Othella (Arcadian Heights)

by Therin Knite

  "Pardon me?" I peek over my shoulder and scan the aisles. No sign of the patrolman.

  "Christ, you know what he did to my guys? Huh? Fucker’s got mad skills. He wrecked us."

  God damn it all. "You didn’t kill him?"

  "Hell no! He ran like the fucking wind, man. We missed him by a mile. Even had the boys scout for him for, like, six hours. Poof. Gone. Like a fucking ghost."

  I bite my tongue, my grip tightening on the phone. "Let me guess: you still expect to get paid."

  "You better fucking pay me. I’ve got men down and out. I can’t afford to lose investments like that."

  "You didn’t do your job. Explain to me why I should pay you a penny."

  "I’ll tell the whole world about your scam, that’s why. Heights spokesman calling in a hit on Marco Salt."

  "Oh, please. If you speak a word of this to anyone, you will die. Clear?"

  A harsh breath. "Bastard."

  "Failure." I hang up and shove the phone in my pocket. Not a moment too soon. The patrolman emerges from the bread aisle three seconds after I stop talking. I rifle through the hotdog options, pretending to search for my favorite brand. The other store patrons notice the hulking patrolman’s presence and begin to shuffle quickly out of the store, disturbed.

  By the time I get to the end of my grocery list, the only people in the store are a terrified cashier and me.

  I’d count Howard, except he doesn’t qualify anymore.

  6

  Marco

  ( 1 Year Ago )

  My chest constricts. The last message I received from the shadow inside the Heights contained a folder full of bodies. And the blueprint for the community. After that, silence.

  Why contact me now? Because I failed to break inside? Because my plan went awry, and since then, I haven’t been able to get within a mile of Jackson City without patrolmen swarming my location? Q has moved them to the city’s outer boundary. Without access to the sewer system and the other well-hidden routes I can utilize to keep out of the patrolmen’s sights, any and all community assault tactics are worthless. He’s cut off the blood supply to my ideas.

  I open the message, holding my breath.

  Send someone inside, Marco.

  The tablet rests on the compact kitchen table for fifteen minutes undisturbed while I try to comprehend the words. The sender wants me to sacrifice someone else to the great beast? Wants me to recruit someone to take on all that danger, all that risk, while I sit by safe and idle? Or does he mean something else? Could the sender be any more cryptic, any less helpful?

  Growling, I type a reply. Go fuck yourself!

  Never has the sender replied, but the counter-request makes me feel better. After I hit the send button, I toss the tablet onto my faded couch in the corner and resume my lunch. The diner’s food was better. I had just bitten into a delicious turkey sandwich when Q’s men decided to make the kill, and...

  My tablet starts vibrating.

  I drop my chopsticks. It can’t be.

  I scramble over to the sofa to retrieve the tablet. There’s another message from the blocked sender.

  Send in Georgette McClain.

  I curl up on the sofa, bringing my knees to my chest. McClain—I know the name. The young journalist who won the Pulitzer a couple years ago. Been in combat zones and terrorist territory. Appears on TV dressed like the best slutty office girl stereotype—sky-high heels, thigh-high skirts, and sheer black hose. A vicious bitch of a woman willing to sell out entire countries to get the story of a lifetime. She plays hardball with submachine guns.

  Well, the sender couldn’t have picked a person I’d be more willing to sacrifice than McClain. I have an immense hatred of journalists on principle. Comes with a CEO title. And McClain is the worst flavor of journalist there is. Rotten enough to make the cleanest politician vomit on his patent leather shoes.

  The sender wants a tough journalist inside the community. To what end? To expose Q where I cannot? Can McClain’s "good" name and sordid tactics solidify the porous evidence against Q’s operations?

  My lip stings from an errant nervous bite. Blood streams down my chin. I lap at it with my tongue.

  McClain is a deadly force of nature; it would do me good to have her on my side, even though the thought breeds biting ants in my intestinal tract. The woman has snuck inside impregnable walls before. Could she do it again? Would she be willing?

