Dead City

by Sean Platt

  If she could find him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  PRESTIGE

  WHEN CYRUS WAS GONE, HOLLY clicked off the TV, silencing the yammering of The Yo Yo Boys — four idiots in brightly colored shirts who’d done nothing to advance the tomfoolery invented by the Three Stooges. She felt dirty. Watching necrotic TV always made her feel like she’d just gone to a shitty diner because it was cheap and she couldn’t afford better.

  There was something debasing about not just pretending to like The Yo Yo Boys, but also providing a tiny bit of the ratings that kept them on the air and employed. If Holly had her way, all four Yos would find themselves off the air and destitute. Maybe they’d have to move out of whatever expensive mansions they surely lived in and into one of the slums — and then, with luck, someone forgotten or negligent would turn, and they’d get bitten. It would be poetic irony: those fools learning to appreciate the entertainment they’d foisted upon the infected nation.

  There was a knock on the door. She checked the ID on the security panel and saw it was August.

  Come in, she heard herself say inside her head.

  “C’mon,” she said out loud. Then she remembered that she’d set the doors to auto-lock (her farce would fall apart if Cyrus or her other handlers came back in to see her reading or otherwise not acting like an idiot) and crossed to the door.

  With concentration, Holly could walk without a limp. It wasn’t always easy. When she’d crossed the Oscars stage last year, she’d barely been able to accept her award because she’d been so focused on not tripping in her elegant gown. The whole way across in front of the cameras, she’d been thinking back to the red carpet interviews and how they might turn on her if she fell.

  Who are you wearing?

  Chantal Melange, coming through Holly’s lips as Shampal Melaahj.

  And where will you be falling on your zombie face tonight?

  Of course, Cyrus had told her, when she’d relayed her fear, that she was being ridiculous. She’d maintained her popularity because people saw her as the face of and spokeswoman for a besieged section of the population — one that, though treated, didn’t seem to be decreasing. With nearly a quarter of the nation infected, Holly was a kind of avatar. Of course nobody would call her a zombie in public lest they be run out of LA, and contrary to how it felt on her dignity, falling atop her sluggish legs would endear Holly more to her people, not alienate them from her.

  But that was easy for Cyrus to say. He’d started managing an underground star with more cred than income, and Holly’s first big paychecks (and, consequently, Cyrus’s) had only started coming around the time the big outbreak hit. Cyrus hadn’t been bitten. He hadn’t even been in LA at the time. But when he came to her in the hospital and she lay there crying, he just kept saying, It’ll be okay, Holly. We can parlay this, while patting her gaping wound like a kiss.

  Holly had known there would be a lag period between the disease’s progress and her first Necrophage bolus kicking in to stop it, and she’d sweated out two harrowing nights while waiting to see how bad things might get. Los Angeles had taken a serious hit, and the National Guard hadn’t been able to cut her group a path until ten days after she’d been bitten. By then, the thing had become more infected than any rational wound had business being, and her memory had begun to go. She’d had trouble concentrating — and, in the hospital, even after the bolus, her symptoms had worsened before finally grinding to a halt in the place her doctors swore she’d be forever. The waiting had made her feel even more helpless than she’d been in that LA basement, waiting for the fires to burn off and the swarms to pass. Her situation could only degrade until the Necrophage’s regeneration reached equilibrium with Sherman Pope’s decay. And so those nights, watching her mind fail more and more, she’d cried plenty.

  She slapped at the Open Door button on the touch screen, missed it, then focused to try again. Goddamn this disease.

  She used to be a dancer. She used to be desired by every man she passed, rather than just the star-dazzled fetishists who boned up over Holly Gaynor today. She used to fuck like a bull rider. Today, she could barely control herself. Half the time, she peed a little in her underwear no matter how much better her mind seemed underneath it all.

