Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds (3 page)

Tony sniffs and scratches the side of his nose like he wants to disagree with me but doesn’t want to upset the sick person. I hold his gaze, tacitly giving him permission.

“We’ve seen some around the depot building, all looking more confused than usual. They’re watching.”

Damn it
, I think. How did I miss this when I checked the buffer in the system? They’re gathering visual data locally, which means no matter how much I interfere, their satellites must have picked up our movement in the yard. Or Tony’s programs made them itch.

The zombies are learning. What happened to Jefferies’s group will happen here within two days and there’s nothing I can do about it.

We’ll pull up stakes and leave probably within the next few hours. Jackson will put out the order as soon as I return to my squeaky metal box, then when the time comes, they’ll come and get me, Amanda gripping one of my elbows, Jackson the other. They’ll walk me out onto the gravel like a pair of priests.

This time, we’ll move out of the city along the freeway, toward the northwest exurbs. Scouts found an RV sales lot full of quarter million dollar motor homes with cushy leather interiors and that refreshing new car smell. The only reason we haven’t left already is because of me and my project.

“I can’t go with you.” I sat up straight, though it takes effort. “There aren’t enough of them away from the city. If I’m going to fix this, I need to be here.” I
have
to stay. I need to make my plan work. They can’t hide anymore.

Next to me, Amanda’s body goes rigid. She’s been expecting me to tell Jackson and Tony I won’t leave. We talked about it a couple of days ago, the first time I thought the meds weren’t working. She argued then. She’ll argue now.

I shake my head. “The other implanted will keep an eye on you,” I lie. “You won’t know it, but they’ll do their best to keep the zombies back, the way I do. We all use the same tricks.” They need to have some hope.

The zombies are about to figure out we’re manipulating the data stream and camouflaging our free humans so that from above, they look like the rest of the hair follicles. But the fingernails of the invisible tech beast are about to rip across the skin of the world and dislodge the disguised parasites.

“I’ll stay with you,” Amanda says. I stare at her big brown eyes and I wonder why. But I know—it’s her place to make the end as good as possible for the dying, even if her role puts her at risk.

Or she reads my terror the same way I read the zombies’: My face is too blanched, my angles too wide.

“Me too,” Tony says. He’s watching Amanda more than me and it’s pretty obvious what’s going on.

Jackson wants to argue with them. They’re valuable, but he can’t force them to stay with the group. He’d be just another form of zombie if he did. “You follow, both of you. Do you understand?” He wags his finger like a father, his face stern enough to hide what he really feels—fear. The fear of losing another two. The fear of attrition and dropping too far over the edge to pull back the group, even though he knew this day would come.

The group will be much more vulnerable without me. “Stay small, stay separate. If something changes, an implanted will let you know.”

Jackson frowned. “No, they won’t. I know your abilities are limited. What are they going to do? Hijack a drone and skywrite for us?”

A sad, neurotic chuckle pops out of my throat. I hadn’t thought of that. It really wasn’t that bad of an idea. “Well, if you see ‘Shop at Christopher’s’ in the sky one morning, you’ll know the Promised Land is to the west, okay?”

“That’s not funny,” Amanda whispers. “You’re going to die.”

Yes, I am.

The other implanted don’t think I can make my plan work. My enclave doesn’t understand what I have in mind. Everyone thinks I’m too weak from the cancer, but I think they’re wrong. Even if it chews me up, I think the cancer is what will let me do it, if I find the right zombie.

I close my eyes. The implants riddling my bones differ from my connecting tech. They’re memory storage and power plants. They don’t learn; their purpose is to keep some semblance of order in my systems.

It no longer matters. I need speed now, not longevity.

I kick my bone implants’ processing over to copying my cancer. I’m making a squishy buffer, an immortal one that can’t be killed. One so fast that its inefficiency is irrelevant. I’m going to give my cancer to the beast of the world, formed into a sweet, unterrifying tumor made of frozen moment of cells.

