Loveless

  Loveless

  M A R I S S A H O W A R D

  Loveless

  Copyright © 2017 by Marissa Howard. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, descriptions, entities, and incidents included in the story are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, and entities is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-0-9985935-1-7

  Fiction / Dystopian

  17.02.21

  Chapters

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  For those who choose to fight for love instead of simply fighting.

  1

  I remember what it was like. The memories live in a part of my mind blacker than this world.

  I was five. Before that day, I remember rivers crashing against rocks and rising from the sweat of the sand. I remember the sun sliding farther down the sky each night, stepping over clouds and the red of the air to seek a destination that is never permanent. I remember fields of wildflowers stretching their heads toward the sky and drinking in the last bit of warmth from the sun. I remember watching them each night and wondering why, with their heads turned toward the sun and their chubby stalks firmly in the ground, they were trembling. When I heard gunshots and I saw my mother crumple into the wildflowers, I never wondered again. If I knew what was coming, I would have trembled each night too.

  I remember seeing them point to me, their faces twisted into grins that almost covered the perpetual scars on their cheeks and foreheads. They lit the field of wildflowers on fire. Their guns were lifted, aimed, their dirty fingers on the trigger. Then they fell back, and I didn’t know why.

  Hands motioned me from the field where I stood in shock. Words were whispered into my ears.

  “Everything is going to be okay. Shhh. Everything is going to be okay.”

  The next few minutes were a blur, hands beckoning me through the town past piles of buildings crushed into the ground, flowers and trees heaped into burning mounds on the side of the road and people, screaming, with arms in front of their faces and children cowering behind them. Shrieks of laughter rang from the shadows, creating a disturbing harmony to it all.

  Then I remember my breath leaving me and I came to a sudden stop in the middle of the dirt. It was the stories I had heard, forbidden by all but still told by some. I knew because of the woman grasping the damp bars of a window as the world was chaos around her.

  It was her eyes.

  They were a deep brown, but they were brighter than the sun. Not like ours, clouded over with fear and emptiness. They were glistening, pooled with emotion and a brokenness and sympathy that I have not been able to explain even to this day. She was looking at me with raw, compassionate, and extraordinary love. Against all odds, she had found a way to hold onto what every other person had tossed into the burning fire. She had found a way to love again.

  Fear clouded her eyes and she ducked beneath the bars. The empty window looked back at me in silence.

  After that, the hands took me to a place that no one remembers. No one but us.

  We went down stairs for what seemed like hours. I remember thinking that if I went down any more stairs, I would drown. Not from a lack of air, but from a lack of life. When we finally reached the ground, we walked down a hallway as black as night. Lights lined the walls every few feet. They would slowly become dimmer, and just when it seemed like they were as black as the air surrounding, they would brighten again, only to blacken soon after. It was as if they were breathing.

  The tunnel ended, and I saw it. A dome stretched in front of me, the gray walls and ceiling blackening like the night sky as they reached higher. Large indents were carved into the sides of the Dome. There were dozens of them, lining the walls like the brittle holes in a beehive. And inside the indents, and inside this dome, were people.

  Some were sitting on the ground, eyes closed and mouth open in shock. Some were pacing, back and forth, back and forth, as if they were waiting for something. Some were simply standing, like statues rooted to the ground. Only a few looked up when I first walked into that room. Only a few of what looked like one hundred.

  “This will be your home now,” the hands said softly. “You’re safe here. Until it’s done.”

  Then they left me, standing alone in the silent room hundreds of feet underground with people who had managed to escape. People who were living here. People just like me.

  I sat down, clutching a yellow, wilting wildflower I had grabbed before the world was destroyed.

  2

  I live in a world where love does not exist.

  It is not even a vision, a fragment of memory, because no piece of it remains. In this world, love is a foreign object, a thing of the past that only caused pain, hopelessness, and bitter divorces ending in broken people. It was the thing that caused so many to surrender their purposes in life, because without a love they once had—the tender hand of a sweetheart to hold or a kiss to dry their dirty tears—all was lost.

  So love was destroyed. Taken away as quickly as people feel it.

  But what we did not know is that the world would be destroyed along with it. Without love, the good, the beauty in this life suddenly seemed ugly. And everything that was dirty, destructive, and lifeless suddenly seemed beautiful.

  It was an inverse of life that sucked the very breath from the living.

  Trees were uprooted, flowers burned in fires along the roadside, and the sky filled with black smoke until it was no longer a mint blue but the color of dirt.

  And the people—that was the biggest destruction of them all. You could see it in their eyes. What had once been pools of hope and specks of delight became distant, darkened with each night that passed and stripped of feeling with each day.

