by Josiah Upton
“Hi,” I say quietly. An image of Zaul’s face comes to mind, and I wish desperately that it was him answering the phone. But Colorado Territorial doesn’t allow calls or visitations. Perhaps if he gets moved to the Rigg house, that could actually become a reality. That future is the reason I’m making this call. I clear my throat. “It’s me, Genny.”
Another pause. Maybe he’ll hang up, so I won’t have to. But he stays on, smacking his lips a few more times. If he’s trying his hardest to be unattractive, he’s succeeding. “What do you want?”
“To talk,” I answer. “It’s about Zaul, and the offer Rigg made.”
“Yeah, well, I told you I was done with all that,” he says shortly. “And I can’t really spend all day on the phone. I gotta be at work in twenty minutes.”
“Work?” I ask. I try to imagine Dalton in a position of employment, having to wear a uniform and answer to a manager – perhaps smile at and assist customers. I can’t make the picture appear in my mind. “Since when did you have a job?”
“Ever since I dropped out of school,” he explains. “I was already two years behind. At the end, I would have been a 20-year-old graduate. And to be honest I don’t really feel like being in those halls again. Something about almost getting eaten alive by an English teacher…” An awkward silence follows. It feels like he’s blaming me for all these things, which is really stupid. “I have to make money somehow. I did have half a million dollars, but now that’s all gone.”
“I still have it all,” I say, feeling strange as the words come out. This is the first time I’ve admitted out loud to having $500,000 in my possession. I haven’t even told my dad about it, or about anything else that happened in Denver. That’s why I had to wait for him to leave for work before making this call.
“Keep it,” he says. “Not like I was going to spend it anyway. I didn’t earn it. My dad taught me a man works for his money, and that’s what I’m going to do right now. So if you’ll excuse me…”
“Wait!” I say. Dalton is the only chance I have of taking Rigg’s deal, which is the only chance of getting Zaul out. I can’t let this stubborn jerk just walk away. “Look, I’m sorry for what I said in Denver, but this is really important, and we need to talk it out. Can you call me when you get off?”
“No,” Dalton states, almost before I finish talking. He sighs. “But if you really want to waste your time, you can stop by my work, at the Mart by the school. I gotta go.”
“But...”
He hangs up. Damn it.
And so now I’m exiting the bus across from my old school, which I’m surprised hasn’t been condemned after what happened the night of the Patriot Burning.
Every time I leave Pueblo, I tell myself I’ll never be back again, only to be proven wrong. It’s still pretty chilly outside, but also very sunny, and overall warmer than usual for this time of year. Even though it’s a late Saturday morning, a group of teens are hanging around in the school parking lot, trying to perform tricks on their skateboards. One of them stops when they see me. She seems vaguely familiar to me, and I’m guessing I do to her, but I don’t slow down to find out.
I pass by the street that leads down to Zaul’s old house, presumably abandoned now that he’s in containment and Gibbs is in prison. It wasn’t very long ago, on another Saturday morning, that I waited in the bushes for his wheelchair and small trailer to disappear down the street, on his way to the grocery store that I’m headed to now. That one and only visit in Zaul’s basement ended terribly, when he flipped out and accidentally crushed my hand in his.
Even still, I wish I could go down there again and snoop around. Take a couple comic books, or maybe snatch one of those weird hand-written notes he had all over the place. I wish I could get my hands on anything that would give me some small, personal sense of him. If the APA hasn’t already cleared the place out.
But I can’t go there. I have more pressing issues to see to. Namely, talking my Hybrid-hating ex-boyfriend-for-a-day into cooperating with a plan that I myself don’t want a part of, all to transfer my Hybrid somewhat-boyfriend into a slightly better cage. Should be a piece of cake.
Chapter 19
Genny
Though every building in the neighborhood is well over one hundred years old, the Freedom Mart seems more ancient than all of them, and that includes the crumbling ones completely uninhabited since The End. It’s where all the cool kids hang out after school. Of course, I wasn’t one of those cool kids, and I didn’t have any friends, let alone ones that were cool enough to invite me to the “Mart”. But some days I would go anyway, just to screw with the system.
