The Grief Team

by Collins, David

  Gordon Latimer, whatever he’d wanted, was no longer worth thinking about.

  Several hours later, Gabriel had had ample time to dip into the Stream to retrieve the bits-and-pieces of Gordon Latimer’s existence. His office, the central hub of video and electronic consoles in the Grief Team’s operations centre at the top of the E.C., was his second home and he was adeptly assembling the information on Latimer. The ex-Director was, unlike so many of his clients, not a broken man wandering into a Crematoria reception centre bent on purchasing a deluxe package. Latimer was efficient, capable, and insofar as Gabriel could tell, utterly competent. Other than the discreet request to see Elias, and there were dozens of those every week from the mall’s citizens, there was nothing.

  In the back of his mind, a niggling thought...one that had as yet not crawled its way onto the open tactical battleground that was his consciousness. Gabriel relaxed and let it float to the top. It arrived as a disturbing surprise. Had Latimer somehow cottoned on to the problem in the Embryo Centre in Cedarbrae? An immediate threat assessment: highly, highly unlikely. Latimer was a merchant of death. He spent his days thinking up new advertising campaigns, appeals designed to bring people flocking inside those shiny metal Crematoria doors where his staff of thin-lipped lizards in formal undertaking garb stood waiting. They did their best to seduce those shopping for termination into purchasing something extravagant. And if extravagant wasn’t in the cards, the next best thing would do. A sale was a sale was a sale in-and-at the end.

  Gabriel sat up straight, pulled his locator-bar into range and began tapping the keys furiously. Rivulets of information began to move across the screen. He slowed, merging his consciousness with them, nudging the flow, wooing it until it was thick as rich cream. Crematoria files began to pour across his monitor: names of client-suicides, expense reports, projections for fuel consumption, updates of the all-important Endlist; millions of bits of data flowed inexorably in what was, Gordon mused, a river of death.

  Minutes later, the Director of the Grief Team sat back in his chair, dumbfounded. Exactly how Latimer had known was yet to be determined, but there it was: a notation in the deceased’s personal notes, buried deep in the Crematoria’s database and thrice encrypted.

  Emb.Cedar?

  That was all. Nothing more. But it was enough to send a jolt along Gabriel’s spine.

  It appeared 44 hours preceding the tragic events in the Children’s Mall. There were no other references.

  Gordon Latimer knew!

  No...wait! He suspected was a more logical determination. Gabriel used his right index finger to sink the notation out of existence, knowing instantly that Bluebands would have to be sent to F level in the Parents Block to scour the apartment. In another thirty seconds, he had made the arrangements and dropped them into the Stream. As far as the ex-Director of Crematoria and his lovely wife was concerned, what they would never know wouldn’t hurt.

  Meanwhile, there was the issue of the unlocked door in the E.C. to deal with. Gabriel tapped his consol twice and the report unravelled. He glanced at it cursorily, his mind still dealing with the Latimers.

  I’m sorry about your wife and I’m sorry about your daughter,Cathy. She’s with the WildKids on the Outside now. We picked her up on the vidkams on top of the Tower and as far as we can determine they wasted little time streetsmarting her. Poor little thing.

  She would spend the first few days crying for her parents, wondering why she wasn’t being catered to anymore. It wouldn’t take her undersized, feral captors long to serve her in the straight-forward biological fashion; age never was a barrier to the more instinctual matters and there was no doubt that Wildkids were only capable of four functions (in random order): eating, sleeping, fucking, and killing. Sometimes, Gabriel mused, you just have to shake your head and wonder. Still, stocks were high and SkyDome was operating close to capacity. And it had better be, Gabriel grimaced, while I figure out what to do about Cedarbrae.

