Wakers Page 2

  He had spent half of fifth grade thinking of ways that he could die without being able to side step in time. Like if somebody sprang from ambush and bashed him in the head with a meat tenderizer, immediately rendering him unconscious. They could stay there beating him until his brain was tartare on the sidewalk, and he would never be awake enough to side step.

  Nobody wanted to kill him.

  But if somebody did, there would be ways.

  Back to his dilemma in the dark in the tomb room. What if no direction led anywhere useful? Would he then return to his healing cave? Take the clothes back off, fold them neatly, and get inside again? He couldn’t pull down the lid because it had slid into some neverland without a trace. Should he choose a reality in which he never caused the lid to open? Then what, wait some long or even infinite time for somebody to notice he was awake?

  Why should he go back? He was blind now, but he was blind back there, too, and he wouldn’t learn anything by sitting around. If there were wardens or alien zookeepers watching him (he was flashing now on every movie and TV show he had ever seen) they should at least see him try to add more information to his meager supply.

  He used gentle pressure from his fingers to push off simultaneously from both boxes under his hands, and tried to keep a steady direction as he moved out into nothingness. At first he felt gingerly with his toes before taking a step, but that was slow going, and if there was a precipice, he’d find out no matter how careful he was. Maybe there’d be a handrail. Dad worked in risk management for a school district—he would have made the schools put in handrails or guardrails on any floor that led to a drop-off or downward stairs.

  How many steps? He hadn’t counted. Eighteen boxes, but no idea how many steps he had taken after leaving them behind.

  His foot kicked something. A wall. The slipper offered scant protection, so Laz was relieved that he had been walking so gingerly. He wouldn’t have wanted to jam a toe.

  It was a full-height wall, as high as he could reach. Should he go left or right? Left won, so it was his right hand trailing along the wall, feeling for any kind of gap or doorjamb.

  It was a doorframe. The door was closed. He couldn’t find a handle at any reasonable height.

  There was no light switch or any kind of protuberance or indentation on the wall he had walked along. But on the far side of the door, there was a raised rectangle with two depressions in it, one over the other. A light switch?

  He pressed the upper one.

  The door opened.

  There was a bright light in the corridor on the other side.

  The corridor ran parallel to the wall Laz had just walked along. There were no written signs visible from where Laz was. He did not dare walk out into the corridor because the door might close behind him.

  But now that some light was spilling into the big room, he could see that it was filled with row after row of healing caves—if that’s what they were.

  Would the door stay open?

  Laz pressed the lower button. The door closed and everything was dark again.

  He pressed the upper button. The door opened back up. Light.

  Leaving the door open behind him, Laz walked to the nearest healing box. Now he could see that the lid was fully transparent. That had not been obvious before, because the whole room had been dark. Now, though, there was enough ambient light for him to see that this box was indeed occupied.

  By a mummy. A desiccated human shape. This time he could see the whole corpse at once.

  Laz cried out and stepped back toward the corridor.

  Is that what I would have become, if I had never pushed on the lid and caused it to open?

  He forced himself to go back and look into the box with the corpse inside.

  The display panel was there, but everything said zero. Clearly this person had not had a heart rate worth recording for a long time.

  Laz went to the next box, the next, the next. If these had once been healing caves, they had failed at their function. These occupants were beyond healing.

  Most of them seemed to be small. Many were child-sized. Same size box as Laz’s though, as if they were supposed to grow into them, like oversized hand-me-downs from older siblings—a concept which Laz, as an only child, had never experienced for himself.

  Now as he looked out over the dim array of boxes, he knew that this was no hospital. It was more like a graveyard. All these boxes must contain dead bodies.

  Why had his cave still functioned? Did these boxes all go dark because the clone inside was dead? Or did the occupants die because the boxes went dark?

  Why am I alive? And why hasn’t anyone come to meet me? To yell at me for getting out of my box without permission? It would be nice to get into a brisk argument with some idiotic adult who was castigating him for not obeying rules that Laz had never heard of.

  Laz enjoyed arguments in which the opponent was locked into positions whose absurdity made it impossible for them to speak sensibly. Other kids would give up and walk away—or get mad and jab at him. But adults always had a completely unjustified certainty that if they just talked long enough at a younger person, they would prevail.

  In this case, Laz would have liked the argument for a completely different reason: It would mean that there was another person present. It would mean he was not alone.

  Laz walked back to the open door and stepped halfway through, one foot inside, one outside of the room. He saw controls for the door on the outside, too.

  He would have to try the outside buttons. If they did not work and the door closed behind him, then he could decide whether to side step into a reality in which he had not chosen to step outside, or just live with the decision and continue exploring the building.

  He pressed one set of buttons and the door closed and reopened. He pressed the other, and bright ceiling lamps flooded the interior of the huge room with light.

  It turned out the corridor lights had not been bright at all—in fact, they were as dim as the EXIT lights in a theater. Laz realized that even the lights now illuminating the room were probably not all that bright—his eyes just weren’t accustomed to having light at all.

