Death Series 08 - Death Blinks

by Tamara Rose Blodgett

“I so don't need this,” Tiff comments, eyeing the offending staircase. “Cyber tech but no elevators? No pulse?” She shakes her head.

  “Spot technology,” Uncle John murmurs. “The absence of some things seem almost purposeful.”

  They do. It's weird the way they have bots but paranormals are kept in “camps.” And the bots perform all the rudimentary tasks. And there are curfews.

  And mass graves of future humanity.

  My mind whirls. The cyborg mainframe is employing a sort of extinction process—of people.

  I want to say so, to explain my revelation to the group, but Mitchell and I are at the end of the procession, and everyone is already at the top flight of stairs. I'll have to remember to say something.

  “What are you thinking, Deegan?” Mitchell gives me a critical gaze, and I know I'm leaking some of my thoughts onto him. AftD is so much more intimate than just corpse raising.

  I'm thinking so many things. But my ideas are too deep for discussion right now. I need to get rid of my menstrual cleanser, change it out—get clean.

  I need food.

  Mitchell accepts my silence and takes my hand, tugging me up the stairs.

  I stop on number six, my right foot planted on the seventh tread. I sway where I stand. I blink, and my second eyelid can't even descend. Fatigue cripples me.

  I feel my body lifted in strong arms.

  Then I'm in Mitchell's cradle hold. He carries me effortlessly to the top of the flight of stairs.

  “Now that's my kind of transport,” Sophie says in an envious voice.

  My head rolls in her direction against Mitchell's muscular bicep, and I give her a weak smile.

  “I have two bathrooms,” Kim says as we stream into her apartment.

  Thank God.

  Mitchell sets me on my feet for the second time in a half hour directly before the bathroom, and all us girls cram in there.

  It doesn't take long to assess how primitive everything is. However, the best feature to the bathroom is the super-old tankless water heater mounted high on the wall abutting the ceiling.

  Unlimited hot water. Yay.

  The walk-in shower is of new construction, looking like a prototype for the next generations of showers we have in my world.

  Showers where you can bathe if you're a man, woman, animal, wheelchair bound, and if need be, more than one person. Unibathing.

  All of us strip while Kim goes into her bedroom and finds new clothing.

  Mom, Sophie, Tiff, and I stuff ourselves into the large shower, sharing shampoo and soap.

  I wash twice.

  The water going down the drain carries dirt, blood, and woodland debris.

  Mom uses a wide-tooth comb in an attempt to extract all the forest crap out of my hair, and finally shakes her head in resignation. “I don't know, Deegan—you might have to live with a more organic look for a little while. And no way on a braid.” She smiles.

  I feel so much better, I could sing, but I’ll miss the tidiness of my braided hair. “No biggie. I just don't want to be gross anymore.”

  Tiff stuffs a stick of bright-pink gum in her mouth. “I hear that. I had a case of crusty crotch to beat the band.”

  We stare at Tiff.

  Her eyebrows arch in clear amusement. “What? You guys were all flower-petal clean? Pfft.” Tiff steps out of the shower, grabbing a towel, and whips her wet hair upside down. She begins toweling off then wraps the towel on her head, twisting it into a loose turban-style knot at the crown of her head.

  She moves behind the shower wall and sits on the commode, figuring out the cleanser. “I miss tampons,” she says after a few minutes of rustling around.

  “Those are gross,” I comment, wrinkling my nose. At the sink, I use the single new toothbrush we all have to share. I remember the part about tampon history in the part of Bodily Function Accessories perfectly. Yuck just doesn't cover it—and the damage to the environment! Toxic shock syndrome? Yeah, great product, douches. And don't get me even started on those.

  We rinse out our cleansers and reinsert. Mine is easy to put in, but Mom, Tiff, and Sophie have a few choice words about theirs.

  I grin. Must suck to be tech-challenged. All of us teen girls were taught very thoroughly on the menstrual cleansers. After all, any of us who had the potential to have babies needed to know the fundamentals inside and out.

  A soft knock sounds at the door.

  “Come in,” Sophie says, hugging the towel tighter around herself.

