Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  “I love you,” he told her.

  “I know,” she said. “I love you too.”

  They had never said it. They hadn’t had to. Now they did.

  He took her head with both hands, gently. Her head was so small. He looked in her eyes. He held her that way until she focused.

  “Help me do this. Make him stop crying.”

  She nodded. Then she started sobbing again.

  Taylor got up, went to the window, and pretended to check the alley below. He needed them all to stop fucking crying, which they weren’t going to do with him sitting beside them. Cassandra started humming some little tune he had never heard her hum before, and rocking Max back and forth in her arms, which seemed to magically stop his crying. Taylor kept his back to the two of them. He used the sleeve of his stolen outfit to wipe the tears and snot and sweat and the remnants of mayonnaise off his face. His knees were all rubbery. He was going to shit himself. His thoughts were racing. He could hardly breathe. Leaning halfway out the window, he could see the back of the TŌ Fish stand. They were packing the leftovers into crates, loading the vans, breaking down tables. He closed his eyes, clenched his asshole, and silently prayed that God, or the One, or whoever it was that wasn’t out there, was looking down into his heart right now, and knowing the depths of Taylor’s hatred ... for Him and His whole fucking sick little game.

  When he opened his eyes and turned around, Cassandra was curled up into a ball with her face pressed down between her knees. Max was lying on the bed in front of her ... lying on the blanket on the bed in front of her. Taylor quickly wrapped him up, leaving his head sticking out of the blanket, and stuffed him into the Transplant bag. He padded it out with another blanket. He zipped up the bag, but not all the way, so that Max could get a little air in maybe. Cassandra, who was still curled up in a ball, lost it again, and started shaking and wailing. He picked up the bag, turned his back on her, staggered to the window like a broken robot, crawled out onto the fire escape, down and into the fish-stinking alley, and walked back out onto Jefferson Avenue.

  Max was already crying again, but not very loudly, and the noise of the last of the shoppers and the stands being taken apart was apparently enough to drown him out, as no one was turning and looking at Taylor as he started back the way he had come, using what stalls remained for cover. The markets were all officially closed now, the crowds dispersing, and the avenue swarming with carts and vans and flatbed trucks that transported the stalls and stands and products back to wherever it was they came from. Taylor didn’t know where he was heading, exactly. Step One was to get well clear of Cassandra’s. Step Two was to find some isolated place. He’d figure out the rest whenever he got there. The sun was broiling the back of his neck as he drifted from group to group of shoppers until they peeled off left and headed south, and he drifted up to another group, acting like just another A.S.P. 1 on his way back home with his bag of groceries. The only problem was, his bag of groceries was a Transplant bag, which was rather unusual, and also his groceries were squirming around and ... oh yes, now they were crying louder ... people were starting to look around and try to identify where it was coming from ... so, OK, time for a different strategy.

  He drifted away from the groups of shoppers, most of whom were turning south anyway, and slipped back into that service passageway that ran along behind the stalls that were left, which there weren’t that many and those there were were being disassembled quickly. IntraZone Specialists were making their rounds, motivating vendors and meandering shoppers to move their asses and vacate the area. Taylor scanned the avenue ahead and determined that after another two blocks he was going to run out of cover completely. The stalls were coming down too fast. There’d be nothing up there but a smattering of shoppers, Security Specialists, and empty avenue .

