Authors: Nancy Kress
Twenty-two
S
UNDAY
A SEVEN-PASSENGER
van carried the Lab Rats a long way from the city. Neither Myra nor Alex came along. Amy sat in the back row with Violet, who chattered about clothes, dance class, TV shows. At first Amy felt relieved. This was normal Violet—funny, sarcastic, effervescent—and Waverly had been wrong. But after a while Amy wasn’t so sure. There were almost too many jokes, too many stories, too much effervescence, like cider whose pleasant bite was on the verge of turning sour.
“Violet,” Amy said hesitantly as they got out of the van, “are you all right?”
“Cramped from sitting too long. Why?” Violet’s gaze bored down on Amy from her greater height, made even greater by four-inch Jimmy Choo ankle straps.
“Nothing. I just thought you seemed . . . oh, I don’t know, a little on edge.”
“Now, why would that be? Nothing to do with being cooped up in a hotel, cooped up in a van, cooped up in Myra Townsend’s sadistic fantasies, hmmmm?”
That sounded more like Violet. Amy grinned.
The huge, dilapidated building in front of them sat in some sort of industrial complex, equally huge and dilapidated. Rusting pieces of machinery, none of which Amy could identify, led to empty overhead pipes. A vast parking lot, its asphalt cracked in crazy-quilt patterns, held only one truck with three missing tires and a broken axle. Windows on the building’s lower floors were boarded over, those on the upper floors caked with grime. Over metal double doors a less faded rectangle of brick marked the place where a sign had once hung.
“Charming,” Cai said.
Rafe said, “I know this place. It used to be a film factory, before everything went digital. Now the company can’t even give it away because there’s ground contamination from all the processing chemicals.”
Waverly said, “Contamination?”
“Nothing that will hurt you if you’re only around it for a few hours,” Rafe said. “Not even in that get-up.”
Waverly wore a miniskirt, high-heeled boots of buttery Italian leather, and a silvery top that looked as fragile as spiderwebs. Amy had on her mosaic-print miniskirt, white tee, and Fendi jacket; Violet wore silk pants, a ruffled blouse, and the Jimmy Choos. The boys, although dressed in expensive pants and jackets, at least wore sturdy shoes. Amy was glad of her Miu Miu sandals, flexible and low-heeled. Why had Myra sent them to an abandoned factory dressed like this? Then she realized.
“It films better if we’re all tarted up,” she said with resignation.
One of the double doors creaked open with a sound like fingernails scraping across a blackboard. A middle-aged man in greasy overalls came out and stared at them, unimpressed. “You the kids from that show?”
Amy grimaced. Who else would they be, in this forsaken place?
“Come on in, then.”
The inside was so gloomy that at first Amy couldn’t make out what lay on the metal table inside the door. Then she did: guns.
“You’re going to be hunters,” the man said with an unreadable expression.
Terrible images ran through Amy’s mind: bullet guns, Tasers . . . That story she’d read for her lit class about men hunting each other for sport . . . But then her eyes adjusted more and she saw that the oversized guns included huge transparent chambers of colored liquids.
Tommy whooped, “Paintball!”
“Oh, really lame,” Violet said.
Amy said, “Let’s wait and see.” If Myra planned this, it wouldn’t be ordinary paintball.
Waverly said, “This top is Isabel Marant!”
The man spat on the very dirty floor. “Your boss rented the whole place. You kids are supposed to shoot anything you see moving. After the first ten minutes you can shoot each other, too. You lose ten points for every hit on them fancy clothes, gain ten points for every hit you get on somebody else, fifty points for every creature you nail. Each gun holds fifteen splats. Loser gets a booby prize. So pick a gun and go.”
Only Tommy seemed enthusiastic. Amy hefted a gun with green paint, copying the expert way Tommy held his. She had never played paintball.
“Fan out,” Cai said.
Before they did, Violet caught Rafe’s and Amy’s arms and whispered, “No shooting each other, OK? I’d like to preserve this outfit. Allies?” They both nodded.