  They couldn’t laugh anymore. They couldn’t pick a child up and throw him in the sky because they saw no reason to. They couldn’t grasp the fingers of another because it was disgusting. Repulsive. To feel the warmth of another was like touching fire, and they didn’t want to get burnt.

  So they destroyed the world, and they took each other with it, until no one was left.

  No one but us.

  This is what they tell us every morning, so we don’t forget. But what do they know? We haven’t been above ground—haven’t touched the light of day, haven’t seen the black sky or the piles of destruction or heard the endless screams—in thirteen years.

  3

  I woke with a bitter chill running down my spine.

  The blankets were wrapped around me and soaked in sweat, clinging to my shaking skin. I sat up and threw them off me. They landed in a heap on top of the empty bed mounted on the wall next to mine. The bed where my mother would have slept. But she was killed thirteen years ago. I shook the memory of her, light brown hair caught by the wind as she collapsed into the bright yellow flowers, from my mind.

  I pulled on charcoal-colored pants and a matching shirt, snapped my hair in a bun, and flicked the switch that opened the door to my indent in the Dome. There were no mirrors here. There hadn’t been mirrors since I was taken here when I was five.

  No one said hello to each other as we walked to breakfast simultaneously. It was like this every day. Wake up, get dressed, walk to breakfast, eat, go to studies, walk to dinner, go to the center of the Dome for Collaboration, go to bed. Everyone wore the same gray pants and long-sleeved shirt, and no one said to each other more than they had to. Apart from answering questions in class, the halls were silent. They had always been silent, because that is the only peace we knew.

  We were told it wasn’t always this way. There had once been a time when people enjoyed talking to each other and understanding a past life that one had once lived, a past that somehow defined and enhanced their future. People would embrace one another when they saw sadness or touch a hand when they wanted to show concern. When they wanted to show love. But love does not exist. It hasn’t existed since we as a people voted to cut it out of life altogether, seventy-four years ago.

  It’s amazing how easy it was to do. When people don’t have relationships to cry about or family members to mourn over, life is simple. But each day that passed hearts grew cold and faces grew lifeless. Violence enveloped the purpose of many of the people that lived. Life was so simple that many started to believe that all of the good—all of the things that once represented love—in this world should be destroyed. Thirteen years ago was the peak of the
destruction. The beginning of the end of the world.

  The faces were unmoving as we walked to the food line and grabbed a plate, a gray napkin, and some silverware. We had heard stories of the past about smiles and laughter, about tears of joy, about a heart beating frantically out of pure delight. But none of us had ever experienced any of it. It was as foreign to us as the world above ground now was.

  “Laney.” The person chosen to serve food today nodded as she checked off my name from the list of the ninety-seven people that lived in this dome. We started with one hundred, but thirteen years is a long time. I didn’t even know the names of the people who died. We assumed that old age took them—dying from anything else down here just seemed impossible.

  I chose the seat next to the door, by an older woman with graying hair and hands that looked like they had been through more than what we accomplished here each day. Much more. I wondered for a brief moment what her life was like before she was taken down here. I had been only five. She was old enough to have lived when peace did exist. When love existed. But it didn’t matter anymore. I let the thought slip away before it even touched the surface of my mind.

  A bell rang through the dining hall and we all stood. It was time to go to studies. The halls crowded with silent people once again. Everyone went, with different age groups in different rooms. There were six in my room. We didn’t know what the other groups of people learned because we never talked to them. We just knew that we needed to keep our minds sharp. If we didn’t, we might become like the people that had emptied their minds of everything but disorder and force; we might become like the people that had scraped the world and left nothing in its place. And if we did, there would be no one left. The world would be done, humanity a whisper that weaved through the piles of ashes above ground. We were what was left, and we held onto this truth above all else.

  Our teacher was one of twelve people in the Dome that had actually been a teacher in his past life. He had managed to save books and manuscripts, along with the other eleven. Books written solely for reading enjoyment were not part of the collection, as those kinds of books were burned in a fire when they made the vote to end love. Most of those books, I had heard, were about love and relationships and therefore contradicted the law.

  There were no history books either. That was our biggest mistake, coming down here without a trace of humanity’s history in factual form. We learned math and English, typical subjects that were once taught to kids above ground. At least that’s what I was told. I was supposed to start school a few months after the world turned upside down.

  “Dalia. Gavin. Laney. Nash. Theodore. Alese.”

