21st Century Dead

by Christopher Golden

  So I avoided the shelters and kept to the sidewalks, scavenging what I could from the garbage bins of the big chain restaurants that overpopulated the Color Sector. I knew they didn’t dose their food with anything stronger than weapons-grade monosodium glutamate.

  “Stop blocking the way, kid.”

  The sandpaper-rough voice was hardly in my ear before the man was gone, having elbowed past me without waiting for my response. I always had a hard time maintaining my watch at rush hour. That’s when the sidewalks became extrajammed with multihued people trying to get through the Chroma as quickly as possible on their way out to the more staid neighborhoods of the Color Sector. The influx of people made it hard for me to remain motionless in front of B-Suits-R-Us and I let go of the metal bar the store provided in order to keep any window-shoppers from getting dragged away with the sidewalk.

  Letting myself get sucked into the swirl of people, I relaxed my body and calmed my breathing.

  Sometimes I got a little claustrophobic in the crush of colored jumpsuits and I’d found that concentrating on my breathing could get me through the worst of it. I would count to eight on the intake of one breath, then do the same thing on its exhale. It shut down the panic before it could build to a crescendo.

  No one had taught me how to read or how to use basic mathematics, but that hadn’t mattered because I’d picked it up myself. For as long as I could remember, I’d been able to read the flashing neon signs that hung on the buildings of the Chroma like infesting ticks, leaching energy as if it were blood.

  Numbers had come as easily.

  More than words, I liked numbers. Infinite and immutable, they were the building blocks of the universe. Everywhere I looked, numbers dominated, making me feel like there was some stability to my unstable world.

  Having calmed myself down with the counting, I was able to open my eyes again and let the numbers go. The crush of sweating human bodies was still thick around me, but I ignored it now and went with the flow.

  For the first time, I saw that I was wedged in among a group of Green jumpsuits. I counted seven of them, talking and joking among themselves. I figured they’d just come from the Municipal Building and were heading home for the night, but then they started moving to the right, grabbing on to the metal bar in front of the Strip and Dine, leaving me a little more space on the moving sidewalk.

  I decided that the Green jumpsuits had the right idea.

  Time to get off.

  I reached out for the side of a passing building and swung myself off the moving sidewalk, my feet touching solid, stationary ground for the first time in hours. Mostly I stuck to the moving sidewalks and the first alleyways off the grid because they were safer. Going deeper into the grid brought you to the tenements that made up the majority of the Chroma. Anything could happen out there: too many poor Red jumpsuits, too many illicit Black jumpsuits running matter blasters, drugs, and other illegal substances.

  For the most part, there were no MPs. Occasionally they would leave the safety of the moving sidewalks and venture out into the wilds of the tenements, but it was a rare sight.

  Behind the buildings, in the first alleyway, was where the garbage bins were kept. This was my hunting ground, where I did my scavenging, and where I chose to sleep. There was a whole community of Purple and Pink jumpsuits back here, a few Orange jumpsuits, too, but I tried to keep to myself.

  No one was your friend in the Chroma.

  * * *

  I’d gotten off the moving sidewalk just past the Strip and Dine, the steak-and-legal-prostitution joint the Green jumpsuits had gone into. Head down, I walked past the side of the building until I came to the first alleyway off the grid. Here, I made a left and entered a world full of garbage.

  As far as the eye could see were giant, square metal bins overflowing with refuse that got collected only once a week by hover scow. In this part of the Chroma, the garbagemen came on Mondays, so by Friday the mass of crap was already piled into minimountains that threatened to topple at the slightest touch.

  I passed two women in Purple jumpsuits inside one of the bins, collecting moldy chocolate muffins from the Pain-du-Pain chain bakery and stuffing them into a tattered mesh bag with a golden-eagle emblem on it. They ignored me, intent on scavenging muffins.

  I did the same and kept walking, stuffing my hands into the pockets of my jumpsuit. I would hit the garbage bins later, but now I wanted to think. And walking was how I thought best.