  The Grief Team was proficient in its duty inside the walls of SkyDome, where reports of daily events flowed along a tributary of the Stream available only to Gabriel himself. With a flick of a switch, he terminated the report flow on the unlocked door, satisfied that the officer responsible had been terminated, and blocked the Stream. There were other more pressing matters and, to be truthful, he could not help Cathy Latimer other than to monitor her progress from time to time...if she survived and if she happened to wander in range of a vidkam. She might. The ‘Kids were pretty random in their selection of food and they might see some sense in keeping her with them as long as she didn’t hold them back. Too bad really. On the other hand, if she survived, there would always be the ever-ongoing sweeps by Grief Team to avoid. There was no question of returning little Cathy to her former existence in the E.C....once Outside, it was Outside forever.

  Gabriel leaned back into his chair and sent the castors reeling to the other side of the hub where the Exchange was being monitored. A practiced eye scanned the numbers, missing nothing, intuitively assessing each trade being registered across the globe. He paused as new figures from the Zone were downloaded. He’d been carefully tracking the data flow, noting signifiers, catching the rumble that something was in the works. It had been hectic all day: someone had been moving chunks of shares and Gabriel smelled a major transaction underway. The size of the flow whispered Celts but the latest figures out of Lindisfarne disputed that. It was unlikely that they possessed the necessary credits to deal with Toronto Nation. No, Gabriel surmised, more likely they were fronting for the New Deutsches. Whoever it was, someone in Lindisfarne was getting ready to open an offer for 200 units. The Swedes? Gabriel dipped into the flow and found what he needed on the ticket order. Blonds and blondes. Of course!

  A month before, special Outside units of the Grief Team had conducted a particularly successful sweep in the old Richmond Hill area, snagging dozens of WK’s. Reports to the Centre from the field team had been specific: all blonds, no dyes, minimal radburns. The rumbling in the Zone was probably a preliminary diversion by the Swedes as they shifted their holdings into dummy accounts, the better to plead for reduced rates from Toronto when the time came. The Swedes would buy all right, they needed the population in the worst way after the last virus.

  Satisfied, Gabriel sent his chair smoothly back to his original station with one well-placed foot. Strange about Gordon Latimer really, he thought, drumming his fingertips along the desktop. Something had happened in the course of the man’s work in the Crematoria which had caused him to suspect a problem with the embryos. What was it?

  Latimer’s files had revealed that the Director had been a survivor of the ‘04+2 Parisian Virus, the one that took up where the Tallahassee ‘04 left off. The final stats, Gabriel remembered, were something like 21.5 million dead, which was moderate but significant. Tallahassee was marked in most citizens’ minds as the World Series of viruses, ironically because it had ended the fourth game of the Fall Classic in the sixth inning. Jose Melino collapsed at the plate with the bases loaded, his hands tearing holes in his chest in his mania and, an hour later, no more baseball, no more World Series, no more fans.

  Gabriel sat, adrift in a sea of monitors, some six dozen of them, each offering instantaneous views of the Seven Malls which, collectively, functioned as Toronto Nation. SkyDome, off-limits to all citizens and operated by the Grief Team, appeared on screen like the soot-black canker it was, planted in the midst of the wreckage of the old C.N. Tower. Each of several hundred vidkams was hooked into the Stream, each monitor receiving information feeds simultaneously, accessing realtime images throughout all Malls at all levels. Other vidkams, situated atop abandoned highrises Outside in the virus-laden air, delivered crystal-clear pictures of what was taking place among the Wildkids.

  Gabriel was micro-managing the Mull situation as well as the latest sweep outside the malls for Wildkids. He planted his right foot on the floor and propelled his chair once again, this time fifteen monitors along to VK-214, the te
rminal monitoring the vidkams in a sector where a clutch of Wildkids had been spotted two hours earlier. With his left hand punching up each cam in sequence, his right moving the togglestick in a well-practised manner, Gabriel searched an expanse of demolished buildings languishing on a site once known as the home of the Canadian National Exhibition, now notorious for infiltrations by the radburned little bastards. Once again, he noted, the vidkam on the lakeside of SkyDome was out of order. Once again, he would order its repair and hope that it stayed functional long enough to record the face of the little bastard who kept knocking it out of commission.

