So I hope my family were sleeping real deep. I never went to see. Vin wanted to, though. That first day, with his arms full of candy he’d just swept off the shelves of the store we were looting, he was all keen to check it out. “Don’cha wanna know, Levo? See that fat Meshie-eating father of yours all squished against the window like a big Jufruit? Mama trying to bite through it with those shiny Bleach-O-Dent teeth all smashed up? Phrocking beautiful, mano!”
Vin was a TubalChem baby, so he never had a family. He didn’t understand family and he never would. Let alone why I cared about mine, even though they’d pretty much disowned me when I opted out of the Graduation Module and went for Manual Labor Status III. There was no point in getting mad at Vin.
“Forget it, mano,” I told him. “They’re all gone, and that’s it. It’s just us now.”
“You, me and a phrockin’ city full of Meshies and PinniPods!” He grinned through a mouthful of PinniPods, brown gunk oozing between his teeth. I glanced towards the back of the store where a face was plastered up against a tinted glass window in the door that must have led to the storeroom. The tint in the glass made the splatter of gunk on the window look like the melted candy smeared around Vin’s mouth. I just wanted out of there.
“Forget the candy,” I said. “Let’s see what else we can find.”
Vin’s brown-edged grin grew wider. “Like Beppies?”
“Whatever. Candy stores aren’t the only ones with old-style doors.”
Vin let the candy drop out of his arms. “Mano, you are a phrocking genius. Let’s hit it.”
I hadn’t done any of the hard stuff for a couple of months. I was kind of thinking of cleaning up; not that I’d have said that to Vin. I just told him my belly was acting up and a couple of minutes after he’d taken his first Funbo or whatever, he couldn’t have cared what planet I was on let alone what I was or wasn’t taking. He was still roaming from job to job, just loading, pushing, whatever, getting the cash he needed to keep him in DrinCuls and Beppies. He didn’t seem to have noticed that I’d been at PhillFast for three months or so, which was like a record for either of us. The work was easy and the people were nice, talking about maybe promoting me after a while. I’d been thinking about keeping on there, maybe saving up to get my own place — like a newer unit. Without Vin and with StayClosed doors that actually worked.
But right now I could really have done with some of the hard stuff. Then maybe I could stop thinking about the things I was looking at.
Pity there wasn’t any hard stuff to come by. Turned out Pharma stores and DrugBanks were right up to date with their StayClosed doors. And it wasn’t any easier to get through StayClosed from the outside than it was from the inside.
“Phrocking doors!” Vin tossed aside the Metallo bench he’d been using to ram the doors of the Drama & Stars DrugBank. The legs of the bench were bent, the StayClosed glass unscratched. “What the krig is in that stuff?”
I was sitting on the sidewalk, with my back against the wall of the BloMo store next door. I’d given up on the doors already. “Something no man shall ever put asunder…” I intoned in a deep voice, mimicking the StayClosed ad that had perpetually played on the city screens — the same ones that still loomed above every store, blank and silent for the first time. My voice echoed along the empty street. Without the gabble of the screens everything seemed too loud.
Vin glanced nervously from one end of the street to the other, and then narrowed his eyes at me. “Don’t freak me out, mano.” His forehead gleamed with sweat and his fingers twitched against his thighs, curling up like he was getting a grip back on the Metallo bench. I wondered how many Beppies he’d had the night before. And the night before that. He’d been rolling pretty strong for a while.
“Rechill, mano. We’ll find one,” I said. “On the edge of City Central, near the river or over the Other Side, there’ll be some places with the regular old doors.”
He curled his lip. Then, so fast I almost missed the change, the big old Vin smile flashed over his face. “Better get moving then, mano. Wouldn’t wan’ to miss out on any of the fun.”
There were other people around. Not many. They all moved past us pretty fast, like they didn’t want to be seen. I got that. I wouldn’t have wanted to get too close to us either. A couple of girls, kind of ripe-looking in tight-fitting Huddlesuits, had crept past on the other side of the road while Vin was trying to crash the DrugBank. He hadn’t noticed them and I didn’t say anything.
