21st Century Dead

by Christopher Golden

  As if the current had abruptly ceased, the delicate eye wires slowed their movements, stiffening and coiling around one another, re-forming into a tapered tip with a flattened face that moved, tasting the air, a scintillating gyre of an antenna.

  The bundle slowly rotated toward me. Turning Connor’s head along with it.

  I could have sworn there was a hint of a smile on his lips, as he spoke.

  “You came. You came.”

  * * *

  When I emerged from the office, and couldn’t see Mindy, I assumed she’d run. That the fear she’d been so futilely trying to bottle up had finally overwhelmed the container. But a whirring sound from the bedroom stopped me from leaving.

  It was a nice bed, I’ll give Connor that. For years I’d teased him about the crummy futon he insisted he’d never sell. I guess Mindy’s moving in changed all that. It was double-thick, looked like a pillowtop mattress. He’d spent. And he wasn’t a guy who liked to spend.

  Mindy lay on her back atop the tousled sheets. The light from the screen of her laptop, perched on the nearby nightstand, gave away the movement of the gleaming strings that had begun to push through her skin.

  … Small they start small …

  I moved to the bedside, not interfering with the process. I wanted to. I imagined yanking the wires from Mindy, not caring about the damage I’d do inside her. Then I’d pull her onto my shoulder and burst into the hall, down the stairs, and into the night. The music would swell, and coalesce into a crescendo.

  But her eyes denied me that fantasy. They were alert for the first time since I’d seen her …

  … Eleven months six days but hey who’s counting.…

  She slipped her hand inside mine. Her lips moved, for the moment still under her control. “I’m—sor—so sorry—”

  “Why did you do it? Why did you play, after you saw what—”

  “He made me,” she whispered. “He forced me.”

  Her hand tightened. She wasn’t through.

  “He forced me, like before.…”

  I thought there were tears welling up in her eyes. But it was just the first glistening gossamer strands, curling and stretching in the air with what seemed almost to be delight. Soaking in their first sensations as newborns.

  “He was drunk and I was drunk and he forced me and—oh God, I couldn’t kill it but I couldn’t tell you and he—he said he’d change, he promised.…”

  Somewhere, far above or maybe deep within, celestial bodies shifted. Moving away, on some new trajectory, once again letting in the scorching heat and the blazing light of—

  … Alive anything but alive …

  “It died, it died inside me, and we died, and I had killed you and—oh, oh God, Brendan, I can’t feel you anymore—”

  Her pupils dilated, wider than I would have thought possible.

  Her lips parted. And then her perfectly crooked teeth.

  Deep, deep inside her throat, I saw something stirring to life.

  * * *

  Two fifty-eight A.M. Almost out of time, now. So read carefully.

  When it happens, it will happen like this: you will receive a phone call, or an e-mail, or a text. Or a pounding, pounding on your front door.

  It could be a stranger. But most likely, it will be someone you know. Someone maybe you haven’t seen in a while. Someone to whom you might owe a debt—or simply an unreturned phone call.

  It might be someone you have hurt.

  … Ended her slaughtered her …

  You must fight every instinct you were born with. You must shove aside any feeling of guilt. You mustn’t be moved by the clarity evoked by their return.…

  … Ended me slaughtered myself ripped out my own still-beating heart …

  You mustn’t let it in. You cannot reconnect.

  This is how it happens. This is how it spreads.

  … Coming I’m almost there …

  Searched the apartment, as much as I dared. Connor was a religious diary note keeper, but anything made of paper in his office had been rendered …

  … Almost home …

  Stopped typing a good ten minutes or so after I got the livestream feed up on her laptop just lying next to her now …

  … New wires new fingers …

  It says there’s only fifty-two readers but I hope to God there’s more.

  … Let you down abandoned you won’t leave you again ever …

  Pulling words from my thoughts, a far better speller than I evAr was ha ha …

  … I loved you I’m sorry we’ll be togeth …

  ANTIPARALLELOGRAM

  Amber Benson

  TINTINNABULATION. Four silver bells on a loop of raw leather. Four silver nails pounded into the top of the metallic door frame, holding the bells in place. When the bells ring, sonorous and clear, you know that someone has come into the store.

  Time to put down your book.

  The store is cramped. Not overflowing with things, though, just small and cloying because of its shape: triangular, with two metal walls meeting in a sharp point, a large plate-glass front window making up the third wall. A shallow metal-and-glass counter full of tiny brown vials intersects the place where the side walls meet, but there’s enough room behind it for only one employee, and a tiny stool for the employee to sit on—presuming the employee is thin and not too tall.

  No bellies or giants need apply.

  They won’t fit.

  Across the room, diagonally in line with the counter, is a perfectly rectangular doorway. Behind this metal door is another space, the mirror image of the first room—its equal and opposite—but chock-full of brown, square boxes labeled STANDARD TIME and TO SHIP. There is no counter, no employee, and no small metal stool to sit on.

  Together, the store and its storeroom form an antiparallelogram, an incongruous shape that, along with the triangular aspect of the two rooms, makes the rent cheaper here than in any of the other storefronts on the block. No one wants to rent an oddly shaped space for his business: squares and rectangles and even ovals, yes.

