Company Town

by Madeline Ashby

  Behind her, the shotgun sounded. She turned. The shooter was running at her. Her icy fingers fumbled on the nail gun. She lifted it. It shook in her grasp. She pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Oh, Christ, the safety, shit—

  “Hwa, get down!”

  Síofra. In her bones. Finally. She fell to the floor. So did the shooter. The sprinklers stopped. The siren died. Her ears rang. Her hands kept shaking. Something peeled away from the shooter’s scalp. A skein of skin, with hair attached. Beneath it was a skullcap. Light danced across the shooter’s skin. It slowed down, ceased, and he went limp.

  “He’s inoperative, now, Hwa. He can’t hurt you. I’m coming. Stay there.”

  She tried to say something. But then there were people in Lynch uniforms, and they had bright yellow towels of absorbent foam, and they were picking her up under her arms and dragging her to the nearest wall and taking the backpack off and unbuckling the toolbelt. They were saying how sorry they were. How glad they were that she was okay.

  Síofra skidded out into the hall. He nearly wiped out on the wet surface. But he just kept running until he got to her end of the hall. The others scattered and lined up against the opposite wall, chins up, shoulders back. Waiting for orders.

  “Hwa?” He waved a hand in front of her face. “Are you in shock?”

  “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.”

  He laughed. He started dabbing her face with a towel. “Look at you. You must be freezing. We didn’t know the sprinklers would go off. We’ll change the crash protocol before the next drill.”

  Hwa tried hard to make her lips shape the word. “Drill?”

  “Yes.”

  She had lost too much blood to feel proper anger. She realized that now, distantly, and without anxiety. “For … the school?”

  “No. For you. To see how you would protect Joel.” His lips thinned. He looked away. “I asked Mr. Lynch not to go through with it. But he wanted to test you, and I … I knew you would pass.” He smiled like his mouth hurt. “That’s why we didn’t use real rounds.”

  She really was pretty far gone, now. She couldn’t even come up with something clever to say. Why was she so hot? Why was she sweating so hard? She’d barely run at all. She lifted her wounded arm. “Blanks do this?”

  Síofra peeled back the tie and looked down. Blood covered his fingers instantly. Apparently she should have taped down the wound after foaming it shut. Hwa felt sticky all down her right side. She’d thought it was the sprinklers. But it was hot. It was blood. The hallway tipped over on its side.

  Her boss was screaming.

  “I NEED A MEDIC!”

  Her vision went pure white. Then deep black. Then they were lifting her on something. A stretcher. Síofra was shaking the skullcap by the collar of his long black coat. Shaking him and slamming him against the lockers and yelling in his face about how you fucking idiot she’s bleeding out just look just look JUST FUCKING LOOK WHAT YOU DID TO HER—

  “H … Hey.” Hwa held out her hand. It fell. She had to concentrate to bring it back up. Imagined all her muscles working like the girders on a causeway. Imagined all the tendons in her hand working her fingers into a fist. Close. Open. Close. Open. Síofra dropped the skullcap and reached out. He held her hand in both of his. They felt almost obscenely warm. She was so terribly cold.

  “What is it?”

  “You can…”

  “Yes?” He bent down closer.

  “You can take this job and shove it.”

  6

  Palinopsia

  The room smelled like mould. Like fungus. Like feet. Hwa suspected that she might actually be dead, and this environment—the damp dimness, the tangy air, the twitching walls alive with blue veins of bacteria—was nothing more than a vivid hallucination of her own corpse’s slow decay.

  “It’s like a cheese cave, they says.”

  Even through the hospital mask, Hwa could detect her old instructor’s disgust. Kripke’s thick rust-coloured eyebrows knit together in a permanent scowl. He was a huge man, too big for the chair by the bed. Hwa was so glad to see him she could feel herself starting to cry. Kripke looked like he already had. His eyes were bleary and red.

  “The docs had to lower your immune resistance when you came in, so your body would take the spackle. But now you have to repopulate your personal flora, or some shit. Looks like a fancy excuse not to clean the rooms, you ask me.” He waved at her chart. Encased in hospital gloves, his fingers looked like sausages. “And why am I listed as the emergency contact? What about your mother?”

