Black Rain

by Matthew B. J. Delaney

  “You are all genetic slop and have no rights as naturals. My mission is to get you ready for battle. For the Guard class, you’ve been made for this. For the rest of you runaways, you better pay attention or they’ll be recycling you back to amniotic by the end of the month.”

  Sharp took off his hat, waved it back toward the fields. “You test babies may not know it yet, but this is the greatest moment of your miserable lives. We’re gonna give you a gun. We’re gonna let you use it. Gentleman, welcome to Braves training camp!”

  They slept inside a long, concrete-block structure with bars over the windows and guards on the outside. The rooms were small, but the cots were comfortable. Jack was unpacking the small duffel of training gear each Synthate had been given when Regal Blue found him.

  “Your father is dead,” Regal Blue said.

  Jack slowly lowered himself to sit on the edge of the bed. He stared at the cracked concrete floor. A full minute passed. The information seeped slowly into him, like water into dried wood.

  Jack pressed the tips of his fingers to his eyebrows, then shook his head. He could not allow himself to mourn. Here, sadness was weakness, and weakness would destroy him. Instead he thought of the deposit box his father had left him. Jack had to find that box now.

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  Regal Blue sat on the bed opposite Jack. “The day your father passed away, the crushers came for me. They knew I’d served in the Games before, but they sent me back, anyway. Just as well. The freedom I had is gone. I’m as good as dead.”

  “What happens now?” Jack asked.

  “Now . . .” Regal Blue said slowly as he went out the door. “Now we get ready to fight.” At that moment the dormitory’s lights cut off and Jack was left alone in the darkness.

  CHAPTER 28

  In the camp, Regal Blue stayed near Jack’s side, helping him along. He had never been a soldier, but the rhythms and mentality of the camp were already familiar to Jack from his football days. Their group was made up of twenty Synthates from different biotech companies.

  All the naturals, even those who weren’t fans, knew about the Games, which had become as much a part of American culture as the NFL. Even in his old life, Jack had always been aware of every season, but now he found himself in the midst of it.

  The Games featured historical wars between two Synthate teams. Every week the theme of the battle changed, and could feature anything from the M-16 and the AK-47 of the Vietnam War era to the musket of Napoleon’s time or the sword and shield of the Roman legion. Each week a new battle was announced, and the camps worked to train recruited Synthates on how to use the new weapons.

  The Games season lasted for twenty weeks. During that time, each team was allocated a certain amount of Synthates to be used for the entire season. The new Synthates came in batches each week, some of them straight from the grow gardens, or others were recycled domestics who were thrown into combat to die as cannon fodder for the spectacle. During the season, coaches tried to limit their losses each game so as to have enough Synthates left over by the end of the season. The winning team for the season was decided in a final enormous Super Bowl of battles that took place once per year with all the Synthates who had survived the season as well as whichever new Synthates a team might be resourced.

  And training camp was how each new batch of recruits prepared for war.

  Each week, Synthate teams representing major American cities battled each other with designated weapons. The weapons and theme of every battle were announced on Monday, with most battles taking place Sunday afternoons.

  Training camp employed sports coaches as well as former soldiers and combat experts, most of them naturals, to train Synthates for the upcoming battles. Because the Games drew from all means of warfare spanning back thousands of years, combatants had a difficult time being truly prepared. Certain arms required a more advanced skill set while other battles focused more heavily on the brute strength and speed of edged weapons and shields.

  Jack arrived in training camp on a Wednesday, and the upcoming week’s battle had already been decided—a fight from the American Revolution, a conflict that in past Games had started off with line formations, then quickly devolved into brutal hand-to-hand combat between the two teams.

  There were armed crushers everywhere in training camp. Most Synthates wouldn’t be expected to last more than a few weeks in a season, so the crushers were always ready for escape attempts. But nobody escaped. Every Synthate in camp was fitted with a tracker. The tracker never came off, even in the battles, so the crushers always knew the location of every Synthate. Escape from camp or failure to show up for a battle meant guaranteed death.

