When she got there, her front door was open, banging in the wind.
“Mom?” she called, stepping onto the rain-soaked front carpet. “Mom?”
There were no lights on, but someone was walking around upstairs. Her mother appeared at the top of the dark stairs. “Where have you been, Kayla?” she asked, her words slurred.
“You left the door open. The carpet is soaked,” Kayla said.
Mrs. Reed came down the steps and walked to the living room sofa with only a slight stagger. She was obviously drunk, but her eyes burned with an abnormal brightness. Kayla wondered what drug had brought it on.
This was scarier than a drunken stupor or her mother’s vacant stares. This expression reminded Kayla of someone who was seeing visions no one else could see, an insane person. “Mom, are you okay?” she asked, not knowing what else to say.
“Guess where I was today,” her mother replied.
“I have no idea.”
“Of course you don’t. I was at my old hospital. And guess what! Those babies won’t need bar codes. Want to know why?” she asked.
“Why?” Kayla asked, standing alongside the couch.
Her mother stared up at her, her eyes wide. “Because they’re now inserting chips in every baby’s foot. And in those chips is each baby’s complete genetic code.”
“Their genetic code?”
“That’s if they live long enough,” Mrs. Reed went on. “You see, they blood-test those little babies right away. That blood test tells them which babies will grow up to be healthy and strong, and which ones will have health problems. The ones who aren’t healthy are being left to die.”
“No!” Kayla gasped. “I don’t believe it.”
Her mother got up and began to walk in stumbling circles around the room. “They don’t stab them or gas them or anything. They just leave them in cold rooms, or slip a little something into their bottles. Some babies get a lethal shot in the night.”
“Are you sure?” Kayla questioned.
“Why do you think I couldn’t stand to go back there?” she yelled. “The unhealthy don’t get a chance, but the very healthy babies are being genetically enhanced.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re transgenic, given genes for night vision from cats. Dog genes are spliced in to give them heightened smell and hearing. I wonder if they’ll ever be able to give them wings. I’m sure they must be working on it.” She giggled, then frowned. “They do it quietly. Behind closed doors. Most of the time their parents don’t even know.”
Could this be true, or was her mother hallucinating?
“How do you know all this?” Kayla asked.
“I know it because I’ve seen it,” her mother answered. “Things I saw at the hospital made me suspicious. Today a friend of mine, a nurse, showed me things that proved it.”
“Did you tell Dad what you suspected?”
Her mother covered her face with her hands as she nodded. “I told him … I told him the night before … the night before he killed himself.”
Kayla’s skin popped with cold gooseflesh. “Is that why you say the bar code killed him?”
Mrs. Reed shook her head, her face awash with tears. “Not at first. At first it was because I thought the things I told him were more than he could bear. But now that I’ve seen his file, I know it was more. It was the part about the schizophrenia. Grandma Cathy was a schizophrenic.” Her mother’s head fell forward into her hands. “She died in an institution in Los Angeles.”
“But Dad wasn’t that way,” Kayla said. “It would have shown up by now if he was.”
“Maybe,” her mother said, looking up at Kayla. “But it doesn’t mean you might not become schizophrenic, start hearing and seeing things that aren’t there.”
Suddenly nauseated, Kayla gripped the couch. Seeing things that weren’t there. Her visions. That’s exactly what she’d been doing!
“You were covered under the bureau’s insurance. They don’t want to pay for your future drugs, maybe for your institutionalization, for your psychiatric bills. So they made his life so miserable that they hoped he’d quit.” She laughed with a touch of hysteria. “Well, he quit all right. He quit the whole damned world.”
Kayla’s stomach flipped and she raced up to the bathroom, vomiting in the hall before she got there. As she leaned against the wall, her mind raced. What kind of world was this becoming? There must be something like this in the Thorns’ codes, too. They were being shut out of everything because their bar codes revealed illness of one kind or another.
And now she was going crazy, just like her father’s bar code had predicted. How could she fight back? How could she resist if she was insane? And that gene for schizophrenia would be encoded right on her wrist for everyone to see.
If she didn’t get the code, she couldn’t make a move. And if she did get it — the world wouldn’t want her. It didn’t want to pay her insurance.
This sickening realization — this unbearable feeling of being counted out — is what her mother had been trying to protect her from. The knowledge that her daughter had no future is what had been slowly destroying her. A surge of sympathy rose inside her, compassion for her tormented mother.
The smoke alarm screamed its deafening whoop. She smelled something burning an instant afterward. Something was burning — and whatever it was smelled hideous. “Mom!” she shouted, racing downstairs.
She was answered with a horrific scream from the kitchen. Her mother stood by the stove, her sleeve flaming. “I’ll burn it off!” she shrieked. “Burn it!”
Kayla grabbed a pot from the stove and turned on the kitchen tap. “Drop down and roll,” she screamed to her mother as the pot filled way too slowly.
Her mother stumbled backward into the side window, in too much pain to speak. The curtain lit and the flame quickly climbed to the valance.
Kayla flung the water from the pot at her mother. It dampened the flames at the bottom of her sleeve but the fire at her shoulder seemed to burn even more furiously. Her mother staggered toward the living room, fanning her clothing.
