ZONE 23

And now for something … well, slightly different.

I don’t normally mention my literary work here on Substack, because (a) I assume that most of you are here for the political satire and commentary, rather than to hear about my experimental stage-plays and weird fiction, and (b) I’m really bad about promoting my literary work, as in I usually forget to do it.

Every once in a while, though, I’ll remember to do it. I remembered to do it today.

I did it back in March, when I posted this chapter from my 2017 satirical dystopian science-fiction novel, Zone 23.

That chapter introduced Valentina, one of the two main protagonists. The chapter I am posting today introduces Taylor, the other one. I have been hesitant to post this chapter because it’s (a) long, (b) rather baroque, so not especially conducive to being read on a phone (which is true of most of the book), and (c) laden with expletives and detailed descriptions of disgusting social conditions and deviant human behavior.

As I noted back in March …

“It’s not a book for everyone. None of my literary work is. I think literature can and should be a bit more ambitious and demanding than what we read on the Internet every day. I’m kind of old-fashioned that way.

Also, it contains a lot of graphic sex and violence, and all manner of other horrible human behavior, and foul language, and other elements that certain readers might find offensive. So, if that kind of material puts you off, you’ll want to skip this one.

Take it from ‘Marge,’ who posted this review on Amazon a few years ago …

‘This is the worst book I have read in my 73 years! If the author removed the overabundance of f words…might be one hundred pages shorter…there is nothing positive I can say about this book … it is perverse, full of sadomasochistic sex …violence, no regard for human life, murder, and everything vile that one could find in life..all in one book! The best use of this book would be to use it as kindling to start a fire…it is so depraved..I have to wonder if it was written under the influence of drugs…save your money..and spare your mind and soul of this evil…One star was too generous, but was my only option.’”

Of course, there are also a lot of good reader reviews on Amazon, and Dactyl Review published a lovely review recently. Here’s a brief excerpt …

“Zone 23 is a witty, nasty, erudite, Pynchonesque narrative, full of fleshed-out sleazy characters and a hyper-detailed alternative world.” — V.N. Alexander

I appreciated that, as weird, non-corporate-approved fiction doesn’t get reviewed, generally. That’s the price one pays for not submitting to the “sensitivity editors.”

But I’m not complaining. Zone 23 has sold quite well, and, unlike The Rise of the New Normal Reich, it isn’t banned anywhere, so you can purchase a copy from most online booksellers, e.g., Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, etc., or order one at your local bookstore, even if you live in Germany.

Oh, and, for those of you who have already read Zone 23, and enjoyed it, yes, I am at work on part two of this planned trilogy … or at least I was, until I got sidetracked by my current legal drama. I look forward to the end of that drama, and to getting back to writing weird fiction.

In the meantime, here’s Chapter Two of Zone 23 …

---

Taylor

Meanwhile, while the Normals were viewing their individualized streams of Content and enjoying their lowfat, gluten-free breakfasts in their comfortably air-conditioned, self-cleaning kitchens, Taylor Byrd was lying on his back on a sweat-soaked, sweat-stinking futon mattress, staring at a fuzzy little dot on the ceiling, which, the odds were, was some kind of mutant cockroach. This dot was more or less right in the center of an insanely intricate mandala-like pattern of moldy, quasi-concentric rings, or semi-orbiculate moldy shapes, etched into the plaster of the ceiling over the course of hundreds of years by an ongoing series of leaks upstairs, the detailed dendrochronology of which was not, at the moment, of interest to Taylor.

The dot, however, was of interest. It was more or less directly above his head, possibly preparing to drop down onto his face and crawl up his nose or something. This kind of thing happened on a regular basis. For reasons no one quite understood, mutant insects, and particularly cockroaches, liked nothing better than to crawl up the noses, and into the mouths and ear canals, of unsuspecting sleeping persons, or to suddenly fly directly at them flapping their filthy little cockroach wings.

Fortunately, there were ways to avoid this, most of which Taylor was familiar with. The thing to do was, get out of bed, or at least sit up, or just move, basically, extricating his face from the possible mutant cockroach's downward trajectory. Taylor, however, was unable to do this (i.e. get out of bed, or sit up, or move), as his brain had been disconnected from his body ... OK, not really, but that's how it felt. He lay there in the suffocating heat and humidity, staring upward, apparently paralyzed, trying to remember when it was, and where he was, and how he had gotten there.

