Tesseracts Seventeen

by Colleen Anderson

  Red dots start blinking all over my display screen. Three zombies claw at the door of the shack. Two emerge from the outhouse, others from behind trees. One sticks his head through the window at my side. We are under attack. The rogues have paid extra for this.

  The rich kid opens the door and shoots rapidly, screaming, until a pile of dead zombies lies just beyond the threshold, oozing red. “I got them all! I got them all!” he squeals. Spit flies from his mouth and a gob of it clings to his satisfied chin.

  “Close the door!” I tell him.

  “Maybe we should move to the next trail,” Greg says to Trent.

  The rich man laughs. “Killshots are there for anyone who takes them. We’re not stealing your points.”

  “I never said you were,” Greg says.

  The rich man squints and snorts. “Are you feeling sorry for the refuse? You’ll get killed that way, boy. This is what they’re paid for.”

  One of them appears silently in the window to the man’s left. Its grey-green fingers are scabbed and peeling, reaching inside, inches from the man’s white neck. I almost forget my job until Trent shouts, “Watch out!” I aim carefully and shoot the one reaching in. I turn and shoot another through the north window, then a third approaching from the west.

  “You’re some shot,” the rich man says, but he makes it sound like an insult.

  “All Team Leaders are marksmen,” I tell him.

  “I’d like that job,” his son whines.

  “Me too,” Greg says, smiling.

  The rich man looks at Greg, then back to me. “How’d a refugee get a job as Team Leader?”

  “I’m not a refugee.”

  “That accent isn’t local, big boy.”

  I stand up tall. “We emigrated from Brazil.”

  “Immigrant, refugee, what’s the difference? You people can’t take the jobs from kids like this. The whorehouses, sure, somebody’s got to fill those. And cleaning up the spills, maybe. But a cushy job like this? No sir. I don’t care how good your aim is.”

  “I’m a landed immigrant,” I tell him. “I have as much right to this job as anyone.”

  “That’s the problem, see? Once we let you people in, you think you have the same rights as the rest of us. You know how many of you are trying to get into this country right now? A tenth of the world’s population is refuse. We can’t give you jobs like this.”

  “I’m not refuse!” HQ tells me to calm down, so I lower my visor and turn away. “I’m a Team Leader.”

  “I bet this kid could be a Team Leader,” the rich man says. “Why don’t we let him wear the HUD?”

  I turn to him and shake my head. “I’m not allowed to take it off.”

  He shoots me in the face, twice, right in the visor, then once in the chest. And he laughs.

  My head jerks back and my body sears with pain, beyond my control, as I crash into the staircase. It’s more than annoying. It’s impossible not to be angered by it.

  “Good one, Dad,” the rich kid says.

  I raise my splattered visor and straighten up with my gun pointing at the rich man in front of me. HQ has lost visual through my headset but the panoramic camera at the top of the staircase shows them our positions. I must lower my gun away from the paying customers, they say, or they’ll hit with an audiobomb and I will be fired. “Just do your job,” HQ tells me. “We’re sending more zoms to take the heat off.”

  “Look out!” Trent yells. “They’re right there! They’re inside!”

  Two zombies inch down the staircase by my head. I can only see their legs, patchy blue-grey skin with open sores. They’re both female, wearing smelly brown dresses and one red shoe each. “Jesus, they look real,” Greg mutters. “Are you sure they’re not infected with something? Maybe the whole game is real and it’s a fight to the death.”

  The rich man laughs. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “It’s under control.” I don’t like interior combat, especially with females. Their old bones don’t offer much resistance and it’s ugly to watch. But it’s my job, so I raise my gun.

  The rich man rushes me, shouting, “Wait till they get down! Leave them to us!”

  “No more head shots,” I tell him.

  “Fuck off!” He aims his gun at my bare face. “Do you know how much I paid for this? I can do whatever the hell I want.”

  Trent and Greg start shooting wildly at the females on the stairs, maybe to prevent the headshots but more likely because they’re terrified. This is the first time they’ve seen the enemy up close.

