by Sean Platt
Looking at the empty shower, where the second-long, early-morning, foggy-headed hallucination had been.
Weasel was a piece of shit, and I’m not sorry he’s dead. Or undead.
Weasel’s real name had been Quincy, which was why he’d taken on a nickname so eagerly, even as unflattering as it was. He drank hard and, like most of Jordache’s in-a-prior-life boyfriends, had good moments and bad. She’d spent much of their time together fucked up, lying on one floor or another, waiting for the room to stop spinning and start making sense. Sometimes, Weasel hit. Sometimes, he wanted to have sex, and Jordache didn’t precisely not want to but was too high to consent or refuse. In those cases, Weasel’s whims won more often than not.
After Weasel, Jordache’s appetite for mind-altering substances had left her. She’d finally found herself clean, sober, and (she thought) in with a good man. Things would be different, and thus far had been. She had her temper and her trailer, but with those skins shed, she could be someone else.
No more lost days.
No more bad boyfriends.
No more regrets.
She thought of Danny.
But instead of seeing Danny in her mind, she saw a tall man on a bluff somewhere full of rocks and dust, his hair blond, his frame wide, his eyes still blue, well past the point at which they should have decayed and fallen from his skull.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
FUNLANES
BRIDGET STOPPED IN A FUNLANES parking lot to recalibrate. She could drive while listening to a GPS system, and she could (though she knew she shouldn’t) drive while sending texts. But she wasn’t used to the FindMe app, and it didn’t give vocal instructions for how to reach one phone’s owner from another’s position.
There was a loud slapping sound against the glass. Bridget jumped. Her head snapped up from her phone in the middle of trying to reconcile Ian’s position with her own admittedly limited knowledge of this area — someone had flattened themselves against her passenger window.
The intruder, flesh pressed against the glass, looked to be a girl of about sixteen or seventeen. She had her hair in two brown pigtails — a style that was far too young for her. Bridget gaped, unsure how to respond to the intrusion until a heavyset man rushed to the girl from behind, taking her by the arm and pulling her away. Even through the glass, Bridget heard a soft, wet purring sound as the girl’s flesh separated at the forearm, exposing the dead brown muscle beneath.
Also through the glass, Bridget heard the man tell the girl, “Now look at what you’ve done. Go get your kit from your mother.”
The girl shambled away, toward another car in the lot where a similarly heavyset woman was waiting with her hands on her big hips. The last glimpse of her face had shown Bridget a wide, empty smile.
Bridget looked at the window. It was smeared with something brown, like insect guts. The man was still outside, seeming torn between saying something and making a gesture. Bridget lowered the window halfway. The brown goo collected at the bottom, squeegeed off by the rubber seals.
“I’m sorry,” the man said. “She’s just curious.”
Bridget, disoriented from leaving half her attention on her phone’s glowing blue dot, blinked up in the brisk, bright morning air. The Funlanes were past the car, where the woman seemed to be unfolding a case to treat the girl’s wound. The bright colors hurt her eyes. She’d been inside one before, and they were just as bright inside, overflowing with necrotics who, according to rumor, left digits inside the bowling balls at least 5 percent of the time.
“It’s no problem.”
“I have Windex.” He sighed, looking at the goo on Bridget’s side window. “She does that to our windows constantly.”
“No. Really.” Bridget tried a smile. “It’s no problem.”
The man gave Bridget a little nod then turned. A second later, she called after him.
“Excuse me. Is that Neerman Avenue ahead?”
The man turned back. “No, that’s Fourteenth. Neerman is two blocks farther up.” He took a step forward to see what Bridget was looking at, but she slid the phone between the seats. He wouldn’t know she was tailing her cheating husband just by looking at the app’s screen, but holding the thing made her feel guilty. “Where are you trying to go?”
Bridget stammered. The answer was, Wherever he ends up, but she couldn’t exactly say that.
“A friend told me to meet them at a hotel, but I forget the name. Is there a hotel around here?”
“Hmm. I don’t know. Do you need a hotel? Are you just visiting Aberdeen? Because we’re from Gregory Village, back that way, and there’s a Hilton.”
Bridget knew the Hilton. It wasn’t close. He was probably making the recommendation in deference to her wardrobe, jewelry, and car, none of which were inexpensive. She’d wanted to be ready to follow Ian when he left, so she’d gone with a predictable reason to get dressed and ready so early: Gabriella had something planned. Given prep time, she’d dress well for any Gabriella errands, and Ian knew it. But she’d only stopped at Gab’s long enough to drop Ana off after taking a Zen pill to dull the edge. Then she’d told Gabriella a different excuse than the one she’d given to Ian. Bridget didn’t particularly feel like hearing “I told you so” from her neighbor right now, or suggestions on how to get Ian back.
Bridget’s head turned anyway. Behind her, she saw only the overpass for the Sherman Pope Memorial Expressway. And a black car that seemed awfully familiar.
“Do you want directions to the Hilton?”
Bridget’s head spun back. “What?”
“Or do you want to meet your friends first?”
Bridget looked behind her again. And yes, there was a black car parked one lot over, not square in any particular parking slot, with two people in front, seeming to look right at her.
