MaddAddam

Zeb in the Dark

It’s evening. Toby has dodged her storytime session with the Crakers. Those stories take a lot out of her. Not only does she have to put on the absurd red hat and eat the ritual fish, which isn’t always what you’d call cooked, but there’s so much she needs to invent. She doesn’t like to tell lies, not deliberately, not lies as such, but she skirts the darker and more tangled corners of reality. It’s like trying to keep toast from burning while still having it transform into toast.

“I’ll come tomorrow,” she told them. “Tonight I must do an important thing for Zeb.”

“What is the important thing you must do, Oh Toby? We would like to be your helpers.” At least they didn’t ask what important means. They seem to have put together an idea of it: somewhere between dangerous and delicious.

“Thank you,” she said. “But it is a thing that only I can do.”

“Is it about the bad men?” asked little Blackbeard.

“No,” Toby said. “We have not seen the bad men for many days. Maybe they have gone far away. But we must still be careful, and tell others if we see them.”

One of the Mo’Hairs has gone missing, Crozier has told her privately — the red-headed one with the braids — but it may simply have strayed off while grazing. Or else a liobam got it.

Or something worse, thinks Toby: something human.

The day has been stifling. Even the afternoon thunderstorm hasn’t cleared away the humidity. Under normal conditions — but what is normal? — lust should have been drained of its supercharge by this weather; muffled, as if under a damp mattress. She and Zeb should have been limp, enervated, exhausted. But instead they’d snuck away from the others even earlier than usual, slippery with longing, every pore avid, every capillary suffused, and thrashed around like newts in a puddle.

Now it’s deep twilight. Purple darkness wells up from the earth, bats flit past like leathery butterflies, night flowers open, musking the air. They’re sitting outside in the kitchen garden for the evening breeze, what there is of it. Their fingers are loosely entwined; Toby can feel, still, a small current of electricity moving between them. Tiny iridescent moths are shimmering around their heads. What do we smell like to them? she wonders. Like mushrooms? Like crushed petals? Like dew?

“Help me out here,” says Toby. “I need more to go on, for the Crakers. They’re insatiable on the subject of you.”

“Like what?”

“You’re their hero. They want your life story. Your miraculous origins, your supernatural deeds, your favourite recipes. You’re like royalty to them.”

“Why me?” says Zeb. “I thought Crake did away with all that. They aren’t supposed to be interested.”

“Well, they are. They’re obsessed with you. You’re their rock star.”

“Lord fuck a dog. Can’t you just make up some piece of crap?”

“They cross-examine like lawyers,” says Toby. “At the very least I need the basics. The raw material.” Does she want to know about Zeb for the sake of the Crakers, or for herself? Both. But mostly for herself.

“I’m an open book,” says Zeb.

“Don’t be evasive.”

Zeb sighs. “I hate going back to all that. I had to live it, I don’t like reliving it. Who cares?”

“I do,” says Toby. And so do you, she thinks. You still do care. “I’m listening.”

“Persistent, aren’t you?”

“I’ve got all night. So, you were born …”

“Yeah, admitted.” Another sigh. “Okay. First you need to understand: we got the wrong mothers.”

“Wrong, how?” she says to the face she can barely see. A plane of cheekbone, a shadow, a glint of eye.

The Story of the Birth of Zeb

I have put on the red hat of Snowman. I have eaten the fish. I have listened to the shiny thing. Now I will tell the story of the birth of Zeb.

You don’t have to sing.

Zeb did not come from Crake, not like Snowman. And he wasn’t made by Oryx, not like rabbits. He was born, the same way you are born. He grew in a bone cave, just like you, and came out through a bone tunnel, just like you.

Because underneath our clothing skins, we are the same as you. Almost the same.

No, we do not turn blue. Though we might smell blue sometimes. But our bone cave is the same.

I don’t think we need to discuss blue penises right now.

I know they are bigger. Thank you for pointing that out.

Yes, we do have breasts. The women do.

Yes, two.

Yes, on the front.

No, I will not show them to you right now.

Because this story is not about breasts. This story is about Zeb.

A very long time ago, in the days of the chaos — before Crake cleared it all away — Zeb lived in the bone cave of his mother. And Oryx took care of him there, as she takes care of all those who live in the bone caves. And then he travelled into this world through the bone tunnel. And then he was a baby, and then he grew.

And he had an older brother whose name was Adam. But Adam’s mother was not the same mother as the mother of Zeb.

Because when Adam was very young, Adam’s mother ran away from Adam’s father.

Running away means she went very quickly to a different place. Though she may not have done any running as such. Perhaps she walked, or drove in a … So Adam never saw her any more.

Yes, I’m sure it was sad for him.

Because she wanted to mate with more than one male, not only with Zeb’s father. Or that is what Zeb’s father told him.

Yes, it was a good thing to want, and she would have been happy if she could be living with you. She could mate with four males at once, like you. She would be very happy then!

But Zeb’s father did not see it that way.

Because he had done a thing with her called marriage, and with marriage there was supposed to be one male for each female and one female for each male. Although sometimes there were more. But there were not supposed to be.

Because it was the chaos. It was a thing of the chaos. That is why you can’t understand it.

Marriage is gone now. Crake cleared it away because he thought it was stupid.

Stupid means things Crake didn’t like. There were a lot of things Crake thought were stupid.

Yes, good, kind Crake. I will stop telling this story if you sing.

Because it makes me forget what I am telling.

Thank you.

So then Adam’s father found a new woman to have marriage with, and Zeb was born. Now little Adam was not lonely, because he had a brother. And Adam and Zeb helped each other. But Zeb’s father was sometimes hurtful to them.

I don’t know why. He thought pain was good for children.

No, he was not as bad as the two bad men who were hurtful to Amanda. But he was not a kind person.

I don’t know why some people then were not kind. It was a thing of the chaos.

And Zeb’s mother was often taking a nap, or doing other things that interested her. She was not very interested in small children. And she said, “You will be the death of me.”

