by Zack Parsons
He hit her again, hard enough to startle Casper. The dog barked.
“Don’t talk about my fucking wife.” The soldier stepped back. He hesitated.
“I’ll forget all about it,” Polly repeated.
The soldier abruptly pivoted away and staggered back through the gate and into the guardhouse. Polly stood up cautiously, still covered by the guns of the other soldiers. She rubbed her ribs.
Two more men came out from behind the barricades, jogging with rifles slung and red hard-shell cases in their hands. Polly opened the back door of the cruiser. Casper blinked up at the light, at her, at the tension crimped into her features. He reached a hand out to touch her. She pulled away.
The guardsmen popped open their boxes full of individually wrapped needles and test kits. They took off their masks—one, to Casper’s surprise, was a Warren—and they performed quick blood draws on Casper and Polly. As his blood was filling a tube, he tried to catch her eye again, but she wouldn’t look at him.
“I’m sorry,” said the soldier drawing Polly’s blood. He was a lanky Warren, gas mask pushed up on his face, heavy black prescription glasses on an elastic band around his head. He seemed too old to be a National Guardsman. “This isn’t how we operate. He’s ... a lot of them have lost family.”
Their blood samples swirled in the test vials. They turned cloudy pink.
“No spore,” said the Warren. “They’re clean.”
Polly said nothing until they were back in the car and driving through the gate.
“Fucking flakes deserve this,” she muttered. Casper remained quiet.
It was a different world beyond the cordon. There were patches of churned dirt that suggested that buildings and asphalt had been removed to make way for the perimeter. Boxy, prefabricated mobile homes were assembled in parks, housing for the soldiers now manning the checkpoints. Trucks filled with regular Army troops rumbled past, their gas masks newer, cleaner, and their guns like a void against the stark white of their arctic camouflage smocks.
Civilian vehicles moved on the streets. Unique, normal humans walked the sidewalks along with duplicates. A few businesses remained open, markets and watering holes, entrepreneurs toughing it out despite military warnings barking out of the sirens attached to the light pole on every corner.
“What happened to you?” asked Casper.
“Nothing,” she said. The police radio burbled with reports of a crime in progress.
“You’re not who I remember,” said Casper.
The cruiser pulled up at a stop light, and she turned her head, her profile limned by the sun visible through the window strip.
“You’re damn right I’m not. Don’t try to cast me as her. Forget about Veronica Lambert. She’s dead.”
The light clicked to green, and traffic began to move again. Polly returned her attention to the road, and the cruiser rumbled on.
CHAPTER FIVE
Milo Gardener met her in a plain hotel conference room in downtown Los Angeles. Every Gardener she ever met in the line of duty was strange, with Pool-born white hair and unusual mannerisms, but Milo Gardener was downright unnerving. Words emerged from his time-flaccid lips as if spoken by a faraway child. Though hunched, he was imposing and not enfeebled by his advanced age.
“I have requested you,” said Milo, “for a special task. We are in need of a shepherd to tend to a flock of visitors from the United Nations. Despite your recent difficulties, I believe you are well equipped to see to the security of these guests and to ensure they see what we want them to see.”
Milo embellished the importance of the job to her without seeming condescending, yet she was left with the distinct impression that he wanted her as a tour guide. Still, it was an improvement over spending her days seeing addle-brained type twos out of the cannery. She agreed to take the job.
“You now work for me.” Milo stood. “I expect superlative performance from all of my employees, but I do not doubt your ability to meet my expectations. I will be contacting you with an itinerary. The UN-chartered flight will arrive tomorrow night. In the meantime, begin preparing a security detail that can travel lightly, inconspicuously, and quickly.”
She shook his hand, surprised at his weak grip and delicate fingers.
“I will be thorough and professional,” she promised.
His hand lingered on hers, his leather-clad fingers cold against her palm, but he said nothing else. She was transfixed by his blue eyes and wondered how much of a man like Casper Cord was within a strange creature like Milo Gardener. He pulled away abruptly and departed.