Out the window of Taylor's room (so, OK, good, that's where he was) a Public Viewer was playing some sort of sickeningly sappy funereal music, which, at this time of morning, or night, or dark, or whatever time it was exactly, was not what it was usually doing. So, OK, something odd was happening, apparently something historic, and sad. Taylor had no idea what it was, as due to the inscrutable vicissitudes of Fate, or the Will of the One Who Was Many, or something, he was one of an unfortunate minority of persons who were not in possession of an All-in-One Viewer, or a Multi-Max Viewer, or Mondo Viewer, or any other type of interactive device providing a stream of individualized anything. And thus he had not heard the news of the tragic and untimely passing of "Jimbo," nor would he have given a rat's ass if he had.

It wasn't just that he appeared to be paralyzed, and so trapped there beneath what was very possibly an orifice violating mutant cockroach, or even that he had just been awoken by the sound, first, of glass shattering, second, Rusty Braynard screaming, third, Alice Williams screaming, and, finally, whatever the fuck they were doing hopping and kind of conga line dancing around the room in circles like idiots ... well, all right, that was definitely part of it, but mostly it was just that the death of "Jimbo," the prescription sale at CRS, the drastic reductions at Big-Buy Basement, the markets, the shares, the temperature in Gothåb ... all these bits of information around which the lives of the Normals revolved, and upon which, of course, their livelihoods depended, none of that shit meant shit to Taylor, or to any other designated Anti-Social Person.

Taylor Byrd was an A.S.P. 3 ... a Class 3 Anti-Social Person. "[A] person," according to the DSM, "constitutionally predisposed to pervasive violation of the rights of others and disregard for social norms." He stood just under two meters tall, was extremely disproportionally muscled, prodigiously scarred in all the standard places, extensively, if rather poorly tattooed, and just overall looked like a dangerous character. Which no doubt about it, he definitely was. By any definition of the word, he was. However, the only definition that counted was the one in the DSM XXXIII, which listed a number of hallmark symptoms commonly exhibited by Anti-Social Persons ... more or less all of which Taylor exhibited.

Taylor, for example, was "prone to irritability." He routinely "failed to plan ahead." He "lied repeatedly" and "failed to sustain a consistent pattern of work behavior." He often appeared to "lack remorse," or "rationalize having mistreated others," or "otherwise demonstrate an incapacity to process guilt and learn from experience, particularly experience involving punishment."

On top of which, he drank, smoked, urinated in public spaces, abused an assortment of illicit substances, frequently used offensive language, was uncooperative, sexually promiscuous, disrespectful and just generally unpleasant. All of which was noted in his file:

asmedbase.ute/ASP3/BYRD/Taylor.0820.2565.709.Z23.

Now, whereas, in less enlightened epochs, a person such as Taylor Byrd would have been deemed an incorrigible criminal and locked away in a deep dark hole, probably for the remainder of his natural life, in the Age of the Renaissance of Freedom and Prosperity, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, had rendered the whole of Criminal Law and every edifice stemming therefrom as obsolete as the manual typewriter.

According to the DSM XXXIII, Anti-Social Persons like Taylor were neither evil nor maladjusted, but suffered an incurable medical condition, and could no more control their aggressive behavior than one could control one's sexual preferences, or the color of one’s eyes or hair ... OK, granted, you could always dye your hair, or have your irises surgically altered, which people did, quite often, actually, just like the vast majority of people (i.e. people over the age of thirty, the so-called "Variant-Positive Normals") took some form of medication to curb their latent Anti-Social tendencies, all of which, for most people, worked like a charm.

Unfortunately, there were these other people, people like Taylor Byrd, for example, who were non-responsive to pharmatherapy and thus, sadly, were more or less doomed to a life of squalor and social deviance. The DSM was quite clear on this point. As difficult as it was to accept, Anti-Social Persons like Taylor were beyond the reach of modern medicine, so, regrettably, there was nothing to do but quarantine them, humanely, of course, for the good and safety of all concerned.

Of course, as far as Taylor was concerned, you could wipe your ass with the DSM, which was basically a load of pseudoscience the Normals had invented to brainwash people, segregate anyone who wouldn’t "cooperate," and blame it on their "defective" genes. And, all right, if you ever actually read the language in the DSM, Axis II, Cluster B, and thought about it for half a minute, you had to admit he had a point. For instance, you probably couldn't help but question the etiological value of phrases like "disregard for social norms" or "lack of respect for legitimate authority," which did maybe seem kind of vague and relative, and possibly not even all that medical.

