by Gard Skinner
“My stare?”
“Your hard eyes. When people get that cold, they tend to forget what’s really important. They neglect the things that make them decent. That make them kind or generous or sympathetic. I’ve seen it in men and women. Soldiers. Police. Homeless. The guys who scavenge the wasteland for metal. They’re saturated with so much war and brutality that it drowns any sliver of kindness they’ve got left. And you’re almost there. You’re on the verge of forgetting.”
“What makes me human?” I asked.
“What makes you happy,” she replied.
Level 38
There were two ways BlackStar could play this. For one, they could send a test invasion, see how we responded, and adjust. I didn’t think they cared much about the people in the sickbeds, but they risked destroying their own supplies and not having any until the next shipment arrived.
The other move was to wait. To play mind games. And I figured that was their plan. The twin in the limo was solid evidence. What a way to cause dissension in my team. To make Reno, York, Mi, and Dakota suspect that I was a mole. That I’d given Jevo our position.
Mi was still certain she’d seen my double. And I believed her.
York and I pulled bunks and couches from the furniture section and made a circle with them in the electronics department. We had a brand-new CO, and on the screens, this one gave us a 360-degree night-vision view of our entire perimeter. In our old CO, we’d had no idea what was on the outside.
But straight up, they were both prisons.
How long would BlackStar wait? No more than a day. They had to have this food. They had to regain control. The trade had to continue: scrap metal and game systems go out; food, supplies, and wall panels come in.
We had our pick of clothing, but everyone went after military-style gear. It’s nice having extra pockets.
One section of the store was stocked with supplies for the troops. We also found heat guns and a stockpile of high-tensile plastic. Helmets were customized and weapons modded, and we began to look a lot more like my old crew and a lot less like escapees from a mental institution.
I’ll tell you, though, my eye was just stabbing with pain. Mi saw me cringe once and walked over.
She pulled back my hair.
“Oh, Phoenix,” she whispered, reaching for a tube of anticoagulant, her fingers red with my blood.
“It’s worse?”
“Its . . . something,” she muttered, and spread whatever she could on it. “It’s swollen, and there are white pus balls all around just waiting to pop. I mean, it looks revolting, and I’m not the squeamish type. You took the penicillin?”
“Do I need more?”
“Buckets.”
So I popped a pile of horse pills. The pain stayed, though.
Stupid port. Those holes in our heads were tough to deal with. Dust in the air was just one enemy. Imagine having metal running behind your eyes. Then it gets cold. Now it seemed to be infected. When I found the guy who’d drilled this thing, well, you can imagine, I was going to hold him down and drill a few holes of my own.
Jevo, though, he had some kind of plug. A safety cap. I guess that’s one perk of being on BlackStar’s side in this war.
With nothing happening, I set up sleep shifts. Just an hour at a time. It would help. We were sick and needed rest. Two would rack in the bunks while the other three watched the monitors and made rounds. Luckily, we could stay in the middle of our fortress in electronics. We had excellent vision and multiple firing positions if troopers breached a wall.
Reno and Mi were off to the sack first. Outside, clouds had covered the late-afternoon sun. Low light and fog are great if you’re laying siege but major problems if you’re trying to hold a position. Still, the cameras covered every inch. That ring of BlackStar trucks and troops just sat and waited.
Doc Winters was listening to a little kid’s lungs through a stethoscope when I went by on one of my laps, and it seemed a good time to pry more information from her.
“You came in on one of those trucks as a captive, didn’t you?” I asked her, watching the cold metal disc make the boy squirm.
She nodded, then pushed the kid down flat and hit a button on the rail. The bed slid back and rotated away.
“How’d you know I was born in another city?”
“Your education.” I pointed to the charts. “I haven’t seen any schools for the poor. And the rich all work for BlackStar making games. So you must have learned medicine somewhere else.”
She frowned, nodding. “I was bought. Then shipped. XMart does good business in skills trade.”
“You had no choice?”
“No one does. Work or starve. Go where there’s work. I do all right. Better than most. Long hours, but that’s the same for everyone, even up at BlackStar.”
“Human trade? That’s where they got the game programmers who live in the plush section of town?”
Another nod. “Their own kids will learn the skills and go to work for their parents. It’s almost a monarchy now.”
“But the people down here”—I was looking at the racks—“never get a chance to learn any kind of valuable skill that can bring them up out of the gutter, do they?”
Doc Winters signed some sheet and yawned for a long second. “How could that happen? The separation between rich and poor is always something the rich are very interested in keeping in place.”
I looked at my hands, so comfortable around the molded grips of my gun. “And they own all the guns.”
“I think that was the first thing corporations did after oil ran out,” Winters said. “They had to disarm the poor. They’re clever, too. It was a simple matter of changing calibers on new weapons . . . forty-fives to forty-sevens. Fifty-cal to fifty-five. They stopped making ammunition for the size of firearms that were still in the hands of the people. It took no time for the masses to expend all their bullets. After that their weapons were no more useful than cars with no wheels.”
“So they got turned in for scrap?”
“Metal for food. That program continues. Now it’s slave labor for food. Good people do anything they can to survive.”
