by Zack Parsons
The offices prepared for the United Nations team were located in an unused hospital outbuilding. The facilities were dated and barren, with hardly more furniture than the stripped UN offices in Redondo. There was a mortuary, a few hospital rooms, and desks outfitted with obsolete electrical computers.
“This will suffice,” said Dr. Burns. If she was upset, she did not betray it. “Dr. Nandy, if you can set up in the mortuary, I believe Dr. Cochrane has already collected some animal samples.”
“Let me know when you are finished,” said Polly. Dr. Burns waved her hand, already distracted by another question about where to bring in a pair of heavy centrifuges.
Polly stood aside while the scientists began hauling in their equipment. The Marines and her drivers assisted. She planned more for the excursion but wanted to give the UN team a chance to acclimate and prepare so they could get the most out of a journey into the Pit itself. All the way up to the Pool, if she could get them that close. It would take her most authoritative voice and more than a little subterfuge, it would probably cost her this new job, but the maintenance vault was her ultimate destination.
The Fane, however, remained out of the question.
Casper Cord wiped himself with napkins purloined from an abandoned Swiftee Burger and folded the “welcome back” chapbook under his arm. He was sick almost constantly and worried about catching something that might last from the garbage he’d been eating. Some of the stuff—brightly colored fried corn and candy that tasted like medicine—he figured might have made him sick fresh out of the package. His old guts weren’t used to any of this. Not that the rest of him was a better fit.
He stuffed Bishop’s book of depressing lies into the pocket of a beaten-up, paint-spattered old duster coat. The good thing about being a filthy, half-crazy derelict was that most people looked away. Not many people to do that, but he hated it when they stared at him. He could see their pity.
He remembered, seemingly a couple of weeks ago, using the john in Ciro’s, tipping the Negro attendant for a spray of cologne and a fresh Bravo. Now he was shitting in a ditch and digging through trash for plastic lighters so he could suck the last nicotine from a collection of cigarette butts. He flopped down on his cardboard. It was still early morning, still cool, and he wanted to go back to sleep. Lenin was awake and staring at him again.
“Say something for yourself,” said Casper. “Do something useful instead of sitting there giving me the creeps day and night. Don’t I feed you?”
Lenin licked his chops and looked expectant. Casper tossed him one of the last morsels in the bag of scavenged food. The dog caught it easily and swallowed it without chewing.
He was sick of the dog. He wasn’t sure if he was going crazy or if it was something the dog was doing, but half the time when he covered himself to catch some sleep, he heard a voice. Real creepy, soft, not even like a person talking, like an animal or a tree or something making a person’s words.
“You’ve got no idea what I’ve been through.” Casper stirred his finger in a tin can full of cold coffee. “I found the woman I loved killed. Fell in love with her twin. Told she was dead all over again. I’ve seen a giant bug—”
The dog barked.
“That’s right, you stupid mutt, a giant bug, and I had my goddamn brain drilled out. Been stuffed down in a hole with nothing to think about for fifty years while the world moved on without me. Now here I am, a bag of bones somebody dug up when they were building a house. It’s not that I feel sorry for myself ... ”
The dog was still staring intensely at him.
“Well, all right, so I do feel sorry for myself. What else is there to do? You tell me that. What about you? What’s your story?”
The dog did not answer. Its merry stupidity infuriated him. He tossed pebbles at its face.
“Talk, goddamnit!” He threw a bigger chunk of concrete, and the dog, ears pinned back, yowled and leaped out of the way. “Please. Please talk to me. Say it to my face. Say whatever it is about what’s coming to my face so I can know I’m not losing my goddamn mind.”
“You’re losing your goddamn mind.”
Casper knocked over his coffee in his rush to get up from the cardboard. An interloper had crept onto the abandoned lot he had claimed as his own turf and walked to within a few feet of his campsite. It was the rangy mulatto with dreadlock hair.
“Bottles,” said Casper.