On the other hand, there was no denying that Taylor Byrd, throughout his life (although mostly in his younger days, so back in the officially 2590s), had evinced quite a lot of aggressive behavior, and had pervasively violated the rights of others, particularly others who had gotten in his face, some of whose rights he'd pervasively violated in extremely repulsive and egregious ways, like with the jagged ends of broken bottles, and knives, and sticks, and bricks, and so on, which luckily had never been linked to Taylor, or he wouldn't have been lying in his bed that morning.

Which isn't to say his file was clean. No, Taylor, who was forty-five at this time, had a lengthy and meticulously detailed record of violations of the rights of others, each of which were documented incidents, about which there was nothing pseudo. It was just that none of these documented incidents (the ones in Taylor's medbase file, as opposed to the ones he'd gotten away with) had involved the use of deadly violence ... but all of that was about to change.

Taylor, right that very moment, so approximately 0530 o'clock, lying there, more or less deathly hungover, contemplating that spot on the ceiling (which was definitely some kind of mutant insect, like a cockroach, but with all these centipede legs), was soon to be wanted for detention and questioning in connection with a recent series of incidents ... incidents involving the egregious violation of the rights of certain individuals, corporations, and their subsidiaries and assigns, whose rights one didn't egregiously violate, not and get away with it anyway, chief among them being none other than the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin.

The Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, despite the folksy-sounding name, was one of the largest, most diversified, powerful, profitable, structurally impenetrable, forward-looking corporate entities in the corporate history of corporate entities. It was one of a handful of other such entities, like Oodleeoo, Inc., the Eschaton Group, SeCom and the Finkles Family of Companies, that dominated the totally open and unrestricted market economy that served the evolving needs of consumers throughout the entire United Territories ... or whatever it was it said on their website. In other words, nobody knew what it was. No one had the slightest idea. To the Normals who nominally worked for the company (i.e. for some division or subsidiary of the company, none of which bore the Hadley name, except for the Security divisions, which were technically contractors for the United Territories), the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin was like corporate Valhalla, or Oz, or somewhere, somewhere where important decisions were made by extremely senior executives, whose names they were not privy to, but whose fingers were on the pulse of everything, anticipating needs, driving trends, setting paces, examples, records, breaking ground with their cutting edges, and tirelessly generating wealth for everyone. To everybody else it was just another vast and powerful, and completely inscrutable entity, whose name you saw everywhere you went, along with the company's official slogan:

HERE FOR YOU ALWAYS ... NOW MORE THAN EVER!

Among its numerous other activities, the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, operating through its wholly-owned subsidiary, IntraZone Waste & Security Services, Inc., which was technically not a subdivision or in any other way organogramically related to Hadley Global Security, Inc., administrated the specially-designated Post-Emergency Quarantine Zones (commonly known as "A.S.P. Zones"), where afflicted people like Taylor lived. These A.S.P. Zones were not like prisons, or concentration camps, or things like that. They were "Special Residential Areas," where Anti-Social Persons could live, segregated according to class, in three concentric, alpha-coded sectors, surrounded by enormous Security Walls. These Zones were big, seriously big, many of them having once been cities, or the central districts of former cities, which over the course of hundreds of years, due primarily to urban sprawl and economic decentralization, had fallen into disrepair ... which, of course, had made it relatively easy for market leading Security firms (or the Security divisions of massive conglomerates, like the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin), when the time to quarantine finally came, to erect their originally modular aluminum and later reinforced concrete walls around these former districts and cities, the majority of which were already encircled by a ring or loop of highway or train tracks. The walls themselves were nothing fancy, a series of dull gray concrete slabs, ten meters high, three meters wide, the inaccessible tops of which, for no real obvious logical reason, but presumably out of an abundance of caution, were dressed with Concertina wire.

Although each Zone had its unique character, the basic layout was always the same ... three concentric alpha-coded sectors, one for each of the A.S.P. classes.

The outermost sector, Sector A, was reserved for Class 1 Anti-Social Persons, most of whom were totally harmless and could, with proper clearance, of course, leave the Zone to work outside at menial jobs in the Residential Communities, mostly as janitors and manual laborers, some of them even as household servants.

