Darklandia Read Free

feel?”
    “Feel?”
    Crying wasn’t allowed. Just thinking about it, the red eyes and nose, the frown, the tears burning tracks down cheeks… it was hideous. Of course, I was frightened. But saying the word aloud….
    “Don’t be frightened,” he said, with a smile. Though my father’s strange crinkled smile, the smile he inherited from my great-grandmother, always induced a slight sense of wonderment in me, today his smile looked gruesome. “Please, Sera, don’t look at me like that. I don’t want to hurt you. I want you to know the truth.”
    “The truth?” I replied, as my father’s sec-band flashed red.
    My vision went black as the power supply to my pod was cut off. My hour was up.
    The glass top on the pod made a squelching noise as it popped out and lifted away from me toward the ceiling. This darkroom only had three pods, one on either side of me, both in use. I followed the path of neon blue lights along the carpet toward the exit. I pushed a glowing button on the wall and the silver door slid open.
    The dim sunlight in the apartment lobby blinded me as I stepped out of the darkroom. The door slid shut behind me and I placed my wrist inside the circular hole in the wall to the left of the door. The titanium security band around my wrist flashed as the scanner verified my identity and that I had served my hour. The flashing green light meant go . My sec-band had never flashed red and I hoped it never did.
    I set off across the dim lobby of the building, now abandoned, it was once one of the first apartment complexes in New York to install a darkroom—before the war wiped out ninety percent of the population and this building became a graveyard for expensive furniture. I stepped out onto Broadway, trying not to think of the darklings that once lived in this building. Willing myself to forget the last memory I had of my father. Trying desperately not to ponder what he meant by “the truth”.
    I usually looked forward to my mandatory hour inside Darklandia, but after the rapture ceremony yesterday, and learning that the mayor’s rapture was not intended, I didn’t want to waste an hour reliving my father’s last words. I wanted to understand my grandmother’s last words.
    “It’s in the water rations.”
    Of course, the water rations were packed with all the essential vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients we needed to survive. We never ate tangible food.
    As my mother and I took turns sipping our rations last night, I contemplated the Felicity Festival that had already been scheduled for the following Saturday to rejoice my grandmother’s rapture. I didn’t know if my mother was also thinking of the upcoming festival. We stared at each other across the kitchen like a couple of dogs in a staring contest, raising our tumblers to our lips, never uttering a word about what Commissioner Baron did at the ceremony. Commissioner Greco Baron. Greco. Such an odd name.
    Georgia Fisk was not an odd name, but my grandmother certainly lived an odd life as a darkling. What did her last words mean? Did she know what was going to happen to the mayor? Were her words just the confused utterings of a senile darkling?
    Something told me they weren’t.
    The streets were almost unrecognizable from the pictures of Manhattan from 120 years ago, before the drought. The skyscrapers that once served as beacons for tired New Yorkers returning home from long plane rides were blown to bits during the Civil War when those skyscrapers served as lodestones for the rebels bombs. So much of the rebuilding effort, which was still eons from being completed, had been centered on providing citizens with easy access to Darklandia and rations while New York City’s history continued to crumble and blow away.
    The actual streets, once teeming with taxis and automobiles, were now empty, but for the occasional GAT: Guardian Angel Transport. These solar-powered mini-buses carried the angels to their designated patrol blocks and transported