Reverence: A Faith-Based Dystopian Novel (The Reverence Trilogy Book 1) Page 2

  When Kira opened her eyes, the doctor had a hand on her mother’s shoulder, that brilliant movie-star smile affixed to his lips once again. “How are you feeling today, Ms. Liebert? Any concerns or questions about the process?”

  “None. Thank you, Dr. Stern.”

  “Good. I’ve reviewed your paperwork, and everything is in order for your procedure.”

  A powerful wave of nausea swept over Kira, and she collapsed into the plastic chair, tiny droplets of sweat forming on her forehead. Her peripheral vision diminished until nothing remained but a small circle of light with her mother and the doctor in its center. Leaning forward, Kira dropped her head into her hands and willed the feeling to pass. She wanted to find a bathroom to be sick in, but leaving her mother wasn’t a possibility.

  Not even for a second.

  A female voice. One of the nurses. “Miss? Are you alright?”

  Kira lifted her head from her hands and leaned back in her chair. With her eyes closed, she concentrated on taking slow, deliberate breaths—in through her nose and out through her mouth. She visualized the oxygen flowing through her body, reviving her cells.

  “Kira?” Her mother sounded concerned. “What’s wrong?”

  The dizziness and nausea abated. She opened her eyes, and the world swam back into focus.

  “I’m fine,” she said, wiping the sheen of sweat from her forehead.

  “Are you sure? You’re white as a sheet.”

  “I’m okay.”

  The doctor stared at her, his lips a slim white line against tan skin. He wanted to kick Kira out of the room—she could see it in his eyes—but she hadn’t given him enough of a reason. Instead, he nodded at the nurse holding the tray. “The medication, please.”

  The woman carried the tray to the doctor, and he picked up the syringe and inserted it into the vial, which was filled with an innocuous-looking clear liquid. After he extracted the liquid, he placed the vial back on the tray and flicked his finger against the syringe to clear out the air bubbles.

  Pulling her gaze from the needle, Kira focused on her mother, expecting to see fear or hesitation. Tears forming in her eyes. A slight trembling of her lips. But Madison Liebert watched the doctor preparing her method of execution with an expression that could only be described as peaceful.

  “Nurse, please note…I’m delivering a lethal dose of Somnumbutal via syringe at seven-thirteen a.m., in accordance with the Compulsory Order.”

  Madison Liebert closed her eyes as the doctor plunged the syringe into her arm. In less than five seconds, it was over. The doctor pulled the needle out and placed it on the tray. Then he stepped aside as one nurse placed a small plastic bandage over the tiny pinprick of blood.

  The drug was no longer inside the vial. Now, it was inside Kira’s mother’s body, traveling along an elaborate network of veins on the way to their ultimate destination. The Somnumbutal would first render her mother unconscious, and then it would drift from organ to organ, meticulously shutting everything down. Kira imagined her mother’s body as a well-lit house, and one-by-one, a little old man was going from room to room and switching off the lights.

  The doctor placed his hand on her mother’s shoulder. “You did wonderful, Ms. Liebert. We’ll leave you two alone now.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Stern,” her mother replied in a soft voice, her eyes already glazing over. “Thank you for being kind.”

  As the doctor and nurses exited the room, Kira perched on the edge of the bed and took her mother’s hand. “Mom? Are you okay?”

  It was a foolish question. Her mother wasn’t okay. She was dying.

  “I’m sorry,” Madison Liebert whispered, her eyes drifting shut.

  Pressing a hand against her mother’s forehead, Kira said, “You don’t have to be sorry, Mom.”

  “They made him leave, Kira.”

  Kira stared at her mother’s chest, watching it rise and fall. Dreading when it wouldn’t rise again. “I don’t understand. Who made who leave?”

  “He wasn’t sick…”

  Her mother wasn’t making any sense. Probably a side effect of the drugs.

  This wasn’t right. Her mother didn’t have to die like this.

