Frozen Solid

To The Winds

Deven woke up, his face smarting.  His hands were in cuffs.  His legs had more cuffs connected to the wall.  His head felt like it had bricks on it.  And it might’ve.  Maybe.  He couldn’t move enough to tell.

God, how did he let the government get him… them?  Actually, no.  Deven had been right, he would’ve never let something like that happen.  It was something else, he didn’t fail.  It was… It was… Loise.  She had given them away by squirming and whispering.  God dammit.  He should’ve left her behind!

She gave them away.  She killed Sean Ross.  Deven hated her with all his empty dead heart.  He hoped she was dead too.  Running away from the fight like a coward.  Hell, she might’ve even planned the whole thing.

He watched as other prisoners were dragged screaming out of their cells.  For death, he supposed, his brain supplying the horrifying images he didn‘t want to think about.  The girl in the cell next to him was sobbing, picking out her hair.  One by one.  Would he turn into one of them?  If he didn’t escape… he would.  Deven wasn’t about to let that happen.

He had heard all sorts of things from his parents before they died, about the last great war.  Deven, trapped in the darkest place he’d ever been before in his life, thought about the flickering hope that those stories had brought his family when they couldn’t meet average again, when they weren’t normal enough, when his dad finally passed away and his mom was left with a son and no way to feed him.

Once, there was a world, Deven thought, where things had color.  Every person was different, unique.  There were Africans and Asians and Nords and Britons and Greeks and so many different people like the stars in the sky.  People were free to set up little white houses with little white picket fences.  There were millions of different types of books and art and magazines.  Life wasn’t perfect, because with differing opinions there were often disagreements.  Deven smiled, remembering his mother whispering, ‘I grew up in a time where I could wear my hair long, in pigtails, with blue streaks in it, and date any boy I wanted, even if he had a calculator that he played pacman on and glasses with an atrocious Mohawk.’

Sometimes that world came to Deven in a dream, where he was wearing something different from every other boy and girl, no uniforms or anything, and the world was washed with watercolors.  Light flooded it even in the darkest places.  It was just a dream, but Deven wanted to live in that world.  That’s why he fought.

His father had always spoken of the last great war with deep regret.  ‘His name was Alastair, and he rose up from the crowds of people, and gave a great speech.  He was young, but hardened from a life of poverty.’ Deven didn’t know who Alastair was for a long time, and Deven even thought of him as a hero in the beginning of the story.

Alastair had gathered a following from the crowd he’d spoken to, a crowd that wanted fair treatment of all, everyone born equal, with no money and no one better than anyone else.  They believed in a normal world, safe for them to mold in his hands.  Alastair didn’t want a normal world.

He wanted to control it.  Alastair wanted to unite all the separate nations, the places that were once called Great Britain and Kenya and America, but now went by Province 637 and Province 334 and Province 1.  He wanted to reign, to be the president of them all.

Deven frowned.  The story took a turn for the worse, Alastair had won over America and designated it as Province 1 in the world.  America was helpless to fight the poison that had festered unnoticed inside of it.  The national symbols were desecrated, the White House turned into the palace for Alastair.

And Alastair cast off his name, leaving it for forgotten and replacing it with the President.  The President changed America first, writing a set of normality guidelines everyone would have to follow unless they wanted capital punishment.  A set of normality guidelines that hadn’t changed since then.