“On your Viewer you mean?”
“No, my voicemail. At work. That wasn’t such a good idea.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t …”
“No. I know.” He looked straight at Kyle as he reached for his Viewer. “You were probably overcome with grief” He positioned the Viewer on the table between them. “You didn’t even know what you were saying, right?”
“I guess not. The truth is, I don’t remember …”
“Course not. You were still in shock at the time.”
Something exploded on a screen to his right.
“But you’re much better now. You’re thinking clearly.”
Kyle was putting the pieces together.
“You’re on your meds. You’re seeing your doctor.”
Kyle nodded. A woman was running, on fire.
“You’re letting this go. You’re getting through this.”
Kyle leaned forward and spoke to the Viewer.
“Yeah. I am. I’m feeling much better. I feel like I’m starting to turn the corner.”
“Good. ”
Cramer switched off his Viewer. Kyle took his out and switched it off too. Jimmy “Jimbo” Cartwright, III was smiling and waving from the deck of some vessel that looked like a floating block of apartments.
“How bad?” Kyle asked.
“Semi bad. Fixable, probably. I’m working on it. The main thing is, no more messages. Or searches. You got to stop with the searches.”
“The searches?”
“All that stuff is logged. You’re typing in the names of persons ... Terrorist networks. What were you thinking?”
“I’ve been trying to research her family is all …”
“Constance Rosenthal? Stanislav Barnicoat?”
“I didn’t …”
“The Nihilist International Network? Have you lost your mind?”
“I thought ... I mean ... it isn’t secret ... it’s all right there ... ”
“Of course it’s there. Why is it there?”
“It’s history.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the point. You can’t just search for stuff like that and not expect ...”
A waitress was passing. Cramer dipped into his Soygurt. That cloud formation was off to Kyle’s left.
“I don’t think you get what’s really at stake here ... look, I can’t get into operational details, but this was not just a standard flip-out. She was referencing certain parties, OK?”
“Valentina?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Who? What? What did she say?”
“It doesn’t matter. Look ... Kyle, you’re family, all right, and I love you and all, but you need to get your ducks in a row here.”
“She ordered something from her mother’s things. The paperwork said a jewelry holder ...”
“It doesn’t matter. Let it go.”
“I’m trying. I just need to understand …”
“No. You don’t need to understand. You need to stop with the calls and searches. Look at you. Take some time if you need it. You could go on one of those bereavement retreats …”
Kyle was staring out into the distance .
“What is that?”
“What is what?”
Kyle nodded toward the clouds of smoke that were rising up out of the southern horizon. Cramer looked.
“That’s Zone 23.”
“It’s burning.”
“So?”
“Is that where she is?”
“Kyle, come on.”
“Is that where they sent her?”
“Even if I knew, I couldn’t tell you.”
Kyle turned abruptly, spilling his water, and watched a screen on which a former factory, or something, was taking a missile strike. He spun back around and thought he saw a flash of orange in the smoke out the window. He turned to Cramer.
“Is that really happening?”
“What?”
“That.”
Cramer glanced to his left. He turned back to Kyle.
“That’s KILL CHAIN LIVE!”
Kyle turned to his right and watched the screen. The palms of both his hands were sweating.
“Where is that?”
“Lower your voice.”
He turned to his left.
“Is that out there?”
Cramer reached over and squeezed Kyle’s hand.
“It’s Content, Kyle. Get a grip.”
Kyle turned back to the screen to his right, but now it was running some heartbreaking footage of Jimbo Cartwright in a hospital bed smiling unflinchingly into the camera. He turned back to Cramer.
“I’m losing it, Greg.”
“I know. I see that. We’ll get you some help.”
Hyancinth Wong was approaching the table.
“The other night I was searching around ...”
Cramer smiled, or winced, and made a gesture with his hand to ward her off. She smiled and breezed on by their table .
“And I found this site where someone had posted all this paranoid stuff about Hadley, and other corporations, and other stuff ...”
“See this is exactly what you need a break from.”
