Ellie pulled her phone out and checked the screen. “No texts.”
“See? See?” Bing took his usual spot on the corner of her desk. “They were looking for you and so they blocked your phone.”
“I doubt that, Bing. We just have really shitty service.” Just then, her phone chirped twice. Two messages had arrived. “Oh look, here you are. ‘U r being paged.’ That was your big warning? Thanks, man. So much for your filter theory.”
“On the contrary.” Bing folded his arms. “They were looking for you. They blocked your phone. They’re done
with you, so now your texts go through. Once they’ve been cleared through their security filter.”
“Well, I can see why they’d block this text, Bing. That’s an explosive message you sent.”
“What did you want me to say? ‘Suits are imminent. Hide the weed.’”
“That would have been nice. And hey,” she leaned forward and hit his leg, “where
is
my weed?”
Bing laughed. “I took it. You took mine.”
“No, you threw yours at me during your hissy fit. And what’s with all the Twinkies? You know I hate them.”
“I know.” Bing kicked her chair. “That’s why I left them, to teach you a lesson.”
“You taught me a lesson, all right. Find a better place to hide my weed at work.” Ellie shook her head. “You should have seen this guy, Bing. Talk about a teeny tiny little power suck. He had every intention of dragging me out of here by my hair and throwing me in a hole. And all just because I moved some of those stupid Feno boxes.”
Bing looked over at the neatly arranged area. “How did he know you had moved them?”
“Big Martha said a messenger delivered two new boxes and, I guess when he saw our living room, ran back and tattled.” Ellie put her chin back in her palm and squinted at the boxes. “I know I’m not what you’d call a model citizen or even an especially law-abiding one, but doesn’t that seem a little excessive to you? I mean, they’re just boxes. They’re all sealed. The file cabinets are locked. If they’re that classified, why aren’t they locked up somewhere? Somewhere guarded?”
“Uh, Ellie, they are locked up somewhere. The records office is supposed to be secure. Remember that badge you’re wearing?”
“Yeah, but nobody ever looks at it. If these boxes are so freaking precious, so tip-top secret, why don’t they keep them away from stoner drones like me? For that matter, why aren’t they on a computer? Who the hell prints all their records?” Ellie rose from her chair and headed toward the red zone. “What’s in these boxes that’s so freaking important I can’t sit on them?”
“Ellie, what are you doing?” Bing jumped up and stepped behind her. “You almost got arrested for playing around with those boxes.”
“No, I almost got arrested for moving these boxes. Now I’m just looking at them.”
Bing’s eyes darted all around the area. “How do you know they haven’t installed sensors or cameras in here?”
“In an afternoon? With Big Martha watching? Are you serious?” She folded her arms and stared at Bing. “Are you telling me that you, Ian Billingsly, the King of All Conspiracies, is afraid to step onto the dreaded red zone?”
“I’m telling you that…” Bing’s mouth moved, trying to decide exactly what he was telling her. “What I’m telling you is that I don’t want to be arrested.”
“Well, neither do I, and I damn near was because of these stupid piles of cardboard.” Ellie turned back to the red zone. “I think I should at least know what nearly incarcerated me.” She hesitated before putting her foot over the red paint, the idea of sensors and cameras never having occurred to her before Bing suggested it. While it was highly unlikely Feno could have had them installed, she figured
nothing was impossible. Not wanting Bing to think she took his paranoid fantasies seriously, she stomped onto the red paint and walked quickly between the columns of boxes.
“See?” She turned back to Bing. “No sirens.”
“At least none we can hear.”
“Oh shut up and help me look at these.” Bing took a deep breath and jumped onto the red paint as if it were a platform. Still no alarms sounded and nobody came running, so the two of them scanned the labels on the sides of the boxes and the cards in the pockets on the front of the filing cabinets.
“Well,” Ellie sighed, “that was a huge anticlimax. It’s nothing but codes.”
Bing squinted and read from a box at eye level. “B seven six eight Hv four to B nine seven zero Hv four. Any ideas?”
