Over My Dead Body

When Kian returned home from the mall, his eyes found his little brother Zone with an urgency that brought back horrible memories.

Zone was sitting on the glass but cushioned sectional couch in the front room, watching some old movie on the big screen. The projector mounted to the ceiling above him shone a soft blue light that offered a sliver of brightness amid the dark house.

Lely, Kian’s seventeen-year-old sister, was seated on the loveseat adjacent to Zone, her eyes remaining glued to the screen as she called, “‘Sup!” to Kian who stood in the doorway. Though Kian could hardly see her, he was sure she had her usual bright, yet borderline dorky smile spread across her face. It was a smile he loved so much.

“‘Sup,” he replied, forcing a weightless lilt to his voice when really, he was feeling deeply ashamed of himself and heavier than ever.

He worried that his actions from earlier had doomed his family, and again, he looked toward Zone. They’re not just gonna take this sitting down, Kian thought of the hunters he and his friends had beaten but had not killed, They’re gonna run home and bring the cavalry like a pack of wolves. And they won’t just come to kill me, this time. They’ll want to destroy me.

And make sure I have nothing left to live for.

The thought brought a deep shudder through his bones, and his mind drifted back to around two months ago when he’d suffered something close to a mental breakdown.

*** ***

Zone had a bit of a hearing problem. Nothing a good pair of hearing aids couldn’t fix. He trudged up to Kian, frown etched deep into the lines of his face, and held out the pair of hearing aids he wore—mangled, wires poking out of them everywhere.

“What the hell did you do to them, man?” Kian exclaimed, taking the device from the young boy and inspecting them closely, though he knew he could do nothing to fix them.

“It wasn’t me. I wouldn’t break them like that!” Zone answered, his face going red a little.

Oh no, not already. Kian thought before asking, “Well then, who did it?”

He already knew the answer before Zone said, “One of the Tabby fiends.”

Still, he felt the need to curse. “Shit!” He said aloud this time. The Tabby Family, notorious for not giving a damn, giving no regard to a victim’s age, gender, occupation, or economic status.

Once you were marked dead weight, you were gone.

But wasn’t it too early for them to have any “dead weight” on their radar? Selection was still well more than half a year away, so the timing didn’t add up. The Tabbys liked the challenge, the tense chase just a couple weeks before a Selection when everyone was already at their most vulnerable, their most frightened, and their most selfish. So, aiming for Zone so early had Kian’s nerves on edge.

“Did they say anything to you?” Kian asked Zone, his voice loud for the boy’s benefit, and watched the nine-year-old rock on his feet for a minute.

“They said that… They said that I sicken them. That I sicken everyone by… by being alive.” His lips started quivering and his gaze dropped toward the ground. “Th-They said that a disabled boy like me is still dead weight, no matter who my mother is or what my brother says and that even the neighbors think it’s no fair that I’m always safe no matter what.”

The expression on Kian’s face darkened. He felt a fire building up in him. “Which direction?” he asked. Zone pointed behind Kian’s head. They were outside of their home, Kian’s back facing east. Kian clenched his jaw and asked, “Which faction?”

“The one with the b-blue flag,” Zone answered, sniffling, tears welling up in his eyes.

The blue faction?? Kian was incredulous, pissed beyond reason. He had paid the members of that faction off months ago with their agreement to leave Zone off their list of targets.

He balled his hands into fists and this time asked, “How long ago did this happen?”

“A-Around twenty min-minutes ago.” Zone was hiccup crying now, hot red in the face and eyes embarrassed, angry. That familiar sadness was in there, too.

Kian breathed hot air through his nose. “Think they’re still there?”

With Kian’s sort of luck, of course his overprotective childhood friend Emi had heard about the incident and met him on his way to confront the fiends who called themselves a family.

“If you’re here to talk me out of it—”

“I am!”

“Then go away.” Kian addressed Emi without looking at her. He was quick in his step, determined to catch anyone who still lingered near the Tabbys’ usual hangout before the sun reached its afternoon peak. Head over, fuck some people up, be back home before lunchtime. Kian’s type of productivity.

“No, Kian, listen to me!” Emi was skipping paces to keep up with him. “You can’t just walk up to the Tabbys acting all tough. Not only can they rip you to shreds—and they might—if they don’t do it today they’ll hunt you down to rip you to shreds later!”

“More reason to deal with them today.” Kian answered flatly.

The two rounded a left-hand corner and started a trudge up a semi-steep incline. The streets in Mid-East Vermillion were topographically abnormal in every way—maze-like twists and turns turned into seventy-degree declines in some areas while in other areas grounds as smooth as a sheet of ice turned bumpy, like a rocky hillside, after just eight steps. Before the duo had traveled over twelve-thousand miles to West Vermillion for the 25th Promotion Festival four months earlier, Kian and Emi had been under the impression that the entire Plate looked like their section of Central Vermillion did. Aside from streets strewn with woodchips, metal scraps, and other anomalies, West Vermillion was easier to maneuver by far.

“You don’t get it, Kian.” Emi was saying, “Selection is in eight months—”

“Exactly! Emi,” Kian stopped walking, spun to glare into Emi’s surprised face, “If I don’t get these bullies off our backs now, they’re gonna try finishing off Zone before Selection even gets close. They’ve hated his guts since finding out that he was almost deaf back when he started first grade. That was when he was six. Three years ago, Emi. During the last Selection. Since they couldn’t get him then, they’re definitely gonna try getting him now, and I’ll be damned if they make a victim out of him, Emi. He’s my family.”

