When the dead thing came to her in the night, and touched her with hands that were not human hands and twined its hair that was not human hair around his fingers, she pried it off with a curse and stilled it as she had been taught. In the morning she showed the boy the dead bird lying against the rock, riddled with dead nanobots, and she scanned it with the reader. “This is how we name the dead,” she told him, so he would remember if harm came to her. She told him to choose a name, and he named it Bird Thing. They sat there quietly for a while, and she rubbed grass against the scratches on their skin. It didn’t heal but it had a cooling feel.
The dead things came night after night, and sometimes they looked like animals and sometimes like people and always like decaying leaves on the forest floor, beautiful until you put your eyes and nose too close. She could not clear the images from her mind in the daylight, and the daylight was dimmer and softer, anyway, as the season turned. She had begun to forget the glare of sun, the warmth of the summer months. The boy asked her if it would snow soon and she counted for a while and then told him not soon, but the snow would come; they had better keep walking.
They were walking south and west, because of the map she had and advice she’d picked up along the way, and because there was an ocean somewhere and an ocean might be a good place to be in the winter. She could remember what warm sand was like, and she thought the boy would like to run on the beach, maybe splash in the water if it was not too cold. The boy was restless, sometimes, even with their constant travel. Occasionally he would disappear for hours, scaring her, and would come back berry-stained and quiet, scratches on his legs, and at those times she thought she saw the boy smile to himself. She was careful not to let the boy know she saw the smile.
The cities were not empty. They were still loud and brusque and fast-stepping, but there were beginning to be dead things in the alleys, teeming with ‘bots, creeping in their direction. Somehow they always found her. Perhaps it was something on her skin. She washed herself repeatedly in the hostel showers, could not smell anything on her body, but who knew if the dead could smell? Perhaps they could sense her reader from a distance, but she would not give up the reader, not yet.
But they needed the cities and the supplies they held. So she washed dishes, cleared a shed, cleaned and repainted a signboard on a pub for a meal and money for a fresh set of Salvation Army shoes, brown hiking boots for her, bright orange sneakers with blue streaks for the boy, who bounced up and down in them as if on springs. The boy went racing down the street afterwards and she let him go, walking slowly in the autumn breezes that whistled through the narrow streets with their tall buildings and light-poles. They slept in the hostel for three nights and she could hear the dead outside her window, scratching, scratching. “I name you,” she growled in her sleep. “I name you.” But she woke before she could utter the Word she had been taught or could think of a name, and there was nothing in the alley when the two of them walked on.
In the hills that night she found a rocky overhang they could shelter beneath. The wind was thick with dust and the prickling smell of sycamore, and she rubbed her eyes and the boy rubbed his. They cooked sausages over a small fire and feasted in silence. She saw laughter in the boy’s eyes and said, “What is it?”
“You have dandelion in your hair,” the boy said, and she combed out the seeds with her fingers, shaking them into the campfire where they popped and blistered. She might have laughed then, had she remembered how, but the bones of her face were stiff from disuse and constant squinting against the sun.
That night the dead thing slithered towards her like a snake, and she heard it before she saw it, soft noises against the dirt and rock. She whispered the Word before the thing could get anywhere close to her or the boy, and she thought, tomorrow there will be a dead snake. But in the morning there was no snake and no ‘bots, only a large scorpion flattened on the ground under her heel. Was it a dream? She shook her head. The scorpion lay just where the snake had stopped. It looked like a scorpion. But the ‘bots were so small. “I name you Scorpion Snake,” she said, just in case, flashing the reader, and she told the boy to fold his bedroll.
A few days later they passed a ghost town. The movement was visible in the distance, so much like heat shimmer on a desert highway and yet not. She led the boy off the road and they worked their way around the town, dodging cholla and barrel cactus and trying not to look to their left, where dead things swarmed around the remains of buildings and signs and, perhaps, people as well. “We can’t sleep here,” she told the boy, who nodded so quickly it was obvious he already knew. I can’t protect him forever, she thought, and they pressed on. Only when they were fifteen miles out of town and had walked for eight hours straight, eyes straining in their sockets, did she push the boy into a rocky alcove and let them sleep, the boy behind her, nestled into the rock.
It was in the fourth week after they had left the last big city that she found the card for the DevOps. Rain was coming down, wet knives against soaked-through shirts and skin, and she thought, let me just lift my head, wipe my eyes for one moment. Just one moment. Then she saw an old, empty glass booth, standing solitary on a ruined road.
