The Bar Code Rebellion, Page 5

  On the ride up, Mfumbe sat between Kayla and Dusa and slept most of the way. Kayla told Dusa about seeing Eutonah.

  “This psychic stuff is so weird,” Dusa commented.

  “When I was in the mountains, Eutonah taught me a lot,” Kayla replied. “She’s amazing at harnessing the power of her mind. She says I was born with natural ability as a psychic, but I need a lot more training.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Taylor lived in a neat house on a suburban street. Mfumbe’s mother burst into tears when he appeared on her doorstep at dawn the next morning, supported by Dusa on one side and Kayla on the other. Overjoyed to see him, she asked no questions as she ushered them into their living room. His father fumed at first, but seeing the condition his son was in, he soon relented and phoned a friend of his whose son was a doctor.

  “Kayl-l-a and Dusa can stay here, right?” Mfumbe checked with his parents.

  Kayla looked at him sharply. The quiver, the odd stammer on the l sound in the way he’d said her name — she’d never heard that in his voice before. He was probably just weak.

  The Taylors exchanged an uncomfortable glance at each other. “It could be dangerous,” he said.

  “You’re right,” Dusa said firmly. “You might want to consult a lawyer after he sees a doctor.”

  “But he’s bar-coded now,” Mrs. Taylor pointed out. “Everything is all right now.”

  “They grabbed so many people and bar-coded them that they might not even bother to look for him,” Dusa allowed. “But we did break him out of jail and —”

  “You broke him out of jail?” Mr. Taylor shouted.

  Kayla stepped toward Mfumbe’s father. “They hurt him and we thought that —”

  Mr. Taylor wheeled around so that he was looking Kayla directly in the face. “I don’t care what you thought!” he shouted at her. “My son was headed for a university education on a full scholarship until he got mixed up with you! Thanks to you, he’s lost that chance. He might be wanted by the police. He has a criminal record for shoplifting.”

  “He just took a bottle of Adleve, dear,” Mrs. Taylor defended Mfumbe.

  “Yes, and he stole it for her!” Mr. Taylor insisted. “Every mess he’s gotten into is because of her.” He took a small phone from the pocket of his cardigan sweater. “In fact, the last I recall, the Yorktown police are still looking for this girl in connection with her mother’s death. I think it’s my duty to call them.”

  “Dad, no!” Mfumbe shouted. The effort set him into a fit of coughing.

  “He’s coughing up blood!” Mrs. Taylor realized. While she and her husband attended to Mfumbe, Dusa and Kayla slipped out the door.

  Dusa’s fake bar code tattoo was made from the records of a woman who had died with an active bank account that still contained close to two hundred dollars. They used it to buy lunch at a diner in Peekskill. As they ate, Kayla asked her about the fake tattoos.

  “This computer hacker genius out west does them for us, Jack something or other,” Dusa explained. “He takes them from the files of dead people. We like to spread the fakes around, to make them available to people who might need them but don’t know where to get them. In fact, I’m heading out to Nevada to get another batch. I have to meet a bunch of people in Yorktown to set it up as soon as we leave here. I can’t bring you to the meeting because it’s top secret.”

  An elderly waiter served them thick slabs of the chocolate cake they’d ordered. “I just saw you on the TV,” he said to Kayla. He pointed to the fake bar code on her wrist. “You were saying how much you love your bar code.”

  “That’s my sister,” Kayla mumbled.

  “Do you like your bar code, too?” the waiter asked. Kayla noticed his wrinkled wrist was also coded.

  “Not much,” she admitted.

  “Me, neither,” the waiter agreed, “but I can’t get in to see the doctor without it, so what could I do?”

  “I know. It’s tough to do anything if you don’t have one,” Kayla sympathized politely. So many people were just stuck with it.

  After lunch, Kayla and Dusa walked down to the Peekskill GlobalTrak BulleTrain station beside the river. When they got there, Dusa went into the station office to meet her Nevada connection. Before leaving, Kayla couldn’t stop herself from glancing up at the window of the apartment across the road where Zekeal Morrelle had once lived.

