The Afterworld

The alarm blared in my ear. I rolled over, slapping it off with a grunt and forcing my legs over the side of the bed. Another dawn, I thought groggily, glancing over to the window where the faintest bit of light was just beginning to appear. Thirty minutes to get ready, thirty minutes to get downtown, and sixty five minutes until I’ve officially missed my Monday dose. 

I’d never missed a dose before, not even this deep into the dead Chicago winter. 

The words of the current mayor, Salma O'Moore, rang through my head as I pulled a paint-stained pair of sweatpants on. To be on time is to be late, to be late is to miss a dose, and to miss a dose is grounds for immediate expulsion into the Afterworld. 

The Afterworld. The world outside the walls of the city, where nobody ever had to take any doses or had to wake up at the ass-crack of dawn. Sometimes I wondered if they had it better than the rest of us, regardless of the lack of safety provided by the officials. 

But, no – they couldn’t have it better. The people of the Afterworld were unorganized, unprotected, and wild. The time-sensitive doses we took were the only thing keeping us from shifting into them. And there were no excuses, either; it didn’t matter if you were sick, or slept through your alarm, or simply forgot to head downtown – you had a window of five minutes until the dose would be deemed wasted, and then however long it took them to find you after that. 

I’d heard of people skipping their dose before. Teller, my former best friend, had done it, convinced that the doses were a slap in the face to our own free will. He skipped his dose, and was gone the same afternoon.

But back then they weren’t throwing people into the Afterworld. They were simply killing them. The expulsions came later, once the officials decided their time would be better used for funding more doses. Let the Afterworld deal with the offenders.

He’d missed the cutoff by maybe a few months. 

I flipped the closet light on, searching through various flannels and jackets for my warmest one; ironically, the Munich High School letter jacket, which I did not earn but had borrowed from Teller, who’d earned it through his brief but memorable stint as a quarterback. I’d spent most of my own high school career avoiding art at all costs in order to better fit in with the preppy rich girls. 

Good thing that was just a phase, I thought, shrugging the jacket on and glancing in the mirror at a last name that didn’t belong to me; Harrison. Close enough to my own, Henderson,  to get by without any officials questioning it. Like they would care about something like that. 

I turned the light back off, grabbed my bike key from where it hung on my too-cluttered bulletin board, and headed into the kitchen. My dad was already gone; since I’d graduated last spring, he’d taken earlier and earlier shifts at the factory, leaving me to get myself downtown on time, and then to spend the rest of my day working on whatever art project I’d thrown myself into that week. This week, it was bright, trippy patterns that I’d mixed with some glow-in-the-dark paint I’d found in the garage. To say I was eager to get this dose over with and return back home was an understatement. 

****

By the time I made it downtown, it was sprinkling slightly, the shivering metal of the nearby skyscrapers looking like ice beneath the low-hanging clouds. I don’t suppose they could shift these doses to a noon schedule, I thought with a yawn, locking up my bike on a nearby parking meter. I really lucked out getting the dawn ones. 

“You made it!” Jude caught my attention at the foot of the building’s staircase. We’d met in art class our junior year, and he was the only one I’d really bothered to keep in contact with post-graduation. 

I smirked at him. “Have I ever not made it?” 

“First time for everything,” he said with a shrug. We left it at that as we made our way into the building, quickly being corralled into the familiar single-file lines. 

“All metal out of your pockets, including keys and cell phones. All bags on the table. They’ll be returned to you post-injection,” a bored-looking security officer shouted above the commotion of the line. 

I tossed everything into my bag, setting it beside Jude’s before heading through the metal detector. They’d banned anyone from bringing bags in a few decades back, when some nutcase had tried to make off with about a dozen injection vials. What the hell did he expect to do with those – sell them? We all received these injections for free, anyway. 

Before I could make it through the metal detector, the one a few lanes over went off, blaring loudly against the walls of the too-quiet room. A silver flash, a gunshot, the shrill scream of someone ahead of us in line, and the scene descended into chaos; people ran to the other side of the room, and I felt someone elbow me in the side as they rushed past me. Jude grabbed my hand and pulled me back as he raced in the other direction. I barely registered the shouts from the security guards, the screams of panicked citizens, or Jude’s hand in mine as he pulled me behind a nearby pillar. 

In the parted crowd, beneath a pile of security guards, was the man who’d set off the metal detector. He had long, uncombed hair, greasy strands sticking to his forehead as he thrashed around wildly beneath them. Bits of spittle flew from his mouth as he shouted desperately. 

“Chicago is lying to you! The world is lying to you! The injections are making you sick – they’re killing us! We’d be better off in the Afterworld to fend for –” but the man’s sentence was cut off by a security guard reaching for the silver handgun.

