Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  Stepping into the neon orange spill of the Skyline Motor Lodge sign, which was mounted at the mouth of the empty parking lot, so facing the empty street beyond, Valentina just had a feeling ... she squeezed up against the cinder block wall that bordered the lot and peered around it. There it was, the black sedan, idling just outside the lobby. A man was sitting in the passenger seat. She couldn’t make him out in the darkness. Where was the driver? There he was. A way-too-abundant man in his thirties in a dark blue suit with a jarhead haircut, standing at the desk with perfect posture, asking Kim, or whatever his name was, to bring up a digital map of the grounds which would show him the various approaches to her room. She drew her head back around the corner.

  “Walk in there and surrender to them,” the voice on the tape in her head suggested. “Tell them what happened. They’re here to help you.” She clutched the bag of items to her chest, closed her eyes, took a deep breath, opened her eyes and ... there was the tram, gliding silently up beside her. Well, OK, technically not right beside her, but fifteen to twenty meters away ... pulling past her now, another twelve meters, and up to the empty concrete platform in the median in the middle of Commerce. The tram was empty. The lights were on. Industrial Avenue was the end of the line. It slowed and stopped. The doors whooshed open. If she ran right now, she could probably make it.

  “What are you thinking? You’ll never make it.”

  She crouched down low and crossed the street, staying out of the line of sight of the man in the car, at least this far, got to the walkway that led to the platform ... but now she had to get to the tram, which was more or less directly across from the lobby. She dipped her head and raised her bag, hoping it might distract from her face, and walked, calmly, or relatively calmly, resisting the urge to turn her head and ... she just made it in as the beeper beeped. The automatic doors whooshed closed behind her. She took a seat behind a panel between two windows, where he couldn’t see her, clutched her bag and stared straight ahead. As the tram slid silently away from the platform, she risked a glance back into the parking lot. The car was still there, lights on, idling. She didn’t have time to check the lobby.

  She sat there, alone, on the driverless tram, heading east with her bag of items, the clothes on her back, and the things in her purse. The rest of her belongings, the Vittorio suitcase, and most importantly the HCS60, were back in the room ... which meant they were gone. She quickly checked inside her purse. Yes, she had. She’d kept the MemCard. But now, of course, she couldn’t use it, not without the HCS60, which was down at the bottom of the reservoir tank of the toilet back in Room 303.

  She rode the tram to the Bowlingbroke Mall, got out, crossed a plaza, or square, or an strip of cement in any event, took a seat in an open-air kiosk, waited two minutes, then got on another tram. This one appeared to be heading north, to somewhere known as Evanston Square, which Valentina had never heard of, but which was probably within walking distance of the Southern Cross Station on the Yellow Ring line ... the Ring line being the unofficial inner border of the Business District. The trams that ran through Center City were connected to each another, of course, but they didn’t connect to the WhisperTrain network that serviced the Residential Communities. The only way to get from the Communities to Center City was the Airport Express. The Express didn’t stop in Center City. It took you directly to the airport. Once you were there, there was nothing stopping you from walking outside and taking a tram to anywhere you wanted in Center City ... but no one had any reason to do that. As for getting out of Center City, well, OK, you could take a tram to the airport and buy a seat on the Express, assuming you could afford a seat, which most of your Center City Normals couldn’t, or you could take a tram out to the periphery where Center City sort of ended and the Business District sort of began, and then walk the twenty or thirty blocks from the end of the line to a WhisperTrain station.

  All of which was academic, because Valentina had no intention of availing herself of any of these options. She wasn’t going back to Pewter Palisades or anywhere else in the Residential Communities. All she wanted to do at this point was to get as far as possible away from that black sedan, and get her bearings. Which wasn’t as easy as you might imagine. The Center City trams, unlike the WhisperTrains, were not equipped with built-in Viewers with interactive GPS, but rather with these ratty old laminated maps displaying an indecipherable graphic that bore no resemblance to the actual geography and that looked like some kind of circuitry schematic.

