GOTH TOWN by Jesse Giles Christiansen
PROLOGUE
JAKE RAYNER is
the only one, other than Samantha Bryant, who had the vision.
He’ll never
forget the first time it happened. He was out for a walk in the woods by
himself, a practice highly discouraged by the Overseers.
He was always
surprised at how little everyone questioned the rules of the Overseers. Many of
them seemed so ridiculous. Then again, they owed everything to them. There
would have been no life here at all, if not for them.
That afternoon
the hazy air was happy and it seemed to seep into everything. Jake was reckless
to allow it to seep into him. His feet, his legs, his fingers, even his
thoughts, were reckless.
I know they’re
going to find me. I just know it. Then they’re going to hook me up to the
Recalibration Machine again.
But that day he
didn’t care about a single thing. He was mad with life. Life was mad in his
veins. Life was livid in his veins.
Everything spoke
to him. The birds’ songs were like shrilly operas stuck in fortissimo. The
creek sneaking along by his side crackled and popped the way a long-asleep
radio wakes up hungry and eager to play. The wind in the pines moaned softly
like a lonely lover.
Then it
happened.
He felt dizzy at
first, his head so light he thought it might float away. Something surged
inside him that could have been swallowed lightning, rising, writhing, and
climbing up to his head.
The memory came.
Memories were
demons; they were even more forbidden than being all alone; they were not
allowed to even start. When they went in for their weekly screening, any
evidence of memories prior to the Anti-Emotion Movement was immediately erased.
It was for their own good. Really. They had to believe in the Overseers. They
gave them everything, and asked for so little in return. The Overseers picked
them up after the Great Fog.
He just stood
there and could not stop the memory. Oh, it was so warm. That swallowed
lightning curled up, balled up in his head and took to nuclear fusion, forming
a miniature sun to melt all the work of the entire Overseers’ brilliant
technology.
But what an
afternoon it was.
The first flash
was of shiny boxes wrapped in fancy bows under a tree that someone had stuck in
a living room. What a bizarre image. Why would someone put a perfectly good
tree in a living room? Perfect madness. Perfect madness, indeed. And the poor,
poor tree.
The tree was
wrapped with winking lights, and as he stood there, letting this memory take
root, he could see the pines around him dressed the same. They were beautiful,
and he overflowed with the urge to take all the pines in the forest, shrink
them down, and put them into everyone’s homes.
Ridiculous.
Utterly ridiculous.
He heard
footsteps, and the beautiful, horrible, absurd memory vanished. The memory
vanished like the scent of a woman riding with you on a train—a woman you know
you will never see again.
He waited for
the Goth Town Police to arrest him. And he cherished those seconds as the taste
of a curious and wild memory remained for a few seconds on his lips. Those few
seconds were more blissful than the rambunctious air that crept all through the
forest that afternoon and shot rays of perilous hope into everything. In those
few seconds, he tried to chase the echo that was home to that taste. That scent
of a woman on a train. He tried to return to it with the desperation of a
legless man waking from a Boston Marathon dream.
But at least the
taste was there when they handcuffed him.
At least the
flicker.
A gray haunt … at least …
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