The Future, Imperfect: Short Stories Read online

  They negotiated tangles of abandoned garden furniture and made their way down the hall. At the end of the hallway, doors hung crazily on their hinges, leading into a room the size of a ballroom. The charred remains here included computers and other equipment, not cutting-edge, but the kind an unincorporated area might be able to afford. Top-of-the-line technology could only be had for corporate units, but all a burb in the Wasteland had was dollars, and precious little even of that unimportant currency.

  "If this isn't headquarters, at least data was processed here," he said.

  Leah nodded, silent, examining what was left of a console in one wall. An older model, but serviceable. She stared at it as if it could answer all her questions, the line of her jaw hard. There was little light left, but he could see the way she was clenching her teeth, fighting back tears.

  "We'll never find out where Carlos is," she said.

  She wouldn't want to know how much part of him wished she were right. He didn't really want to know either, but he couldn't avoid it. At least he could ignore it. "Come on, let's look," Dane said, keeping his voice steady and calm. She swallowed and nodded.

  He turned away, shining the flashlight in a dark corner where a number of desks were overturned, old-fashioned computers lying on their sides next to them. The floor in front of the blackened wall was strewn with storage media. Dane bent down to pick up a removable drive, half-melted from the heat of the fire.

  "It looks as if someone was looking for something," he said, straightening up. "Perhaps in this case it was the corporations."

  "Not the corporations," a voice came from behind them.

  Dane turned, grabbed Leah by the wrist, and drew his gun. He would have shoved her behind him, but she already had her own weapon drawn.

  The young woman chuckled, flicking on her flashlight and training it on the floor between them. "I see you've already heard what folks around here usually want."

  Dane stared at her, relieved that the intruder was a woman, although she could still be in league with whoever was behind this. "And what is it you want?"

  "Oh, not her. I came to see if there's anything to salvage here."

  Leah stepped forward. "Have you heard anything about a Dr. Santis? The doctor who came down from San Rafael to talk to the local burb boss?"

  "Who wants to know?"

  "His wife."

  The stranger whistled. "Dared the wasteland to save the old man?"

  Leah ignored the question. "So you know him?"

  "Sure. He was the one who was supposed to fix us."

  "Fix you?" Dane asked.

  "I never believed it myself, but lots of folks thought he could fix their kids."

  "You're a hermaphrodite," Leah said, her voice flat.

  "Yeah. One of the first to show."

  "Show?" Dane asked.

  The hermaphrodite chuckled. "They didn't find out 'till I started growing things in all the wrong places."

  "With some forms of hermaphroditism, the condition isn't obvious until the child reaches puberty," Leah explained to Dane.

  "Just what I said, lady."

  Dane stared at the hermaphrodite. He could see now that she/he was younger than he'd at first thought, perhaps fourteen or fifteen. The combination of the deep voice and the breasts beneath the tight t-shirt had led him to think she was older. It. Whatever. Screw it. He couldn't think of the kid without giving it a sex, so it would just have to stay "her," the way she'd first appeared to him.

  Leah lowered her weapon. "In order to 'fix' you, my husband would need advanced medical facilities."

  "That's what I figured, so I kept out of the way."

  "Do you know what happened to him?" she asked.

  The hermaphrodite shrugged again. Dane got the feeling she shrugged a lot. "A lot of folks didn't agree with Andy bringing the doctor down. There was a fight that got out of hand."

  Dane gave a snort of disbelieving laughter. "I would say so."

  "Do you have any idea where we could start looking for him?" Leah asked urgently.

  Another shrug. "Maybe the unreal city down the road."

  "Will you take us there?"

  "Lady, you don't want to go there. There are guards."

  "What is this 'unreal city'?" Dane asked.

  "An old amusement park. It's got a gate around it, so the Purists use it as a kind of prison."

  The old Disneyland. And Purists, something May Porter had mentioned. Dane had a lot more questions, but he wasn't sure if he wanted to ask them in front of Leah. He took her arm, and that spark of intense physical awareness passed between them again. She stared at him, her brown eyes huge in the growing darkness. "Leah, I think it's better if I go."