Death of me is hard to explain. It meant she was displeased with the things they were doing.

No, Zeb did not kill his mother. Death of me is just a thing she said. She said it a lot.

Why did she say it if it wasn’t true? It was … those people talked that way. It wasn’t true or not true. It was in between. It was a way of telling about a feeling you might have. It was a manner of speaking. A manner of speaking means …

You are right. Zeb’s mother was not a kind person either. Sometimes she helped Zeb’s father lock Zeb up in a closet.

Lock up means … closet means … It was a very small room and it was dark in there, and Zeb couldn’t get out. Or they thought he couldn’t get out. But soon Zeb learned a lot about opening closed doors.

No. His mother couldn’t sing. Not like your mothers. And your fathers. And you.

But Zeb could sing. That is one of the things he did when he was locked inside the closet. He sang.

The PetrOleum Brats

Zeb’s mother, Trudy, was the goody-goody, and Adam’s mother, Fenella, was the shag-anything trashbunny. Or that was the story told by Trudy and the Rev. Since the two of them claimed that Zeb was so freaking useless and they were so righteous, naturally he thought he’d been adopted, since he couldn’t possibly have come from two such pristine sources of DNA as them.

He used to daydream that he’d been left behind by Fenella, who must have been his real, worthless mother. She’d been forced to flee in a hurry, and hadn’t been able to tote him along when she was running away — she’d dropped him on the doorstep in a cardboard box, to be taken in and trodden underfoot by this Trudy person, who was unrelated to him and lying about it. Fenella — wherever she was — deeply regretted her abandonment of him, and was planning to come back and get him once she could manage it. Then they would go far, far away together, and do absolutely everything on the long list of things that were frowned upon by the Rev. He saw them sitting on a park bench together, eating licorice twists and happily picking their noses. Just for instance.

But that was when he was little. Once he figured out genetics, he decided that Trudy must’ve secretly had it off with some fix-it guy with a wrench who doubled as a housebreaker and petty thief. Or else a gardener: she used to snaffle illegal Tex-Mex guys with black hair, like Zeb’s. She’d pay them not enough to wheelbarrow soil around, dig up shrubs, dump more rocks on her rock garden, which was the only thing that really held her attention in the way of nurturing and tending, as far as Zeb could tell. She was always out there with one of those little fork-tongued weeders or messing up ant nests with hot vinegar.

“ ’Course I could have inherited the criminality from the Rev, he had the chromosomes for it,” says Zeb. “He just tarted up his misdemeanours and made them look respectable, whereas I was the real raw deal. He was furtive and sly, I was right in the face.”

“Don’t be too down on yourself,” says Toby.

“You don’t get it, babe,” says Zeb. “I’m bragging.”

The Rev had his very own cult. That was the way to go in those days if you wanted to coin the megabucks and you had a facility for ranting and bullying, plus golden-tongued whip-’em-up preaching, and you lacked some other grey-area but highly marketable skill, such as derivatives trading. Tell people what they want to hear, call yourself a religion, put the squeeze on for contributions, run your own media outlets and use them for robocalls and slick online campaigns, befriend or threaten politicians, evade taxes. You had to give the guy some credit. He was twisted as a pretzel, he was a tinfoil-halo shit-nosed frogstomping king rat asshole, but he wasn’t stupid.

As witness his success. By the time Zeb came along, the Rev had a megachurch, all glass slabbery and pretend oak pews and faux granite, out on the rolling plains. The Church of PetrOleum, affiliated with the somewhat more mainstream Petrobaptists. They were riding high for a while, about the time accessible oil became scarce and the price shot up and desperation among the pleebs set in. A lot of top Corps guys would turn up at the church as guest speakers. They’d thank the Almighty for blessing the world with fumes and toxins, cast their eyes upwards as if gasoline came from heaven, look pious as hell.

“Pious as hell,” says Zeb. “I’ve always liked that phrase. In my humble view, pious and hell are the flip sides of the same coin.”

“Humble view?” says Toby. “Since when?”

“Since I met you,” says Zeb. “Just one glance at your fine ass, one of the miracles of creation, and I realize what a shoddy construction I am by comparison. Next you’ll have me scrubbing the floor with my tongue. Give a guy a break or I might get shy.”

“Okay, I’ll allow one humble view,” says Toby. “Tell on.”

“Can I kiss your clavicle?”

“In a minute,” says Toby. “After you get to the point.” She’s new to flirting, but she’s enjoying it.

“You want my point? You talking dirty?”

“Rain check. You can’t stop now,” says Toby.

“Okay, deal.”

The Rev had nailed together a theology to help him rake in the cash. Naturally he had a scriptural foundation for it. Matthew, Chapter 16, Verse 18: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.”

“It didn’t take a rocket-science genius, the Rev would say, to figure out that Peter is the Latin word for rock, and therefore the real, true meaning of ‘Peter’ refers to petroleum, or oil that comes from rock. ‘So this verse, dear friends, is not only about Saint Peter: it is a prophecy, a vision of the Age of Oil, and the proof, dear friends, is right before your eyes, because look! What is more valued by us today than oil?’ You have to give it to the rancid bugger.”

“He really preached that?” says Toby. Is she supposed to laugh or not? From Zeb’s tone she can’t tell.

“Don’t forget the Oleum part. It was even more important than the Peter half. The Rev could rave on about the Oleum for hours. ‘My friends, as we all know, oleum is the Latin word for oil. And indeed, oil is holy throughout the Bible! What else is used for the anointing of priests and prophets and kings? Oil! It’s the sign of special election, the consecrated chrism! What more proof do we need of the holiness of our very own oil, put in the earth by God for the special use of the faithful to multiply His works? His Oleum-extraction devices abound on this planet of our Dominion, and he spreads his Oleum bounty among us! Does it not say in the Bible that you should forbear to hide your light under a bushel? And what else can so reliably make the lights go on as oil? That’s right! Oil, my friends! The Holy Oleum must not be hidden under a bushel — in other words, left underneath the rocks — for to do so is to flout the Word! Lift up your voices in song, and let the Oleum gush forth in ever stronger and all-blessed streams!’ ”

“That’s an imitation?” says Toby.