  Although he was aware of the illustrious history of the C.N.E., Gabriel Kraft was far too young to have ever experienced the annual celebrations which took place there; rather, he knew it only as a squalid gathering place for knots and tangles of Wildkids who set fires and tortured their own for lack of anything better to do. Only a week ago, Gabriel had watched in mute fascination as a pack of jabbering Kids harassed a malnourished boy, beating him with sticks and metal bars until he fell. Although he was watching a scene which he knew full well repeated itself many times each week, Gabriel was sickened by the ritual of stinkgas poured over the victim and the soundless writhing as a match was thrown. He hadn’t waited for the feast that inevitably followed the barbeque. It was enough to make anyone sick.

  Gabriel completed his sweep of 214, finding nothing, and then turned his attention to the latest problem with the Mulls. His thoughts quickly reviewed the historical aspects of their unique situation. The rise in the population of Mulls in the Malls had been a concern of the Grief Team for some time. These milky-dark descendants of African slaves were now propogating themselves to a worrisome degree and a plan to deal with such an overabundance had yet to be agreed upon by Elias. A program for action, designated as Mull Watch, had been on the Mayor’s desk for weeks and constituted the largest program of castration ever considered, far larger that what had been done with the Crones. His father, Gabriel well knew, was avoiding the issue and that was a problem.

  Gabriel himself was well-aware of the Mull origins in the wastelands of Desertregion, once known as Africa, and how greedy English and American traders had parlayed the dreams of plantation owners for free slave labour into hundreds of thousands of dollars of profits dumped into their own coffers. It was a get-rich-quick scheme which had authored—when, in the end, you took the long view—the downfall of the United States during the riots almost 300 years later in 2003/4, when Los Angeles and a hundred other cities had fallen into race chaos, driven by plague death. He knew about the first extermination squads, rising out of their bunkers in the mid-West, the much-vaunted White Knights who now controlled what was left of Salt Lake City. Toronto Nation had nothing to do with them; they were fanatics and had nothing of value to trade anyway.

  Ultimately, it was the Tallahassee Virus of ‘04 which proved to be the deciding factor, wiping out millions and millions of blacks and whites alike, leaving, in one of numerous resultant ironies, only the mullatoes, the sons and daughters of slaves and slave owners whose mixed blood had proved to be immune from the airborne killers. Several thousand of these Mulls had already gravitated to New York where, amid the lifeless streets and deserted architectural canyons of Manhattan, they had raised a new flag over a nation they called New Freedom.

  Gabriel had never seen New Freedom because of the travel restrictions which every surviving nation wisely and firmly kept in place, but he knew from the Stream that they were adept players in the World Trade Zone, offering cheap manufactured goods in return for quantities of raw materials and foodstuffs. He was aware of rumours that the Council of New Freedom had been authorizing mechanized forays across the wastelands of old New England, searching for colonies of whites, blacks, yellows, whatever, and wiping them out as soon as they were discovered. It was genocide based more in the stink of righteous revenge than anything else. Toronto remained unaffected and, officially, aloof but Gabriel knew that Elias had a healthy interest in the data which the Grief Team accumulated on the issue. Lately, Elias had also expressed interest in the development of the Hispanic peoples in NewMiami, seeing in them the possibility of expanded trade.

  Historically, Toronto had its own clutch of Hispanic peoples and some of them had survived the viruses, saved by the same statistical fates which governed the entire planet during the plagues. Eighteen months before, the Grief Team had prepared twelve dozen sets of Hispanic babies in a newly-reclaimed wing of the Birth Centre at Cedarbrae and the prospects of a steady birth rate had been good. Production estimates had forecast that inside five years there would be sufficient quantities to assist Miamitown in its repopulation, offering prime heritage units to replace the chromosome-decayed inhabitants who were unable to propagate. Without Cedarbrae babies, Miamitown was doomed.

  But there will be no more Cedarbrae babies!

  Gabriel’s immediate problem was to persuade Elias to accept his Team’s solution to the ever-increasing population of Mulls in the Square One Mall, where they had been assigned residency in 2006 by Mayor Dickie. The mall, serviced by the Mall Planning Council, was losing revenue as the population increased. Too many Mulls. Too little cash flow. And, Gabriel knew, no chance of employing the special resources of SkyDome to fix the problem as long as Elias remained in control. His father’s compassion for the Mulls was as well-known as it was incomprehensible.