  Leaving the women behind me, I crossed over into the next alleyway. It was dimmer here, the garbage so high it blocked out the light, but I didn’t mind. I liked the feeling of being hidden—that was until I felt a pair of strong arms wrap around my torso and drag me into the folds of waiting refuse.

  The smell was tremendous. Like something had died, gotten back up, and then died all over again. I gagged as the stench coated my nostrils and the back of my tongue.

  “Don’t move.”

  The voice was guttural, the consonants hard and the vowels stringy.

  The arms around my torso were muscular and very, very cold. I could feel the length of the man’s body pressing against me—I assumed it was a man from the depth of the voice—and this made me feel even colder.

  I started to shiver.

  “I told you not to move.”

  “I can’t help it,” I said. “You’re so cold.”

  The man growled, the sound scaring me until I realized it was a laugh.

  “If I let you go,” the man asked, “will you hold still?”

  I thought about the request for a moment, then nodded.

  The man released me and I remained where I was, not moving a muscle, the shivers slowing and then coming to a complete stop as the heat returned to my body.

  Though the man was beside me, he stood in the shadow of the garbage bin so that I couldn’t see his face. He was taller than me by a foot and bulkier in the middle, but his legs were thin. The light was too dim to make out the color of his jumpsuit, but I figured he was a Purple or an Orange from the size of him.

  “I’ve been watching you,” the man said.

  I didn’t answer.

  He cleared his throat, the grotesque sound of sticky phlegm being sucked out of his nasal passage killing the silence.

  “You’re very obvious: the store, the jumpsuit, the store, the jumpsuit. Single-minded, I would call you.”

  Still I didn’t respond.

  “I need your help,” the man said in his gravelly rasp. “And I’ll make you a deal for it.”

  I was too stunned by the turn of events to answer him properly.

  “Don’t think about it. Just say yes.”

  The smell was getting worse, making my eyes water, making me want to throw up the mushy brown-rice roll I’d eaten that morning.

  “What’s the deal?” I heard myself asking.

  The man growled—laughed—again.

  “I knew you were a little weasel.”

  I didn’t take offense.

  The man sighed and I could feel the tension go out of his body, tension I hadn’t even realized was there until it had gone.

  “A Black jumpsuit for your help.”

  My heart stopped beating. I couldn’t breathe. It was as if my greatest hope had been plucked straight from my chest and presented back to me on a titanium platter.

  “What do I have to do?” I asked.

  There was a moment of silent anticipation as the man reeled me in.

  “Steal something for me.”

  * * *

  The man said it was called casing the joint, but it wasn’t very different from what I’d already been doing with my time. Only now my goal had morphed. I wasn’t chasing a Black jumpsuit anymore; a Black jumpsuit was chasing me.

  I stood on the moving sidewalk, watching the triangular store.

  Laguna, the girl who’d been there for five months and twenty-seven days of her six-month stint, was behind the counter, reading a book. Like many of the store’s employees, she and
I hadn’t become very close, but she tolerated my presence, never yelling at me when I skulked into the store and looked at the glass case full of vials—all the ones on display were legal, the illicit stuff was kept in crates in the storage room—and generally made a nuisance of myself.

  I knew from my hours of watching the store that Laguna was a user. She was addicted to one of the elixirs, a special potion that made you irresistible to the opposite sex. She was using it to trap one guy in particular, a handsome Yellow jumpsuit that came to the store every night at closing to pick her up. From what I could tell, she’d taken a loan out against her hazard pay so she could keep up with her habit. But I got the feeling that once her time at the store was up, life wasn’t going to be so nice. A Red jumpsuit, she obviously wasn’t rich, and after her money and stock of elixir ran out, she was going to be in serious, serious trouble.

