NK3

by Michael Tolkin

They blew out their candles and pulled Hopper by both hands, while some pushed him from behind. They walked him into the school’s small gymnasium, large enough for a basketball court and bleachers on both sides. No candles here, either, but they pulled him to feel the hospital beds and smashed rehab machines in the middle of the room. He recognized the electrodes and the restraints.

  The feeding tubes were crusty at the end. His Silent Voice spoke impatiently, returning from an awkward moment of reflection. “What are you doing here? You have a goal. You have a goal and you have forgotten the plan.”

  There were few children anymore between the ages of two and twenty. Rehab shocks killed the youngest and after the first month of the plague, the rehab process—two weeks in an induced coma during the neurocortical stim—was reserved only for adults who could do real things. Most children died.

  They led him out of the gym into the locker room. They guided him cautiously not to trip over benches, not to bump into the sharp rusting edge of a metal locker door.

  They walked him into the echoing tiled space. He felt along the walls, spigots, showerheads. He wanted to leave them and return to the road, but they took each arm at the wrist and pushed his legs from behind until he was kneeling on the hard floor, and at the same time they grabbed his hands from the other side and pulled him forward. As he spread his fingers to catch himself on the floor, he felt a body. He was pushed and pulled too far forward to stand up straight and his left hand pressed down on the body’s ribs and his right hand on the body’s neck. Some bodies rot until nothing is left but bones, but in the dry air of the desert, some bodies—like these—become desiccated, flesh still covering bones. He shifted his weight and when he put his right hand down again, because he had no choice, it slipped sideways into the body’s mouth, scraping against teeth. He shouted in disgust and the children made the same sound, which echoed. Then they pulled his hands forward again and he fell across the body, chest to chest, as his hands settled on another dried-out body. One was a man and the other a woman, probably. The second body had breasts. The children imitated his heavy breathing.

  And then there was light, from a cigarette lighter. The darkness of the room absorbed the flame’s weak glow and the child walked with the light away from the bodies, to show Hopper the drawings on the wall.

  The first picture: children, adults, cars on the streets, planes in the sky, and dogs in the yards. The next picture was the same picture, but most of the people were crossed out with X’s: most of the adults, almost all of the children. “More light,” said Hopper. They didn’t understand him. He wanted his Teacher to see this, he wanted his Teacher to meet these children and be their Teacher, too. His Teacher would give them a goal and a plan.

  He stopped in front of each picture even while they wanted to hurry him along. Adults dying, on the ground, eyes open; adults dead, on the ground, eyes closed. Children sick, with streams of black exploding from their opens mouths. Children dead, in piles. Adults and children in piles. Adults and children in piles, the piles burning, bright yellow and orange lines sticking up from the bodies. Rehab in the gym, two adults, and the children on the rehab beds. Then those two dead.

  One of the children opened a door, letting in the light from the playground.

  Another touched the single gold ring on Hopper’s left hand.

  “Ring,” said Hopper.

  “Wheen,” said the child. Other children said it, too. “Wheen.”

  “Who are you?” he asked a girl. “Who is in charge?”

  “Inch odge,” they chanted. “Inch odge. Inch odge!”

  A wave of heat advanced with the rising sun. His Silent Voice said, “It’s getting hot. You can’t ride during the day, not with the buses on the road. Use the day to get the bicycle you want. Find the tool here, then get the bike, then ride at night.”

  The children followed Hopper into the school; a swarm pressed around him and crowded the stairs to keep him from passing.

  He found the tools locked inside a cage in a garage with a school district pickup truck and three lawn mowers. He found a bolt cutter. He knew the function, but not the name for it. He found the truck’s tire iron and bent the cage’s steel mesh until he could tear a hole to crawl through and easily snapped through the cage lock to get out.

  His Silent Voice told him it was time to go and not to say good-bye. One boy called after him, “Hah-puh, Hah-puh,” but stayed on the sidewalk and didn’t follow.

