“That’s not it.”
That was it .
On the count of three.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, emptying her lungs, two, three ... and jabbed up hard and fast with the skewer, missing the amniotic sac completely, and stabbing into her uterine wall. Her pelvic muscles went into spasm, locking down around the skewer and squeezing the salad tongs out of her vagina.
She lay there for a moment, convulsing.
“Told you. Now you’re going into shock.”
No she wasn’t. Not if she could help it.
She lay back onto the garbage bags, closed her eyes and focused on her breathing, gradually slowing, deepening her breaths, willing her body to relax, open ... breathing, floating, weightlessly riding the rising swells of the waves of pain.
The pain is just pain ... it isn’t punishment.
“Yes it is.”
All right. Again.
It took her a while to pry herself open and get the tongs back into her vagina. Her arms were weak. Her hands were shaking. Holding her head up was making her dizzy. The fingers of the latex gloves she was wearing were covered in dark red syrupy blood. Which meant she probably hadn’t hit the artery. She probed once more with the metal skewer. And felt the sac.
“That’s not it.”
She probed around again, just to be sure, comparing the feel of the surrounding tissue. Uterus. Uterus. Sac. Uterus. Uterus. Sac.
That was it.
She jabbed up into the amniotic sac, which was roughly the size of a small avocado, but the previous attempt having made her tentative, she wasn’t certain she had ruptured the membrane. She jabbed again, harder this time, and definitely pierced it, impaled it, she thought, and possibly drove the skewer right through it and up into the roof of her uterus. The wave of pain that hit her now was not the kind you can ride out breathing. This was a tsunami ... a mega-tsunami, rising up her spinal cord and radiating out in all directions, frying her neurons, melting her synapses, stripping the myelin sheaths off her axons ... and then ... nothing ... nothing at all ... nothing but timeless, dreamless black .
Shortly after 0430, she awoke to find she was lying naked on a sheet of plastic in a fleabag hotel. She was lying in a puddle of urine or something. Urine and blood. Mostly blood. Which seemed to be emanating from her vagina. Out of which something metal was protruding. She pulled it out. A barbecue skewer. She sat herself up, and nearly passed out, mostly due to the pain in her loins, but also partly due to the fact that she could not get enough air in her lungs and was obviously having an anxiety attack. That, or maybe she was going into shock. She stripped the gloves off and checked her pulse. Sure enough, it was up near a hundred. And based on the way she was hyperventilating, her respiratory rate was right around thirty. OK, so ... there it was then. Textbook Class II hemorrhagic shock. She checked the puddle of blood on the bed, depressing the plastic with her hand to pool it, and guessed she had lost about a liter in ... what? Seventy, maybe eighty minutes. She quickly did the math in her head, reminded herself of the last two stages of hemorrhagic shock, confusion and coma, and determined that she was going to die here ... unless she could get up and get downstairs and get the night clerk to call an ambulance. Once she did that, if she did that, that would be it. End of story. Certainly, Security Services would save her. They would save her in order to interrogate her. They would want to know where she had gotten the MemCard, and everything she knew about the N.I.N. They’d probably want to interrogate Kyle, and maybe even Susan Foster, and Doctor Fraser, and possibly her father. They might even want to interrogate her mother. After they had finished interrogating everyone, they would lock her away in a secure facility and pump her full of medication, or send her away to a Quarantine Zone ... or in any event, whatever happened, one thing she knew was absolutely certain, this was as far as she was going to get. There would be no neopagan rituals, or random bombings or suicide missions ... but maybe this was her suicide mission. Maybe it was better to die right here ... to go out like a proper Terrorist. Maybe that was always the plan. Who was she to presume to know the Path(s) the One had chosen for her? If everything, as it was, was perfect ... hadn’t she already struck a blow against the infernal forces of IT by aborting the fetus ... the Clear ... Zoey ... or whatever the fuck its fucking name was? She’d probably driven the skewer right through IT, right through its little froglike face, or through its tiny unformed ... wait. Where, exactly, was the fetus? She hadn’t seen it in the puddle of blood that had pooled on the futon and in which she was sitting. She used her hands to dredge the blood puddle, smearing blood all over the sheets of taped-together plastic garbage