The Bar Code Tattoo

by Suzanne Weyn

  Walking around to the front, she read the sign: THE OASIS. A small parking lot held about six cars that had driven in on a narrow road that led away deeper into the forest. There were definitely more than six cars’ worth of people inside the place. How had they gotten there?

  She stepped inside, attracting no attention. The people were all focused on their friends or on the screen.

  “We interrupt this sporting event for a brief special announcement,” a voice broke into the basketball game. The spectators groaned but kept their eyes on the screen.

  A blond woman in a suit appeared in the lower corner of the screen. A picture of the tollbooth where the accident had occurred filled the large screen behind her. “There was a fatal car crash at a Superlink tollbooth just outside of Albany this morning,” the reporter told the audience.

  Kayla stood in the doorway, staring at the screen, mesmerized by the picture on it.

  “It is believed that eighty-five-year-old Tova Alan, the driver, suffered a lethal heart attack that caused him to lose control of his vehicle and slam into a cement wall,” the reporter continued. “His wife, eighty-one-year-old Mava Alan, was rushed to a nearby hospital in critical condition and is not expected to live.”

  Although she knew this already, had faced this reality, a lump formed in Kayla’s throat at the reporter’s words.

  “The Alans were wanted by Globalofficers for toll jumping on their trip up the Superlink. A third passenger in the car was identified as seventeen-year-old Kayla Marie Reed. Ms. Reed is currently a fugitive wanted for the homicide of her mother, Mrs. Ashley Reed. Ms. Reed fled the scene of the accident and refused to stop when summoned by Globalofficers. The charges against her now include toll jumping, failure to cooperate with Globalofficers, and suspected homicide.

  “Anyone seeing Ms. Reed, who is believed to be somewhere north of Albany, New York, please call this central Globalofficers number.”

  Kayla’s junior yearbook photo once again flashed on the screen with the Globalofficers phone number under her face. A man at the bar turned and stared at Kayla. The woman beside him turned to see what her companion was staring at.

  Kayla ran her hand through her short hair as an excuse to put her arm over her face, and walked out the door. It was dark to the left of the doorway and she stepped into the shadow, slowly moving around to the left of the building. Crouching low, she waited to see if anyone rushed out after her. When no one came, she ran out into the darkness again.

  She slumped down at the foot of a large pine. They’d described her as a fugitive from the Globalofficers. How had all this happened? The forest around her swirled and then everything was blackness.

  Hours later she came to with a throbbing head. Her stomach was now a deep and empty cavern. The distant voices from the cabin had quieted. Maybe it was now closed for the night. Hopefully they had a Dumpster and she’d find something inside it to eat.

  It wasn’t easy to find her way back in the complete darkness. As she came nearer, though, she spotted a dull light. It gave her a guide to follow and brought her to the back of the place. Standing behind a tree, she looked in the window and saw that the Oasis was, indeed, closed and she was gazing into the kitchen area. Half a roasted chicken sat, uncovered, on the counter.

  A breeze banged the screen door as light poured from the doorway, telling her there was no locked inside door behind the screened one. Someone must be in there. They wouldn’t just go off and leave the place open and unattended.

  But maybe if the person was in the front, she might be able to slip in, grab the chicken, and escape with it. Her stomach had made her desperate enough to try.

  Cautiously creeping forward, staying in the shadows, she got to the open door and entered the rustic, dully lit kitchen. It was only about five feet to the chicken, but she was afraid to take the first step toward it.

  A floorboard groaned under her first, anxious step and made her freeze in place. She waited for a response.

  Nothing.

  She took another step, then froze again as a trapdoor in the floor just several feet in front of her lifted. Two arms pushed it up. Someone was about to come up from below and they would be face-to-face in a matter of seconds.

  Kayla grabbed a carving knife from a side table, clutched it tightly, and waited.

  “Oh, my God!” Kayla gasped.

