The Feed

by Nick Clark Windo

  She felt his muscles relax instantly.

  “Don’t!” she cried, and then gulped it back. “Don’t forget: just say your name and I’ll find you. I will follow you, I promise. Just do something big and say your name, and I’ll find you!”

  Whether he heard her she did not know. The displays flatlined and his muscles released as his body died. The columns of colored light flared briefly as the power in the room peaked and then dropped deeply to silence. Just the sound of her ragged breathing remained, the last breaths of the last of her family heaving out on the dry air. Tears had warped her sight. But nothing had changed; everything felt the same as always. Had he too just sacrificed himself for nothing? Given his life for an impossible cause? One of the men had spoken to her but she can’t now make out the words. She listens harder, but his mouth is moving differently from the sounds that come swimming through her ears: “You can stay here with me, of course; you’ll always know where I am, Sylene. But in the meantime, take these to stop the pain. The best I can do. And we’ll work on the infection tomorrow . . .”

  The Pharmacist coughs for her attention and Sylene snaps back. He shakes a cupped palm with pills pooled in the middle, his smile frozen, masklike. These pills are different from the ones before: chalky and white.

  “What . . . what are they?”

  “A basic form of physical painkiller.”

  “I don’t need basic, I need effective,” she grunts, swallowing the memories back down as she takes the pills in her hand. “Can I have more?”

  “Not if you want to wear that body for long. There’s much crudity in them. And it is a nice body, Sylene.” The Pharmacist leans in close to her as she swallows the pills, and the sadness in his voice is gone. It is now, instead, so smooth, and his lips are close to her ear. “So, Sylene, who is he?”

  “Tom Hatfield,” Sylene says, the answer shocked out by his nearness.

  “Hatfield?” The Pharmacist sucks in a breath and takes a walk around the room before turning sharply back. He beetles up close and takes her arm. “Does he suspect you?”

  “No. All he’s concerned about is finding his daughter. Someone told us you’d know where she is. But no, he doesn’t suspect me at all.”

  The Pharmacist leans close, and instead of pulling away this time, she stares into his eyes.

  “He looks at me adoringly, Ethan. He touches me and it makes my skin crawl. I let him—I let him because I’m so . . .”

  The Pharmacist has come so near, he’s now just not quite touching her.

  “But it . . . it makes me sick when he . . .”

  His hair brushes her neck. She doesn’t pull away. She smells his greasy skin just before she feels his dry lips on her collarbone and hears him breathe her in. Then his hands are on her waist and she wraps her arms around his body and begins to sob. The contact is mindless and instinctive: feeling something real, some connection to her home, and grabbing it. When she realizes what she’s doing, she withdraws from him straightaway. He stumbles and looks at her, surprised, before something closes down over the expression on his face.

  “Are you all right, Ethan?”

  The Pharmacist smiles fluidly. The mask is back but the mania dances still in the darkening pools of his eyes. “These are funny times, Sylene,” he says, and shrugs. “Save yourself for Mr. Hatfield. We don’t want him to stop the others from coming back. You might have to kill him yet.”

  The candle has burned low and Tom has turned over. A soft circle of skin pulses at the bottom of his throat. His face is so familiar to her. She had gulped so many old vids of him, and grabs, but this face is different from those images. It has not been maintained well; it is older, more worn than it should be at his age. Time has changed him; he is a different person now.

  “Hey. Tom.”

  He lurches awake and slumps against her. He is naked and bed-warm, and as he burrows into her neck he fumbles to find her fingers, lifts them to his mouth and kisses their tips.

  “Just give me a moment,” he mumbles, and kisses them again.

  Sylene stares ahead, unmoving, as he stretches and nuzzles her neck. She stares at the wallpaper as he makes a tired rumble in his throat, takes the hem of her top and pulls it over her head. His hands caress her bare torso, drawing down to the V of her hips, and he kisses the slight roundness of her belly. He hooks his thumbs into her tracksuit band, tugs it down, stands, and pulls her naked body to his. Sylene feels him swell. She slips a hand between them, runs it up his neck and kisses him quickly on the cheek. “Good night,” she says, and slides into bed where the mattress is still warm.

