3

A Zone Back Street

Len showed the hooker his rig and bottle of powder. “You probably know some cheap hotels around here, huh?” he asked. “I don’t want anything but a place to sleep and maybe some food. I’ll share this with you and whoever we need to bargain with, if you can help me.”

The woman sniffed, looking away.

“Obviously I can’t hurt you,” he said, giving one pathetic breathy laugh at his own pitiful state. “We can have just… just a moment of peace, without pain,” he said.

After a moment, she nodded. Len extended a hand and tried to help her up, but she was too heavy and he nearly toppled. They held onto each other for balance and he tried to start walking, but she seemed frozen in place.

Was someone approaching? Len pivoted his head quickly, expecting a threat. Following her gaze he realized she was staring at the severed toe. “C’mon,” he said. “That’s not a souvenir you’re gonna want.”

A Closed but Crowded Restaurant Outside Rio de Janeiro’s Cidade de Deus Slum, 1977

Lucas Araújo lay curled on a sheet of plywood, which rested on a metal cart. Men tied his wrists together behind his knees. At sixteen years old, he was young and strong enough to have put up a good fight, but instead he remained compliant and still except for his body’s uncontrollable shuddering. This was a small storeroom, set off from the main dining and kitchen area where the mostly white-clad crowd danced and chanted in the ongoing Macumba ritual. The thick wooden door slightly muffled the sound as the drums repeated their quick but rhythmic do-DOONK, do-DOONK, do-DOONK.

Just yesterday Lucas would have thought this man towering over him was an ordinary restaurant owner, whose establishment Lucas had attempted to burglarize. Today he had learned that this was the man known as o Caimão, the Caiman, famous as the most vicious gangster in the city. O Caimão had punctuated the lesson by repeatedly breaking the shinbone of Lucas’s four-year-old brother Vinicius with a hammer, crippling the boy and further burdening their already impoverished family.

On the shelf near him were dozens of yellow cans reading “feijão,” the same as the can of beans he’d had in his hand when he was caught.

“Let’s give you another pill, okay?” o Caimão said, opening a small brown bottle. Lucas gobbled it greedily from his palm. Even with two of these powerful tranquilizers already in his system, his body shook so much he was nearly toppling the cart.

“You probably wonder why I give you these,” o Caimão said. “If I want to make a point, demonstrate my power to the community, shouldn’t I want you to scream and thrash? Wouldn’t that make them fear me most?” He grinned, making the puckered, acne-scarred flesh of his cheeks crease, but leaving his eyes cold and flat beneath his close-trimmed black hair. “There’s something more important than showing them I can cause you pain, boy. They already know that. But if instead I show them you’re willing to die for my agenda, well, that’s something else again. That’s how we change their fear into devotion. Your example will teach them to fear me, but also that my agenda is worth sacrifice, commitment, even piety.”

The glassy black eyes stared down pitilessly as his captor continued speaking. “If you thrash and scream, it looks more like you were forced. But if they see you alive, submitting to my power, then they see that even your desire to live is subordinate to my will. They see devotion.”

“They know you gathered my friends, my family, my neighbors,” Lucas slurred. “They know you caught me stealing from this restaurant, and you threatened to torture until death everyone close to me, before my eyes, unless I agreed. It is still fear.”

“There is always fear in any dealing with true power,” o Caimão said. “How could there not be? But fear alone would not get us to this point, would not produce such a volunteer as you. Today your entire life energizes my expanding power and authority, teaching everyone that it is proper, even natural, to willingly lay down their lives for me. Besides, after you’re gone, there will only be me to tell the story. Your death stands for whatever I say, because I alone have the power to say it.”

Lucas felt himself losing connection with his consciousness. All tension drained from his muscles.

“Yes! Good!” o Caimão said. “Your eyes roll up, just like the Macumba men when they say they’re possessed by spirits. The guests will see this as some kind of sign. I don’t care what their superstition tells them, as long as their minds accept that I am worthy of reverence and awe.”

Lucas felt his face droop toward the plywood. They were wheeling him into the main area now and a Macumba man was waving a dead rooster over him. The man had cut or yanked the tongue out of the chicken’s beak and it now sat in front of Lucas on the plywood. “You will speak the language of the dead,” the Macumba man whispered, biting a piece off of Lucas’s ear and lapping at his trickling blood. Lucas felt his own tongue swell in shock or disgust, but he was too drugged for much to register beyond that.

