A greasy coating of cold, black guilt and self-loathing settled over him.
I don’t have to think about this bitch, not now, not ever. Unlucky property of a shitty guy, that’s all she is.
He stumbled and went down hard to one knee.
“Damn!”
Too loud again.
Shouldn’t one of his brothers have caught him? They made him into a fucking monster, a hateful fucking monster, and they couldn’t even—
The image flooded his mind again. He was fucking the girl—the whore—and she opened her eyes. She’d been crying with her eyes shut all goddamned night, and then right when Rus was fucking her, she opened her eyes and looked into his, not sad, not afraid, but just like she was saying, “I’m here and I see what you’re doing.”
“Fuckin’ Garbageman!” he said. This time he was glad it was too loud. Maybe some worse gang would come and kill them now. It was only a group of eight Bridges here tonight, since the entire gang was now down to twenty-four. How big a force could they fend off, really, with just eight? Four Bridges carried the whore, and the other four, including Rus, who had wanted to distance himself from her, walked at their sides as protection.
“Garbageman! We gonna fuck you up!” D’Wayn called out. Now Rus wasn’t the only loud one. “When he sees this bitch, cut up and covered in blood and cum and bruises, he’ll know he fucked with the Zone’s hardest thugs.”
Rus needed to be more like D’Wayn. The Bridges who truly ruled were always the hardest and the meanest. He had to grow the fuck up, but this shit with torturing the hooker had made him lightheaded.
They dumped her outside the heavy metal doors and gave the finger to the Garbageman’s security camera, pulling out weapons. Everyone had a club and at least one knife, but Duke Q also had a .38, and Pawley had a .22 that would look like a bigger gun on camera, even though neither had any bullets. “You’re fucking dead, Garbageman!” Rus taunted to the camera.
“We gonna ugly up every bitch you got, including you!” Duke Q shouted.
The Garbageman would never face the Bridges all together. Then again, he might just start shooting, too. In fact, he would probably do that, straight through the metal gate like last time.
The Bridges hustled away from the door, just slowly enough to avoid seeming scared. The laughing and backslapping trailed off quickly as they turned onto a back street. They walked without speaking, the only sound being that of their feet crunching over the gravel.
They wound from one back street to another. Rus’s neck was starting to ache from craning in every direction. Just a few months ago the Bridges would have attracted the attention of serious tough guys here, but tonight the streets were silent. He would have been less on edge if they’d been confronted already.
The Bridges’ footsteps stopped as the others came into focus, just standing there, frozen, each one of the six or eight silhouettes aiming rifles at the Bridges. Rus realized how easy it would have been for these shapes to remain hidden here, and how many might still be hidden there, with so many layered shadows. These silhouettes had intentionally let themselves be seen.
Blood rushed to Rus’s head, making his lips and ears throb. This was no ordinary street gang. His chest tightened.
Fiends!
“Move and you meet Unity,” a gravelly voice whispered, rancid spittle landing among the hairs on Rus’s neck. A pistol barrel appeared there next, then a hand on his shoulder pushed him to his knees. The other Bridges landed next to him. Hands stripped the Bridges of their possessions. “Congratulations, kids,” the voice said. “You’re now property of the New Union. If any of you survive the training, you’ll have glory, wealth, and power.”
Outside Dobo Protein Refinery
Kym Evans still limped and wobbled a bit as she walked, but Dok’s treatment had helped a lot. She’d already found a way to be a part of the General’s holy mission, first by staring down the Federal Agent and not telling him shit, and then by recognizing her student follower on the street and filling him in on how to find her.
“Perhaps one day we’ll call you Colonel Kym, or even General Kym.”
The Prophet’s words stuck in her mind. It felt right: Kym, herself, commanding hundreds or thousands of dedicated soldiers. More than that, it felt owed to her.
I’m Colonel Kym, you fucking Fed. You won’t scare Colonel Kym into telling you shit, fucker.