  The young man holding up the trapdoor looked equally shocked. “Kayla!”

  “Mfumbe,” she replied. It was so good to see his face. “How did you get here? I heard you were missing. Are you all right? What happened?”

  He came out of the hole in the floor. “Put down the weapon and I’ll tell you.”

  With a self-conscious smile, she put the knife down. He pulled a rough-hewn chair forward, offering her a seat. “I like your new hairdo,” he said. “But the bloody face doesn’t look too stellar.”

  He rinsed a rough white cloth in the sink and handed it to her. The warm wetness felt so good. She was amazed to see how red the cloth was when she was done.

  “Could I have that chicken?” she asked as her stomach growled loudly.

  “Absolutely.” He stuck it on a plate and handed it to her along with a knife and fork. “How about a soda, too?” he offered, pulling a can from the refrigerator and opening it.

  He wiped up the kitchen while she devoured the food ravenously. Then he pulled up a chair for himself and sat backward on it. “You’ve become a real celeb since I last saw you.”

  She laughed bitterly. “It’s been a nightmare.”

  “I know you didn’t set your house on fire,” he said seriously. “What happened?”

  She told him everything, reliving the awful events as she spoke.

  “That’s horrible,” he sympathized. “My story isn’t nearly as terrible, but when I got home that night my dad was waiting for me with a friend of his who’s a postal bar code tattooer. He’d come to our house with all his equipment, at Dad’s request. Dad demanded that I get the tattoo right then and there.”

  “Why?” Kayla asked.

  “His tattoo pal told him the same thing your mom did about the genetic code in there. That got him thinking about how people of African descent have been so discriminated against throughout history. So he’s decided this is our chance to turn the tables. Our family is apparently pretty healthy. He says that since our genes have kept us down for so many centuries, now our genes are going to advance us and we have to be ready to take advantage of this unexpected turn of events.”

  “It is sort of ironic if you think about it.”

  “Yeah, I know. But it’s not right. I’m not going to give up everything I believe just because it suddenly looks like the bar code might work to my advantage.”

  Kayla glanced at his wrist and felt relieved to see no tattoo.

  “I admire that a lot,” she said. “I don’t believe in what the bar code stands for, but it would also work against me. To be against it when you would gain from it … that’s amazingly final level.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “But I couldn’t do it. No matter what I’d get from it, I’d feel like a prisoner.”

  “What happened when you said no?”

  “We had a huge fight. Dad said no son of his was going to drop to the bottom of society after everything Africans had done to lift themselves up. He said, ‘Get tattooed or don’t expect to live in this house’ — so I left. I’d heard about this place. When I was at a virtual reality site someone told me it was around here, so I drove straight up.”

  “Where are we?”

  “The place doesn’t have a name. It’s just a bunch of people who don’t want to be pushed around by Global-1. They live all over these woods. Some are tattooed, some aren’t. Nobody cares. They trade with one another for stuff. I got this job in the kitchen and I get paid with food and clothes so I can survive. It’s astral. I like it here.”

  “Where do you keep your car?” she asked.

  “I traded it for a cabin where I live.” He scowled
. “How did you know I’d left?”

  “I e-mailed you to warn you about Zekeal and Nedra, but you had gone. Your parents are freaked out. They’re looking for you.”

  Mfumbe shrugged. “I hope they don’t find me. I’m real happy here. What about Zekeal and Nedra?”

  She told him they’d joined Tattoo Generation. “Everything seemed to go crazy from the time I found out how Zekeal was betraying everyone, especially me.”

  Mfumbe seemed doubtful. “I can’t believe Zeke is the enemy. He and I were tight.”

  “Why else would he be a member of Tattoo Gen? I know for sure he is a member.”

  “I don’t know. But maybe there’s a reason.”

  They sat together for a moment without speaking. After a few minutes, he pulled a pack of peppermint gum from his shirt pocket and offered it to her.

