At the end of his shift, Herman stepped out of the enclave airlock to find it was 03:45 on Wednesday, November Third. He’d closed up shop ten minutes early, expecting it to still be Halloween. He was sore from the stringent chemical showers, the molecular recompression and the cavity search. They confiscated his hundred-dollar bill.
He paused in the middle of the vast concrete field that surrounded the Los Altos enclave. Faint sounds of gunfire and the sullen boom of mortars rolled in on the wind from Palo Alto, but they were barely even trying to kill each other, tonight. The neighborhoods adjacent to the enclave lived on what they could siphon off the retardation field. At any given time, half the urban grids were browned out in the South Bay, and shifting free-fire zones were reported with the traffic.
Herman crossed the field, trying to grow eyes on the back of his head as the warfare grew louder. His bus stop was just out of range of the lights on the railgun towers. He heard the guns tracking him and was glad, because they weren’t tracking something waiting for him in the dark.
This was the most degrading part of working at Los Altos: to step out of a warm April afternoon he’d wasted in a one-man sweatshop, and find himself in a demilitarized zone in the wee hours of an autumn morning, with a week of his life lost and eight hours’ minimum-wage credit to show for it.
Then the guns swiveled out on the dark and obliterated something that skulked in it, and Herman’s bus was coming, and he forgot all about the job.
That night, in his coffin, his pay-per-view was pre-empted by a MemoryMart© basic training refresher vid. He tried to sneak away into sleep, but flickering subliminals plucked at his cortical arousal levels, trapping him in a twilight state for maximum retention. The blasting narration gushed into his head; the little, unmoored items resting in the IN pile of his memory were blown away like paper fans before a fire hose. He tried to relax, knowing his EEG was being monitored, his response to the vid graded.
When they came to the part about neurotransmitter mixing and the dangers of contamination, did he give an involuntary shudder, a galvanic confession? Did they already know about Mrs. Rowbotham? Did the voice get louder as it intoned, “Willful contamination of MemoryMart© products will result in immediate termination.”
He knew what that meant. According to the small print on his healthcare contract, his body was technically MemoryMart© property. So long as they paid his premiums, they could opt to cannibalize him for parts at any time. He imagined his disembodied brain hardwired to the controls of a MemoryMart© franchise for all eternity. His fear of being caught, of being dismembered, flooded him, and then something strange happened. The churning terror transmuted into a new and alien sensation, one that gnawed in sublime slowness where its precursors had chilled and shattered him, and mercifully melted away.
Herman felt guilt.
Two weeks passed. Herman Heinz slept through most of it, awakened to find no E-mail except for a series of increasingly threatening bills from an online service called Nocturnal Transmissions. Apparently, they’d serviced him with no less than twenty-five hours of “teledildonic play therapy” in the last two weeks, for which they wanted the lion’s share of his next four paychecks. He plotted filing a complaint in one of the virtual courts for fraud, but when he peeled off his sodden paper pajamas, the notion imploded and he logged on and paid the bill. But he still felt lousy.
Behind the barbed wire wall of his impotent rage there lurked a vague phantom sensation of something done and fretted over, bad karma in a cheap cage.
Herman arrived at the inspection station of Los Altos Estates© eight pounds lighter than when he’d left. He approached the first checkpoint and slipped his arm into it, when suddenly it all came back to him, and he was waiting for alarms to go off and needles to plunge into his veins.
The checkpoint scanned him and green-lighted him into the decontamination showers. Herman let out a breath he’d been holding in for two weeks, rubbed at the cramp that gripped his chest. He’d gotten away with it.
Halfway through his shift, Mrs. Rowbotham was scheduled to come in for a session. Herman stood at the counter, ready to bull his way through any accusations she might level at him. Sure, my snot’s running around in her brain, but it’s still my word against hers. He hoped the old ghouls still clung to bygone superstitions about holistic health, and didn’t go in for tacky, invasive procedures like genetic screens or autopsies.
Still, as the minutes passed and Mrs. Rowbotham went missing, he began to worry. He was still posing at the counter like a clockwork jerk when the door buzzed and opened for him to take his break.
