Machine of Death

by Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, David Malki ! (Editors)

  I asked about the appeals process, and the counselor shoved a thick stack of paperwork at me. FORM 1678-ATF: REQUEST FOR EXTENSION OF FATE APPLICATION. It was crowded with dotted lines and small type, layers of sub-forms, bricks of legal jargon. Helene’s knee pressed against mine under the table.

  The counselor explained that it’d take two weeks for the Ministry’s office to process our request. At that point, our case would be passed to a higher court in the Orthodoxy, where a panel of clerks and lay-priests would review it. If all went well, the counselor said, they’d contact us for interviews, background checks, and then they’d give us an application.

  “I thought this was the application,” Helene said.

  “No,” the counselor said. “It’s a request for the application.”

  I felt hollow. Outside the window, searchlights swept the edge of the slums and a siren wailed. The Ministry, hunting for someone. I imagined beastly slack-jawed men with guns patrolling the ruins.

  The counselor mumbled on about the beauty of sacrifice. He talked about the strength of our nation, how scheduling deaths prevented wars, famines, natural disasters. It was all so much bullshit. But we crossed ourselves, mechanically, as he led us in prayer.

  “Providence,” the counselor recited, “help Kelvin and Helene to meet their fates with grace.”

  “I’m pregnant,” Helene told the counselor. She’d twisted the sash of her robe around her hands and her breath came in quick, shallow gulps. “You’ll kill our baby.”

  “I know,” the counselor told us. “And for that we are truly sorry.”

  “Motherfucks,” Helene said. She swept her arm across the table and our paperwork cascaded to the floor. The counselor didn’t flinch.

  “I prayed,” she said, her voice shaking. “We made tithes. I anointed myself and used the rosaries. Our baby’s not supposed to come with us.”

  Helene had always had a stubborn sense of justice. Once, when we’d been in high school, a rainstorm had soaked the ruins for days and scads of earthworms had crawled from the dirt to drown on the sidewalks. Helene spent hours on hands and knees, rescuing the squirming things. Her jeans soaked through. Her hair plastered to her forehead.

  The counselor shook his head and tapped a few notes into his palmtop. “Mrs. Hayashi,” he said, “I’m a little dismayed at your progress to date.”

  “Piss off,” I told him.

  The counselor raised his eyebrows. “The Ministry won’t be pleased with my report,” he said.

  “The Ministry can go to hell,” I said.

  The counselor glared, set his skullcap atop his damp hair, and got up to leave. He pointed at the paperwork scattered across our kitchen floor.

  “Don’t even bother with the forms,” he said.

  In the apartment on Figueroa, the sample’s come back with a readout of Pepper’s fate.

  “Whoa,” Titus says. “‘Loss of Blood.’ Definite Class X. Ambiguity’s off the charts. Possible group-risk, possibly violent circumstances.”

  Pepper flails her arms and arches her back and just about pulls my arms from their sockets. Titus plants his knee on Pepper’s chest, pinning her to the floor. His tagger starts beeping and its lights flash red.

  “Her blood’s not in the system at all,” Titus says.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “An Untagged,” he says.

  Holy shit.

  I look at Pepper. An Untagged. A traitor, a terrorist, a ticking time-bomb.

  The Ministry makes a big show of hunting down the Untagged, weeding them out. They haven’t been tested at birth like the rest of us, so they don’t have classes, don’t know how their lives end. I wonder what it’s like for them, not knowing.

  Well, I thought. She sure as hell knows now.

  “What’s the reward up to these days? Ten mil?” Titus asks. “Hold her for a second.”

  I take both Pepper’s hands and she tries to twist them away from me. My gloves are wet now, sweat covering everything. Ten million credits for turning in an Untagged. Ten million credits for killing someone. Titus pulls the plastic zip-ties from his belt and wraps them around Pepper’s wrists.

  “No police,” he says. “They’ll just want a cut of the money. We take her straight to the Ministry.”

  “They’ll kill me,” Pepper says. “I haven’t done anything and they’ll kill me.”

  They’ll kill me, too. On September thirteenth, the Ministry men will take Helene and I to the airfield in their black cars, they’ll pack us onto a plane with the other R-4s, and then the pilot will fly us out over the Pacific and kill us all.

  “Can’t run from our fates, honey,” Titus says.

