"Every citizen MUST ACT," the voice was saying. "Don't take the pills from Disease Control!"
By now the figure was agitated, gesturing at the camera. "Ask yourselves: who's ever really gotten sick? How can the Bang's pathogens strike such small areas? Why are they always near the borders? How does Disease Control respond so quickly? the pills have kept us docile, but the time has come to act! We've made contact with—"
The doors behind them crashed open, the doorway filled with plainclothes SD and uniformed cops, guns out.
"Hold it!" someone shouted, and the police charged the projector booth.
A young man jumped out of the booth and crash-landed in the aisle, grabbing Greg's seat to pull himself up—the boy was young, blond, his face tight with pain or fear, and for a moment he was just staring at them, his hands flexed on Greg's armrest.
Then he sprinted for the exit and disappeared.
The cops and SDs tripped over themselves back down the projection-room stairs, and they scattered—some for the exits, some for the audience.
Greg and Liz were yanked out of their seats and dragged outside into a holding pen of cop cars, along with the rest of the audience. Liz saw a few of the ones who had tried to run and hadn't made it.
"I don't want to go into the station," Greg told her. "It could end up on my record. "
He still hoped that someday he could get closer—any closer—to Disease Control.
Liz faked a storm of tears when the cops were close enough to see it, and they handed Greg a printout and stamped his ticket stubs and told him to be a gentleman and take her home, already.
"I'm looking for a refund for this prank," Greg told them half-seriously, "I want you to know that. "
On the walk home, Greg read from the printout; a standard-issue distribution, without a date on it. They'd had it ready to go, just in case.
Greg flashed the picture of a frowning boy dragging a skull-emblazoned bag behind him.
Pranks are FOOLISH and WASTE THE TIME of VALUABLE CITIZENS. They DISTRACT from safety work and INTERFERE with your government. If you see a PRANKSTER, contact your local precinct.
The bottom read, in large block letters, TODAY'S DELINQUENT IS TOMORROW'S CRIMINAL.
"Hold it," said the blond kid from behind her, and Liz felt the point of a knife in her back.
"Or today's criminal," Liz said.
Greg leveled a look at the kid. "Keep it cool, Johnny Doe. What do you want?"
"Your car. "
"Don't have one. "
Johnny pulled a face. "Shit. Well. Give me your money," he said, and nudged Liz with his shoulder (not, she noted, with the knife).
"What, you're going to buy a bus pass and ride out of town on the local?" Liz asked, but she handed over her purse. "Seventeen dollars. Enjoy. "
Johnny thumbed through the wallet with his free hand. "they've got my car," he told them like they were all friends. "I need to get out of here. They'll kill me. "
Liz didn't doubt that.
Greg glanced around at the quiet street. Ahead of them was the main drag, swarming with people going out to the City Fair on subsidized dates.
"You should go," said Johnny. "You'll be in trouble if they see you with me. "
Greg looked like he was in the middle of a magnificent adventure, and was sneaking looks at Johnny's sharp profile when he thought Johnny wasn't looking, and Liz knew what was coming before Greg even opened his mouth.
Greg asked, "What do you need?"
Liz and Greg signed into a Society hotel just off the main drag. The concierge registered them, stamped their paper, and smiled politely. No speeches about exit stamps this time—it was gauche for concierges to keep track of that sort of thing.
They closed the door and looked at one another like it was their first date again. Liz felt an itch just under her skin, like she was sick, like she needed to run until she dropped. She felt like Greg looked.
Greg laid his tie over the chair and looked at her. "What if they trace him to my apartment? What if they find him there?"
Liz figured if they found a good-looking young man in Greg's apartment, he'd be in trouble for a lot more than harboring a fugitive.
"Come on," said Liz, tugging gently at the tongue of his belt. "We have work to do. Just close your eyes and think of Johnny. "
At the door of the hotel, Greg kissed her cheek goodnight. He seemed surprised when she fell into step beside him instead of turning for her street, but he took her arm without hesitation.