Executive Diners all around the tier were sitting at their exclusive tables across from whoever they were sitting there with talking into space at no one, or they were staring down into the screens of their Viewers. Cramer was pretty much done with his Soygurt.
“And I knew I shouldn’t be reading it, right? But I couldn’t seem to stop myself.”
“I’m going to call a guy I know.”
Cramer switched his Viewer back on.
“I sat there, reading, for three or four hours.”
Some kind of country music was playing.
“His wife’s on the board of some bereavement outfit on an island up in Baffin Bay.”
Kyle was sweating excessively, for Kyle.
Cramer was pinching and stroking his Viewer.
“I must have fallen asleep at some point. I woke up on the couch with my Viewer.”
“You know we log how long you spend on those sites.”
“I don’t remember falling asleep.”
“Wait ... I think I’ve got her number.”
Hootey Brewster and the Brewster Boys were making some kind of official statement. Other eminent persons were involved.
“Here it is. Hold on, I’ll fleep her.”
It looked like comets were arcing down through the clouds of smoke onto Zone 23, which was slowly revolving away from Kyle, and had become the visual background for Cramer, who was fleeping this alleged woman he knew ... or in any event was fleeping someone. Kyle was now excessively sweating to such a profuse and flagrant extent that one or two Executive Diners, as well as possibly Hyacinth Wong, were surreptitiously glancing over at him.
“I haven’t seen or heard from the Fosters.”
“Who?”
“Susan Foster, our neighbor.”
Cramer was finishing up his Fleep.
“They’re probably on vacation somewhere. ”
He swiped away an ad for something. Kyle couldn’t see what was on the screen.
“They have this time-share in the Arctic Circle ...”
“There you go.”
“No, they go up in August. They do it every year like clockwork.”
Selected revolving video screens were displaying the enormous bug-eyed face of Susan Schnupftuch-Boermann Goereszky, who was shouting something directly at you, but you couldn’t hear it because the sound was muted. They cut to a satellite aerial shot of a Terrorist running with the crosshairs on him. Other screens had gone to commercials ... a Clarion mother with her Clarion baby, smiling beatifically into the camera ... hair conditioner ... cancer screenings ... an app you could run on your Cranio-Implant that simultaneously composed and played your own individualized orchestral score based on your mood and sensory input and ...
The Purge
Meanwhile, back in Zone 23, the endless column of APCs, MRAPs
, UUSVs, AATVs, MCVs, medical units, craft services buses, flatbeds bearing porta potties, and assorted other support-type vehicles that Taylor wasn’t quite sure what they did, clattered south down Collins Avenue like a herd of robotic ant-like insects that had awoken from a dormant ecdysial phase and embarked on some mindless foraging raid. Taylor was watching through the hole in the wall of the ruins of the former auto-parts factory into which he had hauled his ass and taken cover when he heard them coming. He wasn’t hungover, not anymore. He had sweated most of the toxins out. No, the thing that was twisting and tying his large intestine into the shape of a giraffe, like one of those squeaky colored balloons that party clowns used to make things out of, was not a hangover; it was plain old fear. Good old, primordial, ass-puckering fear.
He’d never seen so much Security. And he hadn’t seen this type of Security since the days of the Jackson Avenue Uprising. And that was, shit, thirty-five years ago ... when he was nine, going on ten years old. Apparently there had been some advances. The new and improved AATVs (i.e., Armored Anti-Terrorism Vehicles) had projectile-firing weapons turrets. Their NavPods were grinning with gunnery slits. The Urban Unrest Suppression Vehicles were monsters the size of lunar tractors, and were equipped with seriously heavy ordnance, like .60 caliber mounted machine guns, 120 millimeter cannons, rocket launchers, gas dispensers, flame throwers, some kind of sonic pulse weapon, and lasers, and who knew what else was in there. IntraZone Waste & Security Services did not stock this type of equipment. Not this much of it. This was bad. This was Hadley Domestic Security .