He stepped out and looked around. A few seniors drifted up and down Main Street in their too-colorful plastic jumpers, but no Mrs. Rowbotham. My word against a crazy old bitch who can buy and sell me, he thought.
He wandered down to the barbershop, peered in at Salvatore and Ulli, the robots who cut the old ghouls’ hair. Mr. Eichelburger, the president of the Los Altos homeowners’ association, held court in Sal’s chair. Herman lurked just outside the open door.
“Always was a queer bird,” Eichelburger was saying, “but if she can outrun the security teams, I’d sure like to know her secret…”
“You betcha,” Salvatore put in, and wrapped a steaming white towel around Eichelburger’s face.
“It’s no secret,” Mr. Ennis scoffed. Ennis had bionic lungs, and made cool video game noises when he breathed. “She’s on the damned drugs, like everybody outside.”
“Ja, you can say that again,” Ulli chipped in, and spread foamy shaving lather on Mr. Ennis’s jaw. Mr. Whitney, waiting with a newspaper on his lap, sagely nodded.
“We’re all old, now, aren’t we?” Eichelburger asked. “We slowed the clock to a crawl, but the wolf is still at the door. Why fight it, why go on? It’s in her eyes, boys. Ida Rowbotham knows the answer. She remembers something we all gave up looking for, ages ago.”
“Ike, when you talk like that, I always know it must be an election year,” Whitney said, and they all chuckled. “So what’s she got, anyway?”
“Innocence,” Eichelburger said. “Youth.”
“Youth?” Ennis deflected Ulli’s razor hand with a car alarm bleep. “How young or innocent did she look when she bit Ruthie Perkins in the throat at the orchid show? Can’t say I feel safe knowing she’s still running around loose, either.”
Oh, shit—
“I don’t mean her youth, Marv, I mean when the world was young, before it got cluttered up with dinosaurs like us. I mean the innocence of the Golden Age, before we got fat and lazy with all these damned machines to wait on us.”
“God, Ike, don’t talk like that in front of the help,” Ennis said. “Ulli, that blade’s dull.”
“So sorry, boss.” Ulli stropped the blade on his leather-padded arm.
“You ask me,” Ennis pressed on, lungs blurping, “her mind’s all scrambled. Too many chemicals. Hell, ask her pushers, down the way.” Mr. Whitney waved at MemoryMart©. “That holo-retrieval stuff’ll rot your brains.”
“You said a mouthful, you betcha,” Salvatore clucked.
Herman ran back to his store and barricaded the door until closing time. Mrs. Rowbotham never came in.
Herman spent his next two-week interim riding the Muni trains. He had nowhere to go, and he was broke after paying the rent on his coffin and his second installment to Nocturnal Transmissions, but he couldn’t go back. He knew they were waiting for him.
He’d made Mrs. Rowbotham into some kind of killer. It was as if all his anger had distilled into that one morsel of phlegm, and exploded in her brain, a supernova embolism of vicarious primal rage. What if Ms. Perkins fell victim to it, too? What if his anger spread through Los Altos Estates© like a plague, and the whole population became a pack of rabid, walker-bound monsters?
Cool. But—
In the end, he had to go back to work. None of the relief kiosks would dispense goods for him because he had a job and a coffin to sleep in. In the end, work
was the only place that would have him.
Approaching the checkpoint, he stopped short when he saw a flesh-and-blood armed sentry standing beside it. Herman started to turn and run for it, make them shoot him in the back at least, but the sentry waved him on.
“Showers are off today,” he shouted. “No cavity search, either. Shit, I hope you brought a weapon.”
Despite himself, Herman came closer. “What do you mean?”
“Good luck, man. Everybody’s got to earn a living, right?” He hit the airlock switch and the door swung open with a too-loud pop. Herman stepped inside and it closed.
The matter decompression usually took only a few minutes. If there was a cool part of working at Los Altos Estates©, it was this. As far as he understood it, they had a way of decelerating the molecular processes of your body, so they thought time was passing slower, or whatever. And inside the dome, it did. It’d been springtime in Los Altos Estates© for almost two years.
