Ice Cream and Venom (13 page)

By the time he awoke buried up to his neck in the huge swamp of excrement and other remains on the ground floor, he was guilty of every sin imaginable, and a victim of them as well. He had no idea how he'd come to be there, of course, no memory of who he was, but in situations like this such things don't matter. A subconscious, sub-vocal instinct sounded in his head over and over again, '
just survive, just survive, just survive.
' It had been there since shortly after he arrived in the airport, since this new order of life had claimed him, but it was louder in situations like the present one. It was The First Law, after all, though he lacked the capacity to think of it in those abstract terms.

After quite some time, he managed to work one of his arms partially free of the filth—interesting how memory plays such little part in coordinating life-or-death situations—and reached out for anything solid to pull himself forward. There was a half-buried chair just in reach. He managed to get his fingers around that and pulled. It came loose from the muck and slapped him in the head. Already on the edge of panic, he gave in to it and went hysterical for such a long time that he got bored with it and then tried to rescue himself again. He found an unidentifiable bit of tubing sticking up with a reasonably intact person impaled upon it. He reached out and grabbed for it, but his disgustingly greased fingers slipped off several times. Finally he grabbed the hand of the dead woman, and was able to pull himself forward somewhat. A few hours later he had his other arm mostly free, and he had the woman as a source of food.

In two days, he was able to commando-crawl to the edge of the dung-heap where the density of the material was less, and he clawed his way through on hands and knees. His hand struck something. It was solid, and fairly large. He became interested in it, and wrestled it out of the muck. A briefcase? Small suitcase? Something like it, anyway. For no particular reason, he took it with him when he finally reached the lowest bank of the broken escalators. After forgetting he had it in his hand and rediscovering it several times, he smashed it repeatedly against the wall and broke it open.

Inside was something more magical than magic itself: It was cleanliness.

The case had been waterproof, obviously, though he couldn't comprehend that. Inside it were papers and pens and various office supplies that were as pristine as they day some now-anonymous wretch had brought them to this place. They even still smelled faintly of a mill or office supply store. It was the only clean thing in this entire hellish tiny world, salvaged from the filth.

It struck him as numinous and holy. Taking pains to scrape off as much of the muck from his body as he could, he touched only one sheet, and then tentatively on the edge.

"Paper," he said, the first word he'd spoken in days. The amnesia the victims here suffered was of slightly worse than the standard sixties television plot device variety: they could remember language, skills, things built in to them on a basic level before the more shallow things were wiped by the odd experiment going on in this place, but any more personal or recent memories were as volatile as the morning dew, and somewhat shorter-lived. Even these memories tended to degrade over time, much to the interest of the observers. It was a cruel miracle that anyone survived here at all, which, of course, was the point of the exercise.

He piled up some smashed furniture on the second floor until he had a heap big enough to climb up and reach the merely grimy ceiling and rubbed his hands along that until they were relatively clean. Why? What deep instinct put that thought in him? No one would ever know, but one must be careful not to profane holy things. All the while, '
Just survive, just survive
' beat a rhythm in his head so basic that he had long stopped noticing it, except in emergencies.

He took a pen—it still worked—and wrote "I am on the second floor." He could see that much from looking over the balcony. Something in his head screamed in triumph, and this too was numinous and perhaps even holy. Sometime later, lugging the case full of blank paper along, but inexplicably covered in blood, he found a large room off to the side that had emergency rations in it—Army MREs, probably intended in the event of a blizzard or something similar—it took him a while to realize what they were, and even then it was only an accident when he tried to stab a large snake with his doorstopper and missed, ripping a hole in the reflective Mylar wrapping. He greedily wolfed it down. There were freeze-dried strawberries in there! Freeze-dried strawberries! It was as if heaven had descended upon earth for him in the form of dehydrated sweets, the first thing he'd eaten in God knew how long that wasn't a rat or a person or worse. After such a long time on a starvation diet, he was overwhelmed and whet into a state that was not quite diabetic, but still some kind of hyperglycemic shock.

