No one was sure exactly the day or time when reporters realized their way of life was about to crumble or that a new order would take its place. Miriam, like other journalists, certainly saw disturbing signs, but whatever they reported was like a cork trying to stop a bursting dam. By the time she met Niko that first night, they had all lived through late-night raids and house-to-house searches. The Protectors never said what they were looking for, and if they found something of value, they often conscripted it under some vague rule of threat to the state.
Miriam hoped enough clues would remain to accurately reconstruct what had happened. She knew that history is always being rewritten, and eventually, although it can take many generations, truth emerges grudgingly from behind curtains shut by those who seek to hide it. So she kept on, even after salvaging scattered folders from the wreckage of her office desk after the Protectors had it ransacked by thugs who could not discern waste paper from important records. So they made a great show of scattering everything while never examining anything.
Notes she had smuggled out of her office the night she met Niko showed what had happened before her investigative pieces had ended with a thud when the Regime began to use reporters either as weaponized dirt collectors or propaganda spreaders who were expected to shovel and spread the Regime’s shit.
It began when a small group managed to take control of the great wealth beyond the city by exploiting abundant oil and other mineral reserves. They took advantage of starvation wages, and over time, a small faction led by a vicious but seemingly affable man named Villinkash, who had given himself first the title of General and later, Premier, came to dominate the country’s largest and wealthiest city, which was also its financial center.
Back when he first had been circulating his credentials for office, she and her colleagues referred to him with a smirk as “General Villin.” He made speeches about his service to the country and wore a military jacket studded with medals, although he had never served in any capacity. In the newsroom they used to joke that he got one medal every month when he opened a new cereal box for breakfast.
By pitting group against group, he and his followers drew out the most aggressive and easily controlled factions of the city. These were the ones who felt as if they had been particularly wronged, although they never really articulated who had wronged them or how. Still, Villinkash used a standard playbook on how to divide a country against itself.
His faction took over the banks, co-opting the country’s wealth to hold within a tightly controlled circle. They came to be known as the Overseers. They rallied around Villinkash, who held a strange sway over his followers, so that no terrible act could dispel their worship of him. In addition, he tapped into the belief among enough ordinary people that he could—and would—improve their lives. By the time they realized that they had been duped, it was too late. Whatever self-governing power they’d had was gone like a puff of smoke.
With these two groups behind him, he took control of all the levers of government. He turned the city’s police into a paramilitary force and expanded their numbers by the thousands. With the Overseers’ backing, he took over all businesses, schools, trades, and everything else that had once operated privately and peacefully. Of course he took over all media and reinvented it as a propaganda tool. As this happened, his reputation began to change from affable and charismatic to ruthless and determined. His speeches became more fiery. They ended with salutes and cheers. And always he pointed to the “others” who would take away the rights of his followers.
With the help of the Overseers and the Protectors who ran the practical, day-to-day operations of the new order, he’d seized all government functions and placed them under his control. He had renamed the city “Infinius.” And then the electronic “cleansing” began.
At the same time a glittering high-rise, designed as the height of luxury to house and glorify the people of wealth and influence, rose above all the others at the center of what was called The Ring.
But something went wrong before the dazzling tower was completed.
An ambitious young developer who had visions of a grand future for an influential city looking outward beyond the sea named the skyscraper after himself. The Tower of David, at forty-five stories, had been designed as the tallest of all the high-rises and could be seen from anywhere in the city. Built in stages, the top floors had never been finished, and on the twenty-third floor, a huge flat, cantilevered roof jutted far out, like a bird’s wing over the wide avenue below. The narrower unfinished skeleton led to a second, smaller roof twenty more floors above.
Even its name, emblazoned in two-story golden letters above the entrance, was designed to show the world the importance of its builder. But the handsome, well-toned former athlete, David, became too wealthy and popular. It was rumored that his tower was deeply in debt to the Overseers, who controlled the banks. His bravado and brash public persona made enemies of the wrong people, and one summer solstice before his tower was to have been completed, a tragic fall from its roof ended his life in a heap on the concrete below. The tower was never finished, and with electricity, plumbing, and other necessities never installed, it began to deteriorate.
Almost immediately rumors swirled like a bouillabaisse through the city. One story said David had been eliminated by the relentless Villinkash. It was just the sort of could-be- or might-be-real story Villinkash relished. So he embraced and fostered it. And why not? It enhanced his reputation and encouraged people to fear him.
Was it true? No one ever knew, and by that time, reporters were having a hard time getting anyone to talk. Miriam knew because she’d tried. She’d even had a brief interview with one of the Overseers, a man named Huston, a smooth operator whose own rise was something of a mystery. She’d never found out if he actually knew anything, but by the end of the interview, he had taken her hand in his and looked searchingly into her eyes and asked:
“What do you lack, my dear? I can help you if you need something.”
Too stunned to answer, she stammered some nonsense, and he withdrew his hand. It was amazingly soft, she’d reflect later, and his nails were carefully manicured. He simply smiled benignly at her.