One, two, three shots. Then a disturbed, too-quiet silence fell upon the people who remained in the corridor. 

“Get back in line,” the security guard shouted, his fingers still curled around the trigger. 

****

“Are you okay? You’re shaking,” Jude said, giving my hand a squeeze. He’d refused to let go of it ever since we’d made it through the metal detectors, past the blood and body of the man who’d all but defiled Chicago's carefully laid out system. 

Am I okay? How can I be okay? “I’m fine,” I lied, focusing instead on the nurse a few people ahead of us. I felt outside of my body, as if I was watching the room from far above. 

Five more minutes, and we can get out of here, some deep part of me thought. Of course, they wouldn’t, couldn’t, let us skip this dose – the mayor had told us a million times exactly what would happen if we failed to take one. Expulsion risk aside, skipping a dose would lead to immense pain, brain damage, and the unimaginable shift into the wild people of the Afterworld. And that wasn’t a risk any of us were willing to take, save for maybe Teller Harrison, if he even understood what he was doing by skipping a dose. 

But, as the people ahead of us in line received their doses, leaving me to step up to the nurse, I couldn’t stop repeating the man with the gun’s final words, stomach churning with nausea. The world is lying to you. We’d be better off in the Afterworld to fend for…to fend for what, exactly? Ourselves? Or…something else? 

“Shit,” I cursed, feeling the sting of alcohol as the nurse pressed the syringe into my upper arm. She narrowed her eyes at me. 

“As if you haven’t had one every day of your life,” she snapped crossly. “Really, you think you’d be used to it by now.” She slapped a bandage on me, motioning for Jude to step forward. “Next in line! Come on, I don’t have all day.” 

****

When I made it back home, it was pouring outside. I didn’t tell my father what Jude and I had witnessed downtown. In fact, I’d be happier still if I never had to consider it again, but even as I lay back in bed, listening to thunder pound against the house and feeling the painful pulse of my injection site, I found my brain going back to the man with the gun’s words. Teller used to say something similar, I remembered, back at the beginning of high school, around the same time we’d stopped being friends. 

****

“You know that shit is making us sick, right?” 

I paused mid-bite, staring at him. “What are you talking about?” I didn’t dare raise my voice above a whisper, unsure of who might overhear us. At best, we’d get a phone call home for publicly questioning the doses. At best. 

Teller rolled his eyes dramatically. “Why are you so afraid of them? Those doses are total bullshit,” he said seriously. “Do you even remember what they’re for?” 

I swallowed hard, the bite of my sandwich threatening to choke me. “...They’re to keep us safe, Tel,” I said. I didn’t like feeling like he was interrogating me. 

“Yeah, keep us safe from what, exactly? They still leave it up to us if we want to get the flu shots every season,” Teller pointed out. 

I glanced around nervously. Everyone else in the courtyard was busy eating, or gossiping, or making out. Nobody was paying attention to us. “What are you getting at?” 

“I’m saying that we should be able to make this decision for ourselves, too,” he said pointedly. 

“But we can trust the officials. We’ve always trusted the officials,” I said, hating how small my voice sounded, as if Teller’s words held some semblance of truth in them. 

He shook his head at that, looking disappointed. “I think you should really start reading between the lines, Hal.” 

****

I rolled over in bed, fighting off all thoughts of Teller. He hadn’t said much else to me in his last few months in Chicago – in fact, I’d made an extreme effort to avoid him at all costs, considering how anxious his words had made me. I’d heard from a few other girls in our grade that he’d been caught protesting the doses, and not long after that he’d been officially executed. 

Dead. Gone. All for a bit of questioning. My arm seemed to pulse, to nearly burn, at the idea that I, too, could have wound up where he did. 

What good is staying in Chicago if all we do is question the officials who make it safe for us? 

Nobody, not even Jude, had called me Hal since Teller had died. 

****

“Another day, another dose,” Jude greeted me the next morning at our usual spot in front of the staircase. I couldn’t bring myself to smile at his feigned thrill at being up this early. He caught on immediately. “What’s up?” 

I glanced around and, finding the staircase empty, motioned him a step closer. “Don’t you think it’s weird that they’re making us come to the same place as yesterday?” 

He looked confused. “Why would it be weird? They don’t have any other buildings big enough,” he pointed out. 

I sighed. “You don’t think it’s weird that they still want to do it here after that guy?” 

“I think that guy was a total nutcase,” he said pointedly, holding the door open for me.  

Nutcase or not, did the guard have to shoot him for it? I thought, gritting my teeth against a sudden surge of anger. Wouldn’t it have been kinder to throw him out in the Afterworld? But then, no, it probably was kinder to just kill him. Who knew the horrors that lay out there, beyond the safety of Chicago? Nothing good. 

