Mortal Lock

by Andrew Vachss

  COME UP ON:

  A group of young people, all dressed for combat, but not in the matching uniforms favored by crews. They are making their way through a tunnel.

  NARRATOR

  (V/O, depicting what he speaks)

  The Guardians are a mixed crew. Most crews have only boys or girls. Some of them allow only one skin/shade band—the Turf crews are the strictest about that. The Guardians don’t care about stuff like that, but, remember, they’re still a crew, so they can’t punish you the way the Rulers can. The Guardians can’t send you to the HydroFarm. They can’t send you Outside, either.

  But if you mess up what the Book Boys write, they will hurt you.

  CUT TO:

  A pair of Dancing Girls, standing on either side of a Book Boys message:

  TAKING EARS WON’T KILL YOUR FEARS

  The girls each pull out a can of black spray paint and begin to black out the blue writing.

  The Guardians descend on them, mercilessly. When they walk away, the two Dancing Girls are lying on the ground, bloody and beaten.

  NARRATOR

  And if you claim a Book Boys tag …

  CUT TO:

  A youth is spraying MUSIC BOYS RULE! in blue. His work is skillful: not perfect, but a close imitation of the distinct Book Boys script.

  One of the Guardians steps away from the pack. She aims a small crossbow. The arrow hits the Music Boy in the back of his neck. Another Guardian runs close and swings a heavy machete, neatly decapitating the Music Boy.

  They leave the Music Boy’s dead body beneath what he wrote—a message of their own.

  NARRATOR

  What the Guardians do is against the Rules. They get caught at it, too. Every once in a while, you see it on the Info-Board. That’s where they announce the Crimes and Punishments.

  Everybody knows the Crimes.

  Everybody knows the Punishments.

  But nobody knows who the Guardians are.

  CUT TO:

  A Guardian being subjected to electric shock torture. She is strapped to a gurney, convulsing. A hooded man comes into view.

  HOODED MAN

  All you have to do is tell us. You’re going to tell us anyway—why go through all this pain?

  GUARDIAN GIRL

  You don’t know what pain is, you little maggot. But you will soon. When the Book Boys write your name on the walls, you’ll see—

  The Hooded Man recoils just as another jolt hits the Guardian Girl … killing her.

  FADE TO BLACK

  OPEN TO A LARGE MESSAGE FROM THE BOOK BOYS

  LM24-GG77-6A29

  TUNNEL 29

  BLOCK 7

  CAVE 4

  PAN DOWN TO: The supine body of a man, pinned to the ground by a heavy steel spike driven through his body, obviously by the sledge hammer propped against the wall. A black hood lies just past his fingertips.

  NARRATOR

  Nobody knows why they’re called the Book Boys—everybody knows some of them are girls. But not which girls, of course. The Book Boys are invisible. They write the truth, so they have to be everywhere the truth is.

  Whispers say the Rulers sent so many of them Outside that there’s a whole colony of Book Boys there.

  That could be true. The Book Boys write about Outside sometimes; maybe that’s where they get it from.

  There’s no way to know.

  CUT TO:

  Various shots of different crews spraying on the walls. The usual gang-turf graffiti.

  NARRATOR

  Lots of turf crews write on the walls, but nobody pays attention. Like when they claim a Tunnel … as if anyone could own a Tunnel except the Rulers! Well, maybe in the Uncharted Zone, but who would ever know that?

  Turf crew names are just stupid. They don’t tell you anything about them, the way other crew names do. Like the Golden Dragons. What does that tell you? It doesn’t mean they’re all skin/shade band 70, like gold. And everyone knows giant lizards can only live Outside anyway, where there is light coming down on you even without the generators. At least that’s the way it was before the Terror. That’s what the Book Boys say.

  The Turf crews fight each other, too. That’s all they do. You can watch it happening. Not the fighting, the score: you read it on the walls. One Turf crew will write that they own something. Another crew will cross out what they wrote. That goes on for a while, one crew slashing over what another crew writes. On and on. Until, finally, one crew writes something and it stays there. That means they won.

