Zone 23

by Hopkins, C. J.

  Billy’s last target was a perfect example.

  Billy, during the preceding digression, had stayed locked in and was on his game. He was right on the heels of 225, averaging eight to ten points behind him. It was down to the two of them, mano a mano. They had pulled away from the rest of the pack and were matching each other Target for Target, pulling off crazy-ass circus shots and driving the viewing audience nuts. Susan Schnupftuch-Boermann Goereszky had lost her composure and was screaming into the camera with her blood red, spit-flecked lips, which Billy had her sound switched off so as not to be annoyingly distracted by. They were coming down to the end of it now. Billy could sense the tension peaking. The terrain they were working was littered with bodies. Available Targets were rapidly dwindling. He wasn’t going to win it, he’d accepted that, but the thrill of going head to head with 225 was enough in itself ...

  Then it happened.

  A bell-tone sounded.

  The top of his screen displayed the message:

  SPECIAL BONUS TERRORIST TARGET

  AHMED VOSBIGIAN, CLASS 4, ACTIVE

  Billy Jensen took a deep breath. He held it a beat, did a quick Mūla Bandha, relaxed his anus, and slowly exhaled. His screen went blank for a half a second, then came back up on a different terrain, out on the edge of this Quarantine Zone. The wall was right there. He could see both sides of it. He zoomed in on the perimeter avenue that ran along the course of the wall to the west. He checked coordinates, altitude and wind speed, as the T.A.S. team droned in his headset. He didn’t have a visual yet, as they hadn’t synched him up with a driver, so he was looking down at a twelve block radius out of the nose of some random satellite. On the right-hand, or eastern, side of his screen, orderly processions of Anti-Socials were walking eastward, into the sunrise, looking unthreatening and generally cooperative. Behind them, so roughly in the center of his screen, groups of collateral Anti-Socials were packing up the last of their wares, loading them into the back of their vans, and locking down the doors of their plywood kiosks. All of which was S.O.P. These simulated Zones were all the same. The perimeter avenues, open-air markets, pedestrian rush hour, were standard features. On the left-hand, or western, side of his screen, it looked like there was a concentration of friendlies by one of the Security Gates. Across the avenue, a block behind them, a MedTeam was half deployed on the sidewalk. As Billy was taking all this in, the female voice of the T.A.S. in his headset was briefing him on the ball game. She spoke in an utterly emotionless monotone, and used a lot of impressive jargon, which conveyed a feeling of professional calm in the face of imminent personal danger. Target was on the move with a package. Contents possible IED. Target vector west northwest. Stand by for Target details. And so on. His screen went black then came back sharp and tight, which meant they’d found him a driver. The T.A.S. confirmed as much. He got the coordinates, punched them in, and obtained a visual on the Target.

  Billy had her sound turned off, but folks at home, or enjoying their breakfasts in some massive revolving spherical restaurant, like Kyle and Cramer in the Outlook Café, or wherever they were sitting there glued to their Viewers, in addition to the deadpan military-speak and the tension-building Techno score, were being treated to the piercing tones of Susan Schnupftuch-Boermann Goereszky, who was totally out of her mind with excitement and screaming meaningless sentence fragments into the camera at the top of her lungs.

  “262 ACCESSORIZED TARGET!”

  Roger P. Greenway was helpfully clarifying.

  “Yes, it looks like he’s acquired the Target. Here come our Target details, Susan.”

  “ROGER GOING TO TARGET SATSCREEN!” ******

  The Target details appeared onscreen.

  “Susan, our Target, Vosbigian, Ahmed, is presumed to be in his early forties, and in pretty bad shape from the looks of it, Susan. Class 3 up to the time of the incident. Extremely aggressive. Casualties involved.”

  “DEAD?! HOW MANY? CASUALTIES COUNT?!”

  “No details yet on those casualties, Susan. The Target is apparently armed, however, and in possession of an IED.”

  “POSSIBLE IMPROVISED NUCLEAR DEVICE?! ROGER?!”

  “We don’t have any details. Susan.”

  The screen was showing an overhead shot of Ahmed Vosbigian, who didn’t really exist, running for his life up the empty avenue, a nondescript duffel bag clutched to his chest. Billy maneuvered the crosshairs onto him, coolly tracking his vector as he ran. He selected his asset, nothing too heavy, a 30-kilogram laser-guided anti-personnel-type GodSend missile.

  “WHY AREN’T THEY GIVING HIM THE GREEN YET ROGER?!”

  “They haven’t given him the green yet, Susan. If he makes this shot, he could pull this out. Unbelievable quarterfinals, Susan.”

  “WHAT IS HE DOING?! HE’S STOPPING. ROGER!”

  “He appears to have come to a stop there, Susan.”

  “WHY WOULD HE DO THAT?!”

  “Unclear, Susan. Maybe he’s come to his senses a bit. Sometimes even the bad ones, Susan, those suffering seriously late-stage disease, they have ... like a moment of clarity, Susan.”

  “HE’S JUST STANDING THERE DOING NOTHING ROGER!”

  “That’s definitely what he’s doing, Susan. It looks like there’s some kind of alley to his left. He might be considering fleeing into it.”

