Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  Back when Taylor and Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard were all just kids, there used to be a rainy season when it seemed like almost every day, usually in the late afternoon, you’d get these freak torrential rainstorms, where the sky would go black and crack with thunder, and the rain would beat down hot and hard, pounding down onto the streets and rooftops, blowing sideways into the windows, and the gutters would overflow, and flood, and the rats would come pouring out into the streets and run around in mindless circles, and up onto the stoops of buildings, but you couldn’t hear them shrieking or anything, because all you could hear was the sound of the rain hammering down on the tar and stone and plastic awnings and sheets of metal, hammering like a million fists, the fists of a million invisible babies, and it seemed to Taylor and Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, and all the other little kids, like maybe the world was finally coming to an end, and they’d run out into the street to see it (because who’d want to miss a show like that), shouting, squealing, peeling their clothes off, heads turned up, mouths wide open, to drink in the rain and the end of it all, their mothers shouting down out of windows to get back into the fucking house before they got hit by fucking lightning or bitten by one of those fucking rats and ... then, just like that, it would stop, as if God or someone had turned off a spigot, and two minutes later the sun would be out and ...

  Here was Taylor’s turn up Ohlsson.

  He zig-zagged through the clots of shoppers coming the other way down the street, pushing and dragging their rickety carts, schlepping their plastic bags of groceries. They trudged along silently, soaked with sweat, shirts and dresses sticking to their backs, staring intently down at their feet, determined to beat the sun to their houses. A saggy-titted old Chinese lady who Taylor passed nearly every morning shuffled toward him, raised her head, and gave him that “what are you crazy?” look, like she did pretty much every time she saw him walking in the wrong direction like that. Taylor smiled and pushed on past her.

  The Public Viewers were all back online. They were running the standard standby feed, synthesized strings and a glockenspiel, or something, over a montage of Security professionals protecting various innocent civilians from some unspecified, imminent threat. One of the talking heads came on ... a silver-haired man, looking “serious.” The following, he said, was a Security Advisory.

  Due to an incident of civil unrest in the Southeast Quadrant of Sector C, all Class 3 Anti-Social Persons were advised to return to their homes immediately. Class 3 Anti-Social Persons remaining outdoors in Sector C after 0630 would be deemed “uncooperative,” and subject to immediate detention. Class 3 Anti-Social Persons unable to reach their homes by that time were advised to remain outside the Sector, move indoors, shelter in place, and await the issuance of further advisories. IntraZone Waste & Security Services regretted any inconvenience this caused, and thanked you for your cooperation.

  Shoppers dropped their bags in the street, abandoned their carts, ran, walked, hobbled, limped, shuffled, skipped, hopstepped, and otherwise ambulated, as fast as they could toward their homes. Taylor turned and looked to the east. That column of thick black smoke was still rising, growing ... the fire was obviously spreading. Choppers were circling, swooping, and banking. He turned to the south. Choppers there too. Sweeping the streets with their NiteSun beams. They hadn’t yet made it to the English Quarter, but now it was just a matter of time. This was not some random firebomb set off by a bunch of bozos. He wondered whether ... no, fuck it ... there wasn’t any time to wonder. According to the silver-haired talking head, he had, he guessed, about nine minutes to make it to Gillie’s and out of the Sector.

  Gillie’s, on the corner of Ohlsson and Clayton, so right on the border of Sectors B and C, was strictly a Class 3 Anti-Social hang-out. However, being located on the B-side of Clayton, Gillie’s was technically a Class 2 tavern. Thus, even if they sealed off the Sector, which it certainly appeared they intended to do, Taylor would be all right at Gillie’s. The only problem was, Gillie’s Tavern was another fifteen blocks up Ohlsson. At a block a minute, that was fifteen minutes. Walking, at least. He would have to run. Which wasn’t a problem in itself, running. The street was full of people running. Running in the other direction, that is, into the Sector, not out of the Sector, the direction that Taylor was going to be running. This was going to be a problem. One lone Class 3 Anti-Social Person running flat out, out of the Sector, while everyone else was running in, was definitely not going to look so kosher.