  But nothing like that ever stays too long.

  People say the Turf crews did the same thing before the Terror.

  CUT TO:

  Two turf crews moving toward each other, in classic rumble style.

  NARRATOR

  But that’s too stupid to believe. I mean, why would they kill each other over something they could never really own? That’s as stupid as them saying they own a Tunnel.

  You learn the Big Rules first. Because if you break one of the Big Rules, you go to the HydroFarm … if you’re lucky.

  There are other Rules too. So many Rules, you could never learn them all. You’re supposed to ask if you don’t know. You can’t ask the Rulers—nobody has ever seen one of them. But in every Tunnel there are little pockets all along the walls. Just little indentations, not deep enough to be caves.

  SHOW:

  Inside one of those indentations. It has no door, and contains nothing but a murkily viewed person seated behind a desk, which stands between the person and whoever enters. A flat screen sits on the desk, facing the person behind it.

  A teenager with a shaved head steps into the indentation, his muscular upper body covered only by a lilac-colored vest. A small tattoo of some kind is visible on the back of his neck.

  TEENAGER

  Is there a Rule about lifting weights?

  PERSON BEHIND DESK

  (taps some keys, looks at the screen)

  No. (He hands the teenager a piece of paper.) Sign at the bottom. Your index number, not your name. This signifies that you asked a Rules Question, and the answer was given to you.

  The Teenager signs.

  PERSON BEHIND DESK

  Give me your card. You get two credits for asking a Rules Question. Not Open Credits—you have to say what you want them for before they’re loaded into your card.

  TEENAGER

  The Sex Tunnel.

  NARRATOR

  The people who explain the Rules to you are called Bureaucrats. There are lots of them. They come in every skin/shade, but they all look alike. I mean, they don’t all have the same faces, but all their faces have the same look.

  I once asked a Bureaucrat about the reason for a certain Rule. He told me that was against the Rules, asking for reasons. But he gave me the two credits after I signed the paper, because even though I didn’t ask a Rules question, I got a Rules answer.

  CUT TO:

  BUREAUCRAT

  Every Rule is for your own good. That’s because every Rule is for everyone’s good.

  NARRATOR

  Where the break really started—the one between the Rulers and the Book Boys, I mean—was probably about the Bad Babies. A Bad Baby is one born against the Rules. You can’t have sex until Year 14 if you are a boy. And not until Year 17 if you are a girl. The Bad Babies all came from girls under Year 17 since those girls must have had sex before it was allowed.

  If a girl had a Bad Baby, she would have to go into one of the Medical Tunnels and get fixed. After that, she couldn’t have babies anymore.

  CUT TO A MESSAGE FROM THE BOOK BOYS:

  MAKE THE RULES

  TIE THE TUBES

  BUT THAT HEX WON’T STOP THE SEX

  NARRATOR

  But the Bad Babies kept happening.

  If the Rulers want to know something, they send you to a Synapse Squad. They put this metal band around your head and ask you the questions. Then they just look at the screen and they know the truth. But everybody knows this doesn’t work
on girls.

  So when a girl would get pregnant before she was allowed, the Rulers would make every boy she knew go to a Synapse Squad.

  But sometimes, no matter how far they looked, they couldn’t find the boy who was guilty.

  CUT TO:

  A man in a lab coat, looking at DNA profiles on a large screen, shaking his head.

  NARRATOR

  Remember, the Rulers never give up. They started checking the Bad Baby’s own spray. That’s when they found out that the father of those girls was also the father of their babies. The father was the father, that’s what the Book Boys wrote. In blue.

  The fathers were old enough to have sex, but their daughters weren’t. Anyway, children belong to their parents; they own them. Everybody knows that.

