Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  Taylor had done his share of substances, amphetamines, mostly, and some MDLX, and he more or less regularly drank like a fish, but he’d never gone in for Diplastomorphinal, or any of the other synthetic opiates the In-Zone doctors indiscriminately prescribed. Despite its unimaginably euphoric and instantly addictive analgesic effects (which Taylor had experienced on numerous occasions, recovering from various lacerations, puncture wounds, fractures, and so on), the problem he had with shooting Plasto, aside from the lifelong addiction thing, was that it made you stupid and unable to fuck.

  Taylor, generally, wanted to fuck. He wanted to fuck first thing in the morning ... OK, not like the second he woke up or anything, but generally pretty soon after that. And later, after he had rested a while. And then later, again, if he could possibly manage. And, OK, he wasn’t a kid anymore, so that third round was mostly a thing of the past, and the second was kind of fifty-fifty, but unless he had gone out the night before and drunk himself into a walking coma, he was usually up for his morning fuck ... which was how this whole disaster had started. It was also why (and this made him laugh), had this been any other Tuesday morning, he’d have been, you guessed it, on his way to Cassandra’s ... which he was, of course, on his way to Cassandra’s, just not for the usual ruttish reason. But normally that would have been the reason. To get his rocks off. To get his nut. Because despite the fact that he’d been doing Cassandra for going on over ten years at this point, and that he mostly spent his days with Cassandra (because you couldn’t go out in the daytime anyway), and, all right, he sometimes picked up her groceries, and they nursed each other when they were sick, and so on ... despite all that, which, were we not discussing a couple of Anti-Social Persons, might have resembled the two of them being in love, or even, you know, married, to Taylor that was all it was ... i.e., scoring, screwing, boning, fucking.

  Which, OK, so much for Taylor’s regard for women, or utter lack thereof, and his inability to maintain relationships. The point is, had this been any other Tuesday, that (i.e., sex) would have been the reason he was currently on his way to Cassandra’s (which he wasn’t ... he was still crouched down in the stairwell, pressing his finger into that pain in his chest). That, and because it was Tuesday, officially, and Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard would be lying around on the nod all day, stinking the place up something awful, and who could possibly sleep next to that? That, and the fact that Meyer Jimenez, if Taylor went out and sat in the kitchen, would want to sit across from Taylor, sweating all over the kitchen table, and lecture Taylor on the finer points of assorted topics of his expertise, which lecturing often lasted hours and involved going off on various tangents, which led to various other tangents that seemed to have nothing to do with each other, but then somehow invariably led to his theories on the definitely almost imminent purge of all Class 3 Anti-Social Persons by the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, ** which hadn’t been based there for several centuries, and maybe had never been based there at all ... all of which Taylor had already listened to Meyer rant about a thousand times.

  That, and just Cassandra Passwaters.

  Cassandra Passwaters was an A.S.P. 1. She was one of the “Thirties,” which meant she was thirty, or rather, it meant she was under forty. In Cassandra’s case it meant she was thirty. Due to Ordinance 119, the Thirties were last A.S.P. generation ... or, technically speaking, the last decennium. Cassandra Passwaters, born, officially, thirty years before, on New Year’s Eve, had just made the cut and was, quite possibly, the best piece of A.S.-ass in the Zone. She was blond, full-lipped, ripe, luscious, had her own room in a shared apartment, and a weakness for A.S.P. 3s like Taylor. Taylor had been indulging this weakness, mornings, as soon as she got home from work, and afternoons, before she went back to work, on a more or less totally monogamous basis for going on over the past ten years. Which isn’t to say he hadn’t occasionally indulged the weaknesses of other women, like when he and Cassandra were fighting, for example, or when he was drinking, or Cassandra was working ... it was just that none of these other women whose weaknesses Taylor only occasionally indulged meant the slightest thing to Taylor. Certainly none of them even remotely approached Cassandra when it came to sex.

