The Grief Team (15 page)

Mutt the WildKid could barely keep his eyes open. He’d been standing naked inside this cylindrical metal cubicle for some time and in that time Mutt had experienced a gamut of escalating emotions from anger to repentance, terror to despair, horror to abject disbelief…he had a mouthful of stomach bile which tasted of no-more-Mutt-ever! and he wildly rejected it. 

He was beside himself with rage at the Yellowbands who had forced him inside this soundless, sightless cocoon, attaching and/or inserting plastic tubes into/onto his body orifices, then sealing, locking, leaving him…hardened Citizens returning to their duties in the Dome, leaving the computer-controlled Gasterminate pod to complete its fifteen minute cycle…               

…and Mutt could barely keep his eyes open, his body going limp inside the straps which kept him standing erect.  He was losing the feeling in his limbs.  Inside his brain, a picture show of people, places, and events in his short hard life moved across a TV screen in spontaneous, colour-drenched microflashes; pictures which gradually became recognizable for their individuality and importance…Cathy Latimer with her whine and fat-pouting-lower-lip appeared…his pride of homeplace…Mutt-hand-fish and the taste of goodfuknsam’on…Jason-Mutt-healer…

…and then Jason-Mutt-healer’s mouth opened in his mind and began to cough and cough until the dark-eyed boy, the strain etched across his gaunt features, pulled in enough breath to say, “Believe…Mutt” before his lungs revolted again, and then his image folded into itself and disappeared from Mutt’s head… 

…and Mutt heard, from the distance of the red sun, the sharp hiss of pressurized air as the central seal on his pod was released and fresh-mall-air flooded in. 

Three minutes later, Mutt’s brain had cleared sufficiently to be struck by the sledgehammer-realization that Grey Kitty, presently purring outside the pod, waiting for Mutt to pull the tube out of his ass and get going, had saved me-Mutt-I!  This was quickly followed by a second sledgehammer which told him that Mutt-‘scape! was now possible.    

From a standing position, Peter Heckbert studied the sunburned face of the little girl.  With luck she might escape with only a light pink sheen, but it would mean at least two sessions in a quality peeling parlour.  That was perfectly acceptable in today’s fashions in the Malls he knew; nobody was into ivory white anymore in skin or in clothes.  Heckbert liked to follow the trends. You got to fuck more women that way, if you were tuned in, if you were pushing thirty-five and had a check-out date with the Crematoria at thirty-nine.  He would be lucky again tonight he knew because Barbara had finally answered his ad in the Chronicle.  It promised to be an evening of surpassing ecstasy because Barbara had also slipped something else into the ‘Stream—into his private trap no less!—an image of a pair of thigh-high-red-leather-boots, boots which promised to hug her like skin, that would practically ooze with her sexsweat…Heckbert suddenly realized that he was still staring at the little girl in front of him and he immediately became flustered as he realized the incompatibility of his thoughts with the presence of one so young.  Honour the Child! he thought to himself, using it as penance even though one technically didn’t have to. 

Cathy Latimer was curled into the furthest uncomfortable reaches of the metal bed in the containment room. Two hours before, when he had first seen her and her feral-’Kid companion, she had been impossibly filthy and smelled like dairydung.  Now that she was bathed, disinfected, immunized, and clothed in a fashion more befitting  a Child-of-the-Malls, he was surprised to see that she was still presenting an uncooperative attitude. 

“Not more about this Mutt-no-last-name, is it?” he said sharply, as his surprise gave way to displeasure.  He enjoyed watching her jump at the sound of his voice.  “I’m sure this was explained to you, Cathy.  Mutt-no-last-name is the property of the Grief Team.  He is a feral-’Kid and as such he was available for our export programme.  I think that you should be happy for him;  after all, he’s got a lovely life in the Papal State ahead of him as a very important young man.” 

“Why can’t I see him?” asked Cathy glumly.  “I just want to say goodbye.  If you’re in charge, why can’t you make it happen?”

Heckbert’s smile tightened at the edges as he tried another tact.  “Cathy, most of the time I admit I do say to people that some things are too complicated for Children to understand, but I don’t think I can say that about you.  You are obviously a very intelligent Stage Two and you deserve to be told the truth about your situation and that of your…acquaintance…with Mutt-no-last-name.

Heckbert swung into what he called his upbeat-rhythm.

“What has happened is this: Mutt has been cleaned! and immunized! and he looks like a million credits!!  We gave him a big-big Ration—I’m sorry you didn’t eat much of yours—and a brand-new uniform and then he joined his squad of twelve on board a CleanBus for the airport where…” he exclaimed as he poked at his Newton IV, “…a plane owned by the Pope’s wife’s brother, the Prime Minister, is waiting!”  Heckbert slipped the device into his jacket pocket with a flourish and dropped into serious tones. 

