Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  Of course, as far as Taylor was concerned, you could wipe your ass with the DSM, which was basically a load of pseudoscience the Normals had invented to brainwash people, segregate anyone who wouldn’t “cooperate,” and blame it on their “defective” genes. And, all right, if you ever actually read the language in the DSM, Axis II, Cluster B, and thought about it for half a minute, you had to admit he had a point. For instance, you probably couldn’t help but question the etiological value of phrases like “disregard for social norms” or “lack of respect for legitimate authority,” which did maybe seem kind of vague and relative, and possibly not even all that medical.

  On the other hand, there was no denying that Taylor Byrd, throughout his life (although mostly in his younger days, so back in the officially 2590s), had evinced quite a lot of aggressive behavior, and had pervasively violated the rights of others, particularly others who had gotten in his face, some of whose rights he’d pervasively violated in extremely repulsive and egregious ways, like with the jagged ends of broken bottles, and knives, and sticks, and bricks, and so on, which luckily had never been linked to Taylor, or he wouldn’t have been lying in his bed that morning. Which isn’t to say his file was clean. No, Taylor, who was forty-five at this time, had a lengthy and meticulously detailed record of violations of the rights of others, each of which were documented incidents, about which there was nothing pseudo. It was just that none of these documented incidents (the ones in Taylor’s medbase file, as opposed to the ones he’d gotten away with) had involved the use of deadly violence ... but all of that was about to change.

  Taylor, right that very moment, so approximately 0530 o’clock, lying there, possibly fatally hungover, contemplating that spot on the ceiling (which was definitely some form of mutant insect, like a cockroach, but with all these centipede legs), was soon to be wanted for detention and questioning in connection with a recent series of incidents ... incidents involving the egregious violation of the rights of certain individuals, corporations, and their subsidiaries and assigns, whose rights one didn’t egregiously violate, or not and get away with it anyway, chief among them being none other than the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin.

  The Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, despite the folksy-sounding name, was one of the largest, most diversified, powerful, profitable, structurally impenetrable, forward-looking corporate entities in the corporate history of corporate entities. It was one of a handful of other such entities, like Oodleeoo, Inc., the Eschaton Group, SeCom, and the Finkles Family of Companies, that dominated the totally open and unrestricted market economy that served the evolving needs of consumers throughout the entire United Territories ... or whatever it was it said on their website.

  In other words, nobody knew what it was. No one had the slightest idea. To the Normals who nominally worked for the company (i.e. for some division or subsidiary of the company, none of which bore the Hadley name, except for the various Security divisions), the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin was like corporate Valhalla, or Oz, or somewhere ... somewhere where important decisions were made by extremely senior executives, whose names they were not privy to, but whose fingers were on the pulse of everything, anticipating needs, driving trends, setting paces, examples, records, breaking ground with their cutting edges, and tirelessly generating wealth for everyone. To everybody else it was just this vast, and powerful, and completely inscrutable conglomerate, whose name you saw everywhere you went, along with the company’s official slogan:

  HERE FOR YOU ALWAYS ... NOW MORE THAN EVER!

  Among its numerous other activities, the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, operating through its wholly-owned subsidiary, IntraZone Waste & Security Services, Inc., which was technically not a subdivision or in any other way organogramically related to Hadley Global Security, Inc., administrated the specially-designated Post-Emergency Quarantine Zones (commonly known as “A.S.P. Zones”), where afflicted people like Taylor lived. These A.S.P. Zones were not like prisons, or concentration camps, or things like that. They were “Special Residential Areas,” where Anti-Social Persons could live, segregated according to class, in three concentric, alpha-coded sectors, surrounded by enormous Security Walls. These Zones were big, seriously big, many of them having once been cities, or the central districts of former cities, which over the course of hundreds of years, due primarily to urban sprawl and economic decentralization, had fallen into disrepair. Which, of course, had made it relatively easy for market leading Security firms (or the Security divisions of massive conglomerates, like the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin), when the time to quarantine finally came, to erect their originally modular aluminum and later reinforced concrete walls around these former districts and cities, the majority of which were already encircled by a ring or loop of highway or train tracks. The walls themselves were nothing fancy, a series of dull gray concrete slabs, ten meters high, three meters wide, the inaccessible tops of which, presumably out of an abundance of caution, were dressed with concertina wire.