  So the Rulers made an Exception. An Exception is when the Rules don’t apply. Whenever a girl had a Bad Baby, they would put her on the HydroFarm. While a girl was pregnant, she wasn’t much good to her owners, anyway. They eat more; and they work less, even if you beat them. Nobody wanted them in the Sex Tunnels either. That wasn’t fair to the owners, so the Rulers took the babies, and paid the fathers compensation-credits.

  After the girl did her punishment time, the Rulers would send her back to her own spray, if they still wanted her. If not, they just let her go.

  CUT TO:

  Adolescent girl standing on a platform, waiting for a Conveyor. The HydroFarm is in the background: It looks like row after row of different kinds of plants, all being hand-harvested by various individuals wearing the same ecru-colored uniforms with red stripes, working under a sky of Gro-Lights. The girl is holding a plastic carry-all marked DISCHARGE in one hand. She looks more frightened than relieved.

  CUT TO:

  On the Wall, in Blue:

  WHEN YOU CAN’T CHANGE PEOPLE

  JUST CHANGE THE RULES

  FOOLS

  NARRATOR

  Now, if you’re the owner of a girl, you have to bring her to the Medical Tunnel when she reaches Year 11. They give her an implant there, a little fan-shaped thing, five lines with a star at the base. They put it on the outside of the right thigh, where anyone could see it.

  The implants work for six years, so there won’t be any more Bad Babies.

  A young male steps out of the shadows, a heavy duffel of some thick material slung over one shoulder, with a clearly visible locking device on its top. He is staring at the latest posting of the Book Boys:

  YOU CAN’T TAKE THE CREDIT

  IF YOU DON’T MAKE THE CREDITS

  When he speaks, we realize it is the same VOICE we have been hearing; this is the voice of HEXON, as he explains:

  HEXON

  (V/O)

  My name is Hexon. Even though a Warlock named me, I am a Merchant Boy. People buy and sell stuff all the time. There’s even a Barter Tunnel, where you can trade without worrying about getting your stuff stolen … but you need credits to get in there. Only Merchant Boys work in the Black Market, outside the Charted Zone. We deal in anything. And everything we score goes into our vault. Merchant Boys share. We get our marks from bringing in stuff, not from keeping it.

  CUT TO:

  Hexon offloading his duffel. An older man checks off every item; others carry the stacked-up goods away.

  HEXON

  I was the one who heard the whisper first: someone wanted to buy the Bad Babies. That was crazy. With the implants, how could there be any more of the Bad Babies.

  But I remembered a message I saw once …

  CUT TO:

  WHAT CAME FIRST : GREED OR NEED?

  HEXON

  (V/O)

  That’s what Merchant Boys do—we scout for new opportunities. New frontiers, we call them. You have to start in the Charted Zone, but you have to be very careful in the Open Tunnels. There’s a No-Name crew in some of them. They went in there to hide. The Book Boys wrote that it was the Game Boys who started it. Then the Dancing Girls got in on it, too. Killing. Not for stuff, for marks. Marks on their crew clothes. It was like a contest. They only killed No-Names—“bums” they called them.

  None of the crews play that game anymore, but you still have to be careful in the Edge-Tunnels. Some of the No-Names never came out, even after the killing stopped. And if they think you’re hunting them, you won’t be coming out either.

  CUT TO:

  Mob of bums, tearing apart a pair of bodies.

  HEXON

  (V/O)

  There’s an endless market for baby parts. Hearts are worth the most, but even spares—like kidneys and lungs—are worth a lot of credits. I heard you used to be able to just buy the parts, right in the Medical Tunnel. That’s what the Rulers used the Bad Babies for.

  CUT TO VISUAL OF A BOOK BOYS MESSAGE:

  THE TRANSPLANTS ARE A FAKE

  THE ORGANS NEVER TAKE

  THERE ARE NO BAD BABIES

  IF YOU BUY THAT LIE, YOUR BABY DIES

  HEXON

  (V/O)

  Now it’s against the Rules to sell a baby for parts. Of course, some people do it anyway, because some mothers and fathers will pay anything to keep their own babies alive.