  Cassandra Passwaters reeked of sex. Literally. It wasn’t her fault or anything. It was some kind of weird pheromonal condition that made men want to just fuck her senseless if they got within three or four meters of her. Fortunately, this hadn’t been a problem for Cassandra, who had no qualms at all about sex, or with using sex to get what she wanted, or manipulating 3s like Taylor with sex. Not that that was all it was ... no, Cassandra thoroughly enjoyed having sex. She didn’t do drugs, or drink, hardly, so sex was her primary source of pleasure. It wasn’t like she was addicted to sex, or some kind of nymphomaniac or anything. She wasn’t. She was simply an earthy person, a sensuous person, with a carnal nature, a deeply wanton and lascivious nature, who wanted Taylor to fuck her brains out. Cassandra was very clear about this. She wanted Taylor to fuck her brains out in a totally Class 3 Anti-Social fashion, to finger and lick her until she came repeatedly, gasping, screaming, and ultimately laughing (she’d have these laughing fits when she came), and then fuck her from behind, and spank her, spanking her while he fucked her senseless, and not just because he liked it that way, but because she also liked it that way, and because that seemed to Cassandra Passwaters like one of the most natural ways to do it, and the way most other animals did it ... well, OK, maybe without the spanking, but rough, not like gentle, or nice, the way the Normals in the RomComs did it, and real, not all fake and show-offy, the way the ones in the pornos did it, the ones where they always kept switching positions, which it always seemed to Cassandra Passwaters like maybe they had somehow forgotten how it worked and were trying to remember through trial and error, and so were being, like, all deliberate about it, stopping and checking every few seconds to see whether maybe that was it, or this was it, or that was it, which it didn’t ever appear to be it, the way they kept stopping and turning around and trying to get the angles just right, then going at it like that for a while, but no, that wasn’t it either, and then switching back around to the other way again, which already hadn’t worked before, and then finally looking into the camera plaintively, as if they were hoping the camera operator, or someone there on the porno set, would call a ten-minute break or whatever and explain to them how to do it already. It all seemed terribly complicated, and if there was one thing Cassandra Passwaters definitely was not, it was complicated. Which Taylor generally liked in a woman, not being all that complicated himself. Not that he was dumb or anything. He wasn’t. Neither was she for that matter. They both just liked to keep things simple, and clear, and, well, uncomplicated.

  So how, Taylor wanted to know, had everything gotten so fucking complicated, so unbelievably and hopelessly complicated, complicated to the point where now, there he was, on his way to Cassandra’s, not to get laid, as he would have been normally, but to do this horrible fucking thing ... the very horrible fucking thing he’d been desperately trying to keep from happening for the better part of the last eight months? How did that make any sense ... in any version of fucking reality?

  Fuck it, he thought. He forced himself up, groped his way down the stairs in the dark, stepped out onto the concrete stoop, and took a big whiff of rotting garbage. There, in the brume and din of the morning, was Mulberry Street in all its glory. Assorted Anti-Social Persons were pushing and dragging their carts of groceries ... cans of stew, soup, beans, sacks of rice, spoiling produce, and various other consumer products they had bought at the Jefferson Avenue market. Other Anti-Social Persons were out on the stoops of their buildings, smoking. Pigeons were perched on lintels, cooing. Rats of serious size were scurrying ... the usual mis en scène of the Zone. Up on the corner, Herman the Wino, who was well over ninety, and toothless, and blind, was hunkered down over a hole in the sidewalk, trying to defecate into the sewer. Off in the distance the Public Viewers were running what looke
d like archival footage of some old Normal business asshole who Taylor thought he vaguely recognized and didn’t give two shits about. The funereal music they had been playing earlier had morphed into some sickeningly syrupy fascist sentimental horseshit ... the kind of horseshit they normally played when some rich Normal asshole died.

  “The fuck’s going on?” he inquired of Claudia.

  Claudia was sitting on the stoop to his left, wearing some little nothing dress that showed off her enormous tits, which were still pretty good and not that saggy. Taylor hadn’t noticed her at first, ghostlike, blending into the shadows, like you got after tripping on MDLX. Her gaze was fixed on the eastern horizon, where, now, against the predawn glow, a massive column of smoke was rising, and choppers and UAVs were circling ...

  “Something blew up,” Claudia stated the obvious.

