And then they had laughed. But it wasn't a happy laughter.
Chapter 7
She was put inside an apartment with six other people she didn't know. There was only one bedroom and only one bed for all of them to share. Jetta slept on the floor, along with a few others. Weeks went by, and those weeks turned into months. She didn't know any of the others and kept to herself, keeping her face covered by the hoodie. Mostly, she sat in the corner, her teddy bear in hand, looking out the small window, down into the courtyard where people walked around like caged animals.
The buildings were all new, made especially for them, they were told. Yet there was no clean running water and no air-conditioning, which made the place very warm, especially with the summer approaching. Food was distributed once a day when a big truck brought it inside the fence, and it was thrown out to the crowd. There were days when Jetta didn't get anything at all to eat because she was too short to catch it, or someone pulled it from her hands if she did.
Four of the people she lived with were all part of the same family. A mom and dad and two teenagers. They stuck together, keeping the rest out, hoarding the one bed. The others were an elderly woman, who had been badly beaten on her way to the ghetto, and a young boy, who—like Jetta—sat in a corner and stared into thin air most of the time. Every now and then, Jetta saw a tear escape his eye and roll across his cheek.
One day, she went to his corner and sat down next to him.
"Hi, I'm Jetta," she said. "What's your name?"
The boy's big eyes landed on her as he searched for her eyes inside the hoodie. Jetta smiled, then pulled it back a little. When the boy saw her face, he started to scream. He held both his hands to his face and cried out so loudly everyone in the small one-bedroom apartment stopped to look at them.
"Monster! Monster!"
The two adults approached Jetta and pulled the hoodie all the way off. The mother gasped and drew back, the dad right behind her.
"Dear Lord," he said, scrutinizing her. "What are you?"
"She's a freak," the mother said.
"You're half white," the dad said. "You're one of them, aren't you? Were you sent here to be a spy? Were you? To tell on us, give them a reason to kill us, huh? I told you this would happen. Over and over again, I said it, didn't I? All they're waiting for is for us to make one mistake, one wrong move, and then, they'll strike. Kill us all. Is that why you're here, huh? Of course, they would use a child. Nothing but pure evil."
The dad leaned over Jetta and slapped her face. The slap stung across her cheek and she whimpered. He then spat on her and kicked her. The mother soon followed, throwing in a kick herself, and soon the two teenagers were doing it too. They slapped Jetta and kicked her in the stomach. Jetta whimpered and curled up into a ball, letting them beat her, thinking she deserved it, believing she deserved it all. It was, after all, her fault, wasn't it? She had heard it all her life. It was her fault her parents died in that fire, along with all the others. She had brought it upon them and on the rest of the people. It was all because of her. Because she was a curse sent to Earth from the evil spirits. To torture them, to doom them all. She knew it was so, and so she let them beat her, thinking maybe they could beat all this evilness out of her, so she—and the world—could be set free.
Chapter 8
The beating was bad, but still, Jetta woke up the next morning with no signs of being hurt, except for a few bruises on her legs that disappeared after a few hours. As the sun rose and shone into the small warm apartment, rapidly heating up the corner where she lay curled up, Jetta realized the bruises were all gone. Not even were her eyes swollen or her cheeks red.
The mother was the first to notice as she got out of bed.
"What the…? Sam? Sam, come look at this!"
The dad did, and he too had to look again a few times before believing his own eyes.
"How is that even…possible?"
They both backed up—their eyes torn in fear—as the dad repeated his question from the night before.
"What are you?"
Jetta looked terrified, yet fascinated at her arms and legs, distinctively remembering hearing her arm break as the teenage son stepped on it the night before. She lifted it into the air and looked at it, turning it in the sparse sunlight. Not a scratch.
"This isn't natural," the mother said, her voice shaking. "The way she looked last night…I thought she would be dead by now, but…this?"
The older teenage children approached Jetta, staring at her with big glaring eyes. The mother grabbed them both and pulled them away.
"Don't go too close to it." Then she turned to her husband and, even though she spoke with a low voice, Jetta still heard it perfectly.
"What do we do about her?"
"I don't know," Sam replied.
"We can't have her here. I can't stand the thought of her here...with us. I won't be able to sleep. I can't stand it, Sam. I just can't."
"I know. I know."
They glanced at Jetta once again, then looked away.
"Can we kill her?" the woman asked, lowering her voice to almost a whisper.
"One less mouth to feed," Sam said. "I say no one will miss her. There are way too many people in this place anyway. And there is barely enough food for everyone as it is. People are getting desperate around here. Hunger does that to people. No one would notice."