  The ramshackle apartment was at the top of a long, narrow wooden staircase that ran up the side of the building, above Vinnie’s Tattoo Parlor. Vinnie’s was now boarded up, since all permanent decorative tattoos had been made illegal. She recalled reading that Gene Drake had once worked in Vinnie’s as a tattoo artist. That was how he had come to work for Global-1 as a bar code tattoo “provider.”

  Kayla remembered the apartment, and how she’d been so crazy about Zekeal back then. They’d been together there so many nights, so close — or so she’d thought. She had believed he loved her until the night she discovered he was really a Tattoo Generation agent.

  What an emotional wipeout that had been! Total mind-boggling betrayal.

  It had been the same night that her mother, in a drugged up, crazed state, had tried to burn her bar code off her wrist, accidentally setting the kitchen curtains ablaze. Gas from the stove had finished the job, igniting the entire house into an inferno.

  From that night on, Kayla had been on the run. It was strange now to be here. She stared up at the apartment, remembering the days when she’d loved Zekeal.

  And then the door opened and he stepped out onto the outside staircase landing.

  Kayla stepped back quickly into the shadowy station doorway. Could he see her there across the road staring up at him? He didn’t appear to, though she pressed her aching back more firmly against the door, just to be sure.

  He was dressed in a jumpsuit, the official Tattoo Gen uniform. One of his eyes was covered with a black patch. Had she done that? According to the article in The Lake Placid News, she and Mfumbe had “brutally attacked” him. In reality, he and the others from Tattoo Gen were the ones who had violently raided their encampment atop Whiteface Mountain. Kayla had been shot and Mfumbe had been trying to protect her when Kayla used her psychic powers to drop a tree limb onto Zekeal. She hadn’t intended to blind him, but obviously she had, in one eye.

  Oh, well, she thought coldly. She couldn’t believe he’d ever meant so much to her. Briefly, she wondered if he was still involved with Nedra Harris. The petite fascist was now the national spokesperson for Tattoo Gen. The two of them deserved each other.

  Zekeal went back inside just as a GlobalTrak BulletBus came around the corner. Kayla ran across the street to catch it. Her heart skipped a beat with nervous anticipation as, climbing up to the bus’s scanner, she flashed her fake bar code for payment. The scanner beeped her through. It had worked!

  The BulletBus traveled silently toward her house, running smoothly on its underground electromagnetic track, passing so many familiar sights. She went by the crummy motel where her best friend, Amber Thorn, had been forced to live after something in her parents’ bar codes had derailed their lives. Unable to get a mortgage, her father fired from his job, even denied fuel for their cars, the Thorns had moved to Nevada to live with a relative, an eccentric aunt who nonetheless possessed a viable bar code tattoo.

  The last time she’d received an e-mail from Amber was the previous May. Amber’s Aunt Emily was against modern advances like computers, but Amber had reached Kayla from an Internet address at a cybercafé in Carson City. Apparently, Aunt Emily was driving the family insane with her strict, weird ways. Amber had sounded pretty miserable.

  Kayla’s last attempt at communicating with Amber had been in September, on the very day she and Mfumbe had decided to join the Decode March on Washington. It had been her turn to act as runner, and she’d delivered a batch of handwritten letters to one of the Postmen.

  The BulletBus continued past Artie’s Art Supply, or at least where Artie’s Art Supply had once been. Now the store w
as gone and a HealthBurger concession stood in its place. Kayla remembered how she’d shown up for work one afternoon only to discover that the store was locked and that Artie, his wife, and his two little girls, all of whom had lived above the store, were gone. Artie and his wife were not bar-coded. Kayla wondered what had become of them.

  After a few minutes, Kayla got off the BulletBus on a residential street of narrow, attached row houses. Before reaching her own home, she came to the house where Gene Drake had lived with Francis and Nate.

