Phantom of Apocalypse

Chapter 2

Under the cover of darkness, hunters move swiftly in the streets of the Zone where drones, broken cameras and other detection devices cannot reveal all that takes place inside dilapidated buildings. The surveillance industry has given birth to an entirely new thriving crime wave inside the Zone. Police often join human hunters, making daily survival difficult for the mutant population. Bleeding like rabid-infected dogs in back alleys, wounded mutants enter the hospital emergency room knowing they may never leave alive. Medical staff affords priority to patients covered by health insurance based on their HCS value.

The more dispirited with slim prospects for recovery sign the organ donor consent forms and go directly to the hospital’s ‘Altered Wing’ for processing. Some beg Dr. Jeff to let them become medical research volunteers. This is the fastest way for their relatives to have another chance at life. A few will die in the bio-medical division for organ donation and bio-android division. As a courtesy, relatives of the deceased are eligible to receive medical attention and procreation rights, or relocation to the mutant sanctuary colony in Oregon. As much as some are determined to kill themselves because they have no prospects of securing freedom from a life of servitude, most mutants want to live and procreate.

As part of public policy for population control, hospitals use volunteer mutants and ex-cons as subjects in d**g experiments. As an ex-con, Roy the street boxer volunteered for the program, placing his fate in Dr. Jeff. Instead of discovering a cure for the plague, the doctor’s experiment left Roy even less able to cope with the symptoms of the plague than when he entered the experiment. As long as he has a job at diner and he is not behind bars, Roy is glad he volunteered for Dr. Jeff’s experiment although he was no better than a mutant.

Roy & the Android

Standing behind the food counter, Roy’s bio-skin t-shirt depicts the Statue of Liberty holding a human skeleton upside down. “Green-Recycled-Soul,” reads the inscription. Customers and employees at Joe’s Dream Diner are convinced Roy is as dysfunctional as his antiquated android companion. Most of the infected wear bio-skin for protection from deadly sun-rays. Corporations donate bio-skin to their employees whose HCS shares they own. Indifferent to his low stock value, Roy only wants to remove the microchip that controls his brain and prevents him from feeling free. He was a toddler when the Middle East-Africa Water War of the 2150s and revolutionary activities erupted. After the war, the largest finance companies in the world began trading commoditized labor in the form of HCS once it became obvious that government bailouts were not stimulating stock markets.

Along with the Guardians who run the city, state, and federal government, the Predestined Superiors, “Life Lords” as people commonly call them, own HCS stock. Despite incentives to raise his HCS value, Roy refuses to wear bio-skin promoting corporations, churches, or government agencies such as the Decency Legion, society’s moral despot answering to Guardians. Because of his rugged defiant look and street boxing past, he could easily pass for a rebel. Like others in town planning an escape on Independence Day, Roy has his own plans.

Shortly after the plague, the Dream Diner’s owner, Joe, sold his employees’ HCS stock to the g*n factory’s stockholding company and used the money to add to a vast g*n collection. Dream Diner fry-cook Shorty, a former theologian, initially objected to the g*n company owning his HCS on moral grounds. Once he found out that the g*n factory sponsored the church where Shorty worshipped, he felt morally appeased. To demonstrate his faith, Shorty has inscribed the church’s emblem on his bio-skin: ‘Free and equal under God and country .” As a reminder to its customers of its commitment to God and country, the local g*n factory used the same emblem.

Offering a unique ambiance with a vast g*n collection the Dream Diner is a place where Joe displays traditional values on the diner’s walls. Unlike his boss, Joe who identified with the g*n, Roy used his fists to express himself. Scars on his face from prison fights are proof of his will to survive. The scar on his upper left arm is from the microchip he removed with a kitchen knife. Terrified that the microchip had replaced his soul, he removed it bleeding profusely while running from the police. Once in custody, they tortured him until he confessed that he was working with the rebels. Although the court absolved him of any rebel links, he was sentenced to prison for illegally removing the microchip and crossing the town’s electric fence.

As healthy as any s******c prison guard or inmate, Roy fought gangs trying to recruit him. Rebels urged him to suppress aggression and rediscover his pre-plague humanity by joining them. He ridiculed them as he did gangs of the infected. Every day was a struggle to create some meaning in his life immersed in conflict for no apparent reason other than it made him feel safer. “Unless I fight,” he tells Shorty standing next to him behind the diner’s counter, “I just don’t feel right. You know what I mean Shorty, right? This thing inside me pushes me to do things I don’t want.” Shorty advises him that the only source of fulfillment is faith in God. Stubbornly refusing to embrace Shorty’s patronizing suggestion, Roy trusts only his aggressive instincts to survive. Nor is he convinced that everyone is worthy of freedom and equality, as rebels preach; at least not down here on earth where harmony with people and nature is as rare as clean air, fresh food or chemically-free water.

