Read Undone: A Dystopian Fiction Novel for Free Online

eyes widened in excitement.
    I told her what I had seen, feeling strangely proud of myself. Rick and Lawrence stood by, unintroduced, and picked at the plastic casing of the toilet paper rolls.
    “Did you hear they’re probably going to cancel classes?” Kallie asked, lowering her voice as if it was a secret.
    “No! Is it that bad over there?”
    “I don’t know. I haven’t been back. I’m living with my parents, and they barely let me out of the house today to go shopping.”
    “Where did you hear about that?” Rick asked, sounding doubtful.
    “I have a friend who works in the President’s office,” Kallie explained. “She said they’d been getting weird calls, like, threatening ones about more riots and protests. The police are all over, breaking up some of the activist groups, trying to weed out who was responsible for organizing what happened.”
    “Geez,” Lawrence breathed.
    “Yeah. Intense.”
    Kallie sighed and looked into her basket.
    “Well, I should get going. I told my parents I’d only be gone twenty minutes. Hopefully this all ends soon and things get back to normal.”
    “Yeah.”
    “See ya!”
    We watched her leave. Lawrence began to nudge me jokingly in the ribs.
    “She’s cute,” he remarked.
    “Sure.”
    “Don’t be weird. You can look at girls, you know. You’re not dating.”
    “Yeah, yeah.”
    Rick called us back to task and we gathered the rest of the supplies. After we picked up the bandages, we circled back around the store and found Beth and Tyrsa in the sporting goods section. Tyrsa was deciding whether or not to buy a metal bat that was on sale.
    “What do you guys think?” she asked. “Is it worth it?”
    Rick took the bat from her and swung it in slow motion. He flexed his fingers on the handle.
    “I like it,” he offered. “Could take out someone with a gun if we came at them fast enough with a good swing.”
    “Good!” Tyrsa said. “So we have some options for weapons if that becomes necessary.”
    She put the bat in the cart.
    Between the two groups, we had a decent stockpile going on.
    When we went to check out, I counted five police officers hovering by the exit, eyeing everyone closely. The cashiers all looked nervous. The teenager who scanned our items kept his eyes lowered and only glanced up when Beth said hello . He smiled back shyly before withdrawing again.
    “Your total is sixty- eight dollars and seventy-five cents,” he murmured.
    We didn’t have enough money.

Chapter 4
    We spent a few moments discussing what item to leave behind and decided on one of the battery packs. We had lots of candles and determined we probably had enough batteries for the flashlights and radio. That brought us down to a doable price and Tyrsa counted out the money we had collected the day before.
    We carried the bags back home as quickly as we could, painfully aware of how vulnerable we were with our supplies right out in the open. It actually felt good this time around to pass through areas heavy with police; no one would dare try to mug us there. At the apartment, we unpacked our supplies and counted everything twice, and then three times.
    “It feels good to be a bit more prepared,” Tyrsa remarked, running her fingers along the rows of colorful cans in the cupboard.
    “Yeah,” Rick agreed, swinging the baseball bat around with one hand.
    It had been non-verbally decided that the bat would be Rick’s weapon. It looked terrifying in his hands, capable of cracking someone’s skull with a single swing, like a walnut.
    We got the wooden planks ready to be put up at a moment’s notice and talked about setting a few of them right outside the windows, hidden in the bushes, with nails poking out of them. I helped Tyrsa snap a broom handle in half and watched her duct-tape a steak knife to one end and smooth down the other so it wouldn’t accidentally poke her. We were lucky she already had a lot of random supplies with her. One of her few possessions was a