Some of the teens standing out front today eye me suspiciously as I approach, expecting me to walk around their huddle. Instead I just walk right through, breaking up their pow-wow and pathetic sense of high-school superiority. I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now, especially since I’m a few years older than most of them. But I stop when I see Dalton exit the front of the store, his uniform shirt untucked and his hair a mess. Very professional. He glances at me for a moment, then ignores me to join up with the group. In his arms is a bundle of white boxes, which he starts handing out to the kids. “Alright, that’s ten bucks a piece.”
I walk up to him, arms crossed. “You’re buying cigarettes for kids, from the very place you work?”
“Why don’t you say that a little bit louder, freak?” one of the pimply-faced brats snorts at me. He takes a cigarette out of the pack and pops it between his lips. “I don’t think the cops at the station heard you.”
I lurch forward at him quickly with my fist raised, and he flinches, dropping the cancer stick on the ground. “Beat it, little twerp, before I do get the cops.” I turn to the rest of the group. “All of you!” They stare at me for a moment, before they finally start to think I’m serious. I’m really not, but they scatter anyway.
“Tell your friends!” Dalton calls out to them, then pulls a smoke out of his own box, placing it in his lips and lighting it.
“You do know those things are bad for you, right?” I ask. “That’s been established since before The End. Of all the things to survive an undead apocalypse, I can’t believe smoking was one of them.”
“Maybe that’s why it stuck around,” he says, taking a long drag. A smoky trail escapes smoothly from his nostrils. He’s been doing this for a while. “People didn’t know if they had a future. Drugs, booze, sex – a cigarette. That’s all stuff that can be enjoyed in the now. The now was all that mattered.”
I contemplate his words as my eyes follow the smoke, dissipating in the air. “That’s both foolish and insightful, at the same time.”
“Well, I have my moments,” he says. He takes another drag, then looks at me with a raised eyebrow, as if he’s only just now realized who I am. “And the hell do you care if I smoke? You’re not my mom.”
“Was that your mom who answered the phone earlier?” I ask.
“No, my sister. My mom was too drunk to answer the phone. She likes to live in the ‘now’ most of the week.”
With the way Dalton acts towards girls, it’s no surprise his home life isn’t a candidate for family of the year. But just how screwed up is it? I guess there’s different kinds of screwed up a family can be, though. My own is just one of the many different flavors.
“And your dad?” I ask. I’m not sure how much small talk I need to make before I get to the heart of why I’m here. “Is he working today?”
Dalton gives me the stink eye, then walks away a few feet, his back slightly turned to me. “You didn’t come out here to ask about the Harris family. And I gotta get back inside soon. What do you want?”
I guess the small talk is over.
“Rigg’s deal. You know he won’t just take the money for Zaul’s transfer. He wants us to play along with his plan, be his little public relations puppets. Both of us. I don’t like it either, but I need you to come with me to Denver, and cooperate with Rigg. Just long enough until Zaul is out o
f Colorado Territorial.”
“And what if I said I was done with all that?” Dalton remarks. “You know, like I already said before? What makes you think I’ll change my mind?”
“Because I need you,” I say, upset that I even have to say the words. “I’m not going to be like this forever, so I have to make my moves while I’m still alive. In this life. Look, I know how you feel about him…”
“You think you know a lot about me,” Dalton says, the muscles in his shoulders tensing as he looks over them at me. “You think I’m the same guy I was a month ago, a year ago. But you didn’t know shit about me then, and you don’t know now.”
Is this true? Is he really all that deep? Ever since I first met him, it always seemed he wore his personality on his sleeve. He was like some ridiculous comic book character to me, loud and proud and easily defined, his thoughts and actions easily guessed. But if I’m wrong, then who is the real Dalton Harris? That hand-written note in Zaul’s basement comes to mind. “Then tell me, who are you?”
