***
‘That was… fucking terrible!’ Beige shouts, rushing over to the woman. She drops to her knees, moves to lift the woman and stops. Her hand comes over her mouth.
‘Cool it,’ Sterling calls after her. ‘The woman was a thief, and we couldn’t risk her knowing that we’re here.’
‘That was the Roomsand’s servant!’ Beige shoulders past her older brother, vomits outside their home, coughs, vomits again.
‘What did you do to her?’ he asks, his eyes fixated on the vein that appeared on the side of the woman’s head.
Something I’ve never tried before.
‘Which is?’
Halo takes a few light steps towards the woman, crouches with her legs spread wide.
I knew early on that I could make someone take their own life. I learned to force someone asleep and control their speech as well. I never tried doing something as overtly physiological as this, but it appears to have worked.
‘Physiological?’
I burst the blood vessels in her head by controlling the flow of blood from her heart.
Sterling nods, runs his fingers across his hairless chin. ‘Well, that may come in handy here in the future. Think you could do it to more than one person at a time?’
I don’t know.
‘I wish I had the ability to do that. I’d love to watch Zander’s face turn blue.’
I said I would handle that.
‘Dammit, Halo, I know what you’ve said, but before I step out this door and do whatever it is we’re about to do, I need one promise from you.’
Yes?
Halo touches the woman’s face, closes her eyes.
Sterling nods to the open door. ‘Take care of… Beige. Whatever happens to me is fine, but take care of my sister.’
I plan to.
Beige enters the kitchen, her hand over her stomach. She takes one look at the dead woman and sobs.
‘I know it isn’t easy,’ Sterling places his arm around his younger sister’s shoulders, ‘but you’ll get used to it.’
‘It’s terrible,’ his sister sobs. ‘All this is terrible.’
‘You aren’t the only one who thinks that,’ he mumbles. ‘Well, finish getting ready and I’ll get this out of here.’
Sterling lifts the woman’s legs and drags her out of the door.
‘Where are you going with her?’ Beige asks. She stands in the doorway, wiping away a few tears.
‘I’m going to drop her on top of the rapist and let someone else try to figure out what happened.’
.4.
‘I hate these things,’ Beige says, as he secures her in a pair of armcuffs. She can still use her hands, but there isn’t much she can do with them with her elbows uncomfortably pinned behind her. Like anybody who’s been to reeducation, Sterling spent considerable time in armcuffs.
Reeducation is designed to be a harrowing experience. Most Learners get the message almost immediately – shape up, and cooperate to graduate.
Sterling was not one of them. He fought the system, fought the Corrections Officers, fought the other Learners, and fought just to fight. After his last fight, six COs administered a thoroughly painful, clinically precise beating, slapped him in armcuffs and stuck him in a cramped solitary cell on reduced rations for two weeks.
He finally realized that he could get with the program or he could continue to fight until they killed him, and then who would care for his mother and sister?
Not, he reflects, that he’s done a particularly good job of that lately.
He still has nightmares about starvation rations, close confinement, and too-tight armcuffs, and wakes up ravenously hungry, shoulders cramped and aching. ‘I know how you feel.’
‘No you don’t. You’ve never… ’ She abruptly shuts her mouth mid-whine at the look on Sterling’s face.
‘Ready, Halo?’
I don’t much like these things either.
Beige laughs; Halo is back in both of their heads.
‘No one likes armcuffs,’ Sterling says as he mounts the motocart. ‘Well, that’s not exactly true; I once met a lover… ’
Beige cuts him off. ‘No one wants to hear about that.’
‘Well, you may not, but Halo might. I get the feeling she’s into that kind of stuff.’
You are really pushing your boundaries.
‘This isn’t the life I chose; it’s the life that chose me,’ he says as he starts up the motocart.
Perhaps you can write the next version of the Book.