“Fuckin’ right. I could do the whole spiel standing on my head, I had to listen to it enough. Me and Adam both.”

“You’re good at it,” says Toby.

“Adam was better. In the Rev’s church — and around the Rev’s dinner table too — we didn’t pray for forgiveness or even for rain, though God knows we could have used some of each. We prayed for oil. Oh, and natural gas too — the Rev included that in his list of divine gifts for the chosen. Every time we said grace before meals the Rev would point out that it was oil that put the food on the table because it ran the tractors that plowed the fields and fuelled the trucks that delivered the food to the stores, and also the car our devoted mother, Trudy, drove to the store in to buy the food, and the power that made the heat that cooked the food. We might as well be eating and drinking oil — which was true in a way — so fall on your knees!

“Around this point in the speech Adam and me would start kicking each other under the table. The idea was to kick the other one so hard he would yelp or flinch, but not to give any sign yourself, because whoever made a noise would get whacked or have to drink piss. Or worse. But Adam was never a yelper. I admired him for that.”

“Not literally?” says Toby. “The piss?”

“Cross my heart,” says Zeb. “Now where’d I put that stone-cold heart thing of mine?”

“I thought you liked each other,” says Toby. “You and Adam.”

“We did. Kicking under the table is a guy thing.”

“You were how old?”

“Too old,” says Zeb. “Though Adam was older. Only a couple of years older, but he was what the Gardeners would call an old soul. He was wise, I was foolish. It was always like that.”

Adam was a skinny little squirt. Though older, he wasn’t nearly as strong as Zeb, once Zeb made it past the age of five. Adam was methodical: he contemplated, he thought things through. Zeb was impulsive: he shot from the hip, he let rage take him over. It got him into trouble and got him out of it in about equal measure.

But in combination the two of them were pretty effective. They were joined at the head: Zeb was the bad one who was good at bad things, Adam was the good one who was bad at good things. Or who used good things as a front for his bad things. Adam and Zebulon: bookends, as in the alphabet. That cute A — Z name symmetry was the Rev’s idea: he liked to theme-park everything.

Adam was always being held up as an example. Why couldn’t Zeb behave well, the way his brother did? Sit up straight, don’t squirm, eat properly, your hand is not a fork, don’t wipe your face on your shirt, do what your father says, say yes sir and no sir, and so on. That was how Trudy would talk, almost begging; all she wanted was peace and quiet, she didn’t really enjoy the consequences of Zeb’s pushbacks and sulkiness — the welts and bruises and scars. She wasn’t a sadist as such, not like the Rev. But she was the centre of her own universe, big-time. She wanted the perks, and the Rev was the ever-flowing source of the cash that paid for them.

After telling Zeb what a model kid Adam was, she would go on to say that Adam’s line-toeing was all the more special, all the more praiseworthy, considering … then she would trail off because Adam’s mother, Fenella, was never mentioned at length if Trudy and the Rev could help it. You’d think they’d have used her and her scandalous douchebag behaviour as a stick to beat Adam with — disparage his genetic inheritance — but they never did. He was too good at innocence, or the show of it, with his big blue eyes and his thin, saintly looking face.

Zeb got hold of some old photos of Fenella — they were on a thumbdrive, at the bottom of a storage box in the closet, the one he was frequently locked into. He’d hidden a mini-light in there so he could see in the dark. He found the drive, then nicked it and plugged it into the Rev’s computer to see what would happen. The thing still worked: there were about thirty pics of Fenella, some with tiny Adam, a few with the Rev, none of them smiling much. The thumbdrive must’ve been an oversight because there were no other pictures of Fenella in the house. She didn’t look in any way slutty; she had the same thin, truthful, big-eyed look that Adam had.

Zeb had quite a crush on her: if only he could talk to her and tell her what was going on she would be on his side, she’d despise the whole setup as much as he did. She must have done, because hadn’t she run away? Though she didn’t look like the running-away type, she didn’t look strong enough.

Sometimes he felt jealous of Adam, because he’d once had Fenella for his mother, and all Zeb had was Trudy. Then he’d let resentment of Adam’s failsafe punishment evasion system get the better of him, and he’d mess with Adam in private: turd in the bed, dead mouse in the sink, switch the hot and cold taps in their shower — he’d figured out plumbing by then — or just apple-pie his sheets. Boy meanies. The Rev had done well out of his oil stocks, in addition to the gushing wells of his parishioners’ savings, and they lived in a big house, with Trudy and the Rev at the opposite end to Adam and Zeb. So if Adam yelped they wouldn’t hear him. Though he never did yelp; he just beamed out the reproachful I-forgive-you gaze that was ten times more annoying.

Sometimes Zeb would tease Adam about Fenella. He’d say she must have tattoos all over, tits and all; he’d say she was a cokehead; he’d say she went off with a biker, no, a dozen bikers, did them all, one after the other; he’d say she was peddling it on the street in Vegas to deranged addicts and syphilitic pimps. Why was he saying those gross and repugnant things about the woman he considered his other self, his fairy-dust spirit helper, next door to a marble goddess? Who knows?

The strange thing was, Adam didn’t talk back. He’d just smile in an eerie way, as if he knew something Zeb didn’t.

Adam never ratted about Zeb’s juvenile pranks. Even then he was a secretive little bugger. Anyway, the two of them mostly worked as a team. At school — CapRock Prep, a private school funded by one of the OilCorps, boys only — they were known as the Holy PetrOleum Brats because of their dad’s position, but nobody picked on them openly, not once Zeb was big enough. Adam alone would have been a sitting duck, he was so stringy and transparent; but if anyone lifted a finger in his direction, Zeb would beat the crap out of them. He only had to do that twice. Word got around.

