NK3

by Michael Tolkin

  He found his way back to the freeway. He didn’t know how long he would be riding before the road brought him to the place that would tell him what to do next.

  Seth, Marci, Eckmann, Franz

  The car entered the airport on the south side of the terminals, invisible to anyone—like Pippi—who might be watching the airport from the Fence. Eckmann wanted to tell Marci how sick he was of taking precautions for everything, of thinking strategically for however long they’d been there.

  “Marci, was it hard?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Marci?”

  “Marci. That’s my name. I haven’t heard it in a long time.”

  “So it was hard.”

  The car stopped at the hangar. She didn’t want to say more; she didn’t feel she owed him a report. She hadn’t had a real conversation in a long time and didn’t want to talk now.

  “Push the trunk-release button and let’s get him out.”

  When Marci opened the trunk and saw Seth, she thought he was dead, that she’d tied the gag wrong and he’d suffocated. She put a hand on his neck to feel for his pulse. His eyes opened, and he looked at her without anger or fear. She untied his gag. He said, “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For getting me out of here.”

  “But I put you in there.”

  “But then you let me out.”

  She held his hands as he swung his feet to the ground. “I’m Marci. Here.” She handed him a bottle of water.

  Eckmann took the water from him before Seth could drink. “Doctor, we’re desperate. A mistake was made and someone was hurt. We need your help in surgery. If you won’t help us, we have no choice. We’ll kill you. You understand?”

  “I think so,” said Seth. “But if you want a doctor, why didn’t you take Dr. Piperno? He’s much better than I am.”

  “You’re not Dr. Piperno?”

  “No. I’m Dr. Seth Kaplan.”

  “Are you a surgeon?”

  “A long time ago I was a children-with-cancer doctor, but there aren’t any children with cancer in the Fence. And actually I don’t know what cancer is, except it’s not good.”

  “You didn’t get surgery restored in rehab?”

  “No.”

  “Did Piperno teach you surgery?”

  “He was trying to.”

  Marci walked up to Eckmann and slapped him in the face. “You know what I gave up for you, pretending to be a Shamblerina, not being able to talk to anyone and have a normal conversation?”

  “Not now, Marci.”

  “You don’t know. I did my job, the one you asked me to do, and you had your job to do, and you messed it up completely, twice. First you shoot the pilot and then you get a doctor who didn’t go through rehab.”

  “But what about the blood on his clothes?”

  “Why should that be anything but a really bad sign?”

  Eckmann gave the water back to Seth, to show Marci that he was merciful. “I’m sorry, Marci. You’re right. You sacrificed for us. I asked you to do something difficult and you did it well. I deserve your anger. And now, we have a problem and your anger doesn’t help us.”

  Eckmann led them into the hangar, thinking evil of Marci for making him feel bad for his mistakes, when no one else was stepping in to protect his crew from the life they’d have to live if they had no hope of escape.

  Eckmann took Seth’s left hand in his right and ahead of Marci and the rest led Seth across the floor of the big room to the other side of the jet and a red paramedic truck from the airport fire department.

  Eckmann let go of Seth and opened the back door of the ambulance. “In here,” he said. Seth followed him. His Silent Voice told him: “Do what they say.”

  The pilot was on the gurney, his shoulder wrapped in bandages and gauze over a spreading red stain. A woman held his head up so he could drink from a bottle of Fiji Water. The woman holding his head said, “He told me his name. It’s Franz. He flew for Lufthansa.”

  Franz raised a weak hand and pointed to Seth. “You’re a doctor?”

  “They call me Dr. Seth Kaplan, yes.”

  “He’s verified,” said Eckmann. “Just like you.”

  “Am I going to die?” asked Franz.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did they tell you who shot me?”

  “I didn’t ask,” said Seth. “I’m sorry, though. It looks like it hurts.”

  Franz pointed to Eckmann. “These people did this to me. They attacked us and killed the others. I got shot. They switched my clothing with a dead man’s and shot his head with a shotgun. No face. So Center Camp thinks I’m dead. Did they tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “Did you get branded when you were verified?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re really a verified doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t remember anything about flying. Do you remember anything about doctoring?”

  “Not really.”

  Franz grabbed Eckmann’s hand, sobbing. “What are you doing?”

  “We’re going to get you better and you’re going to get us out of here. Because Dr. Kaplan plays by the new rules, and the new rules are this: whether it’s in Center Camp or Camp LAX, if the patient dies, the doctor dies.”

  The pilot took Seth’s hand. “Get this bullet out of my shoulder. I don’t want to die and I don’t want you to die.”

  Seth’s Silent Voice said: “Tell them to leave.”

  Seth told the Silent Voice: “No. I need help.”

  The woman said her name. “I’ll help you. I’m Consuelo. I think I was a nurse. They found me in a hospital. I feel like I know what the things in this truck are for.”

  Seth turned to Marci: “I want you here, too.”

  “I’m not a nurse. I was a flight attendant.”

  “I want you here.” He turned to Eckmann. “You can go.”

  “I need to watch,” said Eckmann.

  “Then stand back,” said Seth.