Sector B was for A.S.P. 2s, and was usually the largest sector in the Zones, the 2s being only potentially dangerous, so manageable, as long as you watched them closely. A.S.P. 2s were not allowed out, but they were permitted to work In-Zone, alongside the vast majority of 1s, who didn't have Out-of-Zone travel privileges. They worked at the corporate assembly plants, processing plants, tool & die shops, garment factories, textile factories, precision metals and plating factories, stripping engines, building motherboards, ducts, housings, timers, collars, display screens, cells, screws, you name it ... anything not Security-Sensitive. They also worked the In-Zone stores, manned the stalls at the open-air markets, ran the makeshift storefront taverns, made deliveries and picked up garbage. A.S.P. 2s who demonstrated "an appropriate, respectful and cooperative attitude" could, theoretically at least, earn an upgrade to A.S.P. 1 and relocate to Sector A, where the housing was better and the markets were located, and maybe even wangle a Travel-to-Work clearance. In practice, however, this hardly ever happened. Intra-Zone Waste & Security Services upgraded maybe ten 2s a year, usually around the Christmas Holidays, the majority of whom were severely disabled.

The innermost sector, Sector C, was strictly reserved for A.S.P. 3s, who typically had a history of violence, or disruptive or defiant behavior, were disinclined to any type of work, and responded poorly, or not at all, to any form of incentivization. The 3s were not prohibited from working, as in there wasn't an actual ordinance against it, or from otherwise one day resolving to demonstrate an "appropriate, respectful and cooperative attitude," but there wouldn't have been much point in it, really, as the A.S.P. Human Resources professionals at the In-Zone factories, plants and stores regarded them, essentially, as feral animals who you didn't want to look directly in the eye but didn't want to turn your back on either.

Taylor lived on Mulberry Street, Sector C, Zone 23, Northeast Region 709. Mulberry Street was deep in the heart of an area called the English Quarter. There wasn't anything English about it. It was just this grid of grimy little streets lined with eight hundred year-old tenements. Anti-Social Persons lived there, three, four and five to a room, crowded into any apartment where the plumbing still kind of halfway worked and wasn’t totally infested with rats and swarms of giant flying cockroaches. Tangible amenities were neo-Medieval. People didn't tend to bathe all that much. Ancylostomiasis, ascariasis, pediculosis corporis and pubis (in other words nasty intestinal worms, head-lice, crabs, and other such parasites) were inescapable facts of life. These dwellings weren’t all utter shitholes, however. People had effected what repairs they could. Joists had been buttressed. Roofs had been patched. Doors had been remounted. Et cetera. A lot of the kitchens had wood burning stoves, which were usually ancient electric stoves that you gutted and lined with metal sheeting, and ran some ductwork up the wall, across the ceiling and out the window. Some of them even had running water (most of the mains in the Zone still worked), and power, which, if you knew what you were doing, you could tap from a transformer out in the street.

16 Mulberry, Taylor’s address (not that anyone really needed one) had originally been 14-18 Mulberry, three adjoining red brick tenements, wedged in together between other such tenements. At some point during the course of history, the walls dividing the three original tenements had been demolished and the apartments expanded, probably in order to form some kind of luxury lofts that you paid through the nose for. Later, at some other point in history, the process, apparently, had been reversed. The walls had all been bricked back up, and the original twenty-four shotgun apartments, converted to eight of these luxury lofts, had been chopped up into forty-eight units, fitted with miniature toilets and sinks, kitchen "areas" and private doors. Then, at some even later point in history, probably once the climate shifted and windows became a survival issue, the cheap-ass drywall whoever it was had used to create the forty-eight units, or detention cells, or whatever they were, had been mostly ripped out, restoring, sort of, the original twenty-four shotgun apartments, or at least some weird-ass cartoon version of something resembling the original apartments. The result of all this was that your typical apartment at 16 Mulberry was one long space with a kitchen and a makeshift bathroom at one end, and then this series of odd little rooms (each of which rooms you had to walk through to get to the next, as there was no hallway), some of which still had the miniature toilets, which one was gravely warned against using, as the pipes no longer connected to anything, despite the fact that they looked like they did, but fed down into the apartments below and, well, I think you get the idea.