  Last week, I’d tried a new tactic. I’d slipped my credstick into the counselor’s palm as he left our apartment, told him I’d do whatever it took to get this straightened out. I told him there should be enough in that account to keep him happy, keep him quiet. He’d just snarled at me and let the credstick clatter to the floor.

  “Don’t think for a second that you’re the first person who tried to bribe me,” he’d said. His eyes narrowed.

  I shuddered. A few choice words from the counselor, and they’d toss Helene and I into a holding cell. The Ministry excelled at torture: Once they knew how someone died, they knew how to inflict pain without killing him. They knew exactly what he’d be most afraid of.

  “We’re in the business of reducing ambiguities,” the counselor hissed at me. “What do you think would happen if everyone sidestepped their fate?”

  After the counselor left, Helene and I had lain in our sour sheets, listening to the sirens and clatter of our neighborhood. Trash fires crackled somewhere down the block, aerosol cans exploding in the flames. Kids shouted and tossed rocks at each other.

  Helene pressed her toes against my leg and stretched her arm across my chest. She slept on her side these days—on her back, she felt like the baby was crushing her, and on her front she felt like she’d been draped over a bowling ball.

  “We’re zombies,” I told her. I cupped my palm over her cheek.

  “We’ve always been zombies,” she said. “Just now we’ve got a date for it.”

  For years, I’d had the same nightmares. Sterile white plasticine and a seatbelt tight across my lap. Cold wind rushing past me. In the dream, I would look out the window of the plane to see the ocean at a sickening tilt. When we hit the whitecaps there’d always be a shriek of metal and then static. Death sounded like static. And the dream kept going after that. A black canvas stretched across my mind. No eyes to see or skin to feel, and the static kept churning like an engine in the dark, on and on.

  “Feel this,” Helene said, and guided my hand across the taut skin of her stomach. “Feels like his spine.”

  We wanted what every parent in the slumlands wanted. We wanted our baby to come out healthy, and we wanted the priests to tag him and smile and tell us our son was a class A, a Cancer or a Heart Disease and not a squib like we are. We wanted the priests to hustle our precious baby away, evac him out of Angel City on black Ministry helicopters, take him across the fifty miles of desert to the Garden.

  The archbishop and the rest of the orthodoxy lived in the Garden. So did the financial district, the nation’s politico-corporate headquarters. Towers of glass and steel, beautiful people in clean houses. Only the upper-classes could live there: people with slow deaths, or predictable ones, or fates with low violence ratings. Low-classes weren’t allowed to come close. Too much risk to the government, to the economy.

  All of us gunshot wounds, shrapnel deaths, stabbings, poisonings, industrial accidents, we’d been pinned down here in the slums with the factories and pollutants. Better for society that way.

  Helene and I stared at the ceiling. The air smelled thick with gypsum dust.

  “What if we’d never been tested?” I asked her.

  She laughed. “We’d live in the desert with the Untagged. Starve to death out there.”

  Helene and I both lay silent
for a while, breathing across each others’ lips, thinking about the sun-blasted wastes, the yucca and brush in the open countryside. If we were Untagged, I thought, we’d disappear into the arroyos and the Ministry would never find us.

  I tried to sleep, but I’d barely shut my eyes before sunlight trickled in through the holes in our curtains.

  We strap Pepper onto the gurney and carry her outside.

  The heat’s like an oven. In front of the apartment complex, a statue of an angel glowers, its wings casting scythes of shadow. The engraving on the statue’s pedestal reads: “Your sacrifice benefits humanity,” but someone’s crossed out “benefits,” and spraypainted “derails” in its place.

  All around us, the slumlands spread out in a geometric sludge and aerials scrape the afternoon shit from the sky. Titus pops open the back of the ambulance.

  “Ten million credits, Kelvin,” he says, and he shows me teeth. He opens the driver’s side door and climbs inside. “Load her in and let’s go.”

  I look down at Pepper. She quivers, jerking against the leather straps, her skin goosebumped.

  Our baby won’t ever have a name. They’ll fly Helene and I out over the ocean and put the plane into a spiral. The scream of the engines will swallow us and our baby will never have a name.

  Before I can think about what I’m doing, my hands move over Pepper’s restraints, unfastening them. She sits up and blinks.

