The Bar Code Rebellion (6 page)

Kayla looked out the window as the East/West CrossLink blasted by at top speed. The monotony and sameness of the passing cars, the flat, dusky landscape, and the endless highway lulled her. She leaned her head against the cab’s passenger window. Her eyes were wide open, but she was no longer seeing the highway….

She’s moving through a dilapidated tenement, panting as she goes. A rat scrambles by her feet. She stops and opens a pack. It’s her own pack. Hastily, she tosses out old clothes, a sketch pad, charcoal pencils, anything that she can’t sell. She throws the bag angrily onto the floor. Useless! She checks her sneering image in a chipped hallway mirror. Not Kayla’s look, but it’s definitely her face beneath the heavy makeup.

Dusa was speaking to her from the driver’s seat
of the truck. Kayla jumped at the sound of her voice.

“What?” Kayla asked.

“I said, I have to stop in St. Louis,” Dusa repeated. “A guy there is giving me a chip with a lot of records on dead people. Wow! You were in another world.”

“Daydream, I guess.” Kayla hadn’t yet told Dusa about the visions she sometimes had. This one was so strange. Who were these girls she was seeing? They looked like her — but so different. Alternate selves? Alternate possible futures? It was incredibly unnerving, and she wasn’t ready to talk about it.

“Are you okay?” Dusa checked.

“Yeah. Fine,” Kayla replied. They’d been driving for two days. Their destination: Carson City, Nevada. The letter she’d received from Amber had sounded desperate.

I can’t do this anymore, Kayla. I feel like I’m completely surrounded by insanity at every turn. Aunt Emily is a total nut job. I call her Tarantula Woman because she keeps a tank of them in her bedroom and they’re forever escaping.

Dad left for California saying he was going to find a job but I think he just plain split. We haven’t heard from him in a month. My brother took off with some bikers shortly after that. Mom’s hair is falling out from nerves and all she does is worry about it all day. I have no
friends at all. Some days I can’t even get the words out but there’s no one to talk to so it hardly matters. I miss you. I think I’ll just walk off into the desert and keep going until I turn into dry, sandy dirt and blow away.

When Kayla had met up with Dusa again near the tractor trailer hidden in the woods, she’d asked to come along on the trip out west, maybe get a ride to Carson City. From there she’d set out to look for Amber. Her friend needed her — and what use was Kayla’s friendship if she didn’t show up for her?

“What about Mfumbe?” Dusa had asked.

“I think he’s stuck where he is for a while,” Kayla had answered with a resigned sigh. Just to be sure, she found a quiet spot on a boulder in the woods and tried to contact him, mind to mind. She received his reply but it was weak and troubled.
Doctors have given me druggy medicine. Feel rotten, always sleepy. Don’t come to the house. My father called G-1. Looking for you.

“It might not be such a bad idea for you to go west for a while,” Dusa had said when Kayla told her what she’d learned from Mfumbe. “Eutonah also said G-1 is looking for you. I wonder why.”

“Me, too.”

“I say we hit the road right now. Why wait?”

She’d been right, Kayla had thought. Why sit around and wait for Global-1 to catch her? She might as well go this very moment.

They slept in the back of the truck at a campground outside Pittsburgh where they arrived around three that morning. At eight
A.M.
Kayla awoke in the passenger seat in the cab of the moving truck. “I don’t even remember coming up front,” she mumbled, rubbing her eyes.

“I woke you up, but I think you were just walking in your sleep,” Dusa said with a chuckle. “Go back to sleep if you want.”

That sounded like a good idea to Kayla, but she found that sleep wouldn’t come. She had never seen much of America other than the northern East Coast. The passing scenery was much the same along the East/West CrossLink; fields and towns and malls followed by more of the same. The billboards that dotted the CrossLink advertised the same radio stations and the same superchains of stores and places to eat. Kayla remembered a poem that Mfumbe had read to her as they walked along the Hudson River on their way to Washington. It was by a nineteenth-century poet named Walt Whitman.
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.
The poet wrote about working people busy with their various activities.

Kayla had particularly loved the last lines, and she recalled them easily.

