Dead Weight

by Casamassina, Matt

  She turned around again and motioned for someone to come. A man with the thickest beard Zephyr had ever seen — it seemed to consume his face — hurried over. Zephyr could see immediately that this one would never bald. He wore a dark t-shirt stretched over a protruding potbelly. There was no way to judge his age. He might’ve been in his late twenties or early forties.

  “This is Carl,” she said, grasping the man’s shoulder. “Say hi, Carl.”

  “Hi, Carl,” the man said, and smiled.

  “Before the disappearances, Carl worked at a laundry mat. Afterward, Carl made the single most important discovery about the disappearances.”

  The man shook his head. “She makes this introduction every time and every time I say that it was dumb, stupid luck.”

  “And every time I respond that luck may have played its part, but that it was his intuition that got the ball rolling.” She faced the group again. “Everyone who comes into our community meets me, Karen and Carl. After, we’ll draw your blood, but I’ll let Carl explain why.”

  “Sure. Sure,” Carl started. “So, the little one is probably a little too, uh, little, but how many of you use computers — or used them?”

  “I know how to use a computer,” Jordan interjected, clearly cross with his presumption.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sure that you do.”

  “We’re all pretty familiar with them, I think,” Zephyr said.

  “Good. Good. So hold on, I’m getting ahead of myself. As you know, Janis and Karen are sisters and yet they’re both still here. This strikes you as odd given how few of us are around and about these days, yes?”

  The three of them nodded in unison, Jordan mostly to be polite.

  “Yes, well it struck me as odd, too, when I first met them some months ago. So I started to think about how that could be, and it occurred to me, as I’m sure it has to you, that we survivors must share something in common. And that maybe Janis and Karen could simply tell me what that something was because they both had it.”

  “Which is when the questions began,” Karen interrupted.

  Carl smiled again, pearly white teeth engulfed by beard. “Yes, I know. How many times must I apologize?”

  Karen’s voice deepened in mock impression. “Let me see the color of your eyes. Do you have any birthmarks? What about genetic defects? Are you diabetic?”

  “Well, it’s a needle in a haystack,” he said.

  “What do computers have to do with it?” Zephyr asked.

  “Oh, right, well that is how I explain it, that’s all. And actually it might be a bad analogy here because you’re all pretty young. But anyway, I love computers. Always have. When I was younger, I used to program in Q Basic, which is useless today. Anyway, this was before and during Windows. First, we used Microsoft DOS and then we shell—”

  “You’re going way off the path here, Carl,” Janis interrupted.

  The man snorted. “Sorry.”

  “Blood type,” she reminded him.

  “Sure, sure, that first. So how many of you know what blood type you are?” he asked and then raised a hand. “Now don’t tell me what it is if you do.”

  “I do,” Aurora said.

  Zephyr had no idea. Neither did Jordan.

  Carl turned to Aurora, whose face showed skepticism, and said, “You’re AB negative.”

  The revelation wiped her expression clean. “How?” she asked, clearly astonished. “And… yes.”

  “It’s not a lucky guess. We all are,” he said and nodded toward Zephyr and Jordan. “You as well. Everyone on this floor. Everyone still breathing oxygen on this planet, in fact. It’s at least one trait that all of us share. And very likely the reason we’re still here.”

  “So the set up over there,” Janis said. “That’s where we confirm everybody is AB negative. And everybody is. Hundreds tested. There’s nobody here who isn’t.”

  “It was when I started to think about myself, and what I might share in common with Janis and Karen, that I hit upon blood type,” Carl said. “I knew I was AB negative and I knew it was rare — although, just how rare, I had no idea. So eventually my questions turned to blood type and that’s how we hit upon it. Later, we secured the equipment to test it and that’s when we confirmed it.”

  “I seem to remember us getting pretty drunk after that,” Karen said.

  “I’m glad one of us can remember,” her sister joked.

