The Bar Code Tattoo (18 page)

Fall came early to the Adirondacks. By the end of September, orange and yellow dotted the mountains and a chill swept through the pines, heightening their smell and making them sway majestically. Kayla was aware of the change as she made her way down the mountainside, holding a letter she hoped would reach Amber.

She was running slightly behind schedule and quickened her pace. At the bottom of the mountain she still had to make her way along the narrow dirt path that led to the dock on the lake. There, a man in a speedboat would wait to take her letter and the twenty other letters she’d received from resisters in the mountains to their intended destinations.

He was part of a secret organization called “the postmen” who collected mail and delivered it to other “postmen.” The mail was secretly passed until it reached the person it was intended for. It was a way of avoiding e-mail, which could be so easily tracked by Global-1. They came to the dock once a week, but always at different times. Kayla was the one designated to meet the postman this week and she didn’t want to miss him.

She thought of Amber, isolated out west, with only her strung-out family and crazy cousin. In the weeks since she and Mfumbe had escaped the Tattoo Gen raid, the resistance groups had scattered, then slowly re-formed and made contact with one another. These days Mfumbe and Kayla lived in an abandoned hunting cabin. Her wound was slowly healing since a doctor from August’s group had removed the bullet, though her shoulder now ached horribly before every rainfall.

Although they were on their own, Kayla felt part of a caring community in a way she had never experienced in her old neighborhood. People left messages under rocks and communicated in coded imitations of animal calls. Mostly, though, they contacted one another with their minds. Telepathy had become commonplace here in the mountains. There was no need to travel when a face could be mentally conjured and a message received.

As she hiked, she felt a familiar surge of energy in her mind. Experience had taught her to stop and slow her breathing.

Eutonah stepped out from behind a thick pine ahead of her. “Hello, my dear friend,” she greeted her.

“You’re alive,” Kayla said in a voice thick with relief. She hadn’t known what had become of Eutonah after the raid.

“I’m in a prison that Global-1 operates, but I’m
also with you,” Eutonah told her. “My spirit can’t be imprisoned, so I go where I choose.”

“We have to free you,” Kayla said.

“David Young is organizing in Washington. We have to support him. It’s time to stop hiding up here in the mountains. He needs our help.”

Kayla cringed when she heard Eutonah’s words. The idea of returning to the “civilized” world filled her with dread. Back there she’d known death, loneliness, lies, and betrayal. She was happier here than she’d ever been in her entire life. She looked away from Eutonah, trying to get hold of her emotions. She looked back in time to see the woman’s image fade.

Kayla sat on the rickety narrow dock on a secluded inlet of the lake. She placed a rock on top of her letters to keep them from blowing away and waited for the postman. Sun bounced off the water, shimmering, throwing off glimmering light. She stared into it and the lights dazzled and danced before her eyes …

They are inside the white city now. A man stands at a podium. She remembers his face from pictures. David Young speaks to the crowd. Thousands of people stand around a long, low
pool and listen. She is with Mfumbe. David Young tells the crowd to focus on a world where people move freely. Unafraid. He tells them to envision a world of equality and justice where all are valued, regardless of their genetic code. “We will not use violence to achieve our ends,” he says. “But we can use the strength and energy of our minds to change our world.”

She and Mfumbe join the crowd to envision this new world. The deeper they go, the tighter she and Mfumbe hold hands, determined to make their vision a reality.

The sound of the boat’s engine woke her from her vision. She blinked hard to come fully back, then waved to the postman as he cut the engine and let the boat drift up to the dock. “Great day, isn’t it?” he said as she handed him the bundle of letters. He glanced at the letter to Amber right on top. “This one has a long journey ahead of it,” he commented.

“Amber Thorn is my best friend. All I know is that she’s in Nevada, somewhere outside of Carson City.”

“I bet this gets to her,” he said. “More than ever before, people are helping us. It’ll keep getting passed along until it reaches someone who knows
her. All across the country, people are getting fed up with Global-1 and Loudon Waters.”

“That’s encouraging,” she said.

He smiled at her. “Yeah, it is.”

He started his engine and waved as he headed back across the lake. She returned his wave, then began her hike home to the cabin.

How could she go back to the regular world? Here in the mountains she’d been able to start sketching again, using burned wood from their fires. She was doing drawings of the wildlife all around and her work was the best she’d ever done.
I’ve become myself here
, she realized. If she went back, would she be able to hold on to that true self?

When she returned home two hours later, Mfumbe and August sat outside the cabin, cross-legged, talking. Mfumbe held an open paper on his lap. From the way they kept glancing at it, she assumed they were talking about something written on it. “What’s that?” she asked.

“Young is calling for a major rally,” August replied. “He wants everyone in the country opposed to the bar code to attend. I don’t see what he’s going to accomplish.”

“People all over the country are changing,” Mfumbe argued. “Kayla and I barely speak out loud to each other anymore. We use our minds to communicate. I think it’s an evolutionary change that’s happened quickly because the bar code has
changed our environment so dramatically that we’ve had to adapt.”

“I see what you mean. Our group is the same,” August conceded. “We barely speak.”

“Don’t you see, then?” Mfumbe insisted. “This — what we’re living here — this is the new world, not the Global-1 world. Young has a coalition of senators and other leaders behind him. They’ve laid out a whole package of new laws that would give back all sorts of rights and freedoms, including the freedom to live without the bar code tattooed on your wrist.”