  Hwa shrugged.

  “I had to tell her, you know. Me nerves, that woman.”

  “Sorry.” Hwa looked at the pitcher at her bedside. “Give us a bit of that?”

  “Aye.” Kripke poured some into a little tumbler and held it out. Hwa took it with her left hand. It tasted vaguely brackish. They hadn’t had rain in a long while, and the desalinators were working overtime.

  “Brain scan?” Hwa asked.

  He shook his head. “Not yet. You think you…?”

  “Might have.”

  Kripke ran a slow hand over his mouth and beard. He was pissed. She had missed that, his anger. His disappointment and frustration had a certain weight and thickness. When it settled over her, like a blanket, she knew she could be doing better. She knew there was room to improve. It was a comfort.

  “Some stunt you pulled, back there.”

  Hwa snorted. “Yes, b’y.”

  Kripke laid one massive palm over her right hand. Dull pain throbbed up the arm. He must have sensed it, because his grip lightened. He took gentle hold of her fingers, instead. “Remember I said you’d have to learn to kick, because with hands like these you’d never punch?”

  She nodded.

  “Then you gets in the ring with little Ronnie Tolliver and you ups with that knife hand strike, right to his eyes, and I hauls you out because it was an illegal hit. You almost quit right then and there because you thought you should have won the match.”

  “I should have. He was on his knees.”

  Kripke blinked glassy, wet eyes. “How’re you getting on?”

  Hwa reached over with her good hand and patted his. “Farbed up. But on the mend.” She cleared her throat. Her accent always got thicker when she was with Kripke. The gym was the one place she didn’t have to worry about her English or her Korean being wrong, and she could just talk like everyone else. “Quit the gig.”

  Kripke folded his arms on his belly and leaned back in his chair. He needed to lose weight. He was going to be a statistic, soon. She had a sudden desire to be back in the gym with him, lifting or running or even just having fun on the trampoline. She missed the trampoline. But the gym was different without Tae-kyung. She had tried going back, after. But it stung. His ghost was strongest there.

  “You what?”

  “Quit.” She sipped more water. “They jerked me around. So I quit.”

  Kripke’s furry eyebrows came together like two caterpillars checking each other out. “Jerked you around how?”

  Hwa licked her lips. They were suddenly very dry. Christ, what if she’d imagined it? Imagined the weave peeling away from the skullcap’s head and the flashing lights underneath. Imagined the dead look in his eyes, like a doll’s. Imagined the shape in the water.

  “Hey!” Kripke plucked the cup of water from her hands. “You’re gonna get it all over yourself, shaking like that. You cold?”

  “Aye,” she heard herself say.

  He was pulling the blanket up higher on her body and searching the room for something. “Goddamn hospitals. Always too hot or too cold. So. Youse quit?”

  Hwa nodded emphatically. “Hell yeah, I’s quit. I’s done.”

  Kripke jerked a thumb behind him. “You tell that to your detail?”

  Shit. Of course she would have to tell Joel. How was she going to explain that? “Joel? Is he out there?”

  Kripke shook his head. “He left before you woke. Big tall ginger fellow came for
him.”

  “Me boss. Ex-boss.”

  “Some gear, that one. Cockier than two roosters in a henhouse.”

  Hwa laughed. It hurt. “That’s him, sure.”

  “Well, he raked me over the coals, asking me about you. I haven’t seen a man so down in the mouth since Bellucci took the fall in the quarter-final five years ago.” Kripke peered at her from under the bill of his hat. “You hearin’ me, ducky?”

  Hwa looked away. She didn’t even have a chance to answer. A chime sounded in her room. “Jung-hwa Go? It’s time for your eye test.”

  * * *

  “Glaucoma’s pretty common in people with Sturge-Weber,” the doctor said. “And you’re overdue for your eye exam.”

  Hwa was the first patient with Sturge-Weber that he’d ever met. He said he owed it to himself to learn as much about rare diseases as he could, when they presented themselves. Rotational residents got a special hazard bonus if they agreed to do work offshore. They would be among the last to leave, in an evacuation scenario.

