Blood Zero Sky (7 page)

“No . . .” I begin to contradict him, but I’m interrupted by the sound of an explosion, then footfalls clattering down a staircase. “Ethan! They’re coming.” This new voice is foreign, low and commanding, lilting, dangerous.

“Thank you, McCann. We’re almost ready,” says the first voice, and just then the voice’s owner—Ethan, it would seem—steps forward into the light. He’s younger than I expected. Thirty years old, maybe, with fine features and a trim, compact body. He’d be downright handsome, except that the shapeless brownish hair that falls into his almost indolent blue eyes gives him a look of being somehow unfinished.

The other man, McCann, comes to Ethan’s side. The quivering lamplight etches the fine lines of his dark-skinned, muscular arms and his square jaw. Through the shadows, his fierce brown eyes shine.

“Ethan, we can’t hold them off much longer,” he whispers.

Ethan turns back to me just as gunshots resume above us.

“Time is up,” Ethan says, leaning close to my face, his ice-blue eyes almost sharp enough to cut me. “You have to choose.”

“Choose what?” I say.

He holds up the knife.

“You helped Clair and you could be very useful to our cause.”

My head is spinning. I might or might not puke.

“Ethan . . . ” says McCann.

“May, the people of America, the people of the world, need you.”

“I don’t understand. Who are you?” I ask.

“We are not the Godless anarchists the Company would have you believe. We are a secret order, a fourth branch of the United States government, started by the founding fathers of this country.”

“Fourth branch of government?” I say. Bewildered, dizzy, terrified, I can hardly remember the first three. That stuff is ancient history.

“Ethan,” says McCann, blinking at the crackle of distant gunfire and brandishing a huge white machine gun I somehow never noticed before.

“Our order was started for one purpose and one purpose alone, May. In the event that the people of America should lose their democracy at the hands of a tyrant—”

“Let’s go . . .” Clair says, appearing from a shadow-strewn corner.

“If the army, the CIA, the militias should all fail—”

“Ethan . . .”

“—we are charged with leading the revolution.”

“They’re here!” McCann shouts.

There’s a flat
crack
and a puff of dust from the stairwell. McCann, Clair, and two other men I hadn’t noticed before, all wielding huge white guns, take aim at the open doorway.

“I’m taking her!” Ethan shouts. “Cover the rear!”

He pulls me to my feet, holding me up, and we flee.

Though I will later learn I have a concussion and three broken ribs, though it feels like every joint in my body is sprained, somehow I run.

Through a long, long tunnel with white-tiled walls, Ethan leads me by the arm. A timid flashlight beam blazes our trail, augmented after a moment by the flash of gunfire from behind us. I wince, slow, look back, but Ethan drags me on.

As we pass a cross tunnel, I fall. Pain shoots through me. Sprawled on the ground, I look to my left. Three squadmen, all in black, are coming toward us. They train their guns on me.

My eyes squeeze shut.

Then the reports, the million echoes of gunshots, deafening, terrifying. They must’ve gotten me. I must be dead. They were too close to miss.

When my eyes open, Ethan is standing in front of me, the barrel of his gun smoking. Looking down the tunnel between his widely set legs, I can see the bodies of three squadmen sprawled on the concrete floor.

And I’m alive.

Ethan pulls me to my feet.

“Come on,” he says.

“You—you just saved my life!” I stammer, stating the obvious.

“Don’t fall again,” he replies.

As we run, he pulls the knife from his belt.

“Choose.”

“Choose what?” I wheeze.

“Who are you going to give your allegiance to? The Company—or the ones who will destroy it?”

I almost laugh. “Destroy the Companies? Why? They give people everything they have.”

“They give people what they want them to have, and in exchange, they ask for everything.”

Still running, our path is riddled with sundry debris: a bundle of clothing, an old beer bottle, a basket of some kind, a discarded doll. My head is pounding. My ribs feel like there’s a red-hot poker jabbing them with each step.

“Nobody’s forced to work for N-Corp,” I say. “They don’t like the Company, they can leave.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know, May,” he says. “Take the knife.”