I thought of Screw. “Rumor is that once the wall’s complete, BlackStar isn’t going to have any more need for a working class.”
Now the Doc just stared at me. She kept peering with those tired gray eyes. Finally, I had to break the silence and asked, “What’s in that spray they coat the ghettos with? From the helicopter?”
A wrinkle appeared on the edges of those eyes, like a squint. Like she knew something she wasn’t proud of knowing.
She answered, “BlackStar tells the people it’s vitamin boosters to keep them free from horde diseases that blow in from the wasteland.”
“Makes sense, but total BS, right?”
“Of course.”
“What are they doing, poisoning everyone? Slowly?”
She shook her head. “That would affect labor productivity and increase health problems. Most people don’t even realize that the rate they pay at this store for food or clothing doesn’t fully cover the cost of the goods we get shipped in on those trucks.”
“What?” That didn’t make sense to me. How could they not be charged the cost, unless . . . “You mean BlackStar covers the rest of the expense? Out of gaming profits?”
She nodded again. “Corporate charges people every dime they can, but in the end it’s not enough to pay XMart’s rates. So eventually, when the wall is up and we don’t need so many people, it makes sense that not everyone will be allowed to stay.”
BlackStar. Can you believe that? So they weren’t poisoning everyone slowly. No, they needed hard workers.
“The spray is a dopamine aerosol,” Doc Winters said flatly. “I ran it through my scanner one day. A low-dose hallucinogen that’s full of THC, LSD, and some tricky military compounds.”
“What’s it do?”
“It’s their pacifier, like happy gas. A modern Soma. Makes the people work harder. St
ops them from organizing or revolting. Tricks them into thinking they’re happy and valuable and part of something bigger and more important.”
“We breathed the stuff”—I lifted my gun a bit—“and we’re not getting in line to work for their cause.”
She looked at her hands, smiling. “Well, it takes a while to learn your place, Phoenix. Once you absorb a few more doses, you might even like living in the projects, hammering metal all day under a hot sun, then tuning out into fake game worlds all night.”
I stared at her. “Do you like your life?”
She was still staring at her hands. How many people had those hands helped? Millions? What a remarkable use for ten frail fingers. Was that the feeling Dakota had been looking for that day she’d tried to reattach those limbs to our hostages?
“Do I like my life? Son, I accept my life. I do what I can. I have friends across the country in my chosen game world every night. So yes, Phoenix, this is enough for me. It has to be. I can’t change a whole planet.
“But you,” she continued, “I don’t think you could ever make my life work. You don’t have the . . . skill set.”
“We didn’t come in on that truck, did we?”
“I can’t tell you for sure. They bring in babies all the time. The top brass trade wives and families more often than they trade programmers and designers. You just might have been some of those infants.”
“Have you ever met Max Kode?”
She shook her head. “But he has masters too.”
“Does he look like me?” I then asked, hoping she’d seen a picture or something.
Winters paused. “You’re definitely products of the same environment. Always playing angles. Working your advantages.” She took my hand and began tracing the tattoo. “And it’s not like you or your team would ever be banished. You’re company property. The chosen ones. After the full wall goes up, everyone inside will get these markings.”
“One big happy commune?” I pulled my palm back. “What will everyone else get?”
“Overrun. Cornered right up against the outside of the fence they themselves built.”
“What’s to the north?” I asked, mentioning the other wall gap, which was less secure.
“Nothing,” she answered quickly. “There’s nothing up there. But I don’t think the answers you seek are on the other side of the barricade,” she finished, turning away. “I think if you’re really interested in who you are, you need to go back to where this all started.”
Level 39
I’ve never felt closer to death—to real death—than I did thirty seconds later, when I returned to our furniture fort in the middle of the store.
I saw Reno. And Mi. Lying together on one of the wide couches. He’d shucked all his weapons, over in a pile with hers, but it was the two of them that made my lungs seize up and my heart nearly stop.
No big deal, right? We were all friends.
But not so . . . intimate. Mi and I shared something special, and that made some lines the other guys were not allowed to cross.
Reno was stretched out on the deep cushions. His leg was elevated, and it looked better. At least it’d stopped gushing. Now it just oozed.
Mi was horizontal too. They were watching a movie on one of the TVs, some romantic story, I think. Her head was on his chest, just lying there, like he was her pillow. She was all snuggled in, as comfortable as she’d be with a stuffed animal or, straight up, with me.
Mi’s hair spread out, soft, flowing, and Reno was absent-mindedly stroking it with his fingers.
They both giggled. The movie. One of the characters was being sensitive and funny.
When they laughed together, it felt like someone had stabbed me in the gut.
He squeezed her tight. His hand kept moving, brushing a stray lock out of her eyes so she could see. They were so cozy. Like old friends, and more, like lovers. Like two lost souls who’d finally found each other.
And who’d found a private, quiet, tender moment in the middle of the chaos that was our lives.
Betrayal.
I felt like throwing up.
Nausea flooded my throat, head went dizzy, knees felt crippled.
How could he? I felt like killing him. My hand reached for a shotgun. I’d just blow his backstabbing head off, the blood would soak Mi, served her right. That’d teach them. No one betrays Phoenix. Not if they want to live.