  “Me and my wife,” I tell her. “We’re scheduled. Our baby.” I’m shaking. “You must know people. Someplace we can hide.”

  Pepper nods and cranes her neck to look back at Titus. He’s fiddling with the radio in the cab, and isn’t paying attention to us. My breath rasps in my mouth, my tongue feels suddenly heavy.

  “There are safehouses,” Pepper says. Her wrists and ankles are still zip-tied together, and she holds them up. “We have a whole network of them. Cut me loose.”

  “We’ll need a blood swap,” I tell her. “We need someone to lead us into the desert.”

  “We will,” she says.

  I can already picture the lone highway stretching out through the cholla. Helene and I will raise our baby in the cacti, away from the smog, away from the Ministry. I pull out my knife and I slice through Pepper’s zip-ties. She rubs her wrists and scrambles to her feet.

  Then she rears back and spits in my face. “Fucking pig,” she says.

  She shoves past me and ducks into an alley filled with garbage bags and oil slicks. She sprints out into the maze of the sprawl.

  Titus slams the door of the ambulance. “The hell’s wrong with you?” he asks.

  I open my mouth, but no sound comes out.

  Story by Jeff Stautz

  Illustration by Kris Straub

  PRISON KNIFE FIGHT

  VERY EXPENSIVE NANNY. VERY EXPENSIVE TUTOR. Montessori nursery school priced competitively with Yale. Phonics, piano lessons from age four, one edifying vacation in a major European city per year, a diet of both organic and local produce cooked to order from a menu drawn up by a personal nutrition coach, and a white-noise machine. A portfolio of coloring-book samples. What was missing? Oh, yes…

  Mr. Slocombe peered over the thick sheaf of paperwork. “We’ll have to see his medical records, of course.”

  “His medical records?” said Mrs. Weathington-Beech, a little too innocently.

  “That’s confidential information,” said Mr. Weathington-Beech, with studied huffiness.

  “Nonetheless,” sighed Mr. Slocombe, “Saint Maxwell’s requires it, as you should be aware from our brochures, website, and application forms. We do ask that you come prepared,” he added coldly, hoping that a touch of Stern Headmaster would snap them to attention.

  It didn’t. “I don’t see why you’d need that kind of thing,” Mrs. Weathington-Beech lilted. “I mean, really, why would you, unless you’re planning to discriminate against—”

  “Against a five-year-old,” Mr. Weathington-Beech hrrumphed. “It’s just kindergarten,” he added.

  “Saint Maxwell’s, sir, is hardly ‘just’ a kindergarten. That’s why you’re trying to convince us to admit little Cotton, correct? His medical records, please.”

  After a long and wounded pause, Mr. Weathington-Beech produced another set of papers from his briefcase. Mr. Slocombe skimmed them. There was only one line that mattered. Not everyone had their children scanned, of course, but the parents who applied to Saint Maxwell’s wanted their offspring to win the great footrace of life, and they missed no opportunity to equip the towheaded sprites with life’s metaphorical jet packs and rocket shoes. A death machine readout cost money, and that meant it must be an advantage. Q.E.D.

  Ah, there it was…

  Mr. Slocombe pulled out the familiar certificate, signed by a licensed technician and stamped with a golden death’s head seal. His gaze dropped automatically to the six neatly typed words at the bottom. And stayed there. For a good minute.

  “Cotton Remington Weathington-Beech,” he said at last. “Prison knife fight.”

  Mr. Weathington-Beech turned very red. Mrs. Weathington-Beech turned very white. Both Weathington-Beeches squirmed.

  Mr. Slocombe gazed evenly at them from across his polished mahogany desk. “Prison knife fight?”

  There was another, longer silence. Finally, Mrs. Weathington-Beech said, “Well, you know, it might be the good kind of prison.”

  “The good kind of prison?”

  Mr. Weathington-Beech leapt in gallantly. “Minimum-security.”

  “Exactly.” Mrs. Weathington-Beech nodded energetically. “For tax evasion or something. Tax evasion’s not so bad.”

  “I think,” said Mr. Slocombe, the temperature of his voice dropping several degrees, “that the type of prison to which, say, a corporate CFO is sent for tax evasion is very unlikely to play host to lots of knife fights.”

  “It could,” said Mrs. Weathington-Beech, sounding like a child who’s had her favorite binky taken away and stomped on.

