The Grief Team (14 page)

The Grief Team, as conceived by Mayor Dickie and refined by Elias and Gabriel, existed so that life in the malls could exist. Its origins, founded deep in the wisdom, experience, and common sense of Mayor Dickie, were the stuff of which Toronto Nation had been born; a determination to provide and ensure a life for the survivors of the Viruses, two wars, and the after-effects of  eight nuclear detonations on the planet.

Ferria knew her history.

The citizens had moved into the Malls, rejecting religion and accepting shopping. They had learned to dream again under the tutelage of Dickie Donalato, the Father-of-the-Malls, who created the Grief Team in the belief that life in the Malls should evermore be life worth living.

“Ferria?”

You are a good-looking man, Gabriel. Strong, intelligent, heroic…and by anyone’s standards, cruel beyond belief. 

“Forgive me. I’m sorry, I was thinking.” She turned up the wattage of her smile, taking refuge in her sex.

Gabriel’s practiced eye had already assessed Ferria for fuck-ability and decided that she was kinky. The Director, who had indeed been plumbing the depths of the Stream before the meeting, did not know of Ferria’s predilection for pubescent males but he did know the story behind those perfect teeth. She knows that she has no official listing until Revelation Night, so her sex choices haven’t officially been declared. She could be fucking one of Rhonda’s Fan-Mulls and we’d never have a clue.  

Gabriel had been able to catch a large number of reports on Ferria d’Mont out of the stream: Stages of Childhood reports, family status reports, academy assignments and marks, mallshopping records, Stream requests, clearances, neighbours’ reports, Mall TV choices, and hundreds of other observations since Ferria d’Mont had been hatched in Cedarbrae.  Collectively, there seemed to be no pattern that Gabriel could decipher.

“It’s a dream of mine to be Mayor of Toronto Nation one day,” Ferria began. There was a flash of perfect teeth. “I know that’s beyond precociousness, but it’s my dream anyway.”

Gabriel’s smile was thin, his words clipped cleanly. “Sometimes dreams come true. I’m listening.”  His voice was calmer now, relaxing, soothing. The hard lines in his face softened, his eyes reflecting warmth and companionship. This was Father, friend to the boys and girls of SkyDome; Father, whose generosity knew no bounds; and whose wrath was legend.

Until that morning, Ferria had never seen this incarnation, for Father was unknown in the malls. That he existed was common knowledge to the assembly and Gabriel made no secret of it, but it had been a stroke of luck that one of the vidkam tapes about Mutt the WildKid’s movements had been recorded on top of one of Father’s sermons in SkyDome. Mutt had exited the screen abruptly after twenty minutes, replaced by the image of Father Gabriel. Ferria had immediately felt the pull of his visualization, enhanced as it was by TV, and had recognized the danger behind its attraction. She recognized it now and felt a frisson of danger, but she decided that she would talk to him in this guise if he wished.

“After Revelation Night, I will be reassigned elsewhere in the Malls, no longer the Mayor’s executive assistant. Since I don’t want this to happen, I propose to announce my candidacy on Revelation Night and insist on an election.”

Father purred. “Got a sip at the trough and decided you like the taste, did you? Well I’m sure we can find something for you to do around here...”

“I intend to become Mayor. Anything less and you’ll be able to ensure that I don’t receive the kind of access to the Stream that I require. I’m actually looking forward to working with...”

“...you seem terribly confident in your approach, my child. I’m not sure what it is that you want from me however.”  Father’s smile had thinned considerably. “I am merely a conduit for the Rules of the Malls.  I operate the software, run the programmes, set the nets. It is the nature of my work to ensure the peace and safety of all.”

Ferria decided to take a chance and light a match under this incarnation. “You don’t take me seriously, do you? Because I’m seventeen and you’re an asshole?” Surprisingly, her tone was jocular.

Father Gabriel blinked. 

“If you don’t mind an answer in kind, my sweet Ferria, I don’t take you seriously because if you had anything half-fucking-decent that might constitute a problem of some sort for me, you’d have fucking told me in the first three fucking minutes. You didn’t. You have nothing. Fuck off and die by a Virus!”

Ferria clapped her hands in glee, shocking him.

“Grief Team manual. Rules of Intimidation. You wrote it and we studied it at the academy.”

For the third time in ten minutes, Gabriel found himself re-evaluating this child all over again. Why had he never suspected that this child had such capabilities? She was beginning to interest his crotch once again and this time he let his eyes wander for a few long, lingering moments as he assessed the curves of her breasts in her wrap of blue silk. Perhaps she was familiar with his own sexual preferences on his List in the Stream. The mask that had been Father Gabriel of SkyDome slipped away as he began to see a possibility of a damn good fuck before this meeting came to an end.