  He took off running ... cursing himself, and whatever asshole had invented tequila. *** An enormous specimen of Class 3 idiot, with a gang of other little idiots in tow, was running right at him, hooting and hollering, waving his fat, flabby arms all around. Taylor, who wanted to avoid this idiot, stagger stepped deftly and cut to the right. The big fat idiot cut to the right, to Taylor’s right, the idiot’s left, hollering something that sounded to Taylor like “OW-WAH-MAH-WAH-MAH,” or something like that. The other little idiots followed suit, laughing hysterically, obviously drunk. Taylor cut left. The idiot cut left, closing the distance between them to nothing. The big fat idiot, idiot that he was, idiotically, raised his arms, as if he were going to tackle Taylor, and let loose with some kind of Gaelic war cry. Taylor head faked left, right, dropped his shoulder, accelerated, body checked the big fat idiot savagely in the xiphoid process, broke it, along with several ribs, and possibly ruptured the idiot’s liver. He spun off the check and kept on running, through the gaggle of other little idiots, none of whom seemed particularly interested in getting in Taylor’s way any more.

  After he’d run the first few blocks, he felt like someone was twisting a burning metal fork up through his ribcage. He staggered to a stop, doubled over, hands on his knees, gasping for breath. The voice of Silverhaired Talking Head Man echoed out of the Public Viewers, none of which Taylor was viewing at the moment, getting ready to puke as he was. The following was a Security Advisory. Class 3 Anti-Social Persons had less than five minutes to return to their homes, or otherwise move their asses indoors and out of the sight of Security Services. Class 3 Anti-Social Persons found out of doors in Sector C after 0630 would be deemed uncooperative ...

  Taylor slowly pulled himself up, wiped the sweat out of his eyes, took a deep breath and ... something was wrong. Class 3 Anti-Social Persons without a shred of human empathy were standing around on the stoops of their buildings, and crouching out on their fire escapes, and leaning half out of their tenement windows, staring at him like he was out of his mind, or was some kind of fucking circus clown who was out there for their entertainment. The street was now completely deserted, as in there was not one single person on it, except, of course, for Taylor Byrd, who was standing right in the middle of it. Ahead, in the distance, five blocks north, the orange outline of the neon Gillie’s sign winked at him faintly out of the dark. Five long blocks on an empty street. There wasn’t any way he was going to make it.

  He took off running, or, technically, jogging, the veins in his neck and temples throbbing, cut up onto the sidewalk to his right, which he figured was probably marginally safer than the middle of fucking Ohlsson Street, caught his left boot on a crack in the sidewalk and went down howling in a mound of garbage. He got up, cursing, and took off again, ignoring the laughter and scattered applause from the ass-wipes standing around on their stoops (who he hoped would die of liver cancer), and made it another two agonizing blocks, and was feeling like maybe he was actually going to catch a break, when he heard the chopper .

  The chopper, a standard StreetSweeper model, was coming in fast and low from the west, rotors running intentionally loud, flat black snout tilted menacingly downward. Two buildings up was an open doorway. He bolted for it, sprang up the steps, and made it in just as the chopper’s NiteSun flooded the street with its blue-white beam. The chopper banked, came back around, and hovered there, right in the middle of the street, scanning for Class 3 Anti-Social Persons.

  Taylor pressed back into the darkness. There wasn
’t anything to do now but wait. The chopper had either seen him or it hadn’t ... and OK, he figured it probably hadn’t, because it hadn’t fired an AGM into the vestibule and blown him to pieces. Odds were, it was a routine part of IntraZone Waste & Security Service’s rapid response to the civil unrest, which was either spreading into the Sector, or threatening to spread into the Sector, and which was somehow linked to the taking out of the Content Grid, which had either been sabotaged, or collaterally damaged in the rapid response ... or whatever the fuck it was that was happening.