“Yeah, you remember that, so I guess you ain’t all crazy,” said Bottles. He was grimy but lacked a full layer of filth compared to what Casper had already accumulated. He covered the last few feet to where Casper’s cardboard was laid out on the ground. There was a half-buried pot filled with ashes. Casper had built a fire in it to make coffee the night before. Bottles kicked it once and harrumphed at the lack of fresh smoke.
“What do you want?” asked Casper.
“My man, you don’t have to be all hostile like that.” Bottles sat down on the milk crate and warmed his hands in his breath. “It’s a social visit. You’re the new face in the neighborhood. Well, the new person belonging to that same old face. Truth is, I never seen a dupe so low. Not one that made it out of Creeptown.”
“Don’t need your pity.”
Casper picked up his tin can of coffee and salvaged the dregs of his twice-brewed grounds. He bent over the dead fire and stoked it, trying to bring back the flames. It was no use, and there was no more paper around to start the fire going. Bottles eyed the stain spread down the shoulder and back of Casper’s threadbare duster.
“Ain’t pity,” said Bottles. “More like a zoo or something. Goddang, is that throw-up all over that coat, man?”
“Not mine.”
Casper felt the weight of the chapbook in his pocket, and he drew it out. It was cheaply printed on crude stock. Just the sort of thing that would burn nicely. He tore out the half he had already read and fed it into the fire bowl. A flick of the lighter, and the pages were burning. Casper squinted at Bottles, the fire warming one side of his face. He shook the fire-blackened tin can full of grounds at him.
“Want a cup of coffee?”
The facilities being occupied by the UN team adjoined a simple canteen. It was sparsely equipped, stowed like a closed restaurant, the cabinets and countertops garish blue and yellow and red. It was a relic of another era covered in a patina of dust. Polly switched on the lights and flipped a chair down from one of the tabletops.
She sat down, sick in the pit of her stomach. Since the spore storm that morning she had experienced a sense of detachment from reality. Her mind had collided with the impossible, and it was as sudden and profound as the aftermath of a severe car crash.
She reminded herself of the facts by sliding her fingers into the pocket of her uniform trousers. It was still there, soft, yielding to her touch, slightly warmer through the plastic than the fabric surrounding it. Could it still be alive? Surely it had suffocated in the bag. Or did it not breathe at all? She gave it a squeeze, and it squirmed slightly in her grasp.
“Miss Polly. Good to see you.” Rukundo entered the canteen and approached the table Polly was sharing with three stacked chairs. “May I sit with you?”
“Of course.” She said, quickly withdrawing her hand from her pocket.
Rukundo took down the chairs and arranged them around the table. He found a kettle in the cabinet and put water on the stove. Another cabinet contained an assortment of LARC mugs featuring logos and slogans—THE WAY THINGS USED TO BE —dating back to the late 1970s. Rukundo selected one of these from the cabinet. He took a leather pouch from a pocket of his shirt and opened it on the counter. He transferred pinches of dried leaves from the pouch to the coffee cup.
“Black tea from home. I am very particular about it.”
Rukundo was very handsome. He was thin of body and face, big eyes the color of honey, an elegant manner, and a softness to his voice that was slightly feminine and beguiling. The uniform he wore, dark slacks and a pressed white safari shirt with a blue beret, sug
gested military, but Polly was unfamiliar with the insignia. He joined her at the table.
“Are you in the military?”
“I am part of the African Coalition Peacekeepers.” He spoke with an exotic French accent. “I was allowed into the special security unit.”
“You mentioned Kagali in the van. Is that Kenya?”
“Rwanda.” He looked away when he said it.
“Where do you come from? A city?”
“No. It was very small. There was a man in my village who was very old. Older even than your Mr. Bishop. All of us wondered how he grew to be so old, so I went to his house and knocked on the door. He said to me ‘Rukundo, come into the house.’ He had so many wrinkles that you could not even see his eyes. And I asked him, ‘What is your secret to being so old?’”