  His impressions of the big room had been correct. By chance he had gone the shortest way from his healing cave to the nearest wall; there had to be upwards of fifty rows in every direction. He could see that there were doors about every thirty meters along the walls, leading somewhere. It wasn’t Laz’s job to find out where, unless it turned out that this corridor led nowhere.

  Laz turned off the light. He closed the door. Maybe there was another functioning healing cave inside another room, and maybe he would locate it and find a living human being.

  Later. First he needed to find out where everybody was. Who was in control of this operation.

  No. First he had to find a drink of water.

  * * *

  In the course of wandering around the corridors, he found two drinking fountains, but the chilling unit wasn’t working in either one, and when he pressed the button, water didn’t flow. It didn’t even dribble out. The water seemed to have been cut off.

  But I didn’t dry out in my box, thought Laz. Moisture got to me somehow. My box kept me alive. Something in this place is still working.

  The corridors formed a maze—or maybe it was a perfectly consistent pattern that he just didn’t understand. There were doors in other walls, but they didn’t respond to a button press.

  Then it dawned on him that there was something else that none of the walls had.

  Windows.

  Maybe he was underground.

  He went to the end of a wide corridor. It butted up against a wall.

  To the left and right, though, there were buttons. No doors, no numbers, no labels, just buttons. He pressed one.

  The whole floor, from the end wall to about six meters out, rose smoothly. A low wall appeared on the outside edge, enough to keep a rolling cart from falling off. The ceiling parted above him. He went past another floor, with
dimly lighted corridors. This time when the ceiling above the elevator platform opened, there was a much brighter light. It was daylight, Laz knew, simply from the quality of the light. Nothing artificial. Sun through glass, that’s what he was seeing.

  The floor with his healing cave was two floors below daylight.

  The elevator stopped—apparently this was as high as it went. The low barrier wall was gone. Laz stepped out into the sunlit corridor, which quickly led to a large open glass-walled reception area.

  There was nobody at the reception desk. Nobody at the doors. Nobody on the furniture.

  And not much furniture, either. It was as if all the good pieces had been removed, and only the ones with tatty upholstery were left. Like at an underfunded school.

  There had once been electronic equipment at the reception station, but all that remained were sockets of various kinds.

  This place screamed, Out of business.

  Yet one of those healing caves two floors down had contained a living person. Did you all just forget me?

  There were big letters on the glass wall. They were backward—they were sending their message out onto the street. But Laz easily read them, though he had to walk through the large open space for a while before he was sure he had seen all the letters.

  From the outside, passersby would have read the word “Vivipartum.” It sounded like a company name. Laz thought through his Latin roots and figured that it might mean something like “born alive.” He had once had “parturition”—birth—as a vocabulary word, and “vivid” clearly was related to life.

  And that was his confirmation of what this place was. Not a hospital at all. Not even a retirement home for dying people hoping to be kept alive till there was a cure.

  He remembered the articles and essays and op-eds and diatribes and slogans from three or four years ago, when the technology for cloning and fast-growing human bodies had been developed. At that time, cloning was justified solely as a means of supplying organs and limbs for the genetic owner, in case things went badly and a transplant was needed. No more hoping for a liver donor or heart donor, no more matching blood types and using immunosuppressants. All transplant needs were met using organs and limbs that were genetically identical to the transplant recipient.

  The clones will never be brought to consciousness, the proponents assured everyone. They will never have legal existence as people. They are not citizens. They are organ and limb banks, with individual proprietors whose DNA had been used to create them.

  Meanwhile, religions were in a frenzy over the question of whether clones had souls, whether they were tainted by original sin, whether they were eligible for redemption. They were never alive and could not be resurrected; they were definitely alive and to kill one in order to harvest a vital organ was murder. So many people were sure that their view was the only one a decent person could have.

  This was all mildly interesting to Laz as a kid. He remembered that the courts had allowed cloning and harvesting to continue, under the legal theory that clones never achieved consciousness or acted upon their own volition in any way, and were therefore nonpersons in the eyes of the law. Property.

  The controversy didn’t die down completely, so the big cloning corporations spun off the cloning operations into a lot of smaller companies with different names. They all pretended to be in another line of work, and most of them actually conducted other businesses.

  In this Vivipartum building, all the rows of boxed clones were underground.

  Maybe when the owners of the clones stopped making their payments, the life support was cut off and the clones all died. That made sense to Laz. These weren’t people, so nobody cared if they died.

  But somebody had kept up payments on Laz’s body, so he lived.

  And something else. The clones were never supposed to achieve sentience or volitional behavior. Yet here was Laz walking around, full of memories of a childhood that this body had never lived through. If he was in fact a clone.

  He was a clone with a memory.

  Had the technology moved forward, without anybody reporting on it? Could they take the memories out of the original owner’s brain and then play them into the brain of the clone? Laz had never heard of such a technology, but then, after the huge brouhaha about cloning in the first place, the companies would keep such a development completely under wraps, because it would reopen the whole person/nonperson debate again, and who knew where the courts would land?

