Elizabeth McClung - Zed

Table of Contents

HER NAME? ZED. AGE? Eleven, twelve, maybe thirteen - it wasnt like she was getting three square a day and multivitamins. She was small, four-foot nothing: thin, grubby, but with a thrust to her chin which told you, as you saw her beetling down the hall towards you - best step aside. Most people were fairly certain Zed was female. Her soft features and long lashes were contrasted by grey uniform coveralls, slick and shiny from constant wear. The hair was the deciding factor, because it fell, wildly uneven, to shoulder length. Once a year, Zed assaulted it with her knife, hacking it back above her ears. She had a habit of tilting her head down and staring up at people from under her bangs. She just showed up one day - no relations, no history. No one knew much about her, and those who did never passed it on. People didnt gossip about her, at least not more than once, because if she caught them shed stick her knife point somewhere soft on them and ask, Got anything more to say, Chuckles? which, invariably, they didnt.

Yes, she fit right in with the Tower.

THE TOWER, AN UNPAINTED concrete tenement block twenty storeys high with basements and sub-basements below. Twenty storeys of long hallways with ancient whitewash and carpets laid down from the war. Which war that might be was a subject of heated hallway controversy. At each end of the hall ran concrete stairs, unpainted and unventilated, winding back and forth, up and down. They were cob-webbed, grimed, half-lit, urine-scented, and suspiciously sticky. Still, a majority of the tenants used them, unless they were suicidal enough, or drunk, or stoned or oblivious enough to take the elevators. Not that anyone had died yet. But both elevators did have a tendency to groan a little. One of them, when going to the top floors, would shake and stop before letting out a moan of tearing metal. Then, without warning, it would drop a few inches and you prayed and clutched each other. The lights would go out and itd drop a bit more. But after a while the lights would flick on and the elevator would start again, shrieking as it shuddered up the shaft. So when the doors did open, you didnt mind so much that it had missed the 17th floor by over two feet and you had to climb up to get out. In the Tower, this elevator was known as Lucky, or the goodn.

The other elevator, Jimmy, was named after the inaugural suicide of the building, a mythic figure who had jumped into the empty shaft and now resided in the elevator that occupied it. This was why, some of the time, the elevator would take you where you wanted to go without a fuss. It was also why, at other times, it would close the doors and send you up and up, say, to maybe floor 18 and then right down, to the 4th floor: up to 17, down to 11, up to 16, down to 2, all the while never obeying a single pushed button including the emergency stop and never once opening the doors. Once aboard, the only way out was if someone on the outside pushed the elevator button. Then, like a diabolic amusement ride, one passenger would be let out for another to come in before it started all over again. Everyone avoided Jimmy after the unfortunate incident when a 2 a.m. drunk was stuck inside for over an hour, screaming his lungs out.

At one time the Tower may have had a real name, like Highland Heights or Viewside Towers, but that was back before the downtown drifted away, leaving the empty lots and shells of buildings behind like trash after a picnic.

If you had a choice, you lived somewhere else. Otherwise, welcome home.

ON THIS MORNING ZED stood before the main entrance, those two great sunken glass doors, and looked up. The top of the building was wrapped in a shroud of early morning mist. A crescendo of yowls had drawn Zeds attention upwards and now, accelerating toward her through the mist, came a writhing, wailing bundle of cat, its claws extended. Watching the way the air rippled its fur, Zed recognized the cat as Valeries, Val of the 19th floor. Zed saw the cat often as it waited, curled on Vals doorstep. This was because Val lived within the grip of two moods: the first sent her roaming the halls, aggressively horny, in search of a screaming fuck; the other left her curled on the floor in a three-day crying jag petting a cat desperately trying to escape.

While the earth is patient, gravity is not. The cat accelerated, the ground remained.

Zed, no stranger to bloodstains, edged backwards, stepping out of the splash radius.

The cat hit with a wet thud, its head twisted back, mouth gaping. The flight was over. Zed shrugged. Shed check that out later, but now, with the building just waking up, it was time to do the rounds. Time to get to business.

Hammer, the buildings security guard, with his bulging forehead of bone and flat top, leaned against the door. He looked down at the colourful addition to the sidewalk. Cat, he rumbled with his stick-on-gravel voice. Zed nodded. Outside building. Zed nodded again. Not my jurisdiction, he said, with a low coughing sound. Zed looked at Hammers throat, wondering if the volume of words had choked him. It was when he turned that she saw the quake of his shoulders. Hammer was laughing. Zed followed him as he returned to his concrete room, its 180-degree slit holes built just like a real bunker.

Hammer handed her a dog-eared paperback mystery. Done, he told her. Mafia book. Zed put the book into her satchel, a heavy, green sack with a shoulder strap. Hammer watched her, his stubby grey hair matching his pressed shirt.

Mafia, Zed confirmed. Speaking as little as possible became a habit when talking to Hammer.

Mystery, he shrugged. He rubbed his nose and looked at her. Good kid. He leaned forward and indicated with one finger that she should do likewise. Afternoon, he said softly. The power. He drew a finger across his throat.

Then he leaned back with the start of a smile. Info, he nodded. Two books.

She held up one finger.

He shook his head.

So the powers off overnight?

Maybe.

Off overnight, two, if it lasts until dark, one.

Hammer grunted, agreeing. His gaze drifted past her and Zed turned to see the first of the can-men coming into the lobby, ready for the days search for all things metal.

Out, Hammer barked at Zed, but she was already gone.

Zed had slipped through a dusty-grey steel door and now stood at one of the junctions of the inter-hallways. These hallways, snaking in and around the main floor, were the alternate highways connecting the elevators with the outside, the storage rooms to the water tanks, and the garbage bins to the parking garages.

She stood, extending her senses. She absorbed the plinks of warming metal doors and the stench of dried piss and vomit. Where to head first? She felt the hairs on her cheek catch a puff of air and the smell of sour bile and turned cheese caught in her nostrils. Someone was in the garbage bins and she wanted to see who.

One of the prebuilt luxuries of the Tower was the garbage chute system: four hatches for each floor into which bags of garbage disappeared. But like any magic trick, there was a functional underbelly: four industrial garbage bins sitting in a square on ground level under four matching holes in the concrete ceiling. Every few seconds, like expectant subway tunnels, a deep rattling would grow from one of the openings. This indicated that a bounding, hurling, and hopefully-bagged mass of garbage was approaching. After a loud metallic twang, a high-spinning, high-speed sack of previous personal property would arrive. Of course, not all bags or all trajectories are equal. The occasional bag of garbage exploding right out of the hole like a shrapnel grenade just added to the excitement, not to mention the smell.