‘Ha!’ He pulls away from their home and takes stock of his situation: a pro-grade clubbing stick slung over his shoulder, a shiv in his boot and another at his belt, his OL Officer uniform tight across his chest, his face as clean shaven as it has ever been and his hair high and tight – Sterling feels more optimistic about the increasingly crazy affair than he has at any prior point. For the merest of moments he considers turning around to say goodbye to his mother, Bolt and Lily, but the moment passes and he continues on.
The wind whips up into his face and he slows, tugs his face cover up. Grains of sand abrade his exposed skin as he kicks the motocart into park. ‘Cover yourselves!’ he yells over his shoulder.
We can’t.
‘Shit, that’s right.’
Sterling leaps off the motocart as the wind increases. It thunders, screams, shrieks all around him. Beige and Halo are backs to the wind and heads down. He gets them off the bench, down into the body of the cart, wraps his arms around their shoulders and pulls their heads against his chest. He gets the same jolt of electricity he always feels whenever he touches Halo – that and the erection.
His back takes the brunt of the wind and debris. It stings, but the mild electric tingle that travels just under the surface of his awareness is strangely comforting. Halo and Beige squirm themselves closer to him; Halo presses herself against him in a most disconcerting manner.
‘Fuck!’ he shouts as a piece of high-velocity gravel smacks him in the back, followed by several more. The wind screeches all around them and pelts him with all manner of random debris.
It will end soon.
‘Predicting the weather too?’ he shouts, clenching his eyes shut. Depending on a person’s relative perception and frame of reference, Halo’s prognostication is either spot-on or horribly, horribly wrong. To Sterling – uncomfortably positioned as the two women’s flying crap magnet while Halo pretends to inadvertently rub against his practical application of involuntary hydraulics – the storm seems to last forever.
It ends the same way it started – suddenly and with no warning, but it lasted long enough for Sterling’s muscles to cramp up and for Beige to start hyperventilating.
Sterling lets go of the women, stands, stretches and cracks his neck. He turns his attention to his sister, who is still breathing rapidly.
‘Relax, Beige,’ he says, ‘it’s over.’
‘That was terrible… and… and what would happen if you blew away? We are helpless back here!’
‘Halo would handle it, right Goddess?’ he says with a wry grin.
Yes, I would remove the armcuffs.
‘You can do that?’ Beige asks, wide-eyed again.
Not yet, not quite, but I can find someone nearby, have them retrieve the keys from your brother’s broken body, and walk them over here to release us.
‘What am I getting myself into? ’ Beige mumbles.
***
Sterling waits a few moments before restarting the motocart. The trip is strangely uneventful until they get to the outer rim between the Off Limits and the Northern settlement. Zander’s depots are heavily damaged. Most burn, and the surrounding area is strewn with broken and trampled Rationed goods. What appears to be just a mound of R-Cloth turns out to be a flattened, beaten body, and he veers left, but still catches the corpse with the back wheel.
‘What was that?’ Beige cries out.
‘Keep her quiet, Halo,’ he mumbles.
I can put her back to sleep…
Sterling slows and the engine whines down.
‘Get out of the way,’ he instructs. ‘Official OL business.’
The man doesn’t answer and remains stationary; there is enough light from the streetlamp to highlight the dirt smudged across his face. His mother must have been a boulder, his father a prefab wall, and he unslings a well-used and blood-spattered clubbing stick.
‘I could really do without this.’ Sterling says, as he steps off the motocart. ‘Actually… ’ he turns to Halo. ‘Can you do something? To be honest, I’d rather not get started quite so soon.’
Certainly.
Sterling hears a thud and turns to find the would-be hijacker on his knees with his neck bent back.
‘Well,’ he says as he approaches the towering Northerner, ‘I guess this will do.’
‘What are you going to do to him?’ his sister calls over her shoulder. Beige has turned in the back of the cart as much as she can to see what’s going on.
Sterling removes the OL issue shiv from his belt. The grip fits his hand as if it grew there, and the slightly blade-heavy balance pleases him. The man tracks him with frightened, hate-filled eyes as he steps behind him and grabs a fistful of greasy, gritty hair with his off hand. The knife effortlessly cuts the big man’s throat from ear-to-ear. Sterling steps back to avoid the spray of blood, and sighs as the man falls face first onto the road surface and gasps and gurgles his life out.
