Blood Zero Sky (8 page)

Mostly I stare into the fire, but when I look up at the others, I sometimes catch them exchanging glances. The tension is almost palpable. Other times, they gaze at their sandwiches as a gypsy would at tea leaves. I wonder if it’s my fate they’re looking for, or their own. Sometimes, one of them pretends to look past me, but I know they’re actually checking me out, sizing me up. Maybe they’re just trying to discern the differences between themselves and me, the only Blackie-to-be they’ve probably ever seen.

My mind is a tangle of confused, fearful thoughts. It’s good that they’re feeding me. It might mean that they aren’t planning to kill me right away. Unless, of course, this is to be my last meal. If it is, I’d have preferred Italian. . . . I should escape, but I have no idea where I am, and I’m surrounded by people with guns. If only I could contact someone. . . . I manage to glance at my IC, but it shows that there’s no wireless here. Either we’re out of satellite range, or they’ve blocked the signal somehow. I have no options. I’m powerless. All I can do is enjoy my sandwich, try to ignore my throbbing head, and hope that if they kill me, they’ll do it quickly.

It’s McCann who finally breaks the silence: “I like having the fire,” he says, and the music of his African accent brings a smile to my face. “A man needs a fire.”

“Yep,” his son, Michel, agrees.

Clair snorts. “Enjoy it now. When the next-generation sats are up, they’ll be able to detect the heat even inside the building. If we want a fire then, it’ll have to be in the deep underground.”

“N-Corp doesn’t have any satellite programs like that in development,” I say around the last bite of my sandwich. “I would know about it.”

McCann trumpets a laugh. Clair looks at me dismissively, and then back at Ethan.

Just then, a broad-shouldered, ruddy-cheeked young man approaches. He stops at the edge of the firelight and gives Ethan a stiff salute.

Ethan returns the gesture. “Well?” he prompts.

“It’s like we thought,” the young man says breathlessly. “The Headquarters explosion targeted our people. The only operatives we have left on the inside are—”

Ethan gives the young man a look, and then tilts his head toward me. When he sees me, the young man instantly clams up.

“What did I tell you?” Clair says, shaking her head bitterly. “Three years they worked to stop the final consolidation, what did they get? Murdered, all of them. It can’t be changed from the inside. I told you that.”

“It seems you were right,” Ethan says dryly.

“Wait,” I say. “Are you saying that the Company was behind the explosion in the Headquarters building? That’s insane.”

Everyone ignores me.

“And now—the financial loss,” Clair continues. “What are we going to do?”

Ethan stares into the fire.

“We can’t let it happen, Ethan!” Clair shouts.

“Can’t let
what
happen?” I ask.

Clair still turns on me with fire in her eyes, but McCann answers my question.

“The Company won’t allow a financial loss to take place,” he says patiently. “The entire world system is based on the Companies making a continuous profit. A loss hasn’t happened in thirty years, and they won’t let it happen now.” He glances at Ethan, then back to me. “They have a plan in place to prevent it.”

“They have a plan, alright,” Clair snorts.

“What do you mean?” I ask. “What’s the plan?”

“What do you care?” Clair growls. “It won’t affect you. You’ll go about your life, shopping, feasting, going on vacation, and you’ll never even know it happened. None of you Blackies will.” She shakes her head and chomps into her sandwich, like it’s a small animal she’s trying to decapitate with her teeth. “We’ve got bigger problems than her, Ethan,” Clair continues after a moment, nodding toward me as she chews. “Someone outed our people. We’ve got a rat to kill.”

“She’s right,” McCann agrees. “If there’s a traitor, we have to find him.”

“Or
her
,” Clair amends.

“The lives of everyone in the Protectorate could depend on it,” McCann finishes.

Ethan only nods.

From behind, I hear footsteps. Startled, I look over my shoulder. It’s just a middle-aged man, no doubt picking his way through the camp toward the latrine. It’s too late, though. Clair has already noticed my jumpiness.

“What’s the matter?” she says with a cynical smile. “Too many uprofitables for you?”

“No . . . I just . . .” Not knowing quite what to say, I feel my voice die out. I look to Ethan to speak for me, but he doesn’t. He just watches me with his blue cat’s eyes. I feel almost dissected by the intensity of his gaze.

“We have to do something about her, Ethan,” McCann says, nodding toward me. “The sats will pick up her cross soon, if they haven’t already, and when they do they’ll be on our doorstep.”

Ethan nods pensively. “What do you say, Clair? What do you think of Miss Fields?” Ethan says, with a slightly amused expression on his face.

She shrugs. “I just used her to get out of the building. You’re the one who wanted her.”

Ethan stares at me for a long, silent moment, and I fight to hold his gaze. Finally, his hand goes to his belt and draws out the knife. He offers it to me again.

