She’d wrapped up the rifle in its plastic again and buried it under the patio stones of the house next door, which seemed to be empty: windows dark, no car in evidence. Maybe they’d been foreclosed. She’d taken that chance, trespassing on the neighbours, because if her father’s body settled and they dug up the yard, and she’d buried the rifle beside him, it would be found too, and she wanted it to stay where it was. “You never know,” her father used to say, “when you might need it,” and that was right: you never did know.
It’s possible a neighbour or two saw her digging around in the dark, but she didn’t think they’d tell. They wouldn’t want to draw the lightning down anywhere near their own possibly weapon-filled backyards.
She hosed the blood off the garage floor, then took a shower. Then she went to bed. She lay in the darkness, wanting to cry, but all she felt was cold. Though it wasn’t cold at all.
She couldn’t sell the house without revealing that she was the owner now because her father was dead, thus unleashing a whole dumpster-load of garbage onto her own head. Where, for instance, was the corpse, and how had it become one? So in the morning, after a sparse breakfast, she put the dishes in the sink and walked out of the house. She didn’t even take a suitcase. What was there to pack?
Most likely the CorpSeCorps wouldn’t bother tracing her. There was nothing in it for them: one of the Corporation banks would get the house anyway. If her disappearance was of interest to anyone, such as maybe her college – where was she, was she ill, had she been in an accident – the CorpSeCorps would spread it about that she’d been last seen with a cruising pimp on the lookout for fresh recruits, which is what you’d expect in the case of a young woman like her – a young woman in desperate financial straits, with no visible relations and no nest egg or trust fund or fallback. People would shake their heads – a shame but what could you do, and at least she had something of marketable value, namely her young ass, and therefore she wouldn’t starve to death, and nobody had to feel guilty. The CorpSeCorps always substituted rumour for action, if action would cost them anything. They believed in the bottom line.
As for her father, everyone would assume he’d changed his name and vanished into one of the seedier pleebs to avoid paying for her mother’s funeral with money he didn’t have. That sort of thing was happening all the time.
7
The period that followed was a bad time for Toby. Though she’d hidden the evidence and managed to disappear, there was still a chance the CorpSeCorps might come after her for her father’s debts. She didn’t have any money they could seize, but there were stories about female debtors being farmed out for sex. If she had to make her living on her back, she at least wanted to keep the proceeds.
She’d burned her identity and didn’t have the cash to buy a new one – not even a cheap one, without the DNA infusion or the skin-colour change – so she couldn’t get a legitimate job: those were mostly controlled by the Corporations. But if you sank deep down – down where names disappeared and no histories were true – the CorpSeCorps wouldn’t bother with you.
She rented a tiny room – she had enough money left from her cafeteria savings for that. A room of her own, which might save her few possessions from theft by some dubious roommate. It was on the top floor of a fire-trap commercial building in one of the worst pleebs – Willow Acres was its name, though the locals called it the Sewage Lagoon because a lot of shit ended up in it. She shared the bathroom with six illegal Thai immigrants, who kept very quiet. It was said that the CorpSeCorps had decided that expelling illegals was too expensive, so they’d resorted to the method used by farmers who found a diseased cow in the herd: shoot, shovel, and shut up.
On the floor below her there was an endangered-species luxury couture operation called Slink. They sold Halloween costumes over the counter to fool the animal-righter extremists and cured the skins in the backrooms. The fumes came up through the ventilation system: though Toby tried stuffing pillows into the vent, her cubicle stank of chemicals and rancid fat. Sometimes there was roaring and bleating as well – they killed the animals on the premises because the customers didn’t want goat dressed up as oryx or dyed wolf instead of wolverine. They wanted their bragging rights to be genuine.
The skinned carcasses were sold on to a chain of gourmet restaurants called Rarity. The public dining rooms served steak and lamb and venison and buffalo, certified disease-free so it could be cooked rare – that was what “Rarity” pretended to mean. But in the private banquet rooms – key-club entry, bouncer-enforced – you could eat endangered species. The profits were immense; one bottle of tiger-bone wine alone was worth a neckful of diamonds.
