Recombination

by Brendan Butts

  The walls around us began retracting back into the ground almost immediately. My heart was racing with the pure injustice of it all. The guard pointed down the concrete path toward the lights of a street in the distance.

  "Welcome to the mainland. The exit is that way."

  *

  I was out of Cooper City before dawn, on foot. I knew I shouldn't stay near Miami for long. My best bet was to head North toward Boston and try to do odd jobs along the way to survive.

  I knew I couldn't risk calling Sasha or her parents for more money, Skywatch might have already tapped their phones. Plus, they weren't exactly rich and I had a sneaking suspicion they'd cleared out their savings account to give me what money they had.

  I'd just have to make do.

  The scenery on the roads heading north out of Cooper City and winding their way up the East Coast all looked pretty much the same. Large sprawling metropolitan areas surrounded by suburbs that melted away into switchgrass plantations.

  I'd heard stories about the way the lay of the land used to look. Highways surrounded by green forests and farmland and orange groves.

  Most of those forests had been bought up and bulldozed by the energy conglomerates to make way for switchgrass. It's the largest renewable energy source in the country. I tried to imagine what the roads would look like surrounded by that many trees, but my imagination has always been grounded in reality. I just couldn’t manage it.

  A while back they used corn to produce the ethanol used in the ethicol that vehicles run on these days, but corn didn't produce enough energy and switchgrass took over. They say that's why food prices are so high. All the farms produce switchgrass because they can sell it for three or four times as much as something like corn, and it's as easy to grow since it's durable and almost immune to the ever-changing climate in this part of the world.

  It's also cheaper. Switchgrass is what makes it possible for many people to travel and see the country. Or so the report I'd seen on TV had said. At the last census, they reported that 2.5 million citizens were seasonal migrant workers.

  An old switchgrass ace I'd met up on the road a week after leaving Cooper City explained how the switchgrass plantations worked one night as we walked the road together.

  "Walking the roads, you can get free room and board at most switchgrass plantations if you tend the fields and work the refineries the day after." He had a heavy southern drawl that made him difficult to understand. "That's how I manage to stay fed. The migrants follow the birds, see. Migrating south for the colder seasons and back north for the warmer ones. They say a switchgrass ace is never home and their journey never finished."

  "Free food?" I asked, "Really?"

  "If you tend the fields and work the refineries the next day," he repeated.

  "I understand," I said and nodded to him before starting to brushing some dirty clumps of black hair from my face.

  "Just don't go skipping out on work the next day or they'll blacklist you. Won't be able to work at any plantations for at least a season, maybe more."

  I glanced sidelong at the drifter. His skin was darker than mine, though I could tell it hadn't always been. We walked on for a while longer in silence until I noticed he was looking off into the darkness at something.

  "What’s that?” I asked.

  "A plantation. Just over there. This one’s good for you. It's one of the first plantations this far south, they expect newbies to come knocking."

  I turned my gaze in the same direction as the drifter and caught sight of something, though I couldn't make out much more than a rectangular shape in the darkness. The drifter stopped at a small dirt path intersecting with the road.

  "Go ahead. Follow that to the building. Someone will come out to greet you."

  "Thanks. You coming?"

  "No, I fancy a bit more of a walk tonight chum. There’s another plantation a few miles further down the road. Plus, working with newbies isn't my idea of fun. Too much slack to pick up. Maybe we’ll walk together again someday." He raised a hand in parting.

  I raised my hand back and started down the path. The old man didn't offer any parting words or gestures, he just started walking again.

  *

  I made my way down the path for about a hundred yards or so, the building I'd glimpsed from the road growing ever larger. Suddenly, two spotlights atop the low roofed building flickered on and I was doused in a bright light that forced me to cover my eyes. When I had finally adjusted to the light and dropped my hands away, a man was standing in the doorway. Only his silhouette was visible behind the light spilling from within.

  "Staying the night?"

