Introduction

Welcome to 2025! We made it! I have a few things to report, then we’ll get to our story. I got my first two rejections of this year this week, and also my first acceptance! I can’t tell you where yet, but it’s for a reproductive rights anthology and it’s about childbirth.

Now, this story was written with a flurry of other science fiction stories about the divisions we put between people and how that in itself can be violence. Content includes murder, plague, and slight sexual content.

The Wall

I. Memories

I don’t remember when I realized that they hated us. Perhaps it was when I was five years old and I was chasing after a rolling apple in the market, and one of them stomped on my hand and cackled, cackled, and none of his friends came to my aid, only laughed and leered along.

Perhaps it was when I was ten years old, and my friend told me he couldn’t be my friend anymore, couldn’t even meet my eye anymore.

Or perhaps when I was thirteen years old, and one of their adults spat in my face as I was walking to the bus stop, spat in my face for no other reason than that I was walking, and that I was me.

If I hadn’t known it by then, I would have known it on the day I turned eighteen. The day they announced they were going to build the Wall.

#

II. The Wall

I leant back against the cool bricks and set my phaser against my leg. I wouldn’t need it, not yet. The Wall was always quiet this time of day. Nobody wanted to cross when the sun was overhead, scorching so hot through an ozone brittle from centuries of abuse that you could fry an egg on the dirt. In my loose tan fatigues, I sheltered in the shade of the Wall. It was still hot enough that sweat drizzled down my ballsack and slicked up my thighs. I craved a cold shower but with water rations what they were, I wouldn’t be getting one for another week.

It is what it is.

Stuporous and nodding, my phaser trickling out of my fingertips, I almost missed the sound of metal tines clicking against the top bricks of the wall. But I had trained for this, and my instincts kicked into gear in time to grab my phaser and hop to my feet, just before one of them breached the wall and thumped right down next to me. It took all of three seconds to aim and squeeze the trigger, blasting the man’s forehead with a proton blast that obliterated his skull and spewed brain matter out the back of his head. His body thudded to the ground and it was then I realized he wasn’t a man, not really. He was a boy, my age when they built the wall.

You’ll excuse me if I didn’t fucking cry.

Holstering my phaser, I checked for a pulse. Standard procedure, you see. No one knows what kind of shit they’ve gotten up to over there. But he was dead dead, and I returned to my post. I’d claim the body and my bounty later when night shift came to collect me.

#

III. Them

I don’t remember when they started to come over the Wall. I was too young, too full of my own stuff, too angry at the world. But I do remember when I turned twenty-one and was kindly forced to enlist in the Marines. Everyone my age was. They needed bodies to man the Wall, they said. Keep them out. Keep us safe.

I wasn’t even mad. Seemed like a noble enough mission to me. If I got to shoot a few of them? Even better. Shooting kids was the worst. That always stung a minute. But then I would remember the kids who’d treated me like shit when I was a kid, and I wouldn’t feel so bad. We couldn’t let them come over here. They’d just breed and insinuate their hatred into our population. Poison the well, so to speak.

There was no room for error. They were all evil.

All of them, down to the squalling babes they’d throw over in desperation.

And they had to be neutralized.

At least, that’s what I’d been taught. That’s what I’d believed before her.

#

IV. Her

I’d been working day shift for a year when suddenly my captain gets promoted and the new captain gets it into his dickhead that we need new assignments. So all of the sudden I’m on nightshift.

Great.

My first night on patrol is exactly what I expect. As the sun sets in the market, I watch as mothers pick up their meager food rations and fight over the rinds of apples and skins of potatoes, anything extra to feed the bloated bellies of their spawn. No one goes without here, but no one is full either.

I throw a cocky salute to the leering druggies sucking down their Luna pipes in the shadowy corners of the booths. They’re too blissed out to do more than cough at me, which makes me chuckle a little, humorlessly.

Finally, I head to the Wall, to the distant part where I’ve been assigned, where I relieve the day guard, who slaps me on the back like we’re old friends ever though he’s just some asshole from basic. And I stand. And I wait.

Nights are cold in the dustbowl, as cold as the days are hot, as though the chilling moon has sucked all the energy from the earth. Our fatigues are better than standard civilian issue but not by much, and I can feel my dick shrink the longer I’m shivering there. And it’s a long fucking time. I yawn, yawn. I’m used to sleeping this time, it’s my first shift on night, and I make the mistake of leaning back and closing my eyes, just to rest the itch.

#

V. Taken

Next thing I know, cold steel’s pressed to my throat and a body’s pressed to my side.

“Don’t move,” says a woman’s voice. “I’ll kill you.”

I believe her. Of course I believe her. They’re all killers, all evil.

“Alright, relax. Let’s take this easy.” I reach for my phaser and the knife slicks across my throat, a sting of pain I jerk back from.

“I said don’t move!”

This time, I don’t move.

“You’re going to come with me,” she says. “I’m going to take your phaser and you’re going to come with me.” And then the bitch reaches around and grabs my phaser from my holster before I can so much as twitch, like she’s ready. Like she’s trained for this. And suddenly the knife’s gone and it’s a phaser pointed at my head.

That’s about when my heart starts exploding in my chest. How is this happening? Who is this bitch and how did she get the drop on me?

I have plenty of time for all these questions as the marches me away from the Wall, away from the encampment, into the windswept dustbowl of the prairie. There’s no one out here. It’s too dangerous, what with the wild mutated animals and tornadoes and stars knows what else. No one to see me or save me and I’m a little chickenshit doing nothing to save myself as she marches me out to a dark spot and then points to the ground.