  “Do you know how many people in the United States are AB negative?” Carl asked. When nobody answered, he continued. “Well, it’s different in Caucasians, Hispanics, etcetera, but we whiteys are the most likely to have this blood type. And we max out at one percent. Let me just say that again. One percent of the population, at best. And more likely, something like half that considering all the different makeups of people.”

  “Wow,” Aurora said.

  “Yeah, that about sums it up,” the man agreed. “Now, if you do the math, and I have, you start with roughly 300 million people here. And by here, I mean America, of course. Then you do away with all the other blood types—all the variants of Os, and As, both of them more prevalent—you exclusively use Caucasians as the high, and you’ve got maybe three million folks left across the country. But that’s not accurate, either, because America isn’t just comprised of whites, and the number happens to be considerably less for everyone else. Only 0.3 percent of African Americans are AB negative. It’s 0.2 percent for Hispanics. And 0.1 percent for Asians.”

  “Thank you, Internet,” Karen joked.

  “Well, no, seriously, you’re right,” Carl agreed. “We had to put this together from nothing and without that kind of resource at our fingertips, we’d be in a much darker spot than we are. Granted, we’ve got a long way to go.”

  “So if three million isn’t an accurate figure, what’s your best estimate?” Zephyr asked.

  “Maybe a million. Maybe a million and a half, tops, but I’d bet against that. I’m thinking it’s less than a million. Not just because of the dwindled numbers when you consider whites versus everybody else, but because I suspect many of the survivors earned themselves very short-term leases on life. Accidents. Suicides.”

  He shielded his face from Jordan, and mouthed “murders.”

  “The general inability to survive under the circumstances. You three are young and able, but how many aren’t? And then there is still the X factor, some intangible genetic code that we can’t possibly ever identify which somehow categorizes people into empath or sociopath, good or bad. Or so we like to theorize, anyway. If that’s locked away somewhere within us, nobody’s ever found it, to my knowledge. Supposing we accept that we survivors are somehow marked with that cellular zero or one, if you will, then anybody who fell into the gray zone might have disappeared even if they were AB negative.”

  “Let me translate to English,” Karen interjected. “If your blood is AB negative, you don’t disappear. We think. Then we have a theory—my sister does, really—that all the survivors are either good or bad based on some unknown factor. If you’re in the gray zone — you’re a selfish asshole, but you’re not gonna kill someone — we think you disappear, so that takes away a lot more folks. Those of us left are AB negative and lean hard into the empath or sociopath categories.”

  “And it’s a test,” Janis said. “Or a game.”

  Zephyr nodded. “But you don’t really have any evidence of that.”

  She ignored the question. “Let me ask you this. After our little interrogation, if we had turned you away, what would you have done?”

  “What do you mean?” the boy asked.

  “I mean just that, what would you have done?”

  He thought about it. “I don’t know. I’d have been pretty peeved, I guess.”

  “I can answer this one,” Aurora said. “We’d have flipped you guys a big bird and been on our way. Maybe to Disneyland, actually.”

  The woman laughed at this. “Yes, and that would be perfectly reasonable behavior. I could understand that
. But you see, we only turn the bad ones away, and they always resort to violence.” She studied them a moment. “Always.”

  “How so?” Zephyr asked.

  “Oh, you name it. Try to fight us, stab us, shoot us. Worse. It’s all happened.”

  “Which is why we keep their weapons now,” her sister said.

  “Not sure that’s really proof of it,” Aurora remarked. “We’d be severely pissed if you took our weapons, too.”

  Zephyr considered it and agreed, of course, but he also thought that fear would outweigh anger. Stripped of their weapons out here, they’d be defenseless, and he figured their first course of action would be to find a safe haven, not retaliate.

  “We always explain to everyone why we’re turning them away and keeping their weapons,” Carl clarified. “We do actually try to reason with them. We do. Believe me on this. And this is why I think there is something to the theory Janis puts forth. They simply cannot be reasoned with. I really cannot overstate this. Those turned away are always violent.”