The factory was filled with silent equipment, some of it dripping liquids through cracks, some of it sagging in disrepair. Huge wooden boxes and rusting forklifts littered the aisles. Everything smelled dank, musty. The farther Amy went into the factory, the deeper the gloom. But she saw nothing that moved.
From the outside she’d counted five floors, which meant there had to be stairs somewhere. Her plan was to climb to the top, where there might be more light from the unboarded windows, and where she might be less likely to encounter the others. Maybe she could, in Violet’s words, “preserve her outfit.” If she lost the game in points, so what. Hunting should be as much about self-preservation as about prey. And what was the prey anyway? Undoubtedly some tech of Mark Meyer’s. Or maybe more actors.
The stairwell, when she found it, had no light whatsoever and smelled of some animal that had died in there. Hastily Amy closed the door, her nose wrinkling.
Beside the staircase sat a freight elevator, a big cage with a metal grill over it. Amy pulled back the grill and stepped inside. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t. Worth a try. She pressed the button.
The grill slid shut, rasping and wheezing, and the elevator rose. Amy heard Tommy call from somewhere below: “Nothing’s moving to shoot!”
The top floor was lighter, although not by much because the windows were both small and filthy. Amy tried to imagine what this place must have been like when it was a vital factory, full of workers earning good money doing necessary jobs. Where were they all now, since the Collapse? Gran’s words came back to her:
A flash point. We’re nearly there now.
As she stepped out of the elevator, something moved in the shadows.
Amy raised her gun. The thing lurched forward, and when she saw it, she nearly laughed aloud. A zombie! Mark Meyer had created hologram zombies for the Lab Rats to shoot. Realistic—if you could use that word in connection with a zombie—but still cheesy beyond belief. Amy fired.
A glob of green paint hit the zombie and it immediately vanished. At the same time a jolt of electricity ran through Amy. She screamed and dropped her gun. Her hands tingled with pain.
So that was it!
Damn you, Myra!
Either play the game and get shocked, or don’t play it and put yourself in line for the “booby prize,” whatever horrible thing that was. Amy’s eyes filled with tears of rage. When she examined her hands, the skin didn’t seem harmed, and now the pain was fading. So—not enough electricity to cause injury, just pain.
She picked up her gun. Myra was not going to make a wimp out of her. She was going to use up every last gob of paint in this stupid weapon. Even though she would probably be experiencing the most pain; all the guns were identical, and she had the smallest body mass to absorb the shock. Possibly Tommy didn’t feel much of it at all.
She moved forward cautiously, but even so she barely saw the next zombie before it reached her. She shot it and it vanished. This time, prepared for the electric shock, she didn’t drop her gun. But it still hurt.
For the next several minutes she saw no more “prey.” Neither could she see the machinery overhead in the rafters that must be generating them. Amy had just begun to relax when something scuttled along the floor to her left.
A rat.
She stifled a cry. Was it real or just another hologram? It was gone before she could decide, but the possibility of real rats—and why wouldn’t there be rats nesting in an abandoned building?—set her nerves vibrating. Cautiously she moved toward one of the grimy windows, where she could see them better.
The freight elevator rasped behind her. Someone else on the fifth floor! Amy ducked behind a metal tank leaking viscous fluid from the many-armed pipes extending outward. Under the pipes she saw small brown droppings. The rats were real.
Whoever had come out of the elevator was silent, moving stealthily. Maybe he or she didn’t even know that Amy was on this floor. But the ten minutes were up; she was fair game.
As she stood behind the tank, trying to think what to do, the president of the United States came around the other side.
Amy was so startled that a bubble of sound escaped her lips. For a ridiculous moment she actually thought it was the president—wouldn’t Mr. Taunton know a lot of important people? But of course it was a hologram. Amy raised her gun. The president smiled his famous smile and held up one hand. The illusion was so good that again Amy hesitated while all Gran’s stories of assassination ran through her head. Gran remembered them all: President Kennedy murdered in Dallas, Ronald Reagan shot in front of a hotel in DC, this current president nearly killed by that lunatic in San Diego . . . Amy couldn’t do it. Stupid though it was, she could not take aim and fire on the president of the United States . . .
