Corpus Chrome, Inc.

by S. Craig Zahler

  “They were married the day Isabelle Xia turned eighteen. Nicolai was sixty-three at the time.”

  “Gross!” exclaimed a blonde girl who was named Terri.

  “In twenty-thirty-five, Xia and Dhanikov created a group called Americans Against Globalization—A.A.G.—that spoke out against U.S involvement with the Global Senate, which was Europe and most of Asia and Africa at that time. The federal government—that was the big government in charge of the whole country back then—was aware of A.A.G. but was not afraid of them, because people who held rallies and spoke publicly and wrote letters were not the ones the big government was worried about. The government was worried about the people who did things in secret. It turned out that A.A.G. was a façade—”

  Pinto’s hand went up.

  “It turned out that Americans Against Globalization was a fake group which Xia and Dhanikov used to recruit extremists for their secret organization, which was called Protectors of the Fifty. Protectors of the Fifty wanted to make sure that America never, ever joined the Global Senate.”

  “Why’d they think it was so bad?” asked Snapdragon.

  Sergeant Iris replied, “Xia and Dhanikov were born in countries with bad governments, but they were able to leave those places and come to a different country with a different government—America—and be safe. They did not want all of the countries connected in one huge government, because if that huge government ever became bad, then the whole world might become like the places where they grew up.”

  Lieutenant Vashan continued, “Most Americans wanted us to join the Global Senate, but there were millions who opposed it. Still, there is a gigantic difference between speaking out against something and doing what the Protectors of the Fifty did.

  “On the Fourth of July, twenty-forty-five, while President B.R. Gregs was at the important Global Senate summit in Berlin, the Protectors of the Fifty took the Empire State Building. It’s still unclear exactly how they did this—how they infiltrated it so thoroughly—but we know that they had people on the observation roof, armed with razorguns and migraine pens, and also soldiers on every single floor of the building, as well as some dressed up like policemen at ground level. There were approximately thirteen hundred terrorists in the building, and exactly seventy-nine thousand eight hundred and forty-two innocent people.

  “The terrorists who were disguised as policemen sealed the lobby doors and put putty explosives on the hinges, and the ones on each floor confiscated lilies, slapped blockers on all the computers and shot paint bulbs on the lenses of every single camera and against every single window. By the time I arrived, the building and the people in it were cut off from the outside world, and every window was covered with black paint.

  “Xia and Dhanikov hung a large fabric screen on the side of the building that we’re facing right now.”

  Snapdragon and the other children looked at the wreckage.

  “On it was a message telling us not to enter because the doors and windows were wired to explosives that they had attached to the hostages. It was signed, Protectors of the Fifty.

  “Nothing else happened that day, but the whole world watched.

  “The next day, the words on the banner changed. It said, ‘President B.R. Gregs must not commit the free United States of America to the Global Senate. He must leave the Berlin summit at once.’

  “The president made an announcement from the Global Senate Conference Building in Berlin. What he said was, ‘I will not speak with terrorists.’

  “Immediately after his response, a window opened on the tenth floor of the Empire State Building. A woman wearing a rubber bodysuit and a padded helmet was thrown outside. She plummeted, screaming, and slammed against the sidewalk. Her spine and legs and arms and ribs and pelvic bones were shattered, but she lived for twenty minutes, because the rubber suit held her body together and the cushioned helmet protected her skull. She yelled, ‘They’re going to kill my whole family if the president doesn’t leave the summit! They’re going to kill them!’ She said this over and over and over until she passed out and died. Her name was Nicole Dorne.”

  Snapdragon imagined the woman, crushed and suffering inside of her rubber bodysuit, and suddenly, he felt nauseated. Autumn reached out, took his hand and squeezed it.

  “The banner changed, saying, ‘The president must leave the summit NOW.’

  “The president ignored the terrorists, which was and is American and Global Senate policy.

  “The next day, three kids younger than you—Sara Dorne, Stevie Dorne and Sassy Dorne—and their father, Matthew Dorne, were thrown from the building’s tenth floor and hit the pavement. They were wearing the helmets that protected their skulls and the rubber suits that kept them from bleeding out, and the terrorists had given them painkillers so that they’d remain conscious for a longer period of time…though they felt everything by the end. The nation watched this man and these three children die for nearly an hour.

  “The mayor and the federal government filed a broadcast injunction—a stop sign—against the media, which stopped them from showing more deaths.

  “The president spoke to the United States of America and said, ‘I will not speak with terrorists. Their killing will amount to nothing.’”

  “Didn’t he care about all the people?” asked Pinto, angrily.

  “He cared.” Lieutenant Vashan paused and looked at Sergeant Iris with his sad eyes. “He definitely cared.”

  A moment later, the Jamaican-American policeman returned his attention to the children. “I was in the bomb squad back then. We helped the firemen inflate foam mattresses around the perimeter of the building, though we knew that it wasn’t going to help.”

  “Why’d you do it?” asked Terri.

