Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  Taylor rolled Eoghan onto his back and stomped on his genital area, repeatedly. This wasn’t purely gratuitous cruelty. He needed Eoghan to stay where he was while he went out and dealt with his friends for a minute. He stepped over Eoghan’s convulsing body and came out from behind the bar. He retrieved Kung Fu Guy’s knife from the floor, went over to the guy, who was coughing up blood now, got behind him, grabbed his forehead, tilted his head back and slightly to the right, and cut across his left carotid artery. He held the guy’s head against his own abdomen, aiming the spurts of blood away. He did this for maybe ten or twelve seconds, then he stepped back and let the guy fall to the floor.

  Mister Ugly was down on all fours, crawling toward the door, it looked like, or maybe he was trying to collect his teeth, which were lying around on the floor in pieces. Taylor went over there, got behind him, straddled him, squatted, pulled his head back, and cut his throat from ear to ear. Then he stood up, and stepped back, and watched him bleed out. It took just under fifteen seconds. Then he went to the door and pulled down the metal gate from inside and came back in. He closed the door and flipped the deadbolt. Then he went back to talk to Eoghan.

  He walked around behind the bar, stomped Eoghan once in the face to stun him, took him by the wrists and dragged him out. He dragged him to a spot in the back that wasn’t covered with blood and teeth, and propped him up there to have this talk.

  Now this was not Taylor’s finest hour, this part of our story where he physically motivated, and, all right, let’s face it, tortured Eoghan in what turned out to be a completely futile attempt to get Eoghan to tell him something. Eoghan didn’t tell him anything. Or nothing that helped, or made any sense, or didn’t further complicate everything. According to Eoghan, these guys he’d just killed were part of some secret A.S.U. cell that Eoghan claimed he didn’t know the name of, but that allegedly Adam, and presumably Sarah, were apparently secretly deeply involved with. They had shown up earlier, the two dead guys had, and ordered Eoghan to pack the place up. They said they would help. They had given no reason. Eoghan hadn’t pressed the matter. He insisted (to Taylor) that he was only a bartender. He wasn’t involved with operations. Adam had been there the night before, but he hadn’t seen Sarah for days, he swore. He didn’t know where the two of them were. He didn’t know where anyone was. Or what was happening. He didn’t know anything. All he knew, and kept repeating, was whatever this was, it was something big, bigger than Taylor and whatever his thing was ... which yes, he said, like he’d said before, he had heard Adam talking about his thing, and his woman, Calliope, or whatever her name was ... Cassandra, sure, that was it, and yes, he’d heard the name “Bodroon,” or something like that, or thought he had, but he swore he didn’t know what any of that meant ... he’d heard a lot of names and numbers, and if Taylor would stop ... just stop for a second ... and go and fucking look at these guys ... look at their faces and ...

  Taylor did. Kung Fu guy was lying face up. Taylor walked carefully through the blood and squatted down looked at his face. He didn’t know what he was supposed to be looking for ... then he saw it. The guy was too young. Or maybe he wasn’t. No. He was. He was in his late twenties, or maybe thirty. There wasn’t any way to tell for sure. He got up and went back to talk to Eoghan. Eoghan was dead. So that was out. He walked back over to Mister Ugly, flipped him over onto his back and checked his face, which was all smashed up, and covered with blood, so not so helpful. He checked the guy’s eyes. He wasn’t a Clear. Unless they had changed his eyes somehow. He went back and checked Kung Fu Guy’s eyes. Blue ... but not quite Clarion blue. Or maybe they were. He couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t like Taylor had ever gotten up close to any Clears in person. He went back over to Eoghan’s body. He stood there, looking down at it, thinking.

  “The fuck is going on?” he asked it.

  So, lovely, this was just fucking beautiful ... because now he had killed a bunch of people, two of whom were Class 3 Anti-Socials, so that didn’t really matter all that much, but the other two of whom were either Clears who had had some kind of ocular surgery, or grown-up faith-based Terrorist babies, which would make them either part of Sarah’s network or Meyer’s theoretically brainwashed babies, who the corporations had sent to the Zone as undercover Security Specialists ... or some other type of covert agents in some other scenario he couldn’t imagine. In any event, whoever they were, he had killed them ... and accomplished nothing. Or virtually nothing. Or next to nothing.