  “Like the spackle in your arm, for instance,” Dr. Hazard Pay was saying. “It’s really for burn victims. We can administer it in triage situations before an evacuation. It comes out of a big extruder gun, sort of like a pastry bag.”

  “Nice.” She tried not to imagine a huge sack bloated with pink goo attached to her arm. It didn’t work.

  “Glaucoma isn’t so bad, in terms of symptoms,” Dr. Hazard Pay said. “You’ve been really lucky, so far, especially given how far your angioma extends. Until now, you’ve been seizure-free for three years, and you made it through most of school before that. And you’re still physically active, with no weakness on your right side. That’s probably what helped prevent all the other symptoms, all that exercise. And your diet. It says here you eat a lot of good fats, and stay away from sugar. And the anticonvulsants, obviously.”

  Hwa nodded. “The angioma could be atrophying this side of my brain, though, right?”

  “It’s possible. The stain is bundling up the nerves and blood vessels that sit right on top of your cerebral cortex. So if you had a silent seizure, that might be a sign that the bundle is getting tighter.” He squeezed a fist so she could see. “Or headaches. Have you had any bad headaches, lately?”

  “Just my boss,” Hwa said.

  Dr. Hazard Pay laughed. He waved open the door to the optometry area. Projections of eyes woke up and winked at them as they passed. Some were blue. Some were green. Some were bloodshot. Some had cataracts. It was as though every surveillance device in the entire area had developed some special little avatar to wink and laugh at the humans in the vicinity.

  “So you’ve had a robotic examination before, right?”

  “What?”

  He waved open another door to a darkened room. Inside was a tall white machine with six limbs and many eyes. As the room lit up, so did the machine. It fluttered awake, lights blinking on and limbs articulating delicately into a gesture that was most likely meant to indicate welcome and not I am about to eat your eyes.

  “This is Dr. Mantis,” Dr. Hazard Pay said. “He just got a new upgrade, so he’s good to go. Just let him dilate your pupils first, and then he can check the pressure on your optic nerve.”

  “Hello,” Dr. Mantis said. It held out a claw. It had a very gentle British accent. Hwa had no idea why all the robots had to be Brits. Probably the same reason Brits were always cast as Nazis.

  Hwa turned to Hazard Pay. “I can’t have a real doctor?”

  “I am a real doctor,” Dr. Mantis said.

  “Mantis is fine! Better than fine! He’s great! Mantis, send me that report when you finish up, okay?”

  “Yes, Dr. Rockwell.”

  Rockwell. That was his name. The door shut behind him.

  “I will take the best of care with your eyes,” Dr. Mantis said. It pivoted on a giant ball in its lower thorax and hove into her vision. It was still holding out a claw. Hwa grabbed it and gave it a shake. It had a very gentle grip. It used another, lower arm to pull a chair over. “Please sit down.”

  Hwa sat. The lights dimmed. One of Dr. Mantis’s claws came up to clutch her chin. Another held her forehead in place. “Now, I’m going to dilate your eye. Please keep it open.”

  “Aye.”

  Something squirted into her eye.

  “Now I’m going to look at how much pressure there is on the optic nerve, and whether it’s changed colour. If there’s something abnormal, I’ll map your visual field with this light.”

  Something on its body blinked.

  “Now I’m going to come very close to you, and look deep in your eye.”

  The grips on her face tightened. Dr. Mantis rolled closer to her. One of its eyes came level with hers. It was a very large camera. As she looked into it, she thought she saw mirrors shifting position.

  “What kind of changes have you noticed in your vision?” Dr. Mantis asked.

  “I…” She swallowed. Her face felt numb. “I had a sense of derealization and depersonalization.”

  “Did you disassociate?”

  “Only for a minute. And then I thought I saw a seizure aura.”

  “Did the aura take over your vision?”

  She almost shook her head, but the claws held her fast. “No. It was localized.”

  “How big was the aura?”

  “Big. Like, the size of a person.”

  “Was it black?”