“Cut out the cross, May,” he says gently. “Stay with us.”

I look down at the knife. Strangely enough, part of me longs to take it. Despite my fear and distrust of the unprofitables surrounding me, I have to admit that I do feel strangely drawn to them. Even this tense camaraderie I’ve felt around the campfire is more genuine human interaction than I’ve had in months. I can almost imagine myself staying here, living happily among these outcasts. As bizarre as it is, sleeping in their dirty blankets with a white gun at my side and campfire at my feet seems far preferable to wandering my immaculate apartment alone for the rest of my life. Surely here they wouldn’t care if I wore pants, or if I kissed a woman. Maybe Clair, even . . . if I could persuade her not to kill me first.

But of course, such thoughts are insanity. Sure, there is something that thrills me about these people, but what I don’t understand is the nature of their cause. The Company is good! Credit limits go up every year, and the product lines just keep getting better. Every imaginable luxury is just a shopping trip away. Crime is dropping. Faith in God is through the roof. And anyone, if they just work hard enough, can be a Blackie one day! Why would somebody want to rebel against a world like the one we, the Company, have created? That’s what I can’t fathom.

No, the idea of living here is just another dream, another ridiculous, unrealistic utopian fantasy.

I am a Fields. I live in a penthouse. I will be a Blackie. When all these anarchists are wasting away in Company prisons, I will be tanning myself on a two-hundred-foot yacht off the coast of Fiji.

And the Company, it will be expanding still.

Ethan still watches me, and I can see disappointment on his face as he guesses my thoughts. Without a word, he slips the knife back into its sheath.

Clair stands, finally smiling. “What did you expect?” she says to Ethan. Then she stalks off into the shadows.

“You all seem really nice,” I say quickly, apologetically, “but I can’t understand—”

“We don’t have time for you not to understand, May,” Ethan stands, nodding to McCann, who rises, too. “Take her,” he says.

Without warning, McCann grabs me from behind.

“No! Please! Listen! Let’s talk! My father—we can negotiate! He’ll pay you—please—” I shout, in a panic.

Ethan doesn’t respond. He merely stands there in the firelight with his arms crossed, watching as McCann drags me away. I scream until I lose my voice, but McCann doesn’t stop, doesn’t answer. He moves with the inexorable gait of a robot, dragging me away, into the darkness.

—Chapter ØØ7—

McCann leads me to a heavy, rusty-hinged steel door.
When I open my mouth to speak, he jams a gun in my back, urging me through the doorway and into the darkness beyond. A set of metal stairs. We clang our way downward endlessly. The suspense is too much. I could puke at any second. The silence is killing me. I have to speak.

“What’s going to happen to me?” I ask, glancing over my shoulder at him.

“You and God will decide that. No one else.” The humor that filled his voice earlier has fled.

We continue the rest of the way in silence, trudging down the stairs, flight after flight, until I imagine we must have reached a level at least five stories lower than that of the rebel warehouse. At the bottom of the stairs is a doorway, and I hold my breath as we step through it and into a small, twelve-by-twelve-foot room with walls of unadorned concrete block.

Inside the room, now. The door through which we entered is at our backs. Ahead of us is another door, this one a little lower, a little narrower, made of steel and shut tight. The door behind us swings shut as well. One dying, fluorescent tube flickers above us, providing the only light.

I turn and face McCann. A knife blade protrudes from his fist, deadly and evil-looking. We are alone in a place where even the most pitiful death scream would fall to silence before reaching any living ear. I struggle to remember the prayer of Jimmy Shaw, the one he closes each sermon with, but although I have heard it a million times, only a few phrases remain in my memory:
Give me the grace to bear my burdens, the will to work hard . . . let me obey the Lord Jesus and His mother, Mary, honor my family, devote myself to my Company . . . forgive my sins . . .

My heart sinks. Surely, these scraps of drifting words will never form a solid enough raft to float me to heaven. Still, paradoxically, in this moment I feel God all around me as never before. Maybe even without Jimmy Shaw’s words, He is here with me after all.

The knife.

My eyes close. Despite all the anger, all the frustration I have wrapped around myself for years, I would still, in this moment, cast it all off and live.

McCann takes a step toward me. In the wavering light, his eyes seem to quiver. The scar on his left cheek stands out in livid relief. He smiles or snarls, I cannot tell which.

“McCann,” I say, making sure to use his name, hoping it might elicit some measure of mercy. “Am I here to die?”

“We’re all here to die,” he says. “The question is, how will we live?”

What I meant to say was,
Have you taken me here to kill me
? My mind reels as I try, without success, to articulate my fears.

He holds up one large hand, hushing me. “Listen,” he says, “we don’t kill no one if we can help it, but especially not you. We need you. The best way to kill a chicken is to take off the head, right? If the Company is a big, evil chicken, you’re closest to the head, you see?”