  "You don't even know Carlos."

  "Do you have a picture?" he asked. She nodded. "Then I can find him."

  "It's almost dark."

  "It would be dark for you too."

  "But I know him. And I know him in the dark."

  An image shot through Dane, a twist in the gut, a disappointment so strong it was a physical pain.

  "You're both crazy," the hermaphrodite said, shaking her head. "You want to play her hero, buddy? Get her out of the wasteland."

  That was exactly what Dane most wanted to do. And the last thing he could admit.

  He gave the hermaphrodite a humorless grin. "I'm used to the odds being against me. But we could use some help. What's your name?"

  "Tyrie."

  "Care to act as our guide, Tyrie?"

  "On one condition."

  "What's that?"

  "You take me with you afterward. I want out of here."

  Dane shrugged. "I wouldn't have any place to take you. I'm a bit of an outlaw myself."

  "An outlaw? You?"

  "The corporations call me a terrorist."

  "Who are you?"

  Dane extended his hand. "Name's Dane Ritter, at your service."

  Tyrie took his hand, her expression skeptical. "I've heard of Dane Ritter."

  "Well, then you know why I can't take you with me." He turned to Leah. "Do you have that picture of Carlos?"

  She glared at him. "You're not going after him alone."

  "It's too dangerous for you."

  "I don't care."

  Dane sighed. "Even if we go in there together, I still need to know what he looks like."

  She pulled a wallet out of her pants pocket and handed him a photograph. He trained his flashlight on an image of a dark-eyed Latin lover.

  Dane would have loved to hate him.

  * * * *

  She cracked. As soon as they were back in the car, the door closed behind them, she cracked. Great, wracking sobs shook her, sobs that surprised him — he had thought her too self-possessed for tears, let alone a paroxysm of grief. He took her into his arms, rocked her gently, and she leaned her head on the crook of his shoulder. He grew hard, cursing mentally. Then she lifted her face to his and his control snapped. Dane took her by the shoulders and kissed her, kissed her as he once had all those years ago. She kissed him back.

  Then she pushed him away. "Dane, no."

  "That didn't feel like 'no'." He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself.

  "It should have. I'm sorry."

  Leah cried herself to sleep on his shoulder, the tears drying on her cheeks. He looked down at her in the moonlight, brushed a strand of short, dark hair from her temple, nestled his own cheek on the top of her head and slept.

  A light tapping on the car window woke him. He started, waking Leah.

  "Wake up, hero!" he heard through the bullet-proof glass. It was Tyrie.

  "What do you want?" he called through the window.

  "We want to help find the doctor."

  "We?" Dane peered out the window. There was a small army of children at Tyrie's back, a band over a dozen strong, armed with lead pipes and an assortment of aging single-action pistols and rifles.

  He felt Leah's hand on his arm and turned to her.

  "How do we know we can
trust them, Dane?"

  "What choice do we have?"

  She shrugged. "Not much."

  "I'm going out to talk to them."

  "Be careful."

  Dane grinned. "If these kids do me in, you can write me a ballad, ensure my underground fame."

  "Not funny."

  He chuckled, fished his assault rifle out of the back seat, and got out of the car.

  "Hi, Tyrie."

  "Hi. My buddies wanted to meet you. I said anyone who wanted to come along had to help."

  "And why would you want to help us?"

  Tyrie looked around at the other kids. "We got scores to settle."

  "What kind of scores?"

  She was silent so long, he thought she wasn't going to answer. "With the Purists," she finally said.

  "Who are these 'Purists' anyway?"

  "They're the ones who run things around here. They think we're abominations."

  Dane gazed at Tyrie's reinforcements and the children stared back, silent and lethal. The youngest was probably no more than six, but he held his small pistol with confidence, and the knife in his belt was longer than his forearm.

  "Are they all like you?" Dane asked.

  "Naw. Some of their folks died in fights or fires. And some just don't want to wait to find out if they're gonna be abominations too."