But this time, nothing happened. He felt no tingling in his extremities, no sensation of freezing and burning at the same time—nothing. He panicked at the sound of air hissing into the airlock, and clawed at the seals. Gas, they’re gassing me, this is how they fire you—with real fire.
The hatch opened.
Inside, he could tell right away that everything had gone wrong.
There were no strollers on Main Street. Flowering plants overflowed their boxes, and red-brown leaves danced on the canned breeze. A white orthopedic sandal lay on the sidewalk in front of his store. As he drew nearer, he saw it was laying in a burgundy puddle, and had most of a foot in it.
He still had two minutes before his store would open for him, so he went to the barbershop.
Salvatore lay halfway out on the sidewalk, propping the door open. As Herman drew nearer, he saw that Salvatore was missing his legs. Ulli sat on the tiled floor behind him, split open and hollowed out. Fiber-optic cable, plastic modules and lubricant had been used to redecorate the barbershop in a frenzy that suggested a predator’s rage at being cheated of real meat. Leaning in the doorway, he saw they’d been better served by Mr. Whitney, still slumped in the waiting chair. His throat was laid open, limbs wrenched or gnawed off, his ribcage cracked and his organs savaged. He’d managed to catch most of it in his newspaper.
Herman backed away, dropped to his knees as a weird, hooting howl pealed though the misty morning air. The sound rebounded down the empty avenue of the geriatric ghost town.
Something was hunting him.
He scrambled to his shop and jerked on the door. The howling grew louder, ascended in pitch, was joined by others. They were closing in.
He heard something like talons on plate-glass just around the corner, and he yanked at the door again, and this time, it came open and slammed into his face. He staggered back into the street with his hands over his nose, trying to stop the flow, thinking, Omigod, I can’t get blood on this uniform, they’ll make me pay for it...
And he saw one of them.
Though it walked on all fours and stood almost three meters high at the shoulder, it could only be Mrs. Hale.
Even now, he saw her haughty self-assurance in the way she switched her jewel-scaled tail, like the silken train of a dowager empress’s gown. Stray wisps of silver hair still trailed off her blunt gargoyle skull, like hearty weeds among the pebbled, overlapping scales of her new skin.
Where once Mrs. Hale’s empty head had existed to carry that phony hairdo, it now served as an excuse for a mouth that went from ear to ear, and threatened to meet at the back when it
opened. And when it did, Herman marveled at Mrs. Hale’s new teeth. Her very own teeth had grown back—not one, but two complete sets, all canines and incisors. She barked a greeting at Herman and pounced on him.
Her attack was arrested in mid-air by an arc of blue lightning from behind Herman. He turned just as a sentry jumped out of the MemoryMart©, grabbed him and dragged him inside.
A pair of suited executives stood behind the counter, looking very ill at ease. Two more sentries blocked the door and flanked him, their weapons at port arms. The third disappeared behind him. “Herman Heinz?” one exec asked.
“Yes, sir,” he mumbled, trying to see that third sentry, whose breath on his neck stank of steroid gum.
“Do you wish to make a statement?”
“Um, what? I mean, can you tell me what’s happening, first?” The third sentry’s hands came around his face, sprayed a ticklish, icy mist up his nose. He fought, but couldn’t stop the hands from forcing gauze plugs into each bloody nostril. “He’s clean, sir” the sentry said.
“We’re still trying to piece it together, Herman. Some catastrophe has occurred here at Los Altos Estates©, as I’m sure you’re aware, and MemoryMart© is considering terminating its lease on this franchise. As far as it applies to you, well… We’ll probably relocate you to another franchise, in the Disneyheim© or Lawrence Welk© Enclaves, they go through people like toilet paper. But first, there’s the matter of the internal review…”
He sighed, maybe waiting for theme music. “As the only company operating inside Los Altos Estates© that still employs organic workers, we’re going to be under the microscope, once the smoke clears. We’re preparing a report for the legal hierarchies for Los Altos Estates©, pending their review of the changes here, to release us—and you—of all liability. Do you understand?”
