Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  Following the Jackson Avenue Uprising, after Taylor, who was only ten years old, had crawled up out of his basement bunker, and couldn’t find his mother’s body, but found Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard sitting on the stoop of their former building eating stale marshmallows out of that bag, the three of them had wandered through the ruins of the streets that ran both ways off Jackson Avenue. They weren’t sure where they were heading at first, other than away from Jackson Avenue ... as far away as possible, ideally. Somewhere where Security Specialists weren’t making people lie down in the street, then shooting them all in the back of the head. The way they did it, these Security Specialists, who were certainly Hadley Domestic Security (Taylor believed he remembered seeing Hadley logos on their body armor) was they stormed into whatever tenement building they wanted to “sweep and clear” or whatever, shot a few people inside the building so that everyone inside would know they were serious, then they marched the others out into the street. They made them lie face down in the street (or sometimes stand against a wall, facing the wall, if they were doing it that way), then they went down the row and calmly shot the tops of their heads off, one by one. Taylor remembered all this vividly ... the pop ... pop ... pop ... of the pistols, as they moved down the row at a 4/4 pace, and the way people’s bodies would jerk, just once, and how the one to their right would tense all their muscles ... pop ... pop ... pop ... pop. He also remembered wondering why they didn’t jump up (or just turn around, if they were facing the wall) and run, or fight. Because why would you just lie down in the street (or just stand there staring at a fucking wall) and wait your turn to have your brains blown out? Taylor, as a child, had not understood that. He continued to not understand it now. Meyer Jimenez had tried to explain how people, once they knew they were dead, or were going to be dead in another few seconds (or sometimes weeks, or months, or years; it depended on the person and the situation), when they faced the inescapable fact of it, and gave up hope, the last little shred of it, not some type of grandiose hope, like for revolution, or salvation, or something, but simply the hope that they would live through the day, or the morning, or just the next ten minutes, when people finally let go of that, according to Meyer, and surrendered to Fate, or to God, or whatever it was they believed in, there wasn’t any point in trying to run, and there was no one to fight, because the fight was over. The fight was over ... and Death had won. The man who was steadily coming toward them ... pop ... pop ... pop ... pop ... and who was going to reach them in just another few seconds, and point his pistol at the back of their heads (exactly as he was doing now, as he blew their friend’s or their lover’s brains out) was not their enemy. It wasn’t personal. It didn’t have anything to do with this man. He didn’t hate them. He didn’t even know them. He was just, like, Death’s employee, or something. It was like he wasn’t even really there, because this, this final conscious moment, was strictly between the person and Death, who had always been there, who had always been coming ... pop ... pop ... and now he was here and this was it, that inconceivable moment, that final pointless flash of memory, the erasure of everything ... the end of time. Taylor had listened as Meyer explained this, and he had understood the words and all, but he didn’t get it ... he just did not get it. He got the philosophical part, about the inconceivable nature of Death. What he didn’t get was the other part. Because regardless of what you believed about Death, or to what degree you feared the erasure of every last shred of thought and memory that constituted who you thought you were, you didn’t lie down in the fucking street or stand up against a fucking wall and let some corporatist lackey asshole blow the back of your fucking head off. No matter what happened, you did not do this. It wasn’t any kind of personal statement, or ethical stance, or militant tactic, or anything that needed explaining to anyone. It wasn’t ... it was fucking simple. If someone attacked you, you attacked them back. You attacked them with everything you had. You fought, or, OK, if the odds were against you, you ran, if there was somewhere to run ... and if there wasn’t, then you killed as many of the motherfuckers as you possibly could. You did this until the moment they killed you. You did this because they were going to kill you, and you hated their fucking guts for that.

