Paul Theroux - O-Zone

From the darkness there came a low accusing voice — the growl of Mr. Blue. "So you're not so stupid after all."

Fisher did not move, did not breathe. He kept very still, wondering who Mr. Blue was speaking to. "I'm talking to you, captain"

The next day they talked about him as if he were not there. Mr. Blue said the kid was tricky: it was best to ignore him.

"Don't touch him, don't talk to him, don't listen, don't give him anything. I don't want any relationships to develop."

They were sorting their equipment, distributing it in equal loads prior to moving on. They made a great effort to remove every trace of their having spent the night in this grove— scattered the leaves they had slept on, swept away their tracks, filled in the garbage pit. There had been no fire. It was especially important to make the place look innocent, Mr. Blue said, because they were leaving the stock of sealed provisions behind, buried in a hole.

"I want this to be a simple transaction," Mr. Blue said. "If they suspect the kid's a dip, they won't buy him."

"What are we going to tell them?" Martlet said.

"That they can have him. They can negotiate with the search parties and collect the ransom. They've got radios."

Valda said, "But he probably is a dip. He won't eat, and there's no one looking for him."

"That's his problem," Martlet said.

"His people just left without him."

"Don't tell the Bagoons," Mr. Blue said. "They'll see a good hostage. A little dippy and obstinate, but otherwise a normal eighteen-year-old, I guess."

"I'm fifteen and a half," Fisher said.

"I don't hear anything," Mr. Blue said.

"Fuck-wit."

Someone laughed.

"I'm a clinic-classified Type A, upper number. I've been a remote student since I was seven—"

"Nothing," Mr. Blue said evenly, and shouldered his pack.

"Fiber optics, particle physics, theoretical densities, the Bremstrahlung effect, wah-wah-wah—"

He had started a stammering quack in the confusion of his protest, because no one seemed to be listening; and the more he quacked, the more incoherent were his words. It was as if he had lapsed into another language.

"Mutagens! Thermal receivers. Fictile circuitry!"

"Let's move," Mr. Blue said. "We can be in Varnado by noon."

Their camp had hidden them at the foot of this range of hills, but when they climbed a low ridge and began descending again Fisher saw that it was the last range of hills. To the southeast was Firehills-Fisher knew the patterns of scarps and knobs and shut-ins; to the northwest, clearly visible on the edge of what looked like prairie, was the place they had been calling Varnado, and the surrounding township of Summerville.

"I know where we are," Fisher said, and blinked at the tumbled town.

"Not a thing," Mr. Blue said, with his hand to his ear.

"That city-stain."

They did not seem to know the term. Someone mumbled, "Varnado."

"I've been over there in a jet-rotor. I've even hovered there and shot close-ups. It's totally uninhabited. They've stopped putting it on maps, because it's still pretty hot. It doesn't have a name."

"Dip," someone said.

This sight, the land ahead, was Fisher's earliest memory of O-Zone. He had seen it first on the ground-screen when they had come for the New Year's party: the wheel-shaped city-stain of ruined and roofless houses, and tipped-over stacks, and the standing towers with bearded brickwork; the terraces and painted pools. From the rotor it had seemed a large figure flattened on the ground, like a pressed flower or a footprint. They had shot it and gotten a sound-bite, and then they had buzzed it and made for Firehills. That New Year's party Fisher now saw as their undoing— all of them had been wrecked by it, and he had come out the worst.

Today this city in the distance scared him. It was vast and irregular. There was no way out. Its farthest edge was rucked up like a rug into folds on the horizon. A light dust cloud swelled over it like a puffball. Beyond the broken suburbs in the foreground — streets bursting with grass and bushes, collapsed houses, faded cars resting on their axles — there were empty apartment buildings, and the stone towers and condos of the old town.

It all looked so different and dangerous: from the ground it was an aching sight of abandonment. They had just left the steep hill paths that gave Fisher vertigo, and now he was faced with this city-stain, where he felt he might sink and disappear — because "city-stain" was the wrong term. It was only a stain above an altitude of three clicks. He could see now that it was deep and shadowy, and was dusty with desertion. There was not a live thing anywhere in it. But his captors did not hesitate at the edge. They were still tramping. But where were they taking him?

It did not even occur to him to run. And the dark and the disorder of O-Zone frightened him so much they overwhelmed his other fear — of being eaten alive. What had remained of his willpower had almost stopped twitching in him. The thought that he was going to be sold to some new people no longer gave him heart. He could not find anything in the look of this ruined town to give him hope.

He saw a good walled-in house, but it was only a place in which to die. He thought of worse things. In one particular horror-vision he saw a gang of savages enacting a ritual sacrifice and roasting him over an altar fire. In another he was left to scream himself into suffocation in an airless room. He was tortured with biting insects. Or he was simply abandoned in this deadly place. He did not want to be let loose; he needed to be rescued by that porker who had demanded the title "chief of ground operations."

"I hate this place," Mr. Blue said. "I hate Diggers."

Fisher moaned to think that this savage alien was afraid and hated it here.

They were still scuffing through the outer town. They kept to the middle of the street, away from the dead or else grotesquely overgrown trees and hedges. The cracks in the street made it seem as if it were made entirely of puzzle pieces. The sun sifted through the puffball of dust,

"We'll drop this dip and then take off."

They were going to sell him and then leave him there!

"Maybe we should send Martlet ahead to let them know we're here," Tinia said.

"They already know," Mr. Blue said.

He said it in a kindly way. Tinia and Kylie, the two other women, stuck together and usually let Valda do their talking for them. Fisher now regarded these women with a sense of envy: they were going to be leaving this place today, and he was being sold — to stay.

Echols said, "They have sentries everywhere." He was wearing Fisher's broken helmet, with the faceplate up, and carrying a weapon he had stolen from the rotor — one of Murdick's particle beams. "They have radios, too. We've probably passed a half-dozen Bagoons in those empty houses. They'll send word ahead. They hate strangers in their quarter."

They talked as if O-Zone were full of people and places, with names and reputations. Not a Prohibited Area, but twenty counties still more or less ticking over. It was supposed to be empty!

"When will we see them?" Valda asked.

Fisher guessed that none of the three women had been here before, from their ignorant questions.

"When they want to become visible they'll stick their heads out."

The women looked up at the windows.

"Out of the ground," Echols said. "They don't live in those buildings. They live underneath them. Hey, they're all Diggers."

Overhearing this talk aggravated Fisher's fears, and after almost an hour of what he guessed were the Summerville suburbs they came to the granite buildings and the headless towers of Varnado. He was alarmed by the shadows and he felt sure he was being watched from these towers. A cone-shaped one had once been made of glass; every window was broken and what remained was a fragile structure of rusted frames. He had been fearful flying over it in a jet-rotor. He was now traipsing through it on foot! He wanted someone to know this! His fear was tinged with amazed pride at having achieved it.