The Grief Team (18 page)

“What…what about lawyers?” Was there a sparkle in the boy’s eyes? Elias couldn’t be sure but he didn’t miss a beat.

“Dickie was a reader, I told you that. Suffice to say, Dickie read a lot of Shakespeare. Your answer’s in that if you can work it out.” He looked at the boy, decided he probably could, and continued.

“If you were useless, you got your name on the Endlist ahead of the rest. In the beginning, we had to whittle down the number of folks who were showing up on the doorstep, particularly the radburned ones. No hope of them surviving long enough to do anything productive. Eventually, after all of the surveys and a hell of a lot of hard work and long hours, we figured out exactly how many people we could support in the E.C., keeping it pleasant and comfortable for all.” Elias smiled wanly. “Kind of an ecosystem you’d call it, if you were one of those biodegradable-types from before.”

“I came on board about that time, me and Margaret, my wife—a wonderful woman she was!—and Gabriel, my boy. I’d gotten married in Oakville Place, you know, and Gabriel came along pretty smartly after that if you take my meaning.” A broad smile appeared on Elias’ face. “Called him Gabriel because he hit one sweet note when he was born. Just like a trumpet. Damn that boy could scream when he wanted.”

“Gabriel is an excellent name,” agreed Jason, “but he’s not really your son, is he?”

Elias’ jaw dropped. Blood suffused his facial features and his eyes flashed darkly. His words, when they came, were low and dangerous.

“What do you mean, boy?”

“You found him. On the road.”

Anger gave way to shock and disbelief. “How…how did you…?”

The boy smiled. “Some things I just know, I guess.”

Elias blinked and swallowed. A strong taste of fear mixed with the rising bile in his throat.

Who…exactly…is this boy and what is he capable of?

Yes, it was true! He and Margaret had come upon the child, alerted by its cries, in the back seat of an abandoned Volvo. It wasn’t hard to accept that the birth mother had either died or simply left her child because she couldn’t cope. There were millions of people who couldn’t cope with what had happened to them. Margaret had insisted on rescuing the child. Elias, knowing that their exposure to radiation quashed any hopes of conceiving their own, had made no argument. Indeed, the prospect of having a son to raise delighted him.

“Yes,” Jason nodded. “You were delighted”

Elias examined the boy sharply. Apparently he could read minds as well. He smiled and raised his palms in acceptance of the possibility.

“Well you would know, wouldn’t you? So that’s that then, I left Oakville Place and came to the E.C. and Dickie cottoned right onto me and made me his right hand. Gave me the reins to the little squad of do-gooders that he called the Grief Team and told me to make what I could of them, long as they followed the Book. No, not your Book, Dickie’s Book. The product of those long nights and days of reading and thinking upstairs in Sleepy Hollow.”

Elias paused, sausages drumming on his chest. “You know, we keep that old shop just the way it was, didn’t even clean out the toilet or nothing. Everything is just as Dickie left it when he unblocked the door and came downstairs. One of these days we’re going to put some glass across the front of it and let people upstairs to see it. Kind of like looking at the home of one of the Fathers of Confederation or the Liberty Bell, don’t you know?”

Elias shrugged. “You probably don’t know but what the hell, we re-made this Mall, we did everything according to Dickie’s plan and his plan was straight-forward and simple. Order. Ranking. Everyone in his and her place or fuck-off-and-die. You can’t say fairer than that, now can you? We don’t hold nothing back, we tell every Citizen-of-the-Malls exactly what’s happening and where they fit in the grand scheme of things. Over the years we’ve re-claimed other Malls and fit them right into Dickie’s plan. I’m not saying it was easy, but it was done and done right. We picked up a few bonus points along the way, of course, and Cedarbrae was one of them. Found a genetic research lab in that one…all the facilities, thousands of frosty embryos, and a clutch of scientific-type bastards capable of running it too. We sealed those bastards inside, don’t you know; they’d have been ripped to pieces by the Citizens given the chance on account of what ‘Walking Death’ did.

“We turned my old mall, Oakville Place, into a children’s mall. Honour the child and so forth.” Elias cleared his throat, stared at his green mug and was surprised to notice that it was full, whisps of hot tea-steam curling inside the lip. “Damn me, boy. You’ve got a trick or two left in you yet!”

“Tell me…tell me about the children,” whispered Jason. In all this time, Elias noted, the boy hadn’t moved. Only the sharp gleam in his eyes indicated that there was any life inside the wasting shell.