Schillizzi’s Hands

In face of the brainwashing team of Trudy and the Rev, Adam and Zeb took joint evasive action. What were they evading, apart from punishment? Anything that might lead in the direction of the path of righteousness, the Holy PetrOleum Path, the path the Rev and Trudy were forever urging them to tread.

In Adam’s case, this action took the form of blue-eyed lying — he could make just about anyone except Zeb think he was innocent as an egg unlaid — whereas Zeb had the instincts of a sneak thief. Time spent in the punishment closet had its upside, hairpins had their uses, and it was not long before he had the secret run of the house, tiptoeing through the bureau drawers and emails of his elders while they believed him securely imprisoned among the winter coats and outdated consumer electronics. Lockpicking became his hobby, and soon enough, with the aid of clandestine sessions on the school’s digital facilities and free time at the public library, hacking became his vocation. In his fantasy world no code could keep him out, no door could shut him in, and fantasy merged into reality the older and more practised he became.

At first he stuck to porno peepsites and pirated acid rock and freakshow music — all forbidden by the Church, needless to say: it went in for buttoned-up collars and public chastity vows, and its music sucked like a thousand Monster Leeches from Outer Space. So Zeb would earphone the Luminescent Corpses or the Pancreatic Cancers or the Bipolar Albino Hookworms while trolling onscreen for ever-new and cunningly deployed girl body parts. No harm in it really: they’d already made the videos, so what he was doing was just a form of time travel. He wasn’t causing anything.

Then, once he felt ready, he decided to up the ante and really test his powers.

The Church of PetrOleum was high-tech enabled, with a dozen sophisticated online social media and donation sites skimming the cash from the faithful 24/7. The security on those sites was supposed to be as foolproof as such things got, with two layers of coding knitware any potential klepto would have to penetrate before making off with the debit accounts. And the system did keep out such kleptos; but it had no defence against an insider job, such as the one Zeb managed to pull off so spectacularly when he was barely sixteen.

The Rev’s weak point was his belief in his own invulnerability, so he was careless; and as he had no head for number-letter combos, he wrote down passwords. Then he hid them in places so obvious even the Easter Bunny would scoff. The cufflink box? The toes of the Sunday shoes? Retro-cretin, sighed Zeb, extracting the wafers of paper, memorizing their cryptic scribblings, then replacing box or shoe in its exact previous location.

Once possessed of the keys to the kingdom, Zeb diverted the river of donations — not all of it, a mere.09 per cent, margin of error, he wasn’t lobotomized — into several accounts of his own devising, making sure that the donors got the standard grovelling thank-you and guilt-inducing pep-talk message from the church, plus a hate slogan or two directed at the Enemies of God’s Holy Oil: “Solar Panels Are Satan’s Work,” “Eco Equals FreakO,” “The Devil Wants You to Freeze in the Dark,” “Serial Killers Believe in Global Warming.”

For his stash-the-cash hideaways he used an identity pieced together from fragments he’d appropriated by stealth attacks on fuzzily fenced targets, such as 3-D avatar gaming destinations, AdoptAFish and similar bioweepy charities, and Feel-iT-enabled porno installations in suburban malls. (“Haptic feedback gives you true, stimulating flesh-on-flesh sensations! Say goodbye to faked screams and groans, this is the real thing! Warning: Do Not Expose Your Electronic Device to Moisture. Do Not Place Terminals in Your Mouth or Other Mucous Membrane Regions. Severe Burns May Result.”)

No surprise, really, for Zeb to discover during one of his trolling expeditions that the Rev himself was a frequent visitor to the haptic wanksites, though he indulged himself at home — he couldn’t afford to be caught in a mall — and hid the feedback terminals in his golf club bag. He favoured those sites involving whips, penetration with bottles, and nipple-burning. He was also a big fan of the historical re-enactment beheading sites, which were relatively expensive, maybe because of the props and costumes — “Mary, Queen of Scots: Feel This Hot Red-Head Spurt,” “Anne Boleyn: Royal Slut! Did It with Her Brother, She’ll Do It with You, Then You Get to Slice Her Dirty Little Neck,” “Katherine Howard: Turn This Stone Cold Fox Stone Cold with One Whack of Your Powerful Blade,” “Lady Jane Grey: Make This Elite Virgin Pay the Price of Snootiness, Blindfold Optional.” These gave you the sensation, right in your own hands, of what it felt like to decapitate a woman with an axe. (“Fun! Historic! Educational!”)

For extra payment you could decapitate them without their clothes on, which was more exciting. Zeb took a few turns at it himself — courtesy of the Rev’s account, which he cooked accordingly — so he had grounds for the clothes versus naked comparison. A naked woman on her knees, about to lose her head — why was this riveting? Was he callous or a psychopath or something? No, psychopaths had a brain chip missing, according to Adam, who read up on these things. They couldn’t feel empathy; screaming and tears were just annoying noises as far as they were concerned. So they couldn’t feel shitty and/or pervy about what they were doing, not like Zeb.

He thought about hacking in and recoding the program so that when the axe came down you got the sensation not in your hands but in your own neck. What would it feel like to have your head chopped off? Would it hurt, or would the shock cancel that out? Or would you get a rush of empathy? But too much empathy could be dangerous. Your heart might stop.

Were those naked, kneeling, and shortly to be headless women real or not? He guessed not because reality online was different from the everyday kind of reality, where things hurt your body. And they wouldn’t be allowed to murder real women right onscreen: surely that was illegal. But the effects were so amazing and 3-D that you ducked the gush of blood.

Adam didn’t see the attraction of these activities once he found out about them, which he did because Zeb couldn’t resist the urge to share his knowledge about the Rev’s secret life. Which was now also, to some extent, his own.

“That is depraved,” was Adam’s comment.

