The Only Ones (4 page)

He shuts up, because we are going through a bridge that is like a little house, with walls, and makes a lot of noise to drive through. When we’re on the other side, he says, “And what do Ethics do?”

“Take a bribe.”

He laughed and laughed. “Ours too. But what is it about? Life sales?”

Ok, I’m not going to answer that. You’re asking for trouble even talking about Life, let alone sales. You cannot sell Life. Unless you got a license. I just told the guy I didn’t know.

“And Health Inspectors?” He has to steer hard around a big rock.

“No, you see them a lot. They are like, did you take your shot? Did your kid take her shot?”

“Nobody wants to take a shot?”

“Some do.”

He needs to turn pretty hard now, how the road went. “I mean, you can’t blame people,” he goes, “what ends up in some of those damn vaccines. What happened to those poor kids Sylvain tried to help—well, that was more by way of their Parent’s exposure—GIs, a lot of them, shot up to the gills with every kind of goddamn untested thing some mega could make a profit off—breaks your heart, but it was never as common as people thought. Vaccine Syndrome can be mild. Beats polio, for sure. Even measles are no walk in the park. Those stupid vaccine boycotts. Everybody wants to go back to the goddamn Stone Age! You have no idea what I’m talking about,” he said.

I heard of it though. I heard of polio.

“That’s why Sylvain went in the direction he went in, those last years.” Now he is turning us another way, and I think there is a drop on my side, but he is looking at me, not the road, like—you agree, right?

I agree!

He looked back at the road and steered back from the drop. “He’d patch people up, they’d go back home and die of something else. And that was even before the Big Ones started coming through. Then they stopped coming up at all.”

He steers the turn a different way, and now we’re going uphill, and you could see the moon on my side. “The first Big One killed the market. It killed the fucking patients!” He shut up for a while. “Well, people did still come for Bernie. Nothing stopped anyone coming for what Bernie sold.”

Then all at once something went flying across the moon. Whoosh!

It’s birds.

I had seen birds before. But generally, you know, falling in Powell’s Cove or right on the street. You would see their bodies on the street. You do not want to eat those birds. Some people did though. Whoosh!

“Lookin’ good, Larraine,” he says to the phone and we turn off onto a little road with one of those blinking light gizmos and an old woman in overalls comes to let us in. She got a big red face and long white hair.

“Got some goodies for me?” she asks Rauden.

“Just soma,” he said and handed that Pak to her. “Sook’s contact screwed me. Pigeon and gull.”

She said, “I can work with that.”

“If anyone can, it’s you, Larraine.”

They laughed and laughed.

“Want a look?” she said. “Oh, let her look too. If she’s a candidate for Bernie, she’s not even going to know what it is.”

And she brings us around her house, which is like a tower that goes way up, with wires and lights?

And I want to tell you something. You are going to hear what people say about the girls like me, how we are exploited, got no self-esteem or worth or none of that, the life we live. They never say it’s interesting.

Behind this tower is a very little house that is very warm where she had a glass cage of little fluffy things that is going, Peep! Peep! Peep! Peep!

Is that interesting or what?

Larraine lets us use her toilet. She gives us food for the road. Then we are on our way.

Do you want to know what’s interesting?

Meatloaf.

We ate it when the road straightened out.

You know what else?

Pie.

I woke up and the door is open, and it’s still trees outside. Rauden came back fixing his overalls. I guess he pissed on the road. We head off, downhill now. Still trees and rocks with snow on them, and the moon sometimes, but in a different place. And this guy is still talking, like he never stopped. Maybe he been talking to himself the whole time I been sleeping.

“There’d been rumors for some time, even before Sylvain started tracking them down. From the worst hit areas—LAX, Rio, Manila. Queens, of course. Very mysterious—the profile didn’t read as conventional immunity. Odd fluctuations in cytokine levels. Antibody anomalies. The whole thing could have been a myth, but the rubes talked about it—Dad and Old Phil knew quite a bit about livestock hardies, after all.”

I saw a lantern on a pole.

“Sylvain was the only one to do the research. Set up a search program that hacked into clinics and labs, and how it worked, a test for certain modalities went out—Henry explained this to me once—bloods, location, history, like that—and if three got positive checks, an Alert flag would pop up in his system.”