Running behind her, Kayla knew she needed something to slap out the fire. She yanked down the heavy living room drapes, tossing them on her mother.
Her mother fell to the floor and Kayla rolled her in the drapes — as a wall of flames roared in from the kitchen.
Slowly, Kayla grew aware of a painful pounding at the front of her forehead. Nearby, she heard voices speaking in low tones. The pounding inside her head grew so intense that she couldn’t bear to open her eyes. She focused on the voices as a way to distract herself from the pain.
“Nurse, when her records arrive, let me know,” a male voice spoke. “I’ll do the tattoo then.”
“What if she regains consciousness before then?” a woman — the nurse — asked.
“Sedate her. She’s over seventeen and she has no tattoo. This is for her own good. It’s either tattoo her or turn her over to the Globalofficers.”
“Is that the law now, doctor?”
“Yes. And now she has no parents to insist she get tattooed.”
Kayla squeezed her eyes together. No parents? No parents?
The events of the night before suddenly came back to her. The fire. The wall of flames screaming in from the kitchen. Her mother? Where was her mother?
She forced her eyes open. The bright overhead hospital light made the pounding even worse. She became aware of a smoky, acrid smell and realized it was her own hair.
Was her mother somewhere in the hospital, in the burn unit? Pushing up on her elbows brought on a fit of hard coughing.
The doctor and nurse hurried to her side. “She’s inhaled a lot of smoke,” the doctor said to the nurse.
When the coughing subsided, Kayla turned toward them. “My mother?” she asked.
“Sorry, dear,” the doctor said. “She didn’t make it.”
“No!” Kayla wailed. “No.” It couldn’t be true. She sank back onto the bed and turned
her face into the pillow, soaking it with tears.
A firm hand clasped her arm tightly. Before she could lift her head, a needle stung her upper arm. She tried to turn but didn’t have the strength as she spiraled into darkness.
When Kayla opened her eyes again, the room was a dusky gray. She felt more relaxed than ever in her life, as if no muscle were even slightly tense. Then someone coughed and she slowly turned toward the sound.
A middle-aged woman lay in a bed several feet away from her. She slept uneasily, moving frequently. Kayla remembered that she was in the hospital, and then she remembered everything.
Her mother was dead and they were going to code her.
She checked her wrist. No bar code — they hadn’t done it yet. Her vision was hazy and everything in the room was blurred.
Two bright and white forms entered the room. “She’s awake,” the nurse spoke softly to a second nurse. “She’s still feeling the effects of the sedative, I’m sure.”
“Just keep her calm while I get Dr. Andrews,” the second nurse replied, leaving the room. “He’s licensed to code.”
Kayla worked to pull herself to full consciousness. Somehow she had to throw off this drugged state and think clearly. Straighten up, she silently commanded herself.
Dr. Andrews would come in and tattoo her and then there would be no more wondering what to do. It would be done. There was no way she could stop it now, not in her present condition — maybe not even in any condition.
A jolt of panic ran through her. This was it — the beginning of the end of her life. The mark of mental illness would be on her. The mark of this or any serious illness would forever exclude her from real achievement in life because no one would ever want to hire her for fear of having to pay her doctor bills.
There was no avoiding the tattoo now.
Why bother caring? she thought. Her parents were both dead. She’d never see Amber again. Zekeal had betrayed her. What was left for her to fight for?
This was too big to fight, too powerful. It was bound to win in the end. It was a kind of relief to stop fighting against it.
Something in the room crashed.
“Oh, my God!” the nurse cried.
When the way comes
to an end, then change —
having changed, you
pass through.
I Ching
The patient beside Kayla had begun to convulse so violently that she crashed onto the floor.
“Hurry! We need to get her downstairs right away!” a nurse said. The two nurses labored to lift the woman onto a gurney. They hurried her out of the room.
Kayla waited until they were gone, then hauled her legs over the side of the bed. Her knees buckled as she tried to stand and she had to grasp the bed rails to keep from landing on the floor. Stay up, don’t fall, she urged herself.
With this unexpected opportunity, all her resolve returned. It didn’t matter if she couldn’t fight this, if it was hopeless. Right now she had to get out of the hospital, get somewhere away from this doctor with his code license. She moved now on simple survival instinct.
Steadying herself on one object and then the next — from bed rail to table to trash bin to chair — she made her way out of the room and headed down the hall. Walk. Walk. Walk, she chanted silently. Don’t think, just keep moving.
Passing a bank of mirrors by an elevator, she saw herself. Lines of dried scrapes were raked across her cheeks and chin. Her long brown hair was singed and matted with soot. It hung in blackened clumps around her face.
A man in green scrubs turned to look at her as she hurried past the mirrors and down the hall. She avoided eye contact and moved along.
She slowed at the open door to a patient’s room. A dirty black suit and white shirt hung just inside the room, which appeared to be empty. She stepped inside and shut the door as a wave of drugged fatigue knocked her onto the bed.
