Drugs proved unreliable, for them or for anyone—antidepressants could help with day-to-day anxieties, but held no power over the hopelessness of a world that hadn't seen a live birth in five years. Neuroscientists had discovered a means to artificially suppress or stimulate the amygdala, hippocampus, and other parts of the brain to control emotional response, and the government offered the chip—in reality, a network of chips implanted throughout the brain—to anyone who wanted it. Results looked promising, and ever more people signed up until only a few holdouts in any given community refused the treatment.
It didn't take years for volunteer treatment to become mandatory. Unpredictable and violent, the un-chipped presented a danger to civilized society. They had to be treated for the good of all.
Back in their mountain retreat, his mother and Sasha worked with an underground movement to resist forced chipping. Uninterested in their politics and bored of always being cooped up, Barry had run down to the nearest town to score whatever booze he could dig up from the zoned-out chippers' basements, and stole a car to get home. He floored it when a cop drove up behind him and he went off the road and hit a telephone pole.
He remembered struggling against their professional insistence—and their handcuffs—up until the moment the needle went into his neck.
And he remembered calmly walking the calm-faced men in suits through how to get to their house, how to disable the security system, and where they were likely to find his mother and sister so that they might calm them too.
***
Janice shook her head, chewing and swallowing the bite of her apple before replying.
“No. If you try to escape they'll kill you. They call it 'aggressive noncompliance.' Nobody gets out of here except in a body bag.”
“That's absurd,” Barry said. Three weeks in “the yard” and he'd managed to go only the past two days without breaking down into hysterical sobbing more than once or twice. He didn't understand these people and their weary resignation; he just knew he had to find his sister.
“There's no such thing as absurd anymore.”
“No, I guess not. But if Sasha's alive, I have to find her.”
Janice smiled, and this time he recognized the beauty in it. Ninety-two years old, she'd been one of the last to give birth to a viable child, a son she'd had chipped at six years old because that's what you did to the un-chipped. He stayed with her until a heart attack took him on his sixty-second birthday ten years earlier; she grieved for him suddenly and passionately in an elevator a decade later.
“You can't know she's out there.”
“No, but if she were chipped I'd have seen it. I've—I've got a good memory for numbers, always have. Her social security number never came across my desk. Not once, ever.”
“It's a big world. You can't have seen them all.”
“Two five four, seven six, three one five seven.”
A grunt, possible acknowledgement that he'd pulled hers from his memory.
“I'm going home. I know how to get there. I just need to get out of here.”
She pinned him with a hard stare. “Aggressive noncompliance.”
“There has to be a way.”
Her head dropped into her hands, rubbed her face before looking up at him, fingertips peeling down her eyelids into a gross caricature. “These people are emotionless. Don't you understand what that means?” Sitting up, she grabbed his hands and squeezed them. “They don't get bored or antsy or horny, they don't get distracted. They just guard us and eat and sleep until they die of old age. That's it. They have nothing better to do, because they don't want to do anything else.”
“There has to be a way. What about the garbage?”
She quirked an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“The trash has to leave here somehow.”
“Compactor. Messy.”
Hopelessness squeezed his heart. “What, then? There has to be something.”
She sighed, long and melodramatic, before letting go of his hands. “Let me talk to some people. There might be a way.”
For the first time in his adult life, a glimmer of hope burned in his chest. He closed his eyes.
“Thank you.”
***
The police had come back to him with a report: no sign of his family at the mountain hideout.
He gave them their old address, before the Long Winter, and their new address after, plus his mother's work and Sasha's old daycare provider. A thousand questions later they released him, sent him to training for his new job. He never got an update on them, and until he'd shorted it had never occurred to him to wonder.
***
Janice ate her canned spaghetti with gusto, slurping the pasta into her mouth to mash it apart with her dentures. Her companions, three men he'd only met in passing but who treated her with old fondness, ate theirs with similar flair. Barry looked down at the limp noodles and runny, pink sauce pooled beneath them, a tomato-and-vegetable-protein derivative he'd eaten countless times without complaint, and his stomach churned.
“You must be hungrier than I am.” He pushed the plate away.
Janice pushed it back. “No, no. Eat it, and all of it. Now.”
“I'm not hungry.”
Her companions scowled. The shriveled, bald man to her left pushed up his thick glasses and stared down his nose at them both. “You didn't tell him, did you?”
“I didn't.”
Barry twirled a bundle of soppy noodles onto his fork and shoved them into his mouth. “Told me what?” he said around the wad of pasta.
“We drugged your spaghetti.”
He choked, then swallowed.
“What?”
She twirled up another bite. “Romeo and Juliet ploy. You want out, we're getting you out.” Another forkful went into her mouth.
“So, I'm going into a coma?”
“For a day, maybe two. They never pay much attention to the bodies when they get a mass suicide. Just toss them into a tarpaulin and haul them to the dump. This was basically your idea, so chow down.”
“My—mass suicide?” He brightened, and plowed through another forkful. “You're coming with me?”
She patted his hand. “No, dear. We're not coming with you. There's nothing for us out there. We're just…”
“The diversion,” the bald man finished for her, slurping up the last noodle and wiping up the last of the sauce with his finger.