The paper said, "I am on the second floor" and several other random things that had occurred to him since he found it. It had helped him, the paper had; he could keep track of things. He kept it pinned to the inside of a shirt he'd taken off a corpse some time earlier, and continually forgot about it, but whenever it happened to make itself known to him—scratching on his chest, or falling out at inopportune moments, or just feeling odd when he rubbed himself for whatever reason—he looked at it, and was reminded of various minor things about his life. This time he scratched out the things that no longer seemed relevant, and drew a map to the food cache. It took him a few days to do it, since he kept drifting off, but one of the things he wrote on the page was "Make a map to the food, it will help you survive." Presently, he had a fairly detailed treasure map that told him how to get to the food from virtually any location adjacent to the atrium, and which was coincidentally a fairly good map of the center of the airport itself. It was simply labeled "Follow this to food."

Thus, even though he had no memory, he'd managed to work out a system of artificial memory, though he generally forgot he had it with him. The cache became his home base, and he started putting on weight, gradually increasing from the animated skeleton he'd been.

One day he found himself suddenly aware while looking over the balcony at one of the paintings. He began to itch, and when he scratched he rediscovered his map. While puzzling over it, a child—nothing but skin and bones herself—came crawling past. She had long since lost the energy to stand. She was sick and naked, and clearly wouldn't last much longer. She mumbled "hungry, hungry, hungry" as a barely-recognizable mantra.

'
Just survive, just survive, just survive
' kept repeating in his subconscious, he'd been in flight-or-fight mode for however long he'd been in this place, but a consistently full belly and some semblance of an external memory had caused it to recede somewhat.

He looked at the map, and at the dying girl.

"You want something to eat?" he said to her, his voice scratchy and unexpectedly loud. He hadn't spoken in days. She ignored him, mumbling 'hungry, hungry' to herself, and kept crawling on. She was far gone, past the point of realizing anything beyond her own misery. She was entirely bestial.

'
Just survive
' played in his head, but he looked at that law, recognized how small and sad it was, and told it to shut up. In the course of a millisecond, it was gone.

"Yeah, you are," he said to no one in particular. He picked her up—she couldn't weigh thirty pounds even—and put her over his shoulder. She was too weak to squirm or fight or do much of anything. Then he looked on the back of his map, where it said, "Write down things here so you don't forget them" in his handwriting. Underneath that, he wrote:

"You have got to help the girl survive, get her some food, keep her safe."

"Let's get you something to eat," he said as he carried her off to the cache, completely unaware that the fundamental nature of his universe had changed, but feeling good in some way he couldn't define just the same.

The girl didn't survive, of course. She was too far gone. She lasted a day or two, or maybe only twelve hours, and he kept forgetting she was there. He was always surprised to see her, and took her to be an interloper trying to steal his food. Every time he tried to attack, however, he would notice some post-it notes he'd stuck conspicuously to her: "She is not an enemy," one said, "She is a friend. Feed her and keep her safe." So he did, though it did no good.

Or did it? She died peacefully in her sleep with a full belly for the first time in God alone knew how long. She didn't die alone and cold on the floor, but rather she expired on a cobbled-together bed made of cardboard Civil Defense boxes, and in the end he held her hand, though probably she didn't know it. They weren't friends by any stretch of the imagination, but at least she wasn't entirely by herself. A tiny spark of humanity had re-entered the airport.

And from that came a plan, of sorts. He looked at her body after she'd expired, forgetting again who she was until he saw the notes he'd made for himself, though of course he didn't realize he was the one who'd written them. Why had he bothered? What had she meant to whoever wrote the notes? Well, that didn't matter much, he supposed, but she must have been important to whoever left the instructions for him. She was dead, obviously, so what could 'keeping her safe' mean? There were only one or two things a person would want a dead body for—food and sex—so clearly he must be meant to protect her body from those. He found to his surprise that he had paper and a pen, so he wrote himself a note: "Get rid of body in some way others won't get it." Then he wadded it between his wrist and his watchband, and put her over his shoulder.

They made their way to the central atrium, with him forgetting several times what he was doing, but the note reminded him of his mission. He made his way to the third floor, and then chucked her body with all of his might over the side. She fell at an angle, splattering into the center of the swamp of feces and effluvium that made up the first floor, the impact raising slow concentric ripples amongst the chives growing on top. He thought that was oddly pretty.

Her body was driven fourth-fifths of the way in to the gelatinous mass by the force of impact. '
Wow,
' he thought, having no memory of just having thrown her in, '
there's a lot of meat in that dead body in the middle there,
' he thought, suddenly hungry—but not quite as hungry as he normally was—'
but no one will ever get to it way out there in the middle.
' He stared until his hunger became worse, then discovered to his surprise that he had a map to a cache of food, so he decided to follow it. Once along the way he noticed a note in his watch band that said "Dump the body in the central swamp where no one can get to it," but that made no sense whatsoever as he wasn't carrying a body, so he threw it away.