  Although each Zone had its unique character, the basic layout was always the same; three concentric alpha-coded sectors, one for each of the A.S.P. classes. The outermost sector, Sector A, was reserved for Class 1 Anti-Social Persons, most of whom were totally harmless and could, with proper clearance, of course, leave the Zone to work outside at menial jobs in the Residential Communities, mostly as janitors and manual laborers, some of them even as household servants. Sector B was for A.S.P. 2s, and was usually the largest sector in the Zones, the 2s being only potentially dangerous, so manageable, as long as you watched them closely. A.S.P. 2s were not allowed out, but they were permitted to work In-Zone, alongside the vast majority of 1s, who didn’t have Out-of-Zone travel privileges. They worked at the corporate assembly plants, processing plants, tool & die shops, garment factories, textile factories, precision metals and plating factories, stripping engines, building motherboards, ducts, housings, timers, collars, display screens, cells, screws, you name it ... anything not Security-Sensitive. They also worked the In-Zone stores, manned the stalls at the open-air markets, ran the makeshift storefront taverns, made deliveries, and picked up garbage. A.S.P. 2s who demonstrated “an appropriate, respectful and cooperative attitude” could, theoretically at least, earn an upgrade to A.S.P. 1 and relocate to Sector A, where the housing was better and the markets were located, and maybe even wangle a Travel-to-Work pass. In practice, however, this hardly ever happened. Intra-Zone Waste & Security Services upgraded maybe ten 2s a year, usually around the Christmas Holidays, the majority of whom were severely disabled. The innermost sector, Sector C, was strictly reserved for A.S.P. 3s, who typically had a history of violence, or disruptive or defiant behavior, were disinclined to any type of work, and responded poorly, or not at all, to any form of incentivization. The 3s were not prohibited from working, as in there wasn’t an actual ordinance against it, or from otherwise one day resolving to demonstrate an “appropriate, respectful and cooperative attitude,” but there wouldn’t have been much point in it, really, as the A.S.P. Human Resources professionals at the In-Zone factories, plants, and stores regarded them, essentially, as feral animals who you didn’t want to look directly in the eye but didn’t want to turn your back on either.

  Taylor lived on Mulberry Street, Sector C, Zone 23, Northeast Region 709. Mulberry Street was deep in the heart of an area called the English Quarter. There wasn’t anything English about it. It was just this grid of grimy little streets lined with eight hundred year-old tenements. Anti-Social Persons lived there, three, four, and five to a room, crowded into any apartment where the plumbing still kind of halfway worked and wasn’t totally infested with rats and swarms of giant flying cockroaches. Tangible amenities were neo-Medieval. People didn’t tend to bathe all that much. Ancylostomiasis, ascariasis, pediculosis corporis and pubis (in other words nasty intestinal worms, head-lice, crabs, and other such parasites) were inescapable facts of life. These places weren’t all utter
shitholes, however. People had effected what repairs they could. Joists had been buttressed. Roofs had been patched. Doors had been remounted. Et cetera. A lot of the kitchens had wood burning stoves, which were usually ancient electric stoves that you gutted and lined with metal sheeting, and ran some ductwork up the wall, across the ceiling, and out the window. Some of them even had running water (most of the mains in the Zone still worked), and power, which, if you knew what you were doing, you could tap from a transformer out in the street.

  16 Mulberry, Taylor’s address (not that anyone really needed one) had originally been 14-18 Mulberry, three adjoining red brick tenements wedged in together between other such tenements. At some point during the course of history, the walls dividing the three original tenements had been demolished and the apartments expanded, probably in order to form some kind of luxury lofts that you paid through the nose for. Later, at some other point in history, the process, apparently, had been reversed. The walls had all been bricked back up, and the original twenty-four shotgun apartments, converted to eight of these luxury lofts, had been chopped up into forty-eight units, fitted with miniature toilets and sinks, kitchen “areas,” and private doors. Then, at some even later point in history, probably once the climate shifted and windows became a survival issue, the cheap-ass drywall whoever it was had used to create the forty-eight units, or detention cells, or whatever they were, had been mostly ripped out, restoring, sort of, the original twenty-four shotgun apartments, or at least some weird-ass cartoon version of something resembling the original apartments. The result of all this was that your typical apartment at 16 Mulberry was one long space with a kitchen and a makeshift bathroom at one end and then this series of odd little rooms (each of which rooms you had to walk through to get to the next, as there was no hallway), some of which still had the miniature toilets, which one was seriously discouraged from using, as the pipes no longer connected to anything, despite the fact that they looked like they did, but fed down into the apartments below and, well, I think you get the idea.