I stood up. “Better move on, then. Want anything to eat? This BloMo’s got the regular doors.”
“Naw, mano. Mostly I’m just hot.” A bead of sweat from his forehead dribbled down his cheek, like a dirty tear.
I was hot too, and I hadn’t worked even half as hard as Vin. My Bluesuit felt sticky. Which shouldn’t happen. They’re supposed to adapt to any standard ambient temperature.
But what if the temperature wasn’t standard? I looked up at the sky. Blue, like normal. The sun. It was the sun that was different. Instead of the usual pale lemon disk that should have floated above us like a kid’s AirPuff, an angry orange-red fireball glared down at me, searing my eyes with a flash of pain. “Phrock!” I looked away as fast as I could, but I still saw an orange globe – no, two orange globes, one stamped on the front of each eye. I shook my head, blinking fast, until they faded.
Vin sniggered. “Shake it out, mano!”
“The sun, Vin — no don’t look at it!” With an effort, he looked back at me. “It near burned my eyes out. The Vault’s filters are down. It’s full blaze up there.”
Now we needed a Pharma for more than Beppies — we’d need SunGear, SkinPro, LanoFill — all the stuff people needed for trips outside the Vault. Now we were going to need them inside, too. Or maybe enough Beppies not to care about fried skin and dried lungs. No wonder the girls had crept past. It wasn’t us — although it might have been part of it; mostly they were clinging to the shade of the buildings on the far side of the road.
“Better walk fast, mano,” Vinnie tossed at me. He turned on his heel, heading to the shadier side of the street, loping along on his long legs, almost faster than I could follow. I didn’t complain. There was no point.
We moved forward steadily all that day, dropping into a kind of routine — walk for an hour or so, find a store and lift a few cans of Fizz or Tapo, walk again. All the time, eyeballing every Pharma we passed, even though we knew it would be tomorrow before we could reach the areas around the river with their shabby stores. The bad news was that older stores meant older units without StayClosed, so more people — which added up to less stuff to go around.
Even though we stuck to the shade, within a few hours the skin on Vin’s face and hands was streaked with red and my hands were tingling. My face was beyond that, heading towards burning. I kept my eyes ahead, on the rippling back of Vin’s Bluesuit, his muscles working rhythmically as he walked. Not looking to the sides, not looking at the purple faces pressed to the glass, the empty eyes looking at me. Mocking me, making me wonder if in fact they were the lucky ones, because it had only been a few hours for them. Grilling to death under an unfiltered sun could take a few days.
Just after dark, we stopped at a BloMo that still had plenty of Thinpax and cans, although gaps on the shelves showed where others had already been through. We’d seen people flitting along the streets, moving in the same direction as us, towards the river. Nobody wanted to go to the Other Side unless they had to. Now we were all heading there.
We gorged on multiple meal combos, and then built nests from crumpled plastiwrap to rest for a few hours. I peeled my Bluesuit off one shoulder. The skin there was almost as red as my hands.
“We could just stay here, mano,” Vin said through cracked lips. “Eat candy and Thinpax ‘til things are all fixed up.”
“The food won’t last forever. And when are things going to be all fixed up? Who’s out there to do it? Seen anyone that looks like they know what they’re doing? Plus, how’re you do
ing without the Beppies?”
Vin just looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. His hands had gone from trembling to quivering. I’d had to open his Thinpax.
“We’ll find you some,” I told him. “If we keep moving.”
Vin sighed and curled up on a bed of Virtue Pads. “I’ll take your word. For now, mano. For now.”
We slept for a couple of hours and then moved on, There was no full dark without the filter. Stars blazed above us, each one a burning sun in its own right, adding up to a grayish light that prickled our already-burned skin.
It was by this grayish light that we saw our first bodies outside the StayClosed. Vin walked into the first one — he didn’t see it, hanging from a useless CityLec pylon. He grunted when he hit it and fell backwards, knocking me down behind him. We sprawled on the ground, side-by-side, looking up at the body, a darker grey shadow against the drab sky. He’d hanged himself with some kind of cord, looped over the Metoplex arm of the pylon. The sidewalk was scattered with the Thinpax cartons he must have stood on, then kicked away. Dark, curly hair stood out around his head like a black halo.