“Sit,” she says. Like a guard dog, back when we had those, before we started using them for food.

And like an asshole, I sit.

She’s wearing a huge pack on her back. With one hand pointing the phaser at me, she uses the other to slump the pack onto the ground.

“Unpack that. There’s a tent. Put it up.”

“I’m not your bitch.”

She puts pressure on the trigger, causing the phaser to whirr. Piss trickles down my leg. “I think you are.”

#

VI. Jada

Her name is Jada. She volunteers it as soon as I’m done pitching the tent, like the strangest peace offering. It would suit her, with her olive skin and dark hair, if she weren’t one of them.

I don’t give her my name, but I startle when she says, “You’re Wil.”

“How did you—”

She taps her breast and I realize like a dumbass that it’s stitched to my lapel. Fucking Marines.

She flicks the phaser towards the tent. “Get in.”

I crawl in. At this point, I’m not even pretending that I’m going to escape. Not now, anyway. She’s gotta fall asleep at some point.

She crawls in after me. It’s not a big tent and I can smell her, sweat and something sweet. Shit, in another life I’d want to fuck her, but all I can feel now is disgust at our closeness. Disgust and fear, because that phaser is still pointed square at my chest, and I have no doubt she will and knows how to use it.

She settles back and sighs. “Alright, Wil. One night. You’re going to listen to me for one night.”

“The fuck I am.”

“You have no choice.” She shakes the phaser. Are those tears in her eyes? “Now. Let us begin.”

#

VII. Story

“We used to be one people,” Jada says, smoothing her hair with one hand. “Long ago. Before the sun was scorched and the earth became dry and barren, we lived together as one nation under a single leader, united in our struggles.”

I’m not buying this, but I nod, because that’s what you do when someone’s crazy.

“Then the sickness came. No one knows what caused it, but suddenly, people began to cough, and wheeze, and stop breathing. Their heads became hot and they had delirious dreams. If they were lucky, they were dreaming as they died—and thousand of them died, millions of them died.”

“Now the factions began to form. The west thought that the disease had come from the east, and the east was certain the disease had come from the west. They found they’d always hated each other, that their differences were always irreconcilable, and that the only thing they could agree upon was that they must be separate. So they agreed to build the Wall.”

I have been listening raptly to this moment but then I shout angrily, “No! You built the Wall! You built the Wall to keep us away from your Paradise!”

This extorts a genuine laugh from Jada. “Oh, Wil. Is that what you think? Why do you think so many of my people are risking death to go over to your side of the Wall?”

“Because you’re coming to steal the little we have!”

“Because the disease is coming back!” Jada’s cheeks bloom red. “You arrogant fool, do you think we care to steal what little you have scrounged together? What we have is no better. We only want to live!”

Petulant as a child, I sputter, “Then prove it! Prove it. Take me across the Wall.”

Jada looks like she wasn’t expecting that. “You are serious?”

“As the plague.”

She shakes the phaser towards the entrance of the tent. “Alright, then. Let’s go.”

#

VIII. Paradise

I don’t know why I agree to it. I could stop her. I could subdue her now, take back my phaser and fire it between her eyes. But part of me has always wondered, part of me has always needed to know. Why do they hate us so much?

So I let her take me to the most out-of-the-way part of the wall.

“You’re going first,” she says. By this time, I know not to argue. She boosts me up and I heave onto the top, then grab her by the wrists and pull her up until we’re both perched like birds.

“Are you ready?” she says. “Once you see, you cannot go back.”

I don’t answer; I jump down, and she after me, and with the phaser to my back, she marches me through the brush, towards the flickering lights of their city.

Only after a while I realize it’s no city we’re approaching. It’s a cluster of careworn tents, patched and jerry-rigged.

It occurs to me then. “No one guards your Wall.”

“Why would we? Your people aren’t trying to come here.”

Misgivings churn my stomach.

“I’m going to remove the phaser now,” she says as we get close to the tent city. “If you run, I won’t stop you.”

I don’t understand the act of trust, not until I see.

It’s a graveyard. The tents, blowing in the wind, house corpses, emaciated and gray. The stench of death and piss and shit perfumes the air. I’m about ready to run when I hear someone cough.

My heart drops into my stomach. One of the bodies is alive, and starts hacking away, coughing up thick yellow sputum. I can’t even tell which one except by direction, they all look so skeletal.

“You see?” says Jada dryly. “Paradise.”

I understand why she dropped the phaser. There’s nothing to run from. Nothing but the truth.

All this time, I’ve been murdering refugees.

I fall to my knees and vomit into the dust. Jada places a hand on my back, a comforting gesture that’s more than I deserve.

When I’m done, and I wipe my mouth on my sleeve, I hop to my feet and grab her by the wrist. She struggles at first until she sees that I’m not about to hurt her.

“Jada,” I say, “we’ll show them. We’ll tell them. I swear it, I swear it to you.”

Jada’s face crumples. She is crying, and I think I am too. “Really? Please, don’t lie to me.”

“I promise,” I say. How can I see the suffering I’ve witnessed and say anything else? “I promise. We’ll tell them the truth about the Wall. About you and us.”

And I hold out my hand. She takes it. And we walk back towards the Wall, in the cold, dark night, ready to create a new world.

IX. The End

I cough.

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