After the Red Rain

by Lyga, Barry

  Not, he soon realized, because they thought he was dangerous.

  “Your hunger strike is a failed gambit,” Max Ludo said.

  Rose raised his head, desperate to peer beyond the brightness stabbing his eyes. When had Max Ludo gotten there? Had he been there all along?

  A hand grabbed his hair and jerked his head back. Another grasped his lower jaw, squeezing and prying it down, his mouth agape.

  “Our chow not good enough for you?” a voice asked, and the next thing he knew, something slimy and rancid and gritty all at once was shoved between his teeth. It tasted like death and loss and chemicals.

  Rose hissed and shook his head, but he was held fast. The hands jammed his teeth shut. Pinched his nostrils closed.

  “Eat it, you bastard!” Ludo cried. “It took years to come up with just the right combination of spliced genes to make something like that. Eat it!”

  Rose couldn’t breathe… which normally wasn’t a problem. He’d learned early on that when he couldn’t breathe, his body had ways of absorbing the air around him. But the air here was stale, and he was too weak. They wouldn’t let him breathe until he swallowed. He struggled against it, his body clamoring to swallow, his mind crying out against it.

  He started choking and gagging and seizing, his body a jerking, uncontrollable thing that moved of its own volition.

  The hands came away from his head, and he vomited the sludge they’d forced into him. It spattered the floor in front of him and ran down his chin in rivulets.

  Even with his eyes closed, the bright light stabbed him. Gasping, he said, “I can’t. You have to understand. It isn’t natural.” He had to make them understand. If they wanted him alive at all, they had to understand. He didn’t know what words to use. He barely understood himself; how could he expect them to?

  “Not natural?” someone spluttered. “That’s cloned from original stem cells, spliced with the DNA of the extinct turkey. It’s the most natural thing in the world!”

  “Wait.” Ludo’s voice. “If he wants natural, maybe we should give him natural.”

  There was near-silence, filled with a low murmuring among voices out in the darkness that lurked beyond the harsh lighting. And then chuckling, which grew into laughter, and he was hauled to his feet and dragged again, into a corridor, past several doors. They flung open a door before he could read the word stenciled on it. They dragged him in.

  His vision blurred, then sharpened for an instant. Cold tile under his feet, cracked with age. Ahead of him, an ancient-looking metal box, weeping trails of rust. A guard went to the side of it and cranked open a small hatch.

  “Most natural thing in the world,” Max Ludo chortled, “is being in the womb, eh? Am I right?”

  A chorus of obsequious yeses.

  “This is as close as it gets,” Ludo went on. “Old-style sensory-deprivation tank. Almost forgot we had this damn thing down here.” He poked his nose toward the open hatch, then recoiled, exclaiming. “Whew! Okay, so maybe not all your senses will be deprived. Four out of five isn’t bad, though. Right?” Before Rose could respond, Max gestured. “Dump him in.”

  The smell hit him before they got him through the hatch, a rancid miasma, thick and noxious. He could taste as well as smell it. He struggled, but was too weak—they shoved him through the hatch, and he fell into a too-thick pool of water. The smell was all around him.

  “You’ll float in there for a good long while,” Max promised him, his face filling the hatch. “No sound. No light. We’ll see how long you last before you beg us to pull you out. How long before you’re willing to spill all your secrets in return for something, anything but your own thoughts and that smell.”

  “I don’t have anything to tell—”

  Max slammed the hatch shut, leaving Rose in darkness and in silence.

  He inhaled the stench.

  Eyes wide, he could see nothing. Ears on alert, he heard nothing, the tank designed in such a way that its walls and water absorbed even the sound of his own breathing.

  He reached out a hand, stretching his fingers to their fullest extent, brushing against the side of the tank. At least he had smell and touch going for him. There was something out there in the great blackness, he reminded himself. He was not floating in a void; he was floating in a metal tank filled with old, stale water in the middle of a building in the middle of a Territory, in the middle of a City, on the face of the planet.

  He reminded himself of this over and over.

