Chapter 12

I always forget about this, but I thought of it tonight, so here's another chapter! Sorry it's so slow coming. Here's Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 once again if you need to catch up. Much love.
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They took her back into the blinding light and into a white room. The walls reflected the bright light frighteningly well, sending daggers of perception into her squinting eyes. There were no windows. The only thing even remotely distinct about the room was a bed in the left corner directly in front of her. The guards released her and she went to sit down on it, grasping its metal railing for balance. The mattress was incredibly thin, and only one threadbare sheet clung to it like some sort of overgrown cobweb. So much for treating your prisoners well, she thought.
As if reading her mind, one of the guards took off his cap and held it to his heart, revealing blue eyes that were kinder than she had expected. “If you want another blanket, or anything, ma’am, you just let us know.” Puzzled, she nodded. He and his friend gave her weak smiles as they left the room, closing the door behind them.
The walls, floor, and ceiling were all padded with some sort of soft material. Patrick had said the place had been an airport; she would have just as easily believed it was an insane asylum. Of course, she had never seen an insane asylum—they had been done away with when she was only three years old. Coltrane Thornton had told her what they were like…
The unpleasant, unsettling thought entered her head. Who had killed Coltrane Thornton? Could it have been a man in this very building? She reflected on the boy who had once been her neighbor, the round-faced boy with tousled black hair and excited eyes. He had always loved life, even if the life he lived was mostly made up. He had been a trickster, a liar, a joker… but he didn’t deserve to die. Nana hadn’t deserved to die. Mom and Baylor hadn’t deserved to die. Nobody should have died in this ridiculous war. She imagined Coltrane lying on some battlefield, bleeding his life out onto the dirt beneath his body…
She pulled her knees up from the side of the bed and hugged them to her chest, tried to squeeze out the emotional nausea that had filled the pit of her stomach. She was both drained of happiness and filled with despair and contempt, both empty and full at the same time. She unfolded herself and laid her head on the thin pillow.
She found it horribly ironic that the only person in the world she wanted to talk to could very well have been Coltrane’s killer. She wondered if Patrick was okay, hoping she hadn’t gotten him into any trouble. He’d been through enough trouble for her already.
As she hugged her arms around herself, she felt her own cold hand on the bare skin of her shoulder. The entire sleeve of her shirt had ripped off completely by this time. Hadn’t the Sergeant mentioned something about a change of clothes? She got up slowly, crouching on her knees to peer under the bed. She felt like she was being punched in the gut as she took the Memorist uniform in her hands. What kind of sick joke was this, making a prisoner of war wear the enemy uniform? She wadded up the clothes and threw them angrily in a corner. Just as well, she thought. She was probably under surveillance anyway. She stood again and kicked the rubbery wall in frustration—the action almost caused her to lose her balance. She screamed a very exasperated scream, but she was sure it hadn’t reached anyone’s ears. She had gone from sadness to anger over the span of a few seconds. Maybe the walls were rubber because the POWs eventually went insane…
They might as well have killed her. At this point in Piper Conrad’s life, nothing, nothing at all, was worse than being completely alone.
She wasn’t sure what time it was, but she assumed it was time to go to sleep when the lights clicked off, plunging her from the brightness of the afternoon into midnight in an instant. For a moment she was afraid she had gone blind; she couldn’t even see her hand in front of her face.
“Lincoln,” she said aloud. Without explanation the cat reentered her mind. He hadn’t even come into the base with them, had he? The poor thing was probably out in the cold all alone…
“Really, Piper? You’re in a Backwinder prison and you’re worried about a stupid cat?” She was talking to herself. Wasn’t that the first sign of madness? She’d only been in here a few hours, and she was already losing her mind.
She blinked, unable to differentiate the black of her closed eyes from the black of the room. She felt as though lead weights were tied to her eyelashes, weighing her lids down. Slowly but surely, sleep won the battle over confusion and emotion.
Piper was surrounded by fire. It was everywhere around her, above and beneath, as though she had been placed in a room made of it. She could see through the flames to the other side, where she heard her cat meowing mournfully at her. She could hear Mom screaming, but she couldn’t see her. Baylor, however, was straight in front of her, the firelight dancing across his face. Coltrane Thornton was holding his hand.
