Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  As suffocating March turned to suffocating April, and the temperature rose, their numbers increased. Hordes of them now, all over the market, watching him out of the corners of their eyes as he shopped for Cassandra’s morning groceries. Were they tracking his purchases? They might have been. He took to alternating stands more frequently. He also started noting the movements of Security cameras along his route, when they panned, or racked their focus, and comparing the number of Watcher sightings, those on any given morning, to those on any other given morning, and mentally logging the number of passes of low-flying drones and Security choppers, and checking the packaging of everything he bought for tracking devices, or listening devices, or miniature cameras or ... he wasn’t quite sure.

  Another thing he wasn’t imagining was the disappearance of Dodo Pacheco, who had either gone into hiding somewhere far away across the Zone (which Taylor felt was extremely unlikely, given that Dodo never left the quadrant) or into some type of protective custody, and was sitting in an air-conditioned IntraZone facility ratting out Taylor for all he was worth. He’d gone down to Zuckerberg Square as planned (i.e., Taylor had, not Dodo Pacheco), and had had a few words with Rudy Rebello, who had sworn, between his agonized shrieks, that he hadn’t seen Dodo Pacheco for weeks. He’d dutifully reported the Dodo sighting to Adam and Sarah that night at a meeting, an Action Group Update concerning the wording of the presumably final call-out for the D.A.D.A., the date of which (as of now, mid-April) had still not been consensually decided. They didn’t seem too terribly concerned.

  “We’ll look into it,” Adam told him.

  “When?”

  “When I fucking get around to it.”

  And that was wrong. That was not the right answer.

  “If Dodo knows about Cassandra ...”

  “We heard you the fucking first time, Chief.”

  “Yeah, well ... I thought you were maybe auditorily challenged or something.

  “You’re getting paranoid,” Sarah whispered.

  “Stick to the plan,” Adam admonished him. “We’ll take care of the Cooperators. ”

  Taylor, as the weeks and months crept by, was growing less and less comfortable with Adam. Not that he had seen that much of him, except at meetings, which was fine with Taylor. But, see, there was another thing that was wrong, because despite the extensive preparations that according to Adam, and Jamie, and Dorian, and several other members of Adam’s inner circle, had been ongoing on a sub rosa basis in various locations for the past five months, nothing visible was moving forward, or firming up, regarding the D.A.D.A., in terms of a date, or concrete plan, or anything else that anyone else at the Action Group Updates was privy to. No, it seemed (to Taylor, in his current state) like Adam, and his hardcore inner circle of jargon-spewing Transplant comrades, like Jamie, or Jamé, or whatever her name was, and Dorian and Maya, and two or three others, had just been using the D.A.D.A., which was never going to happen, as a means of recruiting as many new gullible militant Transplant idiots as possible, and then dividing them up into totally-autonomous working groups, which Adam controlled. The working groups, which were all allegedly hard at work on their respective projects, none of which could be discussed at meetings, in keeping with the tenets of security culture, were working in isolation from each other. No one, aside from Adam, apparently, knew what anyone else was doing.

  And if that wasn’t already suspicious enough, there was Sarah, and her fucking Unnameable Something, which was sounding more and more to Taylor like a dressed-up version of The One Who Was Many, and her ominous warnings, and Meyerish theories, and her constant pressuring Taylor to let her smuggle him out of the Zone with the baby ... all of which (apart from being highly fishy) was really starting to get on his dick. Every time they met now it seemed, after they’d done their deviant sex thing, which, frankly, was getting a bit routine, she would start in pressuring him to make a decision ... which Taylor had already strongly implied he wasn’t going anywhere without Cassandra, but he hadn’t categorically said he wasn’t, so Sarah just kept needling away.

  Two nights back, at Hardcore Carla’s, he’d finally convinced her to tell him the plan ... or maybe she had always intended to tell him. More and more it felt to Taylor like everything that Sarah did was calculated, or was happening according to some sort of timeline, and that possibly every word she said was written down in a secret script, which she knew the end of but Taylor didn’t.