“Mutt was an escapee, Cathy.  He ran away from SkyDome when he misunderstood what we had in mind for him.  He was caught yesterday, one day before his original training class was to depart for the Papal State.  One day for the little ‘Kid to decide if he wants to join his old buddies or not, one day to choose whether he has a bright future or a life wasted on the Outside. 

“I’m sorry, Cathy, but when Mutt saw his old friends—he went through a year’s training with them, did he tell you?  Mutt got so darn talkative with them that I’m afraid that he…well, forgot about you.  I’m so sorry, but I felt that I had to tell you, so that you would believe that we never meant Mutt any harm.  The Grief Team only terminates Wildkids who use guns and who kill Citizens-in-the-Malls.  You’ve seen Terrorism Today…you know, Mallwatch, on TV?  You know we’re not unkind unless we are forced to be unkind.  That’s the Rule, isn’t it?”

The little girl finally nodded.  “So, so Mutt is gone…?”

“Off to a very happy and productive life.”  Heckbert smiled widely.  “Now perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I just asked you a little more about the boy you call Jason.  Would you like to come up and sit here at the table with me?  That’s a good girl…now Cathy…I have checked with my staff here at SkyDome and there’s no record of a Jason-no-last-name or anyone fitting his description.  We can’t find him.”

“But he was right behind me in the shadowtunnel!” insisted Cathy.  “I know he was!”

Heckbert frowned.  Clearly, Cathy Latimer’s ordeal had resulted in some type of psychological trauma.  Jason-no-last-name simply did not exist.  Heckbert had listened and watched for two hours as his subordinates explained that nowhere in any of the video surveillance tapes did Cathy Latimer ever appear with anyone other than Mutt WildKid or, oddly enough, a grey tabby cat.  All of the technicians, and even Heckbert himself, had thought that cats were extinct. 

Tape footage prior to the time that Cathy indicated she first met Jason were also barren of the boy’s image.  He had viewed footage of Slide ‘n Glide running smack into a noon-time-trap set by Rhonda-Mulls in the ruins of an old restaurant near Square One.  A fitting location, one of the technicians had mentioned wryly. 

Heckbert had smiled at that but he knew the Mull problem was becoming worse.  Rhonda’s Fan Club, so he’d heard, had secretly incorporated Wildkid barbequing as part of their initiation rite.  It certainly made sense to Heckbert, whose advocacy of measures against the Mull population were always consistent, if draconian, at the monthly meetings of the Grief Team Elect.  Already there had been seventy-three unexplained Wildkid disappearances in the Square One perimeter in just six months.  Already it was beginning to wreak havoc with his budgets and allotments.  If it hadn’t been for the fact that most of the disappeared were the slower-addlebrained-radburn-types, exports would be suffering.  Still, resource allotments had dropped significantly and he couldn’t continue to juggle the numbers much longer without throwing the whole delicate balance of SkyDome operations out-of-whack.

And that was something that Gabriel Kraft didn’t seem to understand. The catastrophe of 250,000 thawed, deceased Embryos was one thing, using SkyDome as a baby factory was something else altogether. It was amazing that they had been able to pull it off in the first place, to get as far as they had, still keeping stocks high and profits at normal ranges.  As much as he disagreed with Gabriel Kraft, especially where rations for Wildkids were concerned, Peter Heckbert knew that no one else in Toronto Nation was capable of masterminding the single greatest bait-and-switch operation in the history-of-the-malls, if not the world. Even Elias was being kept in the dark, which had amazed Heckbert at first. 

“For his own good,” Gabriel had ordered.  ‘You know how he talks at parties.  He’s better off not knowing because he’ll worry himself to death about it.  I think that, as Elias’ son, I know what I’m talking about!  Elias is out of the Stream on this one!  I control the Stream, not Elias, so all communications will run on a new rivulet. I’m suggesting that your cooperation and silence are required.’ 

Heckbert smiled and patted Cathy’s freshly-washed, sweet-smelling hand. The very aroma of her was a tonic against the scum and filth in which he worked day-in and day-out. It was hard to believe that she was alive, especially when she had been reported as killed by Slide ‘n Glide. He’d read the reports out of the Stream almost two weeks ago, but now here she was, with a mild case of radburn and some psychological worries to be ironed out. It was a pleasant feeling to see that there were such things as happy endings and Heckbert had had the distinct pleasure of informing Gabriel of this dramatic rescue using his coded channel in the Stream. The response had been immediate, even if it did not explain anything: “Treat child Cathy well. Terminate Mutt-no-last-name immediately. By order.”

