CHAPTER 4
ZEPHYR
“Clean up that mess, 72348! What do you think this is, day care? Get moving, Ward!”
The Crime and Trauma Scene Decontamination officer is somewhat of a prick. And not just a regular one. He’s a new prick, fresh on the job . . . the worst kind, with brand-new slacks, ironed and washed, probably by his mother, paid for by his wealthy Initiative father.
He’s a grade-A bloodsucker. Leeches are protected by a Version 2.0 Pin. The CTSDs seem to age slower than us, and not a single one of them has a wrinkle or scar that shows.
I shove my sponge into the bucket of bleach and wring it out, the thick scent wafting through my nostrils. The familiar wave of nausea rushes through me. Talan is glaring at me as she digs out the Pin from the victim’s lifeless arm, nothing but a pair of flimsy latex gloves between her and number 34570’s tendons. The Leech officer comes over and Talan places the Pin in the lockbox. The nanites will be recycled for the next person unlucky enough to be born into the Shallows.
If you ask me, Leeches deserve a bloody death and a shallow grave.
Talan leans over another body, this one with a bludgeoned head. She rolls her baby blues. I chuckle under my breath. I can almost hear her gravelly voice whining, “Oh . . . my . . . GOD . . . Zephyr . . . Ohmigod. It’s not as bad for you. You’re a GUY. I’m seriously considering prostitution over this.”
I flash her a toothy grin and set to work scrubbing the bloodstained pavement. Talan’s not all that bad looking. She’s got sort of a sexy, mysterious look to her; curvy, in a good way, with electric eyes and long dark hair that reaches her slim waist. She’d get rations if she became one of those girls, sure, but she wouldn’t last long. Nothing in the Shallows ever does.
A finger of hot sweat slides down my spine. Scrubbing under the Florida sun is hard work. Today is Sunday. Collection day, the worst day of the week. It’s a day of mourning and reflection.
I take a shovel and slide it beneath a body. All across the city’s cracked pavement, there are bodies. Dead ones. Some days old, some only hours. There are bodies covered in flies, in birds that peck out lunch or steal strands of hair to weave into a nest. But the worst part is the blood. Dried, crusted rivers of it, stuck to the city’s streets like glue. The metallic scent is choking, and when the heat rises from the tar and the sun shines down so strong it’s like we are under one giant magnifying glass, the blood begins to bubble. When it’s boiled for too long it begins to burn.
It’s my job to clean the stuff up. All the Wards are assigned jobs that no one else wants to do. Like trash duty; hauling piles of it to the Graveyard, a big mountain of garbage on the edge of the city where the street gangs will most likely slit your throat. There’s shoe shining, for the Leeches. Uniform washing.
It’s all a bunch of useless skitz, but we’ve got to do it. Commandment One: Honor the Initiative. Every week, on Sunday, I show up and scan in. I scrub and clean and gag and lose my lunch twice. I sit in a sea of flies and try not to think about the day I found Talan’s daughter lying crooked on the pavement.
The worst part is that Arden was still breathing, lying there soaked in her own blood. The cuts were so deep, even the nanites couldn’t staunch the flow. I watched Talan scoop her up and try to take her away for help, but a Leech held a rifle to her head. One of those big ones, with bullets that would blast a hole through her skull. “Finish her,” he said. “Do the job right.”
I did it instead.
I couldn’t let Talan be the one to do it.
But that’s the price we pay for being Wards. We’re all pawns, orphans with no other choice. We’ll do anything to survive, and the Leeches make sure it stays that way.
The bell sounds. It’s time for lunch break. All around me, the Wards move as one, like a vast migration, toward the Rations Hall. The building is short and squatty, an old elementary school salvaged from the days before the world went to hell. In the corner, a massive hole in the wall is patched with blue tarps. Probably from an old air strike before the Perimeter went up. The original Survivors say it’s better in here. They say even the trees died from the Plague, and the birds all fell right out of the sky. My theory is that the world’s awful no matter where you go.
“Make it quick. We’ve got a city to keep clean here, Wards,” the Leech barks. Beside me, I can hear Talan huff. We enter the hall and the stench of old meat hits us. Hot. Stifling. Strong enough to ruin anyone’s appetite, but we’re so fluxing starved it doesn’t matter.
I follow Talan into the line. The Leech officer standing here is tall and grossly overweight. Like a wrecking ball. He watches while we scan our Catalogue Numbers, and barks at us to pick up the pace. I glance at the screens showing images of what we’re allowed to eat today. A clump of some meatlike substance. I think of it as refried cat. One glass of recycled water. A woman with hair as short as a man’s hands us our bags of rations through a small hole in the glass barrier. We take it without complaining. If we didn’t, we’d be punished.
Some people, sometimes, are punished to death.
“This is bullskitz,” Talan says as we find a spot at a table. She shoves a handful of meat into her mouth. “The Leeches cut our rations again.”
I look down at my small allotment. “Stars, Talan. You’re right.”
“That word’s never going to catch on,” she says.
I shrug. “If I want the word to catch on, it’ll catch on. They’re practically gods, you know.”