Zero day code, p.11
Zero Day Code, page 11
part #1 of End of Days Series
“But my card is good,” she protested, and Rick felt his anxiety spike. He started desperately calculating whether he had enough money to pay for their meal. The manager, a kindly-looking woman in her fifties, appeared and shooed the waiter off.
“I am sorry,” she said. “It’s not your card, it’s our system. I don’t know what’s wrong. But we can’t seem to get through to the bank. Is it possible that you have cash?”
Mel, who was tipping over the last big dipper on her champagne roller coaster ride, muttered something about nobody having cash these days as she started to search through her handbag.
“No, it’s okay,” the woman said quickly. “We’ve got some old card slips in the office. I can do it manually. I’m terribly sorry. It’s really not you. It’s the bank.”
Rick relaxed as he felt the tension run out of the woman beside him. His woman, he thought with a surprise.
He liked that idea. He liked what it said about him that somebody like Mel would even be interested. And he found himself pleased that he was well enough these days to even think about something as normal as dating.
They were a couple of minutes at the front desk, paying for the meal the old-fashioned way, with one of those clunky noisy slide machines that took an imprint of your card. Rick always imagined his cards getting mangled or shattered in them, but Mel’s Visa was fine.
Matter of fact, it was in better shape than she was.
By the time they made it back to her pickup, he had to carry her the last few feet. She was shit-faced, singing and laughing and apologising all at once.
Unsure of what to do, he drove the quarter hour back to his cabin at Bretton Woods, by which time his date had passed out on the seat next to him and was snoring softly. Even bumping and jostling over the rough corrugated dirt track down to his cabin by the river was not enough to shake her awake.
Nomi was exactly where she’d been sitting when they left. Her dinosaur bone looked like it’d been reduced appreciably in size. She waited for the vehicle to stop before bounding over to the fence, jumping and turning in circles.
Worried that he might trip over the dog while he was carrying Mel, Rick told her to sit. Nomi dropped to her butt and waited, quivering with excitement. Rick carried the sleeping woman through to his bedroom. He laid her out on top of the fresh sheets he had replaced a couple of hours earlier. He fetched a jug of water and a glass from the kitchen and left a couple of aspirin next to them. Then he retreated to the couch in the living room, quietly called for Nomi to join him, and flicked on the television, careful to keep the sound down.
He avoided the news channels because they aggravated him, settling instead on a Cubs game.
Nomi lay her head in his lap and he stroked her ears as he watched Jon Lester strike out a couple Braves.
All things considered, it was a pretty damn good date night.
Interlude
Gloria limped slowly in the stifling heat and humidity towards the South Moti Bagh market, having suffered yet another vicious beating by her Ma'am. "You lazy bitch,” Ma'am had screamed, when Gloria had again failed to return from the market with vegetables.
"Sorry Ma'am," Gloria had said, "but there were none."
"Then go to another market, you lazy worthless whore," Ma'am shrieked, striking Gloria on the hip for emphasis with the flat heel of a broken shoe.
But Gloria had been to three markets, spending her own money on the auto fares, but the truth was simply that the markets were, inexplicably, bare.
She limped one. Her hip aching so badly that wondered if madam had done something worse than raise another welt there. It was possible she felt bad simply because of the heat. It was always hot in Delhi, but this monsoon season, coming late and feeble as it had, brought none of the usual relief. The air, while cleaner than in winter to be sure, was heavy with moisture and as still as a corpse. Gloria reached the top end of the long street that would be teeming with activity on a normal day. Hundreds of Domestics like herself would have been there, haggling for vegetables, dahl, flour, rice. But today, like yesterday, and the day before, what buyers remained were outnumbered by sellers, attending their stalls, such as they were, out of habit, but with nothing really to sell. Three Domestics haggled over a sodden bag of flour, the price already way over what Gloria could afford.
