by Cole, Olivia
“Oh fuck,” Tasha hisses. It’s too late to call the woman over. They’ll hear her. They’ll all die. Eight is too many for Z and Tasha alone. “Oh fuck.”
“Oh my god, look,” whispers Z.
Tasha doesn’t want to. She hasn’t heard any barking but she doesn’t want to see what she knows she will see: the blonde of the hair disappearing, drowned in red. The cardboard soggy with blood. The throat open and reflecting in the parts of the Bean where the paint has slid and dripped away.
She looks.
The blonde woman is standing beside the leader of the pack, rocking slowly side-to-side on the outsides of her feet. They don’t look at one another. They sway mechanically, two alien violinists with unseen instruments, moving to the same vile rhythm.
“Holy shit,” Z whispers.
They stand like this for awhile. The pack leader moving in a half circle, his eyes empty and traveling slowly. The blonde woman swaying from foot to foot. Eventually, snuffling, he wanders away, finding no prey under the Bean, and she follows him for a few steps to the edge of the archway as if to see him off. The pack moves away, the leader’s suit still flapping. Ten minutes have passed, Tasha and Z frozen at the edge of the bizarre scene, only their eyes visible around the corner, watching.
When the blonde woman leaves the edge of the Bean, the pack disappearing over the hill toward the lakefront, she returns immediately to her cardboard square. She sinks down on it as if her legs suddenly lost their bones, her skin whiter than ever.
Tasha goes to her immediately, ignoring Z’s hisses for caution.
“Who are you?” Tasha demands. It stinks. All of it stinks. She’s been smelling it since the day she spoke of it through the wall with Dinah, since the day she left Cybranu Chipless; indeed since the day she sold her parents’ kennel to pay their posthumous medical costs.
“I am a rat.”
“You said that before. What does that mean?”
“I was a rat in Arizona.”
“What do you mean a rat? What kind of rat?”
“I was the first,” she says with something like sadness.
“The first.”
“I was the first rat.”
She sweeps her grimy hair away from her neck. There are the pearls. And above the pearls there is the unmistakable shape of the Chip. Not a tattoo, but a raised square area under the skin, only the faintest red light visible through her flesh.
“Chipped. Holy shit.” Z has come up behind Tasha and together they stand staring at the woman, who has dropped her hair again and sits curling her fingers through it.
“Why aren’t you…one of them?” Tasha asks.
No answer.
“How did this happen?”
“There were men.”
“Men?”
“Doctors. A man with four eyes.”
“…Tasha…” Z whispers, annoyed.
“Shh,” says Tasha. “Ma’am, what did the doctors do?”
The woman looks up at Tasha from her spot on the ground, her eyes large. She turns a little to face the wet red wall of the Bean and touches it with her index finger. She moves it, making symbols, drawing shapes, the silver of the sculpture shining through the red. When she’s finished, her finger still and dripping, Z squints.
“What does that say?”
“CYBRANU,” Tasha reads. “CYBRAKNEW.”
“Cybraknows,” the woman says, smiling, and closes her eyes.
Chapter 22
They’ve reached 59th Street when they notice the little bar showing the life of the car’s battery has gone from dark green to light yellow.
“Our little Energizer bunny isn’t so energized,” Tasha says, tapping the dial.
“Yeah, he could use a drink. But I don’t think anything down here is on the city’s power grid or whatever, so I don’t know where we’d plug him in.”
They’d left the blonde woman by the Bean. She’d closed her eyes and refused to open them again, even after Tasha checked her pulse to ensure that she was in fact alive. She’d simply shut down. So they’d left her two sub sandwiches nestled against her body and returned to the Ferrari where they’d left it on Michigan. From there they’d veered over to State and made their way through the Loop and the South Loop—past Chinatown, which houses the tallest high-rises in the city next to the ones downtown—and continued south. Now Tasha looks around. Past 45th Street there has been a noticeable change in architecture: a downward slope as the newer high-rises gave way, first, to older high-rises, then to mid-rises, then to rows of one- to three-story buildings, both residential and commercial. Tasha has never been this far south except once for a concert, and had struggled to find a direct route— the train stations after Roosevelt had been thinned from nine stops to four after a summer renovation decades earlier. The bus routes were phased out little by little. Eventually the only way to get out of the South Side was the Red Line, with seven miles between stations. If people wanted to get to work…they did a lot of walking. Unemployment skyrocketed in the winter. So did exposure-related deaths.