  But never triangles or antiparallelograms.

  Nothing except bad will come from these angular shapes. Any tenant of such a space will have no future … accidents will occur and death is a distinct possibility. There have been twenty-one employees since they opened the store—some quit early and were spared, but others were not so lucky. Triangular accident and death became their currency.

  Now the store asks for only six months of time from prospective employees—this seems to be the upward limit before the bad things start to happen—and then the employees are free to go on their merry way, their wallets much, much fatter from the experience.

  Hazard pay they call it.

  Accidental-death pay.

  The plate-glass front window is gritty, covered in three years’ worth of debris, dirt, and grime. It’s been that long since Demeter ran the store. Demeter, the only employee who ever washed the window. Inside and out, she made it shine, and sales were up for the six months she worked there. In the end, she left with the Schnaz, promises of marriage and a house in the suburbs hot on his lips.

  I don’t work in the store.

  But I want to.

  I’ve lived in the neighborhood my whole life. I’ve seen the comings and the goings. I’ve known all twenty-one employees. Some liked me, let me come and play in the store while they sat behind the counter, waiting and reading. Others shooed me away, forbade me from coming in. With the wrinkled purple jumpsuit I was forced to wear by circumstance, they knew I was the lowest of the low: an untouchable in a caste system that I hardly even understood.

  I was found in a garbage bin behind a New Mexican burrito bar called Truth or Hotsauces.

  No mother. No father. No name.

  Just a scowling, yowling baby boy with dirty brown hair and a pinched, pink face nestled in a mound of flattened, yellow-corn tortillas. The MPs took me to a Pop-Up Green Crescent, where the nurse checked me out and implanted a Color ID under th
e skin of my left wrist.

  Pink.

  For Orphan and Ward of the Color Sector.

  When I turned eighteen I was given a Purple Color ID, which signified me as part of the homeless population. Unless I managed to find a way to change my situation significantly before the day I turned thirty, the Purple would be swapped out for Orange. An Orange Color ID meant you were the walking dead. You had one year to enjoy life before you were collected by the MPs and euthanized to avoid overpopulation. Orange jumpsuits were to be pitied and given free alcohol and street drugs. But I’d spent my whole life feeling like the walking dead. When you’re born with an expiration date, it’s hard not to.

  But we weren’t given the designer drugs the triangular store sold. They weren’t for the likes of the Purple, Pink, or Orange.

  Of course, that didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of other-colored customers interested and affluent enough to afford them.

  There were always plenty of other-colored customers who could buy what they wanted: special powers, included. Those customers came in sleek hover cars made of titanium and aluminum alloys, their fiberglass bodies spray-painted bright neon.

  Colors, like shapes, had special meaning. Blue for the military. Red for business. Green for government. Yellow for the richest, regardless of what they did. There were other colors with their own designations—and then there were Purple, Pink, and Orange for people like me.

  The poor.

  Who did not have hover cars.

  I liked to stand on the moving sidewalk across from the store and watch the rich come and go in hourly cycles. If you held the stationary metal handrail, you could walk in place for hours, as long as no MPs saw what you were doing and kicked you off.

  I would count the hover cars as they floated in empty space, their passengers disembarking just long enough to secure their vials from the store and go. There were lots of Yellows. A few Reds and Greens. Very, very rarely was there a Blue.

  Occasionally a Black hover car would appear in front of the store—the Black ones were “for hire,” meaning anyone could rent them if he was willing to pay heavily for the pleasure. These hover cars I always watched intently because they were completely anonymous. They could be anyone.

  Even a Purple like me.

  One who had made enough money to escape the Color Sector.

  This gave me hope.

  And the vials that these anonymous people bought were a hope of another kind.

  They could be my salvation, my ticket out of the Color Sector, if only I could talk my way into a job at the store. If only I could sell the vials for six months and collect the hazard pay. Then, and only then, would I be free, with no Orange jumpsuit in my future. With the money burning a hole in my pocket, I could go to the suburbs and look up Demeter. Maybe even get my own place there and live a fully homogenized, noncolor, shape-centric after-poverty life.

  This was my dream.

  It was a simple dream, but a hard one to attain.

  First, I would have to catch the man who owned the store. He made oddly timed appearances, usually late at night when no one was at the shop. I’d seen him come in a Yellow hover car and I’d seen him come on the moving sidewalk. He always wore the same thing: a pale gold jumpsuit with a black zipper that split the suit in two.

  He wasn’t old—at least he didn’t look old. He had a shock of black hair and pale blue eyes in a ratlike face. I didn’t know if he partook of the vials he sold or even if he was the person who made the elixirs inside them, but I knew for certain that he was the man I would have to impress if I wanted the job.

  Demeter had told me this, had confided the information to me because she liked me. She said I looked like her dead sister—though I was a boy—and that she wanted only good things for me. All this was before she met the Schnaz and went away, but I cherished her words just the same.

  So I started coming out at night, later and later, watching and waiting. Trying to learn the pattern of the man’s comings and goings. Half asleep, I stood on the moving sidewalk, yawning as the neon signs buzzed and flickered around me. But I could discern no pattern. The man was as random as the customers who frequented his store.

