The Bar Code Rebellion (5 page)

They couldn’t bring Mfumbe to a hospital and risk the chance that he’d be taken back into custody. “But we can’t keep him in the truck or the garage,” Dusa said. “He needs help.”

They were back at the Drakians’ garage. Mfumbe had been sleeping while Kayla sat beside him and read through his slim volume of poetry to pass the time. When he finally awoke, his right eye could barely open. This was bad, but the blood he started coughing up was even more worrisome to Kayla. “What about going to your parents?” she suggested.

“There’s no way,” he told her. “My father and I weren’t even talking when I left home the last time.”

Kayla had been reading a poem called “The Death of the Hired Man” by Robert Frost. “‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in,’” she said, reading a line from the poem.

Mfumbe grunted unhappily. “Easy for him to say,” he mumbled, turning onto his side. “He didn’t know my father.”

By the end of the day, however, they were once
again on the Superlink, this time headed north toward Mfumbe’s home. Despite his objections, none of them could come up with an alternate plan to take care of him. His parents were bar-coded. They probably had private doctors they could take him to see. There didn’t seem to be any other choice, so Mfumbe had reluctantly consented to go.

On the ride up, Mfumbe sat between Kayla and Dusa and slept most of the way. Kayla told Dusa about seeing Eutonah.

“This psychic stuff is so weird,” Dusa commented.

“When I was in the mountains, Eutonah taught me a lot,” Kayla replied. “She’s amazing at harnessing the power of her mind. She says I was born with natural ability as a psychic, but I need a lot more training.”

Mr. and Mrs. Taylor lived in a neat house on a suburban street. Mfumbe’s mother burst into tears when he appeared on her doorstep at dawn the next morning, supported by Dusa on one side and Kayla on the other. Overjoyed to see him, she asked no questions as she ushered them into their living room. His father fumed at first, but seeing the condition his son was in, he soon relented and phoned a friend of his whose son was a doctor.

“Kayl-l-a and Dusa can stay here, right?” Mfumbe checked with his parents.

Kayla looked at him sharply. The quiver, the odd stammer on the
l
sound in the way he’d said
her name — she’d never heard that in his voice before. He was probably just weak.

The Taylors exchanged an uncomfortable glance at each other. “It could be dangerous,” he said.

“You’re right,” Dusa said firmly. “You might want to consult a lawyer after he sees a doctor.”

“But he’s bar-coded now,” Mrs. Taylor pointed out. “Everything is all right now.”

“They grabbed so many people and bar-coded them that they might not even bother to look for him,” Dusa allowed. “But we did break him out of jail and —”

“You broke him out of jail?” Mr. Taylor shouted.

Kayla stepped toward Mfumbe’s father. “They hurt him and we thought that —”

Mr. Taylor wheeled around so that he was looking Kayla directly in the face. “I don’t care what you thought!” he shouted at her. “My son was headed for a university education on a full scholarship until he got mixed up with you! Thanks to you, he’s lost that chance. He might be wanted by the police. He has a criminal record for shoplifting.”

“He just took a bottle of Adleve, dear,” Mrs. Taylor defended Mfumbe.

“Yes, and he stole it for
her
!” Mr. Taylor insisted. “Every mess he’s gotten into is because of her.” He took a small phone from the pocket of his cardigan sweater. “In fact, the last I recall, the Yorktown police are still looking for this girl in connection with her mother’s death. I think it’s my duty to call them.”

“Dad, no!” Mfumbe shouted. The effort set him into a fit of coughing.

“He’s coughing up blood!” Mrs. Taylor realized. While she and her husband attended to Mfumbe, Dusa and Kayla slipped out the door.

Dusa’s fake bar code tattoo was made from the records of a woman who had died with an active bank account that still contained close to two hundred dollars. They used it to buy lunch at a diner in Peekskill. As they ate, Kayla asked her about the fake tattoos.

“This computer hacker genius out west does them for us, Jack something or other,” Dusa explained. “He takes them from the files of dead people. We like to spread the fakes around, to make them available to people who might need them but don’t know where to get them. In fact, I’m heading out to Nevada to get another batch. I have to meet a bunch of people in Yorktown to set it up as soon as we leave here. I can’t bring you to the meeting because it’s top secret.”

An elderly waiter served them thick slabs of the chocolate cake they’d ordered. “I just saw you on the TV,” he said to Kayla. He pointed to the fake bar code on her wrist. “You were saying how much you love your bar code.”

“That’s my sister,” Kayla mumbled.

“Do you like your bar code, too?” the waiter asked. Kayla noticed his wrinkled wrist was also coded.

“Not much,” she admitted.

“Me, neither,” the waiter agreed, “but I can’t get in to see the doctor without it, so what could I do?”

“I know. It’s tough to do anything if you don’t have one,” Kayla sympathized politely. So many people were just stuck with it.

After lunch, Kayla and Dusa walked down to the Peekskill GlobalTrak BulleTrain station beside the river. When they got there, Dusa went into the station office to meet her Nevada connection. Before leaving, Kayla couldn’t stop herself from glancing up at the window of the apartment across the road where Zekeal Morrelle had once lived.

The ramshackle apartment was at the top of a long, narrow wooden staircase that ran up the side of the building, above Vinnie’s Tattoo Parlor. Vinnie’s was now boarded up, since all permanent decorative tattoos had been made illegal. She recalled reading that Gene Drake had once worked in Vinnie’s as a tattoo artist. That was how he had come to work for Global-1 as a bar code tattoo “provider.”

