The buzzing began a full three minutes and four and a half seconds before the fluorescent overhead lights flickered on.

The groan that slipped from her lips began in her bones as she cursed the dead weight of the fake light on her exposed flesh. 

She steeled herself to start her “day” correctly within the confines of her own head, pinned by her elbows beneath pillows.

The stench they swore up and down was some sort of refrigerant leak from the air conditioning kept on all the time inside was obviously chloroform to those who’d made more nuanced or colorful ways through the world.

They were drugging them. 

All. En masse. While they slept. 

Whatever panicky variant of sleep they could collectively get down here. 

She knew it and she could see the same knowing in a scattering of eyes as she made her way through the throngs of hunched over and horribly paranoid souls that made up the brunt of the cluster camp she’d found her way to. It was easy enough to suss them out, too. The Others. They were the ones fully erect.

Not flinching, furtive, nor finding their ways along hopping from shadow to shadow in the eternal duskiness that had taken over this particular here and now. They strode with a defiant clip through the shivering masses, stringent. Utterly unafraid. Always unstreaked, too. Unlike the hordes. Often freckled, fitfully so. & ambivalent about it, in spite of what rose out of the clusters in reaction to seeing them uncloaked.

She didn’t care. She was just passing through. This place aint the point, it’s just part of the passage, she reminded herself as she swung her still GBX-booted feet around and made contact with the floor. They never left the soles, those shoes. Especially not in a place like here, she muttered to herself.

Them off, would’ve been them gone in a place like this. Even considering how repugnant the clump of freckled flesh splayed across the center of her tanned face was to the brunt of them, somebody would’ve tried it. Her. They always did. Due to the thickness. 

They’d swarm and cut her out of them if they could muster the balls. String’er up, they way they waxed about rhapsodically amongst themselves , as the good ole days.

This time, they’d gotten her quarantined. Along with the beauty marks that danced across her face when she smiled, something that she put her mind to doing everyday as a panacea to power her through the insanity of the currently eternal swath of now.

In spite of all those who’d long since given up being willing to find anything to smile for in the rush of life.

Those boots, the blotches and the smile were too risky in these parts indeed. So they’d stuck her the only other space the rebellion her presence was to the status quo could somewhat peacably exist, encampment-wise. Among the pod of other wandering Anchorites.

---

The PA system sprung to life with the latest spiral of dire pronouncements regarding what was left of the world above and outside.

Carrington events, outpaced? She scoffed to herself, barely a faint footnote in the annals of all mankind, compared to this mess.

“Also still hampering the global recovery efforts are the intense Borealis sightings from the fortieth parallel to the equator, becoming a regular-” the announcer droned on.

“How do they eat without losing their appetite listening to this?”

she muttered to no one but herself.

The pressure in the space shifted all the same, like her sentiments had indeed been heard and logged.

Indifferent, she casually patted herself down as she sat hunched over what stood in for a thinly padded bed in the cell, trying to jog her memory and hide herself from any big brother shit they’d surely wired through every inch of a palace like this. Absently scratching her rib cage she found the pocket of fake flesh and grinned to herself, yawning as she catwalk strutted the tablet to the exit wound with two fingers before sliding it into the secret pocket slashed into wristbands she took off less often than the boots.

Snapping her satchel to her back and water bottle to her thigh, she headed out of the cell, cut across the covered courtyard towards the church and patiently waited in line to fill it with the day’s allotment of holy water, hoodie up, visor down.

She deftly slid the tab over the lip of the blackened bottle lined with white enamel, casually shaking it as she sauntered out of the church into the fray and counted off to her self the twenty two seconds it took until it dissolved, smiling at the world around her. 

Right before stepping into the flow of bodies being ushered down the road into the hall for breaking fasts that the announcer above strode back and forth on a platform at the front of, she ducked down an encampment alley, huddled against a roof-shingled wall, flicked open her bottle and peered in. 

The once clear water on white glared back at her, murky and green. The wrong color green. I knew it, she muttered to herself. 

Her tongue hadn’t been telling her tales or jumping to conclusions. The somersaults in her stomach from a single sip at the end of what passed for days had been spot-on. 

They had willfuly shifted the chem profile here too. 

Borealisitis.

Not the light show spectacle in the sky that all pronouncements running ad nauseam over the heads of the people were readying themselves to blame. 

The degradation of the polyolefins produced by the chemical company with the same name that had promised to purify all moisture pumped in was poisoning the water supply. 

The powers that be were gearing up to blame yet another erasure of encampments on the after-effects of the supposed sinking of the sun when the cost for a publicly altruistic company who’d promised to clean it reached a tipping point that made the governmental subsidies it’d raked in by saying as much became too much. 

Just like at the last stop. 

It was time to go.

She poured the water out, hurried back out into the flood of people that mindlessly clomped down into the dark heart of the camp and moved against the tide.

 

---

The clammy, mostly uncovered lumbering bodies gave her the berth once reserved for rats who’d lost all fear of man. The dull snarls rammed into their haggard, splotchy faces angrily animated when their eyes looked up and crashed into her.

