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 freeze on the memory at the end of their humanity that I now read: She was 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 as she sliced her hand and made a permanently, painfully damaged tendon.
Another frozen moment: He’d been thinking his car needed a cleaning. The AC smelled funky. He sniffed and watched the road, his left arm heating in the sun blazing 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.
His frozen moment held panic, whiplash, and the realization he’d never see his kids again.
Others: The latte tasted bitter. I took too many credits this semester. The dog peed on the rug. Damn, the weather’s nice today. Will I get this project done? I don’t want to get fired. Where will I find another job?
I’m wheezing. Tony’s pulling up the ladder. He says something about them noticing us. About how, he thinks, I’m not being subtle anymore.
My body feels like burning rubber. My eyes, my tongue, my fingers. I suspect I smell like it too, or maybe the scent filling my nose is the zombies. They don’t smell human. Not anymore.
Tony and Amanda crouch at the front of the shipping container. They left the door open so we don’t suffocate. Tony holds the semi-automatic Jackson left him. Amanda prays in soft beats. Her voice echoes in the container, filling the dark voids in the back. I lay on a stolen yoga mat and all I can do is watch.
Another zombie moment flashes through my implants: His girlfriend felt smooth, soft, like a fine cotton shirt. She smelled like a woman and he couldn’t get enough of her. She pushed him away, smiling, but the sun shone through her top and he saw her nipples. She needed to wash the dishes, she said, but damn he was horny and she had a fine curve to her backside.
For a split second, he thought he caused the terror in her eyes. Then he understood.
The cargo containers amplify the rustling and knocking outside. The world sounds hollow.
Tony breathes hard.
One more zombie: Mom, I don’t want to read her a story. Why do I have to do it tonight? Mom!
I think I’ve lit us up so brightly that the entire city of zombies is in the rail yard. I’m that damned talking flea on the back of the animal and now the beast’s focused on me, trying to figure out how to scratch me off.
Amanda’s going to die here, with me. Tony, too. He’s just a college kid. He should have a life ahead of him. She would have kept the enclave alive. I should have made them leave.
I can’t feel the burning rubber anymore. The zombies make a lot of noise but it’s soothing. They sound like bees and it mixes with Amanda’s prayers.
I remember my old life, now. I remember tasting apples and thinking they really don’t have a flavor, just a texture and the sounds of crispness. My boyfriend laughed his big, hardy guffaw and smiled with his perfect white teeth. “Oh, my beloved,” he once said. “It’s there. You only need to close your eyes and feel it on your tongue.”
So I close my eyes.
Another ghost, adjacent to the last: I taste toothpaste, because I’m a good girl and Mommy said I’d get a story tonight, so I wash my face and brush my teeth and wipe up the sink. I hold my favorite book, the one Grandma gave me, and I run to my bed. My big brother’s a meanie but I love this book and I won’t think about him and Mommy fighting over who has to read it to me. I hold it tight and I make it bounce across my lap because that’s what the tiger in the story does and there’s a cuddly bear but he’s nice and it’s a safe place, where they live in the book. No one yells, but they’re funny and they act weird and I love all of them.
Where I am now, lying on a yoga mat stinking of death and hearing the very end approach, I recognize the story. It’s a classic, one told many times. I know the place this little zombie imagines quite well.
It is much better than the world as it is.
My brain makes its last blast of endorphins and the itching stops. The zombie’s story, her one last final frozen moment, resonates with my memories of apples and sunshine. I wonder if somewhere, in that children’s tale of a trees and streams, if there’s an ocean with cresting waves of rich blues and greens. If the turbulent waters with their chaotic, salt-smelling life and their roar, can find their way through the beast’s hide. If, perhaps, life can once again break through unfettered and uncontrolled, like my cancer.
I don’t know how efficient a kid’s mind is. I don’t remember being a child. But I do remember awe and wanting, more than anything, to learn and to grow.
And even though in the world of the children’s story everyone wore the same clothes every day, and they didn’t change, they grew. And they lived.
I wonder, as my last thought, if Amanda’s pregnant. Tony’s splayed his fingers over her belly. Then he fires his gun.
At my end, I feel the last screaming pulse of my implants as I copy the child’s last moment and meld it to my mutated, cancerous buffer program. It lashes out into the invisible tech’s collection systems, sending out tentacles that break off but don’t die.
I know, somewhere out there, the other remaining implanted watch, maybe helping me spread a form of human happiness that looks controlled, but isn’t. Maybe they’re wondering if spreading a cancer into the world is worse than what we have now, no matter how happy that cancer might be, or how well it camouflages free humans as non-pests.
My final frozen moment takes shape: I think of Amanda and Tony’s baby as an adult. The singular, smooth terror of the world has vanished into a wooded place, one full of family and growth. She’s safe. Her people are safe.
Every time she visits the ocean, it tastes just a little different, the way it should. Every time she touches a flower, it feels slightly different, because that’s how life works. I want her to grow up understanding that plants come in all sorts of different shades of green, and that’s just fine. Sometimes the buzzing means bees, but she doesn’t have to be afraid.
