Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, page 20
“So—um. Yeah, I have no clue what you’re trying to tell me.”
“Oh, don’t torment yourself about it, Floyd. According to my briefing materials this Activities will occur at the end of this week. You’ll be on hand as an Observer, just like yesterday, providing advice, insight, and colour commentary where appropriate. And you’ll find out who the Deviant is at that time. I know I can’t wait! Won’t it be exciting?!”
Bollocks. This was all snowballing out of control.
the condimental op
I met Hank late the next morning at a dive situated down a cluttered alleyway in Fitzroy. The fish & chip shop looked in need of serious renovations, but at least it came equipped with a bar. A greasy stereo on the order counter was blaring Elvis Presley’s rendition of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” through tinny speakers. All in all a rip snorting place to spend some quality time with my budding sidekick.
“What’s eating you, Floyd?”
“They used you in a Test.”
“Really? Did they make me any skinnier?”
“No. They made you deader.”
“Ah, so you’re sharing drinks with a ghost. Don’t worry about me, mate. I’ll outlast everybody.” He laughed and clicked his plastic glass against mine.
“I don’t doubt that. But you know how real it can seem.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. No worries. So, changing the subject completely, have you talked to Marjorie yet? What a babe. Kooky, too. She kept going on about you when I met her.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“Wish I was so lucky.” Hank poured soy sauce all over his deep-fried fish and potato cakes and then coated it all in a layer of salt.
“Man, how can you eat them with all that gunk?”
“One man’s gunk is another man’s treasure. Besides, they need it. I mean, have you ever wondered what kind of fish they’re serving up these days in places like this?”
“Some sort of land based one, most likely. Ratfish?”
“Exactly.”
I cringed as Hank took another bite. One of the few things this place had going for it was that it let you light up at the table, but just as I went to take a drag I noticed a young couple at the next table, cooing over their toddler. I crushed the gasper out and shelved the lighter.
bull & bush & stockton
It’s the nightmare again. I’m alone on Activities in Abbotsford, doing my Third Man sham. It’s kind of disjointed, and the audio-visual mix is scrappy as usual. Where did we leave off? Oh yes. I’m grabbing that girl, the target Dev, by her torn shirt and yanking her to her feet, dragging her listless form through light rain over to a boarded-up shop.
I prop her up on a window sill like she’s a rag doll and try to nut out the best way to get her to the nearest cop shop. I pull out my Mitt-Mate and depress the ‘on’ button with my thumb but it doesn’t fire up. As usual, I have to give it a good hard shake before the tiny screen illuminates itself. I start to key in my query and notice the frail’s monitoring the entire process. She’s stopped crying and seems relatively composed.
You never know what these people are capable of doing. My left hand is holding her in a moderately firm grip, but now I’m stuck with the Mitt-Mate in my right. Thankfully the results come up fast and I find comfort with the gun firmly back in my hand. She glances down at my hand under the fold of my coat, then back up at me. She watches everything, this one.
“We’re going to leave. Now.”
“I can’t go far.”
“Why? You got other plans for dinner?”
“No. Because of my leg, arsehole.” I don’t look down. I don’t trust her one iota. I stare back at her mush, hoping to read her, but she’s a closed book.
“What’s the deal with your leg?” I’m waiting for the lie.
“Didn’t you see me hobbling about just before? Man, what kind of Seeker are you, anyway? I’ve got a bum leg. I can barely walk.”
“Well you got this far on your lonesome, kid.”
“Awesome.” Her tone is as flat as a tack—she tries to rise, but stumbles. Maybe her leg really is bum. “Give me a minute, will you? I’ll do what you say, but just one minute, okay?” I relax my grip the slightest bit and she takes that as an answer and produces a tiny smile as if I’m acting the gentleman. Fat chance of that, sunshine. She scooches further back onto the sill and sighs. “You know, all I want to do is live and breathe like anyone else. That’s all. Not much to ask, is it?”
“You want to live and breathe this shit?”