  What, you ask, was next to nothing? Nothing. Nothing was next to nothing. Nothing was flanked, on both sides, by nothing. And facing nothing. And backed by nothing. Nothing was basically surrounded by nothing. And was more or less floating in an ocean of nothing. And was drifting in a boundless, spaceless, timeless, infinite, immeasurable quantity of nothing. Somewhere right in the middle of this nothing, his cumbrous boots going squish squish squish, the front of his rain-soaked fortunately dark-hued T-shirt and chinos soaked through with blood, trudging back up Wallace-Lefferts Avenue out of the deep Inner Zone, forever, forcibly anally penetrated by God, or the One Who Was Many, or someone, was Taylor.

  Yes, oh yes, our boy was fucked. In every figurative sense of fucked. And he knew he was fucked, monumentally fucked, epically, cosmically, colossally fucked. Oh yeah, and as fucked as he already was, that wasn’t it for the fucking. Oh no. No, the serious fucking was just beginning. This was just like the warm-up fucking. This was the part where the ancient gods, or whoever was running this twisted show, first sent in the apprentice deities, whose job it was to loosen you up, after which the entire pantheon (hell ... probably all the pantheons) descended onto your upraised ass and got down to some soulful fucking. No, this, this mess, this raid, or sweep, or whatever the fuck this actually was, or in any event the extremely ill-timed disappearance of Sarah, and Adam, who now, purportedly, according to Eoghan, for reasons unknown, wanted Taylor dead, while Max, the sweetest little baby in the world (if Cassandra hadn’t already snuffed the kid), was back in Cassandra’s bedroom, crying, and Cassandra’s roommates and no ... see ...

  Taylor needed to figure this out. He needed to get out of this fucking rain, and get a fucking drink, and think. Just one drink, though, to sharpen him up. Because he needed all his wits about him, and all his powers of reasoning, and so on, and his faculties ... sure, he needed those too. The last thing he needed was to cloud his mind, to give in to some weak-ass impulse, or compulsion, or self-protective need, to dull the pain (i.e., the Worst Pain Ever) that was down there somewhere, throbbing, festering, impacted deep inside the sense, the realization that was taking shape, resolving now into a readable image, the way old analog photos used to, of what he probably had to do.

  So that’s what he’d do then, one quick drink, a shot of tequila, or possibly two. Then he’d just sit there, at Gillie’s (where else?), and face this, and figure out what to do.

  Half a bottle of Gillie’s tequila, several beers, and a few hours later, Taylor, on a strip of actual paper, with an actual pencil he’d borrowed from Henry, who for some reason still kept tally that way, wrote out a list of three scenarios, ranked according to descending likelihood.

  Scenario Number One (likely). The Fifthian Cluster, and the entire A.S.U., were locked in some underground corporate facility, being extraordinarily interrogated to death. That is, if they weren’t all dead already. Odds were, they were all dead already. Sarah was dead. There was no Sarah. There wasn’t going to be any rendezvous. No one was coming to pick up Max. Adam, who had somehow eluded capture, was running some desperate clean-up action, which Taylor had walked in on back at the Pussyhorse. Sarah had not eluded capture. Sarah had not eluded anything. Sarah had drawn on all her strength, inner resources, and faith, and so on, to hold out against interrogation, and had given up everyone and everything she knew. She had certainly given Taylor up, which meant she had also given up Cassandra. Which meant that he and Cassandra were dead. Which meant that Max was also dead. So that didn’t play out all that well f
or anyone.

  He paused to throw back a shot of tequila, which he promptly chased with a mouthful of beer.

  Scenario Number Two (less likely). The A.S.U. had still been raided, and were being (or had been) extraordinarily interrogated, and so were just as dead, or would be soon, but Sarah had somehow eluded capture and was out there somewhere, in a safehouse, probably, working with Adam (and possibly also a skeleton crew of faith-based Terrorists) to damage assess, and clean things up, and above all not get captured and tortured. She hadn’t given Taylor or Cassandra up. Still, the baby-smuggling was off. The D.A.D.A. was off. Everything was off. So no one was coming to pick up Max. No one was smuggling anyone anywhere.