  She sat there in the back of the tram, in the hollow of her molded fiberglass seat, bag of items between her feet, desperately practicing Nadi Shodhana. Five rows up, a withered little man in a pea green suit who was sitting backwards was glancing at her every five or six seconds, smiling to himself, then looking back down and typing on the screen of his All-in-One. Valentina didn’t like the look of him. The other four passengers looked innocuous, a sweet-looking octogenarian couple with matching coral and chartreuse sweatsuits, a thirty-something student type, and a fiftyish woman who was probably a prostitute. Valentina pinched her nostrils and focused her attention on the man in green. She didn’t want to stare directly at him, so she kept him fixed in the corner of her vision, pretending to be looking out the window as she inhaled left, pinched, held it, exhaled right, inhaled right. Out the window, whooshing past her, the brightly painted brick facades of stores with pseudo-Spanish names and gated appliance and hardware shops and chains of artificial chicken places were replaced by strips of peeling posters of beautiful models (all of whom were dead) holding up former haircare products with ragged chunks torn out of their faces.

  The tram pulled up to an empty platform in the middle of something called J. Hoople Plaza, which looked like maybe it had been some kind of shopping complex a thousand years ago. The man in the pea green suit got out. He limped across the desolate square toward an indistinguishable shape in the shadows, which might have been a Security vehicle, an unmarked sedan, or it might have been nothing. She turned and tried to make out the shape as the tram pulled out of J. Hoople Plaza but there wasn’t time and it passed out of view as the man blended into the surrounding darkness.

  She got off the tram at Mecklenburg Mews, seven stops up from J. Hoople Plaza, and one stop short of Evanston Square, the end of the line of the tram she’d been riding. She left the tram at Mecklenburg Mews not because she knew where she was (she didn’t ... she had never heard of the place) but because, as the tram was approaching the Mews, she had seen a string of “antique” shops, which she knew were really just worthless junk shops. But here’s what Valentina was thinking ... one of these so-called “antique” shops might have, if not an HCS60, then some kind of obsolete Content Viewer, or some other device that could play the MemCard. She didn’t know whether she could trust the MemCard, but logic told her she probably could. If the messages on the HCS60 had been sent by one of the Security Services, they’d have stormed Room 303 in force. They wouldn’t have sent a couple of agents in a black sedan to snoop around, talk to Kim and find out her room number ... or whatever it was they were actually doing.

  At approximately 0230 that morning, she checked into the Hotel Huffington, which wasn’t really a hotel as much as some kind of execrable, ad hoc boarding house. It was down this unmarked lane, or alley, which it smelled like people defecated in. Before she checked in, she had walked back down to the “antique” stores she’d seen from the tram. She couldn’t see in through the pull-down gates, but they definitely looked like going concerns.

  The reception area of the Hotel Huffington was under the bottom of an iron staircase that took one up to the rows of filthy airless cubicles they passed off as rooms. The reception desk was in a hole in the wall, which you wouldn’t even want to call an alcove. The night clerk looked like the pictures they put on the warning labels for alcoholic beverages.

  Valentina inquired as to the availability of an en suite room. The night clerk mumbled something in Spanish and held out his hand, which was missing two f
ingers. Valentina handed him a card that Kyle hadn’t used in over three years. The night clerk scanned it and handed it back, along with a greasy plastic KeyCard.

  Valentina’s en suite room was a windowless cell on the second floor with a central AC vent that didn’t work and a formerly cream-colored wall-to-wall carpet that was made out of some type of itchy acrylic. The bed, which took up half the room, was a worn-out futon dressed with a sheet prodigiously stained with sweat and semen. Across from the bed, on top of the carpet, men with cognitive disabilities had installed a plastic shower basin, a miniature sink and a miniature toilet. Several genera of toxic molds were growing up the wall behind them. Bolted to the wall beside the bed was an ancient Azimuth flatscreen Viewer. Valentina switched it on. She manually scanned through several channels, most of which were nothing but static, but one of which was trying to display some scrambled Content she couldn’t make out. Twisted melting demonic faces leered at her out of the visual chaos. She punched the power and switched them off.