"Just curious to see what he does in civilization," she said when she felt him looking at her. "Besides, I'm your alibi if anyone's found him. "
"God, that's the truth," he said, and pressed her hand more tightly into the crook of his arm.
John Doe was gone, having availed himself of Greg's good raincoat and a bottle of milk from the refrigerator, and Greg's sadness at the end of their adventure was mitigated by the fact that he'd have to replace a very pricey coat.
Liz figured that wasn't the last of Johnny Doe, though when Greg wistfully asked her, "Do you think he might ever. . . ?" she said, "Nope," just to keep him from getting tied up in knots about it.
Secretly, she guessed that a rebel wouldn't abandon a safe harbor, but that was really only from the films ("Is Your Neighbor a Traitor?") and she couldn't be sure, now.
Sometimes when they were at the movies and the screen skipped a frame, Greg tensed, and Liz dreaded the day Johnny ever came back and swept Greg off his feet and into some mission, living in a ghost town smack in the middle of the Pathogen Fields.
Liz would have to go on the group dates in the Society Center where they observed you behind the mirror and marked your body language and assigned you someone, and Liz would have to learn to live with someone entirely new.
Above her head, the woman in the video was shopping for groceries. A man behind her said to someone, "We'll have to hurry, the pickup happens tonight," and the woman frowned at an apple; the narrator said, "Mary knows something's not quite right, but what can she do? She can do what we ALL should do: report suspicions. Today's alert citizen is tomorrow's hero. "
On the screen behind her, the man in the jumpsuit opened the lobby door and approached the desk to make his complaint. (He never actually made it, Liz knew; he just went up in the elevator and shook hands with the other actor, every ten minutes, all day. )
"It's easy to be a good citizen!" the narrator said. "We need what you know. "
John Doe was standing at the corner of her street, dressed like a Disease Control agent, when she saw him next.
When he saw her, he went white as a sheet. Then he fumbled for the tray, handed her a cup.
"What's in here?" she asked under her breath. "You poisoning us now?"
He rolled his eyes. "It's the same as the rest," he said. "I'm just waiting here to be taken back to Disease Control. "
So he was going to sneak in that way.
"Is it true you work for the DOI?"
She blinked as his question settled in. Then she shook her head. "Oh, no, Johnny. Don't. "
"How can you say no?" he handed off a paper cup to a passerby, turned back to her. This close, she could see the vein of green in his blue eyes.
"You're not stupid," he said. "You know I'm telling the truth. Won't you help me?"
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm getting into Disease Control," he said. "I'm getting proof that this is all just to keep us in line, and I'm going to air it across the country. People are going to have a nasty wake-up. "
She wondered how he planned to organize the nation full of people he was going to wake up. "I can't help you," she said.
"I know where you work," he said, pleading. "You can help me get the message out. All you have to do is let me in. I'll go upstairs on my own, I can get the message out from there. "
She took a step back. "I can't," she said. "It's too dangerous. "
"No one will know it was you. "
That much she knew for
sure—she said, "Someone will. "
"How can you be such a coward?" He was louder now—too loud, the other Disease Control agent looked concerned—and Liz took a step back as Johnny stepped forward. His eyes were sharp and bright. "Don't you see what they've done to you?"
"Leave me alone," she said. She wished Greg or someone was here, just in case.
He dropped the tray with a clang; paper cups and pills skittered across the pavement, bounced off Liz's shoes.
"It's over," he said. "they'll kill me if you don't help me. You've killed me. "
Liz couldn't breathe. She felt dizzy. She didn't understand what he meant.
The next moment she was on the ground, being handcuffed, and Johnny was being picked up (five cops, maybe more) and carried, kicking, into the back of a van that had appeared out of nowhere.
As the two policemen walked Liz to the car, they passed the van, blaring the last swells of a familiar tune through its speakers.
"Are you due for a date?" called the announcer. "Check with your doctor. "
Mr. Randall was waiting for her on the eighteenth floor of the Department.