The point being, this is where Taylor lived. He lived there out of a greasy old duffel and a twenty-three year-old cardboard box he stowed beneath the plywood platform he had built for his flimsy futon mattress, the standard complimentary bedding provided by IntraZone Waste & Security. He lived there with people like Alice Williams, Rusty Braynard, Meyer Jimenez, Coco Freudenheim, Coco’s cat, Dexter, and assorted other Class 3 Anti-Social Persons. They lived on the second floor, in 2E. It wasn't exactly the Ritz or anything, but at least it was better than up on 3, which was under the roof, and was like a sauna, the roof being flat and covered with tar, or some synthetic tar-like polymer substance, which had been in a state of permanent melt for as long as anyone could possible remember. Nobody knew who lived up on 3. You never saw them. They might have been dead ... except for the fact that you heard them sometimes, stomping around in circles, it sounded like, moaning, or sobbing, and occasionally screaming. Only at night, though. Never during the day. Days in Sector C were quiet. Or relatively quiet, in terms of screaming. In any event, the streets were deserted. Anti-Social Persons sat out the heat of the day inside their tenements. Nights were better. People went out. Or at least got up from their soppy futons and moved around, and drank, mostly. Or abused an assortment of illicit substances. Like Plastomorphinol. Or MDLX. Or maybe watched some In-Zone Content. Or ate. Or slept. Or fought. Or fucked. Whatever. Anything to break up the boredom.

Now, as vile and loathsome as this probably sounds (and definitely sounded to the Normals outside), it could have been worse, Taylor's life in the Zone. Or maybe it was just that Taylor was used to it. The way Taylor saw it, the heat was, yes, insufferably brutal, but it wasn’t that bad. (The A.S.P. 3s, being mostly nocturnal, slept through most of the worst of it anyway.) The rats, roaches and other insects were disgusting, sure, but they were mostly harmless. The acrid stench of rotting garbage, human sweat, urine, feces, was what Taylor's world had always smelled like. Born and raised in the Zone as he was, he didn’t even register the noise, which ranged from mildly annoying to deafening, and never ended, anywhere, ever, which to us would have been like a form of torture, but to Taylor it was just this background soundtrack of people talking and shouting and screaming and fucking and snoring and sirens and sometimes the rotors of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ... not the bad ones, which no one ever saw, the small ones, which looked like giant mosquitoes. That, and the endless streams of Content they pumped into the Zone all day, which played, not only on people's Viewers (i.e. primitive homemade pirate-systems cobbled together out of salvaged materials) but also outdoors on the Public Viewers, massive digital video screens mounted on towers and the sides of buildings that ran all kinds of In-Zone Content ... music videos, cloudscape loops, game shows, SitComs, educational features, three hundred year-old Nature Content, all of this in no particular order, and interspersed on the hour and half-hour with one or more of the talking heads, a revolving line-up of ethnically diverse, spastic, over-enunciating morons whose out-of-synch hysterical voices rang out across the sweltering rooftops like some incomprehensible call to prayer ...

Which all right, getting back to our story, at approximately 0530 that morning, as Taylor lay there on his moldering futon, staring up at that dot on the ceiling (which now he wasn't quite sure what it was, as it didn't seem to be moving or anything, so maybe it was just a spot on the ceiling), one of these talking heads, a woman, with tangerine hair and, it seemed, no eyelids, was wrapping up an InfoBreak.

The expected high was 46 Celsius. Heat advisories remained in effect. Security Gates 15 through 18 were operating at reduced capacity. Quarantined Persons with travel passes were advised to use Gates 14 and 20. Quarantined Persons, regardless of class, were hereby reminded that animal husbandry, including, but not limited to, the breeding of formerly feral pigeons, was strictly prohibited by Ordinance 40. And finally, due to the airing tonight of a special program celebrating the life of Jimmy "Jimbo" Cartwright, III, founder and CEO of Finkles, hosted by "Jimbo’s" personal friends, SoniVerse/FaceWorld recording artists, Hootey Brewster and the Brewster Boys, regularly scheduled In-Zone programming was being preempted as of 2100. Today was Tuesday, 17 April, 2610, H.C.S.T., or it was Monday the something in the month of Iyyar, or Day whatever in the Year of the Lemur, or some other totally made-up date ... which everyone knew, or at least suspected, wasn't remotely when it really was.

Taylor didn't care when it really was. In Zone 23 it was Tuesday morning. Taylor knew that because Taylor was awake.