  The other thing I would have to do, if I wanted the job, was to get a new jumpsuit. One in Black. Anyone could buy one of these nondescript jumpsuits, but the key word was buy. And I had no money. Only the Purple jumpsuit on my back and the scraps of rice and fish in my pockets—my favorite place to scavenge was from the garbage bin of Saw-She-Me, the floating sushi bar four stores down the opposite side of the moving sidewalk.

  I didn’t need anything else because the nicest part of living in the Color Sector was that it was enclosed and temperate. Here, I could scavenge food, use the public toilets to wash myself and eliminate the waste my body made, and get free medical care at any Pop-Up Green Crescent as long as I showed them my Color ID.

  That was the beauty of living in the Chroma, the roughest neighborhood in the Color Sector, where I’d been born and existed for all my life. People minded their own business. Which left me free to sleep in whatever bolt-hole or empty doorway I could find without being harassed or kicked around. As long as I avoided the attention of the MPs, I was just another street urchin underfoot to the rest of the people I encountered: to be pitied by some and ignored by others.

  Rarely did I find myself in any trouble.

  There were the occasional scuffles here and there, but I was smart and stayed out of the way whenever possible. It was to my advantage that I looked unremarkable. I had dark brown hair, light brown eyes, and a forgettable face. I blended in with the crowd, with the garbage underfoot, with the grit and grime of the Chroma.

  Only Demeter had ever looked at me twice—and only because I reminded her of her dead sister.

  Mostly, I just kept my head down and my nose clean. Neither of which would help me get a Black jumpsuit or make the man—if I could catch him—give me the job I wanted so that I could move into the store and sell the vials that would collect me the hazard pay that would change my life.

  It all seemed so simple.

  It was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do.

  And then there were the vials themselves, the elixirs that gave you special powers. Of course, the rub was that you had to keep buying if you wanted the gifts to last. One vial equaled one dose equaled one month. People quickly became addicted to the stuff. Spent vast fortunes so they could fly or walk on water or suck someone’s blood.

  The bloodsucking was on the weirder end of the spectrum.

  The vials allowed you to become a vampire, a zombie, a werewolf—you name the monster and there was an elixir for it.

  Call it the ultimate in role-playing.

  To be fair, there weren’t as many people interested in that kind of thing, but there were enough. Those people, the weird ones, came at dusk just as the store was about to close. They came in Black hover cars, wore Black jumpsuits, looked dodgy. Some had long, feminine hair. Some had faces pockmarked with acne. Some gave off a scent, a feeling, a vibe that made me uncomfortable as I walked in place on the moving sidewalk, watching them. There was something wrong about them, something bad.

  Demeter said that those were the customers she liked least. The others she could tolerate—they wanted silly things—but the monster-lovers made her skin crawl.

  I didn’t care what the customers wanted. I would give them whatever vials they asked for. I just wanted the money.

  The hazard pay.

  So I spent my nights stalking the man who owned the store and my days standing in front of B-Suits-R-Us, staring at the Black jumpsuits gleaming in its front window.

  The old Korean woman who ran B-Suits-R-Us didn’t have to worry about the shape of her space—it was perfectly square, perfectly safe. There was no hazard pay, just the minimum seven chits an hour that was standard fare for people who wore Red jumpsuits and lived in the Chroma.

  If the old woman noticed my presence, she didn’t make a big deal out of it.
I wasn’t getting in the way of her customers or causing her to lose any sales, so it was no skin off her nose to let me stare at her window display. Besides, it would’ve taken more effort to run me off the moving sidewalk than she was willing to expend on ejecting some street kid.

  There were only Black jumpsuits in the window, but I could see jumpsuits of other colors hanging on racks in the back. Unlike the Black jumpsuits, you had to have your Color ID with you to buy the other ones. Red IDs got Red jumpsuits, Blue IDs got Blue jumpsuits, and Yellow IDs got hybrid colors, like the Gold and Black jumpsuit the man who owned the triangular store usually wore.

  Rich people could get whatever color they wanted, money being no object to them.

  My Color ID was Purple. It was embedded in the skin of my left wrist, where it had been placed when I was an infant, and it would stay there, just like everyone else’s, for as long as I lived in the Color Sector. It did not entitle me to buy anything. Purple, Pink, and Orange jumpsuits were given out for free at local shelters.

  I went to the Order of the Cosmic Seed shelter once a year to get my new Purple jumpsuit, but I didn’t take anything else they offered me. I didn’t like the female monks who ran it, or the smarmy looks they gave you as you stood there, waiting to collect your jumpsuit. Their eyes gobbled you up like you were a piece of raw meat waiting to be spitted. We all knew the monks bought and ate the flesh of the Orange jumpsuits after they were euthanized—an electric poker up the ass kept the meat tender—but that didn’t mean the ladies got a free preview.

  I also didn’t like the fact that the meals the shelter offered were laced with a sterilizing agent. I personally had no interest in adding to the population (who wanted to damn another child to the kind of existence I’d had), but I didn’t want anyone forcing his will on me, either.