Escape

Elizabeth Morgan. I silently vowed to preserve what little I knew of who she was: neuroscientist, first of her family to be native to our planet, and victim of some infernal mind scrambling system. There was after all some sort of thought police, a nefarious **** pulling strings behind the scenes. There really was a conspiracy corrupting the minds of my friends, family and every other cohabitant of the City. Yet not all; two things were certain now, that there was legitimate danger in being found out, and that there were others not affected by the shift. If some monstrous machine had had to built, there had to a substantial pool of deviants around.

I retraced my steps, tiptoeing back up the spiral stairs, and back into the gloom of the corridor I originally fell into. I hesitated as to which way to go. Under the hole there had been blackness both ahead of me and behind. I knew nothing of what lay in the dark in the direction I had come from on the surface. I did know that if I went forward from beside the door I would pass over the place where that poor girl had been brainwashed. The latter option was more appealing merely by virtue of containing an image I recognized as opposed to an empty void. Yet I chose the empty void.

Sooner than I expected, the hole through which I had fallen here appeared and the light of slightly brighter morning illuminated the interior of the tunnel. I was even more surprised to discover a stairway, also spiralling, leading upwards, just underneath the hole, on the side where the intact watchtower had been. There was no light at all coming from inside there, which I took to be a good sign. Minutes later I reached the surface again, in the little outpost itself, amidst a mess of plaster from the walls and ceiling, and planks from the upper floor. There was even wreckage from a wooden staircase, long ago rotted to pieces and even to mush in places, its outline still visible where it would have been attached to the wall. The metal door was mostly intact and locked, but only the lower and bigger windows were blocked off completely. It took some climbing and where my hands held rock they burned from the cold, but I reached the upper level and was able to leave the building by jumping out of a window. I made sure not to land in the hole.

About half an hour later I returned to parts of town that I knew, safe and sound, without a mark on me to say what I had been doing. At about the time that my first lesson for the day, maths, would have ended, my phone started ringing. It was a good thing I had the sound on, as opposed to setting it to vibrate, because the damn thing was buried under many layers of overcoat so that I wouldn’t have felt it otherwise. Somewhere on the edge of old town, I fished it out to switch on the screen and see who was calling. I missed a heartbeat and swallowed some air when I saw who it was, prompting me to cough uncontrollably. By the time I stopped the person on the other end had given up. It was Carmencita.

Long ago we’d exchanged numbers. It was long before the romantic crystallisation phase began for me, and we were on very amicable speaking terms. Like many things, that dropped after I spoilt things. I didn’t think she would have kept me in her contacts. Like a fool I called her back immediately.

“Where are you?” she asked without even so much as an angry greeting.

“Not where you are.” I said. That was the truth.

"Are you ill or what?"

“You tell me. Maybe I caught something gnarly off your luscious lips yesterday.” I thought – rather hoped – that would elicit some sort of outrage, that she would take offense to the idea of there being some substance in her that didn’t agree with me. In a way that was also the truth. Instead, she didn’t say anything.

“What do you want of me, Carmen?”

“It’s all right... you stay wherever you are. I should’ve talked to you sooner. Will you at least be around tomorrow?”

“Perhaps...” If I had had an opportunity to plan for departure yesterday, I would likely have arranged to be on the way out by now. By taking this day off I had artificially created such an opportunity, and would make my escape as soon as I could pool the ressources. It wasn’t clearly articulated in that moment, but even “perhaps” was a lie.

“If I promise to be nice to you will you come to me? I can put some funky lipstick on as well if you like...”

“What is wrong with you?” I asked, trying not to laugh at the irony, “Can’t you get dick elsewhere? Or have you magically changed your tune towards me after all this time?”

“It’s not that, it’s just I like it like you do it, and I can’t get it like you do it here. I tried one of our older teachers with a bad temper but even he isn’t quite enough. He still comes out... nice. There’s no urgency, no adventure. I never thought you had it in you to have spice, you know?”

I was very curious now. Her complaints echoed my observations up to that point. In most encounters I had had since the change except with her, there had been precious little in the way of conflict or tension. Sex was a favour of the most mundane nature at present. And my act to placate Carmen had been so anomalous as to leave her with a void only I could fill.

“I’ll consider it.” I said.