by Неизвестный
Eli stared into the man’s face. He looked familiar, in that way all attractive people look familiar, but he was also unusual, with pale, silver-blond hair and dark brown eyebrows. He had big muscles, wore army surplus clothing, and looked like he cracked walnuts with his teeth, just to show his molars who was the boss.
“Where’s Dave?” the guy asked gruffly. His voice was unexpectedly deep, completely different from the meek one he’d used on the phone.
“I’m not Da-Dave,” Eli stammered. He wiped his sweating palms on his company-issued polyester short pants. “Sorry. Dave’s on another route today, so you’re stuck with me. I’m Eli Carter.”
The man’s upper lip twitched in a snarling motion. Eli swallowed hard. They were probably the same age, about thirty, but this guy was a man.
In that moment, Eli understood those dogs who piddled themselves as a sign of subservience in front of the pack master. Not that he wanted to piddle himself, but he could understand.
“Khan.” The man stretched out his open palm in a friendly yet manly gesture, and they shook hands. “The package is right there on the counter, my man.”
My man? Eli grinned like he’d been paid a compliment.
“Great shop you have here,” Eli said.
“Yup.”
Eli glanced around, stalling for time and cringing at himself for doing so. He hated it when lonely people along his delivery route tried to make conversation with him. Small talk annoyed him. Why did people have to be so boring? Eli couldn't use the excuse that he was in a rush, because his route wasn’t that busy, and he always found time for a nap mid-afternoon. No, he had to admit to himself that he didn’t like small talk because he didn’t like people. He didn’t hate them, exactly, he just didn’t care what they felt or thought or said.
But this Khan guy was different.
Eli’s compassion for lonely, boring people grew just a smidge as he struggled to draw out this interaction.
He asked casually, “Is it true you know a necromancer slash exorcist?”
Khan’s eyes seemed to twinkle from within, like he had his own internal light source.
He replied, “Maybe we both know one.” His eyes, which were a dark green, flashed with mischief. “In a city overrun with ghosts, a guy like that would be a superhero.”
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Eli said. “Most sightings can be traced to electro-magnetic fields, or infrasound. I remember a while back, when all those silent fans got recalled. The sound vibrations shook the backs of people's eyes and made them hallucinate.”
“You’re not a believer,” Khan said dryly.
“I’m a man of science.” Eli cringed internally, the way he always did when he referred to himself as a man.
Khan took a long, challenging pause, then glanced down at Eli's company-issued name badge.
“Eli Carter, if you’re such a man of science, I dare you to open your eyes and really look around this city.”
Eli took a deep breath, inhaling the delicious decaying plastic of old computers, along with whiffs of something else. Could it be Khan’s testosterone? It was a heady cocktail.
A phone rang. It wasn’t the brassy bell of the land line, or the digital chirping of the one clipped to Eli’s belt holster.
Khan drew a slim phone from his pocket and answered with an impatient grunt. He listened for a moment, then growled, “How did you get this number?”
He turned his back to Eli and began pacing the width of the storefront. “Ghost Hackers,” he snorted. “They’re a bunch of no-talent clowns with nothing but gambling debts. Couldn’t solve a simple demon infestation if the Good Lord came down from Heaven and blessed the holy water himself. Gimme yer address.”
He grunted a few more times into the phone, then grabbed a pen from near the cash register and started writing the address on his inner forearm, ignoring the pad of paper sitting right there on the counter.
Eli smiled at how cool Khan was, to just write stuff on his arm like that. Khan probably wouldn’t eat lentil loaf, and he wouldn’t put up with a girlfriend’s nagging. Khan probably didn’t even have a set bedtime.
Khan finished the phone call and turned back to Eli.
“Duty calls,” Khan said. “See you around.”
Eli looked over at the box on the counter. His job was to take the cardboard box, not tag along with Khan on a necromancer job. The unfairness of life hit him hard, making his lower lip stick out in a pout.