  Marci, AutoZone, Tesla, Carrera

  Hey You, the mascot, lifted each tire in its rack on the wall and gave it a quarter rotation when AutoZone came into the garage and told Carrera and Tesla to grab the keys for five Hummers and get them ready for Security. “They just verified a pilot and want to run him up to Chief.”

  Marci said, “Keys. Keys, I can get keys.” Then she hopped twice from one foot to the other.

  “Not this one, Hey You,” said AutoZone. He went to the key locker, picked out the Christina keys, and, whistling to Carrera and Tesla, led them to the motor pool parking lot.

  Marci let ten minutes pass and then wandered away, as she did twice a day. The first few times she did this, AutoZone sent Carrera to follow her, and each time he found her squatting in an alley, peeing, talking to herself.

  Carrera complained to AutoZone that this was disgusting, and that they should train her to use the toilet. But AutoZone said, “There’s only so much you can teach a Driftette in her condition, and so long as she’s not pissing in front of the building, it doesn’t make any difference to me and I don’t know that we’ll get someone else so eager about sweeping.”

  This time she squatted but only to reach the controls on the walkie-talkie hidden behind a loose brick. She spoke in code: “I missed the end of that. Could you say it again? I said, ‘Could you repeat what you just said?’ I can’t hear you. Sorry. See you on Figueroa.”

  Could you say it again?

  This meant a pilot has been verified.

  I said, “Could you repeat what you just said?”

  This meant Security is moving a pilot.

  I can’t hear you.

  No more communication.

  See you on Figueroa.

  Good luck. Be careful.

  It was the sort of nutty thing that Marci often said to herself while pushing a broom near the motor pool crew: “See you on Figueroa, see you on Figueroa, Figueroa.” And it was also the sort of thing anyone tuned to that channel hears at least five times a day.

  In a few hours, the Christina passed the garage on its way to the Fence and she danced her jig, for comfort. She was still dancing it when AutoZone and the others came back, sharing a bottle of rum. Carrera tapped on the bottle with a screwdriver, to make Marci dance more, but AutoZone made him stop.

  “No bottle banging in the motor pool.”

  “It’s fun. Everyone does it,” said Tesla.

  “I don’t,” said AutoZone. “I never go to Figueroa.”

  “Too good for it, I guess.”

  Marci returned to the tire rack.

  “If you want to bottle bang, take yourself down to Figueroa,” said AutoZone. “We’re working here.”

  Tesla looked to Carrera for support, but Carrera shook his head no. “Don’t ask me to back you up on this.”

  They heard an explosion just as AutoZone said, “Take a few days off and check in downtown. It’s crowded and filthy there. You like that. Have some fun.”

  The three men ran to the street.

  “Find out what happened.”

  They jumped into Tesla’s Porsche convertible and drove away before AutoZone could say that he only meant for them to go to the Security detail at the DMV.

  Marci swept the floor that she’d swept three times already. She heard AutoZone come in and counted to ten before looking up at him.

  “It sounded like an old gas line or a propane tank that
leaked near someone who lit a match,” said AutoZone.

  “Match,” said Marci, though she knew it was more than that.

  “But you’re not scared,” said AutoZone. “I don’t know why you should be.”

  She said “match” again.

  “You’re really talking to me, aren’t you?”

  “Match.”

  “I don’t want to call you Hey You anymore.”

  Marci wanted to turn around and tell him that he didn’t have to, but she knew if she did the consequences would be ugly. “I want to call you something else but I don’t know what. I want to call you something nobody else would know. So we’d have a secret. Do you even understand what I’m saying, Hey You?”

  “Sweep,” she said.

  AutoZone put a hand on the broom to stop her.

  “The person you were is still in there. You know that? Someone’s little girl, someone who was loved.” He took her face in his hands and kissed the tip of Marci’s nose. She couldn’t control her breath and he smiled as he drew out her excitement, but she didn’t know how much she could respond without breaking character.

  “Sweep.”

  “You swept plenty. You’re beautiful,” he said. “I think, anyway. And I like having you here. I really do. You make me happy every time you come back after you’ve been away. It’s a good feeling. You give me a good feeling.”