  “WHAT IN THE NAME OF THE ONE ARE THEY WAITING FOR?!”

  “I couldn’t begin to tell you, Susan. If he gets in that alley, 262 will need to switch to a larger ordnance, and he’ll need to do that on the fly, which is no mean feat, I assure you, Susan.”

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT’S HAPPENING ROGER! SHOULD WE GO TO ANOTHER ANGLE OR SOMETHING? I THINK WE SHOULD GO TO ANOTHER ANGLE!”

  Susan’s producer was screaming at her to calm down and try to milk the moment. Normals all over the United Territories were staring transfixed into the screens of their Viewers. The tension couldn’t have been any been higher. One of these top-notch Operators was going to advance to the semi-finals. It all came down to this one last shot ... and the Target was not cooperating.

  Billy Jensen was holding his crosshairs dead on the Target, awaiting the green. His finger was on the initiate button, ready to fire the second he got it. He wasn’t impatient. He wasn’t tense. He was breathing evenly. His heart-rate was normal. He wasn’t thinking or wondering anything. He was totally relaxed ... completely focused. He was in that magic place or state that every athlete knows and loves, where there are no distractions ... the world disappears, the sound drops out, time slows down, your mind goes blank, and you cannot miss ...

  “ROGER?! ARE YOU STILL WITH US, ROGER?! WE’RE GOING TO ANOTHER ANGLE!”

  Billy Jensen was in the zone.

  Hail Mary

  Taylor had run a couple of blocks, dodging the stacks of plastic crates and hastily abandoned carts and trolleys and tins of TŌ Ham and cans of soup and the sacks of rice and beans and whatever that littered the sidewalk like an obstacle course, and he was passing a Mister Mango emporium, out of the door of which people with jumbo containers of genuine fruit-flavored beverages were staring with unabashed prurient interest ... when he finally realized no one was chasing him.

  This realization occurred in his stomach, which suddenly felt like it was full of something terribly heavy, like a bag of cement. He glanced back over his shoulder awkwardly, into the blinding glare of the sun, and saw them all back there.

  He kept on running.

  Max was with him ... Max was his son. Max lived in a Transplant bag. He couldn’t hear whether Max was crying. He couldn’t hear anything. He was too busy running.

  Taylor was running ... well, he wasn’t sure where, somewhere else. It didn’t really matter. Somewhere he could put Max down, and take him out of the bag, and kill him. Because no matter what happened in the next few minutes (which Taylor had a pretty good sense what that was), he wasn’t going to let the corporations get him. He was going to take Max out of the bag, kiss him once on his adorable forehead, then
press the towel down onto his face until his little lungs stopped breathing. He was going to do this somewhere else, somewhere close, but not just here, and soon, any moment actually, but not just now ... or now ... or now ... no ... because see, he needed more time ... not much more, just a few more minutes, or seconds, or just ... well, a little more time .

  Three blocks back on Jefferson Avenue, Security Specialists were standing around, or were leaning up against their Security units, like parents at a softball game in which their kids had already trounced their opponents, but they had to play out the final innings, blithely watching Taylor run. This was bad ... but it was also good, because now he was not going to have to do it. Because they were going to do it for him ... and all he had to do was run.

  See, the reason no one was chasing Taylor, or firing their UltraLite rifles at Taylor, or in any way attempting to prevent his escape, was that somewhere up in the merciless sky an invisible Unmanned Aerial Vehicle was preparing to fire a laser-guided GodSend missile down onto his head. The Security Specialists had been advised of this, which was why they were hanging back like that ... which meant they didn’t know about Max. They probably thought he had some kind of IED in the Transplant bag, which the GodSend missile was meant to detonate when it blew Taylor into a thousand bits.

  Good, he thought. Let them think that. Cassandra was going to be OK. There wouldn’t be anything left of Max, or Taylor, once the missile got them. So no DNA tests ... or any other tests. They would hose what was left of them into the gutter. They would never even know there had been a Max. Cassandra was going to be OK.

  Taylor was not going to be OK ... or maybe he was, because what did he know? Maybe he was going to join his mother, and his father, and all the people he had killed, and all the people he had seen being killed, in heaven, but that was rather unlikely. Or maybe he was going to undergo some form of spiritual transformation that he couldn’t even begin to imagine ... or maybe he was going to be nothing ... which he also couldn’t begin to imagine. In any event he was going to find out, in approximately two or three seconds, he figured. He vaulted a crate of some kind of squash, slipped, careened into a kiosk, righted himself, and kept on running.

  Just up ahead was that covered alley that ran back behind the sunscreen stand, which back in some other fucking lifetime, before whatever had happened had happened, and everything had gone so fucking sideways, Taylor was going to walk into and hand Max off to whoever it was that was waiting down there in that HVAC van ... a glimpse of which Taylor now caught in passing .

  He stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk.

  An HVAC van at the end of the alley? Had he just imagined it, or was it actually there? Sarah’s voice was in his head ...

  No matter what happens, the vehicle will be there.

