Dead City

by Sean Platt

  When the doorbell rang, Alice actually jumped in place. Then she switched the TV off and went to the door. It was the pizza man, of course, but he had more than a box in his hands.

  On top of the pizza was a plain manila envelope, fat with documents and God knew what else.

  “Someone left this on your porch,” the kid said with a helpful smile.

  Alice Frank was written on the envelope in thick black marker.

  There was no stamp, no return address.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  DANNY

  IAN WAS HALFWAY ACROSS THE parking lot, clutching the small device in his pocket as if to keep it from jumping out and announcing its traitorous presence, when someone approached from behind.

  “Hey.”

  Ian turned too quickly, sure he’d been caught — again for something he hadn’t asked for and wanted nothing to do with. And it’s not like he’d done anything wrong … until, that was, he’d copied a folder full of unknown and possibly confidential documents onto a thumb drive and walked out of the building with the contraband in his pocket. The files could be nothing, but they could also be something. And although permissions shouldn’t have allowed him to copy the files, the settings on this particular folder had all been made green across the board: Take and share, friends.

  But the person behind him was only Danny Almond.

  “Oh. Hey, Danny.”

  “You heading out for drinks?”

  “No, I’ve gotta get home.”

  “Oh, come on, Ian. Everyone’s going.”

  Ian wasn’t trying to outrun Danny, but he wasn’t slowing down. His body language was the same as someone who barely removes an earbud to stop listening to their music long enough to hear an inquirer. He didn’t particularly want to slow down, or have a chat. He definitely didn’t want to go out for drinks — something that would be dubious at best and inappropriate fraternizing at worst, given that Ian was a few dozen rungs higher in the company and the outing was sure to be filled with drug reps like Danny. And yet Danny wasn’t taking any hints.

  “Bridget likes to have dinner right at six,” Ian said.

  “Really? That’s nice. I’d like stability like that.”

  “Yes.” Still walking. “It’s great.”

  “Hey, Ian. How come everyone else burns the midnight oil around here, and you manage to get home for a 6 p.m. dinner?” Then Danny held up his hands to indicate he wasn’t questioning Ian’s work ethic. The rate at which Ian had risen through Hemisphere’s ranks couldn’t have happened by accident. Ian knew it was due to the rather clichéd notion of working smarter, not harder, and shockingly, his coworkers seemed to honestly know it, too. “I’m not saying that — ”

  “I understand what you mean. It’s just about setting boundaries.” Ian gave Danny a smile, turned his head forward, and kept walking. His hand was still buried in his pocket, clutching the drive. He felt like he was running from a bank robbery, fending off good-natured hellos from cops on the local beat.

  “That’s great. What do you mean, ‘boundaries’?” Danny was taller than Ian by maybe four inches, and all of the difference seemed to be in his legs. Ian felt like he was speed walking, but Danny’s cadence was easy. He was wearing a light-blue shirt and a barely matching tie, now flapping in the breeze. His ordinary-looking brown hair was in a mess the girls seemed to find adorable.

  “Just … you can’t let work consume you. Do your time, do it well, then set appointments with the people that matter to you, like family. And keep those appointments.”

  “Yeah, that makes total sense. Ask you a question, Ian? There’s this girl I’m kind of seeing, and — ”

  Ian turned, cutting Danny off mid-sentence. The kid was moving so quickly to keep up that when Ian stopped, Danny stuttered forward two steps and ended up between Ian and his car, now just a dozen feet away.

  “Danny, I don’t mean to be rude, but — ”

  This time, Danny cut Ian off. Ian genuinely liked Danny and didn’t want to offend him. But now wasn’t the time. Today wasn’t the time, for a hundred reasons.

  “Oh. Sure. No, it’s fine. I’m blabbing on and keeping you from dinner. Don’t let me keep you.” Danny gave Ian his winning salesman’s smile, pivoted, and gestured toward the car like a game show host.