  “Thanks,” she said, taking a piece.

  In the morning Kayla awoke snuggled in a warm sleeping bag. She blinked to bring the simple, neat room around her into focus. Two windows on either side of the wooden door let in soft morning light. Touching her forehead, she felt clean gauze and remembered Mfumbe dabbing her cuts with hydrogen peroxide and covering them.

  She wiggled from her sleeping bag, still clothed, and looked out the window. Outside, Mfumbe had built a fire and was cooking bacon in a pan. Last night when he’d led her back to his cabin, it had been too dark for her to see much. Now she noticed a picnic table with a bench on either side.

  “Morning,” he greeted her when she stepped outside. He offered her a plate of bacon and eggs. “How are you?”

  “Glad I ran into you,” she replied, smiling softly. “I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t.”

  He sat beside her on the bench and ate his eggs. “You picked a perfect place to hide. These people who live in these woods would never turn you in. It’s stellar the way you work together and support one another. It proves to me that bar code resisters can band together and make a difference. It reminds me of the American Revolution when people began to unite against the British.”

  “But they had leaders like Washington and Benjamin Franklin,” Kayla said.

  “We have Dave Young,” he replied.

  “What’s he been able to do?” she scoffed.

  “He’s still active. They haven’t shut Decode down yet.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed doubtfully. “I was thinking of heading up to find Eutonah.”

  “You know, there’s something we never told you — because I guess we didn’t want to freak you out,” he said. “When you contacted Eutonah, your site numbers never moved.”

  “But I saw her! She was totally real!”

  “I believe you. Eutonah is a real woman. I’ve heard of her. But I don’t think you knew of her before coming to our group. Did you?”

  “No. Do you think it means I’m crazy?”

  He laughed lightly. “Why would it mean that? I think you have a gift for psychic ability. We all use such a small part of our brains at any given time. Sometimes we use one part, sometimes another. I believe we’ll all eventually use our entire brain, or at least larger portions of it at once. But that will only happen if we’re allowed to evolve. Maybe psychic ability will be part of that evolution. And maybe Eutonah is more highly evolved, too — so the two of you were able to connect. That might also be the way you found your way to me, here in the woods.”

  Kayla had learned about evolution in school. She knew the theory that living things changed in order to adapt to their environment. People had once debated the theory, but by the year 2015 it had been accepted as fact.

  “What do you mean, if we’re allowed to evolve?” she asked him. “Don’t people and animals do that naturally over time?”

  “Not anymore,” he replied, finishing the last of his food. “Global-1 has lifted all bans on cloning. I believe that the reason they want everyone coded is to make it easy to decide who will be cloned and who won’t. Once people are reproduced just as they were, evolution stops. There’s no change. No adaptation. The human race won’t move forward. The brain will never be used at its full capacity.”

  “But what about designer genes?” Kayla asked. “Doesn’t that change people? They’ll be able to see better, run faster, hear better, and on and on.”

  “That’s true,” he agreed. “But it will be man-made evolution. People will change in ways scientists and the government think they should. Those ways might not be the changes we really need to make.”

  He picked up the plates they’d used. “Come on down to the stream with me. We can wash these dishes and keep talking.”

  They talked for the rest of the day as they picked blueberries in the woods. At six, Mfumbe left for work, leaving her alone. She passed the time by reading from his pile of books, using lantern light. When he returned just before dawn, she awoke long enough to see him crawl into the roll of old blankets on the floor. “Good night,” she said.

  “Night,” he mumbled. She tossed him her pillow. He tossed it back. “It’s okay. Use it.”

  Mfumbe gave her a pad for her sketching and one morning he returned from the Oasis with a pack of playing cards. They liked to play gin rummy, but mostly they talked.