Technically, the endangered trade was illegal – there were high fines for it – but it was very lucrative. People in the neighbourhood knew about it, but they had their own worries, and who could you tell, without risk? There were pockets within pockets, with a CorpSeCorps hand in each one of them.
Toby got a job as a furzooter: cheap day labour, no identity required. The furzooters put on fake-fur animal suits with cartoon heads and hung advertising signs around their necks, and worked the higher-end malls and the boutique retail streets. But it was hot and humid inside the furzoots, and the range of vision was limited. In the first week she suffered three attacks by fetishists who knocked her over, twisted the big head around so she was blinded, and rubbed their pelvises against her fur, making strange noises, of which the meows were the most recognizable. It wasn’t rape – no part of her actual body was touched – but it was creepy. Also it was distasteful dressing up as bears and tigers and lions and the other endangered species she could hear being slaughtered on the floor below her. So she stopped doing that.
Then she made a lump of quick cash by selling her hair. The hair market hadn’t yet been decimated by the Mo’Hair sheep breeders – that happened a few years later – so there were still scalpers who’d buy from anyone, no questions asked. She’d had long hair then, and although it was medium brown – not the best colour, they preferred blond – it had fetched a decent sum.
After the money from the hair was used up, she’d sold her eggs on the black market. Young women could get top dollar for donating their eggs to couples who hadn’t been able pay the required bribe or else were so truly unsuitable that no official would sell them a parenthood licence anyway. But she could only pull the egg stunt twice because the second time the extraction needle had been infected. At that time the egg traders were still paying for treatment if anything went wrong; still, it took her a month to recover. When she tried a third time, they told her there were complications, so she could never donate any more eggs, or – incidentally – have any children herself.
Toby hadn’t known until then that she’d wanted any children. She’d had a boyfriend back at Martha Graham who used to talk about marriage and a family – Stan was his name – but Toby had said they were far too young and poor to consider it. She was studying Holistic Healing – Lotions and Potions, the students called it – and Stan was in Problematics and Quadruple-Entry Creative Asset Planning, at which he was doing well. His family wasn’t rich or he wouldn’t have been at a third-rate institution like Martha Graham, but he was ambitious, and fully intended to prosper. On their more tranquil evenings, Toby would rub her flower preparations and herbal extract projects on him, and after that there would be a round of crisp, botanical-remedy-flavoured sex, followed by a shower-off and some popcorn, without salt or fat.
But once her family hit the downdraft, Toby knew she couldn’t afford Stan. She also knew her days at college were numbered. So she’d cut off contact. She didn’t even answer his reproachful text messages, because there was no future in it: he wanted a two-professionals marriage, and she was no longer in the running. Better to do the weeping sooner rather than later, she told herself.
But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.
&n
bsp; After getting that news, she’d blown her hoarded egg-donation money on a drug-fuelled holiday from reality. But waking up with various men she’d never seen before had lost its thrill very quickly, especially when she’d found they had a habit of pocketing her spare change. After the fourth or fifth time she knew she had to make a decision: did she want to live or did she want to die? If die, there were quicker ways. If live, she had to live differently.
Through one of her single-nighters – a man with the Sewage Lagoon equivalent of a kind soul – she found a job at a pleebmob business. Pleebmob businesses didn’t ask for identity and didn’t need references: if you dipped into the till they’d simply cut your fingers off.
Toby’s new job was with a chain called SecretBurgers. The secret of SecretBurgers was that no one knew what sort of animal protein was actually in them: the counter girls wore T-shirts and baseball caps with the slogan SecretBurgers! Because Everyone Loves a Secret! The job paid rock-bottom wages, but you got two free SecretBurgers a day. Once she was with the Gardeners and had taken the Vegivows, Toby suppressed the memory of eating these burgers; but as Adam One used to say, hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience. The meat grinders weren’t 100 per cent efficient; you might find a swatch of cat fur in your burger or a fragment of mouse tail. Was there a human finger-nail, once?
