“Where can I find this fucking Watcher?”
Dodo said they had this place on Broad Street.
Taylor nodded.
“Good,” he said.
“So, are we OK?” Dodo wanted to know.
“Yeah,” Taylor said. “We’re OK. Just one more thing.”
“Anything, bro. Whatever you need.”
“Take me down there.”
“To Broad Street?”
“Yeah. Show me the place.”
Taylor, who already knew the place, and had no intention of going down there, walked an increasingly twitchy Dodo, who was obviously due for a Plasto fix, west on Clayton toward the canal. Coming up to the corner of Broad, he grabbed Dodo by the back of the neck and steered him into this service alley that didn’t go anywhere, which Dodo knew. The alley stank of liquified garbage, that, and the scum in the Dell Street canal, which was two blocks down and a right off Broad, the north end, a long way away from the station where the Watchers, and probably Security Specialists, were waiting in the dark to pounce on Taylor.
“Oh, no ... no,” Dodo moaned, as he lost voluntary control of his sphincter. He went all rubbery and started shaking. “Please …”
Taylor pushed him on.
Taylor hadn’t egregiously violated anyone to death in over ten years, not since he’d settled down with Cassandra. It wasn’t that he’d gotten religion or anything. He simply hadn’t had any cause to. Somewhere around the age of thirty, the Plasto gangs, the barroom brawlers, and all the other predatory assholes who had plagued his youth started leaving him alone. This was one of the interesting features of the ecosystem, as it were, of the Zone. You take your average Class 3 hardass, a guy like Taylor, or Charlie Gilmartin, or Vaclav Borges, or any of these guys, their odds of living to the ripe old age of forty were like two hundred thousand to one. Thus, if they did, by the time they did, there were two or three things you could pretty much count on ... one, they had killed a lot of people, two, they had gotten away with killing them, and three ... whatever ... the point here being, these were not the kind of guys you fucked with. These were guys to whom your life, and the agonized high-pitched shrieks you made as they took it from you, meant less than nothing. Some of them, Vaclav Borges, for example, would stick-and-twist you as a kind of sport, just to see if he could hit your liver, which by this time Vaclav was pretty good at. Which isn’t to say that Taylor was all gung-ho to stomp Dodo’s skull all to pieces. He’d never gotten off on wasting people, even back in the bad old days. It was just ... well, sometimes it had to be done. And in this case it definitely had to be done. And it had to be done tonight, apparently. The only plausible explanation for Dodo’s appearance and confession at Gillie’s was that IntraZone Waste & Security Services (or possibly Hadley Domestic Security) wanted Taylor to walk down Broad Street, in search of this alleged Bodroon, and into the sights of their UltraLite rifles ... which Taylor had no intention of doing .
Once they got far enough into the alley that no one would see or hear them from the street, Taylor grabbed Dodo from behind by the shoulders, spun him around so they were facing each other, and kicked down diagonally through Dodo’s right knee joint, severing several ligaments crucial to standing upright and not screaming in agony. What happens when you do this is you hear this POP and the person whose knee you’ve just destroyed collapses, usually in the direction of your kick. Dodo did this, and as soon as he did, and was just about to start screaming in agony, Taylor stomped down on the bridge of his nose, ripping the cartilage clean off the skull bone. Now, this is just as painful as it sounds, and is often accompanied by temporary blindness, which in Dodo’s case it definitely was, so that now he lay there, staring at nothing, crying, shaking, sputtering blood, his hands upraised in supplication, wrists together, fingers fluttering, begging Taylor in a gurgling whisper to wait ... wait ... wait ... and so on. “No deviations,” Sarah’s voice said, as he stomped down on Dodo’s skull, repeatedly, as if he was trying to drive his heel through Dodo’s head down into the pavement. And here came that taste in the back of his throat, that familiar metallic adrenaline taste, which he hadn’t tasted for all these years, and Dodo wasn’t saying anything ... and everything was finally getting simple.