“Right! That’s the point! What are you, gay?” Zeb said, but Adam only smiled.

The Rev’s frustrated kink urges must have been in need of an outlet: Zeb was now too large and surly to take a chance on as a sado-subject. He might hit back, and the Rev was at heart a coward, so the belting and piss-drinking and imprisonment were now in the past. Nor was Trudy an option for the warped bastard, since — despite her stand-by-your-mealticket subservience — she would never put up with leather halters and nipple piercing and flagellation with a cane, or eating her own excrement. Information is power, so Zeb thanked his lucky stars for the online haptic-feedback sites, and made a record of the number of times the Rev had used them, and took care to store away this Santa’s packsack of red velvet information for future use. Though the Rev might manage to electrocute himself via his own dick in the meantime — blow himself up like an overboiled hotdog — and Zeb would sure like to be an eye at the keyhole for that hilarious little fiasco. He briefly considered rewiring the haptic terminals to achieve this very effect, but was unsure of the voltage it would take. A Rev just badly scorched rather than no-refunds dead could mean big trouble: he’d figure out who did it, for sure.

By this time Zeb had magic fingers: he could play code the way Mozart played the piano, he could warble in cuneiform, he could waltz through firewalls like a tiger of old leaping through a flaming circus hoop without singeing a whisker. He could slip into the PetrOleum Church accounting — both sets of books, the official set and the actual one — in a few swift moves, and he did, on a regular basis. This went on for a couple of years, as the.09 per cents piled up, and Zeb grew taller and sprouted more body hair, and worked out in the gym at CapRock Prep, where he took care to keep in the middle of the bell curve gradeswise, especially in IT, so that his extraterrestrial hacking talents would not be suspected.

In six months he would graduate, and what then? He had some notions, but so did his parental overseers. The Rev had made it known that through his connections he could get Zeb a coveted job in the northern oil desert, driving one of the humungous machines that wrangled oil-rich bituminous gravel. It would make a man of Zeb, he said, leaving the possible definition of man floating in the air between them. (Child torturer? Religious fraudster? Online girl decapitator?) Also, the money was good. Then, when he’d done that for a while, Zeb could decide on what calling he wished to pursue.

There were three subtexts to this: 1) The Rev wanted Zeb to go very far away because he was beginning to be afraid of him, and rightly so. 2) With any luck, Zeb would get lung cancer, or a third eye, or scales like an armadillo: the air up there was so toxic you mutated in about a week.

And 3) Zeb was not brilliant. Not like Adam, who — in the hopes that he would carry on in the old man’s fraudchurch biz — had been sent to Spindletop U. and had majored in PetrTheology, Homiletics, and PetrBiology; this last, as far as Zeb could see, required you to learn biology in order to disprove it. That took a certain kind of intellectual adroitness, a kind — it was implied — that Zeb lacked. Galley slave would be more his level.

“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” said Trudy. “You should be so grateful to your father for taking all that trouble. Not every boy has a father like yours.”

Smile, Zeb ordered himself. “I know,” he said. The word smile meant “carving knife” in Greek. He’d found that on the web, when he wasn’t decapitating historical figures.

Zeb missed Adam when he wasn’t there, and he suspected it was mutual. Who else could they talk to about the improbable sublayers of their lives? Who else could do a hilarious word-for-word imitation of the Rev’s Prayer to Saint Lucic-Lucas, to whom God had revealed the Holy Oil?

When they were apart they avoided text messages, phone calls, or anything else with an electronic signal: the internet, as was well known, leaked like a prostate cancer patient, and the Rev was most likely snooping, if not on Adam, at least on Zeb. But when Adam would come back for vacations it was old-home week. Zeb would welcome him with an amphibian in the shoe or an arthropod in the cufflink box or a burr or two artfully stuck onto the inside of his Y-fronts, though they were getting too old for this kind of japery, so it was more of a nostalgia thing.

Then they’d go out onto the tennis court and pretend to play a game, and murmur together in brief snatches across the net, comparing notes. Zeb would want to know if Adam had got laid yet, a question that was skilfully evaded. Adam would want to know how much money Zeb had skimmed off from the Church and sequestered in his secret stowaway accounts, since it was their firm plan to disappear from the Rev’s charmed circle once they had sufficient funds.

It was Adam’s last vacation before graduating. Zeb was sitting at the Rev’s home office desk monitor with a pair of medical latex gloves on, humming under his breath, while Adam stood watch at the window in case the Rev’s gas-guzzling tycoon car or Trudy’s Hummerette drove up.

“You’ve got Schillizzi’s hands,” Adam said to him in that neutral way he had. Was it admiration or merely observation?

“Schillizzi?” said Zeb. “Hot crap, the botulistic old bugger’s embezzling again, only this is a lot more! Look at this!”

“I wish you wouldn’t swear,” said Adam in his mildest voice.

“Stuff yourself,” said Zeb cheerfully. “And he’s stashing it in a bank account in Grand Cayman!”

“Schillizzi was a well-known white-hat twentieth-century safecracker,” said Adam, who was interested in history, unlike Zeb. “He never used explosives, only his hands. He was legendary.”

“I bet the old fart’s planning a jump,” said Zeb. “Here today, then zap, and the next morning he’s sucking up martinis on a tropical beach and renting lick-your-cleft bimbettes, leaving the fuckin’ faithful out in the cold with their pants down.”

“Not in Grand Cayman, he won’t,” said Adam. “They’re mostly underwater. But those banks have relocated to the Canaries; there are more mountains there. Only they’ve kept the Grand Cayman corporate names. Preserving a tradition, I suppose.”

“Wonder if he’ll take Trusty Fusty Trudy with him?” said Zeb. Adam’s knowledge of banking surprised him, but then Adam’s knowledge of a lot of things surprised him. It was hard to know what Adam knew.

“He won’t take Trudy,” said Adam. “She’s becoming too financially demanding. She suspects what he’s up to.”

“You know this how?”