O Caimão laughed. “They listen to this man, yet people say I’m crazy. He says he can follow you, see what happens after your death, by tasting your blood first. I let him, why not? It’s a community service.” He smiled impassively down at Lucas.

The tempo of the drumbeats remained constant but they seemed to be hitting them harder: do-DOONK, do-DOONK, do-DOONK. The plywood levitated above the room.

No. Not levitated. Men had lifted it. Lucas jerked and twitched, but it was true: In this drugged state, he was rendered incapable of mounting even symbolic resistance.

The heat seared his eyes and lungs as they pulled down on the wide tubular handle and lowered the restaurant oven’s pitted white enamel door. The rectangular opening was too narrow for him to have fit if he hadn’t been bound this way. They pushed the plywood inside and slammed the door shut. Lucas was unconscious before his addled mind could make him scream, and then he separated from his body.

Amelix Integrations Secure Research Memo

Engineered Organism Division

Dr. Reni Donova, H.S., DCS, Vice President

AAA CLEARANCE LEVEL OR ABOVE ONLY

Re: Projects RT1117 and RT1118: Communication by Unknown Means

Dr. Donova, ma’am:

This memo is to keep you informed of recent developments with the animals in Projects RT1117 and RT1118.

The Generation 1 (G-1) rats were observed communicating with the Generation 2 (G-2) rats while in neither visual nor aural contact.

An experiment was conducted in which each generation was intentionally disturbed/agitated while physically separated from the other. Both generations evinced ability to sense the agitation of the other and respond instantly, standing on hind legs with straight spines and eyes toward wherever the disturbance was taking place. When the agitated animals were relocated to more distant parts of the laboratory, the non-agitated generation still became concurrently alert and instantly located the other rats and the disturbance, in multiple trials. Though the mechanism of communication remains unknown at this time, the outcome is identical regardless of which animal group is directly disturbed.

As you know, G1 was the first group of animals directly exposed to the symbiotic fungus now known among those with clearance as the “Deity Strain,” internal catalog #616Tr3312s. G2 was exposed only to air exhaled by G1, not to the strain directly, for a period of sixty seconds before a complete flush with sterilized air. At no point have the animals seen each other or been caged in the same room. There appears to be no difference between the generations as to the sending and receiving of communications.

An experiment is being designed to further test the modes of communication, beginning with a screen for subsonic and ultrasonic waves and progressing to scans to detect any anomalous electromagnetic waves. Detailed laboratory notes are available for your review in the DEO archives.

Zabeth B.D. Chelsea, DCS

A Zone Hotel Room

Lucas gently stroked the face of the woman with whom this tortured, meatless body had checked in. That man had been Len, and he had been even poorer than Lucas had been back in Brazil. He had access to the memories of the man who had previously controlled this body, though that man existed no more in this world. Those memories showed that this body had injected a drug with the rig that now sat on the windowsill, while the woman had sniffed the same drug as powder through a tube.

Her eyelids were fluttering now.

She groaned and thrashed. “Shhh, shhh, shhh,” Lucas whispered. “It’s all right. Shhh, shhh.” He stroked her hair.

Her eyes opened. He watched as she took in the room, the view out the window, the rig, and himself. He had done the same thing, matching his own perception of this world with the memories the other man had left him. She gasped suddenly and bent down to where her foot rested on a pillow, feeling the makeshift bandage fastened around the stump of her missing toe.

“You are from some other place, some other time?” he asked, raising a shockingly skinny arm from where her neck had previously rested upon it.

She nodded slowly, narrowing her eyes.

“I am Lucas Araújo,” he said. “I am sixteen years old, from Brazil.” He watched her as she processed the information.

“I… am Inti,” she said. “I remember that. But …”

“It is confusing,” he said. “I felt the same when I woke. This place, this body, this language, all different. But I woke maybe two hours ago. Since then, I have been sitting here as you slept, letting the memories come to me. If you stay quiet and listen, the memories will come to you, too, I think. It’s good that you already remember who you are, your name. It took some time for me to see, because my memories are jumbled with someone else’s.” She wriggled and moaned. He gently touched her cheekbone with two fingers. “It is a pretty name, too, Inti.”

“It means the sun,” she said. She paused, thinking, staying quiet like he had suggested. “I am… fourteen years old. Or, I was fourteen then. There are other memories, too. Other memories that are not mine.”

