by Jon Jacks
The girl with the gun spoke for her.
‘Help her?’ She allowed herself a bitter chuckle. ‘She got herself fired on purpose so we could kidnap you, idiot! With all the rubbish you and your friends spout every day, we knew there’d always be something she could blow up into an argument that would get her fired.’
‘And what if I hadn’t agreed to come out here and help her?’ I snapped angrily. ‘How would your plan have worked then, little miss smart arse?’
She grinned.
‘Well, that part of the plan obviously relied on you being unbelievably stupid.’
I bit my lip; she was right. I had been incredibly, amazingly, ridiculously stupid.
‘What really amazes me,’ she said, turning towards me, sending shivers through me as, once again, I suffered that strange experience of staring into an unflattering mirror, ‘is that you went and did it even after someone had already tried to kidnap you. How incredibly stupid is that?’
She delivered the last line with a surprising degree of malice.
‘Ah, but that wasn’t–’ I stopped myself; I was so eager to explain why my actions weren’t as completely ridiculous as they seemed that I’d almost blurted out that Dorian was responsible for what had only apparently been a kidnap attempt. ‘That wasn’t you?’
‘Sorry again, Cally.’ The ex-waitress glanced back at the girl as Claude took the second left, as per his orders. ‘I should have known I should have delayed getting fired when I saw the kidnap attempt on TV.’
‘Not to worry Kerrsly.’ The girl called Cally lowered the gun, digging it hard into my chest. ‘Our little missy here might get full marks in the beauty stakes but, know what, she’s really short on the little grey cells!’
Her eyes narrowed and darkened accusingly.
She sounded almost disappointed in me when she said, ‘Don’t you realise most folks out here haven’t really got your best interests at heart?’
‘Huh, like you do, eh?’
‘More than you think, missy, more than you think!’
As we’d talked, Claude had taken a few more turnings, taking us farther into a confusing warren of apartment blocks.
Cally must have seen the growing fear in my eyes.
‘Look, you’re not in any danger from us; trust me, right? Please?’
As her voice softened, so did her face.
She even gave me a slight, wan smile.
Yet again, I had that odd sense of seeing myself in a frighteningly dark mirror.
*
Between and connected to the towering apartment blocks were the massive, multilevel farm and factory complexes I’d only ever seen in the TV soaps.
In the gaps between the levels, I glimpsed the flitting shadows of movement, of industry. Of machines and Droids toiling twenty-four hours a day.
According to the soaps I’d watched, the roles of overseers of the Droids were regarded as prestigious jobs; fought over, enviously sought, through cunning or even violence.
How much of that was true?
I’d heard that the soaps naturally exaggerated the happiness of families living in the Sections.
Even in the rose-tinted version of life we were presented with on TV, it was obvious that the dirty, poorly paid engineers who helped keep the machines running were princes amongst a population confined to a life of state-sponsored leisure.
Holding one of the rare jobs available to the Perma-Leisured meant the difference between an apartment in which the whole family were crowded into a couple of dingy rooms and one offering more space and a better outlook from the top floors of the blocks.
People stared, their faces creased in either worry or puzzlement.
An expensive car in their district could mean trouble, a visit from a dignitary carrying out an inspection or imposing new restrictions on travel.
There were few other cars on the road, and these were either carefully maintained older models or, even more likely, the result of a number of cannibalised vehicles. The passing buses were crowded, the later passengers clinging on to the outer straps and footways.
We turned off the road, dipping down a ramp taking us beneath one of the looming apartment blocks. Shadows fell around us, broken only by the suddenly bright glare of intermittent lamps.
Claude drove as if all this were perfectly normal to him.
‘Here, into this bay – then stop.’
The waitress – Kerrsly – pointed off to her left.
Claude deftly swung the car into what appeared to be a tightly enclosed delivery bay rather than the more regular, open parking bays.
As soon as Claude had cut the engine, Kerrsly clicked something on the handle of what I’d originally taken to be a gun. Claude slumped forward across the driving wheel.
