Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  “When?”

  “It doesn’t matter when.”

  “You fucking liar. You’ve never worn one.”

  OK, so he’d never worn one. Which was not as odd as it probably sounds. Guys didn’t wear a lot of condoms in the Zone. Condoms were not a popular item. This was true for two good reasons, one of which being that there hadn’t been a reported case of an STD for longer than anyone alive could remember ... the other being Ordinance 119.

  IntraZone Ordinance 119, discouraging A.S.P. procreation, had been in effect for thirty years, during which an entire generation of A.S.P.s had been discouraged. Anti-Baby pills were widely available free of charge to A.S.P. women, as were a range of other options. For men, there were condoms, or sterilization, neither of which options were terribly popular. Sterilization was strictly voluntary, but strongly recommended for male 2s and 3s. 1s were deemed responsible enough to make their own contraceptive decisions. A.S.P. 2s, and especially 3s, were deemed as responsible as rutting billy goats, so the sooner the men were sterilized the better.

  IntraZone Ordinance 119, among its numerous other provisions, had authorized IntraZone Waste & Security to found a subsidiary, IntraZone ConCept, whose mission it was to hasten this process. In addition to the Public Service Advisories that ran all day on the Public Viewers, there were ConCept posters all over the Zone extolling the virtues of “permanent contraception,” which procedure for men was quick and painless, and available free at any ConCept clinic. The face on these posters belonged to “Candy,” a buxom, blond, heavy-lidded, nineteen year-old nymphomaniac, who looked like maybe she was masturbating right there into the lens of the camera. Her lips were slightly parted and glistening. Her eyes had that pre-orgasmic glaze. “DO IT FOR ME!” was Candy’s slogan. It stretched in bright pink all-cap letters across the space where her nipples would have been. Unfortunately, for IntraZone Waste & Security, and IntraZone ConCept, and their parent company, the Candy campaign had been less than convincing. Most of the posters had been defaced. (Guys struck out “for” and wrote in “to.”) They weren’t exactly lining up to get their vasa deferentia snipped either. The ConCept clinics in Sector B had dwindled in number to about fourteen, and the ones in Sector C had all closed. Class 3 Anti-Social Persons kept throwing objects through the windows.

  Despite the disappointing response to the “Candy” campaign and other enticements, IntraZone ConCept had not given up on sterilization of the male 2s and 3s, but they’d pretty much written off Taylor’s generation and were concentrating now on the under-40s. In the meantime, for the older guys, there were other contraceptive strategies. For one thing, there were always the women, who for one extremely compelling reason, the nature of which we’ll get into shortly, tended to take their pills like clockwork. And if something went wrong, like, say, for example, you lost your pills in the piles of crap that completely covered the floor of your bedroom, which you’d never once cleaned in like ten fucking years ... well, OK, there were always condoms.

  “How the fuck do you think it happened?”

  She dropped the tester into the glass of urine and set it down on her bedside milk crate, nudging aside the other glasses of stuff that looked like but wasn’t her pee. She smiled at Taylor in that way he hated, with that icy, condescending smirk that 1s reserved for Class 3 morons, which is how 1s generally regarded 3s, but was not how Cassandra regarded Taylor, at least not usually, not till today. She looked like she was getting ready to reach for something heavy to throw at him, then she broke down and burst out sobbing. Cassandra never burst out sobbing. She’d never once cried in all the years he’d known her. She was making this guttural keening sound. Her face was quivering. Her hands were shaking. Taylor had never seen like this .

  He went to the bed and sat down and held her, which only made her sob even harder. She pushed him away and fumbled around in the sheets for something to blow her nose on.

  “What are we going to do?” she moaned.

  “This isn’t your fault. This is my fault.”

  “I know.”

  “So ... I’ll think of something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Something.”

  “You’d better or I’m fucking dead,” she blubbered.

