The Bar Code Tattoo (15 page)

“Oh, my God!” Kayla gasped.

The young man holding up the trapdoor looked equally shocked. “Kayla!”

“Mfumbe,” she replied. It was so good to see his face. “How did you get here? I heard you were missing. Are you all right? What happened?”

He came out of the hole in the floor. “Put down the weapon and I’ll tell you.”

With a self-conscious smile, she put the knife down. He pulled a rough-hewn chair forward, offering her a seat. “I like your new hairdo,” he said. “But the bloody face doesn’t look too stellar.”

He rinsed a rough white cloth in the sink and handed it to her. The warm wetness felt so good. She was amazed to see how red the cloth was when she was done.

“Could I have that chicken?” she asked as her stomach growled loudly.

“Absolutely.” He stuck it on a plate and handed it to her along with a knife and fork. “How about a soda, too?” he offered, pulling a can from the refrigerator and opening it.

He wiped up the kitchen while she devoured the food ravenously. Then he pulled up a chair for
himself and sat backward on it. “You’ve become a real celeb since I last saw you.”

She laughed bitterly. “It’s been a nightmare.”

“I know you didn’t set your house on fire,” he said seriously. “What happened?”

She told him everything, reliving the awful events as she spoke.

“That’s horrible,” he sympathized. “My story isn’t nearly as terrible, but when I got home that night my dad was waiting for me with a friend of his who’s a postal bar code tattooer. He’d come to our house with all his equipment, at Dad’s request. Dad demanded that I get the tattoo right then and there.”

“Why?” Kayla asked.

“His tattoo pal told him the same thing your mom did about the genetic code in there. That got him thinking about how people of African descent have been so discriminated against throughout history. So he’s decided this is our chance to turn the tables. Our family is apparently pretty healthy. He says that since our genes have kept us down for so many centuries, now our genes are going to advance us and we have to be ready to take advantage of this unexpected turn of events.”

“It
is
sort of ironic if you think about it.”

“Yeah, I know. But it’s not right. I’m not going to give up everything I believe just because it suddenly looks like the bar code might work to my advantage.”

Kayla glanced at his wrist and felt relieved to see no tattoo.

“I admire that a lot,” she said. “I don’t believe in what the bar code stands for, but it would also work against me. To be against it when you would gain from it … that’s amazingly final level.”

“Thanks,” he said. “But I couldn’t do it. No matter what I’d get from it, I’d feel like a prisoner.”

“What happened when you said no?”

“We had a huge fight. Dad said no son of his was going to drop to the bottom of society after everything Africans had done to lift themselves up. He said, ‘Get tattooed or don’t expect to live in this house’ — so I left. I’d heard about this place. When I was at a virtual reality site someone told me it was around here, so I drove straight up.”

“Where are we?”

“The place doesn’t have a name. It’s just a bunch of people who don’t want to be pushed around by Global-1. They live all over these woods. Some are tattooed, some aren’t. Nobody cares. They trade with one another for stuff. I got this job in the kitchen and I get paid with food and clothes so I can survive. It’s astral. I like it here.”

“Where do you keep your car?” she asked.

“I traded it for a cabin where I live.” He scowled. “How did you know I’d left?”

“I e-mailed you to warn you about Zekeal and Nedra, but you had gone. Your parents are freaked out. They’re looking for you.”

Mfumbe shrugged. “I hope they don’t find me. I’m real happy here. What about Zekeal and Nedra?”

She told him they’d joined Tattoo Generation. “Everything seemed to go crazy from the time I found out how Zekeal was betraying everyone, especially me.”

Mfumbe seemed doubtful. “I can’t believe Zeke is the enemy. He and I were tight.”

“Why else would he be a member of Tattoo Gen? I know for sure he
is
a member.”

“I don’t know. But maybe there’s a reason.”

They sat together for a moment without speaking. After a few minutes, he pulled a pack of peppermint gum from his shirt pocket and offered it to her.

“Thanks,” she said, taking a piece.

In the morning Kayla awoke snuggled in a warm sleeping bag. She blinked to bring the simple, neat room around her into focus. Two windows on either side of the wooden door let in soft morning light. Touching her forehead, she felt clean gauze and remembered Mfumbe dabbing her cuts with hydrogen peroxide and covering them.

She wiggled from her sleeping bag, still clothed, and looked out the window. Outside, Mfumbe had built a fire and was cooking bacon in a pan. Last night when he’d led her back to his cabin, it had been too dark for her to see much. Now she noticed a picnic table with a bench on either side.

“Morning,” he greeted her when she stepped
outside. He offered her a plate of bacon and eggs. “How are you?”

“Glad I ran into you,” she replied, smiling softly. “I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t.”