I take it. He grabs my arm, pulls me to a halt. We both crouch on our haunches, our backs against opposite walls, eyes locked, breathing hard in ragged unison.

A moment passes.

Gunshots, which we both ignore.

Looking at the knife in my hand, I say, “I could kill you now.”

He smiles, “No you couldn’t.”

“Why do you trust me?”

“I don’t. I don’t trust anyone. But you could help us.”

“Why would I?”

His eyes smile at me through the half-light. “Because I’ve seen you in the shopping plaza, May. You’re different. ”

I don’t have to ask; I know what he means. The pants.

“You really think you have a future at the Company, May? Your father won’t be around forever.”

So he doesn’t think I could make it without my daddy’s help? I look at the knife clenched in my fist and think of stabbing him after all. Except deep down, I know he’s right. Take my dad away, and I’m one bad ad campaign away from being an unprofitable, just like everyone else.

From down the corridor come the sounds of more gunshots and yelling. Ethan allows himself one glance back, but it’s enough for me to see he’s worried, and not just for us.

“What do you want me to do?” I ask.

He looks back at me. There’s an urgency in his voice that wasn’t there before. “Cut the cross out of your face.”

I don’t answer. I don’t know what to say. It’s my life he’s asking. He’s asking me to take my own life. My name, my credit, my credentials, my accomplishments, all recorded in the cross, all will be wiped away.

“That’s impossible.”

“We’ve all done it,” he says. He points to his cheek and tilts it toward the light. Instead of the cross, there’s just a ragged scar.

“I’d be giving up everything I have to destroy everything my father helped build,” I say.

“Not destroy,” he says. “Commerce will still thrive. All the wealth the Company controls will still exist—many companies will remain, but we must divide and disarm the
two
Companies. We aren’t anarchists, May. We don’t want to destroy society. We want to reinstate the rightful, democratic government of the United States and return sovereignty to the people.”

In other words, they want to bring back the same corrupt, inefficient government the Company managed to replace.

But what if he’s right? What if it was because of the Company—and the people behind it—that the government became corrupt in the first place? I shake my head to clear the confusion. Even if I weren’t suffering from a concussion, the whole thing would still be too difficult to process.

I look at the knife. Scintillations of distant gunshots play across its deadly sharp blade.

From somewhere behind comes the sound of a muffled explosion.

“No time, May,” Ethan says again. “Choose.”

Yes, choose. Cut the cross out, or stab Ethan and run. Either way, I have a feeling my life will never be the same.

Suddenly Ethan’s head snaps to the right, toward the direction from which we came. Footfalls.

“It’s us,” yells a woman. I think the voice must be Clair’s, but it sounds more resonant, more powerful now.

McCann is with her, and one of the other men. The fourth man does not appear.

“The stairway’s collapsed, but they’ll get through the debris soon,” says McCann, as he runs past us.

And now we’re all running, single file, McCann then Clair then me then Ethan.

“Did she cut it out?” yells McCann.

“She was about to,” says Ethan.

“They’ll just track her right to us with that bloody cross in her face,” Clair shouts. “Let’s leave her.”

“They can’t track the cross underground,” says Ethan. “The satellites aren’t that powerful yet.”

“There are no tracking devices in adults’ crosses,” I wheeze. “They only put tracking devices in kids’ crosses, in case they’re abducted.”

“They put them in everyone’s,” says Ethan.

“That’s not true,” I huff. “I’d have heard about it.”

“Blackie,” Clair says, “what you don’t know could fill a warehouse.”

Shadows jump and squirm against two blinks of light as, behind me, Ethan squeezes two shots off over his shoulder.

And we run on through the dark, through the earth, and my mind reels as I wonder where the tunnel will come out and who I’ll be on the other side.

—Chapter ØØ6—

This is the Fourth of July.
Company Day.

I know it by the smell of grilling in the air: barbeque sauce, grease, and delicious-smelling smoke. Somewhere, a marching band plays.

This must be a long time ago, because I still believe my father’s promises. He says he will meet me in the park and we’ll eat ice-cream sundaes together, just like old times. The fact is, we have never met in the park and eaten ice-cream sundaes. Those “old times” are completely fictional, existing only in the deluded depths of his mind where he’s the greatest father in the world.

