by Drew Magary
But I fucked up and walked directly into a worker schlepping a box of cantaloupes. They bounced to the ground and broke and gushed on the asphalt. I crouched down and helped the worker scoop up the mess, saying nothing. I kept my eyes on the ground for a moment, that one crucial microsecond when I knew people would turn and look. I let it pass, then looked, and she was gone. I popped up and saw a flash of red sailing to the back of the shopping plaza. I broke into a sprint and hurried after her. The Four Sisters restaurant was to the rear left of the plaza, and I saw her rushing for it. I ran through and over and around the masses. A man tried to stop me, and I yelled out “ES! ES! ES!” and the sea parted. She turned and looked at me. Suddenly, we were standing near the Queensboro Bridge, she was blonde, and the eighth floor of 400 East Fifty-seventh Street was being demolished in an instant, my dear friend blown into the atmosphere. Solara Beck gave me the same look she had six decades before: a mix of fear and aggravation I didn’t understand then but know every nuance of today. Here she was, the time between now and when I saw her last flattened like a bug that’s been stepped on.
I ran into the restaurant after her. The entrance was separated from the main dining hall by an oversized aquarium, and I saw the girl running to the back of the hall through a pristine village of seahorses and clown fish and other inedibles. I wove through the enormous round tables to the back. Lu, one of the four sisters—and the only one who speaks English—waved to me as I passed. I waved back. Solara ran out the emergency exit to the parking lot and grease dumpsters at the back. I ran through the door and into a mess of dented plug-ins. She was nowhere to be found. I took out my gun. The back of the plaza extended to my left, and the outside wall of the restaurant kitchen jutted out on the right. I ran along the outside of the kitchen wall and peered around the corner. I saw the girl forty yards ahead, scaling the center’s brick wall. I ran for her. She turned, gun in hand, and fired at me. I hid behind a minivan. She blew out the rear windows and the tires. I looked again and saw that she had made no further progress up the wall. I ran for her, and she threw her gun at me, nailing me in the shoulder. I winced in pain as she got a better hold on the white brick and neared the razor wire on top.
“What are you gonna do when you get up there?” I asked. “That’s razor wire.”
“I’ve fought through worse.”
“You need to come down. I’m not gonna kill you.”
“Fuck you.”
I leapt for her and grabbed hold of her ankle, bringing her back down. She fell on top of me, then gave me a swift kick to the head. She kicked my hand to dislodge the gun, but I kept my grip in spite of the agony. She ran for the opposite side of the parking lot. I got up and followed suit.
She was an excellent runner and clearly spent a good amount of time running in marathons and steeplechases and parkour superstar competitions and anything that required a proficiency in bipedal locomotion. I can’t say the same for myself. The gap between us widened, and I fired into the air to shock her. She stopped, turned, and then went back to sprinting like an Olympian. She fled around the back of the center and up the covered walkways of the front to the main lobby. Bodies in the way slowed her progress as well as mine. She turned to look back, and I kept my eyes square on her. She went in the lobby and down into the earthen tunnels. Now we were moving single file, with stacks of people in front of and behind us. I rudely cut in front of as many as I could, and I saw her stumble as she tried to do likewise, toppling the man in front of her. Catching up to her, I laid a hand on her shoulder to see if she was okay. She pivoted and punched me in the gut. I grabbed her upper arm violently, like a parent frustrated with a child, and shouldered her into the wall. We held up traffic, and complaints started coming down the line. With my gun barrel now firmly planted in her back, we turned around, and I led her out into daylight in the most uneasy two-hundred-yard walk of my life. We went behind the Eden Center. She turned and slugged me again, just for good measure. I held firm and kept the gun on her.
“Solara, stop hitting me.”
“You have the wrong person, and I don’t know who the fuck you are.”
“My name is John Farrell and I am a licensed end specialist. I have your death warrant, Solara.”
“My name is Ingrid.”