For her part, Ferria enjoyed Gabriel’s appreciation but right now, beyond any enticements offered by the image of Gabriel Kraft’s rigid member inside her, she was going for her target’s jugular, a strike that would bring everything she desired...or ruin.

“Mayor Dickie said that happiness in our society is to be derived from our collective acceptance of guilt and shame in the desires which both sustain us as human beings and promise our future.”
(see endnote 8)
. Ferria paused. “Mayor Dickie taught us to see ourselves as we really are. The Grief Team frees us from guilt.”

Where is she going now? Gabriel cleared his throat and revved his engines. “I don’t disagree with anything that you’ve said, but I think it is worth mentioning that it took a great deal of time to adjust to living in the Malls. It was extremely difficult in the beginning to direct violence to appropriate and acceptable venues and it was years before the Stages of Childhood program was implemented. You, Ferria, are one who has benefitted immeasurably from our hard work.”

“Why Gabriel, are you fishing for a compliment?” 

“Is the history lesson over?”

“Oh, it’s not over. Mayor Dickie found a way to control just about everything for the benefit of the citizens in the Malls, but history has never been under the control of the Grief Team or anyone else. In the Malls, it just seems like it is.”

Gabriel made no effort to hide his anger. “What’s your point?”

Ferria laid her cards on the table, aces high. “The Grief Team refused to send out a sweep for his Gordon Latimer’s daughter. They reported that she had been eaten by Wildkids.”

“Tragic,” said Gabriel, unmoved. “What’s your point?”

“My point, Gabriel, is that Gordon Latimer, your ex-Director of Crematoria, had stumbled across a mistake, a horrendous mistake made by the Grief Team. A mistake so terrible that Latimer didn’t know who to tell or what to do about it. And then his life took a terrible but convenient turn for the worse at a Rhonda show.” 

“Go on.”

“Gordon was thinking about checking into his own ovens because of something he’d stumbled across, something that he knew was going to make him a marked man and ruin the life he had built for his family but, before he did, he sent a request to my office for an appointment with Elias.” 

“Which he never attended,” Gabriel said, his teeth clenched.
             

“That’s right,” Ferria agreed. “By the way, did you know that one of Gordon Latimer’s hobbies was handwriting? The old-fashioned kind?”

Gabriel flinched perceptibly.

“I suggested that he send any documents in immediately before the interview so that Elias might familiarize himself with them.”

“I’ll bet you did,” he growled, uncomfortably.

“Standard procedure when you exercise power, wouldn’t you agree?” Ferria retorted. “Gordon Latimer made very disturbing allegations and he sent proof to back them up.”

“Proof of what?” challenged Gabriel, but he already knew what the answer would be.

Ferria did not disappoint him. “Proof that the entire stockpile of Toronto Nation embryos are dead.”

Emmett Strachan was killing time in Joey’s, a Celt-style bar near the west exit in Vegas, the sprawling inner-sinner-lower-level of Square One Mall.  Joey had inherited the place ten years or so before, when the owner, a beefy, red-faced Glaswegian, reckoned he had a blood-yearning for the storm-blasted coast around Lindisfarne where the Celtic Nation had re-established itself, and had caught the last flight out of Pearson Airport.  Joey had simply walked in from the mall, placed himself behind the bar, and started serving beers.  Since that time, there had been no more flights except when the Grief Team, which controlled the two 767’s still airworthy—patchworks of other similar aircraft rendered useless in their cocoons of virus-laden rad-fallout—responded to the whims of the Exchange.  When and where and why they flew these days was up to those who could pay the freight for Toronto Nation babies and/or functionalized Wildkids.

Emmett had been congratulating himself on a successful clash with the Director of the Grief Team, one in which good old Gordon Latimer’s handwritten diary had achieved for Emmett in one fell swoop what ten years of toil in the Crematoria as Gordon’s assistant had not.  Emmett’s promotion as the new Director of Crematoria had been announced early the next day after his meeting with Gabriel Kraft and his Ration (as well as Elise’s and Marcus’) credit had been adjusted upward three positions.  The Apartment Adjustor for Scarborough Mall had called his office to say that a newly-refurbished unit on the classier third floor level of the mall was awaiting Emmett’s inspection.  The Adjustor, Dorothy Domenici—“Call me Dottie!”—said that the convenient location of the west end Up escalator made it a-most-sought-after-apartment. “Location, location, location!” Dottie gurgled. 