  August clasped Holly’s hand between both of his when the door opened, making a hand sandwich. She hoped she didn’t feel too cold. Her body was, according to estimates based on the most typical three-week incubation period, around one-third dead. Extremities were the first to lose circulation, but at least her heart kept beating. She knew further-gone necrotics who weren’t as lucky. How could they have relationships? If someone laid their head on your chest and heard nothing, how did they not run away screaming?

  At least most of her body still worked. At least her face, hair, and boobs — her moneymakers — were still smooth, pristine, and expressive. Her girls were still perky and plump; her lips, though sluggish with words, could still give that flawless winning smile. Even her teeth had stayed in her gums and remained white. And at least when she found a man who interested her, she was still warm where it mattered.

  “Honey. How are you feeling?”

  “Ofay.”

  August’s head cocked. “You don’t have palsy, Holly. That’s a learned speech pattern, not an inevitable one.”

  “Okay,” she managed to say.

  “Better.”

  “Hard to talk.”

  August flopped into one of Holly’s overstuffed chairs. It had cost somewhere around the average person’s annual salary, or the amount Holly paid August monthly for her treatments.

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  Holly tried to make herself look vampily disapproving. It took some effort, but she thought she managed. One hand went to a hip. The other hung limp, but not twitcher-limp. She was in loose pants and a tee, but her hair was done and up, her makeup still on from earlier. Maybe if he were interested in necrotics, she could come off as sexy — just to show him she could still do it when the cameras weren’t on.

  Insultingly, August pulled an apple from a bowl on Holly’s coffee table and began to eat it. He had small round glasses, a goatee, shoulder-length brown hair, and a boyish manner that was easily twenty years younger than his chronological age. But that made sense, didn’t it? If August was really an expert in life extension, he should seem young. Immature, even.

  “It’s not bullshit,” Holly said.

  August made a quick little motion, reaching behind himself and into his back pocket. When the hand came back out, it was holding a phone, pointed at Holly.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said, it’s not bullshit,” Holly repeated.

  August’s cheeks were full of apple. He chewed, looking like a squirrel. He turned the phone in his hand, touched something on the screen, and Holly heard her own voice played back, indicating her opinion on bullshit and lack thereof.

  “You see? You can speak properly if you want to. Like when you’re bitching about something. Now: tell me that your eggs Benedict aren’t poached to your satisfaction.”

  “Up yours, August,” Holly said.

  “Very good. Now would you like to start with speech therapy?”

  Holly shook her head. What August was telling her now, he’d told her plenty of times before. The Sherman Pope virus did two things: It caused damage, and it got in the way in and of itself. Necrophage got the virus out of the way but couldn’t reverse the damage it had done. By then, though, most necrotics had experienced rapid atrophy of the facial muscles, including those needed to speak. Some of the smaller muscles could be retrained (in Holly, anyway, thanks to the formulation August had her on). It was a long road, though, August said, and the body was lazy.

  If only she could retrain her legs. Or her sloppy hands. But at least it was something.

  “Well. Then what am I here for?”

  Holly felt annoyed. She knew what he was doing. He was trying to force her to speak. She was self-conscious about her palsy vo
ice and usually pantomimed her way through their encounters, speaking only when necessary. If she was doomed to slur her words forever, what August was doing would be cruel and mocking. But because it was due to her own failure to practice, he was relentless. She felt like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, constantly harassed to make declarations about the rain in Spain.

  “Tuh tell me about my testh.”

  “Come on, Holly. You gave an Academy Awards speech.”

  She’d given it in a whisper, into a microphone. That didn’t count.

  “To tell me about my … tests.”

  August sat up. He’d plopped a leather bag onto the floor beside himself, and now he rummaged through it, finally emerging with a small tablet.

  “Now, as you know, Stardom is supposed to have all sorts of aesthetic augmentations,” he said, beginning the inevitable monologue before getting to the point about her blood test and brain scan results. “Follicle conditioners — not like in shampoo, but ones that actually condition the follicles. Same for stimulations of mostly decimated keratin and melatonin producers. For extra star power, of course, it increases moisture in the lips and, optionally, increases their pigmentation level as well.”

