Chapter 18: No One Deserves to Die in a Cage

I must have dozed off for a few hours, enough at least to make me feel alive again. My dream journal wasn't by hand, and it made me nervous. The sun was up, and it wasn't snowing anymore. I climbed off the bed and looked out of the window. The lake looked black under the gray winter sky. The events of the last night seemed like a strange dream, too unbelievable to be real. But they were. I remembered the muffled sounds of bodies hitting the snow, the dark shapes of rusting trains in the abandoned railroad museum, and the acrid smell of burnt wool in the small room that served Zero as shelter.

Gaunt, mad Zero. Will I be like him one day? The thought scared me.

I went to the other room. Mickey was sleeping on the couch, curled up under a blanket. Asleep, he looked even younger than usual. His computer was rustling quietly in the corner. I moved a mouse a little and it woke up. Mickey's desktop was well organized, with icons neatly assembled into small groups in the corners. There was a group for various video games, another one for work-related folders, and so on. Separate from all the icons, a lonesome text file labeled 'Count Zero' loomed in the middle of the screen. But I didn't touch it yet. Instead, I just looked at the background image for a while.

It was an old photo, digitized with care. On it, a little blond boy was laughing, sitting on the shoulders of a large man. Beside them, a delicate woman was smiling into the camera. She had very beautiful blond hair. The man was the only brunette in the picture, but I could see the resemblance. His eyes were gray, like Mickey's, and they had similar shape to their jaws. He was wearing a green sheepskin coat.

'That's my dad.'

Mickey yawned and sat up, stretching.

'How is he?'

'Dead.'

I sighed.

'And your mom?'

'Yeah, her too. Hey, do you want some ice cream?'

I nodded.

Mickey stood up and scuttled over to the kitchen. He returned after a couple of minutes with two bowls of strawberry ice cream and the half-finished can of energy drink, which we shared.

We enjoyed our bowls in silence, watching the lake. The ships flowed slowly through the port. Man, when was the last I've eaten ice cream? Must have been two or three years ago, at a farewell party for one of the residents at the nursing home I used to clean. I've forgotten how fantastic it tastes.

'My old man was the best.' Mickey said after some time. 'A real man, like in the movies. He could do anything with his hands. Fix a car, build a swing, stuff like that. It was like magic. He was working the shift, and also looking after the house, and also helping the old lady next door with her chores. Even though she was a human, from the camp days. That's the kind of a man he was. Then the last factories closed down, and everyone in the neighborhood was kind of lost. But not my dad. He just wouldn't let anything bring him down.'

Mickey scraped the bottom of his bowl.

'... Not even the fucking Disease. When it came, he just shrugged and smiled. He was okay with it. But he wasn't going to let no fucking PA tell him how to die. Hell no! No one deserves to die in a cage, that was what he said. He said: "When death comes for dinner, you're the one who gets to decide what to cook.'

Mickey smiled.

'So, dad cooked us dinner. Meatballs with mashed potatoes and gravy. We ate, talked, and laughed. Then he hugged us, went upstairs, took his rifle, and went out on his own terms. Like a real man should.'

It was too easy to imagine, in every heartbreaking detail. And, at the same time, so hard. I remembered the last days me my mom and I had together. They were different from what Mickey described. More dark, more lonesome. The guilt I haven't felt for a long time stung me, and I banished those memories away.

'Amen to that.' I said.

A distant wail of a ship's horn struck the window and died, echoing over the lake.

'Is that why you want to find Zero?'

Mickey nodded.

'Zero was a lot like my dad. Strong. He deserves better than to rot at the Farm.'

'He can be dangerous.'

'If he is, we'll make sure that he doesn't hurt anyone.'

The ominous meaning of his words hung in the air, unspoken.

'So, did you find anything?'

He smiled.

'Sure. Let me show you.'

We moved to the computer, and Mickey pulled up the text file I noticed earlier.

'So. Sergei Duncan was, indeed, a local wraith.'

'How do you know?'

'When they take someone away, there's a certain pattern. You can only see it if you know how the PA operates, which we do. There are small inconsistencies in the timeline of a person's death. When they took your mom, they hadn't outright declared her dead, right?'

I shook my head.

'No. I received a certificate of death almost a year later, in the mail.'

Mickey nodded.

'That's how it usually goes. But the taken are never listed as missing during their time on the Farm. All the loose ends are tied up. They don't just stop coming to work, there's a letter of resignation that magically appears on someone's desk, and so on. But if you know what to look for, the signs are apparent. Plus, he had the usual wraith tells: low profile, changed jobs frequently, never stayed in one place for too long.'

'You got it all from Google?'

Mickey laughed.

'No. I had to dig hard. But it's what I do. Still, older folk are tough to research. Technology wasn't as prevalent back then as it is now.'

He scrolled down to a picture of a dark-skinned girl in her twenties, with an unruly main of curly hair.

'Now, young people like us are much easier to track. Meet Tanya Duncan, Sergei's daughter.'

She was quite beautiful, like many people of mixed heritage are. There was a broad smile on her face, but it didn't really touch her eyes. They were green and somber, almost cold.

'With us, it's almost too easy. I've never understood why, but nowadays people feel compelled to plaster their lives all over social media. With a little bit of determination, you can find out almost everything about them.'

He pointed to the screen.

'Take Tanya here. It took me an hour to learn where she lives, where she works, where she spends her free time. What's her pet's name, what type of people she dates. It's pseudo-intellectual assholes, by the way.'

I shifted nervously.

'Can you... can you find all that info about me, too?'

Mickey chuckled.

'Well, I tried, of course. But you're careful, man. Like, surprisingly so. Not much of a digital presence. The only things I found out were the name of the library you frequent and that you had won the countrywide mathematical Olympiad when you were fourteen.'

Right. They gave me two thousand dollars for that, and the PA gave me an unpleasant talk about the dangers of being in the spotlight. I kept my academic accomplishments in check from that point on.

I looked through the information Mickey had gathered on Tanya Duncan, thinking. Despite his boasting, there were a lot of white spots. The portrait it painted was useful, but incomplete.

'So, if we were to talk to her without drawing too much attention, where would we do that?'

Mickey scrolled a little bit further and pointed to another photo, this time of a group of laughing people, with Tanya standing on the far left. The text above the photo read "Annual Solstice Celebration!".

'My guess would be at that party. It's tomorrow, and she goes every year. But we can't just show up uninvited, right?'

I looked at the photo and winced.

'Crap.'

'What? Do you know these guys?'

I sighed and stopped myself from cursing.

'I know this one.' I said, pointing to the photo.

There, a couple of people away from Tanya Duncan, Ted the Drummer was grinning at the camera with an unlit cigarette in his teeth.