The Asylum: Book 1, Ira. Part 1

Ira leaned against the small concrete wall of the convenience store she worked at waiting for her boss to come out and give her the week’s pay. Dust and dirt kicked up on the street as a small Shifter flew by, probably going over the speed limit, Ira thought. The Shifter hover-car was a few years old and didn’t have the best air current brakes for slowing down mid-air, not that the GIO cared much to enforce the speed limit anyway. The Government Intervention Office had higher concerns like drug and alcohol laws, perverted sexual deviants, and employment regulations to enforce. Ira hated them with a passion.
They had taken her mother Mirra, five years ago when they found out about her secret girlfriend. Ira and her father both knew that she was lesbian, and they both held the secret that when revealed, cost Mirra her life. They were lucky that the GIO didn’t punish them for not turning her in themselves, but with her mother gone and most likely dead, Ira didn’t feel lucky.
Her boss finally exited the store and nodded at Ira. He held out the envelope to her and she took it without looking in his eyes. Ralph’s eyes were hard to look at because he used to be blind in his right eye before he had it replaced by a biotech one. He claimed that the biotech didn’t do anything better than the regular eye, but its electric blue color still gave Ira the creeps. She thanked him for the money and walked to where she’d parked her bike in a small back alley.
There was a man who looked about sixty or seventy standing close and admiring the bike. It was an old one, made in 2012, over fifty years ago. She wondered if the man had seen similar bikes when they were new.
The man looked up at her and smiled. “This your bike?” He asked with a southern twang, his voice was low and slightly muffled by his thick grey mustache and beard.
“Yes it is.” Ira said, cautiously. She knew the man was probably safe, but still didn’t quite trust him.
“She’s beautiful. I remember my pop had a motorcycle just like this when I was young. He taught me how to ride when I was fifteen. Oh I loved hearing the engine purr.” He had a lost look in his eyes as he remembered. Ira straddled the bike and the man took a step back to give her space. “The Harley’s were the best, you know. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
Ira nodded, she knew of Harley Davidson’s only by the rusted logo engraved on the side of her bike. “I’m sure no one would dare.” She said, to humor the man. Of course no one would tell her different, because most people were too young to even know what a motorcycle was.
“Does it still run on gas?” The man asked, eying the engine skeptically.
“Artificial. The repair guy wanted to make it a retro styled hover bike, but I wouldn’t let him. He fixed the engine for artificial fuel though.” She explained. In truth, she couldn’t afford the transformation, but she thought the old man would like to hear that it was her choice to keep the wheels on the ground.
The man did seem pleased. “That’s good. So many flying cars now, personally it makes me a bit queasy. I like my feet on the ground.”
“Me too.” Ira smiled for real now.
The man reached into his pocket and pulled out two thin pieces of rolled up paper. He offered one to Ira and she noticed then that it was a cigarette, just a bit old looking, like it had been in his pocket a while. Cigarettes were outlawed more than ten years ago though, and Ira wasn’t sure. “Go on, take it.” The old man said. “Nobody’s looking.”
Ira took it and the man lit them both with an old metal lighter. Ira had seen ones like it being sold in the Freehouse. The Freehouse was an illegal market just outside the town of Oriole Creek. People who didn’t work would often sell food and goods in the market for cheap to people who can’t afford to shop in the regular marketplace. More than once Ira had bought medicines for her sick father there. He wouldn’t tell anyone he was sick because he didn’t want to have to get the GIO’s treatment. Once you’re prescribed treatment, you can’t refuse it or you’ll be stuck with a steep fine. Ira’s dad had been manic depressive ever since Ira’s mom was taken, and he couldn’t stand anything from the GIO, even their free and mandatory health services.
Ira fiddled with the cigarette in her hand before putting it to her lips and inhaling. She coughed and sputtered, but when she got her breath back, she did it again. It felt dangerously good to be doing something she knew she shouldn’t. She’d done her best to stay within the ridiculously strict laws, if only to ensure she’d never see a GIO again. For smoking a cigarette, she could be put in jail for at least a year. She had tried so hard, but this one little thing she felt sure of and she enjoyed it. The burning in her lungs was worth the excitement of breaking the law. She knew only one thing that could make it better. She started her motorcycle and thanked the old man. He nodded as she pulled out of the alley, cigarette still between her lips. The rush was to be short lived though, because a GIO was coming out of the shop on the side of the alley. He saw the trail of light smoke trailing Ira as she sped up and pulled out into the street. He jumped on his hover bike and trailed after her. Ira’s motorcycle was old, but it was very fast. She leaned into the turn onto the main road and shot off like a rocket. Her heart pounded in her chest and she held the cigarette between clenched teeth. What had compelled her to take the cigarette was the same thing that made her flee: excitement.
Ira had lived a rather sheltered life since her mother was taken. She took care of her father and went to school and got a job when she turned 16. She had a few friends at school, but mostly kept to herself because they didn’t understand. None of them had lost their mothers. The thing about the GIO was that they didn’t have to tell you anything. They knocked on the door to her house early one morning and said that Ira’s mother was being arrested for perverted sexual deviancy. Ira and her father both knew that Mirra was lesbian and had a girlfriend, but she was still their family and they helped her hide. Mirra immediately told them to feign innocence so that they wouldn’t be taken with her. She went quietly without a fuss, but the two officers still held her at gunpoint as they led her away. They didn’t say whether she’d be back, or if she would go to prison or be punished or killed, all of which were legal and normal. Ira cried for the loss of her mother, but when the officers came back the next day to ask if Ira or her father knew about Mirra’s crimes as a PSD, they denied it. Without any word on what would happen to her, they assumed the worst.
