Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1) (6 page)

“Umm…I…uhh…are you with…uh….” I stumbled over my words.

“I’m definitely not with the police,” he replied quietly, “and if you need to get out there, I might be able to help once you tell me why.”

“I need someone with electronics help,” I answered, cautiously looking around. “I need to disable a neural web.”

“But you’re organic,” he said, sniffing me gently.

“It’s for a friend,” I replied. “A friend who is in some big trouble if I don’t help him.”

“What do you have to barter with?” he asked.

We had done away with printed and minted currency during the Plague to prevent the spread of the disease from person to person. All transactions were digital and through a central computer system. The underground market required barter, but as a society with few material desires and a lack of consumerism, finding goods worth a trade was hard.

I opened my backpack and showed him the taser pistol that Semper had left behind during the night of his escape. It was matte black with a blue light indicating a nearly full charge.

“That is…
excellent
,” the man smiled. “Call me Alistair. I have a jetboat at the end of the pier that will take us to Old Vancouver. I’m sure one of my associates will be able to help you with your task.”

I hefted the backpack over my shoulders and followed the sauntering man to the end of the long boardwalk, where we turned down a ramp to a waiting boat. It was sleek and hummed with the power of jet engines.

I stepped aboard and took a seat in the small cabin. The boat slowly backed out of the slip and then lunged toward the open sea. Our fishing boat had created a large wake but this boat ripped along over the top of the waves, utilizing a phenomenon known as “ground-effect” to hover above the ocean. Technically, I suppose that we flew the half-hour to Old Vancouver.

The crumbling grey skyscrapers slowly started appearing as bumps on the horizon, growing taller as they came into view. Some of them were devoid of their glass cladding and stood exposed to the elements. Some had toppled onto each other like dominoes. I remembered peering down at Miami from the space station so many years ago, and I imagine it looks similar up close. I briefly wondered why they would show us Miami, but not something so physically close by, until I remembered what this place represented.

Wind turbines and solar panels clung to the tops and sides of a few of the decrepit buildings. Wires were strung haphazardly from tower to tower. Hastily constructed skybridges linked the old sky scrapers several floors above the water line. It wasn’t pretty by any stretch of the imagination, but it was very interesting, and a stark contrast to the clean, sleek lines of most of our society’s settlements.

Alistair expertly guided the boat between the hulking ruins of collapsed buildings, until he rounded a corner and quickly docked at a floating platform attached to the side of one of the skyscrapers. Two men with large Gauss rifles met the boat.

“This kid’s alright,” Alistair said. “He’s here to trade.”

I stepped up from the boat onto the floating platform and the two men patted me down. One then ran some kind of radio frequency scanner from my head to my toes. He nodded to the other one.

They led me up some stairs into a corridor that was illuminated with fluorescent light, then up two more flights of stairs and into a place I hadn’t envisioned.

The floor was intact and enclosed with glass—probably one of the only floors in the building to be in such good condition. Lights gently flickered, illuminating rich wood paneling. The floor was carpeted with ornate rugs. The furniture, though very old, was exquisite in detail. These items had to have been worth a fortune, proving that the underground market was lucrative indeed.

A man with grey hair sat at a heavy oak table, drinking some colored liquid from a glass. I’d never seen anyone with grey hair before. His skin was mottled with spots and sagging with wrinkles. He was old. The funny thing is I’d seen people hundreds of years older than him but they never
looked
old. He had aged, like the men I’d seen immortalized in paint in the museums of the capital.

“I’m Ebenezeer,” he stated, extending his hand toward me. “I’m the Pirate King of Old Vancouver.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” I said, extending my hand for him to shake.

He seemed perplexed as he held my hand.

“You’re organic?” he laughed. “I’ll be damned—he’s
au natural
, folks!”

“Pardon me?” I said, inquisitively.

