by John Shirley
“No, dude, shit, you can ask her if I was doggin’ on her. Ask her yourself if we—when we find her.”
Cal took a deep breath. “What makes you think she’s . . . gone?”
“Okay, I was talking to Siseela, and she’s like, ‘It was so weird, Adair left in the middle of the day with the school counselor lady.’ And I’m like, ‘So, she probably went with her to see her mom or something,’ and she’s like, ‘No, uh-uh, they went down the road the opposite way toward the country and that Santavo bitch has been acting weird, too.’ And Santavo’s the one took Adair with her.”
Cal stared at him. “Okay, you are stoned. But, uh, if she went off with a school official-like person, that’s not too weird, really. I mean, it’s not like some guy in a ski mask grabbed her or something.”
But Waylon was staring past him at something. Cal turned and saw that on the residential side of the fence, behind the Burger King parking lot, a fat guy with his toupee flopping in the wind was putting a homemade satellite dish up on the roof of his little house.
“That shit is freaking me out,” Waylon said. “All over town, people putting up these freaky little transmitters—or whatever they are.”
Cal snorted. “Okay. You’re a paranoid, just like Mason. Speaking of that asshole, I’m gonna call him, get him to go look for Adair with me in his van.”
“Hey, I’m gonna go with—”
But then a Bronco with a lot of mud on the wheels and miles on the engine pulled up beside them, the driver lightly honking her horn. It was a lady with a face softening to fat around the edges and dyed platinum hair, someone Cal didn’t know. But he guessed it was Waylon’s mom when she said, “Waylon, come on, hon, we have to go.”
“What? Where?”
“I’ll explain, but in the car, please. I don’t want to shout our business all over heck and gone.”
Waylon grimaced, shaking his head in an exaggerated motion. “Whatever.” He turned to Cal. “So you’re gonna find Adair?”
“Gonna find Mason to help me find Adair, yeah.”
Waylon’s mom cocked her head at this, as Waylon asked, “So you got a cell phone or what?”
Cal nodded. “Carrying it. Don’t know if it’s still working. I’m way behind on payments.” He thought, What could it hurt, scribbled the cell phone number on Waylon’s arm. Then Cal watched Waylon get into the Bronco and ride away.
Cal went back to filling out the form, but hurriedly now. He wanted to find Mason—and Adair.
And not one minute passed before Mason drove up in his van. “Hey, dude. What’s the haps.”
Cal stared at him. “This is weird shit. People just coming to— whatever. Mason, I’m trying to find Adair. You know where she is?”
“I think I probably do, Cuz-o. She’s hangin’ with some other kids. Come on. I’ll take you there.”
Cal took the application in to the older black guy who managed the Burger King, then hurried back out to Mason’s van and got in beside him. Something felt strange. There was something about the way Mason had just shown up. And he just showed up knowing where Adair was.
But he shrugged. What else was he going to do? At least for once Mason’s van didn’t reek of pot.
So he let Mason drive him down Quiebra Valley Road, toward the country.
December 13, evening
Waylon snorted and shook his head in another well-practiced display of amazement.
“A blood test? Mom, I haven’t said anything about being sick, and they haven’t said anything at school about any blood tests.”
“There’s an emergency in town,” Waylon’s mom said, “because of that thing that crashed, the satellite you were talking about, and the toxic fumes from it. You need a blood test to see if you’ve been poisoned. You went out to that crash site, after all. More than once. And the second time, you saw things.”
“Yeah, but, Mom, I didn’t imagine what I saw. I’ve been writing it up. I’m gonna—” He broke off, realizing he hadn’t told his mom about the things he’d seen at the site, the second time.
Maybe she’d gotten into his files. Maybe she’d been reading his stuff behind his back.
He turned to stare at her, thinking about challenging her on that. How the fuck did you know? But somehow, he was afraid to confront her. Something was warning him not to, and he didn’t quite understand what it was.
They were pulling into the high school parking lot, driving around the back of the school. It looked like a used-car lot back there, lots of cars standing dark and empty, parked sort of haphazardly next to the school gym. The outside rear door of the gym was open, and a couple of kids slouched restlessly in the doorway with their stolid parents. As Waylon watched, they stepped once, further into the gym. They were in a line—waiting for the blood test, he supposed.