“Besides a sneaking suspicion that Feno Chemical is run by androids? No,” Ellie said. “They sure do love their alphanumeric codes though, don’t they? What’s the whole name of the stuff that spilled? HF-sixteen Lj four something something.”
Bing continued to scan the boxes while he spoke. “HF-sixteen LjR four two nine three.”
“How do you remember that?”
“How do you not?” Bing asked. “It’s the chemical compound that’s kept us prisoner in a military superstate for almost seven years.”
Ellie supposed he had a point, and he looked too tired for her to rib him about the military superstate comment. Plus, after the shakedown today, her faith in the apathy of authority had been shaken a bit. “Do you think these codes could be other chemicals?”
Bing rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know. That seems kind of hard to believe.”
“Even for you?”
He laughed. “Yeah, even for me. It just doesn’t make any sense. Surely they keep their chemical records on a highly guarded computer. These really can’t be that important if they’re just boxed up like this.”
“Well, they were important enough to threaten me with jail.” Ellie fished her beeping phone from her pocket. “And they cost the life of an innocent Twinkie.” She glanced at the screen and shoved the phone back into her jeans.
“Anything interesting?” Bing asked. Ellie didn’t have many friends and therefore didn’t get many texts. “Let me guess. Action Star Guy Roman wants you to watch him bench press a school bus full of children.” Ellie laughed but said nothing. “You know as well as I do that nobody’s real name is Guy Roman. He’s totally making that up.”
“It’s his name, Bing. I saw his ID.”
“Oh, and the military never uses fake names.”
“Guy Roman? You think the army’s going to make up a name like that?” She headed back toward her desk and Bing followed.
“See? Even you think it’s a ridiculous name!”
“Unlike Bing.”
“Hey, that’s a nickname. Guy Roman is a porn name.”
Ellie dropped into her chair and put her feet on the desk. “Well then, I guess that suits him, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, gross.” Bing perched on a low file cabinet near the desk. “So where’s he whisking you off to tonight? The water tower? A quickie behind the barracks?”
“Why is everybody so worried about where I fuck Guy?” Her tone was nastier than she meant it to be, but the stress of the day was starting to settle on her. She softened her tone and shot a rubber band at Bing. “Why don’t you be a hero and take some soup over to Rachel? She’s only a few days from clearance and she’s as sick as a dog.”
“I bet she still looks hot.”
“Oh yeah, green is really her color. And I’m sure her breath’s a real treat.”
“I bet it smells like honeysuckle.” Bing sighed dramatically and laughed with Ellie. “I don’t think I’m going to have any luck finding any soup, though. I looked a couple days ago and even Walmart was out. Something about a breakdown on the barrier road last week. The trucks didn’t get through.”
“You managed to get Twinkies, though.”
“Well, of course.” He got to his feet and dusted off his jeans. “I’ve got my standards. I want those back too, by the way. Maybe Rachel can keep down some creamy vanilla goodness.”
Ellie groaned. “Now who’s being gross?”
“Hey hey hey!” Bing wagged his finger at her. “Keep it clean. My intentions for the lovely Rachel are pure. Nothing but good clean fun. If it happens to involve occasional nudity, well, so be it.”
“Go on, get outta here.” Ellie waved him down the corridor. “Go save your damsel.”
“All right,” Bing shouted over his shoulder. “Have fun fornicating!”
“I will!” Ellie waited until she heard his footsteps heading down the stairs. She pulled her phone from her pocket
once more and read the message again. It wasn’t from Guy. It was from Med Services. Since quality of life treatment medications could not be taken in weekly doses, each blue tag patient was required to take their various pills at regular intervals throughout the day.
“For her convenience” the pharmacist had explained that each blue tag patient was enrolled in an automated med-alert phone system that would text when a dosage was due. Ellie had already ignored the first alert, the one that had come in after Bing’s message had finally gotten through. Pulling two small red pills from her pocket, she wondered what would happen if what Bing suspected were true, if text messages around Flowertown could actually be blocked and filtered. Would they block the medical alerts for someone in need of medications? Was she already behind on her quality of life treatments? Figured. She swallowed both pills.