bags, and her arms and legs and breasts and belly, and spattering blood up onto the walls. She found and sorted and closely examined a series of stringy globs of tissue. They were pieces of ... what? Gestational sac? It didn’t matter. None were the fetus. She checked the floor, the shower basin, smearing blood all over the room. It should have been about the size of a fig, a fig-sized, probably mutilated, but nonetheless recognizable fetus. She couldn’t find it. It was not there. Then it hit her. It was still inside her. It was in there, clinging to the wall of her uterus. She had to get it ... to get it out of there. She groped around in the blood for the skewer. She had to dislodge it and scrape it out of her ... IT. No. She could hardly breathe. She was squirming around in the blood on her belly. She pushed herself up, and collapsed immediately. No. She didn’t want to die like this, sprawled out naked in her blood and feces. It didn’t matter where it was. Whether the fetus was still inside her or somewhere she had missed in her search, the Security Specialists would surely find it when they found her blue-white bloodless body, and took their pictures ... which they would show to Kyle. She rolled herself over onto her back. She pushed herself up onto her elbows. All that was left to do at this point was choose the position she wanted to be found in ... lying on the bed, hands folded on her chest, lips curled into a smile of victory? Or what about cross-legged on the floor, sitting up in the lotus position? Or here, on her back in the blood on the floor, her arms outstretched, Christian-style, or ...
None of the above.
She could not do it.
Her body would not let her do it.
She lay there on the blood-smeared garbage bags praying to the One for the strength to do it.
“Please grant me the strength do this …”
Hyperventilating. Heart-rate racing.
“Grant me the strength to walk my Path … ”
“Get up now,” the voice in her head said, not the voice on the tape in her head, another voice, which she didn’t recognize.
“Get up now or you’re going to die here.”
She pushed herself up off the floor.
“Open the door and get down the stairs.”
She stumbled out and down the staircase, naked, blood running down her legs, dragging the piss-stained blood-soaked sheet in her wake like the bride of some abomination. Some other part of her was watching her do this. She didn’t understand how her legs were still working. She turned the corner that led to the “office” and looked inside. The night clerk was gone. The desk he’d been at was coated with dust that looked like it had been there for decades. She opened her mouth and tried to scream ... but nothing came out, or she couldn’t hear it. And neither could anyone else, apparently, because no one came running into the “lobby.” She checked for a phone ... there was no phone. There wasn’t anything ... no jacks, no lines, no sign that anyone had ever been here. The “office” was just a hole in the wall beneath a rusty old iron staircase. The Hotel Huffington was an abandoned building in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Or maybe she was already dead ... and this was some antechamber of hell. She looked down the derelict, unlit hall. It stretched off into the dark in the distance. Down at the end was a sliver of light. She started toward it. She was not going to make it. She was leaving a trail of blood on the tiles. The hallway seemed to go on forever. Seconds ... or minutes ... or hours ... passed.
Her legs were wired into her brain stem. She made it to the door that led to the street. She staggered out wrapped in the blood-soaked sheet. She walked. She wasn’t sure where she was going, maybe just out into the middle of the street to flag down a tram, or a passing van, or anywhere someone might possibly see her. Or maybe she was setting out, naked, on foot, for the 40th Parallel, and beyond, in search of the N.I.N., who were down there, somewhere, waiting for her on the border of that non-existent frontier ... or maybe, in the disoriented state she was in, she was heading for the nearest WhisperTrain station, heading back home to Marigold Lane, in the Pewter Palisades Private Community, where they picked up the recycling on Tuesday and Friday, and whose accent color was Persian Green ...
Max
Valentina missed hurricane ViviCo ... or whatever hurricane ViviCo was. One thing it certainly wasn’t was a hurricane. It might not have even been a tropical storm. However, ViviCo Medien AG, a subsidiary of Spinner SE, “providers of quality Online Content for adults and children for over 200 years,” was not in the mood to quibble over details. ViviCo had paid a pretty penny to plaster its name all over anything vaguely resembling cyclonic activity, and this tropical storm, or atmospheric depression, or lengthy period of heavy rain, contractually qualified, or close enough.