  The point being, this is where Taylor lived. He lived there out of a greasy old duffel and a twenty-three year-old cardboard box he stowed beneath the plywood platform he had built for his flimsy futon mattress, the standard complimentary bedding provided by IntraZone Waste & Security. He lived there with people like Alice Williams, Rusty Braynard, Meyer Jimenez, Coco Freudenheim, Coco’s cat, Dexter, and assorted other Class 3 Anti-Social Persons. They lived on the second floor, in 2E. It wasn’t exactly the Ritz or anything, but at least it was better than up on 3, which was under the roof, and was like a sauna, the roof being flat and covered with tar, or some synthetic tar-like polymer substance, which had been in a state of permanent melt for as long as anyone could possible remember. Nobody knew who lived up on 3. You never saw them. They might have been dead ... except for the fact that you heard them sometimes, stomping around in circles, it sounded like, moaning or sobbing, and occasionally screaming. Only at night though. Never during the day. Days in Sector C were quiet. Or relatively quiet, in terms of screaming. In any event, the streets were deserted. Anti-Social Persons sat out the heat of the day inside their tenements. Nights were better. People went out. Or at least got up from their soppy futons and moved around, and drank, mostly. Or abused an assortment of illicit substances. Like Plastomorphinol. Or MDLX. Or maybe watched some In-Zone Content. Or ate. Or slept. Or fought. Or fucked. Whatever. Anything to break up the boredom.

  Now, as vile and loathsome as this probably sounds (and definitely sounded to the Normals outside), it could have been worse, Taylor’s life in the Zone. Or maybe it was just that Taylor was used to it. The way Taylor saw it, the heat was, yes, insufferably brutal, but it wasn’t that bad. (The A.S.P. 3s, being mostly nocturnal, slept through most of the worst of it anyway.) The rats, roaches, and other insects were disgusting, sure, but they were mostly harmless. The acrid stench of rotting garbage, human sweat, urine, and feces, was what Taylor’s world had always smelled like. Born and raised in the Zone as he was, he didn’t even register the noise, which ranged from mildly annoying to deafening, and never ended, anywhere, ever, which to us would have been like a form of torture, but to Taylor it was just this background soundtrack of people talking and shouting and screaming and fucking and snoring and sirens and sometimes the rotors of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ... not the bad ones, which no one ever saw, the small ones, which looked like giant mosquitoes. That, and the endless streams of Content they pumped into the Zone all day, which played, not only on people’s Viewers (i.e. primitive homemade pirate-systems cobbled together out of salvaged materials) but also outdoors on the Public Viewers, massive digital video screens mounted on towers and the sides of buildings that ran all kinds of In-Zone Content ... music videos, cloudscape loops, game shows, SitComs, educational features, three hundred year-old Nature Content, all of this in no particular order, and interspersed on the hour and half-hour with one or more of the talking heads, a revolving line-up of ethnically diverse, spastic, over-enunciating morons whose out-of-synch borderline hysterical voices rang out across the sweltering rooftops like some incomprehensible call to prayer ...

  Which all right, getting back to our story, at approximately 0530 that morning, as Taylor lay there on his moldering futon, staring up at that dot on the ceiling (which now he wasn’t quite sure what it was, as it didn’t seem to be moving or anything, so maybe it was just a spot on the ceiling), one of these talking heads, a woman, with tangerine hair and, it seemed, no eyelids, was wrapping up an InfoBreak.

  The expected high was 46 Celsius. Heat advisories were in effect. Security Gates 15 through 18 were operating at reduced capacity. Quarantined Persons with travel passes were advised to use Gates 14 and 20. Quarantined Persons, regardless of class, were hereby reminded that animal husbandry, including, but not limited to, the breeding and keeping of feral pigeons, was strictly prohibited by Ordinance 40. And finally, due to the airing tonight of a special program celebrating the life of Jimmy “Jimbo” Cartwright, III, founder and CEO of Finkles, hosted by “Jimbo’s” personal friends, SoniVerse/FaceWorld recording artists, Hootey Brewster and the Brewster Boys, regularly scheduled In-Zone programming was being preempted as of 2100. Today was Tuesday, 17 April, 2610, H.C.S.T., or it was Monday the something in the month of Iyyar, or Day whatever in the Year of the Lemur, or some other totally made-up date ... which everyone knew, or at least suspected, wasn’t remotely when it really was.