  So, all right, Scenario Number Two was slightly less grim than Scenario Number One. At least for Taylor and Cassandra, and Sarah. However, it didn’t do much for Max. According to Scenario Number Two, Max was still an unauthorized baby, a ridiculously adorable unauthorized baby, who definitely strongly resembled Taylor, but nonetheless an unauthorized baby, who was going to get Cassandra killed. Even if Taylor killed all her roommates, and killed Bodroon (and possibly Meyer), and otherwise ruthlessly covered his tracks, keeping a crying unauthorized baby in Cassandra’s bedroom was ... well, out of the question. So Max had to go. He had to go somewhere. Somewhere that wasn’t Cassandra’s bedroom.

  It was time for another shot, and more beer.

  Scenario Number Three (unlikely). This was Taylor’s least favorite scenario, but he had to consider the possibility, depressing and paranoid as it was. Eoghan had informed him, back at the Pussyhorse, that he had overheard Adam discussing (with someone) the recent demise of Dodo Pacheco, and mentioning Cassandra by name, and so on, ** and there wasn’t any rational way to explain that, except for Scenario Number Three.

  According to Scenario Number Three, Adam and Sarah, who were posing as members of this inner circle of baby-smuggling Terrorists that had infiltrated the A.S.U. (or that was using the A.S.U. as a front) were actually, the two of them, Corporatist agents, who had infiltrated the infiltrators, i.e., the actual baby-smuggling Terrorists, who Taylor had never actually met. Or worse yet, maybe there were no infiltrators, no actual faith-based baby-smuggling Terrorists, and the whole thing was just some Corporatist scheme to dupe the mothers of unauthorized babies, and detain them, and kill them, and use their babies for undercover agents, or suicide Specialists ... or whatever it was in Meyer’s theory, the particulars of which had slipped Taylor’s mind (he was getting a little tipsy by now).

  No, he told himself, that didn’t make sense. Why would Sarah, if she were an agent, conceivably go to all the trouble of deviantly fucking a Class 3 thug like Taylor on a regular basis in dives like Frankie’s and Hardcore Carla’s (not to mention the Darkside Club) for going on something like five fucking months? No. That didn’t add up at all ... but wait (and OK, let’s go ahead and call this Scenario Number Three Point One), what if everything was as it was according to regular Scenario Number Three, except that Sarah really was involved with the faith-based Terrorist baby-smuggling outfit, and was only posing as a Corporatist agent, and had infiltrated the infiltrators who had infiltrated the Fifthian Cluster? (Taylor was clutching at straws here, and he knew it. He threw back another shot of tequila.) And where did Bodroon fit into this picture? Was it possible he was nothing more than some random Watcher who had stumbled into this? What were the fucking odds of that? They were pretty fucking slim, in Taylor’s opinion. No ... Bodroon was being run by someone. Someone was feeding him information. Someone higher up the food chain than some junkie scumbag like Dodo Pacheco. But who? IntraZone Waste & Security? The Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin? God? The One Who Was Fucking Many?

  By this time Taylor was totally shitfaced, and beyond confused, and approaching depressed. None of his three and a half scenarios offered any hope regarding Max. He sat there, drinking, thinking, and sort of talking incoherently to himself ... and somewhere near the middle of the homemade “Gillie’s Quality” tequila label, which Young Man Henry personally glued to all the top-shelf liquor bottles, he decided he needed to simplify everything. On his slip of paper, just below the scenarios, he drew up a kill-list, which looked like this:

  Bodroon

  Adam

  (Sarah)

  (Meyer)

  Joel ... Jules?

  Fyodor

  Tamara?

  He couldn’t remember the names of the roommates. Whatever. He wrote down “Cassandra’s roommates.” He gulped down another shot of tequila. He needed to add one name to the list. He gulped down another shot of tequila. And another. And yes ... it was better this way. Better than what was bound to come at the hands of IntraZone Waste & Security, and the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin. No. See, the thing of it was ... he vacuumed up two shots in succession. The important thing was ... and then the beer. The thing was ... they weren’t going to fucking get him. He wasn’t going to let them fucking get him, and warp and twist and condition his mind ... one more shot here ... and own his mind ... his empty, beautiful, curious mind ... which Taylor, if he had the chance, in some alternate reality or parallel universe where he and Cassandra and Max would live in a little stone house in the woods somewhere, and Taylor would take Max out in the woods and teach him things he had never been taught, and thus didn’t know, but had read about somewhere ... or even just here, in this reality, in some underground camp in the desert somewhere, or even if there were somewhere to hide and raise an unauthorized kid in the Zone, which there wasn’t, but if there were, he’d teach him ... because even as fucked as everything was, there were still a few things ... like music, and books, and pirate films, and other things, which people hid and passed around ... and he could teach him how an engine worked, and how to make things out of wood ... and women, he could teach him all about women ... and maybe, out there in those Autonomous Zones that were not there there were other babies, who would grow up someday to be women his age ... and what if Sarah was right about the animals? Maybe there were actual animals ... beavers, bears, or something with a “b,” and not just rats and fucking insects and ... fuck ... fuck ... fucking ... fuck it ...