She and the boy squeezed into the small space for shelter, and once again she saw laughter in the boy’s eyes like a light. Despite herself she felt the small muscles of her face pull into a smile. She lifted her head, looked up, twisted to wipe her dripping eyebrows on her shoulder and then she saw the card with a name and address for a DevOps office taped to the wall.
The card meant hope. She had the Word, but no way to share it with the boy. He knew how to read and to name, but that was no defense. There wasn’t any future in it. And she wanted a future. She could remember a past, more and more dimly, but it was still there, and she wanted to try again, even though it would be different now, even though the past as it was could never return.
Just a little farther west, she saw, and no farther south. She’d planned to take the old highway she’d seen on the map down towards the border city, but she could go west instead, and maybe they’d find a ride across the desert. She looked out at the rain, the boy pressed cold and wiggling against her. They would look for a truck. A ride could be good, she thought, if she were careful and there were no dead things in the cab with them.
They found a truck the next day, a big refrigerated unit heading towards the western cities. The driver was reluctant to take on two whole people and their packs, but there was plenty of room in the cab and within a mile the boy was asleep, slumped forward in his seat. The driver didn’t talk much and that was all right.
She stared out the window as the desert raced by and then the tiered shifts of mountains. It had been raining here too, but the sky was clear now, and the high desert was threaded with bloom and sudden grass. The day grew dimmer and she could see the lights of the suburbs coming up a little ways ahead. “Let us out here,” she told the driver.
“We’re not even to Redlands yet. There’s nothing here.”
“That’s all right. We’re camping.” She kicked the pack. The man shook his head and pulled onto an offramp that led nowhere and they got out and the big truck lumbered back onto the highway. The boy rubbed sleep out of his eyes and they went looking for a good spot to set up camp.
It had been a lucky spot for a stop. They found a deserted campground with a pump that still drew water. She filled all their canteens first; then they washed dust off their faces and spread out their gear. The boy filled the collapsible tub and washed their clothes and hung them on the short dry trees to dry. She built a campfire and the boy gathered cholla skeletons, carefully with two sticks, as he had been taught, for kindling. When the fire was going the boy asked her the question he had never asked before. “Why couldn’t you save Mom,” he said. The boy looked out into the desert when he said it, and there was no question mark at the end, but she knew she’d have to answer anyway.
“Because she left.” She looked down. “Because she was in another house and I didn’t know the ‘bots had gotten that far. Because I didn’t know,” she said, but even as she said it the memory faded from her brain and she wasn’t sure. “But you knew that,” she said to the boy. “You knew she wasn’t there.” She had been taking care of the boy for a long time, she thought; long before their mother had left.
“Sure, but…” he trailed off. The boy dug his heels into the sand. “I miss her,” he said finally.
“Of course you do,” she said, but it was automatic and she didn’t know what it meant.
They were quiet for a while and when they slept, it was the restless sleep of the ghost-laden. The boy groaned a few times in his sleep. Each time, it woke her as though a bolt had been shot through her body and she held the light up to check the ground around the boy’s body, but there was nothing there, no dead things or live, and in the morning the sun found the sweat already beaded on her forehead.
It took five more days before they reached the coast, five days through cities, some more infested than others but none of which they had to skirt entirely. But she’d used the Word more than once, and she was weary and her reader was nearly full. She had no idea what good it would do, but she saved them as she had been taught. Just in case.
At an old theatre that still showed midnight movies, according to the sign, a grey-faced woman leaned out of a ticket window to give her rough directions. They kept walking west, then south on a broad street marked Lincoln Boulevard, and she checked them into a hostel near the beach, close enough you could smell sea air over the choke of hot asphalt and car fumes even though all you could see was dirty gas stations and bar-windowed liquor stores, and they had showers and shook out their clothes as best they could. They were rumpled and she knew they probably smelled, but she couldn’t smell much anymore. She hoped it would do.
When she checked the map she saw it was a longish walk to the DevOps, so she told the boy they’d go tomorrow. “Let’s go watch the sun set at the beach,” she suggested. The boy had never been to the beach. Lakes, yes, but never a proper beach with ocean and sunsets, and so the boy hung back, unsure. But the beach was still wide and warm, and she saw no dead things while they were there. There were people there, swimming in the water and lying on the sand. She shook her head at the swimmers. “We can’t swim here, not right now,” she told the boy. “But you can get your feet wet. Just watch where you step.”