There wasn’t any thunder at first ... just the sudden, deafening roar of the rain as it came down pounding hard and hot on all that heat-baked concrete and metal and melting asphalt and synthetic tar and liquified garbage and shattered glass and discarded hypos and feces pretzels with an uncontrollable inhuman force. Taylor stepped back, away from Dodo, who could not hear or feel the rain or the pain or anything else anymore, and closed his eyes and tilted his head back and let the rain beat down on his face. He stayed like that for close to a minute. He looked like one of those Roman statues, except that he happened to be wearing chinos and a filthy old T-shirt and combat boots, and was moving his arms incredibly slowly in backwards more or less S-like patterns. He didn’t know why he was doing that, exactly, standing there in the rain like that, doing whatever he was doing with his arms, and with his hands, with all his fingers extended. He didn’t care. He wasn’t thinking. He was drunk, but in that weird sort of lucid way. At some point, while he was doing this, this modern dance-type thing he was doing, the thunder started, because now it was booming and echoing down the dark of the alley, and the night overhead was flashing shades of lipstick pink and TV blue ...
Taylor walked around in the rain, going nowhere, for close to an hour. The temperature dropped like ten degrees. The wind was blowing bits of paper, cellophane, rags, plastic bags, pages torn from old paperback books, scraps of old IntraZone ConCept posters, and anything light enough to rise on the currents, into the air like swirling confetti. Sidewalk gutters overflowed and rats came pouring up out of the sewers and flooded basements and holes in the ground and scrambled up stoops and into buildings, and anywhere they could to keep from drowning. People were sticking their heads out of windows, and crawling out onto their fire escapes, and walking out into the rain in the streets, which were coursing with water like reborn rivers. Webs of lightning ripped through the sky like shatter patterns on an enormous windshield. Teeth-rattling claps of thunder followed. It sounded like an aerial bombardment.
Taylor walked up out of the Sector, and around in circles in Sector B, and he sat down on an empty stoop, and he sat there in the rain and the wind with the lightning striking the tops of buildings and the thunder cracking and people shouting. He sat there like that for several minutes without a single thought in his head.
Shortly after 0600, he wandered back up to Jefferson Avenue and did Cassandra’s morning shopping. He did this in the torrential rain, and the gale force wind that was ripping the canvas awnings off the fruit and vegetable stalls, and the signs off of buildings, and rattling windows, and blowing money out of vendors’ hands. He wasn’t the only one out there shopping. The markets were packed with Anti-Socials, every last one of them soaked to the bone, happily wading from stand to stand. They poked little holes in their plastic bags to keep them from filling up with water. People were standing around in the downpour, laughing, actually talking to each other. The Security Specialists had taken cover inside their stations outside the gates. The talking heads on the Public Viewers were breathlessly squawking into cameras, repeatedly declaring a weather-related state of emergency throughout the Region. Apparently, every available resource was being immediately brought to bear .
When he finally climbed through Cassandra’s window, clutching his soggy bags of groceries, he found Cassandra on the floor by her bucket. She was crying. It looked like she’d peed on the floor. She hadn’t, of course. Her water had broken. She was sitting there in the puddle, sobbing. She looked up at Taylor with a look he knew but had never seen on the face of Cassandra ... let’s go ahead and call it white-faced terror.
“The fuck are you doing?” he asked her, stupidly.
“What does it fucking look like,” she blubbered.
A bolt of lightning stru
ck outside, splashing the bedroom with bright orange light.
“It’s not supposed to be for a month.”
“I know. It’s coming now,” she told him.
“Stop it.”
Apparently this was funny, because Cassandra immediately burst out laughing. She sat there in her puddle of water, staring at nothing, laughing hysterically. Then she doubled over and screamed ...
Mission Abort
Meanwhile, back in officially March, on some made-up date that didn’t matter anymore, as had a procession of outwardly normal-looking but inwardly ruthlessly methodical killers that snaked like some macabre parade along the margins of the annals of history, whose ranks she was about to join, Valentina made a shopping list. On it were the following essential items.
Isopropyl alcohol, 500 ml.
IbuFlam Plus, 100 tablets.
Antimicrobial soap, liquid.
Laminaria, dried, sticks.
Latex gloves, sterile, powdered.
Plastic garbage bags, heavy-duty.
Packing tape, 1 roll, transparent.
Ziploc bags, X-large, 4 count.
