Blueprints of the Afterlife

band had been living in an encampment a mile or so from town, fishing, hunting, staying out of the way as best they could. Then one day a teenage boy found one of the women in the woods at the edge of town, near the church. She was speaking in a strange dialect, which the boy described as sounding like a snake. A local priest, a man by the name of Wright, worked the townspeople into a panic and soon three volunteers set out to confront the Indians, leading to their massacre.”

“This is our work,” Rhonda said. “Finding people who hold some trace of that particular genetic line.”

“What’s so important about their genes?” Skinner asked.

“As you know, the Bionet operates according to various permissions levels,” Sal said. “These are all granted and managed by a variety of agencies but essentially it means all of us have read permissions with which we can download prescriptions, limited write permissions with which we can upload our immunities, and some of us—trained medical professionals, mostly—have administrator permissions. But there’s a level that overrides all of these. Super-admin permissions. We believe that these can unexpectedly appear in a person based on certain genetic predispositions. We’ve traced these genes back to this particular tribe.”

Rhonda said, “A super administrator could ensure that the Bionet is never again used to enslave anyone.”

“No more embodiments,” Skinner said, and thought of Jadie.

From the morgue Sal brought out a number of other pre-FUS volumes, issues of the paper dating from around Skinner’s twenty-first-century childhood. They had marked one volume with a scrap of cardboard. The paper in those awful days had printed photos of mass graves and decapitated corpses, images set amid ads for boat repair and chiropractors. And to think Bramble Falls was a small town. Just imagine what the Fucked Up Shit must have looked like in a major metropolis. You could pretty much plug any imagined scenario into the discourse on the FUS and come up with a delusion that somebody would believe. At times it seemed the only way to describe what had actually happened was to reach into the depths of myth. Folks screaming, running with eyes bleeding through canyons of concrete and steel as the sky rained asteroids that uncannily targeted famous landmarks. Shaky, hand-held cameras tracking radioactive Godzillas. Robot militias pillaging retirement communities. Automobiles bursting out of the twentieth stories of office towers. Vampires battling werewolves for supremacy of the night. And so on. Rhonda pointed to a local story illustrated with a photo. An impossibly old Native American man, sitting on a bench outside the drugstore, propping his knotty hands on an equally knotty walking stick, resting his chin on his hands. The story was little more than an expanded caption.

NATIVE ELDER CLAIMS EARLY TIES

TO BRAMBLE FALLS

An unexpected visitor strolled down Main Street Tuesday—Joseph Talleagle, a Native American man claiming to be 112 years old. After purchasing a bottle of water at Andy’s Handy Mart, Talleagle regaled a local audience with stories of his journeys over the years. Spry and good-humored, Talleagle claimed to have last visited Bramble Falls in 1899, though when asked for details of that visit the Native American elder demurred. “I got to keep walking,” said Talleagle. “That’s what I do. Walk and walk and walk.” He then tipped his battered leather hat and continued on his way up Two Snakes Trail.

“We’re working under the assumption that this Talleagle fellow is one of the survivors of the massacre of 1899,” Sal said. “And if there are more survivors, or if he had any offspring, the super-admin genes are floating around out there.”

“No more embodiments,” Skinner said again.