“You take everything for granted. You don’t know how lucky you are.”
“Stop it, you’re killing me,”
The girl punches a wall and obviously hurts herself. “I could tear you apart, limb from limb right now, y’know, with these dangerous little hands of mine. And if you tried to run, I’d hobble after you.”
“C’mon. Quit stalling.”
“Easy for you to say.” The girl’s gaze turned up towards the coffee-coloured sky as she rests her head back against the metal boarding behind her. “Have you ever been to a Hospital?”
I blink. “Perhaps.”
“Sometimes I wonder what it would be like. Have you?”
“I’m no Dev.” I hope she doesn’t hear the emptiness in my words.
“Not yet, anyhow, right? How long before somebody up there decides you’ve slipped over the line? Where are they drawing that line today?”
“We’ve got to move.” She was sounding too much like me.
“It’s so sad. Did they even tell you who I am? Of course not, am I right? All you are is muscle, you know that? Kidnapping poor defenseless girls. Arsehole. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
She’s practically ranting, and I’m letting her. I should be stopping her, shutting her up, but she’s gotten my mind buzzing. The paranoia goes something like this: maybe—just maybe—this girl is a Seeker Branch plant, one of our very own, sent out into the field to monitor my resolve. I haven’t actually seen her leg, and her file was practically empty. Abnormally empty, now that I think about it. What if she’s faking the ailment? What if she’s not even a Dev?
The girl is saying something else but I pay scant attention ’cos I’m so wrapped up in how easy it’d been to locate her, how she’d wandered out into the street right there beside me, how I’d broken a mess of rules by simply talking to her. I’d heard word before about this kind of crap being played out on Seekers. Branch condoned it and dubbed the practice ‘fieldwork role-playing’. The rumour was that you could be Dev’d for identifying too much with them.
She suddenly reaches into her shirt, and I panic, plain and simple. I pull away from her, and she starts to lurch for me, though in retrospect, I think maybe my shift caused her leg to give way, or maybe she slipped on the slick concrete. But at the time it appeared, from my rattled perspective, like she was making her move.
She’s clutching something in her left hand—a piece of paper, an ID? She’s sobbing, no, make that gasping, staring down with wide green eyes. I follow her gaze and find my gun leveled at her—and then realize she has a gaping hole through her abdomen. Some of her innards are hanging loosely down her thigh.
I cannot move. Cannot think. Cannot breathe.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
She’s still alive. The kind of alive that will last awhile, but not long enough. Her lips are moving ever so slightly, so I lean closer. “Please,” I hear between the other sounds as the girl wheezes and gags on her own blood.
I say something back to her—“Okay, it’s okay”, I think—as I ease back her head ever so gently, slide the gun up under the hairline, and kill her for the second time. And then I’m down on my knees, throwing up all I’ve eaten over the past day. I can see her legs out of the corner of my eye. I’m scared of the truth, I don’t want to look, but nonetheless I gently raise the pant leg, exposing a crippled limb with extremely underdeveloped musculature, possibly the result of disease or maybe even a birth defect. Enough to get you Dev’d either way.
I pry a photo from her grasp—it’s of a man and woman. Her parents? Maybe. I feel like I should recognize them, but it’s all blurred out and the more I try to concentrate the more my head spins. The world around me starts to waver, and everything—the walls, the buildings, the street—gets washed away as if by the rain, till it’s just me, her corpse, and that photo.
The dead girl looks over at me, her eyes clouded, blood spattered around her lips, and speaks. “Did they even tell you my name?”
I wake up.
a thousand words
That Activities had been a blank. Call it shock, call it post traumatic stress disorder, call it whatever you damn well like—it was the only way I could go on living. I’d never been able to remember that night. All I ever had, at best, were hazy images of it pulled from my recurrent dream, but if I tried to focus on them I’d lose them—and it’s not like I wanted to try that hard to remember, anyway. Some things are better forgotten. I don’t want to be a murderer.
