Sel’s apartment looked relatively intact, despite the trashed exterior. We’d been neighbours for about a year before things turned to shit. It seemed so weird to be sitting here on her couch, just looking at each other, everything same-same but so different.
Sel made an effort to keep her gaze locked, but every now and then her eyes would trail down to my arms, and over my wasted frame, before she’d snap back to my face. My hands felt awkward holding the little porcelain cup, and the soft couch was sucking me into its pillowy innards. I’d been so long on steel benches and concrete blocks I’d forgotten about things with patterns and curves and colours. I had to keep from throwing up.
“So, hey, Sel. Yes. You. Look. Well. How… is… it… going?” My interior monologue rustily whirrs and kicks in. Wow. You can’t make small talk anymore. A few more conversational disasters drop like rocks on the floor between us. Sel isn’t doing much better. What do you say to a zombie pincushion who looks like they might drop off the perch at any second?
It’s pretty clear what I’ve been up to lately, so Sel doesn’t ask, but I can’t help going there. She coughs a little awkwardly.
“I’m an agent”.
I just stare, unblinking. I would have continued staring, unblinking, in the silence had Sel not dissolved into a garbled mess right then and there.
“Fuck, I’m sorry, its fucked, but there isn’t any other way to survive here, you either work or you get… you know. It’s awful and I feel so terrible, but they’ve restricted the city borders and you can’t leave and it’s all that’s left, and I’m sorry, jesus, I’m so fucking sorry.”
Still unblinking. The couch is eating me. This_teacup_is_going_to_break_I_must_be_very_careful. Sel pauses and looks at me, realising I have no fucking idea what she is talking about.
In between anxiety attacks about the couch’s appetite, I discover that Outside is now a lot like Inside, but with some perks. Sel is now an agent, after having clawed / fucked / stolen her way out of the pit. Clans now own sections of the city, and the poor bastards lucky enough to still live there. She gets by trading blood but here its quality over quantity. Apparently our misery makes our blood taste foul and bitter. I’m a battery hen, while these bastards are free range. Sel’s unit report to their station each day, and even though its in her job description to roll out fucking yoga mats and read them god damn bedtime stories, she still plugs them in and drains them. She competes with other agents to make her quota of the highest standard with rapidly diminishing supplies. If she fucks up she gets kicked back down into the pit. I cough out a laugh when I imagine her bending over for one of those biter freaks with a human fetish just for a black market box of protein powder.
What’s less funny is that she monitors the individual levels in her unit, and if it looks like they’re doing double time in another station, or their quality is diminishing, or they’re somehow not synthesising their vitamin supplements into heam-iron, they’re basically fucked. Her voice slows and quietens as she whispers that they can be traded to a lower work station, or just sold straight up.
Today I learned that being sold may result in becoming:
A biter family pet, a one time contender in a televised fight (you, vs an Infected freak kept chained in a basement, odds not in your favour), a live punch bowl for a party, or perhaps the pick of the bunch; because you might just make it when they dump you in the scrub at the edge of the city and you fucking run like your sad sorry fucked up life depends on it because it does, because those psychos are chasing you with their rabid dogs and when they catch you they’re going to tear you apart, and they’re going to call it Sport, but you run anyway with the little that’s left inside of you, as fast and as far as you can, but it’s never far or fast enough and basically, you’re fucked, game over.