  Our teacher checked us off the list as each of us walked through the door and took a seat in our given spots. He was a tall man, probably in his forties, with a beard the color of the dark ceiling in the Dome. The only thing we knew about him was that he was a teacher before he came to live down here, and his name: Mr. Dabir. He had insisted over the past thirteen years that people who had once lived in a peaceful world called each other by names, and the idea was agreed on by everyone in the Dome. Now, every time someone entered a room or came to the front of a line, you would simply say their name, nothing else.

  This was how much of our world underground worked. The ninety-seven people who lived in this dome had one major thing in common: they all wanted peace. They all wanted life to go back to the way it had been more than seventy-four years ago, when love was as real as the person next to them and yet somehow, the world was peaceful.

  But what is love? None of us had lived in a time when this mystery word existed. We only had stories, memories that were carried from generation to generation, banned by all but still told by some. It was like putting something together with only a few of the pieces. So we tried to remember. This was the purpose of Collaboration, held each night before we went to our indents to sleep. To scrape up memories of a life that none of us had ever lived—a world that none of us had ever seen. To remember how to love again. Because as far as we knew, humanity needed love to survive.

  Our people would share stories their grandmother had told or simply come up with an idea that they believed in. Then everyone would vote. All ninety-seven people had to agree for a vote to be cast into law. Any disagreement would cause disruption, and that was far from peace. And anything far from peace was, as far as we knew, far from love.

  “They all walked together, as much as they could, so no one ever fell behind,” one bald, round-faced man had said one night at Collaboration.

  The vote was taken, and everyone agreed.

  “They wore the same outfits so no one could outdo another,” a short, redhead in her thirties had said another night.

  It only seemed natural. Why allow one to be more beautiful than another, only to cause jealousy, which contrasted peace? Later that night, I had watched my cotton white skirt, yellow shirt, scuffed-up black shoes, and bright blue bow that had once been tangled in my long brown hair be burned in the furnace room, the room that was farthest from the Dome’s center.

  This was how our lives underground had gone since we first came down here. They were shaped and molded by Collaboration each night, or more simply, by people who believed they knew the secret to how humanity once survived in a world with love. This was also how, seventy-four years ago, love had been voted out of existence. In the past we had always governed ourselves, had always held Collaborations where everyone was present. It was all we knew, so we carried on this form of governing down here. And so far, it seemed to be working. Thirteen years and not a single sign of anyone falling down the path of destruction and disharmony.

  I took a seat at my desk and listened. Anything to write on or with was banned by all of us years ago. Allowing someone to write caused them to get ideas, and ideas meant differences of opinion, which could lead to disagreements. Simply taking in knowledge, a gray-haired man with trembling hands had said at Collaboration one night, should be enough.

  Mr. Dabir looked at all of us with the same facial expression we saw each and every day for the past thirteen years. But this time was different. This time, his eyes seemed to linger on each of us a little bit longer. He blinked, cleared his throat like he had always done. Then he spoke. And what he said was different from anything I had ever learned in my time in the Dome; different from anything we had ever voted on or discovered or made into existence. What he said ripped my life out from under me and made me feel hopelessly and dismally lost.

  “Give all of the subject books in your desk to me,” he said, his voice unchanging. “You will not be needing them today.”

  4

  The room grew even more silent than it normally was.

  But then, slowly, the other people in the classroom began opening their desks, setting their books with a thud on the top of the chalky gray surface, one by one, and then lifting them in their arms to take to the front of the room.

  We were taught that obedience, above many things, kept the peace, so it seemed only natural. Dalia, a tall girl with blond hair in a tight bun who sat in front of me, looked at her books for a moment too long before she carried them up with everyone else. I was the last to arrive. I sat my math book and the book that taught us proper grammar and spelling on our teacher’s desk. I suddenly felt lost, as if I had just let go of one of the few pieces that made up my life.

  Mr. Dabir watched us all with a blank expression in his eyes and looked at the books that were piled up on his desk. His eyes lingered, but he tore them away.

  “We have reason to believe that the war above ground is over,” he said, his voice steady. “Our supplies are getting low, and there is no life for us down here anymore.”

  I swallowed. I knew there was only so much time until the food and water would run dry. I had never imagined that it actually would. Mr. Dabir paused, his eyes searching every one of us.

  “We need to see if what we think we know is true—that everyone is dead. They couldn’t have survived more than a few years. They should be long gone by now.” He ran his fingers along the desk. “But many of the people down here…” He stopped. His hands went to his hair. “Are terrified. They don’t remember a life without murder, without destruction. More than just making sure the world is safe now, our people need to be convinced. They need to want to go above ground. To believe in it. Otherwise our community will fall, and humans will cease to exist.”