I instinctively jerked forward, only for Cally to roughly push me back.
‘It’s okay, princess kind-heart; she’s just put him to sleep for a while, so we can have a nice little chat.’
She waved the gun, indicating that I needed to get out of the car.
‘Don’t try to run; I assure you there’s nowhere safe for you to go around here.’
She was wrong.
As soon as I stepped out of the door, I caught a glimpse of a patrolling PoliceBot taking a watchful circuit of the underground car park.
‘Help, help! I’m being abducted!’ I cried, suddenly rushing towards the towering machine.
The Bot spun on its tracked wheels, the majority of its multiple–lensed eyes instantly focusing on me.
The other eyes whirled, quickly taking in its surroundings and the situation, whirring as they latched on to both Cally and Kerrsly.
Neither of the girls ran, or even ducked for cover.
I was expecting the PoliceBot’s body to open up, revealing the protective cocoon available to anyone who had called on its aid. But the cocoon’s doors remained firmly shut.
I crashed into the PoliceBot’s body. I reeled backwards, slipping painfully to the floor.
The PoliceBot’s gun had automatically appeared in its hand. The gun was pointing at me.
‘Not me you idiot! I screamed looking up from the floor.
I pointed towards the two laughing girls. ‘Them!’
The PoliceBot’s gun was still threateningly aimed at me.
‘Stay where you are!’ the PoliceBot barked in a hard, officious voice. ‘You’re under arrest!’
‘It’s all right lanky – she’s with us.’
The PoliceBot’s gun vanished into its mechanical folds.
It moved back, away from me.
It looked towards the two girls.
‘Lanky, make sure no one comes here,’ Cally said, pointing towards the car.
‘Lanky’ nodded mechanically in agreement.
He spun around me, taking up a slow patrol just in front of the car.
Cally noticed my frustrated frown.
‘Why do you think you still tend to use humans as your police?’ she sneered angrily. ‘Even out here, some of us know how to re-programme a PoliceBot!’
*
‘Your police? What do you mean, your police?’ I snorted irritably as Cally and Kerrsly aggressively pushed me ahead of them through the dank car park. ‘The police are there to protect everyone – unless you manage to somehow persuade a PoliceBot to work only for you, of course.’
‘They’re certainly not our police,’ Cally said. ‘They spend all their time making sure we know our place. Our place being this dump I’m going to give you a short tour of.’
‘How long are you going to keep me here? What’s going to happen to Claude?’
‘Claude? Oh, yeah the chauffer. He’ll wake up in a few hours, so dizzy he’ll think he’s drunk a whole barrel of whisky. We’ll have moved the car by then, of course.’
‘We? Who’s we? Are yo
u involved with all the riots we’ve been having?’
Both Cally and Kerrsly laughed.
‘You kidding? When you live like this, riots can be pretty spontaneous you know.’
We’d come to the top of the steps leading up from the underground car park.
Not that it was easy to tell any difference. Beyond the towering blocks, the sky was naturally lighter, but we were still totally enveloped in their gloomy, depressing shadows.
The surrounding concrete was dark, rough edged and damp.
I’d thought it had looked bad from the car. Up close, it was even worse.
‘I have noticed you still haven’t answered how long you’ll be keeping me here,’ I said as they took turns to roughly push me along the narrow, confining alleyways.
They still refused to answer, remaining grim lipped as we passed by the towering apartment blocks.
Even from outside, I could hear the relentless clamour of each block’s inhabitants; the screams and yells of children, the low hum of conflicting, multiple conversations, the whirr and screech of thousands of electrical appliances.
Clothes were hung out to dry on balconies crammed with bikes and futile attempts at bringing to life a few plants amongst this foreboding, grey landscape.
Odd bits of paper whirled past us in the wind. We clunked our way through old plastic cartons and tin cans strewn everywhere across the floor.
‘I thought…I thought there were Bots and Droids that were supposed to keep everything clean!’