They’re going to find out. And they’re going to exercise the bylaw, send my brain to a hell of eternal work. No, God, not Disneyheim©—
Heinz was still staring blankly at the sign on the wall above their heads when the second exec, on reserve in case Herman turned out to be a moron, kicked in. “Herman, at any time, were you aware of any possible contamination of MemoryMart© products, willful or otherwise?”
“Who turned off the time thing?” Herman asked.
The first exec threw his hands up in disgust, but the second went for a kid gloves approach. “We don’t know, Herman, but it shut down shortly after your last shift. Whoever did it rerouted the power consumption back into the municipal grid and damped all the monitors, so nobody outside caught on, but we know this much. An infection of some kind has, um, infected nearly one hundred percent of the surviving population. We’re still trying to pin down the nature of that infection, but the residents aren’t being very cooperative.”
“They’re dinosaurs,” Herman whispered.
“Actually,” the first exec said, pleased at Heinz’s progress to big-boy words, “we think they’re gorgonopsids, Herman. Carnivorous proto-mammals, wiped out two hundred fifty million years ago. Some scientists think they’re our ancestors.”
Something barreled into the picture window, shaking the entire store. The Plexiglas held, but barely. A shriek of frustration chilled Herman’s blood, but the execs stared at him, weighing his responses. He squirmed. “I didn’t mean to do it.”
“Do what? What did you do?”
They would know all kinds of ways to say it so it sounded like an honest, regrettable and ultimately unavoidable accident. He didn’t. “I hawked a lunger into Mrs. Rowbotham’s brain-juice.”
“Jesus Christ!” one exec cried, and, “Oh dear God, no!” the other howled. “How could you? Oh, this is—we’re dead…”
“What’s the big deal? I mean, it didn’t kill her, or anything.”
One exec whispered frantically in the other’s ear, then turned to him. “Herman, what do you know about gene therapy?”
“What’d I do? It was just spit.”
“Gene therapy, Herman. Do you know what it is?”
He shrugged his five-year old’s shoulders. “I know it’s illegal.”
“Good, good. And what do you know about temporal retardation therapy?”
“Old people use it to cheat death, but it’s not illegal?”
“Okay, great… Well, the only barrier to indefinite longevity that science hasn’t been able to conquer without illegal gene-tweaking is the decay of DNA. A
fter about a century or so, chromosomes simply start to unravel. Now, temporal retardation slows all molecular processes by a factor of twenty or so for those who live inside, but what about those who come and go?”
Herman shrugged.
“MemoryMart© is devoted to quality customer service, to the human touch. Our clients in the elite enclaves like the human touch, and mnemonic hologaphy is too complex a task for androids. But the expense of keeping an employee inside the enclave at all times is prohibitive.”
He knew, now, how it was going to end. They were going to talk him to death. He kept nodding.
“Now, top secret tests conducted by MemoryMart©’s research division show that repeated decompression of organic molecules actually accelerates the unraveling of DNA.”
Talking slow enough for Herman to follow caused the exec to choke up. His partner took up the thread. “In order to provide the level of customer service our valued clients have come to expect from MemoryMart©, we’ve been forced to resort to… a limited form of gene therapy.”
Something outside raked the windows with a fistful of railroad spikes.
“You mean you’ve been doing illegal shit on me?” Herman demanded. “Great! So, we’re even?”
“We’re well within our legal rights,” the second exec huffed. “It was for your own protection. The therapy maintained the elasticity of your chromosomes through the rigors of the recompression. It was perfectly safe, and never would’ve been a threat to anybody—a little white lie. But you went and…”
“What in the hell possessed you?” the first exec demanded.
“What did I do?”
“You contaminated our retrieval mix with a tailored virus that plasticizes DNA, dipshit. The solution opened up latent chemical memories in the client’s genes and accessed them. Memories of traits that have lain dormant for millions of generations.”
All-Monster Action! Page 7