"I heard they have some sickness in the building next door. Three people died in there yesterday," she said.
"Maybe we could take her over there and let nature take care of her," Sam said. "Take the old lady with her. She doesn’t have long either. That just leaves us with the boy. He doesn’t eat much, though."
The woman sighed. She looked at her husband, and then put a hand to cover her mouth like she had just realized something.
"Oh, no, Sam."
Sam nodded and rubbed his forehead. "I can't believe I just said those things. What has become of us?"
"It's the hunger," the woman said. "And this damn place. The walls, I can't stand being locked in like this. Will we ever get out of here?"
Sam turned around and looked at the corner where Jetta had been sitting. "She's gone," he said. "Guess the problem solved itself."
Jetta, who had heard the entire conversation, had snuck out of the apartment, teddy bear in her hand, and was running down the stairs of the fifteen-story building, doing what she should have done when she first got to this strange place months earlier but had been too afraid.
Search for her grandmother.
Chapter 9
The ghetto was enormous for such a small girl. It was like a city sealed from the outside world by an eleven-foot-tall wall with barbed wire on top, and guards by the only entrance leading outside. Jetta searched the entire building she had been in for the past several months first but found nothing but despair and fear-torn eyes in dark bony faces.
Jetta walked through apartment after apartment, knocking on doors, asking, pleading for news about her old grandmother.
"If she's old, she probably died," a tall man said and slammed the door in her face.
She kept her face hidden the best she could and only peeked out using her one brown eye, hiding the side of her that people here loathed.
"I'm looking for my grandmother," she said after knocking on the next door. The woman who opened it shook her head. "We have no old people here. Try the courtyard. Many people are sleeping outside because there is not enough room."
Jetta nodded and walked on, knocking on several other doors on her way, but getting nothing but shaking heads. A few let her go inside and search, and what she found was forever burned into her memory. Everywhere she went, she saw nothing but misery. People were dying in every corner, thin skeleton-looking people, old people, young people, people who were weak or sick. Some reached out for her, asking her for food or water, their skinny arms pulling her clothes.
"How do you expect your grandmother to be alive?" someone asked her when she ran into the courtyard
and started to call her name.
The guy was tall and muscular, wearing a dirty tank top not covering many of his tattoos and baggy pants. Could have been what her grandmother would have called a gang member once, when they still could walk the streets and would see them on corners. Or a drug dealer. The type she would tell her to stay far away from. He was young, maybe four or five years older than Jetta.
"There is nothing but disease inside those buildings," he continued. "Soon, they will all be dead. It has started. They're getting rid of us." He nodded toward the guards at the entrance. Soldiers marched outside in the streets, making sure no one tried to escape. Jetta had seen more than a dozen try. They were all shot dead. No one got out.
"They knew it would happen. When you put this many people in a small area with no AC or proper plumbing, diseases start to spread. They're gonna leave us here to die. I stay out here," he said. "You should too. The old will go first, then the children."
Jetta looked up at the guy. He nodded towards another group of bigger guys at the other end of the courtyard. There wasn't much sunlight let inside the yard from the tall buildings and walls surrounding it.
"Those guys control the food. They're the strongest here and take first. I stay close to them to make sure I get enough. You should too. If you want to survive, that is."
Jetta nodded and bit her lip. She didn't really feel as weak or famished as the rest of them, but she was hungry. She wondered about her grandmother and looked up at the tall building in front of them. Someone had told her there were about forty more of them just like that one. It had taken her all day to do just one. It would take more than a month to search the entire ghetto. And, by then, it might be too late.
Jetta put her back up against the wall of the building and slid to the ground, pulling her legs close, resting her chin on her knees.
The guy was about to leave, when he hesitated, biting his lip. He shifted his weight a few times like he was making a big decision, then approached her again.
"I'm Tyler, by the way."
He reached out his hand. Jetta took it, using her black hand, making sure she only looked at him sideways.
"I'm Jetta."
"Little J," he said with half a smile. "Nice to meet you."
He sank down next to her on the hard concrete ground. He looked towards the wall.
"I used to have my own shop inside the town walls. Cars."