‘I bet there’s a lot of things you thought about us that turns out to be wrong,’ Cally snarled.
Despite the squalor I had seen so far, I was still surprised when we came around the side of one of the apartment blocks.
What should have been a green – what always appeared on the TV soaps as a wide stretch of grass where people gathered and children played – was completely hidden beneath a massive pile of stinking rubbish.
No. It wasn’t rubbish.
There were people, children, walking around amongst it.
Not on top of it, but through it.
Along walkways running between walls of metal, wood, card and cloth, like someone had gone to the trouble of constructing a vast maze.
And then, fool that I was, it hit me – it wasn’t a pile of rubbish, and it wasn’t a maze either.
What I’d thought were walls had roofs of stretched polythene or countless plastic bags overlaying each other like coloured tiles.
These were houses, houses made of rubbish.
‘Who…who lives here?’ I looked back at Cally and Kerrsly nervously.
‘Me. And some of my family.’
Cally emphasised the word some like she was spitting it out in disgust.
‘Me too soon enough,’ Kerrsly said sourly. ‘And my family. Now I’ve lost my job.’
‘But…but there are plenty of apartments. And benefits to afford them!’
‘Hah! That’s what you’re told, is it?’
Cally continued to push me into the warren-like lanes weaving between the small houses.
‘Houses’ was too grand a word for them.
None I could see was much bigger than my apartment’s walk-in wardrobe.
They had been made from anything available; old advertising hoardings, stone and brick rubble recovered from the city ruins, the metal of old cookers, dishwashers and cars, all of which had been cut away and flattened to make walls and roofs.
Old, abandoned cars had obviously been a rich source of materials – as well as the metal sides, tyres had been cut and stretched to make odd, log cabin type walls. Windscreens had been used to make the only windows I could see, while whole car roofs were now the roofs of a minority of these ‘homes’. Doors were of cloth, or wood that didn’t quite meet up with either the walls or the roof edges.
‘Why live here when there are so may abandoned homes in the deserted cities?’ I persisted.
‘Do you get all your info from TV soaps?’
Cally was scathing, her teeth almost bared.
‘Do you really think the old cities are a pleasure ground, where there are all sorts of wonderful things just lying around waiting to be discovered? Like wonderful apartments, full of Persian rugs and leather sofas?’
I recognised Cally’s description of an old city apartment featuring in the popular Zone 28.
‘But the old cities, even the towns, were – well, massive, weren’t they? Surely there are areas that could be re-colonised?’
‘How long do you think those cities have been abandoned? How long do you think things last before they begin to crumble or rot or are just simply taken over again by nature? It’s not just ivy and grass growing everywhere; some of the areas are mostly forest once again. Any underground pipes or cables have been destroyed by roots, ground movement, age. There’s no water, no electricity, no gas. How would you like to live there, little miss know-it-all?’
‘We’ve always been told there were more than enough apartments to house everyone.’
If that were true, do you think anyone would live like this by choice?’ Kerrsly nodded angrily towards the crowded hovels we were passing. ‘The apartments are overcrowded, as you probably heard when we passed them. Still, people prefer them to living here.’
She’d stop by the roughly made door of a particularly low ‘house.’
It was a surprisingly well made door compared to what I’d seen so far, in that it fitted neatly and securely inside a thick, heavy frame.
More surprising still, it boasted what looked to be a crude, ridiculously-large DNA lock keeping the door firmly shut.
‘After you,’ Cally said to me brusquely, giving me a firm push towards the door.
‘The DNA lock…’ I began doubtfully.
‘…shouldn’t be any problem,’ Cally finished for me sternly.
She was right. The door clicked open.
‘Ah, of course,’ I said. ‘You bypassed the car’s lock, so setting this to admit me would be easy enough. Let me guess – a hair taken from the restaurant, right?’