Sanitary pads, super absorbent.
Assorted hand towels, any color.
Barbecue scissor tongs, dishwasher safe.
Barbecue skewer, metal, stainless.
Valentina purchased these items at different stores in Center City, paying for them with different credit cards, some in Kyle’s name, some in hers. She combined the more suspicious items with other fairly innocuous items. She did this in a futile attempt to throw off the programs that logged and analyzed every Normal’s purchasing patterns on an ongoing, more or less Real-Time basis. She did this in the middle of the night, mostly at stores at the Bowlingbroke Mall, but she also stopped at a couple of places between the mall and the Skyline Motor Lodge. This, she hoped, would prevent the programs from flagging her already rather dubious series of “contextually random” purchases as “geographically inconsistent,” and placing holds on all her cards, and sending Security Services after her.
Before setting out on her shopping mission, she placed the HCS60 inside an airtight Ziploc plastic bag, the one that held her travel-size lotions, sealed it securely and dropped it into the reservoir tank of the old-fashioned toilet. She watched it slowly sink to the bottom, then she gently replaced the porcelain lid. She zipped the MemCard into the pocket in her purse where she kept her other cards, switched off the lights and the Courtesy Viewer, checked the peephole just to be safe, and then slipped out into the deafening roar of a JiffyJet CRL-9000 that was screaming across the sky overhead. She pressed the palms of her hands to her ears and tiptoed down the concrete balcony, past 301 and 302, both of which appeared to be vacant, down the yellow concrete stairs, across the parking lot, past the receptacles, and came out onto Industrial Avenue, a desolate stretch of former garages, garment factories, and small machine shops that looked like maybe it extended off to the north forever, though she knew it didn’t. She walked to the corner, turned onto Commerce, and walked due east, the way she’d come, successfully avoiding the throngs of families and Security cameras in the Skyline lobby. Something told her to eschew the tram and walk the fifteen, sixteen blocks, which the GPS on the Courtesy Viewer had said would take about nineteen minutes.
She made it to the mall a half hour later, drenched with sweat, her hair a mess, in desperate need of air-conditioning and somewhere to sit down and drink a lot of water. Unfortunately, the only way into the mall was through a set of ever-revolving glass and chromium carousel doors that accommodated up to ninety-three people and advanced at a pace of one meter a minute, presumably for reasons of personal safety. She squeezed her way into the horde in the doors and shuffled toward the air-conditioning. The carousel smelled like body odor, polyester clothing, and cheap shampoo ...
Finally inside, she purchased a bottle of Ellesmere Island organic water for fourteen fifty at the Bunga Bunga, an organic juice place with a Polynesian theme. She shuffled toward the central concourse. Her legs weren’t working. She needed to rest. She collapsed down into one of the slots in this podlike “courtesy seating unit” where people could sit for up to ten minutes, after which an alarm went off and the slot they were sitting in started vibrating. She didn’t plan to be there that long. She drank her water and scanned the terrain.
Herds of less-than-abundant Normals, most of them wearing synthetic track suits emblazoned with garish corporate logos, were drifting in and out of the low-end stores, dragging humongous transparent bags of prominently branded downscale products and obsessively checking the screens of their Viewers for news of the next big half-off sale. Many of them seemed to be humming along with the upbeat inspirational Muzak that was oozing out of the doors of stores, the walls, the ceiling, the thing she was sitting in, and pretty much every other object and surface you could hide a set of speakers in. Valentina listened closely, but she couldn’t detect the subliminal messages IT had embedded inside the Muzak. It didn’t matter ... she knew what they were. She hadn’t noticed this subliminal Muzak at the Northside Mall, but it must have been playing. How many nights ago was that now? Two, three? She couldn’t remember.
Another thing she hadn’t noticed during her first few days down here, but noticed now, was the absence of Clears ... Clears above the age of twelve. The vast majority of the Bowlingbroke shoppers were either in the thirty-one to forty demographic or the forty-one to forty-nine demographic, and those who weren’t were even older. Their children were either infants in strollers, or toddlers in strollers, or pre-adolescents. None of them were over the age of eleven. Valentina knew why this was, but she had never seen the effect in the flesh. The corporations offered a range of low- and variable-interest rate loans, and other generous financial assistance, to non-abundant Variant-Positive parents of Clarion children in need. This assistance enabled them to send their kids to technically-oriented boarding academies located out in the Residential Communities, where they learned any number of high-tech skills that led to financially rewarding careers, and where their parents could visit them once a month, but not in their brightly-colored track suits.
