بخش 04 - فصل 01

HEADS AND SKINS 1

It’s not pain that wakes Freddi, but her bladder. It feels like it’s bursting. Getting out of bed is a major operation. Her head is banging, and it feels like she’s wearing a plaster cast on her chest. It doesn’t hurt too much, mostly it’s just stiff and so heavy. Each breath is a clean-and-jerk.

The bathroom looks like something out of a slasher movie, and she closes her eyes as soon as she sits on the john so she won’t have to look at all the blood. So lucky to be alive, she thinks as something that feels like ten gallons of pee rushes out of her. Just so goddam lucky. And why am I in the center of this clusterfuck? Because I took him that picture. My mother was right, no good deed goes unpunished.

But if there was ever a time for clear thinking it’s now, and she has to admit to herself that taking Brady the picture wasn’t what has led her to this place, sitting in her bloody bathroom with a knot on her head and a gunshot wound in her chest. It was going back that had done that, and she’d gone back because she was being paid to do so—fifty dollars a visit. Which made her sort of a call girl, she supposed.

You know what all this is about. You could tell yourself you only knew when you peeked at the thumb drive Dr. Z brought you, the one that activates the creepy website, but you knew when you were installing updates on all those Zappits, didn’t you? A regular assembly line of them, forty or fifty a day, until all the ones that weren’t defective were loaded landmines. Over five hundred. You knew it was Brady all along, and Brady Hartsfield is crazy.

She yanks up her pants, flushes, and leaves the bathroom. The light coming in the living room window is muted, but it still hurts her eyes. She squints, sees it’s starting to snow, and shuffles to the kitchen, working for every breath. Her fridge is mostly stocked with cartons of leftover Chinese, but there’s a couple of cans of Red Bull in the door shelf. She grabs one, chugs half, and feels a bit better. It’s probably a psychological effect, but she’ll take it.

What am I going to do? What in the name of God? Is there any way out of this mess?

She goes into her computer room, shuffling a little faster now, and refreshes her screen. She googles her way to zeetheend, hoping she’ll get the cartoon man swinging his cartoon pickaxe, and her heart sinks when the picture filling the screen shows a candlelit funeral parlor, instead—exactly what she saw when she booted up the thumb drive and looked at the starter screen, instead of just importing the whole thing blind, as instructed. That dopey Blue Oyster Cult song is playing.

She scrolls past the messages below the coffin, each one swelling and fading like slow heartbeats (AN END TO PAIN, AN END TO FEAR) and clicks on POST A COMMENT. Freddi doesn’t know how long this electronic poison pill has been active, but long enough for it to have generated hundreds of comments already.

Bedarkened77: This dares to speak the truth!

AliceAlways401: I wish I had the guts, things are so bad at home now.

VerbanaThe Monkey: Bear the pain, people, suicide is gutless!!!

KittycatGreeneyes: No, suicide is PAINLESS, it brings on many changes.

Verbana the Monkey isn’t the only naysayer, but Freddi doesn’t have to scroll through all the comments to see that he (or she) is very much in the minority. This is going to spread like the flu, Freddi thinks.

No, more like ebola.

She looks up at the repeater just in time to see 171 FOUND tick up to 172. Word about the number-fish is spreading fast, and by tonight almost all of the rigged Zappits will be active. The demo screen hypnotizes them, makes them receptive. To what? Well, to the idea that they should visit zeetheend, for one thing. Or maybe the Zappit People won’t even have to go there. Maybe they’ll just highside it. Will people obey a hypnotic command to off themselves? Surely not, right?

Right?

Freddi doesn’t dare risk killing the repeater for fear of a return visit from Brady, but the website?

“You’re going down, motherfucker,” she says, and begins to rattle away at her keyboard.

Less than thirty seconds later, she’s staring with disbelief at a message on her screen: THIS FUNCTION IS NOT ALLOWED. She reaches out to try again, then stops. For all she knows, another go at the website may nuke all her stuff—not just her computer equipment, but her credit cards, her bank account, her cell phone, even her fucking driver’s license. If anyone knows how to program such evil shit, it’s Brady.

Fuck. I have to get out of here.

She’ll throw some clothes in a suitcase, call a cab, go to the bank, and draw out everything she’s got. There might be as much as four thousand dollars. (In her heart, she knows it’s more like three.) From the bank to the bus station. The snow swirling outside her window is supposed to be the beginning of a big storm, and that may preclude a quick getaway, but if she has to wait a few hours at the station, she will. Hell, if she has to sleep there, she will. This is all Brady. He’s set up an elaborate Jonestown protocol of which the rigged Zappits are only a part, and she helped him do it. Freddi has no idea if it will work, and she doesn’t intend to wait around to find out. She’s sorry for the people who might be sucked in by the Zappits, or tipped into attempting suicide by that fucking zeetheend website instead of just thinking about it, but she has to take care of numero uno. There’s no one else to do it.

Freddi makes her way back to the bedroom as rapidly as she can. She gets her old Samsonite from the closet, and then oxygen depletion caused by shallow breathing and too much excitement turns her legs to rubber. She makes it to the bed, sits on it, and lowers her head.

Easy does it, she thinks. Get your breath back. One thing at a time.

Only, thanks to her foolish effort to crash the website, she doesn’t know how much time she has, and when “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” begins to play from the top of her dresser, she utters a little scream. Freddi doesn’t want to answer her phone, but gets up, anyway. Sometimes it’s better to know.