by Bobby Adair
“Tell me about Phil,” says Brice.
That’s a surprising twist.
I hesitate.
I guess at a motive and realize I’ve spent too much time looking for hidden agendas throughout my life. Too many years in a Gray-ruled world. It’s shaped me in a way I didn’t realize had bent towards paranoia until just now. “The Phil thing is complicated.”
“It always is for people who think too much.” Brice smiles after setting the barb. He slaps me on the back to let me know it’s just good fun.
I smile, too. No big deal. He’s right. I don’t want to talk about Phil. “What about you? What’s your story?”
“So that’s how it works?” he asks. “You won’t tell me yours unless I tell you mine?”
“You know a lot more about me than I know about you.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” says Brice. “You already know my dirty laundry. I fragged a captain. You saw me do it.”
“So what else have you got?”
“Two years of watching people die in this war.” He tries to be hard when he says it, attempting to cover his sadness with a cavalier smile. “Three years of cush garrison duty on the moon after I joined the SDF and before the war started. Four years in construction before that.”
“Nine years in space?” It doesn’t seem possible anyone could live up here that long.
“I’ve been wearing an orange suit for a third of my life,” he answers.
“Why go that way in the first place? Everybody knows the dangers of wearing orange.”
“Same reason you got a bug in your head,” he tells me.
“My mom agreed to that before I was a week old,” I laugh. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“Still, your mom had a reason for doing it, right?”
I nod.
“She ever tell you what that was? Or did she think you might grow up to be one of them?”
“That’s kind of it,” I answer. “The same for both questions. My mom was a laborer, and she wasn’t stupid. She knew I wouldn’t turn into a Gray if they put a bug in my head, but she saw the writing on the wall. With the Grays in charge of the earth, my mom figured out pretty early that humans were going to become draft horses bridled to the Grays’ ambitions. Human life was going to become short and sweaty.”
“She was right about that,” observes Brice.”
“My mom didn’t want that for me.”
“You grew up and went to work in a grav factory,” Brice counters. “Still a slave, right? Roomy house? Plenty to eat?”
I pat my flat belly. “More food than most, I suppose, not as much as you’d think.”
“Phil looked like he never missed a meal,” argues Brice. “He worked in that grav factory with you, right?”
Looked? Worked?
Both past tense.
Brice rightly thinks Phil is dead.
Could he have survived that collision? Is he out there, adrift? Injured?
Lies I’m telling myself to pretend he’s not gone.
“We had privileges.” I don’t feel ashamed admitting it. The advantaged life of the bug-heads on earth isn’t a secret. “We had things to trade on the black market. Phil… I don’t know. It’s hard to blame Phil for being heavier.” I laugh, and I realize it sounds like Brice’s dark laugh. Am I picking up the habit from him, or is it something about being in the company of death that makes humor so black?
“How’s that?”
“You know, you’ve seen the old videos, right?”
“From before the siege?” Brice asks. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“People back then, in western countries especially, so many of them were overweight.”
“What?” Brice shakes his head. “I don’t know what shows you watched but I always imagined before the siege, everybody was perfect. I didn’t see many old vids, but in the ones I saw, that’s what was there. Perfect hair. Perfect teeth. Perfect clothes. Everybody drove a shiny car.”
“Not the movies and TV shows,” I clarify. “The news. Documentaries. Stuff that showed real life.”
Brice shrugs.
“America used to be the most powerful nation on the planet. Back then the people had everything they ever wanted. Their biggest problems were overeating, drinking too much, and spending all their savings.”
Brice appears perplexed.
“You never watched the old news vids?” I can’t believe it. “Never had an interest in history?”
“Never had a TV,” says Brice. “Wouldn’t matter if we did. I worked when I got home from school. I worked from sunup to sundown when they cut me loose after sixth grade.”
“No TVs in your school?”
“Some,” he answers. “We never saw anything about history. The TVs were for the kids on the high school prep track. Most of us were bound for the farms. You don’t need a TV to teach kids how to spell and count, add and subtract. Mostly school was a babysitting service, a place to keep us while our parents worked in the fields, at least until we were big enough to work ourselves. So I don’t know what you’re talking about. I suppose I’ve seen some pictures here and there, heard stories about how things used to be, but you know, I never believed half of them, just old-timers pining for the old days. They always make things seem better than they were.”
“They were probably telling the truth.”
Brice sighs. “I suppose. All that perfect hair and those perfect teeth must have meant something. What’s that got to do with Phil?”
“I guess I don’t want you to think Phil’s problems are all his.”
“Whatever you say.”
I lean on a pallet of explosives, maybe enough to blow all of Breckenridge into orbit. I comm link to Blair. “Is Tarlow coming?”
“Not yet,” she tells me. “We’re trying to coordinate down here.”
“People are dying,” I remind her. Even I feel like an asshole for saying it.
Her response is testy. “I’m not sending my people headlong into an ambush. We’ll do this right or not at all.”
“Yes, Colonel.”
Blair huffs. “We have another two dozen or so down here. More on the way. Not nearly as many died in the bombardment as we thought.”