“Yes, I know that’s your current alias. Ingrid Malmsteen. You’ve also gone by Michelle Turin, Liza Harvin, and Jenna Frank. It’s all in your file. I have it committed to memory.”
“That’s great, but I don’t have a file. You’re looking for some other idiot, somewhere else.”
“Do we have to keep doing this? I don’t want to have to shoot you just for a positive ID that I already have.” I held up the WEPS and showed her Containment’s file photo of her.
“Okay. You have my death warrant. So why haven’t you shot me?” I hesitated to answer. She assumed the worst, which was halfway correct. “Oh, you gotta be fucking kidding me, fella.”
“That’s not the reason why,” I said.
“Bullshit. I know exactly who you are. You were that creep in Manhattan who was trying to talk me up.”
“And then you killed my best friend.”
“I didn’t kill anyone.”
“The file says otherwise.”
“The files lie. Do you really think every scrap of info you get from the folks at Containment is infallible? Are you that stupid? Is that how you justify going around shooting people?”
“You were found guilty in absentia.”
“So is everyone else.”
“You were guilty. I saw the way you ran.”
“Did it ever occur to you that I ran from you because I didn’t feel like being hit on by yet another douchebag that day?”
“I think you’re hit on often enough to have a more inventive rejection method than running away.”
“Then explain this.” She gestured to her own body, which I admittedly lingered on for a fraction of a second longer than was appropriate under the circumstances. “Do I look like I’ve aged to you since that day? I’m a postmortal. Does that strike you as characteristic of a pro-death terrorist insurgent?”
“No, but you were connected to Randall Baines, and you were spotted at two other bombings within three months of the July 3 attacks. And I don’t take that as coincidence. I don’t think you just happened to be around, turning away suitors, at those particular moments.” I brought down the gun. She didn’t move. “Katy Johannson was my best friend,” I told her. “She was getting the cure the day I saw you. She was in the doctor’s office when the bomb went off. There were no remains of her. They couldn’t even find a tooth—nothing they could send to her family to bury in the ground. She was obliterated. I have free rein to kill you, but I just want to know why you ran. That’s all. I’m not arrogant enough to believe every woman I approach will throw her arms wide open and leap into my embrace. But you ran away like someone who had done something. And I would like to know what.”
Her hair fell in front of her face and she blew it away like it was a rude housefly. She sat down on the hood of a dirty white Nissan and didn’t speak for three minutes. Finally, she looked up.
“He was my boyfriend,” she said. “Randall. I served as lookout for him three times. At your doctor’s office, I was asked to go in for a consult to survey the office. I didn’t get the cure then. I was only posing as a patient. But I never planted bombs. I never killed anyone. I just stood there. I was supposed to look out for cops and all that.”
“Why’d you help him?”
“Because he was violent. Okay? Violent enough to make me think he was a cloud hovering over the surface of everything. I was chickenshit—I admit it. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not a murderer. I’m sorry he killed your friend.”
I was compelled to move closer to her. I had seen this woman in my head for over five decades. The memory of everyone else I knew had grown more distant over that time. My father. My son. Their lives had ended so long ago, they felt like they belonged to another dimensio
n. Sometimes, if I concentrated hard enough, I could remember them perfectly. I could bring their faces and bodies into focus. I could conjure them and spend time with them. Other times, they felt more like vague, wonderful ideas that I couldn’t quite fully form. But Solara Beck was different. Her image stayed at the forefront of my memory effortlessly. Immediate, as if she had been walking beside me this whole time. I remembered her exactly as she was, and knew exactly what was different about her now. I knew every hair on her head—from just two glances, fifty-eight years ago. It may as well have been yesterday. She was beautiful and strange and maybe that was the reason why, but there was more to it. There was a sense that I had kept her alive so vividly in my memory because I knew, somehow, that this moment would eventually present itself. Things always change. Perhaps it was raw lust masquerading as a foolhardy sense of destiny. It didn’t matter, because I was drawn in regardless. Before this moment, I had assumed I’d shoot her when we met again. Just like anyone else I’ve shot or stuck with the dose. But now that was the last thing I wanted to do, right or wrong. I didn’t feel any anger toward her. I felt charged, like an old V-6 engine ignited after spending decades collecting dust.