Valentina finished her water, wiped was left of the sweat from her face, said her mantra, pushed herself up, checked her shopping list, and got down to business. She stuck to the more familiar chains, CRS, Big Buy Basement, Family Farm, Whipple’s, and Finkles, and avoided the smaller, more specialized places like Ollie’s Ointments and Gadget City.
By 0020 she was out of the mall and walking west with her bag of items. Up ahead was a cluster of stores in what looked like a former office complex, one of which was an all-night Quik Shop. One of the others was definitely a pharmacy. She could make out the little green illuminated cross. She had passed it on her way to the mall, and thought she remembered it being an Albrecht’s, but it could have been a Brecker’s, or Vedder’s ... not that it really mattered which it was. Overhead, the sky was screaming with commercial and corporate aircraft as usual. A driverless tram was whisking up the middle of the empty road to her left ... or the almost empty road to her left ... because there, meandering along just behind her, was a totally inconspicuous-looking unmarked four-door passenger vehicle, which being the only passenger vehicle out on the road was extremely conspicuous. Less-than-abundant Variant Positives did not tend to have their own passenger vehicles. What vehicles they did have were normally work-vans, which were loaded with plumbing or gardening equipment, and more often than not belonged to whatever Community or company they happened to work for.
“Now they’ve got you,” the tape in her head said.
Valentina’s anal sphincter clamped shut like an emergency airlock. She turned her head away from the vehicle and commanded her body to keep on walking. She guessed she had about three or four seconds before they screeched to a stop in front of her, leaped out, wrestled her down to the ground, plasti-cuffed her, and shoved her in the back. After which they’d inspect her bag, deduce what she was planning to do (that is, if they hadn’t de
duced it already), go through her purse, and find the MemCard. She briefly contemplated reaching down, pulling out the barbecue skewer, shoving it into her optic canal, through her frontal lobe and into the midbrain, which she thought she might be able to accomplish if she did it all in one violent motion. However, just as she was calculating the angle of entry into her mid brain, the car sped up and drove on past her. She watched its tail-lights recede in the dark, then turn off somewhere up ahead, which might have been into the Skyline Motor Lodge ... or not, she couldn’t quite tell at that distance.
She picked up her pace and arrived at the Quik Shop, where she purchased the roll of plastic garbage bags (the white ones, which were all they had at the moment), and some sugarless gum and a disposable bottle opener, from a person of indeterminate gender with bleached-white hair that just reeked of ammonia. She stopped next door at (it turned out) the Albrecht’s, bought the bottle of IbuFlam tablets, and a box of extra-large edible condoms that came in assorted flavors and colors.
Walking the last six blocks to the Skyline, she mentally rehearsed the scheduled procedure, a slight variation on a standard D&E. She’d worked it all out in her head that morning, the morning following her crisis of faith, or whatever it was she’d experienced out by the pool the previous night at the Skyline. She’d gone back up to Room 303 and run through a number of desperate scenarios. She’d briefly entertained the idea of swiping in at Breckenridge Medical, sneaking into the heavily-guarded pharmacy down the hall from her lab, stealing a bottle of MifegyneX (or some other type of abortifacient), rushing up the emergency stairs as BMC Security closed in on her, and leaping off the sixth floor roof and into the hedges surrounding the complex and ... all right, that was out of the question. As was vacuum aspiration, which would have been her next best option, except that your standard vacuum cleaner was twenty times weaker than what she needed. No, she was going to have to do it the hard way, which she wasn’t particularly looking forward to. However, she was a medical professional. The only really significant risk was perforating her uterus, or cervix, or potentially even her small intestine, and uncontrollably hemorrhaging to death, or developing sepsis, a blood infection, or septicemia, a related condition, or potentially even bacteremia, each of which, if left untreated, led to multiple organ failure.
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