The Salt Line

by Holly Goddard Jones

  —

  After the spectacular failure of Virtuz, and the eighteen months of his life he’d lost to what amounted, now, to a digital garbage pile, Wes was left feeling a little cynical. And more than a little panicked. There were rumblings among the shareholders; the little upstart virtual money co-op everyone had been dismissing just last year, Bank On It, was gaining an indie following that would soon spill over into something . . . well, not so indie. Bank On It’s nineteen-year-old founding CEO, Chetna Sai, was the newest tech darling, a tattooed, eye-riveted punk pixie whose innovation to social banking was a brilliant little spin on crowd-sourcing, in which groups of people could mobilize behind a charity, or a movie project, or a politician, whatever, and do a Collect Invest, with to-the-second updates on interest gained and market trends. One Bank On It Collect Invest had earned, in a month’s time, enough profits to bankroll the campaign of Compassion Party presidential candidate Guy Wiley, who was now poised to make an actual showing in the November elections. Why the hell hadn’t Wes thought of this? Why, instead of screwing around with the idea of virtues, hadn’t he been coming up with ways to let money do what it does best: create power? The key was to find the right vessel for that power. That was capitalism at work. That was how a person could hope to be both a good person and a successful one.

  Should have, would have, could have. It was all pointless, this speculation—throwing good time after bad. And Pocketz was still on top, by a big margin, a huge margin. The job now was to stay there.

  So, though he hadn’t been lying to Marta when he told her that his breakup with Sonya had been the catalyst for this trip beyond the wall, there was another reason he was now swinging his ass over a bare spot in the ground, trying to convince his bowels to move. Wes had given in to his board on their oldest, most chewed-up bone of contention: Pocketz Corporate Collaborations. The trick for pulling off this new venture, they’d decided, was to start slow and start smart: whatever product they came up with had to have an emotional appeal, so that Wes’s investment in it would feel more like an event, epic in scale, than a crass opportunity. But it also had to have the potential to make a pile of money. “We’re not talking prosthetic legs for orphans,” his COO, Sandy, had said. “More like—pharmaceuticals. But that’s risky because it’s so regulated, and there are liability issues out the wazoo.”

  “National defense? Weapons?” suggested his CSO, Cedric.

  “God no,” Wes said. “Can you imagine how that would play with Sai’s crowd?”

  “But he has the right idea,” Sandy said. “Weapons, no. We don’t want this getting torn apart by factions. We don’t want that to be the headline. But people want to feel safe. Everyone wants to feel safe.”

  “Clean energy,” Wes said. “What’s that solar micromotor company called? I saw them profiled on Sunday Salon.”

  Sandy shook her head. “I don’t think that flies either, Wes. It’s political and it’s boring. People see that technology as basically here already. They take it for granted.”

  “But it’s not here,” Wes said. “Not in any form that people can afford to use yet.”

  “That’s the problem. We need something that the average Pocketz user can purchase. A grand idea with some kind of concrete form you can actually own. They want to be able to take a picture of it and post it to their feeds. You can’t post a picture of a solar micromotor.”

  And then, like that, Wes knew. This was the way his brain had always worked, and it was a superb gift, one he tried to never take for granted.

  “Protection from ticks,” he said firmly. He knew from the spark in Sandy’s eye that he had nailed it, and he continued, getting excited. “Sprays. Microsuits. Detectors. That sort of stuff. We present it as an investment in freedom. But we make sure the trends feed recirculates some of those old stories about the tick population growing, the projections that our Wall will be infiltrated by such and such a year. None of those products are regulated, right?”

  “Nope,” Cedric said. “Government doesn’t touch ’em.”

  “Ticks have no faction,” Sandy mused. “I mean, not that I know of. There’s probably some group of ticks’ rights nut-fuckers out there.” She laughed—three bars—then grew pensive. “I guess we might get thrown into the Wall debate, though, and that’s a PR loser, any way you slice it.”