“Here is my card,” he’d said. “Feel free to call on me.”
By then they were living through what later came to be known as The Collapse. It was orchestrated by the Overseers, the Protectors (its generals), the Watchers (its informants), and the Detainers (its armed enforcement). Above them all was Villinkash, well on his way to consolidating his power with one more scheme.
By co-opting the name of his victim, he declared a holiday in David’s honor and established a great and terrifying motorcycle race to honor the city’s favorite son and commemorate his passing. The Race would be held every year on the summer solstice. It would celebrate the glorious rise to power of Villinkash and his Overseers and turn David into a martyr for his cause. His building was left unfinished, and the people took that as both a warning and an invitation. Slowly at first, people with few resources and nowhere to live began to inhabit it. They came first as squatters and then became tenants with no landlord. The Overseers looked the other way, and the Tower of David became a sub-community of its own at the center of The Ring.
The motorcycles had been polished to a glossy shine. Numbered from one to thirteen, they reflected orange and gold gleaming in the sunset. They had been placed to the millimeter as if machined to each spot. The Race would be visible to all the people of Infinius. Attendance was obligatory. The long summer solstice provided sunlight until the very last moment.
Official betting started a month before The Race, giving the Overseers a long lead for their vig on every bet placed. Regime bookmakers stood on street corners, writing in small black books. They were easy to spot: disheveled men in suits with bulging pockets that held all their pieces of betting scrip. Their tout sheets stuck out of side pockets, and their greasy fingertips were black from counting out coins and bills.
They
hawked from designated street corners. “Hey, I got a lead on number eight. A sure winner. Who’ll make big money on number eight?”
“I’ll take two.” A fat woman raised her hand and held up wadded bills.
The bookie grabbed her money and tallied it in a thick notebook he had pulled from his pocket.
“Name,” he barked at her.
“Juanita O’Brien,” she whispered back. “He better win, too.”
The bookie stared at her, his head tilted down so he could see over his grimy glasses.
“Yeah, sure. I guarantee it. That’s why they call it ‘betting.’” He snorted and slipped her money into a fat pouch hanging from his belt loop.
Everything was tabulated, regulated, notated, stored, and audited. The bookmakers changed the odds from day to day, but there were certainly favorites. It was said that the entrant from Building Six was as close to a sure thing as you could get. Odds were he had an in with one of the Overseers.
Now the day had arrived, with crowds wild in anticipation. Under the crushing weight of the Regime, they’d waited for this day all year. It was a festival of epic grandeur. No expense had been spared on visual technology. Free food and liquor helped stir excitement. Bruyaha in all its forms was everywhere, even though the Regime had outlawed private sales years before. Still, like everything else, if there was money to be made, it was a commodity to be traded. And if you had to pay off the Watchers, well . . . it was just a cost of doing business.
Thirteen boys, each eighteen years old, stood by a preassigned bike. Some were solemn, some arrogant with raised fists. These were the crowd favorites. When a fist went up, a deafening roar erupted from all the rooftops surrounding the Tower. The boy would beam and puff out his chest in defiance of his probable fate. Some pumped both fists into the air and twirled for the crowd. There was foot stomping and tossed confetti. Rolled-up newspaper sheets were also a crowd favorite. Lit at one end, they rained down from the rooftops like a meteoric shower of fire to the streets below.
Although the Tower at its highest was the tallest in The Ring, its jutting lower roof was two floors below the others, so when crowds gathered on the twelve roofs of The Ring, they could look down and see The Race from all angles. The Race. Captivating in its gruesome theater in the round.
From huge hovering jumbo screens on the high-rise rooftops to small window-sized units all over the city, screens of all sizes kept track of the betting and profiled the racers in an endlessly looping hype.
Miriam spotted Niko on one of those giant screens, his face set and grim. So young. So determined. And she wished she could stand next to him and take his hand in hers at that moment.
As she stared at his image, she thought there was something about the set of his jaw or the look in his eyes that told her he felt different from the other boys. It was such a subtle distinction that it wasn’t until later that she realized she had caught it at all.
Last-minute betting continued in a frenzy. People cast whatever meager savings they had into the pot. They may as well have rolled it into the flaming papers and tossed it away in the hot solstice wind. Debts piled up with the ashes and the Regime took its piece of every bet.
The winner would be showered with gifts and money, of course. But beyond that, he would have a seat at the Protectors’ table. A novice’s seat, yes, but a place from which to start building his own empire within the system. And since even the Protectors were not safe from Villinkash, periodically there was a purge, which created room for more junior-level hopefuls to move up closer to the head of the table.
That wasn’t all, however, in this system of rewards and punishments. If a young man from one of the thirteen buildings was chosen to be a rider and refused the honor, his choices were dismal to downright deadly. He could be shipped off to a forced labor camp, working in mines where he would never see the sun again, and would probably die within the first year. Or he could simply disappear. There were certainly occasional escapes from one of these fates. One year, an eighteen-year-old named Garret from Building Four escaped to The Shanty Alleys to melt into the vast melee of people who lived like rats in endless warrens. With a price on his head, he was soon handed over for the reward.