He drops his cigarette on the ground, squashes it with his foot, and looks up into the bright sky. “My dad’s dead. I say a lot about the things he’s taught me, his honorable character and words of wisdom. But he died three years ago.”
I wasn’t expecting that. The fall chill gets into my skin, and I cross my arms to warm up. “What happened?”
“He worked as a containment officer down at the Facility.” He looks to me, his mouth forming a grim smile. He must be reading my mind. “I know – that explains a lot about me, right? He’d have all sorts of things to say about Uggers when he got home from work. He said they stank, he said they were wild and filthy, and were always looking at him like a Christmas ham. He hated them.” He takes another cigarette and puts it in his mouth, but doesn’t light it. “One day the Facility called, said there was some sort of incident.”
“Was there an attack?” I ask in a gasp. “Is that what happened?”
“No,” he says, finally lighting up. “There’s this area where most of them are kept, a big open square called the Common. The edges have electronic sensors that shock the collars of any that cross. But that day there was a storm, and the power went out, and the collars stopped receiving frequencies, making them worthless. Some of the smarter Uggers realized what was happening, and started coming across the line, toward my dad and the other officers on the floor. They had to run.
“The locked security doors are held closed magnetically. When the power goes out, they can be easily pushed open. My dad and the others ran to a safe room, where the door closes mechanically. He was the last one in, and the guy turning the lever did it too soon. The door closed on my dad’s hand, crushing it completely.”
“Damn,” I say. My heart pumps as I listen to this story, imagining myself running through pitch-black hallways. A mob of angry, hungry Hybrids on my heels. “I never heard about that. My dad works at the headquarters, and he didn’t even say anything.”
“They either told him to keep his mouth shut about it,” Dalton says quietly, pausing for a moment as an elderly shopper walks by him. “Or they didn’t tell him about it at all. They tried to keep it under wraps. Three officers were killed and eaten because of it. Something like that is pretty embarrassing, and scary. They also paid my mom to keep quiet. The only reason we found out is because of his injury, and she kept badgering them to find out what happened.”
“So, how did he die, then?”
“That came later,” Dalton says. “While he was recovering at home from his injury, they did some routine clean-up at the Facility, including the officer locker room. They found something in his locker. A tape. Actually, lots of tapes. They were amateur videos, the dates going back all the way until he started working there.”
“Videos…” I say slowly, knowing that whatever was filmed is something terrible, something so vile that I probably don’t even want to hear. But I have to. “What was on them?”
He takes a moment to finish his smoke, stalling his answer. I almost think he’s not going to give it. “There was this thing they had in the Hybrid Rec Room, called the Lust Lounge. Somebody in charge thought it was a good idea to reward the containees for good behavior, by letting a male and female in there, and go to town.” Our eyes meet, and suddenly my cheeks feel hot. “Sex, Genny. I’m talking about Hybrid Reanimate sex.”
“Yeah, I got that,” I say, quickly turning away from him. I can’t bear to make eye contact right now. “So, your dad was filming those?”
“My dad didn’t film shit!” Dalton barks, throwing his cigarette down. “He wasn’t into weird stuff. Somebody put those tapes in there while he was recovering, knowing they would be found during the locker room clean-up. And if you’re wondering who, I don’t know. I asked, but he never said anything. In fact, he didn’t say much at all after that. Only that he didn’t do it. My mom didn’t believe him, though. He lost his job because of it, and she hated him for that. They both stopped talking to each other. He started using hard stuff, she started drinking – and sleeping around the neighborhood. She still does.”
Dalton shakes his head, his free hand clenching into a fist a few times. “My dad fell apart after that. He moved out, and a few months later he was found in his apartment, about ten pills worth of that Ugger stuff in his system.”
“Mortetine?” I ask. I don’t know much about the black market, but the only person that comes to mind when talking about illegal Mortetine, is Caesar. There’s too many parts to this story that have his name written all over it. My skin crawls.
