Specimen Days

  He woke at the first light. She was asleep. She had curled herself into a ball. Her head rested against his shoulder.

  He had this chance to look at her, then.

  Her head was slightly larger than a cantaloupe. She had no hair at all. Her eyes, closed, still shone through the veined membranes of her eyelids. Her skin in the dimness was deep green, nearly black. Their skins were not scaly. That was a myth. Her skin was slick and smooth as a leaf. It was thin and fragile-looking, like a leaf.

  She breathed steadily in sleep. She whistled that little involuntary song. The thin line of her mouth, lipless, was only that: a line. Their mouths weren’t expressive. It was all in their eyes and nostrils. Her small, smooth head pressed gently against his shoulder as she slept.

  Then she woke. Her eyelids fluttered. She was immediately awake and entirely vigilant. She sat up.

  He said, “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “We should start walking. We should stay off the road.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re going to have to steal a pod somehow. Which will be difficult.”

  “I can steal,” she said.

  “I don’t mean morally or philosophically difficult. I mean a pod’s security systems are hard to override. I’ll try.”

  “Yes. Try.”

  “Assuming we’re able to get a pod, we shouldn’t have too much trouble in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is mostly just refugees. Who are mostly harmless. But then we’ll be in Ohio. Ohio is the beginning of the Free Territories.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know about this?”

  “Little.”

  “It’s all pretty loose out there. After the meltdown, just about everybody from where we’re standing all the way to the Rocky Mountains was evacuated. Temporarily, supposedly, but people didn’t really come back. Who’s out there now, mostly, is the ones who refused to leave, and it’s still impossible to tell how damaged they are by the fallout. It’s them and the nomads who drift up from the Southern Assembly or down from Canada. They can be nasty. They’re the people who didn’t quite work out in civilized society. Some of them are evangelicals. Some are criminals.”

  “Like Nadia,” she said.

  “I suppose. In certain ways.”

  “We walk now,” she said.

  “Yes. We start walking now.”

  They were able to stay parallel to the road, though for long stretches the episodes of scrubby forest gave out, and they had to walk across open ground. They moved quickly but not too quickly. Hoverpods shot past on the road a half mile to the left. If someone happened to glance over and see them, they would be semiplausible as refugees seeking food and shelter. They would be less plausible as a man wandering with a Nadian. They had to hope no one seeing them from the road would be suspicious enough to alert Magicom. They could do nothing but hope.

  They walked across expanses of grass and weed. They passed once through an abandoned housing tract, neat rows of similar houses with the grass grown up around them. The houses had been one idea, endlessly repeated. Time and weather had bleached them, made them semitranslucent, like paper houses. There was a peculiar satisfaction in their silent sameness, in the way their modestly peaked rooflines cut like little teeth into the blank white sky. In their quiet ongoing collapse.

  Near midafternoon they came upon a complex that shimmered above the road. It was a faux-Gehry silver oval fifty stories high, decorated with small extraneous bulges and, on its southern side, a forty-foot fin that angled halfheartedly in the direction of the sky. Under its sloping silver underside would be the garage area.

  “So,” Simon said. “Civilization. This is probably one of the last inhabited complexes, this far west.”

  “Yes.”

  “Heavy security, I’m sure. But let’s think for a minute here.”

  “Yes.”

  “They wouldn’t let us into residential or business. We could probably slip into shopping, but they’d have their eyes on us every second.”

  She said, “They make deliver here?”

  “Deliveries? Sure. All the time.”

  “That is not much guarded?”

  “Probably not. So, you’re thinking we could hang around the delivery port and try to steal a cargo pod?”

  “Yes.”

  “Here’s the problem with that. I can’t assault anybody. I could steal a pod, but I can’t threaten a driver. My programming won’t allow it. I’d freeze up. I’d go into lockdown. If something really bad happened to somebody, I could shut down entirely.”

  “You were robber in Old New York.”