  In any event, on the day of the “action,” which they figured would fall in the second week of May, the plan was, Taylor would go to Cassandra’s, arriving at exactly 0630, pick up the “package,” place the package in a towel inside a Transplant bag, * walk the package down Jefferson Avenue, turning, at exactly 0650, into an alley across from the stand where they sold the sun screen and other skincare lotions, at the far end of which some unspecified vehicle would pull up and wait for exactly two minutes.

  “Where do I find you when she has the baby?”

  “You don’t. We’ll know when she has the baby.”

  “How?”

  Sarah gave him a look. So ... OK, they had someone watching her. And see, there was another thing that was wrong, because why the fuck were they watching Cassandra? More importantly, how were they watching her? Did they have a miniature camera in her room? Taylor wanted to know all this.

  Sarah asked him to try to trust her.

  “Oh, yeah, and one more thing ...”

  Taylor was not to mention the plan, or anything remotely related to the plan, and definitely not the rendezvous point, to anyone, she stressed, including Adam.

  What was he supposed to make of that?

  “Nothing,” she told him. “This is just how we do it.”

  Which Taylor knew was total bullshit. Sarah had been avoiding Adam. Or she had missed a lot of meetings recently. And the vibe between them had subtly changed, maybe on account of how Sarah was getting tied up and deviantly fucked by Taylor, which Adam was clearly not a big fan of, or maybe on account of something else ... but wait, the next part was even better.

  After Taylor had verbally acknowledged that he understood and would follow the plan, she grabbed her backpack from beside the bed, set it on her belly, unzipped a pocket, reached in and took out a laminated card. She handed him the card. He held it to the light. His photo was there in the upper right corner. Printed beside it in IntraZone typeface:

  WORK/TRAVEL CLEARANCE

  BOYD, TYLER, A.S.P. (1), ZONE 23

  0820.2565.709.Z23.

  SANITATION SERVICES, RESIDENTIAL

  “In case you change your mind,” she said. “We’ll activate it on the day of the action. You’ll have about twenty-five minutes to use it before the sys-scan picks up the hack.”

  Taylor sat there, staring at the pass. His picture, the typeface, the IntraZone logo ... every little detail was perfect. Which was totally fucked. Because how could they do this? No one could do this. Who were these people? He turned to Sarah.

  “Who are you people?”

  Meyer’s warning flashed through his head.

  Everybody infiltrates everybody. Everybody uses everybody.

  Sarah was staring off into space.

  “Listen,” she said, “if anything happens, no matter what happens, the vehicle will be there. Get to the rendezvous point with the package.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Yeah. I heard. The rendezvous point. What’s going to happen?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “What are we going to do about Dodo?”

  “Forget about Dodo. Forget the Watchers.”

  “If they’re on to Cassandra ...”

  “Forget the Watchers.”

  “Dodo Pacheco knows her name.”

  “Dodo Pacheco has nothing to do with this.”

  “To do with what?”

  “With any of this.”

  He came around and squatted in front of her.

  �
��What’s going on? ”

  She looked into his eyes. She looked like she’d looked the first time he saw her, back before he knew who she was ... or whoever she wanted him to think she was.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She smiled, sadly.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing is wrong.”

  Something was wrong. Taylor was sure of that. He didn’t know what, but definitely something ... something about how Sarah was acting, and the pass was wrong, was seriously wrong. Even if she was on the level, and a few of her faith-based Terrorist network were Normals, who were helping her to smuggle out the babies (which Taylor had reluctantly begun to believe), this was an IntraZone Travel-to-Work Pass ... an authentic pass, or a perfect forgery, which there was no such thing as a perfect forgery. ** And why weren’t Sarah, and Adam of all people, Adam, who was fucking security-obsessed, concerned in the least about all these Watchers, and Dodo, and ... see, that was also wrong. And what about Cassandra’s annoying roommates, in particular this asshole, Joel, or whoever, who’d been snooping around Cassandra’s door, which Taylor had also reported to Sarah, who’d seemed like she was only half listening, which made no sense ... unless ... unless ...