The boy took off his shoes and put his feet in the water, yelping at the cold, but after a minute he was kicking up surf and padding along the sand. The boy wasn’t smiling yet, but she could see that it would happen soon, and that thought made her feel a flash of warmth in her chest that might have been happiness had it not been so fleeting. She trekked along with the boy, keeping up, not letting him get out of sight, and when the boy got tired of the water she spent a few of their last coins on ice cream cones. It had been a long time since she’d had ice cream and for a moment she couldn’t remember how to eat it so it wouldn’t melt onto her feet, but then the memory came back and she licked the drooping sides, looking at the boy, who was watching her eat and copying her actions. They sat on a bench without speaking for a while after, until the sun set redly and the cool wind began to come up from the sea.
When they walked back to the hostel she saw movement in the alley and she knew it was a dead thing, not a live tramp. She hurried the boy forward, looking behind her, but the rustling didn’t follow them down the road and she guessed it had other things to do. All the same she was grateful to get into their hostel room and lock the door and press their socks against the gap beneath it.
She slept hard that night, dreaming of their mother. She was standing on a traffic island in a green summer dress, her purse and skirt waving in the wind. She was gesturing to something in the distance and when she turned back towards her, she saw that her face was gone, replaced by circuit boards and gears and grey wires. The boy was snoring softly next to her when she woke, and she put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and they stayed like that the rest of the night.
In the morning after their small breakfast they started the walk towards the DevOps building. They kept to Lincoln Boulevard, even though the beach beckoned, and she looked down every alley and side street before they crossed. There were people out on the streets here, more than there were back home, but everything seemed slower moving than the city she remembered from past visits, summer vacations. It was not summer now, of course, and she supposed that the schools were still open here, at least some of them, at least some of the time. She walked past shops selling trinkets, women’s clothing, books, snacks, luxuries long gone from the places she’d left behind. Perhaps they hadn’t had time to become so afraid yet, here.
The DevOps office had a thick steel front door unrelieved by decoration—not even a knocker or bell. She hesitated, lifting a hand to knock, wondering if it would be heard within, but then she heard the crackling of a speaker and looked up at the small camera mounted above the door. “I’ve got a ‘bot reader and the Word to freeze the ‘bots,” she told the camera. “Can you help me?” And the door clicked and when she turned the handle, it opened, and she walked in and the boy followed.
At the top of the stairs was another door, this one glass and unlocked, and then they were in a large room that was all smooth edges, aluminum-pipe chair frames and curved leather seats and a soft carpet, a glass-topped desk with no one behind it and a pile of junk heaped incongruously in the middle. A tall man with red hair and a wide smile came out of a side door and introduced himself as Ray. He looked the two up and down and finally said, “You’re younger than you look, aren’t you.”
“I’m 17,” she said. “David is ten.”
“Your parents?”
“Taken. Dead.”
“I’m sorry, but…”
She shook her head.
The redheaded man continued, “—I’m sorry, but there’s something I don’t understand. Did you say you’ve got the code to stop the nanobots?”
“I’ve got the Word,” she said. “They implanted it back at the ‘bot plant. It makes dead things stay dead.” She held up the reader. “I’ve got a record. I scanned and named all of them, just like they taught us.”
“That’s—” Ray’s smile grew wider. “A ‘bot factory. That’s great. So what was, what was your job back at the plant?”
“Clean rooms,” she said, remembering the quiet rustle of plastic, the way it stuck to your skin. So long ago.
“What, you were a janitor? Maintenance?”
“Part time. Monitor the clean rooms. Hit the alarm if anything went red.” She felt her hands curl, tilt forward, as if she were back in the lab and holding a clipboard.
“So—not a developer. And you’ve got the code.” Ray paused. “So you can’t, I mean you can’t be the only person who has the implant?”
She looked out the window. It faced south. She could see across the city in the direction she had just come, and farther south to places she had she had never been. “They gave it to all of us. Everyone who worked at the plant. It was a safety precaution.”
“And the rest of them?”
“Dead, I guess.”
“But not you.”
“Not me.”
The door opened again and two more people came in, a slight, older woman with grey hair pulled back into a ponytail and a large young black man. “I’m Elga,” the woman told her, half-opening tired eyes. “Operations. This is Gregory, Security.” She nodded.
Ray looked at her again. “Why didn’t the other plant workers use the code if they had it, then?”
“They were asleep.” She drew a hand over her forehead, as if it could ward off images of sleeping bodies swarming with the blur of ‘bots. “Or there were just too many of them. I don’t know. Maybe some of them made it.”
