by Nancy Kress
He didn’t notice her at first, so intent was he on replaying the game notated in a book beside the chess board. Amy, gazing at the game, recognized it instantly.
“Hey,” she said. “The Immortal Game.”
The boy’s head jerked up, startled. He wasn’t handsome but he had beautiful eyes, gray with flecks of silver. A thick blanket lay across the wheelchair, hiding his legs. His tone was cautious. “You know the Immortal Game?”
“Sure. Adolf Anderssen versus Lionel Kieseritzky, London, 1851.”
His silver-gray gaze sharpened. “You play?”
“Yes.”
“FIDE rating?”
“Was 1900. I don’t belong now.”
He didn’t ask why not. She recognized his type immediately, from countless tournaments in her pre-Collapse life: the superbright, socially challenged chess nerd. Amy felt at ease with him in a way she never did with hot guys.
He said, “Wanna play?”
“I can’t right now, but maybe I could come over later, if it’s all right with your family.”
He looked around vaguely, as if he’d forgotten he had a family. The woman emerged again from the building, saying, “No, no, I told whoever I talked to on the phone that the sofa wasn’t going to fit through the doorway and would have to—oh, hello.”
“I’m Amy Kent, from across the street.” Amy held out her hand.
The woman took it, her gaze focusing suddenly as she realized that an actual girl had been talking to her nerdy son. “Hello! I’m Ann O’Malley and this is my son Paul. We’re just moving in, as you can see.” She laughed, a sound tinged with embarrassment. She didn’t want to find herself in this neighborhood, Amy thought. Well, who did? Still, she seemed nice.
“Ma,” Paul said, “she’s coming over later to play chess.”
“Oh, well . . . sure.” Amy saw her glance around at her disassembled household, scattered on the sidewalk. The kids with the soccer ball tore past in the other direction. The ball bounced off a lacquered Chinese desk. And the woman’s sweater, although old, was beautifully made. These people had had some money once, and had it no longer. Amy warmed to them.
“If it’s too much trouble, Mrs. O’Malley, Paul and I can play another day, after you have a chance to—”
“No, no, come tonight. Say, seven o’clock? Paul never finds girls—I mean, people—who can play chess with him. And call me Ann.”
“OK.” Amy smiled and moved off. But first she couldn’t resist reaching out to make the next move in the famous game that every serious chess player knew by heart: black knight to g7.
“Hey!” Paul said, somewhere between indignation and delight.
Definitely a good day!
* * *
But the next one was not.
On Sunday morning Gran awoke feverish. Her doctor’s appointment wasn’t until three. Kaylie, out late last night practicing with her band, slept past noon. Amy rushed back and forth between the bedroom and kitchen to bring Gran hot tea, aspirin, cold cloths for her forehead, food she didn’t eat. Every time Amy passed Kaylie, lying in an insensible lump, her resentment grew. It didn’t help that last evening Amy had played three games of chess with Paul and had lost two. Paul had remained monosyllabic throughout. Outside, a sullen sky spit rain.
When Kaylie finally woke, she was grumpy. “Do you have to make so much noise?”
“Do you have to be so little help?”
“Lighten up, for chrissakes.”
“You’re helping me take Gran to the doctor’s, do you hear me?” Amy said fiercely.
“I said I would, didn’t I? What the hell’s wrong with you? You cream for that crippled chess player and he push you away?”
“No!” Despite her familiarity with Kaylie’s nastiness in this sort of mood, Amy felt stung. It was true that she’d liked Paul more as the chess games went on, but it was also true that Amy had learned to be wary about boys. She knew—now, after a few bad attempts at relationships—that she got attracted too soon, too often, too indiscriminately. Her sister’s barb hurt precisely because there was some truth in it. Keith, for instance, at the restaurant. Two dates and Amy had been hooked, and then Keith had switched his interest to one of the waitresses. Even Gran had said gently to her, during her stupid heartache over Keith, “You feel too much, Amy.”
Kaylie followed up her advantage by saying scornfully as she disappeared into the bathroom, “You always have to be in lo-oo-oo-ve.”
Kaylie, who loved nobody. Sometimes, Amy thought, not even Gran.