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,

The day what belongs to the day — at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

The poem conjured an image of robust individuals embracing their own unique qualities and together forming a song that was America. When had all this conformity and sameness set in? How had it happened? When had the varied carols turned into a single corporate advertising jingle?

And yet she knew so many strong individuals. People were still people, as varied as ever, if they were only given a chance to be themselves.

In St. Louis late that afternoon, they stopped to eat at a diner overlooking the Mississippi River. Outside the large picture window, the sunset bounced off the river’s powerful and choppy brown current. “How much money is left in your fake bar code account?” Kayla asked as she turned away from the river to peruse the many laminated pages of the menu.

“Not sure exactly,” Dusa admitted. “It could run out at any time. We might just have to bolt if the code comes up empty.”

“Great,” Kayla said with a cynical laugh. Would the day ever come when she wouldn’t have to be prepared to run at a moment’s notice?

Their waitress studied Kayla with particular
interest. “Congratulations,” she said after she’d taken down the order.

“What for?” Kayla asked cautiously.

“You know,” the waitress said, seeming to assume Kayla was joking. “It’s great that you’ve gotten your life sorted out.”

“The ad,” Kayla realized when the waitress had gone. “She thinks I’m the girl in the ad.”

“So do a lot of people,” Dusa pointed out as she got up to go to the ladies’ room. When she returned she carried a newspaper and her face wore an odd expression.

“What?” Kayla asked.

She tossed the paper onto the table. The front pages were folded back revealing the Life & Style section within. Kayla’s eyes widened. The title of the lead story was
FORGIVENESS AND ACCEPTANCE BUILD A NEW DREAM
. A picture of the clean-scrubbed Kayla who had appeared on TV was under the title — and she wasn’t alone. Beside her was Zekeal. The two of them held hands and stared lovingly at each other.

The next day, Kayla left Dusa standing by the famous St. Louis arch so she could meet her contact. He’d give Dusa records of people who were dead, to be used in making fake bar codes.

Kayla walked down by the Mississippi, past a row of seaside restaurants. She shifted her pack on her shoulder. In it was an e-chip Dusa had entrusted to her. “It’s got info on Drakians all over the county,” Dusa had revealed as she’d slipped it into Kayla’s bag. “I don’t want to be carrying it when I meet this guy, just in case he isn’t who he says he is.”

Steamships came into the harbor. For a fee they took tourists for rides on the river. This might be a good time to test the fake bar code she wore to discover if it contained a bank account. She got in line, and to her pleased surprise, her fake rang through with the correct amount for her admittance. Her name rang up as Rose Wahmann.

When she got to the entrance gate, the attendant reached for her backpack. “You’ll need to check that for security reasons,” he said.

Kayla remembered the e-chip. It would make her feel safer if she kept that with her. “Let me just
take out my wallet first,” she requested, working the buckles of the pack.

She was reaching into the bag when someone shoved her forcefully from behind. The impact came on the same spot where she’d been hit in Washington. It caused a searing pain to run down her back, dropping her to her knees.

“Hey!” the attendant shouted at the figure who dashed past Kayla. “She has your bag!”

Kayla stood up and took off at full speed in pursuit of the fleeing figure. Despite the pain in her back, she knew she couldn’t lose the e-chip. Whether this was a straightforward mugging or something more deliberate she didn’t know, but she couldn’t let that e-chip get to the wrong people.

She grew closer to the running figure as they raced along the riverside walkway. It was a female in a red hooded sweatshirt and the silver stretch jeans that had come into style. The hood was raised, obscuring the thief’s face and hair.

The thief raced off the walkway, hopping a chain-link fence. Kayla wasn’t sure she could be as agile but spotted a break in the fence several feet farther up. Running through the opening gave her a slight advantage since she was able to close in diagonally on the thief.

She continued to pursue the thief onto a narrow street filled with antique shops and hardware stores. The restored storefronts looked as though
they were from early in the past century. The girl ducked into an alley, and Kayla followed her in. A flash of the red hood was all she glimpsed as the thief rounded the corner at the end of the alley. Starting to pant heavily, Kayla kept on her trail.

When she emerged from the alley she saw a hint of red dart into a doorway three buildings up on a quiet block of dilapidated, run-down tenements. Kayla continued up the block to the building.

