by Zack Parsons
“No,” said Polly. “I didn’t put the poison into the air.”
But Polly knew something that would drive the talkers to new heights of anger. She knew where the dupes in places like Bad Tower were getting the raw ingredients for their drugs.
“That is what I say to my son.” Mrs. Valdez slid a coffee in front of Polly and shoveled in a healthy spoonful of sugar. “He is with the Army up north. On the big cannons in the Hollywood hill. He says like the man on the radio, but I tell him he listen too much to the radio. And the news.”
“You heard about me?” Polly sipped the coffee.
“No.” Mrs. Valdez clapped her hands together. “I heard man on news say your name, something about a fire, and I say no. I turn him off. They lie all the time.”
“It’s okay,” said Polly.
“No, they lie and make up stories. I will not watch him anymore. Put on channel three instead.”
Mrs. Valdez took a long sip of coffee and then asked, “I watch baseball. Do you like baseball? I don’t remember. My nephew plays baseball.”
Polly knew about Chico Castro. It was a long story she’d heard before, about how he was called up to play for the LA Bombers and ruined his career riding in a car with a hard-drinking friend. The one-car accident had left Chico unable to play. Polly didn’t mind hearing it again. She smiled at all the right spots and shook her head sympathetically when Mrs. Valdez grew emotional. The story ended, as Polly knew, with a miraculous tale of a lottery ticket bought with Chico’s last dollar.
“It was only the smaller prize,” Mrs. Valdez finished, “and he took it back to Algadones. Now he has a wife, six kids, and he has four bathrooms in his house. And a boat. I will go ride on it someday.”
Polly returned to her apartment and crawled into bed, her stomach full of bad coffee and thawed chicken poached in broth. She felt plugged back in. Someone had taken the time to connect her back to the world and convince her, in a small way, that not every story had an unhappy ending.
She closed her eyes and began to imagine Chico Castro and his boat. Her fantasy swam into a dream reality. The deck was sun-warmed beneath her bare feet. Placid waters unfurled in every direction. Chico waved from behind the pilot’s wheel. He was smiling, bronze-skinned, and muscular, incredibly handsome. He called out, but his voice did not make any sound. He frowned.
She was very aware of the sound of her breathing and the noise of the ocean. The soft lapping of waves against the side of Chico’s boat became as hollow as the slosh of water in a bathtub. A single ominous note began to howl in the distance. The bright day began to darken. The noise drowned out every sound, growing louder and louder, until it was a familiar whine.
Polly opened her eyes, her body seized by waking tachycardia, and the spore sirens howled to life across the city of Los Angeles.
COMINTERCEPT - TELEPHONE - NOENCRYPT - GREEN LABEL
06/19/06 - 14:48:07 PST - Partial Machine Transcription
Subjects: Dr. Robin Burns
CHAPTER THREE
He ascended from a deep darkness. First willful flexing of muscles. The first thought of Here I Am. A breathless mouthful of sour mud. Lightless, airless, compressed. Squirming bodies. Sucked into a conduit feet-first, tender flesh beaten against unforgiving tubes. Something heavy and soft wrapped up in his arms. Mud becomes water. Scream rendered as choked gurgle. The head-sickness of realization. This is. How long ...
Others all around. Reaching, screaming, tangling together. Threaded grass of hair, long hair, swims across face. Grasping at arms and hands and feet and breast. Vomited into the rusty trough of a sedimentation tank. He held an animal—a dog, fur clotted with filth as he cradled it in his arms. Groaning. Suffocated bodies beneath. Still struggling to make sense of sensation. Vomiting white onto a pile of living flesh. The dog breathing against his cheek. A soft cry within its chest.
Bright lights overhead, moving overhead. A man above with ghost-white hair points to a man with ghost-white hair below. The man below is extracted by crane hooks, limp, rising slowly above them, dangling like the engine of a car. The amplified squawk of a voice giving instructions. Oh, God, the hoses. Pressurized to strip skin. Blasting away the white remnants of cowls. Toppling men and women from the pile. Rubber boots and rubber aprons. Men standing on the faces of others. Rubber hands grasping and pulling him out. The dog was still in his arms.
“This one came out with a fucking pet.”
One of the men in rubber boots stepped on backs and faces, climbing out of the tank, and came over and tore the dog from his arms. When he resisted, purely out of instinct, the man beat him with a cudgel and shoved him to the floor.
The man carried the dog through a door. Klaxons sounded. He peered back into the rusted hull of the sedimentation tank. A hatch was opening. They were crying for help. The youthful, terrified faces of men and women he did not recognize. Who were they? The sluice gates opened, and the remnant mass was herded away by the flow of water. Washed down into the depths. The doors closed on the tank.