I shake my head. “No, I still don’t get anything. People have more luxury than ever before. Billions of people all over the world have accepted Jesus. Thousands of people are raised out of poverty every day because they work for the Company. You’re telling me all that’s suddenly meaningless? That the Company is just evil?”

McCann pauses. He breathes deeply, as if drawing words up from a deep well inside his chest. Finally, he speaks.

“You know, I used to work for N-Corp,” he says. “Back in my home, in Africa Division. I loved the job. They gave me a small, clean place to live, and food, new clothes—decent credit. It was like a dream. So I tried to get my countrymen and tribesmen to work for N-Corp, too. But they didn’t trust the putting of the cross in the face or the way the Company made people abandon the old ways. Some villagers protested. They fought to take back the lands the government had sold to the Company. The spirits told them the Company was bad, they
said. . . . Well, on this day hundreds of tribal leaders gathered in my village to discuss ways to resist the Company. I went to change their minds, to tell them how good my job was, and I brought with me an imager camera, purchased with my new Company credit. It turns out, you will see, I was wrong about the Company. The spirits were right.”

The light flickers above us, casting trembling shadows, like black, capering demons, across the walls. McCann holds out the knife.

“After what I am about to show you, if you decide to join with us and fight the Companies, you will cut the cross out of your face and come back through this door, the way we came in. If you decide to stand with the Company, then you will go out the far door. The tunnel it leads to will take you back to the industrial arc. That door will lock behind you once you pass through it, and by daybreak this camp and every person in it will have scattered like smoke in a wind, and you will have made your choice.”

When he stops speaking, the silence is complete. Still, I can find no words. I stand holding the knife, staring dumbly.

McCann retreats to the door. He does not smile now.

“You’re leaving?” I ask. A moment ago I was terrified he’d kill me; now I’m terrified he’ll leave me alone.

When he turns back, a bottomless sadness seems to inhabit his eyes. “Forgive me, but I cannot stay and watch,” he says. “Already, my dreams are polluted.”

He opens the door, steps through, and then turns back once more.

“I like you, Miss Fields,” he says to me. “I hope you will choose well.”

He seems about to say more, but a distant, haunted look comes over his face, and he nods at me and says nothing. The door closes behind him with a clap deeper than a peal of thunder, and I am alone.

The light above flickers to darkness.