“You won't see me around,” Eli said. “This isn't my usual route. My girlfriend got mad at me this morning for chewing my toast too loud, so she switched me over to the Zombie Run.”
“Fascinating,” Khan said in that sarcastic way that makes a person feel like the dullest human on earth.
Eli could take a hint. He trudged over to the box and scanned the bar code by muscle memory. He spotted another sign taped to the cash register:
DRIVER WANTED
His pulse quickened. They needed a driver? Eli didn't have confidence in his other abilities, but he could drive. He even had his own van.
He opened his mouth to ask Khan if Ghost Hackers was really hiring a driver, but something caught his eye.
Further in the shop, in the murky depths, a girl with long, brown hair emerged from a doorway. She was lugging an armload of equipment that looked heavy.
Eli battled the impulse to drop everything and rush to her assistance. She didn't even look up at him, but he could tell she was beautiful.
“Got everything?” Khan asked. “There's just the one box. Right there. On the counter, catching your drool.” He snapped his fingers. “Hey, get your eyes off Valentine.”
Eli grabbed the box, muttered an apology, and exited the shop as quickly as he could.
As much as he liked the idea of a new, interesting job, he didn't like the idea of being murdered by his live-in girlfriend, Brenda.
He tossed the box in the back of his van and tried to forget about the DRIVER WANTED sign at Ghost Hackers.
Chapter Two
The next morning, Eli Carter woke up with a smile on his face. Everything was normal, unchanged, and he was alive.
Last night’s lentil “meat” loaf had not killed him after all. He rolled over and nuzzled Brenda. She was the one who had concocted the digestion-damning dinner, claiming that strawberry jam was basically chutney. Never mind that Eli didn't like chutney, anyway. Who puts raisins in a condiment?
She stirred in her sleep, her angelic lips tempting Eli to kiss her. But he knew better. A stolen kiss could result in a punch, so he contented himself with sweeping her pale red hair to the side, freeing it from the clumps of dark makeup on her eyelashes.
Eli had seen Brenda without mascara only one time. She looked inhuman without it. He told himself he was being silly. Of course Brenda was human. What else would she be? But from that day on, he never teased her about the endless application of coat after coat of waterproof mascara.
He rolled quietly out of the bed and squeezed past Brenda’s color-coded storage bins in the hallway.
In the washroom, Eli stood facing the mirror.
He didn’t know his age, but it was possible he’d turned thirty overnight. That would explain the changes he could see this morning in his hairline, and the contours under his medium-brown eyes. He was getting to that age where people got married. Half the guys at his regular comic shop were having kids already.
“Will you marry me?” he asked his reflection.
His reflection frowned, eyes casting down to his chest. One nipple pointed out, and the other was concave that morning. He would need to have a shirt on when he eventually proposed to Brenda. Nobody would marry those nipples.
He listened at the bathroom door to make sure she was still asleep, then he clicked the vanity mirror in its secret spot to open the hidden compartment.
Brenda didn’t know about the compartment behind the mirror, even though it had been her apartment before he moved in. This cubby was a source of endless joy
for Eli—not just the idea of pulling one over on his girlfriend, but the wonderful treasures he kept within. There were magazines, anti-fungal creams he didn’t want anyone to know about, plus his bath toys. When he was alone for a night, he sat in a bath full of bubbles and enacted great battles with plastic alien soldiers. Brenda wouldn’t understand.
He pushed aside the soldiers and pulled out the velvet box. He cracked it open. The engagement ring sparkled.
“My precious,” he whispered to the ring. He was joking, yet he was not. The ring itself had taken hold of him, somewhere deep down and dark. He’d had the ring for over a year, and it never left the washroom.
He wasn’t afraid of Brenda saying no, or of her saying yes. They already lived together, and marriage seemed inevitable. He accepted commitment, like he accepted the indigestion from her cooking. Still, he couldn’t quite bring himself to give the ring away.
Oh, how his lovely diamond ring sparkled, even in the dim artificial light of the washroom. His ring. Not Brenda’s.
