Dystopian Lullabies

Dystopian Lullabies

  By Sara Jamieson

  Copyright 2013 Sara Jamieson

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

  World 7A: The Guard

  Tagan leaned back slightly against the railing. The metal was cold, but it was still more comfortable than maintaining the upright posture of standing unsupported while he sipped at the contents of his cup. He didn’t stand up straight whenever he could get away with it. It might be some sort of latent rebellion from all those years during training when a lack of appropriate posture was a punishable offense (or it might just be that standing up straight took more effort than leaning up against something did, and he wasn’t really a fan of expending any effort that he could avoid expending). The mornings were still a little on the chilly side at this point in the year, but it wasn’t enough to motivate him to stop leaning.

  Besides, the warmth from the cup that he was holding in his hands more than made up for it. There was steam rising into the air from the contents, but he sipped at it anyway. He didn’t mind the mild scalding that the drink gave his tongue. Hot beverages were still enough of a novelty (even after years of working at the bridge) that he couldn’t bring himself to care. Jaeli always spent an excessive (in his opinion) amount of time blowing on hers and letting it cool down before she started drinking. It was, he figured, the habit of someone who had grown up in a world where the concept of drinks that warmed you up inside was taken for granted.

  He enjoyed these mornings where they met in the middle of the bridge (neither of them, strictly speaking, was supposed to go more than halfway across). Jaeli always brought cups and a container of the stuff that she said was called tea. It was always called tea even though it didn’t always taste the same. She said that different kinds had different flavors, but it had taken him some time after he first came to understand what that word “flavor” meant. “Tea” had stirred some childhood memories, so he had decided to assume that she wasn’t trying to kill him. (The rumors about the disappearance of the previous bridge guard hadn’t escaped his notice.)

  He was glad that he had decided to give it a try. This morning’s tea was the kind he liked best; she said it was called sassafras. Jaeli didn’t like it much, but she brought it anyway because she knew that he liked it. She said it was too strong, and Tagan could only scoff at how spoiled she was. If she had grown up the way that he had, then she would understand that having access to something that actually had a taste was a privilege that should be appreciated. He never said that to her out of fear that she might make him drink the stuff she called peppermint on a more regular basis in retaliation (it, while still hot, wasn’t nearly as good).

  He was getting spoiled as well. That was okay though; it was his intention to be spoiled. He wanted to enjoy all of the things that he never would have known existed if he hadn’t been stationed at the bridge. He intended to be good and spoiled for the rest of his life. He took another gulp from the cup that he cradled between his hands. He had tea, and it was hot. It was the best way to deal with a morning. If only he could enjoy it in peace, but he supposed that you couldn’t have everything.

  The price of tea was conversation with Jaeli. He didn’t mind (too much). She was easy enough to deal with most of the time, and there was nothing in their arrangement that said that she had to bring him tea. She had a bit of a temper though, and she ranted something awful when anything set her off. Most days she seemed to understand that tea should be enjoyed with quiet, but today was not one of those days. It was the other kind of day. It was one of those days where something had been said that had her talking (and once she got started it was hard to get her to stop).

  She was giving him that look again -- the one that stated clearly that she had no idea why he pretended to be an idiot when she already knew better. She didn’t get it; she likely never would. Habits were a difficult thing to break. That was why they were habits. They were ingrained. You didn’t think about them. They just were. He wasn’t going to (couldn’t really) break that particular habit when Tagan Keller was very comfortable with the fact that people often felt he suffered from a chronic case of idiocy.

  It wasn’t as though any of them ever actually came out and said so (and it wasn’t as though he could actually ask if that was really what they were thinking), but he had come to recognize the slight shift in tone and demeanor that stole over new people after they had dealt with him for a short time. It was dismissiveness. He was being discounted. They were shuffling him to the place in their brain that was reserved for things of no importance. He was always pleased to see it even if he never let that pleasure show. It worked in his favor to be dismissed. He had a good thing going with his current placement, and he had no desire to do anything that might get him removed from his current duty roster.

  He hadn’t known ahead of time that a bridge guard was where he would want to spend his days. He hadn’t angled for the placement. He had been rotated through in the natural order of things, and he had never been rotated back out. He had spent three years in the little cottage overlooking the river, and they were years that he fully intended to extend as long as he could. He had spent hours upon hours of the alone time that his position afforded calculating how best to make that happen. There was a reason that there was such a heavy turnover in those who were stationed at the bridges.

