32 Face Off

I spent most of dinnertime instructing Sandy. One spoonful of soup. One small broccoli floret. One giant bite of mashed potato. To anyone who knew our ways it was a shameless display of affection, and if they weren't comfortable with it they could just look away from our darkened corner of the room. We were still riding the endorphin wave from our afternoon exertions and didn't want to be distracted. I was in the middle of having Sandy feed me, when Hector walked up to our table.

"Director Psi wants to see you," he said, while he kept on hand on his pistol. "Just you."

"Sandy, go sit with Marcello." Marcello's status was even higher than mine, but still less than Psi's.

The older man sat two tables away, with Helen and a couple of his own guys, and understood what I wanted. He stood and offered her the last chair at his table. "We'll look after her." All the men stood for Sandy as she sat down with them, next to Helen.

Helen, normally so hard and remote, laid a hand on Sandy's and squeezed. Everyone was worried.

Psi had interfered with us before. Usually he just tried to short us on personnel or delay delivery of equipment. Tamala would remind him that my success was his success and my failure could endanger his life, then he would eventually release whatever resources he was holding back. He was a recurring annoyance, but just that: an annoyance.

Pointing Dragon Ball at Sandy was an escalation that couldn't be ignored. I hadn't decided how to respond yet, or if I even had means to respond, but maybe I should have been working that problem instead of canoodling with my girl all afternoon. Psi was lazy, drunk, and unscrupulous, but he wasn't a complete idiot. He sent Hector to get me before I could confront him on my own terms. Psi had taken a liking to Hector because the young man was pliable and didn't question orders.

I knew about Psi's habits because Sandy knew, from the women's network. He liked to have dinner alone in his office and then start drinking. Thus lubricated, he would roll around a while with Tamala and/or one of the unclaimed women, fail to inseminate anyone, blame the stresses of his job (the job Tamala mostly did for him), then stumble to his own bed in a suite down the hall from mine.

I had nothing to say to Hector, but I got up from my place and headed that way in silence. He trailed behind my with gun drawn and held close to his chest. I couldn't remember who taught him that, maybe it was Rachel or maybe it was the Eklunds, but he had learned it from Sojourners. We had shaped him and trained him, but we hadn't prepared him to resist lies and grandeur. I taught him math, but never instilled a suspicion for authority. Now he was walking me into some new trap prepared by my one real enemy.

To be sure, Ludovic and his greenies were greater threats than Psi was. But their violence was impersonal, applicable to anyone and everyone, and I was just as likely to be overlooked as I was to be caught up in it. Psi was different because I had taken something from him, and it didn't matter to him that he had gained a higher position than me. He still wanted to punish me, and he had sent my former friend and companion to bring me to heel. When we entered his office he was alone, with nothing on his desk but a dirty dinner plate, a bottle of vodka, and one glass.

Psi was an unattractive guy by any measure, but his worst feature was his eyes. Those bulbous, glistening things were always looking, always wanting, never resting. He probably had a thyroid condition that made his eyes too big for his face. According to TV advertisements in the Before days there were drugs you could take for that, but the greed in them wasn't something you could medicate away. He was inside the fence, like the rest of us, but he was the Big Man inside the fence and he loved it. It gave him a certain amount of license, but never enough to satisfy him. Nothing would ever satisfy him.

He sat at his stupid desk, the only one in the yard made of "executive grade cherry", and grinned a wet and greedy smile. He drew a paper from the lap drawer and pushed it at me. It was a Letter of Transfer of Guardianship, with Sandy's name on it, already signed by Psi. My name was typed under the line for "current guardian", and Hector's name was typed under the "witness" line. Psi wanted me to sign Sandy over to him.

"Why would I sign this?" I tossed the paper back to him.

"Because of this." Psi pulled a tablet from his desk and played an audio file. It was just a woman's voice reading a series of numbers, most of them less than a hundred. I didn't understand the significance at first, but then I recognized the voice.

Jaida Ecklund was alive.

Jaida knew we were in Denver, and was trying to reach us.

The surprise must have shown on my face because Psi let out a greasy, satisfied laugh. "Oh, this is good. So, so good. I finally have something on E. You have friends on the outside, and you're in contact with them. That's treason!"

"How did you even get this?"

"Oh, didn't you know? My position comes with radio privileges. That's how directors keep in touch with each other, but I like to scan all the frequencies sometimes, pick up the odd chatter. Hector here was terribly useful. When he told me the voice I was hearing was one of your old acquaintances, well I just knew I had to put it to good use."

"It won't work," I told him, "you can't prove that I received the message or ever responded. You can't even prove it says anything intelligible. It's just someone who sounds like someone we used to know, whom we presume dead by the way, reading a bunch of numbers."

"But they aren't just numbers, are they? It's not a one-time pad, the numbers aren't random enough for that. So it has to be something else. A book code, perhaps? Like I said, Hector has been very helpful."

I turned on Hector. "Do you have no sense in your head, at all? Exactly what did you tell him? Huh? Because this man isn't your friend, and he can't be trusted! He's a corrupt asshole who doesn't care about anyone but himself, and you give up your friends? To him?"