  But now that he’d stopped, Ian felt the need to say more. The strange things that had happened today — the message to meddle he felt increasingly sure he’d received before lunch, Gennifer, Raymond Smyth, the temptation and his nefarious file transfer at day’s end — it all had to do with him, not Danny. Danny was a good kid. He was in his midtwenties, ambitious, and good to his clients. Now he had this girl that Ian, in all of his selfish impatience, hadn’t bothered to hear more about. He shouldn’t go out for drinks with the whole rep team, but maybe he was due to have a beer with Danny. The plague had rearranged the world’s priorities (well, those inside America, at least), and in its own boring, small, inconsequential way, good people finding ways to make time for what mattered most was important. Vital, even.

  “Did you end up getting that bonus you were gunning for?” Ian forced a pleasant expression.

  “What? Oh, that. Yeah, I did. Thanks for asking.”

  “That’s great!”

  “It is. Thanks. And thanks for helping me out with it.”

  Ian shrugged, now wondering if maybe he should go for drinks after all. Was anyone looking for the information he’d taken? Was it honestly something he shouldn’t have? Probably not; only Burgess and Smyth had more access than Ian. Someone was probably messing with him, and he’d find out once he had a chance to see what he’d pilfered. Surely, it was nothing — all a big goof. And really, was someone going to grab and frisk him? He could get a beer. He deserved a beer.

  “No problem.”

  Danny leaned in, keeping his voice comically low. “Anyone ask about it?”

  “No. I told you. First of all, you filled that bonus quota six full months ago, so who’d ask me about you using my card now? And second, it’s not a big deal. You’ve come with me into Alpha Building as a guest before. And it’s not like you weren’t entirely within your right to … gee … I don’t know. Go to the auto-dispensary and requisition what you’re supposed to sell anyway.”

  “Well, thanks in any case. I couldn’t have filled that order if I’d needed to wait for supply. I appreciate the help, man.”

  “No problem. Of course.”

  Ian waited to see which direction the conversation would turn, both of them smiling like fools, two heads bobbing slowly. Whatever insult Ian may have implied with his rush, it seemed to be healed. One man helps the other; bonuses are achieved; thanks are given. Friends mattered as much as family, Ian kept realizing. Now more than ever.

  “Well, anyway,” Danny said, his hands on his narrow hips, the salesman’s smile still on his face — more genuine on Danny, Ian thought, than on the other reps. “I’ll let you get home. Tell the fam hi for me, okay?”

  “Sure,” Ian said. It was a pointless platitude. Bridget and Ana had no idea who Danny Almond was, but the thought was nice.

  Danny gave a final wave and walked back toward the building while Ian climbed into his car, unknown secrets in his pocket, waiting to be popped open.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  JORDACHE

  MAYBE THIS WAS A BLESSING in disguise, Danny thought.

  He and Ian were buddies, and if the day ever came that Ian’s code stopped working on the doors and the dispensary, Danny already had his in. There was no urgency now at all. And hey, if Ian was going home, there was no reason for Danny to go out with the other reps, either. Which meant he could do what he wanted instead. What he’d been aching to do, really.

  Danny fished the phone from his pocket then ducked into an alcove between buildings and sat on a sun-bleached park bench. There was a necrotic worker picking up garbage in one far corner of the alcove, but it was otherwise deserted. Danny doubted the guy would understand his half of the conversation
if he overheard. The man had to be right above his inflection point. It was prejudiced to not merely accept the worker’s presence (or assume he was too dull to understand conversational nuance), but Danny still kept an eye on him. Supposedly, the clarifiers knew what they were doing when they selected for people like this guy, and Danny was supposed to know better than anyone that Necrophage kept even the most dire cases from degrading.

  But still. Danny had been in Oakland when Sherman Pope peaked, and in the thick of it the dead had swarmed into the bay from San Francisco. Boaters were still finding them in the water today — mostly rotted, often just heads and torsos with working jaws, still plenty contagious.

  Danny ran his thumb across the phone’s surface, still watching the worker prowl the perimeter. He was bleeding on the grass, fluids seeping from wounds that wouldn’t heal. In grounds workers, that kind of thing was permissible. Blood dried fast, and the grass got mowed every week anyway.

