Rhonda was gearing up for another blast, all four udders beginning to sway violently to the shrill chords of the Rhonda Song. (see endnote 2)
“Rhon-da! Ud-der-ly a-maz-ing!”
Fleetingly, Gordon wondered if the Grief Team had already cast its all-pervasive eye on him, had already zeroed in on the slip in the Stream. Would he leave the mall today, only to find Bluebands at his apartment in Scarborough Mall, ready to arrest him in front of his wife and daughter?
At that moment, Rhonda the Udderly Amazing Cow’s left eye chose to explode in a thick spray of blood, tissue, and artifical bone, followed almost instantaneously by the eruption of her right front kneecap in another bloody spray. The Fan Club went berserk, agog at the spectacular new effects Rhonda was offering. Several long seconds of furious excitement passed before the faithful realized that something was very possibly amiss.
The technicians, a crew from Mall TV, became quite vocal in their angry assessment of the damage as they emerged in a swarm of red jumpsuits from behind the large curtain spread across the rear of the stage. A large, red-bearded man was heard to declare that “the fuckin’ blood pressure gauge is fuckin’ faulty” and that it was “the third fuckin’ Rhonda this fuckin’ fiscal quarter.”
Already the mall’s loudspeakers were issuing calming messages and cordially inviting the surprised spectators to enjoy cakes and candies especially prepared for the Rhonda Festival and now available at the south end of the mall. Crones, the soothing mallvoice declared, would be offered free samples of Redlets and Redlets Supreme at the north end. Members of Rhonda’s Fan Club, however, were already being hastily escorted to the mall’s twelve exits by Grief Team Yellowbands, where they were harshly encouraged to leave the premises and board special Mullbuses that would return them to Square One.
“We’re leaving too!” declared Gordon, lifting Cathy off the bench and setting her gently on her feet. “Whoa!” he laughed, “you’re getting heavy, young lady.”
Cathy pouted. “That always happens to Rhonda. I think that the people who operate the equipment are bad.”
Leigh slipped her right arm under Gordon’s left, matching her pace with his as they protected Cathy between them. The promise of free food had immediately overwhelmed any consternation and disappointment which the crowd might have harboured toward the abrupt end of the show and the resultant crush of bodies forced Gordon and Leigh to take shelter in the doorway of Sam, the Discman.
“It’s not fair that Rhonda can’t make a public appearance without blowing apart,” said Leigh sympathetically to Cathy, sensing that her daughter was still upset. “When we get home, we can write a Suggestion about it and you can slip it into the Stream.”
“Really?” Cathy’s eyes widened and her arms squeezed tightly about Leigh’s neck as she hugged her.
“Don’t make it too strident, Leigh.” Gordon couldn’t help himself, one problem with the Stream was enough.
We know enough to say the following: by the end of 2004, at least 90% of the world’s population had ceased to exist and almost certainly 70% of those deaths were due to the viruses or starvation. Of the remaining 30%, we believe that the nuclear detonations in the Middle East, China, India, Pakistan, and Cold Lake, Alberta—with subsequent exposure by the populations in those countries to windborne radiation—carried off 15%, with civil insurrection and starvation accounting for the remaining 15%. These figures are, at best, nothing more than rudimentary guesswork. To be honest, who really cares at this point? There are certainly some disputable figures which the more capable members of our audience might wish to hold me to account. If that is indeed the case, our Modern History group meets fortnightly in Discussion Room 3 at Scarborough Mall. Please bring a folding chair and a coffee mug.
To return to our Overview in this, the first of our new series on viruses...the absence of material gain, indeed the absence of the necessity for material gain, was one of the most significant results of what Elman Stein called ‘this great world upheaval.’ Conventions such as marriage, family, social services, employment and what-have-you disappeared. During that fractious time, we happy few have learned to accept the dark hearts within ourselves and to distinguish psychopathy from the more pleasurable aspects inherent in our human desires.