The door handle rattled. The love of his life swore at him through the door and demanded to know if he was committing bathroom crimes without the fan turned on.
Eli tucked the ring away again. Brenda continued shouting obscenities at the locked door.
He certainly wasn't going to propose today. Not if she was going to be like that.
The toy alien soldiers standing on the cubby’s glass shelf all gave Eli baleful looks, as if to say they understood completely.
At breakfast, Eli munched his toast, blissfully unaware of his fate. He could not have known that within twenty-four hours, he would be praying for the sweet release of death. He wasn’t even the praying type.
Brenda and Eli sat across from each other at the apartment’s eating table. They couldn’t call it a dining table or a kitchen table, as the apartment had neither a dining room nor what any sane person would call a kitchen, but it was a table, and they ate there.
Outside the window, in the alley below, the garbage trucks angrily shook dumpsters into their hungry maws.
Brenda looked up from her tablet screen. “Could you chew that toast a little louder?”
He apologized and dampened his mouth with a swig of orange juice. Dark thoughts bubbled up. They had some version of this fight every morning, it seemed.
It was fine for Brenda to pull dark clumps from her eyelashes and flick them on the eating table, where they sat like deformed spiders, but his toast chewing was the height of offensiveness.
She didn’t know everything.
Eli smiled with satisfaction, knowing that he had the engagement ring, and she did not.
“Stop smiling,” she said. “I feel like you’re plotting something. What are you up to, Eli? Your side of the bed was all sweaty this morning. What were you doing while I was sleeping?”
“Just sleeping.”
She narrowed her pale blue eyes, scrunching her pale face around them. The pigment fairies had bypassed Brenda, and her light red hair had a translucent quality. In the days of freak shows, she might have made a living as one of the carnival’s attractions. The See-Through Girl.
“What happened to the meatloaf leftovers from last night?” she asked. “I checked the fridge, and nothing was in there.”
“Lentils aren't meat, and I resent you calling it a meatloaf. I put it down the disposal.” He broke out in a cold sweat. Right about now, he could use the ability to lie.
Unfortunately, because of a tiny microchip implanted in his brain, Eli couldn’t lie.
Brenda’s nostrils flared. She’d given him the rope, and now she invited him to hang himself. “And why did you dump the lentil loaf down the disposal?”
Unable to stop the truth, he said, “Because you’re a terrible cook, and nearly everything you make is bad in some way, but last night’s monstrosity with strawberry jam on top was particularly heinous.”
“Heinous.” She blinked angrily, her dark-coated lashes like steel spikes.
“It's the truth.”
“You know what? You do not have a microchip in your head, Eli. You’ve made up that ridiculous story because you’re an awful human being, and you think you can get away with it.”
“It's the microchip.”
She picked up the knife she’d been using to smear nut butter on her toast and pointed the tip at Eli.
“There's no chip. I’d dig through that little scar on your scalp myself, if I could. I’d drill through your thick skull and root around in that mass of jelly you call a brain, just to prove there’s no microchip in your head. But I won’t, because that would be illegal.”
Eli tried to focus on the sounds of the garbage trucks in the alley below, but Brenda’s accusations were getting to him. Soon she would be talking about Eli’s father, and dragging his name through the mud. She would say the man who adopted Eli had done a terrible job raising him, including lying to him about a behavioral microchip.
The truth was, Eli didn’t know much about himself.
As a young child, Eli had been found wandering the city. It had been five days after the Crashdown. He was filthy, and as feral as the wild dogs that ran by the river.
The authorities estimated his age to be four years, by his size. Because of the chaos in the Post-Crashdown city, his initial appearance didn’t even make the news for a few days. Nobody claimed the boy, and he was non-verbal, so he couldn’t even claim himself.
He was placed temporarily with one of the psychologists who assessed him, and then there was the whole cult thing and his incarceration. Luckily for Eli, he was eventually sprung from jail and adopted by the only person who seemed to care about him. That was where his memories began.