He sat beside her on the bench and ate his eggs. “You picked a perfect place to hide. These people who live in these woods would never turn you in. It’s stellar the way you work together and support one another. It proves to me that bar code resisters can band together and make a difference. It reminds me of the American Revolution when people began to unite against the British.”

“But they had leaders like Washington and Benjamin Franklin,” Kayla said.

“We have Dave Young,” he replied.

“What’s he been able to do?” she scoffed.

“He’s still active. They haven’t shut Decode down yet.”

“Maybe,” she agreed doubtfully. “I was thinking of heading up to find Eutonah.”

“You know, there’s something we never told you — because I guess we didn’t want to freak you out,” he said. “When you contacted Eutonah, your site numbers never moved.”

“But I saw her! She was totally real!”

“I believe you. Eutonah is a real woman. I’ve heard of her. But I don’t think you knew of her before coming to our group. Did you?”

“No. Do you think it means I’m crazy?”

He laughed lightly. “Why would it mean that? I
think you have a gift for psychic ability. We all use such a small part of our brains at any given time. Sometimes we use one part, sometimes another. I believe we’ll all eventually use our entire brain, or at least larger portions of it at once. But that will only happen if we’re allowed to evolve. Maybe psychic ability will be part of that evolution. And maybe Eutonah is more highly evolved, too — so the two of you were able to connect. That might also be the way you found your way to me, here in the woods.”

Kayla had learned about evolution in school. She knew the theory that living things changed in order to adapt to their environment. People had once debated the theory, but by the year 2015 it had been accepted as fact.

“What do you mean, if we’re
allowed
to evolve?” she asked him. “Don’t people and animals do that naturally over time?”

“Not anymore,” he replied, finishing the last of his food. “Global-1 has lifted all bans on cloning. I believe that the reason they want everyone coded is to make it easy to decide who will be cloned and who won’t. Once people are reproduced just as they were, evolution stops. There’s no change. No adaptation. The human race won’t move forward. The brain will never be used at its full capacity.”

“But what about designer genes?” Kayla asked. “Doesn’t that change people? They’ll be able to see better, run faster, hear better, and on and on.”

“That’s true,” he agreed. “But it will be man-made evolution. People will change in ways scientists and the government think they should. Those ways might not be the changes we really need to make.”

He picked up the plates they’d used. “Come on down to the stream with me. We can wash these dishes and keep talking.”

They talked for the rest of the day as they picked blueberries in the woods. At six, Mfumbe left for work, leaving her alone. She passed the time by reading from his pile of books, using lantern light. When he returned just before dawn, she awoke long enough to see him crawl into the roll of old blankets on the floor. “Good night,” she said.

“Night,” he mumbled. She tossed him her pillow. He tossed it back. “It’s okay. Use it.”

Mfumbe gave her a pad for her sketching and one morning he returned from the Oasis with a pack of playing cards. They liked to play gin rummy, but mostly they talked.

Mfumbe made so much sense to her. He had ideas about things she’d never considered. “We’ve been headed toward this bar code for years,” he said one night as they sat around their campfire. “First came the credit cards, then driver’s licenses as ID cards, then the face scanners, eye scanners, and fingerprint scanners, and those
DNA chip implants. But I think the bar code is different.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because people wear it. It’s a sign of allegiance to Global-1 as well as an identifier and a genetic table.”

“I guess that’s true,” she agreed.

“Ever since that day we were discussing how genetic sequences are sometimes represented as bar codes, I’ve been thinking — if our genes determine who we are, and genes look like a bar code, then we already wear a bar code tattoo. Our genes are our own unique, personal bar code tattoo.”

The next morning Kayla awoke earlier than usual. Mfumbe wasn’t there. He wasn’t in front making breakfast as usual, either.

Kayla stepped into her boots and went outside. The forest was unnaturally still, except for one section about five yards away. A breeze blew the trees and bushes around and the colors seemed unusually vivid. She stepped toward it and a figure took form in front of her.

It was Eutonah. The woman beckoned to her with her hand.

As Kayla went closer, the image began to blur.

She sensed movement in the forest. Footsteps. A dog barked. Turning toward the sound, her heart slammed into her chest.

The woods were full of Globalofficers.

Kayla ran, her heart pumping. “There she is!” a voice behind her shouted as she raced down to the stream, stumbling and weaving, but determined to reach Mfumbe. She found him crouched at the river’s edge washing some clothing. He jumped up when she crashed through the trees. “Globalcops,” she panted. “Everywhere!”

He grabbed her hand and together they splashed into the stream. The barking dogs sounded nearer every second. She followed Mfumbe out the far side of the stream. “This way,” he said.