  Girls like Laguna, beautiful girls with expensive habits, usually ended up at high-class places like Strip and Dine. That lasted for a few years, and then after they’d gotten too old and saggy to tempt the men they serviced, it would be tenement city: low-rent brothels where the women were valued only by the number of holes a client could ram himself into.

  I worried that Laguna was three days away from learning just how cruel the Chroma could be. Though I felt bad for her and her addiction, my chance to enter the store hinged on her need to get out of the store as quickly as possible so she could hook up with her Yellow jumpsuit. This was her weakness and I was going to exploit it to my full advantage.

  Twenty minutes before the triangular store closed, it was time for the masses to go home. In the middle of rush-hour pedestrian traffic I took the Fourth Block Bridge over to the opposite moving sidewalk. Though I felt claustrophobic as I entered the transparent tube that led to the bridge and the cacophony of sweaty, rainbow-hued bodies that would press against me once I was inside it, I knew it was a necessary evil.

  I did my counting trick, the numbers racing through my head. Once I was free of the bridge and the crush of bodies diminished, I was able to relax a little. Being out of the enclosed tube made me feel a lot better. I could breathe again.

  I let the moving sidewalk ferry me along, reaching out to grab the metal bar in front of the store only so I could pause and look through the plate-glass window.

  There were no customers inside.

  I slid my fingers through the aluminum door handle and pulled it to me. Laguna was so engrossed in her book that she didn’t even notice my entrance until the four silver bells above the door frame chimed, alerting her to my presence.

  She looked up, startled out of her imagination.

  “Yes?” she said, a smile enhancing the curve of her lips

  Then she noticed it was me and not a paying customer. The smile vanished.

  “We’re closing soon, so…”

  She let the sentence dangle, waiting for me to finish it.

  “There’s a man out there, looking at the store,” I said, adding a touch of fear to my tone—just like I’d practiced.

  Laguna set her book down, though her fingers still held on to its thick, white pages.

  “Whaddya mean?”

  I swallowed.

  “He looks real bad. Like a…”

  I paused here for dramatic effect.

  “Like a zombie.”

  Laguna’s face went white, her fingers starting to tremble so badly, the book shook.

  It was a well-known fact that the elixirs used to create vampires, zombies, werewolves, and the like were highly unstable. Get in their way and things could turn ugly fast. There’d been a spate of serial killings a few years earlier—dismembered human body parts riddled with teeth marks and fingernail gouges, left to rot inside garbage bins all over the Chroma—that had finally been linked to a bad batch of zombie elixir. When the MPs finally caught up with the culprits, they had already returned to their human form, but the elixir had done something weird to their minds, had convinced them that they were already the walking dead and that the only way to survive was to keep themselves chock-full of fresh, human flesh. Their apartments were like charnel houses, full of their half-eaten kills. The whole episode had spooked the populace of the Chroma so badly that even the mention of zombies could still set people’s teeth on edge.

  Needless to say, the closer I got to thirty, the more I found myself empathizing with the poor creatures … we were all members of a unique tribe: the walking dead.

  “Where is he?” she said, coming out from behind the counter and standing beside me at the front door.

  I pointed out through the plate-glass front window, my finger spearing a tall man in a Black jumpsuit who was standing in front of the Strip and Dine. He had his back to us, but upon Laguna’s arrival he turned around and it was immediately apparent that he wasn’t a zombie. Seeing this, Laguna relaxed, reaching out and ruffling my hair.

  “You’re seeing things, kid.”

  Shaking her head, she turned away from me and went back across the room, sliding back into her spot behind the counter. Disarmed now, she picked her book back up and started to read again.

  I continued to stand where I was, watching the man across the street—a total stranger I’d picked out of the crowd—as he finally went into the Strip and Dine and disappeared.

  I didn’t feel guilty about upsetting her. I’d scared her just enough that in her relief she’d relaxed any suspicions she’d held about me or what I was doing there.

  I looked up at the clock on the wall above Laguna’s head. Two minutes until time to close. Laguna was back inside her book, eyes glazed as she ate up the words in front of her.

