The Bar Code Rebellion (3 page)

“I miss Allyson, too,” Kayla said, handing the letter back to August.

She, Mfumbe, and August continued to wait for David Young to come out with Loudon Waters. She felt nervous despite the fact that she’d had a vision of the event. In it, she’d seen David Young smiling as he walked out behind an angry-looking, defeated President about to announce his resignation.

In the next second, they appeared, like a rerun of a movie she’d already seen. People around her grew hoarse with cheering. Others beamed joyfully as emotional tears streamed down their faces. All around her, protesters hugged friends as well as strangers. Mfumbe and August slapped their palms together in the air. Mfumbe turned and hugged Kayla. This was the moment they’d dreamed of!

Kayla was cheering along with the others when she became aware of a low whine. She swatted the air, thinking it was a mosquito. Mfumbe’s face became puzzled and he checked around, then up. His expression changed from confusion to alarm as he pointed skyward.

In V formation, a squad of sleek white jets, identical to the robot jet that had fired on them earlier, flew over the White House and toward the crowd.

They were coming lower.

Too low.

An anxious murmur swept through the crowd.

A man broke loose from the protesters and dashed across the street. As others witnessed his panic, they began to run.

Kayla was aware of a rushing telepathic buzz of frantic communication filling her mind.
What’s that?They’regoingtoattack.No.It’sjustsurveillance. No,it’snot.They’retoolow!They’reattackingus!

The jets broke formation, flying off in different directions. “Let’s get out of here!” August yelled, running. Mfumbe grabbed Kayla’s hand, holding tight, and they began to run in the same direction as August.

Somewhere, something exploded, the boom reverberating. Kayla felt the vibration in her bones. She and Mfumbe moved closer together, stunned, as all around them people began shouting and yelling.

Global-1 cruisers appeared, blocking the entrances to side streets. Kayla coughed hard. Mfumbe’s hand was over his mouth and he seemed to be choking. Several yards away, August staggered forward, gasping for breath.
Some kind of
crowd control gas,
she heard Mfumbe say.
We’ve got to get out of here!

Hot tears stung her eyes as they stumbled through the escaping crowd. Someone pushed Mfumbe but Kayla clutched his shirt, keeping him from toppling over.

She was still steadying him when a wave of nausea hit her. It was something in the gas.

She released his shirt and stumbled several steps away from him. Clutching her stomach, she began to vomit uncontrollably.

Heavy footsteps came up behind her. As she lifted her head to see who it was, something smashed down hard across her shoulders with incredible force. She was knocked down — and almost knocked out.

Through slitted eyes she was aware of red spinning lights. A man’s voice boomed through an address system, bellowing commands. “DEPOSIT ALL CELL PHONES IN THE BINS PROVIDED. ANY PHONES NOT VOLUNTARILY SURRENDERED WILL BE FORCIBLY TAKEN. PROCEED IN AN ORDERLY FASHION AS INSTRUCTED BY THE GLOBAL-1 OFFICER NEAREST YOU.”

The pain in her back was terrible. When she tried to push herself up, she was forced back to the ground by its searing ferocity.

“Quick! Quick!” someone whispered nearby. A woman’s voice. “Take her to the truck.”

Strong hands grasped her firmly by the upper arms.

A high whine of animal pain flew from her parched lips when they moved her. Her legs were lifted off the ground and she was spirited away across the dark street, too weak to resist.

Kayla dreamed she was walking through a burning building. It was her high school. Smoke blackened the hallways. She pulled off her T-shirt and soaked it in the water fountain before holding the cloth over her nose and mouth. Inside each classroom, flames blazed out of control, engulfing desks, books, and posters like a ravenous monster.

Through the blinding smoke, a soot-blackened woman floated toward her, her feet dangling just above the ground. Her hair was aflame. It blazed around her head, a fiery halo.