  “I read the bwoshur.”

  August tossed her a look then continued without reprimand.

  “Yes, yes. That’s the base formulation for Stardom, but really, without customization it’s not much more than something like Beauty or Pride. What you also know from the bwoshur is that Stardom works in concert with the stem cells we’ve been injecting.”

  Holly knew that, too. But not from the brochure because everyone knew stem cell treatments were illegal outside of designated clinical applications, none of which applied here. What wasn’t illegal was the supposition that one day stem cell treatments might augment a specialty formulation like Stardom. Any stem cell injections given by certain practitioners while authorities turned their heads would, of course, be purely coincidental.

  “It helps. Sure,” said August. “But let’s be honest. If they’re fetal stem cells, they’re not your DNA. If they’re your own stem cells and hence your DNA, they’ve got a ton of epigenetic errors, and that’s not even accounting for the weird shit that Sherman Pope does to your system.”

  “Okay,” said Holly, wishing he’d just get to the damned results already.

  “But you’re not on Stardom, are you, Holly?”

  “I’m not?”

  “You’re on my customized version of Stardom.”

  “Great.” She knew that, too. August was a tweaker. If he’d stayed at Hemisphere before having his highly publicized falling-out and subsequent hermit period, he’d probably still be tweaking drugs. He was supposedly making Stardom better fit Holly — but Holly, who’d been in the business long enough to smell crap when it was put in front of her, had her doubts. Like aromatherapy and reflexology, maybe a tweaked formula would work wonders on the suggestible, but Holly didn’t think she was one of them. Which, interestingly, was something that seemed to be changing lately — about since she’d begun taking August’s tweaked version of the drug, come to think of it.

  And maybe she really did believe she was somehow improving, even if she didn’t allow herself to hope. Because hadn’t she just waited until Cyrus had left the room to turn off The Yo Yo Boys? Didn’t she still pretend not to understand the nuances of contracts she understood plenty? Didn’t she exaggerate her limp when her handlers were around because it’s what they expected?

  “Wait,” Holly said. “What’f different?”

  “Maybe I have access to hospital birth records,” August said.

  “So?”

  “Including the complete genetic sequence of anyone who had sequencing done.”

  Holly shook her head.

  “Not a lot of people know it, Holly. I don’t blame you for not. But all certified hospitals footprint new babies and take a heel-stick to obtain a blood sample. The footprints are an antiquated process meant mainly to give the parents a keepsake. But sequencing is so cheap these days … ”

  “What are you saying?”

  “This is all beta. And don’t get your hopes up, okay? Because Sherman Pope never leaves your system even if the drugs can get you nearer to nil, and nobody is close to figuring out how to permanently get rid of it. So no matter what we put into you, the disease will always fight it back. But — ”

  “Spit it out.”

  “I’ve taken some of your harvested stem cells, which are replete with a lifetime of insertions, deletions … damage you caused by sitting too long in the sun, receiving radiation from all over the place, and just plain getting older so your cells have to replicate over and over in an endless game of telephone. Let’s just say those stem cells have a ton of mistakes. But part of Hemisphere’s life extension research was focused on fixing those mistakes, using an original, at-birth copy of a patient’s code. The world’s largest proofreading job, basically.”

  “So you can … what?”

  “Not fix the parts of your body Sherman Pope killed off. Let’s be clear about that much, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “But in concert with a drug like Stardom, highly customized, we end up with something very special indeed.”

  “Which is?”

  August pointed at Holly’s canister of designer Necrophage — the cartridges bearing the Hemisphere split-brain logo and the trade name Stardom. Holly followed his finger, somewhat confused. She’d been injecting them in her Gadget for weeks now, and as far as August had told her, it was the Stardom formulation of Necrophage, slightly modified by her absurdly expensive longevity consultant.