  HQ tells me to clear my visor and the wall-cam because both are covered in paint now, and all they’ve got is a heat sensor that can’t tell a zombie from a human.

  “Everything’s fine,” I say. And that’s true until four zombies burst through the door. I shoot the first two, both big males, and their fallen bodies trip up the females behind them.

  The rich man shoots one of the little ones in the throat. She goes down rough, smashing her head on the doorframe. She might have been okay but the rich man shoots her in the mouth at close range. “That’s how you do it,” he tells his kid.

  The little one collapses onto the dirty floor and spasms, choking and foaming red at the mouth.

  “What the fuck is wrong with her?” the rich man says. He shoots her in the head, muttering, “Shut up, would you?”

  The other female kneels down and says something in Spanish, fast and loud, holding the fallen one’s face, smearing the gore into her make-up. The fallen one’s body jerks on the floor, breathless, her eyes bulging, her hands reaching for something that isn’t there. And then it stills. Dead, HQ tells me.

  The live one screams, her words all strung together in a high-pitched wail. She shakes the dead female, and then she shakes the big males lying paralysed beside her.

  “Jesus, did you kill it?” the rich kid shouts. His eyes gleam with pride and joy. “I’ll get the killpoints,” he adds, shooting the dead one’s heart monitor. Lights out now.

  That is not my grandmother, I tell myself. A feeling of horror, hot and pressurized, threatens my calm and I have to repeat the words in my mind. That is not my grandmother.

  The females on the stairs are stalled halfway down, their legs splattered, their heart monitors untouched, their undead faces staring vacantly at the doorway. None of them is my grandmother. I know that full well. That is not me on the floor. That is not my sister. That is not my father. That is not my grandmother. That’s some stranger, some dead refugee like a hundred million other dead refugees. And this is my job.

  The rich boy points his weapon at the screamer in the doorway when suddenly the big one beside her sits up and gasps. He’s not supposed to wake up yet. He must be an addict— excrement, the rich pair would call him. His chemistry is unpredictable. HQ asks for a status report but before I can answer, the big one claws at his belly and wrenches his suit up over his head— tattered clothes, electroflesh, heart monitor, all of it lifts from his torso and exposes a ghostly white chest between grey-green arms. His body is hairless and old and human beneath his painted face. He looks at the dead one and the crying one, then he looks at the rich man sneering down at them.

  The rich boy shoots the old one in the chest and he grunts with the shock. Red paint splatters across his white flesh. But he recovers quickly and roars, lunging to his feet. The grey scored flesh of his face and hands is hideous, and the boy draws back at his approach. The old one is tall, as tall as I am, and broad, as broad as I am. His power takes everyone by surprise. He slams his weight into the boy, knocking him over the upturned table legs.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, we should have kept the exos on,” the rich man says, tugging at the old one’s naked shoulders. “This is one big fucker.”

  The old one slaps the boy’s gun
across the man’s face, and the rich man stumbles into the wall. They are both rogues now, out of HQ’s control. The old one aims and fires, ten or maybe twelve times, all headshots. The rich man grunts and strains and falls to a twisted crouch, dripping red. The old one brings the gun down on his back. But the guns are not heavy and it does little damage.

  “Stop it, you refuse!” the rich kid shouts.

  That’s when the old one goes back for his shovel.

  We used shovels on the farm all the time, my father and I, before the soldiers came and killed him. I fled with my sister to the refugee camp. She was carrying a shovel, on her way to the latrine, the last time I saw her alive. Cavemen used to make shovels from the shoulder blade of an ox, my grandmother told me. They used them to dig their caveman graves. Shovels have been with us for thousands of years. Shovels and refugees and rich men with no remorse.

  I see the old one rushing in — huge and fragile, human and zombie, white and grey, us and them — and for a moment my mind can’t comprehend the theatrics inside this shack. He holds a shovel in both his hands above his painted head like the punk rockers with their microphone stands. But his face, the rage on his face, I’ve never seen rage like that before, and I’ve seen many things as Team Leader and as refuse and as a boy on the farm at home.