  Some of the 4s had shared Taylor’s sentiments. Not very many, but some of them at least. And not just the bozos who had started the uprising. Other people. People fought back. They didn’t have a chance. They fought back anyway. Taylor remembered a little old lady who had climbed out onto to her fire escape and was throwing pots and pans and dishes down onto the helmets of the Security Specialists who were ordering people to lie down in the street. She was wearing a ratty old bathrobe like Coco’s, except with an elaborate paisley pattern. Someone was handing them out the window, the pots and plates, and she was hurling them down at them, these soulless scumbags who were following orders, who had knowingly volunteered for this shit. She was using both hands to improve her aim. She wasn’t doing this with quiet dignity. She was doing this screaming at the top of her lungs, red-faced with hatred and uncontrollable rage. She had to have been eighty, ninety years old, her skin was all wrinkled and blotched and bruised, her fingers all twisted up and arthritic, like the claws of a pigeon ... she was utterly beautiful. The Specialists shot her to pieces, of course, along with whoever was helping her inside. They blew her body back in through the window, then shot up every other window on the floor. Then they finished killing all the people they had there ... pop ... pop ... pop ... pop.

  Whatever. The 4s were all history now. And so was history. History was history. An immeasurable stream of unreliable data scrolling across a network of screens, upon which the purge of the A.S.P. 4s in 2575, H.C.S.T., when Taylor was ten, was a tiny blip. There was surely an online record of it, because everything that happened was recorded somewhere, and then officially examined, and revised and corrected, and commented on to the point where either whatever had happened hadn’t happened, or there were so many different conflicting accounts that no one could possibly be certain what had happened ... and who was left to say any different? The only ones who had made it out of the old Sector D, and so had witnessed the purge, witnessed it all up close and personal, were orphaned little kids like Taylor Byrd, and Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, and a handful of other such damaged souls, like Rudy Rebello and Vaclav Borges (who, rumor had it, had had his mother’s brains blown out into his face, and had walked around for days like that, covered in her blood and cranial matter). Older folks, like Coco Freudenheim, remembered the A.S.P. 4s, of course, and had a general idea of what had happened, but the few little kids who’d made it out hadn’t been all that eager to discuss the details. To pretty much everyone else in the Zone, the Purge of the 4s was folklore, legend, another drunken story to tell, a story which everyone knew, or assumed, was primarily based on made-up bullshit. And of course, to the Normals, Taylor imagined, it had been just one more wonderful weekend, streaming their Entertainment Content, and playing with their little medicated kids, in fucking Shangri-La or wherever ...

  Back in the present, or whatever it was, a detail of Hadley Security Specialists were working their way up the alley toward him, checking IDs against biometrics in a random and totally professional manner. Taylor walked directly at them, reaching into his pocket as if he were going to produce a legit ID card, then took a quick left the fuck up out of there, up this lane that wound around, taking him south, but he had no choice, and down these steps and through this tunnel, which it felt like maybe he was under Collins now, and then up this ramp and out into some other little labyrinth of lanes. He took his first available right, and now his bearing was north northwest ... which, OK, that was somewhat better, except that he was completely lost. He paused outside this weird-ass little two-story townhouse, or cottage, or something, where the shit-for-brains 1s had actually put some potted plants in the fucking windows. Morons. He stood there listening a moment. There ... yes, there it was. It was one of the jumbo Public Viewers, two, maybe three blocks north,
so maybe this alley was taking him out to the far west end of Jefferson Avenue ... which, OK, that would do in a pinch. He couldn’t make out what the Viewer was saying, but that didn’t matter, except for the time, which he sensed was something like 0710, or possibly later, but he couldn’t verify. He set out walking. Yes. Good. The alley was definitely taking him north. The sun was over the rooftops to his right. The Public Viewer was also to his right. And up ahead it looked like maybe ... yes ... there was Jefferson Avenue .

