Cottonwood (7 page)

“Do I look like a Fei Yen?” she asked, amused.

He looked her over, shook it off. “Shit like that don’t matter like it used to. You her or not? I want to get started sometime today.”

“No, I’m Sarah Fowler.”

He pulled out a paz and keyed that in, his frustration visibly mounting. “I don’t see you. Who’s driving you?”

“No one. I’m walking.”

“
Jesus
, lady!” he exploded, and just as swiftly fought it down again. He took a few stabilizing breaths, then jerked his thumb over his shoulder and said, tight-jawed, “Wait over there. I’ll get you on a van.”

Sarah was perfectly capable of scheduling herself a driver if she thought she needed one. For that matter, now that she had a badge and a gate pass, she could have driven her own van right through and into Cottonwood, but it seemed silly to drive clear across the village when her stretch of road—her
causeway
—was right off the Checkpoint. She’d studied it on the map all weekend, she felt like she’d been there already: The road ran left/right out of the gate, she would turn right and follow it about two hundred feet around a tight curve, and then it went due west right up to the aqueduct wall. All of her clients were south of that road. To the north lay a culvert and an open field with four or five concrete reservoirs and sanitation stations. And she didn’t mind walking even if she did have a couple hundred doors to knock on. She wore sensible shoes. Anyway, she felt it sent the wrong impression to show up on her first day in an armored car driven by a guy in a flak vest.

She said none of this, of course. Instead, speaking in a variation of the same soft, soothing tones she was apt to use when approached by large, unfamiliar dogs, Sarah said, “I appreciate what you’re saying, sir, but I think I’ll be okay. And if I get in trouble, I’ll be sure to call in. I think I see Fei Yen.”

He looked back with a scowl that froze the diminutive Asian lady approaching him in her tracks. “Fine,” he said. “You want to walk, walk. But let me tell you something, Pollyanna—”

How he got that from Sarah, she could not begin to fathom, but she sensed this was a bad time to correct him, so she put on her ‘listening’ face and stayed quiet.

“I lose men to those fucking bugs every year. Men with training. Men with guns. You think you’re gonna walk in there and the buggies will want to run up and be your friend? All they’re gonna see is what you are: a dumb bitch with no one to protect her.” He pushed his face close to hers, close enough that she could smell the sharp, weirdly metallic tang of his sweat. “They’re gonna pull your fucking arms and legs off and eat you while you’re still screaming. Can you
appreciate what I’m saying
now?”

Without waiting for an answer, even if she could have thought of one, he turned around and went back to his van. Sarah waited for him to drive off before she started walking again. The checkpoint guard asked her twice if she wanted to call a car, but finally let her through after making her show him the security fast-page setting on her paz (Dial 99 for Danger, just like on the outside) and telling her he thought she was making a huge mistake. She swiped her card—God, that felt official!—and walked through into Cottonwood.

She stopped humming without ever really being aware she’d started.

It didn’t look like the maps. That is, it did—here was the left/right road, the sharp turn, the open field beyond it on the north side, and the aqueduct wall dead ahead in the west—but it was all…wrong.

Hearing her supervisor tell her that Section Seventeen was all single-occupancy housing, she’d been expecting…well, houses. What she saw laid out in orderly rows were railroad cars, single-wide trailers, pre-fab sheds and storage pods, all of them decayed, rusted out, fallen in, and heavily patched with rotting plywood, aluminum panels and sheets of plastic. Doors were largely improvised, badly hung, with loops of rope or metal hooks for latches. There were no trees anywhere that she could see, no grass yards, no green growing things of any kind, only dry dirt and garbage stretching out for miles on every side.

The garbage. She couldn’t stop staring at the garbage. She’d smelled it, of course—even from her house, she could smell that sharp, acrid fugue hanging in the summer air—but she’d thought it had to do with the sewage treatment plant, or maybe even IBI’s own research and development wing. After all, big smells could come from strange places; there had been a paper mill back in Brookings, and on rainy days when the wind was right, it was enough to make a girl gag. She’d never imagined it was actually
garbage
, but this…this was a junkyard sprawled out over twenty square miles. This was a landfill, dried out and gone to rust. This was…This was awful.