Whatever it was, Valentina missed it. It blew through the heart of Northeast Region 709 in the early hours of 16 April, 2610 (and all the other dates it was, of course), cutting a swathe of minor damage to color-coordinated patio awnings across the central Residential Communities, while she was being bathed, groomed, and otherwise processed for immediate transport.
Taylor was delivering Cassandra’s baby ... or at least he was kneeling on the floor beside her, providing emotional support and encouragement by saying things like “push” and “breathe,” and other things he had heard on television, and panicking, as Cassandra screamed in agony. Cassandra was experiencing the miracle of childbirth, which nothing had adequately prepared her for. She was squatting, sort of, at the foot of the bed, biting down on the rolled-up dish towel Taylor had stuffed into her mouth, and screaming as piercingly as she possibly could with the towel jammed into her mouth like that, as her uterine muscle contracted violently. In addition to the pushing and the breathing and screaming, another key part of the delivery procedure was gouging her fingernails into the backs of Taylor’s hands as the contractions hit her. That, and squeezing his hands like a vice, and grinding the bones of his fingers together, which wasn’t the cause of Taylor’s panic ... no, the noise was the cause of Taylor’s panic. As soon as Cassandra went into labor, and started producing these howling sounds that Taylor had never even heard a person make, he’d grabbed up a Content disc at random, shoved it into her pirate Viewer, and cranked up the volume as loud as it went, hoping that that, and the roar of the rain, and the gale force wind that was shaking the windows like some mindless monster that wanted in, would prevent her roommates and the neighbors from hearing her. As it just so happened, the disc he’d selected was Dhalia the Dancing Dolphin, Part Three, which was mostly a lot of old archival footage of dolphins, and other large oceanic mammals, in the wild, from back when they still existed. The score, which was somehow simultaneously nauseatingly upbeat and playful and depressingly maudlin and sentimental, was making the floor and the door frame vibrate. On top of which, even with the towel in her mouth, Cassandra was screaming to wake the dead. One of her nosy and annoying roommates was out in the hallway, pounding on her door. The sky outside was strobing lightning. Thunder was cracking. The windows were leaking. Cassandra was screaming. Max was crowning.
“Push,” Taylor told her.
Cassandra pushed.
A few hours later, as she lay there, sleeping, with Max wrapped up in a blanket beside her, also sleeping, exhausted, the two of them, Taylor sat on the floor and watched them. He sat there, watching, for close to an hour. Nothing was happening. They were lying there sleeping, which Taylor found just endlessly fascinating, which is one of nature’s better tricks. Max, who resembled a giant, rubbery, wrinkled specimen of week-old TŌ Shrimp, was the sweetest, most adorable creature Taylor had ever seen in his life. Cassandra was not just stunningly beautiful, and radiant, and oddly, irresistibly sexy (her sweat-soaked hair was stuck to her face, her lips were all cracked, her eyes were swollen), but had been imbued with some mystical power that turned the brains of men to oatmeal.
Taylor sat there watching the two of them, making the occasional goo-goo noise, and putting his finger into Max’s hand, so that Max’s fingers would close around it, and grip it softly, which was some kind of miracle. He sat there watching ... what was he watching? He wasn’t quite sure. Did babies dream? He didn’t think so. What would they dream? He sat there watching a human baby and the woman he had just pulled it out of sleep.
