Deprivation

Chapter 1: Reverb

The way I found out that I was one of them, one of the Deprivers was kind of funny. Not funny ha-ha, but funny strange. And bizarre. And violent. Very fucking violent. It wasn’t intentionally violent, it was more a spur of the moment, instant reaction to a stressful situation. I had no idea it would turn out the way it did, nor did I know that it would set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately land me here, in the North Carolina State Penitentiary – Depriver Section, or as we lovingly refer to it: the Cackalackee State Hole.All I wanted was a new car, one that didn’t smoke like a chimney and always me leave stuck on the side of the road or wondering when I’d be stuck on the side of the road.

So, after being stranded at the movies one night six years ago, I decided that I was gonna’ take the plunge and wade back into the credit jungle. I went to some car dealers and was turned down repeatedly because my credit sucked and I couldn’t show much provable income. As I was driving I passed one of those Buy-Here/Pay-Here car lots and figured I’d give them a try. To this day I believe they saw me coming a mile away, saw the mixture of hope and desperation in my face.So I told them my situation, told them what I wanted and also what I’d settle for and they assured me that they had just the thing. They showed me a nice eight-year-old minivan that looked great and ran great and I thought “yeah baby, it’s even got a/c. I’m stylin’ now.”

So I bought it. Gave them my thousand bucks and agreed to make my payments on time every time. And I drove away with the radio cranked and a great big smile on my face. If I had known how many people would die by my hand in the next four years I probably wouldn’t have been smiling.I’ve spent my life as a loner. Never made friends, only had a couple of girlfriends. I’ve always stayed emotionally and physically distant from people. Having been born around the same time as the discovery of Deprivers Syndrome, my antisocial behavior was never really thought of as anything more than appropriate prudence in a time when the slightest skin-to-skin contact could, at best leave you deprived of some minor senses, at worst leave you on a cold slab in the Centers for Depriver Control’s forensic pathology department.

So I lived in my self-imposed isolation, with no physical contact other than the occasional visit to the state sanctioned houses of prostitution staffed by stringently screened young women who had been tested and declared immune to DS. In this age of fear and disease, these brothels were the few places you could indulge your fantasies of connection without risking life or mind. Or so we thought. I figure that’s where I got infected. Some prostitute slipped through the screening process. Eventually DS became epidemic within the brothels themselves, forcing the Global Governing Authority to ban all forms of prostitution and spend billions of dollars in a losing enforcement battle. I was just another casualty on a rapidly growing list of Deprivers.     

At the time of my infection, it was estimated that up to three percent of the population was either a carrier of the dormant virus or an active Depriver. Today the estimate is more like thirty-five percent and growing by at least two hundred globally every day. But I digress. Those are the facts. This is my reality. So I bought myself a nice, dependable vehicle. It was great not having to worry about breaking down all the time and not sweating my ass off during the summer. I had the van only a week when it started giving me problems. First, the engine started running rough. Then the radio stopped working. The last straw was when the air conditioning and the power windows both failed on the same day. Now I was driving around in a sauna with no way to get relief. I was pissed. I went to the dealer fuming. I calmed myself as much as I could and I went in and talked to the owner.

This is how it went:There was a little desk directly in front of the entrance door. Sitting at the desk was a very attractive woman I guessed to be in her mid twenties. I explained the situation and said that I thought that they should be responsible for fixing the car. “I think you need to speak to the owner. I’ll call him for you” she said. She dialed a number on her phone, and then whispered conspiratorially into the mouthpiece. She listened for a minute and then said “I see. Okay. Yes sir.” She hung up the phone and flashed me a winning smile with her perfectly white teeth. “Mr. Rangeer is in a meeting. He said to have you make an appointment for tomorrow.” I stared at her for a moment, trying not to be disarmed by her dazzling smile and the ample amount of cleavage she was displaying. I smiled my most charming smile and said “If it’s okay with you, I’ll wait here.”

”Oh, that’s not necessary,” she said. “you can make an appointment for tomorrow. How’s that?” I took a deep breath, let it out and stared at her. I was smiling, but the smile had left my eyes. They had taken on a cold, hard glint. I said “Look, what’s your name?”“Marissa” she said. “Look Marissa,” I said, my voice amiable with just a hint of menace.“We can do this one of two ways. Either you call Mr. Rangeer and tell him to get his sorry ass out here or I walk into his office right now. How’s that?”

