Honey to Soothe the Itch

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  And also like a dream, I’ll see what they see as they lumber through the city. Or I’ll smell something that catches their attention—a cat, maybe. Or the smell of rotting fish. It’s always something strong, and something capable of taking all their focus. But I never taste, though I know the zombie’s tasting, or remembering the taste of something, like their final meal as a human.

  That last impression, that final frame of processing in each of their brains of their final moment is the key to my victory. It’s like the invisible tech has put their minds on permanent standby and is slave-running their bodies. That frozen final moment flashes as the acute awareness of the zombie’s surroundings, and of being taken over.

  It’s like the moment Amanda said I was right about the cancer—the implants were causing what all my expensive bio-support of my old life had been keeping at bay. The other implanted might go soon, too. Or they might get a couple of decades. Me, I’ve got a month or two left.

  I remember the moment I become intensely aware of my own impending death. I remember it with the same level of detail I remember the time I saw a grizzly in Yellowstone: I knew where every joint in my body was. I knew how far away the bear was from me, and if it had noticed me. I smelled nothing at all, as if my brain had shunted all that processing to my visual cortices. But I tasted bitter on my tongue and felt bile crunch my gut into a hard knot.

  When Amanda said “I wish I could run blood tests,” I knew at that moment she was right. I knew where in my body it metastasized, and I knew how far away death was. I smelled nothing, though the camp dogs always sniffed me. But I felt everything, like my brain had decided touch was the sense I needed to pay attention to. I ached differently than I ever had before. Not a post-workout ache, or even a hangover ache, but a new, itchy kind of pain deep in my bones. Something unnecessary grew inside me.

  Every single zombie flashes me something just like that grizzly bear. And just like my cancer.

  All the implanted, including me, have a theory: The invisible tech is alive, like a dog or an ape is alive. It’s smart, but not people-smart. And it’s decided it’s the alpha.

  So, right now, the Earth is one big silver back gorilla and we’re the fleas that make it itch.

  What that makes the zombies, I don’t know. Amoebas? Hair follicles? It’s not a perfect—or even that good—of an analogy.

  What happens when you unleash terror on an animal? It bares its teeth. It snarls. And it attacks, ripping your skin from your body in big bleeding chunks and makes sure you never terrorize it again.

  I’ve seen the world do this already. It did it to Jeffries and his enclave. It does it to every roaming group of free humans it finds. Efficient or not, the world is vicious.

  But no righteous flea wants to die.

  So I watch the zombies sustain themselves. I watch their movements and their minds, looking for a way not to be smashed, hoping for some sort of symbiotic relationship.

  But I know it’s not going to happen. When so many of the implanted vanished so quickly, and with Jefferies disappearing today, I am sure of it. Fleas aren’t something a clean and balanced world lives with.

  This righteous flea isn’t going to shrivel up in the hail of pesticide. I’m clever and I’m dying, and I have nothing to lose.

  Except I know that releasing terror in the zombie horde wouldn’t help us. It wouldn’t help anyone. The last thing we need is for the animal that the invisible tech has become to feel it’s been cornered.

  So I search and I search, looking for unfamiliar frozen moments.

  This flea is going to make the gorilla dance.

  ***

  Jackson helps me out the door of my metal room. He stands in front of me, big and imposing, clad in his camo jacket. He’s sporting his normal three-day growth and his omnipresent camo stocking cap.

  One of the first places the hunters raided was the local big-box sporting goods store. They’d set up camp in a strip mall with the sporting goods place on one end and the grocery store on the other. It lasted a good three weeks before the zombies chased them out.

  That’s when they found me. The others wanted to kill me, blaming the implanted for what happened, but Jackson stopped them. He gave me a chance.

  He’d be handsome if he wasn’t dirty and smelly. But we were all dirty and smelly, so I shouldn’t complain. He takes my hands and helps me down the step. “Did you eat okay?” he asks, grinning.