But Kaylie was patient and careful as they got Gran to the bus stop, onto the bus, to the doctor’s office, which was located in a small, old-fashioned strip mall. Half the shops were boarded up and the parking lot was nearly empty. Another of the huge red graffiti sprawled across the side of a brick building: TIMES BE TOUGH MAN. More and more of them were appearing around the city, and every time Amy saw one she wanted to say: Put in a comma. Which was really not the appropriate response.
In front of the doctor’s office, three steps led up to a small concrete terrace set with big flowerpots, all of them empty and a few broken. A low roof shielded the terrace from the intermittent drizzle. Gran negotiated the steps with difficulty. The doctor took her into the back of the office, alone.
All Gran would say as she emerged, clearly in pain, was, “They took blood, ran tests. He’ll call me later in the week with the results.” She held up her new cell and tried to smile. But it was so hard for her to walk out of the building that both Amy and Kaylie had to support her. Oh, why hadn’t Amy saved enough money out of her advance to pay for a cab!
“Hey,” Kaylie said as they pushed through the glass door and stood at the top of the steps, “what’s all this?”
“Run!” a woman screamed, racing from a narrow alley between stores toward her car. “Plague!”
A siren sounded, so loud that Amy couldn’t hear whatever Kaylie screamed at her. Two more people, a boy and girl with terrified faces, ran across the parking lot. Then Amy saw them.
Rats. They poured from the alley, a dozen of them, then another dozen. Some ran jerkily, staggering; some walked normally. No, not normally—there was foam around their mouths. And blood.
“Get inside!” Gran cried. Kaylie was already tugging at the glass door behind her. It was locked. Two of the rats, perhaps attracted by the noise, stopped at the bottom of the steps and turned. Amy stared at their long, ugly snouts and flat black eyes. One drew back its lips and bared bloody fangs.
Over police sirens coming closer, Gran’s voice came clear and strong right beside Amy’s ear. “Rabies or plague or some mutation—climb, girls. Climb!” She raised a skinny, trembling arm to point at an iron flower trellis bare of flowers. The trellis rose from a huge stone flowerpot, now full of cigarette butts and Doritos wrappers, up to the low roof over the terrace.
Amy couldn’t think. Jumbled thoughts invaded her mind—that was the word, invaded, like a conquering army. Rattus rattus. Black Death, and a third of Europe dead in the Middle Ages. Rabies: rabid squirrels, rabid raccoons, rabid dogs—Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird—rabid rats. Rats could climb, but these might be too sick and the trellis was thin-runged and slippery. Winston in George Orwell’s 1984, forced to wear a cage of rats on his head until he betrayed the revolution. They go first for the eyes. . . .
The rat with bared teeth had already climbed the first step, where it stood hissing at them, the most horrible sound Amy had ever heard. In the parking lot the girl had fallen and a rat leaped on top of her body. “Go!” Gran said.
Kaylie stood on the lip of the flowerpot, one foot on the trellis. She looked at Gran, obviously unable to climb, shouted, “Fuck fuck fuck!” and jumped back down again. Kaylie grabbed Gran’s purse and held it like a weapon. “Come on, you fucker, just try it! Amy! Don’t just stand there—fight!”
Into Amy’s mind came a phantom, clear and sharp as the knife Amy didn’t have: an empty cardboard box, flaps open, so void of contents that
the box didn’t even contain air.
She said, “They’re not real.”
“What?” Kaylie screamed. “Don’t you have that pepper spray?”
“They’re not real,” Amy repeated, just as two cop cars squealed into the parking lot. The rats were like the holographic dog in a tree, and this was—
Someone somewhere above her shouted “Cut!”
The rats all vanished.
Cops heaved themselves from their squad cars. The girl on the ground got up, fastidiously brushing dirt off her jeans and sweatshirt. One of the policemen stared up at the roof, the other demanded of Gran, “What’s going on here?”
Kaylie said, “I think it’s a movie! Gran, we walked into a movie shoot!”
A man climbed down the iron trellis. “Is there a problem, officer?”
Kaylie said eagerly, “Are the cameras on the roof?”
The cop said, “You got a permit for this?”