Men sat in the dirt; gaunt, bored expressions on their faces. By the water-tap, children sat on the rubble of broken hand-make clay bricks, listless. That water was poison at the best of times, only suitable for drinking by untouchables, not civilized people. Certainly not by Sir and Ma’am, who only drank water from plastic bottles, never the tap, not even the filter water. But now the tap was dry. Two men were urinating against a broken concrete wall. The smell of human waste was overwhelming. Sickening. Autos, the ubiquitous kerosene burning tuk-tuks whose rattle and constant blaring horns composed the background din of Delhi street life, splashed past, sending mud and shit up the side of Gloria's saree. She would have to change it before she re-entered her Ma'am's house.
Gloria continued slowly down the street. Stray dogs lay in puddles on the road watching a pair of hungry looking goats perched on the roof of a car, out of reach. The kids Gloria had seen here for the last few weeks were gone; into some rich man's curry Gloria supposed. Men lay shirtless on tarpaulins, or on the bare ground. A man squatted in a concrete hovel amongst a pile of old car parts, smoking, and welding something, the flashes momentarily blinding anyone careless enough to look on. A couple of cows, so thin you could see their ribs, stood grazing on a pile of plastic refuse, choking down the chip packet wrappers, curry-smeared plastic bags, and other waste that would soon enough choke up the poor beasts' digestive systems. Gloria felt so sorry for them. Cows are sacred and no-one, even a non-Hindu, would dare eat one. The laws were strict for Hindu and non-Hindu alike, yet everyone seemed happy enough to let them die horribly in the street, choking on trash; their corpses stripped for leather and the carcasses fed to the dogs.
She passed three children listlessly throwing broken pieces of brick at a cat, which skulked off with a limp as pronounced as her own. To her left a fight erupted, fists flew, a man accusing a woman, another Domestic, but nobody Gloria knew, of having stolen an onion. Shoved backwards by the man, the woman tripped on the edge of a muddy pothole and fell backwards into the filth. Three other women started to kick the stranger. The man beat at her with a metal fence-dropper. The beating continued well after the woman had stopped moving. Stopped screaming. Stopped breathing. The onion lay in the mud near Gloria's feet. She was smart enough to leave it untouched.
Tetsuo Yamada spilled out of the bar around the corner from Shinjuku station, staggered a few paces, and vomited into the gutter. He could hear his friends laughing at him over the of roar of traffic and the cries of dismay and disgust from the crowds surging around him.
Fuck them.
He was not the only drunk on the streets tonight. His workmates were just as bad, but unlike him they had not worked through the previous night to settle the contracts for head office. The assistant under manager of Asahi Legal had personally emailed Tets a thank you for his efforts and told him to get roaring drunk tonight.
Tetsuo Yamada was a good company man, and he would never go against the wishes of the assistant under manager.
He hung onto a lamp post as the world tilted under his feet and he heaved and heaved again until his stomach hurt.
He had not eaten a proper meal all day. Indeed, since arriving at work two days earlier he had not eaten anything but rice crackers and one greasy imagawayaki pancake filled with mystery curry from the kerbside vendor outside head office. He had been working that hard on the acquisition. They all had. And now it was time to celebrate. They had secured a vital deal for the company, the freehold purchase of three thousand acres of soybean plantation in Australia; specifically, in the south of Western Australia, where the grip of the Great Drought was not as a fierce as it was elsewhere. Tets did not fool himself that he was responsible for this coup. The deal had been finalised somewhere in the heavens, so stratospherically far above his lowly head that he could barely imagine the fantastic creatures which abided there. It was not merely a commercial deal after all. So great and portentous were the auguries attendant on the final disposition of a simple soybean farm, that Minsters and even Prime Ministers from both countries had become involved. Even more significantly, the protests from the Chinese Foreign Ministry had grown so shrill and unbalanced that the whole affair was being discussed as a crisis, as far away as Europe.