His mom pulled her Bronco up not far from the gym door, and a minute later they were in the line, Waylon hearing the echoing murmur of people in the big spaces of the gym. Surprisingly little noise, really.
Only the kids were talking, to one another, Waylon realized, as, in another minute, he and his mom stepped into the gym. The gym smelled of dust and varnish and antiseptic and faintly of sweat. The basketball backboards were folded up against the rafters; the bleachers were retracted into the walls. It was a big softly reverberating room with a line of people along one wall, and near the entrance to the locker rooms and showers were a couple of nurses in white uniforms, both of them black women, working at a small brown craft table. They had the kids sit in a chair when they drew the blood, and put discarded needles in an open box. Nearby sat other boxes, cushioned with bubble wrap, for the little vials of blood.
A pale chunky kid huddled in the chair, getting his blood taken; he wore three-quarter pants that showed his fat white calves, no socks in his Adidases, a sleeveless Master P T-shirt, one of those “mushroom head” haircuts, thick on top and buzzed on the sides. Waylon remembered him from school, reciting rap and calling people blud and cuz though the black kids just sneered at him for it. The chunky kid sat there with his mouth hanging open, looking away as they stuck a needle in his arm and sucked the blood out into a big plastic syringe.
The blood test table was clear across the big room, but the deep dark red of the blood seemed to blossom in the syringe like a sudden alien flower, calling Waylon’s eyes to it.
He hated the sight of blood, and this whole cheerful little procession made his stomach clench up. Why hadn’t there been any announcement about it at school? Maybe there had been; maybe he’d missed it. He didn’t pay attention to stuff like that. But somehow he doubted anyone had announced it.
This whole thing made him think about something he’d read on-line about an upsurge in autism and some kinds of cancer, caused by mass vaccinations of the fifties and sixties. Some overlooked impurity in the vaccine. And there was supposed to be a government conspiracy to cover up that gigantic mistake.
Maybe this could be part of that conspiracy. The kids might be here to get injections to hide the tainted vaccines. Or they could be testing biowarfare agents on the town; the government had done it before.
Maybe that’s what the “satellite” had been, really. The crash staged to expose the town to some biowar virus. They could be testing them all for the exposure here.
But then why test only the kids?
This mass blood testing had to be tied in with some kind of conspiracy. This was just too sudden, with no explanations.
Then Waylon’s chain of speculation broke when Mr. Sorenson, the vice principal, came out into the gym through the locker room door, on the boys’ side. He was an imposing man, almost six and a half feet, broad shouldered but otherwise slender, with a long neck and a big Adam’s apple. He wore a yellow golf shirt and gray slacks. He picked up one of the containers of blood samples and went back in the locker room with it.
What’s up with that? Mr. Sorenson personally helping with the blood?
A lot of the kids seemed nervous, some talking to their neighbo
rs in line. But the parents were completely quiet, except to respond to the kids. It wasn’t right, how quiet the parents were. Lots of these people had to know each other. Yet they weren’t speaking.
“Mom, this is fucked up.” Waylon shook his head and looked at his mom. “I don’t want to do this.”
She looked at him with a peculiar calmness. She seemed alert, friendly, relaxed—and bland. That wasn’t like her. If she wasn’t stoned or depressed, she was talking a lot, keeping her spirits up, trying to get to know people. She was way more social than he’d ever be.
But not now. Mom didn’t say anything. She just took a step forward when the line moved, a skinny Asian kid replacing the pale chunky guy at the bloodsucking chair, and she smiled at him.
“Mom?”
“Yes, Waylon?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to hear you say something.”
Waylon watched the pale chunky kid go to stand with a group of other kids who’d already been tested, their parents standing behind them in a line against the section of the wall that contained the machine-retracted bleachers. The parents were silent; the kids were muttering softly to one another.
Waylon looked around. It was a hella big gymnasium; metal rafters near the ceiling. High glazed windows; he could see a single star through one of the open windows in the far upper corner.