  He must be responsible for the added spicing in the broth Amanda gave me. I still taste the tiny little chili fires burn at the back of my throat and I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. At least it reminds me I’m human.

  He doesn’t need to know I was spitting up blood.

  “Yes. Thank you.” I smile back at him.

  Jackson nods and helps me over to a couple of boxes set up as seats under some beige camo netting—our current command central. We moved into this rail yard about two weeks ago and set up right in the middle of the lines. Trains confounded the zombies. I think they have some residual fear of being run over by an unstoppable force.

  Amanda’s waiting with my meds. Next to her is Tony, come in from the railway control center to update us on any machine hacking they’ve been doing.

  Jackson didn’t like splitting the group up this way, but they all knew we needed to keep hidden, and electricity sings bright and clear to the zombies.

  The first thing I did was learn the rail system and put in a buffer so the electricity in the control center didn’t look anything more than lights left on.

  It buffers like the electrical cover I want to use for my special project. Anything I can do to give the enclaves a chance in this new world, I’ll do.

  We’re lucky the end of the world didn’t shut down the world’s modern conveniences. The planet hummed along, internet and cell service still up and running. Refrigerators worked. Cars ran. Four billion zombies used the comforts of life, but not us.

  The worst part is that the zombies aren’t mindless—they just don’t have minds. After the end, entire nations disappeared. Half the human population vanished within three weeks. The few implanted left searched as we learned how to establish a new connection to each other, and we learned they’d been processed, like cattle. Free humans and zombies alike. It wasn’t indiscriminate, either. The end of the world turned out to be the quick, efficient, and ecofriendly culling of unsustainable biological capital.

  It was as if the invisible technology had taken on the personality of a vengeful Earth goddess. We now live in the aftermath of her fury.

  In the first weeks, there’d been the sects. Lots of shouting and sacrificing to the gods. Now, the few who remain just want to live.

  Though that’s not completely true. They wanted to live like modern humans again—disease-free, well-fed, and educated. They want plumbing and electricity they could use and they want their mortgages back.

  Every so often there’d be arguments about the nature of the zombies, usually after we lose someone, either to an attack or to turning. All the old zombie clichés would come up: slow vs. fast, disease vs. magic, hive-mind vs. mindless. Vodka would find its way into the conversation, then sooner or later someone would end up in my doorway, demanding an explanation.

  I always say the same thing: I’m trying to get into the zombie system. I don’t sleep. I only eat when Amanda gives me food. They better leave me the hell alone because every second they bother me is another second of my finite life I’ve lost. And a second I can’t use to find them answers.

  Now, next to Jackson under the camo netting of our command tent, I sit down on a wooden crate and it shifts under me, creaking and groaning. It smells like overripe bananas, which isn’t a good combination with the chili pepper still in my throat, or with the nausea welling up because I walked the twenty feet from my room to the tent. Amanda’s right there next to me, her hand on my forearm and her other offering water and a cocktail of pills.

  I don’t argue. Whatever she’s feeding
me helps and I don’t think using what little brain power I have left to research the drugs is worth my time. Trusting her with my life isn’t a hard thing for me to do.

  “We could meet in your… room,” Tony says, pointing over my shoulder. He offers every time, calling it “my room” even though he wants to say “your box.” He’s a good kid, way too young to be running the tech group, but he’s a good leader. Better than Jackson, to be honest. I know the older man’s been training Tony, making sure he’s involved in all the decisions, so if anything happens, he’ll know how to take charge.

  But he’s still a kid and the smell of sick people makes him fidget, so I come out into the evening air. It’s the least I can do. “Amanda wants me to breathe fresh air, right?”

  She looks at me to say “No, I want you to rest,” but she and I have had this conversation. “Right,” she says, and nods toward Tony.

  She’s got a good fifteen years on him, but I know they have a thing. It’s good for both of them, a little bit of happiness.

  “What do you have?” Jackson asks. He’s been antsy, wondering when this rail depot will come alive, the trains moving out to sustainably ship zombie cargo to zombie cities, despite all of Tony’s work to camouflage the yard’s programming.