  Taylor stepped out into the throngs of morning shoppers and stood there, baffled, drawing a series of exasperated looks as people pushed and shoved their way past him. Produce vendors were shouting out their end-of-the-morning cut-rate prices, desperately trying to unload the last of their wilted wares before 0730. 1s and 2s were rushing from stand to stand with their plastic bags and carts, hoping to score a last-minute deal on a couple kilos of liquifying squash, or rubbery carrots, or moldy mushrooms, or something equally disgusting and inedible. Apart from the absence of A.S.P. 3s and the heightened presence of Security Specialists, who were moving through the crowd in twos and threes, checking IDs and scanning irises, it looked like any other Tuesday morning.

  Taylor’s detour had taken him all the way down to the far west end of the markets. Across the avenue, off to his left, was this field, or lot, where there were no stalls, or tables, or corporate stores, or anything. It was just this stretch of dirt and weeds that extended all the way to the wall to the north and off to the roofless shells of some buildings that had probably once been a school to the west. A block up ahead was Gate 14. It looked like it was open for business. IntraZone Waste & Security Specialists were processing the line of outbound vehicles, mini-buses packed with manual laborers, work vans, a couple of pick-up trucks. The Hadley Domestic Security forces had probably used Gates 8 through 12, which no one used, as there was nothing down there. They couldn’t have entered the Zone up here ... not with the avenue packed like this. He turned around and looked to the south. Minarets of oily smoke were curdling up into the cloudless sky.

  Riding the currents of eastbound shoppers, he set out for Cassandra’s alley ... which was way the hell down at the other end of Jefferson. Which meant he had a serious problem. See, he needed to be there by 0730, as that’s when the markets officially closed, and his plan was, if he could get up to Cassandra’s and back down into the street with Max by 0740, or thereabouts, the vendors would be closing up their stands and hauling away their perishable items ... which was good, as that was always chaotic, and he would still have the last of the shoppers for cover. He wasn’t going to make it. Not at this pace. But it wasn’t like he could start shoving his way through the crowd, or even walk any faster, not without drawing the unwanted attention of the roving teams of Security Specialists. Up ahead, the gigantic face of the Orange-Haired Woman on the Public Viewer, the one he’d heard and had guided him out here, was informing the residents of Sector A that the time at the tone would be 0720. Down in the lower right corner of the screen, a window was running Real-Time footage of the manicured lawn of some Cartwright estate upon which members of the corporate media were filming Real-Time footage of each other, and repeating, every fifteen seconds, how Jimmy “Jimbo” Cartwright was dead.

  Taylor snaked his way through the shoppers, squeezed between two Content stalls, and shot down the little strip of sidewalk the vendors used to stack their empty crates and boxes and barrels and whatever, and occasionally step out the back of their stands when no one was looking and pee down the gutter. He made good time for about a block. Then his secret passageway ended and he had to cut back out into the mobs. He drifted left, avoiding a pair of Security Specialists coming toward him, and got behind a pack of old Turkish ladies who had formed a V and were viciously pushing the prows of their carts into the people ahead of them. He passed a number of cooking oil stands, exotic soap stalls, and an auto parts tent, all of which smelled exactly the same, then the grannies turned off toward Haloumi Heaven, and he was out there on his own again. During all this, his brain was running an emergency cognitive clean-up program that deleted all extraneous abstract thoughts (like whether the D.A.D.A. was actually happening or was just a pretext for the purge in progress, and whether Adam was a corporatist agent, and who, what, and where Sarah was) and locked his mind (the program did) into this sort of tactical mode where everything simplified down to a series of instant decisions he made by instinct. Likewise, all the intense emotions Taylor had been debatably feeling (i.e., his grief for his probably now dead friends, and his fondness, or love, for Max and Cassandra, not to mention the fear, or mind-numbing terror, accompanying his likely imminent death) ... all of these emotions had been shut off. He was feeling nothing. He was like a machine. His eyes were scanning the terrain ahead for possible vectors, probable threats, he was calculating times, distances, speeds ... tobacco kiosk, produce stall, discount shoe store, sun-screen stand ... and yes, that was the sun-screen stand, the one where ... there it was ... just past it ... the little alley where he was going to rendezvous ... back in some other version of reality ... no, delete that ... stay in the moment ... Security Specialists off to the left, so veer right slowly, turn your head and ...