It was dark now. Mikk never came here to the refinery at night because it was too far away from the action, so she’d be safe from him, though she’d have to deal with the stench of carbon recyclables all night.
She could leave at sunrise to avoid Mikk.
As she approached the refinery she discovered someone had dumped a corpse outside the heavy doors. Who would just abandon this much carbon? A full-sized adult body could bring enough cash for a decent meal, maybe two. Kym unlocked the door and grabbed the corpse by a wrist to drag it in. It writhed and moaned—the girl was alive! Kym got an arm under her and hoisted her up and through the door, heading for the office. Someone came in after her, closing the door behind them and locking it. “Where’s the Garbageman?” a gruff male voice asked.
Kym felt as afraid as the situation called for, but the feeling was insulated by her rage and her new sense of power. “You did this to her so you could find him?” Her voice didn’t even shake.
“No. A gang of punks dumped her here about an hour ago. Where is the Garbageman? I won’t ask you again.”
“Oh, you gonna kill me? Criminals like you are all going to disappear,” Kym said. “The General is going to build a new society, and I’m gonna be fightin’ too.”
Even in the dark, she could sense the man deflating somewhat. His voice softened. “Which general did he become?”
The comment seemed strange, but she had too much real shit going on to worry about whatever particular way this guy was crazy. Kym turned her back on him, helping the girl toward the office and unlocking it. If he wanted to stab, shoot or rape her, there wasn’t much she could do to stop him, anyway.
“There are a lot of us,” she said finally. “And more coming.”
She got the office unlocked and turned on the dim light. The girl was a teenager. Kym was surprised to find herself retching. She would have figured she’d be used to horrible acts like this by now. Two other of Mikk’s whores had been dropped here after being raped and mutilated, but this was the first one she’d ever found alive.
The man standing here in the office was a basic Zone dealer type, slender, mid-twenties, with dark hair and facial stubble framing cold blue eyes. She’d probably seen a hundred just like him coming and going from deals with Mikk. This one wore some kind of red cape around his shoulders, which was fastened with handcuffs.
“I know there are more coming,” he said. “I’m the one bringing them.”
“You?” she said. “You serve the General?”
“Haven’t yet met him, but yes. I’m here to form the new legions.”
Kym knew better than to correct him about the General’s gender. “Who are you?” she asked.
“Centurion Septimus Furius. I formerly served under Praetor Crassus and I look forward to meeting your general. Is it Crassus? There is much to be done if the legions are to be formed. If the General came from this place, I will wait here with you until he returns.”
Kym lowered the bleeding, naked girl gently to the floor as he stood there in the doorway, looking out at the mounds of trash.
The attackers had cut the girl’s nostrils out from inside and left diagonal slashes across her face, as well as across her breasts, midsection, and thighs. The cuts were all deep enough to leave nasty scars but none had cut any major blood vessels. Kym kept a bag of rags in a drawer for whenever they might be handy, mostly just clothes she’d stripped from corpses. She dug around to find one of the cleaner ones, an old plaid shirt, and ripped it into makeshift bandages for the girl’s various wounds. The man who called himself Centurion whatever turned from the doo
rway and stood in silence, watching her work.
“This place is a protein refinery, so it takes all this garbage and turns it into food, right?” he asked finally.
“No,” she said, a bit glad for the chance to condescend. “Synthesizers make it into food. Here we just break it down, back into amino acids that the bacteria inside synthesizers will make into proteins.”
“So it goes from here to those things, the synthesizers, all over?”
She shook her head. “Goes to the factory that produces sterile nutrients. Sterile nutes packages have our aminos, plus other things like vitamins and phytonutrients, all combined. Those packages get shipped to the synthesizers all over.”
“And how many people does one of those blocks you make here, the amino acids, end up feeding?”
