Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  Other people were in the booth. They were sitting on either side of Dodo, some pierced-up whitebread PKP freak, who looked on the verge of a grand mal seizure, another scumbag, who was probably his dealer, and a couple of regular Darkside dancers, one of whom was jerking off some fatso with a rubber ball in his mouth. None of these people were there with Dodo. They all just happened to be sharing the booth. This was obvious, at least to Taylor, and beside the point, because the question was, what the fuck was Dodo Pacheco doing in a booth at the Darkside Club at 0500 on a Thursday morning? Dodo Pacheco, who had never once been to the Darkside Club in his drug-addled life. Dodo Pacheco, the Plasto fiend, who had as much interest in deviant sex as he did in anything other than Plasto, which in case you were wondering was less than none.

  Taylor quickly scanned the playroom, looking for anything else suspicious. The dance floor was writhing with naked, sweat-soaked, DMLX-fueled all-night dancers, their glistening bodies gyrating, whirling, circumnavigating stations of stocks, cages, splitters, racks, prangers, and other machines of unspeakable torture. Off in an alcove, a trio of Machos was ganging what looked like a Nordic Nancy. Screens were running bootleg loops of tropical fish that swam in circles intercut with close-up footage of male-to-female sex change surgery. People were getting whipped, paddled, branded, pinched, pierced with needles, shocked, suffocated with bags on their heads ... in other words, nothing out of the ordinary.

  He turned his attention back to Dodo, or rather, to the booth where Dodo had been. Dodo was gone. Where the fuck was he? Wait ... OK, there he was, creepy-crawling toward the exit, trying to use those dancers for cover.

  Taylor drained the rest of his beer and fought his way through the crowd in pursuit, shoving, elbowing, and otherwise physically clearing a path through the wall-to-wall dancers. Any second he was going to go blind, or suffer a series of massive strokes, or otherwise die of this splitting headache, which was probably some type of mid-brain tumor, and here came that nebulous feeling of dread again, which he didn’t have time to contemplate, currently. He made it to the rickety metal staircase, took the stairs two and three at a time, sprang out the street-level door of the Darkside, which opened onto this dead-end alley that terminally reeked of piss and garbage, and into the blue-white megawatt beam of an IntraZone chopper’s NiteSun searchlight ... which, OK, that was the end of his chase scene, and everything else, because now he was dead.

  Or ... no ... OK, he wasn’t dead.

  What had happened was, he had frozen in place, and now, slowly, he raised his hands (the rotors of the chopper rustling his clothes), interlocked his fingers and very slowly brought his hands down on top of his head. Extremely slowly, he lowered his eyes out of the blinding beam of the searchlight, knowing that any sudden movement might cause whatever Security Specialist was up there aiming the .50 caliber armor-piercing armament at him to go berserk and splatter his guts all over the frontage of the Darkside Club. He’d seen this happen a hundred times, not at the Darkside, but other places. All it took was the slightest twitch, a fidgety finger, the flick of an eyelid, and they would blow your intestines, and adjacent organs, and the splintered bits of your spinal column, out through the gaping hole in your back that they had made with the armor-piercing armament.

  Taylor, hoping to avoid all that, and who still had his nerve, and in spite of his headache, stood there like an inanimate object. He knew, odds were, he was probably dead anyway (you usually were with the NiteSun on you), but he stood there like a statue, waiting ... for death, or instructions from the crew in the chopper, until, oddly (as in this never happened), after what felt like an hour to Taylor, but was actually only five or six seconds, the chopper shuddered, rose, banked, killed its NiteSun and swooped away.

  Once the sound of the chopper’s rotors had faded into the ambient noise, Taylor slowly raised his head and scanned the alley, as best he could. Bright white floaters were occluding his vision, after-effects of the NiteSun beam. Even so, he could see well enough to see that Dodo Pacheco was gone. He must have made it around the corner before the chopper switched its light on, which didn’t seem possible, given the geography, and ... whatever. He would deal with Dodo later.