We picked ourselves up and walked on without speaking. There were more bodies over the next day or so. Mostly hanging. Some in stores, beside empty bottles of Drainfix and Stilosopa, sprawled out in gruesome puddles of bloody vomit, their bodies twisted in agony, their faces grey and rigid, stuck in a permanent howl of pain. The hanging ones were quieter, their purple faces and bulging eyes the outdoor twins of the people stuck to the StayClosed glass.
However they died, they soon began to stink in the queer, still heat of the Vault. We walked through the sweet and meaty stench, waded on through it, as our skin baked and curled under the relentless sun. We took turns to lead, the other following close behind, falling into the same rhythm, walking like machines, ducking into stores for fuel — just quick in and out, because in there the stink was often worse, the heat and the bodies trapped together. Vin seemed to be coping OK without the Beppies, although there was a hard set to his jaw that suggested he was clenching something inside, something he didn’t want to let escape. We didn’t talk.
A pale, silvery dawn was beginning as we crossed the broad strip of Geocrete that ran alongside the river that lay between City Central and the Other Side. When I studied history, one teacher showed us an old picture on FloScreen of something she called “nature”: flat courtyards of green stuff called “grass,” dotted with brown sticks with darker green fluffy stuff on top — she said nobody knew what they’d been called. Through the middle of the picture ran a coil of blue, curving through the grass — she said that was what rivers used to look like. Our river didn’t look like that. Our river was a swirl of brown running through a deep Geocrete channel. It ran across the whole Vault, and took a loop right around City Central, with a series of bridges crossing over to the Other Side, before rejoining itself to run through the rest of the Vault and out the far side.
With our usual brilliance, we managed to arrive at the river nowhere near any of the bridges.
Vin groaned and sat down on the cracked Geocrete a few metres away from the channel. “Just a moment,” he said. “Just give me a moment.” He clenched his fists and pressed them against the sides of his head, like he was trying to squeeze something out of it. I figured that by now he had the post-Beppie brain crawl, the sick feeling that some big worm is crawling around inside your head, looking for a way out and not caring which part of your brain it has to force its way through.
I moved a little closer to the channel and looked down at the brown river rolling through it. My hands were dark red and blistered. Every inch of my skin throbbed under the Bluesuit. The river rolled on, deep down in the Geocrete, lapping at the edges. The sound was rhythmic, rushing, splashing. I longed to bathe my hands and face in the soothing and refreshing water. I’d tried dipping one hand in Tapo at our last store, but it stung and left my skin stickier than it was before. The channel, though, was too deep, the river too far away. Even if I lay on my stomach I’d never reach it. If I dropped into it, I’d never clamber back up the smooth walls.
As those thoughts ran through my head, the first body went by. Half floating, half submerged in the swirl of brown, she swept past me. A woman with long, dark hair waving in the current and a single pale swollen arm slightly lifted out of the water. I thought for a moment she might be alive and reaching for help, but the only thing moving was the river. She rolled over in the current, and her arm swayed up and down, as if beckoning me to come and join her. For a moment, I let my muscles relax, let the pain of my burns seep through my body, imagined myself taking a step closer to the edge. Imagined letting myself topple over and fall, spinning in the hot fetid air, until I sank into the water, entwined my arms with hers and just let it go. Let it all go. The staring eyes in the pulpy faces in the windows. The picture in my head of my parents, scraping their fingertips to blood, trying to escape the StayClosed. The bodies we’d seen on our way here, hanging, poisoned. The couple who’d split each other’s belly open with ButcherSharpies, sprawled on the sidewalk outside the store they’d taken them from, surrounded by their slimy insides, each holding a knife in one hand, their other hands clasped together. I could fall into the water and let it wash me clean — wash it all away, outside and in. The muscles in my legs twitched. Just one step. Then a half step. One of my feet slid forward, involuntarily, scraping against the Geocrete…
A cough from behind me broke into the rhythm of the rushing water, interrupted the flow of my thoughts. “I’m ready, mano. Let’s go. Gotta find us a bridge, then we’re over to the Other Side, getting us some Beppies. Oh yes, gotta have some of those Beppies. Some SunGear, get us all healed up. Get us goin’, mano, get us goin’ real good. If you could, mano, just help me up here.”
