22
Corinne Rawson was standing in front of the screening room, shooting the shit with Jake “the
Snake” Howland and Phil “the Pill” Chaffitz. Abused as a child by both her father and two of
her four older brothers, Corinne had never had a problem with her work in Back Half. She
knew the kiddos called her Corinne the Slapper, and that was okay. She had been slapped plenty
in the Reno trailer
park where she had grown up, and the way she looked at it, what goes
around comes around. Plus, it was for a good cause. What you
called your basic win-win
situation.
Of course there were drawbacks to working in Back Half. For one thing,
your head got
jammed up with too much information. She knew that Phil wanted to fuck her and Jake didn’t
because Jake only liked women with double-wide racks in front and extra junk in the trunk.
And she knew that
they
knew she didn’t want anything to do with either of them, at least not in
that way; since the age of seventeen, she had batted strictly for the other side.
Telepathy always sounded great in stories and movies, but it was annoying as fuck in real life.
It came with the hum, which was a drawback.
And it was cumulative, which was a
major
drawback. The housekeepers and janitors swapped back and
forth between Front Half and
Back Half, which helped, but the red caretakers worked here and nowhere else. There were two
teams, Alpha and Beta. Each worked four months on, then had four months off. Corinne was
almost at the end of her current four-month swing. She would spend a week or two
decompressing in the adjacent staff village, recovering her essential self, and then would go to
her little house in New Jersey, where she lived with Andrea, who believed her partner worked in
a top-secret military project. Top-secret it was; military it was not.
The low-level telepathy would fade during her time in the village, and by the time she got
back to Andrea, it would be gone. Then, a few days into her next swing, it would start to creep
back. If she had been able to feel sympathy (a sensibility that had been mostly beaten out of her
by the age of thirteen), she would have felt it for Dr. Hallas and Dr. James. They were here
almost all of the time, which meant they were almost constantly exposed to the hum, and you
could see what it was doing to them. She knew that Dr. Hendricks, the Institute’s chief medical
officer, gave the Back Half docs injections that were supposed to limit the constant erosion, but
there was a big difference between limiting a thing and halting it.
Horace Keller, a red caretaker with whom she was friendly, called Heckle and Jeckle high-
functioning crazies. He said that eventually one or both of them would freak out, and then the
topsiders would have to find fresh medical talent. That was nothing to Corinne. Her job was to
make sure the kids ate when they were supposed to eat, went into their rooms when they were
supposed to go to their rooms (what they did in there was also no concern of hers), attended the
movies on movie nights, and didn’t get out of line. When they did, she slapped them down.
“The gorks are restless tonight,” Jake the Snake said. “You can hear them in there. Tasers at
the ready when we do the eight o’clock feeding, right?”
“They’re always worse at night,” Phil said. “I don’t . . . hey, what the
fuck
?”
Corinne felt it, too. They were used to the hum, the way you got used to the sound of a
noisy fridge or a rattling air conditioner. Now, suddenly, it ramped up to the level they had to
endure on movie nights that were also sparkler nights. Only on movie nights it mostly came
from behind the closed and locked doors of Ward A, also known as Gorky Park. She could feel
it coming from there now, but it was also coming from another direction, like the push of a
strong wind. From the lounge, where those kids had gone to spend their free time when the
show was over. First one bunch went down there, those who were still high-functioning, then a
couple Corinne thought of as pre-gorks.
“What the fuck are they doing?” Phil shouted. He put his hands to the sides of his head.
Corinne ran for the lounge, pulling her zap-stick. Jake was behind her. Phil—perhaps more
sensitized to the hum, maybe just scared—stayed where he was, palms pressed to his temples as
if to keep his brains from exploding.
What Corinne saw when she got to the door was almost a dozen children.
Even Iris
Stanhope, who would certainly go to Gorky Park after tomorrow’s movie, was there. They were
standing in a circle, hands joined, and now the hum was strong enough to make Corinne’s eyes
water. She thought she could even feel her fillings vibrating.
Get the new one, she thought. The shrimp. I think he’s the one driving this. Zap him and it
might break the circuit.
But even as she thought it, her fingers opened and her zap-stick dropped to the carpet.
Behind her, almost lost in the hum, she heard Jake shouting for the kids to stop whatever they
were doing and go to their rooms. The black
girl was looking at Corinne, and there was an
insolent smile on her lips.
I’ll slap that look right off you, missy, Corinne thought, and when she raised her hand, the
black girl nodded.
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