  For the Synthates who survived a season, there was a certain amount of freedom of movement within the Synthate Zones. The intensive opening training camp was for new Synthates. For the battle veterans the camp was optional. One of the only times Synthates were allowed to choose the course of their own lives. The naturals found that Synthates fought harder when they had something to fight for. And the freedom they received from winning was one of the biggest incentives. They only had to be briefed on the use of the new weapons for each battle. As long as they showed up for each new skirmish, they were relatively free. And the warriors who fought in the Games and lived were celebrities.

  But Jack still had to survive. And surviving a Games was like storming the beaches of Normandy. Only the tough and lucky made it.

  The first morning, the recruits viewed films in the darkened conference center from last year’s Braves’ season, learning line formations and weaponry. The films were brutal to watch. Countless Synthates being torn apart in battle after battle, left for dead on the stadium floor. None of the new Synthates had ever been inside Entertainment Stadium and couldn’t even imagine the scale of what a battle was like. Jack had witnessed these miniwars from behind glass and had to manage the fear of what he knew was coming.

  They didn’t have much time to train before the Games, so every minute was filled, from learning new weapons to hand-to-hand combat. Synthates worked with weights and developed speed; the old strength and stamina of Jack’s college days quickly returned to him. The regularity of drills, the blows of the whistle, all familiar from his time in football.

  But every night in his bunk he thought of Dolce.

  To break down now over her would mean death. Even the tiniest fracture would erode over time until everything crumbled. He lived now in a world of complete indifference, an indifference that he could not have even imagined in his previous time. An indifference toward life and death. He had grown up with love and support, and now to be surrounded by people who gave no care for his life and would find only good entertainment in his death was a shocking departure from his time as a natural. But this was the strange new world he inhabited. And while everything that had happened had all the hallmarks of a nightmare, the details were very real. He would have to persevere. He would have to find his own way. No matter what happened. He must go on.

  Jack remembered Night Comfort, the pleasure parlor girl his brother had sent to his apartment. Maybe she’d been right. Maybe Synthates didn’t have the luxury of peaceful protest. Before, Jack could never have supported a violent uprising. Now, though, his feelings began to change. Synthates comprised ten percent of the country’s population. They were smart, strong, and angry. They could force a change soon.

  Of his old existence, Jack had heard nothing, and soon his former life began to seem unreal. Not only his world of taken-for-granted privilege but his very identity had been stripped away. There had been no contact from the outside world. He had ceased to exist. Did anyone know he was here? Did anyone care? Did they all believe he was a murderer?

  Jack had no way of knowing the outside world. Nothing filtered through to him through the security of training camp. He needed to question Regal Blue about his father’s death. Something seemed wrong. But he had to find the right time.

  The last day of camp, they w
ere assembled in the locker room of the training facility. The room itself was modern and clean, one of the few luxuries afforded Synthates. Crushers stood watch around the edge while the team of assistant coaches huddled together reviewing rosters.

  The crushers parted, and Coach Sharp entered the room. He wore a Braves sweatshirt and athletic pants. He was a big natural, fat in the gut, but with the rounded shoulders of a former athlete. His hands were thick and veined and he held them clasped behind his back as he walked the length of the locker room, inspecting each of the Synthates like a general at the front lines.

  He stopped at the front of the room and turned toward them. “Many of you may know I was originally a coach in the National Football League. Now, football is very different from what we do. In football, you’re facing a guy who wants to knock your head off. He wants to rip you apart, eat you for breakfast. He’d put a bullet in your head if he could. That’s football. In this game you’re about to play, the guy across from you actually can.

  “Believe me, have no illusions, you are going into battle. As serious, and as real, as any battles that have ever been fought between men.

  “That’s what we’ve been training for. Good luck tomorrow. Make your makers proud.”

  CHAPTER 29

  “Can Ralph come?”