  “The loving, compassionate oneness of ... ”

  Once she felt herself detach, she sat down on the edge of the futon and took quick stock of her situation. Her situation was not at all good. Security Services were definitely onto her. Either Kyle had called her in missing, or Susan Foster had called her in, or her recent purchases had thrown up a flag ... or whatever, it didn’t really matter what had happened. Whatever had happened, they had found her at the Skyline. And eventually they would find her here. Whether they found her in a matter of minutes or a matter of hours was the salient question. The answer depended on how long it took for the Huffington to upload its batched transactions, which they clearly were not doing in Real-Time. From what she had seen of the infrastructure in that hole down there at the bottom of the stairs, she figured she had at least a few hours ... time enough to complete the procedure. After she’d recovered enough to walk (which if all went smoothly wouldn’t be that long), her plan was, she would go downstairs, rifle through the shelves of those junk shops, find a replacement for the HCS60, reestablish contact with N.I.N., and advise them that she’d completed the procedure, and had passed their test, and murdered her baby, at which point they would come and rescue her, at which point this would all be over.

  She didn’t actually believe in this plan, or, OK, maybe some part of her did, but most of her didn’t, which felt kind of weird, because the part of her that knew, or was fairly sure, that she was either going to wind up dead, or hospitalized for the rest of her life, was telling the other part of her that didn’t (i.e., the part that had to believe in this plan) that it didn’t know what it clearly knew ... which was totally schizoid, and technically impossible.

  She dug into her bag of items, extracted the roll of plastic garbage bags, and the roll of transparent packing tape, and covered everything she could in plastic. She covered the floor and the bed completely, and the base of the toilet, and under the sink. She taped the ends of the garbage bags together and taped them down onto every surface. She went into her bag of items, found the package of IbuFlam Plus, the maximum recommended dosage of which was one to two tablets every six to eight hours, and swallowed five tablets with a handful of water. Just for good measure, she went in her purse, found a bottle of Xanelax 7, an old prescription, which she hadn’t refilled, and took the last two tablets that were left. She got her clothes off, went to the sink, squatted down and washed herself out as best she could with the lukewarm water and the liquid antimicrobial soap. Then she lay back onto the plastic sheeting she’d taped down over the futon mattress. She bent her knees, spread her legs, inserted her finger into her vagina and pushed it up until she felt her cervix. Holding one finger at the mouth of her cervix, she used her left hand to tease her nipples. She did this patiently, for several minutes, until it felt like maybe she had dilated slightly.

  Now it was time for the laminaria. This part was going to be a little tricky. The laminaria sticks she had purchased were not the kind routinely used for unavoidable terminations of pregnancies threatening the life of the mother. What they actually were, these sticks she’d bought and was now inserting into her cervix, one at a time, four of them in all, was a bunch of dried-up yellow seaweed rolled into handy “Natural ChewSticks” and sold at various Asian-themed stores, like SatŌ s Herbal Health Emporium. Now ideally, if you had to use such sticks, you wanted to shove them all up in there, and leave them in there overnight, during which time they would fill with water and gradually expand and dilate your cervix. However, if, say you were ten weeks pregnant, so just past the end of your first trimester, and loaded up on muscle relaxers and a couple of extra-strength Xanalex 7s, you could probably get by with six to eight hours ... which Valentina did not have. Still, she figured, gritting her teeth as she wedged stick three in and rode out the cramps, an hour or two would be better than nothing. Certainly it would be better than this. She got stick four in between the others and collapsed back onto the plastic garbage bags, soaked with sweat and tachycardic.

  “The unconditional forgiveness of ...”