The dogs dragged Globalofficers down to the water where Mfumbe had been washing. “They must have crossed,” a man shouted.

Mfumbe led her to a tumbledown shed. There was a hatch door in the ground in front of it and she helped him pull it up by its handle. Kayla climbed down wooden stairs to the bottom. Mfumbe pulled the cover over the hole before joining her.

“It’s an abandoned mine shaft,” he explained. “I found it one day while I was exploring.”

Using the cold dirt wall as a guide, they made their way along a dark tunnel. “You should go back,” she said. “They’re not looking for you.”

“They might be,” he replied. “My parents might have them looking for me. I’m a missing person. They might be taking in everyone who lives in these woods for being uncoded.”

“But you’re not wanted for a crime.”

He took her hand. “Not having a code is a crime.”

They followed the tunnel for what seemed like a long time. When they climbed out at the end they were still in the forest, but they couldn’t hear any dogs barking. “Listen, we’ve ditched them for now, but they know we’re around,” Mfumbe said. “We’d better keep moving.”

He pulled a piece of rectangular black plastic with a monitor screen from his pocket. “A guy left this GPS in the Oasis yesterday. I was planning to give it back to him tonight. I guess it’s mine now. It’ll tell us exactly where we are and how to get where we’re going. It bounces a signal off some satellites floating in space. The question now is — where are we going?”

“The Adirondack Mountains?” Kayla suggested. “I think that’s the best place.”

“Probably,” he agreed. He pushed some buttons on the GPS and turned. “It looks like we’re going that way.”

They walked through the woods for the rest of the morning and into the late afternoon. Around five o’clock they came out of the woods to the back of a large grocery warehouse. The back door of a
truck was open and the two of them scrambled into the vehicle.

“Soda and potato chips,” Kayla read the labels on the boxes stacked in the trucks. “It could be worse. It could have been beets or something.”

The door behind them slammed shut. Kayla and Mfumbe looked at each other, unsure what to do. The truck might take them farther north. “What if it’s going south?” Kayla asked.

Mfumbe took his GPS from his pants pocket. “We’ll know in a minute.”

The engine started and they both stared at the GPS. “North,” Mfumbe said. “And right up the Superlink.”

“Final level,” Kayla said, smiling up at him.

The truck carried them for miles. They sat with their backs against the boxes, drank soda, and ate chips as they bumped along up the superhighway. She rested her head on his shoulder and he put his arm around her. “I’m glad I found you,” she said.

“Me, too,” he agreed, holding her a little tighter.

When the truck finally stopped nearly two hours later, they hid behind boxes in the back as the driver carried out the freight from the front. “Stay or go?” Mfumbe checked for Kayla’s opinion.

“Stay,” she whispered. “We’ll keep checking that thing to make sure we don’t veer off course. But this truck could take us miles up the road.”

They kept low until the truck motor started again. At the next stop, the driver removed four
boxes, and they realized they were losing more and more of their cover at each stop. “We’d better get out or he’ll see us at the next stop,” Kayla said.

While the driver was delivering his order, they hurried out of the truck. They emerged into the dark night to see a neon sign announcing that they were at the Adirondack Motel. “We’re here already?” Kayla asked as they ran to the back of the building.

Mfumbe checked his GPS. “We’re at the bottom of the mountain range. We have to get up around Keene or Lake Placid. That’s where the resistance groups are. They like being near the Canadian border — just in case things get rough.”

That night they found a discarded mattress in a Dumpster at the back of the motel and dragged it into the nearby trees. “It’s cold,” Kayla commented.

“It’s always colder up north,” Mfumbe reminded her. “We’ve come pretty far today.” He pulled her close and his body heat helped take off the chill.

Kayla awoke in the night, shivering. Several feet away a pool of moonlight broke through the trees. A figure took form in the moonlight. Eutonah was there once again. She raised her arms and seemed to be chanting, although Kayla heard no sound.

Then a voice whispered inside Kayla’s mind, “Stay on my wavelength and I will pull you in.”

Kayla got up and walked toward the sparkling image. But it faded slowly. By the time she reached the moonlight, there was nothing there.

In the morning she awoke and saw Mfumbe
coming across the parking lot and toward the trees, holding a brown paper bag. “Good, you’re up. I was just about to wake you.” He sat on the mattress beside her. “Two teas and two muffins.” He lifted the food out of the bag.

“Did you steal this?” Kayla asked.

“No. I asked for it at the deli down the road. I just thought I’d take a chance and it worked. The guy gave it to me.”

“Astral,” she said.

“Yeah. He told me a lot of people are down on their luck around here. They’ve been thrown out of jobs and can’t find new ones. He says it’s hard times since the bar code became law.”