“And you?”
“Insomnia.”
—Enough to keep her at the window, enough to give her warning of the approaching storm. Enough to lock down until the worst was over. Enough to save her brother. Not enough to save their mother. Or anyone else. But she said none of that.
Ray’s smile froze in disbelief. “Can you show us the code?”
“I can say it.” She opened his mouth and angled her jaw to activate the Word and it came out, a garbled, static noise that jarred her ears and the bones of her eye sockets every time. Elga’s eyes flew open at the sound of it.
Something fell over on the desk.
“You don’t have them here?!” She jumped, shoved the boy behind her. No one else moved.
“There’s some test equipment on the desk,” Gregory said. “It’s all right, you passed,” he added, smiling.
“That’s dangerous.” She kept her eyes on the desk, but it stayed quiet.
“It’s necessary,” Elga said. “It’s like fighting a virus. Sometimes you have to open up the virus to see how it works. It’s risky, but we can’t function without it. Don’t worry, it’s been defanged.” She walked over to the desk, prodded the pile. “That’s impressive. We’ll need to copy that code.”
“You can implant it in David?”
“We can, if you want. But we’ll distribute it a lot further than that. He shouldn’t need it.”
“He needs it.”
“All right.” Elga spread her hands. “We’re not really equipped for fancy implants here, but we can do a rough one. He might have to push a button.”
“A button…”
“In his skin. He won’t have to carry anything.”
“That’s fine.”
The boy looked frightened. “It’s okay,” she told him. “It’ll give you powers.”
“If I had it could I have saved Mom?”
“We couldn’t have saved her. It was too late and she was too far away.”
“What’s the point, then.” He was angry, probably tired.
“You don’t want to die the same way.”
“I don’t know. I don’t care.”
“You don’t, trust me. We’ll have it,” she told Elga. “I can’t pay you, but I guess you knew that.”
“The data and the code will be payment enough,” Ray said. Then things started to move fast, faster than she had been used to. Elga took the reader and hurried out, and Ray and Gregory took them into another room where she and the boy lay back in big chairs and the men did what they had to do. The boy was good and didn’t cry at the needle. They put the button just under the skin of his left forearm and showed the boy how to press it in case he needed it. Meanwhile she lay in her own chair and let them read her implant. When they were done she had a small bandage and the boy had a larger one. She had a headache but she thought, this is it. This is how we are going to stop them. And how we will be safe. She thought that and she drank the coffee they gave her and her headache gradually ebbed.
Later they sat in another office, looking out over the city. “We’ve got the army,” Ray told her, “but we didn’t have the weapon. This is exactly what we needed.” The boy drank a soda and noodled his legs around the carpet. “We can get it out there now,” Ray said. “Push east.”
“You must have weapons. Seems pretty quiet around here. Not so much back east.”
Gregory shook his head. “We’ve got some weapons,” he corrected. “Just not precise enough. And we have some protection. But they can get through any shield, given time.”
“They got out of the factory,” she told them. “Wasn’t supposed to be possible.”
“So we heard. That’s why…”
“Why you’re here.”
“Well, it wasn’t why we started, but it’s where we are now, that’s for sure.”
There was quiet for a little while.
“—What army?” she thought to ask.
“Re-engineered ‘bots.” Ray was grinning now. “They’re just as voracious as the originals, but they’ll only go after their brothers. Very effective. We’ve tested them in labs. They—”
But she was half out of her chair. “What the hell are you doing? Are you crazy?”
“It’s the only way,” Gregory said. “Nothing else is going to be able to get them all. What did you think?”
“That you’d broadcast. I don’t know. Some kind of amplification. Get it through the city.”
“Loud enough for the whole world?”
“Well. I don’t know how to do it. That’s why I’m here.”
“But you’ve tried, haven’t you?”
“Just over—microphones, you know. At bars and places. Early on.”
“And it didn’t work.”
“No, it didn’t work. I figured it was…” She ran her tongue over dry teeth. “Something in the frequencies. Feel like I heard that at some point.”
“It’s that, and other things.”
“But you could work out a way around it.”
“And get it heard everywhere? Every nook and cranny on the planet? It’s not just this continent, you know. It’s everywhere. Got into airplanes, boats, you name it. Everywhere. And you’re going to sing a song loud enough the whole planet will hear?”
“I figured you’d know a way.”
Gregory shook his head. “We don’t know a way.”
“But this.” She stopped. “This is dangerous. You can’t do this. What if they turn on us too?”