“Dunno. Probably a few thousand, when it’s mixed into sterile nutes packs. There’s a backlog of amino blocks, though, so they’ve been lettin’ them pile up here instead of paying us. Trying to use it as an excuse to lower prices, but a lot of us are just sitting on ‘em, waitin’ for the manufacturers to need ‘em again.”
“Waiting for a shortage of dead bodies and garbage,” he said. “Bold move, that.”
He stared out through the glass at the various steps of production, which were relatively well illuminated by moonlight. The hopper was huge and dirty, and from there the pipes traced the process of chemical disintegration and recombination, ratio control, and sterilization. Kym stopped working on the girl as he removed what appeared to be about half a kilo of white powder from one of his big coat pockets.
“Is there a final step in this process, right before it goes out from here?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, without looking up from the girl’s wounds. “The sterilizer. Doesn’t look so clean on the outside, but that big, grimy blue machine sterilizes the aminos inside and wraps them into those big blocks you see on the shelf. They’re sealed in super thick bioplexi film to keep out germs.”
“This is how we’re going to build the legions,” he said. As she watched, he strode out to the sterilizer and dumped some of the powder into it.
Part of the Zone outside La Guada
“Arrulfo!” Ernesto said. “You’re pushing me the wrong way! It’s the wrong way, Arrulfo. We’ve already been there.”
“We have to be quiet now, Ernesto,” Arrulfo whispered. “Remember what I told you?”
“Yes. If there’s a fight I should stay by you.”
“That’s right, amigo. What else did I tell you?” Arrulfo was pushing hard now, even lifting Ernesto’s feet from the ground a little bit.
“If you get hurt in a fight so bad you can’t move anymore, I should run and run and not stop running until I can’t run anymore. And also this is a dangerous area for us so we have to be careful not to be seen.”
Nine men and boys shouted from across the street. “Mex! Mex!” they yelled. English was a strange language Ernesto didn’t understand very well, but “Mex” was clear enough. Their voices were loud. More of them came. Rosa pushed Mari against a wall. Marcos was swiveling his head around from side to side. Arrulfo had said Marcos was a psychopath and all psychopaths were dangerous, but Ernesto had said that Arrulfo didn’t know all psychopaths so he couldn’t say that they were all dangerous, but Arrulfo had said that was what a psychopath was, it was a person who was dangerous. Then Ernesto had said that people in LaGuada said Arrulfo was dangerous because he was so good at fighting, but Arrulfo had said that there were different kinds of dangerous people and psychopaths were just one kind, so someone could be dangerous and not be a psychopath. But Arrulfo had said he paid Marcos and threatened him because Arrulfo was even more dangerous than Marcos, and so Marcos protected Ernesto and Ernesto could be okay around him. Not safe, exactly, but kind of okay, with Marcos and Arrulfo around.
Now there were thirty-two other men and boys shouting. Arrulfo was fighting them but he was still moving, and that meant Ernesto didn’t have to run away. Arrulfo gave Ernesto a stick. “Hit anyone who attacks you, amigo,” he said.
“That’s fighting, Arrulfo!” Ernesto said. “You know I’m not good at fighting!”
Someone hit him hard on the side of his face! His eye ached, getting worse and better and worse and better over and over as his heart pumped. He couldn’t open the eye and he wasn’t crying, but his face was wet and his mouth tasted salty. Now everything in the world was completely different because now he was completely different, with one crying, aching eye getting worse and better and worse and better, one broken eye Ernesto didn’t know how to fix.
His stomach! A shoe was there, and then it pulled away. Now his stomach was hurting but not getting worse and better but just hurting the same all the time and making him fold in half. He was broken in two places and now he was different and unfixable and he lived with his eye getting worse and better and his hurting stomach folding him in half.
This was an attack! Hitting someone in the face was an attack, and kicking was an attack. Arrulfo had said Ernesto was supposed to hit anyone who attacked him. Keeping a hand on his stomach and turning his hurting eye toward his raised shoulder, Ernesto screamed and swung the stick back and forth as hard as he could with his one hand.