Taylor also needed to sleep. He needed to sleep for several hours, or for several days, or possibly weeks. However, that wasn’t going to happen yet, because first he needed to kill some people. Starting with Cassandra’s roommates. Or at least whichever of Cassandra’s roommates had been out in the hallway pounding on her door while Cassandra was experiencing the miracle of childbirth ... which the roommate might or might not have heard. The thing was, if this door-pounding roommate (which Taylor was praying was this Joel or whoever) had heard Cassandra delivering Max, or had heard Max crying, and wasn’t just out there pounding on account of the dolphin music, and had rushed back down the hall in a panic and informed the other annoying roommates ... well, OK, the logistics were going to get tricky, regarding the disposal of bodies and so on. If memory served, there were three or four of them, whose bodies he would have to get downstairs, and into the trunk of a stolen vehicle, whose owner he would probably also have to kill, and drive them down to the Dell Street Canal, or somewhere the hell away from Cassandra’s, without getting spotted and stopped by a team of Security Specialists, which was going to be challenging. Then again, if it was just the one roommate who had heard (or had possibly heard) Max crying, and Cassandra screaming like she was being gutted, and this roommate hadn’t told the others, then it was just the one body, or two, with the driver, which would make things a hell of a lot more manageable. But that was assuming he could somehow be sure that this roommate hadn’t told the others ... which how was he supposed to determine that to any acceptable degree of certainty? No, the whole thing was getting overly complicated. He gave it another few seconds thought, and decided the safest course of action was to go ahead and kill the entire household and deal with the body problem later.
Other people Taylor needed to kill were Dodo’s Watcher, this J.C. Bodroon (assuming such a person actually existed), and anyone else Bodroon had talked to regarding Taylor, and Cassandra, possibly. Taylor’s instincts told him Dodo had been telling the truth, or most of it anyway, and that there probably was a J.C. Bodroon, in which case Dodo definitely hadn’t told Bodroon Cassandra’s name. If he had, Bodroon would have already run, or waddled, to IntraZone Waste & Security, which by now would have sent a Security team to scoop up Cassandra, and Max, and everyone ... and, OK, Taylor reasoned deftly (Max was squeezing his finger here), if Bodroon hadn’t done that (i.e., delivered Taylor up), odds were, he hadn’t told his underlings (i.e., the other Watchers who had been following Taylor) why he had had them following Taylor, and yes ... it was starting to come together now. Bodroon (who, according to Dodo Pacheco, was supposed to be some kind of high-ranking Watcher, whatever the fuck that meant exactly) was hoping to deliver the entire package (i.e., Taylor, Cassandra, Max, Sarah, Adam, and maybe even Meyer) to whoever it was whose boots he licked at IntraZone Waste & Security Services. A fat fucking bag of sadistic obeisance like this J.C. Bodroon would want to do that. He would want to serve the whole complot up like a steaming hot turd on a silver platter. So maybe this was getting a whole lot simpler, and Taylor only needed to kill Bodroon ...
But here was the thing about killing Bodroon. You didn’t kill Community Watchers ... not and get away with it
, you didn’t. IntraZone Waste & Security Services took it as a personal affront. Taylor knew this. Everyone knew this. Every Class 3 cutthroat knew this. Killing spineless cooperating scumbags who nobody liked or gave two shits about, and who were A.S.P. 3s, like Dodo Pacheco, was one thing ... OK, sure, it was murder (and if you were dumb enough to get caught in the act, you would get Class 4ed and disappeared), but it wasn’t the kind of murder anyone actively pursued, or cursorily looked into. * Killing a Watcher was a whole other thing ... a thing that attracted a lot of interest. For example, teams of Security Specialists, who expressed their interest by storming into whatever shithole their suspect lived in and cutting down anyone and anything that moved with their UltraLite rifles on full-automatic (or detaining the suspect’s friends and acquaintances, associates, neighbors, and random bystanders, and extraordinarily interrogating everyone to death). The suspect, assuming someone they knew hadn’t ratted them out to avoid all that (which in this case wasn’t deemed cooperating, it being a matter of self preservation), could rest assured that IntraZone Waste would comb the crime scene for DNA, and would pore over every frame of footage from every satellite camera in existence, and would otherwise utilize every resource available to ascertain their identity, and their current whereabouts, and go there and kill them, and everyone within their immediate radius.
All of which meant ... well, it just wasn’t done. Unless it was absolutely necessary. Which Taylor felt, in this case, it was. But first, he needed to locate Sarah, and tell her to set the “action” in motion, on account of the premature arrival of Max, who at the moment was blowing a series of little saliva bubbles with his fat little cheeks and groping for Taylor with his chubby little fingers, and generally being ridiculously adorable ...
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