  Two blocks down from Cassandra’s place, he ducked behind the line of stalls, and into another service passageway, and was glancing over his shoulder quickly, and he walked right into this clueless Transplant and knocked her onto her ass in the gutter. He stood there a moment, looking down at her, some green-eyed, totally zapped-out redhead. On top of whatever else they’d done to her, the Normals had seriously fucked up her hair. She sat there, staring up at him, goggle-eyed, clutching the straps of her Transplant bag, as if he were going to take it from her. Her bedroll was lying in the muck beside her. Something about her looked familiar ... or maybe it was déjà vu ... or whatever. He didn’t have time to wonder. Off he went, into the stream of shoppers ...

  Coming in through Cassandra’s window, he caught the tip of his boot on the sill, lost his balance, lurched, rolled, narrowly missed Cassandra’s bucket, and ended up down near the foot of her bed in the pile of clothes, Content discs, and other assorted crap she kept there, including, apparently, several squeezable packets of barbecue-flavored mayonnaise. Cassandra was sitting at the head of the bed nursing Max like the women did in those paintings from some earlier Renaissance period, back before there were digital cameras, the dates of which Taylor could never remember ... in any event, they looked beatific (Cassandra and Max did, not the women in the paintings), except for Cassandra’s excessive sweating, and her eyes, which were swollen and red from crying. They looked across the bed at each other.

  “What’s going on?” Cassandra asked.

  “I don’t know,” Taylor told her.

  The pirate Viewer was lying beside her.

  “They shut down the network. All you get ...”

  “I know, he said.

  “They’re bombing. ”

  “Yeah.”

  “They sealed off the sector. I thought ... “

  “I know. Listen to me. We don’t have time. After I’m gone, you clean all this up. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything.”

  “Wait ...”

  “No. Don’t talk. Just listen. I got to go. There isn’t time. They’ll be here later. They’ll go house to house. They’re purging the 3s.”

  “IntraZone?”

  “Hadley. Look ... I don’t have time to explain all this. Stick to the cover. In a couple of days, you go back to work like nothing happened. Wrap him up in a towel or something.”

  “Wait.”

  “No. Where’s the bag?”

  “I don’t know. Taylor, wait ...”

  Taylor tore through the crap on the floor and found an old towel and the Transplant bag. He threw the towel across to Cassandra.

  “Wrap him up.”

  “No. Talk to me …”

  He sat down on the bed beside her, and pulled the hair back out of her face. Max was finished nurs
ing for the moment. He was lying there in Cassandra’s arms, squinting and making adorable faces, and just generally being helpless and innocent.

  “We don’t have time. There isn’t time,” Taylor babbled, not knowing what to say. “They’re purging the 3s. I saw the units.”

  “Purging ... what are you talking about?”

  “I don’t think anyone knows about you. You’ll be all right. But I got to go. I need to get him out of here, now.”

  “They’re still going to take him?”

  Taylor hesitated.

  “Yeah,” he lied.

  “No they’re not.”

  He reached for Max. Cassandra recoiled, tightening her grip on him.

  “No,” she said.

  This was the part that just destroyed him. He was all shut down and ready to do this, then she goes and pulls this shit.

  “Give him to me. ”

  “No,” she said. And now she was sobbing. And now he was sobbing. And this was the last fucking thing he needed.

  “Give me the fucking kid already. You want to die?”

  “No,” she said.

  Snot ropes were dangling out of both their noses. Their chests were heaving. This was so stupid.

  “Do not do this,” Taylor begged her.

  Max went ahead and joined in sobbing. Now the three of them were sitting there, sobbing. The markets were closing. The clock was ticking. He stared at the floor between his boots.