There were more attackers now, but Arrulfo was fighting them, protecting Ernesto. Arrulfo had said he would always protect Ernesto, but Ernesto had said he couldn’t always do that, like if he were dead he couldn’t protect Ernesto. Then Arrulfo had asked him how many fights he had seen Arrulfo protect him in and Ernesto said he had done so in one hundred forty-three fights before today.
This time there were thirty-two attackers, eighteen with weapons.
There were shouts around the corner where these had come from.
Ernesto ducked his head again, flailing and staggering. Whenever he watched Arrulfo fight, he saw how perfectly Arrulfo’s motions counteracted and overcame his opponents. Now, being attacked himself, Ernesto still saw the hinge actions of his attacker’s joints and the arc of the weapon. Arrulfo could push on one side of a joint and make the body fold and crumple, but pushing the same joint another way made a long, awkward limb he could use for leverage. He recognized the mechanics of what Arrulfo did, working those hinge actions and arcs to his advantage in grappling opponents to the ground, intercepting the blows before impact, and using cunning spins and shifts in balance to neutralize whatever attack came at him, but it didn’t help. Ernesto couldn’t move his body the way Arrulfo could. There were too many things happening when Ernesto tried to move his body, too much information to process, for him to be able to do it smoothly.
Ernesto did not like fighting.
There was someone next to Arrulfo, now. Not fighting him, just standing there next to him, fighting other people. He had long hair in a tube on top of his head.
7
Outside Fisher University Library
Li’l Ed sat on a bench, staring at the untouched bioplastic container of Synapsate next to him, still in the spot he’d set it over half an hour ago. The family dinner had been in progress for the last twenty minutes or so via EI, but so far it had been silent except for a few preliminary greetings and the prayer.
“What will you do now, Li’l Ed?” his father asked finally.
“I don’t know, sir,” he said quietly. “The school situation seems to be in limbo at the moment. I’m sure everyone is waiting for some sign from everyone else, and then there will be a collective decision about us.”
“I think the most likely collective decision is that you and Jack will Depart,” his stepmother Nolene said.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m afraid you’re right. But if I turn myself in for voluntary reconditioning now, I’ll lose my place at Fisher. It would be highly unlikely for McGuillian to put any additional resources into me after that. I’d be reconditioned and Accepted, but I’d be at the very bottom rung of the company, probably for my entire career. I would like to attend for just a while longer, to see how it all plays out. I promise that at the f
irst sign that the wind has shifted and they’ve turned against me, I’ll apply immediately for voluntary reconditioning. I have a completed application form pre-saved, and I keep the site permanently open in my EI.”
“It’s a serious and unreasonable risk, Li’l Ed,” his father said. “We can’t condone that.”
“It’s so much to give up if I don’t need to, sir. I worked so hard to get into Fisher Academy and take my place on the executive track. Life at the bottom of the organization is barely life at all, and I think I’d rather risk Departing, if I have even the smallest chance of staying at Fisher.” He paused, then took a different tack. “What if the Lord’s plan for me was to stay on track, to pass this test of my determination?”
“Li’l Ed, I’m surprised at you,” his father said. “You are old enough to understand that the Lord and McGuillian are the same. It’s fine to envision them as separate entities as long as you don’t try to put them at odds, but it’s time to grow up, son. The company is from whom all blessings flow. Your clothes, your food, your home, your health; everything about you is a gift from McGuillian. The company is our provider, and it alone judges our worth.”
Li’l Ed sat without speaking, unable to respond. Finally, he cleared his throat. “Yes, sir.”
“The risk is unacceptable, Li’l Ed,” his father said. “There’s nothing more dangerous than Departing; it’s the endgame scenario every time. Any life at McGuillian is better than no life at all. You will surrender yourself for voluntary reconditioning.”
The Book of Wanda, Volume Two of the Seventeen Trilogy Page 13