He wanted to be out there, instead, where stars shone. And he wished Adair was with him. He wished he knew where she was.
Waylon glanced at his mom again. She seemed so self-contained, all of a sudden. Friendly, but distant. So what was it? What was bothering him?
He hadn’t smoked a major blunt, or anything. Just a bowl, really. He felt kind of furry around the edges, with the details flintily sharp in a tunnel-vision kind of way. That lady in front of Mom seemed so still, the way she stood there, it was like she wasn’t breathing. But the glossy auburn curve of the way her hair was set seemed to pulse faintly.
Okay, he was used to that kind of bullshit with dope. It wasn’t like he was really big-ass loaded.
So why did his mom suddenly seem like she was acting ?
“Mom, where’d you hear about this blood test thing? I mean, did someone call you up?”
She seemed to consider for a long moment. “Yes. There was a call. A phone call. We were called here.”
He looked at her, feeling odd, as he took her words in. He was feeling a chill, right in his heart, and it was spreading out through him. It was hard to tell exactly what was wrong with Mom. An oddness about the way she talked, that sense that she was acting. Maybe it was the bowl he’d smoked.
Mr. Sorenson came out again, walked over to the pale chunky kid, and took him by the arm. “Come on back, please, Ronald.”
Waylon could just make out their voices. Yeah, Ronald, that was his name.
Ronald looked at the doors to the locker room. Clearly he didn’t want to go. “Is there something—something wrong with my blood?”
The other kids tittered nervously at that.
“No, nothing wrong, exactly, we just have to check some things, to make sure. Come on, we’ll show you,” Mr. Sorenson said.
He led Ronald into the locker room. And the line moved forward.
Waylon was aware of his heart pounding. He felt like his skin was too small for his body.
Maybe I’m being paranoid, he thought.
Or maybe I’m scared for a good reason.
Waylon made up his mind. “Mom, I’m gonna find the bathroom. I’ve gotta pee big-time.”
She looked at him. “No, you’d better wait.” Then she frowned. It was as if the frown was an afterthought.
“Be right back.” Waylon trotted away from her, up the line. The two black nurses were heavyset women with conked hair, one very dark and the other light-skinned. They both looked up at once as he passed, both of them turning their heads to watch him go into the locker room.
The windowless locker room seemed empty at first; the only human presence was a smell of sweat and soap. He couldn’t see anyone in the PE office, that little glassed-in cubicle across from the rows of lockers. Then he heard a sob, echoing from beyond the office. A boy’s whimper, coming thinly, distorted, from the showers.
Waylon walked carefully between rows of lockers, and it seemed to take forever, as if the aisle stretched out, telescoped past the empty rows of metal locker doors. As he approached the showers, he stopped to stare at a machine of a kind he’d never seen, just beside the showers’ entrance. It was on a tripod as high as he was tall, with a glass tray suspended near the top, between the legs, and some kind of laser beaming where the three supports of the tripod met, aiming down into a petri dish of blood. A little panel wired to the side of the laser gave a readout, and a wire extended into the blood. When he took a step closer to the machine and peered into the dish, he could see little metal things that swam around in the blood, like krill.
The mechanism looked jury-rigged, slung together from various parts taken from here and there, and not like something that came from a medical lab. And it gave off a buzzing sound, as if muttering to itself.
Waylon took a step closer to the tiled entrance, leaned to peer into the clean bright starkly geometrical spaces of the showers. Mr. Sorenson was kneeling beside the pale chunky kid, Ronald, holding him down on the tiled floor. Ronald was on his back. The vice principal seemed to hold the boy down without much effort though Ronald was a big sort of kid and he was struggling as the tanned, muscular, burr-headed PE teacher, Mr. Waxbury, gripped the boy’s jaws, forcing them apart with his two hands.