  She gasped at the sight of a small terrier sitting on the front steps. Gene’s dog! It sat amid bouquets of flowers in front of a door heavily graffitied with various slogans and remarks done by different writers. GENE DRAKE WAS A HERO! GENE DRAKE (1997–2025) HIS SPIRIT LIVES ON. GLOBAL-1 WILL BE UNDONE!!

  Some of the bouquets were wilted, even dead, but new ones lay on top. Someone had attempted to rub off the writing, but fresh comments were scrawled over the smear of erasures.

  A young boy came around from the back of the house and put a leash on the terrier’s collar. “Stop coming here every day!” he scolded the dog, his voice warm with affection despite his sharp words. “You’re our dog now,” he added as he tugged the dog away from the steps.

  Strange, Kayla thought, not for the first time, that an odd character like Gene Drake — heavyset and badly groomed, reeking of cigarette smoke, nervous and uncharismatic — should be so deified and adored after his death.

  A red leaf dropped from a nearby maple tree. Then another fluttered to the ground. A wind was blowing them all down, one by one. She watched them fall, forgetting about everything else….

  She is standing in a desert, a hot breeze burning her skin. Blue mountains in the far distance. Feelings of hatred. Rage. Murderous thoughts. She will show them all the power of her genius, show what a mind expanded many times beyond its usual dimensions can do. If they want to play God, she can play God, too. They will not cage her, no matter what!

  Someone walked up beside her. His presence jolted her back to reality.

  “Postal delivery,” said the young man in dark glasses standing beside her. A Postman. He handed her an envelope with the name Kayla Marie Reed written on it.

  “How did you find me?” she asked him.

  “The kid with the terrier saw you,” he replied as he walked away.

  Kayla glanced down at the handwriting on the envelope. It was a script she knew well.

  She smiled.

  Ye shall know the truth,

  and the truth shall make you mad.

  Aldous Huxley

  Kayla looked out the window as the East/West CrossLink blasted by at top speed. The monotony and sameness of the passing cars, the flat, dusky landscape, and the endless highway lulled her. She leaned her head against the cab’s passenger window. Her eyes were wide open, but she was no longer seeing the highway….

  She’s moving through a dilapidated tenement, panting as she goes. A rat scrambles by her feet. She stops and opens a pack. It’s her own pack. Hastily, she tosses out old clothes, a sketch pad, charcoal pencils, anything that she can’t sell. She throws the bag angrily onto the floor. Useless! She checks her sneering image in a chipped hallway mirror. Not Kayla’s look, but it’s definitely her face beneath the heavy makeup.

  Dusa was speaking to her from the driver’s seat of the truck. Kayla jumped at the sound of her voice.

  “What?” Kayla asked.

  “I said, I have to stop in St. Louis,” Dusa repeated. “A guy there is giving me a chip with a lot of records on dead people. Wow! You were in another world.”

  “Daydream, I guess.” Kayla hadn’t yet told Dusa about the visions she sometimes had. This one was so strange. Who were these girls she was seeing? They looked like her — but so different. Alternate selves? Alternate possible futures? It was incredibly unnerving, and she wasn’t ready to talk about it.

  “Are you okay?” Dusa checked.

  “Yeah. Fine,” Kayla replied. They’d been driving for two days. Their destination: Carson City, Nevada. The letter she’d received from Amber had sounded desperate.

  I can’t do this anymore, Kayla. I feel like I’m completely surrounded by insanity at every turn. Aunt Emily is a total nut job. I call her Tarantula Woman because she keeps a tank of them in her bedroom and they’re forever escaping.

  Dad left for California saying he was going to find a job but I think he just plain split. We haven’t heard from him in a month. My brother took off with some bikers shortly after that. Mom’s hair is falling out from nerves and all she does is worry about it all day. I have no friends at all. Some days I can’t even get the words out but there’s no one to talk to so it hardly matters. I miss you. I think I’ll just walk off into the desert and keep going until I turn into dry, sandy dirt and blow away.