  “If that’s true, then every time you turn someone out, you’re creating an enemy,” Zephyr said.

  Karen nodded. “Yeah. Hence the protection.”

  Zephyr turned back to Carl. “Sorry, what do computers have to do with it?”

  “We almost made it,” Janis sighed.

  “Ah, the analogy,” Carl continued. “Like I was saying before, I grew up dabbling in the era of DOS and then Windows. Back in the DOS days, we had a command we used to batch rid ourselves of unnecessary files. Delete star-dot-whatever. So, if I wanted to delete all the text files in a directory, I’d simply type delete star-dot-t-x-t and all the text files in the directory would be erased in one fell swoop. You understand?”

  “Not. At. All,” said Aurora.

  Carl chuckled. “I’m sorry. I’m not really great at this stuff.” He ran his hand through his thick beard and continued. “So, imagine you have a bunch of photos in a folder on Windows. But in the same folder, you also have a bunch of Microsoft Word documents. Now, let’s say you went in there, drag-and-dropped all your photos to the trashcan but kept the documents. You follow me?”

  “Um,” Aurora said.

  “OK, sorry. Like I said, bad analogy, but that’s the best I can come up with.” He looked around the room and then spread his arms wide. “I think that’s basically what happened to all of us. To everyone. To mankind. Something selectively deleted our asses. Or drag-and-dropped us to the trashcan, so to speak. You see? You, me, Zephyr, everyone in this room, everyone still alive. We’re the leftover documents.”

  He looked over the table. “Now, I pose a question to you. Are we all still here by accident or on purpose?”

  36

  Gray

  Jordan’s dresser was overflowing with clothes. Gowns and dresses of all varieties. Jeans, corduroy, spandex, and sweats in multiple colors. Jackets, hoodies, long-sleeves, and T-shirts. No shortage of choice — a definite perk of growing up in a city short on children, not on children’s clothes. So why was choosing her outfit every morning such a battle?

  “I don’t want this one,” she whined one daybreak after he tossed an orange hoodie to her and asked her to get ready for lessons.

  “Fine, I don’t care. Pick another then. But hurry up or you’re gonna be late.”

  “I want you to help pick.”

  “I tried, Jordan. Either put on the hoodie or dress yourself. I’ll see what I can find for breakfast.” He could hear the steady rhythm of water as Aurora showered in the nearby bathroom. “Figure it out.”

  Figuring it out was what they did these days. In the four months since they had moved into the apartment, they’d developed a clumsy routine. Wake up, scramble toward some goal, make it somewhere, do something, and then race back and pass out before starting the process again. Jordan’s something was lessons, which was the closest thing to school in the aftermath of the disappearances. An elderly woman named Mrs. Brackle taught her and nine other kids ranging in ages from five to twelve about reading, writing, math, and the world around them. Much to Zephyr’s surprise and frustration, there was no sugarcoating the latter topic, as he learned when Jordan returned from lessons one day and announced that her teacher said her mother was probably dead.

  “OK, it’s harsh. But I don’t know—it’s probably for the best,” Aurora said when he told her about it.

  “For whose best? Hers? Why take away hope here? She’s a little kid.”

  “I know that. But we’re not living in a world with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy any more. I get that you want to keep the magic, Zeph, but it’s not doing her any good.”

  “Easy for you to say,” he muttered.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  She stared at him, her hands on her hips.

  “It means,” he said, and then lowered his voice, “that you’re not the one who has to answer her at bedtime when she asks if her mom might still be alive despite what her damned careless teacher said.” He shook his head and sighed. “Listen, I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”

  “I get it,” Aurora said and kissed his cheek. “I’m sorry, too. How about we both get one be-an-insensitive-dick pass today, OK? I gotta go.”

  They were both scouts, but they never ventured out together. If Aurora was scheduled for a city search one day, Zephyr stayed back at base and either subbed in as monitor or spent the day in weapons practice. And if he was on reconnaissance, she remained and found something equally important to do with her time. Although it was never discussed, there was unspoken logic to this methodology, which was that one of them must always survive for Jordan’s sake.