Sucking in gulps of air, she stared at the building with its boarded-up windows. How brave did she feel? She shook off the question. There was no choice but to get that bag back.

She pulled open the splintered purple front door. Inside, the hall was dark, lit only with the filtered sunlight from a filthy side window beside the peeling door. A hideous smell assaulted her, and she saw that some animal had relieved itself in the corner.

Cautiously, she climbed the steep, narrow stairway. In the halls, doors had been removed from their hinges and apartments were empty. The handle of a broken hammer lay on the floor on the first landing, and she stooped to pick it up for protection. It was heavy and had a jagged, broken end that could prove dangerous to anyone coming at her.

She paused on the second-floor landing, clutching her weapon more tightly. Footsteps echoed
from above her. Tilting her head slightly, she listened closely. How many people were up there?

As best as she could tell — just one.

Barely daring to breathe, she crept up the remaining stairs and entered another apartment that had been deprived of its front door. Lines of bright sunlight crept through the cracks in the boarded windows, affording her just enough light to see. She was in what had once been the living room and followed the sound of the footsteps toward a shadowy hall.

The thief stood at the far end of the hall digging through Kayla’s pack, impatiently tossing its contents onto the cracked linoleum floor.

Ducking into the empty room nearest her, Kayla peered around the doorway. She’d seen this place before. Where?

As the thief tossed the bag in disgust and pushed back her red hood, Kayla knew exactly where she’d seen it — in her vision!

The girl turned toward a cracked mirror hanging on the wall behind her. As she looked at herself, Kayla saw her, too. Overbleached platinum hair. Heavily made-up eyes and a smear of bloodred lipstick.

And Kayla’s face.

Kayla covered her mouth in surprise, but not in time. The girl heard her involuntary gasp of shock and whirled toward it.

Kayla stepped out into the hall, firmly clenching
the broken handle. “You stole my pack,” she said, stepping forward. “I need it back.”

“Take it,” the thief said, belligerently jerking her chin toward the bag. “There’s nothing worth crap in it, anyhow.”

As Kayla grew closer, the girl could see her more clearly. “Wait a minute,” she said, a nervous shake coming into her voice. “I’ve seen you before, it was …”

“In a vision,” Kayla finished.

“Yeah,” the girl agreed softly, staring at Kayla, her black-rimmed eyes widening with every step Kayla advanced. “In my mind I saw you at the steamboat. I saw you, but only from the back. I thought it meant that you had something in your pack that would be worth a lot. That you’d be a good mark. And sure enough, when I went down there today — there you were.”

Kayla asked, “Don’t you notice something else? Can’t you see how alike we are?”

Apparently, the superficial differences between them were all the girl saw. She cocked her head to the side and gazed at Kayla with complete incomprehension.

Kayla went to the girl’s side and faced the mirror. “Look,” she urged. The two faces were aligned perfectly beside each other. The girls were the same height, their faces the same shape, their noses had the same slope, their foreheads the same width. If Kayla had wanted to become identical to this other
person, all she’d have to do was bleach her hair and pile on makeup. With a quick glance at the girl’s wrist, Kayla saw she had no bar code.

The girl got it. The fact was evident in the amazed, slightly unnerved expression on her face. “This is banged out,” she murmured.

“What’s your name?” Kayla asked.

“Kara.”

Kayla turned to her, disbelief written across her face. Could they be twins separated at birth?

“Where were you born?” Kayla asked.

“Somewhere in Missouri.”

“You don’t know exactly where?”

Kara shook her head. “I don’t remember where my first foster home was. I was in a bunch of them until I split from the last one and went solo.”

“How long ago was that?” Kayla asked.

“Just before I turned seventeen. I don’t know — March, I think. I remember everything was real muddy the day I took off. It was pouring rain.”

Kara showed Kayla the large empty room where she slept on a fake fur coat she’d found in a Salvation Army donation bin. She showed her the drawings she’d done of her visions. She had a pile of them that she kept in a musty, cobweb-crossed closet. When she pulled them out, she had to brush rodent droppings from their surfaces. “Damn rats,” she muttered without too much agitation. This was how her life was, and she seemed resigned to it.