  Taylor wasn’t just saying shit he thought Cassandra wanted to hear. In some Narcissistic, self-serving way, he really believed it was his fault, or was mostly his fault, or was partly his fault. If he hadn’t been such a big fucking baby, Cassandra wouldn’t be sitting there pregnant, making those horrible wailing noises, and blowing her nose into her filthy bedsheet. But then again, he also believed, if Cassandra hadn’t lost her pills, he wouldn’t have gotten so fucking mad at her, and gone to Gillie’s, and gotten so drunk, and ended up out in the Willoughby Projects, in which case (i.e., if he hadn’t done that) he wouldn’t have ended up back at Cassandra’s, and they wouldn’t have fought, and thrown shit around, and made up and fucked like savage beasts, all pent-up and desperate and angry, which was how they always ended up fucking after they fought ... so OK, sure, technically speaking, it was his fault, but partly it was also her fault. And mostly it was the condom’s fault.

  Taylor had never quite mastered the art of fucking with his cock wrapped in plastic. In Taylor’s book it was almost worse than not being able to fuck at all. He did the best he could that month. He wore the condoms, grinned and bore it, but even when it worked, his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t understand how the Normals did it. Never mind the question of why they did it. He figured they were all numbed out on their meds ... that, or maybe they had all been brainwashed and couldn’t really tell the difference anymore. You’d see them in the Normal pornos, which were really just Sex-Education Content, gazing longingly into each other’s eyes as they tore the condom packs open, slowly, licking their lips like they just couldn’t wait to hermetically seal their cocks in plastic .

  This didn’t make any sense to Taylor. Wearing a rubber was like eating TŌ Food. You went through the motions of doing the thing you were actually doing, but weren’t really doing, but weren’t exactly not doing either, because there you were, in the flesh so to speak, eating or fucking, whichever it was, and it looked and worked like the actual thing, except for the fact that the chicken or fish was a bunch of genetically modified bean curd and your cock was wrapped in sterilized latex as if it was going into surgery or something. Which, frankly, for Taylor, just killed the whole mood, such that sometimes, after a minute of fucking, or TŌ fucking, as he took to calling it, he’d start to get all tense and frustrated, and his cock would go limp and just hang there, sadly, wrapped in its little rubbery sheath. And at other times, when he didn’t go limp, he’d fuck Cassandra like he normally did, fuck her into a screaming frenzy, and she’d come like crazy, two or three times, and run out of gas, and lie there, gasping, and Taylor wouldn’t even be close to coming. All right, so they’d fuck some more then, and after a while Cassandra would reach another plateau and come again, hard and deep now, down in her soul, and Taylor, who normally, whenever that happened, would come so hard he’d hurt his prostate, would want so desperately to come along with her, but he couldn’t come with the condom on, so finally he would just pull his cock out, tear the fucking rubber off, and Cassandra would finish him off with her hand ... which left him feeling all scrambled inside, like he’d just gotten laid, but hadn’t, not really.

  One night, after a couple of weeks of that, Taylor went down to Gillie’s Tavern and got himself good and fucking shitfaced. He picked up a drunken little A.S.P. 3 with a snake tattoo by the name of Loraine, took her home to her shithole apartment on the 17th floor of the Willoughby Towers, drank her liquor and fucked her brains out from Friday night until Sunday morning. They dropped some MDLX she had, put some hypno on endless repeat, got out Loraine’s collection of toys (most of which had been designed to inflict some form of pain on Loraine), and otherwise behaved like stereotypical Class 3 Anti-Social Persons all weekend. Which was fine with Taylor, as far as
that went. The only problem was, as hard as he tried, he couldn’t stop thinking about Cassandra. He thought about Cassandra the entire weekend. The more he thought about Cassandra, the harder he spanked and fucked Loraine, which worked out pretty well for Loraine, but left Taylor feeling all numb inside, which wasn’t exactly his favorite feeling.