“Are they armed?”
“Mostly,” she tells me, “with disruptors and single-shot railguns.”
“Okay.” I figure it’s best not to push any harder. “Let me know when Tarlow leaves.”
Brice is looking at me with an odd expression on his face.
“What?”
“I’m riveted by this story of Phil’s weight problem.” He sounds vaguely sarcastic, but I’m not sure. “It might be the most interesting story I’ll hear all day.”
I’m not sure I want to say anything more about it. I sit on a pallet of large metal buckets. They all sport labels covered with warnings and directions, fine print—thousands of words no one will ever read. Looking around inside the bunker for any distraction, I realize for the tenth time, there isn’t much to do while waiting. So, I talk. “He had a brother.”
“Lots of people do.”
“They were both bug-heads,” I tell Brice.
“How long have you known him?”
“We were in school together, all of the “special” kids. Pre-school, I guess. They started us young. I’ve always known Phil.”
“What’s this brother got to do with anything?” Brice wickedly smiles. “Did Phil eat him?”
I shake my head. “He died when he was six.”
Brice feels bad about his off-color joke, but I don’t make a thing of it. We don’t have vaccinations like they did before the siege. We don’t have antibiotics, not in a large enough supply for everyone. We don’t have much in the way of medicines, not for anybody who’s not Korean. Lots of babies die. Lots of kids don’t make it adulthood. Death is always around. You get used to it.
Chapter 27
“They told us the news over at the hospital.” I start, thinking of the smells in that
place, like a closed-up house with no breeze where rats have been trapped with mounds of their shit and only an acrid hint of antiseptic to make it seem like the air is safe to breathe. I can taste it. I remember how the funk clung to my clothes and followed me through the rest of the day. “The doctors told his parents it was an immune reaction to the bug in his head. Like with me and Phil, they put the bug in his brother’s head when he was a baby, but it never took. His body never accepted it. Then, when his lymphocytes couldn’t kill it—got tired of trying I guess—they went insane and turned on him.”
Brice grimaces.
“The doctors had big words for it all. I’m not going to claim I understood everything.” I don’t know why the disclaimers are important, they just seem like they are. “Phil’s brother was sick all the time, as his body was eating itself up from the inside. It took years for him to die, while his organs struggled to develop into a regular person. It just failed. He grew up disproportionally. He was always small and skinny compared to other kids his age, but his head kept growing. Just the bones, not the skin. It looked like one day his face might stretch so tight it would split open when he laughed or coughed.” I take a breath, even though I’m feeling the amphetamine cocktail still coursing through my blood, the story is bringing me back to that time, unreeling like a poorly edited movie in my head, full of abstract emotions.
“I went with them to the doctor many times. I don’t know why. I was a kid. I went along because an adult brought me. It never seemed weird until the thought came back to me as a grownup.” I glance up at Brice and see he’s paying attention because this next part is important, at least to me. “I know Phil’s mom wanted to believe the doctors were trying to help his little brother but they weren’t. They were taking measurements and running tests. They wanted to understand everything about their little patient, to know what was making him tick. To them, he was nothing more than an experiment, and they weren’t going to give him any drug that might harm the bug or kill it.”
“How do you know that?” asks Brice. “Did they tell you?”
The question takes me off guard, because I realize I don’t know the answer. I never heard a doctor say those things. No one in Phil’s family ever offered up any evidence for their suspicions, yet Phil believed it strongly, and so did his dad. The old man went on about it with tinfoil hat tenacity, at least when Phil’s little brother and mother weren’t around. I answer Brice with something vague. “Things I heard.”
Brice accepts my answer and nods to prompt me on.
“The kid died. It was the flu that finally finished him off one winter. I remember Phil crying a lot. His mom tumbled into a black mood she never recovered from. His dad took to working more, or finding ways to avoid coming home. I almost never saw the old man after that.”
“I’ve been to funerals for kids,” says Brice. “They’re never easy.”
“There wasn’t a funeral.” Even as a kid, that seemed unusual to me. “The doctors bagged up Phil’s brother and took him away, telling Phil’s parents he was the property of the MSS. Just like that. No grave. No service. Nothing.”
“Damn shame,” says Brice.
He’s right.
“An unusual thing happened after that,” I say. “The food ration for Phil’s brother never stopped coming. I know I’m exaggerating when I say it, but to me, it seemed like Phil’s mother made Phil eat every bite of it. After watching one child waste away, a skinny kid was the most horrid thing she could imagine. She blamed herself, ultimately she had to, I guess. She chose to let the Grays put the bug in her kids’ heads. She turned into love-overkill mom, stuffing Phil with every crumb she could find, protecting him from skinned knees, other kids’ meanness, bug bites, you name it. If she could have wrapped him in a papoose and carried him around on her back, I think she would have.”
“And he got bigger?” asks Brice, trying to be unusually polite.