  “Look,” said Mr. Weathington-Beech, “surely you’ve gotten this before.”

  “No. No, we haven’t.” At the sight of the Weathington-Beeches’ fallen faces, Mr. Slocombe relented. “We get some suicides.”

  “There!” Mr. Weathington-Beech jabbed a manicured finger across the desk. “If you ask me, knife fight shows a lot more character than suicide. Suicide…suicide’s cowardly.” Mrs. Weathington-Beech nodded.

  “I’ve got a nephew scheduled for suicide,” snapped Mr. Slocombe. “Fine boy. A little tense.”

  In fact, Saint Maxwell’s received, and often accepted, applications from preschoolers slated to die criminal deaths. It was just a question of, well, the quality of the crime. You let in the cocaine overdoses; you kept out the crack overdoses. But this was so obvious it was hardly worth mentioning.

  “I don’t see why you people even care,” Mr. Weathington-Beech was saying. “It’s not like he’s going to die in a prison knife fight while he’s at kindergarten.”

  “Prep school, maybe,” said Mrs. Weathington-Beech vaguely. She seemed to have abandoned all hope of Saint Maxwell’s and drifted into a soft pink private world of her own, a world blissfully devoid of knives, fights, or prisons to contain them.

  “It’s a matter of reputation,” said Mr. Slocombe, gathering up Cotton’s paperwork. “In seventy-eight years, Saint Maxwell’s has never had an alumnus die in a prison knife fight.”

  “But you’re our last hope!” cried Mr. Weathington-Beech, his final layer of expensive psychic armor falling to reveal naked, lower-class desperation. “We’ve tried every decent school in the county!”

  “So we’re your last choice, are we?”

  “You know how it works! If Cotton goes to a sub-par kindergarten, he’ll go to a sub-par elementary school. If he goes to a sub-par elementary school, he’ll have no choice but a sub-par high school. And if he goes to a sub-par high school…” Mr. Weathington-Beech shuddered.

  “Brown,” said Mr. Slocombe sympathetically.
/>
  “There’s always public school,” said Mrs. Weathington-Beech, gazing off into the middle distance. This was such a tasteless joke that the men had no choice but to ignore it.

  “We’ve done everything right,” moaned Mr. Weathington-Beech. “Sarah stepped down at Berkshire Hathaway to do full-time attachment parenting. I switched consulting firms so we could move to a town with a lower level of mercury in the water. We’ve already got breeders working on the puppy for Cotton’s seventh birthday and the pony for his tenth. Everything. Everything right.” He looked up at Mr. Slocombe with haunted eyes.

  Mr. Slocombe felt too tired to be diplomatic any longer. “Then how do you explain the shiv in his gut?”

  “Well, maybe the machine is wr—” To Mr. Weathington-Beech’s credit, he stopped himself. The death machine was never wrong. They’d done tests.

  “We shouldn’t have named him Cotton,” sighed Mrs. Weathington-Beech to no one in particular.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mr. Slocombe, and he really was. “But this is why we check, you know.”

  “Have a heart,” said Mr. Weathington-Beech, defeated. “Sarah and I both got ‘car accident.’ That could be tomorrow.”

  Mr. Slocombe gave him a long, sad look. Deep in his plushly-lined heart, he knew he was liable to succumb to cheap sentimentality.

  Mrs. Weathington-Beech suddenly fluttered back to Planet Earth. “Maybe a donation to the school would help?”

  Well. Perhaps not too cheap.

  Cotton Remington Weathington-Beech did acceptably at Saint Maxwell’s. He excelled at music and fingerpainting, and his best friends were Akiva Smythe-Button (prostate cancer), McGregor Rigsdale (chronic lower respiratory disease), and Resolved Stutzman (botched coronary bypass operation). The four of them went on together to the Tinker Hill School, and then—minus McGregor, whose parents moved to Hawaii for his asthma—to William H. Howland Prep.

  Cotton officially learned about the prison knife fight at age twelve, when he came across a copy of his own school records in his father’s study, but he’d more or less always known. He’d noticed the special disapproving, pitying, and/or terrified gazes he got from teachers when he acted up in class. He’d been pulled aside on the playground by any number of authority figures and warned about roughhousing, even when he was just standing around with a kickball. And his parents insisted on watching The Shawshank Redemption whenever it was on TV.