“You need to listen to me,” I said. “It doesn’t matter what hair color you choose or what name you pick for a fake ID. The ES order is binding, and my firm is not the only one contracted to carry out your sentencing. DES is after you as well. You’re a discovery many people are eager to make. They won’t leave you alone until the order is carried out.”
“So, what? I have to go hide in an attic for the rest of my life? Keep a diary?”
“I don’t know. Why haven’t you explained your situation to the cops or someone?”
“Because Randall would kill me.”
“But he’s dead.”
“But his cause isn’t,” she said. “They’ll kill me. Don’t you get that? And there was no point in showing up twenty years ago, when the government found out who I was and had me tried. Because I did it. And they don’t give a shit about the why of it. I’m not gonna show up at my own death trap.”
Everything about her made me want to act irrationally. “I can help you.”
“Why would you help me?”
“Because I was the one who brought Katy to that doctor,” I said. “It was my fault. I can’t bring her back, but maybe helping you would give me some bullshit illusion that karma has been balanced. Unless you’re lying to me.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Then I can help you.” Just telling her I could help her made me feel like a living, breathing person for the first time in a very long time.
“What can you do?” she asked.
“Well, I can kill you. If you catch my loose meaning.”
“You mean . . .”
“If I record your exit interview and file your end specialization as completed, that ends the search. We file a certain number of mock end specializations each year, at the request of the government and certain special interests.”
“So you stage deaths. The reports are true.”
“They are. Old CIA analysts who don’t want to be hunted down, witnesses, political donors who have an intolerable number of counts on their rap sheets . . . They go into the database.”
She laughed derisively. “You are one twisted business. You know that, right?”
“It’s like a messy room. Only the person living in the room sees the order to it.”
She looked me over as if I were the only prize left on the shelf to choose from. “All right. How do you do it?”
“I can explain it in the car.” I extended my hand to help her up from the plug-in. “You can say no and keep running. I won’t shoot you. But I can help because, I dunno . . . It feels like what I’m supposed to do.”
She took a few minutes and then tentatively accepted my hand. “All right.”
I helped her up. The WEPS buzzed. It was Matt, with an urgent request to sweep an area to the south, near Fredericksburg. Ernie was out on another job. It was all mine. I turned to my new companion. “Come with me. Looks like your demise will have to wait.”
DATE MODIFIED:
6/24/2079, 10:09 P.M.
The Sweep
Solara napped in the passenger seat of my plug-in as we sat on I-95 south, traffic moving like food being passed through your guts. Sleeping urchins and families lay on the roadside. Hitchers knocked on the door every ten minutes, their hands swaddled in rags to protect them from germs. Hours passed and the traffic began to thin. Rain pounded down, and I sat on the edge of my seat, trying to see through the glaze on the windshield. We hit forty miles per hour at certain points. I looked over at Solara, who lay curled up under an orange blanket. Her eyes opened and she gazed at the road. She smacked her mouth to get the taste of sleep out. “This is a long drive,” she said.
“They all are.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“On a sweep,” I told her. “Sheep flu victims.”
I pulled the plug-in over to the shoulder at a random mile marker. Solara had gotten Skeleton Key, so there was no need for a hazmat. The shoulder was relatively unoccupied, save for a small caravan a couple hundred feet ahead. All I could see was a handful of black people, listening to music and staring at a small grill. They saw us and I mouthed the word to them: “Sheep.”
They pantomimed turning a key. They were vaccinated.