It was possible. The local pleebmobs paid the CorpSeCorpsMen to turn a blind eye. In return, the CorpSeCorps let the pleebmobs run the low-level kidnappings and assassinations, the skunkweed gro-ops, the crack labs and street-drug retailing, and the plank shops that were their stock-in-trade. They also ran corpse disposals, harvesting organs for transplant, then running the gutted carcasses through the SecretBurgers grinders. So went the worst rumours. During the glory days of SecretBurgers, there were very few bodies found in vacant lots.
If there was a so-called reality TV exposé, the CorpSeCorps would make a pretense at investigation. Then they’d list the case as Unsolved and discard it. They had an image to uphold among those citizens who still paid lip service to the old ideals: defenders of the peace, enforcers of public security, keeping the streets safe. It was a joke even then, but most people felt the CorpSeCorps were better than total anarchy. Even Toby felt that.
The year before, SecretBurgers had gone too far. The CorpSeCorps had closed them down after one of their high-placed officials went slumming in the Sewage Lagoon and his shoes were discovered on the feet of a SecretBurgers meat-grinder operator. So for a while stray cats breathed easier at night. But a few months later the familiar grilling booths were sizzling again, because who could say no to a business with so few supply-side costs?
8
Toby was pleased to learn she’d got the SecretBurgers job: she could pay the rent, she wouldn’t starve. But then she discovered the catch.
The catch was the manager. His name was Blanco, though behind his back the SecretBurgers girls called him the Bloat. Rebecca Eckler, who worked Toby’s shift, told her about him right away. “Stay off his radar,” she said. “Maybe you’ll be okay – he’s doing that girl Dora, and he mostly does just the one at a time, and you’re kind of scrawny and he likes the curvy butts. But if he tells you to come to the office, look out. He’s real jealous. He’ll take a girl apart.”
“Has he asked you?” said Toby. “To the office?”
“Praise the Lord and spit,” said Rebecca. “I’m too black and ugly for him, plus he just likes the kittens, not the old cats. Maybe you should wrinkle yourself up, sweetheart. Knock out a few of your teeth.”
“You’re not ugly,” said Toby. Rebecca was in fact beautiful in a substantial way, with her brown skin and her red hair and her Egyptian nose.
“I don’t mean ugly like that,” said Rebecca. “Ugly to deal with. Us Jelacks, we’re two kinds of folks you don’t want to mess with. He knows I’d get the Blackened Redfish onto him, and they’re one mean gang. Plus maybe the Wolf Isaiahists. Way too much grief!”
Toby had no such backups. She kept her head down when Blanco was around. She’d heard his story. According to Rebecca, he’d been a bouncer at Scales, the classiest club in the Lagoon. Bouncers had status; they strolled around in black suits and dark glasses, looking suave but tough, and they had women swarming all over them. But Blanco had blown it big time, said Rebecca. He’d ripped up a Scales girl – not a smuggled illegal-alien temporary, they got ripped up all the time, but one of the top talent, a star pole dancer. You couldn’t have a guy like that around – someone who’d mess up the works because he couldn’t keep his cool – so they’d fired him. Lucky for him he had friends in the CorpSeCorps or he’d have ended up minus some body parts in a carbon garboil dumpster. As it was, they’d stuck him in to run the Sewage Lagoon SecretBurgers outlet. It was a big comedown and he was bitter about it – why should he suffer because of some slut? – so he hated the job. But he figured the girls were his perks. He had two pals, ex-bouncers like himself, who acted as his bodyguards, and they got the leavings. Supposing there was anything left.
Blanco was still bouncer-shaped – oblong and hefty – though running to fat: too much beer, said Rebecca. He’d kept the signature bouncer ponytail at the back of his balding head, and he sported a full set of arm tattoos: snakes twining his arms, bracelets of skulls around his wrists, veins and arteries on the backs of his hands so they looked flayed. Around his neck was a tattooed chain, with a lock on it shaped like a red heart, nestled into the chest hair he displayed in the V of his open shirt. According to rumour, that chain went right down his back, twined around an upside-down naked woman whose head was stuck in his ass.