“The old man said, ‘One, I drink only black tea from leaves grown in the highlands, ’ and he gave me some tea. ‘Two, I eat only almonds with their skin boiled off,’ and he gave me a bag of boiled almonds to take with me. ‘Three is most important,’ said the old man. ‘I never argue with anyone.’ And I was cross and said to him, ’That is it? This can’t be. There must be some other secret to your great age. Some magic or prayer.’
“ ‘Yes,’ said the old man, ‘you are right.’ ”
Rukundo stared at her, very serious, and then burst into loud, hitching laughter. Polly began to laugh as well, finally separating the joke from the tone with which Rukundo told it.
“Something funny?” asked Dr. Burns.
She entered just as the kettle began to boil. Rukundo ducked his head as if caught doing something mischievous, and he hurried to deal with the whistling kettle.
“Nothing at all, miss,” said Rukundo.
“Miss Foster,” said Dr. Burns. “You wanted me to get you when we were finished.”
“Yes,” said Polly. “Before I take you into the Pit, I need to speak to Dr. Nandy. I want to show her something.
Dr. Burns brought Polly to the newly operational mortuary. Dr. Cochrane and Dr. Nandy were sorting through a pair of coolers filled with bagged, dead animals apparently infected with spores. Polly touched the thing squirming in her pocket.
“What is it?” asked Dr. Nandy.
“I don’t know,” said Polly.
She placed the sealed bag from her pocket onto the nearest mortuary table. The creature, the size of her fist, pale and plump, wriggled like a grocery-store pork chop in a bag wet with blood. Its proboscides curled against it body, and the coarse bristles covering its segments tented the bag.
“Where did you find this?” asked Dr. Nandy, leaning over the bag and holding her spectacles to her face.
“In my apartment building,” said Polly. “It ate my neighbor.”
COMINTERCEPT – SOVNET - ELECTRONIC TEXTNOENCRYPT - BLACK LABEL
FROM: Konstantin Sokov@UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC)
TO: lanka Sokov
SUBJECT: my trip
My beloved lanka,
I hope you are in Vladivostok and that your family has arrived safely. I am sorry I could not be more truthful earlier about where I was traveling. The situation in California is very complicated, but I have collected many clean samples already. Before I am done, I will fill the vault beneath the black rock of Cape Tegethoff with the essence of this country. I do not know if science can ever remake it, but I know it is worth preserving.
We were brought to the place called the Pit, and I was given an office. I am not wanted. There was a great excitement over a specimen, and I was not included.
I remained in my office and realized I could see the ocean. Beyond the brutal architecture of the fortress walls there is an area, still restricted by fences, that contains a long stretch of coast. After a bit of sneaking I escaped outside, beneath an open sky, out from the shadow of the towers, and was at last standing upon the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
These were not the sunny beaches of California girls in their bikinis. No surfers or swimmers. I was near the busy industrial harbor of San Pedro with its steady flow of cargo ships and refugee boats. The thought of so many vessels coming and going in the midst of disease quarantine filled me with pessimism.
All along the water the beach grass was brown and dead. The branches of salt trees and shrubs were heavy with sprouting fungus, leaves and trunks stained white with disease. The strandline was fouled with bull kelp and other seaweed, discolored and turning to mush, ignored by the hundreds of gulls overhead. Dead birds and fish rolled in the surf.
I brought in my pockets a few capsules to collect specimens, and I filled these with bits of healthier kelp and native amphipods burrowing in the sand. The sand fleas beat their backs against the curve of the plastic capsule. There were a few glistening jellies, and I discovered one small enough to fit into a capsule. I doubt any of these samples will prove to be free of contamination.
I came to a finger jetty of haphazard concrete slabs, and I climbed upon the awkward jumble of blocks to have a better view of the ocean. The tiny inlets formed by the overlapping stone blocks were filled with the decaying remains of tidal animals. The hollowed shells of crabs floated upon the surface, sucked in and out by the waves, and beneath were the bloated cucumbers and starfish, whitened and downy with coats of disease.