Taylor was awake because Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, and some other person, had been stumbling around the room they shared, kicking at piles of crap on the floor, and they'd kicked over a glass, or a bottle, or something, and Rusty Braynard had stepped on some glass, and cut his foot pretty bad, it looked like, and now he was hopping around like a chicken calling Alice Williams a whore, and a fucking whore, and a cunt, and so on, and grabbing onto the back of her shoulders trying to get her to walk him around while he hopped behind her on his one good foot. Alice Williams was throwing elbows, trying to get him the fuck off her back, and twisting and jerking and bobbing up and down, and running all around the room in circles shrieking as if her skin was on fire. All of which together looked, at least in Taylor's peripheral vision, like one of those weird aboriginal rituals you saw sometimes in the Nature Content, which aside from being incredibly annoying, was making it impossible for Taylor to think, which he hadn't been doing a lot of lately, at least not clearly, which was not good. Taylor needed to be thinking clearly. If he wanted to live through the day, he did. And even if he didn't, it didn't matter, because at this point it all came down to one thing ... in the end it always came down to one thing.

The thing it all came down to that morning was ... he needed to get to Jefferson Avenue and up to Cassandra's by 0730. He needed to do this without getting shot, or taken out by a Godsend missile, or picked up by a Security team. To do that, he needed to do two things. One of which was start thinking clearly. The other of which was, get out of bed. At the moment, he was doing neither. What he was doing was lying in bed, staring up at what was now, beyond all doubt, a mutant cockroach, which was crawling aimlessly around in circles on the ceiling directly above his head ... off to one side of which, Taylor's head, Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard were dancing and hopping and flapping all around, doing whatever the fuck they were doing. His head, incidentally, was throbbing. His eyes were probably going to explode. Worse, it appeared his tongue had been coated with some type of post-industrial adhesive you used to glue things underwater that tasted not unlike the ass of a dog. Soon he was going to projectile vomit, or shit himself, one, and possibly both. Which given the way the bed was violently spinning and dipping was going to get ugly. What the fuck was he even doing there, back home, in his bed, on Mulberry Street? He did not know this. He could not remember ... or, OK, one thing he could remember was ... well, actually, not all that helpful. He remembered staggering down the embankment of what appeared to be the Dell Street Canal, gazing up at what looked like the moon, and what might, in fact, have been the moon, onto the phosphorescent face of which had been projected the Finkles logo. Nothing particularly idiotic or self-destructive occurred in this memory, or memory fragment, or whatever it was, but then, OK, another memory ... this one also not that helpful. Here was another Dell Street Canal scene, this one prominently featuring Taylor dragging what certainly appeared to be a body ... the body of what looked like a walrus, or dugong, or some other species of sea-going mammal, all of which had been extinct for decades, so OK, odds were, not a walrus, or any other sizable sea-going mammal ... but definitely a blimp, as in a massive body, as in a king-sized, fat-assed, bloated, blubbery, conspicuously unresponsive body. Unresponsive as in a lifeless body, wearing what looked like a Watcher's uniform. A Watcher's uniform the size of a tent. Taylor, in this nauseating hungover flashback, is hunkered down at the bottom of the frame, dragging this elephant seal of a body backwards down a concrete embankment toward what appears to be the Dell Street Canal. He's got one hand around each ankle, or almost, because they're the size of his arms, Taylor's arms, the ankles are (his biceps, that is, not his forearms), or the size of two big joints of TōHam, and they look just about as pink and clammy, and he's gritting his teeth and kind of heaving and snorting and using his legs and his back and jerking, and it looks like he's going to bust a hernia before he can get this enormous fat guy down the embankment and into the canal. The huge dead fat guy is just lying there, prone, very conspicuously not responding as the jagged concrete acts like sandpaper, grinding off what's left of his face ... which isn't much. The nose is gone, as are the lips, and cheeks and brow, and most of the chin, so the face is flattened, sickeningly flattened, and is sliding along, smearing this streak of blood and face meat down the embankment like the trail of a slug. Taylor, clearly totally shitfaced, jerks it down the concrete slope the last few heaves, grimacing, groaning, backs down into the bright green scum, dragging the fat-assed, flabby bulk of the non-responding Watcher with him, grapples with it, turns it, pushes ... the water up to his armpits now, the now completely faceless body floating, bobbing, finally sinking, except that he couldn't remember it sinking ... and, OK, now it was coming back to him ... the body belonged to one J.C. Bodroon, who he'd dumped in the Dell Street Canal, apparently, and had weighted him down with ... what? Fuck. What had he weighted the body down with? Nothing. Which meant that it was out there now, lolling among the other garbage. Which meant it was just a matter of time before some satellite's camera spotted it, pattern-recognized the Watcher uniform, and flagged it for a Security team. Once that team ID’d the body, and scanned his logs, they'd be onto Taylor ... unless they were already out there now, in which case there would be IntraZone snipers up on the rooftops across the street, which if Taylor could sit up and look out the window, odds were, he'd be able to see.