  The Wall debate, the goddamn endless Wall debate. Build it bigger, expand the TerraVibra perimeter? Tear it down? And just as the conversation would seem to be dying out for a while, another Wall tax hike would get shoved through Congress, and the whole cycle would start again.

  “But a suit—that’s about individual choice,” Wes said. “Wear it outside the Wall, if you want to travel. If you ever need it inside, God forbid, you’ve got it. I really think this might be insulated from the other debates. Or even bolstered by them.”

  Sandy nodded. “You may be right there. And the usefulness of all these gadgets is hard to gauge, from what I understand.”

  “That’s a good thing,” Cedric said, noticing the look of worry that appeared on Wes’s face.

  “Definitely a good thing,” Sandy agreed. “I think it’s brilliant, Wes. It makes a statement. It communicates an interest in the greater good. It hits on big ideas without making big promises. I say we do studies on the major forces in the market, put out some feelers, draw up profiles, and make an approach.”

  Wes, feeling like he’d ceded some essential part of himself—and dear God, there was a relief in that—had patted the conference table and stood. “Do it, then. Keep me updated.”

  The report had been ready in a matter of days. There were three sizable, suitable companies specializing in mass-market tick-protection products. The biggest, Circutex, had all of the Atlantic Zone government contracts, as well as contracts with the other North American zones and several international ones, and a handful of lucrative out-of-zone corporate contracts, including the beef supplier for Burger Blitz. They specialized in industrial microsuits—spacesuits, Wes thought, looking at a sample his staff had brought him. They wouldn’t photograph well at all. The next company, Field and Shaughnessy, had a product called NO-BITE, available in cream and spray forms, that touted a 95 percent effectiveness rate against miner ticks and other invasive insect species. It had been around for a long time, nearly sixteen years, and though Wes suspected the company wouldn’t mind a splashy new corporate partner to bring new attention to an old standard, he just didn’t see the opportunity in that for Pocketz. That was an easy pass.

  The last possibility—a somewhat mysterious umbrella corporation called Perrone Inc.—was the most interesting to Wes. Its owner, David Perrone, seemed to have a lot of capital, and his investments through Perrone Inc. were all over the place, literally and metaphorically: a chain of quick-lube shops, with locations both in Atlantic Zone and Gulf; a few outer-zone factories; an upscale Salon and Spa in Raleigh; and maybe some Wall fortifications subcontracting, though Sandy admitted that the dotted lines on those were harder to trace. Perrone himself had gone over the last three years from having, astoundingly, almost no significant digital footprint—there were Pocketz accounts in his wife’s and sons’ names, an expired Mi Familia account, a few other weirdly vague, random hits in the feeds—to quietly emerging online and in life, forming a picture of a cautious family man with powerful ties to some of the heaviest hitters among conservative zone leadership. “I think this is a person,” Sandy told Wes, “who is primed for some kind of a positive, public coming out.”

  It sounded almost sinister, when she put it like that, though Sandy saw this as a mark strongly in Perrone’s favor.

  Perrone Inc. also owned a start-up called SecondSkins, a microsuit marketed not in bulk to out-of-zone contractors but mostly in direct sales, via the web, to individuals, regular folks—well, rich regular folks. SecondSkins had a few bulk contracts. One was an outer-zone touring company, Outer Limits Excursions; Perrone Inc. wa
s an investor. They also sold to some specialty shops in Gulf Zone, where tick infestations cropped up a few times a year, always causing a big panic and leading to quarantines, refugee relocations, riots. It was a strange product. People who could afford a SecondSkin Elite Microsuit (3,500 credits) were largely not the people who would ever be in a position to need one. But Wes’s antennae tingled as he reviewed the report. OLE was a relatively new operation, and there were others cropping up, here and in other zones. It was natural for a kind of large-scale claustrophobia to set in once the panicked post-eradication years were behind them, mostly. People were going to want to travel. Take calculated risks.

  Hell, Wes would buy one. As a sufferer from what his psychiatrist called “health anxiety,” his own personal flavor of OCD, Wes was always on the lookout for ways to shield his sad sack of fallible human flesh from disease and injury.

