by Dan Wells
Boom.
Ke-chak.
PART THREE
THE COMMON MAN
37
Friday, August 17
11:22 P.M.
Somewhere in Atlantic City
119 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
“Looking for a date?”
Lyle walked on, keeping his head down. The girl called after him, but not eagerly, and moved on to the next guy after Lyle continued to ignore her. He passed an alley, heard vague scuffling and the thud of a muted punch. He pulled his hood down farther over his eyes and kept walking.
Every dollar he owned was shoved in his shoes and underwear, with just a small roll of bills in his pocket—something to give the muggers to avoid a beating. It was just a couple of bucks, and he looked poor enough. If they ever guessed he had nearly five thousand dollars hidden somewhere on his body he’d be dead.
Of course, if anyone figured out who he really was he’d be as good as dead anyway. NewYew had been tried, convicted, and dissolved, its component parts—those legitimate enough to continue in operation—spread to the four winds and gobbled up by eager cosmetic competition. Every employee the courts could find had been duly punished for their connection to ReBirth, the world’s most popular biological weapon, but the government was hungry for more. They wanted him to make more, but he refused to be a part of it. He wanted to help people who needed it. He’d already given away the last remnants of the lotion he’d taken from Ibis, curing a handful of cancer patients in back-alley deals, and now he needed more. That meant going to the places were ReBirth was still being sold: to parking lots and overpasses and back-alley beauty clinics, asking questions and trying to figure out where the dealers got their lotion from. If he could find more blank ReBirth, he could do more good in the world.…
A car drove by, slowly, and Lyle turned away, pretending to talk on a phone, keeping his back to the street until the car was gone. Hiding from the police had put him in some very dark places, with some very dangerous people.
“You want a date?”
Another girl, barely half a block from the first. Lyle glanced at her, mumbling his refusal, but stopped short when he saw her face. The girl laughed.
“That’s right,” she said, spreading her arms. “Victoria Carver. You ever do a movie star, baby?”
“Where’d you get that?”
“God and my mama.”
Lyle stepped closer. “This is ReBirth,” he whispered. “Where did you get this dose? Where’d you get the DNA?”
“You’re ruining my image, buddy,” the hooker hissed. “Guys like to pretend I’m the real thing, get it?”
“Fine,” said Lyle, “you’re Vicky Carver, just…” Lyle grunted in defeat. What good would it do to track down some random arm of the black market? “Never mind.” He fished in his jeans for his wad of bills and pressed it into her hand. “Sorry.”
She stared at the money in shock, but swore at his back a moment later as he walked away. “Five bucks, huh? What am I, homeless?” Lyle adjusted his hoodie and kept walking.
“Looking for some ReBirth?” The voice was deep, and when Lyle glanced to the side he saw that the speaker was tall and narrow, nearly seven feet, with shadowed features that looked hawklike in the streetlights. “Heard you talking to the lady.”
“Maybe,” said Lyle. He swallowed, wondering if this dealer might finally be the one to give him the info he needed. Belatedly he glanced up the street, as if expecting a cop car to leap out from behind a bush. He looked back at the man. “What do you have?”
“Not saying I have anything,” said the man. His bass voice rumbled. “ReBirth’s illegal, you know that as well as I do.”
“Then why’d you bring it up?”
“Because I might know a guy,” said the man. “Depending on what you’re looking for, anyway.”
Lyle bit his lip. “Originals,” he said. “Not the celebrity stuff like her, the real NewYew stuff. Does your guy have any of that?”
“Probably,” said the man. His voice was conversational, but always with a hint of professionalism. “How much you looking to spend?”
Lyle spoke carefully, hoping that any thieves listening in would be fooled by a simple misdirection. “I don’t have it on me, but say … a thousand.”
The man laughed. “What the hell kind of ReBirth you think you’re gonna buy with one thousand dollars?”
“That’s not enough?” Prices had gone up.