Kayla listened, thinking — remembering what Eutonah had said about going back, remembering her vision. “Global-1 is going to fight back with all it’s got,” she commented. She thought of the aerial bombing she’d seen in her vision.

Did they really have to go back to all that misery? She remembered the raid by Tattoo Gen. Global-1 and Tattoo Gen were powerful and ruthless.

“We call ourselves the resisters,” Mfumbe continued. “But we should really call ourselves the hiders. That’s all we’re doing up here, hiding.”

August got to his feet. “I disagree with you there,” he said. “We’ve grown strong up here. We know who we are now. Think about what we were, five people in a warehouse, and two of them were spies. Now we’re strong and united.”

“But we’re
hiding
,” Mfumbe insisted. “And besides, there are bound to be more raids. We can’t just sit here and wait for them to come for us.”

“We could go to Canada,” August suggested.

“We could,” Kayla agreed. But more than anything, she wanted to stay here.

“I have to go back for supper,” August said. “See you both.”

When August disappeared into the trees, Mfumbe turned to Kayla. He switched into their wordless telepathic way of communicating mind-to-mind.
It happened. I had a vision like the visions you have
, Mfumbe told her with his mind.
You and I were with lots of people from the mountains and other places. We were heading toward the capital to confront Loudon Waters and Global-1. They attacked us, even fired on us, but we kept going. We were all communicating with our minds and we were unstoppable. Dave Young was holding elections for freely elected people who weren’t controlled by Global-1.

Kayla grabbed his arm. She was too unnerved by the thought of going back to speak with her mind. “I can’t do it,” she said desperately. “I’ve been so happy here. I was so miserable there.”

He drew her to him and held her tenderly. “We’ll be together, always together. Now that our minds can touch, nothing can part us.”

Being parted from him again was one of her fears. Was it true that they could always find each other now? Eutonah had found her. Maybe it
was
true.

Lee, the gray cat they’d found in the forest, raced out of the trees. He had something in his
mouth and was heading for her. “Oh, no!” she gasped. He had a small black-and-white bird, a chickadee.

He laid it at her feet, nearly dead. One of its wings hung limply, unhinged, and it shivered.

“Oh, God. Poor bird,” Mfumbe sympathized, standing beside her. The bird stopped shivering and lay there, still.

Kayla picked up the small creature and covered it in her hands. Walking away from Mfumbe, she imagined her hands becoming warm with her own life energy. She shut her eyes and imagined the energy as being blue, then she directed the stream of blue into the bird. She did this until her knees began to quiver. Still, she kept directing the energy. Streaks of various colors shot like fireworks in the darkness behind her eyelids. Her entire body trembled.

And in her hands something stirred. The smallest fluttering of a wing.

Uncupping her hands, she saw the bird’s chest gently rising and falling.

It looked at her, then righted itself and flew to the nearest branch. After resting there a moment, it rose up and soared through the blue Adirondack sky.

Mfumbe wrapped his arms around her. Completely spent of energy, she slumped against him. “Amazing,” he said softly.

Tears of exhaustion and joy welled in her eyes. Despite her fatigue, she had never felt so strong.

“Where do you suppose he’s going?” Mfumbe said.

“Home,” she replied, somehow certain. “Going home.” The word
home
resonated inside her and she thought of the song her mother used to sing.

I’m like a bird, I only fly away….

Those words weren’t true for her anymore. She’d found her power and her soul. And her home was inside her. There was no bar code on her wrist, and she felt proud of that. She hadn’t given herself over to anything that would control or diminish her — not to Zekeal, not to Global-1. She’d protected herself and Mfumbe by breaking a branch with her mind, and she would use the power of her mind again.

She looked up at Mfumbe. “All right. I think we can do this,” she said. “I’ll go back. I’ve seen a vision and I see us winning. It’s worth risking everything.”

How I Came to Write
The Bar Code Tattoo

T
HE
E
ND
I
S
N
EAR
! That’s what the flyer in my hands said. In fact, it gave the exact date and time. My friend Mary had just flown in from Texas that day and someone had handed the paper to her in the airport. Now she handed it to me as a joke. “Very funny,” I said.

Later, though, I read it more carefully. The reason for this coming cataclysm, it went on to say, was that the prophecies as laid out in the biblical book of Revelations were about to be fulfilled. The last fulfillment was that Europe was about to be united and everyone would be branded with a bar code. The guideposts of the bar code were equivalent to the mark of the devil. Without the “mark of the devil” no one would be able to buy or sell. That’s what got me thinking. If you couldn’t buy or sell, you’d really be in big trouble.

The date for “the end” came and went. But I was still thinking about buying and selling. The implications led me to write a piece of short fiction that was essentially the story of the Thorn family. But that story made me wonder what kind of info
would be contained in the bar code. While I was pondering this, the Human Genome project was going on and — while I was thinking about
that
— Nelly Furtado was singing her plaintive song on the radio. Suddenly, everything everywhere seemed relevant to the story developing inside me. It all poured itself into Kayla’s journey — and I guess that’s a pretty fair description of the creative process. At any rate, it’s the story of how I came to write
The Bar Code Tattoo
.

—Suzanne Weyn