  Talk of the Wall was abstract to him. It had been there for the entirety of his lifetime, would be there, he believed—political debates notwithstanding—long after he was gone. He’d never seen it in person. Never traveled within the span of its perimeter, felt its vibration. It was like God: you took its existence on faith, mostly, and you assumed it meant you well. Or you didn’t. But if the scientists were to conclude tomorrow, for sure, that it was an enormous expenditure of energy with no real environmental impact, outside of an increased rate of earthquakes and (some claimed) brain damage and hearing loss to those living and working long-term in its shadow—say they proved it, and the Greens had their way and razed it—well, these forces were beyond Wes’s power of influence. They were certainly beyond the average Atlantic Zoner’s power of influence.

  A suit, though—your own little personal Wall within the Wall, another barrier between your body and global disaster? Well, Wes knew there would always be a market for that. Especially if it came (as SecondSkins really should, he thought) in a fashionable, figure-flattering cut, with customizable colors and patterns. This was a product Wes himself could stand behind. Could stand in.

  And that’s when the last piece of his plan had clicked into place. It was kind of mad, really—and he’d have to do a hard sell to his board and shareholders to convince them the risks were worth the reward. But what better way to make a show of solidarity with SecondSkins (Wes had already assumed his approach of the company would be successful, that they’d feel they’d won the corporate lottery) than for Wes Feingold, Pocketz CEO, to travel out-of-zone wearing one?

  Oh, would he have hatched such a scheme if he weren’t still smarting from the breakup with Sonya, if he didn’t want a drastic change of scenery—a drastic change in himself? No. In that way, he’d been honest with Marta. But he couldn’t let slip his other motives, not to Marta and not anyone else on the excursion, either. If he were to be bitten in the next three weeks (Think positive, Wes! he told himself, his personal “Wall” now bunched awkwardly over his bent knees), the SecondSkins partnership was a bust. Pocketz would have to find some other investment opportunity. But OLE was taking every precaution to make sure Wes didn’t get bitten, that the deal would go through as planned and Wes would return from the excursion triumphant, ready to describe his experiences and boldly announce his intentions to invest in SecondSkins Gen2, a comfortable, attractive microsuit available at a price point (1,000 credits) even the middle class could afford.

  —

  He was almost comfortable now, thinking through the particulars of the launch, when he heard something: voices. Coming not from the camp but from the woods out beyond him.

  At first he was just embarrassed, and he pulled up his underwear and zipped back into the microsuit with frantic, haphazard motions, face so hot that it felt like a giveaway, an ember in the dark. Then his instinct was to hold very still, to let the voices pass him back to the camp, so that he wouldn’t risk startling them and having to explain himself.

  His flashlight, still on, had dropped into his lap. He switched it off and held his breath.

  There was rustling in the leaves, a broad movement of at least two bodies, then a pause. Wes peered into the direction of the noise, but his vision had been seared momentarily by staring at the flashlight beam.

  “How do we do this?” Wes didn’t recognize the voice. It was male, raspy.

  “Fast,” another voice said, and this one he knew. “I’ll point you to your positions. I’ll point out the tents with the VIPs.” There was more murmuring, this too muffled for Wes to distinguish. “—under no circumstances. Got it?”

  A high-pitched voice, maybe female: “Yeah.”

  The raspy voice again. “Yeah.”

  Maybe there was another. Wes couldn’t be sure.

  “Let’s move, then,” Andy said.

  Wes could see a bit better now, well enough to distinguish the shapes of four figures. Moonlight glinted off something on one of their shoulders.

  It was the barrel of a gun.

  He pressed himself against the tree, biting his lips to contain his rapid breath. There had been time in his other life to wonder, with casual curiosity and even a little yearning, what he would do in one of those situations that were always cropping up on the news feeds: convenience store holdups, back-alley attacks, home invasions. There had been incidents in the last couple of years of PickPocketz, thugs with clever technology for getting past the company’s complex security firewalls, even the coercion monitors, and forcing victims to authorize untraceable large-scale credit transfers. What if that were me? Wes had wondered when these stories crossed his desk. Was he a fighter or a fleer? He was the kind of man—diminutive, neurotic, cerebral—that people automatically assumed was the latter.

