Chapter 3. The Dead and the Quick
After the Maestro killed the Hulk, there were both immediate and long term consequences for Aster's family, and for the other citizens of Dystopia. The first thing that happened was that the very next day, about two dozen uniformed guards came to the zoo and demanded to search it for 'terrorists'. From what Aster could hear, it sounded as if they though that someplace as large as the zoo would be a good place for the 'terrorists' to hide.
Aster's father said they could search all they wanted, but that it would be dangerous for them to go into the cages with some of the animals, and he would have to move them out of the cages before they could be searched, as he didn't want the animals hurting the guards, or the guards having to shoot the animals. The guards could watch him do so, if they wished. For a few hours, the guard were marching up and down, looking into cages, and in the backs of the building such as the World of Reptiles and the Mouse House. Some of them got on ladders and looked above the ceilings of buildings. Others lifted up manhole covers with crowbars and went down into the sewers. Aster wasn't really worried. She knew there were no terrorists hiding at the zoo. Her father wouldn't allow it, and given the facts that firstly she knew the zoo like the back of her hand, and secondly, there was no way for ANYONE to sneak around the zoo without having the animals react to them in various ways, she would have known it if anyone was trying to hide there.
There were large plaques throughout the zoo, with a map of the entire zoo. The plaques had been made before the War, of course, and in some places the layout of the zoo had been altered. There were fewer animals than there had been, back when the maps were made, and they had been moved closer together, and some of the outlying parts of the Zoo had been closed off, while in other places, roads of gravel had been laid down where none existed on the map. The guards growled over every discrepancy they found between the current-day zoo and the ancient maps, and forced Aster's father to explain the differences to them numerous times as if hoping to find a flaw in what he said. Even then they weren't happy, and insisted on inspecting every difference personally, making sure that there actually wasn't anything hidden at the ends of the closed off roads, and that the new roads led where Aster's father said they did.
The guards actually seemed disappointed that they did not find any terrorists. A few of them glared at the animals and muttered things about 'waste of food' and 'eat better than we do'. Aster saw that a few of them had put some of the food they had stocked for the animals, things like corn, wheat, fruit, and dressed rabbits into sacks.
"They're stealing the animal feed." She complained to her father in a low voice.
"Forget it. They're angry and frustrated because they can't find what they're looking for. And the Maestro won't let them rest until they DO find what they're looking for. Let them take what they want, and leave. If we argue with them, they'll take more, or even arrest us."
Eventually the guards did leave, though not before one of them aimed a gun at a large goat, fired, then ran over to seize the fallen creature by the hooves. "Fresh meat tonight! With drippings! Look at the fat on it!"
Aster scowled. That was one of their prime dairy goats. The milk brought in a lot of extra money. Milk of any sort was a rare luxury in Dystopia, and someone whose wife couldn't nurse, which was a fairly common problem due to poor diet and radiation would pay almost anything for it. Plus it could have been bred for several more years at least.
Still, there were other things in the zoo besides a little food and a single goat to worry about. The tree that had been thrown was still on the roof of the Mouse House. Aster's father and some of the men who worked at the Zoo had to rummage around in the back of one of the building until they came out with axes and ladders. The climbed up on top of the roof of the Mouse house, and chopped at the tree for a while, periodically throwing branches down alongside the building. They just left them there. They weren't blocking the door, and her father said it would be free firewood, come winter time. They could be chopped up into proper lengths later, when things settled down and there was more time. Right now, the important thing to do was to get the roof repaired, which required Aster's father going to the market in Dystopia with some of the men (who pulled a large wooden wagon behind them) and buying up several pieces of lumber, boards, nails, and shingles. The latter were hard to get. There were a few working sawmills in Dystopia, although trees were rare, especially Outside, and nails lasted a long time and could be reused, but shingles to match those on the Mouse House had been made before the war. A few people were making thick, lumpy shingles out of wood, but Aster's father wanted the repair to match the rest of the building. Which it did, and in a few days, the Mouse House was as good as new.
About a week after the guards had searched the zoo, Aster's father told her that she and her sister had to come with him into the public square, just outside the Maestro's palace. Apparently the guards who had searched the Zoo, or perhaps some different guards, had finally found the 'terrorists' they were looking for. They hadn't even bothered trying to fight them. They simply called the Maestro, and the Maestro had come and killed them all. None of the bullets, grenades, or other weapons the terrorists had, had made even a scratch on him. Now, their heads were on spikes in the public square, and the Maestro had demanded that everyone in Dystopia, except 'nursing babies', come to the square to see what happened to people who rebelled against him.
Aster was 12 and her sister, Thumb' was 7, so neither of them were 'nursing babies'. So they had to go with their father to the square. It seemed like everyone else in Dystopia was going there, too. Stores, market stalls, brothels, and houses were all shut up or locked, and the streets were far more crowded than usual, with everyone headed only one way -towards the Maesto's palace, rather than going in all different directions or just standing around the way they usually did.
When Aster got to the public square, she saw over the heads of the people in front of her that there were several heads on long poles, lined up on a long wooden platform in front of the Maestro's palace. One was obviously the Hulk, it was nearly twice as wide, long, and deep as a normal head, not to mention that it had bright green skin under the crusted blood that spattered it. Plus a painted wooded sign under it said 'Hulk'. The other heads were of regular people, one very old man that said 'Rick Jones', a woman with a long, bright red braid that Aster had sometimes seen on the way to the Library had a sign under her head that said 'Janice'. And several others, which she got bored with reading after the first six or so.