“Chubbier with each passing year. At school, kids teased him.” I look at Brice, because I know he knows this. “You never see fat kids anywhere, anymore. You rarely see obese adults. Not enough food left on earth after we ship everything to the moon colony or orbital battle stations, or the mines in the asteroid belt, or the SDF, or the construction crews, or fucking North Korea. Not enough people left on earth to grow what’s needed.” I shrug. “People, not just kids, resented Phil for his weight. It changed him. Made him—”
“Prickly?” Brice suggests.
“Yeah.” It’s a fitting word.
At a stopping point in Phil’s history, we don’t say anything for a while.
I call Blair again for an update on Tarlow’s progress, and she promises me he’s on the way.
Still, nothing more to say.
We stare and wait, until another of my memories comes up that I haven’t thought about for a long time. “You know, I saw one die once.”
Chapter 28
“You saw a Gray die?” Brice is skeptical. It’s something every human dreams about seeing, however, the layers of elegant sincerity wrapped around most stories of dead Grays fall away under questioning, exposing the wistful rumor beneath.
My story is real, though, not something I heard about, something I saw.
The incident is clear in my mind like it just happened. “I was thirteen then. I lived down near Silverthorne before the spaceport grew up to take over the whole valley. In those days, every mine with a kilo or two of ore still in the ground was being worked to support the grav factories and shipyards. Trailers to house the miners were spread over every flat meadow and muddy riverbank through the mountains.
“My mom and me lived in a row of identical trailers, two-room boxes on wheels packed tightly on three acres of bare dirt a few blocks uphill from the Blue River. She slept in the bedroom. I used the couch in the other room, which doubled as our living room and kitchen. Phil lived two houses down with his parents and brother, four of them in a place identical to ours.
I half chuckle. “It seems shitty now to live in such cramped squalor.” I look at Brice. He knows the privileges bug-heads get, so I don’t feel like I’m bragging. I don’t know what I feel about it. “Now I have a house with an upstairs and a basement with a grassy lawn and trees. Three people on three floors, each twice the size of those trailers we lived in.”
“Your mom made the right choice putting a bug in your head,” says Brice. “The house I grew up in sounds a bit like your trailer, but no wheels. It was rotting right out from underneath us. My dad was always scrounging wood and scrap sheet metal to fix holes in the roof and floor.”
For a moment, it seems Brice is nostalgic for it. Maybe I am, too. Squalor isn’t bad when it’s all you know. At least life had a simplicity to it then, the only worry was constant hunger. Even the MSS seemed like a problem for parents to deal with, not kids.
“I didn’t realize it until I was in fourth or fifth grade—everybody who lived on the three-acre dirt plot had bug-headed kids—the MSS had long since relocated the miners who lived there before us. The Grays wanted us kids to play together, to form pods or whatever. We were an experiment, members of the first generation of implanted humans with a bug since birth. There were a dozen colonies of us around the valley, yet all of us kids attended the same school. We didn’t have any normal friends. They kept those kids separate from us, at least until they moved them all out of the Gray Zone.”
“A Gray Zone?” Brice asks. “I haven’t heard that phrase since I was a kid. What is a Gray Zone?”
“That’s what they called it in those days, Breckenridge and places like it,” I answer. “It was supposed to be an area safe for the Grays.” I laugh at the bleak reality of earth’s situation. “Now the whole planet is a Gray Zone. It didn’t take long for that to happen—a single generation.”
“Safe for Grays.” Brice is just as disgusted by the state of the world. “Not so much for people.”
“It was summer,” I continue, getting back on track with my story. “Me and Phil were riding our bikes
up to Frisco. We were headed toward town to meet up with a couple kids we knew from school, and the three of us wanted to hike up the mountain and follow the ridges south down Tenmile Range, hitting all the peaks along the way until we reached Hoosier Pass. We were stupid enough to think we could do the whole hike by midday and make it back home in time for dinner.” I laugh, genuinely. “Probably a good thing we never got up the mountain that day.”
“How’s that?” asks Brice.
“No way we could made it back. We’d have ended up missing days of school. The MSS would have punished our parents.”
Brice grimaces. Everybody knows about the MSS’s brutal discipline.
“It was still early.” I remember the way the sun felt hot on my face even though the air was still cool. It had been a dry summer. There wasn’t any moisture in the air to take the edge off the sun’s harsh glare. “Me and Phil had just rolled down the dirt road, not pedaling more than a few times on the downhill zigzag to the bridge across the river.
“The spaceport wasn’t as busy then as it is today. Earth’s industry was only a dozen years past the siege and was still ramping up to meet the Grays’ needs. Still, big semis hauled shipments along Highway 9 in what seemed like an unending slow line on the rough road. All that cargo was destined for the grav lifts to be shot into orbit for construction of the space station.
“We stopped at the corner of the two-lane highway, in the parking lot of the ration distribution center. The trucks were loud and slow, with one rolling by every thirty or forty seconds. Dust was in the air so thick it got in your eyes, and you could taste the grit in your mouth. Half the asphalt on the road had crumbled away because the Grays had no interest in fixing it. We were waiting for a gap between the trucks so we could cross. Mostly, we were just watching the semis, because the truth was, there was enough space between them we could have crossed any time. Phil saw it first, and pointed it out to me. He always had a good sense for when Grays were around.”