  “Everything’s holding,” I say. We’re safe here, at least for a little longer. But Jefferies had thought the same thing about St. Petersburg.

  If we move out into the wilderness, it’s pretty much giving up. In a rural area, accessing the major information systems would be near impossible. And I won’t have access to as many zombies.

  I’m hoping that there’s enough here I can find one I can use to mark the free humans as “non-pest.” That’s what I tell Jackson and Tony and Amanda. And that’s what they believe. But if I can find the right zombie, with the right final moment, maybe I can do more. Maybe I can affect the entire body.

  Jackson fiddles with a loose nail in the side of the crate he’s sitting on. His fingernail flicks over it in a steady clicking cadence. “Sanderson and her group came back about an hour ago with canned food.” Jackson shrugged. “What the hell are the zombs eating?”

  They weren’t eating so much anymore as consuming. The slurry we’d seen them take in made them run just right.

  No one wanted to talk about what the slurry was made out of, but we all knew we needed to stay away.

  I shake my head as I look down at the rail yard gravel under our feet, feeling sick to my stomach again. Usually the meds Amanda gave me kicked in by now. They mess with my thinking, but the pain and itching messed with it more. I wonder if they’d ever work again, now that I’d started coughing blood.

  Tony sniffed and scratched the side of his nose like he wanted to disagree with me but didn’t want to upset the sick person. I hold his gaze, tacitly giving him permission.

  “We’ve seen more around the depot building, all looking more confused than usual. They’re watching.”

  Damn it, I think. How did I miss it when I checked the buffer in the system? They were gathering visual data locally, which meant the satellites must have picked up movement in the yard. Our movement. Or Tony’s programs made them itch.

  I nodded. “I’ll look.”

  We’d be pulling up stakes and leaving, probably within the next few hours. Jackson would put out the order as soon as I returned to my squeaky metal box, then they’ll come and get me, when the time came, Amanda gripping one of my elbows, Jackson the other. They’ll walk me out onto the gravel like a pair of priests.

  This time, we’ll move out of the city along the freeway, toward the exurbs northwest of here. Scouts had found an RV sales lot full of quarter million dollar motor homes with cushy leather interiors and that refreshing new car smell. The only reason we hadn’t left already is because of me and my project.

  “I can’t go with you,” I said. “I can’t live what time I have left watching the sunsets from inside a German-engineered coach.” I sat up straight, though it took effort. “There aren’t enough of them away from the city, and if I’m going to fix this, I need to be here.”

  Next to me, Amanda’s body goes rigid. She’d been expecting me to tell Jackson and Tony I wouldn’t leave. We’d talked about it a couple of days ago, the first time I thought the meds weren’t working. She’d argued then. She’ll argue now.

  I shake my head. “The other implanted will keep an eye on you. You won’t know it, but they’ll do their best to keep the zombies back, the way I do. We all use the same tricks. It’s what we have.”

  Until the zombies figure out we’re manipulating the data stream and camouflaging our free humans so they look like the rest of the hair follicles. It will only last for so long, though, then the fingernails of the invisible tech beast will rip across the skin of the world, looking to dislodge the parasites.

  “I’ll stay with you,” Amanda says. I stare at her big brown eyes and I wonder why. But I know—it’s her place to make the end as good as possible for the dying, even if her role puts her at risk.

  “Me too,” Tony says.

  I glance over at him. He’s watching Amanda more than me and it’s pretty obvious what’s going on.

  Jackson wants to argue with them. They’re valuable, but he can’t force them to stay with the group. He’d be just another form of zombie if he did. “You follow, both of you. Do you understand?” He wags his finger like a father, his face stern enough to hide what he was really feeling—fear. The fear of losing another two. The fear of attrition and dropping too far over the edge to pull back the group, even though he knew this day would come.

  They will be much more vulnerable without me. “Stay small, stay separate. If something changes, an implanted will let you know.”

