The Feed

by Nick Clark Windo

  Tom drops the knife. His hands are sticky with blood, viscous and dripping slowly from his wounds. He spits and gags. He turns to where Sylene was, but she’s not there anymore; now she’s standing, holding a bleeding arm to her bruising face, and Tom realizes that the sound in his ears, over the snarling and gnashing and his own grunting cries, the awful sound he has been hearing is her screaming.

  They break into another house many streets away. The wounds on Tom’s hands and face burn with each contorted pulse. There is something rancid downstairs but they raid the drawers and cupboards on the upper floors. Looking for bandages. Looking for ointment and water with which to wash their wounds. Sylene comes into the bedroom, where he is tearing T-shirts into strips. Her hands are full of tubes, all of them marked with quickcodes.

  “Any of these?”

  “No idea,” he says, grabbing them, squeezing, smelling the curls of gel. “I think this is lip balm. I’ve no idea about this. Here—does this smell right?” He holds a tube under her nose, palming some of the cream.

  “I’ve no idea. Medicine’s very different for me. The nanobots . . .”

  He nods briskly. “Well, this is going to have to do. Did you find any water?”

  Sylene shakes her head.

  “Come on.”

  They go to the bathroom: once-white enamel is now stained and crusted; a shower curtain hangs furry with mold. The toilet evaporated dry years ago. Tom licks and sucks his hands. He hawks thick blood into the sink. He spits into his palms and rubs his fingers into the wounds on his face, wincing, gasping with the pain, smearing the surprisingly hot blood into whorls.

  Sylene stands close. Her voice is quiet, her face bloodlessly pale. “Tom. Are you all right?”

  He stops. Looks in the mirror. What looks back is covered in layers of dirt and blood, mixed like a painter’s palette. It is a different man. He is gaunt, his cheekbones prominent, with deep dark bags beneath his eyes. They stare, wide and angry. There’s something animal in them. He’s never noticed it before. His hands are shaking. And his face now starts to judder. He blows out his cheeks as he lowers himself slowly to the edge of the bath. A whimper comes out, unintended. Sylene puts a hand on his head and runs her fingers through his blood-soaked hair. He takes her arm and turns it gently to look at the wound.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “I was lucky.”

  He brings her arm to his face. The wound tastes sharp, the blood warm. He sucks and spits. He flicks his tongue along the cut and spits again, and then he wipes his lips. She lowers her arm, and spits on both her thumbs, and sets about cleaning his face.

  They leave the house with bloodstained ribbons of fabric wrapped about their limbs. They walk like each step costs them, but they are walking hand in hand. The city is silent. Golden sunlight slices down from a powder-blue sky through crisp and frosty air.

  “We’re not far now. We’ll hit a super-road soon.”

  “Have you killed people before?”

  They kick through piles of dry and scattered leaves. Dogs bark somewhere, their gnashing yelps echoing the ruins. Once quiet, Tom and Sylene proceed.

  “Twice. You?” he asks, and she shakes her head. He nods. “Then it’s my job, so you never have to.”

  They reach the super-road and trudge up the ramp, the city warping in the wraps of thickened glass at its sides.

  “What did it want?”

  Tom glances at her, at her life: the warmth in her cheeks, the fear darkening her eyes. He remembers its gaunt face. The expression in its eyes, dilated, excited, desperate.

  “Food? Does it really matter?”

  She nods. And thinks. “And what was with its lip?”

  “It must have been a Resister. An extreme one.” Tom gestures at his own face and ears. “People had augmentations: microphones and speakers implanted in their skin. But then there were stories about people being bugged. Government and corporate surveillance. It was expensive to have them removed, so it became a mark of honor, among some groups, to do that to your face.”

  They are on the top of the super-road now and leaving the older area behind. Houses spread. Maybe not all of them are empty. Maybe humanity, in some form, survives. The road arcs over a band of newer-builds, each upturned bowl containing blocks of buildings and overgrown parks, the domes like drained and broken globes, the dwellings like models within. Ahead, in the distance, the river spreads like quicksilver. Standing tall before the swollen water, the tower pierces the sky.