“An educated guess,” said Adam. “The body language. She’s giving him the narrow eyes at breakfast, when he’s not looking. She’s nagging him about vacations, and when are they going to take one. Also she’s feeling held back in her interior decoration ambitions: note her on-show collection of wallpaper samples and paint chips. She’s tired of playing the angel wife for the benefit of the congregation. She feels she’s helped to create the domestic surplus, and she wants more scope.”

“Like Fenella,” said Zeb. “She wanted more scope too. At least she got out early.”

“Fenella didn’t get out,” said Adam in his neutral voice. “She’s under the rock garden.”

Zeb turned in the Rev’s ergonomic swivel chair. “She’s what?”

“Here they come,” said Adam. “Both at once, it’s a convoy. Power down.”

Mute and Theft

“Say that again,” said Zeb once they were on the tennis court and safely out of hearing. Neither of them was much good at tennis, but they pretended to practise. They stood side by side, serving balls over the net or, more often, into it. Their rooms were bugged — Zeb had discovered that years ago, and enjoyed feeding misinformation into his desk lamp and then looping it back to himself via the Rev’s computer — but it was best to play dumb by leaving the bugs where they were.

“Under the rock garden,” said Adam. “That’s where Fenella is.”

“You’re sure?”

“I watched them burying her,” said Adam. “From the window. They didn’t see me.”

“This wasn’t a … you didn’t dream it?” said Zeb. “You must’ve been fucking fetal!” Adam gave him the fisheye: not only did he not approve of obscenity, he never seemed to get used to it. “I mean, really young,” Zeb amended. “Kids make stuff up.” For once he was shaken: he could barely think straight.

If Adam’s story was true — and why would he invent this? — it changed Zeb’s whole view of himself. Fenella had shaped his story about his past, and also the one about his future, but suddenly Fenella was a skeleton: she’d been dead all along. So, no secret helper waiting out there: he’d never had one. There was no understanding family member he would someday locate, once he’d found the Exit sign and unlocked the invisible locks and cut his way out of the Rev’s chicken-hawk-wired coop. He was flying a wing-damaged solo, all alone except for his joined-at-the-head-wound brother, who could well turn pious on him for real, he had the talent. Then Zeb himself would be drifting in Voidsville, out in the cold and dark, like a torn-loose astronaut in one of those old five-tomato space flics. He slammed a ball into the net.

“I was almost four,” Adam said in his I-have-spoken-and-therefore-it-is-so voice that was too much like the Rev’s for comfort. “I have clear memories of that time.”

“You never told me,” Zeb said. He was offended: Adam had not deemed him trustworthy. That hurt. They were supposed to be a team.

“You would have let it slip,” said Adam. “Then who knows what they would’ve done?” He tossed his ball up, tapped it lightly over the net. “You could’ve ended up under the rock garden as well. Not to mention me.”

“Wait,” said Zeb. “They? You mean fucking Trudy was in on this too?”

“I already told you,” said Adam. “There is no need to swear.”

“Sorry, it just fucking slipped out,” said Zeb. No way he was going to let Adam tell him how to talk. “Trudy the Good?”

“Must’ve been something in it for her,” said Adam in his I-am-loftily-overlooking-your-provocation voice. “If only blackmail material. Or maybe she wanted Fenella out of the way, to clear her path. My guess is she was already pregnant with you. The Church of PetrOleum doesn’t sanction divorce, what with the Holy Oil at the marriage ceremony. As we know.”

So now it was Zeb’s fault, the death of Fenella. For having the bad taste to get himself conceived. Shit. “How did they do it?” he said. “The two of them? Did they slip arsenic into her tea, or …” Not a decapitation, he thought, ashamed of himself. They wouldn’t have gone that far.

“I don’t know. I was only four. I just saw the burial.”

“So all that about her being whore-pill trash, deserting her baby and so forth, that was just …”

“It’s what the congregation wanted to believe,” said Adam. “And they did believe it. Bad mothers are always a good story, for them.”

“Maybe we should call the CorpSeCorps,” said Zeb. “Tell them to bring shovels.”

“I wouldn’t risk it,” said Adam. “There’s quite a few Petrobaptists on the force, and there are a number of OilCorps heavies on the Church board. There’s a lot of overlap because of the benefits to both parties. They’re agreed on the need to crush dissent. So the OilCorps would cover up for the Rev over a pure and simple wife murder that didn’t per se threaten its holdings, since they’d know there’d be much credibility lost through a scandal. They’d accuse the two of us of mental instability. Shut us away, use the heavy drugs. Or, as I said — dig a couple of new holes in the rock garden.”

“But we’re his kids!” said Zeb, sounding about two years old even to himself.

“You think that would stop him?” said Adam. “Blood is thinner than money. He’d hear a convenient voice from God, suggesting a son sacrifice for the greater good. Remember Isaac. He’d slit our throats and set fire to us, because this time God wouldn’t send a sheep.”

Which was about as dark as Zeb could remember Adam ever being. “So,” he said. He was out of breath, although they’d barely been moving. “Why are you telling me about this now?”

“Because if what you’ve said about your successful cash-diverting activities is true, we have accumulated enough money,” said Adam. “Also the Church might catch you doing the diverting. Time to go, while we still can. Before they send you off to die in the tar pits,” he added. “It would be called an accident. Of course.”

Zeb was touched. Adam was looking out for him. He always thought further ahead than Zeb did.

They waited until the next day, when the Rev had a board meeting and Trudy was heading up the Ladies’ Prayer Circle. Then they took a solarcab to the bullet train station, exchanging fake info for the benefit of the driver’s flapping ears. Most of those guys were snoops, formal or informal. The script was that Adam was on his way back to Spindletop and Zeb was seeing him off. Nothing unusual in that.