He cleans the shiv on the dead man’s shirt and re-sheaths at his belt. ‘You know, Halo,’ he says as he starts the engine. ‘You and I really make a good team.’
‘What are you two talking about?’ his sister hisses. ‘You’re both killers… murderers!’
‘Beige, I know all of this comes as a shock to you but… ’ Sterling takes a deep breath. ‘There’s a lot about me that you don’t know. For one – I’ve been living this way for longer than I’d care to admit. Old Halo here has only recently become my partner in crime.’
Old?
‘It’s an expression,’ he says as he mounts the motocart.
Beige shakes in her seat, rattling the chains on her armcuffs against the backboard. ‘Let me out of these things. I want out!’
He nudges her with the back of his elbow. ‘Relax,’ he says, ‘this is the way things are now.’
***
Sterling has spent much of his adult life between the Northern settlement and the Off Limits on this particular ribbon of land. Usually, this area is a hotbed of activity at all hours, with its fleshrooms, fight clubs, lizard racing parlors and skip-toss joints. Now, apart from the roar of flames consuming several of the establishments, it’s deathly quiet. Hard-eyed, grimly silent men with makeshift weapons guard the other establishments that remain intact. Abandoned motos, broken bodies, and debris of all descriptions crowd the lane and challenge his driving skills.
The Northern Reeducation Facility is just a few vestas away from this part of the Northern Settlement, and they pass the turnoff for the access road. Sterling recalls the first day of reeducation – the endless in-processing, the hazing and beatings, the attempted rape right after lights out. He was unjustly incarcerated, and it was Zander’s fault he was trapped there. As his sentence wore on, sometimes he would lie awake at night, crowded in the too-small prefab sleeping platform he shared with seven other men and fantasize about the revenge he would wreak upon Zander Damien. Sometimes he would fantasize about Lily, the girl that he barely knew. Sometimes – usually – he would just collapse into the dreamless slumber of the truly exhausted.
‘Fucking Zander… ’ he growls to himself.
I will keep my promise to you.
‘Stay out of my head,’ he mumbles. He hadn’t really thought about where they were going, but Halo had long since taken over that aspect of his thinking process. The route she has them on leads to the furthest entry point, the place where the chosen are taken inside to be raptured.
‘Well you’d better do it soon, because we are almost there.’
Trust me. Do exactly as I say.
.5.
The Great Demarcator looms before him; the wind moans through the thickets of coiled shiv wire on its upper rim. Sterling skids to a halt just outside the Khomei Barriers.
‘Remember,’ he tells Beige as he steps off the motocart, ‘you are my prisoner, not my sister. Do exactly as I say. Got it? Don’t talk back, don’t ask questions, don’t assert your independence, and don’t use my name.’
She responds with a pout and the noise of exasperation that is universal to human teens who’ve been aggravated beyond endurance by stupid parents or other authority figures.
‘Seriously – knock that shit off. This isn’t a game.’ He pinches her nose and she jerks her head away. ‘You’ll get us killed if you keep up the shit.’
‘Then don’t pinch my nose! That hurt!’
She’ll be fine.
‘Yeah, she’d better be, or we’re fucking dead, and no kidding, Goddess.’
Sterling clears his throat. ‘Okay, listen you two – especially you, Beige. This is going to be uncomfortable. Don’t fight it, don’t protest, just go along with it.’
Beige makes the noise again.
‘Little help here, Halo?’
I’ve got her; let’s proceed.
He puts them side-by-side in front of him, Halo on the right and Beige on the left. He slides his right arm up under Halo’s armcuff chain, puts his hand on her left shoulder and bends her forward as he takes up the slack in the chain. The process is the same for Beige, who doesn’t struggle or protest. The mog has settled somewhat, although it’s suffused with a gentle flickering glow from the fires that still blaze in the distance. He doesn’t hear the screams of the dying and the sounds of chaos and conflict, but he knows it’s happening.