  “Mom, listen to me. Try to keep your eyes open, okay?” Kira begged. “I’m going to find the doctor and I’m going to tell him I want to volunteer in your place. They might let me do that. Then, I’ll have the doctor bring you back. I’m sure they have an antidote, but you have to keep your eyes open a little longer. Okay? Please open your eyes.”

  “Can’t… Going to sleep now…”

  Kira grabbed her mother’s shoulders and tried to meet her gaze. “Mom?”

  But there was nothing. No spark of recognition. No awareness.

  Nothing.

  Then Madison Liebert’s eyes rolled backward and her head flopped onto the pillow.

  “Mom?”

  Lowering her ear to her mother’s chest, Kira listened as her heartbeat slowed. One missed beat. Then another. Finally, her mother’s chest rose and fell for the last time.

  Death was a horrible thing.

  “Mom?”

  Kira waited for a response, for one more word.

  Nothing.

  She held onto her mother’s hand for as long as she could, not letting go until a grim-faced sanitation engineer entered the room and transferred her mother into a body bag, and then slid her onto a stretcher.

  Unlike the Volunteers, whose bodies were cremated and their remains launched into the sky during the fireworks display at the weekly Reverence Ceremony, the Compulsories were given no such honors. There would be no casket for her mother. No funeral procession. Just a trip into the Unregulated Zone in a black disposal van filled with other dead Compulsories to be disposed of like trash in a landfill.

  Kira didn’t move until the man rolled her mother’s body out of the room. When the door clicked shut behind him, she collapsed onto the bed and sobbed into the sheets.

  “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

  The bed still carried the faint floral scent of the handmade soap her mother always bought at market.

  Soap that smelled like roses.

  Chapter 2

  Two Years Later

  They made him leave, Kira. He wasn’t sick.

  At the sound of her mother’s whispered voice, Kira’s eyes snapped open.

  Bolting upright on the couch, where she’d been dozing, her heart hammered against the inside of her ribcage as she searched the living room for her dead mother.

  “Mom?” She placed a hand over her heart, as if pressing on her chest would prevent her from having a heart attack if her mother responded.

  Of course, no one answered.

  Madison Liebert had been dead for two years.

  Kira lowered her face into her hands and massaged her temples. She’d been plagued by headaches for the last few weeks, but that wasn’t anything new. Her allergies were always bad in the early fall months. At nineteen, however, she was old enough to be selected as a Compulsory, so she had no desire to register her headaches with one of the local pharmacies just to get a bottle of aspirin.

  Too many headaches might lead to a Compulsory Order with her name on it.

  With aspirin off the table, Kira had stretched out on the couch after dinner and closed her eyes, hoping a brief rest would lessen her headache. But she must’ve dozed off, and now she had no idea what time it was.

  Or what day.

  A familiar sound pierced the fog in her head, bringing Kira back to reality, and she lifted her face from her hands.

  The sound of people in the street outside her townhouse.

  Lots of people.

  Of course! It was Sunday. How could she have forgotten?

  How long had she slept?

  She pressed the button on the side of her watch, cringing as the screen lit up with the time.

  Six-forty-two.

  Oh, no.

  She was late.

  Very late, but she could make it if she hur
ried.

  Rushing to her bedroom, she kicked off her sweatpants and pulled on a pair of jeans—the same wrinkled pair she’d worn the day before and hadn’t gotten around to washing. She tore off her t-shirt and pulled on her navy polo with the tiny blue rose sewn over the heart, which identified her as a volunteer advocate. Without bothering to glance in a mirror, she grabbed an elastic from her nightstand and jogged downstairs, pulling her hair into a ponytail. She tied a cardigan around her waist—it would be dark and chilly before she returned home—and slipped on her sneakers.

  She was going to need them.

  In the street, a few people rode bicycles, but most hurried toward the river on foot. Because of the limited resources—which included fuel—only people with high-level city jobs owned personal vehicles. Everyone else used the city bus system. Since the buses didn’t operate on Sundays to conserve fuel, most of Vita Nova had to walk—or run—to the island.

  After locking the front door, Kira dashed down the steps and into the street. She fell in with the crowd, catching a quick glimpse of the barricade wall between two neighboring townhouses. A concrete monster twenty feet high and ten feet thick, the wall formed a protective barrier around the entire city, leaving only a small section of the land that bordered the river unfortified.