  He slipped his right hand past the waist of her pants and probed for an answer.

  “You’re wet. Does that feel good? Does this feel good?”

  She argued with herself: what would a real shambling Driftette say? The worst cases would say nothing, but she wasn’t at that low level.

  “Good,” she said, looking into his shoulders.

  “I’m glad.” He traced the patterns of electricity that circulated over her skin like passing breezes on a pond. The lighter the touch, the better he could find them.

  Too soon, he heard Tesla’s Porsche. “I have to open the door.”

  “Sweep,” Marci said, getting the broom. She followed AutoZone to the door.

  “The Christina is wrecked,” said Carrera.

  “Why are you talking about the Christina? Forget the Christina,” said Tesla. “The pilot is dead. It was an ambush. They killed all but one of ours and we killed three of theirs, but they lost what they came for. The pilot is dead. An LAX crew, no doubt about that, but they got nothing except for the righteous wrath of Chief.”

  Marci dropped to her knees and searched the floor for loose debris until she was under the counter where she scratched a line to mark another day.

  Chief, Frank Sinatra, Pippi

  “I blame you.” Chief looked Frank Sinatra in the eyes, but at the head of the table, his back was to the city, always a distracting view on a clear evening like this, and Frank Sinatra, in charge of the Security Committee, forced himself to keep his eyes on Chief’s. This was hard because Chief’s woman/wife/sustainable lover, Pippi Longstocking, her own back to the meeting, looked through a telescope pointed at the airport. From where Frank sat, her left pigtail, dyed red and thickened with paste to stick out to the side, lined up with Chief’s left ear. This was about as funny as things got for Frank and he wanted to share this with someone, but in his position, the radical gift of sharing a joke could get him into trouble with Chief.

  Her name had been Gretel before she was Pippi and she was Heidi before she was Gretel. Gretel’s messy blond hair had been covered in a dotted kerchief. Heidi’s blond hair was tied in two thick braids that dropped over her breasts. But now that she was Pippi, the Heidi braids stuck out like handle bars on a bicycle. She dotted her cheeks with red lipstick, to look like the little girl on the wallpaper in one of the mansion’s bedrooms.

  Frank would have asked to move the meeting inside to the card room or one of the dining rooms, but Chief liked to hold important meetings on his terrace, precisely to test the attention of his heads of committee. His two closest guards, Go Bruins and Royce Hall, lived in the house with Chief and Pippi. Royce Hall had played football for UCLA; no one was sure about Go Bruins. They were on the Security Committee but answered to Chief. Chief looked like he might have been built like them when he was their age. He was tall with big arms, but the strain of being Chief showed in the creases in his face, and wherever he went, he walked slowly.

  “When the DMV verified the pilot they didn’t call me for extra security.”

  Frank Sinatra was not his real name, but most of the music on the iPhone he still carried, because it was the only thing he owned from before that stayed with him after rehab, was Sinatra. The phone was useless but the music was still there. The songs, which had as little effect on him as they would a dog, were directed at two different women, or, possibly, to one unreliable woman. It was either “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” or “I’m a Fool to Want You.” If the head of Security were ever sad and lonely and heartbroken, a set of emotions lost like the passwords to the computers they needed most, he wouldn’t sing about it.

  Three years after rehab, Inventory found Frank Sinatra’s identity papers in a UCLA administration building file cabinet. He was once Reynaldo Johnston, UCLA director of Security. That job would explain why he’d been included early in the First Wave, but not why his name had been changed. June Moulton, when the papers were found, told him: “You should believe that the doctor who was in charge of your rehab died and that the person replacing him didn’t know who you were: that he looked at your iPhone and that he found all the Sinatra music and that he gave you that name. That’s your myth, Frank Sinatra. It’s a great Playa name. Live it.”

  “Vayler, do you have any evidence that Eckmann sends his own crew beyond the LAX perimeter for food supplies?”

  “Still none, Chief. You have to understand things about the airport and its supply-chain management, Chief, sir.”