I turned and saw Vin, rocking on his butt, trying to lift himself up using only his legs. His arms were coiled tightly against his chest. His body had just moved into spasm, which meant he must have been fighting the brain crawl for hours. He was strong, stronger than I thought. He was also in more trouble than I’d thought. Spasm started with the shoulder and arms, but in an hour or two it would move to his legs. Within a few hours after that, he’d be curled in the fetal position, in silent agony, with his mouth frozen closed as the spasm moved to his internal organs. And if he’d taken enough Beppies, he’d never uncurl again. I’d read Disposals hated Beppie deaths. They had to break bones to get the corpses to fit into the narrow incinerators.
I glanced back at the water. The woman’s body was long gone. And Vin needed me. He, at least, still had something to live for, even if it was just Beppies.
I grabbed one of his curled arms and hauled him up. I had no idea where we were. “Right or left?”
“Always right, mano, always right.” He managed a kind of grin through his stiffening lips.
Once he was up, Vin moved along pretty well, even if it was more of a shuffle than a stride. We followed the Geocrete riverbank for so long it felt like we were walking in a straight line, although I knew it had to curve slightly to encircled City Central. Right or left, it didn’t matter; we had to come to one of the bridges eventually.
What we came to was the ruins of a bridge. Dented Metallo panels and frayed cables hung from both sides of the canal — in the middle was nothing, just a great gap under which the river rushed onwards, oblivious.
Neither of us said anything, but our steps slowed as we grew closer, even though it was clear there was no way over the river here. The remains of the bridge couldn’t have crossed a utility unit, let alone a river.
We stopped and surveyed it in silence. “Didn’t know the electricity going out could do this,” said Vin. His voice was utterly toneless; I couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking.
I lifted my eyes from the wrecked bridge, gazing across the wide expanse of Geocrete that lay between the river and the low, shabby buildings of the Other Side. The sun was rising, almost over the horizon now, but the shadows seemed deeper there t
han over here. Some trick of the dying sun. I kept looking, peering into the spaces in between the buildings. The answer had to be over there — and I saw it. “There, between the buildings.”
For a moment Vin was silent, then his voice hissed in my ear. “Phrocking little beasts.”
The deepest shadows between the buildings moved, flitted around, stopped momentarily and then moved again. People. Going about their business, whatever that might be. Masked, covered, shielded in the dark carapace of SunGear.
“They blew the bridge,” said Vin. “Keeping it all for themselves, keeping the Funbos, the Beppies, the whole krig for themselves.”
Not to mention SunGear and large amounts of easily accessible food, drink and hope. But I didn’t mention that to Vin. The Beppies were enough for him.
“Next bridge,” said Vin. “They can’t have blown them all.” He turned and walked away, continuing on the strip along the river. “Walked” was generous; we’d been moving for half an hour or so and Vin’s progress, hindered by his seizing muscles, was now more of a tilt forward. But his legs kept moving, kept churning along the Geocrete, and I followed silently.
Of course they’d blown them all. By the fourth ruin, even Vin’s strength couldn’t keep him moving any more. He slumped down, first in a stiff-legged sitting position that he couldn’t maintain. Groaning, he toppled onto his side, his arms frozen against his chest, his legs starting to curl up towards his belly.
I looked around, studying the buildings that lined the Geocrete riverbank on our side, looking, without hope, for a door that would open. I’d scanned every building we’d walked past as we circled the river, but I hadn’t seen a single one we could get into — StayClosed windows and doors had sold big in this suburb. Probably for safety since they lived so close to the Other Side. It was the same in the streets we’d walked as we approached the river — we’d found our last enter-able store hours ago. Vin couldn’t make it back that far. I wasn’t even sure I could.
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