They had no idea I was watching. They had no clue they’d been discovered. Private moments like that are not made for three.
But my hand didn’t grab the pistol grip. It wouldn’t slay him. Why not? It should have. I wanted it to. Anger burned through every pore. Crazy how my brain calculated it in a military assessment kind of way, but . . . killing him would, unfortunately, deplete my forces by twenty percent. That would hurt the team.
Still, he deserved it.
Mi belonged to me. We were meant to be together.
And this, the snuggling, the laughter, the shared joy: it was the lowest form of treachery. As new as we all were to the flesh-and-blood world, this was as close to infidelity as any of us could get.
Mi was mine. Everyone knew it. Reno would die for stealing her affection this way. There were plenty of pillows around. She didn’t need him. She didn’t need him for anything. I was supposed to be enough.
Enough? Even in this small body? Weak? Powerless? On the run? Scurrying around in a world where I was the very bottom rung of the ladder, instead of the very top?
Then he leaned over and softly, deliberately, kissed her on the side of her head. Right above the port. It was slow, it was tender, and it lasted forever. His other hand held her soft cheek so tenderly, with so much love. It was the kind of thing you only see between two people whose bond has long history and goes deeper than those around them can imagine.
I almost murdered him. I almost splattered his skull right there. But for some reason, as my brain swam with this new, ugly emotion, I slunk off, leaving the two of them to finish their movie.
To finish it together.
Level 40
How long had that taken to develop? A few hours? Our siege wasn’t even one full day old. In the tank, everything moved at game speed. Out here, it was slow death, but the five of us must still have been on our NPC clocks. We couldn’t settle in for long. We’d always be cursed with the need to make big moves and make them fast.
I waited. I didn’t lash out. I found a way to back off and bide my time.
Mi went on patrol. York was checking the vehicle bay. Dakota was sacked out. I gave Reno an extra sleep shift and took his rounds. He was hurt bad; he needed more rest.
BlackStar had to be planning something. And it had to be big. What would their next move be? That helicopter, armed with guns instead of drugs? Explosives along a wall? A tunnel?
One surgical or tactical strike and they might just take this store back. I could just see the five of us—the ones who lived through the firefight—kicking and screaming as they plugged us back in, shoving our heads under, into the blue murk. Holding us there until we stopped squirming, until we drowned. Then we’d go back to work. And with no meddling children allowed to find a way to bring us back out.
Reno, man, I hated him on a gut level, but he did not look good. The hollows under his eyes were darker. The skin around the bandages was blotched and pocked and turning white. How long does it take humans to heal from three large-caliber supersonic rifle bullets? In-game, it barely slowed us down. Out here? It’d been twenty-four hours. What was the problem?
Maybe I’d smother him in his sleep. It wasn’t exactly a warrior’s death, but he didn’t deserve one. Never mess with another man’s woman. It’s part of the male code. It’s the primary element in great stories, love and war: we have to defend our princesses.
I picked out a pillow. A square yellow sponge creature. Then I crept over to where Reno was napping and raised the weapon over his face.
I’d just press down. No one would know why he’d passed away. It
wasn’t like we would run an autopsy. Everyone would figure Reno finally died from the wounds . . .
But I knew immediately I couldn’t finish him. I wanted to. I had to. In my mind, I could easily snuff him out. But there was no way my hands would push down. He was my brother. Mi was much more, but still, even if they were interested in each other now . . . even if that tenderness was genuine, I had to learn how a man handled these things, not how a gamer did it. The human Phoenix must prevail.
“What’s the pillow for?” Mi asked, standing right behind me.
My heart almost stopped.
Tears flooded my eyes. But she couldn’t see that.
I thought quick. “I wanted to elevate his leg more.” I put the cushion under his mangled limb. “He doesn’t look too good.”
“No, he doesn’t,” she agreed.
Then I slunk away. I did shoot a backward glance. Yeah, she had tears in her eyes too.
I went back to the loading bay. I’d help York get the truck ready.
Level 41
“Phoenix, up front,” York chirped into the mic. Daylight had just broken, and it sure wasn’t a bluebird day. Clouds had packed in thicker, and everything was covered in a dense mist. Our cameras were having a hard time seeing the trucks, let alone what might be lining up beyond them.
“Rain is over the city wall,” Mi told us as we assembled, “and moving our way. If making some kind of break under cloud cover is the plan, this might be our best chance.”
“We’ve got enough food in here for centuries,” Dakota reminded her.
“Yeah, but the people outside don’t,” Mi argued. “They’ll never let us just hold out, no matter how valuable we are.”
York again on the radio: “Phoenix, get to the front of the store! You really want to see this.”
He was right. But something else came up before I’d see what it was.
I heard a painful hack. Mi was wheezing even more. Almost every few seconds now.
I kicked into the hospital again and pulled down the highest-price prescription bottle Winters had available. Mi was gulping all that stuff like soda pop. And it helped. It helped a lot. I might have been really angry with her for the Reno thing, but you just can’t sit and watch a person cough so hard you can tell it hurts on a rib level.