  Toby Tyler, the head of Systems, held up a hand. Drunk as usual, she was surrounded by her squad of subcommanders, all of them wearing their radios and headsets in case there was an emergency in the field. By rights each should have been given their own committee: Water, Power, Gas, Gasoline, Transport Service, Communications, Agriculture, Medicine. Toby claimed control of them all because a disruption in one system affected the others. She’d been General Mercedes Santos in the California National Guard, the coordinator in charge of civil disasters, and under the emergency rules, she was the fifth person in Los Angeles to go through rehab. She was probably in her early fifties and had kept to her physical fitness regimen after the reconstitution of her mind. Even with a hangover, she ran five miles every morning.

  “Whenever you’re pressed about Eckmann, you go into this supply-chain story, Vayler. We’ve heard it.”

  “Just answering the Chief’s question, to me, Toby, to me.”

  Chief told Toby to shut up. Pippi laughed at this and Chief reached back to pat her ass.

  “Was it Eckmann?” Chief asked, then corrected himself. “That’s not a question. It was Eckmann.”

  “One of the guards is still alive. He’s on his way to surgery now,” said Frank. “But he’s not expected to make it.”

  “And how did they know we had a pilot?”

  “I am only too happy to answer that question,” said Vayler Monokeefe. “They have a spy in the DMV or Security. No one from Inventory could have known about the pilot. It’s an ElderGoth lapse. But Verification isn’t Security, so it’s really on your shoulders, Frank.”

  “Prove it and I’ll take action against the traitor,” Sinatra said, “but I don’t think so. We only allow First Wavers to work inside the DMV and it’s not like a First Waver to sabotage what we have here. I think it’s a Second Waver who was rejected by Verification and heard about the pilot. This is all a gesture of resentment. And that fits exactly with what we face in the crew at LAX. Resentment and exclusion. Right, Chief? Who’s the more resentful, you or Eckmann?”
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br />   “We’ve never before verified a pilot who could fly big jets,” said Chief. “They shot that pilot at close range, Frank. They blew his head off with a shotgun. They didn’t want him for themselves. They knew that if we had him, we could hold him until they starved to death.”

  “Are you saying they do have a plane ready or they don’t?”

  Pippi interrupted. “They have a plane. If they didn’t have a plane, they’d open the hangar doors. I’ve been watching.”

  “Why assassinate a pilot if you have a plane and no one to fly it? What don’t they want us to do now in response?” Sinatra asked this out of deference to Chief’s position, not because he thought Chief would have better insight.

  Chief pointed at June Moulton. Standing alone, June Moulton looked north over the dark ash pit of the San Fernando Valley. She usually wore a sari. Today’s was orange. Both Moulton and Chief made everyone understand that she wasn’t to be approached by anyone. She almost never spoke up at general meetings without a prompt. Sometimes, after decisions were made, she might talk quietly to one or two of the others, but in ways no one could quite remember when asked what she had said. Even Chief rarely talked to her. It had been expected that she was going to have more to do if the children in the Fence lived, to tell them about the Founders. But children didn’t live long. She flapped her shawl, the sign of inspiration. “They can’t beat us. They have no story to tell. There aren’t enough of them. They’re goading us to attack.”

  Chief clapped his hands, something he’d seen in a movie. “Everyone be quiet and let me think about this.”

  This shut them up.

  While they waited for Chief to break the silence, Pippi saw movement at the airport, a car, and she thought about saying so, but when Chief wanted to think, no one could interrupt him.

  “June is right,” he said. “They’re goading us to retaliate. I think they’ve got just enough weaponry to hurt us badly. If they get an advantage over us, that’ll go far. They can organize the Unverified Second Wave, because they can be persuaded, and they can cause trouble with the Drifters, dumb as they are. We won’t get drawn into their fight. Just because we had a pilot doesn’t mean he could fly whatever they have inside the hangar, and now he’s dead. So, Vayler, we have the Burn coming up and we need to complete the inventory. Use all the Drifters you need.”