As they cruise down State, Tasha observes that this part of the city looks like it has a few miles on it, a palette of grays and browns. It reminds Tasha, a little nostalgically, of Louisville in the late fall: sleety and slatey, rust running together, the occasional pink smudge of street trees. Compared to the slick, metallic texture of downtown, the neighborhood she finds herself in now is more like brushed velvet. The transparent alloy of the L tracks is the only glittery thing she sees; a shiny artificial bone implanted in an ancient skeleton, a stainless steel rod inserted into worn flesh. The buildings are shades of charcoal around the shocking silver of the L’s cradle. Early models of electric cars dot the streets like carcasses. There are real carcasses, too.
“There’s not as many down here,” Tasha says out loud.
“As many what?”
“Dead people.”
“Nope. The farther south we go the fewer there are. I don’t see any Minkers either though.”
“Yeah, I know.”
They cruise along in silence, observing the landscape. Tasha thinks of what Dinah said about the city’s efforts a few years before to cut the South Side out of waste pick-up. Tasha thinks she remembers something about excluding the area from the annual planting of tulips that they did up and down State. The thought vaguely pisses Tasha off. It’s almost blatant assholery, she thinks. No tulips for you, South Side, as if Chicago was blowing a giant raspberry at half the city. As for the trash collection, though, they must have worked something out, Tasha thinks, seeing no overabundance of garbage crowding the sidewalks. There’s rubbish, certainly, but that could have been from the Change. The North Side had looked like a hurricane hit it too.
As they pass 69th Street, the battery life display on the dashboard turns a deeper shade of yellow, threatening to become orange. Z has curbed the lead foot that had rocketed them down Michigan—probably what drained so much of the battery to begin with—and they cruise at an even twenty-five, driving as hesitantly as they feel. Tasha examines the buildings from her window: hair salons, restaurants, shops, accountants. This aspect doesn’t look much different than her neighborhood except there’s no blue glow of the Volamu, and there seems to be more air. The shorter buildings block out less of the sky, and though it’s still marbled with pockets of clouds, at least she can see it. She puts her window down a little farther.
“See anything?” Z asks her.
“No, just regular stuff. It’s so quiet.”
They pass a brightly painted restaurant, Harold’s Chicken. She ate at the South Loop location regularly when she was in college. Harold’s served bad chicken, but bad in the best possible way.
“Did you ever eat Harold’s?”
“Of course,” says Z. “Me and my boyfriend would take the train to the one on Wabash on Friday nights.”
“You have a boyfriend?”
“Well, had a boyfriend.”
“Oh.”
Tasha doesn�
��t push the issue. Z looks at her, then, as if reading her mind, laughs.
“No, no, not because of this. We broke up before all this crap happened.”
“What happened?”
“He didn’t like my job. I don’t think he was cool with the fact that I could kick his ass. He’d rather I worked at, like, The Pink Lynx or something? Jesus.”
“Oh my god!”
“I know, right?”
“No, look!”
Z brakes and looks where Tasha points. It’s a playground, an old-fashioned outdoor one, with a slide and monkey bars and a jungle gym. On top of the slide is perched a kid, a boy, probably eleven or twelve years old. He’s wearing a red-and-blue plaid shirt—Tasha’s stomach clenches a little at the memory of the last plaid shirt she saw, bloody and lodged in the branches of a tree—and brandishing a shovel. Halfway up the ladder is a Minker, a woman. On the ground below, looking up and barking, a Chipped kid around the same age as the kid with the shovel. The woman hasn’t climbed another step of the ladder; rather, she stays where she is, growling up at him. Whenever she stretches out a hand, he swipes at her with the shovel. Tasha can hear his voice, but can’t make out the words.