  They reach the sloping sides of the super-mall, its contours, once crystal, opaque. It rises above them massively like a sunken, landed cloud.

  “I don’t think we want to go in there,” Tom says, pointing into the dark tunnel where the road carries on into the side of the thing. “But up there . . .” he continues, raising his arm toward the tower, the glassy canine that erupts from the center of the mall and makes him feel so very cold, “that’s where we’ll find Bea.”

  As he lifts Sylene up the wall beside the road, his wounds split and his bandaged hands darken with fresh blood. He scales the wall himself, trying not to use his left hand at all and only the fingers on his right. As they traverse the narrow sloping walkway, the road drops down into the bowels of the building below them; to their left lies the patchwork spread of broken roofs, the Sunday-morning feel of empty streets in a crisp fresh breeze. He hasn’t known for years what day it is. What does the world care about that?

  They hug the curved building until they emerge onto a wide plaza, tiny amid the brown-boned arc lights and the huge translucent curve framing the entrance to the mall. They walk slowly across the expanse and up to the rolling side of the thing. “Careful,” Tom says as he bends tiredly through a jagged hole in a twisted-framed door. But it is his own rucksack that catches on the shards, and he panics, stumbles, landing on his hands on the glass-showered floor. Sylene drops beside him as he sits there, stunned.

  “You’ve lost a lot of blood. You should eat.”

  “I’m fine,” he says, struggling to stand. He can’t stop now: he can’t. Bea flashes in his mind, crying, imploring him on and on. But if she isn’t here . . . if her BackUps haven’t actually been saved . . . “I’m just tired, Sylene. Come on—”

  “No. We should eat.” Sylene takes the rucksack off him and pushes him back to the ground. “We don’t know what’s here, what we have to be prepared for.” She peers over his shoulder. Escalators ascend from this white-walled atrium. At the top is a high-domed space of struts and light, but more than that they can’t see.

  They sit in silence, with food, and Tom stares at the ground—for all his stillness, his thoughts are awhirl. Each step they take now brings them closer to the Hub, to Bea, to see if Sylene told him the truth.

  Once they have eaten, she helps him stand and pull his bag back on. She tightens the straps and holds his shoulders firmly. “Listen,” she says, and takes his hands. “Whatever we find, Tom, whatever has happened to Bea, I’m here. I lost my family too. I know how you feel. I can still be here for you.”

  Tom knows there are tears in his eyes, and he expects that she can feel his heart beating in his hands, it’s thumping so hard. After a while he puts an arm around her shoulders and pulls her to his chest. In the absence of words, it’s all he can do. But soon she pushes him away.

  “I can’t breathe!” she gasps.

  On the escalators, the sensation of the metal and the sound it makes under Tom’s boots is disorientatingly familiar to him. At the top, though, the mall opens out into an expanse of refuse and glass that knocks back his memories of this place. Shop windows are hillocks of cascaded crystal. Bags and packaging clog the way. The tables, chairs, and umbrellas outside cafés are overturned. The plants in the raised beds have died.

  Air escapes him.

  “This was a good place,” he whispers. “I broke in with Ben to play here when they were building it. And then at night, when it was finished, when everyone had gone, I’d come down here alone.”

&nb
sp; “You lived here?”

  Tom gestures with his head. “In the tower, above the Hub. All the offices and our apartments.”

  Over them, the white struts are laced with dirty webs. Filthy cocoons dangle down. The curved glass of the complex is mottled, but he can still just see through it and glimpse the tower that rises above, the top few floors his childhood home.

  “So that’s where your homeHub is too, up there?”

  Tom nods and they move on. Most shops have been ransacked and all the corridors are layered with dust. Wide paw marks trail through it, and the circular sweeps of tails. Cobwebs block entire corridors with gossamer layers, stretched tight and lumpen in places with trussed-up things. They cross dark patches on the marble, deep stains of blood, but there are no bodies to be seen. Two domes of the mall meet above them in an atrium, beneath which an oval light-well drops. Tom leans over the balcony and looks at the darkened floors below. Grayish piles in the food hall move ceaselessly; rippling things writhe. An ammonia stench is so pungent it gives the air a heat-like haze.

