State of Chaos (Collapse Series) (6 page)

But not right now. Troops are popping open the trailers. Ladders, sacks and boxes are packed into the bed. Kamaneva points to the trucks. “You will harvest the entire orange crop,” she announces. “Fill your sacks, bring them back to this point, then place them in boxes. You will have water periodically, when troops provide it. You start today. There’s no introductory period. Go.”

Just like that. I finally got a job.

Sophia and I lace our hands together, moving towards one of the pickup trucks. The
early morning sunlight is breaking over the horizon, illuminating the distant Sierra Nevada mountain range. I can see Mt. Whitney sparkling with snow from here. It must be nice to be unmoving and unaffected by everything around you. To stand for thousands of years and stay the same.

I’d like to be a mountain.

Then again, I’d also like to visit McDonald’s. Welcome to my world.

“You.”

Sophia and I come to a halt at the same time. Kamaneva is standing a few feet behind us, her hands clasped in front of her. Up close I notice the wrinkles around her eyes. The frown lines around her mouth. She’s older than I thought.

“You’re friends?” she asks.

I manage to shake my head.

“Hmm.” She steps closer, placing one finger under our chins. “I had two daughters, once. They were young like the both of you.”

I fight to keep my expression neutral.

“One of them died,” she goes on. “The other one lived.”

She removes her fingers and steps back.

“It would be such a pity if you found yourselves in the same situation.”

She gives us a long, hard look before turning around and stalking off. Sophia stares after her. “What the hell was that supposed to mean?” she whispers.

I lick my lips.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Hey, you two! Get to work!”

Grease the guard is back. Darn. He throws two cloth sacks at our feet. Sophia and I bend to pick them up, slipping the thick strap over our shoulders. Some of the other women are hauling heavy ladders into the field. Omega guards are barking orders. Everybody is tense, afraid to ask questions, afraid to defy the instructions.

We’re terrified.

It would be such a pity if you found yourselves in the same situation.

Who is V. Kamaneva? She comes across as strange and cruel. And I haven’t even seen this
woman in action yet. Sophia and I follow the other workers into the fields, Grease keeping close to us. “You pick the oranges, put them in the sack,” he commands. Then he points to the end of the row of trees, where male prisoners are bringing out large boxes. “You put the oranges in there. Other workers will sort them. You don’t worry about that. You just pick.” To my surprise, he gives us a smile. A creepy, make-me-want-to-crawl-in-a-closet smile. Sophia pushes up next to me. “Is it just me or is he bad news?” she asks.

“He’s bad news,” I say. “And his hair is disgusting.”

Shoot. Hair.

Something I don’t have a lot of anymore. I start to get teary-eyed again but I take a deep breath, look up at the orange trees, and try to zone out. Think of something else. Something
other
than the fact that I’ve been forced into slave labor.

Like why Omega needs us to pick oranges.

“What’s the point of this?” Sophia states as we walk towards a group of women placing a ladder against a tree. “How does picking oranges
help Omega take over the world?”

“Well…” I lower my voice, conscious of the armed Omega men standing guard on the edges of the fields. “You said you thought something big was going down on the East Coast, right? Omega has a lot of troops over there.”

“Right.”

“You said it could have even been a nuclear war.”

“Yeah, so…?”

“So Omega has got to be some kind of cover name. An organization that nobody’s ever heard of doesn’t just pop up out of the blue, nuke New York, hit the East Coast with a full frontal assault and then start taking over the country.” I run a hand through my choppy hair. “Somebody big is behind this, and you and I just aren’t getting the full story because there’s no way to
communicate
with people who really
do
know what’s going on.”

“Okay, but that doesn’t answer the orange question,” Sophia deadpans, raising an eyebrow. “World domination and fruit packing…? Come on.”

“I’m guessing Omega needs food,” I reply. “Look at it this way. If you’re an invading army, you’re going to need some way to feed your troops. If New York is really nuked, then it’s possible that other places are too. Omega’s going to need food. That would explain why they’re bringing us here. They need us to harvest what’s already here and then start planting new food.”