  Consuelo gave Seth a long squirt of hand sanitizer. “There are first aid manuals in the trucks. I read them. They have pictures of what to do for some things. Here, this is what you need to sew the bullet holes shut.”

  There was a tray of surgical knives like the ones Seth had seen at the hospital. Consuelo held up a short-bladed knife. “I think this is the right kind.”

  “You don’t know?” said Franz.

  Eckmann grabbed the scalpel from Consuelo and opened Seth’s hand. “Take the knife.”

  Seth tucked the end of the handle under his palm and—­watching his hand move without conscious intention—he curled his three outer fingers to hold the knife in place, pressing his thumb on the left side of the knife and his forefinger along the top of the blade.

  “Close your eyes, Dr. Kaplan,” said Marci. “Just close them and feel it, Dr. Kaplan.” Piperno had never said something so simple. Seth closed his eyes and rolled the handle of the knife against his thumb. His Silent Voice said, “I watched Piperno. He was a good man trying to help you but you didn’t try hard enough to learn. You were scared of hurting the patient. I saw what he did. I watched the videos. You were looking at everything except the operations. Let me do this. I can do this. Just let me do what I know I can do.”

  Seth put the blade down on the tray with the other surgical tools and watched his fingers dance through them, lifting them gently, testing their weight, studying the different shape blades, opening and closing the forceps and spreaders.

  He liked the way they felt. Each brought up a different reason for appreciation: the craftsmanship of each blade impressed him, the way the blades made him think about the people who had forged them and how they were now dead or drifting. Then he stopped thinking about anyone else, and the world was reduced t
o the tools on the tray. He closed his eyes.

  Consuelo pricked him with a needle. “Wake up, Doctor.”

  “It’s easier this way,” he said.

  Eckmann whispered into Kaplan’s ear, “Take the bullet out of the pilot, Doctor. Do it now.”

  Seth grabbed another tool, a long probe.

  His Silent Voice said, “Go through his back.”

  “Turn him over,” said Seth.

  Consuelo said, “That’s going to hurt him.”

  “Turn him over.”

  Seth used the scalpel to open the wound so he could see into the torn muscle. Then he pushed the small tip of the steel probe into the pilot’s shoulder. Seth heard the screams but Franz’s agony did not register to Seth as distress for which Seth might be responsible or suffering that Seth might have an obligation to relieve. The muscle memory that guided Seth as he searched for the bullet had nothing of the original mix of motives that brought Seth to study medicine in the years before the disaster, nothing of the call to heal or the hunger for prestige. Seth didn’t understand the connection between his hand, the probe, and the pain. Did he want to save the pilot’s life? Only his hands, searching for a bit of flattened alloy, could answer that question, but they were busy. The probe tapped the metal and with small forceps he pulled it out.

  Seth showed the bullet to Franz. “Why should I be grateful for this?” asked the pilot.

  “Because he saved your life,” said Marci. Turning to Eckmann she added, “He did what he was supposed to do. Tell him that.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. You’ve done us all a great service.”

  Seth dropped the bullet onto the metal tray with a plink and unwrapped the needle and thread. His hands relaxed as Consuelo held the wound together. He pushed the fine needle through one side and then the next and pulled the two parts closer. He made a dozen loops like this in Franz’s arm, on both the entry and exit wounds, and tied the knots. Loose ends dangled. Consuelo cut them.

  There was nothing more his hands could do.

  Marci saw that Seth was tired. “Is there anything else you need to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Eckmann put his arms around Seth. “You want a drink? I want a drink.”

  Franz tried to sit up but the pain pushed him back.

  Consuelo said, “I’ll stay with him.”

  Eckmann took Seth to a bench outside the hangar where they could see the lights of downtown, the smaller area of light around the Playa, and the thin line of lights along the top of the Fence.

  “You can’t see Center Camp from here, but you can feel it.”

  “Piperno is in Center Camp. That’s where he said he was going.”

  Marci passed around small bottles of vodka from a rolling drink cart from American Airlines. Seth didn’t know what to do with it and Eckmann unscrewed the cap.

  “Drink?” asked Seth.

  “Drink,” said Eckmann.

  “Drink,” said Marci. “This is my first drink since I gave up my name. I didn’t want to drink while I was a Driftette. I was afraid of giving myself away.”

  The vodka hit Eckmann quickly and he wanted to explain himself to Seth. “My memory is almost continuous, Doc. They got to me so early . . . They knew. They needed me so the airport would keep running. We were smart people down here, engineers, bright guys, and we set up our own rehab center in Terminal Five. We got the ECT machines, we got the insulin, and we got what was needed to keep NK3 from tearing deeper ditches in consciousness. I think it worked better than what they had at UCLA or the other centers. And did you figure out the truth about what happened to the machines at UCLA?”

  “What happened at UCLA?”

  “You saw the broken rehab machines in the gym, didn’t you?”

  “They were broken?”

  “Yes. Guess who did it?”

  “Guess?”