  “I could do that because the clients wanted me to. It was one of the only jobs I could get without a résumé.”

  “I can threaten.”

  “So I’ve seen.”

  “I threaten, you drive?”

  “Yes. I can drive, no problem. I just can’t harm or threaten with harm any living creature with a spinal cord.”

  “I threaten. You drive.”

  “Well, let’s take a shot.”

  They went to the base of the complex and stood at the edge of its plaza, which was veined with weedy cracks. This would be a low-rent complex, then. Its glass lobby doors were less than clean. A number of its titanium panels had fallen away. It was checkered with brown squares where the titanium had been.

  Its security would not be high-quality. It might still be fitted out with the long-ago model that had claimed to identify everyone who entered but had in fact automatically questioned every third person and automatically stun-shot every fifty-first. This had been hushed up. Because replacing the systems would have been tantamount to admitting guilt, some of the older, less expensive complexes still had them.

  “Deliveries would be around the back,” Simon said.

  “We go,” she answered.

  “Sure. We go.”

  At the rear of the complex a ramp curved down from ground level and terminated at a steel gate that would rise when a deliveryperson had been identified. It was empty now. In the vicinity, barrels of garbage glowed blue-white in the sun. This complex must have deactivated its toxic-disposal system to save money. It was probably hiring Nadians to remove the most lethal waste products. The Nadians would be dumping it in the fields Simon and Catareen had walked across.

  She said, “We wait. We hide.”

  “Where are we going to hide?”

  “Barrels.”

  “We shouldn’t get too close to that stuff, actually.”

  “Short time.”

  “If we don’t stay too long, I suppose the worst we’ll get is a little dizzy.”

  “There is not other.”

  He and Catareen crouched behind the barrels of toxic waste. Experimentally, Simon touched one with his fingertips. It was hot. From the barrels emanated a ghostly sheen, barely visible—a quickening and brightening of the air. Simon wondered if the residents of the complex’s lower floors suffered headaches they could not explain. If their children were having trouble with their teeth.

  After a while, they heard the hum of an approaching pod. Catareen stood quickly. “You wait,” she said. She darted out from behind the barrels and laid herself down in the middle of the ramp.

  A moment later the deliverypod hove into view. The driver stopped several feet shy of Catareen’s prone form.

  She lifted her head and looked at the pod driver. Simon could hear her say, “Please. Help, please.”

  He heard the driver’s amplified voice from the pilot’s seat. “What’s the trouble?” It was the high, eager rasp of a teenager.

  She raised one arm, waved a green claw limply in the air. “Please,” she moaned.

  The driver would be deciding. Should he hover past her, go inside, and notify someone? Or should he intervene directly? Opinion was divided about helping Nadians. Some people refused categorically. Some were overly helpful, to counterbalance those who refused.

  Simon could see the young man get out of the
pod. He said silently, You are a good young man, I’m sorry your attitude is going to be changed.

  The young deliveryman bent over Catareen. She hesitated, whispered something. Then she was on him. She wrapped her taloned hands around his neck. Because he was at least a foot taller than she, she planted her feet on his abdomen. She was very fast. She was lizardlike. For a moment Simon saw her as an animal, seizing prey. Then he ran out from behind the barrels.

  The deliveryman—the delivery boy—was white-faced and trembling in Catareen’s grasp. He had pale orange hair and a dusting of freckles.

  He said, “Please don’t hurt me.”

  Simon paused. His circuits hummed. The kid wanted to be hurt, didn’t he? He wanted it without knowing he did. Was that true? Or was Simon getting the signal wrong?

  Simon said, “We’re not going to do anything to you you don’t want us to do.”

  “Get inside,” Catareen said to the boy. “Passenger side.”

  Quivering, the boy climbed into the pod with Catareen clinging to him like a fiendish child. Simon got into the pilot’s seat. He reversed the pod and hove onto the road. The boy sat beside him with Catareen ferociously crouched on his lap.