  I choke out a laugh, bloody saliva splattering on the tablet screen. "Of course she would, the child star of the new muckraker generation."

  Sucking my bottom lip, I type another reply: Should I show her the pictures? What should I tell her?

  The now chatty sender responds five minutes later.

  Tell her everything, Marco.

  7

  Georgette

  ( 1 Day Ago )

  I’m locked in mortal combat with two dumb bitches, a couple of snot-nosed boys who started playing toilet pranks two minutes after takeoff, and that hot latte Omar Dupree. And by combat, I mean poker. Because what other shenanigans could a group of nerds get into on a private chartered flight with shit TV and no alcohol?

  Physicist Edith Cain brought the cards. She had them tucked into a back pants pocket the security rep didn’t bother to check since women carry pretty purses, not wallets, right? For the first two rounds, I lull the group into a sense of security: I’m some nervous kid masquerading as a grown woman whose poker face takes a nose dive every time somebody throws down a pair of tens. But after thirty minutes of being ridiculed, I pretend "beginner’s luck" sets in, and I win three, four, five hands in a row.

  Cain groans, tossing her cards on the table. "You’ve got to be joking, Marks. Are you hiding them up your sleeves?" She leans down as if she’s peering into the shadows of my loose shirt fabric.

  I shrug my shoulders. "Sorry. Guess I catch on quick."

  "I want a rematch." Cain gathers the cards into a full deck and starts shuffling.

  Dupree chuckles and sips from a cup of water. "Cool it, Cain. Let the woman have her win. Not everything’s a competition. You’re not even in the same field."

  Cain flips cards like a blackjack dealer and snorts. "Right now the field is poker. I play where the action’s at, sweetheart."

  "No, thanks. I’ve had enough for now." I rise from the chair and make my way across the cabin to the seats on the opposite side. Cain growls, but Dupree shushes her and trails behind me. He lugs his bag from the overheard compartment and digs out two books of crossword puzzles. One is offered to me, and with that beaming smile, it might as well be on a silver platter.

  I reach out and take it with a trembling hand. "Thanks."

  He speaks in low tones. "No problem. Some people, you know? We’re supposed to be living in the same facility for the rest of our lives, and you’ve got morons making enemies already. I’m amazed the community hasn’t gone Lord of the Flies yet."

  I’d love to point out the recruits don’t live long enough for the situation to devolve to Piggy levels of grave, but instead, I nod and use a pencil from my own bag to begin a puzzle with an "animal" theme. Specifically, scientific names for animals. Genus. Species. The sort of crap you’d find in the textbooks I burned at that anti-war bonfire in college.

  Pencil pressed to the page, I sneak a sideways glance at Dupree. Only to find he’s got his eyes on me. And while novice Adele would think it a come on and turn bright pink in two-point-eight seconds, I’m not a sexually inexperienced idiot. Dupree is scoping out the competition, same as Cain. His methods are just subtler than the physicist’s.

  I survey the cabin. The recruit pack has split into several factions, mostly along field lines. The engineers are huddled in the back, near the bathroom door, whispering about something and throwing snide looks at the other recruits. The sole geologist is reading a copy of a massive Russian novel I’m sure was banned by Homeland Security for "combatant propaganda" reasons. (God knows how he snuck that in.) Every time he turns a page, he locks his calc
ulating gaze onto a different "competitor" for approximately four seconds.

  The other factions display similar predatory behavior, as if every single scientist on the jet is plotting domination of the Heights, throwing their lots in with a team they plan to backstab at a convenient later time. It’s a war, and I’m in the zone. And once we’re locked behind that defense grid, the game begins. A game with more tiers than I can name and more twists than I can predict. A gladiatorial circuit disguised as a gathering of prudent, science-minded kids. A circuit about to trap itself within the confines of a spider web determined to render each player a hunk of cold meat on a colder slab.

  I turn toward Dupree and smile. Not with Adele’s nervous, quivering half-smile but the same broad grin I gave the Cleveland rapist before I shot his balls off with a burning shard of metal.