  At some point during the first week of April, while elderly Anti-Social Persons were dying of heatstroke inside their apartments, and “Jimbo” Cartwright, who was in a coma, bravely fought his final battle, Taylor faced the possibility that the last six months, this whole misadventure, the entire baby-smuggling operation, Adam, Sarah, the Fifthian Cluster, the Day of Autonomous Decentralized Action, the defective condom, the MorningAfter Pill, all of it, right from the very beginning, had been one big byzantine IntraZone trap ... a trap that he and Cassandra had stumbled, or rather, had carelessly fucked their way into, the inexorable Corporatist jaws of which were now in the process of closing on them. Because ... OK, the extra heat from the Watchers, and even Dodo’s cooperation, and disappearance, could be reasonably explained, because certainly IntraZone Waste & Security, or conceivably even an Intelligence Unit of the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, would have picked up chatter on its listening networks strongly suggesting that the A.S.U. was planning some kind of utterly futile but nonetheless highly disruptive action, which Adam, and by extension Sarah, and thus, by association, Taylor, were obviously up to their eyeballs in, and would have ordered the Watchers to order their Cooperators to rat out anyone who might be involved, which Dodo had done, which made perfect sense, and the condom was just a defective condom, and the MorningAfter Pills a bad batch of pills, or Cassandra had just had a bad reaction, and the D.A.D.A. would actually happen, someday, as soon as a date had been consensually decided ... each and every piece of the puzzle, obsessed about in isolation, theoretically, could be explained.

  Or almost every piece of the puzzle.

  The counterfeit travel pass could not be explained ... not to Taylor’s satisfaction. And why was Sarah, or whichever outfit Sarah (if that was even her name) was involved with so invested in Taylor ... in smuggling Taylor out of the Zone? Was the whole thing one big Terrorist mind game, an elaborate psychological experiment, or was it simply an IntraZone Waste & Security (or a Hadley Domestic Security) set-up? And if so, why? To achieve what end? To track him out into the Autonomous Zones? Surely, with all their advanced technology, they would never resort to such primitive measures. Was it possible Sarah was on the level, and was hooked into some secret network that was not only active in the Normal Communities, but that had also somehow infiltrated the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, and could generate perfect travel passes for A.S.P. 3s whenever they wanted? He tried to get his mind around that. But now he was back to where he’d started ... why would they have chosen him?

  Taylor, having faced all this (i.e., all these questions that he could not answer and scenarios he could not rule out), did not know what the hell to do. And so, he decided, he wouldn’t do anything ... not without some confirmation as to what was what and who was who (and as to whether he was now completely paranoid, or was really as fucked as he thought he might be). In the meantime, he stuck to his normal routine, spending his days in bed with Cassandra, who was going through a gassy phase, and his nights with an ever more distant Sarah, or just wandering aimlessly around the Zone, which by this time was like a open-air sauna, his head going round and round and round ...

  He got the confirmation he needed in the wee hours of officially 16 April, a particularly oppressive and ignominious morning. He was sitting alone in a booth at Gillie’s, chasing shots of Dusky Grouse with piss warm beer and sweating profusely. Everyone at Gillie’s was sweating profusely, and drinking heavily, and those who weren’t were sitting around in semi-fugue states stinking like goats with their mouths hanging open. T.C. Johns was down in the head, trying to get the water to work enough to fill up the drain in the floor and stop it reeking like an open sewer. Young Man Henry, who was running the bar, was taking bets from the White Street Boys, and sundry other Class 3 scoundrels, on when and exactly in which direction Jim MacReady was going to pass out and fall off his stool and knock all his teeth out. In a booth across the room from Taylor, Charlie Gilmartin and Vaclav Borges were talking some totally shitfaced 2 with an eyebrow ring and a harelip scar out of whatever money he had wandered in with. Coreen Sweeney was sitting by herself at her usual table, staring into space. She looked like some kind of wax figurine, as in she hadn’t twitched, coughed or blinked for five or ten minutes, and was probably dead. A din erupted from around the bar as Jim MacReady swayed southwest, and looked like he was going down, until Walter Dupree, who had a hundred on north, straightened him up with a vicious uppercut. MacReady started to teeter northeast, but now the rules were out the window, and one of the other White Street Boys, who must have had his money on south, caught him on the bridge of the nose with a roundhouse, knocking him off his stool to the floor. At some point during the melee that ensued, and lasted almost a full two minutes (which in terms of bar fights is like an eternity), and that was brought to an end by T.C. Johns, who waded in swinging this giant pipe wrench, someone, a spindly, spiderlike person, bearing an uncannily close resemblance, in Taylor’s opinion, to Dodo Pacheco, slunk into Gillie’s and up to the bar, the far end, steering clear of the scrimmage, which had now winnowed down to Walter Dupree, who was up in the face of T.C. Johns, waving his arms all around and shouting, which shouting was spraying the massive lenses of T.C.’s glasses with flecks of spittle, which T.C. promptly put an end to by grabbing Walter Dupree by the scrotum and squeezing his balls as hard as he could, as if he were trying to crack one walnut by squeezing it against another walnut.

