Dead Weight

by Casamassina, Matt

“We’re a bit scattered,” Zephyr admitted. “But we happened upon your posting while we were in New Mexico, so I guess you could say we’re from there.”

  “Oh? Well that makes you three our farthest travelers yet then.”

  She studied them a moment. “So listen, I’m not particularly proud of our meet and greet here, but as I’m sure you know, there’s lots of bad news out there and it pays to be careful. I know you’ve got questions. Come on inside and we’ll see if we can answer some of them.”

  She waved the rest of her party over and made perfunctory introductions. Then she turned back to them. “Now, I like you three already, but that doesn’t mean I trust you just yet. Pan here is gonna follow behind us in case you’re thinking about trying anything you shouldn’t. I assume we’re not gonna have any problems.”

  “You assume correctly,” Zephyr said.

  “Good. When we get to the entrance, we’re gonna pat you down and then you’ll be allowed to enter with me.” Satisfied that they understood, she started off.

  Half an hour later, the three of them found themselves at the head of a long marble table in some conference room, only the flicker of the fluorescents to keep them company. It might have been any meeting area in any office building across the country, but there were no real windows and the door locked from the outside. There was, however, an approximation of a window cut into one wall and adorned with black glass. A focus group test center turned interrogation room.

  “Well, this is fun. So now what?” Aurora asked.

  “We wait. Not much else to do.” He turned to Jordan and stroked the little girl’s hair. “How you holding up, kid?”

  “Good. I hope these people are nice.”

  “I think they are,” Zephyr said.

  “I have to say, this isn’t what I was expecting,” Aurora began. “I mean, I don’t know what I was expecting, to be honest, but it wasn’t this.”

  “Hippies and cornfields?” Zephyr mused.

  “Maybe.” She smiled. “I sort of… yes, actually. Hippies and cornfields.”

  “Maybe that’s how they started, but someone probably came along and shot them and burned the fields. And here we are,” he said. It was a joke, but Aurora definitely didn’t get it, or if she did, she didn’t like it, so he added, “Or I don’t know— maybe the hippies and cornfields are in the back?”

  Just then, the lock turned, the door opened and in came four people, their pink-haired escort the only recognizable figure in the group. Zephyr braced himself for old men and women in lab coats, military garb, or both, and was instead greeted by civilians in daywear, all of whom looked to be in their twenties save one. A single man and three women, counting Catherine.

  The man was easily the oldest of the assembly. He was short, bald, with tanned skin, a small nose adorned with glasses and eyes as unrevealing as the window behind him. He was well groomed, his black hair shaven, his nails trimmed. He took a seat at the table next to Zephyr and smiled.

  “My name is Alec,” he said with the thinnest of accents. Middle Eastern. “To my left is Janis and to her left is Karen. Nice to make your acquaintance.” The man extended his hand and Zephyr shook it.

  “You’re probably wondering what’s going on, who we are, what our purpose is, and so forth, and we will, of course, get to that in due time. But first, we have to ask you some questions. Will this be all right?”

  Zephyr Nodded. “Sure.” Both Aurora and Jordan replied in turn.

  “Good. We understand you journeyed from New Mexico to find us. Why?”

  “Well, New Mexico was beginning to run its course. But mostly because you said you have some answers,” Zephyr said.

  “And why do you carry your weapons?”

  Was this a trick question? Zephyr glanced at Aurora. “For protection.”

  The man locked eyes with him. “Mr. Zephyr, have you engaged in warfare with anybody since the disappearances?”

  He asked in the nonchalant tone of a man querying about the time of day, and yet Zephyr felt the weight of the question.

  “Engaged in warfare? What… I don’t understand. What does this have to do with anything?” he asked in return. “We’ve traveled halfway across the country to find you. Look at us. We’re a couple of teenagers and a little girl. What do you think we are?”

  The man’s face showed nothing. He could’ve bluffed anyone in Vegas. “I ask you again. Have you engaged in warfare? It is a simple question.”