  Dupree’s amiable mask falters.

  I toss his crossword puzzle book onto his lap, stick my pencil in a bag pocket, cross my legs, heave my breasts, and peer out the window at the passing wasteland fields below.

  I’ve snuggled into a den of vipers bent on total supremacy.

  Honey, I’ve come home.

  8

  Quentin

  ( 1 Year Ago )

  Under the sheets with a flashlight like a boy up late at night, I leaf through two documents that have defined the past three decades of my life. My copy of the Whittaker Report is so worn and highlighted and scribbled on that the words are faded and obscured. In contrast, the revised Heights plan is pristine. The pair of documents share a common passage, the final passage, taken from the former and given to the latter. I know it by heart, but reading the statement that changed my world so long ago always spurs this feeling of genuine nostalgia.

  Because I remember Howard’s face, his voice. That day in a dim, dirty file room when he first read it to me. When he was a government researcher and I was a mid-level employee at Metronome Defense—whom Howard had met three weeks prior and immediately stamped "best friend."

  I’ve read it to myself every night for the past three weeks.

  Given the evidence stated throughout this document, it is apparent that we are headed down a dark and dangerous path. A path with a clear and final end date. On August 14th, 2118, humanity will pass a point of no return. The downfall of human civilization will be assured. All that we have worked for, all the dreams we have born and bred, will be destroyed. We will fall, as nations, as communities, as individuals, like dominoes, and in the end, there will be nothing left of us but specters in a wasteland.

  Can this tragedy be averted? Can the apocalypse be stopped?

  And if not, will we survive? Will we rise from the ashes and live again, breathe again, build ourselves to such heights again? And if we do, will we fall again? Will the doom of humanity be an endless cycle of hope followed by horror?

  And if this is so, can the cycle be broken?

  Is there only hell for us?

  Or, by some grace of some god, can we some day achieve our Arcadian state?

  — Joseph Whittaker, 2062

  I flick off the flashlight for a moment, take four deep breaths, and remove Clarissa Salt’s incursion data from beneath my pillow. The photos. The main breach reports. The recorded debugging sessions. Everything and anything that could contain a clue. Most of it is beyond me, but I will rake hot coals through my brain if that’s what it takes to discover what the defective bitch did to my best friend.

  Because I never believed in the Arcadian state, but Howard did.

  And I believed in Howard.

  And if it’s the last thing I do, I will restore Howard Sims to the man who first read that statement to me. Who spoke of the end of the world as a new and bright beginning.

  The man who held more hope in a dying body than all the gods on Earth could grow in their infinite, shallow minds.

  ... [ Chapter Eight ] ...

  1

  Marco

  ( 6 Months Ago )

  The journalist sniffs me out like a bloodhound on the trail. She arrives at the rendezvous point on the corner of Broad and Fairview and paces around the light pole for eight minutes. Reflective sunglasses hide her eyes, but I can feel her drinking in the atmosphere. She is paranoid. Her shoulders are stiff, and her attention shifts from one focus to another at the slightest sound.

  PTSD. No doubt she’s had treatment—several times—but drugs can never fully erase the stain that living nightmares leave on the mind.

  McClain surveys the area by breaking it into a grid. She homes in on one portion of the street at a time, listens, looks, and then refocuses on the next segment. When her scan reaches the restaurant, where I’m observing her from between two slats in a tall-backed booth, she reaches into her purse and slips something from it into the pocket of her pea coat. Gun.

  Then she walks toward the entrance with a powerful, sexy stride. A decade and a half ago, my cock would have sprung up in seconds at the sight of her. A short skirt riding high on her thighs. Those heels with the damned red soles.

  Scars.

  I blink, sure I’m mistaken.

  The bells on the door jingle as she enters, and I lose sight of her bare legs until she passes the low wall separating the bar from the seating area. Even in the dim light, McClain’s faded scars are visible. There’s a wicked curve of puckered tissue that stretches from mid-right-thigh to some hidden end beneath her skirt. There’s a pale circle smack dab in the middle of her left knee, exactly where a torturer would break a kneecap. There are thin white lines on both her shins where someone sliced her open with a box cutter a hundred times at least.

