The Body Scout: A Novel

by Lincoln Michel

  “Did the favor come with a fee?”

  The old man smiled, yellow teeth peeking from beneath his gray beard. “We accept donations.”

  “Let me guess, a guy named Jung Kang delivered it.”

  “That was the name on the receipts, yes. Obviously you know that or you wouldn’t have dragged me in here.” The old man kept glancing at the screen embedded in his desk. He seemed to be getting agitated by whatever it showed him. “I guess we can’t expect any donation this month, then?”

  “You can expect all you want. Kang’s dead.”

  I showed him Kang’s corpse on my screen for emphasis. A still from Dolores’s security feed.

  “My god,” the old man said. His eyes flicked back and forth between me and his screen. “No matter how much poison you pump into yourself, you still end up a brittle, broken thing in the end, don’t you?”

  “The man who did this is hunting Lila. And they won’t be keeping her on any Edenist diet if they catch her.”

  I could hear a commotion in the halls of the building. People running outside. Shouts. They didn’t seem to be running this way though.

  “And what will you do if you catch her? Buy her a ponycycle? We protect our own here. Including wayward souls.”

  The door slid open and an Edenist rushed in holding a screen in his hand. He was tall for an Edenist and wore a green coverall uniform instead of a tunic. “Oldblood Jonas, we’ve got a problem.” He noticed me and stopped himself. “Can you come outside?”

  “One second, Youngblood Meers. This gentleman was about to leave.”

  “Was I?”

  “I certainly hope so. Meers, help him out?”

  Meers put his hand on my shoulder. I put my elbow into his stomach instead. He grunted and doubled over. I grabbed the gun he had tucked into his back pocket. Meers dropped his screen on the ground. It displayed different security camera feeds.

  The old man reached across the table to try and yank the gun from my own hand. I put the steel barrel into Meers’s soft stomach and grabbed the old man’s hand with my free one. I was tired of talking, and of his refusing to talk. I put my thumb and forefinger around the old man’s pinkie, a few centimeters apart. Squeezed. The pinkie snapped like a piece of pink celery. It had the same wet crunch.

  The old man kept moaning.

  “Take me to Lila,” I said to Meers. “Now.”

  Meers just stared at me, eyes filled with hate. The old man laughed. His hand was turning purple, but he laughed. “You fool, I’ve already sent her an alert. She’s long gone.”

  I looked down where the screen had fallen. In the bottom left feed, I saw a young girl running into the courtyard.

  29

  THE ESCAPE ROUTE

  When I caught up to Lila, she’d already stopped running. We were in the middle of the courtyard. Everyone around us was moving. There were shouts. Orders and exclamations. The Edenists scurried like ants in a freshly stomped colony. Then I realized why.

  Hovering above the walls, a fleet of police cruisers sat flashing lights and blaring sirens.

  “We have an executable search warrant for forbidden livestock. We’ve broadcast it to your screens. You have five minutes to read it and comply.”

  The squadron hovered in the smog.

  The sight of cops made my heart stumble a few beats. They were like the world’s worst houseguests, never helping and always showing up when you could least afford to deal with them. I wondered if Okafor was in one of those cars. If they’d switched from warning me off the case to using me as bait. They wouldn’t ever betray me on purpose, I didn’t think, but they were the type to follow orders no matter what. Which was to say, Okafor was a cop.

  Through the gates, I could see a large, smooth man whispering in the ear of a police sergeant. Coppelius. The two of them laughed.

  “Listen,” I said to the girl. “We need to get out of here. And fast. And now.”

  Lila looked at me, wrinkled her face up a bit. “If it isn’t my uncle the cop.”

  “I’m not a cop. And these ones definitely aren’t with me.”

  “Piss off,” she said and sprinted in the other direction, toward the storm wall.

  I followed her.

  We ran. We ran through the courtyard, weaving between the scattering Edenists. Ran down the side of the warehouse, hopping over streams of animal waste running toward the curb. Ran out of the compound, feet slapping in the wet pavement, across the street through the traffic of creepeasies and street cleaners, over the bridge, and down the sidewalk into a hazy park. We disappeared into the smog like two nails dropped into a vat of oil.