But now, finally, it’s all rushing back. Not just the dream, but the actions of that night, of the Activities. I’d shoved it all down so deep that it could’ve stayed lost forever, but—
I almost vomit, thinking about that poor girl and what I did to her.
And then I remember something else—there really was a photograph. I concentrate, willing the details back to the surface, and then it clicks. I’d never reported the photograph she had to my superiors because if I had let on what I knew I’d have been Relocated. There was a reason her file was empty—I wasn’t supposed to know who she was.
I go over to my bedroom closet and reach up to the highest shelf and start feeling around in the dust. I find something and pull it forward, till it reaches the edge and I can pinch it and take it down. I blow the dust off of the photograph. It’s crumpled and water-stained and has some blood along one edge, but it’s still in surprisingly good condition. Seated in the centre are a well-dressed man next to a pregnant woman, and I recognize them immediately. What the hell? They have absolutely no business even knowing each other, but just the same, here they were. Everything becomes clear—I know who her parents are.
My eyes returned to the man—a young Wolram E. Deaps. So their daughter had been a Deviant and I’d killed her. As for the pregnant woman—fuck. I needed to speak with Colman, pronto.
hammerhead
“Colman?”
“Christ. Who the bloody hell do you think this is—Saint Nick? You need to get your eyes checked, or at least sponge down that screen of yours, kid.”
“I think the grub is on your side. I can see you just fine.”
“Really?” He ran a finger down his screen. “So it is.” He smiled at me. “Hammerhead.”
“That’s me.”
“How’s Iva?”
“Same as usual.” I look down at my beverage. Straight, noncarbonated water. Unbelievable. “So—getting to the point. We need to talk about Wolram E. Deaps.”
“What the blazes, Floyd? I told you at the bar. This subject is not up for discussion.”
“Things change. I know about your niece.” It had been his sister, Josephine, in the photo. I’d met her several times over the years when she swung by to visit him.
“Fuck.”
“Mate, listen to me. This is for real.” I put the photo up to the camera. “I need you to tell me everything you know about Deaps and Josephine, and about their daughter, your niece.” I took a deep breath. “And I’m going to need to ask you to forgive me for something.” Colman looked off camera for a minute before turning back towards me.
“Ah. Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“That bastard. That fucking bastard publicly backed the Bill of Deviations bollocks—hell, he even funded it. Can you imagine? He criminalized his own daughter’s bloody existence. And to cap it all off he took her. Corinne was only seven, and Josie hasn’t seen her in over a decade—she tried to, she tried like hell, but it’s not like she could do anything. She went to the police and they threatened her with arrest, told her she didn’t even have a daughter. Told her if she troubled them again she’d be Hospitalized. Can you fucking well believe that?”
Then it was my turn. I ratted myself out to Colman, telling him how I’d killed his niece without going into much of the details. He looked off camera for a long time after that, then—without another word—he cut the connection. Maybe he’ll forgive me one day. Tonight that’s not going to happen.
déjà who?
A few minutes later, the telly made a popping sound and Tom Richards, the head of MCD, filled my screen. He was wearing a double-breasted pinstripe with insanely wide lapels and a fat pink tie. His sudden appearance scared the shit out of me—he must have special privileges, because I never actually answered the call, I was just going to let it ring.
“Howdy, partner. Have your coffee yet?” Crap, I wasn’t ready for this. I was still pulling my head together from my call with Colman, but I guess I was lucky he hadn’t caught me on the hop with a tumbler and a blister-sheet of pills in either hand. The place was dry. It had been for days, and I was climbing the walls.
“Tom—er, say, just what should I call you, anyway?”
The man’s freeze-dried smile quavered a fraction. “Sir, or Mr. Richards, will do nicely thank you very much. Now then, Floyd, do you have any plans for this evening?”
“Nope.”
“Good for you. There’s a big match tonight.” Again with cricket. I decided there was nothing sinister about this particular case of déjà vu, it was just that this guy had shockingly unoriginal and repetitive conversational skills. “It’s the biggest—the Grand Final. Are you interested in the cricket?”