They began to argue. The man, who looked not much older than Amy, said it was a film for his college course and he didn’t need a permit because it was a “noncommercial endeavor.” The cop, unimpressed, wanted to know just what had happened. Amy stopped listening to them.
She’d been wrong. Wrong to think that some lame student movie was actually connected to the dog that had vanished from a tree, and that both were some kind of plot against her, Amy Kent, by her new employer. Why? What would they gain? And who was she to think she was important enough for anybody to follow her around, setting up weird situations and filming them? This was just a movie—now more young people carrying camcorders spilled from an empty shop next door—and she was an idiot. The young people wore sweatshirts saying MIT and even Amy knew that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had the nation’s most advanced robotics and optics labs. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
And wrong most of all in not even trying to defend Gran. Kaylie had grabbed a purse—a purse!—to do that. Amy had pepper spray in her pocket and, frozen with fear, hadn’t even reached for it. She was a coward, a wuss, wrong wrong wrong.
Gran staggered. Amy caught her before she could fall and eased her to sit on the edge of the flowerpot. The cop stopped arguing with the movie guy long enough to say, “Is the old lady all right?”
“No!” Amy said, trying fiercely to keep back tears. “She’s my grandmother and she’s very sick. Please, can you give us a ride home? I don’t have any money and—please!”
The cop said gently, “Sure, kid.” Over his shoulder he bellowed, “Murphy! Take this family home!”
Murphy, his face young beneath his cap, helped Gran into the backseat of the squad car, all the while staring hungrily at Kaylie. She scowled back; cops were emphatically not her style. Amy sat miserably squashed in between Gran and Kaylie, staring at the metal grill that kept dangerous criminals from assaulting Murphy and his partner. Wrong, wrong, wrong. A movie. Special-effects rats. Kaylie leaping off the trellis to defend Gran. Amy frozen, her pepper spray untouched in her pocket.
But . . .
Why had the glass door to the doctor’s office suddenly been locked?
* * *
“She froze,” Alex Everett said, gazing at the screen.
“Good,” Myra Townsend said.
Seven
MONDAY
MONDAY MORNING AMY arrived for her first day of work at Taunton Life Network on Sixth Avenue, downtown. She’d left at seven since she had to walk and had no money left for the bus, but at least it had stopped raining. The building was huge, a glass-and-blue-steel skyscraper that occupied the entire block. Amy found the entrance she’d been instructed to use, a small side door on Remington Street. A security guard had her put her fingertips to a scanner, then consulted a tablet.
“Go ahead, miss. Through those detectors, elevators on your right. Go to Room 864-B.”
She was nervous. Was she dressed OK? She wore her best pants and Kaylie’s green silk sweater, swiped again before Kaylie woke up. Her shoes, though, were her old school flats, comfortable for walking but worn and with a tiny hole on one side. Would jeans and sneakers have been better? Myra Townsend had said they wanted an “athletic” employee. Still, the pants had enough stretch for good movement—
She needn’t have worried. The elevator took her to the basement, where she wandered low-ceilinged, featureless corridors until she found room 864-B. A bored-looking man with another tablet said, “Name?”
“Amy Kent. I’m new today and—”
“Cubicle 96.”
More than a hundred people, all doing . . . something in their separate cubicles. In cubicle 96 Amy found a phone, a headset, a thick sheaf of papers, and a list of instructions:
Call each name on the list. Follow the script EXACTLY as you conduct the survey. If the initial response is that no one in this household plays video games, don’t waste time in chitchat. Politely say “thank you,” hang up, and go on to the next name on the list. Remember, your calls may be monitored for training and quality-control purposes.
Telephone surveys. She would be doing exactly what she had lied to Gran and Kaylie that she would be doing.
No. There had been a mistake.
“There’s been a mistake,” she told the bored man with the tablet after she’d wended her way back through the cubicles and found him again. “This isn’t supposed to be my job.”
“Says here it is.”
“No. I need to talk to Myra Townsend.”
She hoped the name would impress him. It didn’t. He consulted his tablet again. “Ms. Townsend will come get you later in the morning to take you to Human Resources to fill out paperwork.”