  Taylor had no clue what was happening. Whatever it was, it was definitely something. IntraZone Waste & Security Services didn’t seal off an entire sector every time some gang of assholes set off an isolated IED. And whatever took out the Public Viewers ... Taylor hadn’t even thought that was possible. No. This was coordinated. Which meant that it had to be the A.S.U. ... which it could not be, because they’d all been detained ... unless they hadn’t ... which they obviously hadn’t ... which meant ... no ... it couldn’t be, could it? On the other hand, what the hell else could it be? If it wasn’t the D.A.D.A., what else was it?

  “No deviations, no matter what happens.”

  He could almost hear her voice in his head. She’d made him repeat it like he was some kind of moron ... Sarah.

  “I need to hear you say it.”

  “No deviations.”

  “No matter what happens.”

  What if Sarah hadn’t disappeared? What if she was out there now, on her way to the rendezvous point? What if she had always planned to synch up “the action” with the start of the D.A.D.A.? That would be just like her, wouldn’t it? There’d never be a better diversion .

  He reached down into the pocket of his chinos. There it was ... the counterfeit Travel Pass. Was it possible, remotely possible, that he might not have to go through with this thing ... this thing he was going to Cassandra’s to do ... the Worst Thing He Had Ever Done? No, he told himself, it wasn’t possible. He was going to do it. He had to do it. He had to prepare himself, mentally, to do it. He had to steel his heart to do it. To close his heart. To empty it out. He didn’t have any more room in there for any more of Sarah’s faith-based pipe dreams ... assuming, that is, they were her pipe dreams, and not some faith-based-sounding nonsense scripted by some corporate hack to lure him into some Corporatist plot to penetrate whatever actual faith-based Terrorist network was actually active, and had possibly finally launched the D.A.D.A. ... unless the D.A.D.A. was also part of it, in which case ... no, he’d confused himself now. The point was, even if she wasn’t dead, or being detained and tortured somewhere, and was out there, on her way to the rendezvous, how could he possibly trust her now, or anything she’d said, after all that had happened? He couldn’t. He shouldn’t have ever trusted her. He shouldn’t have ever trusted anyone. What was it Meyer Jimenez had said?

  “Everybody infiltrates everybody.”

  Right.

  “Everybody uses everybody.”

  Right.

  And something else he’d said ... something Taylor couldn’t quite remember, something to do with time, or power, or the unreality of reality, or something ... which didn’t matter, and wasn’t going to matter, unless Taylor made it out of the Sector.

  At the moment, he wasn’t making it anywhere. What he was doing was hiding in this vestibule, hoping that that IntraZone chopper out there was not equipped with Thermal Imaging, which Taylor, like a lot of Anti-Social Persons, mistakenly believed could see through walls. It couldn’t, of course, but he didn’t know that ... so one more thing that didn’t matter. Or maybe it did ... just not to Taylor, who, again, like a lot other people, and not just Anti-Social people, could only believe what he thought he knew was real at the time was the way things were, which maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, or maybe it was both, or neither .

  “At the core of every fact, my friend, is an act of faith.”

  That was it.

  Fucking Meyer.

  Whatever.

  Anyway ...

  “CLEAR THE STREET,” the chopper ordered.

  Whatever decrepit tenement Taylor was hiding in the dark of the vestibule of was definitely some kind of total shithole that seriously reeked of week-old dead guy. Taylor was suddenly acutely aware of this. His hangover was suddenly acutely aware of this. He stuck the tips of his first two fingers up his nostrils to keep from gagging. Peering around in the dark of the vestibule, with his fingers up his nose like that, he didn’t see any sign of the dead guy, but what he did see was just as repulsive. There, on either side of his head, a few of them sickeningly close to his head, feral pigeons were nesting on the lintels, cooing and shitting down the sides of the jambs. Below the pigeons the ceramic tiles were cracked and broken and caked with guano, which had hardened into a greenish crust, which ran down to an enormous mound of human feces he had nearly stepped in. Across from him, also streaked with guano, a rusted-out panel of doorbell buttons displayed the names of long dead people who used to live there, who no one knew ... Chu, Mahmoud, Weber, Kupferberg. No one ever thought about these people, or knew their stories, or when they had lived here. Their names were etched in neat little rows in the vestibule of every building in the Zone ... a faded memorial from some other world.