  Simon saw that the boy had been delivering soymilk to the complex. Orange boxes of it were stacked neatly in the pod’s rear.

  The boy said, “Please. Oh, please, take the pod. I won’t do anything.”

  Simon paused. He needed to do the best thing for the boy. He’d shut down if he did harm. But he could not seem to determine whether the boy wanted to be spared or menaced.

  Catareen said nothing. She held her talons to the kid’s scrawny neck.

  When Simon tried to speak, he found that his voice was not working. He tried again. In a low tone he was able to say, “We’re just going to drop you off in a little while. You can walk back. You’ll be fine.”

  His voice had taken on a mechanical laxity. He felt as if he were driving drunk. He devoted his attention to steering.

  The boy whimpered in Catareen’s grasp. Simon drove as well as he could. He wavered slightly but was able to stay on the road.

  When they saw a side road approaching, Catareen said, “Turn here.”

  “Oh, God, oh, no,” the boy said. He must be thinking they meant to kill him.

  He said, “Please, please, please.”

  Simon went blank then. His workings ceased. He could see, but he could not move. He saw his hand frozen on the pod’s steering stick. He saw the side road go by.

  Catareen said, “Not turn?”

  He couldn’t speak. He could only sit as he was, frozen, watching. The pod drifted to the right. Simon couldn’t correct it. By the time Catareen understood that he had no powers of control, the pod had veered off the road and onto the dirt and grass of the shoulder. It shuddered slightly.

  Catareen removed her claws from the boy’s throat. As she put a hand over Simon’s immobilized one to ease the pod back, the boy opened the passenger door and jumped.

  Simon, still frozen, looked in the mirror globe and saw the boy tumbling onto the dirt. His vision began to cloud. He fought to remain conscious. He saw the boy flip twice in the dirt, raising a dust cloud, growing more distant as the pod sped on. His sight started failing. A whiteness gathered around the periphery of his vision and began closing in. He struggled and strained. He saw the boy sit up.

  Simon’s vision returned. His fingers on the steering stick began to have sensation again. He brushed Catareen’s hand off his own, turned the pod sharply, went back for the boy.

  “No go back,” Catareen said.

  He ignored her. He had no choice.

  He stopped the pod at the place where the boy sat limply on the dirt. He got out and went to the boy.

  He said, “Are you all right?”

  The boy was cadaverously pale. He sat with his legs folded under him. His cheek was bruised. Simon felt his metabolism slow again. He felt his vision begin to whiten.

  He said again, “Are you all right?”

  Slowly, the boy nodded. Simon squatted beside him, checked his arms and legs. Nothing appeared to be broken.

  “You seem to be all right,” Simon said.

  The boy started crying then. He had a scattering of blemishes on his forehead. He had a hawkish nose and pale, silly eyes.

  “Do you think you can stand?” Simon asked.

  The boy could not speak at first, for crying. Then he blubbered, “What are you going to do to me?”

  There was an unmistakable note of excitement in his voice.

  He was a level seven, then. Simon’s circuits hummed.

  He heard himself say, “I will kill your sorry ass.”

  The boy screamed. He scrabbled backward in the dirt. He turned himself over and began crawling away, into the grass.

  No. Repress. Concentrate.

  Simon said, “I want your sweet, fat ass. I want you to stick it high in the air for me so I can plow it with my big tattooed dick.”

  Fuck.

  The boy howled. He crawled into the grass and got uncertainly to his feet. He fell again. Simon felt his synapses firing and his cognition shutting down. It was unfortunate but not exactly unpleasant.

  He said, “Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, death is as great as life.”

  Then Catareen was out of the pod and after the boy. Simon watched helplessly. He saw her take hold of the boy, who was sobbing, who had turned the color of cement. He saw her rifle through the boy’s pockets and remove his vid. He saw her return and, with some effort, march him, Simon, back into the pod. He was able to move at her urging. During shutdown, early phase, he could still respond to directions, though he could not initiate action of any kind.