  Metal under his fingertips. Then a patch of something fuzzy. Mold, he thought.

  Hello there, living thing, he thought.

  He smiled.

  And closed his eyes.

  Nothing changed.

  Later—how long, he could not tell—they hauled him, reeking and soaking wet, out of the sensory-deprivation tank. The first sound to his ears was the tired, fading laughs of the men around him.

  And Rose felt disoriented. Vulnerable. The light was too bright, the room too loud. Huddled on the floor, he could not find his bearings, could hardly move on his own.

  But…

  “Go hose him off and throw him back in his cell,” Ludo said.

  Hands under his arms lifted him.

  But as he adjusted to the light and the sound, Rose realized something.

  He felt better than he had in days.

  They threw him into a tiny stall clad in cracked tiles.

  Why did he feel better? Something they’d done. The moss in the tank. Paramecia in the stagnant water.

  And now… now water! Cleaner this time, and more water than he’d encountered since his imprisonment began. He lay on the floor and spread his arms and legs wide, letting the water touch every inch of him. Cleansing him, yes, but more important than that…

  Hydrating him.

  Fortifying him.

  It was over soon enough, over sooner than he would have hoped. But as they hauled him back to his cell and hurled him in—“Take some time to think, pissant. You’ll talk soon enough.”—Rose realized two things in the damp, cooling clarity of his postshower euphoria.

  First, that he would die in prison.

  Second, that this meant he had to escape.

  CHAPTER 33

  Cognizant of the camera monitoring his every move, Rose feigned continued weakness and depression. In truth, he felt stronger than he had in days. His color had improved, and the mildew along his skin was retreating. He felt the press and burst of new sepals beginning to grow.

  This wouldn’t last forever. Soon enough, he would weaken again. He had to act now, while he had any strength at all.

  So he planned his escape. He was certain it was the smartest move he could possibly make.

  It turned out to be the worst.

  CHAPTER 34

  You see, Ms. Ward, they move in patterns.”

  Deedra still couldn’t believe that she was out after curfew, brazenly flouting all the curfew laws and all but daring the drones to detect her. The Territory—so bereft by daylight—became something of a magical wonderland by night. In the weeks since she’d first been approached by Dr. Dimbali—since she’d learned the truth about Rose and decided to liberate him—she’d spent more and more nights outside, roaming the streets with Dr. Dimbali. She heard no “This is fundamental! This is truth!” from him when they were alone. That bombastic, preaching part of his persona was a put-on for L-Twelve. When it was just the two of them, he spoke quietly but confidently, his tone utterly self-assured, even when outside after curfew.

  By night, the Territory was a haze of shadows and murky light scudding along the undersides of clouds. The cracks on the facades of buildings became art. The scorch marks from some long-ago riots became mere shadows. It was quiet and still and almost something beautiful.

  “Once you understand something’s pattern,” Dr. Dimbali went on, “you can exploit it.”

  He was droning on—appropriately enough—about the drones. Once, she had feared them, but now she understood that they
were just machines. Highly intelligent machines, yes, but still yoked to their patterns. Dr. Dimbali had pointed out certain dead zones in their coverage, spots on the streets where—at the right moment—no camera spied.

  She’d been fearful at first, but he had gone out that first night and returned an hour later, no worse for wear. He walked the streets with impunity. It was easier for him because he’d uploaded the drone patterns to his SmartSpex. But with each day that passed, she became more and more confident, especially once he showed her the new poncho he made for her.

  “The drones detect you at night through active infrared,” he lectured, “which looks for differences in temperature and zeros in on your ambient body heat. But what many people don’t realize is that you can disguise your body’s heat signature. This poncho is made of a stretched polyethylene terephthalate—a polyester film, if you will—married to a thin sheet of reflective foil. Made it myself, and don’t think it was easy. It will reflect back on you your own body heat. Somewhat warm in the short term, but it will prevent the drones from seeing you.”

  Weeks later, she still wore the poncho, its hood up. As long as she kept it on, she was invisible to the drones.