  “No, sweetie, Ralph has to stay here,” Arden said, kneeling in front of his daughter. The vidScreen behind her played silently in the background, displaying Disney 3Dees. Arden barely noticed as he struggled with Maggy’s pink pullover jacket. Maggy thought the jacket was too heavy and didn’t want to wear it, so he had to coax the puffy garment over her shoulders using a series of distractions.

  “What’s Ralph like to eat?” he asked.

  “Lettuce,” came Maggy’s cheerful reply.

  He slipped the coat on a little more.

  Ralph was a foot-long iguana that he’d bought for Maggy after she’d been sick. He thought she would have preferred something warm and furry that she could play with, but when Maggy had seen the iguanas inside their glass tanks, she’d immediately pointed at them in excitement.

  On the drive home from the pet store, she was silent almost the entire way, so quiet, in fact, that Arden thought that the reptile with its bulging eyes and flicking tongue might be scaring her a little.

  He was surprised, then, when Maggy suddenly said from the back seat, “Is he sick?”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “He’s in a bubble. Just like me, when I was sick.”

  After that, Arden didn’t feel right keeping the creature inside its glass enclosure. So Ralph was left to roam freely around the house. Maggy and Ralph soon grew close, the reptile seeking her out at night to sleep on her warm pillow and sitting at the breakfast table each morning while she fed him bits of lettuce.

  “We can bring Ralph next time, okay, sweetie?” Arden said to Maggy, now fully inside her pink jacket.

  “Okay. Mommy, too?”

  “Well . . .” Arden replied hesitantly, “. . . maybe.”

  Arden’s ex-wife, Sheila, was a lawyer who lived in a Battery Park City luxury condo with her boyfriend, Raoul, an asshole self-proclaimed post-modern painter from Brazil.

  Once upon a time, she and Arden used to be happy. Used. That was a word that came up a lot in his life. A fucking curse, that word. He used to be a good cop. He and Sheila used to be a loving couple.

  Maggy used to be healthy. Maggy. She was all that mattered now. Two years ago, when the white mist fell across New York, everybody was thrown into a panic. Arden still remembered the morning of the attack. Someone had infected the air scrubbers, and throughout the night the machines had quietly filled the atmosphere with toxic dust. That morning, New York City woke covered in a dark coating of ash. Six months after that, people started getting sick.

  The newspapers called it the Black Rain. What it was, in fact, was a cancer-causing genetic mutagen. Black Rain occurred only a year after the virus El Diablo had struck the city, sickening and killing thousands, and a year before that the Synthate Liberation Front had blown up the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Those were dark times.

  Ralph sat on the coffee table and watched his mistress get ready. His tongue darted in and out. Maggy ran over to him, bent down, and kissed him directly on the nose with her tiny lips. For weeks after the attack, Arden had kept his daughter inside the house, but still the virus within the dust found a way to infect her.

  “Say good-bye to Ralph,” Maggy said as she took Arden’s hand and headed for the door.

  “Bye, Ralph,” Arden said before shutting out the light, and Maggy echoed him. “Bye, bye Ralph!”

  Twenty minutes later, Arden dropped off Maggy with Sanders’s wife at their small honeycomb in the Brooklyn conurb. His partner’s family lived in a relatively quiet block of tall honeycomb towers and micro-pod complexes, insulated from the Synthate Zones further to the east.

  The passenger door opened and Dwayne Sanders sat down. “What’re we doing out so late?”

  “Going to the city.”

  Arden turned the car around and headed back toward Manhattan.

  “Why?”

  “I think I got something on that Reynolds thing.”

  “Trying to earn your Junior G-man badge? They already got the guy for that, some undercover Synthate, worked at Genico.”

  “He wasn’t just some guy. And he didn’t just work at Genico. He was the head honcho’s son. Doesn’t make sense, a guy like that.”

  “The SFU says that’s our guy, so that’s our guy,” Sanders said. “Whoever he is. Doesn’t matter.”