  He staggered backward and looked down the alley. There it was, an HVAC van. He couldn’t see inside the cab, or tell if it was parked or the engine was running. It couldn’t be Sarah. It had to be Sarah. It wasn’t Sarah. Of course it was Sarah.

  Sitting just inside the mouth of the alley, taking shelter from the morning sun, was ... wait ... that was that zapped-out Transplant, the one he had knocked onto her ass behind the stalls on his way to Cassandra’s. She was perched, in what looked like a yoga position, on a stack of flattened cardboard boxes, her Transplant bag and her futon beside her, her eyes half-closed, her upturned hands resting lightly on her knees and ... no ... she couldn’t be ... yes ... she was meditating. And now it was Meyer’s voice in his head ...

  In the end, it all comes down to faith.

  Taylor, who had no faith in anything (or thought he didn’t, when of course he did, because no one has no faith in anything), did a rather funny thing. All he had to do was stand there, perfectly still ... and wait for the missile. He knew it was coming. He couldn’t hear it. He wouldn’t hear it. He would never hear it. He and Max would both just be there ... then, one second later, they wouldn’t. Max was definitely crying his ass off, wrapped in the towel inside the bag. Taylor could hear him distinctly now, howling, inconsolably wailing, even over his own labored breathing and his heartbeat pounding inside his head. All he had to do was stand there ... a few more seconds. The missile was coming. He could sense it coming. It was almost there ... and even if he broke and ran, ran up the alley toward the van, ran with everything he had left in him, cursing and crying and begging the fucking God he hated and didn’t believe in for one last burst of fucking speed, to just let him do this one fucking thing, to let him save this one little baby, he would never make it to the end of the alley. And even if by some miracle he did, and got Max into the van in the bag, and turned and ran back down the alley, or down the street at the end of the alley as the van sped off in the other direction, these motherfuckers would just take out the van, as well as Taylor, which would accomplish nothing. All these words are badly distorting the time this moment was actually taking. In reality less than a second had passed since the second Taylor turned back and stopped and heard Max crying and looked down the alley. All these thoughts were coming at once, were coming at some incalculable speed that was warping Taylor’s perception of time, which had not merely slowed, as it had seemed at first, but had stopped, and now ... and there was only now, it was like the spaces between the times that were the moments had disappeared, or had fused into some indivisible space of time that went on forever, and where the mind that Taylor knew as Taylor, but wasn’t Taylor, or wasn’t only Taylor, was looking out over this spatiotemporal plane in all directions at once, which was totally disorienting, and completely impossible, so maybe he was already dead ... but no, he wasn’t, because Max was crying. The redheaded Transplant had opened her eyes and was sitting there, cross-legged, staring at him. She was ten or twelve meters from the mouth of the alley. The van was still there at the end of the alley. Max was still crying. The missile was coming. His heart was racing. The avenue was empty. The sun was up and to his left. The Transplant bag was to her left. The van was waiting. The shrapnel radius. Fifty meters. Twenty seconds.

  He bolted into the mouth of the alley and pushed the Transplant down off the stack of cardboard cartons and onto the ground. He shoved his bag into her arms. It squirmed. She grasped it. The bag was crying. “His name is Max,” Taylor told her, as he tore the plastic cords off her futon. “Max,” he said it one more time. He threw the futon over the two of them. He pushed a few cardboard cartons on top of it. He did all this in a blur of movement. Then he grabbed her identical Transplant bag and ran back out of the mouth of the alley, and into the middle of Jefferson Avenue ... counting his strides from the mouth of the alley ... five ... six ... they were beautiful strides ... his quadriceps were pumping pistons ... the sky to the west insanely blue ... seven ... eight ... nostrils flaring ... devouring air ... he threw his head back ... there were tears in his eyes ... but he wasn’t crying ... not exactly ... nine ... ten ... thirty meters ... he was going to make it ... it was just ... yes ... thirty five ... it was all just ... it was just so fucking ...

  Tinnitus

  The sound was like the sound of something sucking everything out of existence through a pinhole punched through the skin of the sky. She never actually heard the explosion, or the whoosh of the wave of the million bits of shattered glass and asphalt and bricks and ragged shards of twisted metal blown back into the alley around them, and into the futon and the cardboard on top of them ... all of which had happened in less than a second.

  Now there was just the ringing sound, or more like a buzzing or humming than ringing, and the faraway sound of a baby crying ... but she could feel it squirming right there in her arms.

  She couldn’t remember where she was at first, which by now she was getting used to that feeling, but she knew there was all kinds of stuff on top of her, some of which appeared to be burning.

  She wormed her way out of the smoldering cartons, and out from under the shredded futon, and sat there clutching her duffel bag. No. This wasn’t her duffel bag. The Anti-Social had
given it to her. She unzipped the zipper ... and there was the baby, bawling away with the sound on mute. Its little pink face was twisted into the classic outraged baby face, the one where you know there’s nothing you can do to immediately assuage its intense displeasure ... a face Valentina had not seen in the flesh for over thirty years. Then it hit her. It wasn’t a Clear. Of course it wasn’t. She was in the Zone. The scary-looking Anti-Social had shoved the baby into her arms. What would he have been doing with a Clear? And what had he said?