“If you ever find a place where that is enough you let me know, and I’ll shop there, too.”
“Who carries around more than a thousand dollars?” asked Lyle. “Especially on a street like this?”
“Smart people,” said the man, his deep voice rich with authority. “People who care about the product they’re buying. You want to go cheap on something that alters your DNA, you be my guest; you go across the street there and that kid in the red hat’ll sell you a drop of ReBirth for a hundred bucks—but you get what you pay for. You’re playing Russian roulette with him and everyone like him: might end up with any kind of face, any kind of body, maybe a woman, maybe nothing at all. A hundred bucks for a drop of L’Oréal. Or like as not these days, you’ll end up as Joe.”
“Who’s Joe?”
“Joe Average; some no-name that’s been cropping up all over these days. Don’t know why they’d make a lotion of him, but there’s an awful lot of him on the market.”
Lyle frowned, concerned. He didn’t remember anyone in their list of imprints who could be considered average. He’d have to follow up on it later; for now, he steeled his courage and looked the salesman in the face. “I can go as high as five, but for that I want the real stuff—the blank stuff.”
The man shook his head. “Five won’t get you blanks, but it’ll get you a pretty face. Something Latino maybe, or Asian. Good bone structure.”
“Latino?”
“You wanna retain the benefits of racial privilege you gotta pay a little more. Eight at least for a white guy, seven if you’re buying for a lady friend, or if you swing that way yourself. I don’t judge.”
Lyle glanced up the street again, then back at the man. “Where do they get it?”
“You are like a stupid question machine.”
“ReBirth was seized by the government,” said Lyle. “They have all of it, or they’re supposed to, so where does your ‘friend’ get the stuff he’s selling?”
“I don’t have time to sit and chat about stuff I don’t know anything about.”
“But of course you know,” said Lyle, dropping his voice and leaning in closer, “we’re just both pretending you don’t, so please … stop pretending and tell me.”
“This conversation is over,” said the man, and he rose to full height, towering over Lyle, and turned and walked away without another word. Lyle cursed himself for pushing too hard. I need to know where they get it, he thought, especially the new stuff, this “Joe Average.” The more he thought about it, the more he wondered if maybe he knew exactly who this Joe Average really was. What if that’s me? What if the Lyle lotion got out, somehow, and more Lyles will be cropping up left and right? He looked back down the street, saw Victoria Carver again, and wondered how she could possibly afford that kind of black market DNA. He made a quick decision and started back toward her. She was standing in a pool of lamplight, dressed in a too-short skirt and a jacket that would have looked expensive if he wasn’t comparing it to the cost of her face. She saw him coming and looked away, trying to catch the eye of a car passing by on the street.
“I changed my mind,” he said.
“Too late.”
“I don’t want…” He fumbled for words, having no idea how to pick up a hooker. “I just want information, but I’ll pay for your time.” She stepped away. “I’ll pay double,” he said. She stopped and turned back slowly.
“What kind of information?”
“Do you have somewhere private we can go?”
She thought a moment, then nodded.
“I got a place.” She turned and started walking, without waiting to see if he followed. He hurried to catch up, terrified that someone would see him, wondering at which point, exactly, what he was doing became illegal. Surely walking down the street with a prostitute wasn’t illegal all by itself? He wanted to ask about her rates, realizing that he had no idea how much money he’d just promised to double, but was too scared to do it in public. The woman led him to a cheap motel, not far from the cheap motel he was staying in himself, and stopped at the front desk. The man there was drab and sagging; he looked at her, glanced disinterestedly at Lyle, and handed the woman a key. Lyle looked away, cursing himself for letting the man see his face, and followed the fake movie star to a first-floor room in a dark back corner of the parking lot.
Lyle spoke the instant the door closed: “How much, exactly, are your rates? I need to get the money.”
The woman rolled her eyes. “You don’t have it on you?”
“I do,” said Lyle, “I just…” He didn’t want to show her where he was hiding it, or inadvertently let her see how much he had. “Give me a minute, I need to use the bathroom first, just tell me how much.”