Not everyone was as generous as the deli man. As they continued north, they began shoplifting, taking only what they needed to survive on.

The idea of stealing bothered both of them, but they could find no other way to stay alive. Kayla was amazed by how expert she had become at sneaking food and drink out of convenience stores.

At one truck stop, Mfumbe’s photo stared back at them from a bulletin board. His parents were looking for him and had put up Missing Person flyers. “You should let them know you’re all right,” Kayla said to him.

“I’d like to let my mother know,” he admitted. “But I can’t think of a way to do it.”

Neither could she. Without access to a computer or a phone, they were completely isolated.

Along the way they read discarded newspapers they found in garbage cans or Dumpsters. Kayla’s story had nearly disappeared. Did it mean they weren’t looking for her anymore? That seemed too good to really be true, but at least her picture wasn’t all over the place.

David Young’s picture
was
all over the papers, though. After he’d resigned from the Senate in protest over the bar code, he’d set up Decode headquarters right in Washington. “This is still a free country and I have nothing to hide,” he told the press.

Kayla studied his picture in the paper, a good-looking man in his thirties with dark eyes and tousled brown hair. “He has a kind face,” she observed to Mfumbe.

“He’s a great guy,” Mfumbe said. “I’d like to go to Washington and work for Decode.”

“Washington’s that way,” she said, pointing south.

“I don’t mean right now. I can’t go now.”

“Why not?”

“Because right now I’m with you,” he answered.

She looked up at him and realized that the only reason he was there was because he wouldn’t leave her. He was doing this for her.

She wrapped her arms around him and pressed
her cheek against his chest. He embraced her, holding tight. Then she looked up at him and they kissed.

Three weeks later, Mfumbe and Kayla walked into the town of Keene Valley, New York. Both had lost over ten pounds. The walking had made them muscular. Their hair was knotted and wild. Their gaunt faces and wiry, strong-looking bodies made people stare at them as they went down the road. Kayla thought they must look like savages from some exotic and hard place. And that was what she felt she’d turned into.

They came to a hillside nearly covered in juniper bushes and sat down, leaning against the flat side of a boulder. The juniper smelled so wonderful, although the plants’ rough foliage caught at her pants, snagging them.

Kayla looked off at the towering peaks of the mountain range. It was vast and magical here.

“In another couple of weeks I would have been graduating,” Mfumbe said a bit sadly, looking up at the mountains.

“That’s right,” she said without looking at him. She was weary, and the blue-tinted mountaintops were soothing to gaze on.

“Then I would have been off to Yale. Someone at Yale saw me on that Virtual
Jeopardy
show and offered me a scholarship on the spot.” He sighed.
“They don’t give scholarships to guys without bar codes.”

“No wonder your dad was so determined for you to get tattooed,” she commented.

“I know. I can’t really blame him. But I’ll be eighteen next week — no longer a minor, and my parents can’t force me to do anything against my will.” He was silent for a while, and Kayla let her mind go blank except for taking in the scenery in front of her.

“I love you, Kayla,” he said abruptly. “I’ve loved you since the first day we met, on the stairs. But I could never tell you. You were so crazy about Zeke and all. I thought I loved you back then, but that was nothing compared to the way I feel about you now.”

Kayla listened, growing happier with every word. They were so close now. She’d known ever since they kissed at the truck stop that day that she loved him — was
in
love with him and loved him deeply as a person, both. She knew he felt the same. Why else would he have gone through all this with her? But hearing the words made it so real, so out in the open.

And then she heard snoring.

Whirling around, she saw that he was asleep against the rock. How long had he been like that?

He was asleep but his words were still in her head as clearly as if he were saying them in front of her. But was love enough? Wasn’t she only getting him into more trouble?

If that was true, she should leave him right now, while he slept and couldn’t stop her. Then he could go to Washington. He wouldn’t be stuck with her.

Getting up, she walked down the hillside — but stopped.

Zekeal stood there, right in front of her. He stared at her but didn’t seem to see her. Was he real or a vision?

Kayla ran back to Mfumbe and shook him. “What? Wha —” he stammered as he came awake.

“Zekeal is down the hill. Over there. I saw him!”

He stood up and peered into the distance. “No one’s there.”

“He is! I saw him!”

“You must have been dreaming.” A sad, disappointed expression overtook his face. “Dreaming about Zeke.”

“I wasn’t! I don’t care about him anymore. You’re the only one I love. But he
was
there!” She looked down the hill and saw no one. If Zekeal had been there, he was no longer present.

Mfumbe wrapped his arms around her. “You love me?”

“Yes, I do. I love you completely.”

“Then there is no Zeke, no bar code tattoo, no Tattoo Gen. There’s only us,” he said.