Kayla sucked in a sharp breath of smoke-filled air as she realized who the woman was. The fiery, ephemeral figure was her dead mother. “Kayl-l-la,” she intoned, her voice trilling as if some mechanism within it had become stuck on the
l,
a tinny, metallic sound. Her mother’s voice
had
sounded like that, occasionally stalling on a consonant sound. Why had she never noticed it before?

Paralyzed with shock, Kayla was unable to react as the haunting vision of her mother approached. “Kayl-l-l …” Her mother’s face twisted into a grimace of frustration as though the effort of speaking was defeating her. And then, with a sudden burst
of determination, she began to scream. “You don’t know! You don’t know! You don’t know! You don’t —”

Still screaming, Ashley Reed reached out and touched Kayla’s hair. It, too, burst into jets of white-hot fire.

“No!” Kayla shrieked, shielding her face with her hands. She raised her arms high as the fire jumped from her head and raced along her arms to her fingertips. “No!”

Her body began to gyrate uncontrollably, then lifted into the air and began banging off the walls.

“Wake up!” a woman commanded firmly as she shook Kayla’s shoulders.

Kayla’s eyes snapped open. She was in a dark place, on a hard floor. Her first response was to run. She scrambled to her feet, but a hand caught her firmly by the wrist. Kayla yanked it away.

The pain in her back drove her to her knees. Instantly, the other person was by her side. A high beam microlight snapped on, illuminating a woman’s face. “Do you remember me?”

“Katie.” Kayla recalled the long-haul trucker who had once given her a lift to the Superlink. It had been on the night she’d escaped from the hospital where they had wanted to bar-code her.

During the ride they’d discussed the bar code tattoo. There was cancer in Katie’s family, a fact that would stop her from getting a job, health insurance, a mortgage, and so much else the
moment anyone scanned her tattoo. So she’d chosen not to get one. Before they parted company, Katie had given Kayla her last fake bar code tattoo. It had served Kayla well until it had been smeared off by first-aid cream.

“No one has called me Katie in the last six months,” the woman said. “I’ve changed my name since we last met. I started to go by my e-name, Medusa, after I had a little trouble with the law. It makes it harder to track me, and I kind of like it better anyway. It’s scary.”

“Wasn’t Medusa the snake-headed Gorgon woman?” Kayla recalled, remembering her ancient Greek mythology. “People turned to stone if they looked at her face. You’re right — it
is
scary. Who are you trying to scare?”

“Global-1. Those Tattoo Gen creeps. Anyone who’s on my trail.”

“What kind of trouble are you in?” Kayla asked.

“I started transporting bar code tattoo resisters to Canada illegally. It’s nearly impossible to cross the border these days, but I found ways. I took a lot of old people who believed they were going to be killed in the hospital.”

Kayla recalled a couple, the Alans, who had been fleeing to Canada to join their physician daughter, Sarah, there. They’d helped Kayla before G-1 police had tracked them down — and they’d died in a car crash trying to escape. She also remembered the
woman she’d met in the Super Eatery who was marching with senior citizens against the bar code tattoo. Kayla hoped she was all right.

“I got caught crossing the border one night and had to make a run for it,” Katie-Medusa went on. “After that, I was wanted by the G-1 cops, so it seemed better to change my name. The problem was that no one liked saying Medusa so it got shortened to Dusa. You might as well call me that now.”

“How did you find me?”

“I’ve been following your story in the news. I recognized you lying there on Pennsylvania Avenue and figured I’d better pick you up before the G-1 cops did. We’re in the trailer of my rig, parked in an underground garage just outside Georgetown.”

“Did you see Mfumbe?” she asked. “August?”

“Friends of yours?” Dusa inquired. Kayla nodded. “You were alone. The G-1 cops would have scooped you up eventually, but lucky for you they were still a ways off grabbing other people they’d gassed and clubbed. Maybe they weren’t sure if you were seventeen or not. If you were sixteen, they might have been in trouble for clobbering you because you’re not in violation of the law yet. They couldn’t have hauled you in and charged you with not having a bar code.” She shrugged uncertainly. “They might still have charged you with being a
public nuisance or jaywalking or something. Who knows what they’ll come up with?”