I hug my arms around my chest, surprised that I put the pieces together without Chris’s help. He’s always the one who explains Omega’s evil intentions like a boss.

An Omega guard yells at us suddenly, telling us to quit standing around, working our jaws. It scares the crap out of us to get singled out of the entire group like that, so we climb up a ladder and start picking. I’ve never done this kind of work before, and at first it seems pretty easy. Pick an orange, put it in your sack, climb back down when it’s full, and then dump the oranges in the bins for the male workers to haul away.

It’s fine until you do it over and over again. Without food and water. Without breaks.
And without a place to use the restroom. It goes from easy to torturous in a snap.

“There really aren’t very many troops in the Central Valley,” Sophia says to me as we’re hauling a huge sack of oranges to the end of the field. The sun is high in the sky, and we’ve been working for at least four hours. My arms are sore. My neck is sunburned, and despite the cold temperature, I’m soaked in sweat. “How much food can it take to feed a few soldiers?”

I drop my eyes to the white bins at the end of the field, making sure nobody can hear me. “Maybe they’re getting ready.”

“For
what
?”

“For backup.”

Sophia’s mouth forms a little O as we reach the bins, dump our oranges in, and head back to the trees. “If they’re on the East Coast…maybe they’re working their way closer?” Sophia suggests.

“No.” I shake my head. “I don’t think so. Something else is going on. But have you noticed how all of these troops are Russian? Soviet Union, anyone?”

“The Soviet Union did not invade the United States,” Sophia says, smirking. “They don’t exist anymore. Besides, it’d take a lot more than Russia, don’t you think?”

“Right. They couldn’t do it alone.”

Isn’t that the truth? Nobody could take over the world’s greatest superpower without some serious firepower, some serious planning…and some serious big wheels backing them up. There’s a lot more to Omega than meets the eye.

Not a concept I’m thrilled to realize.

Chapter Four

Omega is like an annoying relative that you can’t get rid of. They’re always there, waiting for you to make a mistake. Waiting for you to cross an invisible line. And when you
do
cross that line, you’re dead.

Game over.

My first day at the labor camp is nothing short of miserable. I lose my hair, my clothes, my dignity and my independence. Something I
don’t
lose is my appetite or my need to drink clean water. Hunger and thirst are the two things at the forefront of my mind as the hours pass.

Throughout the first day, Sophia and I work hard, picking oranges, putting them in our sacks, taking them to the bins. Rinse and repeat. It’s very boring. Very tiring. We don’t get any downtime. At around two in the afternoon a pickup truck drives up to the corner of the field.

Prisoners start flooding towards it. Sophia and I hang back, cautious. Until we see that there’s a huge plastic water tank on the back of the pickup bed. We approach slowly and I watch
while prisoners fill old milk cartons, thermoses and plastic water bottles. Sophia licks her lips.

“Where do we get some of those?” she says.

“I don’t know.”

Prisoners push and shove to the front of the line, filling their containers and gorging themselves with water. My dry mouth is
very
jealous right now.

“Hey.” Grease is marching up from the side of the field. He tosses a plastic milk carton at my chest before giving an oversized orange juice can to Sophia. “You’re welcome.”

I open and close my mouth a few times before blurting out,

“Thank you.”

But he’s already gone.

“That’s not right,” Sophia observes. “He wants something from us.”

“I don’t care. I’m thirsty.”

I work my way to the pickup bed and pull the lever on the container. Cold water comes rushing out. Probably ditchwater. Not long ago I
would have rolled over and died before I drank out of a ditch. Today I don’t care.

Funny how things have changed.

I fill the container to the brim and screw the lid tight just as I’m roughly shoved aside by a male prisoner. I hit the ground on my shoulder, wincing with pain. I get to my feet. My cheeks flush with anger and embarrassment. I feel like crying. Or kicking him. Maybe both. But nobody even notices I was knocked down. I’m invisible. Sophia rushes up behind me and places her hand on my shoulder.

“You okay?” she whispers.

I nod.

“I’m going to get some water, too.” She squeezes through the crowd, gets her own water, and the two of us head back out to the trees. Away from the crazy prisoners pushing and clawing their way to the water.

