Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  A deafening buzzer, like the one that sounded when you got an answer wrong on Quandary, sounded. She was back in the padded pink room. The video camera swiveled toward her. The PA crackled. A voice, not Barry’s, a colder, more professional voice, definitely Security, addressed her now.

  “Step back from the door, Ms. Briggs.”

  Valentina froze in place, every muscle in her body contracting. The lights in the room appeared to be brightening .

  “Step back from the door, Ms. Briggs.”

  She couldn’t remember what she’d just been thinking. Whatever time and place this was was not where she was supposed to be. Something that had not happened had happened.

  “Move to the wall. Face the wall. Place your hands against the wall.”

  Valentina assumed the position.

  “Do not remove your hands from the wall.”

  She thought she’d dreamed but really what she’d dreamed had been the place she was, and this had always been the dream, which someone else she was was dreaming ... which didn’t make sense ... unless ... maybe ...

  The deadbolts in the door clacked open.

  “Face the wall.”

  The oneness of the ...

  “Do not attempt to turn your head.”

  The multiplicitous ...

  “Do not move.”

  The loving compassionate oneness of the ...

  Sex & Violence

  One of the other hallmark symptoms of late-stage Anti-Social Disease was “an inability to form and maintain enduring social and professional relationships,” the type of emotionally rewarding relationships the Normals, without even having to be reminded to do so by some app on their Viewers, formed and maintained with their families, friends, colleagues, clients, and online followers. According to the DSM XXXIII, Anti-Socials could “mimic” such relationships, and be “verbally facile” and “superficially charming,” but they could never genuinely “empathize with others,” whose pain and suffering they “viewed with contempt,” or, in some cases, found entertaining. *

  This “mimicking” (or “masking”) of real emotions was usually employed to deceive their victims, or other unsuspecting persons they wanted to use for their selfish purposes, but occasionally it was also employed by Anti-Socials to deceive themselves. Now this had been proven in scientific tests. Bizarre as it sounds, there were documented cases where Anti-Social Persons had, through some weird form of self-hypnosis, convinced themselves they were capable of feeling genuine regard and fondness for others, and even something approaching empathy. Why they did this was not well understood.

  Taylor, apparently, was one of these anomalies, these A.S.P.s who had hypnotized themselves ... because how else to explain this “feeling” of grief, or regret, or remorse, or whatever, Taylor, who, at that very moment (i.e. as Valentina was assuming the position), was feeling, or at least appeared to be feeling, crouching in the dark with his back to the wall on the first floor landing of 16 Mulberry? He’d been there, crouching, for about three minutes, during which teams of Security Specialists had not come storming up the stairwell after him. There had been no second detonation, or missile strike, or whatever it was. Once the noise of the pigeons had faded, he’d heard the voices of people shouting, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying, or whether they were actually saying anything. Then, after a minute maybe ... nothing, just the usual din of the Zone, and the Viewers playing that funereal music, which he still didn’t know what was up with that. He figured he would wait there another few minutes, then, assuming the coast was clear, he’d make his way down and see what had happened.

  In the meantime, there was this pain in his chest.

  The pain was like a knot, or cramp, or dull, throbbing, grief-like ache. It was located near his solar plexus, and ... OK, if you didn’t know any better, like if you hadn’t read the DSM, you’d suspect that it might have had something to do with the thing he had to do that morning, the thing he was going to Cassandra’s to do, which was going to be, no doubt about it, The Worst Thing He Had Ever Done. Or, had it been an authentic feeling and not some pseudo-emotional trick that Taylor was playing on himself (and us), that it might have had something to do with all the unrelenting human suffering Taylor had suffered, and inflicted on others, throughout his meaningless, violent life. However (and according to the DSM, this last explanation was a lot more likely), it was probably just some sentimental crap (Anti-Social Persons being notoriously sentimental toward themselves), like his not being able to say goodbye to Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, who he was certain he was never going to see again, and who despite the fact that they were, by this time, useless fuckups and a burden to Taylor, he had known and lived with for thirty-five years, and basically regarded as ersatz family.

  The three of them had all grown up together in a former section of the Southwest Quadrant, way out west, on Walt Whitman Road, where Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard had always lived, and were probably born, and where Taylor’s mother moved them after they fled the Jackson Avenue Houses. This, of course, was back in the old days, back when there were still kids in the Zone, so before the Jackson Avenue Uprising, which left them all orphans at the age of ten .

  After the Uprising, and the purge that followed (which more on that later on in our story), they’d made their way as best they could, living at first with a series of relatives, like Alice Williams’ uncle Seamus, until he died of liver cancer, then Rusty Braynard’s aunt Louise, until she got stabbed and bled to death, then various other aunts and uncles, most of whom weren’t really aunts and uncles, just people Taylor’s mother knew, or at least whose names and addresses she knew, and wrote down on the scrap of paper she pressed into his hand that night (i.e. the night before the Uprising started) and told him she loved him, and would always love him, and kissed him and sent him down to the basement.