She returned to her neighborhood beneath a gloaming gray sky, columns of smoke rising within the cordon and farther east, where the Army supposedly operated a field crematorium for victims of spore outbreaks. Sirens howled distantly. Curfew was coming, and there were few cars on the streets. A retriever dog with a collar appeared from a side street and ran north along the curb. It trailed a frayed leash behind it, and its eyes were wide and showed white. It jerked and dropped low to the ground as a heavy-lifting helicopter passed overhead. Its eyes and ears followed the thudding Doppler of the rotors.
The light was on upstairs in Mrs. Valdez’s apartment, and Polly discerned from the moving shadows that her elderly neighbor was up and about. After her last visit and the subsequent nightmare it had inspired, she felt increasingly concerned about the old woman. They were not far from the cordon, and the entire area was under threat of a spore storm. Almost everyone but dupes was gone or in the process of leaving, but poor, hapless Mrs. Valdez was caught up in the inertia of her life and was not going to evacuate.
Polly climbed the stairs and discovered the door to Mrs. Valdez’s apartment slightly ajar. In the dim light she made out a black smear on the door frame beside the knob. She leaned in and realized it was blood, congealed but not yet dried.
“Mrs. Valdez?” she said, and she opened the door with the toe of her boot. “Mrs. Valdez, are you all right?”
The apartment was as she remembered, too cramped and disorganized to spot anything out of place. She took a step inside, nearly tripping over a stack of magazines. There was a strange odor in the air, earthy, sour in her sinuses, like the marrow stench of the Pool edged with decay. Fat black flies buzzed against the windows and overhead lamp.
“Mrs. Valdez?” Polly stepped over a sliding stack of photo albums. The top one flopped open to pictures of a funeral of an elderly man. The images were bleached with age. She picked the album up and closed it. When she returned it to the stack, she saw that where it had fallen was a blood smear on the carpet and the rough outline of a shoe.
She searched for something, some sort of weapon, in case there was an armed intruder. She hefted a jar filled with pennies from a shelf. It weighed enough to do some injury. She kept quiet and stepped more carefully. All of the lamps in the apartment seemed to be on, although the piles of mementos and bags filled with ornaments obscured the direct light.
There was more blood, smeared by fingers on the edge of a door frame. Bloody paper towels and enough blood to pool on the linoleum of the kitchen. There was an empty tube of antibiotic ointment and first-aid tape on the kitchen counter beside the sink. A narrow hallway delved from the kitchen into the darkness. Rooms opened on either side, and there was a third door at the far end of the hall. There were bloody footprints everywhere on the hall carpeting. They beat a foul path from one door to the other and back to the door at the far end of the hall.
Polly took a halting step onto the carpet, forced to stand in the blood. She froze. There was a repetitive clicking sound, almost like a ratcheting, followed by a soft thump. It came from the room on the right. Her heart slipped in her chest. She raised the jar of pennies and advanced, moonlight showing the way around a dresser and into a small bedroom dominated by a queen-sized, four-poster bed of solid wood. The lamp was overturned in her path. Her feet crunched in broken glass.
A strip of light was visible at the bottom of the adjoining door. Shadows pac
ed back and forth. A bathroom, probably, and behind it, softly, the ratcheting sound again, this time ending in a slow scrape against the door. The noise repeated several times and began to seem less mechanical and more like the chattering call of an insect or amphibian. Her stomach tightened, and Polly tasted acid in the back of her throat.
She approached the door and listened. Something was definitely breathing on the other side. It thumped loudly and shook the door. Polly reached a hand out to the knob. It was sticky with blood. She lifted the jar of pennies up high and steeled herself for what she might find.
“Miss Polly?”
Polly nearly dropped the jar of pennies at the sound of Mrs. Valdez’s voice. She caught the jar with both hands and turned to find Mrs. Valdez slumping in the doorway of the bedroom.
“Mrs. Valdez, what happened?” Polly went to her and helped her stand.
The old woman was out of breath, her hair matted with sweat and her eyes heavy-lidded with exhaustion. Her dressing gown was disheveled and bloodstained, and the entire length of her left arm was wrapped up in paper towels.