Ha. Fuck the Chankoro, too, Tets thought, as he finally stopped dry-heaving and dragged himself upright, using the lamp pole. He staggered as a heavy hand landed on his shoulder. It was his supervisor. Mister Inoue.
“Come, Yamada,” he barked. “We must fill you with ramen so you can hurl it up all over again!”
The braying laughter of his colleagues was not hurtful.
He knew they were impressed with how quickly he had settled the fifteen thousand pages of documentation for the sale. He was young, but he was building his legend. One day he would be the assistant under manager, and then…
Who knew?
Perhaps he might inhabit those rarefied heights where these deals were negotiated. One day Tetsuo Yamada might sip French wine with gaijin Prime Ministers, not cheap beer with rowdy salarymen.
“Come along, we will have ramen and katsuo,” his boss declared. “And Asahi will pay.”
A great cheer arose at that.
The cheap beer they had been drinking.
It was not so cheap anymore.
And the ramen with skipjack tuna at Menya Musashi, while still famous up and down the Shinjuku line, no longer attracted lines of customers twenty deep. Very few people could afford it now. Tuna was worth its weight in gold these days. And gold had been getting more expensive too.
The small team of lawyers from Asahi’s Legal Affairs Division, did not have to line up at the vending machines by the entrance to the restaurant. There was no crowd waiting to get in. In fact, Tets could not remember the last time he had seen one here. Although, he could hardly afford the eye watering prices on his salary, so he did not come by very often. He mostly worked until ten and caught the train home to Naoko.
He flushed with momentary shame at the thought of his young wife.
He had not seen her in two days.
Had not spoken to her either.
They had worked so hard for the soybean farm.
Naoko would understand.
She was as hopeful for his career as Tets was ambitious for advancement. And besides, when he had to work these long days and even overnight at the office, it meant their own grocery bill was that much smaller. He was well paid, and their rent was quite reasonable, living so far outside the centre of the city. But even so, he knew that Naoko struggled with her duties at home. Everything was just so expensive these days.
He took his ticket from the vending machine and presented it to the young woman by the entrance to the restaurant.
“Kotteri,” he told her, before she could ask.
He wanted his ramen done in the heavy style. And he wanted an extra egg. And pork.
Despite having just thrown up all over the street—and himself, he realised, looking down at the stains on his suit jacket and shirt—he was starving.
The waitress did not so much as glance down at the disgusting mess he had made of himself. She had six rowdy customers wanting to spend money. Inside the darkened eating house, Tets could see three cooks in the open kitchen. He recalled the nights when he had just started as a young lawyer, when seven or eight noodle chefs worked the pans, yelling and performing for the crowd as they hauled steaming ramen from boiling water. There was no crowd tonight.
But still… they were here now and so it would be as great a day for Menya Musashi ramen shop as it had been for the corporate warriors of Asahi’s Legal Affairs Division.
They all piled in one after the other.
Everybody was hungry.
Mayor Andy woke into a furnace. The same furnace they’d all been living in for nearly five years. The Great Drought had scorched the red soil bare for a thousand miles around the town of Walcott. The wheat and soy crops that had sustained generations of farmers and townies were just memories now. The leaves were gone from every tree in the town’s Memorial Gardens. The drought had even burned the grass from the greens at the local bowling club. And now it had finally taken the last drop of water.
Andy’s phone started buzzing in the hot, still hour before dawn.
It was Pete Barraclough, the Shire Council’s chief engineer.
Filtration plant is gone, Pete texted him. Control board failure overnight. Pumps seized up. We’re dry.
In his mind, groggy and sleep deprived, Andy heard the bad news in Pete’s broad, flat Australia drawl, with all the cursing.
Farkin’ plant’s gaawn, mate. We’re farkin’ dry.
Andy’s wife Sarah rolled over in bed, turning away from the light of his phone screen. She half-mumbled a question, asking if everything was okay. Andy turned off the screen and tip-toed out of their bedroom. Nothing was okay, and there wasn’t much he could about it until the water trucks arrived from the Snowy Mountains depot, two full days drive to the east.