Before they’ve taken more than a few steps, a metalzip whistles through the air and hovers just before Beige.
Smash it, quickly!
Sterling shoves them both hard; as they stumble forward he slides his arms out from under their armcuff chains, pivots on the ball of his left foot and swats the metalzip out the sky with his right hand. It hits the ground, angrily buzzes and vibrates, and Sterling stomps it once, twice, and then grinds it under his heel.
‘Holy shit,’ his sister whispers.
‘Have wanted to do that forever,’ he grins.
The response is immediate. Light blasts out from multiple points on the wall; they’re lit up brighter than high noon on a cloudless day, and a tremendously amplified voice calls out, ‘HALT! HANDS UP! STAND STILL OR YOU WILL BE KILLED!’
‘They’re my prisoners,’ Sterling shouts, ‘they destroyed the Northern Servers.’
Two men step out of the light and approach them, the nearest one carrying a bullet flinger. ‘Identify yourself!’ he barks.
Table, Edgar; GDSF ID number 8675309.
‘Table, Edgar; GDSF ID number 8675309,’ Sterling says in as authoritative of a tone as he can muster.
The one with the bullet flinger is human. The other is not. Target the metal man; he is the greatest danger.
‘What happened to the metalzip?’
‘It just stopped working,’ Sterling replies. ‘It fell on the ground and um… yeah, that’s it.’
Get ready.
In one fluid move, the human OL officer spins and crashes the butt of his bullet flinger into his partner’s face, tackles him to the ground and tries to get his shiv into the metal man’s eye. They roll and struggle, Sterling unslings his clubbing stick and bounces on his toes as he waits to get a strike in.
‘I can’t tell who’s who!’ Sterling shouts.
One of the fighters suddenly glows red, and he throws the other OL Officer from him. Sterling steps in and throws everything he has into his swing. It takes the metal man in the side of the head; the OL issue clubbing stick splinters in Sterling’s hands. The met
al man spins away from the impact and lands on his side, then unsteadily gains his feet.
‘Not good!’ says Sterling.
A sudden flurry of bullets staggers the metal man, drives him to his knees and then to the ground. The human OL Officer moves in on his erstwhile companion and flings another bullet with every step forward, until he sudden shouts, ‘I’m empty! He’s not dead yet! Take him!’
Sterling leaps shiv-first at the twitching man of metal bones, drives his OL shiv into the man’s right eye, through his skull and pins him to the ground. The metal man spazzes for a moment, settles in the dust.
‘I’m definitely keeping this!’ Sterling says to himself, as he withdraws it from the now-dead OL Officer’s eye socket. He rises to find the human OL Officer standing with his weapon at his side.
‘Well?’ he finally asks over his shoulder to Halo.
I have him, but he’s fighting me. I must let go of your sister.
Beige lets out a loud gasp, as if she’s been holding her breath for the last few minutes. ‘That was… we almost… we could have been… ’
‘No shit, kid. Welcome to my life,’ Sterling says, as he catches his breath. ‘I told you, it ain’t easy. Now shut up.’
***
It’s as if he’s been clubbed right between the eyes; he has never been this physically exhausted and emotionally wrung-out in all of his misspent life. He’s still on the tail end of the combat high, but when the crash comes, Sterling knows it’ll be bad. His hands shake, his eyes are itchy and scratchy, his mouth tastes like a column of barefoot Learners have shuffled through it, his heart is over-revving like a moto with a stuck throttle.
He would trade his chance at rapture for an uninterrupted night’s sleep.
And as if this whole Goddess-inspired shenanigan wasn’t enough on its own, there are the metal men. He’d never even heard of them right up until the first one he met killed Bolt. Their speed, strength and fighting ability are unlike anything Sterling’s ever encountered. He could cheerfully live whatever he has left of his life without ever meeting another one.
The Zero Patient Trilogy (Book Two): (A Dystopian Science Fiction Series) Page 13