Mr. Waxbury was leaning over Ronald as if he was going to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The boy tried to scream, but could make only choking sounds because the metal stalk extending from Mr. Waxbury’s own throat was jamming down into the boy’s mouth. And something pulsed along the cable, from Mr. Waxbury to Ronald, like millions of tiny stainless steel aphids. Little things crawled into the deepest insides of the writhing boy. Then Mr. Sorenson brought a small box close and pulled the boy’s shirt up. Something extended itself from a gash in Mr. Sorenson’s right palm, and there was a flashing, scissoring, a spattering of skin and blood the way sawdust flies from a buzz saw, and the boy was filleted open. Mr. Sorenson inserted something in the surgical wound, something Waylon couldn’t see. Then Sorenson shifted, his body blocking Waylon’s view.
But he could see Ronald’s legs; they gave a final shudder and went limp.
“Oh, fuck,” Waylon breathed, without even knowing he was saying it right out loud.
Mr. Waxbury and Mr. Sorenson—the Mr. Waxbury thing, the Mr. Sorenson thing—both snapped their heads up at once. Locked their eyes on his.
They stood, turning toward Waylon. Sorenson glanced at Ronald. “It’ll finish the first phase on its own now.”
Waylon took a step back. A moment of mutual uncertainty—if he ran, then they’d come after him; and if they came after him, he’d run.
Mr. Waxbury tensed.
Ronald sat up with a snap and looked at Waylon with the same expression the adults had. Bland but alert, predatory eyes. His belly was still filleted, flayed open. Things clicked and revolved within him behind a curtain of blood and mucus.
“Cuz! Check it out,” Ronald said, tugging his shirt down to cover his wound, grinning. “Turns out it’s all okay, after all. I feel way so much better now.” He clambered to his feet in one smooth motion. “I feel like I got mad skills, bro. Let ’em test your blood. Let ’em do it to you. It’s like when I got broadband, cuz, but it’s way better.”
“It’ll be better yet,” the Waxbury thing said. “After the enhancements, the supplements, the modifications. It goes in stages. But it’s fast, now, you see? Isn’t it, Ronald?”
“Yeah, I hardly felt a thing, dog!” He paused, thoughtful, and then went on, “See, the young ones, some of them—that’s just some of them, see—they don’t convert so easily to the All of Us. Something in the blood. There’s chemicals that are, what, like, produced when pe
ople are a little more aware of themselves and stuff around them. See, what the All of Us is telling me is, if you’re not ‘the type to join us’ easy, well, dog, the blood test can find that out because some chemicals they know about are, like, produced as a side effect of being, you know, that kind of guy. But see, dude, if you’re already like I was, halfway there anyway, and you’re, like, into just being entertained and getting hooked up to shit, then you can convert fast to one of them and you won’t, like, fight it afterwards. Otherwise they got to reset you, they got to kill you and, like, take you apart. Some of us can go to the highest interface right away and, well, fuck, we like it that way. You see? For the All of Us, cuz?”
Ronald took a step toward him, his eyes shining with an almost enviable joy in his rightness.
Waylon said, “I . . . don’t know.”
Then he heard a door open. He turned and saw the open door to the sports gear room. Racks were filled with basketballs, and tennis rackets, and football padding, each marked QUIEBRA HIGH SCHOOL PROPERTY. And a body was lying on the floor back there. He couldn’t see who it was; he could just see the legs sticking out. But then the legs twitched. Whoever it was, was still alive.
And someone else came out of that room, from the side the body was on. It was Cleo, that girl from school. Donny’s girlfriend. Or ex.
She was naked. Stark naked. Tan lines around her pale breasts, tan marking out pale skin in a bikini shape around her blond crotch. She looked alert and happy. Something white dribbled from the corner of her mouth. Waylon at first thought it was spittle, but then he realized it was semen.
“You can have sex with me,” she said. “Gary did. I gave him incredible sex. You can have sex and drugs and party and then be one of us if you want to do it that way. It makes conversion easier, if your mind is occupied that way.” Her tone was so casual, so reasonable.
She came toward him and opened her arms.
Waylon stared at her breasts. The pink seashell of her labia.
Then he turned to run—
And his mom was there. Waylon’s mom stopped him: she slapped him hard, across the face, so that he was flung backwards against the frame of the shower entrance and shouted in pain. Sank down against the wall. He felt stunned, dizzy.