“Well, that was a bad plan,” Ellie said to herself as she passed through security outside the records office. It had occurred to her that if Bing was headed to soothe the ailing Rachel, that meant her room would be too crowded by one. She knew Bing had absolutely no shot at winning her young roommate’s heart or favors, but she saw no need to dash his hopes. Rachel liked Bing’s flirting, and Bing didn’t seem to mind the constant, if friendly, rebuffs. Whatever it took to pass the time, she figured. But while another fruitless attempt was underway, Ellie would just be an interloper, so she had to find somewhere else to go. Plus, Bing and Rachel both figured she’d heard from Guy. Ellie had no intention of revealing the true texts she had received.
She headed down Avenue Four. The heart of Flowertown had originally been mostly farmland, and as quarantine and treatment facilities had sprung up, the military had laid them out with military precision. Starting from the few blocks of already present structures, Flowertown had blossomed out in a near-perfect grid, the names of the streets showing the same imagination as their shape. North-south
lines were avenues, east-west were streets, and everything was numbered.
For the most part, there were no real sidewalks because there were very few cars to dodge. After the initial chaos of containment, all roadways were closed to everything except military and rescue vehicles. Personal vehicles within the spill zone were impounded along the barrier zone for disinfection, and as centrally located living quarters became permanent, few residents bothered to reclaim their vehicles. There was really no place to drive anyway.
What made HF-16 so dangerous was what would have made it such an effective pesticide, had the testing been allowed to continue. Targeted for a specific strain of grain-eating beetle, the chemical was intended to not only eradicate a large segment of the parasite population, but to remain inert within those birds and bugs that ate the remaining survivors. It was hoped that those predators would then continue to excrete the pesticide, the chemical having attached itself to the animal’s cellular structure, and therefore ensure the eternal extinction of the grain-eating beetle.
In a horrible sense, HF-16 worked. It did attach itself at a cellular level, and any organism that absorbed it did continue to secrete the chemical through any form of elimination, from bodily waste to fallen hair to saliva-soaked chewing gum. Unfortunately, it proved toxic to a large number of organisms, including people, farm animals, and most of the bird population. It also proved to be quite resistant to decontamination, which was why the water system of Flowertown had been completely contained. City and county water mains were diverted, sewage lines internalized. A ring three miles wide around Flowertown had been completely
burned and sterilized with a combination of herbicides and decontaminants as well as high-frequency jamming waves, to prevent any wildlife from sneaking out with the dangerous chemical. Anything that made it to Flowertown had a very difficult time getting out.
This included any type of pollution. Open burning within the confines of the spill zone was prohibited, and containment engineers had even tried to enforce a no-smoking ban for the first six months before they realized there were limits to human cooperation. Litter was strictly controlled, hundreds of people employed simply to pick up scraps of paper and wads of gum, lest they blow out of the containment field. Recycling was mandatory, and packaging on incoming supplies was legally required to be kept at an absolute minimum. The end result of all this containment and legislation was that Flowertown, the most contaminated place on earth, was also the most environmentally progressive. It was an irony that was only amusing for the first year or two.
A tall, skinny kid with bad skin was scraping peeling paint off the yellow curb Ellie walked along. She wouldn’t have noticed him if he hadn’t stuck his arm out before her.
“Hey, Ellie, right? You carrying?” She shook her head. He was looking to buy some pot and must have met her sometime she was with Bing. “I heard Bing’s got some good stuff right now. Tell him to call me, okay?”
“Yeah, I will.” Ellie kept walking, not bothering to get the kid’s name, much less his number. Bing knew everyone in Flowertown, at least all the pot smokers, whose numbers had grown exponentially over the years. Boredom, anxiety, and the nausea-inducing maintenance medications made
marijuana a household staple, and since none of it could leave the spill zone anyway, the law turned a blind eye to its commerce. As Bing had wisely crooned one night, “The opiate of the masses has finally become an actual opiate.” She patted her pocket, feeling the bag Bing had thrown at her earlier still tucked away there. It was strange, she thought as she pulled open the door to an unmarked bar, that Mr. Carpenter hadn’t insisted on patting her down.