What Gabriel Kraft had been able to achieve less than eight hours after Emmett had deliberately eaten the last of the Director’s donut had impressed Emmett immensely and, as a significant by-product, made him more than a little anxious. He had chosen to play the fool, the nervous wretch, the-put-upon-assistant-toady for the Director of the Grief Team. The Director had to be convinced that not only was it possible to purchase Emmett Strachan’s silence about Gordon’s diary, but also that the few crumbs of what used to be called upward mobility, which Emmett presented as his ‘desires for compensation’, were truly indicative of a man too greedy to ask for less, too scared to ask for more; a man who lacked foresight, feared authority, and despised his neighbours; a man whose instinctive sense of self-preservation was rooted in his own miserliness.   

In his own eyes, Emmett had played his part perfectly.  Intellectually, he had gone to great lengths to assess the considerable dangers inherent in having attracted the interest of the Grief Team.  Approaching Gabriel Kraft with the diary in person could have been foolhardy had Emmett not been forewarned and forearmed by his keen sense of the logical development of power and personality.  Or, at least, in his own estimation. After twenty years at Crematoria there was little about the pitiful lives of human beings that Emmett had not learned; in particular, the curious attitude that the powerful cultivated toward the weak. When one is weak, one understands.

Finding Gordon’s diary had not been a problem.  Emmett, who had worked side-by-side with Gordon, had been aware of its supposedly secret existence for years, just as he knew that Gordon also kept pictures of naked Mulls in his locker outside the Cleansing Room. He had read it too; all sixty pages a boring homily to his daughter Cathy, with the exception of the last two wherein Gordon detailed his suspicions about the Embryos. After reading this, it had only taken Emmett twenty minutes to assemble the data from the Stream to corroborate it…but then he knew what to look for, Gordon hadn’t. The final piece of the puzzle lay in a bill of lading from the depot at Yorkdown Mall. 

Someone had mistakenly sent thirty-two tanks of Virus-Killer X to the Crematoria storage site in the basement of the E.C., where they remained even now. They should have been pumped into the air-circulation pipes in the Embryo-Chambers in Cedarbrae as disinfectant prior to human occupancy. Something else—Crematoria Liquidating Fuel?—had been pumped into the system instead…with disastrous results. 

The fact that Gabriel Kraft had managed to keep a lid on this debacle this long had not escaped Emmett, who didn’t give a shit about the Embryos anyway. He was far more interested in the human aspects of death not life.  It was no skin off his nose if the Exchange market for Toronto Nation babies dried up although, if he had cultivated any interest at all in the Exchange, he would have noticed immediately that babies were still being exported in their usual quantities. A non sequitur if ever there was one.    

Vegas was a haven for Mulls-of-all-kinds and lately at Joey’s that sad fact had often meant suffering Rhonda’s Fan Club.  These days in Vegas, it seemed that everywhere you went some freak-Mull was hanging around, lolling his Rhonda-nose—which in Emmett’s opinion looked just like a big dick —or singing that fucking Rhonda Song.  Rhonda’s Fan Club apparently numbered in the hundreds now and bar-talk in Joey’s had it that the Club had begun requiring new members to take a vow of silence in the Stream until they had their Rhonda-noses surgically created. 

“It’s to stop them fuckin’ freaks from blabbing about all those Wildkids they’re cookin’ upstairs if you ask me!” said Joey to Emmett three drinks ago, when the bar was still pleasantly free-of-freaks.  “Whole fuckin’ mall smells like a Texas barb’que.  That’s where I was born.  Texas.  All right, Texas!”

Emmett thought Joey told it like it was and he told him so.  But some of the cowfreaks wound up barging into Joey’s soon after that and now here he was being forced to listen to that fucking Rhonda Song again as the freaks got drunker and louder.  Emmett was disgusted by them and ached to stand and confront them, to tell them to shut up! and fuck off! and getoutofmyfuckingspace!…but they were eight and he was one.  He knew that they would kick the shit out him, probably kill him. 
             

Emmett left the bar and decided to drop a few coins in one of the one-armed bandits Joey kept by the door.  He knew he was just delaying the moment when he would have to go home and face his wife and son, but it was easier when he knew Marcus would be asleep in his bed, and there would only be Elise’s tears to deal with. Lately, he hadn’t been able to get close to her…Little Arthur Connors kept getting in the way.