  By 0530, or thereabouts, he had made it back to 16 Mulberry and up the creaking, piss-reeking stairs and through the door and into the kitchen, where Meyer was slumped at the table, drunk, a half-empty bottle of rum in evidence. He went through Meyer’s jacket pockets and came up with IZD ninety-two twenty. Meyer watched him through bloodshot eyes, mumbling something in what might have been Yiddish, but at this point Taylor didn’t give a hairy fuck. The muscles in his neck were spasming. He was dripping sweat. His head was pounding. He took a quick swig of Meyer’s rum, dug through the cupboard over the sink, found a packet of Ibucedrin in the secret spot where Meyer kept them, and gulped down five with a liter of water. Heading down the hall to his room, he threw a glance into Dodo’s alcove, knowing that Dodo would not be in there, which, no surprise here, folks, Dodo wasn’t. Sylvie’s nook was also empty, which didn’t mean anything, or not anymore. Wherever she was, she was off the hook. Taylor had found his Cooperator. Dexter was in with Coco, purring. Claudia, or someone in her room, was snoring. Out the front windows, on the Public Viewer, one of the female Talking Heads, not the one with the orange hair, was blathering on about the greatly improved but still officially guarded condition of some rich-ass Normal, Jimbo something, who was valiantly battling intestinal cancer, and who Taylor wished would just fucking die. Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard were half on the nod in front of a Viewer that was running their pirate bootleg copy of this ancient movie called Planet of the Apes, the hero of which, played by Marlon Brando, Taylor’s mother had named him after.

  Taylor squatted on the floor beside her (Alice Williams, not his mother, of course), fingered her hair back out of her face, kissed her on the forehead softly, and told her he needed some money, right now. Alice Williams (in super slo-motion) retrieved a bag that Rusty Braynard was holding in his lap, dug down in it, and pulled out a handful of IZD bills. She sprinkled the bills over Taylor’s feet. She did this by feel, as her eyes wouldn’t open. “Look,” she mumbled, eyelids fluttering. She nodded toward the screen of the Viewer, where the apes were riding horses across a field of wheat or barley or something. “It’s yooooooo,” she cooed, and giggled, and drooled.

  Taylor gave her another kiss, and counted out the cash he needed ... he took three hundred, just to be safe. He peeked inside the paper bag. It was stuffed with bills, fifties and hundreds, and pharmaceutical Plastomorphinol, several hundred hits, it looked like. He gathered up the leftover bills off the floor, stuffed them back into the bag, pushed it up under the greasy old blanket Rusty Braynard was halfway sitting on, and high-tailed it out of 16 Mulberry.

  The time was approximately 0540.

  Alternately walking and jogging to Cassandra’s, he made a mental list of the people he would need to find and convince (or otherwise encourage) to divulge the whereabouts of Dodo Pacheco. The list consisted of Rudy Rebello, and Rudy Rebello’s scumbag associates, who Dodo wasn’t officially one of (he was more like an adjunct scumbag associate). Rudy, and his gang of slimy scumbags worked the streets off Zuckerberg Square, dealing Plasto, pirate Content, and anything else they could get their hands on. Last Taylor knew they were using the vault of a former bank as their daytime headquarters. They sat out the heat of the day down there, copping Zs, shooting Plasto, and taking turns anally raping each other, then came out at night and worked the square. They mostly catered to the totally desperate, emaciated half-dead Plasto fiends, those with serious suicide habits, who the other dealers wouldn’t deign to sell to. Taylor hadn’t spoken to Rebello, whose guts he hated, for several years, but he figured Rudy would want to help him, once he had dislocated his elbow, or one of his scumbag associates would. The point was, whoever gave Dodo up, and after Taylor took Dodo somewhere and asked him a series of incisive questions regarding who he was cooperating with, and how much the
y knew about Cassandra, and the baby, and anything else he could think of ... Dodo Pacheco was fucking dead.

  Now, the thing was, technically, before he brought an egregious and incredibly painful end to Dodo’s worthless cooperating life, he needed to clear it with Adam and Sarah, because “no deviations” and all that shit. But that would be just a formality, he thought, because certainly, having heard his story, and having done some sort of “risk assessment,” or whatever ridiculous operational procedure they would have to perform to make a decision, they would both agree that the Dodo situation was something that needed to be dealt with ... fatally. He figured he would probably find them down in the Branson Avenue basement that they mostly used for Action Updates but which also served as a daytime place to crash for some of the Fifthian Cluster. Or Adam would be down there, anyway. (Sarah had never told him where she slept, or how she spent her days, exactly.) So, OK, that’s what he’d do, immediately ... after he did Cassandra’s shopping.