“Yes,” he said. “I have those, too. From another person who is not here now. If you practice, you can let them blend together. What’s in your head that you did not live, it can help you see your own life differently.”

She was quiet again, for a much longer time. When she spoke again, her voice was quieter, her speech much slower. “I believe that my life was several hundred years ago, though I do not remember so many years.” She fell silent, staring into space with a dreamy look. “I begin to see what you mean about letting all the memories work together. It is very strange. My home is the place these people would call Peru.” She smiled slightly. “I can see … a map. Not from my world, from this one. It has my mountains on it. I can read it and see that I am from Peru, and I can see Brazil, too, Lucas. It seems we were… neighbors, almost.” She turned on the bed they shared, to better face him.

“And in your place, Peru, did you die, Inti?”

She nodded again. “The village leaders said a maiden had to die, to please the gods and protect our home, our people. It was a great honor to give this gift to our people. I volunteered. They…they gave me strong drinks with alcohol and drugs, and they carried me up to the mountain.” Her eyes settled on him. He watched them soften as she discerned his new body’s extreme deterioration.

“You died willingly for an agenda,” he muttered. He cleared his throat and continued in a clearer voice. “Now we’re back, you and I, to see the world our sacrifices have built. You can remember things the other woman knew?” he asked. “I am the same. The man who had this body is gone, but I know what he knew. It is the same for you, I think.”

She shook her head slightly. “This person is not gone. I can feel her inside me. She still lives.” Inti gave him an amused smirk. “Perhaps we are different in this because while each man is just one man, every woman is many women.”

He smiled back.

“She thought this was cocaine,” Inti said, gesturing at the little jar of powder. “That’s a preparation from leaves my people chewed and used for tea.” She paused for a moment and then asked, “Do you know why we are here?”

Lucas shook his head. “Maybe it’s because you and I both gave up our lives for others. Perhaps we’re back merely to live again, just to share this moment together.”

The Place Mr. B’s Memories Called the Zone

After he was relatively certain the Pink Shit had done its work on the Garbageman, Furius circled back to find him. Presumably, they would all eventually come searching for the new legion, but he was particularly looking forward to this man’s absolute obedience once he swore the sacramentum and became a proper legionary. In this case it was worth the extra nuisance of collecting him while still unconscious.

Though, he supposed, like Furius himself, the legionary would be someone else, not actually the Garbageman. He would have already sworn the sacramentum a few thousand years ago.

The Garbageman was nowhere to be found.

While the Garbageman had ensured that Mr. B had no idea where he lived, it was relatively common knowledge that he had worked at the Dobo Protein Refinery. For now, he would just turn his attention to running down his list of B’s contacts and moving as much Pink Shit as he could.

The Zone Hotel Room

Addi’s foot throbbed, sending pain signals not just from the swollen part that remained, but even a phantom sensation from the missing toe itself.

The sun was up. The window was caked with so much grime it was hard to see through, but there was no mistaking the daylight coming in. Why hadn’t they been thrown out yet?

She remembered the drug and the girl in her head. There was no better way to make a seventeen-year-old prostitute feel like shit than to have a fourteen-year-old virgin inside her head, dredging up memory after memory of degradation and abuse. The visitor was shocked at every recollection, but kept forcing herself to dig deeper, layering new associations of disgust and horror on top of the memories Addi had tried to bury. Worse, the girl seemed to have fallen in love with this slabbie, who had given her the drug in the first place.

The drug! She had used it to pay for this room. Charley at the desk downstairs probably had someone else in his head, now, too.

If the sun was up now, it had been several hours since the Garbageman had taken her toe. That was several toes he would take, now, and still she had no money. The girl, Inti, had warm and sweet memories of just talking and cuddling with the slabbie all night. There’d been no way he could’ve done anything more than that, anyway, in his starved and exhausted state. Addi had never known before what closeness and intimacy felt like. The many protective walls she’d built around her psyche kept her from experiencing such things. Right now, though, there was no time to be sentimental or weirded out. They had to get out of this room and hopefully slip past Charley, and then she had to evade the Garbageman or suffer worse pain and disfigurement.

“Hey,” she said, nudging him, searching Inti’s memory for his name. “Hey, Lucas. Time to go.” She put a hand on his shirtless chest and shook gently. His skin was cold and the shrunken body was stiff.

“Sorry, Inti,” she sighed. “Your new love is dead.”