  "I, uh, I’ve never...” I sputtered.

  "First timer, eh? Come on in, I'll get you settled." I followed the man inside, my stomach gurgling loudly in anticipation of what I hoped would be a hot meal.

  The man led me to a small, dimly lit office filled with security monitors and candy wrappers. I kept pace eagerly, wanting to get this over with quickly so I could eat.

  The man sat down at his desk and he entered a few commands onto his computer, "Full name?”

  Seven Ecks, I almost said but stopped myself. The man sensed my reluctance.

  The man blinked at me for a moment before nodding and entering some more commands on his computer, “John Smith it is then. How old are you?”

  “Si--” I stopped myself. “Eighteen,” I said after a pause.

  “Yeah, alright why don’t I just fill the rest in for you, how about that. Welcome to Orlando Plantation, John.”

  "Orlando? Not bad." I said, impressed with how far I'd gotten in only a few days. Then again, I hadn't been sleeping much. My legs hurt like hell from all the walking and I was worried my shoes were going to fall apart.

  "Okay, here's how it works. I get you something to eat, and you hit the sack. Work starts at dawn, that's about six hours from now and you'll want to be rested. You get a break at noon for lunch, and the workday ends at sundown. That's three meals, and a cot to sleep on. If you want dinner, you'll have to stay on for another day. Understand?"

  "I do," I replied without really thinking. My thoughts were focused on food.

  The man nodded and stood up as he said, "We're just pulling up the spring crop, so plenty of work to go around. Follow me."

  He took me to the kitchen for some food, and then to a sleeping area filled with bunk beds. The sight of the beds filled me with a sudden yearning to be back at home, in my parents’ house, safe.

  They’re dead, and you will be to if you don’t stop acting like a baby.

  Climbing into the bed, my stomach filled for the first time in a week felt good.

  It didn't take me long to drift off to sleep. I was woken up in the morning by a different man. He passed out gloves to all the other drifters. There were about forty of us in total. Then he led us out to the fields and we began working.

  The work was boring as hell. On hands and knees, we pulled up endless rows of switchgrass, cleaned off the dirt, and tossed the valuable weed into a wheelbarrow. When the barrel was full enough, you wheeled it over to the refinery about a quarter of a mile away and dumped it onto a conveyor belt. Then, you wheeled the barrel back over to your row and repeated.

  The sun beat down on me and it didn't take me long to strip my shirt off and wrap it around my forehead to keep sweat from dripping into my eyes. I could feel my skin beginning to burn slightly.

  So far, I'd been traveling mainly at night. The sun was something new to me. In Miami, all we had was the overhead glow lights that simulated the sun. My Hispanic heritage gave me a bit more protection than some of the drifters working the plantation, but not much.

  Twelve hours later my stomach was growling again and my entire body ached. I decided I would stay on for another night so as to get the evening meal.

  Days turned into weeks. It took me almost three weeks to realize dinner was how they got you. You work all day and you're hungry and you have no money. If you leave the plantation, you
leave on an empty stomach.

  It took me another month to save and steal enough food to make leaving possible. When I finally did leave the plantation, the warm weather, diamond season, as the drifters called it, was in full swing.

  I had spent almost two months working the fields. The nights were much warmer and I rarely had to take my jacket out of my backpack. As I walked along, I noticed I was able to make better time. Working the fields for so many weeks had toned my muscles and given me an endurance I hadn't known I was capable of.

  *

  I don't ever remember being sick growing up. Any memories of the extensive treatments I had received at five years old were lost to me. As much as I try to remember what it must have been like to be on the cusp of death, I can't. It's blank. There's just nothing there.