Today, I walk at the bottom of a canyon of skyscrapers. Distant fireworks crackle, but nobody in sight is celebrating. A tangle of faceless people hustles past me, their eyes downcast. Above, on a balcony, a woman is grilling, flipping a piece of chicken with metal tongs. She blinks the smoke from her eyes. She frowns. She doesn’t see me. Nobody sees me. A child somewhere laughs. Ahead, on the next block, the green expanse of the park beckons, but an endless blur of passing cars separates me from this oasis. There is no crosswalk; instead, there is a set of concrete stairs leading down to a tunnel that comes out on the other side of the street.

I descend.

Smells of puke down here, but I don’t notice it much. I’m wracking my brain. By Friday, I have to figure out how to make twenty million people think they need a tiny, dancing robot. An assignment for my marketing class. Even now, at only fifteen years old, marketing is my life.

I walk along, lost so deep in thought I don’t see what’s waiting for me until I’m upon it.

My gaze snaps up from the concrete at my feet and I find three sets of ferret eyes blinking at me. It’s three squadmen, hats cocked, legs set wide in various stances of macho aggression.

“Hey D. D! We got an even younger one.”

Then I see the fourth one, further away in the shadows. A woman is pressed up against the wall in front of him. Greasy hair falls across her face.

The man holding her there—D, he must be—turns and looks at me. We make eye contact, and he smiles. He shoves the woman away, down the tunnel. She stumbles, adjusting her skirt, and I see the sheen of tears on her cheek.

“Get the hell out of here,” D barks at her.

“You’ve been relieved of duty,” one of the other guys shouts, and everyone cackles. Her footfalls echo back to me as she runs away down the tunnel, interspersed with the sound of her sobbing. I’m already backing up, but not fast enough.

Here they come. Their movements, their tense, over-energized gestures, their forced, nervous, almost demonic laughter, all fill me with increasing fear. The stairway I came down is perhaps ten yards behind me; I can’t make it there before the nearest one catches me—all I’d succeed in doing by running is turning my back on my attackers. So I stand my ground, take a deep breath. One very young squad man with a serious face hangs back. Something—maybe the fact that I’m not running, maybe a twinge of conscience—clicks in his mind, and he slows, but the other three are already on me. The nearest one, the one they called D, reaches for me.

“Don’t worry, baby,” he says. “We won’t hurt you much.”

As his hand comes close, instinct kicks in and I snatch two of his fingers, one in each of my hands, and jerk them apart like a wishbone. The snapping sound echoes loudly in the underground, as does D’s ensuing howl. He cradles his hand and stumbles back, falling against one concrete wall.

The next one is on me instantly. He grabs my arm in one hand and my hair in the other, picks me halfway up off the ground, then throws me backward. As I fall, I use the momentum he’s given me and kick upward as hard as I can. My foot hits his crotch squarely, so hard it hurts my ankle. The squad member collapses, huffing and moaning, and I land hard on my back on the moist, dirty cement, scraping both my elbows and bruising my tailbone.

Two squadmen remain uninjured, the final attacker and serious boy, and both are now hanging back, unsure how to proceed. I scramble to my feet.

In my brain, a worried voice tells me I should run now, that the luck I’ve had so far was only luck, after all, and will run out fast. But it’s too late; the attacker has decided not to let me go.

“We got a feisty one,” he says, and lunges at me.

I slap him across the cheek, and he instantly retaliates, punching me squarely in the face. The blow is sudden and knocks me over against the wall. Stars sparkle across my vision. My eyes well up with moisture, and I feel my nose start to drip. I regain my composure just in time to see the other punch coming at me. I duck it, and his fist slams against the cement of the tunnel with bone-splintering force. He staggers backward, mouth open in silent agony. From the sound, he must’ve broken his hand.

As he falls to his knees in the throes of pain, I begin backpedaling as fast as I can away from him, until a single word interrupts my flight: “Stop.”

I look to see the last squad member, the boy, the serious one. He stands a few paces away from me, looking very pale. In his hand, a gun. It’s just me and him, our eyes locked.