“Next time we’ll just go last,” I say.

Sophia agrees, then we pop the lids off our cartons and chug down half of the water inside. It’s cold and refreshing, even if there
are
flecks of dirt and god-knows-what floating around in it. It does what it’s supposed to do.

It keeps me alive.

“How long do you think our workday is?” Sophia wonders.

She climbs to the top of the ladder. I work my way up behind her, swinging onto the trunk of the tree. After just a few hours of working out here, we’ve already got a system down. She picks at the top of the ladder, because she’s taller, and I bend down and get the oranges underneath the canopy of branches that she would have a hard time reaching. “Probably from sunrise to sunset,” I sigh. “And I’m doubting we get a dental plan.”

Sophia snorts.

“I’m doubting we get
anything
.”

“I wonder when we eat.” I drop a couple of oranges into my bag. “Kamaneva said we get ten minutes for dinner.”

“Ten minutes? That’s not enough. I need an hour. At least.”

“An
hour
? It doesn’t take that long to eat.”

“You’ve never met my family.”

I grin for the first time since arriving.

The rest of the day passes slowly, and the by the time evening hits, I’m exhausted – mentally and physically. Every once in a while Sophia and I will hear the boom and rattle of distant gunfire, reminding us that we’re working in the middle of an active warzone. It’s chilling.

“Hey, listen.” Sophia pauses, cocking her head. “What’s that?”

I stop. The school intercom is emitting a piercing tone. It sounds like a heart rate monitor that’s flat-lined. All around us, seasoned prisoners stop what they’re doing, grab their ladders, and take off.

“I’m guessing we’re done,” I say.

Sophia takes one end of the ladder and I take the other. We haul it to the end of the field and heave it into the back of a pickup. We grab our water containers and watch as other prisoners drop their shoulder sacks into a bin. Sophia and I follow suit and blend into the crowd as armed Omega troopers close in around us. It’s not long before we’re moving back into the complex. We march down the long corridors before making a sharp turn into the cafeteria.

Sophia and I are clueless about how to proceed, so we let the other prisoners surge in front of us while we bring up the rear. They line up at a long, low table. Stacks of bowls are piled at one end. Everybody grabs one.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” I mumble.

I take a bowl and file down the side of the table. I hold my bowl out as a woman – a fellow prisoner, by the looks of it - spoons out something hot and steaming into the container. I stare at the contents. It looks like muddy water.

“What
is
this?” Sophia hisses.

“I don’t think I want to know.” We’re given a piece of hard bread at the end of the line and Sophia and I sit down at a plastic table in the corner. “This bread is ancient.” I try to break it in half, but it’s too stale. It won’t even bend. “That’s it. My teeth are screwed.”

“It’s better than nothing,” Sophia says. “…I think.”

The Mystery Soup is nothing but water with a few spices, some chunks of unidentifiable meat and a little flour thrown in. I soak the bread
in the bowl to get it soft enough to eat. Honestly, I’ve had better meals. Then again, I’ve had worse meals. I
did
live in Los Angeles, after all. There are some pretty nasty places to eat down there. I went through a lot of trial and error in high school to find the restaurants that were worth the time and money.

This
is not worth time or money. Or caloric value.

I don’t see a rosy, healthy future for myself if this is the only food we get around here. It’s nothing more than thickened gruel and a piece of stale bread. It’s not enough to keep an anorexic canary alive, let alone a human being.

Maybe we’ll get more food tomorrow.

Keep dreaming,
my little voice says.

In the end, Kamaneva is right. We only get ten minutes to eat, which is more than enough time considering the fact that our meal has less mass than bottled baby food. Afterwards we’re marched back to the
LAB
. The doors are shut behind us and locked tight. Armed Omega troopers are stationed in the hall and outside the windows.

Sophia and I press our backs against the far wall and drop to the ground, watching other prisoners crawl into their own spaces. Some squeeze underneath the lab counters and curl up inside the big storage cupboards. Others literally sprawl out wherever they are and close their eyes. Arms and legs are everywhere, and the women don’t seem to be embarrassed to prop their legs up on each other’s backs or stick their head in somebody’s face.