But something better than here? 

The thought frightened me – but then, so did the thought of this, of waking up every morning at dawn to take an injection that did nothing more than “keep us safe”, no questions asked. Questions asked, and you died. Questions asked, and you were banished without a second thought into the unknown. 

Did they kill him to keep him silent? Why would his words have scared them if they weren’t true…?

Single file lines. Metal detectors. The sterile swipe of alcohol, and the pinch of a needle. Ten minutes later, and we were out on the curb. 

“I don’t think you should think about that guy anymore,” Jude told me gently. “I can’t imagine it’s good for you.” 

Would have been better still if I didn’t have to see his brains blown out across the capitol building’s floor. 

****

More lines. More metal detectors. More doses. 

More moments of the man with the gun’s words echoing in my brain.

More thoughts of Teller, who I hadn’t thought of in years, coming to me at all hours of the day. Wondering if he felt like it was worth it to question the officials, or if he regretted it when he realized they were going to kill him. 

More moments where, for the first time ever, it felt like the doses were hurting me more than helping me. Stinging more than they should have, the injection site aching for days afterward. Bruises, so deep and aching that they may as well have started in my bones, covered my upper arm. I didn’t let my father see them. 

More thoughts of the Afterworld. 

****

“Do you ever feel like people are lying to you?” 

My dad glanced up from his breakfast, turning the TV down before answering. I’d made sure to wake up extra early to catch him before he left for work. “What people, Haley?” he asked, and I just barely caught a look of fear in his eyes before he blinked it away. 

“My old friends at school,” I explained, putting on my best “teenage-girl-with-teenage-girl-problems” face. “They said that they didn’t know this party was happening until it was already halfway over, and that’s why they didn’t ask if I wanted to join them. But I feel like they just didn’t invite me because they didn’t want me there. What would you do?” 

My father chewed his lip, considering. The familiar newscast intro music sung in the background. “If I felt like people were lying to me,” he said slowly, “I would consider what my values were, and stick to them. No matter what the cost.” 

He didn’t immediately turn the TV volume back up, and I thought, for a moment, that he understood what I was truly asking him. 

But what are my values? 

****

“Have you heard anything new about the other cities?” I asked Jude later that same morning. We were holed up in my bedroom, each working on our own paintings, too awake to bother going back to sleep.

He glanced up, a smear of red paint on his cheek. “Not really,” he said after a moment. “Though I expect they’re doing the same thing we are. A whole lot of nothing,” he finished, his eyes going back to his canvas. 

There were ten of them, I knew, falling between Boston at the furthest east point of the map, and Los Angeles in the west, with thousands and thousands of unmanned Afterworld between. “Wonder what it would be like to go to one of them,” I said, trying to sound casual, even though the now-familiar heat of anger was blooming in my stomach. Do I value staying here, feeling how I feel?

He shook his head. “Never gonna happen. We’re stuck in Chicago ‘til the day we die.” 

Maybe. Maybe not. But I didn’t ask him any more questions. 

****

More lines. More metal detectors. More doses. 

On a Tuesday morning, I offered my left arm instead of my right. “I bumped my shoulder on the counter,” I explained to the nurse. “Huge bruise. Really stupid of me.” 

She shook her head, motioning for my other arm. “Right arms only,” she told me. “Procedure. You understand.” 

I only hesitated a moment before rolling up my sleeve. She stared at the bruise I’d described, all four inches of purple and yellow. “Your boyfriend hitting you, girl?” she asked quietly, shooting a venomous glance to Jude. 

“No,” I insisted. “It was the counter.” I didn’t want to tell her it was a sudden reaction from the needle. I’d never seen anyone else with a bruise. 

She eyed me up and down. Alcohol, and the sting of the injection right in the center of the bruise. 

****

I had a dream about the Afterworld that night. 

It was nothing like they had told us; it was bright, filled with sunshine and meadows, and the cold, clean knowledge of knowing that we could do as we wished, say as we wished, no longer stuck beneath the eyes of the officials. 

Does a world like that exist? Somewhere where we don’t have to be afraid all the time? 

Maybe. 

Maybe you have to find it for yourself. 

****

The alarm blared in my ear. Another dawn. Thirty minutes to get ready, thirty minutes to get to the capitol, and sixty five minutes until I’ve officially missed my Friday dose. I let the alarm continue ringing, until the sound threatened to drill itself into the memory folds of my brain. I’d been waking up angry for weeks now; angry at the alarm, at Chicago, at the city officials who had promised to protect us. 

My alarm blared for a few minutes longer. 

Then, I pressed the snooze button. I’d already made my decision. 

Let them come for me.