  He let his instincts take him south, into some alley that veered southwest, which he took for all of fifteen seconds ... dead ahead was a makeshift checkpoint, where Security Specialists were checking IDs and scanning irises, looking for 3s. He doubled back and came back out onto Jefferson Avenue. Max was crying. He cut up behind a couple stands, then left, and into another little alley, halfway down which another team of Security Specialists were checking IDs. He backed up into a 1 with a cart, some exhausted-looking middle-aged guy whose pores were all clogged with grease or oil. By this time Max was caterwauling. He sounded like a cat on fire. The 1 looked down at Taylor’s bag. He looked up at Taylor. He looked away. Taylor pushed past him and out onto Jefferson. Security units were cruising toward him. Fuck. He scanned. OK ... there. If he could just get behind that van right there, the one that was inching up the avenue, some kind of HVAC sign on the panel ... and wait, the driver looked familiar. No. That didn’t make any sense. He looked like Cassandra’s roommate, Joel, or Jules, or whatever the fuck his name was, the one with the ridiculous tribal earrings ... but why would he be driving some van ... with a woman beside him in the passenger seat ... a woman who looked a lot like ... Sarah? No. That was completely insane. Still, Taylor picked up his pace, walking quickly, skipping, jogging, trying to get alongside the van and get a better look ... and now he was running, and Max was howling like a fucking banshee, and this artificial banana vendor with the Panama hat was pointing at Taylor and shouting something and ... fuck ... fuck ... a Security Specialist across the avenue was talking into his lavalier mike, and fuck ... two more Security Specialists were walking toward him, pointing at the bag ...

  “BAG ON THE GROUND!” one of them shouted.

  The other Specialist was going for his sidearm, which the Specialists preferred for close encounters.

  Taylor walked directly toward them.

  “BAG ON THE GROUND! BAG ON THE GROUND!”

  These weren’t the most articulate Specialists, nor were they suited up for battle. They were just the everyday market Specialists, whose job it was to clear the avenue.

  “BAG ON THE FUCKING GROUND, ASSHOLE! ”

  Taylor closed the distance with them just as Specialist Number Two was bringing his weapon out of his holster ... which Taylor promptly relieved him of, after driving one of his testicles up into his groin with a vicious knee kick. The shouty Specialist raised his rifle, which Taylor quickly grabbed the barrel of, and jacked the butt into his face, breaking off most of his upper front teeth. The firearms were bio-coded to the Specialists, so useless to Taylor, so he tossed them away. He picked up the bag of Max off the sidewalk, did a 360 to confirm that he was now totally and irrevocably fucked, which he was ... as now, behind him, to the east, a number of other, more formidable Specialists were running toward him with their UltraLite rifles, shouting down into their collars, and gutless fucking cooperating 1s were standing on the sidewalk pointing at him, and Security Units were executing U-turns, and poor little Max was hollering his head off, and God and the One and Fate were up there jacking each other off and laughing, and fuck them, fuck them all, he thought ... he tucked Max into his chest like a football, like American fullbacks used to do, locked his left arm over his right, and he took off running down Jefferson Avenue ...

  Zone 23

  Valentina had never actually seen the wall ... not up close. There were pictures of it online, of course, and you could see it from the upper floors of a lot of the corporate towers in the business district, 6262 Lomax among them, but Paxton Wills didn’t face that way, and neither did any of the other offices she’d frequented in her previous life. She had seen it out the windows of planes, and now and again from the hills of the more abundant Residential Communities where she and Kyle had been invited to dinner at the homes of the various corporate bigwigs who were always restructuring BVCC, but none of those views had done it justice. Now, walking directly toward it, walking through the shadow of it, she could feel the unrelenting mass of the series of identical concrete slabs stretching away in both directions like an echelon of neo-brutalist monoliths standing out on the edge of the world.

  She had glimpsed it out the window between the helmete
d heads of the Security Specialists as they were traveling east on the perimeter road that formed the inner boundary of Center City. By that time her eyes had recovered from the mace, or the pepper spray, or whatever it was. The van turned onto an access road that traversed the two-kilometer stretch of no man’s land surrounding the Zone. Strapped in her seat and facing west, she couldn’t see it, but she had felt it down there, looming up out of the southern horizon, drawing ever nearer as the van approached. She closed her eyes and repeated her mantra, and there, in the dark of her mind, she saw it ... and she realized that it had always been there, out there on the abscissa of everything, blending invisibly into the depth of field of all her thoughts and dreams ... but those were only thoughts and dreams, apparitions, symbols, signs. This was the sensate thing itself .

