Free Undone: A Dystopian Fiction Novel by Chad Evercroft Page B

continued. “He has a farm and it’ll be safer there.”
    We all hoped she had gotten safely, but we weren’t especially optimistic. Rick crumpled up the note in frustration.
    “She should have let us know,” he said. “We could have at least given her some supplies to take with her.”
    We turned on the radio to see if we could find any news about what was going on. Things were not good. A major riot had broken out in New York City, drawing the National Guard’s attention to the East Coast. Even though Indianapolis was still seeing occasional outbursts and the strikes were still going on, nothing “exciting” enough had caught the eye of the media, which in turn would result in help being sent. The same went for Bloomington. Nobody really cared about us. Most of the students had left or, like us, stayed under the radar, so no one was clamoring about human rights or aid. We were just another small town with a lot of poor, angry people and scared, angry cops.
    “It’s like this place is an anarchy now,” Tyrsa said. “Everyone looking out for themselves as best they can, even if that means throwing away any law and order.”
    Peeking through the slats in the window planks, I could see people still running down the street, carrying trash bags or even luggage. There were some police officers, too, many of them battered and bruised, their uniforms torn or blood-stained. They looked lost, like they had just abandoned their posts and ran. Who could blame them, really? The force had been outnumbered during the first student riot and at the grocery store. There would always be more civilians than police officers. When people were this desperate, chaos would always win.
    A month went by, but it felt like I had aged ten years. Each day dragged on, like time was being slowly stretched like a rubber band, and each night was like the band snapped back and hit us in the face. The nights were full of fear and jolted us from the boredom of survival into the danger of survival. Night was when the looters came out.
    The first break-in attempt occurred only a week after Jenny and Darcy left. The police presence was essentially non-existent at that point, at least in an organized sense. They might have still been around, but they had chosen to dress in street clothes to avoid being targeted, and were just as worried about getting enough water and food as everyone else was. The radio insisted that Bloomington was being run by the boys in blue, but it didn’t know what was going on. There was no media in town anymore. Local offices had been shut down and looted for anything useful. The police were just people. And people were dangerous.
    The looter tried to come in through the backdoor. Rick had taken the deadbolt off of Jenny and Mrs. Gaither’s doors since they weren’t around to care anymore, and re-installed it at the back. At around eleven pm, we heard thumping. I had been asleep on the couch since seven pm, dozing off and on with nothing else to do, and heard the noise first. When I woke Rick and Lawrence, we identified the sound as coming from the backdoor.
    “Is it the wind?” Lawrence suggested.
    “I think someone is trying to break in,” Rick whispered hoarsely. 
    “What do we do?” I asked. “Just sit here?”
    “The lock should hold,” Rick assured us. “If it doesn’t, we’ll be waiting.”
    Rick got his baseball bat while Lawrence and I held a wrench and a hammer, respectively. We stood in the dark hallway, depending solely on the element of surprise to give us the advantage if someone came bursting through the door. The thumping continued for a good ten minutes, and we could hear voices arguing outside. My heart pounded. I wrapped my fingers tighter around the handle of the hammer, trying to decide how hard I should bring it down on a human head. I thought about what Tyrsa had said, about how easy it was to think about killing someone, but then actually seeing them die would be hard. I didn’t really