Prodigy

I

I wake from my sleep with a gasp.

My hand finds its way to my chest. As it does every night.

The discordant sounds of loud Televisions, footsteps thudding all around me, screaming children, women and men alike, barking hounds, banging doors, and cars speeding over the broken gravel just out my cracked window finishes the job and chases away any last vestiges of sleep that had remained.

I throw aside the thin bed covers that had tangled around my legs, moving to hop off the edge of the top of the double decker bed I sleep in, but stop.

I inhale deeply, catching my breath. Wiping the beads of sweat that had gathered off the top of my lip. This had not been worse nor better than the last times. It had been much of the same.

Vivid. Sweet. Painful. Sad.

Waking up an anger in me that slept just as much as I did at the thought of the other memories. The other not as vivid but undoubtedly as painful memories.

I jump off the edge, careful not to jostle the rickety bed too much. The Salvaged Company knows the thing is barely holding up.

I hold in a hiss as my feet make contact with the cold concrete that is the floor of my apartment. I won't be surprised if the Flyaway drug freezer I heard was in this building was right below my flat.

Because this is the type of place I live in, where an illicit drug freezer could be what is right below my apartment. Where gang fights with trigger-happy Projector armed men and women are the norm in my neighborhood. Where the helpless are robbed blind like there's no tomorrow. And where fugitives that have killed and stolen are hidden. Fugitives like me.

The pads of my feet are silent on the cold floor as I walk to my bathroom. The bright LED lights are almost too bright when I flip the switch, throwing me back to a spinning car and purple rain that changed me.

I hiss through clenched teeth as I squeeze the edges of the stained sink. My heart starts it's galloping as the memory plays behind my shut eyes.

“No.” The plea comes out as a moan. Not now, not now, not now—

It is a crack that stops it. The surge, it's called.

I look up at my fogged up mirror, then down at the cracked tiles. There are exactly twenty tiles in this bathroom, I counted—I get bored when I'm sitting on the toilet waiting for something to happen. And eight of them are broken, including the new one I just added. My landlady can't find out about this.

The air sizzles and crackles like it always does when I get worked up as I wipe the fog off my mirror, trying to keep my mind off troubling memories.

My eyes look bloodshot. Unless you know what you're looking for.

Thing blue lines are mixed with the red ones, marking me as one who should be part of the Salvaged Company. Except I'm not. I'm a fugitive. Which keeps me from getting good work, a citizen ID card, good food and a good apartment.

I shake my head. After the storm, in all the regions that were affected, some people that had been in the rain turned up dead, while the rest... They were mutated. The government set up a few organizations to help, but none was and will ever be as successful as the Salvaged Company. A corporation that rescued humans that survived the mutations, because not all made it through the second stage of survival. I know I nearly didn't.

The tiny space in the bathroom that barely fits a toilet and a shower becomes charged, raising gooseflesh all over my body at that memory.

I start my search in the shelf above the sink for my sleeping pills. I never remember where I put those, probably because by the time I put them back, I'm already drugged out.