  Tom, head wilting with semi-sleep, settles himself onto an armchair, picks up his book and opens it carefully. “Don’t worry.” He smiles at her. “I’ll be good watching till dawn. We’ll get you well, and then we’ll get the hell out of here. Find out where that van is and find Bea. All right?”

  Birds wake her, or was it the sound of a door? Tom is naked in the chair, now asleep. She hears people moving on the gravel outside and a muttering hustle of voices. Bile rises in her—Kate’s—gorge and she closes the bathroom door and vomits as quietly as she can.

  Once Tom has woken, they go out onto the veranda. She walks slowly into the sunlight, her joints thick with exhaustion, still feeling deeply nauseated, and leans on the wooden rail. Cats patrol a precisely trimmed lawn, beyond which rows of flower beds stretch, regimented, down to large greenhouses and an encircling redbrick wall.

  Tom gasps.

  “He’s been busy,” Sylene agrees. She’s never seen anything like it. The abundance is beyond her wildest dreams. What her sons would have done to see this. Look at the colorful surface of the earth: plants weave around trellises; their orange flowers droop and burst powder blue amid the leaves and tuberous stems. As Tom supports her across the lawn, she sees that smaller plants are segregated. The Pharmacist has tended them all. Some are soft like down, and everywhere the soil is mulchy, the air fragrant with dew. Not the dry and reddened earth she’s used to. All this life nearly makes her cry. It’s the most joyous thing she’s ever seen. Beyond the beds, the Pharmacist emerges from a greenhouse wearing a wide-brimmed hat. He still has his bow tie on, even though he now sports gardening gloves as well. He makes a shooing motion back toward the house where, on the veranda, chairs and a small table await them.

  “He walks like a bird, don’t you think?” Tom says as he helps her back.

  Sylene glances at the Pharmacist, now loping up the grass behind them. As she sits in the shade, she feels suddenly drowsy. Even this small amount of exertion has drained her. “Or a geklean,” she concurs. She remembers seeing her first as a child as it crawled the plungehole, cleaning and resealing the glass, its padded feet spread, micro-claws finding the roughness in the strengthened polycarbide as it loped, neck long, past her gawking face.

  “A what?” Tom crouches beside her. “Are you delirious?”

  “No, it was something I read as a child . . .”

  The Pharmacist scrapes earth from his shoes and steps onto the veranda. “Sleep well, all?”

  “Ever heard of a geklean?” Tom asks him, still kneeling beside her.

  The Pharmacist, hand paused on the balustrade, looks concerned. “A . . . ?”

  “I think she’s delirious. Are the drugs not working?”

  The Pharmacist smiles with ease. “All will be well, Tom. Let’s see what we have here . . .”

  In his basket are various plants: one with light, flat sprouts, another with trifurcated leaves. He strips them, then Tom makes way as he kneels and flexes his fingers. Before the bandage is fully unraveled, the fabric starts to stain. The dirty mark widens as the lower layers are revealed. When fully removed, the pad is black with slime. Tom gasps in shock.

  “No, no,” the Pharmacist breathes from the floor, “this is good. We’re drawing the toxins out. And this will now fight the infection.” He flicks a viscous substance into a mortar before mixing it with the leaves. Sylene smells chemicals wafting o
ff the cream and a light freshness easing up from the slowly crushed plants. The different smells compete but gradually the substances mix. As he works, the Pharmacist hums the jazz riff from the night before, and, clumsily, Sylene hums too, through her sleep haze, nearly following the tune. Tom listens. She closes her eyes. The air on her face, the coolness of the shade. The humming, her thoughts, melting . . .

  “What is it?”