Kian felt the thickness of tears rising up in his throat as he leaned toward Emi, the girl’s eyes wide but soft, caring. “I protect my family.” Kian jabbed his thumb into his chest, hard, with each word. He could no longer raise his voice, or else Emi might hear the weakness there.

When she spoke, it was quiet and controlled, as if persuading something wild against an attack. “I know. Family is everything to you.” Her movements slow, she reached her fingers up to Kian’s short hair. When he jerked away, she continued speaking. “I get all of that, but think about what’ll happen if they end up hurting you now. Hurting you bad… How could you protect Zone, or even Lely and your mother, if the hunters come after you later, or just—if something else goes wrong? What then?”

In the silence that followed, Kian blew hot air from his nose and ground his teeth together. “You sound like Dr. Rallus.” He grumbled and huffed when Emi admitted to having regular conversations with the doctor about Kian’s mental and physical health.

“He’s worried about you.”

Kian was bothered—bothered that Dr. Rallus would tell Emi anything about his requests and conditions, as if she had any right to his privacy. He found his way to a glass wall on their left and slid down it into a sitting position. “Alright, this’s what we’re gonna do, Emi. In exchange for me not going to the Tabbys, tell me what Dr. Rallus told you before he left.”

“Well, the first thing he said was, ‘That Kian is a damned cold-hearted, family-crazed fool.’” Emi imitated Dr. Rallus’s old-man doctor voice, as the two often called it. She sat down beside Kian as he chuckled a little. She then went on slowly, “Then he said he was worried about you. Said you’re heaped full of anger and regrets, have no regard for your health, and might do something rash someday.”

Emi trailed off. Kian knew she was waiting for him to say something, and when he didn’t, she lurched forward as if something had stung her. “Ki, what’s goin’ on with you, huh?”

Ki.

Kian shook his head, partly in refusal to answer Emi and partly to fling the oncoming flood of memories away before it came. It didn’t work.

All at once, his mind was filled with the sound of his own tortured cries; himself from eight years in the past. The feeling of those deep, ragged breaths adding to his suffocation; becoming lightheaded, his face hot with tears; his abdomen quivering in pain as his crying lasted well after the foghorn had stopped its funereal wailing.

He remembered dragging his brother’s body into the Safe Zone, going back for the woman and baby only after thinking of what Nari would say if he didn’t. He remembered his entire body aching and refusing the help and attention of all the Selection survivors who had been safe in the Assembly building behind him, checking on the little boy surrounded by dead bodies and a barely-born baby. At first, he hadn’t understood.

Surrounded? He’d thought. There was only Nari and the woman lying there beside him. And then, he looked toward the man who had murdered Nari for his Plate chip, the man who had crawled his way into the Safe Zone, and found him still lying where he’d lain before, unmoving. When Kian thought, Oh dear God, he better not be dead, a streak of fear leapt through him so hard, bile shot up to his throat.

He couldn’t rip his eyes away as people inspected the man’s vitals. He remembered how shattered he’d felt when they’d found none. The tears were back, and this time everything hurt. His heart was just a ball of pain.

It was all for nothing.

Eventually, Menaly and Lely found him, having rushed ahead when neither boy had showed up at their usual meeting place. This part was too agonizing to think about again. He’d thought about his mother’s screams, louder than his own, hundreds of times since that day. He’d felt like he could sink straight through Vermillion Plate and into an endless downward tumble to nowhere. He continued to feel like that when his mother, shaking like a leaf, pulled the baby into her arms and asked what his name was.

Less than a second of hesitation passed him by, and even less care, when, “Zone”—as in the “Safe Zone” in which they sat—was what left his lips. The baby’s name was the last thing he’d cared about.

Nine years had passed since that day, but sitting against the wall beside Emi as he was now, shame overwhelmed him. That memory would always suck, because Zone was his little brother now and at one point, he didn’t care about him. If it wasn’t for Nari’s memory, he wouldn’t have helped him. For years, it was hard to even look at him, and Zone was a smart kid. He knew it. That was where the sadness in his eyes came from.

Even when he had done his part to keep Zone safe as a kid, the effort had been half-assed and motivated by Nari’s memory.

Kian was 13 when he got it into his mind that paying off hunters would be the most effective way to protect his family. Kian had four hiding places around the house where he kept growing bits of his weekly allowance in case of emergency. His new baby brother at the time was basically deaf, probably an aftereffect of the foghorn blaring during Selection. The baby still fed his heart bad memories each time he looked at him and saw Nari’s dead eyes staring back instead. In those first two years, he’d nicknamed the baby Poison, though he vowed to forever keep that to himself.

Still, the next Selection had been fast approaching at the time and hunters had already taken out schools worth of people living with disabilities. They hadn’t known about Zone yet, but Kian knew they would sooner or later, and it would be his responsibility to keep him alive after everything Nari had done to ensure the baby’s safety. He’d save up nearly every dime of his allowance to pay off any hunter, bribe any crazy Tabby fiend, who tried to take his family away from him.

Kian was desperate to not lose anyone else he cared for. The only way Selection would snag another victim from his family was over his dead body.