The Zero Patient Trilogy (Book Two): (A Dystopian Science Fiction Series)

by Harmon Cooper

  Halo turns and her forms elongates. She’s a head taller now, her hair changing color as she zephyrs to the house where I almost…

  ‘She forgave you,’ I say. ‘Follow her guidance.’

  One glimpse is enough for this lifetime. I stand… corrected, retrained, refocused.

  (You won’t make it to the North.)

  ‘I will make it to the North and when I do,’ I tell the voice in my head, ‘when I do… ’

  Moto mine, the key in the starter, I veer towards the east with tears in my eyes in remembrance of my actions, those I’ve hurt, those I’ve taken to places unseen, early graves, holes in holes, flesh on breath and hands on breasts.

  ‘Blasph,’ I whisper, not able to verbalize my life. ‘Blasph redeemed.’

  STERLING

  .1.

  ‘What is this place?’ Sterling whispers. The section of wall behind them springs back up out of the ground, seals them in and cuts off all the light from the outside. He experiences a brief moment of panic until the overhead lights come on and reveal a large open chamber of unnaturally smooth gray stone. There are numerous doorways leading out from the chamber, all of them unmarked. The Forehead Driller picks up the delixer barrel, unhesitatingly enters the third doorway from the left and purposefully strides away.

  In a few moments, we will follow him in, but not too close. He will destroy the Northern Servers for us.

  ‘You keep saying that – ‘destroy the servers’. What are they and what do they do? And why destroy them anyway? What will that do?’

  Simply put, the servers channel the data – the information – that the Depots and the Off Limits must have to operate. Halting that flow of data will severely disrupt the Off Limits, the Depots, and interrupt the flow of goods and services. Chaos and confusion will ensue. Have you ever seen ants scrambling from their hill after it has been kicked over?

  He smiles at the thought. ‘I have.’

  This will have much the same effect.

  Another thought wipes the smile from his face. ‘But, what… what about my family?’

  They will be fine.

  ‘How can you say that? How can they be fine if you – yes, you – throw the Canyon into chaos?

  We will both find out shortly. It will be several days before the disruption fully takes hold, and most people are too distracted by the upcoming Stayed Day War and the various festivities leading up to it. Depot managers will think it is just a minor outage that will quickly be resolved. Those at the Off Limits will know otherwise, but will conceal the scope and nature of the problem for as long as possible to maintain the illusion of normalcy and avoid panicking the public. If you will – to maintain control, the controlled must believe that the controllers are fully in control. When that belief fails, panic, chaos, and civil disorder erupt.

  And this is what we want.

  ‘What we want? This is what you want. I want my life back the way it was. I don’t want any of this chaos and madness – this is all you!’

  You and I are both in too deep to get out now.

  ‘You and I? What about your friend in there?’

  He will remain here.

  ‘Just like that? He’s going to remain here as the place burns?’

  Yes.

  ‘Why?’

  It’s better this way.

  ***

  The way Halo so easily expends the lives of others does not sit well with him.

  Her callous nonchalance regarding death – first Bolt and now this man – makes him wonder if she will use him up just as casually. He strongly suspects that she will.

  Come. Follow.

  Halo leads him down the corridor, and he’s again struck by how frail and insubstantial she seems. He could easily break her neck or shiv her up under the ribs, cut his losses before their thorny situation worsens. He strives mightily to suppress the thought, and is not entirely successful. He tries to suck down the thought with a gulp, but the desire wells up like blood in a shiv wound.

  You wish to do me violence.

  ‘Are you surprised? But I’m trying to control it. It’s not easy, you know.’

  I know.

  He grunts. ‘We men, we get these urges and it takes all of our power to control them. Shit, I would wager that a typical man spends a great deal of his day fighting urges.’

  They do.

  ‘And it isn’t easy, we… the Book says that we are animals.’

  It does, and I tend to agree with the Book on this subject. From what I’ve seen, everyone struggles in the Canyon. It is the way of the Stayed.