He padded toward the kitchen out of habit, intending to put the kettle on for a pot of tea. He couldn’t do that, of course, and when he remembered that he couldn’t he swore quietly, still not wanting to wake his wife.
The bore water the town had been living off the last three years was brown and flinty and made for a diabolical brew. If you put enough condensed milk and sugar in it, you could almost pretend you weren’t drinking something that tasted like some old bastard’s fetid piss strained through a pair of unwashed football socks. He took a bottle of store-bought water from the fridge. Ten bucks a pop it cost, but it was clean and sweet, and he made do with a single swig. It was cold too. Beautifully cold. They were running low on everything but heat and dust.
Andy checked the time on his phone. 4.47AM.
Jeez, Pete must have slept out at the plant.
Or not slept, more likely. The engineer had been obsessively monitoring the town’s only source of drinking water since a lightning strike during a dry storm last week had fried the circuits on the number two pump’s control board. The Council had voted to buy in a couple of tankers of drinking water, but they had to wait at the back of a very long queue. There were more than a hundred towns west of the mountains who’d gone dry even earlier than Walcott.
Andy pushed through the screen door keeping the flies out of the kitchen and stepped out on his back veranda. The sky was still a deep, obsidian black, awash with the hard brilliance of a billion stars. He felt the wooden floorboards underfoot, still warm from the yesterday’s heat. A pair of old folding chairs bathed in the glowing blue status light of the big Tesla Powerwall they’d installed with the government subsidy a couple of years ago. At least there was that, he thought. With all of the solar cells on the roof, and the batteries every second homeowner and business had put in lately, they could at least run the air-conditioning without feeling like they were adding to the problem.
“Shit,” Andy cursed as he realised, he was wrong about too.
Just like he had been about the tea.
With the whole filtration plant down, and the tankers at least two days out, they’d have to go to Stage 7 water restrictions, and that meant turning off any water-cooled plant and machinery. Like the older air-conditioning units over at the base hospital and the ‘swampies’ that a lot of the older folks about town tended to use because they were cheaper.
He cursed again, turning around to hurry back inside.
Mayor Andrew Old needed to get out to the plant and see Pete Barraclough as soon as he could. People were going to start dying if they couldn’t run those units, but there was literally no water left to keep them going. Unless Pete could work a miracle, they would have to start moving people around, rehousing them wherever they could stay cool.
It was going to be a long two days.
12
You Didn’t Do Nothing Wrong
Jody’s car ran out of gas two miles short of Temescal. She made it over the Bay Bridge and down the Webster Street exit, heading for Broadway-Auto Row, but her little Civic started coughing and bunny-jumping as she came up on the Walgreens.
“Noooo,” Jody cried, punching the steering wheel.
She wanted to scream and wail. Instead, she sent up a prayer to the patron saint of single mothers, and she steered the spluttering Honda into the car park at the pharmacy. It died half-in, half-out of a parking bay. She cursed herself for running the AC. It must have guzzled the last few drops in her gas tank. But she had no choice. The midday heat was scorching. She felt the interior of the car begin to heat up like a pizza oven as soon as the engine and the air-conditioning cut out. Opening the door and stepping out into the day was like getting fried by a huge bank of Klieg lights. It seemed impossibly hotter.
“Yo bitch, learn to drive!”
The voice was harsh, male and so San Fernando stupid that it could’ve been Chad. Jody couldn’t help turning around towards whoever had shouted at her. It wasn’t Chad. This asshole, striding through the parking lot toward her, was about half the size of her ex-husband. His most striking feature was a head full of improbably long, greasy red dreadlocks. He was a multitasker, too. Ogling her butt as he abused and insulted her driving technique. Jody gave him the finger. Slammed the door. Stormed away.