  “Well then, no. My simple answer is no. I have protected myself. And these two—they’ve never even used their guns.”

  “Please explain how you protected yourself,” the man said.

  “What does it matter?”

  “Humor me.”

  The boy sighed. “Fine. Sure. Whatever.” He met the man’s gaze. “I’ve protected myself. That’s all I’ve ever done.” And so he began, first recounting his friendship with Ross and what came after, and next with the story of the twins and the nightmare scenario that followed. Although the retelling was summarized, he touched upon all the major events, omitting none of the incriminations. When he was done, he met the man’s eyes. “That enough for you?”

  “Yes, that’ll be enough, Alec. Thank you,” said the blonde woman. He thought her name was Janis.

  “Very well.” Alec rose, thanked Zephyr for his candor, and bid them farewell.

  “You might have lied, you know. Why didn’t you?” the woman asked. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a tight pony tail that revealed a pale, bony face. Not anorexic, but in the neighborhood.

  “What the hell is the point of this, anyway? If I murdered someone, I’m unfit for your little city, is that it?”

  When she didn’t answer, his anger surged. “I woke up one morning and my parents were gone. The first person I met was a psychopath and the second was a sweet little girl. None of us know what the hell is going on. We’re just trying to survive like everyone else. But I’m not a murderer, so if that’s not good enough for you, you can go screw yourself. How’s that? I’m done answering these questions.”

  She stared back at him in silence and after an awkward moment, she finally asked, “Feel better?”

  “Not really.”

  “I admire your tenacity, Zephyr. I do. But you’ve come to our house, so show a little respect for our process. We are here to determine if you belong in one or another group of post-apocalypse survivors.” She found his eyes and nodded. “As you said, one is allowed entry into our community. The other is not.”

  The woman clasped her hands together and let them fall back into her lap. “May I continue now?”

  He shrugged.

  “You said it yourself. You met a psychopath. And then you met a sweet girl.” She looked at Jordan and smiled. “Thankfully, girls like her have never proven uncommon, but the other kind—

  the aggressive, the violent, the sociopathic, the altogether deranged, these are, shall we say, less prevalent in modern society. So don’t you find it a little odd that in this new world with such a dwindled population, the first man you encountered fit the latter bill and not the former?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. It wasn’t a lie.

  “What if I told you that everyone living today could be categorized into non-aggressive or aggressive, non-violent or violent, empath or sociopath or worse yet, psychopath?” she asked. “The old man you met. The slave men who killed your friends. Whoever hung that dead body at the state limit. I can cite dozens more examples from my own experiences.”

  “I would ask, what are you getting at?”

  She smiled. “Well, first off, I’m letting you know officially that I don’t think you’re a sociopath, and second, that you, Aurora and Jordan are welcome here. Third, I’m sorry that you don’t appreciate the way we came about this, but I assure you that it is a necessary part of our process—a process developed over months and not unscathed by serious setbacks. Mishaps that we are hopeful shall never be repeated.”

  “Thank you,” Zephyr s
aid, and relaxed a little. “Look, I’m really sorry. I know I went on the defensive there, but I just felt like I was being attacked. Trust me when I say that we all understand that you need to be careful.”

  “Yes, and we all appreciate that you are allowing us to stay,” Aurora added.

  Janis flashed a genuine smile. “We are happy to have good people. We frankly need all the good people we can get.”

  “Your website called Alpha a city, but from what I can tell, it’s more of a compound. No offense intended,” Zephyr said.

  “None taken,” she said and laughed. “Yeah, we get that a lot. I think it’s important to remember that Alpha is just the beginning of something bigger.” She nodded at her companion. “It’s already grown so much. Not long ago, it was just us. Karen here is my younger sister.”

  Sister? Another sibling. How was this possible? It had to be more than just coincidence. There was a resemblance, but the similarity pronounced itself only now that the two of them confirmed the relation. Her hair was a little darker, her features smoother, and her voice softer.