She stared at him flatly. “Four hundred bucks.”
“Four hundred dollars?”
“You said double,” said the woman, gesturing at her body, “and this doesn’t come cheap.”
“Fine,” said Lyle, “just … I’ll be right back.” He slipped into the dingy motel bathroom, locking the door behind him, and carefully pulled off his right shoe. Inside his shoe, under the orthopedic insert, was a slim stack of hundreds, and he counted out four of them. This is too much, he thought suddenly, I could live for weeks on this, and she won’t know anything anyway, but I … He remembered her scorn from before, and imagined her rage if she found out he’d just wasted more of her time. She probably had to pay for the room, and the man at the front desk didn’t look like the kind to be happy with a cut of zero dollars. I’ve already got her here, he thought, I may as well ask her. He replaced the insert, tied the shoe tightly back on, and flushed the toilet, just for appearances. He unlocked the door and stepped back out to find the girl still standing by the door, her jacket still on.
“You didn’t wash your hands.”
“I … didn’t actually do anything, I was just getting money.”
“You flushed.”
“Look, here it is, four hundred dollars.” He walked across the room and handed her bills; she looked at him just a moment before taking the bills, counting them, and tucking them into her purse.
“I could just leave now,” she said, gesturing at the door. “Nobody pays up front.”
“Call it a professional courtesy,” said Lyle, too tired to keep arguing. “Now, I won’t pretend that neither of us knows the realities of prostitution, so I’ll just say it: you have a … pimp, a business manager, who paid for that DNA. Is it the guy at the front desk?”
“A business manager?”
“How much did it cost?” he asked. “Normal ReBirth, the models and such that NewYew packaged before the crackdown, goes for five to eight thousand dollars on the street. How much did you, or your business manager, pay for Victoria Carver?”
“Are you for real?”
“Please just answer my question.”
The woman sighed and sat down. “We could have done this in a restaurant, you know, where I could get something to eat.”
“I don’t want to discuss this in public.”
She shrugged. “My ‘business manager,’ who is not the guy at the front desk, paid twenty thousand dollars for this body. That’s cheaper than most because Victoria’s pretty common, but most of them are on the West Coast and I’m one of the only Victorias back here in the East, so…” She gestured vaguely, as if that explained itself.
Lyle furrowed his brow, shocked at the price. “There’s no way you’re making that back at two hundred dollars an hour.”
“Most of my appointments are prearranged,” she said, “high-priced call-girl stuff, fancy hotels and everything. This with you is after-hours work, something for my own pocket instead of his debt.” She pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
“That’s bad for your health,” said Lyle, feeling immediately stupid about it. Smoking was probably the least dangerous part of her lifestyle.
“Shows what you know,” said the woman, and lit one up. “ReBirth heals my lungs faster than I can screw them up, and since you’re not letting me eat…” She took another puff.
“You’re right,” said Lyle, nodding. He hadn’t thought of that, and decided that his own dose would protect him from the secondhand smoke just as easily. He ignored the wisps of blue smoke and got back to business. “So. Victoria Carver’s DNA comes at twenty thousand dollars a pop. Are there others, other women, that have more expensive DNA?”
“It’s not the DNA, honey, it’s what you do with it.”
“But there are others?”
She nodded. “My ‘business manager’ has other girls, yeah. Cristina Francis and Hermione Granger and like that—big with the nerds. Says if he could get a Princess Leia he’d be a millionaire, but that ship has sailed, hasn’t it?” She took another long draw on the cigarette, and blew out a cloud of smoke.
Lyle nodded. “Do you know how much those other girls cost?”
“Hourly or for the night?”
“I mean their DNA.”
She tapped the cigarette into the motel ashtray—which hadn’t been cleaned since the previous occupants, Lyle noticed. Maybe even before them. “Why are you so interested in all this, huh? Sick of being Joe, want to make the switch to something new?”