Ira was bullied in school despite her best efforts at defending herself. A racist boy once beat her up and told her that her mother was a pervert because of her Indian heritage and suggested that Ira was perverted too. Ira could not turn him in for his racism because if his accusation was taken seriously, she would be given far worse punishment than the simple beatings that the boy had given her. Her father was manic depressive and delirious most days so he was no help to her even when he was taking the GIO issued medications. Her hatred for the GIO was encouraged by her father who had ripped their bugs from the walls in their home and spewed a near constant stream of insults about them in fits of rage and sadness.
Ira was itching for rebellion but could do nothing about it. She had been careful out of fear, but it was fear that fueled her hatred. She became independent from the loss of her mother and the subsequent insanity of her father. She liked that quality in herself, but hated that it was the government which gave it to her.
In one afternoon she had broken three laws at once, and after so many years of strict caution about the law, Ira felt completely free. She was speeding while fleeing from a GIO and smoking! Her mother might not be proud, but Ira can’t help but believe that she would have supported her.
The siren following her was slowly getting harder to hear over the roar of her motorcycle and Ira made a sharp left turn on a side road that led towards her home. She remembered her father and couldn’t bring her trouble to him, so she quickly turned right at the next corner instead of left. There was a place she had heard about, for people who can’t help but break the laws. For people called perverts like her mom, for those who couldn’t find work but couldn’t apply for temporary unemployment, for people who refused the government’s medicine, and for people whose mere existence was against the laws. She had heard about it, the Asylum, it was called, while buying food at the Freehouse. The young man who made and sold soup at the Freehouse had mentioned the Asylum to a customer he was serving. The man, probably not much older than Ira, had said it was hidden and run down, covered in sprawling vines and weeds, but that it was on Wisteria Lane.
Ira drove on and soon came to an old dusty unpaved road. One of the only unpaved roads left in the country, she suspected. The sign was covered mostly by large dangling bows of light purple flowered vines. She didn’t have to see the sign to recognize that the road was covered with Wisteria. She turned left and drove for a little over a mile, and nearly passed the house because it was so well covered by the rusty fence in front of it and not only more Wisteria, but also raspberries climbing from bushes up the walls and two old oak trees in front of the enormous brick house. She turned in and under more sprawling vines she found the gate with a rusty chain wrapped around it. She turned off her bike and looked around. The fence was ten feet high and looked like it was part of the vines after so many decades of growth. The chain was easily visible overtop the vines, and had obviously been opened earlier that day. There was no lock on the chain and with an easy tug it fell dangling from the iron fence. The gate groaned loudly when she pulled it open. What awaited inside was like nothing she’d ever seen before.
From the outside it looked like nature had taken over the place, but as Ira pulled her motorcycle inside the fence, she saw that it was in fact completely tame and obviously kept up by a gardener. The grass was long, but not uncomfortably so. The raspberry bushes were trimmed at the bottoms but allowed to climb up the walls of the house as vines, concealing the house from outside view. And the oak and Wisteria had been planted probably a hundred years ago, and were trimmed to keep them from growing into the house. There was a bucket of fresh picked raspberries sitting next to the cement steps up to the doors. The windows of the house were, aside from the vines, clean and open and the giant wooden front doors were polished. On them hung a painted plywood sign which read “ALL ARE WELCOME IN THE ASYLUM”.
The house looked like the pictures Ira had seen of school buildings in the 1900s, so very different from her school’s plain concrete walls and prison-like fences with guards posted at every door. Here, Ira had a feeling she was trespassing despite the welcome sign, so she parked her bike on the grass, walked up the five steps, and knocked on the doors. After a few long seconds, one of the doors started to open and a small voice behind it said "The doors are always unlocked, you know. You don't have to knock anymore Ditto." The owner of the voice appeared as a short girl with curly blonde hair. "Oh, sorry, I thought you were someone else." She said.
Ira's confusion must have shown on her face because the girl opened the door wider to let Ira in. "Come on in. I'm Adie." She opened the door showing the old building’s interior was entirely different to the exterior. A wide marble staircase took up most of the main hall and an old glittering crystal chandelier unlike anything Ira had seen before hung from the floor above them casting the room in a brilliant white glow. There were two tall wood doors behind the staircase, and an open set of double doors leading to a large dining room and kitchen on the left, and an archway into a sitting room on the right. Everything other than the walls and lights was new and pristine. It was obvious that a lot of people lived here, but despite that it was well kept. Adie waited patiently as Ira took a few seconds to look around.
After a moment Ira returned to her natural senses and looked at Adie again. “Hi, I’m Ira.” She said pleasantly, if a little dazed by the sight of the house. “What is this place?”
Just then an old man appeared at the top of the staircase and slowly walked down it with the aid of a cane. “This place is my home. It can be yours too if you need it.”