  “When the world ended,” Janis continued, “I was in San Francisco and she was down here. I made the journey to find her and then we were two. We met some good people, and then we met some bad people. It was after the bad ones that we realized we needed to band together with the good.”

  “We stayed in my apartment for weeks,” her sister added.

  “By chance, one morning while I was out scavenging the grocery stores for water—this was shortly after the pipes ran dry here—I met a man named Trey Sorrenson. Then we were three. And Trey, well he’s one of the great ones. A former engineer. He changed everything for us.”

  “Yahoo,” Karen added.

  “That’s how we got the website, and that’s when it came together. It’s only been a couple months since then, but we’ve grown from two to three to dozens and now hundreds. We’ve taken over a city block. We’ve got smart people working on big problems and we’ve got an army so that we can protect our own.”

  “We may not yet be a full-fledged city, but I’m guessing we’re the closest thing left. In fact, we might represent the largest community of humans alive. And we’re growing every day,” Karen said.

  Hundreds of people. Compared to the former population, it was a microscopic figure, but none of them had seen more than a few survivors at a time in months.

  “What kind of big problems are you working on, if you don’t mind me asking?” Aurora asked.

  “The obvious ones, for starters. Clean water and sustainable food. To that end, we’ve tapped back into the city’s water supply. It’s not what it used to be, but we’re able to purify it. We’ve been sending parties out to the purification plants to gather intelligence on automation and we think we’re getting closer. In the meantime, we do it manually, and it takes some time, but it works. Food is harder. We’ve got storage units full of canned goods and freezers packed with perishables, but frankly our system isn’t yet sustainable. That’s why we’re remaking the landscape—doing away with the old roads and planting for the future.”

  “Why not just move to farmland?” Zephyr asked.

  Janis leaned back in her chair. “That has its own set of issues. Water supply is harder. Electrical is a joke. And we’d lose access to the benefits of the city. There are dangers, yes, but we have strength in numbers and more often than not we can still find what we need here, whether it’s Internet access for guidance—and believe me, that alone is worth it—gasoline for generators or access to medical supplies. On top of everything else, we already have the structural facilities to support a growing community here. The more people who join us, the more buildings we occupy. Out in the middle of nowhere, we’d have to build, and we’re not there yet.”

  “Sounds pretty smart,” Aurora said.

  “Thank you, Aurora. Like I said, though, those are the obvious ones. We also want to unravel what exactly happened to cause the disappearances. And why the people left are the way they are.”

  So they didn’t really know what happened, Zephyr thought. “Why the people are the way they are?”

  “Yes. We touched on this earlier, Zephyr. Empath or sociopath. All of us at this table, and the hundreds more in our community, fall into the former. Let me ask you something. Have you ever been so angry that you just wanted to punch something or someone?”

  “Sure,” Zephyr acknowledged.

  “What stopped you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said and shrugged. “I guess I just realized that it wasn’t going to help.”

  “Yes, but that is cognitive reasoning and cognitive control at work. Self-control, in other words, not to mention a dash of social conscience. You are able to imagine the worst, but you respect the boundaries between imagination and reality.” She surveyed the entire group. “The differences between us and the outsiders is that we possess those cognitive resources and they do not, but more importantly, they are dangerous on top of it all. These are people who may feign normal behavior but when pushed, they will throw cognitive reasoning out the window and turn instead to ultra-aggressive behavior without consideration of the consequences. Not just prone to violence, but underneath it all, violent.”

  Aurora looked at Zephyr and then back to Janis. “I’m sorry. Huh?”

  “I think I see,” the boy said.

  “But I’m not sure that you do,” Janis replied. “It has never been so black and white. Not before. The spectrum was a long, stretching gradient. You might have been cognitively able and still sociopathic. Or maybe lacking full self-control but just a pain in the ass. A child throwing a tantrum, not a serial killer. You understand? But this is not so today.” She locked eyes with them. “In our experience so far, everyone – every single person we’ve met—leans hard into one group or the other.”