Elias knocked back a long swallow of scalding tea with no visible effect. “We honour children,” he said sharply. “We give them the parents they deserve, that is we select only the best Citizens to rear and raise them. The process is long and rigorous because we don’t want any mistakes made. I guarantee that we’d have looked after you a helluva lot better than God’s done and that’s a fact-and-a-half.”

He shrugged and took another swallow. “According to Dickie, the world fell apart because we let our children loose to do whatever they wanted. Let ‘em grow up anyhow and anyway they could, let ‘em make their own way. Well, shit-on-a-stick boy, look what happened. You may think way up there in cloudland that politicians started all of this destruction but it wasn’t. Everything went to hell-in-a-handbasket because it was war between the generations. Too much power in the hands of children with no respect for their parents and what do you get? Hell, they couldn’t wait to wipe the old folks off the planet. Wouldn’t listen to sage advice; they knew-it-all and blew-it-all-to-hell! Fact! And Dickie knew it too, saw it in the bullet holes in his wife, he did. Blown away by some youngster barely old enough to have fingers long enough to reach the trigger.

“You have to live long enough to have some respect for death, son. Death means nothing to kids. Hell, they all think they’ll get up the next morning for cereal, juice and toast. And when they don’t, that’s when a little bit of reality comes creeping in. Well, not for us. Not for us here and now. We raise them and we raise them right. Come tomorrow night—Revelation Night—we’ll take the pick-of-the-crop and invite them into the Malls as Citizens, ready and able to make our new nation work. And the rest of them will find their places elsewhere. We send our children all over what’s left of the world...hell, three-quarters of Sweden was either incubated or Reject-supplied by us. Good citizens all of ‘em. And if they’re not, well they’re not here and they’re not our problem.

“We honour the child. But that doesn’t mean that the child doesn’t have responsibilities to the nation. Losing sight of all of that, that’s what got us into trouble in the first place. You can’t let teenagers loose to run society when they don’t know their ass from their elbow. Plain truth.”

“Why SkyDome?” It seemed to Elias that Jason’s words hung in the air like whisps of cloud for several moments before they evaporated.

Elias grunted. SkyDome. The necessary of all necessaries. He found himself reaching back into his storehouse of prepared speeches on that topic and then stopped. He’d been speaking truth all along to this lame-excuse-for-Christ-on-a-stick and there was no reason to stop now. From the looks of him, Jason wasn’t going to be around much longer.

Elias softened. “Can I get you anything? Aspirin? Cough syrup? A resurrection?” He smiled as the boy giggled. “All right then?”

“Early on we discovered that there were large numbers of kids who had been badly burned in the rad fallout. We had to keep them out of the E.C. and all of the other Malls…nothing to do for them except let them have space Outside to die. Problem was, over time, we discovered that the little bastards had been busy producing other little bastards. They were dropping offspring at ages you could hardly believe and all of ‘em born into radiation so thick that you could eat it with a spoon. Life expectancy for these Wildkids—couldn’t think what else to call them really—was fifteen, sixteen tops. The radburns just ate at their outsides and insides until they dropped. In between, they pretty much matched what our experts told us about feral children. Not much good for anything other than eating, fucking and killing really. They ransacked homes, stores, factories—hell, we had to shoot our way in and out of some places where we had to have equipment or supplies—and they ate anything that wasn’t nailed down. When all of that ran low, they just turned around and started eating each other. Cannibalism, they used to call it. Saving the malltaxpayer money is what we call it.

“The Grief Team still sweeps for them close to the Malls, we don’t want the little bastards getting any ideas about joining us inside. So we sweep them up and give them SkyDome as their home. For a little while, at least.”

Elias stopped. He thought for a moment or two and then swallowed a sharp intake of breath. “If you can truly see…I mean, if you can see, what I’m going to tell you, you already know. You need to understand that we didn’t make the decision lightly…hell, we agonized over it for months before we finally saw that it was the only way we could guarantee our survival. We had to use SkyDome, of course, there was no other place to do it. It was big enough, completely unsuitable for Mall-people with its roof stuck open in a ten metre wide slit. And the underground levels were adaptable for the machinery that we had to move.”