  I’d been sick, real sick. Going to die sick. And I wasn’t the only one. There were a bunch of us kids that were dying and Skywatch swooped in with vaccination in hand and offered our parents salvation. The cost for us children, though it wouldn’t become apparent until years later, would be everything. Skywatch owned us. We were property. They could take us away whenever they wanted, do whatever they wanted with us, and no one could stop them. This had all been in the contracts our parents had signed before we were given the vaccinations. Vulnerable parents with deathly ill children, I doubt any of them had read the fine print.

  When I broke my arm as a kid, my parents had to have it set and let it heal on its own. Skywatch had warned them against treating any injury with nano-surgeons as it could render the vaccination inert, leading to my death. I remember my father telling my mother he didn’t think nano-surgeons would be a problem, considering there was no way they would ever be able to afford that kind of medical treatment.

  I never had so much as a cold growing up. My parents had always chalked my good health up to youth and excellent genes, though they’d both been sick on multiple occasions. It was something I wondered about during the random moments of self-reflection in between school and chores and Sasha.

  It wasn't until months after I left home that I even knew the kind of pain being sick could really bring. The loneliness and longing. The desperate desire for someone to tell you that everything was going to be okay. Even if it wasn't.

  It happened in a small switchgrass town called Scantville. The kind that gets by on fast food and pawning off the same ethicol they grow on their plantations for three times what you'd pay in any major city. A highway town.

  It was about a month after leaving my first plantation and about three months after I'd hopped the ferry from Miami to the mainland. That put me about halfway up the East Coast, the southernmost of the Carolinas.

  I was in a 24-hour diner, washing dishes for my evening’s food when the news hit. A vaccine-resistant strain of Ebola was carving a path through the state at a rate the CDC couldn’t keep up with. Normal treatments worked with only a fraction of the success rate they did on the less virulent strains.

  I caught it, maybe from a plate that had been coughed on one too many times, maybe from a toilet that hadn’t been bleached properly.

  I was laid up with the other infected in the town’s high school gymnasium, begging for meds before I really knew what was happening. Almost everyone infected over sixty or under twelve didn't last more than a few days. The mortality rate for teenagers and adults dropped off a bit, but only a bit.

  My chances of survival were under fifty percent, even with Ebola-Nox. It didn't come as any sort of surprise when I overheard the doctors talking about not wasting their dwindling supply of Nox on outsiders. Word had come down from the mayor that the town had taken a vote and now only locals were going to get Nox.

  I was only twelve hours showing so I still had most of my strength. The cough and weakness don't really hit you until 24 hours in.

  I had enough strength to get out of my cot of old blankets and grab my backpack I walked along the rows of the moaning and begging and dying, straight to the back of the gymnasium. In the back was the metal cabinet where they were keeping the Nox. I pulled my extra set of clothes out of my backpack and left them on the floor.

  I filled my backpack up with the town's remaining supply of Nox, triple dosed myself and walked around injecting everyone in the gym.

  I was still feeling bad, but at least I wasn't getting any worse. Everyone got inoculated. The doctors tasked with overseeing the gymnasium and the sick within were so preoccupied with making sure their own loved ones were safe, they didn't even notice me. I overheard phone calls and pleading voicemails left on deaf machine ears as I dutifully marched the aisles, executing my task.

  When I finished, I put the remaining Nox back in the metal cabinet and walked out of the gymnasium. No one stopped me, no one offered a passing question. If I wanted to leave, walk out into the dark and die all by my lonesome, that was my own business. Those I had administered the Nox to seemed to sense what I had done for them, the ones that were still conscious anyway. They watched me go without a word.

  As I was leaving, I looked over my shoulder and caught sight of a man standing in the midst of the double doors of the gymnasium, his head covered by a vacuum sealed helmet. The helmet was as black as the clothes the man wore and the gun on his belt. I was already a good distance away and I couldn't make out any real detail about his form, but I could tell his gaze was directed at me. He made no move to follow, so maybe he didn't realize what I had done.

  I knew that wouldn't last. I knew the townsfolk would realize what had happened soon enough or one of the people I’d injected would realize there was profit in selling me out. Gratitude is fleeting. The Doctors would curse themselves for not guarding their supply of Nox better and then they would be looking for someone to blame.