I couldn’t guess how they’d managed to get the necessary DNA information from anything Kerrsly had picked up and removed from the restaurant. But I glanced at Kerrsly with a confident smirk on my face, hoping to give the impression that I had figured out more than I had.
‘Yeah, okay, if that’s what you’d like to think Miss know-it-all.’
The sternness had disappeared from Cally’s voice.
There was almost a smile on her face. And a strange gleam in her eyes that could have been – what? Excitement? Triumph?
There was little light inside, but I could see enough to realise a woman was rising from her seat.
She was smiling, almost crazily. She was shaking too, like she was unsure whether she should stay where she was or draw closer.
‘Kerrsly,’ she said with obvious relief as the girl followed me inside.
Cally made as if to follow, but the DNA lock began to shriek out a warning.
‘Duplicated DNA! Duplicated DNA!’ its female voice rhythmically intoned.
Cally grinned.
The woman rushed towards me, her eyes wide and wild.
‘It’s her Cally!’ she cried tearfully. ‘It’s really her!’
*
Chapter 9
‘Course it’s her mum,’ Cally said flatly as Kerrsly overrode the DNA lock’s restrictions.
Cally stepped inside, glaring angrily at the excited woman.
The woman seemed to interpret the glare as an order to calm down.
She shrugged, gathered herself, said, ‘Yes, yes, of course it is, of course.’
She turned to Kerrsly.
‘We’ll obviously help your family as much as we can, my dear. You’ve done well, extremely well. We can’t thank you enough for your sacrifice.’
‘Sacrifice?’ I gave Kerrsly a puzzled frown.
&
nbsp; ‘The job. I sacrificed my job to get you here, remember? And my family will suffer for it, having to move in to the shanty town.’
‘You’ll get benefits–’
‘Benefits?’ Cally laughed. ‘Haven’t we already said room in the apartments is just about fought over? Lose a job, and you’re seen as having thrown away your chance. You go to the bottom of the housing ladder.’
I was almost stupid enough to try and defend my position. I realised it was a dumb idea.
‘So is that why you’re living here?’ I said instead to Cally.
‘Didn’t I also already say that some other things counted against me?’ Cally replied irately. ‘I’ve never had a job – probably for the same reason.’
‘A seat, you should take a seat my dear!’
The woman was talking to me. She was indicating that I should take the chair just behind me.
The chairs were old car seats, covered and patched up here and there with cloth.
‘Why do you want me?’ I said, remaining standing. ‘Am I a hostage? I’m not worth anywhere near as much as you probably suppose.’
Cally and Kerrsly laughed bitterly. The woman smiled benignly.
‘You’ll be free to leave soon, my dear – but we need to talk.’
Kerrsly headed towards the door.
‘Even you must see we need to make some changes round here.’
‘Yes, I can see that – but what do you think I can do about it?’
‘I don’t know either,’ Kerrsly admitted as she stepped out through the open door. ‘But Cally assures me you’re important to the cause – and I’ve never known her to be wrong about things like that.’
As the door closed behind Kerrsly, I looked back towards Cally.
‘Important? Me? I haven’t got the faintest idea how you think holding me can help you.’
Suddenly, the woman rushed towards me, grabbing me, hugging me tightly. She was crying. Her voiced was a pained wail.
‘Oh Angie, Angie, Angie! I was hoping, hoping there’d still be some memory of me in there, hoping you’d recognise–’
I pulled away from her sharply.
‘Recognise,’ I said, confused. ‘I’ve never met you before!’
Cally stepped towards us both.
‘Angeic,’ she said calmly. ‘She’s your mother; your real mother!’
*
‘My mother?’
I laughed out loud. A nervous, cackling laugh. Were these people crazy?
‘My real mother’s dead!’
The crazy woman standing before me looked crestfallen.
Cally just shook her head.
‘Uh uh, Angeic. You saw the DNA lock screaming out a warning about duplicated DNA.’ She pointed back to the lock as her voice became a sneer. ‘I find it hard to believe myself – how could someone like you be my twin?’