  “It’s the smell.” He breathes heavily as tears come to his eyes. “I never wanted to see this.”

  “Well, let’s find Bea and get out.”

  “I’m scared they’re alive, Sylene.”

  “Who?”

  “My parents.”

  “Well . . .” She puts a hand on his shoulder; looks at him, thinks, and then clearly chooses to say something else. “Well, we can leave. We can find Bea another way. We’ll work something out. However hard things get, Tom, there is always a choice.”

  The gentle clatter of scattering glass echoes around the space.

  Along the oval balcony, at their level, from the mouth of another wide corridor, a dog emerges from the shadows. Its thick neck and heavy shoulders catch the daylight as it sniffs and turns things over with its nose. Its pelt is filthy, its jaw hard-set. Canines protrude from its lips. Another beast follows, and another behind that. They circle the balcony toward them.

  “Sylene—” Tom whispers, but she already has a finger to her lips.

  The animals have come halfway. One has found some cloth to chew and grunts as it tears it apart. Tom points back the way they have come and they move, treading lightly, the smallest crack of glass making them freeze in fear. Two of the dogs disappear down another corridor, their silhouetted hulks lurching in the reflected light, but the last one stares through the glass of the balustrade at them. No—it’s panting, openmouthed, peering down at the food hall below. Its breath steams the glass, its eyes fixed on something. Then it shrugs itself after the others.

  Sylene takes Tom’s hand and pulls him quickly along the corridor. They stop halfway down and Tom takes them to a set of double doors that open into an enclosed concrete stairwell. What little light there was is lost as the doors close, and he feels back for her hands in the darkness.

  “We’re going seven floors up,” he says. “Hold on to me.”

  He shuffles forward. Reaching out blindly, he connects with the banister and starts to climb. There are things on the stairs, lumps that he works his way around. Sometimes things scratch his legs, sharp like bone. He pretends he’s a child again. Eyes closed. He used to know this place backward and forward, with Ben, at night, when only the faint red security lights were on. He stands on something that slides across the step and flies into the stairwell, clanging its way down, bouncing off the banisters, until it lands. A screaming barrage erupts from the darkness below, setting off similar screams above and around and the sound of scrabbling claws and writhing fur, until it slowly succumbs to silence.

  Seven floors up, they struggle to find the door, banging their hands against the perfectly smooth wall until a chink of light expands. They heave against a weight that keeps the door wedged closed, but they force it slowly open and squeeze out into the corridor. The ceilings are lower up here and the floor is covered with more debris: piles of things that had been bodies. No flesh now, but cloth-wrapped bones. Dissolved matter is stained into the marble. The mass weighing the door closed is a skeleton, contorted and confused, disjointed.

  Sylene groans through the hand that’s at her mouth again.

  “You didn’t mean this, Sylene,” Tom tells her, though his voice is dead. “Remember, it wasn’t your fault.”

  He has to remind himself of this too, as they climb over the bodies toward the oval light-well. Struts crisscross the space this high. The foyer of a cinema. Quickcode poster boards flaying. Popcorn shriveled in its bins. Something has ransacked the sweets. Tom stops by a patch of empty wall.

  “This is the way in?” Sylene sounds dubious.

  “This is how I came down at night. Look . . .”

  On the wall, below his knee, part hidden by scuffs and time, but still there, is etched a T.

  “The tower is nano-proof and sterilized. Or at least it used to be.”

  “So how do we get in?”

  “Magic,” Tom announces, and sweeps his hand out wide.

