her poison into the air. Of course, they all thought she was crazy, so they turned her away. Only when the population started gettin’ sick, did they believe what she was capable of. By that time, it was too late. The infection spread like a wildfire.

“She had already gathered her disciples and the people who had no idea what was goin’ on. Her Paradise had been built in secret and lived peacefully while the rest of the world crumbled. We gathered folk who were still healthy and brought them here. Every once in a while we find people like you stumbling through the forest and take them in. Anyways, we’re here.”

“But,” Angeline started, seeing only trees and damp forest floor. “There’s nothing here.”

“Look up.”

Angeline looked. Above her head was a village sprawling across the treetops. Buildings hugged each tree and wooden walkways connected them like a spider’s web. She could see silhouettes of people looking down at her. She felt small. 

“Welcome to the Outskirts.”