Something roared—a deep, almost metallic rip of sound that made her jump and turn wildly around. She saw three aliens running behind the rows of houses. One of them stopped and crept around to watch her from the shade, but seeing that she was looking right back at it, let out another of those deep, honking bellows and took off, leaping easily up to the roof of his hiding place and from car to car in impossible strides before leaping down again, gone. The call was echoed at some distance, then again, closer, and then it was quiet.

Sarah realized her heart was pounding. God, they moved fast. And jumpers, wow. No wonder the wall was so damned high.

Now wait, what? Why did there have to be a wall at all? They were integrating, weren’t they? The ultimate goal was to bring the walls down.

She started walking again, all the way down that dusty, garbage-strewn road and around the corner. The culvert on the south side of the causeway was an open sewer, the liquid trickling along its rusty banks as black and oilsome as tar. Beyond it, the reservoirs were stagnant, fly-thick mires from which rotting cardboard, doorless refrigerators and chunks of machinery surfaced like dead hippos. The sanitation stations were skeletal pipes, most bent out of any useable shape, all rusted, without a wall for privacy or any kind of laundry services.

“I don’t get it,” she whispered.

Maybe this was why they needed the caseworkers so badly…to help clean up.

Sarah approached her first house and stood outside, staring at it. Two railway cars, side by side, patched together with plywood. It looked old, older than Cottonwood had even been standing. She opened her case, fumbled out her clipboard and census sheets, and checked the number painted on the house’s side against the checklist. Number 201040: John Byrnes.

She hummed softly, caught herself, and stepped up to knock on the pressed-wood door. She heard something move inside. Someone, she corrected herself. “Hello?” she called, and knocked again. “Sir? My name is Sarah Fowler, and I’m from IBI—”

The door yanked itself open inwards, and there he was—the alien. Seven feet, dark brown with black streaks, snapping mouth palps, twitching antennae, and dull red eyes, glaring at her. He spat out a curt series of grumbles and clicks. “Fuck off,” said an electronic voice in her ear. He slammed the door.

Her first instinct was to leave. She stifled it, nerved herself, and knocked again.

“Hello? Can you please tell me if I’m speaking to Mr. John Byrnes?”

A second spurt of insectile noise, one with no translation. Then he said, “No, you’re speaking to—” Here was what obviously had a name in it, cut up by clicks and grunts. “—but you couldn’t chew it with your mushy human mouths so you
call
me John Byrnes. Happy? Now fuck off.”

“Mr…Sir? I’m sorry to disturb you at home, but I have to ask you some questions as part of the new census—”

“What’s that?”

“The census? It’s where we document all the residents and their needs so we can help you better.”

“Better than what?”

Sarah glanced back at the reservoirs. “Better than this, I hope.”

There was a short pause.

The door opened again. He stuck his head out a little more, squinting at her with what seemed a little less hostility and a little more curiosity. “
Who
are you?”

“I’m Sarah Fowler.” She put out her hand and he smacked it away with a vulgar-sounding blatt of sound. His hand was hard, plated; hers stung where he’d hit it. She tried on a smile anyway. “I’m your caseworker.”

“What’s that?”

“IBI hired me to work with you—”

“Work with me?” He leaned back, antennae tapping at his ceiling. “Doing what?”

“For a start, I find out some information about you—”

“Fuck off.”

Slam.

Sarah stared at the door, bracing herself for a third go. She raised her knuckles.

He opened it, rubbed his palps together in a series of slow, thoughtful-sounding scrapes, then straightened up and said, “What information?”

“Okay.” She peeled back the checklist and came to her first census sheet. “Are you, um…Were you given the name John Byrnes when you were first processed?”

“Yes.”

“Can I see your, um…head?”

He faced right so that she could key the number scarring up the side of his head into her paz. John Byrnes, just like he said.

“Is this your residence?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“May I come in?”

“No.”

Sarah blinked at him, nonplussed. “Um, I’m suh-suppoh-osed—” She stopped, cheeks flaring. ‘I do not stutter anymore,’ she told herself sternly as Mr. Byrnes loomed over her, his eyes narrow and mandibles snapping. “I’m supposed to make sure your housing needs are muh-met.”

