Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  Amanda stands and dusts off her knees, more to unkink her back from sitting on the metal floor than to get off the dirt. “Do you want me to shut the door?”

  I look out. The light pours into my metal box from a sun low on the horizon, throwing real shadows. Intense, delineated slices of light that spread deep enough into my room they almost touch me. It’s evening outside.

  “Yes,” I say. Yes, I did. The kids move around on the gravel, playing their silent games. They’ve learned how to be quiet and how to dress so they blend into whatever they stand on—they all wear dirt and bleakness and look like the ground.

  They’ve learned how to hide when out in the open.

  Kids shouldn’t have to live like that. They should all feel cozy and protected. This time of night, they should be finishing their chores and settling down for an evening’s reading of a favorite bedtime story. Maybe one about talking animals who live someplace beautiful and idyllic, a place safe for kids and adults alike.

  A place like the world should be.

  ***

  I don’t sleep. Not really. I dream and, perhaps, take on the senses of a zombie. I sort of feel them, sort of understand what they are doing, but the connection isn’t complete and my brain doesn’t recognize their spaces as legitimate. Everything is too tall, or too wide. Angles are too steep and I get vertigo looking up a hill or down at the zombie’s feet.

  Also like a dream, I see what they see as they lumber through the city. Or I 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 plan. It’s as if 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 similar to 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, as well. Or they might get a couple of decades. Me, I have a month or two left.

  I remember the moment I became 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 the cancer metastasized, and I knew how far away death was. I smelled nothing, though the camp dogs always sniffed me. 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 I think that final terrifying moment is why the zombies attack us. We’re walking reminders—ghosts—of the hell of their transformation into a world-monster.

  So, right now, the Earth is one big, frightened, silverback 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 a good—analogy.

  What happens when you unleash terror on an animal? It bares its teeth. It snarls. 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 attack already. It attacked Jefferies and his enclave. It attacks 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 movements of zombie minds looking for a way not to be smashed, hoping for some sort of symbiotic relationship.

  If I can find the right zombie, with the right final moment, maybe I can affect the entire body. We camouflage now, fuzzing out the movements of the free humans in the systems, but it’s always temporary. I’m hoping to find that one zombie with the right last moment that I can mimic and use to mark the free humans as sweet and friendly. As “non-pest.”

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

  I need a good final moment. One that won’t release terror in the zombie horde. The last thing we need is for the animal that the invisible tech has become to feel as if it’s cornered.

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

  ***

  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 shadow and his omnipresent camo stocking cap.

  The hunters first set up camp in a strip mall with a sporting goods place on one end and a 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 are 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 burning 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 confound the zombies. I think it’s residual fear of being run over by an unstoppable force.

  Amanda’s waiting with my meds. Next to her sits Tony, who’s come in from the railway control center to update us on his group’s machine hacking efforts.

  Jackson doesn’t like splitting the group up this way. Everyone knows we need to stay hidden, and electricity sings bright and clear to the zombies, so I learned the rail system and put in a buffer to protect the hacker group. The end of the world didn’t shut down modern conveniences. The planet hums along, internet and cell service up and running. Refrigerators working. Cars moving. So I made the electricity in the rail yard control center look as if the lights had just been left on.

  Four billion zombies use 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 learned they’d been processed, like cattle. It wasn’t indiscriminate, either. The end of the world turned out to be the quick, efficient, and ecofriendly culling of unsustainable biological capital.

  The beast that is the invisible technology had taken on the personality of a vengeful Earth goddess. We now live in the aftermath of her fury.

  Every so often there’d be arguments about the nature of the zombies, usually after we lost someone either to an attack or to a 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 box’s 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 can’t use to find answers.

  Now, next to Jackson under the camo netting of our command tent, I sit down on a wooden crate. 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. Trusting her with my life isn’t a hard thing for me to do. 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.

  “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 as if 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. A little bit of happiness is good for both of them.

  “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.

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

  They weren’t eating so much anymore as consuming. We’d seen them take in a slurry no one wants to talk about. No one wants to know what it’s made of.

  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 kick in by now. They mess with my thinking, but the pain and itching messes with it more. I wonder if the meds will ever work again, now that I’ve started coughing blood.

  Tony sniffs and scratches the side of his nose like he wants to disagree with me but doesn’t want to upset the sick person. I hold his gaze, tacitly giving him permission.

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

  Damn it, I think. How did I miss this when I checked the buffer in the system? They’re gathering visual data locally, which means no matter how much I interfere, their satellites must have picked up our movement in the yard. Or Tony’s programs made them itch.

  The zombies are learning. What happened to Jefferies’s group will happen here within two days and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  We’ll pull up stakes and leave probably within the next few hours. Jackson will put out the order as soon as I return to my squeaky metal box, then when the time comes, they’ll come and get me, 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 northwest exurbs. Scouts 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 haven’t left already is because of me and my project.

  “I can’t go with you.” I sat up straight, though it takes effort. “There aren’t enough of them away from the city. If I’m going to fix this, I need to be here.” I have to stay. I need to make my plan work. They can’t hide anymore.

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

  I shake my head. “The other implanted will keep an eye on you,” I lie. “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.” They need to have some hope.

  The zombies are about to figure out we’re manipulating the data stream and camouflaging our free humans so that from above, they look like the rest of the hair follicles. But the fingernails of the invisible tech beast are about to rip across the skin of the world and dislodge the disguised 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.

  Or she reads my terror the same way I read the zombies’: My face is too blanched, my angles too wide.

  “Me too,” Tony says. 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 really feels—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.

  The group 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? Hijack a drone and skywrite for us?”

  A sad, neurotic chuckle pops out of my throat. 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 is to the west, okay?”

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

  Yes, I am.

  The other implanted don’t think I can make my plan work. My enclave doesn’t understand what I have in mind. Everyone thinks I’m too weak from the cancer, but I think they’re wrong. Even if it chews me up, I think the cancer is what will let me do it, if I find the right zombie.

  I close my eyes. The implants riddling my bones differ from my connecting tech. They’re memory storage and power plants. They don’t learn; their purpose is to keep some semblance of order in my systems.

  It no longer matters. I need speed now, not longevity.

  I kick my bone implants’ processing over to copying 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 sweet, unterrifying tumor made of frozen moment of cells.

  Because when I die, I’m going to make sure Amanda and Tony make it back to the group.

  ***

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

  I’m wondering, also, if I’m no longer eating enough to power my implants. I know I’m not moving enough to generate the piezoelectric charge I need. 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 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 tall stacks of red, yellow, sometimes green and blue shipping containers, all empty, all waiting for a return trip to the ports.

  We mostly stay away. The crane’s onboard systems made it a sensitive piece of machinery and we don’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 days inside a lemon yellow container smelling of t-shirt dye and rotting bodies that’s accessible only via a 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 moved slowly, afraid of waking me.

  I pulled back from the other implanted, refusing to do my part to fill the hole left by Jefferies. They understand. They will soon have to fill my hole as well, and a couple of them have started already.

  One of the roaming enclaves in Australia has a pre-implanted and she figured out 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 both Amanda and Tony to go. I can’t eat anymore. I barely drink. Processing the shape of their faces and the lines of their movements takes energy I don’t have and should be using for to search for my ghost, anyway. They refuse.

  They ask questions. Make me tell them the story of my goal and how I vow to bring back their world before I die. The reigning intelligence may have dropped humanity to the ground and clamped its jaws around our collective neck, but we still breathe. We still kick. So do I and I’m going to fix this.

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