From a net café at the station, Zeb cleaned out the Rev’s Grand Cayman hidey-hole account while Adam acted nonchalant and scanned for anyone who looked too interested. Once the Rev’s funds were secured and transferred, Zeb sent the infected gonad a couple of messages, using a lilypad pathway to delay potential cyberhounds as long as possible. He hacked into a men’s underarm deodorant video ad, clicked on the gleaming, depilatoried stud’s belly button — he’d gone through that pixel wormhole before — then skipped to a home and garden site, appropriate under the circumstances, and chose a trowel. From it he launched his messages.

The first message said, “We know who’s under the rocks. Don’t follow us.” The second contained the details of the Rev’s thefts from the Church of PetrOleum’s charity initiative funds, and another warning: “Don’t leave town or this goes public. Stay put and await instructions.” That would give the mildewed old bugger the idea that they’d be back in touch soon for blackmail purposes, which must be their motive, and he could lie in wait for them.

“That should do it,” said Adam, but Zeb couldn’t resist adding a third message: a copy of the details of the Rev’s Feel-iT haptic site transactions. Lady Jane Grey had been his favourite: he must have decapitated her at least fifteen times.

“Wish I could watch,” said Zeb, once they were on the train. “When he opens his mail. And even better, when he finds out his Cayman bank stash is gone.”

“Gloating is a character flaw,” said Adam.

“Up yours,” said Zeb.

He spent the trip looking out the window at the passing scenery: gated communities like the one they’d just fled, fields of soybeans, frackware installations, windfarms, piles of gigantic truck tires, heaps of gravel, pyramids of discarded ceramic toilets. Mountains of garbage with dozens of people picking through it; pleebland shanty towns, the shacks made of discarded everything. Kids standing on the shack roofs, on the piles of garbage, on the piles of tires, waving flags made of colourful plastic bags or flying rudimentary kites, or giving Zeb the finger. The odd camera drone drifted overhead, purporting to be scanning traffic, logging the comings and goings of who-knew-who. Those things were bad news if they were hunting for you specifically: he’d gathered that much from web gossip.

But the Rev wouldn’t be searching for them yet. He’d still be at the board lunch, gobbling down the labmeat hors d’oeuvres and the farmed tilapia.

Hackety-hack, railroad track,

Momma’s in the garden, so don’t look back,

Zeb hummed. He hoped Fenella’s death had been sudden, with none of the Rev’s more puke-making obsessions involved.

Beside him Adam was asleep, looking even whiter and thinner than he did when awake, and more like an idealistic statue of some annoying allegorical figure: Prudence. Sincerity. Faith.

Zeb was too high for sleep. Also jittery, despite himself: they’d crossed a big thick barbed-wire line, they’d robbed the ogre, they’d made off with his treasure. There would be fury. So he kept watch.

Who killed Fenella?

A really evil fella.

Hit her on the head,

Gave her quite a whack,

Everything went black,

Now she’s fuckin’ dead.

Something was running down his face. He used his sleeve to wipe. No snivelling, he told himself. Don’t give him the satisfaction.

Once in San Francisco, Adam and Zeb decided to separate. “He won’t sit still for this,” Adam said. “He’s got a lot of contacts. He’ll put out a red alert, use his OilCorps networks. We’re overly noticeable together.”

True enough: they were too disparate. Dark and light, hefty and frail; anomalies like that were memorable. And the Rev’s description would be of the two of them, not one at a time.

Mutt and Jeff, Zeb hummed to himself. Mute and Theft. Cute and Deft.

“Don’t make that pseudo-musical noise,” said Adam. “It draws attention to us. Anyway you’re flat.” He did have a point. Two points.

In a pleebland grey-market hourly-rental morph-your-backstory kitshop, Zeb crafted identities for them — cardboard, wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, time-sensitive, but good for the next stage of the trip. Adam went north, Zeb went south, each heading for camouflage.

He and Adam had agreed on a dropbox in space. It was the topmost rose being strewn by the zephyrs in a print of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, posted on a much-visited Italian tourism site. Zeb opted for the left tit nipple of Venus, but Adam overruled him: too obvious, he said. It would also be too obvious for them to attempt to contact each other for at least six months, he added: the Rev was vindictive, and by now he’d also be frightened.

Zeb pondered the likely consequences of this vindictiveness and fright. What would he himself do if two young wiseass descendants of his that he’d never liked anyway had made off with his foul secrets? The rage. The betrayal. After all he’d done for Adam. And for Zeb, because weren’t his physical chastisements in the best interests of the lad’s spiritual development? He was probably still deceiving himself with righteous barf like that.

Among other things, he’d hire some DORCS: digital online rapid capture specialists. They charged a lot but were said to produce results. They’d set up a search algorithm geared to detect likely profile matches online. So it was necessary to stay away from digital as much as possible. No surfing. No purchasing. No socializing. No wisecracking. No porn.

“Just don’t act like yourself,” was Adam’s parting advice.

Deeper into the Pleeblands

Zeb cut his hair in San Fran. He was growing a moustache, and he’d bought some coolish contact lenses on the dark-grey market that not only changed your eye colour but also gave you astigmatism and spurious iris features. But though these might get him through a casual scan, he didn’t want to risk closer scrutiny, and the Fickle Fingers of Fake fingerprint distorters he’d also bought were laughable in any professional sense, so it was better not to chance the bullet train again. Also, most of those riding it still believed in the legality of law and the orderliness of order, and might report anything suspicious, as they were constantly being nagged to do.

So he chanced the highways. He hitched south as far as San Jose, working the Truck-A-Pillar convoy stops for rides and trying to look older than he was. Some of the drivers hinted at blowjob payment, but he was too big for them to force it.

The other hazard was the quick-trick pros working the roadside bars. But the only sex he’d had so far had been online, via the haptic-feedback sites; he wasn’t ready for actual flesh on flesh. Plus, he was wary of making connections with other people, however brief: who knew how many of them might be trading information on the side? Some of those hustlers were suspiciously well dressed and did not look hungry.