“They won’t.”
“That’s what they told us about the first wave.”
“They were wrong. We’re not.”
“How the hell can you know.” She hit her fist against the arm of her chair. She looked at the boy, who’d fallen asleep sitting there, his toes pointing at each other. “How the hell can you risk us all like that.”
“We’ve been testing for months,” Gregory said. “I wouldn’t okay it if I weren’t sure.”
Elga came back in to thank her for the reader. “We have data on the nanobot variants now,” the woman said. “It’ll be so much easier to find and identify them.” She couldn’t answer. Elga held out the reader to her but she pretended she didn’t see it. “We’ll just hold onto it for you until you leave,” Elga said finally.
They took her over to the factory, let her look into the windowed boxes at the empty ‘bots. She saw the shimmer, shuddered. “But they’re empty,” Elga said. “We’re going to put your code in them. We’ll test it. We have secure test labs.”
“I want the Word,” she said.
“The Word?”
“The code. The implant. I want you to give me an implant that’ll stop these. Stop your ‘bots. Make them stop, in case they go rogue like the last batch. You have code to do that, don’t you?”
They looked at each other. “We can add the code to your implant,” Elga said slowly. “If that’s what you want. But—” Gregory gave a warning look. Elga shook her head. “You’ll have to be careful. Don’t just start turning them off on us, or there’s no point. Give it a chance to work.”
“You shouldn’t give it to her,” Gregory said. “She doesn’t understand. She’ll destroy the whole project.”
“She won’t destroy it. She knows it’ll save us.”
She knew but she didn’t like it. “Only if they go rogue,” she told them. Only if they come anywhere near me, she thought. “And the boy, you can put it in his implant too?”
“He only has one button. It would have to go on the other arm. He’d have to keep track. Which is which. Or he could get himself into a sea of trouble.”
“We’re already in a sea of trouble,” she said. “Put it in.”
They put it in.
When they left the others gathered to thank her for the data, for the code. “You’re saving the world, you know,” Ray said. She shook her head.
Elga handed her back her reader and this time she took it. “Don’t screw us up,” Gregory said.
“Maybe—” She turned to Elga. “Maybe you’ll start fighting to the east, you know. Where the real trouble is. Or the north. More people there.”
“We’ll start right here,” Gregory said. “Obviously.”
“But then, after that…” She looked down.
Elga said, “You’re heading south, aren’t you.”
She nodded. “Maybe give us a head start,” she said.
“We’ll do our best. It’ll take us a week or so to get this lot sorted and tested, anyway.”
“All I can ask.”
After they had slept and the boy had played in the sea and she had done a little work for a few of the shops who could pay, she and the boy walked south on the old coast road, the sea on their right hand, afternoon sun glancing across water and lighting houses and shops with gold. She saw the low sun on the boy’s face and it gave her a soft feeling inside, something unfamiliar and almost tangible, so that she startled when the boy asked, “How will I know when it’s time for the button?”
“When you hear something you shouldn’t,” she told him. “When we’re alone and I’m asleep and you’re nervous. It doesn’t matter. I might wake up, but that’s okay.”
“Will I use it up?”
“Not for a long time.” They walked a while in silence, sand on the sidewalk making a susurrating sound beneath their shoes. She could hear waves just beyond the houses to their right, and the sharp cries of birds overhead. It was a long way from the factory and the sounds of plastic and machinery.
“I don’t have a reader.”
“You don’t need it. It was just for the DevOps, or someone like them. In case I found them, so I could help them out. I don’t even need mine anymore.”
“But you still have it. You still scan things.”
“It’s a habit,” she told the boy. “Habits are funny things. They’re hard to drop even when you don’t need them anymore.”
“I have the habit of missing Mom,” the boy said seriously.
“It’s all right,” she said. I do too, she almost said, but she didn’t know about that yet. She put an arm around the boy’s shoulder. They stayed like that for a while, walking south in the golden light, walking towards whatever they would find. Whatever they would need to name.
 |
Valerie E. Polichar is a writer and singer/songwriter living in San Diego, California. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals over the last 40+ years, including Bourbon Penn, South Dakota Review, and Futures Mysterious Anthology. She edited and published the literary/arts journal Grasslimb from 2002-2020. After earning her Ph.D. in experimental psychology, followed by a long career in IT management, Valerie now reviews music for Spectrum Culture, Echoes & Dust, and OrcaSound. In her living room studio, she creates music and collaborates musically under the name Huge Shark. |