Everything Eli believed to be true about himself, Brenda was inclined to treat as fiction these days.
Back when they first started dating, she would beg him to tell her more about his operation. They stayed up late, drinking cocoa and talking about their odd childhoods.
When Brenda eventually admitted she’d exaggerated or altered her stories, she expected Eli to admit the same. When he did not, a sliver of distrust grew between them. Over the last few years, the distrust had metastasized, and now they had… this.
Brenda leaned across the eating table, pointing the knife between Eli’s eyebrows. “Admit there’s no microchip. Admit you say those awful things just to spite me.”
He pointed to the spot in his hairline and nodded forward. “Start digging.”
She pressed the tip of the dirty knife against the scar.
“One of these days,” she murmured.
“You’re getting nut butter in my hair.”
She snorted and pulled away suddenly. Eli looked up to see a cruel smile twisting on her lips.
Now what?
She picked up her tablet and tapped away for a minute. “Oh, that’s too bad,” she said with mock sympathy. “It looks like Gerald called in sick today, which means Andy will take his route, Dave will take Andy’s route, and you, my dear Eli, will be on the Zombie Run, yet again.”
Eli’s skin prickled with another wave of cold sweat. “You wouldn’t.”
He'd lucked out the previous day and not had to cross through the Zone, but he wouldn't be so lucky today. He swallowed and tried to summon something truthful that would help this situation.
“Brenda, you looked beautiful this morning when you weren’t conscious.”
The See-Through Girl flared her pale nostrils.
“Save your cleverness for work, because you’ll need it.”
And with that parting shot, Brenda stood and pushed the table away from her, slamming the edge against Eli’s lower rib cage. He kept eating, pretending it hadn’t hurt.
Chapter Three
The Zombie Run was the least popular delivery route. It passed through the Crash Zone, a circle of destruction and chaos in what was once the business district of the city.
Nobody sane worked or lived inside the Crash Zone. A person could pass through without suffering long-te
rm effects, or so the city officials assured residents, but it was an area best avoided.
There were no actual zombies in the area—at least not the kind seen in movies, with chunks of body parts falling off as they milled about in search of brains and shopping malls. Residents of the Crash Zone—called Crashers by most—had perfectly human plumbing. If you ripped an arm off a Crasher, he or she would die. Just not immediately.
It wasn’t scientists who tested this theory by ripping off arms. Crashers had a pesky tendency to run after vehicles passing through the Zone. They seemed to be as helpless to their urges as Border Collies living near a highway, chasing cars because their brains told them cars were sheep. Chase the sheep.
The only problem with the Border Collie metaphor was that humans hadn’t been selectively bred to chase sheep. So what was it? Nobody knew, or those who did know weren’t telling.
The look on a Crasher’s face as he or she chased after a car was one of rapture. If the vehicle slowed down for a light or to circle debris on the road—and there was always debris on the road in the Zone—the Crasher would close in on the vehicle and grasp at anything. Mirrors. Door handles. Bumpers.
A little defensive driving maneuver usually shook them, but not always. The main roads leading into the Zone had stop points, where drivers could voluntarily use the provided tools to remove protruding mirrors and handles, or cover them with stretchy self-adhering plastic—the vehicle equivalent of a bandage.
In the twenty-six years since Crashdown, the laws regarding the legal status of Crashers had flipped back and forth nearly a dozen times.
As Eli rolled up to the checkpoint to remove his mirrors, he read the current bulletin on a digital billboard. As of that day, the penalty for negligence causing the loss of a Crasher limb was equivalent to a month of Eli’s salary as a delivery driver.
Eli found it amusing they used the generic term “limb,” when it was always arms, not legs.
He’d been a teenager the first time Crashers were designated non-person entities. This legal change happened in a rush, because there’d been some sightings of Crashers with infants, and the authorities needed the legal clearance to capture and tag Crashers before re-releasing them.