Rewards and punishments began long before The Race. Once the thirteen riders were identified, the Regime brought them to a replica of the rooftop track where they were each presented with a motorcycle and ordered to practice, which seemed like a benign request until they started the bikes and began to ride. Each boy quickly discovered that applying either the front or rear brake resulted in an electric current that shocked the rider. If a rider applied the front brake, the shock ran through his hand and up his arm to his neck. Pressing the foot pedal brake sent a shock through his leg. The first shocks were mild but the more a boy applied either brake the stronger the shocks and the more severe the pain. The same was true of throttling down. And so the boys learned, like race horses on a track, to ride full throttle as fast as they could. But the training didn’t end there. The Regime took no chances on The Race. A sniper was assigned to each boy. Should a boy fail to perform at the last minute or anytime during The Race, his assigned sniper would shoot to kill.
But this was not the final treachery of The Race. Each year riders were chosen from families who had been allowed to keep their sons at birth. And now after raising them for eighteen years, the spoils would be doled out in the order that the riders reached—and went over—the roof edge. The faster the rider, the bigger slice of the winning pie his family would get. Speed, agility, and sheer bravado were at a premium and were rewarded by The Regime. Niko, having no family, had no such incentive, yet everyone knew there was also no percentage in holding back. Punishments would be doled out as often as rewards.
The track that year began straight, then curved slightly, leading to a straightaway toward the edge. Racers had to throttle up and gather speed as they advanced, leading to the straight run at the end. The rider who came to a hard stop at the edge of the roof would win.
Everyone knew there was no way to escape, and only one boy would survive The Race. The rest would catapult over the edge as David had done because only one of the motorcycles had brakes. And everyone knew it.
At one time the stairs El climbed had solid concrete walls, intended only for a fire emergency, but now she could see through to the blight that had once been a thriving metropolis. She was too young to remember the time before everything changed. She’d heard stories from the nuns. Rather, she’d heard them speaking in hushed tones as they went about their chores, looking furtively around as if afraid (or, El thought as she got older and more curious, ashamed). But of what, El never asked.
It was dawn on the day of The Race. El made the climb up steel steps that clanged and swayed as if from a slight breeze. Her fingers rested lightly on a dangling handrail too unstable to trust anymore. Going slowly took too much effort. So she no longer stopped at each landing as she used to in those first months after she’d left the nuns, before her leg muscles were taut and firm, when she’d had to stop to catch her breath and her legs ached with each ascent.
She’d had it easy with the nuns, who had doted on her, but then the oldest ones had died and gone to Heaven. At least that’s what the two who were left told El. She wasn’t sure about Heaven. Their descriptions were so specific. There was a gate and St. Peter was waiting there. And angels. All the nuns who had died were angels now, they told her. Now there was only one left: Sister Catarina.
El had been protected by the nuns until she was fifteen. But when Sister Catarina was too ill to care for herself or anyone else she was taken away by the Retrievers in their white overalls and face masks and rubber gloves. Then El was told to leave. The Retrievers boarded up the garage the nuns had turned into their sanctuary. The city was rife with such boarded and abandoned properties. El had been given an envelope full of enough cash to buy some canned goods and pay two months for a shared room on the nineteenth floor of the Tower. She had been allowed to gather a
few clothes and shoes and personal articles. At the last minute, she’d reached out for the cross Sister Catarina had given her the day before, when they had prayed together.
During The Cleanse, an underground had developed. When all but one of the priests had been cleansed out, their last act was to hide whatever was left in the church. At that time there was such chaos that it wasn’t hard to get around the electronic scanners, which hadn’t yet been installed everywhere. Now it would have been impossible, but then, no. So the Sisters of Mercy had a rich cache of hidden valuables.
“Remember,” Sister Catarina had whispered to El, although they were the only two left, “besides the pit, there are secrets hidden beneath the flooring stones. Everything you will need. Don’t let them have it. One day, when you need it, come back. Ten stones to the north and twelve to the west. Remember that. Take this cross in your hand and swear by Almighty God that you will be good and not fall prey to them. Swear it and then I can go to Heaven in peace, dear El.”
El took the cross and held it to her lips as the nuns had taught her. “I swear,” she whispered, and kissed the cross before holding it for Sister Catarina to kiss. She struggled to hold tears back from overflowing. She wished she could save the sister. She wished she could stay there forever.
On the day of The Race, as El rounded a landing, Niko popped out of a cavernous space off the stairwell. His head was pattern-shaved in concentric circles for the event. Bands of bristle crossed the top of his cranium, and sparse sideburns pointed down to his jawline, where the bone jutted under darkly tanned skin. He wore black leather pants and a sleeveless tee with the image of a snarling tiger splashed tightly across his muscled chest. His sinewy arms were covered in so many tats it was impossible to tell where one ended and the others next to it began. Niko was taking a heavy risk on these stairs.
A Place Called Zamora Page 4