  Cassandra, at this point, was seven months pregnant, and miserable, and peeing like twelve times a day, and getting up every hour or two while she was trying to sleep, in the heat, to pee. Which of course every time she got up to pee, or thinking she had to, she woke up Taylor, who hadn’t slept for more than maybe ninety minutes at a stretch for weeks. Her nausea had passed (boy, that had been fun), and now it was only the total exhaustion, and the unrelenting physical discomfort, and the mood swings, and cravings, and the constant peeing, that were making her existence a living hell. That, and the ongoing Content Problem, and the fear of her nosy and annoying roommates, who were quietly freaking completely out over how she refused to come out of her bedroom, and who were probably going to cooperate on her ... oh, and also how Taylor now routinely showed up reeking of whatever her name was’s cunt, as if she couldn’t smell it all over him, while she, Cassandra, was a virtual prisoner, trapped inside her own fucking bedroom, peeing into a plastic bucket and watching the same ten Content discs, which were crap to begin with, for the last four months.

  Taylor, at approximately 0650, bags of groceries and Content in tow, sleep deprived, headache throbbing, thoroughly sweat-drenched and pussy redolent, crawled in through Cassandra’s window. He found her crouching beside the door, listening to one of her nosy roommates, who, apparently, if Taylor was correctly interpreting Cassandra’s frantic series of gestures, was out there in the hallway right now, doing the same thing Cassandra was doing (i.e., crouching and listening through Cassandra’s door). He set down the bags as quietly as possible and waved Cassandra away from the door. She crawled into bed and pulled up the sheet, assuming the infectious Hepatitis position. He tippytoed to the door (in his boots), gripped the doorknob, turned it silently, and yanked it open ... revealing nothing. No one was out there listening to anyone. Cassandra was obviously losing her shit.

  “He was fucking out there,” she assured him angrily. Jules (or Joel) was who she meant. Taylor told her he’d deal with that later ... and, oh yeah, they were out of Chewies, so he had gotten her these seaweed stick things instead. She reminded that him she hated those fucking stick things, which, if Taylor had ever actually listened to a fucking word she fucking said, he would have remembered she fucking hated, so now he could shove them up his ass. He told her she didn’t have to fucking eat them, although, if she read the fucking box, she’d find out they were just like the Chewies, with a different name, but the same fucking shit. She informed him that he had no idea what the fuck he was talking about, and inquired as to whether he had finally managed to remove his dick from whatever her name was long enough to buy, or steal, or otherwise find her some new fucking Content, or whether she had to go fucking apeshit. He said, as a matter of fact, he had. He’d bought these fucking discs right here, and no, before she even asked, he didn’t know what was fucking on them. He threw the discs onto the bed. She gave him that condescending Class 1 look, and wondered aloud if maybe she shouldn’t just throw herself out the fucking window and put an end to this whole fucking nightmare, which Taylor was not making any easier by acting like a typical Class 3 asshole and talking to her like she was some kind of idiot, which if anyone was, it was fucking Taylor. Taylor apologized (not like he meant it) for saving her fucking life and all that, grabbed up her bucket, stormed across the hall, and emptied into the disgusting toilet that none of her nosy and annoying roommates had deemed it necessary to clean for weeks. One of the roommates (not Jules, or Joel, or whatever the fuck his fucking name was) was standing down there at the end of the hall, seriously contemplating coming down there. Seeing Taylor in the hall with the bucket, wild-eyed and not having slept for months, she changed her mind and got the hell out of there, which, OK, probably good decision. Taylor stalked back into the bedroom, put down the bucket, and started for the window, whereupon Cassandra immediately inquired as to where the fuck he thought he was going. He told her he had to take care of something. Cassandra replied that if he went out that window, that would be it, it would all be over, because she’d walk out onto Jefferson Avenue, seven months pregnant and (why not?) naked, and what did Taylor think about that?