“It’s standing.”

“But—”

“You aren’t coming in without a fight, meat-sack,” he said flatly. He turned around.

“Is your power working?” Sarah blurted.

He paused in the doorway and looked back at her.

“Maybe I can inspect it from here,” she offered. “ You don’t have to let me in if you don’t want to. Just…please…let’s try to work together.”

“Why?”

“Because…” She looked around. No one was there to help her. She looked back at Mr. Byrnes. “Because that’s what this place is for. Integration.”

He coughed out a shrill, buzzing sound—a laugh, maybe—and then looked at her again, harder. “Are you
serious
?” he demanded, and before she could answer, he stepped out on the porch again. “The power works,” he said. “Walls are good. All the holes are patched. What else?”

“Do you live alone?”

His eyes narrowed. He snapped his palps once or twice. “Yes.”

“Okay, um…single-occupancy residences are allotted three food chits each day. Are you receiving them?”

He uttered a perfectly-obvious snort despite the very real handicap of not having a nose or any other fleshy parts to snort through. “Yes.”

“And one water tablet per day also?”

“Yes.”

“Is your purifier functioning at this time?”

He snapped his palps again. “Seems to be. Would I know if it wasn’t?”

That was a good question. Sarah pulled out her paz and typed herself a note. “I’ll get back to you on that, I promise.”

Mr. Byrnes turned his head to one side and spat a wad of shockingly thick, black stuff off the porch and onto the ground. She would not have thought it possible to smell it over the rest of the stink that was Cottonwood, but she could. “You promise,” he said, rubbing one hand over his mandibles to clean them. He looked at her paz, then at her shoes, and finally at her face again. “Go ahead.”

“Okay.” She found her place on the census sheet. “Do you have any medical needs that should be addressed?”

“By you?”

“Well, by IBI. You know, by a doctor?”

“Fuck your doctors.”

Sarah consulted her papers and tried again. “Do you have any heart problems that you’re aware of?”

“No.”

“Respiratory trouble? Trouble breathing?”

“No.”

She glanced at him dubiously. His breathing seemed kind of wet and labored to her, but she had to believe he knew better. “How about trouble sleeping?”

“No.”

“Any urinary problems?”

He snorted again and grabbed the clipboard out of her hands, turning it so that he could read it. “Why in the hell would you need to know that?”

“It’s a legitimate medical symptom!”

“No.” He flipped some papers, shoved them back at her. “Want to see?”

“Do you have any open sores or untreated abrasions?”

“What, now or ever?”

“Now, I guess.”

He looked down, running one hand over his chest. It made a wooden, raspy sound. “I don’t think so.”

“So you’re not experiencing any pain or discomfort.”

He stared at her again.

“Physical discomfort,” she amended, very aware of her surroundings. “Of…Of a m-medical nature.”

“No. How many more questions are there?”

She checked. “About fifty.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” He opened his door again, but leaned on it for a while instead of retreating, clicking to himself. At last, he said, “What happens to my answers?”

“I—I really don’t know.”

“So how are you helping me?”

“W-Well, we have to have everyone’s information so we can look at the p-problems and—”

“Look at them? You’re going to
look
at them?” He flung his arms out suddenly, making Sarah think split-second thoughts of orientation videos and blood flying and arms coming off. “Can’t you see the fucking problem?”

“Yes,” she said.

He stared at her, his arms slowly dropping.

“Mr. Byrnes, I want to help you. I just need to figure out how. This is supposed to help me do that.” She looked at her papers, then up at him again. The futility, the cruelty of it overwhelmed her. “I have to start somewhere,” she said in a little voice.

He clicked and buzzed a long time without speaking. When he did, it was, “Next question,” in a flat and angry voice.

He kept his answers short from that point on, and signed the form at the end so she could compare his mark on the checklist and give it an eyeball match. She wrote
John Byrnes
next to his alien letters and his lot number, and then stupidly stuck out her hand again.

He looked at it, and at her, coldly, then stepped back and slammed his door. “
Now
fuck off,” he called, and Sarah returned to the causeway, telling herself over and over that the first one was bound to be the hardest and it would all get easier from here.