We turned toward the woods and could hear sounds of people in the distance. Every distance. Every direction. The woods were full of them, buzzing, the world a giant hive. But no one was immediately discernible. The rain had made the trees wet and black. Thousands of cracked and fallen branches littered the forest floor, the cumulative accomplishment of all those powerful storms piling up on one another, year after year. Litter abounded—wrappers, plastic bottles, e-waste, random car parts. Things once useful, never to be of service again. We cleared through the brush and followed my screen, closing in on a large collection of little white dots. My boots tracked softly atop the large tufts of soaked weeds and old brown pine needles. We passed by four people, naked and fucking. I discreetly whispered a warning to them, and they froze in midcoitus to run, their assorted naked parts flopping around like numb limbs in the thick mugginess.
We came to a redheaded woman slumped against a tree. She knelt by one of the branches, sucking on it like a bone. She saw us. I gave her a warning: “Sheep.”
“I saw them,” she said. “They’re up ahead.” She stared at me. She had dull green eyes, like the shards of a bottle thrown into the sea and washed ashore years later. “I know why they’re sick. I know why the world got sick. Do you know?” I didn’t answer her. She didn’t need my approval to go on. “It’s the ghosts. It’s the ghosts who did this. I hear them. I feel them cozy up to me when I’m asleep on the ground. The ghosts aren’t happy with us. They saw us grab more life than they got, and they raged. They howled and they shook their chains, and they swore they’d get back at us for being on the right side of history. It’s the ghosts who have made this world sick. You don’t shortchange the dead. There’s a whole lot more of them than there are of us, and there always will be. You watch. They’ll claim us all.”
I took out a candy bar and gave it to her. She wolfed it down, wrapper and all, and went back to sucking on her wet branch.
We moved forward. A clearing came into view up ahead. We heard moans and rustling. A few steps farther and I could see the muddy tangle of the forest floor give way to pale white and violet webbing. A field of sick. A collection of victims, arranged haphazardly on the ground, faceup and facedown, like a deck of playing cards that had been thrown into the air. Some had already succumbed. But the living and the dead were indistinguishable. I gently nudged each one with my boot, to check for a reflex. Solara stood by a tree on the outskirts and remained fastened in place.
I went to work quickly, sussing out the living from among the human scrap. I tagged their drenched jeans and sweatshirts with a generous swipe of a
fat Sharpie. I searched them for identification while I opened the kits and took out the doses. I knelt beside the first victim, a woman in her cure twenties. I gently rocked her shoulder, as if to wake a sleeping child. She opened her eyes. Green gunk slimed her tear ducts. Copper fluid drooled from her mouth and drizzled onto the leaves and needles, leaching death into the soil. I took her license. Her name was Olivia.
She looked at me. “Am I dead?”
“No,” I said. “You’re very sick. You probably only have about six to eight hours left.” The news had no effect on her. I began recording. “I need to know if you have loved ones, Olivia. People you want informed. People you want to leave your belongings to.”
She weakly rolled her head over in the direction of a man who was lying faceup in a puddle of standing, fetid water—lounging spread-eagle, eyes open to the sky. Luxuriant in death. You could have put a drink in his hand. He had no Sharpie mark on him.
I asked her if she had any belongings. She took out an old WEPS.4 device. I turned it on and the screen buzzed to life. The battery was still good, but the moisture inside had caused half the screen to turn to randomly colored lines. I sealed it in a bag and marked it for discarding. I presented her with the dose.
“My name is John Farrell and I’m a subcontractor with the U.S. Department of Containment. Containment mandates that all remaining sheep flu victims be swept immediately to prevent further infections. What I have here is one cc of diluted sodium fluoroacetate that will end both your sickness and your life. You will not feel any pain or discomfort, beyond what the flu is causing you right now. Alternately, there is a robovaccine available that will cure you. This robovaccine costs five thousand dollars, and Containment will only accept payment via direct withdrawal through a bank routing number. Do you have the ability to pay for this vaccine?”