  “It was Chief who broke them. It was Chief and Toby Tyler. Chief and Tyler locked the gym, only let in their friends, people who could do things, or were fuckable, and abandoned the rich, whose money was now useless, and the politicians, whose constituencies were dead in body or spirit. The old aristocracy died or turned into Drifters, and the new aristocracy tore up the machinery to make sure no one else could get through. I don’t blame them. It was cowboy justice. We knew what they were doing and stayed away. We had our own rehab system here, and we did the same, in our own way. We wanted a society of the useful. If you were an executive for the airline and had a pass for unlimited flying, but you never knew how to fix a jet, what good were you? The Drifters, this used to be their city, and we paid the rent on it. I don’t miss them. Twenty-three planes managed to get away with the last pilots who remembered how to fly and the only rehab-trained mechanics, leaving the rest of us you see here to patch our collective training together. All we lacked was a trained pilot. In comes Franz. I’m sorry he got shot. How much time do we have until he’s strong enough?”

  “Strong enough?”

  “To fly, to fly!”

  “Fly where?” Seth asked.

  “Away from here!” Eckmann opened another two bottles. This time he didn’t have to force Seth to drink.

  Seth asked for another bottle as soon as he finished the first.

  “Feels good,” said Marci.

  “Yes,” said Seth.

  Eckmann sighed. “Do you understand how fucked up everything is in the world?”

  “It’s the only world I’ve ever known,” said Marci.

  “No,” said Eckmann. “There was another world and it’s still inside us if he can only find it. What do you think, Doc?”

  “At the hospital, I saw movies about the before world. People got undressed as soon as they met.”

  Chisel Girl, Frank Sinatra, Justin

  She carried a woodworker’s twelve-inch beveled-edge chisel in a leather sheath on her belt. Even if the two men chasing her knew what she could do with it, they wouldn’t have stopped, because they were Drifters and didn’t have minds supple enough to understand that if they grabbed her, she would kill them.

  They started chasing her when she came out of the empty Costco. They thought she had food. If she got away from these two, she wouldn’t bother with another Costco. Even with the green triangle, all of them were empty now.

  She was fast, but not fast enough to get away from them if this kept up for the rest of the day, so she turned off the street into a five-story parking garage. She ran up the ramp, past cars on flat tires, cars never touched by rain, their color hidden under dust and ash.

  She slowed down to let the men see her. She didn’t want them to quit, because if they turned away and then saw her again the chase would start over, so she kept up her pace until she came to the open roof of the garage, where the cars had been washed by recent rains and where the chrome reflected the sun.

  Stopping them with the chisel was the easy part. The first one to reach her blocked the view of the second, already dropping his pants, and the chisel was in his eye the moment he pushed her shoulders into the wall. As she pulled the chisel out of his face the other man saw the blood. The second man, with his pants around his knees, tried to run away, but he tripped and fell. She pushed the chisel into his neck. Her hands were bloody and using the blind man’s shirt, she wiped away what she could.

  After they died she searched them for food, but they had nothing but a few hard candies. She was hungry and the whispers came to her, like all the people in the world saying the same thing, but in words she didn’t understand. The crows would find the bodies soon enough, and go for the bloody eyes first, but she was tired and no one could see her. So she slept. The crows almost never bothered the living. It could have been ten minutes later or an hour when she heard the van coming up the street. She thought it was in her dream and she stood up too quickly, without thinking.

  Frank Sinatra was
in the front passenger seat of the van. The driver, whose name was Pickle, saw her. He slowed down, pointing her out to Frank, and then stopped. “There’s one there, a woman, see her, up top?” Frank stepped out of the van to get a better look. He hoped she would just go away and disappear so they could move on to the Audi lot, but she stood up taller.

  “Forget about her,” said Frank.

  “I know you’re in a hurry but rules is rules,” said Pickle. “And this rule is yours.” They were only ten miles from downtown, in Alhambra, just past the eastern ash moat, the remains of an early Burn, and it was Frank’s order that all Drifters found this close to downtown had to be taken in and processed by Verification. “And there’s something different in how she stays there, watching us,” said Pickle. “I’ve never seen that before, Frank.”

  “How so?”

  “She likes being looked at.”

  So Chief’s assignment to find the fearsome lone Drifter on a mountain bike last seen near Banning, who was probably lost on his way to death by thirst or starvation, would have to wait.

  Pickle went around to the back of the van and opened the doors.

  The woman had seen this before, the van, the rear door, the folding table, the two-burner propane stove, and the cooler with food. The stove was lit; ramen from a package was heated in a pot of water. Everyone who ate the food ended up on the vans or buses—and she was hungry. She’d seen no food for a few days. Knowing that it was a trick, she could trick them back. She could take the food and then run. She could hide the chisel between her waistband and shirt, not let anyone see it. They might have a gun, though. Or more than one. She could stab two men quickly and run. Only if more Drifters showed up. There were Drifters around, hiding. She knew that without seeing them. They were watching the van, and watching her.

  “Drifter baiting takes practice,” said Pickle. “Everyone has to be quiet, but available. The food is not the best that Center Camp can offer. We give them Slim Jim sausages, vacuum-sealed logs of string cheese, sodas, jars of taco sauce, and ramen.”

  Frank was surprised the cooler held oranges. “Those are for us, too good for them,” said Pickle.