Little Guadalajara, “La Guada,” the Zone

“Arrulfo, it’s not good that you teach him to rely only on you,” a voice said. “He needs to have others in his life he can trust. This trip will be dangerous and if you go, he’s going to go, too, because you taught him to be glued to your side.”

“Rosa, we have talked about this. It is difficult for him to trust people, but he has learned to trust me. Because I’m the only one he trusts, he needs me, he relies only on me.”

“He can’t go with us.”

“He can’t stay alone. He won’t.”

The voices were in the hallway outside this room.

Ernesto Silva ran the ballpoint of a long dead pen cartridge around the bearing track of the rear wheel hub from the bicycle he was restoring. There were little pits there, evidenced by the pen point’s wobbles and vibrations. He had a smooth stone with a nice corner that could fit into the track and gently abrade away the unevenness. The tiny bearings themselves were corroded and misshapen, too, but Ernesto could roll them against the flat part of his stone to smooth them. When he was finished the track would be slightly larger than the original manufacture and the bearings would be slightly smaller, but he could compensate by packing them with wax from a toilet seal he’d taken out of a crumbling abandoned building.

Someone knocked on the open doorframe behind him.

The bike’s axle wobbled as he rolled it against the floor. Ernesto always worked in this spot because he knew the floor was smooth and level. The wobble meant the axle was bent. It was as wide as his palm and nearly as thick as his pinky finger, made of hardened steel. There was no way to bend it back straight, even if he’d still had his pliers, which had been stolen. He did have a fist-sized rock with a rounded point he could use to pound the axle against the floor. That could make it straighter than now, but it would also introduce new pits for him to have to smooth out again. Even after pounding it that way, the axle would never be truly straight.

“Ernesto?” a voice called in Spanish from behind him, gentle but strong. “How are you doing, amigo?”

The bicycle would never be fully fixed if the axle couldn’t be truly straight. He was doing this work to fix the bicycle, but it would never be fully fixed. More wax would help, but the bicycle would never be like it was supposed to be. Ernesto’s face felt hot. He was trying to make the bicycle work the way it was supposed to work, but the axle was bent forever and so the bicycle was broken forever. He could make it work well enough to be ridden, but it would always be broken inside.

Soft footsteps came up behind him.

“Ernesto?” a voice said.

The rubber seal around the bearings was cracked in too many places to salvage. The washers, spacers, and locknuts had corroded, and though he could abrade away most of that damage, the washers, spacers, and locknuts would corrode again without a new rubber seal. He could make one out of old plastic bags, but it wouldn’t be durable so it wouldn’t last long. The bicycle wouldn’t stay fixed for long if he had to use plastic bags instead of a rubber seal, but the rubber seal was cracked in too many places to salvage, and the bicycle would never be fully fixed, not ever, because of the axle and the track and the bearings and the pits and corrosion.

Something touched him!

Ernesto gasped in shock, shouting and flailing to remove the hand from his shoulder. Ripping his attention away from his work was as difficult and painful as if his eyeballs had been in physical contact with icy metal. He turned his head and saw fingers and palms, not reaching for him but just empty palms pointed at him now.

“Easy, cousin,” a voice said. Ernesto peered past the hands and found a face. It was narrow and smooth, with big brown eyes and a small tuft of beard under the chin. There were thick, bushy eyebrows and matching bushy close-cropped hair. The face was similar to the picture memories of Arrulfo that Ernesto carried in his mind. Picture after picture from his memory matched the face before him now, not exactly but close, close, one after the other. This was Arrulfo. Ernesto let his eyes return to his work.

“I don’t like to be touched, Arrulfo,” Ernesto said, testing the track again with the ballpoint. Ernesto was ten years and forty-four days old. Arrulfo was seven years and fifty-two days older than Ernesto.

“I know, amigo, I know. I’m sorry. This is important and I need to have you listen to me now. I touched you so I could make sure you’re listening.”

The stone was making progress on the track, wearing down the little pits, but the corner he was using was wearing out. He turned it to a sharper one and ran it around the track again.

“You can ask me questions,” Ernesto said. “Questions are a good way to tell if someone is listening.”

“Okay, cousin. You’re right.”

“You don’t have to touch me.”

“I am sorry, Ernesto,” Arrulfo said. “I know you don’t like to be disturbed when you are working, but I have something important to ask you.”