  “It’s important to do something at a time like that—something other than just stand around and watch innocent people die. But it didn’t change anything—Protectors of the Fifty dropped the next victims from the fiftieth floor and the effect was the same. Their insides were smashed and they survived for short periods of time. Eventually, our doctors euthanized…um…sped up the deaths so that the victims wouldn’t suffer.

  “For three weeks, people fell from the building—two or three every hour, twenty-four hours a day. During this period, President B.R. Gregs joined our nation to the Global Senate.

  “Then things got worse.

  “A metal canister was dropped from a window onto the mattresses. The initial fear was that it was a bomb, and everybody cleared the area, except for the bomb squad officers, who were in impact suits. The fabric screen was blank, and we had no idea what was in the canister. I was sent to assess the threat.

  “It was a metal thermos that did not appear to be or contain an explosive. I untwisted the top and looked inside, and it looked back at me. It was filled with eyeballs.”

  Snapdragon’s lower lip trembled, and he fought against tears. Autumn wiped her leaking eyes. Pinto and Keshara and Peggy and Dariuz and Terri cried.

  “I almost threw up, it was—” Lieutenant Vashan paused and shook his head. “It was one of the worst moments of my life. I was shaking as I walked back to the chief, and when I showed it to him, he did throw up. There were fifty eyeballs in the thermos, each surgically removed from a different person.

  “A few minutes later, the fabric screen said, ‘You will receive ten canisters a day until the president withdraws our nation from the Global Senate.’ That amounts to five hundred eyes a day.

  “President B.R. Gregs continued to ignore the terrorists.

  “We received canisters for two weeks.

  “During this period there were an unknown number of suicides inside the ESB. People cut their wrists or refused to eat or suffocated themselves. There was a conflict on the sixty-fifth floor, an uprising, but all of the hostages were executed
and dumped onto the street, their genitals mutilated or cut off.

  “The president did not change his position.

  “Things got worse.

  “Hostages were hung from windows by their own intestines. The holes in their stomachs were sewn shut so that they would live for hours—and some lived for days—dangling upside-down by their guts. An airborne riot wagon tried to rescue one of these people and was shot with a sticky bomb and destroyed.”

  “Why didn’t the president do something?” demanded Pinto.

  “What the heck was he waiting for?!” shouted Snapdragon.

  “On August sixteenth—almost seven weeks after the event had begun—President B.R. Gregs called a summit with the Global Senators and the mayor of Nexus Y and the governor of New York. At that time, it was estimated that more than seventeen thousand people had been mutilated or killed by the Protectors of the Fifty.

  “The mayor and the governor proposed the idea of a temporary U.S. withdrawal from the Global Senate, but everyone feared that would only prolong the hostage situation. And doing something like that—giving the terrorists what they wanted—also went against both U.S. and G.S. policy and opened the door for more terrorism worldwide.

  “At that meeting, the president and the G.S. decided to storm the Empire State Building.

  “My cousin and my father were in two of the one hundred and seventy-four airborne riot wagons that made up the assault team. When they were preparing themselves, I said good-bye to them. My cousin was optimistic and said she would survive and see me again, but my dad just put on his gear and shook my hand. He didn’t seem very hopeful.

  “All of these men and women are heroes.

  “The eighteenth of August arrived.

  “It was raining. The outside of the Empire State Building was covered with dangling corpses and a few people who were still dying. I was with the bomb squad on the ground, inside one of the lightning tanks.

  “I watched the airborne riot wagons surround the building. Gangways shot to the walls. Officers crashed through the windows, and explosions threw them back outside. Scores of officers fell to their deaths while more stormed inside. It was an example of the best of mankind confronting the very worst.

  “There were one hundred and two floors of warfare in that building. The terrorists had nothing to live for, so they used lava grenades and poison gas bulbs and oven bombs that killed everybody, including themselves.

  “The moment that Isabelle Xia was shot and killed, Nicolai Dhanikov detonated the bombs that the Protectors of the Fifty had planted throughout the building.

  “The world ended for a moment.

  “All I could see was pure white. All I could hear were screams and static. My tank was kicked four blocks from ground zero. We spun end-over-end until we slammed into a building. I threw up and blacked out.

  “My captain woke me up a few minutes later.

  “We were trapped in our lightning tank—it had been crushed and melted—but we lit forge-axes and got out. Smoke and dust filled the air and black glass was all over the ground. A strong wind cleared the air and we saw what had happened.”

  Lieutenant Vashan pointed to the agonized foundation of the Empire State Building.

  Snapdragon wiped tears from his eyes with his fists; Autumn pressed her face to the boy’s shoulder and wept silently like an adult.

  “Seventy-nine thousand eight hundred and forty-two hostages died. One thousand nine hundred and twenty-two police officers were killed. Six hundred and eighty-four people in the immediate area also perished.

  “President B.R. Gregs resigned the next day. He felt that he was no longer emotionally equipped to be our Chief Representative in the Global Senate. Vice President Samantha Luther replaced him.