  The barricade existed because of the Job virus.

  That was what the media had called it, after the Biblical character of the same name. The first cases had emerged twelve years earlier, first in Europe and then in the United States. A devastatingly lethal virus that killed its victims within three days of infection, their bodies breaking out in weeping, pus-filled sores that caused sepsis and eventually death. The federal government couldn’t get a handle on it. Most of them were dying themselves. Vita Nova—then known as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—went into lockdown, on the orders of the city’s mayor. No one came into the city, sick or not. Anyone showing symptoms of the virus was exiled outside the city, in what the government now referred to as the Unregulated Zone. They blocked off all roads leading into the city. Engineers from a local Army unit conducted a massive demolition campaign to destroy all but one of the city’s thirteen highway and railroad bridges. Only the Market Street Bridge survived the campaign and now stood as the city’s sole link to the Unregulated Zone. Those same engineers had flooded the area near Three Mile Island to create a natural southern barrier against the disease and then erected an electrified fence around the perimeter of the city. Guards patrolled the fence twenty-four hours a day to keep anyone from sneaking in.

  Not that anyone could sneak in.

  The fence operated at thirty-thousand volts.

  Eventually, a concrete barricade with concertina wire curled along its top had replaced the electrified fence. Because of those protective measures, Vita Nova had seen no cases of the virus inside the city limits for more than a decade.

  A year after the last reported case of the virus, the city voted to rename itself Vita Nova—meaning “new life.”

  Kira jogged to the stadium, passing several struggling families along the way. Parents carried their young children on their shoulders or dragged them along, forcing them to walk faster than their little legs could carry them.

  Everyone was rushing for good reason. On Sunday evenings, the entire population of the city migrated to City Island for the weekly Reverence Ceremony. The mandatory Reverence Ceremony, where the newest batch of Volunteers began their Final Week by receiving their blue roses in front of the entire city. Afterward, the city honored the Volunteers who’d given their lives the previous week with a memorial ceremony and fireworks display. The Guards locked the gates to the Stadium at seven p.m., no exceptions, and anyone who wasn’t inside got a warning from the city. Too many warnings and you became a Compulsory.

  She passed a mother carrying twin toddler boys, one in each arm. Both boys were crying and sweating in the early September heat, as was their mother. Kira ignored her instinct to stop. Most parents were on their own, with no help. Few children in Vita Nova grew up in two-parent households, and even fewer grew up with grandparents.

  The walkway came into sight just ahead and, beyond that, the cerulean surface of the river shimmered as if coated with diamonds.

  Almost there.

  The crowds grew thicker when she reached Front Street, one of the city’s primary arteries, which ran parallel to the Susquehanna River. People poured into the street from every direction, all converging on the Volunteer Memorial Walkway, which would take them halfway across the river to the Stadium on City Island. Pale blue lights outlined the old iron truss bridge, guiding everyone to the Stadium like landing lights on a runway.

  Prior to the virus, the walkway was known as the Walnut Street Bridge, and it had once spanned the entire river, linking the city’s eastern and western shores to the small island in the center of the river. The eastern span of the pedestrian walkway still connected the city to the island, but on the opposite side of the island, the western span dropped off with the unnaturalness of an amputated limb. A short section of the old bridge remained standing on the river’s opposite shore, extending out from the Unregulated Zone like an arm beckoning the city for salvation.

  Unlike the other city bridges, the Volunteer Memorial Walkway hadn’t been destroyed by an explosive charge during the height of the virus. Instead, the western span had been destroyed by ice floes decades earlier. City leadership had erected a chain-link fence to prevent people from exploring the western span, but the teenagers of Vita Nova frequently scaled the fence at night and made their way to the end of the bridge, where they sat with their legs dangling over the rushing water and got their closest glimpse of the Unregulated Zone.

  Several of her friends had done it, but not Kira. In nineteen years, she’d never climbed that fence, and she never intended to.