  ‘Then why are we doing this?’ he asks.

  Halo stops and turns to Sterling.

  We are doing this for the sake of everyone you know, for the North and the South. The veil must be lifted if we ever hope to free ourselves from…

  ‘From what?’

  All will be revealed soon.

  ‘I hate it when you say that.’

  ***

  The hallway opens into a spherical antechamber, with smooth polished walls of the same uniformly, homogenously gray stone that seems to make up everything in this place. The color, texture, and finely finished surface reminds Sterling of the Rectangular Rocks, and he wonders how, or if, the two are connected. He fails to notice when Halo stops short of the threshold, and walks into her. She stumbles forward and he catches her in his arms, holding her just a heartbeat longer than is strictly necessary.

  Don’t enter. Look.

  She indicates a half-globe of some highly polished black material embedded in the ceiling of the antechamber. A short tube protrudes from it, and as he watches, the globe turns slightly to point the tube directly at them.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asks, staring at the globular device.

  A remote viewing and recording device with a bullet-flinger – that’s the tube. The room recognizes the Forehead Driller; it knows he’s supposed to be here so he’s allowed to enter. You and I are not supposed to be here. If we enter, the bullet flinger will fling bullets at us until we’re dead.

  ‘Someone can see us now?’

  No. No one is watching now, but they will see us later when they review the record to see what happened.

  A section of wall on the far side of the antechamber silently slides open. The man walks out naked, eyes still closed, still under Halo’s influence. He leaves a trail of wet footprints as he approaches them. Behind him, the room is filled with dozens of rectangular boxes; sleek, black, about waist high and as wide as a man’s shoulders. They are lined up in regular rows like grave markers, and each is featureless save for a small, single blue light that brightens and dims repeatedly. The machines make a low mechanical whir like flies swarming on carrion; the sharp tang of delixer wafts around the Forehead Driller. He’s wadded his clothing up around the machine closest to the door and drenched it in the delixer. His unraveled bandage, also soaked in delixer, runs from his pile of clothing to the center of the antechamber. His exposed forehead wound is crusty and rimmed with angry red flesh.

  Give him the fire starters. He has disabled the automatic fire-putting-out equipment and opened all the top ventilators and the main entryway we came in through to fan the fire once he starts it. We must leave now.

  ‘Just like that, huh?’

  Yes, just like that. They would come for him almost immediately, and what they would do to him would be long, drawn out, and unspeakably vile. If you must know, it is far, far more merciful for him to perish here, quickly.

  ‘Why did we even have come in then? What purpose did that serve?’

  I want them to know who did this.

  ‘WHAT!?’ He shrieks like a maiden with a scorpion in her wrappings. ‘Are you FUCKING INSANE!?’ He grabs her by the shoulder, digs his fingers in and spins her around to face him. Her anti-touching electricity jolts up his arm, but it is nothing compared to the fear and fury that rages through him.

  ‘They will KILL YOU, they will KILL ME, and then they’ll go after my mother and my sister!’<
br />
  Yes, they will.

  ‘Well, that’s lizard shit! I’m done, I am fucking done with you and your… wait – you’ve got a plan, some way to get us out of this, right?’

  No, no plan.

  ‘That’s just PERFECT, then! PERFECT!’ Sterling’s voice rebounds from the smoothly polished walls. The Forehead Driller remains impassive, awaiting his next instructions. Halo tilts her face up, and Sterling can feel her looking at him.

  Kaleidoscopic images of all the things he’s endured over the last few days come to him in a sudden flash of sight, sound and sensation. He sees the flesh giver in the South, sees himself kidnapping Halo, waking up in the cave, the beating he got from the OL Officers and Zander’s shivmen, fighting and killing Clay, passing through the Great Demarcator, Bolt’s tragic death and burial, the fight with the metal man – an overwhelming sense of helplessness engulfs him. He’s nothing more than a game piece in all this; Halo’s tool that speaks, and now he’s in deeper than he ever could have imagined.

  We need to be seen to be heard.