He looked at his hands and turned them in the light. "I could fix anything with these. It was a dream of mine, since childhood. To have my own shop. At fifteen, I was thrown out of my school because of the new rules of segregation. I didn't believe they were bad. Just fearful, I told my mother. I serviced so many of them in my shop. Guess it kept me alive. I helped them with all their problems, big or small, finding pleasure in helping them. My mom used to tell me I was their slave. Soon, they would call me boy, she said. 'You're nothing but a nigger serving his master,' she would say. 'They don't care about you. To them, you're just another black kid looking for trouble.' And it would hurt me so bad when she said stuff like that, you know? ‘Cause I was proud of myself. I had built a business. I kept my family alive and protected this way. And I made money. Not much, but enough to eat, you know? I thought I was just like them, that we could be equal. They came to me for help. Me. But then, one day, I was out driving and I was pulled over. They took me down, beat me half to death, and made me realize I wasn't. Knocked me right back where I belonged. I was nothing in their eyes. Just another black boy. That was when I knew. One day, they would come for us. One day, they would decide to just get rid of us all. It all started when they came to my shop and closed it down. They took it from me, handing me a letter telling me it now belonged to the government. I didn't even know they could do that. Guess I was the fool there, huh? A week or so later, I ended up here. My mom caught a fever and died three days ago and now I’m alone. I should have left while I could. Should have gone with my brother. I stayed to protect my mother, who couldn't travel. Meanwhile, my brother is out there fighting. He and his buddies escaped before they came for us. Joined Black Liberty's armed forces. I heard they bombed the subway in New York recently. Someone in building 4D told me."
Jetta looked up at Tyler. "How's that supposed to help?"
Tyler chuckled. "You're just a kid. You stick with Tyler and he will help you survive. You stick with Tyler, you hear, Little J?"
So, she did. After all, he was the first person there to actually want her to stick around. Covering the blonde side of her face and keeping her left hand inside the shirt, so he wouldn't see the white skin, she stayed right there by his side, ate what he brought her, what he fought the crowd to get, slept leaning against his shoulder, and listened to his stories all day long, making time go faster as people fell like flies around them.
Chapter 10
"I think I may have found a way out."
Tyler sat down next to Jetta. He was sweating heavily and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He had been gone for an hour or so, like he usually was around noon. Jetta didn't know what he did, but she often saw him walking around among people, talking to them, and sometimes he would come back with a package of cigarettes or maybe even—and that was very rare—a candy cane for her.
She never asked questions, just took it and enjoyed it.
Tyler was speaking with nothing but a whisper, looking anxiously around him.
"You listen closely to me, Little J. There's a lady," he said, breathing heavily. He paused.
A group of women walked past them. The courtyard had become more and more crowded since people had realized they were getting sick from staying inside with all the diseased people. Just breathing the air in there could kill you.
Tyler waited till they had passed before he continued:
"A white one. She comes here once a week. She's an undertaker and helps remove the dead ones. She has been known to help some folks get out. But you gotta be well. She'll check you for symptoms. You don't have any, do ya?"
Jetta thought about what symptoms were and what they looked like, then shook her head. She had never been sick a day in her life.
"No throwing up?"
She shook her head again.
"Rashes?"
"No."
"Headaches?"
"No."
Jetta realized she didn't even know what a headache was. She had felt the pain when Sam and his family had beaten her, but that didn't last long. Other than that, she didn't remember ever feeling pain.
"Now, me, I never get sick," Tyler said. "I’m as strong as an ox. Let me feel your forehead."
Before she could react, Tyler had reached inside her hoodie.
Jetta pulled back and, as she did, the hoodie slipped and revealed a little of the white part of her face. Jetta pulled it back in place as quickly as she could, hoping Tyler didn't see it.
Tyler paused and removed his hand. He stared at her for a very long time, not saying a word, and she felt anxious.
Would he tell on her? If people knew, they might want to kill her for being half white.
Tyler bit his lip like he was thinking very thoroughly about something.
"Nah, you're probably fine." He handed her a piece of bread. "Here. Eat. You have to be strong. The lady comes tomorrow, and I’ve put a word in for us with the people that arrange who goes. I think we might have a chance. Especially since you're a child. Now, I’m eighteen, so I can't go for being a child no more, but you can. How old are ya?"
"Fourteen," Jetta said, remembering she had spent her birthday in the apartment with a bunch of people she didn't know, not telling anyone.
"Well, you're small. You could easily be eleven. Or ten. If she asks, then that's what you are, all right? They mostly take the children. But you've gotta say you need me with you, you hear me? I’ve been good to you, now it's your turn to pay me back. Tell them I'm your brother."
"But what about my grandmother?"
Tyler sighed and ate some bread too. "I told ya,
kid. She's probably dead by now. Old folks go first. Now, eat."
End of excerpt.
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Willow Rose, The Surge
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