  When Kayla had met up with Dusa again near the tractor trailer hidden in the woods, she’d asked to come along on the trip out west, maybe get a ride to Carson City. From there she’d set out to look for Amber. Her friend needed her — and what use was Kayla’s friendship if she didn’t show up for her?

  “What about Mfumbe?” Dusa had asked.

  “I think he’s stuck where he is for a while,” Kayla had answered with a resigned sigh. Just to be sure, she found a quiet spot on a boulder in the woods and tried to contact him, mind to mind. She received his reply but it was weak and troubled. Doctors have given me druggy medicine. Feel rotten, always sleepy. Don’t come to the house. My father called G-1. Looking for you.

  “It might not be such a bad idea for you to go west for a while,” Dusa had said when Kayla told her what she’d learned from Mfumbe. “Eutonah also said G-1 is looking for you. I wonder why.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I say we hit the road right now. Why wait?”

  She’d been right, Kayla had thought. Why sit around and wait for Global-1 to catch her? She might as well go this very moment.

  They slept in the back of the truck at a campground outside Pittsburgh where they arrived around three that morning. At eight A.M. Kayla awoke in the passenger seat in the cab of the moving truck. “I don’t even remember coming up front,” she mumbled, rubbing her eyes.

  “I woke you up, but I think you were just walking in your sleep,” Dusa said with a chuckle. “Go back to sleep if you want.”

  That sounded like a good idea to Kayla, but she found that sleep wouldn’t come. She had never seen much of America other than the northern East Coast. The passing scenery was much the same along the East/West CrossLink; fields and towns and malls followed by more of the same. The billboards that dotted the CrossLink advertised the same radio stations and the same superchains of stores and places to eat. Kayla remembered a poem that Mfumbe had read to her as they walked along the Hudson River on their way to Washington. It was by a nineteenth-century poet named Walt Whitman. I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear. The poet wrote about working people busy with their various activities.

  Kayla had particularly loved the last lines, and she recalled them easily.

  Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,

  The day what belongs to the day — at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

  Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

  The poem conjured an image of robust individuals embracing their own unique qualities and together forming a song that was America. When had all this conformity and sameness set in? How had it happened? When had the varied carols turned into a single corporate advertising jingle?

  And yet she knew so many strong individuals. People were still people, as varied as ever, if they were only given a chance to be themselves.

  In St. Louis late that afternoon, they stopped to eat at a diner overlooking the Mississippi River. Outside the large picture window, the sunset bounced off the river’s powerful and choppy brown current. “How much money is left in your fake bar code account?” Kayla asked as she turned away from the river to perus
e the many laminated pages of the menu.

  “Not sure exactly,” Dusa admitted. “It could run out at any time. We might just have to bolt if the code comes up empty.”

  “Great,” Kayla said with a cynical laugh. Would the day ever come when she wouldn’t have to be prepared to run at a moment’s notice?

  Their waitress studied Kayla with particular interest. “Congratulations,” she said after she’d taken down the order.

  “What for?” Kayla asked cautiously.

  “You know,” the waitress said, seeming to assume Kayla was joking. “It’s great that you’ve gotten your life sorted out.”

  “The ad,” Kayla realized when the waitress had gone. “She thinks I’m the girl in the ad.”

  “So do a lot of people,” Dusa pointed out as she got up to go to the ladies’ room. When she returned she carried a newspaper and her face wore an odd expression.

  “What?” Kayla asked.

  She tossed the paper onto the table. The front pages were folded back revealing the Life & Style section within. Kayla’s eyes widened. The title of the lead story was FORGIVENESS AND ACCEPTANCE BUILD A NEW DREAM. A picture of the clean-scrubbed Kayla who had appeared on TV was under the title — and she wasn’t alone. Beside her was Zekeal. The two of them held hands and stared lovingly at each other.

  FORGIVENESS AND ACCEPTANCE BUILD A NEW DREAM