Droplets of sweat had formed on Elias’ forehead and he used the back of his right hand to wipe them away. “Dogs’breath, boy, but it was a problem-and-a-half getting a cannery from the old Swift plant into the basement of that place. But we did it all the same. Operating it was the next conundrum but Dickie quickly figured out that the old birth mothers — we call them Crones—well, there wasn’t much else for them to do seeing as natural birth had been banned and was punishable by a quick jaunt to the Crematoria.” A thin smile crossed Elias’ lips. “And the irony was too obvious to ignore. If anything, being a reader, Dickie had a masterful appreciation of irony.

“So the Crones went into the cannery and, to make their work more palatable, Dickie had a candymaker who’d survived whip up a kind of gum ‘n soma sweetie. Big on a brave new world, Dickie was and, again, he thought the irony was delicious.

“So we gave them Redlets and let them get hooked. So they could do their job, making Bammo!burgers and canned Bammo! and all of the Bammo!products that we Citizens-of-the-Malls have learned to eat, enjoy and depend upon.”

“Wildkids…,” breathed Jason, “for food.”

“Well,” Elias said, staring unflinchingly at the boy in front of him, “that’s as good a way to put it as any.”

Emmett was in deep. Very deep. Any psychiatrist in the E.C.—had there been any—would have had a field day. Paranoia. Psychosis. Split personality. Name your mumbo-jumbo and you could have pulled an exact match out of Emmett.

Wiping his brow, clearing perspiration in wide, flat drops, the former-Assistant Manager of Crematoria was in the bowels of the E.C.; specifically, inside the room which housed the tanks of accelerant that fired the ovens. They were hooked up to a network of pipes, criss-crossing the ceiling before reaching upward four floors to ground level.

Five metres away from Emmett, a second cluster of aluminum-capped tanks stood waiting. Their shipping tags, marked Virus-Killer X, for delivery to the Birth Centre at Cedarbrae, had escaped the notice of the delivery men for reasons which fell neatly inside the human factor for error. Doubtless they had been the same men who had delivered the tanks which, when connected, had sent Crematoria accelerant into the microscopic veins of two hundred thousand embryos, killing them instantly.

Fate?

Emmett didn’t really give a shit. They were there; he was going to use them. All of them. Then, and only then, he was certain, would Little Arthur leave him alone.

Inside Studio A, the technicians at Mall TV in Pickering Centre were making the last adjustments to the lighting grid. Spots and fresnels were called on and off, bolts tightened, plugs inserted and taped. The director, charged with complete responsibilty for the live production of Revelation Night, was presently taking a quick break in a janitor’s closet just outside the studio, where he was receiving stress relief from a production assistant. Numerous extras, volunteers for this one-night-only-special, jostled for position on the set, exchanging excited smiles with each other as the moments ticked by and the rehearsal continued. Above, and at the rear of the set, shielded by thick glass, the director’s assistant sat in the production booth, making the most of her opportunity to lead by delivering a manic tongue-lashing—not unlike what her boss was receiving in the closet round the corner—to a few technicians who’d drawn her ire. Cameras flicked on and off, curses erupted like acne, and it was all coming together in its own way.

One floor below, in the Arboretum, the candidates for Revelation Night were gathering, boys and girls born in petri dishes and raised as model Citizens-of-the-Malls. There were, exactly, fifty-four of them: thirty male, twenty-four female. Surrounded by anxious parents, each candidate had already stripped to the skimpy bathing suits they were required to wear. According to the dictates first established by Mayor Dickie, a candidate for Mall citizenship was required to be examined not only for intelligence, social compatibility, and other innate qualities but also for their physical beauty. Dickie, who had retained a vivid memory of first learning how to masturbate in the televised glow of a Miss America pageant, saw no shame in admiring beautiful flesh in the flesh. After his death, well, it was just another of the fine traditions Elias happily maintained.

Amid the cacophony of tight, shapely buttocks, exquisite breasts and broad pectorals, more production assistants scurried about, infused with the responsibility of shepherding the group into some sort of order. Everyone, courtesy of the controlled atmosphere inside the Arboretum, was awash in sweat. Removing the parents from the mix and getting them upstairs into the studio seating was proving to be difficult, particularly as the parents met the sons and daughters of other applicants and couldn’t help making comparisons. The odd errant hand or two, anonymity ensured by the crush, slipped inside lycra for a healthy squeeze-feel.

Sexsweat filled the arboretum, mixing with the heady odor of orchids and other equally fragrant botanical masterpieces. Mall-lookers, pressed against the glass, enjoyed this show-before-the-show, excitedly nudging friends as they pointed out this pair of bobbing breasts or that prominent bulge in skimpy black lycra. The candidates, delighting in the perfection of their bodies, were exuding pheromones by the nose-full and the odd erection here and there drew mute but evident admiration. The ‘fuckability rating,’ as Mayor Elias Kraft would undoubtedly have noted, had he been there to do so, was right off the scale.

