Honey to Soothe the Itch (2 page)

I don’t answer Amanda’s question for a second.  I’d been combing for the right ghost when the St. Petersburg enclave was overrun.  Jefferies vanishing had taken all my processing power.

But Randall had the few who remained and I could go back to work.  Except now without Jefferies, a new hole in our network had opened up and the rest of us needed to learn how to fill it.

Jackson,
our free human enclave’s de facto hunter-protector, asked me once what that meant.  He’d assumed the implanted like me jacked into something that was already there and that we interfaced, not created. 

It’s not like that.  We can—and do—interface with systems, not just the internet.  If there’s a network available, we build a link, and we do that by learning.  Where’s the edges?  What is the shape of what I’m linking to?  Information takes on a physicality, a weight.  A body.  And we grow a new limb.

Or, more precisely, we grow new synapses that allow us to use this new, wonderful limb we’re all of a sudden attached to.  It takes time, and practice.  And now Jefferies is gone and the rest of us need to grow into his space.

We can’t leave
blank areas.  The zombies fester if we don’t throw light on them.  We made that mistake with Siberia.  And now Jefferies is gone.

And if there’s a space, a patch of the world in the middle of our collective back we can’t contort to scratch,
I might miss the one I need.  The zombie with the right ghost.

I noticed something about the zombies right
at the end of the world—I could network into a few of them.  Not many, but a few.  The other implanted thought this was just a glitch and a worthless one at that.  What were we supposed to do with one or two influenced zombies?  It’s not like we had the time or resources to figure out how to control one. 

Stevens, one of the three hundred or so implanted in California who’d been at the forefront of the initial attempts to stop the end, he’d sent out a burst of info about artificial limb control, cyber-telepathy, mind snapshots—projects ranging over multiple work groups imbedded in a wide and diverse set of
corporations and cultures. 

H
umans weren’t connecting the dots, but the invisible technology was. 

Stevens vanished within hours
of the end, as did the majority of the Silicon Valley implanted.  I think they fought the first real battle in this war, and they lost big time.  We will never know.

But his burst stuck with me, and now I wonder—can I see the last moment before the zombie became non-human?  Is there a mind snapshot in there?  And most important, can I use it?

Amanda touches my arm, her face reflecting what must be on mine.  I’ve noticed that, too, with her.  Her expressions tend to mirror what she sees on the faces of others, but with a clarity of emotion the mirrored person doesn’t have.  Amanda feeds you back a cleaned-up file.

She’s looking at me wearing a grave mask of determination.  “Eat your broth.  I’ll come back in an hour or two with your meds.  Okay?”

I nod.  She’d given one of the hunters a detailed list of pharmaceuticals to cull from local hospitals.  He’d come back with a truck full of stuff to keep us all alive, but mostly to keep me functioning.

“Tell Jackson I’ll have a report for him then.”  Jefferies may be gone, and I may be running out of time, but Jackson needed info to keep this enclave alive. 
Info I could provide.

Amanda stands and dusts off her knees, more to unkink
her back from sitting on the metal floor than to get off the dirt.  “Do you want me to shut the door?”

I look out.  The light poured into my metal box from a sun low on the horizon,
throwing real shadows.  Intense, delineated slices of light that spread deep enough into my room they almost touched me.  It was evening outside.

“Yes,” I say.  Yes, I did.  The kids moved around
the gravel, playing their silent games.  They’d learned how to be quiet.  And how to dress so they blended into whatever they stood on—they all wore dirt and bleakness and looked like the dirt they danced on.  They all learned how to hide when out in the open. 

Kids shouldn’t have to live like that.  They shoul
d all feel cozy and protected.  This time of night, they should be finishing their chores and settling down for an evening’s reading of a favorite bedtime story.  Maybe one about talking animals who lived someplace beautiful and idyllic, a place safe for kids and adults alike.

A place like the world should be.

***

I don’t sleep.  Not really.  I dream, perhaps, when I take on the senses of a zombie.  I sort of feel them, sort of understand what they are doing, but the connection isn’t complete and my brain doesn’t recognize their spaces as legitimate.  Everything is too tall, or too wide.  Angles are too steep and I get vertigo looking up a hill
or down at the zombie’s feet.  How they step can’t be a real step, or touch can’t give real information.  

And also like a dream, I’ll see what they see as they lumber through the city.  Or I’ll smell something that catches their attention—a cat, maybe.  Or the smell of rotting fish.  It’s always something strong, and something capable of taking all their focus.  But I never taste, though I know the zombie’s tasting, or remembering the taste of something, like their final meal as a human.

That last impression, that final frame of processing in each of their brains of their final moment is the key to my victory.  It’s like the invisible tech has put their minds on permanent standby and is slave-running their bodies.  That frozen final moment flashes as the acute awareness of the zombie’s surroundings, and of being taken over. 

It’s like the moment Amanda said I was right about the cancer—the implants were causing what all my expensive bio-support of my old life had been keeping at bay.  The other implanted might go soon, too.  Or they might get a couple of decades.  Me, I’ve got a month or two left. 

I remember the moment I become intensely aware of my own impending death.  I remember it with the same level of detail I remember the time I saw a grizzly in Yellowstone:  I knew where every joint in my body was.  I knew how far away the bear was from me, and if it had noticed me.  I smelled nothing at all, as if my brain had shunted all that processing to my visual cortices.  But I tasted bitter on my tongue and felt bile crunch my gut into a hard knot.

