Undone: A Dystopian Fiction Novel by Chad Evercroft Page A

hated and were not receiving what they needed in return. Bad health insurance, bad hourly pay, strict rules about vacations, sick days, what have you. To keep a job, people had to sacrifice some of their basic needs and couldn’t even really complain about it, for fear of being kicked out the door. Waste management was the first to get hit by the strikes. Inspired by the raw energy of the protests and looting, workers brushed the dirt from their hands, planted their feet, and refused to play along with the system.
    Enough is enough. No more exploitation. Are you paying attention now?
    It’s amazing how much trash five people can create in just seven days. We did our best to be as clean and tidy as possible, but without running water, we were eating off paper towels and paper plates. We could have used the water we had to wash our regular plates, but that would just be a waste. We needed that water for drinking. We bagged up all our trash at the end of each day and put it on the curb out of habit, but soon we discussed different ways to dispose of it. Burning it was one of the first suggestions, but it sounded disgusting and burning trash could release dangerous chemicals into the air. Besides, we couldn’t burn tin cans. We decided to bury it. We had a little plot of woods behind the building that seemed like the best spot. That same evening, Rick and I took two shovels - one from our stash and the other from Jenny - and spent two hours digging a large, deep hole. It wasn’t a particularly warm evening, but the work was hard for me and I quickly sweat through my T-shirt. The physical exercise combined with being slightly dehydrated and smelling the trash through the bags made me feel ill. When we decided the hole was big enough for the trash we had collected over the week, we threw the bags one on top of the other and completed the task of filling the hole in again.
    Sweaty and reeking of dirt and trash, we went back inside. I poured a little water unto a towel and dabbed it under my arms and on my neck before applying a fresh layer of deodorant. It wasn’t much, but we washed the most important areas of our body when we could, just to stay human. Lawrence and the girls were struggling with not being able to wash their hair, which, being long, posed a more present problem than Rick’s and mine.
    “I’m so gross,” Beth moaned, retying her hair into a ponytail. “So greasy.”
    She shook her hands as if she had just held some revolting reptile and made a face.
    Rick rubbed a smear of dirt off his face with a paper towel and smiled. “Well, you look fine,” he assured her.
    Beth rolled her eyes. “Yes, Rick, that’s what I was worried about,” she said sarcastically.
    I chuckled to myself and turned on my phone. We all kept our electronics powered off to save as much battery as possible, but without a consistent power source, there was only so much we could do. I would turn my phone on for a few minutes each day to send Mom an “I’m still alive” text, but the process of turning the phone off and on was draining the battery. That was something else we had taken for granted: having fully-charged phones and laptops all the time. Without that, we felt cut off from the world. If we didn’t have the clock in the kitchen, we wouldn’t even know what time it was without going out of our way to find out.
    When our electronics had completely died on the fourth day after the whole building’s power went out, we took everything to a coffee shop and charged there, but we got dirty looks from the employees, like we were stealing their electricity or something. We decided it would be best to hop from place to place, but those sorts of businesses were closing their doors so the owners could take off to safer parts. There hadn’t been any more big riots in days, but the quiet felt like the eye of the storm. There was something else brewing and no one wanted to be around when it hit.
    “We need more water.”
    Beth had