Free Exodia by Debra Chapoton

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that with his arm stiff, head cocked, eyes darting right and left.
In a muted whisper he warned her of approaching danger.
    “ Soldiers?” she
guessed.
    “ Sounds more like a parade.”
He dropped his arm. “Something’s not right. If they were going to
go house to house hunting for Dalton they would’ve started here and
worked their way inward, right?” He took a step off the road and
crossed over to a row of broken billboards where litter grew taller
than weeds. It crossed his mind briefly how this used to be a great
place to hunt for glass and plastic. “Look,” he said.
    One of the few boards that
still worked no longer glowed with the face and slogans of the
Executive President; now it flickered messages that chilled their
blood: Curfew enacted. Youth registration
required for all Reds over twelve years of age. Water regulation in
effect. Residential reversion to 2080 census.
    She didn’t mean to, but Lydia gripped
Barrett’s arm. “We’ve only been gone a couple days. What’s
happened?”
    Barrett gave the expected
shrug.
    Lydia let go of his arm and asked,
“What else can you hear? Shouldn’t there be people around
here?”
    “ Yeah, right. But I don’t
hear anyone. It’s like they’ve taken everyone away.”
    “ Not a parade … a death
march.”
    As fast as Barrett ran Lydia still kept
pace as they scrambled through streets and yards.
    They bee-lined through the slum
following the tramping sounds that at first only Barrett could
hear. They got ahead of the marchers and hid behind a pile of
rusted machinery. From there they watched the Exodian guardsmen
herd a sizable number of men and women toward the capitol. It came
as a relief actually that there were only a few hundred people and
not thousands being herded like sheep.
    “ Do you recognize anybody
from our streets?” Lydia asked.
    Barrett frowned then cursed leaving no
doubt as to the answer. Lydia didn’t want to believe it. She
zig-zagged back toward Bancroft Street thinking only of her mother
and the two young kids in their charge. Barrett let her lead the
way.
    The street was almost deserted; two
young kids played a quiet game of tag in the road.
    “ Where is everybody?” Lydia
shouted.
    The older of the two, the one who had
received the first stolen orange when Dalton had come to their
street, stared at her, and took his time with the simple answer.
“It’s Wednesday.”
    * * *
    Fifty-one families and nineteen single
men and women were assigned to live in the sprawling building that
had formerly been a super-school. The grounds around it had long
ago been hand-tilled and re-purposed as co-operative gardens. Food
was grown, shared, guarded.
    Classrooms had become homes, offices
were made into tiny apartments, and the gymnasium made the perfect
gathering place for social and political forums. Lydia and Barrett
headed there as fast as they could. But they were too late; the
weekly Wednesday meeting finished early. They stood under a broken
basketball hoop and watched as Red after Red, men, women, and
children, left the gym. Lydia didn’t see her mother, but she
spotted two teens, friends who had been involved in spying,
stealing, and sabotaging, and waved them closer.
    “ What did we miss? What’s
going on?” Lydia said to one.
    “ Hey, you’re back. You
missed a lot. Not that old Timothy Teague’s rantings aren’t
something worth missing.”
    “ Teague? He’s useless. We do
more for the cause than he does.”
    “ Yeah, well, you’re gonna
love what he had to say about you and Bear.”
    Barrett moved closer.
“What?”
    Their friend snorted, looked up at the
statuesque Lydia and then down at Barrett. “You moved too fast.
Technically, according to Teague, you’re grounded.”
    The lines on Lydia’s brow
knitted closer together. “Grounded? Like no more missions? But we
just got the Dalton
Battista out of here … out of certain death.”
    “ Yeah, well, like I said,
you were too fast. He didn’t need to