  Invisible. To the drones.

  Words she never could have imagined thinking, not in a million years.

  She had more to fear than just the drones, though. The systems that monitored her apartment door, for example…

  Dr. Dimbali had an answer for that, too.

  “Well, yes, of course the doors log your comings and goings, but so what? There are other ways in and out, if you’re clever.” She’d witnessed this firsthand—Dr. Dimbali’s basement lab sprouted a rough-hewn tunnel that led to some sort of old delivery ramp that extended into an alleyway.

  “I don’t have a secret door,” she told him.

  “No, but you have a window. And no one ever thinks to go out the window because they assume the drones would see them anyway. And since no one goes out, there’s no reason to go out. And so the windows aren’t wired. It really is an amazing ouroboros of cluelessness and fear.”

  The next night, she’d opened her window, slipped on her antidrone poncho with the hood up, and scaled the wall down four stories. It had been both more terrifying and easier than she could have imagined. The building had protrusions and ledges, old water pipes, and pocks where riot shells had dented its walls years before her birth. Perfect handholds and footholds.

  She was no longer bound by the restrictions of curfew and the confines of her apartment. That first night, she lingered on her way to Dr. Dimbali’s, not caring that he would lecture her on tardiness.

  The Territory was hers. Its empty streets, its hollow-eyed facades, its blind drones. She spread her arms and danced down a boulevard, forcing herself not to shout and whoop for joy.

  “Why doesn’t everyone do this?” she asked now. They huddled in a building within sight of the Secure Territorial Prison & Justice Facility—SecFac. “Why doesn’t everyone figure out the patterns and come outside at night?”

  Dr. Dimbali grunted in something like disgust and annoyance. “Because most people don’t bother looking up. And those who do don’t pay attention to what they see.”

  “Is there a way to avoid them during the day, too?”

  “My dear Ms. Ward, as the very nature of our mutual friend Rose should make abundantly clear, anything is possible.”

  Even, perhaps, breaking Rose out of prison.

  Weeks ago, she’d been a normal girl. There’d been nothing exceptional about her. Now she was violating curfew regularly and planning to help free an alleged murderer and spy from prison.

  From their vantage point on one of the upper floors of the abandoned building, they could make out the entire sprawl of the Magistrate’s Complex, which consisted of three edifices joined together by rough concrete passageways. One building housed the Magistrate’s Office and administrative functions. Another contained offices for the local police and the DCS officers. The last building was the squattest, the ugliest, in a Territory filled with ugly buildings. This was the prison section of the Complex, SecFac, its gray exterior interrupted sporadically by slitted, barred windows. Rose lay beyond one of those windows, and every time they came to “reconnoiter the prison” (that’s how Dr. Dimbali put it), Deedra had to tamp down the urge to run screaming to that building and cry up and out to each window in turn until she found Rose.

  The drones were thickest over the Complex, swarming the air like cockroaches on scrap food. “This is new,” Dr. Dimbali told her gravely. “They stepped up the Complex’s surveillance patterns.” He grimaced. “They’re more worried about Rose than they’re letting on in the wikis.”

  Since Rose’s arrest, the wikis had maintained a steady stream of reports from deep within the guts of the Complex, averring that Rose had already confessed to the murder of Jaron Ludo, as well as to being a spy from Dalcord Territory. Magistrate Dalcord screamed treachery and massed troops along his border; Ludo responded in kind. The proof seemed unassailable:

  OPERATIVES OF DCS, WORKING UNDER THE SUPERVISION AND PERSONAL GUIDANCE OF MAGISTRATE MAXIMILIAN LUDO, ARE MAKING PROGRESS IN EXTRACTING FURTHER INFORMATION FROM THE PRISONER. “WE’VE FOUND,” MAGISTRATE LUDO STATED IN A WIKIPOST, “THAT HUMANE TREATMENT OF EVEN THE VILEST VILLAINS PRODUCES THE BEST RESULTS. SO WE ARE TREATING THIS ‘ROSE’ AS CIVILLY AS POSSIBLE, AND HE IS REWARDING US WITH INFORMATION.”