She waited. She tried to think how many people who came up to report something to the Department had ever come down again.
"We'd like to congratulate you," said Mr. Randall.
Liz blinked. "Pardon?"
"Your John Doe was part of a series of test runs we did around the city to gauge the audience for a new instructional film. Marketing has been working with us for months. "
Relief flooded her. "Oh, I see," she said.
"Our field man did his damnedest, but I told him—I said, that girl has her head on straight, you won't get her to help you! He tried twice, the theatre and the street, but did Elizabeth fold?" He laughed. "I told him he'd have as much luck getting help from me as from you. "
She thought about giving Johnny her keys to Greg's place, telling him the fastest way to get there, taking Greg's arm to go for an alibi date.
No one had told Randall about that. This was no undercover job, then; Johnny Doe had died and taken that secret with him.
"Thank you, sir," she said.
When she got back to her desk, she called Greg. "Want to get married?"
He only hesitated a moment. "I thought you'd never ask," he said, a little too brightly, but only just. "I'll pick you up tonight and we'll go to City Hall and your doctor. "
She wanted to tell Greg what had happened; how she had been too afraid to
help Johnny, and what must have happened to him by now. "See you soon," she said, hung up as he was saying, "Goodbye, darling. " Above her, the film was ending, the Department actor grinning through the
last frames of twinkling music. "What do you know that we should know?"
Independence Day
by Sarah Langan
Sarah Langan is a three-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. She is the author the novels The Keeper and The Missing, and Audrey's Door. Her short fiction has appeared in the magazines Lightspeed, Cemetery Dance, Phantom, and Chiaroscuro, and in the anthologies The Living Dead 2, Darkness on the Edge and Unspeakable Horror. She is currently working on a post-apocalyptic young adult series called Kids and two adult novels: Empty Houses, which was inspired by The Twilight Zone, and My Father's Ghost, which was inspired by Hamlet.
If you listen closely to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA," you'll hear real pain beneath the slick guitar solos. The song is a lament for an America where ordinary people mattered and their vote made a difference in the direction of the nation. It was a song written in response to the Vietnam War, and the squawking nationalism that swept the U. S. after the Bicentennial.
But it's the Tricentennial that our next story examines. Polluted and terrorized, somehow America is just as frantically patriotic as it was when the Boss wrote his classic song—and the feeling is twice as empty. Langan says of her piece: "I was working on an homage to Springsteen. I couldn't decide on a particular song, and decided instead on what I thought was the essence of Springsteen; standing up, and fighting for what you believe in a screwed-up world. "
The waiting room is shiny and bright, but the people inside it are dirty. Trina tries not to stare but she can't help herself; she can tell just by looking that a few are addicts trying to score a fix. One lady's wearing a black garbage bag instead of clothes.
Trina waits her turn with her dad, Ramesh. He won't be seeing the doctor today. He's never seen the doctor. He says he's not sick, but he's lying. He coughs all the time, and in the mornings she's seen him spit blood and phlegm into the bathroom sink. Last month, the Committee for Ethical Media installed a television camera in their kitchen because he submitted an unapproved audio to the news opera "Environmental Health. " Instead of running it under a pseudonym like he'd wanted, the editors called the cops. Now the whole family is under house surveillance. Anybody who wants can flip to channel 9. 53256 can see her lard-congealed breakfast table, and the weird foam curlers her mother keeps forgetting to take out of her hair in the morning. Her whole eighth grade class knows that Ramesh's pet name for her is Giggles, and that they can't afford fresh milk. Only one-day soured from the bodega on 78th Street. It's humiliating, and so is he.
While they wait, he puts his hand on the back of her neck and squeezes the skin surrounding her port like he's trying to pull it out. He doesn't understand, even though eighteen Patriot Day channels repeat it day-in and day-out: You can't stop progress!
Trina rubs her bruised cheek and glares at Ramesh. He sighs and lets go of her port. It's a victory, but it doesn't make her happy; it only stirs the piss and vinegar stew in her stomach.