  Dead ahead was Gate 15. The Security Specialists were walking her toward it, two of them flanking her, one behind her. They were walking on the scorching asphalt path that led to the gate from the parking area. The blacktop was trapping the oppressive heat, which was worse down here than in Center City, where she had spent some nebulous period of time in some half-remembered cheap motel. It felt like the path was melting beneath her, sticking to the rubberized soles of the flimsy slip-on sneaker-type shoes she was wearing. The lightweight, loose-fitting clothes they had given her were soaked through with sweat. She was struggling to breathe. She squinted into the blinding glare that was bouncing off of every surface directly up into her eyes and staggered along like a broken rag doll someone had just fished out of a lake. The Security Specialists, whose body armor must have been coated with a ThermaSoak skin, and were safe from the glare behind their visors, marched her on, completely unfazed.

  Gate 15 was a fortress type gate with a big red painted “1” on one of the doors and a big red “5” on the other. The doors were almost perfectly square, and opened outward, and were made of iron. Excessively armed Security Specialists wearing uniforms she didn’t recognize were processing vans with mismatched fenders, mini-shuttle buses, and other odd vehicles, in the space between a pair of boom arms, one on either side of the gate. Other Specialists were standing off to the side with their matte black UltraLite rifles held in the classic “sling ready” position, staring implacably in various directions and generally looking intimidating. Just to the right of the door with the “1” was a bungalow-style Security Station, which looked like it was probably attached to the tower that rose up the wall behind it. At the top of the tower was a mirrored enclosure with a metal catwalk running around it. The sun was shining directly into it. Valentina looked away from it.

  They veered to the right and walked her up a slightly sloping ramp to the station. The automatic doors whooshed open. They walked her into what felt like a freezer, and up to an elevated processing counter that stretched across the length of the interior and came up to the level of her eyes and the shoulder level of the Security Specialists. An older Specialist was seated behind it, a balding, middle-aged Variant-Positive, typing something into a keyboard as he smiled down into a recessed screen. Stenciled on the wall behind him in a big red sans serif corporate font …

  INTRAZONE WASTE & SECURITY SERVICES, INC.

  SPECIAL RESIDENTIAL AREA 23, N.E. REGION 709

  He held one finger up to the Specialists, smiled at his screen, and went on typing. Her escorts stood there, waiting patiently. Valentina scanned her surroundings. The lobby, or whatever this was exactly, was an all-white rectilinear space, with the counter running across one side and a row of fiberglass seats on the other. The seats, in alternating primary colors, so red, then yellow, then blue, then green, which technically wasn’t a primary color, then red again, and yellow, and so on, were affixed to a heavy metal bar that was bolted into the wall behind them. Down at the end of the row of seats were three other persons with unfortunate haircuts. They were wearing the same white, loose-fitting outfit that Valentina was currently wearing, each of which was in one or another stage of having been soaked through with sweat. They were staring fixedly down at the the toes of their shoes, or the floor just in front of their shoes, or something down there, and hugging themselves, and rubbing their hands together desperately, and shivering, and basically freezing to death. The dark-skinned man and woman in their sixties, who Valentina assumed were married, unless they were simply seated together, were whispering prayers in some non-English language. A few seats away was the younger woman, thirties, early forties maybe, rocking back and forth in her seat, whispering nothing in any language. This younger woman looked familiar, but Valentina could not quite place her. For a second she thought she was someone from work ... but no, she wasn’t, or she didn’t think so. She was foggy, but she still remembered her colleagues, their faces at least, or she thought she did.

  The Security Specialist behind the counter pressed a button she couldn’t see. A voice came over the PA system, “six four three ... six four three.” The older man and woman stood up. They held out little squares of paper, extending their arms as far as possible, squinting at them without their glasses, determined that the woman had 643, and set about whispering about this fact. The man at the counter pressed the button. The PA system sounded again, “six four three ... six four three.” The older couple continued whispering. The man at the counter sat there waiting, approximately fifteen meters away from them. Finally, the older, dark-skinned man convinced his wife to approach the counter, which, once she had, she couldn’t see over, so she had to get up onto her tiptoes and pull herself up with both of her hands. The Security Specialist behind the counter reached across and took her number. He examined it, disposed of it behind the counter, and handed her down another slip of paper with something on it she could not read. She peered up over the edge of the counter with a desperate look of total confusion. During all this, Valentina’s escorts hadn’t moved one centimeter.

