Burn the Village

“A child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel the warmth.” – African Proverb

Hanna thought often of the way life must have been before the end of the world. She’d heard of a blue sky, once. She looked upward at the clouds rolling against the rust-colored heavens—though she knew better to think there was a God among them.

Thunder clapped, and Hanna counted the seconds on her fingers as she waited for the next crash. One, two, three—BOOM! The storm moved mechanically over the bio-dome, back and forth, and if you were smart enough you could figure out the exact time of day by where you were, and how long there was between lightening strikes. It was time to return; there was the poor-man’s work to be done.

She kicked the mud from her boots and began her long march back to the hovel under the stilted houses—the small hanging shanty she called her own (once their own, but she couldn’t bear to think of that just now). She lived in the mildewed underbelly of the colony. There she encountered as much flooding as could be expected for the price, and endured the mold crawling the walls and turning her lungs from pink to rotted jet.

When Hanna arrived she set about her nightly pattern. Once she had finished most of it she carried on to the last routine. Balancing her small frame on her only stool, she reached up into the panel of cotton pinned to the ceiling. There she housed her most treasured item: the locket he had given her.

A peculiar thing, shaped in the head of a spade (really it had been fashioned as a heart, but that symbol had been long removed from the world, and she had never known it before), they’d found it digging up old-earth graves for twenty cents an hour. He had risked everything to smuggle the locket out to her. In it, she drew their portraits, forcing the too-large paper into the spaces photographs had once been. She fancied herself a passable artist, and there was some resemblance to their persons. Enough, she thought. Enough to remember him right.

She tucked the charm into the slack of the cotton and tapped it twice just to be sure. There it would remain until she returned, worn and sore and filthy, from digging in the swampy old-world cemeteries. She was overworked, her young body already beginning to fail her, but the job had to be done, and surely not by those in the upside of the colony! No, they had proper careers for proper people. Let the old Barnacles hanging by the stilts do the harder labor, that’s right.

Hanna had, for most of her life, harbored no resentment for those born above. But now—since he had passed on—she felt it: a twinge of hate, burrowed deep in her chest. Maybe if they had access to the sorts of specialists living in the colony, he might’ve—

No. She thought, keeping her head up as she made her way to the night’s plot. Thinking like this won’t do any good. He wouldn’t have wanted that. She kept her eyes wide, unblinking, as she forced back tears. It wouldn’t do to let the others see her this way. Barnacles were tough, unyielding. She had to be.

She trekked over the mud and through the swamp to the dig site. The ground sucked her feet in, but her strong legs pulled them up defiantly. She reached the dig site already dirty, and still there was a twelve hour shift to be done. The other diggers, all men, snickered and pawed at her as she passed and received her assigned station.

She began digging and didn’t stop until she reached the oak box of the grave. She cracked it open with her shovel and took what valuables lay on the corpse, then climbed out and moved on to the next plot. She was grateful they were at an older cemetery today, sometimes they dug up fresher, better-preserved graves and had to sift through rotted flesh and maggots to get what they came for—jewelry, medical equipment, and implants. The old-earth implants were great, or so she’d heard. They were easy for the technicians of the colonies to convert to… well, she didn’t really know what they converted it to. That was something for those above the Barnacles.

She forced open the next casket and gasped at the treasure trove. It was such that she thought this man must’ve been half implants, when he was alive, and now—because of the water-tight lining of the casket— they were in perfect condition. She set to work chipping out the technology, taking care not to damage anything.

She was climbing out of the hole after filling her satchel when her foot caught on something—someone had left equipment lying about. Hanna tried to steady herself, but it was too late. Her ankle snapped with a sickening crack! And she fell backward into the grave.

The other workers heard her cries for help and came to the lip of the plot. She begged them to help, and one of them—his name she wasn’t sure of—lowered his arm to her, grabbing the satchel and pulling it out. He thanked her, and they all left her there to die.

She lay in that grave for what felt like an eternity. She heard the men pack up and leave, and she was sure then that she would perish. The crew would not come back until the next cycle, and that would be months later. She hadn’t any food, and she could not crawl out of the hole with her ankle in the condition it was in.

A day and a half passed, and Hanna faded in and out of consciousness. Then… she heard it. The thunderclap. She thought as hard as she could through the haze—tried to remember what day it was, tried to track the time.

Oh my God, she thought. It’s going to flood.

And it did. It rained so violently that the raindrops left little marks on her skin. But it also rained so hard, and for so long, that all six feet of the empty grave filled quickly, and lifted her up and out of the ground.

She floated up, and clawed at the mud, screaming in agony as she did. She dragged herself along, passing out at intervals, but eventually she made her way to the colonies. She pulled herself up the ladders and onto the surface. The people around her gasped in horror at her mangled, muddy form.

She reached out to them and pleaded, begged for their aid. Someone called for the Public Safety Unit, and three enforcers came and kicked and pushed her until she fell off of the edge, and back into the swampy underground.

Hanna lay; half stuck in the bog, and felt it—she felt the rage and loathing boil up inside her. “I’m a fucking person, too!” she screamed.

But no one heard her, or—if they did—they ignored her. So she crawled once more up the ladder, stopping this time at the underbelly, and made her way to a medic.

The medic set her ankle and bound it, and sent her off to hobble home on her own. She cried tears of fury the whole way. When she returned to her little hovel, she could not even reach up to get the locket he had given her. She curled into a ball on the floor and sobbed at the condition of her life.

After some time, she had finished, and rested there quietly, thinking of what to do.

She admitted not much could be done, on account of her ankle.

So she waited. She waited in the fields for the idea to come to her. She watched the rolling skies as her ankle healed.

Then, one day, she saw it: the opportunity. The edge of the bio-dome had formed a crack. It was small, and hardly noticeable if you weren’t there on the very end of the land. But it was there, leaking the just a hint of water. It occurred to her to wonder where exactly their bio-dome was located. If it was underwater, and a crack formed, why, it could get bigger and split under the pressure, drowning everyone in the colony.

But how to keep the Public Safety Units from noticing and repairing it before it could flood? She thought, day and night, checking every day to see that it was still there, still growing. Soon the Public Safety Units would patrol the perimeter and discover the fissure.

She decided to chip away at it, as carefully and quickly as she could with her digging tools, and she hid her work with bigger and bigger rocks until she was sure the officers had passed. She kept at it until, a few days later, she got to the last layer of the bio-dome. She lay on her belly, tool in hand, staring at the thin barrier and wondering. Wondering if she really wanted all those people to die—herself included.

Then, before she knew it, she'd stabbed the carving tool at the wall and broke it. At first nothing happened, but after a short moment the sky split all the way down the middle with a thunderous crack, and the water spilled in with a roar. It hit the ground so hard it created a small canyon.

Hanna lay there and wept tears of joy as the world filled around her. In the distance she could hear the screams of the others, and they sounded like a symphony.

“Thank God.” She whispered, and closed her eyes. “Thank God.”