  “OK, you’re right. I’m actually not so sure I understand what you’re getting at here,” Zephyr said.

  “I definitely don’t,” Aurora agreed.

  “Imagine,” replied Karen, “that the world is a chess board. Now how might the game change if someone removed all the pieces except for the two kings? On one side, white. On the other, black.”

  Goose-bumps raced along Zephyr’s flesh. “Good and bad. That is what you’re saying.”

  Karen spread her hands in acknowledgement. “Yes. Polar opposites. First and last. Beginning and end. Alpha and Omega.”

  “And make no mistake—this is chess,” her sister said. “The disappearances are not randomized. Someone or something has methodically set up the board.”

  “So Janis believes, anyway. We don’t know that. Not for sure, anyway. What we do know is that everyone alive today— good or bad, empath or sociopath, however you want to define us –— we all share something in common.”

  “What?” Zephyr asked.

  She smiled. “Come on. I want to you to meet someone.”

  Janis, Karen and Catherine led them into a large lobby appointed with a series of impressionistic paintings depicting beaches, sunsets, shells or fish. Zephyr thought it odd to decorate in this fashion when tourists could see everything in these prints and more by walking outside.

  “This main building is home to all of our amenities,” Janis explained, making mock quotations with her fingers to emphasize the last word. “Restaurants turned into kitchens and cafeterias on the first floor. Outside, the pool, which is used far less for swimming than it is community bathing, although it’s still a hit with the kids. The second-floor gym has been converted into a training center for our soldiers. The equipment is still there for those who want to use it, but there are also weapons and melee instruction, which Cat can tell you about when we’re done here.”

  “Happy to,” the pink-haired woman said.

  Janis continued, “The third floor used to feature meeting rooms, but we tore down the walls and set up our operations. That’s where we’re headed now.”

  “What’s in the other building?” Aurora asked.

 
“Just people. How many now, Kar?”

  “Well, we have 350 rooms, every one of them occupied with at least two people.”

  “Wow—sounds like business is booming,” Aurora joked. “So when you say Alpha houses hundreds, we’re really talking closer to a thousand?”

  “We’re just about there, yeah. Partly why we’ve needed to expand. We’re out of room.”

  In the elevator, Aurora’s hand found his and she smiled. Zephyr took Jordan’s in his other. For the first time in a very long while, he felt like he had family and community — at least, the closest to both these days. It certainly didn’t hurt that the simple action of riding an elevator was as much a part of the old world as fast food and amusement parks.

  The doors parted to reveal a vast, open floor gutted of nearly all extravagance. The marble tiles of the lobby were gone. Whatever material had covered the floors previously had been stripped away until only chalky gray cement remained. Thick, round pillars of concrete, chipped and cracked, extended from floor to ceiling at regular intervals, the only architectural obstruction between the elevator and enormous windows that gazed forever upon the forgotten sea. The space was huge. The size of an underground parking lot. Which, come to think of it, was exactly what it looked like. However, this facade was shattered the minute Zephyr glanced up, for those same crystal chandeliers hung from a ceiling covered in an oily mural of angels and horses flying across a wispy cloudscape.

  Great, stretching portions of the space were empty, but a conglomerate of oak desks, with just as many computers and monitors, laptops, television sets, and other mystery mechanisms, was positioned at the center. Medical machinery rested in one corner. And wires of all kinds ran in every direction. At least a dozen people sat before monitors peppered throughout the space.

  “As you can see, we keep a steady eye on our perimeter, but also the outlying buildings and city blocks. Anybody steps within a mile of us, and we’ll see them coming. We saw you folks sneaking around about an hour before our shooters stopped you. We can also see and communicate with those manning our expansion units from here. And there’s plenty more, from research to outreach,” she said, waving a hand at the desks. Then she pointed to the medical configuration. “And that’s where we’re headed, but first, you need to understand why.”