Behind the lantern, the road turned downhill sharp. Rauden steered hard and kept on talking.

“Dewey liked to call them X-treme hardies, but for most of us, they were Sylvain hardies. Thought it was just an old man’s fantasy. Even Bernie had his doubts, though Dad said the pair of them had big plans. Sylvain had started buying up conventional hardy product, male product. Dad had the idea there was some dicey stuff too—viruses, maybe for testing purposes, kept them in his goddamn shed. Dewey knew some dealer in Scotchtown, guy’s still working, for all I know. We’d moved to Bovina by then, but we all kept in touch. Dad was worried—thought Dewey was losing it, guy kept muttering about footprints in his hardy search. With hindsight though, Dewey was probably right.”

Now the downhill turn turns the other way. Rauden steers that.

“Maybe a month after Dewey made real contact with one of these so-called X-treme hardies—she was from Michigan—an Inspector showed up at Dewey’s front gate.”

I saw a little house in the trees. The little house got a light.

“Claimed Sylvain was in violation of some health or Ethics code—well, he probably was—we all fucking were—but to arrest the guy?”

That is the first lit-up house we have seen since Larraine’s.

“And of course Dewey tried to bribe the Inspector, then got charged with that as well. A bunch of the old rubes went to try to get Dewey out of jail—old Phil Delize, Larraine’s husband Rebert—what a sweet guy he was—and a few of the younger ones, maybe eight total. They threw them in the clinker too.”

Rauden steered around the house with the light.

“Henry always said someone big was behind it. Maybe some mega who wanted to get Sylvain’s hardies before him, and God knows what they’d do to them. The timing of the raid does work. And when Dad came down to sort things out afterward, it was clear someone had broken into the Farm.”

You could see something red ahead through the trees.

“Henry thinks the flu that went through the jail was planted, but that seems excessive, even for those greedy motherfuckers. The Inspector died too. And the sheriff. Everyone in the place. Henry says that’s what did Dad in too.”

The red thing is a lantern.

Rauden stopped the truck there. Oh, man. He’s crying again. “Just knowing about it,” he said. He sat there at the wheel, crying.

I just looked out the window. It is not so dark out as before.

After a while Rauden wiped his eyes and made a turn on a different kind of road. This road is flat, got some houses on both sides, and some of them got lights outside, on trees, though you don’t need them so much now. It’s getting brighter.

“You may be wondering why I’m going into all this.”

Wonder. Ok, where do I start?

“Well, with Dewey gone, old Phil’s son Phil Junior took over the Farm—you met Phil Junior’s widow, Janet—but the place was a mess—ransacked, partly burned. Most of Dewey’s files had been destroyed, and what was left was so fucking booby-trapped with Dewey’s own antihacking shit—viruses, worms—it wasn’t worth saving, except for one little backup program that can be handy in emergencies—reads breaches very well and kicks off the backup generator when needed. Turns out to store backup for some of Dewey’s missing files, which you definitely want to steer clear of since most of them come with individual anti-hacking devices that are certainly SOTA today—and one of these goddamn files was that old hardy search I’ve been mentioning, with that pop-up flag and a real doozy of a worm. How it works, the worm is in the actual flag, so it’s only activated when the flag is triggered by the goddamn three modality thing—and what are the chances any goddamn code in your goddamn system is going to trigger that?”

And he gives me that look, like I agree, right? I agree.

We go across another bridge now, just small, across a little river, and on the other side is, like, rows of stores that show up real good because it’s getting so light.

“I saw that worm today. Now what could have triggered that?”

I said I didn’t know.

“Your pure spit code and fucking bloods,” and he smacked the wheel again, like, three times. “Your code kicked off the hardy flag. Some fucking Courier!”

I didn’t say a word. I thought I was the Subject.

It’s already morning when we pull into an icy yard near a long building called Motel 16, and a big white truck is parked on the side, and a girl is running out crying and an old guy is standing at the door, shaking his fist at her. When he saw Rauden, he started to laugh, spread his arms for a big hug, and brought us into the RV that looks more like a regular lab inside than Rauden’s place. It got cots and tables and counters and all that, and Bernie made a hot Beverage though he said none for me, in case he needs to put me out for a test, but he was nice. He wore a white jacket with short sleeves, though it is cold, but he had a kind of sleeve anyhow, of white hair, and he smelled good. Bernie says to Rauden, where they are sitting on stools with their Beverage, “So what is so special you must interrupt my tight schedule and drive all this way on such a dangerous night?”