"But, he's in charge here! I thought he could talk you out of leaving, or doing something stupid. I could have told Alvarez you know, or the greenies, and they would have had you killed."

"You could have told me, you idiot." Hector is sideways to me now, gun pointed at my center mass, ready to fire. "I could have told Jaida to go away. Or, yeah, we could have arranged an escape. Stop trying to be my friend, Hector. You're terrible at it."

I turned back to Psi, who was watching the exchange with contempt. He was completely unconcerned that Hector might pull the trigger on me. "Oh, put that away, Hector," he said, "it won't do any good here. Anyway, we're here to negotiate a trade, not to fight."

"Trading Sandy for your silence doesn't work for me. As soon as you have her, you'll still turn me in."

"I'll be turning you in, all right, in three days time. You can take some of your zombie control devices and leave, right now, and I won't report you for three days. But the delectable Sandy stays here with me, protected, and she'll make lots of kingdom babies."

Psi pushed a pen at me, one of those stupid, wooden "executive" jobs that feel hefty in the hand but on the inside are the same as every other ballpoint pen in the world. His eyes drank me in, wet with lust. His mouth grimaced, as I fumbled the oversized pen and had to pick it up again in shaking hands, and struggled to get it the right way around in fingers that didn't want to move. I'm not shaking out of fear, or despair. I'm surging with adrenalin while trying to look beaten at the same time.

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Have I mentioned how sad his little desk was? He liked it because it said "executive" somewhere on the underside, but it was just red-stained veneer over cheap wood. It was also narrow. So when I'm leaning over the damned transfer form I'm close to Psi, a bad actor, a threat to Sandy and every other woman around him, and he's leaning forward because he's feasting, loving this moment when he breaks me and gets Sandy.

That's when I stab him in the eye, with that dumb pen. I launch myself at Psi, leading with the ballpoint like a dueling sword, sink it deep into his eye socket, and we both go toppling over on his side of the desk. I land on top, my weight on the pen and on his shoulders, and Psi is screaming but he's screaming into my chest so I doubt anyone can hear him. I feel a part of his skull give way and the pen sinks until my fist is against his eye. I let go of my improvised weapon long enough to get my palm on the end, and sink it until the whole thing is buried inside his head.

Hector is yelling, "Stop! Stop it, or I swear I'll shoot you dead!" He's pointing the gun at me but he's about two seconds too late because Psi is as good as dead. Most of his body doesn't know it yet, but his arms and legs are flailing because they realize their driving force has gone missing.

I glance over my shoulder at Hector, and he looks a lot more scared than I feel. I start to talk him down, while Psi's body wears itself out. It's gone from flailing to twitching. "It's too late to shoot me, Hector. It's already over."

"Oh shit! Look what the fuck you've done! Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! What do we tell the greenies? How do we explain this?" He's waving his gun now, gesturing with it while his finger is on the trigger. My worst fear is he might shoot me by accident.

"They don't give a shit about him. Just like they don't give a shit about you, or me, or anyone else inside the fence. They're not going to care. Hector, look at me." I move so I'm sitting on top of Psi's chest but I have one hand over his mouth to stifle the weird noise coming from him. It's like a combination gargle and moan. His eye, the one that doesn't have a pen jammed into the socket, is wandering back and forth like he's looking for something. He isn't dead, but there's nobody home, either. Amazingly, the eye I attacked is still whole. The pen slipped into the space between his left eye and his nose, and pushed the orb right out of its socket. It's still hanging by the nerves and flopped onto the floor, huge and moist.

I briefly wonder if Psi will zombify from that pithed state, or if he has to fully die first. It's an interesting question that needs to be left for another day, because Hector is about to shoot me if I don't calm him down. So I pay attention to the fully conscious guy with the gun.

"Hector, weapon control!" I shout at him, so he at least takes his finger off the trigger. "When was the last time they counted us? They only count the women, and they only do that when the pregnant ones rotate out. When the next inspector show up, we'll just say we don't know where he is. We thought he got transferred or something, and I took charge. Hell, he might not even ask! We can finish the machine, Hector. Isn't that what you want? Psi isn't even the real director anyway. Tamala does all the work. We can finish Fan Girl and the reactor stacks in a few weeks. That's what you wanted, right? Build machines to kill all the zombies. We're nearly there. Don't ruin it now."

His gun was lower, but he wasn't wholly convinced. He didn't want to be responsible for the director's death. He didn't want to get caught. He still wanted to be a real soldier of the NKA, not just a liaison to techies and work crews.

"Ludovic isn't going to care which one of us gets his machine to work. The greenies don't care who's in charge inside the fence: they don't even know our names. Help me get rid of the body, and everything will be fine. Put the gun away, and get me a dolly. Act like there's nothing wrong. Psi is being a dick and asking for weird stuff again." I start giving orders, and Hector follows them. "If anyone asks questions, tell them Psi says they should mind their own business."

He holsters his weapon and, after some deep breaths, he leaves. That gives me a couple of minutes alone with Psi so I can plan. By the time Hector returns I know what to do.