“Ma’am?”
“Yes?”
“Do you have your bearings now?”
Still looking back, Bridget said, “No problem, thanks.”
While she watched, a larger vehicle, like a minivan, pulled up beside the idling black car. It had the same orange front license plate. In the car, the driver raised something slowly to his lips, like puffing on a cigarette.
When she looked forward again, Bridget saw the big man walking away.
Bridget retrieved her phone and looked again at the blue dot indicating the location of Ian’s cell. The car had gone a few blocks farther, but the direction seemed to be simple: one block up then many to the right. As long as his phone had a signal, she’d be able to follow without getting close enough to be seen.
Bridget drew a few deep breaths, telling herself to calm down, to stop being so paranoid about simply checking up on her man’s comings and goings.
She pulled into traffic.
The black car and the minivan pulled out behind her, making no effort to hide.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
NOT EVER
AUGUST DIDN’T KNOW THIS PART of town and didn’t particularly like being here. It was something nobody was ever supposed to say, but most uninfected people found being in the Skin District creepy. August was no exception. The necrotic ghettos were depressing enough, but even the non-ghetto sections had a way of upsetting a normal brain’s sense of equilibrium.
The biggest problem was in unstated social changes. Most communication wasn’t done in words; it was done in body: posture, eye position, direction and speed of gestures, and so on. That’s how animals communicated, but it’s how humans normally communicated, too. But bodily norms were among the first things to go when people got infected. Only the shortest incubations kept people quasi-normal, and a few days was long enough for Sherman Pope to make a person somewhat socially retarded. Necrotics stared too long and in the wrong directions. Their disobedient bodies didn’t gesture properly or sit right. Their mouths turned up wrong, warping what were supposed to be smiles into toothy, vaguely threatening grimaces.
Just walking around here, where they lived in droves among the thriv
ing businesses designed for them, was enough to make a normal person’s skin crawl.
But even beyond that, everything down here had an oddly inflated bizarro vibe. Roads were 15 percent wider to account for a necrotic driver’s diminished sense of control when not using auto-drive — not enough to easily notice, but enough to feel distinctly strange. Lights were all too-bright indoors and outside at night because necrotics often (but not always; the disease manifested differently, depending on the person) lost some of their eyesight and required the light to see. Colors were brighter because studies had shown that longer-incubation necrotics, prone to emotional outbursts, were calmed by bright colors. And everything that required dexterity was super-sized: walk-to-cross buttons were the size of dinner plates; door handles had smaller diameters and the doors pivoted nearer their middles rather than at the edges; most buildings used environmental sensors in bathrooms and public areas so that nothing had to be touched.
Most unsettling of all, August thought, were the cleaners. It looked to a naive eye like the district had a penchant for neatness and the tax money to spend extravagantly — but Panacea, not the city, paid for the big cleaners and the many droids and robots that swept walkways and lobbies. It wasn’t an epidemic hazard for citizens to bleed and slough body parts as they walked (Sherman Pope was spread only by blood-to-blood contact with a feral), but it did smell awful and tended to attract unsightly urban vultures.
No, August didn’t like being here — even if it was the best place to hide from the press, with or without his scheduled meeting with Alice. He understood why necrotics often clumped together like any ethnic group, and why businesses catering to necrotics followed, making the problem worse. But understanding didn’t make him enjoy it, or think it was a particularly good idea.
August’s phone rang. The caller ID read, ThruPath — the switchboard service that funneled his alias phone numbers into his never-distributed real one.
“Hello?” he said, touching the steering wheel’s blinking icon.
“August?” The voice, Bobby Baltimore’s, sounded disbelieving.
“Don’t sound so shocked.”
“Cindy tried to call you, like, ten times before I left Yosemite. I tried to call a few from the plane. We kept getting your voicemail.”
“Oh. You should have left a message.”
“I got your decoy message, not your real one.”
“Look, Bobby, I’m sorry. I just hooked the number I gave you back in to the service I use. I recently switched phones. I’ve been distracted.”
“So I heard.”
August figured that meant Bobby had seen yesterday’s news — and, probably, the many speculative reports that had followed. Nobody could agree exactly what August may or may not have to do with the Holly Gaynor mystery, and really, nobody could even agree if there was a mystery around Holly at all. She wasn’t talking to the press, on August’s recommendation. Her people, now that Holly had slipped away and come to hide with August, weren’t admitting to anything, either. Officially, Ms. Gaynor had no comment. Officially, Ms. Gaynor was comfortable in her Aberdeen Valley mansion in the hills … and definitely not back at August’s anonymous second apartment right this minute.
But speculations were priceless. Holly had managed to say a few unmuddled words in public, and somehow August Maughan had now left Hemisphere in disgrace for conducting mad scientist experiments on necrotic minds.
Ironically, today’s reality, with Holly, wasn’t terribly far off.
“Where are you, Bobby?”
“Back at my house.”
“Outside the park?”
“No, back here in Aberdeen.”
“I thought you were shooting?”
“You thought wrong. I was around deadheads too long. It was messing with my head.”