  Kim comes in, gives us a look, and smiles. “Feel better? You guys smell better.”

  Gee, no kidding? I nod, and there are low sounds of general assent around the room.

  She flops a big pile of clothes on a chair in the corner. “You'll have to mill through this stuff.” I can tell Kim wants to say something more.

  I search her face for a moment. “What?” I ask quietly.

  “This was mine and my brother's place.” She looks down for a second then lifts her chin, seeming to draw fortification from inside herself. “That's why I have a double apartment.”

  I had wondered. The space seemed big.

  She blinks her eyelids rapidly, and I think she's keeping tears at bay. Kim inhales deeply. “Anyways, some of his things are in that pile, and some are mine. Use whatever fits best. The rest of his larger sized stuff is in the other bathroom for the guys.”

  Her swallow is so hard I hear it.

  I walk over to her and pat her on the back. She's short, like me, and I decide she has the prettiest eyes I've ever seen. The only compassionate pair on bot world so far.

  “I'm sorry that your brother's dead,” I say softly.

  Kim shakes her head fast. “Not dead.”

  Mom’s and Sophie's heads simultaneously jerk in her direction, hands half-buried in the new pile of clothes.

  “Then what?” Tiff asks. Not to be mean, but to be clear. It's just her way.

  Kim wrings her hands, looking everywhere but at us.

  “He has been made Compliant.”

  My heart ticks faster, my mouth going dry. What the hell does compliant actually mean?

  I ask that. None of us thought to question it before. What did we care? I mean—we're not from here. We're blinking back home soon.

  So what if this world is messed up?

  I gulp back my grief over the memory of the little onesʼ bodies, decomposed to just so much bone and rot. Unraisable.

  My hand thumps in time with my accelerated heartbeats where the bone pierced the pad. Pax healed the wound, but it’s not forgotten.

  Bot world is desperately wrong, but it's not our faults. We have our own world to deal with.

  “Compliant means when you cross over.”

  “Cross over?” Mom asks, the beginnings of horror edging her words.

  Mom's meaning is clear to me. A thousand pieces of an elusive puzzle come together, and I lose my appetite completely.

  Kim doesn't even have to explain. I already know what she's going to say.

  “He's a cyborg now.”

  “Compliance isn't really compliance in the classical sense,” Sophie says in a hushed voice of perfect understanding. “It's body-snatching.”

  Kim nods sadly. “Yes. That's why it was so important to avoid grid detection.”

  I shiver.

  It would've been bad if we'd tripped their trigger.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Paxton

  I place my hand on Dee's neck and give a soft squeeze. My poor sis, she's just not cut out for the stupidness that has become our lives.

  First, we escape that Reflective world. Then I toss us back at bot world, where we get fucking lucky—there's no other way to look at that—and meet up with the single decent person in all of bot world.

  But now I'm stuck with hangers-on. I have to get Kim and Ron the Null out of here.

  I'm lucky that Tiff hasn't grilled me about where Bry landed yet, though I can feel he's on our homeworld somewhere, along with Archer. Probably too m
uch for Tiff to own mentally now.

  I shift my gaze to my healing handiwork on the Null dude's beak and see that it's still kind of crooked.

  Dammit.

  Gramps did a number on him. But seriously? Ron said something about Gramps thinking with his dick and wham.

  I chuckle.

  Gramps is pretty much a reactor. Like a nuclear reactor.

  Not that we have that toxic shit for energy anymore. Talk about poisoning the planet. Now that's something for the enviro-emos to get fired up about. They did, and now we use our nearly endless natural gas supply, instead of burning it off to get at fossil fuel.

  Dumb-ass concept.

  Dee gives me a grateful look, and I pat her neck and drop my hand. We're totally different, but our bond goes beyond the sibling one—we blink. We raise corpses.

  I snicker behind my hand. Or convicts, in Dee's case.

  She punches my arm. Feels like a gnat bite. “Don't you dare laugh at me, Paxton.”

  She got a lot of my thought process through the old telepathy pipeline. I look directly into her scowl. “I'm laughing with you. Just thinking about all the prisoners you could raise here.”