  “Improvisation!” The Pharmacist laughs, and Sylene tries to blink her suddenly sun-glared double vision back together. “The cream is an antiseptic. Those,” the Pharmacist explains to Tom, nodding up at a box on the table, “are antibiotics. And the plants . . . well, this place is limited and medicine hard to find, so I use what else I can.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Sylene slurs, raising her head weakly to survey the garden, its colors glowing mistily in the sunlight. “You’ve done so well. It’s wonderful to see things grow.”

  “Where we are from,” the Pharmacist tells Tom as he starts to spread the now-green cream onto Sylene’s wound, “that’s to say, where I am from, there was not the opportunity to grow. But all I have done here is to collect these plants and protect them. They’ve done the rest themselves. Isn’t that amazing?”

  Tom narrows his eyes. “Where are you from?”

  Reaching for the bandage, the Pharmacist glances up at Sylene. He has a hidden smile in his eyes. She tries to speak first, but the effort is too much and the Pharmacist starts to hum the tune again as he takes a long time slowly rolling the bandage out.

  “Where are you from?” Tom persists. “Why have you done this to the world?”

  “Tom,” Sylene warns, edging up onto her elbows. “Don’t—”

  “No, Kate, I’m happy to talk,” the Pharmacist soothes her. He takes a stolen moment to frown her back into the chair and then smiles wanly at Tom. “You seem like understanding people. You seem like people who are just. There are at least two sides to this story, and we’re not as bad as everyone thinks. Us ‘taken’ . . .” His fingers flex as they secure the bandage around Sylene’s calf. Then he rests his palm on it, folding his hands around her shin, and leans back to look up at Tom. “We were abandoned. We were hurt too. We were left in pain for generations with no hope of salvation and no chance of escape, like you. Have you ever felt that, Tom? To see such pain in your loved ones that you would kill yourself for them? To feel such pain in yourself—not physical pain, but utter mental anguish, that sort of pain, you know?—have you ever felt so much pain like that that all you desire is to escape your own head? Because otherwise you will lose your mind? Tell me, have you felt that, Tom?”

  Sylene stares up at Tom as he shifts slightly in the face of the Pharmacist’s unwavering gaze. Are those tears in his eyes, as he blinks and nods, or just an illusion caused by her own?

  “We were damned, Tom, actively,” the Pharmacist says curtly. “There were always other choices, to avoid what happened, but they were never taken. What happened was inevitable. Ignorance is no defense. Everyone knew what was coming to pass. We were not considered important, it’s as simple as that. We were not cared for like people who matter. We were set up to be destroyed. And this is revenge for that.”

  “Destroyed by whom?” Tom asks. “Can you slow down a bit here?”

  The Pharmacist glances at Sylene from the corner of his eye and then back. His voice is devoid of emotion, his eyes are hard, but, she notices, his hands tremble. “By you.”

  Sylene’s heart rate rises as Tom’s face screws into a frown.

  “So you’re . . . what, you’re from Iran? You’re . . . Chinese? What on earth did we do that you wanted this revenge?”

  Myriad emotions flicker across the Pharmacist’s face before he snorts and shakes his head. “You don’t deserve to know.”

  A hollow lump of laughter resonates in Tom’s throat. “We don’t deserve to know? You destroy our lives but we don’t deserve to know why?”

  “You destroyed ours first”—the Pharmacist shrugs—“and never told us why.”

  “Our daughter has been abducted! By people turned into animals because of the state you’ve made of the world! And we don’t even get to know why?”

  “If only you knew,” the Pharmacist says, smiling with hollow eyes, “how many children you condemned to death. If only you knew—”

  “You people killed my brother!” Tom cries.