  He wrote the last name down on his list. Because this was how it had to be. Because either he did it or they would do it, or they would turn him into one of their killer sheep. Taylor would not let them do that. He would not allow these motherfuckers to take him and raise him and make him like them. No matter what happened, that was not going to happen. He took a swig straight out the bottle. No sir. That was not going to happen ... not to this baby ... not to Max.

  4.

  The Overlook Café

  So here we are then, back where we started ... or, all right, circa ninety minutes later, in any event on that same Tuesday morning, 17 April, 2610, and all those other proprietary dates. Taylor was on his way to Cassandra’s, having slipped out the back of Gillie’s Tavern, where we left him, staring down into his beer. Cassandra was locked inside her room, with Max, who hopefully she hadn’t snuffed yet. Valentina was in the back of a van, recovering from being pepper-sprayed in the face at more or less point blank range. Jimmy “Jimbo” Cartwright was dead. His mortal remains were lying at rest in a body bag (or cadaver pouch) in the cabin of a Finkles corporate jet that was screaming across the lower stratosphere toward an undisclosed location where the Cartwright family’s personal mortician was waiting to pump them full of formaldehyde. The Normals were on their way to work, or they were already there, or were working from home ... clicking, stroking, pinching, poking, or verbally, visually or mentally cueing the keys and icons on their All-in-One Viewers, on which there hadn’t been any more BREAKING NEWS, and which were streaming, tweaking, and fleeping frantically, filling their feeds with urgent messages, memos, updates, half-off offers, reminders to bookmark and comment on comments they had apparently read but didn’t remember. By this time, most of them had totally forgotten whatever it was they were really only halfway paying attention to as they simultaneously on
ly halfway paid attention to several other things that they didn’t have time to reflect at any length on and two hours later wouldn’t even remember having read or seen or heard in the first place (i.e., before some other item on their screens distracted them from whatever it was, and they clicked, or stroked, or poked, or verbally or visually prompted the screens of their Viewers, and ended up viewing whatever they were viewing when it was interrupted by whatever they were viewing), which some of them were actually viewing again, and experiencing a little déjà vu, which didn’t matter, or not at the moment, because the point was ... whatever. There was no point. Or if there was (which there probably was), the Normals were not privy to it. Or they didn’t have the time or energy for it. Most of them were way behind at work. And they were doing their best to provide for their families, and to maintain their physical and emotional health (i.e., to not start thinking destructive thoughts, or asking a lot of unanswerable questions). And they were desperately trying to get enough sleep. And meet their financial obligations, which primarily consisted of servicing their debts. And to remain available around the clock to their friends and families, and coworkers, and bosses, on their All-in-One Viewers, which they never turned off, and which were logged onto their companies’ networks, or one of their companies’ clients’ networks, or some other corporation’s networks, all of which were interconnected and streaming katrillions of bajillions of bytes of information back and forth and around and around in an endless circle at seven times the speed of light like the brain of some spastic Kurzweilian god in the throes of acute amphetamine psychosis ... and they were being bombarded with this information, with facts, figures, images, words, conjurations, simulations ... projections of a perfect, peaceful world inhabited by happy, productive people, who were always on their way to work, or were already there, or shopping from home, or enjoying some type of leisure activity ... and they smiled down like goliaths at you (out of whatever fictional world they lived in, these perfect people you would never be), selling whatever it was they were selling (which probably wasn’t the product they were holding, or gazing ecstatically happily at), and feeling overwhelmingly positive about the future of pretty much everything generally ...