The noise within the bar blew her thoughts from her head. Some basketball game was on the big screen behind the bar, and whoever was playing mattered a great deal to the gang gathered before it. Ellie groaned, the sounds within the small room seeming louder than usual. She made her way to the far corner of the bar and waved to the bartender for a tall draft. The girl behind the bar nodded and held up an empty shot glass, silently asking Ellie if she also wanted her customary shot of bourbon. Ellie shook her head. She was getting a headache and could feel the two pills she had swallowed on an empty stomach turning into something bitter and foul. It looked like the quality of life meds, or QOL, as they were labeled, were going to be as hard to get used to as the maintenance meds, assuming she had long enough to worry about it. The bartender reached across the bar and traded Ellie the tall glass of beer for a debit card. She swiped the card and handed it back to Ellie, along with a bowl of saltines.
Ellie took a bite of a cracker. “What, no American cheese slices to go on them?”
The bartender shook her head in disgust. “Can’t get peanuts or even potato chips. Larry wanted me to start charging for the bowls so we wouldn’t go through them so fast. Can you imagine trying that in this monkey house?”
“Why can’t you get peanuts?” The crowd watching the game had begun to chant, so Ellie had to shout to be heard.
“That truck wreck.” The bartender was now at a full shout. “On the barrier. Won’t get anything until next week!” Someone must have made a basket because the bedlam at the other end of the bar got even louder. The bartender, knowing where her money came from, headed back into the fray as Ellie waved her off. First Bing’s soup, now the bar’s snacks. Word around the zone was that only one tractor-trailer rig had overturned on the secure highway through the barrier zone, but it seemed it had been carrying an awful lot of supplies.
The beer bounced around in Ellie’s stomach, and she was grateful for the crackers. She rubbed her hands over her face, and it felt like her eyeballs were too big for their sockets. Was this how it would be, she wondered? Would she just begin to feel progressively worse every day, every minute? Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she didn’t want to answer it. She hadn’t paid attention when the pharmacist had told her how often she would need to take her QOL meds. If this was another dosage reminder, she wanted to ignore it, but curiosity got the better of her. She pulled out her phone and tapped the screen. It was from Guy.
“PS1 til 10. Alone.”
Ellie tipped back the glass and drank the beer down in a few deep swallows. PS1 was power station one, less than six blocks from the bar. If memory served, it had a decent-sized living area for the guards and workers, including a shower that almost always worked, to say nothing of a decent-sized cot. She belched and grabbed a few saltines for the road. Meds aside, she still had some say over the quality of her life.
Before she made it to the door, the crowd at the bar erupted again, this time in angry shouts and some creative obscenities. Ellie glanced over her shoulder, expecting to see some referee getting the business from fans, but instead the screen was full of a trailer for a new action film coming out. She had seen flashes of ads online, but this was the first actual trailer, and judging by the sea of middle fingers jabbed at the screen, her opinion of the film was the popular one. The movie was called
Leak,
and from what she could gather, it was about a band of terrorists who escaped Flowertown to infect Chicago or New York or some other place more important than Iowa for whatever reasons the jackasses in Hollywood thought people would buy. It was an outrageous concept and hugely insulting to all the people who had had their lives restricted for so many years through no fault of their own. Containment and contamination weren’t just buzzwords in Flowertown. Everyone had lost someone after the spill, and nobody endured the maintenance medications lightly. When Ellie thought of the implications of suggesting that anyone in Flowertown would willingly subject the rest of the country to what they had been put through—
The crowd cheered again. The screen was black, as if bending to their collective will. People high-fived each other, glad to see the odious trailer gone, replaced by a black screen, then a blue screen, then a scroll of technical jargon before freezing on the network logo. Someone had cut the trailer short. In the middle of the college basketball playoffs. Ellie knew how much it cost to run a TV ad during the playoffs. That was a mighty expensive mistake on someone’s part. She turned and headed out of the bar, remembering the ass-chewing days of advertising. She didn’t think
she’d want to trade places with whoever would be paying for that mistake. Then she stepped out onto the street and the smell of the rainwater decontaminants struck her. She’d trade places with that fuck-up in a heartbeat. In a heartbeat.