“Damn! He’s just a kid!” Z breathes. She’s afraid, Tasha can tell. Probably wishing she had stayed at the Web instead of coming out here with Tasha. She could cut and run at any second. Tasha makes a move.
“Hey, kid!” she shouts out the window. “Kid! Over here!”
The kid’s head snaps their way, and so does the Chipped woman’s. The Minker kid doesn’t seem to notice; he’s too eager for his turn to climb the slide. The kid with the shovel points at himself, a gesture asking “Me?” Tasha laughs. Is he serious?
“Who else? Come on!”
The kid takes another swipe at the Minker with his shovel, then turns and sits at the edge of the slide. With a little push, holding the shovel in front of him like handlebars, he slides down the polished metal path. The Minker climbs more steps slowly—Tasha is impressed; she didn’t know they could do that—but is stuck at the top: the actual act of sliding is a little beyond her capacity. The other Minker, the kid, is attracted by the motion of its quarry reaching the bottom of the slide and begins tottering over to claim him. But the kid in plaid is ready and swings his shovel impressively, a resounding crack as it connects with the Minker’s skull. The Chipped kid topples, blood arcing, and although Tasha knows he won’t stay down for long with his Chip still intact, it buys enough time for the boy with the shovel to reach the Ferrari.
“Get in back,” Z calls past Tasha as he approaches the car.
He does, taking care not to slam the door once he’s in the backseat.
“Nice car,” he marvels, running his palm admiringly over the interior.
“Thanks,” says Z, her fear seemingly gone. “We found it.”
Tasha chuckles, then turns in the seat to look at the kid.
“Who are you? What were you doing out here by yourself?”
“I’m Malakai. I was taking a walk.”
Tasha looks disbelievingly at Z, who has begun driving again—in no rush, as the Minker woman is still stuck confusedly on the slide, and the Minker kid is still repairing his skull.
“He was taking a walk,” says Tasha.
“A walk? Oh. Well, that’s nice. A walk.”
Tasha turns back to Malakai.
“Do you often take walks when there’s flesh-eating freaks wandering around?”
He shrugs.
“There’s not really that many. Not around here. I mean, there’s some, but we take care of everyone we come across. There was one in my neighbor’s garden yesterday,” he says without emotion. “My brother killed it though.” Tasha imagines he probably played more than a few hours of Halo 20.0 before the Change.
They drive on for a little while, the boy enjoying the ride. Tasha can see his mouth turned up gently at the corners, his demeanor calm and almost peaceful. Who does he remind her of?
“Make a right,” he directs Z as they approach 79th Street.
Z turns the car obediently, and Tasha looks interestedly out the window at the change of scenery. It’s more residential here, fewer shops and restaurants. The road needs repairing: she wonders if the Mayor redlined this area for street work too. She thinks of the footage she had seen of the area before the Change—it had looked like a warzone. Maybe other parts are, but this isn’t so bad. It’s gray—no city-funded flower-service here like downtown—but homey. Why didn’t they ever show this part on the webnews apps? She continues looking. The buildings she sees now, however homey, have boarded-up windows, chains around the gates. The fences, she sees, are lined with strings of aluminum cans and glass bottles.
“Nice decorations,” she says out loud.
Malakai regards her through the rearview mirror.
“They’re there to make noise so we hear it if any sick people come in the yard.”
“Oh.”
“We’re in the red,” Z interjects, pointing at the battery level. “We’ll be stopping pretty soon.”
Tasha notices the nervous edge in her voice; she’s feeling panicky again. She was so comfortable at the Web, and she seems to be okay when they’re in motion, but the great outdoors dulls her spunky edge a bit. The wide world outside the shopping mall is unpredictable without the cameras showing her all angles of her kingdom, reporting any movement. At the Web, she was in charge. Outside, they don’t know what’s around the corner until they turn it; no one is the boss. Every Chicagoan for herself.