  Lots couldn’t cope with the solitude. Tagan, enjoying the solitude himself, always found that difficult to understand. He had decided that it wasn’t the solitude itself that got to them -- it was the lack of someone to give them orders. They were conditioned for that from the time that they entered training. They were conditioned for that in a lot of ways before they ever entered training. Childhoods revolved around learning to obey. Was it any wonder that so many had trouble when they were requested to complete a task that required autonomy? They tried to breed autonomy out of everyone. Then, they became frustrated when they succeeded.

  He wasn’t sure if they even realized that there was irony there. They didn’t exactly raise children who became adults who asked questions either. They might never notice that that was what had happened. Or, perhaps, there were those like him scattered everywhere who noticed but kept their mouths shut. It didn’t really matter. Tagan wasn’t looking for anyone to share his thoughts with -- he didn’t exactly crave the involvement of other people in his life. Even if he did, he wasn’t really an idiot. You didn’t go around trying to start up conversations about ideas. That was the type of thing that got people shot. He would know; he had been trained to do the shooting.

  They had to have bridge guards, but they didn’t have much in the way of options. Those who stayed had to be able to handle the lack of an immediate authority figure (something that was enough by itself to make those authority figures suspicious). They needed to be trustworthy enough to be left often alone, but why would anyone trustworthy want to be left alone? He chuckled to himself, sometimes, over what the completely circular conversations on that topic must sound like somewhere in a faraway office where assignments were made.

  He had caught on quickly that there was one fairly simple way to make himself an attractive option. He just needed to be lazy. It was brilliant really (and he did say so to himself in the quiet moments when he was patting himself on the back over what he had made of his life).
There was nothing suspicious about a man who was comfortable being left on his own because he was lazy enough to enjoy not having a supervisor standing over him making sure he remained on task.

  Lazy was safe. The lazy didn’t ask awkward questions about why gateposts “holding ground against the enemy” were entrusted to single guardians. Lazy men didn’t wonder why said gateposts were the scene of regularly scheduled business transactions. Lazy men just did what they had to do and didn’t bother with anything else. In a truly bizarre manner, being lazy made you trustworthy. Those who were watching might deride you behind your back, and they might find you disgustingly lacking in most of the qualities which they believed had value, but they needed your lack of qualities to accomplish something important to them. Lazy worked, so Tagan had been lazy.

  He had received his reward with the placement he wanted. It hadn’t even been that hard. Being lazy didn’t bother Tagan. He actually enjoyed it. There were no disadvantages to being lazy as far as he could tell. It got him a place to stay. He was a safe choice, and they left him where he was. He didn’t have to move from place to place. He didn’t have to censor his thoughts for fear that they would show on his face. He didn’t have to learn new people every few months and how to tread carefully around them. He didn’t spend his days being watched. He didn’t spend his days wondering who was watching. He just was.

  Tagan was not a man who entertained illusions (which was, perhaps, why he had never found himself in sync within the all too indulgent of illusions world in which he was raised). He had no illusions about the world he lived in; he knew that it didn’t function in the way that they were all told. He knew that it choked out all the qualities that it derided as harmful to the community and then struggled to keep the community surviving in their absence. He knew that it held words above practicalities and that everyone suffered for the lack of adherence to reality.

  He knew that the world across the river was different. He knew that it embraced many of the things that his own tried to eradicate. He also knew that it wasn’t some sort of perfect place either. Their life was difficult over there in ways that his was not. There was no such thing as perfect. There was only what kind of difficulty with which you were willing to live.

  Tagan also had no illusions about himself. He didn’t care about the state of the world. He thought about it as an intellectual exercise because it amused him to do so (and it helped his cause to know exactly what he was dealing with). The world, ultimately, didn’t matter. Tagan Keller mattered. Tagan’s life, Tagan’s convenience, and Tagan’s wants were what mattered. He was self-absorbed, and he was at peace with that. No one else was going to look out for Tagan. He wouldn’t trust anyone else to do it anyway. He looked out for Tagan, and he did a good job of it. He struck a balance between the two options that used the river as their divide and chose to live in a little bit of both and a whole lot of neither. He was a world apart, and he would remain that way for as long as he could manage it.