The plan that emerged from this was simple, so simple in fact that it could only barely be called a plan at all. Of course it would have to be that way, since no one had any memory at all and were all operating on reflex and basest instincts. In fact it operated on a level not unlike a subtle form of behavior modification, over time, with training, and without memory he was able to add one reflex to his normal stable of them: check the paper.

He had access to a large-but-finite supply of food, but also a fair amount of paper, pens, and some minor office supplies. He got lonely. He wanted friends. Catching and training people was a simple matter: he simply jumped them in the hallway when they were alone and looked to be easy pickings. Then he'd haul them back to Civil Defense cache and sit on them until they both forgot what they were doing and calmed down. Then he'd check his notes to find out what he'd intended himself to do with the new person. He'd assign them a totally random name—"Sarah" or "Bigass" or whatever seemed appropriate, and then he'd write this down and attach it to them in some conspicuous wise, along with whatever he wanted them to do. Simple instructions—'stay here' or 'guard door' or 'let the boss back in when he returns' things like that. He'd made himself a "The Boss" nametag by this point, of course.

Catching people was easy enough to begin with, and it got easier still as the ready supply of food improved his health and strength. Initially he only went after women for obvious reasons, but as his harem of minions increased in size they had more needs than he, himself, was able to supply, and they began abducting men and indoctrinating them the same way he'd done his initial captives. All were given names—which of course they couldn't remember—and maps back to the cache.

Their instructions became more involved, their missions more complex, they began more arcane missions driven by curiosity rather than survival, and standing orders gradually evolved:

Standing order number one
: Do what the paper says.

Standing order number two
: No one is ever to be alone, everyone must always go in twos at least.

Standing order number three
: If what the paper says doesn't make sense, follow the map to home.

And so on. These were written on every paper for every person, regardless of the mission. He was not their leader, though; they didn't and couldn't have one since their situation was too unstable for any form of hierarchy to evolve. Instead the written word was their leader, even though they couldn't remember who gave them instructions just moments after they'd been written. Their society was basic and rough and barely functional, and it certainly couldn't deal with any kind of prolonged crisis lasting longer than a few minutes, but it was a working solution to an untenable problem.

How long this happy state of affairs continued no one can recall, but eventually they reached a tip-over event: Attacks, fighting, rapes, and murders began to decline. More and more people that went out to follow their written instructions actually came back. First only some of them returned, then they started coming back bloodied and bruised, but they always made it back. Presently the teams started coming back without having any incidents of note at all—neither ones they could remember, nor otherwise. Eventually there were more people in his ad hoc community than out of it, and from that point on things progressed rapidly and safely. The endless violence disappeared, the written word had saved them and the pen had become their sword.

The lions operating entirely on aggression and instinct had been subverted, defeated, by the lambs operating on organization and something akin to compassion. Primate curiosity re-asserted itself: They mapped out the entire airport, they traveled in twos, they had enough to eat, and a basic code of behavior had evolved that prevented most crisis and strife. Anything that couldn't be handled by the standing orders was resolved by their short attention spans and even shorter memories. Fights erupted, degenerated in to chaos, the same as before, but when the chaos degenerated in to exhaustion the fights fizzled out, the combatants surrounded by rings of people shouting, "Check your paper! Check your paper!"

True, the food was running out, but as it was intended as disaster relief for a town somewhere, and there were less than a thousand of them. It would last a while yet. There was time. When it was gone, all bets were off, but for the time being they were safe. More than safe, they were curious. '
We can't get out of here—WHY can't we get out of here?
'

When the next airliner landed, it was met by him and a group of his minions in the terminal. New people—so clean!—Came from the boarding gangway, already looking confused and panicky. His people met them and gave them some papers: "Do what these say at all times," they said, "or else bad things happen." They couldn't remember exactly what the bad things were, but there were enough scars and missing teeth and limbs and gouged out eyes that no one had any real doubts about the existence of the bad things.

He went down the gangway and spoke with a nervous man standing by the door of the plane. The smell of stale coffee and half-cooked airline food washed over him with a sensuality he'd never before experienced.

"I'm sorry, sir, you can't go back on the plane," the flight attendant said.

"I don't want to, I just wanted to tell you something... uhm... odd," he said.