“Not really,” I reiterated.
“Oh?” Richards looked even more disappointed than the last time. “That’s a darn shame. It should be a good contest though. Yes, sir. Most assuredly.”
“I’m sure.”
“You were pretty exciting yourself in the footage I’ve seen from the Controller assault in Brunswick District the other day. We’re very happy with the outcome. Ratings through the roof on all networks, even in the repeats.”
“Great.”
“Let me tell you that we are all very proud of you. You’ve helped to place Seeker Branch—and MCD in general—in a very good public light. Positively well done.” Snore. Any stock I might’ve put in this show pony had evaporated, he was all hot air and cricket tips. “But the best news I’ve left until last.”
“The best news?”
“That’s right. Once again Mr. Deaps wishes me to pass on his gratitude—and this time he asked me to extend an invitation for drinks at his home tomorrow evening. He’d like to thank you personally, and he’d also like to talk to you about the importance of your upcoming Activities. The world is changing, Floyd, and you’re a big part of that.”
“How many people are going?”
“Just you. I’ll text through the address, time, and security details.”
“Just me?”
“You’re fortunate. I’ve yet to be to Mr. Deaps’ place.” He looked a bit put off, but not exactly jealous. “I’d suggest you dress for the occassion—remember, you’re representing all of us here at MCD.” I got the sense from his tone that he wasn’t just criticizing my attire, but my entire way of life. This guy was definitely good with the subtle jab—the barb was so well placed I felt paranoid for thinking it was there. “Alright, Floyd, that’ll be all. Remember to switch on the game tonight—c’arn Australia!” Richards gave a celebratory fist pump and disappeared off the screen.
Well, this was unexpected. I’d only just remembered I’d killed the man’s daughter and now I’m invited to his home? It had to be a coincidence. There is no way he, or anyone else, could know that I’ve remembered. They’d run me ragged with so many bloody debriefings and Tests that they knew I’d blacked that night out. Besides, even if I were to have gotten my memory back, they had no reason to suspect I’d know who she was—they weren’t aware the photo existed, and without the photo it would be impossible for me to know about the relationship between Deaps and the girl, a tidbit that had intentionally been kept from me for obvious reasons. The fact that I hadn’t been long since Relocated pretty much proved they thought I knew nothing, right? Hell, Deaps probably didn’t even know I was the one who killed his daughter.
My Mitt-Mate vibrated—Richards had passed along Deaps’ address: 12C in the Alexandria. That was in the best part of the Dome—the double plus super-plush bit.
the mouse at play
Busting into the offices of Management Control Division was far more anti-climatic than it sounds. You’d think an intelligence agency of such importance would be a security nightmare, and perhaps, for most people, it would be. But my Seeker ID got me right in, even after hours. No alarms, no nothing. My visit would be logged, but I doubted it would set off any red flags anywhere and it would quickly disappear into statistics.
Richards’ cricket infatuation guaranteed that he’d be out of the office watching the big game tonight. Turns out, no one else was in the building either, except for a couple of security types who were clearly indifferent about my presence there once they checked my clearance level. If anything, they were scared of me.
Something was brewing and I was too close to the epicentre to ignore it any longer. It made me sick to the bone feeling like a pawn. I’d been played for years by these bastards—forced into Seeker Branch after Veronica’s Relocation, then sent on countless Activities to in turn Relocate countless others. How many lives had I ruined?
I’d written down a list of my intertwining objectives for tonight’s operation on the back of a grocery receipt, just so I wouldn’t forget anything. First up, I needed to crack the identity of this VIP Dev being rounded up for Relocation in my next Activities. Second, I wanted to find out more about my ill-fated Activities with Deaps’ daughter. Colman had filled me in on what details he could, but the big picture was still blurry. Why was I sent out on that Activities? Why was Corinne on the streets in the first place? Finally, I needed to get my hands on anything I could uncover about Deaps. His long reach overshadowed everything.