  Taylor, wincing, headache throbbing, sat her down on the edge of the bed and tried, as calmly as he possibly could, leaving out how he’d been at the Darkside deviantly fucking Sarah all night, to explain the recent Dodo sighting, and how he needed to get with Adam and Sarah and deal with same, which ... Cassandra didn’t care.

  “You’re getting more paranoid than I am,” she told him. “Which is saying something, because I’m losing my shit. I’m sitting here every night hallucinating roommates, and choppers, and goons out the window, while you’re out fucking whatever her name is … ”

  “Stop,” he grabbed and held her wrists. “This is no joke. Dodo could burn us. If he knows about you …”

  She twisted her wrists free.

  “Listen to yourself. What actually happened? You saw a guy in a club somewhere ... and what? What else?”

  There was nothing else. Other than Taylor’s sense of dread. That, and the Watchers, who were following him everywhere ... or the Watchers he thought were following him everywhere.

  “The fucking Watchers follow everyone everywhere. If they knew anything, we’d be dead already. You’re freaking out.”

  OK, that ... and Sarah, and her offer to smuggle him out with the baby, which he didn’t want to burden Cassandra with. Or not at this particularly moment.

  “I need to handle this.”

  “No. You don’t. You need to stick to the plan like they said.”

  “The plan you keep saying is not going to work.”

  “Look at you. Look at both of us, will you? Please. Look at the shape we’re both in. Stay. Help me get some sleep. You get some sleep. We’ll both get some sleep.”

  “I need to ...”

  “Please. Please don’t blow this.”

  “I’m not going to blow this.”

  “Yes. You are. And after all this ... look, we made it this far. Two more months. We can make it two months. We can hold it together for two more months.”

  Taylor didn’t know what to say.

  “Close the curtains and get in bed. You can’t go out in the heat now anyway. What were you thinking?”

  He wasn’t thinking. His head was throbbing. He could hardly see. Of course he couldn’t go out in the heat. The expected high was 52 Celsius. His sleep-deprived brain would fry like halloumi before he even made it out of the sector. He closed his eyes and sat there in agony. What if she was right about all of it? What if Dodo was just a coincidence? What if he was just getting paranoid? He didn’t know what to believe anymore.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, and this time he meant it.

  “Lie down,” she ordered him .

  Taylor did.

  She sat there a moment watching him breathe. Then she used both hands to grab her gravidity, pulled herself up, waddled to the window, and drew the curtains to keep out the heat.

  During the four weird weeks that followed, while
the Normals were celebrating Easter, Passover, Resurrection Day, Egg-white Omelet Day, and the scores of other vernal holidays no one could remember why they were celebrating, Taylor’s paranoia mounted. It wasn’t just the sloppy tails he’d been shaking routinely since the end of October. He was seeing Watchers everywhere now, and he couldn’t find Dodo Pacheco anywhere, and Sarah was still at work on his head, and there was still no go-date for the fucking D.A.D.A., and the thing with the chopper outside the Darkside ... what the fuck was up with that?

  Or maybe it wasn’t paranoia. Maybe it was just the insufferable heat. The daytime temperatures were up in the 50s. The humidity was one hundred percent at least. The talking heads on the Public Viewers were tracking some sort of cyclonic activity that was out in the Atlantic and moving this way. They were running all kinds of Doppler images, and impenetrable graphs, and generally panicking. The barometric pressure was dropping. Joints were aching. Moods were souring.

  Or maybe it was lack of sleep. Sleeping in intervals of ninety minutes for months on end will do that to you. It will make you irritable, and moody, and jumpy, and overly suspicious, and totally paranoid.

  In any event, whatever it was, he was seeing Community Watchers everywhere ... about which there was nothing imaginary. One day, two of them strolling down Clayton, right across from Gillie’s Tavern, at 0600 in the fucking morning ... glancing into random doorways and making notes on their digital logs, as if a transparent ruse like that would fool a hardcore 3 like Taylor. The next day, another two, corner of Conolly, pretending that they weren’t just fucking standing there waiting for Taylor to come up Mulberry, which what the fuck else would they have been doing there? A few nights later, three on Ohlsson, ostensibly checking Plasto scripts. And so on. Everywhere he fucking went. It was like some kind of Watchers convention.