  He grips her upper arms in both hands and bears down. ‘What does that even mean? I’m tired of this; tired of you… ’

  She doesn’t flinch, doesn’t react; instead she reaches up and lightly touches his face.

  Peace, Sterling, peace. It will be all right. Trust me. Have faith in me.

  He sighs, loosens his grip. ‘I’m trying to, Halo, I’m trying to.’

  .2.

  The entrance door to the outside stands open before them. A muffled whumpf comes from the hallway they’ve just exited, and air from outside moves past them into the interior, picking up speed and intensity in almost no time. A faint orange glow quickly grows behind them and reveals the Forehead Driller’s motionless silhouette at the threshold of the antechamber.

  Let me render him one last mercy.

  The Forehead Driller collapses as if his bones had turned to water.

  Sterling climbs onto the motocart, starts it up, moves to the entrance door and stops.

  ‘It doesn’t look good out there.’

  I didn’t expect this.

  ‘We’d better hurry.’

  He pulls his face cover up and drops his Leaks over his eyes. The roar of the wind beats against his senses, reminds him of how fragile his life really is. ‘Hold on tight!’ he shouts to Halo. With that he tears south, back towards the outer rim of the Northern Settlement.

  There are dust storms in the Canyon, and then there are Blackouts, which can block out the sunlight for days. What Sterling sees curling in from the east has all the makings of a Blackout. A wall of dust extends from the floor of the Canyon to almost twice the height of the tallest escarpment. It is fluffy and gray at the top and it blends in perfectly with the hazy sky. The Blackout thickens and darkens as it approaches the ground, and is shot through with lightning from the static discharges.

  Sterling increases his speed, faster than he’s comfortable going out here in the middle of nowhere, but their only hope is to run before the storm overtakes them. The tires hum against the hardpack soil, and the shock absorbers – long bereft of any shock absorbing properties they once possessed – transmit every bump and jolt directly to his tailbone – and Halo’s too, probably. He hangs on, grits his teeth, and increases their speed yet again.

  Even inside shelter, a Blackout is no joke; out here in the Big Lonely, it will flay flesh from bone, blast the moto down to bare metal and strip the tires down to the wheels. No, the only thing to do is RUN!

  Head the way we came, back to the man’s home.

  ‘His home? You sure?’

  The wind has already picked up speed around them, whipping bits of dirt and gravel past them and into them. He can feel the static electricity prickle the hair on his arms and the back of his neck. He casts an anxious glance over his shoulder – the Blackout is gaining on them. The lightning illuminates the towering wall of death from within, and it is oddly beautiful. ‘You would have liked this, Lily,’ he says under his breath.

  Hurry.

  ‘You think I need you to tell me that?’ he snaps. Sterling gives the motocart all it’s got, which isn’t much. As the wind beats past him, he recalls the last Blackout a year or so ago. He was playing a game of rocks when the storm thundered through, and ended up crashing in a flesh dealer’s spare room for two days until the blackout passed. Dozens died during that storm, and it was said to be a relatively small one. He’d caught a glimpse of it, just as he’s caught a glimpse of this one, but he has no way to judge the size or intensity of this particular wall of windborne misery. Sometimes the aftereffects of a Blackout linger for days; other times the wind blows it out as soon as the Blackout passes.

  All he can do is run, run, run. It becomes his sole purpose in life, his ultimate focus – don’t look back, only look forward. Don’t worry about the past, only worry about the future. Time passes without meaning or measure; all he can do is go, go, go! As wind screams in his ears like a banshee in heat, as his heart hammers wildly inside his chest, as Halo speaks to him inside his head, Sterling finally reaches a modicum of inner tranquility in the death race for his life. This is what his life has become.

  With this acceptance comes liberation from worry and fear; he drives the motocart as if the Goddess orchestrates his destiny with a broken baton. Gravel spins from beneath the tires; the approaching Blackout rumbles the ground. He is focused on the way ahead; he has become one with the machine as the Blackout washes over them and steals the light from him. He slows to a crawl; it’s impossible to continue at his blazing pace.

