Because his loyal dogs ruled everything.
Because his daddy bought every resort on the island, East and West, several years before the Change.
Why? Because he is the Secretary of Defense. Surprise, surprise. You can connect the dots.
And just like that, Archer became the king of the island. With servants, a tight circle of followers, minions, and his goons. Smart, too. He controlled the tower and the data center. He had access to the mainland. He had boats that went back and forth, bringing the necessary goods. He became the king, the mafia don, the owner, the slave-master, the pimp, the executioner, and the master of fate. You name it—that was Archer Crone. And if you weren’t willing to lick his boots—well, you ended up on the Eastside.
Twenty-one of us.
We were lucky he let us reside in the secluded resort. We had the basics. Sleeping accommodation. A small supply of dry goods. A garden in the back. Two boats.
We lost some of it during the last storm as well as the wooden deck and overwater bungalows. We learned pretty quickly how to handle the garden, the greenhouse, the chicken coops, and the fruit trees.
You learn anything when you are hungry. Including fishing and using about anything as food.
Still. It’s not paradise. Not when you have zero knowledge of what’s happening beyond its borders, having to meet in secret with those from the Westside to find out. Not when you have to grow pot to sell to the town on the Northside in exchange for tokens that will buy you meat, cereal, coffee, booze, tobacco, and used clothes.
You learn.
You survive.
You realize that self-sufficiency is hard fucking work.
Then you find out that seclusion does not always mean safe. And when the thugs from the town attack one night, you lose a friend, and then another friend, a girl, Olivia, whose fate becomes much worse than those who died during the bombings. Her name is said quietly and with the awful memories of what humans can do to each other when stripped of basic human values.
You make a little cemetery in the jungle and hope that it doesn’t grow.
You carry on. You are twenty. You want to call your relatives and ask why you should even bother surviving. You want to hear their voices. You want someone stronger, older, and wiser to tell you it’s gonna be alright. You want to sit one full day without having to think about what chores are on the list and whose night shift it is. And you push away the thought that maybe your relatives are not all dead, despite seeing their names in the released government records of the deceased.
Thanksgiving comes. No one looks at each other. You charge your phone—that useless brick—because it carries memories. So you sit all evening and flip through the pictures. Over. And over. And over. Though the dear faces start feeling like they belong to someone else’s life.
Then a hurricane comes and wipes out half of the structures and almost the entire supply of food for the next month. One of your friends breaks down and wanders off into the night, only for his body to wash up ashore a week later.
The cemetery acquires another grave.
But you carry on.
Because that’s what you’ve learned to do.
Paradise is a great word. It lacks responsibility. Because responsibility is a burden that makes you grow up too fast.
This is not paradise. This is survival. Coping. Waiting it out. With a grim thought—there might not be anything in the future to look forward to.
Sure, we have good days. We are a family. We learned to share and take care of each other. There are occasional parties and booze and music from before the Change because, unlike the Westside, we don’t have internet access. These are the moments when we forget that we have no one but each other. And we laugh. And sing. And drink. And kiss. And fuck. In those moments, we truly feel lucky.
But such moments are one in a hundred. When you wake up the next day, the azure waters and the luscious jungles with the bright parrots are still there—it’s Groundhog Day all over again.
I don’t tell the blondie all of that. She will find out. As we walk along the beach, she asks questions, and I answer some of them.
She seems like a nice girl. Another survivor, Dani, looked like she was mute last night. And the third one—Katura—is a bad-ass bitch who thinks she has her shit together and is too confident for her own good. I gotta give it to her, it’s good for survival. There are plenty of such girls on the Westside, who will do anything to please the Chancellor. Katura might just fit right in.
I explain to Callie “the village,” as we call our little settlement, and how things work around here. Somehow, I want her to stay. The Westside will break her—I can tell. The selected winners don’t know what they signed up for.
When we come back to the village, the air is already thick with smoke and the smell of food.
The other two girls sit at one of the tables in the dining area and talk to several curious people. Katura, the cocky one, is eating an orange, spitting the seeds onto the ground. She has a story, that one.
Bob Marley trickles through the air.