How Not to Die in the Suburbs
Before the year 3000, the Suburbs were actually an ideal place to venture. Vast boxed housing was ensconced with lights every fifteen feet. Houses were close enough to touch if you reached out of the glass portways, but sound-proofed to keep a level of privacy.
Stories say that there were once children playing with their plasma balls in the streets. Sometimes the entire compound gathered for an annual burning of the sky, where fire exploded upward toward the lower troposphere to please some kind of pagan gods. Embers of blue and red whistled into nothingness.
Stores weren't nearby, over a mile away, unlike today when we are blessed with basement store fronts at the base of our PODS. Certainly we're not all so lucky to live over something more than just a TapPOD, but that is for those who could afford it.
Today, it is an honor not to live in a Suburb, now referred to as the Urban Wastes.
Today, instead of white fences, brick boxes, rooftops and fire hydrants, there are The Tunnels.
Some relics of homesteads remain, barely holding one wall upright, their roofs ripped from some unseen force, the foundation all that remains.
So if you must leave the compound, which you should never have to, know this about these dead, pock-marked towns.
1 - There will be gardens with a wide array of vegetables and fruit. Do not eat anything from these gardens. The Tunnelsmen poison these edibles, hoping to drag you down for a meal.
2 - When you are walking on the pavement, avoid anything that moves. Everything is dead. If it isn't dead, it's a drone. These are designed to lure you down into The Tunnels. Run from all that moves.
3 - There is no such thing as a safe place to set camp when you're in Suburban Wastes. Get in and get out.
4 - Do not go underground. You'll find openings clear as day all over the area. Do not enter them. You will not return.
Dorsha was amped from this note on the command prompt. The nearby screen asked her if she was sure that she wanted to exit the city, and if it should mark such events in its logs.
She turned around, taking in the vast landscape of thousands upon thousands of stacked shacks. Each shack read P-O-D-S on the side. The blue doors slid open and shut, some propped open, some PODS modified from 5 x 5 x 10' into large mansions of sorts.
"How fancy, now the trash is even bigger trash."
With a scoff, she looked from left to right, there were up to 5 levels of PODS, ladders leading from bottom to top.
From here she could see the ants crawling over one another, their bright neons unifying them as a race of trash to her. A rainbow of identity.
The blues worked on the bottom Tap-PODS, the reds lived in the penthouses up top. Each individual was marked the same as the next, smeared with brown markings scattered over their forms. Since we left the stronghold far North, since that day Generation one was forever marked by their act. By tweaking some skin gene, they were programmed to be stained, marred by this muddy smear if they escaped. Easier to find, that way.
As generations went on, each one had more and more of a faded mark. Mine was lightest of all.
I have to snap out of it, shrug away the thousand-yard stare, the prompt behind me started to make the dilapidated machine beep. It was all pieced together.
Everything we had was make-shift, and just like our will to live from crumb to crumb, everything was disenchanted. In our boxes, our cells, our guts told us to stay alive, no matter how.
I needed more. More than these tin roofs, familiar faces, hard edges, and rat races.
I needed to leave.
My heart is already racing the moment I command the console to release me.
The night sky illuminated my task, and as the aluminum door shuffled open, placed there as more of a suggestion not to leave, I stepped out and no longer suffocated.
"Good bye mother, father, and the inbetweens."
I would wave, push past the door, while it shuts, I feel jubilation in my act.
Our compound was surrounded by grasslands, yellow and vivid, as far as the eye could see. Little did I know that just as my complex is out of sight, is when the grass would wither away with each step.
The world seemed to give up on the life it hung onto. Nothing but flatness, dusted with sand and pale dirt.
Potential destinations were out in the distance, to my left and front and right. As the tenth-hand Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books had suggested in school, I was at the whim of my will.
Within my grey military back, I carried water, and crackers soaked in meat broth.
Retrospectively, this was too little and too late. I was already hungry and the chunks swimming in the baggy of cracker soup was all-too appetizing. Another short-coming of the contents was that the cold bit through my cling-wrap garment with ease.
The night trudged on, as I did through the night. My search for the Suburban Wastes is fruitless until morning. Seventeen hours after leaving the compound, and short of water.
The scene was intimidating, skeletons of fragmented homes lay in ruin before my eyes. Beams were half broken or sagging at the half-way point of what was left of parallel walls. Buzzards sat there, craning their necks at me. I could feel their expectations.
Never lacking timing, fate places an entrance to The Tunnels ten feet in front of me.
So I have taken a seat, staring at the hole, the earth giving a gaping yawn through the floorboards and into darkness.
I ate what remained of my cracker soup, contemplating my fate. I debate, as bugs made their home in my clothes and warm hair.
Something to the left of me moves, shuffling upon it's white fur pads, and onto what is left of the floor next to me.
A rabbit had joined me and the hole. It blinked up to me, after assessing that I was apparently no threat it sidled up to me for a wordless conversation.
Should we go on? What lies in wait? While we sat, the strangest of odours had overcome the area that we sat. He old me about leaving his family, about how he needed a fresh start. I told him my similar story. We laughed and we cried, until we were silent. Our fate sat below.
His hand held mine, and as we both locked eyes, that's when he jumped. I was dragged with him into the dark.
----
I landed. Rab is gone. He's left me. I must have fallen for ages. Had I been sleeping? I rubbed my eyes, wherever they were, and set out to find the worrisome Rab.
----
Maybe he's through these bushes, or under this rock. There's really no telling where he has gone.
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They're looking for me. But here in the dark, they'll never see me. I'm not even sure of the last time I've seen myself.
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I should go home. I never should have left.
----
I have found Rab. He is not alone, and neither am I. We've started to tunnel our way our. We're rabbits, it's what we live for.
----
These roots are scrumptious. Rab is finding them all over lately, even the little eats them.
=====
'Alice, will you wake up? I've been sitting here for days. Just wake up...'
Rab was tugging on his short hair, sitting silently in the hospital room. In the notebook in front of him were realtor images of the house with the picket fence that he and Dorsha had put a bid in for. Their things were all packed away in the PODs, and as a final celebration of moving out of Vegas, they visited a magic show. That's why she was here, in the hospital.
She never should have let the man hypnotise her. Now she lay, sleeping for weeks.
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