“Sissy!” he said, and both of them began running through the fire toward her. She tried to tell them no, she was screaming her lungs out at them, but they couldn’t hear her…
And Patrick was laughing, his brown eyes twisted and demented in the flame.
Coltrane and Baylor broke through the flames to her side, but they were only eerie skeletons, their flesh eaten alive by the fire.
Then the lights blared on, and she was safe in the white room again, alone with her sorrows and fears.
Just as her eyes sprung open, the door did as well. She jumped in shock as one of the guards, the one who had taken off his hat, walked in carrying a tray. On it was a bowl of fruit and a slightly burnt piece of toast. She couldn’t help thinking that this wasn’t too bad a deal: she had more of a bed than she’d had on the run with Patrick, and from the looks of it she was eating better too. If she could only keep this up, if she could see another human face three times a day, she could stay sane. She could survive this.
“There you are, ma’am,” he said, placing the tray carefully in her hands and turning toward the door. He talked with the same accent as Trey had.
“I’m not a ma’am,” she said, trying to persuade him to stay. She didn’t want to be alone so fast again. “I’m just Piper. You know, though, you’re the second person to call me that since I got here.”
He laughed. “This is the South, and we haven’t seen any girls for months. You’re a ma’am. But if it upsets you, I’ll quit it.”
“The South? What do you mean?”
“The Southern United States. Or at least it used to be. I don’t s’pose you ever heard of that, huh?” Piper shook her head eagerly. “Nah, I didn’t figure. Even some of our people haven’t. See, most of us left the cities to come here, but some of us hid out underground when the United States fell.”
“What’s the United States?”
“It was a big country, kinda like the Nation but not as strict. Little bit smaller too. But it was the most powerful country in the world. But it got nuked.”
Piper’s eyes widened in shock. One word she knew was “nuke.” She’d heard her dad talking about them in low voices to her mother. They could wipe out an entire civilization in an instant. The guard saw the look on her face and continued to explain.
“Yup. Outta nowhere, too. Only a few people survived. My great-great-grandfather’s family was one of ‘em. He was paranoid for years, built a built a bomb shelter three miles underground. Started when he was twenty-three and finished when he was almost eighty. But he died of old age, unlike just about everybody else. He and my great-great-grandma survived. So we just stayed where we were for generations, in case it happened again. As far as I knew, we were Americans, until the war started. Stuff started happening. We came up again. But we remember better than anybody. We could see where the Nation was going, even if we were watching from a distance. You haven’t ever heard of Hitler, have you?”
She shook her head.
“Mussolini? Stalin?”
She shook her head again. “No.” What odd names.
“Didn’t suppose so. Is it true they don’t even teach you history at your schools?”
She nodded. “The past behind, the future before.” Another National motto.
“The Diviner wouldn’t let them teach you about Hitler and all them even if you did learn history. It’d be too risky. People would start to notice the similarities.”
“Between what?”
“Between him and some of the worst dictators of all time.”
“Dictators? What do those have to do with this?”
He looked puzzled for a minute, then rolled his eyes in exasperation. “No, no, no, not those things you write with. Dictators. People who take complete control of their governments. Power-hungry monsters, more like it. Hitler killed millions of people just because they got in the way of his vision of a perfect world.” He noticed the perked look on her face. “Yeah, I said vision. Sound familiar to you?”
It wasn’t the same. It couldn’t possibly be the same. This Hitler man probably didn’t even exist.
“Don’t you think it’s even a little strange that you weren’t allowed to leave? And your man, he’s going even further than controlling people. He’s moved to the forces of nature. Is it true they don’t even have weather there?”
She nodded. A smile swept across her face unexpectedly—the reference made her think of Patrick. The guard shook his head in one swift motion, clearly indignant. “See, that’s just not right. Man trying to take the place of God… but I bet he hasn’t told you about Him either, has he?”
She shook her head again. That seemed to deliver the dying blow for the guard, who closed his eyes, stood up, and started heading for the door. Once they opened again, Piper thought she could see tears welling against his clear blue irises, but she couldn’t be sure. Just when she thought he was gone for good, he turned around one more time.
“You haven’t ever seen a Bible, have you?”
She shook her head. He looked at her for a long time, then stared at his feet. “Have a nice morning, ma’am.” He walked out of the room, closing the door behind him with a quiet click.