Payback

Chapter 4

I can’t believe I’m about to enter Chan’s family’s house. It’s a dream come true. Or at least it used to be.

My old nemesis opens the door then puts her hands back on her wheels, rocking forward and back. Still in a wheelchair. Still with immaculate hair and eyebrows. Still stuck-up and superior. The world’s changed, but Esther Wadlow is still Esther Wadlow.

All I can think to do is giggle and say ‘Sup?’

‘You know what’s up.’

‘Thanks for agreeing to see me.’

She quickly whirls away so I’m forced to stare at her disappearing back. ‘No point standing on the doorstep, Shepherd. Close the door behind you.’

As I follow her down the hallway, I snort at how far I’ve come in the world. Back when we were schoolkids, like 2034, I would’ve given a million bucks to go inside Chanvatey Prach’s mansion. His parents are f*****g loaded; they own a whole franchise of bakeries across the country. He only worked at DeliDiscount to pick up girls.

I check out the family photos on the walls as I follow Esther. It’s trippy to see Chan’s progression over the years. Chan used to have braces when he was eleven, like a dork. Then I think he tried extra-hard to become cool. Around thirteen, he seems to have had a growth spurt and his outlook finally matched the way he actually looked. Big shoulders for a man who acted like he could carry anything. Wide jaw for a man who talked big, made big promises. Big d**k, I assume, for a man who took the V card of six of the girls in our group, working his way up to Esther, a ten out of ten in terms of popularity and looks.

A girl you couldn’t just tap and gap.

A girl who always thought she was better than me.

It wasn’t hard to find Esther living at Chan’s house. There are fewer people in the world these days. The first Esther Wadlow I messaged on Instagramazon was a fail, but when I realised she’d probably taken her husband’s name, and I typed in Esther Prach, bingo. Her profile was sugary-sweet. It was all about her husband, and I felt an immediate jealous lightning bolt. Chan’s profiles, though, barely mentioned his wife at all–just worry, angst, fear. While I was in jail Chan turned into a columnist on InfoWars. The Moneyland Experiment had scared him real bad. He dropped all pretence of being elite and went full-time conspiracy theorist.

Well, he WAS full-time, and then his articles suddenly stopped a week ago. Right after he testified against me.

I had to reach out.

Esther Wadlow weaves through the marble halls of the mansion then veers left, then right, spins around, and confronts me. We’re in a kitchen as big as my whole house.

‘So, this place is kinda quiet. I thought the Prachs were a massive family.’

‘You’re here to, what, observe how my life’s going so you can report to someone? Sell your story to ShameStream?’

I ignore her jibe. ‘You got married, you and Chan, you moved in with his family? That’s so wonderful, congratulations, right? I mean, you’ve gotta be the first couple in school to’ve–

‘What school? Does this look like school? Was Moneyland SCHOOL, Eden?’

SCHOOLIt may be a luxurious mansion, but it’s cold and uninviting now. We’re drifting down the hallways. Windows disappear. Only walls, covered in paintings. Deep inside and getting darker.

‘Can’t you just get Chan and, like–like don’t you feel our whole history’s sort of intermingled? C’mon Es, we go back to kindergarten. We need to talk about what happened.’

‘Watch Inside the Famine Five on TuneFlix. I think that covered what happened to us pretty good. Showed us we all should’ve been a lot more scared of you.’

Inside the Famine Five‘I didn’t come here to fight, Es. I want you to tell me what’s been happening in the world. I’ve been locked up, for crying out loud. No one else had to go to jail. Just me.’

‘Where’s your so-called baby?’ Esther sneers. ‘It’s actually half Adam’s.’

That’s cold. I strut up and loom over her. ‘Bring Chan out. I wanna get on with this.’

‘He’s online.’

‘Can’t you interrupt him?’

‘It’s a bit more permanent than that.’

‘The Cloud?’

Her cheeks rise and her forehead lowers like a roller door, protecting her eyes. ‘What’ve you heard?’

Esther’s seriously paranoid. Combine that with this empty house, something is massively wrong. I just can’t work out what.

‘Look, my dad’s gone to The Cloud too. Half the people I used to know and love are on The goddamn Cloud. And I literally don’t understand what that means. Where IS it? It’s, what, a retreat? Like an ashram or something? People are going there to get away from the city? WHERE, Es? Please just tell me and I’ll go away, I’ll leave you and Chan to run the Eden Shepherd Hate Club.’

WHERE‘We never hated you.’

‘You guys TESTified against me. That’s hate.’