I calmed myself as much as I could and I went in and I talked to the owner. I explained the situation and said that I thought that they should be responsible for fixing the car.He said that he sympathized, but since I had bought the car “As is” and chosen not to purchase a warranty, the responsibility was mine. Now, let’s be very clear. I did purchase the vehicle “as is”. I didn’t purchase the warranty only because I didn’t have the money. So, technically he was correct. It was my problem. Tough titty. That was the gist of it. But I didn’t see it that way. Technically he may have been correct, but ethically he was all wrong.

I repeatedly appealed to his sense of responsibility and fairness. He didn’t bite. After about two hours of my haranguing and harassment he got really pissed and started threatening to have me arrested if I didn’t get off of his property. I got really quiet for a second. I started contemplating how badly I wanted to hit this guy. How I wanted to watch him grovel at my feet and beg for mercy, say he was sorry, he’d made a mistake, he’d fix it, please don’t hurt me.I got up from my chair, leaned over the desk and put my hand out to shake. He instinctively took it. I grasped his hand and squeezed with all my might, letting all my frustration out through this normally genteel ritual. At first he tried to resist, to crush my hand in his much bigger one, all the while staring right into my eyes and smiling triumphantly. After about five seconds of this something happened. I felt a surge of energy in my hand and he got a startled look on his face that slowly turned to shock and then outright horror as his eyes glazed over and then turned completely white.

In that instant he started flailing his arms and howling like a gut-shot wolf. He staggered around the office crashing into things and screaming that he couldn’t see. I thanked him for his time and walked calmly out of the office where I told the receptionist that her boss was having some kind of fit and she better call an ambulance. I then strolled out the door, got into my piece-of-shit van and drove away. That was the first time. After that my life just spun out of control. I headed directly to my crappy apartment and filled a couple of garbage bags with my clothes and the few other belongings I possessed. I knew I didn’t have much time because it wouldn’t be long before the local cops pieced things together and contacted Depriver Control. I had two hours at most to be out of the city. Although the DC’s tracking technology had advanced dramatically in the last few years, something to do with genetics and airborne DNA residue, that wasn’t the why I knew they’d find me soon. I had just bought a car for fuck’s sake. They had my address.

So there I was, on the lamb, with absolutely no clue where I was going or what I was going to do. Pretty much everywhere in the country people discriminated against deprivers, not to mention the reward for ratting on a depriver usually ran in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was pretty much fucked from my perspective. I just decided to make the best of it. I dug out the nine hundred and eighty six dollars I kept in a hole I had cut in my mattress, grabbed what little food I had in the refrigerator and got the hell out. I went to the bank and cleaned out my savings account. All four hundred and sixty-three dollars. I hit the road with fourteen hundred and forty-nine dollars, six diet cokes, half a loaf of bread, two beers that I’d been saving for emergencies and a van that was running like shit.

I left Durham, North Carolina heading west. I bought a cooler and filled it with ice and lunch meat and raw hot dogs. Along with the food I got some Diet Cokes to keep me juiced up on caffeine. I drove for sixteen hours straight that first day. Six of those hours were spent repeatedly trying to get back to the interstate after venturing off on some little road or another looking for a place to hide out for awhile. I’d find someplace promising, get all jumpy and head right back out to the interstate. I finally called it quits a little ways west of Nashville, Tennessee. Nashville was a part of the country that at one time in history was smack dab in the middle of what was derisively called the “Bible Belt”. A place that was extremely inhospitable to anyone who wasn’t white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
If you were merely Catholic, things could be tough on you, but if you were black or Indian or any other color or race that “wasn’t white”, woe be unto you.

I learned immediately upon stopping in Nashville that the people there hadn’t changed that much. The bigotry and hatred were still there. They had just shifted their focus to Deprivers. They hated us more than they had ever hated black people or Indians or Mexicans. They even hated us more than they had hated gay people during the AIDS epidemic of the eighties and nineties as well as the Iraqis and Afghanis during the Middle East crises during the early part of the new millenium. They hated us because we were a direct threat to them. A highly visible and sensationalized Sword of Damocles. Needless to say the media only exacerbated the problem. There were so many incidents in Nashville reminiscent of the Salem Witch hunts that the media actually became inured to their effects and eventually stopped reporting them altogether.