To the south, the sky above Sector C, or the part of it Taylor was able to see through his hole in the wall, which faced southwest, looked like they were halfway through a Security Services aerial trade show. Choppers were swooping in out of the sunrise, launching air-to-surface missiles, or laying down suppressing fire, then banking up into perfectly executed and completely pointless evasive maneuvers. Mosquito-like swarms of UAVs were circling in the sky above them, relaying Real-Time targeting data to other UAVs that were up in the stratosphere launching GodSend missiles down like falling stars onto Taylor’s friends. Down there somewhere in the flames and smoke and the screams and panic was Mulberry Street, and Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, and Coco, and Meyer, and Sylvie and Claudia, and assorted other Class 3 Anti-Social Persons, or the charred and bloody remains thereof.
All right, so ... this was it. The Day of Autonomous Decentralized Action. The D.A.D.A. It had finally begun. It didn’t appear to be going that well, at least not during the initial stages. IntraZone Waste & Security Services, and the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin’s dreaded Domestic Security Division, were aggressively quelling whatever unrest the A.S.U. had been able to foment. Judging by this column of Security vehicles, the rear of which was finally approaching, and by the overwhelming superiority of aerial assets they were currently enjoying, they intended to quell the unrest completely, as in liquidate the entire sector. Which, OK, meant that Meyer was right, at least about one of his paranoid theories. This wasn’t just a rapid response ... this was a purge.
They were purging the 3s.
Taylor crept back down the stairs and dropped out a window at the rear of the factory, landing in the trash-strewn service alley that paralleled Collins for a couple blocks. The column of heavy vehicles had passed, but who knew what was coming next? Collins was clearly their transport route, so best to stay the hell off that. Also, there was shade in the alley. The brief respite from the scorching heat that the storm had brought with it was officially over. The sun was up above the horizon, getting ready to start frying everything.
The rain had finally stopped the night before at approximately 0130, as Taylor was pounding the gigantic face of J.C. Bodroon into mush with a toaster. He’d already pounded Bodroon’s face with a chunk of concrete and a cast iron stew pot, and was just about to call it a night, but then he saw the toaster lying there. (This, you’ll recall, was down on the bank of the Dell Street Canal, where a few minutes later Taylor, several sheets to the wind, and having lain in wait for and ambushed Bodroon, macing him blind with his own can of mace, and extracting what little information he could, * and having walked him down to the western embankment, and broken his ankle to put him down, and pounded his face in with various objects, had dragged Bodroon down into the water and floated him out into the scum, and hadn’t weighted him down with anything.) The way the rain abruptly stopped as he raised the toaster up over his head reminded Taylor of his childhood days, when storms like that had been more frequent. He couldn’t remember exactly how frequent. He was sitting there, straddling Bodroon’s chest, which hadn’t moved for several minutes. He was resting the toaster on Bodroon’s forehead. The rain was still pissing down at this point. He was saying something that made no sense to God or himself or whoever it is you unconsciously mutter and sometimes plaintively moan and confess to when you’re shitfaced drunk. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried. He wasn’t now, but his face was all contorted like the face of a person crying. It wasn’t that he didn’t accept his fate. He did. He knew what he had to do. He knew it had to be this way, ... that it was better this way, so it wasn’t that. It was just that, back on Walt Whitman Road, or in what was left of Taylor’s memories of his memories of back on Walt Whitman Road, back when the sky would sprout these massive mushroom clouds of cumulonimbus that would pour down rain for hours like this, and the sound of it hammering down on the rooftops and streets and sidewalks and tapping the panes of windows like pebbles was all you could hear, and Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard and Taylor, and all the other little kids, because back then the Zone was full of kids, ran down out of whatever sweltering airless ratholes they were normally forced to spend all day in on account of the heat and went hydroplaning through the flooded streets on sheets of siding they tore off of buildings, and sloshed like monsters through the ankle-deep water making like they were going to catch and drown the even littler kids in the lakes of rain that formed on the corners, and just ran around playing grab-ass generally, and at night his mother would sit beside the cot in the hall where he slept back then and read him stories, not off a machine, stories from actual paper books, which stank like mold and water damage, and his mother smelled like sweat and cigarettes, and her voice was like a song in the dark, because his eyes were closed, and the words didn’t matter ... and it was just that, back then, life, or the world, or Taylor’s world, hadn’t seemed so totally fucked beyond all recognition somehow ... but then again he was just a kid. He brought the toaster, whose housing was metal, down with both hands into Bodroon’s face. He did this over and over and over. Because Max would never get to play in the rain. Or hear The Adventures of Homer the Monkey read to him in the dark by Cassandra. Or hunt down mutant monster rats in the ruins of scary abandoned buildings his mother had threatened to slap him senseless if he even thought of sneaking into ... or anything. Max would never do anything. Taylor hoped Bodroon understood that. He raised up one more time with the toaster. As he brought it down the rain ... stopped. All of it. Everywhere. All at once. It did not dwindle down to a trickle, or let up, or thin out, or taper, or wane. It was pouring down rain. Then it just stopped.