‘That’s justice. You made us crawl along the road for crab-apples under that dumbass dome. You should’ve sold out to Adam. We all could’ve had an alright year if you’d just let him do his role-playing thing.’

‘Except it wasn’t playing. He took all the food. He made us starve.’

‘YOU took care of yourself. My Chanvatey, he starved. You turned his beautiful body into… into…’ Esther puts a knuckle on her lips and swallows a sob. Dawdling in front of a cabinet of expensive-looking china, she swivels left then right in her chair, uncomfortable. ‘He’s happy now. That’s all you need to know. My man’s in a soft fluffy cloud. He eats whatever he wants. He talks to me–here.’ Esther presses her org, types h***:://www.thecloud.mech/something into the web, brings up a gorgeous website, finds the profiles of a grinning, happy, half-photoshopped picture of Chan with thick sunglasses plastered to his face.

heThe glasses look like they’re a little tight. Extremely tight. Like they’re welded to his eye sockets. Permanent.

‘It’s all over soon anyway,’ Esther decides at last. ‘You wanna see Chan so bad, come with me.’

Esther wheels away, turning corners till she slides into an elevator, and we descend a floor, then two, then it’s noticeably darker, no windows, just artificial light from glowing monitors in the underground walls.

She puts a passcode into a keypad. I follow her rolling chair into a dim basement with eight, no, ten single beds. The light is grey-blue. This used to be a garage; there is AstroTurf across the concrete pad.

It reeks of pine floor cleaner. There are buckets of the stuff under every bed and collections of empty bottles.

It takes a moment before my eyes accept the thin light. Basement-garage. Far side of the building. A single glowing panel on the ceiling. On every bed, a human being lies asleep. This is a mental ward, a storehouse for comatose catatonic–

No. This is a morgue. These are a dozen corpses, linked by ethernet cables which connect in the corner in a small blinking box. One with long silver hair that’s got to be the matriarch. A tiny refrigerated girl in the shape of Chan’s baby sister. Pink unicorn hair clip with rhinestones. The whole family, permanently coma’d.

Every corpse has a pair of sunglasses fixed onto its mummified face. I can see the temples of the glasses; the arms are steel tubes with fibre optic cable ending in needles which disappear into each sleeper’s hairline. Something’s different about the nose pads, too–around the bridge of each person’s nose, the skin is a purply crimson like a fresh bruise. What was that thing we learned in school, where the psychiatrists used to get inside a person’s brain with steel to change their outlook. Harsh cold metal on brain lobes.

Lobotomy, that’s the word.

Comatose in a dusty garage suitable for smoggy cars, these people wear masks of contentment. Every one of the sleepers has their brain linked to the net. Every one of these corpses–including Chan, all hairy and saggy, with his hands laced over his crotch–has a wide grin.

I hear the door lock behind us. I turn slowly. Esther holds a pair of the thick glasses. She bites the protective plastic tips off the glasses’ pointed ends. I see their sharp nosepad-needles gleam, needles positioned perfectly to glide past each side of my nose-bridge and penetrate my eye socket and plunge directly into my–

Esther wheels forward, collides into my middle, tumbles out of her chair, gnashing, sorta laughing, Heg-heg-heg, excited. b***h has lost her mind. She used to be a wheelchair rugby representative; her arms are made of hard rubber. She’s tackled me and I’m falling, collapsing back against a metal trolley covered in sunglasses. She has my spine on the garage floor now, and she’s crawling up me, demented face leering. I still have a pair of glasses I’ve been turning over in my hands and I’m slashing at her face, using the temples of the glasses like claws to scratch her and she’s heavy, oh God she’s heavy, and–

Heg-heg-heg‘STOP, STOP, ESTHER, DON’T DO THIS.’

Her chest presses down. Black hair falls off her shoulders and suffocates me. I can barely see what I’m doing, ripping, battling, fighting. I have to get up, get away, but she is an alligator, powerful on the ground, her hair is masking my face, choking me, muffling my breathing, ‘I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING, GET OFF ME, GET–’

I’m lashing out, fingernails tensed, punching with the only weapon I have, the plastic glasses with the needles, and I remember that thing they taught us in rape prevention classes at school, how you’re supposed to jab a rapist right in the nose with the heel of your palm and my arm is pulling back for a solid punch and I extend and connect hard, brutal, whipping her head back and her hair flies off me and her weight is collapsing.

Her body falls away and blaps on the floor like a sack of grain.

blapI’ve jammed the pointed ends of the glasses squarely onto her face, right into the soft little nooks where the eye sockets lead into her brain.

Lights out.