"Is there a problem?" asked the flight attendant, who had been told simply to keep his passengers from re-boarding. He hadn't been told what to do about this crusty, half-naked, disgusting, hairy mass of a man who smelled like a sewer.

"Problem?" he said, absently to the flight attendant.

"Yes sir," the attendant said with fake cheerfulness. "Just follow this hallway to the terminal, and everything will be fine."

"Terminal—you know, it's the damndest thing. I was... I was just gonna tell you something, but I forgot what it is," he said.

"Must not have been very important then," the attendant said.

He noticed a piece of paper in his hand, "Oh, I must have written it down," he said to the attendant, "Let's see: Standing order one, two, three, four, five, ok, this seems to apply: 'Try to find a way out, and when you've found one, come back home and tell the others.' Uhm... We'd like to leave, please," he said.

The attendant freaked out at this, and ducked back in to the plane, pulling the door shut behind him. There was the sound of screaming and argument from inside, and eventually the unmistakable sounds of fighting—the people on the plane hadn't wanted any part of this, they'd known it was wrong on a very basic level. They were frightened and overstressed, and it didn't take much—just a man with a pleasant disposition and written orders—to push them to a breaking point. Their own standing orders didn't cover such an eventuality.

He wrote his observations down, "We must have come in on the planes. We need to get on the planes and leave." He got as far as "Position people in every terminal in small groups..." when the plane backed away hastily from the gangway, leaving him standing in the air, thirty feet above ground, the generic horizon in the distance, the weather still as pissy and sleeting as it was the day he arrived, not that he could remember it. The hallway didn't fold back against the building this time. He watched the plane take off, as another of his minions wandered up and stood next to him.

"You shouldn't be alone" the new one said to him, reading from his paper.

"I feel... I feel like watching that plane leave should mean something to me, but I can't think what," he said. Then he checked his note.

"Ohhhhh, right!" he said, slapping himself on the forehead with the same filthy had he used to wipe his own ass. Eventually the two of them got confused as to what to do, and went back to the cache.

For the first time in the deliberately murky history of the airport, a plane arrived and discharged its compliment of damned without anyone dying. They were incorporated in to the group safely and quickly. Order prevailed.

Half their supply of food was gone by the time the next plane came. This caught them less by surprise, and so they had orders written down to deal with it. As it happened, the orders weren't really terribly useful—trial and error was the major factor in the evolution of these things, but if a starfish can exhibit complex organized behavior without a brain, so can a community of humans without memory. They tried to get on this new plane. This resulted in a fight with a hysterical flight attendant—a woman this time—and a heroic (or merely guilty) pilot who came out to rescue her. The somewhat less heroic crew of the plane backed it away while the fight was still going on, and took off, stranding those two. He had hoped to get some information from them, but of course inside of a few minutes they were as vacuous as everyone else. They, and their passengers, were assimilated in to the group, and the standing orders evolved a bit more.

By the time the next plane came, they had decided to just rush it the moment the doors opened, though they had no idea how they'd get the crew to fly, or what they'd do with the people already aboard it. As it docked with one of the boarding gangways, they wandered down it somewhat confusedly, repeatedly checking their notes to see what was going on.

With a loud 'clunk' from the moving gangway, the connection was made.

The door opened.

They ran—he ran—blasting past the flight attendant, and suddenly his face erupted in a wall of pain as a man in black police combat gear punched him hard in the nose. He went down, and was dragged out of the way. Thirty or forty more men in SWAT gear filed past him, fighting hand-to-hand with the five or ten people who'd managed to get on the plane. One of them was stabbed in the groin, another fell over and took a knee to the face, two more ran away. The one who got hit in the face fell awkwardly in the close quarters, sprawling on the man who was holding him down. He was able to wriggle out of the guard's grasp. He had no idea what was going on, but getting the hell out of there seemed like a fine idea. The guard grabbed for him, but he kicked him square in the throat and the man fell down, sputtering, and didn't get up again. Getting away from the dying guard, he scrambled to the hall just in time to see the squad with shotguns firing beanbag charges in volley after volley in to the crowd, who, of course, fled in abject horror.

Two of them turned. One shot him in the chest, and he felt pain unlike anything he'd ever experienced before. He went down on all fours. Another guard rushed him and grabbed him by the hair, yanking his head up and punching him again and again in the face, each impact more painful than the last. He felt a searing white heat of pain and heard a snap as his nose broke.

"At least I won't remember this," was the last thing he thought before he blacked out.