  Underground is a weird place: some mothers and fathers will kill their babies for the credits. And some mothers and fathers, if you even asked them about doing that, they’d kill you.

  The Rules don’t protect babies, because some people will always risk breaking a Rule if there’s enough credits in it for them. Maybe that’s why there’s such a monster Bounty on any Book Boy: they keep telling everyone that, over and over.

  CUT TO:

  A RULE IS A TOOL

  WALK THE PATH, BECOME THE PATH

  HEXON

  (V/O)

  I spent thirteen days in the Open Tunnels, but I couldn’t pick up a clue. Not a whisper, not a trail, not even a scent.

  SHOW:

  Hexon talking with various people, sometimes furtively, sometimes at a table in what looks like a bar, sometimes using sign language.

  HEXON

  (V/O)

  Some of the Traders had heard the same whisper I had, but they all thought it was too crazy to be true. Even down here.

  I don’t know why, but I wanted to know. The longer I stayed out, the more I needed to find the answer. If the Book Boys said there are no Bad Babies, it must be true. So how could there be a price on them?

  SHOW:

  Hexon penetrating into the Uncharted Zone. Sometimes, he is recognized, sometimes he hides. Once, he encounters a crew of Bums. He squats, opens his duffel, and hands out various small items.

  HEXON

  (V/O)

  I went out past the Open Tunnels, past the Black Market, looking for the crew that wanted the Bad Babies.

  But I never found anything except those freakish Zone Rats. The noise they make is something you never forget once you hear it.

  SHOW:

  The mutated rats, their tiny heads almost completely dominated by eyes. They are much bigger than conventional rats, and come in every color (and combination of colors) imaginable.

  HEXON

  (V/O)

  It’s really dark outside the Charted Zone, except for the little pools of light where traffickers set up shop. That’s why it’s called the Black Market, I guess—it’s mostly black, with just little spots of light.

  I kept moving, using my crystal-flash only once in a while, to preserve the charge. Once I thought I saw a dog … just a flash of fur, I guess. But it was way too big to be a rat … even a Zone Rat.

  I was on my way back when I stopped into a provisions stand near the Rim. They only sell maintenance food, like water or freeze-dry. Zoners too—some of the prospectors won’t go outside the Charted Zone without them.

  CUT TO:

  Hexon standing at the Provisions Stand, neither casual nor nervous. A girl steps up into view, holding out a plastic card. She is much shorter than Hexon, fairly slim, but with bare, muscled arms. Caucasian, lighter-skinned than Hexon, but not subway-pale.

&nbs
p; GIRL

  (business-like)

  Four freeze-dries; two green; two white.

  Hexon opens his mouth to say something, then slams it shut. Realizing she is about to leave, he approaches.

  HEXON

  (proffering his pack)

  Would you like a smoke?

  GIRL

  (polite, but very clear)

  No, thank you.

  The Girl walks away. Hexon’s eyes are drawn to her hips—a natural reaction, given her more-than-necessary wiggle—when he realizes she is wearing the skin-tight black pants of a Dancing Girl [Note: we should SEE this image within-an-image]. She turns her head slightly, looks back over her shoulder. Hexon immediately forgets any thoughts of razors.

  They find a place to sit—a makeshift bench just a little past the halo of light from the Provisions Stand.

  GIRL

  (facing Hexon; straightforward)

  My name is Fyyah. Not like the kind that burns. F like Favor, Y like Yellow, Y like Yellow, A like Apple, H like Happy.

  HEXON

  That’s a beautiful name. Mine is Hexon. But it doesn’t mean anything. I don’t put hexes on people; I’m a Merchant Boy.

  FYYAH

  Then you already know what I am.

  HEXON

  A Dancing Girl, you mean? That’s not what you are—that’s just the crew you’re in.

  FYYAH

  If it doesn’t mean anything, why did you tell me you’re a Merchant Boy?

  HEXON

  (looking down)

  ’Cause I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t want you to go. I wanted to say something, I don’t know … cool? But I’m no good at talking to girls.