“Oh, you’ll have to forgive me,” he chuckled. “We just don’t get a lot of skin-and-bones visitors. We don’t get a lot of visitors regardless, but we haven’t had a flesh-job visitor in years.”

I kept peering at his old face. My father was right: I’d never seen aging before. The old man sensed my confusion.

“You’ve never seen someone my age,” he surmised, “or at least someone who looked my age. Well this is the real world, kiddo. This is what happens when you don’t play their game. You get old, but you enjoy doing it!”

He laughed and raised his glass into the air. I could smell the contents from across the table. It was some sort of alcohol. I know that humans used to drink all sorts of poisons, but they were harmful to the development of children and they were impractical for adults who neither ate or drink, so alcoholic beverages hadn’t been cultivated since the dawn of our transformations.

He poured me a glass and slid it across the table to me. I raised it to my mouth and smelled the acrid odors and sickly sweet fragrances. I pressed it to my lips, and instantly felt them burning, but I swallowed a mouthful…

…and then coughed it all over the table, much to the delight of the old man.

“What a waste of fine twelve-year old scotch,” he snorted, laughing. “Don’t worry lad: it’s an acquired taste. Since you’re not much for drinking, let’s get on with business.”

I had so many questions about Old Vancouver that I’d almost forgotten why I’d ventured across the sea. Ebenezer answered them for me as quickly as I rattled them off. They grew food on the rooftops and on some of the floors with blown-out windows. There were about three hundred people living in the three main interconnected towers. Most were related by blood or marriage. A few were petty criminals who chose exile over death or imprisonment. A few had migrated from various parts of the Republic when they were deemed unfit for the surgery.

To be deemed unfit, you had to have a 95 percent chance or greater of failing the surgery. Though most children were genetically programmed to be perfect specimens, a few genetic recombinations could prove fatal and a few body chemistry compositions couldn’t be replicated with the machines. Ebenezer told me how his blood salt content was too high and it would corrode the machines, but to put him on a maintenance fluid (synthetic blood) with a lower salt content would have probably killed him.

“They told me I could stay in town and grow older,” he said, sipping his scotch. “I tried that for a while, but it was hard to get a job. A lot of jobs required travel to the Luna base or to Mars, and it’s pretty much impossible to get there without the surgery. And then there’s the fact that you just don’t fit in. You smell different. You need to take lunch and bathroom breaks. You’re treated like a child, because to them, you’ve never grown up—even though you look older than any of them. I started looking for a way out, and found it here. I can’t say I started this enclave, but I can say I’ve grown it and helped it prosper.”

“Are there other communities like yours out there?” I asked.

“I don’t know anymore,” his scratchy voice crackled. “There used to be a few small communities on the east slope of the Cascades, but not as far east as the Plaguelands. They are part of the Republic, technically, but they live a fairly subsistence lifestyle and never come to town for anything. They go there to live out the rest of their years, which without modern conveniences and breeding, doesn’t really let them get very far.”

Something still didn’t make sense to me. “So if everyone is sterilized at birth to prevent unwanted mating, how are you all related?”

“We have a doctor, here,” Ebenezer coughed, “a sort of doctor, anyway, who can undo what they’ve done. It’s only the males that get clipped, and we just unclip. You want us to take care of that for you before you leave?”

He chuckled and looked around at some of the others in the room. “Free of charge for our new friend!”

“Umm….” I hesitated. “I, uh, don’t really need to do that right now.”

“Well that’s a shame,” Ebenezer said. “One of my grand-daughters is an absolutely beautiful young woman and she wants a child. Your genes would be a welcome addition to this community. I’d pay you for them, handsomely.”

He turned to one of his associates and said, “Bring in Georgina. She’d love to meet our new visitor.”

Ebenezer winked at his associate, then smiled at me. I protested but clearly he wasn’t having any of it. I was utterly confused.