  Deedra didn’t believe any of it.

  “Why so many drones?” she asked.

  Dr. Dimbali didn’t turn to look at her; he was busy scanning the sky with his SmartSpex, recording the movements of the drones. “Rampant paranoia, the currency of our realm. They think his confederates will come to break him out.”

  “But… we are planning on breaking him out.”

  With a harrumph, he said, “Well, yes. But they don’t know that.”

  Curfew had been cut back even further—usually it lasted from sunset to sunrise, but now it preceded the former and extended past the latter. The original reports had focused mostly on Rose murdering Jaron. That was bad enough. But as time went by and the shock of the Magistrate’s son being murdered faded, the accusations of espionage took center stage. What had begun as a killing had morphed into a conspiracy that sprawled from Territory to Territory, sinking its tendrils into every heart and mind.

  “If they change the narrative,” Dr. Dimbali pointed out, staring out the window, “they can change your behavior. They can alter our society—such as it is—to meet the new, paranoid reality they are constructing—have been constructing—before our very eyes. We live in a world without history. That’s exactly how the powers that be want it. When you cannot imagine a better world, you cannot demand it. Or fight for it. So they drown you in half-truths and speculation and ignorance.”

  Deedra raced her pendant back and forth along its chain. “It can’t be that simple. They can’t just do that.”

  He chuckled, still watching the scene outside. “I wish such naïveté weren’t a liability. In another world, in another time, perhaps. It not only is that simple, it has been that simple in the past.”

  She tucked her pendant away; he turned his attention away from the window and the drones, and she sighed, leaning against a wall. Sometimes, the idea of defying the Magistrate and his government seemed inevitable and righteous. Other times, it seemed foolish and suicidal. Most frustrating of all? There were times when it was all those things at once.

  Dr. Dimbali stooped so that their eyes were level and grasped her urgently by the shoulders.

  “I want you to understand something. Listen to me carefully and believe me. I do not dissemble easily, and I won’t do it now. What I am about to tell you is the unvarnished truth. To wit: all these people you’re so afraid of, Ms. Ward, these police and the Magistrate and the DeeCees. All of them. They’re much less clever than you are.”

  “And you.”

  He permitted himself a small smile. “Well, that goes without sayin
g. But all they have on their side is machines and guns. Yes, and numbers. A good brain can think around those things. I’ve been watching you—I know you have such a brain.”

  Deedra flushed with the unanticipated praise.

  “I’m just not sure.… I know it was my idea, but there’s so many of them.…”

  “Think of what’s at stake, Deedra.” It was the first time he’d used her first name, and that—even more than the desperate urgency in his voice—compelled her total focus on him. “The world before—the world from that book Rose left, the one you let me read. That world was real. The book was fiction, but I’ve seen the facts.”

  “You lived it?” she asked.

  He favored her with an indulgent smile, his thin lips quirking upward for a rare instant. “I’m not quite that old. The world we’re discussing existed a long, long time ago. Centuries before the Red Rain.”

  “What caused the Red Rain?” she asked. “What was it?”

  He stiffened in discomfort. “The fact is: No one knows. It began over a hundred years ago, ended probably before you were born. The world was already in dire straits, of course. The Red Rain was one more insult, one more injury. But the documents I had access to when I worked for the government… they proved what I’d always known. That once, the air was fresh, the world unpaved, the trees abundant, the food not from labs. That is the world we deserve. It’s our birthright. We need to get it back, and Rose is the key!”

  She wrenched away from him; his grip had tightened painfully, crushing her shoulders.

  He stared at her, as though uncertain as to why she’d pulled back. Then he returned to the window, hands clasped behind his back.

  “I went to my superiors. I showed them what I’d learned. ‘We need to go back to this,’ I told them. ‘We need to find a way to restore the world.’ ‘It’s too late,’ they told me. And when I pushed and pushed and pushed, they fired me. Blackballed me. Exiled me here.