On the walk to the power station, Ellie decided that even more than Guy’s body, what she really wanted was a shower. Her skin felt slick with oil and old fear, and she burped up traces of the vile medication. Nobody would ever call her a stickler for hygiene, but even Ellie had her limits. She pushed the buzzer and stuck her tongue out at the closed-circuit camera above the panel, and the latch on the chain-link gate opened.
“There’s my girl.” Guy sat with his feet propped up on the front desk of the small station. “I see you got all dolled up for me.”
“Don’t start. Are we alone?”
“Just you, me, and cable TV.”
“Good.” Ellie peeled her shirt off and stepped out of her jeans as she headed for the shower. “Tell me you have water.”
“It’s the power station. Of course we have water. Is that the only reason you’re here?”
“Not the only reason.” Ellie spoke loudly enough to be heard over the running water. “But if you could smell me, you’d know it’s for the best.” She pulled the flimsy plastic curtain across the small stall, but Guy pulled it back. Grinning, he sat back on the toilet, folded his hands behind his head, and watched her.
“Consider it the cover charge.”
Ellie smiled and turned her face up to the water. It stank of chlorine and was only barely tepid, but it washed the
smell of anxiety off of her skin. She rolled the bar of hard government-issue soap between her hands until a pathetic lather formed, and she ran her hands over her body, not bothering to see if Guy was watching. She knew he was. She would love to luxuriate in the moment, or maybe invite Guy to join her, but they both knew that even water for military facilities could only hold out so long. A quick lather of medicated shampoo and Ellie felt clean once more, the smell of flowers overcome for the moment by the smell of chemicals.
She turned off the water and leaned back naked against the cool tile. “Seems a shame to get back into those dirty clothes now that I’m all nice and clean.” Ellie expected Guy to join her in the stall, making one of his usual comments about getting dirty. Instead he tossed her a towel.
“We’ve got to talk.”
She stared at the scratchy white cloth. “This can’t be good.”
“It’s not all bad.”
“Okay.” She made no move to cover herself. “Let’s hear it.”
“Get dried off. I’ll get you a drink.”
She tipped her head back, the fluorescent light making her eyes hurt again. Guy stepped out into the office and she followed him, dripping water and leaving sopping prints behind her.
“You want a beer?” He turned to her with an open bottle. “And do you think you could put something on?”
Ellie took the bottle. “I never thought I’d hear those words out of your mouth. This day is just full of surprises.” She took a deep drink. “I don’t suppose you have any
thing clean around here that I could borrow for a little while. I wasn’t kidding about not wanting to put on filthy clothes.”
Guy poked around in a cupboard and pulled out an army-green T-shirt. “I don’t know whose it is, but it’s clean.” He tossed it to her and turned his back, leaning on his fists at the desk.
“Wow, thanks for the privacy.” Ellie pulled the shirt over her head. “I’m decent now. I think it’s okay to look.” When he still didn’t look up, she took another drink from the bottle. “You know, Guy, this is still a drama-free zone, remember? I thought we were both cool with that. If you’re seeing somebody else and you don’t want to—”
“I signed the papers.”
“What?”
He straightened up and turned to her, holding a thick sheaf of paper. “I signed them. Today. After I saw you.”
Her mouth hung open, waiting to hear something that would make sense of what he was saying. “I thought you weren’t…you said you’d never…you love the army.”
“Yeah, well, I thought about it.” Guy leaned against the back of the office chair, his feet crossed casually, but the fingers that gripped the pages were white. “I changed my mind.”
“You changed your mind.”
“Yeah, I changed my mind. You know, it’s a good offer. A really good offer.” Ellie stepped backward unsteadily, reaching behind her for the cot she knew was close. She sat down hard on the edge of it, not caring that she was naked beneath the shirt. Guy tapped the rolled-up papers against his palm. “I thought maybe you’d be, you know, happy about it.”
“I’m just…shocked. You said you’d never sign those. You said those guys were toy soldiers. What did you call them? White-collar mercs?”