Freedomland

Lili was sitting up straighter and made eye contact with Elijah as he crept back into the bedroom. She coughed a little bit, then spoke. Her voice sounded unnatural, frail, like an old person’s. “How did you get in?” she asked. “My parents aren’t here this whole week.” “I got your keys out of your jacket,” he said softly. The eye sockets full of blood crept into his mind’s eye, like an unwanted Device program. He felt a little sick again, and tried to push the image aside. He glanced up at Lili, who was looking at him expectantly. “It’s soaking in the tub. Your jacket.” “Thank you,” said Lili. “Hey, did you call the cops?” Elijah shook his head firmly. “It’s not our business,” he said. “It was pretty much a freak accident that we were there anyway. And I do not need the cops in my life right now. Or ever.” “I guess so, huh,” said Lili, looking him in the eye. “Yeah,” he said, and looked away. He knew what she was thinking about, and didn’t want to go there. Silence cloaked the little room, its walls covered in the same posters that had been there since middle school—old rock bands, airbrushed unicorns. The little twin bed took up much of the floor space. The ceiling seemed particularly low, the sarongs that covered it hanging like sagging underbellies. Elijah found himself thinking of the eighteen floors of people above them, people who hadn’t seen and would never know about the murder in the alley. Suddenly Lili got up, wrapping the blanket tighter around her shoulders, and went to the bedside table. She pulled open a drawer, and dug out a lighter and a stick of incense, which she set into the little burner on the table and lit. It burned for a few seconds before she blew it out and returned to her perch on the bed. The wafting scent began to choke out the old apartment mustiness. Incense always reminded Elijah of Lili. She burned it a lot, said it was good for cleansing. Elijah didn’t feel cleansed. He thought about the smell of the corpse and nearly choked. “It doesn’t smell like that on TV,” Elijah said aloud. “What?” Lili turned on the edge of the bed. “Death.” She nodded. Elijah thought about the first time they’d experienced death together, this being long before his dad died. It’d been the first time Elijah was really aware of death as an actual force. In second grade, Lili’s hamster, Dominick, had escaped his cage and died beneath her bed. Elijah had been over one afternoon, and found Dominick’s drying body because of the smell. Death had a specifically unique scent—almost sweet, but sickly and nauseating. He hadn’t experienced anything else like it—not until today, anyway. When his dad died, all it had been was a closed coffin and he and his mom and some damn government priest, all wearing black. This had been like a cop show or some crappy American movie. Something clicked in Elijah’s mind—he realized what had been bothering him. “I didn’t exactly have my TV on, you know,” said Elijah carefully. “When you saw the Angel?” Lili asked. Elijah nodded. “She was saying the same things. As the woman. She had the same dress. Why would someone kill her?” Murder was something that happened in the movies. You never heard about it actually happening these days. After America became Freedomland, which was before either of them had been born, murder was all but eliminated. He’d learned in school: In Freedomland, no one killed because they didn’t have to in order to survive, like they had in America. The new system worked. And anyone who did die at least had a backup file somewhere, even if they couldn’t afford to get reanimated. It was a comforting thought, that no one really died. This woman, though, somehow had. Even if she did have a data file in a government vault somewhere, she was still dead in a deeper gut feeling sense of the word. Dead. “The Angel just appeared,” Elijah continued. “I had just turned my Device on, but I didn’t have any applications active. I don’t know why that happened.” He tapped his temple with a forefinger. “It wasn’t a remote hack, either, at least not one I’ve ever seen.” Lili barked out a monotone laugh. “Maybe you’re just crazy,” she suggested. “I don’t know,” said Elijah with such seriousness that Lili stopped and scooted onto the floor so she could look him in the face. He glanced up at her. She looked scared, concerned, a mix of emotions he hadn’t seen from her in a long time. Usually she was tied up in her own issues, not his. “Maybe you hallucinated because of the shock of seeing the body,” she suggested. “I know I was pretty out of it for a while there.” “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think I was in that much shock. I mean, at first when I saw her, I thought of some old slasher flick.” “I’ll bet it’s a sign. I think we were supposed to see it,” declared Lili. Elijah snorted. “Yeah, right. I’m sure God has abundant free time to go around casting visions to random kids in the street.” “Which God do you mean?” asked Lili. There were two these days—the one you read about in the Bible, and the one who ran the country. That God was a human, or had been at some point, genetically engineered to be perfect and immortal back during the transition to Freedomland. And God was perfect, the ideal ruler for a flawless state. A state that was supposed to be without murder. Without abuse. Without abduction. “Either God. Both.” Elijah shrugged. “How do you know that the woman was an Angel, anyway? She could have been an Archangel, you know, a government agent, someone on the inside.” Elijah stood, pacing the burgundy carpet irritably, his head threatening to brush the cloth on the ceiling and dislodge its dust. “Whatever,” he said, “I still don’t know why she talked to us.” “She said she’d been looking for me,” said Lili. “I know. She said that to me too. It doesn’t make any sense. We’re not special.” Lili shrugged. “I got abducted. That’s almost like special.” Elijah paused in his pacing and faced Lili. She was gazing thoughtfully into middle distance. She was probably thinking about the same thing that he was at that moment: How in the April of Lili’s eleventh year, she’d been taken from her bedroom only to be returned without explanation 48 hours later. While the case was officially closed, it had never really been solved. Nobody knew who took her or why it had happened. Lili remembered nothing—she said the whole thing was a big dark blur in her memory. Elijah realized Lili was staring at him. “You have blood on you, you know,” she said. Elijah glanced down at his hands, feeling a clench of panic in the bottom of his stomach. Sure enough, streaks of drying blood were all over the backs of his hands. How had he not noticed the blood in the bathroom when he was cleaning up Lili, or vomiting? There it was, screaming at him. “On my face, too?” he asked Lili. “Yes,” she said. “You have a few splatters. Turn around.” Elijah turned slowly. “And some on the back of your neck. Looks like it got in your Device ports, too. I have some rubbing alcohol, if you want to clean them.” Elijah nodded, and headed into the pink, fluorescent-lit bathroom. Lili trailed behind him. Elijah went over to the sink, picked up the little yellow duckie-shaped scrub brush that had been a fad like ten years ago on Hearth and Home Kids Channel, and began to scrub at his hands viciously. He lathered on soap and ran the water hot enough to nearly burn. Steam rose up and clouded his reflection in the mirror, slowly blocking out his shaggy brown hair and pallid skin. He could hear Lili rummaging in the cabinets above the toilet. “Okay,” she said, and put a bottle of alcohol and some swabs on the counter next to Elijah. He turned off the water and for a moment he just stood there, hands dripping into the sink. The blood was gone now, but his skin was red and irritated.