Son makes a move for his spearstick. Before he can reach it, the woman is standing two meters away, side‐on to Son, presenting at once minimum target and maximum opportunity for attack. Now her friend is stationed at the limit of Son's side vision, both a distraction and the second prong of any attack.
The guy shifts position slightly. "Easy, now," he says.
Son's catchbags lie there by his spearstick. He feels for the ball and the length of cord.
"It's okay," Dee Zu tells him. "The medibots have taken. They're working."
Medibots. The things that replaced this woman's toes. Or so these people claim. Kin to the blurs.
Son looks down to where the cut should be, finds nothing but a fine white line against tanned skin. He curls his arm to make a bicep and then extends it in an exploratory straight punch from the shoulder. The bum tendon in his elbow makes little complaint. When he stands he also finds his leg much improved, even when he does a deep knee bend. Son rubs at the wound on his thigh. It's dry. The flesh around it appears almost normal, the angry red and black swelling gone.
"How do you feel?"
He feels pretty good. When he twists his hips they don't hurt as much, and they yield a greater range of movement. His sickness has mostly passed.
He checks behind him and then backs away to a more strategic position. These people mean to reassure. Yet they're strangers. And now Dee Zu is holding his blade, the weapon Poppy gave him when he came of age four years ago. She holds it up, pointing skywards, classic diversionary tactic, Son thinks, as he gazes sidelong at Cisco, awaiting the next element of a joint maneuver.
"Watch," Dee Zu tells him.
As if. He mostly watches Cisco instead.
"Really," she says. "Watch."
Ever so gently she draws the blade along the fleshy base of her thumb, a thin line of blood beginning to trickle in its wake. Then it's running down her arm and dripping off her elbow. Despite himself, Son watches, keeping an eye on Cisco at the same time. But Cisco remains motionless, relaxed.
"See?" Dee Zu holds her left hand higher, and the blood stops. The cut is closing. In no time, all evidence of the wound has disappeared.
Just as no sign remains of the cut in his own arm.
Carefully, Dee Zu turns the knifepoint toward herself and lays its handle across her right palm. "Here," she says. "Catch." She tosses the weapon to Son.
He catches the knife by the handle. Otherwise, he doesn't move.
"Friends?" the guy says. He steps toward Dee Zu, his eyes never leaving Son's. Then the two of them sit together, side by side, on a rock. No trace of the spear wound remains on the guy's leg.
"We can be friends," says Dee Zu.
•
Maybe they can be. The woman has skin like chocolate. Like the milk chocolate Auntie stashed away, bringing it out only on special occasions till it was all gone. Her skin is like that, though lighter in color with a reddish sheen in this light. He can't get over her face. Her cheekbones and her lovely oval eyes, folds at the corners. No surprise these observations have Poppy's voice niggling away at him, telling him he's nothing but an airy‐fairy dreamer and dimwit. And maybe he is still feverish. But just look at those lips. The pert nose.
The guy, on the other hand, gives him a pain in the ass. And here's both of them spilling blood all around the place like this was the smart thing to do. Every predator in this world must have homed in on them already. He feels this. And here this asshole talks to Son like he's a rube.
Still, give the mallster his due, this blue‐eyed marshmallow mallster looks fit. And he knows a few tricks as a fighter. Hard won, judging by the guy's face, which bears signs of a tough life, at least for a mallster. Somebody or something busted his nose, at some point. And scattered evidence of cuts and punctures, maybe burns, are inscribed across his face. So what's with that? Given the fact he's loaded with these medibot things.
The woman, Dee Zu, has lost some toes, but, if he understands what they've said, which he may well not do, they're growing back. Her good foot is fine‐boned and fit. About as beautiful as he can imagine a foot reasonably being. And the other foot isn't what anybody would call ugly, even with the toes not yet fully grown. What if Auntie could have had some of these medibots?
Son performs a quick scan of their surrounds, notes the various critters and their respective dispositions. He reads the situation as best he can, but Eden resembles no arena he has ever operated in.