  Danny brought up his contacts. Rolling through them, looking for Jordache, he saw that about a third of the entries had red backgrounds behind them. Somehow, this made him feel better about watching the twitcher in the courtyard more than he’d watch an uninfected worker. Who was prejudiced? The DCC national database, not Danny Almond. Maybe if Panacea had been in charge in the early 1800s, they’d have put red backgrounds behind the phonebook entries of all black people, just so everyone would understand whom they were choosing to fraternize with.

  His conscience assuaged, Danny found Jordache’s entry. Before he tapped to call, he took a moment to look at her photo. Her dirty-blonde hair looked immaculate but casually styled, and he could see large earrings beneath her pretty locks. She was wearing lipstick that was deep, deep red, like smoke-stained bricks, and had on a fair amount of eye makeup. The look was sexy as hell, but Danny wondered why he’d never, despite it all, seen her not so made up. It was like she didn’t trust her natural look. Which was absurd, in Danny’s opinion. She was beautiful. In time, maybe he’d be able to help her see that.

  He tapped Jordache’s entry. The screen went red to match her background while the call tried to connect. Danny fought a strange desire to hold the phone up to show the lurching, groaning worker whom he was calling and how unfair the profiling was. Maybe he could hold up a fist in solidarity. Right on, brother.

  “Hello?”

  “Jordache? It’s Danny.”

  “I know who it is, silly.” The “I” came out like “Aah.”

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Cleaning.”

  “Now, what kind of a thing is that to do on Friday night?”

  Jordache’s slightly accented voice took on a hectoring feel. “The kind of thing that needs doing,” she said.

  Danny could picture her right now, sure that she’d just put a hand on her slim hip. There was nothing Jordache did that Danny didn’t think was cute — except the things she did that were downright hot. She sat on the chairs in her lawn cute. She crossed her legs cute. She walked cute, and on the few occasions Danny had been at one end of the trailer and watched her make her way down the middle to the other, the view from behind (all short-shorts and long, tan legs) had teased him with an inappropriate boner. Back then, he’d been an acquaintance, walking the line between friendly man and pusher. Their boundaries hadn’t been drawn yet, and there was always the possibility she’d turn him in. Looking back now, that seemed ridiculous. She’d asked about the designer Phages, and he’d told her what they did. The notion that she’d rat on him for offering free samples seemed absurd in retrospect.

  “Do you want to do something, maybe?”

  “You mean go on a date? Tell me so I can do my face.”

  Danny fought a nervous swallow. Jordache was always blunt and allowed no subtlety. She’d told him more than once, unasked, “You can’t fuck me yet.” That had been simultaneously disappointing and scintillating. He’d spent the rest of those nights trying not to look at her tits, or at the spot between her legs that he was apparently denied access to … for now.

  Danny considered making a joke about how instead of doing her own face, maybe she could do his. He could get away with saying it; Jordache’s sense of humor was crude, and people told Danny he had a boyish, innocent charm. The fact that it felt too honest for a joke stopped him.

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t have to take me out, Danny.”

  “Maybe I want to take you out.”

  There was the slightest pause on the other end of the line. Danny, who knew that being a high-performing salesman entailed being a decent psychologist, knew precisely what the pause meant. Jordache’s last boyfriend had been a fucker, and it was no loss that he’d gone off the deep end before getting shipped to Yosemite. Her boyfriend before that had apparently been a fucker as well. And the one before that? He’d been, seemingly, a fucker. Jordache seemed to have decided she had one and only one thing to offer men. The fact that Danny kept coming around despite never receiving payment seemed to puzzle as much as flatter her.

  “Honey,” she said, her voice robbed of its earlier edge, “why are you so good to me?”

  “Because I like you.”

  She didn’t ask why. The fact that she wondered was implied.

  “Can I come over?”

  “Danny, I don’t want to — ”

  “To pick you up,” Danny interrupted, not wanting to hear again what she didn’t want to do with him. Yet.

  Another pause. Jordache had a car and was fully licensed to drive. “Pick you up” wasn’t the standard between them. It wasn’t even accurate to say they were dating. They were more like good friends who each knew what the other was thinking, but resisted for some arbitrary reason.

  “You don’t have to pick me up.”

  Danny’s eyes flicked around the courtyard. Even the necrotic cleanup guy was gone.

  “I have something I need to give you.”