What few hairs remained atop Peter Heckbert’s head had been yanked out in fury and were now gradually fluttering down onto the floor of his office in SkyDome. A glance through his window onto the massive playing field below, now a maze of fences and pens, told him that the Wildkids were already spreading the same news that he had received only minutes before. The red light on the Jumbotron was blazing and he watched as Yellowbands began wading into clusters of Kids, touching their zipsticks to legs, buttocks, backs and crotches in an effort to regain some control.

Beads of sweat formed on Heckbert’s upper lip as he considered his options. Someone was going to be held accountable for the (second!) disappearance of Mutt-no-last-name but it wasn’t going to be him!

In a small room, just down the hall from the office of the Director of SkyDome, Cathy Latimer was fast asleep in a very uncomfortable chair. Squeaky clean for the first time in more than two weeks, she looked very much as she had when last visiting the Children’s Mall with her mother and father. A closer look revealed that her lips were moving as she slept...softly singing the Rhonda-Song perhaps. Melding with this was a perceptible, very much different sound; one which began with a low, drone-like quality and, as it progressed, evolved into a recognizable purr.

If one believes that, for every human being on the planet, there is a doppelganger, an exact twin, and/or a perfect-genetic-match, then why not a confessor? The unburdening of sins and the opportunity to wash the soul clean are based in the most elemental of religious tenets. Pardoners in medieval times sold ‘tickets to heaven’ to pious but ignorant villeins. Men in black cassocks placed themselves inside boxes with sliding metal grates to listen to the most egregious (and tantalizing!) tales of humans-off-the-rails. The desire to confess must be, ineluctably, as human as the desire to fuck; yet, with all things, there is a time-and-a-place.

Elias was exhausted. He had unburdened himself as to the end result of being a Wildkid in SkyDome. He had been stripped of the lie about Gabriel’s birth and now years of hidden grief and suppressed unhappiness spilled forth. Secret tales of the Grief Team flowed inexorably into the open. He was, metaphorically, awash in guilt and, literally, now awash in tea having tipped the contents of his green mug onto himself.

Jason-no-last-name, had Elias bothered to notice, had gradually improved his posture and was now sitting quite comfortably in the chair opposite Elias. Whereas, in the beginning, he had barely been able to summon the energy to remain more than prone, he was now sitting comfortably. The towel which covered his thin chest had slipped and it was apparent that the discoloration and bruising were miraculously diminished, if not absent altogether. A hint of blush had suffused itself along the tops of his otherwise pale cheeks and something similar had taken residence in his lips. He was looking much, much better.

Elias was using a pillow to sop up the spilled tea, his shirt was soaked. “Damn!” he muttered. He looked at the boy and laughed. “First thing I did after meeting Dickie was spill coffee on him. These fingers…”  He waved the five fat appendages on his right hand in the air as if they were all that was needed to complete the thought.

Jason smiled.

Ferria d’Mont was scratching her head in a frenzy. The boy on her bed would not wake up. She had shaken him hard enough to knock the cold towel away from his chest and rattle a couple of bones but he wasn’t responding. Her ear to his lips told her that he was still alive and breathing, but he was well and truly out of it. She wasn’t that desperate that she didn’t notice the extraordinary absence of bruising. Nor did she miss the mild smile on his lips. A hard slap across his face should have removed that…but it didn’t.

A glance at the clock told her that she was seriously tardy for Revelation Night. She studied the boy in desperation and then made a decision. Unconscious or not, he was going with her.

“Come with me,” the boy said, extending a pale, thin hand.

Elias leaned forward and took it gently within his own more significant paw. It felt as if he was holding air in his palm. Gradually, he became aware that he was no longer seated on the chesterfield in his apartment in the E.C.; rather, he was now suspended, seemingly, without any appreciation or sensation regarding his physical size. Indeed, he felt as light as a feather and this engendered an immediate rush of wonder and delight.

“I have no sense of physical reality!” he exclaimed, not alarmed but enthralled.

“That’s nice,” responded Jason, or at least his voice did. The boy himself was no longer visible and the hand which Elias had been holding had been replaced by something entirely different. It was gnarled, misshapen and connected to…

“
Fucking’dogs’breath!
Uncle Dickie!”

