Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

Catareen removed her claws from the boy’s throat. As she put a hand over Simon’s immobilized one to ease the pod back, the boy opened the passenger door and jumped.

Simon, still frozen, looked in the mirror globe and saw the boy tumbling onto the dirt. His vision began to cloud. He fought to remain conscious. He saw the boy flip twice in the dirt, raising a dust cloud, growing more distant as the pod sped on. His sight started failing. A whiteness gathered around the periphery of his vision and began closing in. He struggled and strained. He saw the boy sit up.

Simon’s vision returned. His fingers on the steering stick began to have sensation again. He brushed Catareen’s hand off his own, turned the pod sharply, went back for the boy.

“No go back,” Catareen said. He ignored her. He had no choice.

He stopped the pod at the place where the boy sat limply on the dirt. He got out and went to the boy.

He said, “Are you all right?”

The boy was cadaverously pale. He sat with his legs folded under him. His cheek was bruised. Simon felt his metabolism slow again. He felt his vision begin to whiten.

He said again, “Are you all right?”

Slowly, the boy nodded. Simon squatted beside him, checked his arms and legs. Nothing appeared to be broken.

“You seem to be all right,” Simon said.

The boy started crying then. He had a scattering of blemishes on his forehead. He had a hawkish nose and pale, silly eyes.

“Do you think you can stand?” Simon asked.

The boy could not speak at first, for crying. Then he blubbered, “What are you going to do to me?”

There was an unmistakable note of excitement in his voice.

He was a level seven, then. Simon’s circuits hummed. He heard himself say, “I will kill your sorry ass.”

The boy screamed. He scrabbled backward in the dirt. He turned himself over and began crawling away, into the grass.

No. Repress. Concentrate.

Simon said, “I want your sweet, fat ass. I want you to stick it high in the air for me so I can plow it with my big tattooed dick.”

Fuck.

The boy howled. He crawled into the grass and got uncertainly to his feet. He fell again. Simon’s felt his synapses firing and his cognition shutting down. It was unfortunate but not exactly unpleasant.

He said, “Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, death is as great as life.”

Then Catareen was out of the pod and after the boy. Simon watched helplessly. He saw her take hold of the boy, who was sobbing, who had turned the color of cement. He saw her rifle through the boy’s pockets and remove his vid. He saw her return and, with some effort, march him, Simon, back into the pod. He was able to move at her urging. During shutdown, early phase, he could still respond to directions, though he could not initiate action of any kind.

She put him in the passenger seat and got into the pilot’s. She turned the pod around and drove, fast.

Gradually Simon’s powers of movement returned. He felt them coming back. It was a growing warmth, an inner blooming. He was able to say, “Guess I went a little zonky back there, huh?”

“Yes,” she answered. She was focused on the road. “Circuits. Programming. Nothing I can do.”

“I know.” And yet she was angry. He could feel it. They hove on in silence.

He had seen her jump on a boy like a lizard seizing a beetle. He understood that some of what was said of Nadians was probably true. They had animal aspects. They were capable of doing harm.

Finally he said, “We don’t have much time, you know.”

“Yes,” she said.

“All that kid has to do is flag down some Samaritan in a pod. Which may have happened already. In which case, Magicom is about to be majorly on our asses.”

“Yes.”

“In which case, we should not be on the main road.”

“No.”

And yet she drove on with relentless, orange-eyed focus. Lizard, he thought. Fucking lizard.

He said, “There are old roads all over Pennsylvania. This looks like a turnoff coming up.”

“Yes.”

“I should probably drive.”

“I drive.”

“I only had a problem because we hurt that kid. I thought I’d explained that to you.”

“I drive,” she said.

He decided not to argue with her. She seemed to be a good enough driver. Stopping to change places would take time.

She took the road that led off the podway. A battered sign said HARRISBURG. They hove through the remnants of a settlement. The Council-administered states had begun tearing such places down, or so you heard. According to rumor, Magicom was trying to sell Pennsylvania but could find no buyers.

Catareen piloted the pod competently over the cracked and buckled road. Abandoned houses and storefronts rattled by, McDonald’ses and Wendy Kentuckys and Health-4-Evers, all weed and dark, shattered glass.

Most were empty. Some had been taken over by Nadians, who had put up their sun-blasted awnings. Who tended their young ones, their scraps of drying laundry, their little fires.

Catareen and Simon hove for hours unimpeded. They kept the pod headed west. The landscape was unchanging, empty houses and franchises and random shops and every so often a derelict shopping mall, all so similar that Simon worried they might have doubled back on themselves unwittingly. When these places were operating, they must have been more individualized. He worried that he and Catareen might be headed back to New Jersey. They might end up at the complex where they had stolen the deliverypod.

They could only trust the pod’s directional. They could only drive on.

Night fell. They had each had two boxes of soymilk. They needed food. They hove silent and hungry across the dark nothing. The pod’s lights showed mile after mile of broken road that led toward nothing more than the hope of Emory Lowell. They were pursuing a date and place Lowell had implanted in Simon five years ago.

If the Nadian was concerned, she made no sign. She merely drove with her incessant, reptile-eyed concentration.

Finally he said, “We should stop for the night.”

“Hour more,” she answered. “No. We should stop now.”

He saw her lipless mouth tighten. She was a lizard woman who wanted her own way. She was imperious andunempathic.

Then she said, “If you want.”

She pulled to the side of the road. She deactivated the pod, which sighed and settled. Its headglobes faded. A pure darkness arrived, alive with the rasp and chirping of insects.

“We can get rid of some of the soymilk and sleep in the back,” he said.

“Or house.”

She indicated with her small, ovoid head a row of houses on the road’s far side, sharply gabled against the stars, like a child’s drawing of a mountain range.

“Technically they’re still private property,” he said.

She waggled her fingers in the air a Nadian gesture of dismissal, he supposed.

“Hey,” he said. “We’re criminals, right? What’s a little breaking and entering?”

They got out of the pod. Simon stood for a moment on the weedy dirt, stretching his spine. They were in a vast black house-filled emptiness. An immensity of constellations hung overhead. This far from city lights, they were countless.

Nadia’s sun was one of the stars just above the black roof silhouettes. That shitty little star over there.

He realized Catareen was standing beside him. They could move very quietly, these people. These lizards.

She said, “Nadia.”

“Mm-hm.”

“We say Nourthea.”

“I know.”

The name “Nadia” had always been an ironic approximation. One of the right-wing papers had started calling it Planet Nada, Spanish for “nothing,” as its riches and wisdom kept failing to materialize. The name had stuck.