“Yeah, that stuff,” Dalton says. “The human body can’t take more than a few of those, but I guess he already knew that. All he left behind was a cold body, and all those little nuggets of how to be a real man. This spring will make it four years. That hush-money the APA gave us ran out a while ago, and my mom’s never been able to hold down a job for long. I guess that’s another reason why I’m working here.” He smiles bitterly, gesturing to the Freedom Mart behind us.
“My mom died when I was four,” I say. “Almost five. Cancer. I don’t have that many memories of her. And the ones that I do, I’m not sure if they’re real, or just made up from the stories my dad told me. Or maybe from pictures I’ve seen. There’s one of my last birthday while she was alive, at that park just outside the Pueblo Zoo. She has her arms around me, and I’m blowing out the candles. I can see the day so vividly in my brain. I can sense the joy of opening a box to find my favorite toy, a stuffed monkey. I can feel the grass under my feet. I can smell the shampoo in her hair. But when I try to recall details that aren’t in that picture, nothing comes back to me.”
Dalton has lit another cigarette, chain-smoking right outside his job. The feelings that my dead mother evoke make my hand reach for it, grabbing it from his mouth. “I guess now we know a little bit more about each other.” I eye the burning tip of the paper cylinder, the slow incineration mesmerizing. I place it between my lips, and inhale. It feels like a roaring campfire in my lungs, choking me from the inside. I hand it back to him, coughing violently. “Oh God, that’s terrible! Why do people even do that to themselves?”
He takes it in his hand, laughing. “So, what? We swap dead parent stories, share a cigarette, and you think now everything is just fine?”
“I’m never sharing a cigarette again,” I say after another loud cough. “With you, or anybody.”
“You pissed me off,” Dalton says quickly. “What you said in Denver. You didn’t know me, why I was there. I wasn’t exactly sure myself, so how could you be?”
“Well, you said some pretty choice words, too,” I retort. “That’s not the first time you called me a bitch.” My eyes look to his cigarette again, for some reason getting the inclination to grab it again. But I’m not going to start an addiction, especially over something that hurts so much. I look to the ground. “I was wrong to think you couldn’t change. I can see you have. You aren’t the same as you were before Jensen. And before that, I bet you weren’t the
same as when your dad was alive. And I’m not the birthday girl in that picture anymore, because the woman with her arms wrapped around me is dead now. Dramatic events in life change people.
“And that’s why we need to do this thing with Rigg, before that Facility changes Zaul. He is a good person. If he were in there the day the power went out at the Facility, I know he wouldn’t be going after the officers.”
Except for maybe Caesar, I think.
“I know,” Dalton says, smoking the cigarette down to its butt. It drops to the concrete, joining its other fallen brothers. “I know. But it’s like I have two different voices inside my head. One is my father’s, telling me how vile and disgusting and murderous Hybrids are. Then there’s what you’re telling me, and what happened in that office. Or I guess, what didn’t happen. If the Facility is as bad as I’ve heard, Zaul shouldn’t be in there.”
“If that place is run by the type of people I know to be there,” I say, “then it is that bad. And no, he doesn’t belong there.”
Dalton looks to me, his eyes genuine, and free of their usual pride and anger. “I’m not doing this because of some game I’m trying to play, trying to take advantage of you. I’m doing it because it’s what an honorable man would do. That part of my father’s voice, I can listen to.”
I search his eyes further, looking for deceit, looking for any reason not to trust his words. Either I’m incapable of finding any, or I just don’t want to. In the end, Dalton is the only way this is going to work. I can’t waste anymore time questioning his motives further. “So, you’ll take another field trip with me to Denver?”
“Sure,” he says. “But no more lectures about my smokes, or acting all butt-hurt by the way I talk.”
“Deal.”
“Good,” Dalton says, taking steps toward the road. “Then let’s go save an Ugger.”