Now it was like it never happened. The heat and humidity were back with a vengeance. The muscles in his neck were cramping. His chinos and T-shirt were sticking to him. His skin was basting in a glaze of sweat. He could hear the bombardment off in the distance. He zig-zagged through the warren of narrow lanes and backstreets south of Jefferson, keeping to the shade wherever he could. A.S.P. 1s were scurrying toward him and into their doorways like panicked mice. There weren’t any Public Viewers back here, but one of them in the general vicinity was explaining how Sector C was now closed on account of unrest, which was being suppressed, and how any remaining A.S.P. 3s in Sector A at the present time were to report to the following designated checkpoints, at which various refreshments were being provided, and shelter in place until ... et cetera. Taylor followed an A
.S.P. 1, who was on his way home from his factory night-shift and was nearly but not quite Taylor’s size, into a doorway and took him by the throat ...
Three minutes later, a better-dressed Taylor, or at least a more sector-appropriately dressed Taylor (1s didn’t tend to wear ratty old chinos, filthy T-shirts, or combat boots), emerged from that doorway and resumed his journey. He felt rather strange all dressed in beige, or khaki, or whatever color this flimsy pajama-like corporate uniform was, but at least he still had his combat boots. He’d left his filthy old clothes in the hallway, so when the 1 woke up, he’d have something to wear, which he realized now didn’t make much sense, as the 1 presumably lived in the building and so would probably just walk upstairs in his underwear. He didn’t quite understand why he’d done that. He’d squeezed the 1 unconscious with a choke hold. He was going to keep squeezing until he’d killed him. But then, for some unknown reason, he hadn’t. Now he was back outside in the heat. He was heading north, or as north as possible, cutting from backstreet to lane to alley, keeping the rising sun to his right. He didn’t know this part of the sector, which wasn’t laid out in the usual grid, but one of these streets had to come out on Jefferson. That was where all the 1s were coming from.
Taylor, as he pushed his way through the streams of frightened 1s in their colored pajamas who were scuttling toward him through this idiotic maze of winding lanes and circuitous alleys that were not coming out on Jefferson Avenue, was trying to get his head around the completely inconceivable concept that everyone he even vaguely knew, except Cassandra Passwaters, was dead ... or they would be by the end of the day. Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, Meyer, Coco, Sylvie, Claudia, Young Man Henry, T.C. Johns, Vaclav Borges, the Gilmartin brothers, Jim MacReady, Coreen Sweeney, most of the other regulars at Gillie’s, the vast majority of whom were 3s, random residents of Mulberry Street, like the people upstairs who no one ever saw, Herman the Wino, the Chinese woman who always made that face at Taylor when she saw him walking in the wrong direction, all of them ... all of these people were dead. Taylor couldn’t be certain of course, but he reasoned, if he were IntraZone Waste, and the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, areas like the English Quarter, Stokely Fields, Little Damascus, and certainly the entire deep Inner Zone, would have to be high-priority targets, which meant they had been leveled with missiles already, and even if they hadn’t, it didn’t matter, because they would be, because this was a full-out purge, and Taylor, unlike a lot of people who had heard the stories but hadn’t been there, remembered the last one. He remembered it vividly ...
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