  People tended to state the obvious coming down from MDLX. The stuff was basically a tricked-out version of pharmahuasca, with a nitrating agent, that ripped your soul clean out of your body and showed it to you for forty-five minutes, after which, for the next six hours, you needed to fuck more or less continuously. It left you virtually dead in the head, as in reading random signs out loud, or saying the names of whatever you saw, which didn’t make for such great conversation ... not that Claudia had ever been famous for her conversational skills or anything.

  Taylor patted the top of her head as he slipped down the steps of the stoop and past her. He set out walking, north-northwest, into the tide of oncoming shoppers, just like every other Tuesday morning, and, weirdly, at least for those first few moments, as he dodged the carts and bikes and bodies, it almost felt like any other morning, except for the one significant difference. That difference being his acute awareness that he was never, ever, going to do this again (i.e. walk this stretch of Mulberry Street, or anything else he had ever done), because at some point on this particular morning, probably right around 0730, he was going to disappear from the face of the Earth, and presumably the rest of sentient existence ... and that would be the end of Taylor’s story. First, he had to do this horrible thing, which he definitely was not looking forward to, after which he would have to run, and there wasn’t anywhere to run but in circles, and hide, and you couldn’t hide forever. No, sooner or later (probably sooner) Security Services were going to get him. They were going to detain him, and torture him, and kill him, and this was assuming they didn’t spot him and shoot him down right on Jefferson Avenue, or vaporize his ass with a Godsend missile ... or whatever, the details didn’t matter ... whatever happened, however this ended, whether he ended up making the news, another A.S.P. gone haywire and put down by Security Services, or just vanished without explanation, the only ones who would ever know the truth of what had actually happened, and how, and where, and why it had happened, were not his friends, or anyone he knew, but were whichever soulless fucks it was at the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin that took care of all that kind of shit, the official accounts of what had happened, or hadn’t happened, or might have happened, but then later would turn out not to have happened, which ... fuck it, by that time no one would care. Taylor could almost see them sitting there, in their ergonomic chairs in their air-conditioned offices, sitting there in their rows of cubicles, pushing buttons, following orders ... the meek who had inherited the Earth ... or who believed they had inherited the Earth, when, really, apart from their clothes, houses, haircuts, holidays, money, and gadgets, they were no more free than Taylor was, and were just as doomed as Taylor was ... so what did their haircuts and holidays matter? Because what did anything fucking matter? In a hundred years they would all be dead, the A.S.P.s., Variant-Positives, Homo sapiens sapiens, the whole fucking race ... at which point, what was left of the world, suffocating shithole that it was, would devolve to the Clears, and they were welcome to it. So what did it matter what he did, or who knew the truth, or who told his story, or what the point of any of it was ... or whether he even made it to Cassandra’s?

  It didn’t.

  It didn’t matter to anyone.

  Nothing fucking mattered to anyone.

  Nothing mattered.

  And yet it did .

  And, see, here was another weird thing about Taylor that wasn’t covered in the DSM. Despite his Anti-Social nature, and inability to form relationships, and empathize, and love, and all that, and in spite of the crushing emotional weight of the utter pointlessness of pretty much everything, Taylor felt he had to do this. He owed it to someone, or something, to do this ... to Cassandra, yes, but not just Cassandra ... something bigger than himself or Cassandra, something, or someone, who was looking down, or in, or out of some other place, and keeping score, or track, or something ...

  What?

  Fuck if Taylor knew.

  Something for which he had no words.