Along with his limping dog next to a used android that Roy calls Adam, he lives in a small room above the diner. Both dog and android have the American flag painted on their backs with the slogan ‘ free and equal under God and country’ . Never allowing anyone to invade his privacy, Roy becomes vicious if any one even appears to threaten his dog or the android. When he first moved to New Heaven after a government-imposed relocation to protect rural areas from rebels, he won the android in a street fight. That was a few days before he found the wounded stray dog. Indicative of a trace of empathy buried deep inside his pre-plague mind, he rescued the dog from gangs target-shooting in the alley behind the diner. Most of the infected have replaced their pets with robotic or hologram pets. This how they remain free of empathy for the animal that would aggravate symptoms of the plague. Live pets belong to mutants and rebels who mock the infected for obsessing over machines and living in a virtual reality necro-world.

“I don’t need a pet nor an android, not as long as I have the Lord by my side,” Shorty spurts out. An emotional prisoner to angry outbursts, Roy belittles Shorty’s religion as plot of evil priests trying to take control of peoples’ souls and pocketbooks. “My father worshipped God. Let me tell you, my father was no man of God,” he tells Shorty standing at the opposite end of the food counter. “Besides, worshipping God is no different than worshipping Guardians and Life Lords.” Cutting slices of processed frozen squares before frying them in soy oil, Shorty ignores Roy who was in prison for crimes against the state. After mumbling a quick prayer under his breath, the former theologian asks Roy to pray with him. “While you’re at it, why don’t you pray for this microchip in my skull to disappear and for the plague that’s making me sick?”

When he was incarcerated, Roy complained to the prison psychiatrist that the microchip prevented him from having a grip on his mind. “It is like I can’t feel that I can control my mind, you know what I mean? I can’t stand the feeling that the chip is reading my thoughts, even my moods before I know what they are. It makes me feel like I’m in a cage inside my body.” Despite trying, he cannot ignore the microchip that makes him feel as programmed as his android. Fixated on Adam, the dysfunctional android that serves him, he appreciates that it never questions anything about his horrific past. Not only does Adam make him feel human, it affords him the sense of control he lacks in his life. Shorty teases him that he envies the android because it can feel neither plague-induced aggression nor pain. To justify his dependence on the android, Roy mocks mutants who mix their blood and fluids like animals. “They reproduce like the livestock on my father’s farm,” Picking up a paper napkin, he wipes his mouth to indicate his disgust with mutants. “They l**t after each other. Now that’s something that would make any normal person sick these days. Adam is better than any human companion. He’s loyal only to me and never questions a thing.”

As far as Shorty is concerned, Roy is barely a step above mutant and a couple of steps below his android with which he has a strange emotional relationship. “It seems to me Roy that you’re mixing your meds again. I hope you’re not committing sinful acts with that broken-down android, are you,” he jokes, directing his attention to a dozen or so diner customers who simply stare at him with icy expressions. Down on his luck because of the plague, the former theologian goes out of his way to demean Roy for dropping out of school and failing to raise his HCS stock value. Unlike Shorty who sees his life as a religious mission, Roy has no transcending purpose in life; he just wants to return to the family farm and live there until death natural or otherwise.

Frantically placing street-fight bets on the I-cell surgically attached to his left wrist, the street boxer notices something that makes him smile. To prevent sharp pain induced by the ephemeral thrills he is experiencing, he takes a pocketknife and punctures his forearm until blood flows freely through the cloth towel he holds over the wound. To prove he can withstand pain, he places salt and pepper on the wound. “This is how my father treated my flesh wounds back on the farm,” he explains. Having witnessed self-mutilations and suicides amid the plague, employees and customers are hardly impressed.

Within minutes after Roy’s self-inflicted injury, Dr. Jeff and his friend “Rebel Red” come into the diner. A cloned biosynthetic human, Dr. Jeff enjoys greater tolerance for plague symptoms than the rest of the population. Nervously biting his swollen lower lip, he keeps twirling an addictive capsule he calls the ‘soul pill’. Placing it on his tongue, as Red is watching without making a gesture, he quickly changes his mind and puts it back in his pocket. He appears embarrassed that his pregnant friend knows he is a d**g addict. Irritably, he gazes at the antique g*n collection covering the diner’s walls. Advising Roy that the salt is not enough for the wound on his arm, he asks about his health. Having treated Roy after his release from prison, the doctor knows that the seeds of the virus were inside of him long before the plague.

“Remember what you and I discussed so many times? Every time you feed the killer instinct, it rejuvenates and makes you sicker. I realize it’s very difficult, but you need to resist that impulse. Use distractions to preoccupy your mind. I suppose these days we all seem to be running out of distractions. The virus forces us to become more and more like machines of one sort or the other. That way, it’s easier to turn against each other and ourselves.” Hardly appreciative of Dr. Jeff’s medical observations, several customers in the diner belonging to necro-cultist gangs mock him. Masking their dark intentions behind zombie expressions, they tell him to go back to his hospital and preach joy and empathy to dying patients. Before he has a chance to respond, his friend Red intervenes.