Free Blood Zero Sky by J. Gates Page A

electronic screams add to the chorus.
    Each handhold is slick, smeared with algae and oil—or something worse—and twice I almost fall, but somehow I make it to the top and pull myself over the lip. I take a few shaky steps forward and lean against a rusted chain-link fence.
    The world is spinning. I puke on a dandelion growing through a crack in the pavement.
    Now Clair’s face is here, her big, beautiful eyes appearing over the edge of the man-made riverbank, the lipstick smeared from her sensuous lips, her face fraught with sympathy, terror, and bewilderment, all lacquered beneath a veneer of resolve.
    In an instant she’s with me, my arm over her shoulder as she leads me through a break in the fence, across a deserted street, through an empty courtyard full of cracked pavement and lonely weeds, and down a series of empty, debris-strewn alleyways. All the while, she whispers to me in this eerie, singsong, almost motherly, lullaby way, her voice underscored now and then with the blood-curdling warble of sirens or the percussive chuckle of a gunship helicopter.
    “We have people here. It’ll be okay. We have friends waiting, in one of the empty factories. If nobody saw us jump, they’ll think we were in the chopper. They’ll think we’re dead.”
    In my delirium, that prospect seems wonderful. “I wish I were dead,” I mumble.
    She doesn’t understand what I’m getting at. “I know you might be in a lot of pain,” she says, “but you’ll be fine. We have people who can help. They aren’t doctors, but they know medicine.”
    “No,” I say. “I wish I were dead because—because I hate the world.”
    She snorts derisively. “Why would you hate the world, Blackie?”
    “If you want to get to the top . . . ” I begin, but nausea overtakes me and the rest of my words get lost.
    I should be resisting, I remind myself. I should be fighting my kidnapper, not helping her. But I don’t. I’m in no condition to fight, even if I wanted to.
    Clair doesn’t stop. A siren comes our way and she looks over her shoulder and drags me along faster. Toward what, I have no idea.
    ~~~
    Starving.
    The blood on my head has curdled to a dark, sharp crust, and the whole world throbs every time I move my neck.
    Lying prone, staring up at layer after layer of rusted catwalks and dust-laden piping, I watch the lamplight make the shadows dance.
    I must have passed out, because I don’t know where Clair found the lamp.
    I don’t know how long she’s been gone or where she went. It feels like I’ve been lying here forever, falling in and out of time.
    When the man’s voice comes, it seems to drift from among the catwalks, resonating through the hollow hearts of the pipes, echoing off some unseen ceiling with cathedral-like acoustical clarity. I try to move my head and look for whoever is talking, but the effort is too much.
    The unseen speaker says: “The Company, before they were even called N-Corp, bought out hundreds of other companies. Acquired them. Mergers, they were called. Stop me if you know this. The Company started out, decades ago, dominating the food industry, then appliances, then restaurants. They were purchased, next, by one of the largest media conglomerates—even at that time, there were only a few companies controlling nearly all of the media. For years, each new acquisition kept its former name, so that few people realized that the same corporation that made their car and financed their house also sold them most of the food they ate. Later, they decided to put all the combined companies under one brand. They chose the name of the division with the most positive brand association, according to their marketing surveys.”
    “Nabisco,” I murmur. “N-Corp.” I strain to see the speaker, but he must be behind me.
    He continues, his cadence hypnotic: “What about the government, you might ask? What about antitrust laws, if you’ve even heard of such things? I’ll bet you never even learned about