How long ...
He marched in a daze through old hallways, once clean and hospital white. Year upon year, decade upon decade of dripping feet on tiles. Ever greater quantities of flesh through the birth canals. Epochs of invisible filth materializing in gray grids and scuffed trails. The file was joined by others from other tanks and became a shambling mass prodded by rubber-suited wardens, their identities concealed by gray respirator masks.
He could see his face repeating. A few of the girl
. Many of the Bishops. They trudged drunkenly, without protest, without concern for modesty, passing beneath grates of misting water that cleared the last of the debris clinging to their bodies. They sat slack in the chairs of a hundred barbers as their hair was removed with buzzing clippers. He gazed at the sullen face of the Bishop across from him as peels of hair dropped to his chest. “On your feet”. Rising as one. Shuffling out, shoulders itchy with shorn hair, beneath another screen of water to wash it away.
Shoving hands pushed him through a doorway. He was isolated in a room. Small and imperfectly lit by failing fluorescents. Cold and naked still. A single spot of blood on his temple. He sat in the small, uncomfortable chair. He tried to remember, but there was a great black void in his memories. He perceived the past as if it were at the end of a long tunnel, distant images and memories echoing and distorted by the tunnel’s length. He had been here before. Looking for her. Looking for ...
Her.
The door opened, and there she was, still beautiful, but her features harder and receding beneath years and fat. He remembered that face but not her name. Her generous proportions bustled beneath a dark military uniform. She wore a pistol and a cudgel on her hip. He did not recognize the military patch on her arm. FOSTER was printed across her left breast on a name strip.
She said nothing and set about fitting a machine cuff around his forearm. He could not speak. She closed a collar around his throat that cinched his air and forced him to breathe shallowly. He tried to speak, but she ignored him as she lowered a crown upon his head.
The cuff at throat and arm pinched him, and he could feel needles entering his flesh, a small measure of his blood siphoned through curling hoses. After a moment there was a hiss of pressure, and three televisions blinked. Glowing green letters scrolled over darkness. The crown was heavy upon his head and connected by trunks of electrical cables to the televisions.
CLADE 11784-3C flashed in green text upon the first television. MONOPHYLETIC PROTEIN SECRETING B-TYPE. 101 OF 101 ANTIBODY MARKERS.
“Your blood looks good,” Veronica said. “Brain waves are off, slow to recover.”
The second television displayed a name.
CORD, CASPER.
The third television displayed yet more information in quivering green letters.
INFORMATION VIOLATION, SEDITION, CORRECTIONS, UNDERCROFT, LIFE SENTENCE. NO EARLY RELEASE.
“Do you remember this name?” the woman asked, tapping her finger on the center television without actually looking at the screen.
Yes. It was his name. The third screen was his sentence, pronounced by Ethan Bishop, and she ... she was ...
“Veronica,” he said, numb-mouthed, pleadingly, a thin stream of drool falling from his lips.
“No,” she said, and she adjusted an alligator clip on the crown that held his head. “That name doesn’t belong to anyone anymore. I want you to tell me your name.”
“Ver ... Veronica?” He tried to lift a hand to her face but found it held down to the chair by a fabric strap around his wrist. When he managed more than a single word, his voice was bleeding and dragged behind a truck. “Veronica. Veronica ... what happened to you?”
She sighed as if his question was exasperating. “Are we really going to play this game”—she paused to read the name off the television—“Casper Cord?”
She faced the television and stood with her back to him for a long while. An odd typewriter made of beige plastic lay on a shelf beneath each television. Her fingers clicked at the keys.
“It really is you. I’ve never seen one this old. Maybe you do think I’m Veronica.” When she stepped away from the television, it displayed the date and time of his last memory. 4:08 AM, June 29, 1951. “Whoever you are, I need you to repeat the name. We have to follow the script.”
He felt mentally and physically exhausted from trying to communicate with her. His shoulders flexed, the result of shrugging with his arms strapped in place. “Casper Cord.”
“Casper Cord, you have paid your debt to society. Pit Security Department of Corrections Emergence hereby releases you from the Undercroft, returns you from zeroing with all mental faculties and agency restored, and hereby permits you to resume emergence. Do you accept that you are a free man? Please say yes to receive your complimentary clothing and emergence stipend.”
“Yes,” Casper said, and he hung his head.
Veronica placed a small cardboard box on his knees. She removed the crown from his head, unstrapped his wrists, and freed him from the cuff and collar. Blood welled from the needle pricks left on his forearm.
“A unique identifying phrase will be issued for you momentarily. Please look into the camera and wait for the flash to receive your new Master ID.”