  His biggest fear was that his supervisor would be overridden by the man that oversaw the trades at the bridge. He wasn’t exactly sure how the order of seniority worked as the two held similar positions in different but related areas. His supervisor was perfectly happy with Tagan’s lazy reliability. The man who directed transactions despised him. Tagan knew exactly why that was.

  Officer Salois was a zealot of the highest order. While Tagan could see where it was convenient to have such people in certain positions, he also wondered if the man hadn’t been placed in his position just to get him out of everyone’s way. It must be dangerous, after all, to have someone who believed whole heartedly in everything that he had ever been told underfoot when you were trying to work out solutions to problems caused by the fact that lots of the things that you were telling everyone were lies.

  It might be that everyone beyond a certain point on the hierarchy of the power structure all believed with as much intensity as Officer Salois did. Tagan suspected not (as he was fairly confident that the entirety of the population would have starved to death in strict adherence to the ideals that they spouted if that had been the case). They certainly weren’t coming up with the supplies to make the ration bars (awful, tasteless things that they were) that kept everybody in the cities alive with the pitiful attempts at food production that he had seen in his early days of being rotated from one assignment to another.

  He would wonder how Salois reconciled the traffic back and forth across the bridges with what he was supposed to believe about the state of things, but he didn’t figure that Salois ever asked questions. He did as he was told. He was what they were told that every child was supposed to grow up to be -- which was why he couldn’t stand Tagan. Lazy and uninterested in propagating the desires of the protectors of the collective was pretty much the antithesis of what a child was supposed to grow up to be.

  Salois probably had him figured as nearly as bad as a questioner or a runner on his scale of things to despise. He might even outrank runners on the scale; Salois would just shoot the runner and be done with it. The fact that he couldn’t shoot Tagan likely caused him much more frustration. They had managed to muddle along well enough so far. Tagan just had to go out of his way to make sure that he didn’t do anything extra out of line to set Salois off when he was around.

  He hated going out of his way. It was one of those things that required effort. Thankfully, it wasn’t called for very often. There were other bridges, and they were spread far apart. Salois had to travel to all of them which meant that he wasn’t overseeing transactions at Tagan’s bridge on a regular basis.

  Jaeli had gone quiet; she must have realized that he wasn’t paying attention. She was just glaring at him now, but he didn’t care (not as long as she didn’t demand that he give back the tea cup). He poured the last of the liquid from the container and sighed. He would drink this one more slowly. It wasn’t like he had pressing matters to attend to; Jaeli probably did, but it wasn’t like he had asked her to keep him company. He could just leave the cup on the bridge for her when he was finished. He couldn’t take it back with him. He couldn’t chance getting caught with contraband from the other side. He wanted to, but he had to keep in mind the bigger picture.

  Nothing ever went back across with him that couldn’t be swallowed quickly if he spotted trouble coming -- which meant that nothing went back across with him at all. He had been tempted by the pie (another of those things that came in flavors), but he had decided that it wasn’t worth the risk. If he got taken by surprise by an inspection (which had never happened even though they always told him that it would someday), there was too much chance of incriminating evidence (like crumbs) even though he was very sure that he could, in fact, gulp down an entire pie if it became necessary for him to do so. Pie was, after all, his favorite of the things that he got in trade from Jaeli. It was even better than having hot tea.

  He hoped there was a runner soon. He was really missing pie. There weren’t a lot of runners. It wasn’t as though someone was trying to cross the bridge every time that he turned around, but there were a lot more of them than the authorities would ever admit to there being. It had been a little over a month since the last one. He could still taste the apple pie that had been part of his asking price. He might ask her for cherry next time. He hadn’t had that one since before the weather got cold.

  The pieces that she brought him the couple of times during the winter months (the ones she said were presents for “holidays”) were always pecan. He wondered why she still bothered to bring him those meals. At first, he had figured that she was offering him some sort of sample so that he would agree to terms about the runners, but she was still doing it three years later. There must be something about that “holiday” concept that meant something to her.