The rule in the Bunker: Wear clothes whenever you were with the others. Auntie naked remained a powerful idea even after Son won his new privileges. And Dee Zu standing here bare‐naked is disturbing. As is his own nakedness. He crosses his legs and folds his hands over his lap, totally casual, the others also looking anywhere except there.
"How do you feel?" the guy says.
"Okay." The fever is gone.
Her friend is just as naked as the woman, though less interestingly so. His dick, like Poppy's and unlike his own, is a what Poppy called a hoodie. Which leaves Son's own configuration in a minority.
He pokes gently at the wound on his thigh. "Good," he says. "I feel good."
"You're a tough kid," says the guy.
As though he'd know. "Not a kid," Son replies. "A hunter."
"Wow."
"Four years a man. A real man."
Still and all, Son is tired. Very tired. Some more sleep would be good. If these people haven't killed him yet, he can probably take a nap without worrying too much. He doesn't even hear Poppy saying nay as he drifts off again, one hand on the bag beside him.
meet & greet
The boy is awake again.
Never mind their earlier intimacy, the prospect of physical contact with this stranger makes Cisco queasy. Whatever. He extends a hand.
In an eyeblink, the boy is on his feet, unsteady yet prepared to defend himself. That answers the question of whether Cisco's medibots have taken to their new host. And they must be working fast. The boy is fiddling with a cord he has taken from his bag.
Cisco steps back just as quickly. "Easy, there," he says.
"So you don't shake hands," says Dee Zu. "How do your people greet each other?"
"I don't have people."
"No people?"
"They're dead."
"When?"
"Yesterday."
"All dead?"
"Everybody."
"My God."
"Yeah."
"Yesterday?"
For his own part, just about everybody Cisco knew died yesterday, most of them in Living End. There's a lot of this shit going around.
"Okay. Who were your people?" says Dee Zu.
"Survivalists."
"Survivalists, failed," Cisco suggests.
The boy ignores this. "Speckops," he says. "My father was, anyway. Auntie wasn't."
"Who's Auntie?"
"A woman. She's gone." What an idiot. Now he has told them he has no backup.
"You aren't Asian."
"Homelander."
"American?"
"Yeah. Born in the Bunker. Near here."
"Where?"
"It's gone now."
"Gone?"
"GameBoys."
"Oh."
"Yeah," Son says. The cord still dangles from one hand. He straightens his other arm, gives it a couple of experimental twists, punches the air. He flexes his thigh muscles, twists his hips without standing. He looks surprised.
Cisco is surprised, come to that. Even if the medibots have taken, it's too soon to see real effects. Maybe it's only the power of suggestion.
"How many were you?" Dee Zu asks.
The boy hesitates before answering. "Four," he says. "Why?"
"Four. In the same bunker. For how long?"
"Sixteen years."
"Wow." She says it again.
"Yeah." Son lifts a catchbag, shakes dust from it. "All my life." He aligns his sticks in a neat bundle with his thongs and catchbags. "Now," he says, at once shy and aggressive. "
I have questions."
•
"You aren't GameBoys."
"No," Dee Zu says.
"So what are you?"
"Test pilots," says Cisco. "From ESUSA Mall."
"You're mallsters."
"Worlds UnLtd test pilots." Dee Zu spells it out.
"People."
"As opposed to what? Teleps?"
"'Teleps'?"
Cisco gives Dee Zu a look as though to say who is this guy?
"Teleps," Dee Zu says. "Telepresent avatars?"
"You could be one of those?"
This guy is just a boy. He almost reaches to touch the woman, maybe to reassure himself she's flesh and bone. But he doesn't follow up on the impulse, and Cisco settles back.
"We're test pilots," she says.
"He has no idea what you're talking about." Cisco tones down the condescension in his voice, wonders what it's doing there in the first place.
a bad moon for fathers
"Give him a break, okay?" the woman says to the guy.
She's nice.