Because when I die, I’m going to make sure Amanda and Tony make it back to the group.

***

Amanda tips the steel water bottle to my lips. She’s upped my pain meds and moved me onto God knows what. It’s interfering with my ability to calculate.

I’m wondering, also, if I’m no longer eating enough to power my implants. I know I’m not moving enough to generate the piezoelectric charge I need. My legs feel like rubber attached to a car battery—life wants to move through them as blood and nerves and flexing but it can’t, and pretty soon I’m going to catch fire. And when I burn up, there’ll be nothing left but toxic sludge.

At the back of the rail yard, a crane looms over tall stacks of red, yellow, sometimes green and blue shipping containers, all empty, all waiting for a return trip to the ports.

We mostly stay away. The crane’s onboard systems made it a sensitive piece of machinery and we don’t want it spying on us. But after the enclave left, Tony and Amanda moved me into the maze of boxes, picking one in the center of a stack in a shadowed corner. I’m to live out my remaining days inside a lemon yellow container smelling of t-shirt dye and rotting bodies that’s accessible only via a rope ladder.

I can no longer get down. Amanda and Tony, though, climb up. They’ve had sex twice, in the far corner when they thought I was asleep, whispering sweet, wonderful things to each other. They moved slowly, afraid of waking me.

I pulled back from the other implanted, refusing to do my part to fill the hole left by Jefferies. They understand. They will soon have to fill my hole as well, and a couple of them have started already.

One of the roaming enclaves in Australia has a pre-implanted and she figured out new tricks to look more like the local zombies. I passed them along to Tony before the meds made it hard to talk, hoping to ease his fears about getting out alive, when I’m gone.

I told both Amanda and Tony to go. I can’t eat anymore. I barely drink. Processing the shape of their faces and the lines of their movements takes energy I don’t have and should be using for to search for my ghost, anyway. They refuse.

They ask questions. Make me tell them the story of my goal and how I vow to bring back their world before I die. The reigning intelligence may have dropped humanity to the ground and clamped its jaws around our collective neck, but we still breathe. We still kick. So do I and I’m going to fix this.

I think Amanda cries. It’s hard to tell in the hot, suffocating gloom of the shipping container. They leave the door wide open, but the breeze doesn’t move in here. I smell my own death festering like the lesions on my legs.

I flicker into implant space, where I don’t itch.

The zombies don’t know if they are dead or alive. They’re not aware. They
do
, and that’s about it. Do, and freeze on the memory at the end of their humanity that I now read: She was alone, in her kitchen, slicing watermelon. The air had smelled crisp and fresh and her kids played in a plastic pool just outside her patio door, yelling and shrieking and shooting each other with water pistols. She’d been as joyous as she was annoyed, and her world had been bright.

But her frozen moment held screaming as she sliced her hand and made a permanently, painfully damaged tendon.

Another frozen moment: He’d been thinking his car needed a cleaning. The AC smelled funky. He sniffed and watched the road, his left arm heating in the sun blazing through the side window, and he wondered about skin cancer. Then he changed the radio station, wondering why all the new music sucked. It all sounded like machines. Soulless, like his ex.

His frozen moment held panic, whiplash, and the realization he’d never see his kids again.

Others: The latte tasted bitter. I took too many credits this semester. The dog peed on the rug. Damn, the weather’s nice today. Will I get this project done? I don’t want to get fired. Where will I find another job?

I’m wheezing. Tony’s pulling up the ladder. He says something about them noticing us. About how, he thinks, I’m not being subtle anymore.

My body feels like burning rubber. My eyes, my tongue, my fingers. I suspect I smell like it too, or maybe the scent filling my nose is the zombies. They don’t smell human. Not anymore.

Tony and Amanda crouch at the front of the shipping container. They left the door open so we don’t suffocate. Tony holds the semi-automatic Jackson left him. Amanda prays in soft beats. Her voice echoes in the container, filling the dark voids in the back. I lay on a stolen yoga mat and all I can do is watch.