  But it was not as simple as all that. For now, watching those four dark figures stride toward the corona of light at the top of the hillside, he was neither. He was an animal, paralyzed. And yet he was also his fourteen-year-old self, trying to find a logical explanation, an algorithm for creeping, weapon-wielding menaces who belonged out here in the darkness, who didn’t actually mean him and the rest harm. People from the Wall. Government. Something they forgot to tell us, some problem they’re here to notify us about. That’s why Andy’s with them.

  He thought about earlier, when Andy’s mask—was it a mask?—of gruff good cheer slipped. What was left when it did: the contempt.

  Fight. With what? He reached down and retrieved the flat rock he’d used to dig his makeshift latrine. It felt utterly inconsequential.

  Run. Where would he go? Andy had the food, the shelter, the maps. The guns.

  And Marta was still up there.

  He gripped the rock, cast his gaze around. A stick. A bigger rock. Something. Anything.

  They were almost to the top of the hill.

  Go.

  He moved before he could doubt himself, hunkering low to the ground, trying to make his steps light. The damp, rotten smell of the leaves was very close now, no longer pleasant; he was dragging himself through the stuff, would probably have ticks crawling all over him, but what could he do about it?

  There was a brisk clapping at the camp—sharp, but reasonable. Sane.

  “Lights on, folks,” Andy called out. His voice was so steady, so full of the old reassuring charm that Wes had come to associate with him, that he doubted himself for a moment. Had he seen—heard—what he thought he had?

  The glow at the hilltop brightened. Wes could hear murmuring, grumbles.

  “I’m going to need you all to step out of your tents. This’ll only take a minute or two. Got to do a quick head-count.”

  Wes took a few more steps, careful to stay behind the cover of a stand of trees. He could see the clearing now. Andy and the three other figures from the woods were there. They had positioned themselves evenly around the circle of tents and slightly behind them, each wearing a mining light that blazed so brightly that the people emerging from their tents could only blink in dazed confusion, holding up their hands
as if to blot out the sun. In this way, they didn’t see at first what Wes saw: that Andy and the other three figures were armed with high-powered assault rifles, which were leveled at their torsos. The first to notice was Wendy Tanaka. She screamed, and Andy stepped forward and unceremoniously clocked her with the stock of his gun. Her cry was cut short, and she fell in a heap at his feet. Her brother made as if to go to her, but Andy swung the rifle in his direction, and Ken put both hands in the air in surrender. The others quickly followed suit.

  “That’s one,” Andy said flatly. “Rest of you, line up. Get in the light where I can look at you.”

  The others—Tia was among them, Wes noticed, and her expression of shock was either genuine or a damn good acting job—did as he asked, hands still high in the air. Andy walked from one end of the line to the other.

  “All right,” he said. “Where the fuck’s Feingold?” He went to Marta. “Feingold. Your buddy. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. Wes could see the fright in her eyes even from his hiding spot. “He got out of the tent to relieve himself. Maybe ten minutes ago.”

  “Check the tent,” Andy said to one of the goons, motioning.

  The goon checked. “Not there,” he said in his raspy voice.

  “Fuck,” Andy muttered. He pulled a revolver out of his back waistband and pointed it at Marta’s head. “Yell for him. Yell for Feingold.”

  She looked at him blankly.

  Andy signaled to another of his goons, the woman. “That one,” he said, pointing at Mickey Worthington.

  “Wha—?” Mickey began.

  The woman pulled Mickey out of line by the collar and forced him to his knees.

  “Put him out of his misery,” Andy said, and she unholstered her own revolver and shot him in the temple.

  Wes jolted as if he himself had been shot, every nerve in his body sending out an electric charge. In shock—he couldn’t seem to make himself move—he watched as Marta, Andy’s revolver still pointed at her forehead, screamed, “DON’T COME BACK, WES! DON’T COME BACK! DON’T COME—”