In any event, what it all added up to was that probably the last place he needed to be at 0530 that Tuesday morning, was lying in bed on Mulberry Street watching some mutant form of cockroach crawl around on the fucking ceiling, while Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, and some other unidentified person, reenacted some neo-aboriginal ritual to invoke the gods of ... whatever.

Taylor, in a feat of incredible strength that would have killed a lesser mortal, sat himself up on the edge of the bed and waited patiently to puke his guts out. Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard must have seen him, because they stopped in their tracks. They turned, took one look at Taylor, quickly plotted the likely vector of Taylor's clearly imminent puke stream, and skittered and hopped their way out of same.

Taylor, however, did not puke his guts out. What he did was, he sat there a moment, making weird faces as he scanned the room, which appeared to have been professionally ransacked, strewn as it was with dirty clothes, bottles, bags of worthless junk, burnt-out circuit boards, gutted Viewers, wires, knobs, plastic syringes, all of this sprinkled with jagged shards and chunky nuggets of broken glass, and spattered with blood, and what he did was, Taylor, as quietly as he possibly could ... he asked Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard exactly what the fuck they thought they were doing.

"The fuck are you doing?"

"Who? Uth?"

Rusty Braynard spoke with a lisp.

"Yeth. You," Taylor mocked him. "Thee anybody elth in here?"

"I thlithed my foot on thome fucking glath."

"I can fucking see that. What's with the dancing?"

"Danthing?"

"Or whatever the fuck you were doing."

"I don't underthand."

Taylor gave up. They didn't know what the fuck they were doing. By this time they had probably forgotten how it started. They both had that Tuesday morning look ... the bug-eyed mono-maniacal stares, the lockjaw grins, the fluttering fingers that looked like they were playing scales on a pair of invisible miniature pianos. The other person was some greasy little punk who was missing some teeth, and was maybe Chinese, who Taylor had never seen in his life. He wondered if Taylor had an "extra" cigarette. Taylor wondered if maybe the punk would like to come and suck one out of his ass. The punk didn’t seem to want to do that, so Taylor went ahead and started getting his boots on. Meyer Jimenez was already up and cooking something pungent in the kitchen. It smelled like maybe pigeon paella. Claudia's Husband of the Week was snoring. Coco Freudenheim, who never really slept, was calling Dexter a silly belly and pleading with someone who wasn't there to witness what a silly little belly he was. Aside from the sappy funereal music, which the Public Viewer had gone back to playing, all this was just like any other morning. Somewhere in here Rusty Braynard had cleaned up his foot and found some shoes, which might have been Alice Williams' shoes, and he was down on their futon wedging them on, and Alice Williams was helping him tie them. The greasy little possibly Chinese punk, the only one currently in the bedroom who wasn't futzing with a pair of shoes, had moonwalked his way to the two big windows that looked out onto Mulberry Street. He was standing there, gazing out like a moron, his body bathed in the cool blue light that spilled from the screens of the Public Viewers, which lit him up nicely for the Intra-Zone snipers ... which, OK, probably weren't out there, because they hadn't mistaken the punk for Taylor and fired about two hundred high-velocity rounds through his chest in a tightly-grouped pattern. Then again, Taylor reasoned, they might have been showing some discipline for once and just lying up there on those fucking rooftops waiting for him to exit the building. This, however, was extremely unlikely, snipers being notoriously twitchy, and not so discerning when it came to their targets, and ... whatever. He'd find out soon enough.

He tied off the laces of his jungle boots, peeled off his bloody, canal-stinking T-shirt, pulled on another odoriferous T-shirt that was lying in a ball at the foot of his futon, and that wasn't spattered with a Watcher's blood, grabbed a half a beer off the floor, drained it, belched, got to his feet, and then lurched in a more or less John Wayne fashion down the submarine-like hallway. He staggered past Coco’s and Meyer’s rooms, Claudia’s room, Dodo’s alcove, Sylvie’s nook, through the kitchen, and into the tiny makeshift bathroom, firmly intending to take a big dump. He felt like, if he took this dump, and maybe puked, and got another beer down, he might be able to clear his head enough to make a run for Cassandra's ... assuming, that is, he wasn't cut to shreds the moment he stepped out the door.