  He took a quick peek out into the street.

  The chopper was starting to yaw and dance now, which meant it wasn’t there for Taylor. This was just a routine maneuver, which would soon be over, which, as soon as it was, he would tear-ass the last three blocks to Gillie’s, and find out if anyone knew what was happening. They hadn’t yet set up a perimeter on Clayton when he’d ducked into this lovely vestibule, and he doubted they had managed to set one up in the last two minutes or whatever it had been ... which meant he maybe still had a chance. Or he would, if that chopper would just fuck off. It wasn’t fucking off, however. Instead, it was kind of circling slowly, sweeping the street with its NiteSun again, which it already had, illuminating nothing ... except for that crusty old Russian-looking guy with his face jammed into the side of a building, leaning into it, holding his dick in the classic drunken two-handed grip, peeing all over his taped-up shoes.

  “CLEAR THE STREET,” the chopper reiterated.

  The Russian-looking guy continued peeing. He removed his right hand from his dick, which he seemed to be able to manage with his left, raised it, his right hand, into the air, and flipped the chopper an old-fashioned bird. The chopper ascended, ever so slightly. Taylor winced and shook his head. He’d seen this movie many times before. The Russian guy, who was obviously shitfaced, and not quite finished peeing on his shoes, did this little shimmy-shake dance where his head kind of bobbed back and forth real fast, and his arms kind of flapped, and his fingers quivered, as the over-adrenalized chopper gunner put about three hundred rounds in his back. He crumpled, dead, at the base of the wall, down which most of his guts were now dripping.

  The voice of Silverhaired Talking Head Man, who really wasn’t kidding around now, informed the residents of Ohlsson Street that the official time was 0630. The IntraZone chopper, its work done here, swooped off in a southerly direction to maintain order and cleanliness elsewhere.

  Taylor bolted down the steps.

  He got down low and took off running ... running in the street, because fuck the sidewalk. At this point it was all about speed. One block up he hit his stride. The street was empty. This was good. So was the sky, which was also good. However, two blocks up ahead, at the intersection of Clayton and Ohlsson ... popcorn lights, sirens, headlights. So not so good ... but not over yet. The units, and presumably APCs, were closing in fast from both directions, but they hadn’t yet reached the intersection. If Taylor could get across the avenue before they got there and dive down the slope that ran down off the avenue to Gillie’s, and get himself up and get into Gillie’s, which maybe he could with the streetlights out, which it looked like they were, and if he stayed real low, and now there was only one block to go and ...

  Rev
elation

  One thing every Normal knew, knew for a fact, and took for granted, was that Anti-Social Disease was cunning. They knew this because they had heard it repeated over and over throughout their lives, more or less since the day they were born. As children, they had heard it repeated by their parents, their kindergarten teachers, their grammar school teachers, high-school teachers, and guidance counselors. Later, they had heard it repeated by their friends, their professors, doctors, coworkers, and bosses. They heard it repeated in the Content they streamed. It was spoken by the actors in virtual Immersions, frequently quoted in corporate presentations, invariably recited in political speeches. It was whispered in the course of grave conversations, typically with friends or family members, concerning other friends or family members. Often it was lunchroom gossip, the news that someone had gone full-blown, and had behaved inappropriately, and had had to be hospitalized, which happened on a fairly regular basis. News like this was always sad (deeply sad ... very, very sad) for the person concerned, and their loved ones, of course, but hospitalization was for their own good and was hopefully just a temporary measure. Whoever delivered such distressing news, which in Valentina’s case was usually one of the Histopathology Department’s breezy administrators, would typically do so, pause for effect, sigh wistfully, raise their eyebrows, tactfully refrain from mentioning how they’d suspected whoever had gone full-blown had been “slipping away” for quite some time, loudly stir their herbal tea, which didn’t need stirring, with a metal spoon, look Valentina squarely in the eye, and repeat the adage, “the disease is cunning.”