There were regular intrusions of noise-and-riotous-behaviour from pleasure-seekers in Vegas as the door to Joey’s opened and closed and finally Emmett gave up on the spinning tumblers and went through it and onto the strip.  It was a busy night and Emmett was tense, wired really. He knew it.  It was all that shit about the Fan Club that had started it, that awful urge pumping away inside of him again. The violence of his thoughts was a narcotic, seeping into his veins and joining the rhythm of his heart, pumping and pumping, keeping that rhythm going. 

He wished he could lead all of the freaks into the Crematoria and fry their freak-asses, he wished that he’d pulled out the razorblade that he carried for protection and lopped off one of those penis-things while those Mull-abominations were singing that fucking song in Joey’s…but part of him wished that he didn’t have that hunger, that need to hurt someone really bad again. Like he had hurt Little Arthur Connors, whose head had split right down the middle when he landed, reminding Emmett of a boyhood memory when he had seen a watermelon broken in half across a man’s knee. 

Emmett’s grip on the razorblade inside his jacket pocket relaxed a little. The mental image of the watermelon-memory had a decidedly cooling effect on his rage, made colder still by remorse, soon a deeply-felt icicle of agony which poked away at his conscience for some time. Certainly time enough tonight to lead his steps out of Square One and onto a CleanBus to take him home…where he could not bring himself to tell Elise about the beast he was harbouring, nor could he look into his beautiful son’s eyes for more than a moment, the innocence which he saw there searing his heart.  It was the worst pain of all.

What good had he accomplished by bearding the lion in his den only to give in to this limitless urge to hurt? 

Emmett’s journey to Scarborough Mall from Square One was uneventful seeing as there were only three other citizens-of-the-malls on board.  The three were male, maybe three or four years each past Stage Five, and expensively-dressed.  Emmett eavesdropped long enough to know that they were within a year of being on their way to Parenthood and all the rewards of life-in-the-malls. They spent the forty minute ride laughing about the adventures they had had in Vegas that evening where, judging from the wide smiles on their faces, they had all had an opportunity to exercise their libidos. 

Their laughter was interrupted from time to time by loud pings against one side and then the other of the CleanBus, whose armour plating always proved more than a match for anything the Wildkids had access to in weaponry. Grief Team weapons meltdown enforcement had virtually stripped the little bastards of anything heavier than a Mac-10 and even one of those death-dealers was a rarity. The one that the WK’s had used in their attack on the Children’s Mall a while ago had been recently auctioned off on Mall TV for two-and-a-half credits—practically a month’s Rations! 

As they passed uptown toward the shambles of what had once been called ‘Scarberia,’ more loud thumps were heard as rocks and other projectiles bounced off the metal and rubber skin of the CleanBus. No one paid much attention; there hadn’t been an accident involving a CleanBus for years, not since the Grief Team had authorized drivers to employ their fleschette dispensers at will. Used by the Canadian miltary during the riots in Toronto after the bombing of the C.N. Tower, the ‘Shredder’, as it was denoted under the icon on the dashboard of every CleanBus, was capable of dispensing quarter-ounce aluminum zigzags in a 360º circle-of-death that left nothing standing for four hundred yards. Wildkids had learned to keep their distance. 

Emmett leaned back into the padded foam head rest and closed his eyes. 

He was coming out of the E.C. Crematoria, the main branch, and he was on his way to pick up Marcus who was about to arrive by CleanBus downstairs at the Dundas entrance. He was walking along the second floor of the Centre, holding a copy of the Chronicle in his left hand, walking next to the metal railing which kept mallshoppers from falling onto the floors below. He had told Marcus never to climb on the railings. Climbing on the railings meant Daddy would have to apply to the Grief Team for a punishment for Marcus and Marcus didn’t want Daddy to punish him, did he? Never climb on the railings, and now, just ahead, there was a boy doing just that right in front of him. It was that Connors boy…the boy who had told lies to Marcus about his Daddy…and he was lollygagging on the railing, no one stopping him…and Emmett knew that he’d better get Little Arthur Connors down from there before he fell…

Little Arthur Connors screamed until his little head hit the cold marble floor with no more sound than if you’d cracked an egg…and Emmett ran down those stairs…ran to help that boy, even though he knew he was dead…could see right inside his skull.  He was dead…and Emmett looked right at him and was glad that he was…glad that he had protected Marcus from Little Arthur Connors’ filthy rotten mouth…

The CleanBus arrived at Scarborough Mall, the three friends politely waiting as Emmett disembarked, shouting goodbyes at each other as they then hurried on their separate ways.  Emmett waited until the CleanBus pulled out and then he slowly made his way to the escalator and home.  Location, location, location, he was thinking.