“Why didn’t they get you?”

Dusa smiled bitterly. “Drakians know better. Did you really think Global-1 was going to lie down and die because a thousand idealists demanded that their front man, their former corporate chief, Loudon Waters, should resign? They’ve moved mountains, spent billions, to get that guy into office. Did anyone really think they’d care what the people in this country wanted?”

“We did.
I
did, anyway,” Kayla admitted, suddenly feeling foolish and naive.

“Come on,” Dusa scoffed. “We were prepared for this. We realize what Global-1 is like, how they operate. We had a stock of gas masks, for one thing. We kept away until the trouble started, like we knew it would, and then we came out to see how many we could help.”

“Gene Drake was my neighbor,” she told Dusa.

“Are you kidding?” Dusa asked, impressed. “What was he like?”

“Honestly,” Kayla replied, “he was a weird guy. He smoked these Chinese cigarettes, which I always thought was strange.” Nobody in America smoked anymore, which was why he had to buy imported cigarettes. “And he had a banged-out way of yelling at his little brown terrier, even though he played ball with him in his front yard for more than an hour every day.”

“I’ve heard that he was kind of odd,” Dusa admitted. “But what we admire about him is that he acted. He learned that Global-1 was taking genetic histories from the blood samples they collect when they give a bar code, so he refused to do more codes. He ripped the laser machine right off its base … and they killed him for it. He’s the first martyr for the resistance.”

“But I’ve read that Drakians believe in violence and are dangerous,” Kayla said.

“Propaganda. Not true,” Dusa said firmly. “We act, but we don’t carry weapons. We’re for freedom and life, not against it.”

Kayla pushed herself forward onto her hands and knees and slowly straightened to her feet. The pain was excruciating. “They whacked you good,” Dusa commented. “Your fingers are moving, right?”

Kayla wiggled them and nodded. “I have to find Mfumbe. Would you just let me try something?”

“Sure.”

Kayla shut her eyes.
It’s Kayla. I’m okay. Where are you, Mfumbe?

She relaxed and opened her mind to a receptive state. Instantly, she was flooded with the whispering chatter she’d heard earlier in the day. Hundreds of messages in different voices, even different languages, words tumbling over one another.
WhereareI’mokayI’m hurtwhere areyouIdon’t knowreallyscared not sureareyouokayhurtfeelsick
come find me scaredhurt feelsick don’tworryscared …

She let out a cry of anguished frustration as her eyes opened. “It’s no use. I have to go look for him.” Taking a step toward the door, she cringed again from the pain in her back.

“Don’t worry, this time I’m not going to just send you on your way,” Dusa said. “It’s nearly dawn. I have to do something, and I want you to come with me. Then we’ll look for your friend with the odd name.”

“His great-great-times-ten grandfather was from an area that’s now called Mfumbe in Zambia, in Africa,” Kayla offered. “That’s where his name comes from.”

“Okay. Makes sense.” Dusa tossed Kayla a protein bar for breakfast. “I guess it’s important to know who your ancestors were, now more than ever before. Don’t worry. We’ll find him.”

She and Kayla walked to the back of the tractor trailer. Dusa opened the back doors and leaped lightly to the ground. Extending her hand, she helped Kayla, who was moving more slowly, to descend. Inside the garage, men and women were sleeping on tattered rugs and in old sleeping bags. Dusa nudged one of the sleeping men with the scuffed, scarred toe of her boot. “So, Nate, are we going to do this thing or are you going to sleep all day?” she demanded as he came awake. “I picked up the box of fakes last night.”

Nate yawned and stretched. He was only in his twenties, shaved bald, with very dark skin and the physique of a weight lifter.

Kayla had seen him before. He was one of the two roommates who had shared the house next door to hers with Gene Drake. She spotted the other roommate, a young Asian man, still asleep on a blanket nearby.