“What… what's in your pasta?”
“Ground peach and cherry pits. Should be lethal in… minutes.”
A python constricted his chest, his breath staccato explosions that didn't draw in enough air. “You can't! It's—”
Janice coughed, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. Swooning, she fell against the man next to her.
“Wow. Fast.” His eyes bugged out in alarm before he slumped forward onto the table.
Barry tried to stand, spun, and landed face-down on the bench. He reached out across the table for Janice's limp hand, but lost consciousness before he touched it.
***
Darkness.
He fumbled for his light, touched cold flesh, recoiled.
Breath came in panicked jerks, and brought with it the sharp, throat-burning stench of bodily fluids and death. Woozy eddies drowned the world.
Squirming against the slick, stiffened meat of his companions, he lashed out against the thick, rubbery blanket that choked off air and light.
Fingers brushed metal. He followed the rough line, found the edge, and dug his fingernail into it. He gasped as the zipper parted, at the gust of warm, fetid air and the sudden pain in his finger. It pulsed, red in the dying sunlight, the nail pulled back and out of the flesh. He put it in his mouth, sucked on it, and moaned when he looked down, clenching his teeth around the top of his knuckle to muffle the sound.
Four bodies lay in the bag with him, naked flesh slicked with shit and vomit, faces twisted into agonized rictuses frozen in place by rigor mortis. Janice leered at the night sk
y, dead eyes glittering under the moonlight, toothless mouth a final indignity—the police had taken her dentures along with her clothes. Had his companions killed themselves for him, or had they used him as an excuse to end their wait? Did it matter? He scrambled for purchase, putting his arms on things he didn't want to think too hard about, and pushed, kicking with his legs to free his lower body from the tangle.
Old bones creaked. Withered muscles strained.
His leg came free with a wet sucking noise and he erupted from the bag. The world spun too much to stay on his hands and knees. Gasping, he collapsed face down on the heaped refuse. He wept, for the obvious, callous inevitability of it. The police had dropped their bodies in the dump with the rest of the garbage.
It took a while—minutes or hours, he didn't know—for the world to stop its relentless spin, settling into a queasy knot in his stomach.
He clambered down the mess, past old appliances and furniture, the remains of entire houses and buildings dumped for lack of anything useful to do with them—reduce, reuse, recycle, save the planet, conserve fossil fuels; all of it had been rendered pointless by the Long Winter and the solution to it, Nyloxx, loose in the soil.
Goosebumps pricked at his skin; not the chill of winter, but a cool summer breeze across his wet, bare skin. Nose wrinkling at his own stench, he found an old throw pillow and tore off the cover, using the coarse fabric to wipe off the worst of the grime and moist decay.
He pulled a plaid dress shirt and newish jeans from an old dresser and elsewhere scored a pair of black leather dress shoes, but put none of it on. Creeping up under cover of heaped garbage, he tried the door to the trailer by the entrance and found it unlocked; in the age of the regulator, no one had a reason to steal. He let himself in, washed up as best he could in the bathroom sink, and put on the scavenged clothes.
A wraith stared out of the mirror. Gray hair wild, chin a riot of scruffy gray whiskers, eyes sunken and haunted. No one would mistake him for chipped, but he didn't have a razor or even a comb. He wet his hands and patted down his hair, called it good enough, and stumbled out into the night.
He followed the stark white streetlights to town, a mindless little village consisting of a cafeteria and three office buildings surrounded by largely automated farms, their GPS-controlled combines and auto-harvesters working in the dark to feed a dwindling populace. Nine cars sat on Main Street, and he had to laugh. An ancient Tesla XVII sat under a light, the streamlined four-seater an updated clone of the model he'd stolen six decades earlier.
A raucous noise echoed down the street, a ragged cry from a throat unused for laughter. He clamped his hand over his mouth. Hurrying before anyone investigated, he opened the door, slipped inside and hammered the button with his thumb. The lights clicked on and a navigation screen overlaid the windshield. He turned it off, preferring the dim quiet, and pulled out onto the road.
He'd never made the drive, and it had been a lifetime, but he knew it by heart. His headlights crawled up the mountain at thirty miles an hour—sick and weak from whatever the hell Janice had given him, he couldn't trust anything faster. The world still swam when he turned too fast, and with the human population shattered he expected a million deer to throw themselves in front of his car, but saw none.
He entertained the idea that Nyloxx hadn't poisoned them too. Maybe wolves had come back, kept the herds in check. Sasha had always loved wolves.
The road deteriorated as deciduous, temperate trees gave way to old-growth conifers, and he had to turn on the heater to keep the windows from fogging up. The dark swallowed him, and the rhythm of the wheels rocked him to a lullaby of night sounds. He shook his head to stay awake, rolled down the windows to let in the chill.