“Mr. Romeo come home,” said Mrs. Valdez. “He hurt really bad but he okay now. I give him a bath. He is sleeping in the bathroom to get well.”
Polly brought Mrs. Valdez into the kitchen and sat her down at the table. In the full light she did not seem so badly injured.
“He did this to you?”
“He so scared. He scratch me when I carry him. He did not mean it.”
“I need to see what he did,” said Polly. Mrs. Valdez shook her head petulantly. “If you don’t show me, we have to call an ambulance, and they won’t be gentle. I will be gentle.”
She was almost as afraid to see what was under the bandages as Mrs. Valdez was afraid to show her. People infected with the spores were known to conceal the spreading white growth until it was too late to remove the infection or amputate the limb and save their lives.
“Okay,” said Mrs. Valdez.
She pinched her lips and closed her eyes. Polly knelt beside her, slowly unwinding the paper towels covering her arm. The first layers unfurled easily. Blood began to show through in spots. The towels were darker and darker and sticking to the injuries. Polly peeled them back gingerly. Mrs. Valdez winced as the final layers were removed.
There was no telltale white of spore growth. There were dozens of deep scratches and gouges as well as unusual bite marks—paired holes that seemed too closely grouped—that were swollen and oozing clear liquid. Polly soaked a towel with purified water from a bottle. The swelling and redness became more apparent when the blood was wiped away.
“This already looks seriously infected,” said Polly. “We need to take you to a hospital before you become sick.”
“No!” Mrs. Valdez pulled her arm away and stood up from the chair. “On the radio they say the hospital you go into, you catch the sickness, and the Army takes you to burn you. I not going in there. No. You can’t make me.”
“You could die.”
“If I die, I go here in my house with my family.” Mrs. Valdez said. “I love Mr. Romeo. I stay with him.”
There was no hope of moving the stout old woman against her will. Polly doubted an ambulance would even show up this close to the cordon. Maybe the Army or the police, not that she would resort to involving them.
“Okay,” said Polly. “I have a first-aid kit in my apartment. Let me go get it for you, and I will do what I can for your arm.”
Mrs. Valdez nodded. Polly hurried out of the apartment and up the stairs. She had a hard-shell emergency medical kit she’d swiped from Rapid Response years ago. It included some powerful antibiotics that should stave off the infection. When she returned to Mrs. Valdez’s apartment, she found the door shut and locked. She pounded on the door and called out to Mrs. Valdez, but there was no answer.
“I know you can hear me, Mrs. Valdez,” said Polly. “Don’t be afraid. I am leaving my first-aid kit outside your door, and I am putting a note with instructions on what to use to make sure that arm doesn’t get badly infected. Do exactly what these instructions say, and you should be okay.”
Polly did as she said and slid the kit against the door.
“Please use it,” she said as she leaned her head against the door. “It might save your life.”
She retreated and waited at the top of the stairs for some time, the corner of the kit visible. After many minutes the door opened, and the kit disappeared into Mrs. Valdez’s apartment. It was a small victory, but one that might save her elderly neighbor’s life.
Polly struggled to sleep. She was distracted by thoughts of the United Nations visit and the odd responsibility being given to her by Milo Gardener. The assignment did not make sense. Why shuffle her off to the woebegotten depths of Corrections Emergence and, in the span of a couple of weeks, turn around and give her such a critical assignment? The possible reasons troubled her.
When she managed to suppress such concerns, her mind drifted back to the vision of Mrs. Valdez and her arm. She pictured the strange bite marks—two holes only separated by an eighth of an inch—and the puffy flesh surrounding each wound. The image in her memory was accompanied by the soft ratcheting sound she had heard from the bathroom, rising and falling, punctuated by a thump that shook the bathroom door in its frame.
Splayed out upon the table, the type three called Violet Vex slowly became the meal. This was her purpose, she insisted, and therefore it was her desire. Her assistant had administered a spinal anesthetic so that she might remain conscious until the moment of death, watching her guests with blue eyes outlined in black, encouraging them to take a second helping of her thigh or the meat of her arm.