  Back when I was a ballplayer, I kept in shape. I worked out each muscle group every other day, a small black drone beeping encouragement in my ear with each pump. I drank protein smoothies, took steroid injections, and slept in a muscle massager. Back then, I knew my body’s limits down to the inch. Knew exactly what each limb could lift, how much water or carbs or protein I needed to digest each meal. Back then, I could run for days.

  Now my lungs were more used to eraser smoke than filtered oxygen. I was wheezing as badly as the old man by the time we entered the park.

  Despite being a twig, the girl was holding up better than me, just like on Governor’s Island. She was into the cloudy park before I was across the road. But then she stopped, coughing and clutching a fence by the baseball field. I caught up with her. The field was ringed with a rusted chain fence, and the electronic scoreboard blinked an unchanging 0-0. A few smog lights partially illuminated the field. The benches were home to pale fungi feeding off the wet air.

  Still, a group of kids were playing ball with filters strapped to their faces. Same way Zunz, Okafor, and I had done back in the day. The girl at bat fouled the ball high, and it clanged against the overhanging fence.

  Lila stopped coughing. Cupped her hands around her mouth. “Hey, Pigface.”

  The masked boy in left field waved. He trotted over. “Hey, Nails. You want to play? We need a center fielder.”

  “I gotta hide. People are chasing me. Ping me if the cops or anyone else follows me, okay?”

  “Like that guy?”

  She looked back at me panting. “Like that guy, yeah, but anyone else. Any other guys like that guy.”

  “Sure thing, Nails.” He pulled his blue baseball cap low on his head, then ran back to the left field.

  Lila and I ducked behind a self-cleaning outhouse that had stopped cleaning itself. Sat down. We caught our breath in the thick smell of piss and shit. Human this time, which was even worse than the warehouse animals.

  Other than the kids, the park was mostly empty. Fat gray rats scurried between bushes. A bodega drone floated around the path, shouting at no one in particular. “Hot dogs! Pretzels! Getcha hot dogs and pretzels! Credit and bytewallet accepted!”

  A group of pigeons pecked the ground by an overflowing trash can, hammering their beaks into weird rocks I realized were food. Fossilized pizza crusts, petrified bagels. An archaeological dig of leftovers.

  I pulled out my filter mask. Started breathing a little easier. Lila didn’t seem to be though.

  “Do you have a mask?”

  Lila had her head between her knees. She shook it. She wasn’t looking at me, and I was worried she’d sprint away again, leaving me without any answers and Coppelius on my tail.

  But she was bent over. Her breath was heavy and wet. She seemed like she might vomit.

  “Take mine,” I said, holding it out for her.

  She waved it away.

  “I just need to rest here a second.”

  She coughed again and I thought I saw blood on her lips.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “I’m used to it.”

  I peeked around the outhouse. Didn’t see any flashing lights in the smog. Didn’t see anyone who could see us. We were hidden in the haze.

  Game three would have started. I stole a quick look at the score on my screen. Bottom of the second, game still tie
d at zero. Mike Truk was on the mound for the Mets, working a full count against Marius Lupu. Truk threw a two-seamer that sank on command. Yet Lupu got a tip on it. The ball bounced over shortstop Van Young’s glove, and Lupu made it safe to first.

  Lila was looking back now too. Her body shook.

  “I’m trying to help you,” I said, offering her the mask again.

  “I don’t need help. Just tell me who that giant at the gates was. The big guy with the prehistoric features. I’ve been dodging him for a while.”

  “His name’s Coppelius. Or that’s his code name at least,” I said. I was happy to change the topic. “Lab-grown spy. I’ve had several unpleasant run-ins with him myself. And no pleasant ones. I think he’s taking orders from Monsanto.”

  “I thought you worked for Monsanto.”

  I shrugged. “Yes, but on more of a freelance basis.”