“Maybe, but meantime there’s been a mistake. I was hired for a different job!”
“Yeah? What job?”
“Well . . . I don’t know.”
He sighed. “Miss, do you want to get to work or do you want to be escorted out of the building? I can arrange that. You have something to take up with Ms. Townsend, you can do it when she arrives.”
“But—”
“You in or out? Choose.”
“In,” Amy said. There didn’t seem to be any choice. She went back to cubicle 96.
For two hours she conducted telephone surveys, trying to find out what people thought about a computer game from TLN’s game division and recording the results on photocopied forms. Thirty-seven people hung up on her. Two men tried to talk dirty to her. Three lonely souls wanted to chat. Forty-one people had never heard of the game; sixty more had heard of it but had never played it. Sixty-one if you also counted Amy. Twelve people actually answered the survey questions.
Did people really spend eight hours a day at this mind-numbing task? Amy couldn’t hear what the people in the other cubicles were doing, but surely TLN didn’t need more than a hundred people doing phone surveys all day, every day? Even her restaurant job, hot and muscle-straining and messy, had been better than this.
At ten Myra Townsend arrived, and Amy nearly sprang at her. “Ms. Townsend! I thought—I mean, you told me—”
“Oh, Amy, I’m so sorry! There’s been a mix-up. This isn’t your job at all. Come with me, dear.”
Amy relaxed. So it was a mistake. And Ms. Townsend’s kind face and warm brown eyes were the most welcome things she’d ever seen. She followed the older woman from the room, automatically noting her gray pantsuit—Jil Sander, Amy guessed—gray-and-pink silk scarf, just-right Cuban heels. Ms. Townsend kept up a flow of apologetic chatter, delivered in a discreet cloud of rose perfume.
She led Amy up in the elevator to the main lobby, a vast expanse of marble floor, uniformed guards, a forest of plants in marble pots, and crowds of well-dressed people. A wall with three revolving doors gave onto Sixth Avenue. A side door was open to an alley, through which more uniformed men wheeled metal boxes on handcarts from the open back door of an armored truck.
Amy saw Violet Sanderson in the crowd, walking beside a middle-aged man.
“Hey,” Amy said, pleased, “I met that girl over there, the
one with long black hair, at the—”
“Everybody down! Now!” someone shouted.
Men in hoods, armed with automatic weapons, suddenly surged into the lobby. The men with the metal boxes drew their own weapons. The rat-a-tat of guns deafened Amy, along with screams and shouts. She and Myra Townsend dropped to the floor just as the man pushing the dolly dropped, spouting blood. Hooded men blocked the doors. Alarms sounded.
Just like yesterday—
But this was no movie, no holographic special effect. One of the guards bringing in the metal boxes moaned as he lay dying, a sound that pierced Amy’s gut. Ms. Townsend had flung one arm protectively if uselessly over Amy’s body, as if to shield her.
“Nobody move!” one of the gunmen shouted. “Don’t move and you don’t get hurt!”
Amy saw a girl move.
The girl crept slowly across the floor toward a baby. The baby hadn’t stopped screaming and its mother lay still, blood on her back. She’d been hit in the exchange of gunfire with the box-deliverers. A gunman shouted into the terrified silence of the lobby, “Shut that kid up! You, hold still!” He waved his gun at the girl on the floor.
She only crawled faster, rising now to all fours. Amy, sprawled flat behind her, could see only a blonde head, a shapely rear in expensive jeans, and the dramatic red soles of Christian Louboutin sandals.
“I said stop, bitch!” a hooded man screamed, waving his gun at the girl.
She kept going, reaching the baby just as the gunman let loose a spray of bullets above everybody’s head. The girl threw her body on top of the baby, shielding it. Just as a boy rose to his feet on the opposite side of the lobby, Amy felt a tug on her shoulder. She turned her head.
Violet Sanderson crouched beside her, whispering fiercely, “Do something!”
Do something? Was Violet crazy? The blonde girl had taken an admirable risk to protect that baby, but during an armed robbery the best thing to do was lie still, follow orders, hope to not get shot . . .
Across the lobby the boy launched himself at a hooded man guarding the revolving doors.