  She shrugs, and I notice some crap in her hair. Leaves? Huh. But she smells a helluva lot better. ʼCourse—so do I. The only one who didn't have a shit ton of BO was Mitch. Zombies rot. And if they're not rotting, they don't smell like anything.

  Clyde couldn't shower. Things would come off and clog the drain. Instead, he lounges in the corner, fingers laced and placed behind his head, feet crossed at the ankle as he surveys our group. He’s relaxed, like our asses aren't plugged into a cyberworld channeling bots above humans.

  “Okay humor aside, how ya feeling?” I ask Dee. Because the fact that her sucky cycle thought it was a good plan to make an appearance in the Kill World.

  “Cramps.”

  “Oh.”

  Her dark-green eyes flash at me. “You asked.”

  “Yeah.”

  Kim grabs what looks like everything from her cupboards and puts a ton of food on a banquet-sized table.

  I imagine her brother and whoever they hung with eating there. I think of Dee telling me about her brother not needing food anymore because he's a cyborg.

  I shudder. Creeper bots.

  “My turn,” Kim says before making her way to the bathroom the women used.

  She enters the bathroom and shuts the door to take her own shower.

  “Let's talk about her behind her back,” Tiff announces, glancing at the closed door.

  “That's not very nice,” Ron comments, working over the brim of his ten gallon in a nervous-tick kind of way.

  “Go ahead,” Dad says, drawing Mom in against his side.

  Tiff flips Ron off. “Sit and spin, pal. You're here by our sufferance alone.”

  Gramps puts up his palm, and Tiff high-fives it.

  “Fuck it,” Jonesy says. “You guys discuss whatever deep subject matter you have in mind while I mow through the food.”

  Sophie groans, but Jonesy ignores her, tearing open five bags of chips and a bunch of chocolate-and-white sandwich wafer things called Oreoes.

  Weird name.

  “These look interesting.” Jonesy sniffs then takes a tentative bite. “Love it.” He gives a little moan, scooping up five more. “Different. Fatty.” He waggles his brows.

  Sophie gets interested and grabs one.

  We listen to the shower turn on behind the closed bathroom door.

  “Where's the moo?” Jonesy asks, and a black crumb falls off his lip and onto the table. He frowns, then his face brightens. “And beer for later?”

  Disgusting. Beer and milk mentioned. Together.

  “She doesn't have beer, ass,” Tiff says.

  “No Tiff, is the PMS a thing for ya right now?”

  Tiff rolls her eyes. “That's before your cycle, Jones. I'm on it now.”

  Jonesy scrunches his eyes and puckers his lips. “I need more fuel to undo the snarl of your words. Besides, the Jonester doesn't pay much attention to the cycle part. It's the non-cycle part that's interesting.”

  The girls all appear to die, except Tiff.

  “Right,” Tiff replies in a droll word.

  Jonesy sucks down a few more of the Oreos and begins to suck the crumbs off each finger.

  I walk over to the fridge and scope a half gallon of milk. Personally, I find the drinking of cow's milk a reason to spew chunks.

  But I walk over to the table and plop the glass jug down for Jonesy.

  Uncle John frowns, turning the jar over in his palm and looking for the recycling logo.

  “Everything's glass in the fridge,” I comment in explanation, having noticed the lack of other storage material.

  His eyes sharpen. “Perhaps plastics have been foregone in favor of the completely biodegradable glass.”

  Or they all go to the construction of bot-anity.

  “That concept is more logical. In my day, there was no plastic. Food was always stored in glass. Tasted better, too.” Clyde looks around the room as though waiting for a challenge.

  A small chunk of scalp flops over as he moves his head, and a tuft of hair hangs distractingly upside down like a half open can lid.

  Sophie gives the piece of dangling flesh a glance then turns away, looking a little green.

  No dissenters voice their bullshit because we're all too busy shoving food in our mouths by the handful. I go back to the fridge and grab all the food that's left. Deli meat, cheese, and a jar of pickles land on the table, along with a carbonated drink called Mountain Dew Throwback.

  First ingredient: sugar.

  “Oh, this is so bad for you kids,” Mom says in despair. She twists a metal corrugated cap on one of them and takes a sip from the rolled-glass top. “Divine.”