  The triple dose of Nox and my own good health won out against the Ebola infection, and after a day I was feeling better.

  I burned holes in the soles of my shoes over the next few days as I put as much distance between me and that goddamn town as was humanly possible.

  Chapter 3

  The next time I saw the Helmeted Man, it was a month and a half later. I was in a truck stop diner in North Carolina, just off Interstate-95. A fellow drifter I’d met a few miles back on the road had called the diner a quaint little thang. It reminded me of something out of a movie. There was a long bar area set aside for those who were eating alone or didn't want to wait for one of the few booths inside the small establishment to be vacated.

  I'd gotten there about five pm, early enough that I didn't have to wait. I'd walked in, slid into a booth, and ordered a coffee. I'd spent the day begging change off anyone and everyone who would listen and care in a town a few miles back. I'd been lucky, there hadn't been many beggars about that day. Maybe most of them were already holed up in one of the town's numerous plantations.

  Either way, I'd made enough to afford food and drink. This meant I could skip the next half dozen plantations. I tried to avoid plantations whenever possible as it was too easy to make friends, get comfortable, and put down roots. As much as I craved the feeling of belonging a plantation might provide, I knew I needed to keep moving.

  I had already eaten my meal and was feeling more filled and content than I had in a long while when he walked in. I'd been sitting at my booth for a long while now. I was getting good at drawing my stays at places like this out for as long as possible.

  This was my respite from the open road, and I was long past being driven out prematurely by the dirty looks of waitresses.

  I don't know if he planned it, or if it was just blind luck on his part, but a couple was vacating the booth on the other side of the aisle just as he walked in. He was sitting in the booth almost before the couple had stood up, ignoring the angry looks this drew from the clientele that had been waiting patiently for a table to free up. He didn't look at me directly, but I could feel his gaze on my neck from time to time.

  I was on my third cup of coffee, having expected a long night’s walk, and hoping to draw out
my stay at the diner as long as possible. The caffeine was burning through my system, making me edgy. To this day, I’m not sure how I knew it was the same man from the Scantville gymnasium, but as he stepped through the double doors of the diner, I'd known it just as sure as I'd known anything.

  It could have been the way he'd honed in on me like he was there for me. It could have been the blackness of his helmet and clothes. It could have been the gun on his belt. A magnum, not uncommon in the south, but not something you saw every day either.

  I stiffened at the knowledge of his gaze on me and dipped my hand into my pocket to pull out a handful of change. My hands were shaking from the coffee. I needed to be more careful, I shouldn't have let on that I knew he was there for me.

  The waitress, hoping to leave for the night, had delivered the check a few minutes before the Helmeted Man had walked in. It was a subtle suggestion on her part that I had overstayed my welcome here.

  I hadn't planned on leaving for a while. In fact, I was hoping to get my coffee refilled several more times before I cut out, but now I was thankful that the waitress had been so insistent on leaving. It would have aroused the suspicion of the Helmeted Man if I'd asked for the check just after he'd walked in.

  Now it just looked like I was a traveler, eager to resume his journey.

  I had no idea what the man wanted or what his chosen profession was. Maybe he was a merc hired by the Scantville citizens to pursue the kid who had so eagerly doled out their dwindling supply of Ebola-Nox? Or perhaps a bounty hunter hired by Skywatch to track down their property and bring it back to them?

  Right then, it didn't really matter. This guy was obviously after me, and I'd be damned if I let him get what he wanted.

  I tipped my waitress generously and scrawled a short note on the check she'd placed in front of me with a pen a previous patron had left on the table. Then, I stood up, ignored the Helmeted Man, and walked out into the parking lot.

  I didn't look over my shoulder as I exited the diner, but that was hardly necessary. I knew the Helmeted Man had gotten up and followed me out.