"Real nice." The fever may be gone, but Poppy is still with him. "You just had to tell them your whole family is dead, didn't you? Nobody left but the Lone Ranger, here. Who probably figures the skank'll feel sorry enough she bonks him. Well, good luck with that, boy. Hope you get laid before her friend fucking kills you."
To Son she says, "We're from ESUSA."
"The USA? Homeland?"
"We're from the ESUSA Mall," says the guy. "Where New York used to be. Or close enough."
"On the other side of the world from ESSEA," Dee Zu adds.
"But you're from the USA?"
"You don't get around much, do you?" the guy says.
Dee Zu gives him a look and tells Son, "We're from ESUSA Mall. We got out just before the PlagueBot took it."
"The Boogoo?"
These are people. At the same time, Son reminds himself, they're mallsters. Not the degenerate, Doll‐dependent wallow‐hogs Poppy described. But mallsters for all that. And what kind of marshmallow world would let them survive to adulthood?
•
In face of the Troubles, according to Poppy, the Powers That Were herded the polite citizenry—all the safely vanilla zoomers, maxhappies and tranzoominist loonies—into the securistats. Pressures such as rising sea levels, however, and international terrorism, meant even these ultra‐secure stealth megalopolises started suffering security breaches. That's why they installed what were basically giant panic rooms inside selected securistats; some place to hide for what was left of the genteel folk. These malls, so called, were super‐secure cages swaddled in force‐field cocoons and perched on stilts high above the advancing seas, and their keepers slammed the gates on the mallsters and locked them. Just ahead of the Boogoo, as it turned out.
Gran‐Gran used to get all pissed off at the idea people were descended from monkeys. This notion was a dyed‐in‐the‐wool abomination, she'd tell Son. Nothing but a goddamned heresy. Poppy would say never mind that. No way the mallsters, at least, were related to monkeys. They were descended from hamsters. So their human masters, and then MOM, stuffed them into cages and supplied them with their own nanotech seed dishes—the Dolls—plus their qubital treadmills—Worlds UnLtd's manifold of generated realities—and they set about living happily ever after. Except the Boogoo came along and ate them first. And Poppy would laugh.
Hamsters were like solitary rats, tame ones. People used to keep them as pets.
Poppy gave Son more of this sad history the night they drank the last bottle of tequila in the Bunker, the same night he decided to sharpen Son's reflexes, these projects inciting memorable fulminations from Gran‐Gran regarding the work of the devil.
Even Auntie couldn't hold her tongue. "You're getting drunk," she told Poppy.
"Yes, I am. I can't get drunk with my own son the day he becomes a man?"
"He's too young to get drunk."
"He's a man and, as long as I say it's okay, he can do what he wants."
So, Poppy continued, the hamsters were themselves descended from the prefabs. "Long before the malls, chum, real men were getting overrun by modular men. So‐called men. Prefab people built with off‐the‐shelf parts compliments of the ad industry and their corporate masters. Oh, yeah. Prefabulous presentations of empty personalities. Hollow men built by hucksters. Maybe only holo men, before it was over."
Though some shit‐disturbers did remain. In fact, around the time they started generating the securistats, the Powers That Were got so fed up with GameBoys, in all their rascally variety, that they locked up the ones they could catch in escape‐proof facilities deep in the ground and forgot about them. The ones they couldn't catch or kill, they locked out of their safe cities, and most of these soon degenerated into the things you see today.
Aside from the GameBoys and what were to become the mallsters, then, there was nothing left of humanity except the ferals. People such as themselves who chose this life. Real people who chose to live in Poppy's "real world."
Be that as it may. These two ex‐mallsters give every evidence of being real people.
•
"So how did you get here?" He directs the question to the woman.
The guy answers. "Intercontinental ballistic pods," he says. "On strings."
"Strings?"
"MOM did the driving."
MOM. Poppy's totalitarian bitch‐machine, goddess of the malls. "I heard pod delivery shut down years ago. Before I was born."
"And so it did," says the guy. "This was special."
"Special delivery," Dee Zu adds. "That's us. Last packages delivered."
"No return delivery?" Son says.
"No more ESUSA Mall."