Initially, Heckbert had some compunction against allowing Cathy to believe that her father was still alive but Blueband Parental Advisors, rushed in from Oakville Place, contradicted him. They reassured the little girl that Daddy was indeed going to be informed of her miraculous escape from the Outside and that he would be joining her shortly…perhaps tomorrow… perhaps the day after…when they were sure that she was not virus-infected and it was safe for Daddy.

It was the best that Heckbert could offer Cathy for the moment.  Still, he was worried about this phantom Wildkid she believed in.  He would ask a P.A. to speak with her about Jason-no-last-name but, until something definitive surfaced, he didn’t see much sense in communicating with Gabriel about it.  After all, Heckbert determined with a nod toward his own sense of superior logic, he wasn’t in the business of asking Gabriel’s permission for every little diddlyMullfuk’nthing.

Mutt flew after Grey Kitty, slipping through slits in doorways and under windows, melting into shadows, becoming invisible to sight and smell…he flew naked along the corridors keeping a high, arched grey tail and a tight pink anus in sight.  When they caught their breath inside a cold chamber, Mutt discovered boxes filled with ragged, dirty clothing and he appropriated what he needed to cover himself.  Then off they flew, two grey flickering images moving through Fortress SkyDome, reaching the first fissure in the sub-sub-basement, dissolving into it like sugar in water. 

Thirty minutes later, Mutt-no-last-name had packed what he needed from homeplace and was making tracks west along the Lakeshore. He’d start fresh somewhere around the Children’s Mall, see what the pickings were like. Find the lake if he wanted to and make a new homeplace.

Once…twice…thrice…he pulled up and turned to look back at the blot on the landscape that was Skydome, a peculiar, niggling urge picking at him to return and find Jason-no-last-name. He thought about it, feeling the smooth skin where his radburns had been. Each time, he shrugged off the compulsion and, muttering to himself, carried on.

He didn’t stop to see if the grey cat followed him into the late afternoon sun.

It didn’t.

The Mayor of Toronto Nation was thinking, poking from time-to-time into the data stream, checking a detail here, an assumption there. In a sudden burst his fingers firewalked across the keyboard, then hovered while possibilities were measured and assessed, then plunged again into the stream. Elias Macdonald Kraft was nobody’s fool, and that included his son, Gabriel. Although he had not gone fishing in the Stream for many many months, Elias was now setting and opening traps everywhere looking in vain for some evidence of the boy in his dreams, the mournful, coughing boy who said that he was coming to see Elias, coming soon…

Elias, who possessed the master lock to each and every trap in the Stream, inexplicably found himself barred from several areas and no matter how he dipped his baited hook, he was unable to catch anything. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to hook a coded channel, Elias gave up and had a short temper tantrum while he made a note to speak with Gabriel about who was fucking around with the Stream.

Elias was only 47, with five good years remaining before he was designated for Crematoria, an event which he secretly planned to avoid by invoking a suitably vague Rule plagiarized from Mayor Dickie’s original game plan for Toronto, a rule which would allow Elias to remain whole for a good while longer.  Such were, he allowed, the minutiae and benefits of being in public service.   

Dickie’s game plan, as Elias termed it, was actually the first Mayor’s first attempt to codify the restrictions under which citizens would live in the Malls; it was, to be sure, an unmitigated disaster.  Elias remembered it well and kept the document under lock and key in a safe in his office.  He did not destroy it, recognizing that future generations of Citizens-of-the-Malls would someday wish to see the fragile be
ginnings of their ship of state.
(see endnote 9)

Dickie had delighted in his vision of Toronthenia, a home-in-the -Malls for the bedraggled, soulless survivors of a once-teeming metropolis of two million, with millions more beyond in the ‘Golden Horseshoe’ which cobbled around Lake Ontario, but his first attempt to emulate the glory that was Athens was doomed to failure simply because of the psychological conditions of the 1209 survivors, who had walked or pedalled to the E.C., drawn by rumour, by evening lights, by hope of rescue, freedom from terror, and, inexplicably, an overwhelming urge to shop
.

Shopping is normal. 

That was the first canon on Dickie’s List. Shopping was something that everyone knew how to do and Dickie Donalato, co-owner/co-operator of the Sleepy Hollow Bookshop, located on the upstairs level of the E.C., had long been a student of human nature.  He recognized that basic human needs included feelings of satisfaction experienced through the physical expression of the power of the dollar. 

To purchase is to own! 