His progress was interrupted briefly by some female Anti-Social Person who was stretched out naked in the filthy bathtub, ankles and wrists draped over the rim, eyes wide open, staring at nothing. It looked like maybe she'd spent the night there, probably tripping on MDLX, which meant she was one of Claudia's friends, most of whom Taylor had fucked at some point, but this one didn't look at all familiar. She didn't seem to be going anywhere, so Taylor went ahead and took his dump.

A few minutes later, he was back in the kitchen, where Meyer Jimenez, who was on Taylor's kill-list, was stirring a pot of pigeon paella, acting like he didn't know what was happening. He stood there blithely, ignoring Taylor, stirring away with his huge wooden spoon, as if he had never heard of Sarah, or Adam, and was just some random asshole Taylor had slapped around for no reason, who didn't have anything to do with anything. Meyer, as ever, was drenched with sweat from head to toe, and stank like rum, and the bottle of rum was there beside him, and his seersucker suit was sticking to him, and the kitchen smelled like garlic and saffron and only slightly of Taylor's dump. Taylor stood there glaring at him. Meyer looked up from his pot of paella. He peered out at Taylor through the sweat-streaked lenses of his glasses, which he wore on the tip of his nose. He seemed on the verge of saying something, or asking or possibly explaining something ... Taylor, who had heard enough from Meyer (who was fortunate Taylor hadn't already killed him), turned and walked back down the hallway. If he somehow managed to survive the morning, he'd come back and deal with Meyer later. And if not ... well, it wouldn't matter.

Back in his room at the end of the hall, he found Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, dressed in their neon yellow track suits, down on the floor on their hands and knees, digging through boxes of "important papers." They were searching for their CRS IDs. They looked like giant yellow raccoons with some kind of neurological damage. The punk was standing just behind them, making this high-pitched whining noise that Taylor didn’t need to be hearing at the moment, and was just about to put a violent end to, when the voice of bug-eyed, orange-haired woman, the talking head on the Public Viewer, informed the residents of Mulberry Street that the time at the tone would be 0600. That was it ... it was time to go.

Taylor got down on his knees, fished his backpack out of the duffel that was under the bed beside the box, opened it up, and there it all was ... the change of socks, the GoGo bars, brand new toothbrush, bottles of water, counterfeit Travel Pass, homemade pacifier ... all of which was useless now. He took the Travel Pass. That would be evidence. And the GoGo bars. He left the rest. He shoved the pack back under the bed, pushed himself up off the floor, staggered back down the hall once more, passing everyone’s rooms as before, back through the kitchen, adrenaline flowing, scrotum tightening, anus contracting, past Meyer Jimenez, nostrils flaring, and out the door of Apartment 2E of 16 Mulberry Street, forever.

He didn't say goodbye to anyone ... not even Alice Williams and Rusty Braynard, who he knew would wonder, in the years that followed, what had happened to him, how he'd died ... or whether, maybe, he hadn't died, and had made it out to the Autonomous Zones, which everyone knew didn't really exist, which meant, deep down, they would know he was dead. It wasn't that he didn't want to (i.e. say goodbye, or something anyway), but he couldn't, and he couldn't even flash them a look, because that wasn’t what he normally did. He had to stick to his normal routine. She had drilled that into him, Sarah had, back before the plan went sideways. And now, even if the plan had gone sideways and everything was fucked all to hell, which it definitely was, which wasn't his fault, that didn’t mean it was time to get reckless. Assuming they hadn’t yet found Bodroon, or at least hadn’t yet identified his body, and that there weren’t snipers all over the rooftops, odds were, he could still get to Cassandra’s.

He made his way down the stairs in the dark, navigating by the glimmer of light that spilled in through the shattered windows that looked looked out onto the disgusting airshaft that rose up through the center of the building, the ledges of which were crawling with pigeons, cooing and shitting all over everything. Just as he reached the first floor landing, the corner of which some Anti-Social asshole had decided to use as a toilet ... KA-BOOM! Something exploded outside, or was taken out by a tactical missile, or something ... he couldn't be sure what it was, because now there were hundreds of panicked pigeons spiraling up the airshaft beside him, flying sideways, mid-air colliding, beating each other apart with their wings ... and OK, this was it, he guessed, because odds were they were walking them in, and they'd put the next one right down the airshaft, and that one he would never hear, and ...

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