  Zephyr hurried the little girl to lessons, kissed her goodbye and then rode the elevator up to their palatial estate on the seventh-floor. What a joke that was. The room couldn’t have been larger than 450 square feet and the living space was singular. No bedroom. A microwave and a tiny sink comprised the entirety of the kitchen. The bathroom barely fit one. Compared to the mansion they seized back in Las Cruces, this was a dollhouse. Still, they had neighbors, which meant people, conversation, friends and colleagues, community, and therefore the gains were considerable. Living on the outside had its advantages, but when darkness came, so always did the fear. And it was a relief to fall into a comfortable sleep at night. To feel protected. Besides, Janis promised more expansion soon and said they would be at the top of a short list for suites, possibly even one of the penthouses in the high-rise across the street, because they cared for one of Alpha’s children. It couldn’t happen soon enough.

  Deployment was in two hours, which meant he had the room to himself. He considered a return to sleep or masturbation and dismissed both. Instead, he changed into dirty sweats and then made his way down to the gym, which was crowded despite the disappearances. Some things never changed. The facilities, stretched across an entire floor, were divided into two unique spaces. The first looked like a regular gym complete with free weights and resistance machines. The second was a wide-open section covered in dark rubber floors populated by several sparring rings.

  He spent an hour alternating between jumping jacks, push-ups, planks, and push-up side-planks. When he had first started this routine more than a month before, he could only do 30 push-ups and not even 10 push-up side-planks. Now he could easily bark out 80 and 30 respectively. In fact, even after three or four repetitions, his lows were superior to his previous highs. His arms and chest burned and sweat dripped and fell while he gritted through his makeshift program and he finally understood the adrenaline rush that came with regular exercise.

  He’d been a skinny little runt before the disappearances. In the aftermath, a combination of forced diet and pure survival had turned him wiry, and he’d developed, shot up and filled out. Now, coupled with his regular exercise, his muscles announced themselves with definition and he stood tall. Taller, even, than Aurora, who now cocked her head skyward to kiss him.

  A little while later, with
a fresh shower and clothes to boot, Zephyr stopped into the weapons unit and signed out a .30-30 rifle complete with shoulder strap. This was a luxury afforded him after a three-week firearms course piloted by a beer-bellied black man nicknamed Heffer. With all of his previous practice, Zephyr was a natural, and whizzed through the program in five days flat, an accomplishment that he brandished to Aurora whenever possible because she still hadn’t passed and could therefore only carry a revolver into the field.

  Trey Sorrenson was the engineer who hijacked Yahoo and transformed it into an advertisement for Alpha. He was a big deal around the upstart city because he was one of the few names Janis and Karen dropped to newcomers. Although the leadership was informal, if there existed an executive branch, he would have made the board at the very least, which is why it made perfect sense that nobody wanted him on the survey teams. No man or woman was expendable, they said, but post-disappearances or not, a good engineer was not someone you just pissed away, especially if he was a celebrity in his own right. Trey was either the most naive and oblivious person still alive, or he just didn’t care, because the man volunteered for every scouting exercise that opened up.

  “Well, well, well,” he said as Zephyr entered the deployment center’s grungy locker room. “Look who’s finally here. It really is nice of you to show up.”

  He was a short, lean man in his mid-twenties with a pale complexion and cropped brown hair, and he always seemed to be grinning. The two of them had bonded right away on a mission three months before when, while waiting for a team to return from an inspection, Trey asked Zephyr if he liked to play video games. That was all it took. A few hours later, the two of them had discussed, dissected and debated the finer points of the Metroid Prime trilogy, a Nintendo first-person adventure series starring heroine space bounty hunter Samus Aran. Trey argued that Metroid Prime 2 was the best game of the bunch because it was far and away the most difficult and therefore most rewarding, while Zephyr contended that the first was revolutionary and had superior pacing. By the time the conversation concluded, they were officially friends.