  The readout on the broken Viewer said 0320. She noted the time. She lay there, cramping, taking the pain, willing herself not to piercingly scream, or panic and desperately pull the sticks out. Shortly thereafter, she must have passed out, because the next thing she knew it was 0730, and Kyle was on the screen of the Viewer, saying something, and his face was melting. She tried to sit up and tell him she was sorry, but her wrists and ankles were strapped to the bed, or the slab, or whatever it was she was lying on. Her voice was speaking without her somehow. It sounded like an old recording of a tape of an even older recording. She lay there, listening, terribly confused. Kyle was gone and now the Viewer was running a sitcom in which her mother was coughing these tiny people out into one of those tissues she kept in her robe. Every time she coughed one out, there was canned applause, or sometimes laughter, and she’d open the tissue to see who it was, but Valentina couldn’t see who was in there. She pressed the “live in studio” button and told her mother and Kyle she was sorry ... she wasn’t sure for what, exactly ... for everything, she said, that should cover it. She hadn’t intended to become a Terrorist. She swore she hadn’t. She had not lied. She had wanted the baby, Zoey, whoever. The only thing was, she explained to the audience, IT had seeped into her brain and her organs and into her DNA and had made her someone else she wasn’t before she was even born a fake that had had to pretend she was who she was. She had never had a chance, she went on, to become who she was but had never been. IT hadn’t let her. IT would never let her. IT wanted her for a talking catheter. There, in her hospital bed in the studio, surrounded by members of the N.I.N, who were wearing their goat masks and sporting erections, reciting the Twenty-Fifth Affirmation, she watched from the top of the nosebleed seats as she, the one she was on the sound stage, dowsed herself with a kidney-shaped bedpan of rapeseed oil and lit a match and ...

  She came to (as you do sometimes) without a clue as to who she was or where she was or what was happening. Wherever she was was covered in plastic. A vent in the wall was blowing a stream of humid armpit-redolent air down into this cell, or dungeon, or tomb, or whatever this was she was lying in ... assuming this was actually anywhere and not just somewhere else she was dreaming. Whoever she was was definitely someone someone had jammed a lot of rocks up into, or pieces of metal, or broken glass. When it was was 0350. A clock on the screen of the Viewer said so. Above the clock the screen was playing this retro-animatronic Content in which a gigantic mutant squid, or some species of monster with the head of a squid, was terrorizing all these Japanese farmers, who weren’t Japanese and who were wearing pajamas embroidered with the face of Mister Mango. The tentacles of the monster squid (boneless rubbery tubes with fingers), were multiplying like glioblastomas, shuddering out of the slime smeared bowel of the brainless dead-eyed cephalopod torso like the time-lapse footage of those feeding corals you saw sometimes on the Nature channels, hideous blood-red polyps opening, fingers reaching in
through the doors and the windows of the Japanese cardboard farmhouses, wriggling up the farmer’s asses, their intestines, and bursting out of their mouths ...

  Valentina forced herself up, got to her feet, and switched off the Viewer. The screen went black. A message appeared.

  YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS.

  She stared at the message.

  She closed her eyes.

  “There is no message.”

  She opened her eyes. The message was gone. The face of a woman she vaguely resembled stared out of the dead black screen. Her name was Valentina Constance Briggs. She lived in a house on Marigold Lane ... in the Pewter Palisades Private Community. Somehow she had ended up here, on a screen in a room at the Hotel Huffington, naked, everything wrapped in plastic, preparing to perform a D&C with salad tongs and a metal skewer. This was real. This was actually happening ...

  She pulled out the laminaria sticks and flung them into the shower basin. She checked her dilation as best she could. Two or three centimeters. It would have to do. She went in her bag and found the skewer. She forced herself up and stood at the sink. She washed her hands, put on the gloves, used the bottle of isopropyl alcohol to sterilize the tongs and the skewer, took another four IbuFlam tablets, then she lay down and began the procedure.

  She opened her vagina and inserted the tongs. She pulled them open as wide as she could. She inserted the skewer and eased it in until she felt it touch her cervix. She wiggled it around until she was certain she had the tip in her cervical canal. She advanced the skewer into her uterus, probing for the feel of the amniotic sac. She felt a ... what? A mass. A bump. A bubble. It didn’t feel like muscle. She probed it with the tip of the skewer. That had to be it.