  The rich man and his son, they tremble.

  I step in front of Greg and Trent to shield their eyes. I don’t do anything else. I could call for an audiobomb. I could shoot the old one or knock him into the table or hit him with my gun.

  It’s my job to stop him, I know that full well, but I just can’t do it.

  * * * * *

  Catherine Austen writes fiction for all ages. Her most recent novel, All Good Children (Orca), won the Canadian Library Association’s 2012 Young Adult Book Award and the 2012 Sunburst Award (YA category). A sequel in development (thanks to the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec) spawned the setting for “Team Leader 2040.” Catherine was born in Newcastle, New Brunswick, raised in Kingston, Ontario, and now lives in Gatineau, Quebec. She is proud to be a Canadian and she hopes our future will not be as grim as the one she imagines.

  Sand Hill

  Elise Moser

  As the first intimations of the end of winter sent dampness seeping across the sidewalks, Mella packed a bag and went out to the side of the highway to watch the semis rumble past. Hidden in the tall brown grass by the side of the road, cool moisture soaking through the seat of her jeans from her perch on a hummock of rotted ice, she watched and felt herself pulled away. When dark fell she carried her bag and her inexplicably heavy heart home.

  This was not the way to leave, but what was the way to leave?

  As spring came on, Mella was ravenous, feeling somehow that all the food she ate ought to be rolling up into a ball in her stomach, layering onto her muscles and the flat planes of her back; she craved a new gravity of the limbs. Sometimes she thought it meant she should have a child. After nursery school one day she had announced to her mother that she planned to have a baby and name it Nebraska, and from that time on she remembered and held to that idea. But at the same time she knew she didn’t want a living thing in her body. The sight of women’s distended bellies made her uncomfortable. She understood the idea of birth, but couldn’t feel at ease with the thought of a squirming animal inside a person, kicking at internal organs and pressing them out of shape.

  The dreams were her first memories. They had always worked in the back of her skull, digging at her head from inside. Sensations she didn’t understand bloomed into her consciousness. A blast of cold in her face. A pillow of warmth lifting her up from somewhere she couldn’t see. The ideas of sharpness, of folding, of being among many, of dancing. The smell of water and earth mixed together, a wall of green. The sight of the curve of the land on the horizon, before she even understood that there could be anything but flat concrete.

  Mella’s dream life slipped over onto the edge of real, and sometimes back again, when she was with Stefan. He was just like her. Tall and thin, with jackknife limbs and darting eyes. From the moment she saw him she knew they shared something beyond them, something they could not name but could not stop feeling. She chose him, and he chose her.

  She had the urge to defend herself, and Stefan, and to watch over tender things. When she was eight she brought home two grey kittens she found in a cardboard box outside the 7-11, and named them Kookoo and Ruki. The next spring Kookoo came to the back door with a baby rabbit in his teeth. Mella took it gently from the bewildered cat’s sharp mouth, but the wee thing died there in her open palm. She cried her heart out, the rabbit’s sparse, dirt-stiffened fur under her long fingers. She returned it to the cat and watched with a taste of blood in her mouth as Kookoo pulled it apart and ate most of it. Maybe he dragged it off to the bushes; it wasn’t there when Mella came back from a melancholy piano lesson.

  The dreams were her discomfort, struggling to emerge when her head didn’t feel big enough to contain them. The dreams were her comfort, opening her to a landscape of light and air and water that didn’t exist anywhere in her waking experience. The dreams were her inner self and her life. Stefan had them too.

  “I was there last night,” he’d say.

  “Me too.” Mella smiled.

  She had flights of anxiety, exhaustion, pushing herself to the limits of her endurance, searching with her eyes and her inner senses for a place to rest, for resting places that used to exist, but were blackened now, destroyed. Then she woke in her room and her limbs were painfully stiff, her eyelids like iron pot lids grating across the soft balls of her eyes as she used all of her remaining energy to open them.