Maybe the experts believed that money was power, but Dickie had long since concluded that it was the psychological thrill of spending that was in itself so overpoweringly seductive and, during the years of horror, chaos, and Walking Death, when billions died and 2004 became the hellish-historical-signpost for the near-extinction of the human species, Dickie Donalato encouraged his clutch of survivors to shop. 

Somehow, amid such a cacophony of world calamities, stunned survivors—those whose bodies contained the statistical anomaly which foiled the Tallahassee Satan’s Viruses— slowly remembered the pleasure of doing something which defined their existence.  They spent money, ludicrous amounts of it because it was everywhere.  And they bought toasters and microwave ovens and beachwear and bunkbeds, paying at empty check-out desks because they were not thieves, just survivors.  

It was, Dickie maintained, the beginning of what he called mall-awakening and it occurred several months before one very tired Elias Macdonald Kraft, Manager of Oakville Place Mall, negotiated his special edition “Free O.J. in ‘97” Ford Bronco—his choice of forty on the abandoned lot in Oakville—through the detritus and damage along the Q.E.W. and the Lakeshore, up Yonge Street to Dundas, where the mighty Centre still stood. 

Sleepy Hollow Bookshop had been in the Centre for fourteen years, a period of time during which a number of significant events had challenged Dickie’s grasp on reality.  A Maritimer, born and raised in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, he had finally gone down the road to Upper Canada in the first year of the 70’s.  Unemployment and a baby on the way had made up his mind for him, reluctant as he was to leave his home.  He and MaryAnn (and little Donaldo) had made a decent living selling books which mass-market-clonestores wouldn’t or couldn’t handle.  In their eighth year in Toronto, they leased space on the rarely-frequented top floor of the E.C. and began specializing in mail orders.

Although there were plenty of events to choose from if you were looking for something to mark the beginning of the end of the world—Haardvar’s assassination, two Wars of Canada, your pick of Viruses—for Dickie it was the death of MaryAnn at the shaking hands of an unknown child in December, 2001.  She had gone down three floors in the Centre to get take-out cardboard cups of coffee from Druxy’s, when a gum-chewing-shaved-head-wild-eyed-boy-no-older-than-eleven suddenly stepped in front of her.  As MaryAnn hesitated, wondering what she should do with both hands occupied, her mind was made up for her by one shot from a .38 revolver which sent a bullet screaming into her left temple, killing her instantly. 

Dickie, a widower, and childless too when the first Virus hit and Donaldo Donalato, 16, didn’t come home from school ever again, began staying later and later at Sleepy Hollow, often shuffling home at three o’clock in the morning to eat a bowl of boiled noodles covered in parmesan cheese, only to return three hours later to re-open the shop.  In Sleepy Hollow he had his friends: books to keep him occupied, books telling him their great stories, books with all of their wonderful ideas…Dickie stopped reading only to serve the needs of a dwindling number of customers.  In the moments between wandering with Richard Burton in his escapades in the Dark Continent, or thoughts entranced by Thomas Flanagan, Umberto Eco, Alberto Moravia and a hundred others…in those moments when he was concerned with satisfying a “Do you have a copy of...?”, Dickie felt exposed, naked, vulnerable, and he would scrutinize the buyer intently until he was sure that books were indeed what was desired.

Things had gone so rapidly downhill for Dickie and Canada that he could not be sure if he was more distressed at the loss of MaryAnn, Donaldo, or his beloved country.  To lose his wife, to see his country involved in civil war, these were assaults on his mind which took a heavy toll. Dickie stopped washing himself and began sleeping on an old futon he brought from home and placed on the industrial carpet at the back of the shop.  

Truth be told, Dickie and his late wife had only been hanging on by their financial fingernails, a situation which had not improved with the sudden, apocalyptic collapse of stock markets in Tokyo, London, and New York.  When it was announced by an investigative-news-magazine-style-television-show that its reporters had uncovered incontrovertible evidence that the newly-elected President of the United States was a transsexual who was currently having an affair with the president of the World Bank, markets collapsed.  News followed an hour later of the President’s suicide, an act which sent the markets into a final tailspin.  Dickie hadn’t liked the President much anyway seeing as he was, first, an American and, second, not all that telegenic anyway.  He had been more upset when the announcement came that Canada Post had ceased deliveries and that the Canadian Army was loose in the streets of the nation. 

The resultant financial chaos quickly became the focus of everyone’s worries for, three days after the demise of the U.S. President, the Prime Minister of Canada, Fooku Haardvar was assassinated on the front steps of Union Station in Toronto.  His Reformation Party’s coup d’état had played badly in Quebec, although the First War of Canada passed so quickly that Dickie Donalato wasn’t absolutely certain that it had happened in the first place.  Yet the devastation along Front Street and behind, on the rail-lands where the C.N. Tower had fallen during rush hour on a snowy January morning was proof enough.  For weeks, when the riots slowed to a lull before catching fire again, people breathed sighs of relief that the Tower had not fallen on SkyDome; after all, spring was just around the corner and talk of the Blue Jays’ prospects had already begun.