“Well fuck-you-too, Elias! I thought you’d be happy to see me! I don’t do this every goddamn day-of-the-week, you know!”

Elias recognized the voice of the Father-of-the-Malls instantly but Dickie’s physical appearance was something else altogether. He looked like he’d been the principal attraction at a weeny-roast that had lasted far too long.

The kid is very good, thought Elias. Damn good.

“You bet he is!” said Dick-the-weeny. “Now don’t fuck with me, Elias. Say it or think it, I’m tuned in.”

Elias took a longer look at this crispy critter floating in mid-air (mid-ether?) next to him. “Jesus, Dickie, you look awful!”

“No worse than you’re going to before the night’s over.” The words, passing through crisped lips, crackled like potato chips. “And you’d better stop using ‘Jesus’ as an expletive if you know what’s good for you. Took me a long time to pay for every one of mine.”

Elias felt his pulse harden. He moved from enthralled to terrified in one long skip of his heartbeat and his features collapsed into a portrait of dismay.

Dick-the-weeny nodded, dislodging a few charred flakes from his neck. They floated away like feathers. “Yeah, you better get used to it, Elias. You and I, we’re the major entertainment down here…that is, I’ll be sharing the stage with you shortly.”

“Holy shit!” breathed Elias. He was ready to gag.

“Yeah, it’s all here, Elias, every little thing I said didn’t exist does exist. All of it!”

“It’s Hell…I’m…we’re in Hell!”

“Quick as you always were, my boy! Nothing gets by you, does it, Elias? Or that prick-son of yours. Him and his goddamn Stream.”

“But you wanted it, it was you who asked him to create it. ‘Help us control everything we need to control.’ You said that, Dickie!”

“I said a lot of things, Elias. Forgive me if I take some of them back.” Dick-the-weeny’s cackle was tuned at the pitch of rusted iron doors closing together. “A couple of months with white-hot pokers up your ass tends to offer a new perspective on things past. Anyway, how was I to know you could turn stream of consciousness into what he did. Fuckin’ nutcase! You never should have let him read anything by Virginia Woolf! I told you that James Joyce was bad news, Elias!”

Elias winced and felt the rush of hot tears. “I don’t understand.” Where was Jason-no-last-name? Surely there was time to explain…

“Don’t look for him, Elias. You won’t find him,” crackled Dick-the-weeny. “He’s way beyond what you’re capable of understanding. You just be satisfied that you’ll be here with me…give you someone to talk to in between bastings.”

“Oh my god!”

“No…no, Elias. He hasn’t been yours or mine for a long, long time. All we did was make him sick. Made him real sick but couldn’t make him die.”

“But…but there is no religion in the Malls! There is no worship! No churches, no synagogues!”

Dick-the-weeny lost a few more charred flakes. “It had nothing to do with Malls, you dumb-fucking-Maritimer. It never did. It was always the children…the children…”

“But we train them! We make them and we train them! They don’t know God from a hot dog!”

He waited for an answer. He gripped Dick-the-weeny’s briquet-fingers with all of the strength he could muster and was shocked when they crumbled to ashes and floated away.

“It only takes one, Elias. Only one to bring Him back. And she believes.”

“She…who? Ferria? Not Ferria!”

A gust of smoke exploded out of Dick-the-weeny’s roasted maw. “No! Not that she-bitch! She’ll have her own room down here when she comes. I think I can safely say that.”

“Who then? Who?”

“Suffer the children, Elias,” intoned Dick-the-weeny. “Suffer the children to come unto thee.”

“What does that mean? Goddammit, Dickie!”

“And a little child shall lead them.”

“Stop with this…Dickie? Where the fuck did you go?

Dickie?

Dickie?…”

Cathy Latimer held on tightly to Grey Kitty until he began to squirm, making it obvious that he wanted to be on all-fours again. She carefully placed him on the tiled floor in the hallway and looked about her. Empty. Above, very far above, she could hear sustained echoes that sounded like thousands of voices all raised at once. In the time that it had taken Grey Kitty to effect her escape from the office, Cathy had seen more than enough to help her understand that something was very wrong in SkyDome. She had had only a few moments to look out of a window to the pens below before Grey Kitty had meowed his disapproval, but she had seen Yellowbands staggering under the weight of Wildkids. Limbs were being torn from sockets, eyes gouged, and clothing set afire with bodies still wearing them. She was very badly scared, but she was following Grey Kitty and she trusted him.