By the time Hector returned with a dolly, Vegetable Psi was nearly naked. Cutting away his clothes with office scissors wasn't terribly difficult. Pulling the pen out of his skull and getting his eye back into his face was harder, because the eyeball kept popping out. I didn't care about the eye or how he looked, but I needed to remove his very identifiable pen from his soon-to-be-corpse and not have blood and brains leaking out all over the place. I finally tried gluing his eyelid closed with superglue from his desk, and that worked like a charm. Hector and I tied the vegetable to our dolly, his clothes and the transfer papers went into a paper bag, and we waited for darkness to really set in.

The moon was in its last quarter, so it wouldn't rise until midnight or later. That meant we had a good patch of darkness, early that night, to wheel Vegetable Psi out the back of the hotel and into the segregated area where we tested our machines. The horde was standing twenty feet back from the fence, nice and quiet, thanks to the static generators running at high power. I brought with me all of the director's keys, and my hunting knife.

"Take the bag and hold it open," I told Hector, handing him the paper bag with the Psi's clothes in it. Then he watched, in compelled horror, as I cut around the back of the vegetable's head, along the sides of his face, and under his chin. All the way around his head went my knife and then, after a few more judicious cuts, I peeled off his hair and face in a single piece and tossed it into the paper bag. I did all this by starlight, so Hector couldn't see all the details, but he could see enough. Both of Psi's eyes were hanging down, pushed out by the spasming facial muscles, and his teeth were a bright line against the dark red musculature of his face. If he was making any noise we couldn't hear it, thanks to the rag I had stuffed into his mouth. Maybe Psi was less dead than I thought, but I didn't let it bother me.

"How the fuck," whispered the shocked Hector, "do you know how to do something like that?"

"One hundred and ninety five, Hector." His dumb look was enough to remind me he hadn't been at HuSH labs for very long. "That's how many test subjects I went through. I've peeled a lot of skin. And if you ever betray me or Sandy again, I'm going to peel you, too."

We used the director's keys to open the gate that let zombies into the testing area, and dumped Psi just outside it, then closed and locked it again. I nudged one of the electrical cables enough times to disconnect two of the static generators from the batteries, to make it look like an accident, and the entire shamble fell on Vegetable Psi at the same time. We were out of there before it got really messy. Without any other stimulus to excite them, the zombies went quiet after they had their fill of Psi.

All that was left to do was toss the paper bag with Psi's clothes and face into the incinerator. By morning it would be gone.

Hector looked at me, shaken. "What now?"

"We need to handle one more thing," I assured him. "Then you can sleep for the night."

❖ ❖ ❖

When Hector brought Tamala to the director's office, and she saw me sitting in the director's chair, she knew something serious had happened to her situation. I remember her looking around briefly, like Psi might be hiding under one of the chairs or behind the door, and then she faced me. Hector took up his position, standing on my right side like he had stood next to Psi sometimes.

"I warned him not to mess with you," Tamala said. I detected a trace of satisfaction, a tiny smile that said she had been right and he had been wrong for the hundredth time. Finally, his errors had killed him.

"He didn't," I lied. "In fact, he did the opposite and put me in charge. He even left a letter saying as much. A letter," I emphasized with care, "that he dictated to you."

Her eyes briefly went wide, before her expression returned to normal. "I remember. I put it around here somewhere." She sat down at a tiny desk in one corner, just big enough for a manual typewriter and a stack of paper, and began banging out Psi's last message to the kingdom. In it, he confessed he wasn't up to such an important task and fled, before an Accountability Officer could find him out and have him executed. He signed his confession the same way he signed everything, by having Tamala do it.

"He also left a ledger," said Tamala as she handed over the letter, "of all the bribes he paid to ministers. I'll leave it on your desk for tomorrow."

"Our missing inventory," I huffed. "Of course he was paying bribes. I should have guessed."

"What happens to me?" Tamala had caught on to my ploy so quick, she could have thought of it first. There was no way I was sidelining someone that talented.

"You keep doing what you've been doing, running the compound. But we have to get you your motherhood knot, or else they're going to send you up to the palace lottery. Just pick out a few men you like, and Hector will make sure they don't give you any trouble."

"You mean, I get to choose?" A hopeful look crept into her eyes.

"Absolutely. Kingdom law won't allow you to be childless, but I can at least make sure you get to choose the father."

The last task Tamala did that night was type up a new Transfer of Guardianship form and sign herself over to me, using Psi's signature, with Hector as a witness.

❖ ❖ ❖

After we put the director's office in order I went to Marcello's place to collect Sandy. I found her reading a borrowed novel, something with dragons and half-dressed people on the cover. "Come on, it's a good night to look at the stars."

Marcello looked up from his scotch and the comic book he was reading. "What happened?"

"Personnel change. You're looking at the new director of Imperial Yard. We'll have a leadership meeting tomorrow morning, and I'll fill in everyone then." I held a hand out to Sandy, "come along, before the moon rises."

Sandy and I climbed the hotel stairs, up to the roof. We searched to make sure it was deserted, then I folded her into my arms. While we watched the stars follow their tracks, I told her everything. Psi is dead. Jaida is alive. Tamala is provisionally on our side. Hector betrayed us again.