  Taylor couldn’t remember exactly how many nights he’d spent in that basement, camped out under those metal stairs, eating some kind of energy bars that were dry and tasted like moldy bananas. Mostly he remembered the sounds ... the pop pop pop of UltraLite rifles, the whir and boom of the RPGs, the grinding tracks of the APCs, and, weirdly, the sound of a woman’s voice, repeating some phrase he couldn’t decipher, over and over, which many years later, out of nowhere, without even trying, he realized must have been a recording. However many nights it was, once the noise had finally died down, he’d waited, two or three hours, he thought, climbed the ladder that led to the street, pushed open one of the metal drop-doors, and crawled out onto Walt Whitman Road, or what was left of Walt Whitman Road, which was just a strip of smoldering shells of burned out buildings and piles of rubble. IntraZone Waste & Security Services Sanitation Disposal Technicians, dressed in their orange HazMat suits, were loading the bodies into vans and buses, zipping them into big yellow bags, and stacking them one on top of the other. He wandered up as close as he could, but he couldn’t get close enough to see their faces. He checked inside the ruins of his building, and some other buildings, and the old bodega, and he walked all up and down Walt Whitman Road, but the Techs must have already bagged his mother, or else she’d been burned beyond recognition ... in any event, he couldn’t find her. He poked all around up and down the street, looking for something that might have belonged to her, like her glasses, or one of those hair things she wore, and he found a few globs of melted plastic, and some shattered lenses, and a couple of teeth, but the glasses could have belonged to anyone, and the teeth were too yellow to have been his mother’s. He found Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard perched on Rusty Braynard’s stoop, their faces blackened with soot and blood, eating stale marshmallows out of a bag. Rusty Braynard’s building was gone ... gone, as in it was not there. All that was left was the concrete stoop, its steps rising up from the ground toward nothing. The memory of the two of them sitting there, looking like a couple of shell-shocked squirrels, eyes glazed over, mechanically chewing cheekfuls of sugary marshmallow goo, made Taylor smile in the dark of the sta
irwell ... because who would have guessed the three of them would have stayed together all these years, or that they’d have even survived that long?

  Somehow, against the odds, they had. They’d done it living off their rations, mostly, and scamming and stealing when times were tough, and sharing whatever they had with each other, and sticking together, no matter what. They’d moved like nomads from place to place, one shithole tenement after another, two years here, three years there, until finally, circa ten years back, they’d lucked into Coco’s at 16 Mulberry. Along the way, they had, of course, fought, tortured, and otherwise inflicted the gamut of senseless pain on each other, just like real siblings, Taylor imagined, and that’s how they felt, just like real siblings, except for the fact that Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard fucked sometimes ... or used to anyway, back in the day. Taylor doubted either one of them could fuck themselves, much less each other, strung out as they were by then. He wondered what would become of them now ... how long they would make it without him.

  For some strange reason he remembered the time, back when they were all in their twenties, when this gang of assholes trapped Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard in a basement on Drake Street. Taylor couldn’t remember whether they had chased them down there or had found them down there, but what they did was, they stripped them naked, tied them to this set of pipes down there, and took turns beating on Rusty Braynard with a piece of rebar until he bled from the ears. They broke his jawbone in three or four places, fractured his skull, fucked up his shoulder, did a number on his cervical vertebrae, serious Class 3 Anti-Social stuff. Once they were done with Rusty Braynard, they took turns raping Alice Williams. They raped her in every hole she had. They did this several times a day, switching positions, for multiple days. The way they did it was, they bent her over this metal work table that was stained with oil, and the top of which was just about the length of her torso, and they raped her two at a time like that. Whichever asshole was standing in front of her would hold her head up by the hair with one hand, press the knife to her throat with the other, and warn her she had better not bite down ... which Alice Williams later said she wished she had, but never did.

  After they didn’t come home for a week, Taylor went out looking for them. He talked to some people who knew some people who’d heard some shit and, long story short, he found them down there in that basement on Drake Street, brought them home, and cleaned them up. Alice Williams couldn’t walk for a month. Taylor had to pick her up and carry her down the hall to the bathroom. He held her head while she peed and shat, which made her scream just something awful, then he carried her back down the hall to the bedroom. After she had drifted off again, he went back down the hall once more and cleaned up the blood she had left on the toilet. He did this daily, for over a month. They had to spoonfeed Rusty Braynard until his jaw reset itself, kind of, which gave him that kind of bulldog look, and the exaggerated frontal lisp he spoke with. He never did get his hearing all back, but after a couple of difficult months, he started to be able to talk again, some, and Taylor and Alice Williams figured he made as much sense as he ever really had, which wasn’t ever really all that much.