  Jesus Christ.

  McClain pauses to index the restaurant’s interior the same way she did the street, and she locates me in under a minute despite my cover. She glides onto the seat across from me and sets her purse next to the flickering candle in the center of the table. For a minute, we stare at one another, McClain observing me from behind her glasses. Finally, she nods and removes them, sticking the designer wear into a purse pocket.

  "So, Salt, they have anything good to eat here?" A command in the form of a question. Hallmark of the media hawks.

  "Pizza’s not half bad."

  "Finger food on the first date? I thought tech boys had grown out of that frat party mentality."

  "I’m no longer a tech boy."

  McClain’s eyes are a poisonous green. "Oh? Marco Salt, the great and powerful, doesn’t want to be a tech boy anymore?" A probing tongue runs across her bottom lip. "Or are you the Marco Salt who lost his mind and drowned in the big, bad world?"

  "Neither. I’m the Marco Salt who wants to give you the story of the century."

  "Ha!" She grins, and a sharp canine peeks out between her lips. Too sharp. Elongated. Modified to make her look more predatory. "Like I’ve never heard that one before. You want an exposé or something, Salt? A rise and fall piece? I’ve done plenty of those."

  "Actually, yes. But not about me."

  I halt the conversation when the waiter comes to take our orders. McClain demands a medium cheese pizza. For herself. Not to share. And judging by the shapes of the muscles in her sleeves, she needs every single calorie.

  I order a small pasta bowl; I won’t eat half of it.

  Once the waiter is another nameless nobody in the distance, McClain situates her elbows on the table and rests her chin against her palms. "So, what’s the topic?" There’s a hint of amusement in her voice, in the clicking of her tongue against the palate of her mouth. She’s humoring me. Thinks I’m a nut. Came here to sneak a photo of what’s become of Marco Salt. Make a few bucks. Get some good laughs out of the world at large.

  "Arcadian Heights."

  McClain doesn’t respond. She waits. She doesn’t take bait. Too experienced for such juvenile traps.

  "I have evidence that the community is killing its recruits."

  McClain’s right eye twitches from an aborted eyebrow raise. "Hm?"

  "Would you like to see my evidence, Ms. McClain?"


  She leans her face farther into her left palm and extends her freed right hand. "No promises. Just a looksee."

  I’ve captured her interest, but she guards her reaction. The scars on her legs speak loud and clear what too much enthusiasm does to an investigative journalist. I remove my folded flex tablet from my jacket, select the picture folder, and hand the tablet to McClain. The woman plucks it from my fingers without making skin contact. Like she believes mental illnesses are contagious.

  She doesn’t. She just wants me to know how much my existence disgusts her.

  A social climber versus a man who leapt off the top of the social totem pole.

  I must reek of diseased and destitute failure to this woman.

  McClain scrolls through the folder contents. The images appear as an ordered thumbnail list. For a moment, McClain loses hold of her feigned indifference. Her eyebrows shoot up, her lips part in a silent gasp, and she begins tapping her too-high heels against the tile flooring. Then she coils up again, morphing from mere woman to gorgeous, heartless, cold, and calculating muckraker. She selects the first image in the set and begins to leaf through the corpses one by one.

  Her finger hesitates when the eighteenth image appears, and she flicks her gaze from the tablet screen to my face to the screen again so fast I almost miss it. Picture number eighteen is Clarissa’s. McClain dwells on it until the waiter comes around with her pizza, at which point she shoves the tablet into her purse.

  She eats her entire pizza in twenty minutes and never says a word to me. Though she eyes my fork when I spend five minutes straight poking at my pasta before I bring a single piece to my mouth. There’s some critical evaluation unraveling in her mind. The assessment of pros and cons. Ifs, ands, buts. A scale where she weighs the opportunity costs against the profits of such an insane venture.