Dead Witch Walking. Ким Харрисон
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glanced up, sending my gaze over the ugly yellow partitions. My eyes narrowed as my coworkers looked the other way. They were standing in huddled groups as they gossiped, pretending to be busy. Their hushed whispers grated on me. Taking a slow breath, I reached for my black-and-white picture of Watson, Crick, and the woman behind it all, Rosalind Franklin. They were standing before their model of DNA, and Rosalind’s smile had the same hidden humor of Mona Lisa. One might think she knew what was going to happen. I wondered if she had been an Inderlander. Lots of people did. I kept the picture to remind myself how the world turns on details others miss.
It had been almost forty years since a quarter of humanity died from a mutated virus, the T4 Angel. And despite the frequent TV evangelists’ claim otherwise, it wasn’t our fault. It started and ended with good old-fashioned human paranoia.
Back in the fifties, Watson, Crick, and Franklin had put their heads together and solved the DNA riddle in six months. Things might have stopped there, but the then-Soviets grabbed the technology. Spurred by a fear of war, money flowed into the developing science. By the early sixties we had bacteria-produced insulin. A wealth of bioengineered drugs followed, flooding the market with offshoots of the U.S.’s darker search for bioengineered weapons. We never made it to the moon, turning science inward instead of outward to kill ourselves.
And then, toward the end of the decade, someone made a mistake. The debate as to whether it was the U.S. or the Soviets is moot. Somewhere up in the cold Arctic labs, a lethal chain of DNA escaped. It left a modest trail of death to Rio that was identified and dealt with, the majority of the public unaware and ignorant. But even as the scientists wrote their conclusionary notes in their lab books and shelved them, the virus mutated.
It attached itself to a bioengineered tomato through a weak spot in its modified DNA that the researchers thought too minuscule to worry about. The tomato was officially known as the T4 Angel tomato—its lab identification—and from there came the virus’s name, Angel.
Unaware that the virus was using the Angel tomato as an intermediate host, it was transported by the airlines. Sixteen hours later it was too late. The third world countries were decimated in a frightening three weeks, and the U.S. shut down in four. Borders were militarized, and a governmental policy of “Sorry, we can’t help you” was instituted. The U.S. suffered and people died, but compared to the charnel pit the rest of the world became, it was a cakewalk.
But the largest reason civilization remained intact was that most Inderland species were resistant to the Angel virus. Witches, the undead, and the smaller species like trolls, pixies, and fairies were completely unaffected. Weres, living vamps, and leprechauns got the flu. The elves, though, died out completely. It was believed their practice of hybridizing with humans to bolster their numbers backfired, making them susceptible to the Angel virus.
When the dust settled and the Angel virus was eradicated, the combined numbers of our various species had neared that of humanity. It was a chance we quickly seized. The Turn, as it came to be called, began at noon with a single pixy. It ended at midnight with humanity huddling under the table, trying to come to grips with the fact that they’d been living beside witches, vampires, and Weres since before the pyramids.
Humanity’s first gut reaction to wipe us off the face of the earth petered out pretty fast when it was shoved under their noses that we had kept the structure of civilization up and running while the world fell apart. If not for us, the death rate would have been far higher.
Even so, the first years after the Turn were a madhouse. Afraid to strike out at us, humanity outlawed medical research as the demon behind their woes. Biolabs were leveled, and the bioengineers who escaped the plague stood trial and died in little more than legalized murder. There was a second, subtler wave of death when the source of the new medicines were inadvertently destroyed along with the biotechnology.
It was only a matter of time before humanity insisted on a purely human institution to monitor Inderlander activities. The Federal Inderland Bureau arose, dissolving and replacing local law enforcement throughout the U.S. The out-of-work Inderlander police and federal agents formed their own police force, the I.S. Rivalry between the two remains high even today, serving to keep a tight lid on the more aggressive Inderlanders.
Four floors of Cincinnati’s main FIB building are devoted to finding the remaining illegal biolabs where, for a price, one can still get clean insulin and something to stave off leukemia. The human-run FIB is as obsessed in finding banned technology as the I.S. is with getting the mind-altering drug Brimstone off the streets.
And it all started when Rosalind Franklin noticed her pencil had been moved, and someone was where they ought not be, I thought, rubbing my fingertips into my aching head. Small clues. Little hints. That’s what makes the world turn. That’s what made me such a good runner. Smiling back at Rosalind, I wiped the fingerprints off the frame and put it in my keep box.
There was a burst of nervous laughter behind me, and I yanked open the next drawer, shuffling through the dirty self-stick notes and paper clips. My brush was right where I always left it, and a knot of worry loosened as I tossed it into the box. Hair could be used to make spells target specific. If Denon was going to slap a death threat on me, he would have taken it.
My fingers found the heavy smoothness of my dad’s pocket watch. Nothing else was mine, and I slammed the drawer shut, stiffening as my head seemed to nearly explode. The watch’s hands were frozen at seven to midnight. He used to tease me that it had stopped the night I was conceived. Slouching in my chair, I wedged it into my front pocket. I could almost see him standing in the doorframe of the kitchen, looking from his watch to the clock over the sink, a smile curving over his long face as he pondered where the missing moments had gone.
I set Mr. Fish—the Beta-in-bowl I had gotten at last year’s office Christmas party—into my dissolution basin, trusting chance would keep both the water and the fish from sloshing out. I tossed the canister of fish flakes after him. A muffled thump from the far end of the room pulled my attention beyond the partitions and to Denon’s closed door.
“You won’t get three feet out that door, Tamwood,” came his muffled shout, silencing the buzz of conversations. Apparently, Ivy had just resigned. “I’ve got a contract. You work for me, not the other way around! You leave and—” There was a clatter behind the closed door. “Holy shit …” he continued softly. “How much is that?”
“Enough to pay off my contract,” Ivy said, her voice cold. “Enough for you and the stiffs in the basement. Do we have an understanding?”
“Yeah,” he said in what sounded like greedy awe. “Yeah. You’re fired.”
My head felt as if it was stuffed with tissue, and I rested it in my cupped hands. Ivy had money? Why hadn’t she said anything last night?
“Go Turn yourself, Denon,” Ivy said, clear in the absolute hush. “I quit. You didn’t fire me. You may have my money, but you can’t buy into high-blood. You’re second-rate, and no amount of money can change that. If I have to live in the gutters off rats, I’ll still be better than you, and it’s killing you I won’t have to take your orders anymore.”
“Don’t think this makes you safe,” the boss raved. I could almost see that vein popping on his neck. “Accidents happen around her. Get too close, and you might wake up dead.”
Denon’s door swung open and Ivy stormed out, slamming his door so hard the lights flickered. Her face was tight, and I don’t think she even saw me as she whipped past my cubicle. Somewhere between having left me and now, she had donned a calf-length silk duster. I was secure enough in my own gender preference to admit she made it look very good. The hem billowed as she crossed the floor with murderous strides. Spots of anger showed on her pale face. Tension flowed from her, almost visible it was so strong.
She wasn’t going vampy; she was just mad as all get-out. Even so, she left a cold wake behind her that the sunlight streaming in couldn’t touch. An empty canvas bag hung over her shoulder, and her wish was still about her neck. Smart girl, I thought. Save it for a rainy day. Ivy took the stairs, and I closed my eyes in misery