I take one last breath. The itching stops.
What I want, no matter what the cost, is for the world to know it’s alive.
~ ~ ~
Some futures are just too clean and tidy to be haunted by zombies…
A Man Does Not Sneak Away
Edward Landon Marcus Strevakoff closed his monocle eye and stared with an unadorned perspective at the wall of his workstation. Like his fellow field workers, when he wasn’t planet-side and up to his elbows in a time traveler’s dirty work, his life consisted of the necessary “immersive history exploration” docudramas his access key monocle beamed into his left eye. If you wanted to blend into the past, you had to learn about the past.
But sometimes closing his left eye and squinting at the grain of the wood directly in front of his nose with his right allowed Edward to remember he had a functioning body.
When he applied, field worker positions on the Flight Up The Center had been his dream job—excellent pay, “adventure” on an interstellar ship running trade to the colonies but also jumping Back on return voyages. The Flight, like her sister ships, provided the worlds with necessary time stream hygiene services.
To this day, memories of his mother’s stiff lips, wide eyes, and constricted nose when speaking of the “natural” time stream always made Edward’s stomach knot up. His loving, caring mom, the woman who trudged through dirt and garbage to take him to the zoo, and to the park, and wherever else good parents took their kids, always looked as if she’d stepped in dog crap when his father ranted about “letting things be.”
She understood the need for t
ime stream hygiene, even if Edward’s father did not.
So Edward Landon Marcus Strevakoff took his job as a fixer field worker seriously, if, for no other reason, than to make sure he attracted a mate as wholesome as his sweet mom.
Still, sometimes he had trouble focusing. In twelve hours, he’d be standing somewhere in an early twenty-first century suburbia, automobile exhaust fumes swirling in his nose and the uncivilized screeching of over-medicated children piercing his ears, cleaning up some little mess shat out by the time stream.
His schedule said a quick and easy run to clear up some woman’s messy relationship. All he had to do was distract her for about two minutes, to keep her from meeting a scumbag who would ooze all over her life and destroy her good deeds. Her descendants had bought the standard Right Path package, asking that she be aimed in the correct direction. It would be, at least for Edward, a cake walk.
But if he wanted to do it well—and not get caught—he needed an era refresher, which meant he needed to pay attention to the flashing lights slapping his left eye like some screaming crazy clown.
He would, in a second. But right now, he stared at the wall of his cubicle with his non-monocled right eye. Six trips Out on the Flight Up The Center, five Back, and he understood why the company outfitted the entire interstellar fleet to look and smell like a late twentieth century billionaire’s yacht. The worker bees like him felt special. And it did add a touch of the organic to what would otherwise be the equivalent of a very long ride in a very big RV.
The unholy smell of burning popcorn wafted between the cubicles. He groaned, as did his fellow field workers on either side of him. He wouldn’t lean back and engage—his fellow field workers seemed standoffish anyway—because Sherry burned popcorn every single day, usually swearing at it from the kitchen in her sweet but terrifying feminine tones, as clockwork as the ship’s systems. They all groaned, and they kept their heads down, but the smell was strangely comforting.
As were, he had to admit, the turn of the twenty-first century docudramas his monocle snaked into his brain. The stories were modern-made, of course, full of color riots and brain-triggered phantom tactile brushes against skin and wind in his hair. The one he watched now must have been expensive because when he opened his left eye, the docudrama feed started up immediately, sniffing around in his real perception for something to blend with. A large entertainment complex flickered into his mind—one where people gathered to watch two dimensional vids on bay door-sized screens. Stale movie theater popcorn, complete with what the time locals called “butter flavor” dropped onto his tongue.
He’d been in a cinema once, on his last jump. How the people of the time dealt with the decibel levels of chatter and electronics, he still didn’t understand.
There’d been a target. He’d dropped the necessary capsule in the target’s brown slop the time locals called “soda.” But he remembered her friend better—a pretty young woman with copper-colored hair and skin so fine he thought her of his time. She’d been smoothly shaped, a well-groomed woman in clothes that celebrated her curves. He’d spent the entire “movie”—all two hours and ten minutes of jarring crash-cut edited stupidity—staring at the back of the friend’s lovely head.
Edward sighed. He tried to do his job well. Every day of his life, he tried.
His link beeped.
The monocle flashed over to communication mode and his boss’s nag-bot’s icon popped into his vision. Lancaster wanted to see him.
And the only words Edward Landon Marcus Strevakoff’s mind could feed him at that moment was Oh, shit.
***
Edward walked down the corridor of the Flight Up The Center for the what felt like the millionth time, feeling again, for the millionth time, as if he been called to the principal’s office. His stomach did all sorts of hops and skips, and for the first time today, his mind focused.
The ship seemed brighter and its edges more delineated, as if they were dangerous, like drop-offs. Or razors. The heels of his boots swiffed along the tight burgundy weave of the dirt-eating carpet but he still wondered what clung to his feet. A slight inward bow rounded all the ship’s passageways as if the designers wanted to take out the submarine feel but just couldn’t quite figure out how. It bothered the back of his brain, and now also the front. And he noticed, for the first time, the many stewards’ slight-but-necessary lean inward to conform to the curve.