  The island was as close to the Unregulated Zone as she liked to get. During the first few years of the pandemic, the city had remained on lockdown. No one went in or out. For months, the diseased tried to breach the barricade to get to the hospitals inside the city. Eventually, they had died off, and the virus had presumably died off with them. After a few years had passed, the city leadership established the Patrols—the city’s version of military soldiers—with the mission of going beyond the barricade to look for supplies.

  It was the Patrols who had first discovered them. The Lawless. People who had survived the virus by abandoning their humanity. Brutal bands of marauders and killers living in the Unregulated Zone, among the ruins of society. They prowled the empty streets of the forgotten towns, taking what they wanted and killing anyone who got in their way. The Lawless had murdered dozens of Patrol soldiers over the years, but they’d never breached the barricade. Although it was a dangerous job, the heavily armed presence of the Patrols in the Unregulated Zone prevented the Lawless from getting close enough to Vita Nova to attack.

  As she entered the walkway, Kira veered to the right, bypassing the crowded concrete section to her left for the interlocking iron girders that comprised the right side of the walkway. The rough metal cut into the bottoms of her sneakers and made her feet ache, but there weren’t as many people in her way, so she could move faster. Through the iron girders, she could see the river sweeping by fifty feet below. The sight made her dizzy, and she returned her gaze to the distant lights of the Stadium.

  A horn blared—two long blasts.

  The five-minute warning.

  Everyone on the walkway increased their pace, and the entire structure trembled, as if it had enough sense to be afraid.

  Less than a minute later, Kira stepped off the walkway and approached the gate to the Stadium, where a dozen Guards stood spaced at equal intervals, scanning the laminated identification cards that the citizens of Vita Nova—men, women, and children—were required to carry with them at all times.

  Only after the Guard scanned her ID did Kira relax a little. She’d made it inside the Stadium with a few minutes to spare. The final horn blared, signali
ng the closing of the gates. Anyone who hadn’t made it inside before that horn would be delinquent.

  Following the crowd into the Stadium, Kira climbed high onto the bleachers and found a seat in the top row. Before the virus had ravaged the world, the Stadium had been a Minor League ballpark. Enormous crowds of people had once flooded onto the island to see a baseball game played in the middle of a river, with downtown Harrisburg as the backdrop.

  But instead of baseball players, Guards filled the field. Vita Nova’s version of police officers, the Guards defended the barricade wall and the checkpoint on the Market Street Bridge. During Reverence Ceremonies, Guards also provided security for the Volunteers and the deputy mayor.

  Tonight, twelve Volunteers stood in the center of the field. The number of Volunteers varied per week, with the average number being between five and twelve. Kira had seen as many as nineteen Volunteers in one week, and as few as two.

  Once on the field, they were lined up by age, oldest to youngest, with the most respect being given to the youngest among them. The younger the Volunteer, the greater the sacrifice.

  The evening’s oldest Volunteer was Elizabeth Currant, age fifty-seven. She was also Kira’s client.

  The gray-haired woman stood at the head of the line, wringing her hands. Kira had met Lizzy two weeks earlier when the woman had walked into her office and explained her reasoning for becoming a Volunteer. During a self-exam, she’d discovered a lump in one of her breasts. Despite her husband’s pleadings, she’d been too frightened to go to the Medical Sector to see a doctor. The possibility existed that the tumor was benign, but since a cancer diagnosis would’ve led to her immediate selection as a Compulsory, Lizzy hadn’t been willing to take that risk.

  “If I’m going to die, I want to die as a Volunteer,” she’d told Kira during their initial meeting, clutching her handbag against her chest. “I feel terrible leaving my grandchildren, but what choice do I have?”

  Unlike most Volunteers, Lizzy had asked for little during her Final Week. Just a fancy dinner with her husband at the city’s nicest restaurant—The Riverfront—and an overnight visit with her three grandchildren at Rolling Meadows, the beautiful estate where Volunteers spent their Final Week. On the night before her death, she would be invited to the Volunteer Ball at the Executive Mansion, but Lizzy had informed Kira that she had no intention of attending the ball.