  Once they were more or less out of the woods, Taylor went out and talked to some people, and found out who the assholes were, which it turned out they were some badass crew from the Douglass Morrison-Witherspoon Projects. He scoped them out for a couple three nights, laid in wait for them, one by one, whacked them upside the head to stun them, walked them down to that same Drake Street basement (i.e. as if they were drunk and he was helping them home) and tied them to that same set of pipes down there. It took him nearly a week in all, the last one being the hardest to ambush, but finally, early one Sunday morning, he had all four of them tied up together, side by side on that set of pipes, their arms stretched out and tied to the pipes and their asses on the ground in a seated position. He tortured them a while before he killed them, which normally wasn’t Taylor’s thing, but he made an exception for these particular assholes. He didn’t torture them fancy or anything. All he did was, he found the rebar that they must have used on Rusty Braynard, and he used it, in kind of a surgical fashion, to shatter their knees and elbows and ribs, and crush their balls, and knock some teeth out, and to otherwise cause the asshole in question to experience prolonged and unimaginable pain. He did this to them one by one, working his way down the line of assholes. That way, he figured, the other assholes (not the first one, but that couldn’t be helped) could see what they had coming to them, and maybe even reflect a little on what they had done to Alice Williams, which in Taylor’s book was way over the line. He figured they had maybe reflected some, on account of how they got all quiet and just kind of sat there, shitting themselves, as he whaled on whichever asshole it was whose turn it was to get his balls crushed and elbows broken and knees turned to mush. After whichever asshole that was was all done blubbering and whining and begging, and looked like maybe he was going to pass out, Taylor got himself a good hold on the rebar, gripping it like a baseball bat (or on second thought probably more like a golf club, not that Taylor had ever held one), and he swung it into the asshole’s face, over and over, just as hard as he could. He did that until he was fairly certain you couldn’t tell who it was anymore, not so much to hide their identities, because nobody was going to miss these assholes ... it was more like he wanted to erase their identities, to erase who they were, or what they were, as if they weren’t just these four assholes, but were parts, or nodes, of some fucked-up something Taylor hated, and had always hated ... something he couldn’t put into words, something that had always been there, and would always be there, but shouldn’t be there, and if he just swung that piece of rebar harder, and harder, and harder, and harder, he could kill that thing, or part of that thing, or hurt it, or turn back time ... or something. He remembered asking them some special question, chanting it each time he swung the rebar ... but now he couldn’t remember what it was, or whether it was even words he was saying, or shouting, or screaming, or whatever he was doing ... whatever. It didn’t matter what it was. All that had happened back in some other lifetime.

  Now, the kicker was, a few years later, Taylor found out the whole misadventure had basically been about Plastomorphinol. Apparently, the assholes he’d killed in the basement were this crew of black market Plasto dealers, who were working their way up out of the projects, who Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard had ripped off two or three weeks before, which rip-off, according to Alice Williams, they had perpetrated purely out of desperation, and only after having been ripped off themselves by one of Rudy Rebello’s associates, as to whose whereabouts Rudy Rebello swore he did not have a clue ... all, or most of which, coming, as it did, from Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, if not a total crock of horseshit, was, at minimum, highly suspect. The thing that made it highly suspect, notwithstanding the well-known fact that Rudy Rebello was a spineless weasel and soulless scumbag of the lowest order, was that Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, ersatz family and all that they were, were degenerate Plastomorphinol users ... and had been for going on twenty-five years.

  Plastomorphinol, a semi-synthetic alkaloid derivative analgesic (also known as Diplastomorphinol), was sold throughout the Zone to registered users (in carefully regulated quantities, of course) at authorized pharmacies like CRS. They sold it in market-researched packaging with colorful graphics and fanciful brand names, but all it was was straight up Plasto. Something like ninety percent of the 3s in the Zone were registered Plasto users. Zero percent of 1s and 2s were, as registering as a Plasto user earned you a Class 3 designation and a relocation to Sector C. The 3s, however, were already 3s, and were already living in Sector C, and, basically, didn’t have shit to lose, so anyone who could walk, limp, or otherwise get to their local pharmacy and sign their name, or their mark, or whatever, had registered as a Plasto user. Registered users who weren’t actual users sold their allotments to the black marketeers, who marked them up and sold them on to registered users who were
actual users, whose habits almost invariably exceeded their official allotments, and who were Plasto fiends .

  Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard were registered users who were actual users. The way that worked was, once a week, so every Tuesday morning, officially, they would roll out of bed at 0530, dig out their CRS IDs, don their yellow polyester track suits, which hadn’t been washed in several years, and which Taylor could smell from across the room, and set out walking, or steal a couple bikes, and set out riding, to the CRS. They would get back right around 0900 (or earlier if they pinched the bikes), their skin all red and dry from heatstroke, clutching their plastic CRS bags. They’d come in, not say a word to anyone, strip off their smelly neon track suits, get back into the bed they shared, another greasy old worn-out futon, exactly like Taylor’s, except on the floor, and cook and shoot up Diplastomorphinol. Then they’d just slump there against the wall, mouths hanging open, hair all stringy, reeking something awful in the heat, and stare into space through their half-closed eyelids, just having the time of their lives, apparently.