  The man at the counter leaned out toward her.

  “This is your housing assignment,” he said. “Pick up your bedding at Gate 15. Your bedding, along with your hygiene kit, are provided as is, free of charge. You can upgrade them later at your own expense.”

  He handed her down another slip of paper.

  “This is your temporary work assignment. Report to work tomorrow morning at that address at 0730. Once an evaluation has been made, you’ll be given a permanent work assignment. Do you understand?”

  The woman nodded.

  “Exit out the doors to your left.”

  The woman staggered away from the counter, back to her husband. They whispered briefly. Then he walked her down to the doors to her left, the ones at the opposite end of the room. The doors whooshed open. The woman stepped through and out into the blazing sunlight. She stopped, turned back toward her husband, blinking, obviously blinded by the glare, and opened her mouth as if to speak ... the automatic doors whooshed closed in her face.

  Valentina stood there watching, shivering herself now, completely baffled, as the husband shuffled back to his seat and went back to staring at his shoes or whatever, and to fingering his numbered slip of paper. No one seemed to be guarding these people. They just walked into the Zone on their own ... then again, what were they going to do, run for it up the access road, or across that stretch of no man’s land, with all those Security Specialists out there, and those snipers up in that mirrored tower? And there were probably landmines, and who knew what else ...

  “What can I do for you gentlemen today?” the Specialist behind the counter asked.

  “Level 3 transport,” one of them said, and he handed the man at the counter a MemCard. The man at the counter took the card and inserted it into a port up there.

  “Level 3?”

  The Specialist nodded. The man at the counter pulled up a screen.

  “Walk-in?”

  “Right.”

  He smiled at his screen and started typing on his keyboard again.

  “Give me a couple, three seconds,” he said, scanning his screen as he typed and clicked. “Housing is going to
be a little tricky. We’ve got a bit of unrest in the sector. Mostly contained in the southern quadrants, though. HDS is in there now. You may have noticed as you were coming in.”

  “Right,” one the Specialists said.

  Valentina hadn’t noticed, but then she hadn’t been able to see out the windshield. Back out on Perimeter Road she had thought it had looked like it was going to rain.

  “All right, this should be OK. It’s way up in the northwest quadrant.”

  He handed her down a slip of paper.

  7747 Calumet Avenue.

  “That’s your new address, Ms. Briggs. You won’t be able to get down there currently. Sector C is in a lockdown until we neutralize this Terrorist threat. It shouldn’t take more than a couple hours. After that, they’ll let you right in. You may want to shelter in place for a while, somewhere inside, out of the heat. You’re entitled to apply for a work assignment. You can do that at any job service center. Details on that, and everything else, you’ll find in your orientation kit. You pick up your bedding and kit at the gate. These gentlemen are going to walk you in. Do you understand everything I’ve just explained to you? ”

  Valentina said she did.

  “All right, gentlemen, have a nice day.”

  Valentina’s Security Specialists walked her past the older man and the younger, possibly familiar-looking woman, and on through the other set of automatic doors, and out into the unbearable heat. They walked her past who she recognized now as the IntraZone Waste & Security Specialists who were scanning the interiors and undercarriages, and in some cases also the engine blocks, of the procession of vans and mini-buses that were waiting to be scanned and enter the gate, and on, past others who were taking and scanning what appeared to be the old-fashioned ID cards (as in physical laminated cards you carried) that the drivers were proffering out of their windows, and on, past the others, who were scanning people’s irises, and faces, and teeth, and the tips of their fingers, and whatever else they could think of to scan, or just standing around with their UltraLite rifles looking like highly-trained professionals, and they walked her on, past still other Specialists, and through the gate, and into the Zone, the entire southern horizon of which appeared to be burning out of control.