When I came to, I wished to hell I hadn’t. I’d lost Alpha. And Crow. Sal and Hina.
They’d been replaced by strangers.
We were on a road, and I knew that immediately. Being on the road’s in my blood, I guess. It’s hardwired into me. I felt the shake. The unpeeling feeling. I tried lifting my head but only my eyes would move. Drugged. Strapped in place. And back on the road, staring at the brightest sky I’d ever seen.
I peered at the strangers to the right of me, the strangers to the left. Their eyes were closed and I told those faces to just keep on sleeping. Ain’t nothing to see up here anyway.
No more corn. The world had changed.
New smells now. Familiar smells.
Plastic. Steel and juice.
Ah, yeah. Juice. The smell of the road. Lifeblood to every set of wheels that’s rolling.
When the first building passed over my head, I thought it was nothing but a shadow. I thought maybe I’d blinked. But those buildings kept popping into my sky, flashing past me, more and more of them until the buildings took over and the sky disappeared.
Endless shades of black and gray and silver. You never seen so many windows. Like glassy eyes. Buildings so high, they bent like a landscape, arcing all together, slivers of steel in plastic sleeves, pointing at the sun.
Then pointing at the moon. But then even the moon got blocked by the buildings. Even that massive old moon.
I could smell the fumes off the bio vats. The greasy stink of hoarded corn being brewed into juice. And that juice must have flowed through pipes as wide as ancient rivers, all tunneled through the streets like veins.
When the lights came on in the city, it made the drugs feel even stronger. First the windows sparked up, but that was nothing, just a simple orange like something burning. It was the fizzy billboard glow that got me. Lights of every color, you couldn’t even try to count them. They never flickered, but they spun and I spiraled, orbiting in light like I was drowning in stars. It made it hard to swallow, and I chewed at my tongue and my cheek. Signs flashed at me. Saying what? Who cared? Not me. Couldn’t read those suckers anyway.
Until the last one.
All the wealth in the world and this is what they do with it. Tall buildings and lights that burn twice as bright and all night long. So much juice, you’d wonder how there was any corn left for eating. But I’m sure they were eating plenty in that city that don’t sleep.
No sleeping in Vega. No rest for the wicked.
But I thought maybe I could drift off now, the buildings disappearing, the lights going out. We were being sucked under the ground. Deeper and deeper. Yeah, just go to sleep, that’s what I wanted. Except, that last sign I’d spotted, it bothered me. Because I hated to think it might be the one word I could read, like it was the only word that mattered.
GenTech.
I don’t even want to tell you what it was like down there. It was a place the sun didn’t shine and no wind whispered.
They kept the lights low, and that was the one nice thing they did for us. They had a system, I guess. Though I had no idea what it was.
But of course they had a system. This was GenTech. They knew what they were doing. They knew what they wanted.
Sick bastards. Dressed in purple and marching about with their clubs raised high. And I don’t know what they needed those clubs for. Most of the prisoners were still unconscious, and the ones like me were too drugged numb to fight. We were just bodies. Not even people. We were bodies that pissed and puked and moaned as the agents picked through our limbs and faces and dragged each victim one by one to a staging area in the middle of that nasty black hole.
I reckoned this was the lowest point to which all else tumbled. The end of the road for all those lost souls who’d been taken. The people plucked from the dust and sold off by slavers. The people like my father and the old Rasta and Alpha’s mother and now me.
It was GenTech. In the end, it had always been GenTech. The purple fist crushing the last gasp from our crusty lungs.
But for what?
On the outside, I could still barely move my fingers. But inside I was a full-on riot. My mind not working right but all looping around. And I thought again about the damn story about a meat trade, that the rich freaks in Vega liked to mix up their meals. But if it was meat they were after, then why were those agents testing each of one us by taking our blood? Because that’s what they were doing — sucking the red stuff into small plastic tubes.
From what I could tell, there were two possible things that could happen once the agents ran their tests. Two options for all the bodies that had been taken.
First option was the agents grabbed your blood and ran the test, and then off you went. Gone. No idea where you were dragged to. But it was better than the alternative. Much better.
Because the second option was the agents grabbed your blood and ran the test, but then they just looked right through you.
And then they burned you.
Middle of the staging area they had some furnace sunk in the ground. A pit full of flames.
And that was option number two. So you can see how the first one became so appealing. Especially after you spent a day breathing in the ashes of all those poor bastards who’d been fried.
Could have been longer than a day. Could have been it was just an hour and each minute felt like twenty. The drugs we were on kept things silent. For the most part.
Every now and then a low moan would howl, escaping out of someone’s lips like they were trying to wake themselves up.
I was awake enough already, though. On the inside. I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on as I watched the poor bastards who had to take their turns before me.
A woman with one arm tested positive and the agents dragged her away. Next up was a blond kid who failed, and I clenched my eyes shut.
And it kept going on like this. One after another. Those purple suits threading through the crowd and calling out numbers, hauling off bodies, and stoking that fire pit in the middle of the room.
It just kept on going, and what started off horrifying only got worse. Any wall that my mind had built or the drugs provided, that wall pretty soon got blown into bits, reality piercing like a razor on bone. It got so bad I started longing for my own turn to be tested, just so I wouldn’t have to witness no more. Watching some kid get pulled from his mother, or some woman being took from her man. All these unknown faces. These strangers.
But then the purple suits changed even that. Because from out of a corner, they gathered up someone I knew.
It was Crow. His top half hadn’t ever really healed from the burning, and his bottom half wasn’t even there at all. Gone. Lost in the jaws of the duster. The agents carried Crow’s torso to the staging area. And as they jabbed his arm with the needle and siphoned his blood, some twisted part of me wanted to shout out at him.
Hey, little man. That’s what I wanted to yell.
Sick, right?
Must have been the drugs.
Crow passed the test and they hauled him out of view, and I wondered how they’d stopped him from bleeding out in the cornfields. I wondered where they were taking him now. But I didn’t have long to sit there and think about it, because next thing you know, the agents had Sal up there, and I could tell by their faces that the poor bastard had failed the test.
The sight of Sal being hoisted toward the flames did something to me. It broke into my skull and shattered down the back of my mind, and I could move again. But as I stumbled up and staggered toward the purple suits, it was like someone was working my muscles for me, as if it wasn’t my mouth that was screaming. As if it wasn’t my friend about to be burned alive.
Is that what he was, then? My friend?
I honestly don’t know, but yeah, I like to think that he was. Which is why it must have hurt him when his eyes recognized me for a moment but all I was shouting was “The numbers, the number. Tell me what it is.”