  “Ali would be having convulsions right now.” Gramps says with restrained glee, tossing back half a bottle. A loud belch erupts from his mouth half a second later. “Excuse me, folks.”

  Gramps doesn't seem very concerned by manners.

  “Like an ʻexcuse meʼ even works like that half-barf burp you just sounded off. Pfft.” Tiff carefully sets her gum on the edge of a napkin and digs into the barbecue chips. “So about Kim?” she says, eyes on Gramps.

  His narrow on her like smoky sapphires. “What about her?”

  “She's Brad's second cousin once removed or something. And we've picked up Ron here.”

  I look at Ron. He's a lanky, lean hard-looking dude who's pretty beat up.

  “They'll kill me if I stay now. Or”—he shivers—“make me Compliant.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “let's discuss Compliance.” I look to Dee. After a heartbeat's pause, she talks.

  When the shower turns off and only crumbs remain where the food was, silence permeates the room.

  Finally, Clyde says, “This world is even more dangerous than ours.”

  That's a no-shitter. What was I thinking when I blinked us here? Oh yeah, I was getting us out of the last tight spot with those fuckers who were trying to recruit me. Nah, that was the first time. The last time was getting Dee away from the Brad of this world. I just keep coming back here. Gonna have to find a new parallel. This one blows.

  And I'm not interested in being the new Graysheets version of AftD puppeteer. No thanks, dickbags.

  “I believe, having seen the infanticide”—John glances at Tiff but her head is bowed, hands clasped, as though she refuses to acknowledge the awful mass grave—“that they are splicing and dicing humans with cyborgs. In a hundred years, this planet won't be a planet of humanity, but one of cyborg-human hybrids.”

  “How could things get like that. How is it we notice and the humans who live here are complacent?”

  “One.” Gramps holds up a finger. “We've got a fresh set of peepers on this business.” He scans our faces. “Two, people here don't seem to be on fire to have kids. And why would they? The bots do all the dirty work. People can take it easy, not work for anything, and just get b
y with their credits and fill in wherever the bots don't need to be. And Thompson Enterprises has the zombies by the balls—”

  “Or vagina,” Tiff interjects neutrally, and I about spit out my pop.

  Gramps smirks. “Right. Anyway, they need those AftDs to keep the zombie trade going, but the other humans? No.”

  “But it's like vampires,” Dee says suddenly, and I have to remind myself she's a numbered IQ because, damn, this switch in topic makes no sense.

  John nods.

  “If there were vampires,” she begins.

  “That's horseshit,” Jonesy says, stuffing the thirteenth Oreo into his mouth.

  “Jones, quiet,” Dad says, flipping his palm toward Dee.

  Mitch shoots a dirty look at Jonesy like a speeding bullet.

  “Anyway”—a small frown forms between her eyes—“say there's ten percent vampires in a world, and they can only live on human blood.”

  We wait, and she goes on. “If they just feed indiscriminately on all humans, pretty soon their diet is depleted and they die because there's no more food.”

  Vampires. What bullshit. I give an uneasy look-around, thinking about how bots seemed pretty out there, too. Until they were in our faces.

  “Essentially,” John says, clearly picking up on her thought process, “humans are still needed in some number for certain things.”

  “Like the zombie whoring,” Sophie says in disgust.

  I snort. “Yeah, I'd like to see a bot raise a dead guy.”

  “I'm not sure any of this matters,” Mom says. “Pax will blink us home soon, and then we don't have to deal with the bot world.”

  Oh sure. So easy. Ask Archer and Bry how that went. They're probably getting their asses paddled by the handless sanction cops.

  That makes a laugh pop out of my mouth like an untimely burp.

  Dee gives me a strange look.

  I can't keep it together. Funny visuals, Dee.

  Nothing is funny about this, Pax. You and Dad always laugh when everything is serious. Stop being stupid.

  I roll my eyes, and she folds her arms, glaring at me.

  “Sounds simple,” Tiff says. “Except I want to get knocked up.”

  We turn to Tiff, giving her open-mouthed surprise. Sometimes Aunt Tiff says shit that sucks the oxygen out of the universe.