  Loraine’s apartment was the size of a closet, and reeked of sweat and feet and pussy (and some unidentified mystery smell), however, being up on the 17th floor with nothing around it, the view was stunning. A strip of windows you couldn’t open looked out as far as the eye could see. Taylor stood there, at some point, tripping, gazing into the gray, dimensionless sky alive with liquid trails of the lights of planes and commercial choppers and UAVs on their way to nowhere. He could see the whole Zone, or the northern part anyway, all three alpha-coded sectors, all the way out to Jefferson Avenue, and the markets ... and there, out beyond the Wall, the boundless sea of twinkling lights stretching endlessly off to the north, dropping down off the visible horizon ... cities bleeding into other cities, megacities, gigacities, thirty-something billion people packed into townhouses, corporate offices, condos, air-conditioned cocoons, sleeping, eating, working, breeding, churning out products and streams of Content, going forth and multiplying, choking what was left of the Earth like shimmering colonies of luminous algae ... what was the fucking point of it all? Down and off to the right of this vista, scattered throughout the Northeast Quadrant, the lights of the In-Zone plants and factories were winking and blinking and bleeding together like the synapses of some vast neural network. Down there somewhere, in one of those plants, assembling motherboards, or chipsets, or something, was Cassandra Passwaters ... who he did not need. He didn’t. Taylor didn’t need anyone. He certainly didn’t need this bullshit. This lame-ass condom-wearing bullshit. Fuck Cassandra and her fucking condoms. He’d wait until she got her new pills. She’d either have him back or she wouldn’t. And if she wouldn’t, he’d just find someone else. (Not Lorraine, someone else.) It was probably time to do that anyway. Fuck Cassandra and her fucking monogamy. He’d never meant to “settle down” anyway, and so on, in Taylor’s doped up logic.

  Just before sunrise that Sunday morning, Taylor got up and got a shower in this plastic cold-water shower contraption that dribbled pathetically and had zero pressure. He was coming down from the MDLX, so his body felt like it was made of Jell-O. Loraine, who was nowhere near as attractive as Taylor remembered thinking she was, was passed out cold in the crusty sheets, the stench of which was past intolerable. He checked around for something to eat, but there wasn’t anything even vaguely edible, so he got his boots on and tiptoed out, heading back home to 16 Mulberry, or the deep Inner Zone, or who knew where, Gillie’s maybe, it didn’t matter ... anywhere that wasn’t Cassandra’s.

  He got to Cassandra’s just before dawn, pushed and shoved his way through the throngs, cut through the fishmarket, climbed the fire escape, and crawled in through her bedroom window. She had just gotten home from her factory shift, and had changed out of her factory coveralls and into one of her see-through gown things. Her pirate Viewer was playing some Content in which a clown was trying to teach some other clowns how to drive a car. She asked him where the fuck he’d been. He informed her he hadn’t been fucking anywhere. She asked him what the fuck he wanted. He asked if she fucking had something to eat. She said she thought she maybe had some powdered eggs, which he could shove up his ass. He wondered if she’d gotten her period yet. She told him she hadn’t. He asked when she would. She told him it should be any day now, and either he could be patient and wait, or grow the fuck up and use the condoms, or go back to whatever whore he’d been fucking without a condom if he liked her so much. Taylor reckoned he might just do that, and he wondered if maybe she’d found her pills among all this crap all over the floor, which maybe she was waiting for the maid to clean up. She snatched a bottle from her bedside milk crate and hurled it at him. It missed, just ... shattering against the wall beside him and spraying shrapnel every which way. Taylor caught a shard in his cheek. He dug it out, examined it, briefly, dropped it in an ashtray, and started for the window. Cassandra leaped up off the bed, jumped on his back, knocking him over, got up, pounced on his chest like a cat, and punched him two or three times in the face before he could get a good hold on her wrists and roll her over and hold her down, and still she managed to get one knee up and into his nuts before it was over.

  Later that night, they’d been going at it good and hard for a couple, three hours, not fucking for three hours straight, of course, but fucking, then lying around for a while, then fucking again, and so on, like that, and Cassandra was on her back for a change, folded in half with her legs in the air, and Taylor was pinning her wrists to the bed and was up on his hands and the balls of his feet in something resembling a push-up position, fucking her like there was no tomorrow (which, of course, technically speaking, there wasn’t), and anyway, Cassandra couldn’t take it anymore and started to shudder and come and shout, and Taylor pushed himself way up into her and shuddered and started to come and shout, and now the two of them were coming and shouting, and one of Cassandra’s roommates was shouting, and banging the wall with the heel of her shoe, which neither Taylor nor Cassandra noticed, shouting at the top of their lungs as they were, their bodies convulsing in perfect synch, orgasms shooting electric currents up their spines and into their brains, rolling their eyeballs back in their heads ... and it wasn’t until a few seconds later that both of them, more or less simultaneously, realized the condom had broken.