  Mfumbe made so much sense to her. He had ideas about things she’d never considered. “We’ve been headed toward this bar code for years,” he said one night as they sat around their campfire. “First came the credit cards, then driver’s licenses as ID cards, then the face scanners, eye scanners, and fingerprint scanners, and those DNA chip implants. But I think the bar code is different.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because people wear it. It’s a sign of allegiance to Global-1 as well as an identifier and a genetic table.”

  “I guess that’s true,” she agreed.

  “Ever since that day we were discussing how genetic sequences are sometimes represented as bar codes, I’ve been thinking — if our genes determine who we are, and genes look like a bar code, then we already wear a bar code tattoo. Our genes are our own unique, personal bar code tattoo.”

  The next morning Kayla awoke earlier than usual. Mfumbe wasn’t there. He wasn’t in front making breakfast as usual, either.

  Kayla stepped into her boots and went outside. The forest was unnaturally still, except for one section about five yards away. A breeze blew the trees and bushes around and the colors seemed unusually vivid. She stepped toward it and a figure took form in front of her.

  It was Eutonah. The woman beckoned to her with her hand.

  As Kayla went closer, the image began to blur.

  She sensed movement in the forest. Footsteps. A dog barked. Turning toward the sound, her heart slammed into her chest.

  The woods were full of Globalofficers.

  Kayla ran, her heart pumping. “There she is!” a voice behind her shouted as she raced down to the stream, stumbling and weaving, but determined to reach Mfumbe. She found him crouched at the river’s edge washing some clothing. He jumped up when she crashed through the trees. “Globalcops,” she panted. “Everywhere!”

  He grabbed her hand and together they splashed into the stream. The barking dogs sounded nearer every second. She followed Mfumbe out the far side of the stream. “This way,” he said.

  The dogs dragged Globalofficers down to the water where Mfumbe had been washing. “They must have crossed,” a man shouted.

  Mfumbe led her to a tumbledown shed. There was a hatch door in the ground in front of it and she helped him pull it up by its handle. Kayla climbed down wooden stairs to the bottom. Mfumbe pulled the cover over the hole before joining her.

  “It’s an abandoned mine shaft,” he explained. “I found it one day while I was exploring.”

  Using the cold dirt wall as a guide, they made their way along a dark tunnel. “You should go back,” she said. “They’re not looking for you.”

  “They might be,” he replied. “My parents might have them looking for me. I’m a missing person. They might be taking in
everyone who lives in these woods for being uncoded.”

  “But you’re not wanted for a crime.”

  He took her hand. “Not having a code is a crime.”

  They followed the tunnel for what seemed like a long time. When they climbed out at the end they were still in the forest, but they couldn’t hear any dogs barking. “Listen, we’ve ditched them for now, but they know we’re around,” Mfumbe said. “We’d better keep moving.”

  He pulled a piece of rectangular black plastic with a monitor screen from his pocket. “A guy left this GPS in the Oasis yesterday. I was planning to give it back to him tonight. I guess it’s mine now. It’ll tell us exactly where we are and how to get where we’re going. It bounces a signal off some satellites floating in space. The question now is — where are we going?”

  “The Adirondack Mountains?” Kayla suggested. “I think that’s the best place.”

  “Probably,” he agreed. He pushed some buttons on the GPS and turned. “It looks like we’re going that way.”

  They walked through the woods for the rest of the morning and into the late afternoon. Around five o’clock they came out of the woods to the back of a large grocery warehouse. The back door of a truck was open and the two of them scrambled into the vehicle.

  “Soda and potato chips,” Kayla read the labels on the boxes stacked in the trucks. “It could be worse. It could have been beets or something.”

  The door behind them slammed shut. Kayla and Mfumbe looked at each other, unsure what to do. The truck might take them farther north. “What if it’s going south?” Kayla asked.

  Mfumbe took his GPS from his pants pocket. “We’ll know in a minute.”

  The engine started and they both stared at the GPS. “North,” Mfumbe said. “And right up the Superlink.”

  “Final level,” Kayla said, smiling up at him.