  She put him in the passenger seat and got into the pilot’s. She turned the pod around and drove, fast.

  Gradually Simon’s powers of movement returned. He felt them coming back. It was a growing warmth, an inner blooming. He was able to say, “Guess I went a little zonky back there, huh?”

  “Yes,” she answered. She was focused on the road.

  “Circuits. Programming. Nothing I can do.”

  “I know.” And yet she was angry. He could feel it. They hove on in silence.

  He had seen her jump on a boy like a lizard seizing a beetle. He understood that some of what was said of Nadians was probably true. They had animal aspects. They were capable of doing harm.

  Finally he said, “We don’t have much time, you know.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “All that kid has to do is flag down some Samaritan in a pod. Which may have happened already. In which case, Magicom is about to be majorly on our asses.”

  “Yes.”

  “In which case, we should not be on the main road.”

  “No.”

  And yet she drove on with relentless, orange-eyed focus. Lizard, he thought. Fucking lizard.

  He said, “There are old roads all over Pennsylvania. This looks like a turnoff coming up.”

  “Yes.”

  “I should probably drive.”

  “I drive.”

  “I only had a problem because we hurt that kid. I thought I’d explained that to you.”

  “I drive,” she said.

  He decided not to argue with her. She seemed to be a good enough driver. Stopping to change places would take time.

  She took the road that led off the podway. A battered sign said HARRISBURG. They hove through the remnants of a settlement. The Council-administered states had begun tearing such places down, or so you heard. According to rumor, Magicom was trying to sell Pennsylvania but could find no buyers.

  Catareen piloted the pod competently over the cracked and buckled road. Abandoned houses and storefronts rattled by, McDonald’ses and Wendy Kentuckys and Health-4-Evers, all weed and dark, shattered glass. Most were empty. Some had been taken over by Nadians, who had put up their sun-blasted awnings. Who tended their young ones, their scraps of drying laundry, their little fires. br />
  Catareen and Simon hove for hours unimpeded. They kept the pod headed west. The landscape was unchanging, empty houses and franchises and random shops and every so often a derelict shopping mall, all so similar that Simon worried they might have doubled back on themselves unwittingly. When these places were operating, they must have been more individualized. He worried that he and Catareen might be headed back to New Jersey. They might end up at the complex where they had stolen the deliverypod.

  They could only trust the pod’s directional. They could only drive on.

  Night fell. They had each had two boxes of soymilk. They needed food. They hove silent and hungry across the dark nothing. The pod’s lights showed mile after mile of broken road that led toward nothing more than the hope of Emory Lowell. They were pursuing a date and place Lowell had implanted in Simon five years ago.

  If the Nadian was concerned, she made no sign. She merely drove with her incessant, reptile-eyed concentration.

  Finally he said, “We should stop for the night.”

  “Hour more,” she answered.

  “No. We should stop now.”

  He saw her lipless mouth tighten. She was a lizard woman who wanted her own way. She was imperious and unempathic.

  Then she said, “If you want.”

  She pulled to the side of the road. She deactivated the pod, which sighed and settled. Its headglobes faded. A pure darkness arrived, alive with the rasp and chirping of insects.

  “We can get rid of some of the soymilk and sleep in the back,” he said.

  “Or house.”

  She indicated with her small, ovoid head a row of houses on the road’s far side, sharply gabled against the stars, like a child’s drawing of a mountain range.

  “Technically they’re still private property,” he said.

  She waggled her fingers in the air—a Nadian gesture of dismissal, he supposed.

  “Hey,” he said. “We’re criminals, right? What’s a little breaking and entering?”

  They got out of the pod. Simon stood for a moment on the weedy dirt, stretching his spine. They were in a vast black house-filled emptiness. An immensity of constellations hung overhead. This far from city lights, they were countless.