The pencil drawings were crude, their perspective
awkward in places. Yet Kayla thought they indicated a deep natural ability for art. They were vivid in their detail, and their bold lines seemed expressive of the artist’s intense reaction to everything she saw, both the ugly and the beautiful.

“These are unbelievable,” Kayla murmured as she inspected them one by one. Even more than the execution of the drawings, it was their subject matter that held her there, fascinated.

The first was a drawing of a house on fire — Kayla’s house.

“That was a vision I had last spring, sometime around May. I heard a woman shouting, and then this crazy fireball roared up the hall,” Kara recalled with a shiver. “It was different from the vision I’ve been having since I was thirteen. It’s a different house from the one in the other vision.”

“Tell me about the other vision,” Kayla said.

Kara pulled a drawing from the pile and put it on top. It was a pencil drawing of a house burning. A girl of about seven or eight was standing outside it, laughing as flames engulfed the building. The girl bore a striking resemblance to Kara. It could have been Kayla, too.

“Is this you?” Kayla asked, pointing to the girl in the picture.

“I don’t know,” Kara admitted. “In the vision I’m never sure. It seems to be me, and yet I don’t know any of the people I’m thinking about or recognize the house.”

“So much fire,” Kayla noted, half to herself.

Kara nodded, taking the drawings and studying them as if for the first time. “I was banged out about it for weeks, afraid it meant this firetrap dump was going to go up in smoke. I still worry about it.”

“It isn’t
your
future,” Kayla told her, speaking quietly. “One drawing is of my house. It burned last May.”

“Your house?” Kara asked, stunned.

“Yes, and this other house has a child in it, this laughing child. It’s not my house, and it isn’t this building.”

“I wonder if one of us will have a child who looks like this in the future.”

Kayla studied Kara’s face, now fixed into an expression of almost childlike awe by the full realization that she was staring at a twin. Without the hard expression she’d worn at first, she looked even more like Kayla. And there was clearly a mental connection between them.

“Do you have any idea who your parents are?” Kayla asked cautiously, uneasy about posing such a sensitive question.

Kara laughed bitterly. “At my last foster home they hinted that she was some kind of addict, but I don’t know if that was real or they were just being their evil selves. I had to escape before they made me get that banged-out bar code on my birthday. When you make your life on the street, you don’t need one. I see you don’t have a real one. You
can spot the fakes if you know what to look for. They start to flake a little after a while. The real tattoo doesn’t. Why don’t you have one? Not seventeen yet?”

“I turned seventeen on April sixteenth,” Kayla replied.

Kara’s jaw fell. “Me, too! April sixteenth!”

“We
must
be twins!” Kayla said.

Kara held up three fingers.

“You had a vision of another one of us?” Kayla dared ask. “Was it someone in a desert? Someone … frightening?”

Kara shook her head. “No, I saw someone reading palms. She was good at it, too, because she was like me.”

“What do you mean, like you? Could you see her face?”

“No, it was more like I was thinking her thoughts, looking out of her eyes,” Kara revealed. “But she was a good palm reader because she had the same ability as me.”

“What ability?” Kayla asked.

“I can see the future. She can, too, but she pretends she sees it in palms. She doesn’t. It’s the visions. Her visions come faster than mine.”

Kayla realized that it meant that there were four of them, three of whom could see visions of the future. Could the girl in the desert see ahead, too? She moved the picture of the child and the burning house to the bottom of the pile and looked at the
next drawing, a desert landscape with a blue tent standing in the middle of the vast desert emptiness. “I’ve had a vision like this, too,” she told Kara. “I saw this same scene in one of them, only I didn’t see the tent.”

“Crazy,” Kara murmured. “I should tell you that I’m pretty sure somebody’s looking for me.”

“Your parents,” Kayla guessed.

“No. I don’t know who it is, but someone tried to grab me the other night when I came back late. Another time before that, two men chased me. I can’t let them get me. I have a feeling they know I have visions.”

Kayla recalled her meeting with Eutonah in the Waters Shed jail. She’d warned her that Global-1 was looking for her — and not just because she didn’t have a bar code tattoo or even for her supposed involvement in her mother’s death in the fire. Why, then? And why were they also searching for this other girl, Kara, who was identical to her?

Suddenly, Kayla’s problems seemed much bigger and more complex than they had been before.