  He wondered what kind of social system was developing in a place where people cast off their children at the "wrong" kind of puberty. "Does everyone throw their kids out if they become hermaphrodites?"

  Tyrie let out a laugh devoid of humor. "Is that the worst thing you can come up with, hero?" When he didn't answer she continued. "The Purists insist on checking the kids who are reaching the right age and take the ones who're more than one, like me. They say there's no place in God's universe for a third sex and life must be kept pure."

  Dane was afraid to ask the next question, and when he did, it came out almost as quiet as a whisper. "And how do they do that?"

  "When a kid starts growing things in the wrong places, they chop 'em off. A lot of 'em don't survive."

  Dane felt sick. "Oh, Jeezus. What about you?"

  The hermaphrodite shook her head. "I was warned."

  "And Dr. Santis refused to help 'purify' the kids," Dane murmured.

  "Yeah. All he wanted to do was take tests. Andy and his faction were fine with that, but not the Purists."

  "Andy's the burb boss?"

  Tyrie nodded. "He was trying to pull together a burb administration like you guys have up north."

  "And now he's gone" Dane muttered. He thought he'd seen a lot, but his experience didn't come close to that of the young hermaphrodite and her compatriots. As Tyrie had pointed out, he hadn't even been able to imagine it.

  * * * *

  They hid the car between some crumbling walls in the hotel district a few blocks down from the old amusement park. Skirting the entrance where guards were usually posted, Tyrie led them through the rubble of a former wall, across some old railway tracks, and through what was left of a stand of trees struggling to survive. When the Big One hit, the epicenter had been between Pasadena and Los Angeles, but it had done a lot of damage in Anaheim as well — so long ago now, the original Disneyland was little more than a memory. Disney had created a new park in the corporate zone of Pasco, Washington, on a much grander scale than the old one. Dane's parents had taken him and his sister there when they were children. He could see shadows of that new park here in the old; twisted, torn shadows, a mountain of steel and stone with its guts gaping, mirrors and glass, broken and crazy, at odd angles. Dane trained his flashlight on the rubble, and the distorted mirrors reflected an image of himself, his eyes drowned in darkness.

  Deep within the park, a wild dog howled.

  "This way," Tyrie whispered, and they turned right, passing the skeleton of a fake Bavarian castle. The army of children followed, silent as the grave of childhood surrounding them.

  In the shadow of an artificial mountain they stopped and split into two groups. Tyrie and Leah slipped around to the rear of a once futuristic building with their contingent, and the oldest boy, Tobias, led Dane and four of the biggest children to the front. While the two girls, a whopping twelve if they were a day, distracted the men at the door, Tobias, Dane and Forrest took them from behind.

  "Purists, my ass," Dane muttered to himself.

  Tobias was for killing them outright, but Dane persuaded him to drag them into the pavilion, where Tyrie and Leah already had two men at gunpoint. The youngest boy had found some rope and was tying them to their chairs like a pro.

  "Any luck?" he asked.

  When Leah didn't respond, Tyrie answered for her. "We found two kids out back, but no sign of the doctor."

  Leah put the barrel of her rifle under the chin of the nearest guard. "Where is he?"

  "It is in God's hands. Santis would not recognize His will: 'Male and female created He them.'"

  "What did you do with him?"

  "We left him for the dogs."

  Leah whacked him across the face with the butt of her rifle and he passed out. Her head fell to her chest and her arms to her sides, the hands holding her rifle across her thighs trembling.

  "I'll go look for him," Dane said.

  "I'm coming too."

  Dane drew her to the side of the room away from the others. "This time you stay here. I can't have you breaking down on me."

  She gazed at him mutinously but didn't protest. He lowered his voice. "What happens when I find him, Leah?"

  "Dane, don't ask," she said, shaking her head. "No."

  He stared at her for a couple of seconds and then released her arm and strode back into the middle of the room. "You coming along, Tyrie?"

  The hermaphrodite nodded. "You take over here, Tobias."

  Dane and Tyrie left the run-down pavilion and headed back toward the center of the park. "Maybe we should follow the sound of the dogs," he said.