  Jackson frowned. “No, they won’t. I know your abilities are limited. What are they going to do? Highjack a drone and skywrite for us?”

  I chuckle. I hadn’t thought of that. It really wasn’t that bad of an idea. “Well, if you see ‘Shop at Christopher’s’ in the sky one morning, you’ll know the Promised Land’s to the west, okay?”

  “That’s not funny,” Amanda whispers. “You’re going to die.”

  Yes, I am. But it didn’t matter.

  The other implanted didn’t think I could make my plan work. My enclave didn’t understand what I had in mind. Everyone thought with the cancer, I was too weak, but I think they’re wrong. I think the cancer is what will let me do it, if I find the right zombie.

  Because I’ll use some of my implants’ processing power to copy my cancer. I’m making a squishy buffer, an immortal one that can’t be killed. One so fast that its inefficiency is irrelevant. I’m going to give my cancer to the beast of the world, formed into a tumor of its own frozen moment of cells.

  ***

  Amanda tips the steel water bottle to my lips. She’d upped the pain meds, moved me onto God knows what. It’s interfering with my ability to calculate.

  I’m wondering, too, if I’m not eating enough to power my implants anymore. I know I’m not moving enough. My legs feel like rubber attached to a car battery—life wants to move through them as blood and nerves and flexing, but it can’t, and pretty soon I’m going to catch on fire. And when I burn up, there’ll be nothing left but toxic sludge.

  At the back of the rail yard, a crane looms over stacks and stacks of red, yellow, sometimes green and blue shipping containers, all of them empty, waiting for shipping back to the ports.

  We mostly stayed away. The crane’s onboard systems made it a sensitive piece of machinery, and we didn’t want it spying on us. But after the enclave left, Tony and Amanda moved me into the maze of boxes, picking one in the center of a stack in a shadowed corner. I’m to live out my remaining few days inside a lemon yellow container smelling of t-shirt dye and rotting bodies. Accessible only via rope ladder, I can no longer get down. Amanda and Tony, though, climb up. They’ve had sex twice, in the far corner, when they thought I was asleep, whispering sweet, wonderful things to each other. They’d m
oved slowly, afraid of waking me.

  I’d pulled back from the other implanted, refusing to do my part to fill the hole left by Jeffries. They understood. They’d soon have to fill my hole, as well, and a couple of them had started, already.

  One of the roaming enclaves in Australia had a pre-implanted and she’d figured out some new tricks to look more like the local zombies. I passed them along to Tony before the meds made it hard to talk, hoping to ease his fears about getting out alive, when I’m gone.

  I told them both to go. I can’t eat anymore. I can barely drink. Processing the shape of their faces and the lines of their movements took energy I didn’t have, and should be using for to search for my ghost, anyway. They refused.

  They’d asked questions. Made me tell them the story of my goal. How I’d vowed I’d bring back their world before I died. The reigning intelligence couldn’t be an animal. It couldn’t. It may have dropped humanity to the ground and clamped its jaws around our collective neck, but we still breathed. We still kicked. So did I.

  I think Amanda cried. It was hard to tell, in the hot, suffocating gloom of the shipping container. They leave the door wide open, but the breeze doesn’t move through here. I smell my own death festering like the lesions on my legs.

  So I flicker into implant space, where I don’t itch.

  The zombies don’t know if they are dead or alive. They’re not aware. They do, and that’s about it. Do, and remember: She’d been alone, in her kitchen, slicing watermelon. The air had smelled crisp and fresh and her kids played in a plastic pool just outside her patio door, yelling and shrieking and shooting each other with water pistols. She’d been as joyous as she was annoyed, and her world had been bright.

  But her frozen moment held screaming and a cut to her hand and a permanently, painfully damaged tendon.

  Another: He’d been in his car thinking it needed a good cleaning. The AC smelled funky. He sniffed and watched the road, his left arm starting to heat too much in the sun through the side window, and he wondered about skin cancer. Then he changed the radio station, wondering why all the new music sucked. It all sounded like machines. Soulless, like his ex.