24 September, 2050

She shot up on the bed, her back ramrod straight. 

It was pitch black. Or her eyes weren't opening. 

She touched her face, reached her eyes and made sure they were open. 

It was spooky. She felt like she was hung in an abyss. Her heart was racing, then sweat began streaming down her back. 

An eerie feeling plunged in her bowels: she was not anywhere she was supposed to be. 

Hell, she wasn't even sure if it was her or just a surreal avatar of her 15-year-old self that her traumatized limbic system kept resuscitating time and again.

***

10 June, 2047

She was hiding in the closet and trembling. The fight had spilled into the room through the splintered door. 

Fuddy was losing the fight. She could tell. He was no match to anyone with his paunch and that loose roll of fat around his neck. She started smelling blood. 

It had been going like a regular evening. TangoCard, Fuddy's work contact and friend would be visiting in a while. She hurriedly washed the remaining dishes, put the food away and set the table for the celebration. Fuddy was going to attempt to ease tensions, convince Tango his served up tissue-donors would be par with PetriGrow standards.

She went to the only room and locked the door inside. Fuddy had graciously offered it to her with the bed and the closet, and moved his stuff out into the living area when she'd arrived six months ago. She had the chain-lock installed the next day.

She quickly set up the table for study and turned off the lights. 9pm was always company time for Fuddy and she had no wish to discover or be discovered. The room had always been off limits to visitors anyways. 

She tried to delve back into 10th grade algebra but couldn't. The light of the red-shaded lamp fell on the lower half of Cecilia's framed face. That was Fuddy's sister, kidnapped at nineteen, twelve years ago. Mutilated parts were found dumped months later miles away from home, identified by the distinct tattoos.

Fuddy had given his sister's nickname Cecil to her and respected her boundaries from day one. She had asked permission to keep Cecil as an alias - staying anonymous was a priority now - and he didn't mind. She enrolled in the local school as his niece and erased her v-space. There were always rumors that the thing could never be permanently deleted but she had paid a hacker to do it for sure. This after getting two local jobs, one after school hours, and another on weekends. Fuddy's community connections had proven useful there.

TangoCard had arrived by now and the night would be getting boisterous. Inside, she sincerely hoped things would go well, but Tango's voice got higher as the celebration went and took an a sharper edge. She pushed away her workbook in unease and picked up her phone. 

She had already destroyed her old 5G by submerging it in vinegar for three days after a farewell message to Vera on arrival. Her new phone was old school - no AI, Virtual Reality Operating System, or holograms, and hopefully no built in sitting-duck vulnerability. A basic WiFi-limited Smart, that's all. She learned the ways of darknet and made new accounts on two ancient haunts with one leg down in onionland: an old email server that won't die off and the resurrected Twitter. All the in-crowd had long moved from either and she felt safe. Vera obliged her by joining Twitter at last so they could stay connected. 

There wasn't any tweet or DM today from Vera so she tried to get into the world of Scott, Jem and Boo Radley but the ghosts in the real world called. TangoCard sounded openly disruptive now, names and expletives galore with some pushing around. Concerned, she shot up and glued herself to the door, when she heard a low thud with Fuddy exclaiming: “I bought it for you, Tang”. 

The cake. 

She heard Tango's rash voice, shrill despite the drunk slur: “Three of five, you nimcock! Three of five. Here. Eat your cake.” 

Muffled noises followed from Fuddy and changed into alarming grunts of a choking goat. Tango was stuffing the cake in Fuddy's mouth. 

Instinctively, she slipped back to the table and, quickly gathering her materials, shoved them into the ever-ready bag in the closet. 

Was this it? The tipping point?

Three of four Fuddy's latest ducks had turned up bad eggs. They must have misreported alcohol abuse or chain smoking histories and happily earned their upfront fee for subpar hepatic shavings. When the tests went bad, the PetriGrow runners could only chuck the cuts of the brokers, the donor scouts responsible for discreetly baiting fish. It had turned into quite an industry since the FDA had approved the Tissue Growth Project. A futurist medical organization, The Lancet, previously grant-based, had sprung into action. PetriGrow labs sprung up like mushrooms in every state and healthy people could part with negligible amounts of healthy tissue to help usher in the long-dreamed era of commercial vat-grown organs.  

The brokers in the States had spent a decade carefully growing local supply chains in the squalls. The loose anything-goes monitoring in under-the-weather townships combined well with governance apathy for ‘squalids’ - as the lower masses were derogatively called by the uppers. Minimum rate donors were naturally high in demand. There was no one to raise brows as long as things seemed okay on the filled forms, and guarantees and disclaimers were duly signed.

And yet every system has its own checks and balances. Fuddy's was hunting the niche for hepatics in southwestern Michigan. He probed prospects after his day job and set up meet-cutes with brokers. But the more he got excited with the steady side-income, the more he fuzzed on protocols. It had been showing up in results for some time and the rejection rate had only gone up despite previous warnings.

The bag dropped from her hands as Fuddy's desperate yell shook the walls outside: “Put back the knife, Tango! I'll make it up to you,  I swear!”

The tipping point.