  The initial feelers on the market to ascertain whether or not there was any interest in forced migration to New Freedom proved to be short-lived. The Council of New Freedom had let it be known that there was no home for Mulls there and that was that. Struggling to look after their own, Manhattan showed little interest even when the rates offered were rock-bottom. As for offering free population to the Celts, the Deutsches, or the tiny Papal State, Gabriel didn’t even bother to think about it. All three had run effective extermination programs against Mulls and would regard fresh stocks as anathema.

  As for the Cossack Region, they had yet to even join the Zone. Little was known about these handsome, swashbuckling descendants of the Khan who had, centuries before, swept through peasant villages, impaling screaming infants on their bright spears and lopping off the heads of the terrified peasants. Cossack distrust of outside peoples was notorious and legendary even in Gabriel’s time. Who did not remember the bulging, dripping, red sack tossed with arrogant disdain on the cracked pavement outside the E.C. by the Cossack ambassador? The bag had split, allowing six of its contents, the Toronto Nation Special Ambassadorial Team, to roll and bounce along the walkway until they stopped, eyeless and bloody in the weeds, dark bruised noses ripped and flared like blackbirds’ wings. The Cossack ambassador, black-eyed and erect, his message delivered, had calmly removed a gun from his belt and blown his own brains out.

  The problem with the Mulls remained. It seemed insurmountable and, as time passed and the cramped Mull-designated areas within Square One bulged at the seams, it was inevitable that something had to give. Already, foraging parties of Mulls were beginning to interfere with the itinerant population of Wildkids, daring to transgress Rule 9 (see endnote 3), as they searched for supplements to their meagre food allowances. If Rule 9—Outside is Death— could not stop them, what would? These renegade Mulls searched for easy pickings of pre-teen WildKid stragglers who were quickly captured with the offer of food, only to reappear several hours later as someone’s grotesquely-barbequed evening meal in the Mall. It was becoming a problem and Grief Team bands were already reporting losses around the Area 300 along the weed-infested highway known as Number 10. How much longer, Gabriel wondered, before a foraging party of Mulls felt brave enough to probe the main depot at SkyDome and the shit really hit the fan? He felt a shudder run down his neck and along his spine as he sent his chair reeling backwards, along the bank of monitors to those which accessed SkyDome.

  As he surveyed the pens, he checked his watch. In ten minutes, the Exchange would close and the day’s bidding in the World Trade Zone would end. The Swedes
would likely get their price for the contingent of reconstituted blond WK’s, Gabriel thought. It was time to think about slipping down to the grand concourse of the E.C. to do justice to a cup of coffee and a donut. That would suffice until he figured out how to persuade Elias that the Mull situation was rapidly running out of control.

  THREE

  The Assistant Director of Crematoria, Emmett Strachan, was recalculating the odds for the umpteenth time that he was but a hair’sbreadth away from being in deep shit with the Grief Team. The examination of Gordon Latimer’s files by the Team had been quite thorough. Emmett had never seen anything like it...Gordon’s entire office was gone. Everything! All files purged from his connection to the Stream. Even Gordon’s apartment in F Complex, where Emmett was presently hanging his sorry head in disbelief, was bare. Stripped to the carpet underlay. All appliances, furnishings, fixtures, televisions…everything gone. The round hole in the floor in the small bathroom partition indicated clearly that even the toilet had been deemed worthy of removal. Emmett had cocked an eyebrow at that.

  “Dogs’breath, Gordon, it’s like you never existed!”

  Nonetheless, the Grief Team’s reputation for total response was a thing of beauty observed and, to Emmett’s ordered mind, quite impressive. And scary as hell. The apartment was a statement devoid of emotion, full of the weight of absolutely nothing; it amazed him, made him feel claustrophobic, as if the air was suddenly palpable and able to cushion him if he but leaned against it.