A flash point. We’re nearly there now
—
Something slammed into her right side and pain tore through her body. Amy screamed. It was the suddenness of the electric jolt, not the severity, since it wasn’t any more than when Amy fired her own gun. But she hadn’t expected the same shock when she was
hit
. Tommy whooped and ran from behind a piece of machinery. “Hey, Amy, I got you and—” He stopped dead.
The president was still waving and smiling. Tommy evidently knew who he was; his eyes widened and his gun wobbled. Then he dropped the gun and put his hand over his heart.
“Stop that, it’s not the Pledge of Allegiance!” Amy snapped. The pain slowly drained from her body and she twisted to look at the back of her skirt. The Dolce & Gabbana mini was ruined, orange paint splattered all over the back. Paint had even reached her tee.
She pointed her gun at Tommy and shot him, and then she shot the president, who instantly disappeared. The double jolt of electricity hurt, but Amy was too angry to care. She’d never again own clothes this nice.
Tommy said, “You shot the president!”
“No, I didn’t. Tommy, this is my floor. Go back down one floor in the elevator!”
“OK,” Tommy said meekly. Amy hoped that all this was on film and that it undercut the competitive drama Myra was hoping for.
In the next five minutes she shot one more zombie, Mahatma Gandhi, and a rock star whose latest album had gone platinum. She saw no more rats. The elevator creaked again.
This time it was Cai. When she had him in view, she called, “If you shoot me you’ll regret it!”
“I won’t,” Cai said. They approached each other warily, and sourness spread through Amy. Here were the makings of a genuine romantic fantasy of the type she used to spin for hours in her head: she and a gorgeous man, trapped in a situation of forced antagonism, wanting each other desperately but unable to touch, not only kept apart but also forced to be enemies by a cruel world that didn’t understand the love of soul mates . . .
Except that Cai didn’t love her, she was more concerned with rats than with soul mates, and what she wanted most was to get out of this building and see if the paint would come off the back of her skirt.
Cai shouldered his gun, a manly pose that would have looked great on him except for the red paint on his shirt and half his face. Amy said, “Who hit you?”
“Violet. She’s firing like everything is real. This is a really lame scenario, you know?”
“Yeah. Even with the shocks.”
“They’re pretty mild,” Cai said.
“Maybe for you. It goes by body mass.”
“You sound like Rafe.” Cai shifted his gun. “Amy, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” Her heart beat faster. “But remember that we’re probably being filmed.”
He leaned even closer, which—weirdly—did not increase her heart rate. Into her ear he said, “Does Kaylie
always
get her own way?”
Amy laughed. In those few words she glimpsed the entire Cai-Kaylie relationship. Oh, the poor guy.
“Nearly always,” she said.
He looked unhappy. But before he could say more, a child crawled from an empty crate and said, “Help me! Please!”
Amy stared. No holograms had talked. The president had not said, “My fellow Americans . . .” Mahatma Gandhi had not urged nonviolent resistance. The zombies had not groaned. Was this an actor? The little girl was thin, filthy, ragged. . . . It wasn’t hard to imagine her abandoned and taking refuge in this old building. In the worst neighborhoods of the city there were hordes of such children.
Cai started forward. A phantom leaped into Amy’s mind:
lightning hitting a tree and igniting it—
“Don’t touch her, Cai!”
He stopped. “Do you think she’s an illusion? She looks so real.”
“I don’t know.” Amy grabbed Cai’s arm and pulled him backward.
“Help me, please!”
He said, “If she
is
real—” just as the little girl’s face morphed into a zombie’s and she vanished in a burst of light and sound that blinded and deafened Amy so much she staggered backward.
“Shit!” Cai shouted. “A flash-bang!”