  “Must be the flu,” her mother said, smoothing her brow, and brought her weak tea or ginger ale. Mella sipped, half-sitting, struggling not to fall back into sleep. Something was pulling her in.

  Other times she slipped through sleep into a space beyond, and woke full of strength, a soaring in her veins, her limbs amplified and beautiful. Then she pirouetted through the morning kitchen and her mother smiled to see it.

  Mella remembered lying curled up inside a rounded room filled with diffuse light. There was a carpet of sound outside and there was movement, shadows crossing the daylight of her walls. She called out, and heard a comforting purring sound in return, like dried peas pouring gently into a cup. She remembered this, or maybe it was a dream.

  Stefan wanted to be a pilot. Then he found out about gliders and decided he wanted to learn to hang glide or paraglide. “I found a place where they give lessons,” he said excitedly.

  “It’s too dangerous, Stef,” his dad said.

  “At least not until you’re sixteen,” said his mum.

  Instead, he obsessively drew pictures of various kinds of gliders and gliding birds. He had a brief fascination with skates and rays, which glide through water. He and Mella folded paper airplanes compulsively, out of any kind of paper. Sunday comics, returned math tests, foolscap from his father’s desk at home. They made a large plane out of a geological map they found in the garbage, and tiny planes out of grocery receipts they scissored into sections. Stefan attached black sewing thread to the nicest ones and tacked the threads to the ceiling of his room until it was crowded with them, like a dense flock of some kind of angular birds. When he was twelve he grew two inches in six months, and had to climb onto a ladder and loop each thread up so the noses and wing-points didn’t poke his face as he walked from the doorway to his desk, from his desk to the bed. He and Mella lay on his carpeted floor and looked up at their multicolored flock.

  “I’d like to fly that one,” Stef said, pointing to a blue one made from an airmail envelope.

  “I’d like to be that one,” Mella whispered.

  In the summers they disappeared into the woods behind Stefan’s house, which was part of a newer development that abutted a parcel of un
cleared land. The trees were thick and it was dim in there, but over time Mella and Stefan came to know their way, stepping between tree trunks and fallen branches, on rocks and mossy corpses of logs that had lain so long they were half-dissolved into earth. Mella liked to run her hands over their soft moss coats. She liked things that were partly one thing and partly another. She liked that she and Stefan were both coolly androgynous, even after they started developing. She liked finding pupae hanging from twigs and knowing they were resting places between one form of existence and another. Sometimes she imagined pinching them open and slurping the soft unformed creatures inside, for the softness and moistness they must hold. She was compelled to walk where it smelled of life. By slipping into this humming place they were making themselves.

  “Let’s go walk in the water.”

  It was a narrow creek that ran roughly over its bed of stones and mud. They crouched and took off their sneakers, knotting the laces so they could carry them over their shoulders, curling their toes to stay upright on the smooth rocks. Sometimes they waded all the way through the woods to the highway. When that happened they emerged, put on their shoes, and crossed to the little strip mall down the road. They bought Cokes, or bags of chips.

  “Stef, what flavour? Barbecue?”

  Stefan shook his head. “I wish they had frog flavour. Or fried ants, or something.” He glanced at Mella. He knew she knew that he was serious.

  They munched on the walk back, checking over their shoulders that no one was watching as they slipped back into the forest. Other times they stayed low in the foliage close to the road and just watched the cars pass, unwilling to leave the cool, quiet, green and private world where they felt more than half alive. Sometimes their feet were blue with cold when they left the water, and they lay in the ferns on the bank, their faces and bodies dappled with sun and leaf shadows, warming each other’s feet with their bodies. Stefan’s fingers slowly explored between Mella’s small toes. Sometimes on hot afternoons they fell asleep and dreamed together. Of dancing on long black stick legs. Of flying. They plunged into these dreams, seeking them, muscle memories of different bodies creating new selves that still shimmered inside them when they awoke.