When Amanda said “I wish I could run blood tests,” I knew
at that moment she was right.  I knew where in my body it metastasized, and I knew how far away death was.  I smelled nothing, though the camp dogs always sniffed me.  But I felt everything, like my brain had decided touch was the sense I needed to pay attention to.  I ached differently than I ever had before.  Not a post-workout ache, or even a hangover ache, but a new, itchy kind of pain deep in my bones.  Something unnecessary grew inside me.

Every single zombie flashes me something just like that grizzly
bear.  And just like my cancer.

A
ll the implanted, including me, have a theory:  The invisible tech is alive, like a dog or an ape is alive.  It’s smart, but not people-smart.  And it’s decided it’s the alpha. 

So, right now, the Earth is one big silver back gorilla and we’re the fleas that make it itch.

What that makes the zombies, I don’t know.  Amoebas?  Hair follicles?  It’s not a perfect—or even that good—of an analogy.

What happens when you unleash terror on an animal?  It bares its teeth.  It snarls.  And it attacks, ripping your skin from your body in big bleeding chunk
s and makes sure you never terrorize it again.

I’ve seen the world do this already.  It did it to Jeffries and his enclave.  It does it to every roaming group of free humans it finds.  Efficient or not, the world
is vicious.

But no righteous flea wants to die.

So I watch the zombies sustain themselves.  I watch their movements and their minds, looking for a way not to be smashed, hoping for some sort of symbiotic relationship. 

But I know i
t’s not going to happen.  When so many of the implanted vanished so quickly, and with Jefferies disappearing today, I am sure of it.  Fleas aren’t something a clean and balanced world lives with.

This righteous flea isn’t going to shrivel up in the hail of pesticide.  I’m clever and I’m dying, and I have nothing to lose. 

Except I know that releasing terror in the zombie horde wouldn’t help us.  It wouldn’t help anyone.  The last thing we need is for the animal that the invisible tech has become to feel it’s been cornered.

So I search and I search, looking for unfamiliar frozen moments. 

This flea is going to make the gorilla dance. 

***

Jackson helps me out the door of my metal room.  He stands in front of me, big and imposing, clad in his camo jacket.  He’s sporting his normal three-day growth and his omnipresent camo stocking cap. 

One of the first places the hunters raided was the local big-box sporting goods store. 
They’d set up camp in a strip mall with the sporting goods place on one end and the grocery store on the other.  It lasted a good three weeks before the zombies chased them out. 

That’s when they found me.  The others wanted to kill me, blaming the implanted for what happened, but Jackson stopped them.  He
gave me a chance. 

He’d be handsome if he wasn’t dirty and smelly.  But we were all dirty and smelly, so I shouldn’t complain.  He takes my hands and helps me down the step. 
“Did you eat okay?” he asks, grinning.

He must be responsible for the added spicing in the broth Amanda gave me.  I still taste the tiny little chili fires burn at the back of my throat and I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.  At least it reminds me I’m human. 

He doesn’t need to know I was spitting up blood.

“Yes.  Thank you.”  I smile back at him.

Jackson nods and helps me over to a couple of boxes set up as seats under some beige camo netting—our current command central.  We moved into this rail yard about two weeks ago and set up right in the middle of the lines.  Trains confounded the zombies.  I think they have some residual fear of being run over by an unstoppable force.

Amanda’s waiting with my meds.  Next to her is Tony, come
in from the railway control center to update us on any machine hacking they’ve been doing. 

Jackson didn’t like splitting the group up this way, but they all knew we needed to keep hidden, and electricity sings bright and clear to the zombies.

The first thing I did was learn the rail system and put in a buffer so the electricity in the control center didn’t look anything more than lights left on.

It buffers like
the electrical cover I want to use for my special project.  Anything I can do to give the enclaves a chance in this new world, I’ll do.

We’re lucky
the end of the world didn’t shut down the world’s modern conveniences.  The planet hummed along, internet and cell service still up and running.  Refrigerators worked.  Cars ran.  Four billion zombies used the comforts of life, but not us.

The worst part
is that the zombies aren’t mindless—they just don’t have minds.  After the end, entire nations disappeared.  Half the human population vanished within three weeks.  The few implanted left searched as we learned how to establish a new connection to each other, and we learned they’d been processed, like cattle.  Free humans and zombies alike.  It wasn’t indiscriminate, either.  The end of the world turned out to be the quick, efficient, and ecofriendly culling of unsustainable biological capital.

It was as if the invisible technology had taken on the personality of a vengeful Earth goddess.
  We now live in the aftermath of her fury.

In the first weeks, there’d been the sects.  Lots of shouting and sacrificing to the gods.  Now, the few who remain
just want to live. 

Though that’s not completely true.  They wanted to live like modern humans again—disease-free, well-fed, and educated.  They want plumbing and electricity they
could use and they want their mortgages back. 

Every so often
there’d be arguments about the nature of the zombies, usually after we lose someone, either to an attack or to turning.  All the old zombie clichés would come up:  slow vs. fast, disease vs. magic, hive-mind vs. mindless.  Vodka would find its way into the conversation, then sooner or later someone would end up in my doorway, demanding an explanation.

I always say the same thing: 
I’m trying to get into the zombie system.  I don’t sleep.  I only eat when Amanda gives me food.  They better leave me the hell alone because every second they bother me is another second of my finite life I’ve lost.  And a second I can’t use to find them answers.

Now, next to Jackson under the camo netting of our command tent,
I sit down on a wooden crate and it shifts under me, creaking and groaning.  It smells like overripe bananas, which isn’t a good combination with the chili pepper still in my throat, or with the nausea welling up because I walked the twenty feet from my room to the tent.  Amanda’s right there next to me, her hand on my forearm and her other offering water and a cocktail of pills.