She leapt with the bag to the half-open window and used a long birch beam under the bed as a crowbar to hide the bag under the brambles. Tango's swearing and Fuddy's pleading had reached a crescendo and thumping steps were beating the boards. Acute concern for Fuddy had turned her heart into a drum but she was her own parent, child and sibling. Survival first. 

She pulled off covers, pillows and blanket from the single bed and bundled it all in the narrow closet in case something happened and she couldn't get out. For her whole first month here, she had fantasized this last minute strategy and now the drill was a go. 

And then it happened.

Tango threw Fuddy against the bedroom door cracking it in the middle. That's when a futile sense of loyalty to her benefactor wasted crucial seconds. She dived for the closet and shut the panels on herself right as Tango's next kick wedged Fuddy's torso halfway in the door. 

It was dark and she was scared and lacked air under the beddings, but Fuddy out there was paying the real price of small-town greed. Justice reaches the poor first with a tight fist. Checks and balances.

Tango's next kick broke the door in a thunder and the next heart rending scream of the older man told her Tango's knife-holding hand had found a target. 

She was shaking uncontrollably but at the same time her brain was modulating it so she didn't rattle the door. Stuffing the sheet in her mouth for fear of letting out a scream, she waited for Fuddy's last. She couldn't tell if it was tears or sweat that was soaking the sheets but it felt like Fuddy's blood. 

His last was a painfully grating gurgling sound as his throat clogged up in his own blood. She felt she could see his X-rayed insides and watch him drown. 

The silence that followed was life-changing. She wasn't sure if she had fainted or died or just the universe had turned off. Then there was an agonizing creak behind her. Suffused light filtered through the layers of fabric as a wood panel scratched the untiled floor. 

With all her might, she inhaled a big gulp and froze. Suddenly, the yoga she had learned in Pontiac came to her. She calmed her mind and peeled her focus off from her body and the wet sheets and the suffused glow that washed her hideout. 

And then the glow was no more. She heard a receding shuffle and distant splintering, more shuffles and scraping and then a final thunk of the main door shutting.

The murderer was gone. 

At last she removed the sheets and sat up in the drench of blood's rusty smell. From a wish to keep his eyes shielded from his own grisly crime, the murderer had switched the light back off when he left. She knew she couldn't handle the grisly sight herself. The ruckus and the rending screams of the butchered man must have alarmed the neighbors. She could hear sirens any moment now. 

She forced herself on her legs, went to the window and climbed out.

‘Never look back’ had just sealed itself as her life philosophy. 

***

24 September, 2050

At last, the spell receded. She was feeling herself again. She wasn't as shook as the flashbacks usually left her. The reason, in a weirdly selfish way, was that the memory in question didn't involve a personal ordeal. In fact, it had allowed her to finally escape the creepy circumstances she had been managing in. 

Feeling a cotton sheet underneath her, she twisted around. A chink with a tiny tinkle of light coming in. She touched it, it felt like sandpaper, no, a thick cardboard. She reached it's edge. It was a windowsill. 

Suddenly, she was not hung in pitch black space anymore. She was in that antique motel box of a room that Harry the actor had offered her to stay in. 

She instinctively slid off the bed embarrassed. She had severely objected to sleeping on the bed despite there being enough space. The boy - Brian, she remembered now - had talked her into reading from his favorite book to her. She was so droopy-eyed already, everyday was a long, long day for her, she must have dozed off before finishing the chapter. 

What had woken her up though? The nightlight Brian had promised he would be switching on after turning off the lamp must have fused or something. Waking up in stark darkness at an unfamiliar place had spooked her triggering the flashback.

But she felt purged now, and latched on to the sweet chill of her cooling off sweats before carefully groping around to investigate.

She found the door at last and took off the wedge jamming the door from the outside. Brian was still purring peacefully.

It was pitch black out there too. No lamp, no moon, not even lit windows, just a handful of sleepy stars. But the gentle night breeze was a welcome pleasure. 

Where the hell was Harry? 

What had woken her up? 

She thought she caught the glint of something and walked right into a wooden structure. Luckily she wasn't hurt. She remembered then the pile of broken furniture parts thrown by the crumbling bricks at the end of the courtyard of this motel wing. According to Harry, it was the evacuees’ way of taking it out on the big hawk bank coming in to foreclose the property. 

She dropped to her knees and crawled towards that one time glint and found a phone. She switched on the built-in flashlight and … lo and behold … it was a bunker space under the junk! It was a result of the way some big furniture pieces had gotten stuck into each other leaving a good long enough space for someone to lie down.

And that someone had been Harry judging from the book she found there that she had seen Harry walk out with. 

That was why she must have woken up. The boy getting up and leaving. Indeed, she distinctly remembered noticing a neighbor's motorcycle parked a ways from the rubble room and it wasn't there now. 

She felt the spooks again. What was going on? She had thought the boy was a run of the mill street actor and seeing how he supported his lil brother had added the word ‘sweet’ to her mental description. But this inexplicable behavior deleted that. 

Her guard was back up with a full-length fence. It was time to investigate. 

She returned, jammed the wedge in place and, with the actor's phone in hand, moved resolutely towards the closed chambers in the large shelf that lined half the wall opposite the bed.