  Taylor couldn’t possibly have given less of a shit when it “really” was. In Zone 23, it was Tuesday morning. In Taylor’s world it was Tuesday morning. Taylor knew that because Taylor was awake. Taylor was awake because Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, and some other person, had been stumbling around the room they shared, kicking at piles of crap on the floor, and they’d kicked over a glass, or a bottle, or something, and Rusty Braynard had stepped on some glass, and cut his foot pretty bad, it looked like, and now he was hopping around like a chicken calling Alice Williams a whore, and a fucking whore, and a cunt, and so on, and grabbing onto the back of her shoulders trying to get her to walk him around while he hopped behind her on his one good foot. Alice Williams was throwing elbows, trying to get him the fuck off her back, and twisting and jerking and bobbing up and down, and running all around the room in circles shrieking as if her skin was on fire. All of which together looked, at least in Taylor’s peripheral vision, like one of those weird aboriginal rituals you saw sometimes in the Nature Content, which aside from being incredibly annoying, was making it impossible for Taylor to think, which he hadn’t been doing a lot of lately, at least not clearly, which was not good. Taylor needed to be thinking clearly. If he wanted to live through the day, he did. And even if he didn’t, it didn’t matter, because at this point it all came down to one thing ... he needed to get to Jefferson Avenue and up to Cassandra’s by 0730. He needed to do this without getting shot, or taken out by a Godsend missile, or picked up by a Security team. To do that, he needed to do two things. One of
which was start thinking clearly. The other of which was, get out of bed. At the moment, he was doing neither. What he was doing was lying in bed, staring up at what was now, beyond all doubt, a mutant cockroach, which was crawling aimlessly around in circles on the ceiling directly above his head ... off to one side of which, Taylor’s head, Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard were dancing and hopping and flapping all around, doing whatever the fuck they were doing. His head, incidentally, was throbbing. His eyes were probably going to explode. Worse, it appeared his tongue had been coated with some type of post-industrial adhesive you used to glue things underwater that tasted not unlike the ass of a dog. Soon he was going to projectile vomit, or shit himself, one, or possibly both. Which, given the way the bed was violently spinning and dipping, was going to get ugly. What the fuck was he even doing there, back home, in his bed, on Mulberry Street? He did not know this. He could not remember ... or, OK, one thing he could remember was ... well, actually, not all that helpful. He remembered staggering down the embankment of what appeared to be the Dell Street Canal, gazing up at what looked like the moon, and what might, in fact, have been the moon, onto the phosphorescent face of which had been projected the Finkles logo. Nothing particularly idiotic or self-destructive occurred in this memory, or memory fragment, or whatever it was, but then, OK, another memory ... this one also not that helpful. Here was another Dell Street Canal scene, this one prominently featuring Taylor dragging what certainly appeared to be a body ... the body of what looked like a walrus, or dugong, or some other species of sea-going mammal, all of which had been extinct for decades, so OK, odds were, not a walrus, or any other sizable sea-going mammal, but definitely a blimp, as in a massive body, as in a king-sized, fat-assed, bloated, blubbery, conspicuously unresponsive body. Unresponsive, as in a lifeless body, wearing what looked like a Watcher’s uniform ... a Watcher’s uniform the size of a tent. Taylor, in this nauseating hungover flashback, is hunkered down at the bottom of the frame, dragging this elephant seal of a body backwards down a concrete embankment toward what appears to be the Dell Street Canal. He’s got one hand around each ankle, or almost, because they’re the size of his arms, Taylor’s arms, the ankles are (his biceps, that is, not his forearms), or the size of two big joints of TŌ Ham, and they look just about as pink and clammy, and he’s gritting his teeth and heaving and snorting and using his legs and his back and jerking, and it looks like he’s going to bust a hernia before he can get this enormous fat guy down the embankment and into the canal. The huge dead fat guy is just lying there, prone, very conspicuously not responding as the jagged concrete acts like sandpaper, grinding off what’s left of his face. Which isn’t much. The nose is gone, as are the lips, and cheeks and brow, and most of the chin, so the face is flattened, sickeningly flattened, and is sliding along, smearing this streak of blood and face meat down the embankment like the trail of a slug. Taylor, clearly totally shitfaced, jerks it down the concrete slope the last few heaves, grimacing, groaning, backs down into the bright green scum, dragging the fat-assed, flabby bulk of the non-responding Watcher with him, grapples with it, turns it, pushes ... the water up to his armpits now, the now completely faceless body floating, bobbing, finally sinking ... except he couldn’t remember it sinking ... and, OK, now it was coming back to him ... the body belonged to one J.C. Bodroon, who he’d dumped in the Dell Street Canal, apparently, and had weighted him down with ... what? Fuck. What had he weighted the body down with? Nothing ... which meant it was out there now, lolling among the other garbage. Which meant it was just a matter of time before some satellite’s camera spotted it, pattern-recognized the Watcher uniform, and flagged it for a Security team. Once that team ID’d the body and scanned his logs, they’d be onto Taylor ... unless they were already out there now, waiting for him to exit the building, in which case there would be IntraZone snipers up on those rooftops across the street, which if Taylor could just sit up and look out the window, odds were, he could probably see ... in any event, what it all added up to was that probably the last place he needed to be at 0530 that Tuesday morning was lying in bed on Mulberry Street watching some mutant form of cockroach crawl around on the fucking ceiling, while Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, and some other unidentified person, reenacted some neo-aboriginal ritual to invoke the gods of ... whatever.