Not everything was perishing. A bloom of scarlet phytoplankton was visible a hundred or so meters from shore. As the waves rolled through this mat, they became vividly red and yellow and came crashing to the beaches to deposit some of the plankton. Fish leaped in a frenzy to devour the plankton, their excitement drawing the gulls in the gray sky.
A ship moved swiftly through the growth, its prow like a knife through the red meat of the plankton bloom. The ship’s superstructure was an angled slab, and its billowing stacks were recessed almost completely into its hull. This was a military vessel. There were no apparent weapons, but above the superstructure sprouted the whiskers of a dozen antennae and the spinning dish of a radar system.
The vessel’s name was painted above the scarlet bow wake of churned plankton. The Republic. It scattered the gulls, cut across the ocean, apparently impervious to what was happening around it, and I became very melancholy. It was a war machine of iron to combat an army of ghosts. I fear the Americans misunderstand the terms of the engagement.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was just as well that the specimen Polly brought occupied the UN inspectors long into the evening. While they discussed the results of various tests in hushed tones, she pored over a detailed map of the spire to determine their best approach for the maintenance vault. When time came at around 8:00 PM, she assembled the UN scientists and marines at the main door of the outbuilding like children waiting to go to recess.
Polly had told the menagerie of UN scientists to travel lightly. They did not listen. They lined up to depart with backs bent beneath packs and carrying heavy cases filled with their scientific instruments. Even the Marines were bogged down in their gear.
She went down the line, lecturing each person individually and demanding they trim down what they intended to bring. When she finished each lecture, she handed the recipient bright yellow boots and gloves and a bright orange coverall. The boots and gloves were oversized rubber; the coverall was cheap, artificial, and smelled of long-term storage.
“Love, no offense”—Dr. Cochrane shook out the coverall and held it up to his stout frame—“but looking like a Christmas orange is a shite disguise.”
A few of the doctors murmured their agreement.
“You cannot be disguised,” said Polly. “You will be entering a closed facility with a closed population of duplicates. Better to not hide at all, pretend to belong by standing out. Stay calm, stay quiet; if we are stopped and you are asked any questions, you will defer to me. If we are taken into custody by Pit Security, you will comply. Do not try to run or fight.”
She looked pointedly at Captain Dryson and added, “No weapons of any kind.”
“You heard her,” said Cap
tain Dryson. He began taking carbines from his men. “Hand them over. No pistols, no grenades. Don’t hold out on me.”
“You sure this is a good idea, sir?” asked one of the Marines.
“Button it up, Romero,” said Funkweed. “Captain Dryson gave you an order.”
Dr. Burns, far more agreeable since Polly had handed over the specimen, added her own weight to Polly’s instructions. There were no further questions. The scientists brought minimal equipment, the Marines none at all save for a single deployable hard case filled with radio equipment.
They crossed the freight artery, stopping the traffic of the reclamation vans, the flat-faced waste-disposal trucks, and the deliveries of perishables for the extensive housing located underground. The six-lane road branched into a dozen ramps that descended into the loading bay. There was an entrance at ground level and a translucent security kiosk occupied by a single uniformed guard. Polly did not wait to be stopped; she approached and showed her credentials to the scruffy type one in his Plexiglas cube. He buzzed the magnetic locks on the door, and Polly ushered the scientists and Marines into the loading area.
They traversed the cavernous bay by walkways layered between the overhead ventilation fans and the slow river of trucks idling beneath their feet. Trucks stopped in loading areas to be serviced by container cranes and forklifts. Three lanes of trucks continued on and disappeared into branching tunnels lit in wheeling flashes of headlights and taillights.
High above this shuddering ballet, the smell of diesel fumes was intense. The fans, large as trucks themselves, drowned out all other sound when they activated. The suction they created stole Polly’s breath and pulled at her clothing as she directed her companions beneath each spinning blade.
