Honey to Soothe the Itch (3 page)

I don’t argue.  Whatever she’s feeding me helps and I don’t think using what little brain power I have left to research the drugs is worth my time.  Trusting her with my life isn’t a hard thing for me to do. 

“We could meet in your… room,” Tony says, pointing over my shoulder.  He offers every time, calling it “my room” even though he wants to say “your box.”  He’s a good kid, way too young to be running the tech group, but he’s a good leader.  Better than Jackson, to be honest.  I know the older man’s been training Tony, making sure he’s involved in all the decisions, so if anything happens, he’ll know how to take charge. 

But he’s still a kid and the smell of sick people makes him fidget, so I come out into the evening air.  It’s the least I can do.  “Amanda wants me to breathe fresh air, right?” 

She looks at me to say “No, I want you to rest,” but she and I have had this conversation.  “Right,” she says, and nods toward Tony. 

She’s got a good fifteen years on him, but I know they have a thi
ng.  It’s good for both of them, a little bit of happiness.

“What do you have?” Jackson asks.  He’s been antsy, wondering when this rail depot will come alive, the trains moving out to sustainably ship zombie car
go to zombie cities, despite all of Tony’s work to camouflage the yard’s programming. 

“Everything’s holding,” I say.  We
’re safe here, at least for a little longer.  But Jefferies had thought the same thing about St. Petersburg. 

I
f we move out into the wilderness, it’s pretty much giving up.  In a rural area, accessing the major information systems would be near impossible.  And I won’t have access to as many zombies. 

I
’m hoping that there’s enough here I can find one I can use to mark the free humans as “non-pest.”  That’s what I tell Jackson and Tony and Amanda.  And that’s what they believe.  But if I can find the right zombie, with the right final moment, maybe I can do more.  Maybe I can affect the entire body.

Jackson fiddles with a loose nail in the side of the crate he’s sitting on.  His fingernail flicks over it in a steady clicking cadence. 
“Sanderson and her group came back about an hour ago with canned food.”  Jackson shrugged.  “What the hell are the zombs eating?”

They weren’t
eating
so much anymore as
consuming
.  The slurry we’d seen them take in made them run just right. 

No one wanted to talk about
what the slurry was made out of, but we all knew we needed to stay away.

I shake my head as I look down at the rail yard gravel under our feet, feeling sick to my stomach again. 
Usually the meds Amanda gave me kicked in by now.  They mess with my thinking, but the pain and itching messed with it more.  I wonder if they’d ever work again, now that I’d started coughing blood.

Tony sniffed and scratched the side of his nose like he wanted to disagree with me but didn’t want to upset the sick person.  I hold his gaze, tacitly giving him permission. 

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

Damn it
, I think.  How did I miss it when I checked the buffer in the system?  They were gathering visual data locally, which meant the satellites must have picked up movement in the yard.  Our movement.  Or Tony’s programs made them itch.

I nodded.  “I’ll look.”

We’d be pulling up stakes and leaving, probably within the next few hours.  Jackson would put out the order as soon as I returned to my squeaky metal box, then they’ll come and get me, when the time came, 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 exurbs northwest of here.  Scouts had 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 hadn’t left already is because of me and my project. 

“I can’t go with you,” I said. 
“I can’t live what time I have left watching the sunsets from inside a German-engineered coach.”  I sat up straight, though it took effort.  “There aren’t enough of them away from the city, and if I’m going to fix this, I need to be here.”

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

I shake my head.  “The other implanted will keep an eye on you.  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.  It’s what we have.”

Until the zombies figure out we’re manipulating the data stream and camouflaging our free humans so they look like the rest of the hair follicles.  It will only last for so long, though, then the fingernails of the invisible tech beast will rip across the skin of the world, looking to dislodge the 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. 

“Me too,” Tony says. 

I glance over at him.  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 wag
s his finger like a father, his face stern enough to hide what he was really feeling—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.   

They will be mu
ch 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 t
o do?  Highjack a drone and skywrite for us?”

I chuckle.  I hadn’t thought of that.  I
t 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’s to the west, okay?”

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

Yes, I am.  But it didn’t matter.

The other implanted didn’t think I could
make my plan work.  My enclave didn’t understand what I had in mind.  Everyone thought with the cancer, I was too weak, but I think they’re wrong.  I think the cancer is what will let me do it, if I find the right zombie. 

Because
I’ll use some of my implants’ processing power to copy 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 tumor of its own frozen moment of cells. 

***

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

I’m wondering, too, if I’m not eating enough to power my implants anymore.  I know I’m not moving enough.  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 on fire.  And when I burn up, there’ll be nothing left but toxic sludge.

At the back of the rail yard, a crane loom
s over stacks and stacks of red, yellow, sometimes green and blue shipping containers, all of them empty, waiting for shipping back to the ports. 

We
mostly stayed away.  The crane’s onboard systems made it a sensitive piece of machinery, and we didn’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 few days inside a lemon yellow container smelling of t-shirt dye and rotting bodies.  Accessible only via 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’d moved slowly, afraid of waking me.

I’d pulled back from the other implanted, refusing to do my part
to fill the hole left by Jeffries.  They understood.  They’d soon have to fill my hole, as well, and a couple of them had started, already. 

One of the roaming enclaves in Australia
had a pre-implanted and she’d figured out some 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 them both to go.  I can’t eat anymore.  I can barely drink.  Processing
the shape of their faces and the lines of their movements took energy I didn’t have, and should be using for to search for my ghost, anyway.  They refused.

They’d asked questions.  Made me tell them the story of my goal.  How I’d vowed I’d bring back
their
world before I died.  The reigning intelligence couldn’t be an animal.  It couldn’t.  It may have dropped humanity to the ground and clamped its jaws around our collective neck, but we still breathed.  We still kicked.  So did I.

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

So
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 remember:   She’d been 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 and a cut to her hand and a permanently, painfully damaged tendon.

Another:  He’d been in his car thinking it needed a good cleaning.  The AC smelled funky.  He sniffed and watched the road, his left arm starting to heat too much in the sun 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.

More:  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.

M
y body feels like burning rubber now.  My eyes, my tongue, my fingers.  I suspect I smell like it too, or maybe that’s the zombies.  They don’t smell human.  Not anymore. 

Tony and Amanda
crouch at the front of the shipping container.  They’ve left the door open enough we can breathe.  Tony’s holding the semi-automatic Jackson left him.  Amanda’s praying 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:  His girlfriend felt smooth, soft, like a fine cotton shirt.  She smelled like
a woman and he couldn’t get enough of her.  She’d pushed him away, smiling, but the sun shone through her top and he could see 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 noises outside.  There’s rustling and knocking.  The world sounds hollow. 

Tony’s breathing hard.

One more:  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 bright the entire city of zombies is in the rail yard.  I’m that damned talking flea and now the beast’s focused on m
e, trying to figure out if it’s dreaming.

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.  The sun will come up tomorrow.  I won’t see it, but the world will.  And I can imagine what it will look like:  Warm and stretched along the horizon, framed in blues, purples, and reds.  Maybe, somewhere, the ocean will reflect the sun’s brilliant glow back to it and both the world and the sky will become happy together, like Amanda and Tony.