  “No. It was the other kind, I think. It looked like…” She licked her lips. Just remembering it raised the hairs on her arms. “It looked like drops of water on glass. Does that make sense?”

  “Not really, but our visual fields are very different. I can see in infrared, and you can’t.” The mirrors shifted again in Dr. Mantis’s eye. “Did you have a seizure, after seeing this aura?”

  “No. Dr. Rockwell says it was probably a silent seizure—all aura, no twitching. So maybe I got off light this time.”

  “Have you experienced any blind spots?”

  “Blind spots?”

  “Holes, in your vision. Things you know must be there, but you can’t quite see.”

  That was was one way of describing it. “Maybe?”

  “Have you engaged in any accessory reality activities, lately?”

  Hwa tried not to frown. “Sorry?”

  “Helmets, goggles, layers, things like that. Have you put on a new pair of specs recently?”

  “Uh … yeah. Actually. I have. And I was wearing them today. I mean yesterday. The last time I was awake.”

  The light switched off. A purple blur replaced its glow in Hwa’s vision. The claws left her face. She felt a little dizzy without them to hold her in place. Dr. Mantis drew up to its full height.

  “It might be a ghost,” Dr. Mantis said.

  One if its lights turned on, and a projection appeared on the opposite wall. It was an old-fashioned pencil sketch of a human eye, with a lightbulb and arrows and a pair of very old, chunky specs. As the robot spoke, the images animated across the wall.

  “It’s called palinopsia. It’s like seeing something on a delay. You see it there, long after it’s gone. It can be a side effect of seizures. Accessory visual stimuli can buffer in your perception, especially if you’re not used to it. That compounds the problem, especially for patients like you. It’s something to think about, if you want to keep wearing your device. You might be processing visual field information long after your eyes actually perceive it.”

  “So it really was a ghost,” Hwa said.

  “From a certain point of view.” Dr. Mantis’s claws clicked together. “Get it? That’s an optometry joke.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” Hwa chuckled. She gave the robot a thumbs-up. “Good delivery. Very deadpan.”

  All three sets of claws clasped each other. “Really? I’ve been prototyping my bedside manner.”

  Hwa suddenly felt very bad for not having called the thing a real doctor. It was just trying to run its program, like everyone else in this town. They were all
perched on top of machines, after all. Even the towers were built mostly by drones. She should have shown it more respect right from the start.

  “Yeah, you’re doing a great job.” She mustered a smile. “Thanks. How’s my eye?”

  “It is perfectly normal,” Dr. Mantis said. “There is nothing wrong with your vision.”

  * * *

  <> her mother said.

  “I got shot,” Hwa replied.

  Hwa watched Sunny’s gaze light on the valve on her right arm. <>

  “Aye.”

  Acknowledging her ugliness was always the right password for entry into her mother’s home. It was the coin of the realm. Sunny backed away from the door and waved her into the side room. It reeked of something sweet. At first Hwa thought Sunny was trying out a new perfume, but the smell came from the floor. There was a huge pink stain in the carpet near the fridge.

  “What happened?”

  <> Sunny sat down at the low table in front of the display. She’d gotten a bigger one, since Hwa was last there. It hung across most of the wall.

  “You moved the trophies,” Hwa said, and realized that was why she’d come back. Her new place wouldn’t be complete without them. Sunny acted as though she hadn’t heard. She kept her gaze pinned to the display. “The trophies,” Hwa said, a little louder this time. “Where did they go?”

  <>

  Hwa looked at the door to Tae-kyung’s old room. Their old room. She could go in. Right now. She could do it.

  She couldn’t do it.

  She moved to the refrigerator. Sunny hissed as Hwa crossed her line of sight. Hwa ducked down and squatted in front of the fridge. Not much: a jug of the iced tea Sunny swore was good for the skin, with odd bits of dried roots floating in it; a six-pack of green shakes in subscription bottles; three bottles of pink champagne; and way at the back, a jar of kimchi.

  Aside from their language, it was the one piece of their heritage that Sunny had hung on to. She had grown up eating it. She credited it with her good figure and excellent constitution. It was all she ate, after every surgery and each childbirth.