Survivors gradually gained some idea of what had befallen them and there began a struggle which continues today on the Outside away from our homes in the Malls. That struggle, which many in the beginning might have called a class struggle, a religious struggle, or a political struggle, evolved into a generational movement which reordered the ascendance of the powerful, and first placed control over the destiny of Toronto Nation in the hands of the Father-of-the-Malls, Richard Donalato.
The late ‘Dickie’ Donalato, who left his little Sleepy Hollow Bookshop on the top floor of the E.C. for what proved to be his true calling, gathered the remaining 951 citizens of Toronto and showed us how to regenerate our city, allowing us once again to take our place among the remaining Nations of the world. As modern pilgrims, Mayor Dickie and his citizens abolished the failed notions of faith and religion and, for the ultimate good of humankind, reconstructed instead a more down-to-earth, biologically-correct, practical approach. Dickie knew that our hearts of darkness were made benign through centuries of social lacquer applied through various socio-religious-civic concerns. Indeed, Dickie realized that man could not get along with his fellow man ultimately because of governments’ adherence to these false tenets.
That is history’s lesson: we are what we are.
Mayor Dickie took cognizance of this and, noting the carnage around him, decided that to maintain and protect our very proper belief in primate individuality, an entity to serve this belief was the first rule-and-requirement. He rejected anarchy as false and self-serving. He knew that humans, whose startling variance in abilities and desires needed constant attention, would thrive in an environment especially created to allow this to happen. Thus, out of chaos and disorder, out of the ashes of our forefathers, Mayor Dickie created the Malls, which ensure peace, plentitude and freedom for all who deserve it...I apologize if I am a little emotional, but I was an acquaintance of Dickie; that is, I attended several dinner parties with him and we spoke liberally and…I…excuse me…I am listed as a sufferer of Post-Apocalypse Syndrome…give me a moment to…ahem! There followed, as we know, the first links in the chain that would become the World Trading Zone and the emerging dominance of Toronto Nation as the strongest link in that chain.
Today, we are happy and content in our Malls. We have TV and the finest Stream in the world! We have so little crime that we find we simply have to create it now and then...and you fuckers in Square One can laugh, damn you! We have Rhonda, the Udderly Fantastic Cow and the best selection-and-testing methodology for raising children which exists today. We have Revelation Night, that most glorious of holidays! Best of all, we have the Grief Team! Be satisfied with who we are and what we have…that too is the lesson that history teaches us.
And to what do we owe our current prosperity? Very simply, we owe it to our embryos. We have six scientists! Four more than any other Nation in the world! And we possess the technology and ability to immunize our environments! Embryos have done this for us! Hundreds of babies supplied each year from the last surviving stockpile! The world needs our babies and our babies need the world! Even as I speak, Toronto Nation babies from our Birth Centre in Cedarbrae Mall are being loved and raised in our fellow trading Nations everywhere. That’s good to know, isn’t it? And our Stages of Learning program is an excellent example of keeping overseas partnerships alive and well.
Ladies and gentlemen, my bias in this series of programs is obvious, isn’t it? But all of my biases are listed in the TV directory and you probably knew that anyway because...well, as someone once said a very long time ago: great minds think alike. I hope you’ll watch my second program, The Replicants: Genius At Work next week at this time. Good night to Penny, my darling daughter. I honour you.
; The erratic chukka-chukka of gunfire caught everyone by surprise. After all, the mall had been attack-free for over six months. Someone in Mall security, as the Grief Team would later determine, had improperly locked a door and Wildkids were now inside. An intense fusillade of bullets swept the crowded south end where parents and children screamed as bodies collapsed and heads shattered in violent sprays of blood and bone.
There were three terrorists, all Wildkids, all under thirteen, advancing slowly on the growing pile of jerking bodies, still firing their Mac10’s, pausing only to replace smoking, blue canisters of ammunition with fresh ones. Their faces were intent and mechanical. The tallest, a redhaired boy with bronze skin, led blond twins. Angry red weals along their chins indicated radburns likely only months away from becoming cancerous. Their clothes were scruffy versions of standard homeschool wear, a poor attempt at cloaking their identities.