  Her laughter transformed into hacking. She leaned over, nose to the grass. Her little body heaved, spat. Then she was still.

  I looked out at the smoggy park. The handful of living trees were coated with gleaming slime, either accumulated pollution or else genetically engineered bark that kept the pollution at bay. It was hard to tell the difference between the problem and the cure these days.

  “So, not like I really care, but who did it?”

  “What?”

  “Killed my father. You said you were investigating it.”

  “I don’t know yet. It might have been an accident. Bad batch of Monsanto drugs. I’m not sure.”

  Her face was a cocktail of disgust and frustration. She stood up, paced around a bit, looked down at me. “Swell. Well, what a pleasure to meet you. Glad you tracked me down to tell me nothing at all.”

  “You should come with me,” I said, forcing my aching body up. “It’s not safe with the Edenists.”

  “Yeah, sorry, my father told me to never go home with strangers. I mean, I assume he would have said that if he’d been a father.”

  Her screen pinged with one word: RUN. She looked around the outhouse, then back at me. Coppelius, flanked by cops, had his hand around Pigface’s throat. He lifted the boy into the air. His legs kicked pointlessly, stirring the smog.

  “Okay, never mind. Let’s go. No more dumb questions though.”

  30

  THE DROWNED TUNNEL

  Lila led us to an abandoned building with a faded painting of a beach on the facade. Palm trees, leaping dolphins, and a red sun beaming for miles across the ocean. An antique tanning salon, from before they developed sun cream that would tan without baking cancer into your skin.

  The storm wall towered behind the building. Few people lived on this side of the wall, and only the exiled—climate refugees unable to get citizenship—lived on the other. The salon’s lock had been broken long ago. We maneuvered through tables of creams and ointments. Plastic streamers in different colors dangled from the ceiling. Weird sponges and rusty tools. Bundles of dried plants. It was like being in the hut of some medieval witch.

  “Downstairs,” Lila said.

  Everything from my knees to the floor was stained, rotting. Dried-up seaweed and bits of sand were scattered around. Lila moved toward the back stairwell.

  I stopped. “Stairs?” I wasn’t a fan of crawling downstairs in dark buildings. I could feel a panic attack coming on. A burning seed in my gut beginning to sprout.

  “Let’s hide up here,” I offered. I gestured at the rows of tanning booths that lined the floor like robotic caskets.

  “Yeah, that doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

  In the distance, I could see the lights of police cars faintly blinking.

  “I know a secret way out. Come on.”

  I didn’t move.

  “Okay,” Lila said, waving her hand in exaggerated arcs. “Goodbye, Uncle. Goodbye yet again.”

  Lila disappeared into the dark throat of the stairwell.

  The sirens grew louder. Fragments of light sliced across the antique walls.

  I looked at the stairwell. Listened to the sounds of Lila disappearing. I couldn’t help but think of the cave-in that had crushed my arm. The hours I spent trapped under rubble while my family died.

  I lit an eraser. Smoked it as quickly as I could to tamp the claustrophobia. Tossed it on the floor and followed her into the damp gloom.

  Several flights down, I lost all reception on my screen and cybernetics. The seed of panic was blooming inside me, angry red petals spreading through my gut. Still, we kept going. Down and down.

  I held out my screen as a flashlight. The floors were inhabited only by roaches and spiders now. Old objects from my youth floated in dirty puddles of water. Filter coffee makers, glass bottles, computers with physical keyboards built into them. Seawater trickled into the lower floors. A few more years and the whole thing might collapse. Be nothing more than the hiding place for crabs and eels.

  Before we went underwater ourselves, Lila cracked open a wall grate and slithered through. I followed.

  We emerged into another dark tunnel. An alarm blared. Then I realized it wasn’t an alarm, but a chorus of squeaks. I raised my screen light and waves of rats rippled away in a horrifying tide. Hundreds of them, their dark bodies scrambling over each other back into the dark.

  “How did you know—”

  She shushed me. We stood in the dark silence. Listened. A minute passed. Two. Ten.

  No sounds followed us.

