In the After

where, exactly, we were going.
    “Orientation is on the outskirts. We try to contain the post-aps until we know what we are dealing with.”
    “Have there been any problems?” I remembered how Rice and I first met, and smiled sheepishly. “Uh, like mine?” I still felt guilty about pulling a gun on him.
    “People sometimes freak. Mostly they’re just appreciative. The psyche-eval usually weeds out the troublemakers, though not always.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Rice looked at me, considering carefully what to say. “Last year we found a boy with limited mental faculties. He was about ten, which would make him six or seven when it happened. It was amazing he’d survived so long, but he didn’t integrate well into New Hope. He had to be expelled.”
    “Like, as in, he could no longer attend school?” It didn’t seem fair to punish someone who had a disability.
    “No, he was expelled from New Hope.”
    I stopped walking and turned to Rice. “He was banished?” I whispered, horrified. “ That’s what it means to be expelled?”
    “He couldn’t function here, he couldn’t even hold down a Dusty job. He was a complete drain on our resources.”
    I was stunned at his words. Baby looked up at me nervously, sensing something was wrong. “How could you send him back out there? He was ten years old! What about old people, do you expel them too?!”
    “It’s not like that. We have a building for elderly care and we have the Ward for people who are mentally incompetent. This boy, he was different. He used to make it out to the farm and kill the animals.”
    “Maybe he didn’t understand that he didn’t need to kill anymore, that his food was provided. You don’t understand what it’s like out there.”
    “He used to watch the toddlers, Amy. He watched them the same way he looked at the animals on the farm.”
    “Oh.” We walked in silence. When your entire world was filled with Floraes, with terror and silence, and thinking of your own survival, how is anyone normal after that? I squeezed Baby’s hand and tried not to think about it.
    “Here we are,” Rice told us after a few minutes. We entered the short, squat building, and Rice led us to a room with a black door.
    “You all love to color code things,” I commented. “Don’t people ever get confused?”
    “No. They don’t.”
    I wondered what would happen if they did, what my punishment would be if certain people found out I’d been in a restricted area. The Ward? Expulsion?
    Rice led us into a room painted a pale blue. Instead of tables and chairs, desks were placed in rows, all facing a large screen. He opened a laptop and placed it on one of the tables.
    “Have a seat,” he said. “I thought you’d like to see this first.” He typed away on his computer and on the screen appeared a map of New Hope. We were centralized in the “urban” district where most everyone lives. The residential buildings were numbered, with the lowest numbers near the Quad, the higher farther away. To the east was the dairy farm that Rice had mentioned, with more farmland to the south and west, and a lake to the north. East of the dairy farm was a forest that the map labeled FOR EXPANSION TBD .
    “You keep the Floraes out of this entire area?” I asked, eyeing the map.
    “We’ve been aggressively expanding certain areas, like the farm. It was originally just a few acres, with a small number of animals.” He pointed to the map. “Now it covers this whole area, and we’ve maximized livestock breeding through advances in animal husbandry.” He glanced at me. “It’s really pretty fascinating how much we’ve accomplished in such a short amount of time.”
    I looked at the map again. “But there isn’t a fence?” I still found it hard to believe.
    “No, we don’t need a physical barrier. You won’t find the Floraes within a two-mile radius of the emitters.”
    “What about other people? People who might want to come and take all this away?” New Hope was well protected from the Floraes, but what would they do if a guerilla force came to take it over?
    “That seems very unlikely.”
    “It happened to us,” I said quietly. I thought of Amber, of what she did to us.
    “What would someone gain by destroying us? We welcome all post-aps, offer a functioning society, a way to live without constant fear of death.”
    Doesn’t he know there will always be someone out there who wants to destroy good?
    Rice was fiddling with his computer