They made the bloody bodies dance like Raggedy-Mull dolls, raking their fire back and forth, back and forth until, finally, their supply of ammunition was exhausted. In the chilling seconds before agonizing moans filled the sudden silence, the three Wildkids dropped their weapons and fled.
Gordon had reacted to the first spray of gunfire by hugging Cathy tightly, pulling Leigh after him as he moved quickly inside the discstore. Splinters of concrete and glass showered the area as he positioned his wife and child behind a metal display case filled with cheap datahologram editions of the books of Stephen King. Cathy’s sobs mixed with screams and gunfire. Gordon tasted blood in his mouth and realized that he had bitten through his lower lip. After what seemed like forever, the firing stopped and he found himself inching forward to the edge of the case, trying to locate the Wildkids.
Little radburned bastards!
MAC-10’s spent, the three pulled out zipsticks as they ran through the parkette, feet flying as they vaulted over bodies and benches, headed for the discstore. The tall, red-haired Kid appeared in the doorway, slipping and sliding on the shattered glass. As he passed the display case, Gordon reached out and tripped him with his right hand, sending the boy careening forward into another display case, the corner of which met the boy’s forehead with a dull thud. Gordon stared in disbelief at the wedge-shaped depression between the startled blue eyes as the red-haired boy slid to the floor.
In the next second, the two blond Wildkids—twins, Gordon realized, as he saw them up close—fired their zipsticks at the same time. A sharp cry of pain momentarily preceded the intense, pungent smell of burning human flesh. Gordon fell against the display cabinet, dead before he finally slid onto the floor.
He was spared the agony of witnessing the murder of his wife.
And the abduction of his only child.
TWO
The Director of the Grief Team was a reluctant passenger onboard the Mall’s cocktail-and-indoor-barbeque-circuit, gatherings which Gabriel Kraft loathed and attended only when he could no longer find excuses that would satisfy his father, the Mayor. He complained of wasted time, time better spent monitoring Grief Team operations and watching Toronto Nation as it went about its business; time to fine-tune his daily timetable much as a craftsman might tinker with the delicate mechanism of a fine watch. Elias, Gabriel knew, didn’t sweat the details in his performance of his mayoral duties and that meant someone had to crunch the numbers. Someone had to maintain the integrity of the Stream. Enter Gabriel, the apple of his father’s eye and the true product of his father’s loins, which was saying something in these days of manufactured offspring.
Elias, however, as Mayor and pater familias, had the authority to order him to attend whatever-and-whenever-he-wished. And he didn’t mind insisting at least five or six times a year. “You’re their protector, Gabriel,” Elias had said again last week, in between bites of a Bammo! sandwich-built-for-two, so big it needed handlebars. “You have to be seen. Otherwise people get the idea that you’re hiding something.”
Hiding something. Too fucking right, thought Gabriel who, privately, always felt himself to be sitting on a time bomb with no idea how to defuse it. Yet he always appeared composed and utterly affable whenever he was in the company of Elias. He moved placidly amid the noise and haste, and nothing that Elias ever did managed to shock him. Known for his outlandish behaviour and give-’em-hell bonhomie, Elias’ recent drunken striptease at the Mango Lounge had been incredibly funny after all, and Gabriel had laughed as loudly as the rest of the Mayor’s drunken electorate. Elias, responding to taunts of ‘shake that thing!’ had done exactly that. For some reason, the citizens of Toronto Nation loved him for it, seeing in his excesses not the fall of Rome but the sustenance of the grape and the good life.
Gabriel had been raised under his father’s corny, antiquated Maritime tutelage and that of Mayor Dickie, another East Coaster, who had been his second, equally loved ‘father’ until his death ten years ago. Quite naturally, Elias had been elected as the new Mayor of Toronto Nation, a hand-picked successor to the man now revered as the Father-of-the-Malls. In the immense shadows of such popular men, Gabriel had learned to make his own space. In such darker recesses, he had thrived on manipulating the Stream, the ubiquitous descendant of the old Internet, until its waters flowed in any direction guided by his will.
