Free The Occupation of Emerald City: The Worker by Ken Brosky

it’s not.” I run my finger along the streaks of black
paint that prevent any outside viewing—only dim, monotonous light streams
in. “I just can’t believe it’s been so long. I can’t believe there’s a soldier
sitting in the front row of this bus. I can’t believe we’re even on a bus.”
    “It could be worse.”
    I don’t say anything. How long since I’ve actually slept?
Everyone else seems to be dozing off in the quiet shade of the bus’s black
windows, but I feel wide-awake. Before all this, I could sleep on a dime. I
could lie down on a bed, stare into the darkness behind my eyelids, and rest
for a full eight hours. Only once, after I broke my nose six years ago, did I have
trouble sleeping. I remember it because the dull, throbbing pain slid down the
damaged bridge, settling in pools under my eyes and I had to breathe through my
mouth.
    “I had a life before this,” Joshua says. “I used to write for
Web sites. I had a cat named Tiger. I can’t go back. I can’t see my cat dead.”
    “I’m sorry,” I say. Then, because I don’t know what else to
say, I add, “I’ll help you get a job at the power plant.”
    He doesn’t answer. His fingers pick at the seat in front of
him.
    My parents used to have a cat, a chubby orange tabby. His
name was Winston, and I loved him to death when I was a kid. He was runt with a
little gremlin face and he liked to take clothes I left lying around and drag
them into the basement. I imagine Winston, alone in Joshua’s apartment, dying
of hunger, and feel like crying. But nothing comes out.
    I turn away from the black windows. The young man with the
eye patch is looking at me with his bright blue eye. His mouth creases into a
smile, I can see fresh wrinkles in his cheeks that haven’t set deep into the
skin yet. He’s a young man aged a decade inside the prison.
    “Does God talk to you?” Blue Eye asks.
    “No,” I say.
    “That’s a shame,” he says. “God can help you through the
darkest times.”
    “If that’s what you want to believe,” I tell him.
    “It’s what I know ,”
Blue Eye says.
    I stare at the white patch of gauze taped over his smooth,
pale skin. “Did they do that to you?” I ask, pointing to his eye.
    He smiles, reaching up to touch the gauze with two fingers.
“This? No. This was an act of God. God works through us.”
    “So the insanity plea works,” Joshua mutters.
    “Did he tell you why he did it?” I ask.
    Blue Eye smiles, clutching the back of the seat as the bus
takes a hard right turn. “When those bombs fell, I thought I was going to die.
I prayed and I prayed and I asked God what he wanted from me. He never answered
because he was disappointed in me. Why should I have even had to ask? I know
what he wants from me. He wants this country. It belongs to him. It belongs to
the Christians.”
    “I doubt that.” I should have known just by the dorky short
blond haircut, the innocent face, that he was a certifiable fundamentalist.
Nowhere else on the planet, it seems, are the religious so fanatical. The fact
that the Coalition let him out of the prison is just more proof they don’t
really know what they’re doing.
    “Some day,” Blue Eye says, “you’re going to see what I see.
And God will ask you to make a
sacrifice.”
    The bus stops and two soldiers step inside, helping the more
comatose people out first. I make my way down the aisle last, surprised to find
myself outside in the middle of downtown Emerald City, next to the giant glass
Central Bank headquarters and surrounded by teeming crowds of black-clad
Coalition soldiers and armored vehicles that clog the streets; everyone looks
like they’re carrying out an order, their ranks peppered with contractors
wearing gray bulletproof vests with the Anodyne logo on the breast.
    I have to blink a few times to take it all in. The air cools
the water coating my eyes. In front of me is a single city block of green
space, only now the grass is mostly brown or dirt