  He had tried to find some sort of a connotation for the word somewhere in his memory of the books that his mother had kept hidden in their apartment when he
was a kid, but it was clearly a subject that hadn’t been covered by them. His memories of those books weren’t a complete loss though -- he knew lots of words that Jaeli used that he wouldn’t have otherwise known. It was why he had known the word “tea” when she first used it even though he really hadn’t understood what it was. He had asked her about another of the words for edible things he had remembered from the books once -- lemonade. She had told him that she couldn’t make it because lemons didn’t grow close to the bridge. Sandwiches, on the other hand, she had been able to produce.

  He decided that those would be his terms for the next time a runner came. His pie for the week would be cherry, and he would have turkey sandwiches with that stuff that she called gravy. He would get her to make stew as well, and he would have biscuits to go with it. He was so ready for there to be another runner.

  They just couldn’t come on the day of the next trade. That was, after all, why he and Jaeli had met up in the center of the bridge this morning. She had put up the flag on her side to let him know that a message needed to be sent. That’s how they were supposed to communicate -- with flags and messages that he sent on over the radio in his cottage. They weren’t supposed to exchange words. He wasn’t supposed to accept items that she brought from her side of the bridge. He wasn’t supposed to make deals with her to let runners go across the bridge.

  He was supposed to shoot them. The ones who actually made it to the bridge weren’t usually deserving of the title of “runners” anyway. They were usually so tired and hungry from the trip to get to the bridge that they were more in the way of “stumblers.” He was pretty sure that there were some people somewhere who made a habit of helping the runners. He didn’t know how they did it, but some of them clearly knew exactly where they were going. He could tell the difference between the ones who hadn’t known any more than they should go west until they found the river and the ones who had been directed to some sort of a trail to follow to get to the bridge.

  He suspected that most of the people who tried to run without some sort of prior knowledge didn’t make it. He had seen things during training and in the four years before he had been rotated to the bridge that made it seem likely. He had helped to move the body once of a woman who had poisoned herself by trying to eat something that obviously shouldn’t have been eaten. They never even would have found her if she hadn’t been following one of the paths that the bridge traders took.

  He had seen someone shot in one of the cities on three different occasions. (There were times when he wondered whether they had shot his mother or taken her somewhere to have her put down, but he didn’t dwell on that. It hardly made a difference how it had happened. Dead was dead.) Two had been runners. One had been a parent who had gone berserk when her child had been tagged. They always made the trainees do several rotations in a hospital because while such a parental reaction wasn’t common, it was the situation most likely to arise in which an ability to make decisions when caught by surprise could be tested.

  He had shot someone himself once. It was a runner who had made it out of whatever city he had come from and found his way to one of the areas designated for crop production. Tagan didn’t know whether he had been well and truly lost or just hungry, but the man had been there in a restricted area where Tagan couldn’t help but see him. The woman who was his supervisor at the time had been watching. He had taken the shot. He didn’t bother to think about it. He didn’t dwell on the event. It had happened. He had done it. If it became necessary, he would do it again. Tagan looked out for Tagan. That was all that mattered in the end.

  He hoped a runner came soon, but he hoped it wouldn’t be in three days. He preferred to avoid potential complications (and he really wanted his pie).

  “Jane Elizabeth!” A voice echoed from the other side of the bridge, and the girl muttered under her breath in response. He drained the remains of his tea and offered her the cup.

  “Better get back to the trouble making side,” he told her lapsing into the teasing that had become more commonplace over time. It had been hard for him after so many years of carefully guarding his tongue, but there was something about Jaeli that was disarming. She wasn’t a bad kid when she wasn’t wasting her time on words that served no purpose.

  “I’m thinking that your side causes a fair amount of trouble,” she retorted gathering and piling her things into the basket that she hung over her arm.

  “That’s because you’re one of the traitors,” he informed her with a shrug of his shoulders as if it was an obvious statement of fact. (It was according to what he had been taught as a child.)

  “Traitors,” she huffed with a roll of her eyes. “We had a republic -- not a suicide pact.”

  Tagan didn’t respond as she turned and made her way back to the side of the bridge where she belonged. It was still one of those days, and he didn’t need to set her off again on her ranting. He had already tuned out enough of that for one morning.

  Besides, it wasn’t as if he could make any sort of a reply that would be effective. He didn’t know what a republic was.