Several of the guests departed before she was even served. It was, after all, an intolerable sight for a normal human, who perceived only the gory human frailty, not the beauty of her sacrifice and the serenity to be found in the living mutilation of a human body. The enjoyment of consuming another human’s flesh, no matter how willingly offered, was even further beyond their comprehension.
When those with weak stomachs had departed—mostly type twos and the handful of normal humans invited to attend—the remaining dinner guests mocked their exit. They saluted one another as courageous and selected cuts of hamstring and gluteals, pectoral and trapezius, with even greater relish.
Wesley Bishop sat at the head of the table, beside the head of Violet Vex. She watched her vivisection in a mirror suspended above her to advise the servers in their knife work. She talked with Bishop frequently and insisted he be served the choicest cuts.
“Dig deep,” she instructed the type two carving her chest. “The lean muscle is best.”
While this Grand Guignol was under way, a video was projected on the long wall of the rookery’s main dining room. Footage played of Violet Vex wearing a jogging suit and running along sunlit mountain roads, crossing streams, walking through idyllic pastures, and lying nude upon a beach. These scenes were punctuated by montages of her eating, stuffing herself full of rich foods to provide just the right “marbling of my succulent flesh,” as she narrated.
The butchers began to part bone and strip away planks of quivering musculature to reveal the organ meats. Vera, features pale and sunken, voice barely more than a whisper, finally spoke her last.
“I must depart,” she said, her body shaking from the sawing of the knives. “I wish I could remain to enjoy the main course. I am ... slipping away and hope for ... a pleasant meal ... may I sustain you ... as ... friendship sustains ... us all.”
She breathed her last. Her cheek gently dropped against the table. One of her assistants changed over the video to a lingering wide shot of her literally walking into the sunset with Thank you written over the image in golden script. The guests clapped as her mutilated carcass was draped in a lavender sheet and the cuts of meat, piled high upon platters, were stacked onto carts and wheeled off to the kitchen to be cooked.
“Without a doubt, your most extravagant party yet,” said Idol Co
nstantine, the famous type one movie star. “A toast to our gracious host.”
Idol raised his glass, but Wesley Bishop stood, raising his own in a toast.
“To Violet Vex,” Bishop saluted with his glass, “for providing us with such a welcome distraction from our troubles.”
The toast was enthusiastic. The guests, luminaries of the world, heads of subsidiaries, duplicates from the upper echelons of American society, were epicureans seeking ever more extreme indulgences. Tonight’s meal of performance artist Violet Vex would go down in legend.
When the trays heaped with sizzling meats arrived from the kitchen, there was another round of applause. The room filled with the aroma of cooked meat. Tureens of blood gravy were joined by plates heaped with asparagus, potatoes, and other vegetables. Violet Vex’s chief assistant promised, “Everything on your plate was nurtured personally by Miss Vex.”
Bishop sawed off a steaming morsel from her pectoral steak and savored the nuance of her flavors. Her meat reminded him of suckling pig. The guests cleared their plates. There was a commitment to gorging, a desire by each diner to pay a debt incurred by Violet Vex’s sacrifice.
No amount of acting or self-assurance could overcome the instinctive human revulsion to cannibalism. Even starving men gagged on the flesh and blood of men. Not so for his guests. The time given to them by the Pool had removed such human inhibitions as surely as did the war rituals of benighted tribes of man-eaters. Fat tongues patrolled greasy lips; teeth tore into thigh and limb and crispy skin. Browned muscles parted to knives. Preparations of organ meats quivered on rising forks.
When the meal was finished, servers arrived and cleared the table once more. Bishop and his guests retired to the lounge for a digestif and found Violet Vex waiting for them. Her type’s red hair was hastily dyed a glossy black, cropped mannishly, and parted at the side to match her previous style. Her blue eyes were darkened with teardrop outlines of mesdemet. Her body, restored to softness, was tightly swaddled in a garment of red-tinted plastic wrap that mashed her inherited contours out of shape.