Then all around me, the nightmare begins.

~~~

In that tiny underground room, perhaps only a few hundred feet above hell itself, white light leaps onto three walls. From the light, images come forth, indistinct at first then solidifying. And I suddenly realize: this room is a 3W3DI, just like the one I have at home.

The audio system crackles to life, and the sound of laughter echoes eerily against the barren concrete walls. I glance over my shoulder, half expecting to see McCann standing behind me (for the laughing voice is his), but the steel door is shut tight, and I am alone on a narrow, dusty road somewhere in Africa Division. The road stretching out at my feet is skirted by dry, wind-rustled grass. Against the horizon, a few small huts and piecemeal shacks rise from the barren landscape under a majestic, cloud-swept sky. My world jostles as I/McCann move up the road amid the faint cloud of dust kicked up by our feet.

In the next instant, I see what has elicited his laughter—a group of children run up the road toward us, screaming, laughing, and shouting greetings in a language I don’t understand. They swarm around us, skipping, jumping, and kicking a tattered soccer ball back and forth. From our pockets we take out little pieces of candy, which the children receive with elation. We laugh with them. They clamor to take our hands and pull us toward the village, leading us home.

A few chickens hasten out of the road as we pass. The children chase one another around us in circles. Several of them speak to us quickly, excitedly. Part of me yearns to know what they’re saying but another part of me already knows, for children are children the world over, and excitement is universal when a favorite uncle comes to town.

Up ahead, two women wearing long, colorful robes approach, and next to them comes a thin man with long arms and a bright, toothy smile not unlike McCann’s. He wears blue jeans and a sweat-stained button-up shirt. When we meet, we all exchange handshakes, hugs, jokes, and exclamations of joy. Amongst the children, we walk on. We have reached the outskirts of the village now, and we pass a tiny, windowless shack with a tarp for a front door. Two old tires and a rusting motor scooter stand next to the house.

For a moment, my heart swells with pride to know that through my work at the Company, these destitute people are probably now living in clean, comfortable conditions.

The narrow, dusty road curves toward the crest of a hill. The rest of the village—perhaps only a few more scattered huts—must wait on the other side.

The most eager of the children, a young boy of perhaps seven with fast legs and no shoes, has already reached the hilltop. There, against a feathery wisp of cloud draped in the blue of the sky, he stops short. At first, I think he must be waiting for us to catch up. As adults often do, we are lagging behind. But instead of looking back at us and shouting “come on” in his tongue, instead of doubling back, grabbing our hands, urging us forward, he simply stops. He stands very still and shades his eyes, watching something intently. Then he slowly extends one small finger and points.

For a moment, we ignore him—many other children vie for our attention, and the adults surrounding us engage us in lively conversation. But soon, as the hilltop grows nearer, the boy draws our full attention. We follow his finger into the distance. At first, there’s nothing to see: only the blue of the sky and, to the east, the still-low disk of the morning sun.

But gradually, out of the distant blue, dark specks come into being. A flock of birds approaches. At first, they are distant. An instant later, they are close. They are birds—must be birds—but they are birds of singular purpose, for none of them wheels; none darts down to alight on a branch. And the sheer number of them is awe-inspiring. This migration must be unprecedented, for the black specks gush over the horizon by the hundreds. In the next moment, these straight-flying birds are nearly upon us, their wings rigid, their movements fluid and marked with almost supernatural speed. Now the people next to us are pointing too, speaking in hushed and fearful tones.

And I realize, in a wave of nausea and foreboding, that nobody in this village has seen a flock of these strange birds before. Ever.

The little boy on the hilltop lowers his pointing hand slowly and backs up a few steps, his eyes fixed on some unseen thing waiting just below the line of the horizon. The world is thrown into tumult as we run toward him. The little boy’s fear is thick, palpable, spreading like blood through water. The sound of footsteps is all around us—
everyone is running, the adults, the children, all hurrying toward the fear-stricken little boy. We, McCann and I, reach him first.

He stands face-to-face with a bird that nature would never have allowed to take wing. From here we can see it is actually a two-foot-long aircraft, a black-painted triangle of metal. It hovers maybe four feet from the ground, issuing a barely audible, mechanical purring sound.

The boy points at it and says one word. I can only imagine he’s asking us what this thing is. He swallows his fear for one instant, allowing himself to glance away from the thing and turn his hopeful brown eyes on us. He even forces a smile. We say something—tell him not to be afraid, perhaps—but his eyes snap back to the flying triangle. He backs up a step.

Something inside me screams,
Don’t trust it!

And then we hear the sound, a tiny expulsion of air like an overenunciated T. At first we don’t see what’s happened. The black bird’s purr raises a few notes in pitch, and it darts away. It’s already just a speck in the sky again by the time the little boy hits the ground. We’ve reached him in two steps, but by then his gaping eyes have already glossed over. His arm is still extended, his finger still points, but now it points heavenward. In his neck: a tiny dart.

The little boy is dead.

Then the sound again, more unnatural purring, more T sounds. We turn to see the children all around us falling, one by one, like a set of dominoes.

T-T-T-T-T

They all fall down, ringed by hundreds of hovering black triangles.

We snatch up a child, the only one who hasn’t fallen—a sobbing little girl—and run over the hill with her in our arms, screaming warnings that aren’t words, screaming in the most primal, most universal of tongues.

Over the hill, in the village below, among the dry, brown grasses, inside the huts, piercing the canopy of the sky at every turn, the metal birds swarm like locusts. We run among them through the village, screaming our warning as, around us, men carrying spears and guns, women bearing babies, children with dolls and playing cards, all fall, one by one, into the dust.

Perhaps the most horrible thing of all is that, I, we, can still hear the wind. We can still hear a distant radio. The black triangles make no sound except their murmured purring and their staccato exhalations of death. We run through the horrible quiet, searching for a weapon, for a refuge, for a way to turn the tide of annihilation, but in the next instant, it’s already too late.

The black birds are gone. We spin and spin, looking for the last one, the one that will put death in
our
throats. But the flock has flown away. We watch them diminish, like the smoke of a dying fire, and soon the distance and the blue have absorbed them again. It’s over. I look around.

Everywhere, I am watched by the staring eyes of the dead. And that’s when I notice: none of these corpses has a cross in its cheek.

I drop to my knees and set down the little girl I have saved. For now, after this horrible judgment of God, it is my duty to dry this little girl’s tears, to root out the answer when she screams at night and asks why her parents, her friends, her teachers, and her cousins were all killed. I must raise her. I must love her. Through her, I must make things right.

I set her down. She smiles at me, her teeth shining and white. Catching my breath, through shuddering tears, I speak words to her. Is she okay? Is she alright? She mustn’t be afraid, mustn’t cry (although I am crying) she mustn’t, mustn’t—

Her smile doesn’t flinch. Her eyes cannot blink.

I, we, roll her over find the dart in the back of her neck.

We look up, our view unsteady with the shaking of sobs, but the only thing that still moves in the once-vibrant village is the wind through the dry, dead grass.

Across the road, between two squat, mud-brick huts, I see something so strange that at first I think I must be imagining it. There, looking as out of place as a spaceship might in this peaceful, primitive place, stands a billboard from the last N-Diamonds campaign.