If she lay down, she knew she’d sleep. That couldn’t happen, she couldn’t let it. Quickly, she peeled off her hospital gown and dressed in the old suit. It nearly fit, though she had to roll up the pant legs and tighten the belt past its last hole.
She slipped into the man’s shoes, which were several sizes too big, and tucked her hair into the jacket collar.
Appearing casual was the key to getting out undetected, she decided as she left the room. With the sedatives still coursing through her bloodstream she couldn’t go fast, anyway. That was probably a good thing because otherwise she might bolt for the door and attract attention.
The glass door whooshed open, letting her pass. It was a cool evening, almost dark.
Nausea swirled in the pit of her stomach. Foul fluid filled her mouth, rising up from her insides. Determination carried her across the parking lot, out to the busy road.
A car horn blared as she staggered across the road. With her head down against the blinding halogen headlights, she headed for a stand of pines on the other side. Once she was deeply enclosed within the trees, her stomach lunged and she threw up. Dropping to her knees, she passed out.
In the dream, Kayla was eight again. Her mother had just dished them out each a bowl of ice cream and they sat at the table, side by side. Kayla’s crayons were spread on the table as she worked on the picture in front of her. She finished the brown hair surrounding the face she was drawing and held it up. “It’s you, Mommy.”
“Me?” Her mother was delighted. “It’s really good, Kayla. You’re so talented.”
“I’m going to be an artist when I grow up,” Kayla said as she climbed on her mother’s lap.
Her mother smoothed her hair and kissed her forehead. “You can be whatever you want to be, Kayla. You’ll be a wonderful artist if that’s what you’d like to do.”
She wrapped her small arms around her mother’s neck. “I love you, Mommy.”
“I love you, too. I’ll always love my Kayla.”
The cold awakened her, but her mother’s voice was still in her head. There were headlights and car noises nearby. She lay among the pines blanketed in deep blackness.
I’ll always love my Kayla. She was grateful for this dream memory. It was a gift to live this moment again, a moment when her mother had still been herself.
Kayla’s face contorted into a twisted mask of sorrow. Even though her mother hadn’t been well, somehow Kayla had always believed there would be better times ahead and that her mother would be able to struggle out of her pain and back to her former self. That possibility was over now. She’d never see her mother again. The pain, the loss of that chance, was more than she could stand.
A wrenching, pain-filled sob shook her. Another, then another wracked her body. These gave way to a rush of tears that seemed to come from some limitless source of misery deep inside her. She cried, facedown in the cold and darkness, until she again fell to sleep.
When she awoke, she realized that the drugged feeling had mostly passed. Her hand could now curl into a fist and it wasn’t as hard to move her legs. Her stomach rumbled. The last time she’d eaten was at Zekeal’s place.
There was something in the pocket of her suit jacket and she fished it out, an e-card belonging to John James. Would he mind if she bought herself something to eat? Probably. But she had to eat.
It was a two-mile walk to the all-night diner down by the river. When she got there, she suddenly felt self-conscious about her appearance, but hunger drove her inside. “Do you take e-cards?” she asked the woman at the front register. “My dad gave me his to use.”
The blond woman in her twenties eyed her suspiciously. “No tattoo?”
“I turn seventeen next month,” Kayla replied. She showed the card, and the woman nodded. “Sit down over there.”
She ordered a hamburger, fries, and a Coke. Food had never tasted so delicious before. In the booth behind her, a woman spoke on her small phone.
“Hi, it’s Katie. Listen, I’m on my way. I just stopped for some supper. I’m taking the Superlink as far as Roscoe, then I’ll jump on t
he Thruway,” she said. “I’ll be there before midnight. Okay. See you then.”
Katie stood and took her e-card from her wallet. There was no tattoo on her wrist.
Kayla summoned her nerve. This woman had an honest, kind face. “Excuse me,” Kayla said to her. “I need a ride. Could I possibly get one from you?”
“Where you going?” Katie had long brown hair tied back in a ponytail. She was attractive, but her skin was weathered and creased with fine lines. She was probably in her early thirties.
“Um … just past Roscoe, to my aunt’s house.”
Katie stared at Kayla, taking in Kayla’s dirty man’s suit, her bruised face. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen next month.” It seemed like a good way to avoid the bar code issue.
“You running away from home?”
“No.”
“You sure about that?”
“My parents are dead.” Saying the words caused her voice to catch. She couldn’t think about her parents’ deaths anymore, though. If she dissolved into mourning now, she wouldn’t be able to think, to survive. All that had to be pushed down under the level of consciousness.
If Katie had noticed the shake in her voice, she gave no indication. “Okay. Pay your bill and come on,” she said. “I have to get going.”
Kayla sat in Katie’s tractor-trailer, squinting at the oncoming headlights. “Ever take the Superlink before?” Katie asked.
“Once, a few years ago. My parents and I went camping on Lake George.”
“It’s pretty up there. The Thruway used to be the fastest way to go north, but now the Superlink is so much faster. You can drive so fast that it cuts your time in half.” The speedometer revealed that they were traveling at 140 miles per hour.
“Where does it end?” Kayla asked.
“The Canadian border. Why do you want to know?”
“Just curious.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble?” Katie asked her. “Running away from something?”