She's carrying the list in the pocket of her spandex jeans. Each visit, her dad makes her write down her complaints before they leave the house, and then goes over them with her. He tells her that he wants to be sure she says the right things so she doesn't get in trouble. But the truth is, he doesn't give crap about her. He's just protecting his own sorry ass.
He got drunk last night at dinner. Her mom, Drea, accidentally took too many vitamins and nodded off at the table. Trina pretended she was a duck, and let it roll off her back. Quack, fricking quack. At least dinner was ready. Peanut butter and Fluff: the ambrosia of champions. But after a few drinks, Ramesh got The look. He started talking through his teeth like a growling dog: "they're pushing me out. Looking over my shoulders all the time. Even the janitors. Cameras everywhere. A man can't work like that. "
He rubbed his temples while he talked like his thoughts were hurting him, and Trina tried to be sympathetic, but she'd heard this song before. Every time he got drunk, it was the same. Meanwhile, cameras were recording his every word, and where would they live if he got fired? Worse, what if that blood in the sink turned out to be cancer, and in a week or a month from now, he was dead?
In the corner, the television was set to "Entertainment this Second!" Drea pretended to be interested in what Ramesh was saying, but she was looking past him, at the show.
"Those fuckers are killing my work!" Ramesh shouted while banging his fist against the table like a gavel. Everything jumped—even his stinking vodka bottle. The salt shaker rolled into her lap. She was scared to call attention to herself by putting it back, so in her lap it stayed. Her little friend, salty. She and salty, against the world.
She hated salty, all of a sudden, because his sides were all greasy with thumbprint scum. She hated her dad, for ruining dinner. She hated their crappy apartment, and the kids at school who called her pink lung. Mostly, she hated the way Ramesh shouted, because Drea was so out of it, Drea had checked out months ago. It was Trina he was yelling at. I can't fix your problems. I'm thirteen years old, remember? she wanted to say.
But she didn't. It would be too hard to explain. The salt spilled like bad luck, and she let the shaker drop from her lap. It rolled under the table. "Fuck you, you fucking no good drunk," she grumbled under her breath, only the words got away from her. They rushed from her chest, and then burst into a ho
ller that practically echoed inside the kitchen. She spun at her mother, to make sure it wasn't Drea who'd spoken. But Drea's earpods were inserted. On the television, beauty queens in bathing suits wrestled in a pool of mud for the title of "hottest bitch. "
Had she really just said fuck you To her own father? She was already blushing from shame when she felt the blow. It came while her head was turned. Her dad, a dirty fighter. Another reason to hate him. At least it was his open palm and not his fist that tore across her face and knocked her out of her chair.
She lay stunned on the floor. From the table, Drea shook her head, "Don't fight, babies. It's beneath you," she said, but she might have been talking to the mud-slingers.
Trina's face broke like glass. Her lips pulled wide, ready to explode into the worst crying jag of her life, so she squeezed her fists so tight her fingernails pierced her skin, and tried to stay calm. Ramesh was kneeling next to her. His long limbs wobbled drunkenly until he gave up kneeling, and sat down. She flinched as he ran the plastic Smirnov bottle along her swelling cheek. It was so cold it got stuck and pulled her skin. "Let me see. Hold still," he told her.
"You're a terrorist," she sobbed. "that's why they want to get you fired. A dirty Indian terrorist," she said, even though she was half Indian, too.
"Shh," he said. "I'm sorry. That was unforgivable. I'll never do it again. " He was still holding the bottle against her skin. He smelled like mice and formaldehyde, and though he wasn't supposed to, he'd worn his white lab coat home from the office. It made him feel important, because he could tell people he was a doctor, too.
Trina tried to stop crying, but she couldn't. She pushed the bottle away and hid her face between her knees. It was dark in there, and she wanted to come out and let him hold her, but she hated him so much.
"I'm so sorry," Ramesh crooned. His long limbs didn't quite fit under the table, so he was hunched like a man in a dollhouse. The air was warmer, because they were both breathing fast in a small space.
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