  Close your eyes.

  He laughs at this suggestion – that’s about the only thing he could do to make things worse at this point.

  Trust me.

  Sure, why not? He closes his eyes, and yet they seem to still be open. Moreover, his vision has never been this good. Everything is as sharp and as clear as… as… he has no basis for comparison. The storm roars in his ears; the dust and grit abrades his exposed skin, but his vision is absolutely unimpaired. He spots the settlement ahead, much closer than he anticipated.

  That’s the house.

  And he knows exactly which home it is. He continues towards the home with his eyes closed, noticing bits of detail that hadn’t been evident before – the wrappings on the outside of the prefab homes, a few scattered tools, motocart parts, the obvious markings of a grave, stepping stones made of sunbaked clay. Sterling pulls the motocart in front of the home and hops off.

  With his eyes still closed, yet his vision full and clear, he lifts Halo into his arms and kicks open the door.

  ***

  Sterling gasps as soon as he gets his face cover and his Leaks off. The stench of the house smacks him in face again, but he disregards it. He’s anxious to question Halo about her ability to see through his eyes, or see using his eyes – he doesn’t quite know how to articulate it – when the slight motion of a large bundle of shapeless rags in the semi-darkened room catches his attention.

  The large bundle of rags – actually the woman he’d carried inside at the start of their journey to the Northern Servers – turned her head at their entrance, but otherwise takes no notice of them. She sits cross-legged on the floor, her back against the wall and a shiv clutched in her left hand. She has ripped her wrappings to expose her arms, and has carved a series of diagonal slashes from wrist to shoulder. Both arms are slick with blood.

  ‘Why would anyone cut on themselves like that?’

  As a blood penance for her son.

  ‘What did he do?’ Sterling looks away. His ears prick at the sound of the shrieking wind outside. There are no windows in the squalid hovel, and it wouldn’t matter if there were – everything outside should be pitch black by now.

  He robbed a depot and was sentenced to reeducation. Do you remember the two Learners we saw earlier? The one helping the other?

  ‘Yes.’

  The one that stumbled was her son.

  ‘Was her son?’

&
nbsp; He’s already dead. The OL Officers saw to that.

  ‘Should I tell her? And about her husband?’

  How would that be a kindness? No.

  Sterling moves to a circular port on the wall. Even though he knows what lies on the other side, he still wants to see how bad the storm actually is. He slides the cover to one side and peers out. To his surprise, he can almost see the structure nearby, which means the Blackout isn’t as bad as he originally thought it would be. Still, they’ll need to stay indoors for a while.

  ‘It’s clearing up.’

  The worst of it has passed over this area.

  ‘I can see that… ’ Sterling turns to the woman. ‘Sorry about your husba… ack.’ His voice dies in his throat.

  I told you NO. You do her no kindness; you merely attempt to assuage your own feelings of guilt, which are not yours to feel. I am responsible; any guilt is mine. Leave her in peace; she will go on to the next cycle very shortly.

  ‘This is lizard shit. Nothing but lizard shit.’ he whispers as he walks into the only other room. He finds verminous bedding on the floor, but sits anyway and presses his back against the wall.

  It is better this way.

  ‘Says you,’ he whispers bitterly.

  With eyes closed and mind as blank as he can make it, he listens to the wind roar and bellow outside. His thoughts wander and carry him back unbidden to a truly remarkable experience that perplexes him still. About three months ago, he’d lost Delix, his prize racer, in a particularly ill-considered bet. A day or so later, his second string lizard lost every race but one, and Sterling was almost broke and in a particularly vile mood. He’d gone to the fleshroom he always used; the one on the opposite side of the Northern Settlement just to keep his personal business as far away from home as possible.

  He’d paid Rocklick the flesh dealer for the use of a lover right up front, and then drank his way through his remaining funds. He was expecting the normal routine: a brief dance, some repentance and absolution, followed by a bit of the old in-out and then a scalp massage – the usual.