Lyle looked at her closely. “Joe?”
“Joe Average,” said the woman. “You thought I wouldn’t recognize you? I had a client three days ago with the same exact face, same wonky color in his eye, so either you have amnesia or a twin or you got some bad lotion that made you who you are. Maybe that’s it, then: you got some bad ReBirth and want revenge on the sellers?”
Lyle put his hand up, half reaching for his eye with the heterochromia, and stopped halfway. “How many of these ‘Joe Averages’ have you seen?”
“Only the two,” said the woman, “but I’ve heard the stories. Bad lotion on the market, people thinking they’ll turn into Enrique the shirtless fireman, and getting Joe instead.”
“And you put it together that I was one of them.”
She held up the cigarette with a smile. “You understood what I meant about my body rebuilding itself faster than the smoke could hurt it. And you didn’t say anything about the secondhand smoke.” She took another puff, and blew the smoke out softly. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense for an anti–tobacco crusader, but it makes all kinds of sense for another ReBirth clone.”
Lyle nodded. “You’re good at this.”
“I’ve been in this business a long time.”
But you’re barely in your twenties, thought Lyle, looking at the girl, then realizing that while the body was mid-twenties, the woman inside could be almost any age at all. “How long?” he asked.
Her eyes narrowed, her mouth curving up in a smirk. “You really want to know?”
“It’s okay, I’m a doctor.”
“I’ve heard that one before.”
Lyle’s face reddened.
The girl leaned back in her chair, draping her arms across the armrests like a woman totally in charge of her situation. “Let’s just say I was in this business long enough to get out of it, and then to get back in again when someone offered me a brand-new, twenty-five-year-old body.”
Lyle stared, then laughed drily. “I can’t say that I blame you.”
“It’ll be fun while it lasts,” she said, nudging her curves here and there, straightening her clothes. “I’ve been twenty-five before.” She looked up. “Nothing lasts forever.”
“This will,” said Lyle softly. “Same as the lungs, same as everything; it rebuilds itself back from any damage it takes, including age. You’l
l be twenty-five forever.”
She raised her eyebrow. “You serious?”
Lyle nodded.
She gazed at him oddly, studying him as if for the first time. “How do you know that?”
“I told you, I’m a doctor. Sort of.”
“Who are you?”
He thought about it, wondering again, as he had for months, who he really was. “I’m nobody,” he said. “Just a face in the crowd.” He paused, just a moment, then looked at her squarely. “Do you know where I can find the dealer your business manager buys from?”
“Yeah,” said the girl, tapping the ashes from her cigarette. “Yeah, I think I can help you out.”
38
Wednesday, August 22
8:00 P.M.
The Amber Sykes Show
114 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
“Hi, everyone!”
The audience cheered, and Amber Sykes waved back enthusiastically.
“Welcome to the show!” said Amber. The audience continued cheering, egged on by large signs just off camera, and slowly quieted as the signs dimmed. “We’ve got another great lineup for you today, starting with the guest that everybody’s been wanting to hear from, possibly the most controversial figure in America—maybe the world—please welcome Guru Kuvam.”
The crowd cheered: not everyone could book a guest like Kuvam, but Amber wasn’t just anyone. She’d gone from fluff reporter to talk show host in record time, thanks mostly to her ReBirth launch coverage, and eventually Kuvam had actually approached her about being a guest. Amber walked to the side of the stage and shook the Guru’s hand as he entered—a tall man, lanky but powerful, clad as always in distinctly nonstandard clothing. Today it was a Peruvian serape, thick and wooly and brightly colored. His shirt and pants were loose beneath it, simple and unadorned. His feet were sandaled. He embraced Amber, kissing her on the forehead, and the young host was quick enough to milk her momentary shock into a laugh from the audience. She led the man to the couches in the middle of the stage, and when he sat he crossed his legs, yoga-style, on the center cushion. Amber sat on the other couch.