His hackles rose.
The last of his midday meal clung to his mouth. Edward hadn’t had a moment to drink before Lancaster called him to his office, so he swished his tongue over his teeth instead, hoping to clear away any stuck bits. Cleanliness was important, especially when facing the boss.
He stopped in front of the Head Steward’s colossal office and ran his fingers through his dark mane of curly-but-kempt hair. Calls up from the cubicles were rare, and often meant new assignments. Edward tightened his abdominal muscles to relieve the stress in his gut, thankful he did his daily maintenance, and inhaled deeply.
Lancaster was fond of the scent of fresh tobacco. Not the burned stuff—nothing that caused air pollution—but the natural smell of a plant the entire crew associated with a romantic historical time period. One full of grime and social slime, but an un-automated grime and an easily identifiable social slime.
Perhaps, if Edward was lucky, he would leave Lancaster’s office today with quick jaunt into the pre-Industrial Age, with its swirling organic sensations and its easily subdued behavior, and all his hackle-raising would turn out to have been silly overreaction.
He tapped the door.
Lancaster leaned forward over his vehicle-sized oak desk—real oak, much like the wood paneling sheathing the entire insides of the Flight—his thumb and ring fingers pressing into his well-maintained flesh, and heaved a massive exhale of a man burdened.
Edward’s back straightened so fast it cracked. He neck tightened as tight as Lancaster’s shoulders appeared to be—all bunched up and stressed into hard cords.
At that moment, that very moment, he knew his hackles had been right.
“You are a fit specimen, Mr. Strevakoff, are you not?” Lancaster looked up and his hand combed through his obsidian black hair before moving to the equally obsidian-shiny top of his massive desk. An entire family could live under the damned thing.
“Yes, sir!” Edward clasped his hands behind his back. He adhered religiously to the strict maintenance routines dictated by the field worker’s manual: A hour and a half of regular, rotating exercise a day, only low-glycemic, nutrient-dense foods, and eight and a half hours of sleep a night. He had good skin and a strong jaw, like most of his coworkers. They were, on average, a handsome group here on the Flight, Edward included. Handsome always calmed the time locals.
Lancaster nodded as his finger slowly moved the documents around on his desk top monitor. “And charming, Mr. Strevakoff?”
Edward frowned. They were all charming. Charming is what kept them out of trouble. Handsome may make them memorable, but charming got them their way. If they couldn’t charm, they couldn’t perform their hygiene tasks.
“So why is it, Mr. Strevakoff, that Research found evidence of brawls? And of…” Lancaster sat back in his chair and crossed his arms, his eyes narrow. “…a police record?” His voice dripped with the held back nausea one would expect a person to have when speaking such a foul term. The corner of his lip curled like he’d smelled a bubbling mass of decaying dead rat.
“Excuse me?” The accusation in Edward’s tone popped out of his mouth before he could catch it, leaving a very sour taste on his tongue. No one accused another person of having a police record. Not your mother. Not your friend. Not even your boss.
He had no police record. How untidy.
“You know what this means, don’t you, Mr. Strevakoff?” Lancaster leaned forward again, and steepled his fingers. He stared at Edward, his eyes remarkably blank for a man about to destroy another man’s life.
Edward had been on the Flight for
six trips Out now, five Back. He’d never had problems, except that one time when he stayed too long because he’d been staring at the pretty young woman in the movie theater, but that was beside the point. The pay here was good. Quite good, actually. Enough to improve his grooming substantially.
How the hell was he going to find another job like this one?
“I don’t have a record!” He spat it out, which probably wasn’t helping his case.
Lancaster sniffed but didn’t answer. Instead, he waved his hand and the document appeared in the space right in front of Edward’s face: A record, complete with a less-than-flattering mug shot and a long list of bad behavior, from the early twenty-first century.
Lancaster stood and slowly reached out his hand, palm up, fingers rigid. “Your access key monocle, Mr. Strevakoff.”
***
Lancaster’s nag-bot flicked new steerage orders into Edward’s clipboard. He held the damned thing, staring at its annoyingly huge size, and watched the words scroll over its surface.
He had to curl his fingers around its edge to hold it. How did the stewards work with these damned things? If he held it in front of his face, it would block another person’s view of his entire head.
“Mr. Strevakoff, sir?” Edward’s mind snapped back to the kid in front of him whose name he did not remember. Lancaster had sent the kid to make sure Edward found his new apartment in the lower decks of the Flight Up The Center. And to make sure he cleaned out his cubicle.
The kid currently paced Edward down the now-overly dark-seeming corridor toward the field workers’ staff offices. Why the hell did they think the dark, orange-ish wood was a good idea? They were in a damned spaceship.
Lancaster gave him no options. No paths to recourse. Just an “out you go.”
Edward stomped along. Out where? The Flight Up The Center had dropped into twenty-first century orbit three hours ago. It’s not like he could go home. They were in the wrong era.
Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds Page 3