Ernesto looked back down at the cracked rubber seal. It was too cracked to salvage. “I don’t like to be disturbed when I’m working, Arrulfo,” Ernesto said. “You know I don’t like to be disturbed when I’m working.”

“I know, Ernesto. I know. But this is an emergency. Mari is very sick and I need to take her to find a doctor in a different part of the Zone. There is a doctor there who can help her, but it is not safe for her and Rosa to go alone. It is dangerous for us to leave this area. If I go with them, there will be nobody to watch out for you here, so I’m going to have to take you along, also.”

“I don’t like fighting, Arrulfo. Dangerous means fighting, and I don’t want to fight anyone. I’m not good at it. I don’t understand fighting.”

“I will try to do all of the fighting for you, cousin, if I can. Will you come with me?”

“Yes.”

Corner of 6th and G, the Zone

The threadbare brown jacket hung limply, doing a decent job of concealing her Corporate Green uniform on the dirty Zone street. Wanda turned in a circle, looking all around. A few bums sat on the ground in different spots, leaning against crumbling walls of buildings with glassless window holes, but she saw no one else at all. Where was the legendary mass of former corporate humanity, the Horde of the Departed?

The stench here was like nothing she had ever experienced. It was the most powerful combination of urine, vomit, death, rot, sewage, and chemical smells imaginable, laced with a strange sort of electrical discharge and ozone scent she thought might just be her own terror. The sensory overload excused her tears, perhaps. This was her life, now: decay, desperation, and toxicity.

Her EI told her there was a signal here, and briefly an idea flashed of trying to send a message to Nami. Such a message would never get past the corporate firewall, though.

Down G there seemed to be a greater concentration of bums. Perhaps they had strayed from the Horde, or maybe the Horde had already migrated away from this location. In any case, there was no sprawling mass of desperate former corporates. She supposed the desk clerk could simply have gotten it wrong, and the Horde may never have been here at all. She walked farther that way, staying on the gravel in the middle of the street to avoid contact with the dirty and frightening people against the walls. Each face turned up to stare at her as she passed.

Wanda felt the Zone wearing on her already, making her paranoid. Of course these people would watch her go by, she told herself.

They have nothing else to do. It’s nothing more than that, no reason to imagine it’s a calculated, orchestrated observation for some nefarious purpose, even though…every single one of them is still looking at me.

By halfway down the first block she had passed half a dozen, and one by one they had all risen to their feet. They now stood where they had sat, no longer leaning against walls, still staring. At the corner of Fifth Street, a cluster of them stood silently, more than she’d noticed there before, each one unabashedly watching her every move. With every step past Fifth Street, they seemed to close in a bit nearer to her. By the midpoint between Fifth and Fourth, a new one approached, fast, coming straight up into her face.

“Hello, friend,” the man said quietly, but with a strange intensity that made the hairs stand at the back of Wanda’s neck. He was dressed in rags and had a long, scraggly beard, but he seemed to stand straighter than most bums she had seen, and to enunciate his words more clearly, too, though his voice was barely above a whisper. She hadn’t noticed him before he’d appeared a few steps away. Now he stood directly in front of her, blocking her path, and a quick glance from side to side showed at least seven others just slightly farther than arm’s reach, now, all standing, all peering into her face.

“Where are you going?” he asked, as quietly and intensely as before.

“I…nowhere,” she said. “I think I made a mistake. Someone told me I should come here, but I don’t think this is right.”

“Yeah,” he said. Wanda found herself leaning toward him, listening intently so as not to miss a word he said in that disturbingly quiet voice.

Where a moment ago there had been a small group standing and watching, there were now more than twenty. She gasped, pivoting her head from side to side to look over both shoulders.

“I…Yes. I should go back. I was looking for…I’m sorry to have disturbed you.” She started to turn around and walk toward 6th again, but she thought better of it, stepping backwards rather than turning her face away from him.

“Are you looking for someone?” he asked. His voice was that of a person talking in a library or study hall, eerily out of place on a Zone street.

She turned then, angling away from him and taking a few quick strides. He matched her, step for step. She set her eyes toward the intersection where this had all begun, 6th and G, and tucked her chin, almost running. The number of people watching seemed to have doubled, crowding in as she ran past.

The man stopped following her. She ran the last half-block, finally looking over her shoulder as she returned to her starting point, breathing heavily, the stench stinging her nostrils and tongue.

The same small group of bums sat in the same spots they had before. Nobody else was around.