“Outta my way, Darkie!” a sallow- skinned beached whale of a woman choked as she shoved past her. Her angry outburst emboldened the troglodites traveling in the sea of the so-called pinnacle of humanity with her. 

Muttered slurs came in waves. Whispers.

“Monkey…”

“Mixed breed…”

“Mutt..”

“Mongrel…”

More roared up out of  them. Like sediment settling down in a stirred up swamp …

She brushed it off, considered it nothing more than that disgusting little splash of sludge that used to kick up onto the back of the bottom of her jeans when she used to occasionally have to walk around in the rain. 

Almost makes you not care what’s coming for’em she thought to herself, then chastised herself.

Insults peppered her back as she went up instead of down, accusations of being everything but a child of God nipping at her booted heels for being in their way brandishing those freckles, of all abilities to the remnants whose bodies had long since stopped being able to handle production of melanin at all.

The broken, pallor mortised bodies churned en masse down towards what was the closest they’d had to a town square under the roads after all that’d happened. 

They’d been mentally heartless for so long that the shift to the uncanny sheen of pallor mortis had slid through their segregated sectors for God knows how long, like a fog. There was still no one  on record as being able to officially tell when their hearts had actually stopped.

But what was on record was when the snake oil salesmen had descended upon them in droves and found ripe barrels of them ready to be beckoned back to a refined, latter-day 21^st century version of bizarre, hate-filled predilections of their antecedents.

They had no bite solely because the teeth had fallen out of most of them. 

The slathering sickness triggered by the sunscreens and sunblocks had scarred massive swaths of the population with burns that left them streaked with a white that made them recognize they had indeed not been as such before when they’d finally ‘healed’ of it.

& thanks to the chemical heavy-handedness applied to the treated water they drank they didn’t even notice their actual voice boxes being corroded in real time, so loud were all the twisted conversations whirling down the drains in their heads. 

The erosion was nothing but the aftereffects of passive crowd control leaned into by the NGOs  graciously running the camps who’d partnered with Borealis fully aware of their track record. The likelihood of actual, volatile vocal uprisings dwindled by the day.

Their withered barks now were mainly used to whisper-shout slurs towards the backs of Others- any who’d not succumbed to the idea of drinking the synthesized pigment of the naturally melanated people that their kind had openly and willfully hated for literal generations, since they’d stopped being allowed to get away with just wholesale slaughtering them. The Others were cast out for not seeing the therapeutics as a consumptive panacea for all that had ailed them. 

They’d been the bane of their existence, but they’d also kept many of their ancestors alive, so the psychological dissonance , though tragic, could make weird, yet justifiable sense. They’d feasted off the spiritual energy of them for eons.

She was another kind of Other, though. 

The kind that grew up happily basking in the sun. 

The offspring of those who coated themselves with Coppertone and baked all summer long in it, and passed down stronger DNA due to that exposure. 

She was one of the Others whose idea of sunscreen was carrot oil, who wouldn’t let a bottle of spf come near her. Her freckles had come out every spring and summer and the Ferals she’d come up with had cheered, welcoming her home from her hibernation.

She wasn’t mixed in the slightest. She just worshipped the sun. & loved everyone who beamed love under it, no matter what nation or tribe they came from. Sun had kissed her from the tip of her head to her toes. She had no psychology to see it as a curse. Even now. She was fastidious, but a bucket of love. Almost allatime, too.

But every once in a while. A motherfucker tried.

---

A trio of pale biddies hobbled by her, bitching the entire way. “Cant believe they keep letting her kind down in here, it’s obvious she is not like us-”

“It’s obvious she didn’t even attempt to use any type of-”

“They say it’s not communicable, but it’s gotta be cancerous- it always was before, so even more now-”

Sympathy , not empathy. She thought to herself as she climbed incessantly up.

Yep… it is Time…to Go~ The natives are getting restless.

The further up and against the tide she went, the redder and warmer the atmosphere around her became. She’d been traveling west along the systems underground for so long that she hadn’t seen the real sky in months.

She hoisted herself up over the embankment out of the tracks, made her way through the turnstiles and marched over to the base of the escalators up that ran feverishly 24/7 due to the ingenious switch to using solar to power them six months before the first event.

A few Others gave her the nod as they traipsed past and hopped on like it was double dutch, pushing on lenses and tugging down visors. 

She took a deep breath, in no way attached to what she knew she was leaving behind for the last time.

She’d figure it out.

One way or another.

Above ground.

Never again down there, no matter what waits up there this time.

She pulled the crystal encrusted horn nestled against her breasts up to her lips and kissed it before ripping the dog tags off that had allowed her entry below in the first place. 

“Thank you,” she murmured to them. “But…Never again.” 

She shoved the tags in her pocket, flipped a golden cicada on a chain up between her teeth, bit down and rammed her ventilator in place, just in case.

The rickety escalator roared up or down on an incessant loop.

You’re giving it too much thought she growled to herself.

“Fuck it! Go!” She  roared and leapt onto the careening escalator and held on for dear life. 

In thirteen seconds flat she was spat out above ground, peering up into the sky under the giant red orb of the sun.

©AngelBrynner 2025