When he was eighteen, his blessed mother Margaret had expired in yet another plague mutated out of Jeffrey Meilgaard’s demonic replicating virus. Elias, and through him his son, miraculously possessed the gene which resisted each plague (thus far) and which kept them alive. Margaret Kraft had not been so fortunate, yet even now her presence was still felt in the small, warm apartment high in the E.C. on ‘A’ complex which Elias shared with his son.
“Are you hiding anything, Gabriel?” Elias asked abruptly, pausing in his futile attempt to lash a vivid red tie around his vast neck. It was Tuesday, close to six o’clock, and one of those rare occasions when father and son were actually together in the same place at the same time.
Gabriel fielded the throw out of left field as cleanly as he always did. “I’m hiding my contempt for your choice of tie.”
Elias had spared a quick glance at his son. “That’s a polite way of saying it looks like shit. Dogs’breath, son, there isn’t a tie in this mall that would look good around this neck.”
That was probably true, given the three folds of fat which it had to circumnavigate, but Gabriel had no quarrel with his father’s physical size. He had long ago accepted that Elias was determined to live the kind of life that he wanted to live. Good food and lots of it! Good sex and lots of that too! Let-the-good-times-roll!
Gabriel accepted it as he accepted everything. Self-determination, of one kind or another, had to be admired after all was said and done. And self-determination in Toronto Nation was the stuff of life, wasn’t it? Millions—no billions!—had died in the attempt to prove otherwise. All the same, Gabriel was thankful that his own trim features reflected the athletic side of his mother’s family.
“Tell me about Gordon Latimer.” Elias had given up on a bastardized Windsor knot. He slung the tie across the small apartment, reaching for a Western string tie instead. He’d purchased it in Calgary when he’d gone west as a teenager to see the Stampede and get laid. Cowtown was now as hard to find as those adolescent years.
“You’ve heard.” In Gabriel’s precise tones, it had been a simple statement of fact. He knew that Ferria d’Mont, his father’s assistant, had informed Elias only an hour before. Elias knew that he knew, of course, it was just his way of approaching a potential problem.
“I mean, tell me about him. You knew him fairly well, didn’t you?”
“No, not really. Met him at parties you forced me to attend. He appears to have led a rather normal life on the third floor. I can’t imagine a Director of Crematoria leading anything other than a discreet existence really. Wife, child, one playmate, standard Stage Two parental apartment in F complex, Priority 3 for rations...he had nearly twenty credits stashed away at the Royal Bank so he obviously was saving for something. M
y guess would be a planned move into D, or maybe even C, complex. By all accounts, a well-liked individual. Mr. Ordinary really, except for the fact that he burned people to ashes for a living.”
Elias had smiled at that, a big beaming red-faced smile which every one of the 16,135 mall-voters knew on sight. Elias was nothing if not popular and he didn’t stint when it came to injecting a little humour into the situation. Some of his dirty jokes, particularly those broadcast on Mall TV, were said to have peeled the laminate right off the sets, but no one ever held it against him. Elias, of course, with his trademark comic leer, would immediately have declared that he very much hoped that at least some of the women would “hold it against him.”
“He asked for a meeting with me.”
Gabriel concocted mild surprise. The Stream had reported that fact moments after Latimer had dropped it into the waters. “How well did you know him?”
Elias waved five fat sausages in the air before slapping them on his broad chest, making the metal-tipped ends of the Western tie jump. “So-so. Across a desk at meetings. Capable man. Good provider. Shame about his wife and child. Always thought his wife would look good under me. Guess I’ll never know what he wanted.”
And with that, Elias shifted his considerable bulk towards the door, already thinking about opening several of the large tins of beluga caviar promised at the reception. An incredible find in the storeroom of a delicatessen on the Danforth by a Grief Team member, one who knew the Mayor’s appetites and who had earned himself a healthy couple of credits as a reward. Caviar! Elias licked his lips, hoping that someone would remember to provide those little crackers he liked as well. There would be some serious scoopin’-’n-’chewin’ going down tonight!
The Grief Team Page 2