  Laz had not been cloned to provide body parts for some older version of Laz. Laz had been given the memories of his life up to age seventeen. Laz was being prepared to be a replacement.

  Ridiculous. Why replace somebody who wasn’t dead? If his older original self had died, they could only revive him if they had recorded his memories while he was alive. Laz had no memory of that. If somebody judged a teenager like him to be important enough to record, Laz would not have forgotten it.

  If his original self was alive, why would they be prepping Laz to replace him?

  Maybe they now put memories into all the clones. Maybe so that they could do a brain transplant, if that was necessary. And it was just random chance that Laz’s clone had survived when so many others downstairs had died.

  Maybe I’m not a clone at all. Maybe I’ve read this whole situation wrong.

  In the whole time he had been standing in the glass-walled reception area, not a single vehicle had passed by on the street outside.

  Laz walked to the window, then to another spot in the glass wall, and he saw that the parking lot wasn’t empty. There were a few cars in it, but they were parked any which way. Like nobody cared. And there were a couple of cars with people in them, but they weren’t moving. Neither the cars nor the people.

  There were crash bars on the doors—strictly according to fire code—but Laz was afraid again that once he went through the doors and let them close behind him, he wouldn’t be able to get back in. Besides, he didn’t know if the weather outside was sunny and hot or sunny and cold. He sure wasn’t dressed for cold.

  He pushed open the outside door. A blast of air came in. Cold. But not bitterly cold. Colder than Los Angeles. More like San Francisco standing near the water.

  Holding one door open, he pulled on the handle of the other. Locked.

  He looked for a way to unlock it. If nobody had noticed him so far, he wasn’t going to count on being able to knock on the door and have somebody let him back in. He stepped back into the doorway and looked for a way to unlock the door mechanically. No such.

  So he pulled one of the tatty sofas over to the door and awkwardly pushed it out between the two doors, to hold them both open. Surely this would bring some kind of security guy into the reception area.

  It didn’t.

  Laz went outside and walked toward a car with a guy in it.

  A dead guy. A guy who had been dead for a long time. A guy with a smashed-in head. Or a blasted head. There was no gun in the car, though, if he had killed himself.

  The other car had a couple in it. Also dead. A long time dead. And a bottle that must have held pills. Suicide?

  The other cars were all empty.

  How long ago had they died? Why hadn’t anybody cleaned up the mess? Why had three people chosen the same parking lot to kill themselves, one by gunshot and two by overdose? And who had removed the gunshot guy’s pistol? Why had they left the empty pill bottle? Somebody had done some cleanup, yet they had left these corpses.

  For me to find? thought Laz.

  It’s not about you, Laz could hear his mother saying. Don’t be such a drama queen, Laz. The world doesn’t revolve around you.

  But what if nobody else was ever going to come out of that building to this parking lot? thought Laz.

  The pill guy was wearing a jacket.

  Could Laz wear a jacket whose owner had rotted away inside it?

  A gust of wind told him, Yes, he could, because it was cold out here. He would try to replace it with something not so disgusti
ng as soon as he could.

  The car door opened when he pulled on the handle. Not locked. Laz tugged on the jacket. The body kind of fell apart inside it. Much of the body came out of the car with the jacket, but then fell out of it onto the asphalt. Laz felt a moment of nausea, a moment of horror, but he knew that the people in this car did not pose any danger to him, so he paused a moment to let his rational mind take control again.

  Laz unzipped the jacket, shook it, beat it against the car to get all the body parts out of it. Then he pulled it on. It didn’t smell. Well, it did, but not as bad as the inside of the car had smelled, and he could stand it. It blocked the wind. It was long enough to protect Laz’s butt and privates as well as his stomach and chest and arms. It would keep him from dying of exposure wearing paper clothing out here.

  Was that why they left these bodies? For him? So he’d realize there had been some kind of cataclysm, that civilization had ended and bodies were left where they died—and so that he could also salvage important articles of clothing from the corpses?

  They could have left him a note and a nice warm set of clothes.

  He reached back into the car and felt in the guy’s pockets, trying not to stare down into the pelvic cavity surrounded by the waistline of the pants.

  Nothing. No wallet, no car keys. No keys in the ignition, though he realized that this car would certainly have had a proximity key.

  He went around to the other side because he saw the woman had a purse. He opened it. What would he do with a makeup compact? It had a mirror in the lid. He closed it, put it in his jacket pocket. There was also a small pocket knife. That might come in handy. But that was all. Surely women carried more than this in their purses.

  Missing car keys. Missing wallet, missing money, missing almost everything. Somebody had taken from these bodies everything they didn’t want Laz to have. He was allowed to have a small knife and a mirror. He could have a jacket. Nice of them.

  He shuddered in the chilly breeze and gathered his thoughts. These things were not directed at him, at Lazarus Davit Hayerian, seventeen-year-old high school senior and smart mouth extraordinaire. Beware narcissism, you stupid heap.