Like Gene Drake, they’d worked down at the Global-1 Post Office. After the U.S. Postal Service had gone bankrupt, Global-1 had taken over the buildings and converted them into bar code tattoo centers. The last time she’d seen either of them was right after Gene Drake’s death. Global-1 police had been taking them out of their ransacked house in handcuffs as she watched from her darkened bedroom window.

“Hey, look who’s here, Francis!” Nate said to the second roommate who yawned and stretched to a waking state. “It’s our old neighbor — the foxy girl from next door.”

Kayla had never even spoken to him and was surprised that he recognized her, let alone had noticed her looks.

Francis rolled over, sat up, and rubbed his eyes. “Do you mean the one we always thought was so sexy?” he asked.

“Yeah. She’s right there!” Nate said, pointing at Kayla.

Francis squinted at Kayla and then pulled on a
pair of wire-frame glasses. “She’s cute — but, Nate, that’s not her.”

People were coming awake all around them, disturbed by their conversation. Someone turned on a small portable TV set tuned to the news. “Our neighbor had long hair with a blue streak in it,” Francis continued. “She was always kind of … put together.”

Kayla was becoming irritated at being spoken about as if she weren’t there.

“There she is!” Francis continued, pointing to the portable TV. “What are the chances of that? She’s on the TV just when we’re talking about her.”

It was the public service announcement again. They remembered the old Kayla — and that was who they were seeing on the TV. The clean-scrubbed Kayla smiled into the camera. “I love my bar code tattoo, and I know that everything is going to be all right,” she gushed.

“She’s gone over to the dark side!” Francis cried indignantly. “I’d like to wring her perky little neck!”

“Well, here’s your chance,” Nate said, pointing at Kayla. “Like I’ve been telling you — she’s standing right over there.”

Every newly awakened eye in the dimly lit garage was now focused on Kayla. “I don’t know what that’s about,” she insisted, holding out her right wrist to show she wore no bar code.

Dusa came alongside and brusquely rubbed the place where the bar code might have been. “No
makeup over it, no patch,” she reported to the others. Carefully, she bent Kayla’s head forward to check the back of her neck. “Nothing,” she said.

Francis stood up and swaggered up to them, leering at Kayla. “I’ll have to check the rest of her.”

“You’re not checking anything,” Dusa scoffed. “The bar code tattoo has to be easy to see when a person is fully clothed. If you can’t see it, she doesn’t have it.”

“Then who’s the babe on the TV?” he asked.

Dusa looked to Kayla for an explanation. “Do you have a sister? A twin?”

Kayla shook her head. “No brother or sister at all. Mfumbe thinks it’s a digital fake up meant to make me look like I’ve given up the fight, or even to trick me into getting caught.”

“Makes sense,” Dusa conceded, and the others nodded in agreement.

“I’ve seen that ad before,” Nate recalled. “In it you say you were there the day they shot Gene. Did you see him get killed?” A murmur of excitement ran through the group. Kayla realized that Gene Drake had taken on heroic status in the eyes of these people; even Nate and Francis, who knew differently, appeared swept up in it. They looked at her now like someone who’d had direct contact with a saint.

“I was still outside the post office,” she admitted. “But I heard the shots. I saw the blood hit the window. In the ad they have me saying the event
traumatized me. It did, but not in the way they meant. It
stopped
me from getting the bar code that day and made me think. What was so awful about the tattoo that it made Gene do what he did? What did he know?”

“Gene Drake gave his life so you could be free!” a woman in the group shouted. Her words were followed by cheers from the others.

“What did Gene find in the bar code?” Kayla asked Nate. Gene had told her that in his training to be a bar code tattoo provider he’d befriended someone who’d learned the password to access Global-1’s bar code database. Together, he and the friend were going to hack into the Global-1 system. She’d always assumed the two of them had been successful and what they discovered had driven Gene to rip the machine from its base and hurl it at the wall — the act of defiance that had cost him his life.

“Was that when he learned that everyone’s genetic history was in there?” she asked. “Was that it?”

Anxious, darting glances were exchanged between Francis, Dusa, and Nate. “We think he found something even worse than that,” Nate told her. “A lot worse.”