The old man continued relaying his personal eighty-three year history to me until a beautiful auburn-haired woman entered the room. She was slender, tall, and pale, wrapped in a white robe, which she dropped to the floor as soon as the three of us were alone. My jaw dropped at the sight of her beautiful naked body. I was speechless. She approached me, leaned in close to me, and spoke some words gently into my ear that I just couldn’t hear. I was paralyzed. I couldn’t deny that this girl was stunning and caused a stirring inside me, so I shifted in my seat, uncomfortably.

Ebenezer and Georgina tried for nearly an hour to get me to agree to undergo their procedure so I could mate with her. I protested. I refused. I tried to get our negotiations back on track to learn how to disable Semper’s neural web: my whole reason for being here. They wouldn’t hear it. Their request soon became a demand, and soon it became a ransom: I was told I couldn’t leave Old Vancouver until I agreed.

I felt ill. I was being held prisoner. I was in deep over my head and I couldn’t think of anything except to run. I dashed from my chair and grabbed my bag next to the door. I threw open the door to the hallway and one of Ebenezer’s guards stepped in front of me. I punched him hard in the face—the first time in my life I’d ever hit anyone in anger. To my utter amazement, he flew against the wall and dropped like a rag doll.

I raced down the flights of stairs to the dock where the boats were moored. I knew how to drive boats, and if I could just get aboard before anyone else got to me, I’d be home free. Maybe I’d go home and give up on this venture. Maybe I’d give up on trying to save Semper. My mind raced faster than my feet.

I threw the door open to the floating dock, and was a scant dozen paces from the boat when the last thing I saw was a board swinging right toward my face.

I don’t know how long I was unconscious. It couldn’t have been too long. I awoke tied to a chair, back in Ebenezer’s office. My bag was on the floor next to me. My right cheek and eye socket throbbed and pounded. I could taste blood on my lips. Everything felt funny.

Ebenezer stood in front of me, staring disapprovingly. He growled.

“I welcome you into my home, offer to help you, and offer to pay you handsomely, and you reward my generosity by trying to steal one of my boats?”

“Let me go,” I mumbled.

“No,” he said defiantly, “and now you’re definitely undergoing that procedure.”

I stared back into his eyes, trying to burn a hole in him with my glare.

“So now you’re forcing people to have surgeries too?”

His face dropped all expression and he slowly took a step back. He cursed under his breath, and then told the guards to release me.

“I…apologize,” he said quietly. “It’s just very important that we keep breeding out here. That we keep our gene pool fresh. That we keep growing and building.”

He paused and swallowed hard. “
We
,” he emphasized, looking intently into my eyes, “don’t live forever.”

Ebenezer turned toward the window as the guard untied me from the chair.

“You’ll go speak to Henry, in the green tower,” he said toward the ocean, but obviously intended for me. “He has an electronics lab where he can work something to disrupt your friend’s neural web. You’ll leave your taser with him for payment. And then Alistair will take you back to the city.”

Then the old man turned around and walked toward me, extending his hand.

“Again, I apologize,” he said. “I didn’t intend for things to get out of hand. I do wish you the best of luck. And should you ever decide to take me up on my offer to provide me a great-grandchild, please return.”

I stood from my chair, shook his hand cautiously, and gathered my things. I rubbed my cheek as I walked out of the room; it was swollen and split from the impact of the board. I hoped my skull wasn’t fractured. I left the room and, in the hall, stopped to apply some Mitocaine from my pack. It was both a pain-relieving topical crème and a gel that caused cells to regenerate instantly. Instantly, I felt better, but it would take a few more applications for the pain and damage to completely subside.

I made my way to the green tower across a rickety skybridge. I instantly found Henry’s lab, where the nice middle-aged man instructed me on how to disable a neural web. Apparently, I wasn’t the first person to venture to Old Vancouver to ask the question. He quickly built me a small device, the size of a phone, which would automatically login to Semper’s neural web, hack it, and disable it. I gave him the taser as payment for his services, and as I left the room, I saw him playing with the gun as if he were shooting imaginary villains in an old movie.