  “Two days later, former President B.R. Gregs committed suicide.”

  Chapter III

  Paternal Impulses (Kick the Stars)

  Holding a spool of udon in one hand and a sauce vial in the other, Champ Sappline looked up at the one-hundred-fifty-story building in which he would presently be reunited with his long-dead father.

  The façade of the cylindrical chromium edifice was segmented like bamboo into five thirty-story sections. Excepting the black panes of the one hundred and second, one hundred and fourth, and one hundred and tenth floors, which were dedicated to the Empire State Building, One World Trade Center and the Twin Towers, its windows were one-way glass that matched the metal. Affixed to the surface of the building by the soles of their feet were two hundred seventy defunct mannequin prototypes. The extruding androids faced up, frozen mid-stride on a spiral journey that wound around the cylinder from the pavement to the sky.

  Clothed in brown slacks and a collared green shirt and wearing a tie for the first time since his ill-fated sojourn to Madrid (which had been his final trip as a married man), Champ sat upon a spongy bench and sucked udon that was flavored with garlic, miso, shiso, shiitake and shrimp powders. He sipped sesame glaze from the sauce vial as he chewed the lubricated noodles.

  Eating, the garbage man pondered his failed marriage, a nearby turkey pigeon, his roommates, his home below the toilet, tasty flavor-injected udon, the war in his building (which had just escalated to “Class III: Violent; Shoving and slapping”), Mikek’s smells, the mundane woman to whom the herpetology student had introduced him on his birthday who did not want to see him again even though she thought he was “very good-looking,” and the weird fact that he was now five years older than his father.

  Champ opened the sauce vial and set it before the black beaks of two turkey pigeons. “Enjoy,” he said, tossing the emptied udon spool into a garbage canister from which he had sucked soup more than fifty times. Standing upright, he straightened his tie and looked at the Corpus Chrome, Incorporated Building. Repressed anxieties burgeoned inside of his chest.

  The lily in his right ear beeped, and a demure female voice said, “Incoming call: R.J. the Third.”

  Double-tapping the device, he answered, “Yeah?”

  “I wanted to wish you good luck.”

  “Danke.”

  “Your father is welcome to occupy the bathroom that our next door neighbors just insurrected from floor five. I believe it comes with a plunger.”

  “He has a room at the firehouse. CCI wants him there—it’s part of the deal.”

  “That’s understandable.” The popinjay clicked his tongue twice and added, “Do not hesitate to ring or rouse me to discuss your reunion. I am interested on a personal level, and also as an auteur.”

  “I’ll give you a call after.”

  “There’s somebody else who wants to say something to you—”

  A piteous mewling sound that could only originate in a morbidly obese cat caused Champ to end the call. The anxious fellow then dragged on a Purpureal vapor tube, and the uplifting (albeit calming) combination of chemicals patted him on the back, saying, “Well done, sir!”

  Pulling his long blonde hair behind his ears, the garbage man walked toward the one-hundred-and-fifty-story temple of resurrection.

  * * *

  On the seventieth floor, Mr. Johnson, clothed in a beige tweed suit, motioned with a paddle-like hand toward the sky-blue passage on the right. Champ veered into the indicated hall, where the two men proceeded in tandem.

  “Did you listen to the files I put in your vault?” inquired the shepherd.

  “I listened to one of them—it was pretty depressing.”

  Mr. Johnson declined to comment upon Champ’s negligence.

  After passing a dozen iridescent numbers, the shepherd said, “You’ll be pleased to know that your father is doing quite well. He has scored quite highly on his equilibrium, manipulation and recognition tests.”

  “That’s good. Maybe—because he was a f
ireman—he was more prepared for death than most people?”

  “Perhaps,” said the shepherd in a manner that indicated he did not agree with the garbage man’s hypothesis.

  “Seven forty-two, right?” asked Champ.

  “Indeed, indeed, indeed.”

  Three strides later, the pair stopped in front of the living wall marked 742. Champ felt a chill prickle his skin, as if he had just stepped from a warm shower into a cool draughty room.

  “Would you like a softener?” asked the shepherd.

  “Nah,” the garbage man said as he raised his vapor tube. “This’s fine.” He sucked Purpureal; a trilling B-flat lanced the quietude, and positive sentiments combated his anxiety. Soon, the invisible hand patted him on the back, saying, “Well done, sir! Very, very well done!”

  Mr. Johnson reached into the wall and dialed a code beneath the surface; three musical tones rang within the hall.

  “The waiting area lies beyond,” said the shepherd, motioning his guest forward with a nod.

  Champ walked through the nanobuilders and into a brown alcove that was furnished with a suspended leather couch, a water sphere and a table that upheld two movie sheaves and a mote aquarium; on the far wall hung an orange polarity curtain.

  For a moment, the garbage man wondered if he were dreaming.

  Mr. Johnson entered the room, and behind him, the wound of ingress was healed over by crackling nanobuilders.