“It’s alright,” I say soothingly. “I won’t tell anyone. You won’t get in trouble, okay? Just let me go. ”

I take a step to leave and he shouts again, “Stop! Lay down on the ground.”

D scrambles to his feet now, snarling like a dog. The guy I kicked in the crotch is up too, and limping toward me.

“On the ground, now!” the kid says. The black pistol in his hand trembles. One twitch of his trigger finger and I’m dead. There’s no other choice. I lie down.

It feels like a trap door has opened beneath me, and I’m falling. I don’t know who the girl is who lies on the filthy concrete while D climbs on top of her, but I’m a thousand feet underground, falling away from her.

“My father’s the CEO,” I hear myself say with all the boldness I can muster.

“Sure,” D chuckles. “So’s mine ”

The whole world is growing dim. My breath is chugging in and out of my lungs, faster and faster. This can’t be happening to me. My dad is the CEO. I’m going to be a Blackie.

D glances to one of his comrades. “You get her legs.”

I open my mouth to scream, but D clamps a hand over it. I thrash and fight with all my strength, but their hands, their bodies are too many. The last thing I remember is the grit and filth of the tunnel floor against the side of my face and D on top of me, his breath reeking.

“Who’s the CEO now, sweetie? Huh? I am.”

The rest, thank God, I black out.

Half an hour later, I stand between the band shell and the Ferris wheel in front of the ice-cream stand waiting for my father, my mascara streaked, skirt torn, knees trembling. No one looks at me or asks if I’m okay—they just gave me a wide berth as they passed me by.

The clock in the tower strikes two o’clock. I stand there, unmoving as the tears dry on my cheeks. After what seems like only a few minutes, the clock strikes three.