  Tyrie nodded, put two fingers to her mouth and gave a loud whistle. From the north, they heard a series of barks and howls in response. "Yeah, they got something, all right. We better stay together. Wolves only hunt when they're hungry, dogs hunt for fun. If they got the doctor, we're next."

  Dane couldn't repress a shudder.

  At the skeleton of the mountain, they turned right. Before them lay a shallow pool of stagnant water covered with algae. They smelled it before they saw it — the body of a man, face down in the pool. Death by water, in this dry land. Dane felt his stomach go to his throat. If this was Leah's husband, he would have to bring the news to her.

  Tyrie waded out into the shallow water, holding her nose, and kicked the body before scrambling back. "It's Andy," she said through her fingers.

  He waded over to her, pressing his nostrils shut. The dead eyes of the burb boss reflected the moonlight, staring into the night sky with an eerie glow. He had seen death before, seen it in the burbs, seen it in the field of turned earth, but he had never looked so closely, had never seen it with its clothes wet and its face bloated.

  And he had never wished such a death on another.

  He hurried away from the body and sucked in his breath, needing air, as if someone had punched him in the stomach.

  There was a flash of movement at the corner of his vision, and he whirled, catching the glow of large animal eyes in the flashlight. With a snarl, the wild dog sprang. Dane aimed and shot. The dog gave a yowl of pain and fell, splashing water on his feet.

  A shaggy-haired German Shepherd mix, it looked gentle enough, looked like it should have been a pet, chasing balls for children rather than attacking adults. "We've got to find Dr. Santis."

  Tyrie nodded but didn't seem very hopeful. "There are probably more nearby. Dogs hunt in packs."

  They passed underneath a tangle of huge metal rails, walked through wide, fictional streets, skirted fallen towers and crazy skeletons of buildings and mountains. Unreal city, Tyrie called it. It was certainly that.

  Ahead, Dane he
ard another snarl and a short bark. He followed the sound, Tyrie close behind. As they came around the ruins of a restaurant, he saw three more dogs gathered beneath what was left of a metal cab from a former ride. It hung several feet from the ground, still attached to the heavy iron girders. The dogs were jumping at the cab, trying to get in.

  Someone was in there.

  Dane stared at the cab, frozen. He had to save Leah's husband. If he did, he wouldn't be any better than the Purists, killing children in the name of God, killing each other for what was left of this sorry piece of earth. And he would make the corporations he hated look like saints in comparison, even though they withheld technology which could save places like this.

  "Okay, Tyrie," he whispered. "Let's go."

  They ran forward, shouting and waving their arms. As they pounded across the pavement, the dogs turned on them rather than scattering. The once-civilized beasts weren't about to give up their prey that easily.

  Dane stopped, aimed, and fired. One, two, three. Two dogs fell, dark bodies between them and the cab. The third snarled and charged.

  "Good shot," Tyrie said, her voice shaky, training her weapon on the attacking dog. "But you missed one."

  She caught the last dog in the chest. It gave a yap and whine of pain, twisting around with the force of the bullet to land at their feet.

  They stepped around the furry corpses and approached the metal car. In light from their flashlights, Dane could see a trail of blood. He hiked up on the rails and clambered into the compartment. A man was propped against the side, his face a bloody pulp, one arm at an unnatural angle to his chest. He stared at Dane, unmoving, in his eyes neither hope nor fear.

  "You Carlos Santis?" Dane asked. There was no recognizing this face from the picture Leah had given him.

  The man nodded.

  He had found him. And now he would bring Leah her husband.

  "Then we have to get you out of here," Dane said. "Your wife's waiting for you."

  It was hard to tell in the welter of blood and bruises, but he thought Carlos actually smiled before he fainted away.

  * * * *

  "What if the Purists find you?" Leah asked, her dark voice like a caress. The hot morning sun was behind her, throwing her face into shadow. She had been his only companion on the wide road south, but now there was another there, propped up on the back seat — the one he had saved despite his own uncivilized impulses. Leah had set Carlos's broken arm as best she could, but they needed to get him to a hospital.