  The Pharmacist stands so suddenly that Tom jumps. Sylene hauls herself to her feet too, dizzily, behind them, reaching out for the Pharmacist’s arm, but he pushes her back, snarling at her. “Brothers, sisters, children, hope—you took everything before we even had it. You didn’t give us a chance! You consumed our world and left us to die. You annihilated us. Look at you—you’re so self-obsessed you don’t even know who we are! So conceited! You disgust me. And you thought there could be no retaliation, because we had no way to get back at you! Well, surprise! A desperate creature is capable of anything, Tom; you, with your technology, with your Feeds, did you never stop to think that someone might surpass you? That someone might find a way to use it all against you? We had no choice! You made us lose our minds! What other hope did we have? We escaped the hell you made, leaving our bodies to burn behind us, and we sent our thoughts out wildly for sanctuary, looking for somewhere safe to tether ourselves, and some of us found you, with your surprisingly open minds.” The Pharmacist’s expression has frozen in contempt, but now it slowly warps in realization of something and he turns to Sylene. “You are animals. Stupid, unaware, incompetent animals. You’re not even worthy of the destruction you’ve caused.”

  “But wait,” Tom says. “The people you take? Jane. Guy. My brother. What happens to them?”

  “Gone.”

  “Their memories?”

  “There’s not enough room for two.”

  Tom’s eyes dart wildly. “And do you choose who you . . . inhabit?”

  “No.” The Pharmacist laughs, looking down at his body apologetically. “We can’t.”

  “And . . .” Tom slumps and then regains himself. “How does it feel? To be free from that turmoil, to escape the mental anguish? How does that feel?”

  The Pharmacist looks suddenly surprised. He runs a hand through his greasy hair. His eyes flick to the dressing on Sylene’s leg, which he bends to tuck in tightly before grinning at her. They hold each other’s gaze. There is something mournful in his eyes. Sylene’s heart pummels her chest. She stood. She stood there in the heat of the sun and knew that it would kill her. She had wanted to die. Like her husband, like her sons. It was their destiny to burn.

  “Like a relief,” the Pharmacist replies.

  The next morning she is sick again and, sweaty, sits on the veranda in the dew. Something is changing with the days: the temperature is dropping and clouds firm up around the horizon. Tom sits beside her. He is always beside her; he will not leave her alone. He asks her who she thinks “they” are and where exactly “they” are from. He reminds her of an anagram, years ago, about China—something about China Lads—and whether she thinks it was them. She takes her pills. A wooziness smothers her mind. An inner swell of sickness. She can no longer string thoughts together; they detach and splash apart. She takes more pills.

  The pain in her leg subsides, but that night the rest of her body worsens. A heavy fever takes her and she is violently sick. Tom bathes her and the Pharmacist re-dresses her wound. She hears them talking, discussing her, their mutual hatred roiling beneath the surface of their words. They can’t leave here now. Tom will not leave her alone. The Pharmacist strokes her skin. In the morning, Tom feeds her soup the Pharmacist has made. She hears him swimmingly through her dreams—dreams of her sole surviving son, of being buried and burning in the sun. She hears him ask the Pharmacist about Bea, about the van; how Claire told them it had come here. She can hear the hatred in his voice. The Pharmacist must hear it too. He tells Tom, “Let’s get that leg healed first.” Then he feeds her more pills, and makes her drink, and scrapes out an
d recleans her wound.

  Fever dreams swirl for days until they curl away as she cools. Her body relaxes and at some time her thoughts take grip again and loop together as she comes back from the shadows, where flickering ghosts of things that were and things that might have been had appeared equally real.

  They are sitting, Sylene and Tom, in silence on the veranda, as they have been doing for days: she in a chair with a bucket at her side and he, as always, beside her. His chin is thick with stubble and his eyes will no longer settle. Every day he asks if she’s well enough to leave, when can they leave to search for Bea? They watch the Pharmacist tend the garden and talk politely when he returns. She wants to ask the Pharmacist things, they swell like a deluge inside her stomach, but Tom is always there, he is there right now between them.

  Then, as the birds take to the air in the early-evening breeze, a guard rounds the hedge by the lawn. “A rabble!” he shouts, waving, raising his gun toward the gates.

  “Ah!” The Pharmacist curls out of his chair and tilts his hat. “What have they got?”

  The guard shrugs and calls, “Fuel and stuff. They said that’s what you wanted.”

  “Well, tell them next time we want meat!” He spins to Tom and Sylene and lowers his voice. “You do like meat?”