  When the wall remains shut, his face falls. He runs his palms over the surface until his fingers find a protrusion whose tiny perforations are clogged with dust. He blows on the BioLock, hard, and the wall jolts back and disappears to one side. Tom turns, beaming through the crusted blood and filth on his face, and gestures for Sylene to enter. Hands on her back, he hurries her into the darkness and the door seals tightly behind them. They ascend stairs, plunging deeper into the shadows. It’s just like it was, running through the place, the night-timed lights subdued. Ben and him as kids, slightly older than Bea was—than Bea would be. Is.

  Nearly there. There is a strange spring in his step as he overtakes Sylene and rushes on, pulling her along curved corridors until they mount a walkway that takes them up and devastation emerges around them.

  Sylene gasps and stumbles over the debris as the space expands above.

  “Well,” Tom sighs, “I’m not surprised. Nothing’s impregnable.” He is light-headed and his hands are numb. He spins around, arms out, gazing up into the space. Then and now collide: as a child, he stood here, awed by it all, by the people busy around him, searching the crowd for his father, too busy; now he stumbles on a mound of wires. “They must have gone insane. Being here, in the Hub of the Feed, but unable to make it work.” The Hub is battered and smashed. Circuits ripped out, the metal gantries surrounding it dangling from the walls. “Is it how you imagined it?”

  They are standing in the innards of the Hub, knee-deep and unsteady. Sylene’s forehead creases, her arms across her stomach. The room is very, very high. The Hub towers for stories up to a distant roof of glass. Machine parts have been hurled down and lie in piles, cortices of wires tangled across the floor.

  “Tom, I’m so sorry.”

  “Oh, I never thought it would be intact.” Tom grins. His thoughts are racing as he spreads his arms out and, his voice echoing, cries up into the cavernous space. “And even if it was, the power’s down! The emergency generators would conserve their power for the locks and lifts and doors.”

  “Tom . . . So . . .” Sylene’s face is crumpled and flushed. “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going upstairs.”

  His voice hardens. He yanks Sylene over the twisted debris. Even when she stumbles and falls, he pulls her, dragging her from the Hub, ignoring her pleas to slow down. No time. It’s now. To see if she was lying to him. To see if he’s lost Bea. Faint light stretches around the curves of the corridors, strange silhouettes dancing on the walls until they reach a portal in the rain-dirtied wall, a dense reflective door.

  “Go on.” Tom pushes her forward hard, and she stumbles.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The BioLock. Your turn.” And when she doesn’t move, he continues as if explaining to a child. “This is the private lift to the apartments. So go closer,” he urges. “Wave your hand. Breathe out. It’ll know Kate’s here.”

  “But—”

  “Do it!”

  Sylene shakes her hands towa
rd the portal. It turns opaque, slides back to reveal a booth.

  “See. It doesn’t know that you’re not you. You’re family, Sylene!”

  “Tom, you’re scaring me.”

  But he is past her and inside. “Come on, Sylene, come on.”

  “You’re scaring me, Tom.”

  “Get in the fucking lift!”

  The door slides shut as soon as she enters, and the acceleration is immediately smooth. They score up the building in the light of the cityscape and the widening horizon beyond. “That’s where we came from, look!” He waits for her to turn, then continues as if without a pause. “And there—you see all that water? The barriers have burst. That’s the river. Why are you crying?”

  “Tom, you’re manic.” She pulls away from him as he dances from foot to foot. His hands are pumping. Eyes wild. “What are you going to do if there’s bad news?”

  With perfect deceleration the lift stops. The door illuminates, turns translucent, and opens.

  “Welcome home!” he announces.

  Mezzanine levels rise above them. The air hasn’t moved for years. The curved glass wall sweeps up for stories, holding out an immensity of view. Huge floorboards, painted white, and glass tables and arcing lights. A wormy woolen rug stretches away to the sofas. Screen plinths by the walls, atom-thin and dull. Vases where the flowers have died and become dirty impressions of themselves. Tom remembers when they arrived to live here, without knowing that was why they’d been summoned. Ben had welcomed them in. Right here. Told them the theory: That people were being invaded. That someone was taking over their brains. Sitting there on the settees. When his parents were still here. When Ben was alive. When Bea was—when Kate was still—