  It was now or never.

  I pushed open the front door so that the bells began to tinkle, the noise from outside filling the room.

  “Bye, Laguna!” I called out.

  She didn’t even look up from her book, just raised a hand in farewell.

  But I didn’t go through the front door. Instead, as it slowly began to crawl back to its frame, I tiptoed over to the other door—the one that led to the storage room—and gently eased it open, slipping inside just as the front door clicked into place.

  From my time with Demeter, I knew the storage room was stacked with boxes, but without the light on, the darkness was absolute. I could see nothing.

  Silence from the adjoining room. My heart raced inside my chest as I waited for Laguna to realize what I’d done and come kick me out.

  Nothing happened. And then I heard it. The sound that assured me I was safe.

  A soft rustling of paper as Laguna turned the page of her book.

  I didn’t have to wait much longer after that. As I’d hoped, Laguna didn’t linger. Closing time came and I heard her turn off the lights and lock up, the front door closing softly on a heated embrace with her Yellow jumpsuit. I gave it ten minutes, a good margin of error, in case Laguna forgot something and came back unexpectedly. I did this by counting to six hundred, using that time to let my eyes adjust to the darkness. When I hit five hundred ninety-nine, I let out a long breath and started to move.

  The man had told me the exact location of the vials he wanted me to steal, but getting to them proved harder than I’d expected. I wasn’t worried about tripping any alarms—one afternoon Demeter had unwittingly told me that none of the motion sensors or cameras were hooked up to anything, just there for show—but maneuvering in the darkness was not easy.

  Using my hands, I found the metal wall and began to follow it, letting it guide me to the other side of the room. I was nervous, worried about getting caught, but there was also something exhilarating about the whole endeavor. I had never done anything illegal before. Never so much as filched an apple, but here I was, burgling a store.

  At the end of the wall, where I would’ve run into the counter if I’d been in the main room, I squatted down and let my hands skim across the plush fiber of the carpet. The man had told me to look for a loose carpet tile, but no matter where I placed my fingers, I found nothing. Aft
er a few minutes of frustrated searching, I started to get scared. If I was caught stealing, my life would be worthless.

  Worse than worthless.

  Over. What time I had left would run out instantly.

  My mind started to spin. If I wasn’t going to find the hiding place, should I just steal some of the vials from the counter in the other room and then try to sell them?

  I had no black-market connections, nor would I know how to go about getting any. I would probably get fleeced by any of the tenement lowlifes I went to for help, putting me back at square one. Besides, there was a part of me that was scared of the man who’d offered me a Black jumpsuit. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he would come after me if I reneged on the deal we’d made.

  The smell alone had been incentive enough for me to say yes. I couldn’t imagine the man’s stench covering me, overwhelming me as he wrapped his hands around my throat and squeezed the life out of me. I realized I would do almost anything not to incur his wrath, and that included finding the loose tile and getting what he wanted.

  I felt the triangular walls closing in on me, the power of the antiparallelogram working to overwhelm me, screw up my mind, so that I didn’t know what I wanted anymore. If I let it get inside me, it would be over. I would reveal myself and that would be the end. The police would come and take me away.

  And that’s when I discovered it. Right as I started hyperventilating and having heart palpitations. Right as my mind went numb with fear.

  I dug my fingers between the carpet tile and the one next to it, prying the loose one up and flipping it over so it was out of my way. Instead of a stone floor, my hands grazed metal: a ring that I slid to attention and pulled upward, a square of the subfloor coming with it.

  I desperately needed light. I thought about turning on the fluorescent overheads, but talked myself out of it.

  I closed my eyes.

  I dropped my hand into the hole in the floor, extending my fingers like tentacles. The metal box was exactly where the man had said it would be. I reached in with my other hand and brought the metal square out of its hiding place. It weighed very little and was the size and shape of a kid’s jewelry box.