  “And the SFU gets to tell the public they got another dangerous Synthate off the street. They get more funding for laser guns or whatever the fuck they use.”

  “Everyone makes out, what do you want to mess with this for?”

  “It plays wrong to me, that’s why,” Arden said. “This Jack Saxton, everyone likes him. Former football hero. He gets up every day, goes to work, has a nice honeycomb, a car, plenty of touch bucks, then one day he just snaps and murders three people?”

  “He’s a Synthate. They don’t think like you and me.”

  Arden drove across the Manhattan Bridge. Ahead, the Manhattan skyline stretched out, airplane warning lights blinking red atop the Genico tower. A helisquall hovered over the Synthate Zone to the north.

  “That’s my point. He didn’t know he was a Synthate. This kid did everything right, had a ticker tape parade, for fuck’s sakes. And now look at him. His wife is dead. He’s bound for the Island, and we both know what kind of trip that is. So he destroys his whole life to waste some researcher and his wife at a costume party?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Sanders said, playing an imaginary violin. “You got me all broken up inside. Now, let me tell you how I see it. You’ve got this young, up-and-coming executive, hot wife, nice apartment, no more honeycombs for him, maybe a few pleasure parlor trips, the whole fucking thing. Only trouble is, he’s a Synthate. No problem, he’s kept it hidden for the past twentysomething years, and he figures who’s going to know? I’ve got my adopted daddy’s mao keeping me safe. But then some snooping scientist, this guy Dr. Reynolds, is checking employee medical records—”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Who knows? He’s a good citizen, wants to catch himself a Synthate. And that’s when he comes across Jack Saxton. He’s got this guy cold, and best of all, it’s the boss’s adopted son. But before he can start blackmailing the dude, Jack offs both him and his wife.”

  “I don’t buy it. Someone betrayed him. Someone turned him in to the SFU. And that gives him more reason for revenge than most people. But he didn’t do Reynolds. No way. Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Squad must have flaked a hundred Synthates for shit they didn’t do. Maybe a thousand. Why are you taking this one so personally?”

  “Because whoever killed Reynolds took out the one guy who maybe found a cure for Black Rain. And that pisses me off.”

&n
bsp; “Oh,” Sanders said, understanding immediately. “So let’s get the bastard.”

  “The SFU isn’t going to like us meddling in their closed case.”

  “Fuck ’em. What you got?”

  A burden lifted. Arden was asking a lot of his partner, but felt relieved to hear him say the words. He pulled over on the edge of Chinatown, took out the Village Voice and turned to the Adult Personals section. Small pop-up ads 3Deed in the car: Asian Escorts, Transsexuals, Teen Synthates . . . all danced and beckoned to them.

  “Kinky,” Sanders said.

  “You remember Benny Zero?” Arden asked.

  “Yeah, sure I remember.”

  Benny Zero was a hustler and pimp dealing mainly in Synthate whores and call girls. Night Comfort had mentioned his name to Arden, and the more he thought about him, the more Arden saw him as a possible link to whoever popped Reynolds and his wife. Back when Arden and Sanders had worked vice together, Zero was in the business of pimping only high-priced natural girls, but prison time and a brush with the Russian mafia had pushed Benny Zero underground. His trade was still whores, but strictly Synthates now.

  With Zero’s connections in the off-inventory Synthate world, he might be aware if someone had ordered a fucked-up psycho Synthate, the kind to undertake a contract murder. Problem was, before they could talk to Benny Zero, they had to find him.

  Sanders picked out one of the ads at random. “Luscious Latin Escorts” featured a dancing vidImage of a raven-haired Synthate with big creamy tits and a pumpkin for an ass.

  Arden dialed the number. On the third ring a woman answered.

  “Hi, I’d like to place an order for delivery,” Arden said.

  “Sure,” the woman responded, flirty but bored at the same time, as if her shift was almost over.

  “I’m in town on business, staying at the Empire Hotel, room 3700.”

  “What type of food do you want? We have Asian. Spanish. Russian.”