The Second War of Canada, as two out of three eminent historians were quick to call it, had its venue on the west coast, specifically Vancouver.  To Dickie, this war seemed equally as quick though in fact it lasted eight months before the last shot was fired.  None of the combatants realized that Fate had something much more horrific in mind thanks to Jeffrey Mielgaard, the Walking Death of Tallahassee and, when Dickie Donalato’s fellow Canadians began dropping into their own pools of blood, urine, and faeces, clawing at their burning breasts and swollen nipples, Dickie took that as his cue to leave the world as he knew it and escape to a world as he wanted it to be.

That night, Dickie began stealing canned goods and other non-perishable items from the market in the basement of the E.C..  He used the freight elevator to move hundreds of dollars worth of items, chief-among-them: Twinings’ teabags, bottled water, noodles, and powdered Parmesan cheese.  Over the weeks and months as Walking Death toured the Golden Horseshoe, his orderly book shop achieved the more dubious appearance of a lair, where books lay in piles-upon-piles, wedged into crevices, stacked along arms of chairs, all competing for space with Dickie’s new bed.  He dispensed with radios, computers, and assorted electronic communications equipment, in favour of a small Casio palm-sized TV.  His practicality determined that a portable toilet came next and he didn’t stint on the bumwad.

In the recesses of his mind, he was aware that he was miraculously immune to the Viruses, but it didn’t much matter seeing as death had ceased to amaze or frighten or inhibit him.  He went about his business, pleased that the early reports of Virusdeath in U.S. malls had kept the E.C. (and surrounding urban and suburban shopping malls) free of patrons.  The odd, rotting corpse he encountered in his forays to obtain items for Sleepy Hollow was of no consequence compared to the carnage visible outside.  There was no question of going home to his little house squeezed between a coin laundry and a shoemender on the Danforth. 

Sleepy Hollow would be his last stand. 

It did not seeming unfitting that the Mall had supplanted everything else as home as everything that Dickie needed was within reach.  The Mall would provide, the Mall would survive, even as Walking Death scoured the city, its virulence cutting off d.j.’s in mid-chatter on the radio, cars with expired drivers at the wheel crashed into anything in their paths, and lunch-time crowds died in various stages of ingestion and digestion.  In Sleepy Hollow, the anti-riot metal grating was pulled across the storefront by Dickie for what he believed was the last time and securely locked.  He kept his newly-acquired arsenal—seven handguns, two hunting rifles, and a shotgun—courtesy of Bob’s Guns ‘n Ammo—in strategic locations through the store with copious amounts of the appropriate ammunition in place.

His preparations complete, Dickie pulled the Casio out of his pocket and sat down to watch one final electronic serving of the ongoing world horror on CNN, the only network which had managed to stay on the air. Its three remaining technicians/reporters, two men and a woman, had sealed themselves inside their Atlanta studio, cataloguing the nuclear events, the riots, and the steadily rising deaths by Viruses. In several cases, on other networks, the motionless bodies of announcers, men and women, remained on the air, faces rotting in congealed pools of their own blood-and-mucous; yet the technology still functioned, beaming their images to the equally silent, decaying bodies of couch potatoes across the world. 

After listening to ten minutes of the hysterical ramblings of one of the male reporters, and the grunts of the other two as they fucked ferociously in the background, CNN and its starving staff went off the air in Sleepy Hollow when Dickie dropped a hard-cover copy of The Bible (King James’ version) on the Casio, crushing it.  

From that moment, day after day, night after night in his exile, Dickie Donalato munched hot platefuls of microwaved noodles sprinkled with dry parmesan cheese as he considered his books and began to ponder what kind of world would be left, if there was to be anything left at all.

And it came to pass one day, as he thumbed through a copy of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, that Dickie Donalato finally understood how a child could fire a gun and kill an defenceless, innocent wife-and-mother. Because there was no God, no Allah, no Jehovah...only a species of animal, driven and governed by instinct, reacting innately.  It was blinded by spirituality but its feral instincts were always there. Golding had been right. It was in the children and always would be.

Thus, of an evening, inspired by visions so profound that his temples began to throb and ache, Dickie cleared his desk of bills and invoices and found pen, ink, and paper. He brewed a large pot of tea and then set feverishly about his task.

He was making his List.

The Father-of-the-Malls was come.