  And so it was, on that late July or possibly early August morning, 2609, H.C.S.T. (the Year of the Mekong Giant Catfish), that a tiny unauthorized Anti-Social Person, who several months later Taylor named Max, began his strange and fateful journey toward the light of this dying world ... which, more about Max and the dying world later. We need to get back, or forward, rather, to that September morning, and the pee, and the sobbing ... or, technically, a few days after that.

  Taylor spent those next few days (i.e., after the morning of the pregnancy test) doing exactly what he had promised Cassandra, namely, trying to think of something. He hadn’t been able to think of anything. Except for what he’d eventually thought of, which was crazy, and was definitely not going to work. At the moment, he was sitting in a booth at Gillie’s, drinking heavily, and reviewing the facts. And looking for a way around the facts. And there wasn’t any way around the facts.

  Cassandra was pregnant. This was a fact. She shouldn’t have been, but there it was. And this was really eating at Taylor, because medically speaking it was virtually impossible. At 0500 on the Monday morning following the Sunday of the Broken Condom, they had gone to the CRS together, picked up a package of MorningAfter pills, and gone back to her place and followed the instructions. The pill, when taken within twenty-four hours, had a ninety-nine point nine nine success rate. And she’d definitely taken the fucking pill. Taylor had sat there and watched her take it. So, OK, there was another fact. Which didn’t matter. Not one iota. The pill hadn’t worked. The pill was shit. Which meant they were down to two or three options, each of which, individually, sucked.

  For starters, according to paragraphs 3 and 4 of Ordinance 119, as of 01 January, 2580, or 12 Tevet, 6340, or something in the Year of the fucking Dugong, female Anti-Social Persons who had somehow gotten accidentally pregnant despite the employment of clinically tested and widely available contraceptive measures, were, upon discovery of said pregnancy, to report, in person, at their earliest convenience, to their nearest IntraZone ConCept clinic ... whereupon they would disappear.

  While no one knew the official numbers, conspiracy theorists, like Meyer Jimenez, estimated that approximately two hundred thousand accidentally pregnant women had followed these instructions, and had disappeared. They’d walked into their local clinic, taken a number, had a seat, been shown through a door by a smiling assistant, and had never been seen or heard from again. According to Ordinance 119, these dis
appeared accidentally pregnant women had all been transferred to a specially-designated Females-Only Quarantine Area. They had been provided with prenatal care, had delivered their babies, and were living happily (albeit in a female-only environment) somewhere very far away. Their unauthorized infants had been transferred to a Juveniles-Only Quarantine Area, where doctors, psychologists, and other medical professionals, were treating their Anti-Social Disease with cutting-edge pharma- and behavioral therapies, many of which were experimental.

  No one in the Zone believed a word of this.

  The vast majority of the disappearances had happened during the two-year period following the issuance of Ordinance 119. It had taken a while for people to begin to put together what was happening, and even then, for the first few years, no one wanted to face what was happening. So, they didn’t. Simple as that. They told themselves that it wasn’t happening. They told themselves, and each other, stories, or chose to believe the ConCept story, the story about the “relocations” to the “other Zones” and all that horseshit. All of which was understandable, the implications being what they were. However, as more and more women went missing, and the sound of infants crying in the Zone gradually diminished, then entirely ceased (and history wonks like Meyer Jimenez correlated the date of the Ordinance to the births of the first generation of Clears) people began to accept the truth.

  By January 2585, or Tevet 6345, or something in the Year of the Coronado Skink, the pregnancy rate in Zone 23 had been reduced to zero, or virtually zero. It had stayed that for twenty-five years. By now (i.e., the time of our story), there was no one left in the Zone under thirty. There were still, of course, the occasional accidents, but these were extremely rare events, and were invariably due to the inexplicable failure of the so-called MorningAfter pill, a powerful progesterone receptor antagonist, which, according to the label, was totally foolproof, and the last defense against accidental pregnancy. ***** According to Ordinance 119, the unfortunate women who suffered these accidents, or otherwise remained accidentally pregnant six weeks after their last menstruation, were required to report to a ConCept clinic.