August looked through his windshield. There were ropes along the curbs to keep citizens from falling into the street. A surface train rattled by a few blocks down, its front equipped with a triangular cow catcher.
“I know the feeling,” August said.
“I assume our appointment is canceled.”
August’s mouth worked, twitching his little goatee. Given what had happened with Holly and the Prestige drug, events — or possible events — inside the Yosemite Reserve had been heavy on August’s mind. It was one of the things he thought might come up with Alice and Ian Keys, and he’d already made a note to ask Bobby. He wasn’t a scientist or particularly stable, but he had more in-the-wild experience than just about anyone, other than perhaps those poor bastards still cleaning out Bakersfield.
“Maybe.”
“Did you skip town?” Bobby asked. “The news people think you skipped town.”
“No, I’m still here.”
“Where?”
“Grover.”
“What, downtown? In the Skin District?”
“You’re surprised?”
“Just seems like a place I’d be more at home than you.”
Yes, that was true. And as he stopped at a light, August couldn’t help watching all of them, thinking how thin the line was between his current world and Bobby’s usual one. Necrophage did its little kill-and-swap act just fine, but half of a clarifier’s job, when someone was close to tipping, came down to psychology. Decades of zombie movies had told these people what they were, sure as doctors had. The ugly truth was that in Yosemite, most people raged before their medical rage point. They did it because they’d decided they were zombies. They were infected; they’d been condemned to turn in a place packed with ferals; they felt their conditions sliding into an abyss. They saw where they were going, and most chose subconsciously to turn in advance — to lose their minds, to shout and growl, to attack what they could and eat its flesh before biology strictly required them to.
“Hey, we’re all Americans,” August said.
“Right. One nation under the plague. Forget the Melting Pot. This is the Rotting Pot.” He chuckled. “Hey. I had something I wanted to ask you.”
“About your treatments?”
“Actually, about my work. After seeing the thing with Holly Gaynor, I got to wondering if — ”
“Hang on, Bobby.”
August tapped the wheel to repeat the last direction. The GPS told him to turn right, so he obeyed, driving full manual because he trusted himself not to hit a stumbling necrotic more than he trusted auto-drive.
“Are you driving?” Bobby asked.
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“I could tell you,” August said, “but then I’d have to kill you.”
“Fine. Be that way.”
Maybe he should tell him. Invite Bobby along. He probably would, if this were his party instead of Alice Frank’s, and if she wasn’t clearly playing things so close to the vest. August didn’t understand the last-minute change of venue, but the new location was as good as the original. He’d tag along this time, trusting that Alice wouldn’t call press because, if nothing else, she’d want the scoop for herself. The next time they met, if his hunch was right, he could set the terms. And if it made sense, his Yosemite expert could come along.
The GPS told him to make another right. He must be close. The conversation with Bobby would have to wait.
“Bobby, I’ll need to call you back. I’m almost to Grover Mall.”
“Grover Mall? Man, when you want to be around zombies, you really want to be around zombies!”
“Ah, Dawn of the Dead jokes. Nice.”
“It’s really more of an insight about consumerism.”
Another turn brought the mammoth glass cube into view. As far as the necrotic parts of Aberdeen Valley went, this was the best of them — probably, now that he thought about it, the reason that Alice had chosen it. August could relate. If they had to be three uninfected people in infected territory, it only felt sensible (if politically incorrect) to do so in the polished spots — the kind of place that Aberdeen used as one of its oft-displayed crown jewels for the rest of the country to
marvel at.
August eschewed the garage, found a meter, and opened his door. He had a big hat and, despite recent news events, didn’t have a particularly recognizable face. The mall was actually decent cover. If the twitchers here had any emotions about August Maughan after the Holly Gaynor thing, it’d be hope.
August killed the engine, holding his phone to his face as he exited then crossed the lawn.
He saw five men in suits run by him. Not necrotics. Panacea clarifiers.
“Buy me a nice, overpriced shirt,” Bobby said in August’s ear.
August barely heard it. He felt like he was in a trance, staring straight ahead. He lowered his phone, killed the call without saying goodbye, and slipped the cell into his pocket.
What he was seeing ahead was not supposed to happen.
Not in today’s world.
Not in Aberdeen Valley’s city limits.
Not ever.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
ORANGE JULIUS
IAN’S PHONE RANG WHILE HE and Alice were crossing into the back of the food court, toward the perfect mixture of public (so nobody could try anything funny) and private (so nobody could listen). The way Ian felt right now, an Orange Julius in the middle of the country’s necrotic capital was the perfect spot for a clandestine meeting between three people who didn’t entirely trust each other: there would be no bugs or listening devices, there could be no obvious conflict fit to create a scene … and if Ian suddenly felt he didn’t want to be part of this anymore, he could always run, and no one would stop him.
They’d met out front. Alice was taller than he’d thought but radiated a more trustworthy vibe than he’d expected — probably, he had to admit, because Hemisphere PR painted her inside the company as a kind of devil. August Maughan, she’d told him, had texted and was running a few minutes late. So they’d gone in.
And it had been fine.
Until it wasn’t.
The call showed a nonsensical four-digit Caller ID: 0804. Ian declined the call, and it rang again immediately.
