hollow promises

06

SHILOH JONES

    A centennial and a half ago the world turned to ruins. China invaded Taiwan, and with the former US President's pledge to protect Taiwan they had also dragged the US into conflict. With the US sending soldiers to war, Russia took the opportunity to invade Ukraine. From there, the world entered World War III, the first ever nuclear war on earth. The draft was enacted and parents were torn from their children and send to war; ninety-two percent of soldiers died in conflict and four of the remaining eight percent died from later injuries and ailments.

    While battles were fought both overseas and in the US the international crime rates rose to record highs. Any and all law enforcement had dwindled and after a few years in the war it had been almost entirely eradicated. Civilian deaths grew more common and the population decreased, and that was when the Underground became an idea. A safe-haven for civilized and nonviolent was just a figment of imagination back then, within two years it had become a true occurrence. When the studies showed that the nuclear radiation was causing infertility, a group of wealthy doomsday planners who had been living out their days in an abandoned highschool moved themselves and their families into the bunker, and thus the Moles were born.

    I'd known the story my entire life. Everyone knew the story, it was common knowledge. We were told about it as a bedtime story, at the dinner table, and more.

    The ride to Gehenna was shorter than I expected. The desert felt as if it went on forever when it was all I could see, but then the trees came into view. They were less lime colored and more bluish than I'd been led to believe. They were so tall that I thought the helicopter might brush the treetops, yet we never touched.

    My body had began to ache after a mere few minutes in the position. Half of the girls had already fallen asleep from the exhaustion of it all, including Marcy. I hardly took my eyes off of her, my gaze constantly shifting between her and the open door on her side. I was mildly afraid she would slip out of her cuffs, she was skinnier than I, and slide ride out the door.

The trees turned into a town, the little broken down houses blended into the greenery that had overthrown them. The town began to shift into larger buildings, and then the larger buildings shifted i entirely into a city. The city was rundown, everything about it told me that it had been left to rot during the wars. Walls of bricks had collapsed, leaving the indoors exposed to the overgrown vegetation outside. I blinked and my gaze shifted from the ruins beneath us a white wall in front of us. It was tall, so very tall.

The wall touched the clouds, which were larger than I thought they would be. They stretched for miles upon miles and their color was warmer than white yet nowhere near yellow. It was strange, as we grew farther from the ground it felt as if the clouds grew farther away. We slid overtop the wall and the clouds ran away from us, no longer impaled upon the wall. On the other side of the wall was another world entirely.

    It was a city, almost all of which was visible from the height of the helicopter. The center of the city was higher than the outskirts, yet the outskirts were much more colorful. Everything was bright, from the colored neighborhoods along the wall to the bright white skyscrapers in the center. The greenery was limited but arranged in circular patches around the city. We neared the center and the helicopter neared the ground yet again.

    We landed abruptly on the concrete roof of a tall building within the bright center of the city. The helicopter shook violently and Ashley's vomit slid down the floor and under the soles of my white shoes.

The blades atop the vehicle began to slow down and my wrists were suddenly grabbed and unlocked from the chain above me, however they were still stuck together. A burning sensation shot up my fingertips and into my shoulders, I winced as he grabbed my arm from beneath the armpit and tugged me to my feet. I was lead out of the vehicle second, Marcella was first and I was lead out directly behind her. The sun beamed down on us harshly and I squinted my eyes to avoid the burn from their violent rays.

There was a red door opened on the rooftop and it led us into a long stairwell with various doors sticking off the sides. The doors were all a stark white, as was the hallway's walls, and each door held a label in a foreign language. We stopped at the one labeled "Attractio 1" and were lead in. The hallway was incredibly different than the warmth inside the room. One entire wall was windows to show the cityscape, the wall directly across from it were painted to look like a forest, and the other walls were warm white. The floors were dark wooden planks and in the center of the room they were covered with a large fluffy white rug. Atop the rug were various red couches, four, along with a few yellow chairs to match. The footsteps following behind us halted and girls behind us began to be released into the space whilst Marcella and I were lead into one of the side rooms.

The room had two beds with red bedsheets sat atop a blue rug and each of us were sat on one of the beds. I was closer to the door than Marcella. My keeper grasped my chin and craned my head upwards so I was staring at him.

"The doctor will be in here soon, he is a nice man, you will behave." He instructed. Marcella's keeper had pointed to mine as if to tell her that he was speaking for the both of them. "If you are rude or do not follow his commands, I will hit you. Do you understand?"

I nodded as the door opened and a tall middle-aged man sauntered in with a long white labcoat.

"Geminos. Nonne incredibile est? Duae virgines eadem facie, ut videtur, sanae?" I read his name tag as he spoke, it was a foreign name I knew not how to pronounce. Soleil.

    "Ego nesciebam eventum realem fuisse. Honeste putavi esse fabulam." Marcella's keeper responded and laughed at the end. Neither of the other men laughed, clearly he hadn't truly been funny.

    "Cogito statim experiri. Fine diei ponentur. Styli jam constat unum ex iis accipere." The doctor told them..

    "Bene." Mine responded.

    Soleil smiled and kneeled down in front of me and pushed his hands on his knees. "Have you ever gotten blood drawn, child?"

    I nodded. It was part of the Friday routine, everyone got their blood drawn to make sure we were up to the Mole standards of health. The first time I was six and cried terribly, but after a month it got easy.

    "Good. I'll be fast and I won't take too much." He responded and took a needle off of the bedside table between I and Marcella's bed. He took my wrist and with a glance of my keeper's aggressive gaze, I unclenched my muscles and let him have it.

    "What's your name?" The needle went into my skin and I watched my blood exit my body.

    I took to long to open my mouth, my keeper spoke up, "Answer him."

    "Et bene, Joph. We're getting along fine." Soleil responded. He had a name then, Joph. It was unique.

    "Shiloh." I told him out of fear for Joph. His annoyance radiated off of him in suffocating thick waves.

    "That's beautiful, Shiloh." He stood and moved on to Marcella. I crossed my arms in front of my chest and squeezed my upper arms tightly, in denial that any of the last six hours had occurred.

    He made idle conversation with Marcella and she was quicker to respond than I. She told him her name, her favorite color, and which parent she got her 'lovely eye color' from.

    At the end of the session Soleil stood between us and informed us that we would have rapid testing done so they would only be gone a minute. Then they left, all three of them, and Marcella and I were alone.