  Taylor was relatively drunk at this point, so he couldn’t be sure, but the longer he stared at this gangly Dodo Pacheco-like person, who had now gotten Young Man Henry’s attention and summoned him over to the end of the bar, the more convinced he became that he was actually staring at Dodo Pacheco. Which made no sense, and couldn’t have been right ... that is, until Dodo turned and smiled. *** Then he walked right up to Taylor’s booth and sat down across from him and started talking.

  Dodo it appeared was the under the impression that Taylor had somehow come to believe that Dodo was in some way cooperating on him, and had been asking around the Zone about him (i.e., Dodo’s current whereabouts and so on), and wanted to find him, and talk to him, and kill him. Which, OK, Dodo understood how Taylor could’ve come to believe that about him, because technically, in a sense, it was true ... but not like Taylor thought or anything, on account of how Dodo hadn’t told them anything they didn’t already know, or think they knew, or suspect about Taylor, who he had always had, like, the most respect for, despite whatever ugly history Taylor might have had with Rudy Rebello, who Dodo had never trusted, personally. The thing was, see, the reason he was there, Dodo, sitting there across from Taylor, in spite of the fact that Taylor wanted to gouge out his eyes with a spoon or something, was that he wanted to, you know, come clean with Taylor, and, you know, war
n him, and tip him off, like. Apparently, the deal was, according to Dodo, this Community Watcher, one J.C. Bodroon, had taken a personal interest in Taylor, and was trying to gather enough information to take to IntraZone Waste & Security to prove that Taylor was up to something ... something involving the A.S.U., and some Terrorist uprising, or attack, they were planning, and oh yeah, Dodo just remembered ... possibly also an unauthorized baby. According to Dodo, this Watcher, Bodroon, who Dodo swore held some kind of senior rank in the risible Watcher hierarchy, was all over Taylor like white on TŌ Rice, and had been for weeks, and probably months, and knew he had a woman somewhere in the general vicinity of Jefferson Avenue, but he didn’t know exactly where, because Taylor had been losing his men at the markets. Allegedly, six weeks back, approximately, this Watcher, Bodroon, and a few other goons, had collected Dodo from some Plasto pit, and forced him to, like, cooperate on Taylor, which Dodo was only, like, pretending to do, because really, he was acting as a double agent, and was working on Taylor’s behalf ... and so on.

  Taylor sat there, utterly stone-faced, still quite drunk, but sobering quickly, as Dodo, shifting back and forth on his ass cheeks, and continuously fidgeting with his clothes and hair, expounded this extremely improbable bullshit. He let Dodo get to the point in his tale where he swore on his life (and whatever Taylor wanted) that this Watcher, Bodroon, as far as he knew, not only had not identified Cassandra, but had also not reported back regarding Taylor to his IntraZone handlers. He hadn’t done this, Dodo explained, because his plan was, once he had the whole case, Bodroon (who Dodo described as “humongous”), all wrapped up with a bow on top, he’d be better positioned for some serious suck-up ... at which point Taylor interrupted him. He said he wanted to know one thing.