My father never shows up.

~~~

The blindfold falls away from my eyes. For some reason, my first impulse is to look up.

Birds wheel above. I don’t know the name of their species—
sparrows, maybe—but I watch them turn as one, and I envy them. Their freedom. Their thoughtless unity. Beneath the wood-raftered ceiling of almost heaven-like girth, they turn and turn and flitter away.

Ethan stands watching me, his arms folded, an odd, wry grin playing across his lips. The blindfold still dangles from his hand. As soon as they were confident they’d lost the squadmen pursuing us, he and his rebels made me put it on.

“Don’t want you giving us away, do we, Blackie?” Clair had whispered into my ear as she cinched the blindfold tight, a new harshness in her voice.

Now, as I blink and look around, letting my eyes adjust, Clair and McCann stand a few steps away, whispering to one another. Behind them, scattered across the cracked concrete floor of the old warehouse, crumpled shapes move ever so gently, breathing the deep breath of sleep. There must be hundreds of people here. Some are obscured beneath tents or hidden by makeshift lean-tos. Some figures are large, probably comprised of whole huddled families, and others are small, single, and fitfully roll and rustle beneath their blankets. A dozen glimmering campfires dot the expansive space, lending the room an air of warmth, casting the whole scene in a tremulous light that makes it all oddly beautiful.

“What is this place?” I ask.

“Our camp,” Ethan says, “for tonight, anyway.” He turns and, with a gesture, leads me onward, picking his way through the sleeping bodies. McCann and Clair follow.

As we walk, I stare down at the sleeping figures in utter confusion. Who are they?

A tattered, camouflaged blanket covers a bearded old man. His head rests on what looks like a backpack. Next to him in small, orderly stacks rest a deck of cards, a pack of chewing gum, a chrome butane lighter, and a white pistol.

That can’t be right. I squint through the dark. Only squadmen are allowed to carry firearms. For anyone else, it’s a breach of Company policy punishable by termination. But Clair had one, didn’t she? All of them do.

Ethan notices me staring.

“Ceramics,” he says, gesturing to his own gun. “Company metal detectors don’t pick them up.”

Beyond the old man, I see another sleeper. He or she rolls over and the sole of a boot pushes out from under the corner of the blanket. Next to the figure, within easy reach: a white rifle. “Who are these people?” I ask.

“The unemployed. Drifters, dreamers, scholars, misanthropes. Rebels.” Ethan glances back at me, as if gauging my reaction. No doubt, even in this light he can see the color draining from my face.

“The Company would call them unprofitables,” Clair says. She does not look at me.

“Unprofitables. . . .” I repeat, feeling suddenly dizzy and sick with fear.

Unprofitables are the people we are warned never to become. They lack the capacity to be productive. They lack respect for the good of the stockholders. They are filthy, worthless, useless, idiotic, insane, and criminal, leeches stuck to the underbelly of society, stealing its productivity, draining its resources, undermining its order. They are the cancer that refuses to be excised from our world. They are selfish sinners who lack the moral strength to do what the Company requires of them. If it weren’t for the drain people like this put on the economy, the Company could be perhaps 15 percent more profitable, at least according to what I learned at N-Academy. I stand up straighter and walk faster. If I could, I would hold my breath to avoid breathing this air, polluted as it is with the breath of these slothful wretches.

Ethan glances back at me. Seeming to read my thoughts, he says, “Not everyone is meant to be a tie-man, May. Surely you’ve realized that by now.”

Certainly not. There are also positions for receptionists, mechanics, construction workers, transportation experts. But there is no place in the world for an unprofitable. As Jimmy Shaw says, laziness is the father of all sins.

My mind races to figure how I can escape this den of unprofitable, anarchist murderers.

Clair picks up on my uneasiness. She gives me a sidelong glance and a bitter smile, then spits on her hand and swipes it across her face. Before my eyes, the cross on her cheek smudges and streaks. Shocked, I look down at a sleeping face, then another. Both have scars on their cheeks, and no crosses. My eyes snap back to Clair.

“How did you get into Headquarters?” I demand. “You have to have a cross to get in.”

But she only rolls her eyes and walks on.

Suddenly, a shape emerges from the shadows and races up to us as quickly as a darting cat. “Da! You’re safe!”A little boy no older than six sprints toward the one called McCann, leaps onto him, and clings to his neck. McCann laughs.

“Always. And you, were you a good boy while I was away?”

The boy suddenly turns sullen. “No,” he says reluctantly. “I broke Ada’s jar with the soccer ball.” He winces after speaking, perhaps in anticipation of punishment, but McCann only laughs.

“Well then,” he says, “I guess you’ll have to find her a new one.”

The boy seems hardly to hear his father’s words; his attention has wandered to me. “Who’s that?” he asks, pointing in my direction.

“I’m May.”

“This is my son, Michel,” McCann says, introducing the boy.

“She’s a Blackie, Michel,” Clair says, making no effort to disguise the disdain in her voice. “I bet you’ve never seen one of those before.”

Michel squints at me and wrinkles his little nose.

“A Blackie?” he says. “But she’s so . . . white!”

Ethan and McCann laugh loudly. Even Clair lets a smile slip.

“No, no,” McCann corrects, still grinning. “It means she’s her own person, not owned by the Company. It means she’s not in the red. She has no debt. ”

“Well, I’m not quite a Blackie yet,” I murmur. I don’t tell them the rest, that I’m only about five years and a few million dollars away.

Little Michel still seems perplexed. “What’s debt?” he asks.

“Don’t worry,” Clair says, giving me a pointed glare. “When we’re finished, all the debts will be settled.” Her eyes linger on me for a moment longer, then she turns and makes her way across the room through a maze of blanketed bodies.

“Don’t mind her,” McCann tells me. “She’s an angry person. Sometimes I think after she’s done fighting the Company, she’s going to declare war on everyone else. Don’t worry, she’ll be back by the time dinner is served.”

McCann laughs and Michel does, too, but Ethan just watches me.

From another direction, a kind-faced, middle-aged woman with large hips and squinty eyes approaches, wiping her hands on an apron. She smiles, but shakes her head with disapproval.

“You’ve been fighting again,” she says.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ethan says with a smile. “How are you, Ada?”

Ada shrugs the question away, as if it is of no importance. “Dinner’s ready,” she says. “You all must be starving.”

~~~

In the middle of the massive warehouse, Clair, Ethan, McCann, Michel, and I all sit around the fire burning in the cut-off bottom of a steel drum. We eat sandwiches of wheat bread, dried beef, and mustard—silently.