She pointed to a camera recessed in the wall behind a pane of thick glass. He stared at his distorted reflection in its lens, head shaved, face young, and the camera flashed. As he blinked out the after-image, he saw the television screen that displayed his name blanked. A moment later the words NINETY-NINETY appeared in place of his name.
“Double-number name. You are very lucky.” Machinery clattered unseen within the wall for several seconds. It ceased, and a small plastic card snapped out of a gap beneath the camera. Veronica passed it to him, and he took it, feeling the warmth of the plastic, smelling the newness of it. His photograph seemed made from a mosaic of tiny squares. An odd, shimmering strip above his name, Ninety-Ninety, was filled with repetitions of the word and the digit 2.
“Get dressed. I will be back in a few minutes to escort you out.”
Within the cardboard box was a green coverall stenciled with LARC across its shoulders, a pair of rubber sandals, and a red card similar to his ID card but with a stylized version of the Bishop company logo. Welcome Back! printed in italics above a serial number in raised lettering. It was a “debit card,” which meant nothing to him. Beneath this was a small booklet, stapled at the spine, entitled, “Long-Term Emergent’s Startup Guide to the World, 2006 Edition.” The cover was a confusing photographic collage depicting unfamiliar people, events, and inventions.
Fifty-five years.
He dressed, wondering at how he could remember nothing. The coverall fit perfectly. He stuffed the booklet and the strange cards into its pockets. The rubber sandals weren’t rubber at all. There was a rippled texture within, and the material felt tacky against his skin. He sat back down in the chair and waited.
Veronica’s kids—what were their names? He could not remember their names. She’d made him promise. Matthew? Malcolm? Would they still be alive?
“All set?” Veronica—the one with FOSTER on her name strip—was standing in the doorway, arms folded across her chest.
No. Something else was missing. When he emerged from the pit, he had something with him, but he’d lost it in the confusion. It snapped back into his addled brain. He had many questions, so he chose which one to ask carefully.
“Where is my dog?”
“Huh?”
“I had a dog with me when I emerged. They took it from me.”
She didn’t seem to believe him, but he pressed the issue. She relented. “All right, let’s go look for your dog.”
She told him to stop calling her Veronica, to call her Foster. When he started to ask her about the kids, she rounded on him and drew out the cudgel. She pushed the end of it into his sternum and walked him back against a wall.
“Their names pass your lips, and we’re done looking for the stupid dog. Then, just for doing me the favor of dredging up some bad memories, I’m going to give you knots to take with you to Creeptown.”
She didn’t seem to be bluffing, so he went quiet and followed her through the corridors searching for the dog. She moved differently than Veronica, less sex appeal but more swagger. She was confident, joking with some, stern and commanding with others, never the sort to stare at her feet. Occasionally she snapped to attention and saluted someone else wearing a black uniform like hers.
“Where are we?”
he finally asked, confused by all the turns they’d made down corridors narrow and wide, empty and packed with shaved-headed emergents.
“We just left Outflow Processing, corrections wing. The bad boys and girls end up there. Like you, mister fifty years. There’s a concourse up ahead that will take us to OA, Outflow Anomalies. I’m guessing your dog got caged up and stuck in with the really weird stuff that comes out. “
Casper stumbled trying to walk and crane his neck at a file of men and women ascending a staircase into a gallery that opened high above. An elevator whisked past horizontally several floors up, adding to his bewilderment.
“There’s so many of us,” he said.
“Too many. You’ll find that out soon enough. Once I’m done with you here, you get dropped in Creeptown. I’d advise you to keep going, north or east, and don’t look back until you can’t see Los Angeles anymore.”
“That bad?”
She hooked her fingers through the handle of a door made from green glass, turning back as she opened it and favoring him with a noncommittal raise of her eyebrows and a pinch-lipped smile.
They arrived, after an interminable walk, at a double security door sharing halves of the stenciled word ANOMALIES. Foster swept her plastic ID card through a slot beside the door. There was a magnetic disengagement of locks, and both doors swung open into the hall with a pneumatic hiss. The room beyond, vast and low-ceilinged like an endless basement, was a cacophony for every sense.
The fluorescents cast their clinical whiteness through air thick with pulverized dust. Jackhammers were pounding away behind rows of industrial shelves, sparks spattering through the ventilated shelving and dancing across the chalky floor. The shelves were stocked with items like the evidence room at the police station, cardboard boxes with paper tags, just the paper tags for things too big to fit in cardboard boxes.
He followed Foster into the shelving, taking in passing details like a cardboard box labeled HUMAN TEETH (LOT) and a moth the size of his hand pinned to a dusty card reading BIG MOTH. There was a pickled mouse in a jar of green fluid, the card noting FOUND IN CAVITY. A cardboard file box overflowed with corroded wires twisted and knotted into meaningless symbols.