  There was no reception at all down here. It was a giant concrete tube that curved toward darkness in either direction. In the center, rusted metal lines ran across the floor, like the spine of some gigantic snake we were trapped inside.

  I knew this place.

  “The old subway,” I said. I walked around looking at the tiled walls plastered with advertisements for movies and extinct fast-food franchises. The tiles had been white, once. Now they were a grimy brown. “God, I used to ride this every day, back before the supraway went up.”

  When I was a child, this platform would have been pulsing with people. Men, women, and children of all sizes, pressed together in a desperate attempt to get inside before the doors closed. On busy days, you could have suffocated in the throng of flesh and cloth.

  “Your dad and I would play this game where we’d jump inside the train as soon as they said ‘Stand clear of the closing doors, please.’ Whoever came closest to getting crushed won.”

  Lila reached out and touched my elbow. She hacked up more of her insides. She was steadying herself. “I don’t. Give a. Rat’s ass. About your. Nostalgia.”

  “I actually hated it. Always felt like the tunnel would burst and we’d all drown.”

  It hadn’t been an irrational fear. The whole system had been abandoned from constant flooding and rising waters a couple decades ago.

  Lila stayed bent over. A tangled rope of mucus dripped from her lips. It formed a reddish puddle on the floor.

  “We need to get you to a hospital.” A film of sweat had appeared on her skin. She looked over at me, tried to speak, then spat again. She pulled a vial out of her inside pocket, downed it. After a few seconds, she had composed herself.

  “It’s nothing, just something in my throat.”

  “Something like lichen lung?”

  I’d seen that thick wet cough as a child. The rumor had been it was an early biotech that got loose. Genetically modified spores. Before the government was able to bioengineer birds and beasts, they figured out how to shape fungi and germs. Hybridized them. Made them stronger. More virulent. Whatever the origin, lichen lung spread all through the city, killing off masses of the rich and poor alike. Although mostly the poor. The city went into quarantine four different times trying to stop the spread.

  Then ChicagoBio came out with an antifungal spray. The government spent billions buying up the medicine. Then made a few billion more selling it to the citizens. No one could ever confirm the disease’s origin.

  “No,” she said like she was trying to tell herself that.

&nbs
p; “You don’t spit up bloody yellow clumps like that from anything other than the spores.”

  She sat on a wooden bench crusted with barnacles. Water sloshed in the sunken tracks. Lila kept her hand clamped over her mouth.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “Human bodies do things. You don’t feel yours because you’re half machine.”

  “I still have another half. I feel plenty.” I had an eraser to my lips, about to light. I clicked shut the flame. “Listen, kid, I know you don’t like upgrades, that you think it’s self-pollution and all that noise. But the spores dig into the tissue. You’ll die. But a doctor can line your lung to fix it.”

  “Not going to be converted to desecration. Sorry.”

  “Desecration? Your body is desecrating itself. I’m only suggesting a little janitorial work.”

  “Is that what you and my father learned back in the burrows?”

  “We learned how to survive.”

  “How did that work out for him?” Her look slid into me like a splinter.

  I didn’t know what to say and looked around the empty subway tunnel. Imagined the bright lights of an approaching train, the doors sliding open for Lila and me to rush inside. But no train came. The only sounds were the fight splashes of distant, swimming rats.

  “So?” she said.

  “So?”

  “What’s the plan? You’re the adult here.”

  “First, we need to get out of here. Hide out someplace safe. Above ground preferably.”

  “Well, I’d been staying in my deadbeat dad’s hideaway house. But that’s out of the question now. And Jung is dead too.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said pointlessly.

  “You better watch out. The father figures in my life have a high mortality rate.” She patted me on the arm. “I guess we’re going to your place, Uncle.”

  I didn’t have lichen lung, but my face must have looked just as pained. “My apartment has been, well, commandeered by some business associates.”

  “Associates?”

  “Associates I don’t like to associate with. Loan sharks.”

  “For what?”

  “Medical debt.”

  Lila stared at me. Her young face wiped of expression. “Great rescue job. Top-notch.”