Then there were the diseases. The last thing he needed was to be stuck in a hospital — supposing his ID passed inspection — or enduring a working over from some HospitalCorps security thug, supposing it didn’t pass, which was likely. Once the truth of who he was had been vise-gripped out of him, there would be a call to the Rev. Then disposal orders would be issued, or he’d be shipped back in plasticuffs to face the self-righteous music. I’ll teach you to respect me, I have been set in authority over you, God hates you, you are morally worthless, repent on your knees, drink what’s in the bucket, flat on the floor, hand me the two-by-four, you want it harder, I’ll make you howl, and so forth and so on, the familiar religio-sado heavy-metal perv litany. Pre-bedtime amusements.

When the Rev had finished with Zeb’s neurologically trashed, defenceless, quivering body, it would be into the rock garden with it, eventually; but not before he’d been scorched and zapped into betraying the digital pathway leading to Adam, and had been forced to plant some online lures and instructions for him, including the necessity of not going public with the Rev’s fiscal and sexual misdoings and the urgent need for a physical meetup at which all would be explained. Zeb had no illusions about his ability to withstand the kind of implementation the Rev and his helpers would be more than willing to inflict.

So that was the hospital option, supposing he caught pube rot. The alternative to the hospital route didn’t appeal either. Dick fester, stiffie shrivel, penis putrefaction: the internet scare sites on that subject were the greeny-yellowy stuff of nightmares. More than enough reason to avoid the beckoning sirens of the Truck-A-Pillar stops, no matter how plump and firm the thighs extending from their red leatherette hot pants, how high their fake-lizard platform shoes, how boldly engraved their dragon and skull tattoos, or how bimplanted the half-melons emerging from their black satin halter tops like rising dough. Not that he’d ever seen rising dough, up close. But he’d seen videos of it. Once-upon-a-time mommy retros that, to tell the truth, made him feel kind of weepy. Had dead Fenella ever done any dough-baking? Because Trudy sure as hell hadn’t.

So when the smudgy-mouthed, crack-eyed, jelly-bummed beauties said, “Hey, big boy, how about a quickie, out behind the doughnut stand?” he did not say, Coming and he did not say, Meet you in heaven when I’m dead and he did not say, Are you out of your fuckin’ mind? He said nothing.

In addition to the disease factor, he did not yet know how to navigate the dark and darker pathways of the pleeblands: he didn’t want to hook up with a total stranger and then wander blind-eyed into some alley or sleazy motel or dubious knocking-shop washroom and come out on a stretcher or in a body bag, if that. More likely was, they’d toss him into a vacant lot and let the rats and vultures take care of him. Now that more and more of the once-public security services were privatized, there was no margin in the proper burial of a drifter like him, or in the apprehension — they liked to use that word, apprehension — of whatever scoundrels might have knifed him for pocket change.

His height and his budding ’stache were scant protection. He was green wood, an easy target; they’d get that at one glance, they’d beeline for him. The pleeblands were far from the school playgrounds of his youth, in which size really did matter. “The bigger they are, the harder they fall,” the scrappy little bantams — more than one of them — had said to him then. “Yeah,” he’d replied. “But the smaller they are, the more often they fall.” Then a swift whack, not even a punch, and down they’d go.

But in the darkest pleeblands, there wouldn’t be any verbal foreplay. No rattlesnake-warning quips and banter, just a rapid stab or slice or even a bullet from some obsolete, illegal firearm. The Linthead gang was especially vicious, according to the net. And the Blackened Redfish. And the Asian Fusions. And the Tex-Mexes with their drug-war tricks — the stacks of heads, the legless bodies strung up from old movieland marquees. He figured there must be a lot of Tex-Mexers controlling the Truck-A-Pillar highway heading south, it was close to their territory.

Despite these reservations, or, to be more honest, despite these cowardly fears, he knew that his best hope of cover in the short-term was in the worst part of town. Spending too much money would attract jackals; he was streetwise enough to know that. So once in San Jose he kept a low profile, stayed out of bars, and blended himself into the underclass that swirled around in the lowest pleebs like rats in a dump bin, scrabbling for whatever they could pick up.

For a while he slung quasi-meat products at SecretBurgers. It was ten hours and less than minimum, he had to wear the company T-shirt and a dorkwit cap, but SecretBurgers wasn’t fussy about identities. And they had protection against the street gangs for their booth workers, and bought off both official nosies and non-official ones, so nobody hassled him. He felt sorry for the female workers: they were paid less than the guys, and they had to wear tight Ts and fend off customers and management alike. They should have been issued hard plastic visors for their tits.

But his sorrow didn’t stop him from finally acquiring in-the-flesh carnal knowledge with one of the SecretBurgers meatbunnies called Wynette, a brownette with big, dark-ringed, starved-looking eyes. In addition to her alluring personality — a euphemism, he now has to admit, for her somewhat meagre snatch, which was the part that fascinated him, and he apologizes for that, but such is the case with hormone-sodden adolescent males, and it’s nature’s plan, and he thought he was in love, so fuckit — she offered the advantage of a tiny room.

Most of the SecretBurgers meatgirls couldn’t even manage that: they shared overcrowded walkups, or squatted in repossessed and decaying houses, or hooked on the side to support some child or addicted relative or tinselly pimp. But Wynette was cautious and frugal, and hadn’t squandered, and could afford some privacy. Her place was located above a corner store that sold alcohol tasting of troll piss and paint remover, but Zeb wasn’t too choosy at that time, so he used to grab a bottle of it to ply Wynette with before sex because she said it helped her relax.

“Was it as good?” asks Toby.

“Was what as good? As good as what?”

“Sex with Wynette. As good as the decapitated Lady Jane Greys.”

“Apples and oranges,” says Zeb. “No point comparing them.”

“Oh, give it a try,” says Toby.

“Okay. The Lady Jane Greys were repeatable. Reality’s not. And since you’re wondering, they’re both good sometimes. But it can be disappointing either way.”