Kayla remembered the apartment, and how she’d been so crazy about Zekeal back then. They’d been together there so many nights, so close — or so she’d thought. She had believed he loved her until the night she discovered he was really a Tattoo Generation agent.

What an emotional wipeout that had been! Total mind-boggling betrayal.

It had been the same night that her mother, in a drugged up, crazed state, had tried to burn her bar code off her wrist, accidentally setting the kitchen curtains ablaze. Gas from the stove had finished the job, igniting the entire house into an inferno.

From that night on, Kayla had been on the run. It was strange now to be here. She stared up at the apartment, remembering the days when she’d loved Zekeal.

And then the door opened and he stepped out onto the outside staircase landing.

Kayla stepped back quickly into the shadowy station doorway. Could he see her there across the road staring up at him? He didn’t appear to, though she pressed her aching back more firmly against the door, just to be sure.

He was dressed in a jumpsuit, the official Tattoo Gen uniform. One of his eyes was covered with a black patch. Had she done that? According to the article in
The Lake Placid News
, she and Mfumbe had “brutally attacked” him. In reality, he and the others from Tattoo Gen were the ones who had violently raided their encampment atop Whiteface Mountain. Kayla had been shot and Mfumbe had been trying to protect her when Kayla used her psychic powers to drop a tree limb onto Zekeal. She hadn’t intended to blind him, but obviously she had, in one eye.

Oh, well,
she thought coldly. She couldn’t believe he’d ever meant so much to her. Briefly, she wondered if he was still involved with Nedra Harris. The petite fascist was now the national spokesperson for Tattoo Gen. The two of them deserved each other.

Zekeal went back inside just as a GlobalTrak BulletBus came around the corner. Kayla ran across the street to catch it. Her heart skipped a beat with nervous anticipation as, climbing up to the bus’s scanner, she flashed her fake bar code for payment. The scanner beeped her through. It had worked!

The BulletBus traveled silently toward her house, running smoothly on its underground electromagnetic track, passing so many familiar sights. She went by the crummy motel where her best friend, Amber Thorn, had been forced to live after something in her parents’ bar codes had derailed their lives. Unable to get a mortgage, her father fired from his job, even denied fuel for their cars, the Thorns had moved to Nevada to live with a relative, an eccentric aunt who nonetheless possessed a viable bar code tattoo.

The last time she’d received an e-mail from Amber was the previous May. Amber’s Aunt Emily was against modern advances like computers, but Amber had reached Kayla from an Internet address at a cybercafé in Carson City. Apparently, Aunt Emily was driving the family insane with her strict, weird ways. Amber had sounded pretty miserable.

Kayla’s last attempt at communicating with Amber had been in September, on the very day she and Mfumbe had decided to join the Decode March on Washington. It had been her turn to act as runner, and she’d delivered a batch of handwritten letters to one of the Postmen.

The BulletBus continued past Artie’s Art Supply, or at least where Artie’s Art Supply had once been. Now the store was gone and a HealthBurger concession stood in its place. Kayla remembered how she’d shown up for work one afternoon only to discover that the store was locked and that Artie, his wife, and his two little girls, all of whom had lived above the store, were gone. Artie and his wife were not bar-coded. Kayla wondered what had become of them.

After a few minutes, Kayla got off the BulletBus on a residential street of narrow, attached row houses. Before reaching her own home, she came to the house where Gene Drake had lived with Francis and Nate.

She gasped at the sight of a small terrier sitting on the front steps. Gene’s dog! It sat amid bouquets of flowers in front of a door heavily graffitied with various slogans and remarks done by different writers.
GENE DRAKE WAS A HERO! GENE DRAKE (1997–2025) HIS SPIRIT LIVES ON.
GLOBAL-1 WILL BE UNDONE!!

Some of the bouquets were wilted, even dead, but new ones lay on top. Someone had attempted to rub off the writing, but fresh comments were scrawled over the smear of erasures.

A young boy came around from the back of the house and put a leash on the terrier’s collar. “Stop coming here every day!” he scolded the dog, his voice warm with affection despite his sharp words.
“You’re our dog now,” he added as he tugged the dog away from the steps.

Strange, Kayla thought, not for the first time, that an odd character like Gene Drake — heavyset and badly groomed, reeking of cigarette smoke, nervous and uncharismatic — should be so deified and adored after his death.

A red leaf dropped from a nearby maple tree. Then another fluttered to the ground. A wind was blowing them all down, one by one. She watched them fall, forgetting about everything else….

She is standing in a desert, a hot breeze burning her skin. Blue mountains in the far distance. Feelings of hatred. Rage. Murderous thoughts. She will show them all the power of her genius, show what a mind expanded many times beyond its usual dimensions can do. If they want to play God, she can play God, too. They will not cage her, no matter what!

Someone walked up beside her. His presence jolted her back to reality.

“Postal delivery,” said the young man in dark glasses standing beside her. A Postman. He handed
her an envelope with the name Kayla Marie Reed written on it.

“How did you find me?” she asked him.

“The kid with the terrier saw you,” he replied as he walked away.

Kayla glanced down at the handwriting on the envelope. It was a script she knew well.

She smiled.