Toby kept her eye on Dora, who’d arrive at the grilling booth to take over when Toby’s shift was done. She’d begun as a plump optimist, but over the weeks she’d been shrinking and sagging; on the white skin of her arms, the bruises bloomed and faded. “She wants to run away,” Rebecca whispered, “but she’s scared. Maybe you should get out of here yourself. He’s been looking at you.”
“I’ll be okay,” said Toby. She didn’t feel okay, she felt scared. But where else could she go? She lived from pay to pay. She had no money.
The next morning, Rebecca signalled Toby over. “Dora’s dead,” she said. “Tried to run. I just heard it. Found her in a vacant lot, neck broke, cut to bits. Saying it was some crazy.”
“But it was him?” said Toby.
“Course it was him,” Rebecca sniffed. “He’s bragging.”
At noon that same day, Blanco ordered Toby to his office. He sent his two pals with the message. They walked on either side of her, just in case she might get flighty ideas. As they went along the street, the heads turned. Toby felt she was on the way to her own execution. Why hadn’t she quit when she had the chance?
The office was through a grimy door tucked behind a carbon garboil dumpster. It was a small room with a desk, filing cabinet, and battered leather couch. Blanco heaved himself out of his swivel chair, grinning.
“Skinny bitch, I’m promoting you,” he said. “Say thank you.”
Toby could only whisper: she felt strangled.
“See this heart?” said Blanco. He pointed to his tattoo. “It means I love you. And now you love me too. Right?”
Toby managed to nod.
“Smart girl,” said Blanco. “Come here. Take off my shirt.”
The tattoo on his back was just as Rebecca had described it: a naked woman, wound in chains, her head invisible. Her long hair waving up like flames.
Blanco put his flayed hands around her neck. “Cross me up, I’ll snap you like a twig,” he said.
9
Ever since her family had died in such sad ways, ever since she herself had disappeared from official view, Toby had tried not to think about her earlier life. She’d covered it in ice, she’d frozen it. Now she longed desperately to be back there in the past – even the bad parts, even the grief – because her present life was torture. She tried to picture her two faraway, long-ago parents, watching over her like guardian spirit
s, but she saw only mist.
She’d been Blanco’s one-and-only for less than two weeks, but it felt like years. His view was that a woman with an ass as skinny as Toby’s should consider herself in luck if any man wanted to stick his hole-hammer into her. She’d be even luckier if he didn’t sell her to Scales as a temporary, which meant temporarily alive. She should thank her lucky stars. Better, she should thank him: he demanded a thank you after every degrading act. He didn’t want her to feel pleasure, though: only submission.
Nor did he give her any time off from her SecretBurgers duties. He demanded her services during her lunch break – the whole half-hour – which meant she got no lunch.
Day by day she was hungrier and more exhausted. She had her own bruises now, like poor Dora’s. Despair was taking her over: she could see where this was going, and it looked like a dark tunnel. She’d be used up soon.
Worse, Rebecca had gone away, no one knew exactly where. Off with some religious group, said the street rumour. Blanco didn’t care, because Rebecca hadn’t been part of his harem. He filled her SecretBurgers place quickly enough.
Toby was working the morning shift when a strange procession approached along the street. From the signs they were carrying and the singing they were doing, she guessed it was a religious thing, though it wasn’t a sect she’d ever seen before.
A lot of fringe cults worked the Sewage Lagoon, trolling for souls in torment. The Known Fruits and the Petrobaptists and the other rich-people religions kept away, but a few wattled old Salvation Army bands shuffled through, wheezing under the weight of their drums and French horns. Groups of turbaned Pure-Heart Brethren Sufis might twirl past, or black-clad Ancients of Days, or clumps of saffron-robed Hare Krishnas, tinkling and chanting, attracting jeers and rotting vegetation from the bystanders. The Lion Isaiahists and the Wolf Isaiahists both preached on street corners, battling when they met: they were at odds over whether it was the lion or the wolf that would lie down with the lamb once the Peaceable Kingdom had arrived. When there were scuffles, the pleebrat gangs – the brown Tex-Mexes, the pallid Lintheads, the yellow Asian Fusions, the Blackened Redfish – would swarm the fallen, rooting through their draperies for anything valuable, or even just portable.
The MaddAddam Trilogy Page 35