  “Stardom,” Holly repeated, finding no difficulty in saying the word cleanly.

  “Stardom is crap compared to what I’ve been able to do for you, using your code-corrected stem cells and those beautiful little vials over there. Stardom will pump you up and make you look better while the disease keeps its hooks in you. But this—” Again, he pointed at the bottle. “This, my dear, might just fix some of the damage clogging that brain of yours.”

  Holly looked to August.

  “So what is it?”

  August smiled. “I call it Prestige.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE LATE SHOW

  IAN COULDN’T CONCENTRATE.

  HIS PHONE had stopped ringing, but there was still the question of how the hell Alice Frank — Alice Motherfucking Frank, of all people — had found his number in the first place. It wasn’t listed anywhere. Ian did have an official Hemisphere number that forwarded to his cell, and it automatically routed to voicemail after 5 p.m. and on weekends. That number could also be selectively sifted; Hemisphere’s reception program did a decent job of sending calls to the appropriate parties even if the caller asked for someone different. Alice was tops of the undesirable list and would be sent to public relations, the mail room, or worse thanks to her frequent attempts to reach Burgess, but that only worked if she called Ian’s official number, which she very much hadn’t.

  She’d called his direct number. The good one. The personal one. The one that ran straight past the gatekeepers.

  How had she known that number? Ian tried to think of who even had it, outside of Bridget. Burgess, of course, and Smyth. Ted, Gennifer, and the others had it, but even Danny Almond called on the official line. Outside of work, it was friends only. The thought made him shiver. Seeing as everyone at Hemisphere knew of Alice’s rather large grinding-axe against the company, the most logical leak was from someone Ian knew personally. That meant that someone in his circle was an inconsiderate, possibly backstabbing asshole. It also meant, given that everyone in the world knew that Frank was Hemisphere’s biggest critic, that the person who had blabbed wasn’t just stupid. He or she was probably being deliberately malicious.

  Ian glanced from the TV to the phone again. It was as if he expected it to not only ring, but possibly bite him.

  Well, there was no point worrying about it. Facts were facts. Somehow,
Alice Frank had Ian’s number, but he couldn’t start glaring at every acquaintance with an evil eye. And it’s not like he had to answer the call again, or talk to the reporter. He hadn’t before, so why would she even think he was interested in talking now?

  And why had she stopped calling? That was troubling in itself. When Analise had been little, they’d prayed for her to be quiet. But when she’d been out of sight and suddenly too quiet, that was actually more cause for alarm than noise. And everyone knew children and reporters were so much alike.

  Maybe she was finding another way to get at him, persistent to the end.

  And if so, maybe it was because she somehow knew what he’d been up to today. What information he may or may not have copied from the company computer and brought home — files that he hadn’t had the courage to open. Doing so would crack a seal and force him to decide one way or the other. So far, he’d only had a creeping sense of unease, but what if the files he’d been instructed to copy, read, and delete held confidential, high-access information? What if it was, not entirely coincidentally, the nefarious kind of company secrets that Alice Frank might be calling to hear all about?

  “Stop being an idiot,” Ian said aloud to his empty study.

  He clicked the paused video back to life and resumed watching. There she was all over again: Alice Frank, on his study wall with the much-beloved Bobby Baltimore. Seeming to mock him now from two separate directions.

  The video about the Yosemite Reserve, streaming from Frank’s website as a replay, wasn’t even a full hour long. And yet Ian couldn’t get through it. He felt like he wasn’t absorbing all Smyth had asked him to absorb because he felt guilty about something he hadn’t done. It wasn’t fair. But Frank’s phone calls had interrupted him twice after he’d started, and once before dinner.

  Bridget had let him go to the study without protest, but she clearly didn’t like it. Ian didn’t work after six and definitely didn’t rush off to take secretive calls in private. He didn’t close himself in the study after rushing through dinner then sit alone while his wife and daughter entertained themselves without him.