The guy's voice swaggers. "No more pods."
"No one else to deliver."
"Nowhere to go."
A nice routine. What doesn't make them a bit sad makes them laugh. A happy carelessness that'll kill them before they know what's happened.
"I saw somebody else go into Eden yesterday," Son says.
"Eden?"
"He means Living End."
Son looks him in the eye. "Where did the other guy come from?"
"ESSEA Mall."
"You've got pods to ESSEA?"
"He came by subway."
More and more like a dream. "You can take a subway to ESSEA?"
"No. The PlagueBot also breached ESSEA."
Son saw it go. "When?" he asks, just to check.
"Day before yesterday."
Bingo. "Wow. How many mallsters lived there?"
"One," Dee Zu says.
"One?" They're messing with him.
"Probably one." The guy's voice is careless. "My father."
Dee Zu reacts as though her friend is messing with her mind. "Your father? Leary?"
A bad moon for fathers.
"The last one standing in ESSEA," says the guy. "And he died last night. Here in Living End."
"In Eden?" Son says.
"Yeah. Wherever."
"One person in that whole mall?"
"That's right."
"And in ESUSA Mall?"
"Just the two of us, it looks like."
Son goes silent. Then he asks, "What about the other malls?"
"Probably there aren't any."
"Then you're the last two."
"The last two what?"
"Mallsters."
"Maybe."
"Anyway, you're full of shit."
"Oh?" Dee Zu smiles. Her friend doesn't.
"I saw others cross into Eden," Son says. "And I hear you talking about others. Toot. And Tor, and Sky. Who are they?"
how best to stay alive
How to explain Toot to this caveman? Or Sky.
Cisco merely says, "Bots. They're still down in the caves."
"Maybe," the boy tells Cisco. "But you crossed over into Eden with somebody else." As though he suspects Cisco has been smuggling people into Living End.
"That was Rabbit."
"No. It was nearly as big as you."
"Not a real rabbit."
Dee Zu snickers.
"That was a bot. My guide into Living End. Into the cave system."
"Where is he?"
"Buried somewhere beneath us with the rest of them."
Along with Leary and Brian the Evil Canadian. Their wet masters, at least. And Muggs, Brian's bot gofer. Meanwhile, Toot, Sky's bot gofer, is down there somewhere right now, except he's probably still alive and well, pursuing his mysterious errands.
"Okay," the boy says. "Just about everybody we know is dead. But we're still alive. We need to decide how best we might stay that way a while."
"You first, Mr. Local Expert. What's your advice?"
"No, no. After you. Let's hear what you think."
kings of the heap
"We'll need shelter."
"Duh." Son is suitably impressed.
"And water."
"Can we stay here in Living End?" Dee Zu says.
"In Eden? Where else? You want to take your chances out there in the dust?"
"We only get two choices?"
The Bunker is gone. The malls are gone. Given the fires and smoke and so on, retreating into the cave system doesn't seem like a great plan. Besides which, that's GameBoy territory. "Nobody would call this an ideal situation," Son replies. "But we deal with what we've got."
It's best to keep the GameBoy bunker as a hole card. Son wonders what it would be like to live in another underground bunker, this time with Dee Zu and her friend. Decides that doesn't bear thinking about.
"How do we defend ourselves?" Dee Zu asks.
"First we set up a bivouac."
"A defensive perimeter?"
"Yeah."
"Protected from what?" Once again, her friend plays at testing Son's command of the situation.
"Everything."
"Right." The guy looks at Dee Zu as if to say I told you so.
"And what about the blur dust in here?" she says. "Inside Living End. What's happened to that? Are we safe from it?"
"First we deal with the threats we know." Son hears himself being as adult as he knows how. He sounds a lot like Poppy. "We need to work out the new rules of the game."
"Which is going to take how long?"
"Not long. We write some of the rules ourselves."
"Oh, yes?" The guy goes all wide‐eyed.
"We let everything else know who's king of the heap."
"And that's us?" Dee Zu thinks he's kidding.
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