A cold wind off the lake dragged dead leaves in circles on Main Street. Skinner imagined Chiho worrying in his absence. She didn’t need his bullshit, though she’d been putting up with it since day one. Their courtship. One afternoon in a sidewalk cafe, in the days after armistice, Skinner sat across from an agent from Microsoft. Contractor like him, guy with hair like a 1970s presidential candidate and a grin so wide you could have spread a qwerty keyboard across his dental work. Name was Dan Thomas, something nondescript like that. Thomas wanted Skinner to accept an offer to work on the MS private security force. They drank coffee out of ceramics and talked about stock options. Dan Thomas fake laughed at one of Skinner’s half-jokes. Thomas described the benefits, the unlimited free soft drinks Skinner could expect when he pledged to MS. As Skinner opened his mouth to say he still had two years on his current contract with Boeing, the guy’s head exploded. Or not exploded exactly. More like cleaved down the middle as per a machete whack to an upright watermelon. An eye on one side, an eye on the other, in the middle a canyon of brainy gristle. Skinner hit the deck, unsafetied his Fresca, and tried to locate the assailant through the chaos of legs both pedestrian- and furniture-related. No second shot arrived. They must’ve gotten their target. A crew showed up, all bomb-squad helmets and flak jackets, and Skinner was hustled roughly into the back of an armored minivan inside of which he was briefed by a higher-up asshole at Boeing. What it boiled down to was: this Dan Thomas fucker had been about to assassinate him. “We had one of our guys liquidate him,” said the higher-up asshole. Skinner thanked the higher-up asshole and asked who the sniper was. “Classified,” the higher-up asshole said, and they dumped Skinner out a couple blocks from his apartment. One of the crew was so kind as to have retrieved Skinner’s partially eaten blueberry scone from the scene.

Then there was a series of half-seen interstitial memories: raids, bad guys beaten against cinder block walls, Skinner jamming a coat hanger heated up on a stove into an informant’s ear canal. It just got ugly from there, nothing this old man trudging down the main drag of his hometown a century removed from the horrors had any right to be proud of, all these acts predicated on fear, that epic wedge between the virtues one imagines oneself to embody and the barbarity of how one survives.

For a time Skinner kept finding himself in the company of folks who just keeled over in his presence, their viscera suddenly externalized by a silenced bullet fired from a discreet location. Outside a Krispy Kreme as he bit into a classic glazed, an approaching businessman jerked like he was performing a dance move but it was a round passing through his rib cage. While he was in line at a coffee shop, anticipating that cinnamon mocha, a guy came up behind him reaching into his suit jacket for the butt of his firearm when out popped his eye followed by a gurgle of blood. Once, as he walked across the street, a passing car’s windows crinkled and webbed under a volley of rounds; later the authorities identified the driver and passenger as paid killers toting unregistered OfficeMax semiautomatics. In each instance Skinner swallowed hard and scanned the surrounding office buildings for telltale glints of muzzle. But she was too fast, too economical. She had probably already compacted her rifle into its components and blended in with the last-minute Christmas shoppers a block away. Skinner came to consider the sniper his guardian angel and fell in love with the idea of her even though he had yet to discover she was a she. He wanted to believe it was a woman who was saving his ass. As if to extinguish this romantic notion, Chiho one afternoon missed and took a chunk out of Skinner’s left calf.

The scene was a crowded city park, now in full-terror mode, with kids being snatched up by parental types— adults whose legs wobbled as they screamed and fled. Skinner had become intimate with the cobblestones, each one imprinted with the name of a person or organization who’d given the city fifty bucks so it could buy some new playground equipment. And this was a ridiculous detail, but Skinner’s ice-cream cone was melting and upended out of arm’s reach. He was embarrassed that the sniper had seen him walking across the park eating an ice-cream cone with sprinkles on it. Of all the wussy things to eat. Not only that, a strawberry one. (Why were folks always trying to whack him when he was enjoying sugary treats?) But he couldn’t stare too long at that sad and abandoned confection because the assassin, a guy who basically appeared to have bought his outfit at a men’s store called the Assassin’s Clothier—black jacket, pants, sunglasses, white shirt, black tie—anyhoo this assassin’d been merely clipped as well, or rather a round had obliterated his right hand, the hand he typically used to fire his gun, but unfortunately he was ambidextrous and as he reached for his pistol, part of his neck disappeared and it was like anatomy class in the park with the wailing people and the melting high-fat dessert. And don’t forget that Skinner’s calf was spraying blood in a sort of fountainy arc, and dammit he’d really been enjoying that cone! Then, within seconds it seemed, Skinner’s guardian angel descended from her cloud and was hauling him up over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry, wearing his 250-lb. body like a stole, sprinting toward the door of a van opened to reveal a couple guys with headsets shouting frantically into throat-lozenge-shaped microphones in front of a wall of surveillance gear. Chiho tossed Skinner inside and scrambled on top of him. He got a good look at her. She had a