Rauden leaned over and said something quiet.

“What?” Bernie looked over at me, surprised. “That old hocus pocus? Do not read too much into this, Junior. You know the man was not in his mind at the end.”

Rauden whispered some more.

Bernie looked at me harder.

Rauden started to talk so loud I could hear it from my stool. “The fucking flag went off! The worm went up. Her bloods fit the fucking modality. I’m telling you, Bernie. Come up here, I.”

I went and stood in front of them.

“Bernie! You are looking at a Sylvain hardy!”

iv

There is a TV in the Motel 16 room Bernie puts me in when he got done. The TV is broke. The window is broke too. The test was invasive.

I had worse.

He gave me pads where I, you know, bled.

“Too bad,” he said when he left.

The window in the room got a hole. I could hear a sound through it. I went to check. Ice falling from the roof. I lay down again. Now it’s crunch, crunch. I went to look again. An older woman and a man are crunching across the parking lot, over the ice, and went in the RV. The next crunch, crunch is them leaving, with the woman crying.

The next crunch, crunch is Bernie crossing with Rauden, who came back from errands in Ithaca. I ducked back on the cot and act like I’m asleep when they come in, with Bernie patting Rauden’s back, Rauden looking shaky, and Bernie saying, “Too bad.”

And that is when I got it. Whatever these guys thought they could do with me, it isn’t going to work.

Bernie took food out of a little Locker and put it in a cooking box. He said it is Frank in Bean and gave me mine to eat on the cot. Him and Rauden ate at a table. With all three of us, it is not too cold in here. Frank in Bean was pretty good but not as good as meatloaf. Rauden mostly just sat without eating, but Bernie ate the whole time he talked to Rauden.

“I’m very sorry, Junior, but,” Bernie goes, “she would have been a hard sell even without this problem. My clients are such dickheads—they insist on virgin Hosts. They do not understand a girl like,” Bernie looks at me and nods. “And patching her up would not be simple. Even selling her ova will not be simple. These dickhead clients all insist on pre-pandemic product! And, you know, that one Dewey had dealings with? The Dearborn hardy? She had many problems, even besides the antibody anomaly. Compatibility, response. Her ova had some very serious problems, and there was another he heard had the same problems. Eat your lunch, Junior.”

“No offense, Bernie,” Rauden said and did take a few bites, “but are you sure there are no problems with those pre-pandemic embryonic viables you’re selling those dickheads? Isn’t that stuff twenty years old?”

“I am very careful with my freezers. Double generator backup. So? Sometimes it doesn’t work.” He looked across the room at me. “She would be a hard sell, Junior.” Rauden looked too. I just look at my empty plate, and Bernie starts clearing up. “She has no Proofs! No history! No one has heard of Sylvain hardies!”

So I wasn’t the only one.

“The ordinary tests are useless, as you have already seen. There is one that could work, but it is very, very risky. It is even risky to try to patch her up. Too bad,” he said again. “The life these poor girls live, they will sell anything. Some of them,” he lowered his voice, like I won’t hear him if he does, “they are so exploited, their pimps have put them on the street since they were little girls. They do not understand their own worth. They sell parts of their own bodies. Most of them would be glad to be a Host. Nine, ten months? They are happy to be off the street. Too bad.”

He went in the toilet to clean up and came out drying a dish on a towel. “Let’s start her on shots ASAP. Beef her up. See what happens! Call me to schedule the Harvest. When we see how the Harvest works out, we will know how to proceed.”

Rauden and me got our coats on and Bernie patted Rauden’s back again. “So!” he goes. “You are going cross species! You’ll have to do the shots yourself. I will be on the road. But I am sure it will be easier than the work you do with Daisy. That is fussy work. I have written the instructions for the timing and tucked it in the kit. Watch out for yourself, Junior. They say there is a new thing starting up though it is still overseas.” He puts his arms around Rauden. “I miss your father still.”