“It’s okay if we stop,” Malakai says brightly. “We’re almost there.”
Tasha wonders where “there” is. Home? A safe house? A trap? There was a trend in horror movies a few decades back, Tasha remembers from school, in which even kids like Malakai were suspect: kids were cheese in the mousetrap. Tasha considers the idea, sneaking a look at the boy in the backseat through the rearview. He looks serenely out the window. Whatever, she thinks. She has enough to worry about without agonizing over the possibility of an eleven-year-old stabbing her in the back. Plus, he seems to know his way around. Maybe he can help her track down a trace of Dr. Rio when they get where they’re going.
A block later the Ferrari runs out of juice. It makes a pale dinging sound, as if making a last plea to be given a power source. There isn’t a socket for miles, though, to answer its prayers, and it whines to a slow stop in the middle of 79th Street.
“Should someone say a few words?” Tasha says as they get out of the car.
Z is too nervous to reply, and Malakai is too busy mournfully admiring the dead Ferrari as they prepare to leave it behind. Tasha supposes his admiration is prayer enough, and she shoulders her backpack. Z has done the same; she’s looking all around, her neck swiveling like an owl. She has rescued the Ferrari owner’s iPod from the console and clutches it like rosary beads.
“You okay?” Tasha asks. Malakai is leading them up a street marked Perry Avenue, spinning his shovel like a drum major. It twirls artfully in his fingers. He must have been in the marching band in school, Tasha hypothesizes. No one is just that good at twirling things.
“Yeah, I think so.” Z’s neck is still swiveling. “It’s just, like, different. It’s so open.”
Tasha nods. She thinks back to the first few days after the Change; skittering along walls and hiding behind dumpsters, bobbing and weaving through a parking lot warzone. Her fear of open spaces has not disappeared—indeed, she feels the hungry moths of it fluttering in her stomach under layers of sub sandwich—but she’s quelled it out of necessity. Fear only adds more lead to the legs: running down Lakeshore Drive had been taxing enough with a backpack full of canned goods and no sports bra (or shirt). Fear is like love: it complicates things. Tasha doesn’t know how to say these things to Z, so instead she pinches Z’s arm awkwardly and says,
“It’ll be fine. This kid doesn’t seem too worried, right? I mean, look at him: he’s like twelve, if that. And he’s not even scared! He’s, like
, chilling. I’m sure wherever he’s taking us is safer than the Web. I mean if you think about it, we’re safer just by, like, geographical location.” She babbles in her effort to be positive. “We’re on the South Side, right? This is where we were trying to get. Plus Malakai said himself that there aren’t even that many Minkers down here.”
Malakai looks over his shoulder.
“There’s not,” he says.
“See?”
Z looks reassured. Her face has relaxed and her shoulders fall a little. Tasha remembers reassuring Vette, just before their encounter with the bride and groom. It had been so true coming out of her mouth, then transformed into a lie seconds later. It all seems like a lifetime ago. Z looks at Malakai, who is still twirling the shovel artfully.
“Geez,” she says, watching its arc, “was this kid a drum major or what?”
Malakai leads them up a walkway to a two-story building with old-school concrete molding around the doorway and windows. Tasha can’t tell if it’s a house or an apartment building. It’s gated, and Malakai walks rights up, uncoiling the heavy chain from around the posts.
“No lock?” Z asks.
“Nah,” he says, standing aside to let them pass through first, “they’re not too good with opening stuff. The chain is enough.”
After he succeeds in re-wrapping the chain around the posts, which he does carefully and studiously, he leads them up the path to the porch, which is wide and decorated with various potted and hanging plants. It reminds Tasha distinctly of Louisville. In front of the door is a welcome mat, with an image of a smiling cat stitched beside the Welcome. Beside it is a pair of muddy soccer cleats, the laces orange.
“Oh good,” Malakai says, seeing the shoes, “my brother’s home.”
He reaches for the doorknob, but the door is already swinging inward, a tall figure standing to the side of the entrance to allow them in. It’s Ishmael.