Another zombie moment flashes through my implants: His girlfriend felt smooth, soft, like a fine cotton shirt. She smelled like a woman and he couldn’t get enough of her. She pushed him away, smiling, but the sun shone through her top and he saw her nipples. She needed to wash the dishes, she said, but damn he was horny and she had a fine curve to her backside.

For a split second, he thought he caused the terror in her eyes. Then he understood.

The cargo containers amplify the rustling and knocking outside. The world sounds hollow.

Tony breathes hard.

One more zombie: Mom, I don’t want to read her a story. Why do I have to do it tonight? Mom!

I think I’ve lit us up so brightly that the entire city of zombies is in the rail yard. I’m that damned talking flea on the back of the animal and now the beast’s focused on me, trying to figure out how to scratch me off.

Amanda’s going to die here, with me. Tony, too. He’s just a college kid. He should have a life ahead of him. She would have kept the enclave alive. I should have made them leave.

I can’t feel the burning rubber anymore. The zombies make a lot of noise but it’s soothing. They sound like bees and it mixes with Amanda’s prayers.

I remember my old life, now. I remember tasting apples and thinking they really don’t have a flavor, just a texture and the sounds of crispness. My boyfriend laughed his big, hardy guffaw and smiled with his perfect white teeth. “Oh, my beloved,” he once said. “It’s there. You only need to close your eyes and feel it on your tongue.”

So I close my eyes.

Another ghost, adjacent to the last: I taste toothpaste, because I’m a good girl and Mommy said I’d get a story tonight, so I wash my face and brush my teeth and wipe up the sink. I hold my favorite book, the one Grandma gave me, and I run to my bed. My big brother’s a meanie but I love this book and I won’t think about him and Mommy fighting over who has to read it to me. I hold it tight and I make it bounce across my lap because that’s what the tiger in the story does and there’s a cuddly bear but he’s nice and it’s a safe place, where they live in the book. No one yells, but they’re funny and they act weird and I love all of them.

Where I am now, lying on a yoga mat stinking of death and hearing the very end approach, I recognize the story. It’s a classic, one told many times. I know the place this little zombie imagines quite well.

It is much better than the world as it is.

My brain makes its last blast of endorphins and the itching stops. The zombie’s story, her one last final frozen moment, resonates with my memories of apples and sunshine. I wonder if somewhere, in that children’s tale of a trees and streams, if there’s an ocean with cresting waves of rich blues and greens. If the turbulent waters with their chaotic, salt-smelling life and their roar, can find their way through the beast’s hide. If, perhaps, life can once again break through unfettered and uncontrolled, like my cancer.

I don’t know how efficient a kid’s mind is. I don’t remember being a child. But I do remember awe and wanting, more than anything, to learn and to grow.

And even though in the world of the children’s story everyone wore the same clothes every day, and they didn’t change, they grew. And they lived.

I wonder, as my last thought, if Amanda’s pregnant. Tony’s splayed his fingers over her belly. Then he fires his gun.

At my end, I feel the last screaming pulse of my implants as I copy the child’s last moment and meld it to my mutated, cancerous buffer program. It lashes out into the invisible tech’s collection systems, sending out tentacles that break off but don’t die.

I know, somewhere out there, the other remaining implanted watch, maybe helping me spread a form of human happiness that looks controlled, but isn’t. Maybe they’re wondering if spreading a cancer into the world is worse than what we have now, no matter how happy that cancer might be, or how well it camouflages free humans as non-pests.

My final frozen moment takes shape: I think of Amanda and Tony’s baby as an adult. The singular, smooth terror of the world has vanished into a wooded place, one full of family and growth. She’s safe. Her people are safe.

Every time she visits the ocean, it tastes just a little different, the way it should. Every time she touches a flower, it feels slightly different, because that’s how life works. I want her to grow up understanding that plants come in all sorts of different shades of green, and that’s just fine. Sometimes the buzzing means bees, but she doesn’t have to be afraid.