  Jordache made a pleased little noise. “One of these days, Danny, your guy — ”

  “Don’t say his name.”

  “He’s gonna change things on you and you won’t be able to get it anymore.”

  That last was Danny’s fault. He’d been getting PhageX off of Ian’s requisition account for six months now, and there was no reason for that to change, but he wanted her to appreciate what he got. So there was always the looming threat of a cut-off supply … but then that was all just made up by Danny, for theatrical effect. There was no drama without peril, and he doubted he’d be as much a hero to Jordache if she knew the simplicity of it all.

  As things turned out, he didn’t only have access, as Ian, to the designer formulations that he didn’t have as Danny; he could also order in greater quantities. As long as he didn’t get greedy enough that people wondered why Mr. Keys was requisitioning so much Phage, there was no reason this couldn’t continued forever.

  “I managed to get more.” With an ominous tone, Danny added, “This time.”

  “So … I don’t have to go back on base Necrophage?”

  Danny was glad she couldn’t see him because he was doing a horrible job of keeping a straight face. He was grinning widely enough into the phone to hurt his cheeks.

  “Nothing but the best for my girl.”

  Jordache actually squealed. He wished he’d done this in person because she’d have wrapped him in a hug — probably one of those low-rent but incredibly appealing full-body hugs where she used her legs as well. Maybe, if she’d done that, he’d have fallen over and they’d have been horizontal together. And maybe if she’d been grateful enough to kiss him down on the floor or bed, things could have progressed from there. Based on Jordache’s stories, she’d made some very poor spur-of-the-moment decisions in the past — her indecent exposure charge with her old, now-deadhead boyfriend, Weasel, behind the Panera being the juiciest. Was it amoral for Danny to want her to make another poor decision with him? He didn’t think so. He wasn’t an asshole, so in the end things would be as they should be.

&
nbsp; “So,” Danny said, smiling wide enough to fit a coat hanger in his mouth, “can I come over tomorrow?”

  “Bring your boots,” she said, giving Danny one of her odder countryisms, “and you and me’ll kick up some dust.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  SECRETS

  BRIDGET KEYS PULLED HER THYROID pills from the medicine cabinet and shook one out into her palm — triangular and purple, with a Z embossed into its hard-shell front. It looked nothing like a thyroid pill, and not for the first time, Bridget wondered if anyone would ever be nosy enough to figure that out. Her old thyroid pills, before she’d finally gone in and had the damned issue perma-fixed, used to be tiny, pale pastel things with a line bisecting the center. These things even looked fancier — probably stuffed with fillers and lacquered at the factory to make them appear worthy of the hefty price tag.

  Her husband was executive vice president of the largest drug company in the world (arguably the largest anything company in the world); he’d never know that what was in her little orange RX bottle in the upstairs medicine cabinet wasn’t levothyroxine. He was a businessman, not a doctor. So unless he thought to violate her privacy before consulting the Physician’s Desk Reference, he’d never know.

  Not that he’d care. If mother needed a little helper to get through her day sometimes, it was nobody’s business but Bridget’s. Ian married a fun, spontaneous girl. It shouldn’t surprise him that after fourteen years of needing to plan every tiny thing, some of her spontaneity had finally returned.

  Except that Zen didn’t make you spontaneous.

  Zen brought the kind of calm that only money could buy.

  Bridget swallowed the pill then returned the Zen-in-thyroid-bottle to the cabinet. It bothered her that she was keeping this a secret, and that nobody other than Gabriella knew. The secrecy suggested to Bridget that it was probably something to be ashamed of. But the quiet of being a housewife was its own kind of mania; if she wasn’t managing Analise’s activities and homework, she was dealing with worries about Ana: whether she had enough friends or the proper sorts of friends, if Bridget was doing right by her as a mother, if Ana was well adjusted and up to grade standards. She’d hired help long ago to keep the place clean and sometimes make their dinners, but the freedom afforded by maid services and those high-end vacuuming robot thingies was anything but … well … Zen. The house was too quiet with no one around. Bridget had figured she’d use the time to pursue her old interests, but more often than not she’d filled those hours with worry. And with Gabriella, who definitely wasn’t someone Bridget aspired to be.