At long last he found the driveway, smothered with tall grass tamped down into a pair of overgrown packed-earth runnels. Twin silver lines marred the grass where someone had driven over it in the past few days, or at least since the last rain. He turned and eased down on the gas. The car rolled through with a hiss that increased and decreased in intensity with his speed, interrupted here and there by the sharp bang of a black-eyed Susan against the bumper. Mama had planted those flowers in their garden, the year after the snow melted; they'd spread, and now dotted wherever trees hadn't smothered. His mind failed him on how far he had to drive, but he knew the moment before the cabin came into view.
No lights shone in the windows, and moonlight scattered off of a roof that jarred with his recollection—slate gray tin instead of mottled brown shingles. The yard had disappeared under a wild green tangle, and the bannister leading up the front steps to the porch lay akimbo next to the disconnected, rotting porch swing.
His spark of hope flickered, dimming to match the vacant cabin.
He killed the car and got out, shutting the door with more authority than was necessary. If anyone lived here, he didn't want them surprised.
A reluctant shuffle dragged him up the creaking steps to the front door. Ajar, it creaked open to reveal the ruined remains of human habitation—a rotted-out couch showing springs and rat's nests; moldy plates piled next to the sink just visible through the kitchen door; the old, red-brick hearth blackened and littered with beer cans.
“Hello?” His voice rang out in the empty, soulless space. A fat raccoon darted from under the couch, bumbled two steps toward the door, then retreated into the kitchen without undue haste—it didn't fear him. And why should it? Why should any animal fear man anymore?
With no answer, he approached the bookcase against the far wall. Most of his father's collection had disappeared. A few had rotted to nothing. But The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow stood tall and proud on the third shelf up, the sleeve on the hardcover defying the ravages of time except for a scuff on the spine betraying the aluminum underneath.
He grabbed the book with both hands, pushing in the top while pulling out the bottom. It gave. The bookcase popped away from the wall on silent hinges, betraying the ladder leading below.
The rich, earthy smell of a garden twisted his stomach. His mouth went to sandpaper at the thought of killing another rabbit, cutting around its neck and tearing off its skin moments after petting it and calling it a good girl. He gagged on the memory, sucking in air to displace it—sterile, cool, bleach with a sweet hint of lemon. Someone had cleaned, and recently.
He climbed down the two stories, knees aching with every rung, knuckles white as the vertigo ebbed and flowed. “Hello?” he called, halfway down, voice echoing through the tiny antechamber that led to the greenhouses. His feet hit the floor and he walked through the dark to the light switch, flicking it up with old confidence.
As the LEDs flashed on, figures rushed him. Stars exploded through his skull as they slammed him against the wall, pinning his arms and legs with their bodies.
A black woman in nurse's scrubs looked him up and down, and grunted. Her gray afro matched the wrinkled skin stretched over chubby cheeks, the softness in her face at odds with the murder in her eyes. “Shorted, did you?”
“Yes,” he said, breath short and raspy through the fingers around his throat.
“It's Esther.” She backed up, and his assailants let him go. He rubbed his wrists and stepped away from the wall.
“You know me?”
“Your name is Barry Esther. You must be, what, seventy-four?”
“Seventy-three.”
“Seventy-three. I'm Annie, and I'm in charge here. Don't do anything impulsive.”
“I won't,” he said. “I'm just looking for my family.” Her smirk could have meant anything. Hope soared, fragile and exposed. “Are they here?”
“Your mother passed not long after you were taken. Sasha called it a broken heart.”
It had to be true, but knowing it stabbed an icicle through his chest. “A long time, then.”
“A long time,” Annie said. “We have some of her things in Sasha's desk.”
“She's here?”
Annie jerked her head toward the door to the greenhouse. �
�Follow me.”
It wasn't an answer, exactly.
One of his attackers, an old man over six and a half feet tall, opened the door into soft, warm light. Barry stepped around the huge man and gasped.
The greenhouse of his childhood shattered into memory, replaced by a hospital ward, two rows of fifty—no—sixty beds. Women lay in each, most of their bellies bulging to one degree or another. IVs trailed upward from needles piercing their arms; skinny legs stuck out from underneath hospital gowns. Gray and wrinkled, the youngest of them couldn't have been ten years his junior. And none of them looked enough like his sister to be an older version of her.
“What is this place?”
“The Nursery. Sasha founded it, not long after, you know. After. We knew each other from the food kitchen, you remember?” He nodded; she continued. “Twenty years in, she found me, shorted, administering what care I could to other Shorts. She offered me a chance to do something more.”
Annie walked down the rows and he followed, waiting patiently as she passed kind words and greetings to each woman, touching hands and kissing foreheads, rubbing pregnant bellies and massaging swollen feet, until at last she stopped at a small desk set against the farthest wall. Above it sat a portrait, his family, smiling in happier times—he couldn't have been more than five. Barry leaned forward, knees turning to jelly, unable to think, to breathe. They got him settled into a chair and handed him the frame. With shaking hands he ran his fingers down the glass, leaned in and kissed it.
No psychic connection crackled from the smooth, cold surface. No mystic message whispered across time that everything would be all right. He wiped his eyes and looked down at the book, leather-clad with “Sasha Esther” emblazoned in peeling silver on the bottom-right corner. Setting down the photo he opened the diary, hands shaking.
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