  He knew a few things it definitely wasn’t. It wasn’t God, or the One Who Was Many, or whatever nonsense the Normals believed in, or The Fatal Contradiction of the Corporatist System, which the morons in the A.S.U. believed in, or whatever impenetrable mindfucking nonsense weirdos like Meyer and Sarah believed in, or didn’t believe in, as they liked to stress, because nothing was true or real, or whatever, and everything always came down to faith, not faith in some god or ultimate principle, like Fate, Truth, Desire, or Power, but faith in some fucking unnameable something, which they claimed, this faith, could alter reality, not virtual reality, actual reality, which according to Sarah was not reality ... or was reality, was the only reality, but was just as virtual as virtual reality, a manifestation of collective will, or the current limit of our imagination ... which, OK, was not remotely helpful, and was anti-helpful, and the opposite of helpful, and none of which, not one fucking iota, had any bearing whatsoever on staying alive for the next sixty minutes ... and see? It was just this sort of thinking, this pondering the fucking meaning of everything, of faith, and reality, and everything else, that had gotten Taylor into this mess. Because what the fuck did it possibly matter whether, or why, it mattered to Taylor, or to some unnameable spiritual something, or cosmic teleological principle, that you couldn’t even fucking talk about? It didn’t. None of this fucking mattered. All that mattered was the here and now. That fucking doorway. This fucking step. These fucking rooftops, right fucking here. Not all this ontological horseshit, but were there fucking snipers up there? Right up there on those fucking rooftops. And whether that half-second flash of light that third-floor window across the street had just now reflected was a searchlight catching the lens of one of their high-powered scopes. And what about this fucking guy over here, with the sunflower shades, whose shoes were too good, who Taylor had never seen in the Quarter, and was he going to suddenly pull an UltraLite MiniMac 16 rifle out of that fucking cart he was pushing? Which ... OK, it didn’t look like he was, because now he was heading up the steps of that building. Still, the point was, he could have, easily, anytime during the last few seconds, while Taylor had just been strolling along, his head going round and round and round with all these pointless thoughts and questions ... which, OK, this was it right here. This was the fucking problem right here ... all this fucking thinking about everything. This was how everything had gotten so complicated.

  Taylor extracted his head from his ass, paused on the corner of Radisson and Mulberry, turned back and took one lingering look, a goodbye look, down Mulberry Street. It looked strangely smaller, like some kind of mock-up ... strips of tenements made of paper, a rendering half remembered from a dream. Claudia was there on the steps where he’d left her. It looked like she was just painted in there, a minor detail in some elaborate triptych. Coco was standing on the stoop behind her, waving hello or goodbye to someone across the street who Taylor couldn’t see. Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, unidentified punk in tow, were creeping, albeit in their bright yellow track suits, the two of which just about glowed in the dark, across the street to steal some bikes, trying their best not to look suspicious. They were weaving their way through the
soft parade of shadows, shades, the shapes of shoppers, dragging their carts and bags up the street, making their way up the steps of their buildings, and into their doorways, and disappearing. Herman the Wino was down on the ground, pants and skivvies around his ankles, calling out to God, or someone, to help him up, which no one was doing. Off to the east, day was breaking ... the first malignant fissure of sunlight softening the hard rectilinear edges of rooftops, billboards, and Public Viewers forming a horizon across the Zone. The thick black column of oily smoke was rising over the Southeast Quadrant, mushrooming up into itself ... something was definitely going on. It was too much smoke for a missile strike, and those choppers were on the hunt for someone, the odds were just some random assholes who’d blown up a clinic and the fire had spread, but something about it didn’t feel quite right.

  Taylor stood there on the corner, sweating, and fighting down a wave of nausea, watching the smoke and the choppers and ... it felt like there was this hiccup in time, or maybe his mind just skipped a beat, or something, because now there was nothing but static, a blizzard of blinding blue-white light, and peals of piercing high-pitched feedback reverberating off of every surface ... it wasn’t Gabriel’s horn or anything. It was coming from the screens of the Public Viewers, and the video billboards, and PSA screens, and every other liquid crystal, and plasma, and light-emitting diode, and electroacoustic transducer in the Zone ... the entire IntraZone Content grid. It was all going haywire, all at once.

  Variant Correction

  Out in the Residential Communities, which, incidentally, also formed a series of more or less concentric rings, or circles, or semi-orbiculate shapes, radiating outward, away from the Zone, the Normals, those who were still at home, and whose condo balconies, or winter gardens, offered a view toward the Zone, watched the light show with rapt fascination. None of them had ever seen anything like it. Some of them tried to film it with their Viewers and fleep or tweak the pictures to their Friends. Others just stood there staring, baffled. Several people fleeped, or tweaked, that they thought it was some new form of lightning that emanated upwards out of the earth, or some kind of corporate art installation, or that they had not the faintest clue what it was. Whatever it was, it was certainly pretty, the way the lights kept flashing and flickering, but it didn’t seem to be building toward anything, or at least not in any kind of linear fashion. After a few minutes, most of them tired, and turned their attention back to their Viewers.