Aster wasn't really sure what looking at the heads was supposed to prove. She had seen plenty of dead bodies before, sometimes when she went to the Library, she had gone through the public square and occasionally there was the body of a thief, murderer, or traitor who had been hung, and by the Maestro's law, the body could not be cut down for a full three days. And she had dissected and practiced surgery on a few bodies that her father had gotten from the morgue. So the heads didn't really frighten her. And she already knew that the terrorists had been killed for their crimes against the Maestro. What was looking at the heads supposed to do? She's have to be pretty stupid to need to look at their actual heads in order to know that they were dead, or that rebelling against the Maestro was a really bad idea. Then again, maybe people were that stupid. Take the guard who had shot the goat, for instance. A prime dairy goat, and he shot it just to eat it. If he'd had a brain, he would have recognized what the fat udders meant, and stolen the goat. He could have sold the milk for years, and used the money to buy far more meat than he would ever get from one single goat.
There was a large table in the square, where a few guards sat with thick notebooks full of blank, yellowing paper. People were going up to the tables and signing in the books. Or, if they couldn't write, which seemed to be the case more often than not, the guards would ask their name, job, and address, and write it down for them, then make the people press their finger in ink and put a fingerprint after what had been written. Aster recognized the notebooks as being the sort that was made before the War. Her father had several of them at the Zoo. Some of them were written on, others were blank and her father would sometimes write on them late at night. She supposed that notebooks were one of the things that needed an industrial base to make. Or maybe not. The metal spiral didn't seem much harder to make than the pots and pans that some people made out of melted metal, and paper and books were mentioned in some of her fairy tales that she had read when she was younger, such as the spell books used by wizards. How did one make paper without an industrial base, though? Aster wasn't sure.
Aster and her family went up to the tables, and had to sign their names in one of the notebooks. Aster's father wrote his name: Joshua Aversa." as well as his job: "Zookeeper" and where they lived: "Bronx Zoo".
He pressed his fingerprint after his name, and then it was Aster's turn. She wrote her name "Aster Aversa", and turned to her father. "Do I have a job?"
Her father seemed about to say something, then shook his head slightly. "Write, 'daughter of Joshua Aversa', and then 'Bronx Zoo' for where you live."
Aster complied, pressed an inky fingerprint after what she wrote, then stood to one side as Thumb wrote the same thing with a shaky hand. There was some delay, as their father reminded Thumb to sign her real name, 'Tina', rather than 'Thumb' as they always called her, and had to explain why with the impatient people behind them glaring angrily at the hold up. Aster took the opportunity to glance at what had been written in the notebook by the people before them, curious about who they were, as she was curious about almost everything in the world. No doubt most of the jobs, and almost all of the addresses would have seemed odd, or even shocking, to someone living before the War. Or at least, to someone living recently before the war. It would have seemed more normal to someone from medieval times, when the stories in Aster's old fairy tale books had been written. But people in the twentieth century generally did not admit to being a 'pimp', 'prostitute', 'mercenary', 'metal scavenger', or 'Assassin for the Maestro' in public, or describe their address as being 'third drainage pipe down the road from the big bridge' or 'large shipping container behind the Maestro's palace, just to the east'. Even the ones with real houses, such as Aster's family were lucky enough to have, described it by nearby landmarks, rather than street names and address numbers. But it wasn't particularly strange or alarming to Aster. The jobs were the ones that regular people had in Dystopia, just as people before the war people had such jobs as 'stock boy' or 'computer programmer'.
After signing their names, then they all had to walk slowly past the heads. There were smaller paper signs below the large wooden ones with the names, describing the assorted crimes of the different terrorists. It got boring after the first few. Almost all of them were pretty much the same. Murder. Theft. Arson. Treason against the Maestro. Unauthorized use of pre-war technology. Blah, blah, blah.
Aster thought they could go home after looking at the heads. But maybe that was just wishful thinking. The heads smelled BAD, they had obviously been up on the tall spikes for a few days, and were starting to rot in the afternoon sun and attract flies. Well, all except for the large green head of the Hulk. Aster saw no sign of rot on that one, and the flies wouldn't go anywhere near it. She asked her father about that.
"Radiation. The Hulk and the Maestro are both full of radiation. It makes them stronger, but kills almost everything else. Including the bacteria that cause decay. I read in an old book once, some people used to use radiation to make food last longer. Not forever of course. The worm will have it's due."
"What's that mean… 'The worm will have it's due'?" She walked a few steps farther from the heads. The crowd was not dispersing, instead they were being ushered into the Maestro's palace in small groups. Apparently there was something more that the Maestro wanted people to see. More heads, probably.
"It means, everything dies, and afterwards it rots. Gets eaten by worms, and becomes dirt. Then the dirt grows into new plants after a while, and things live again."
"Not many plants on the Outside." She pointed out to her father. "Even though almost everything is dead, there."
"Yeah. It's the radiation, like in the Hulk's head. It kills the fly and the worm. Things die, and they stay dead. Because the worm doesn't get it's due."
"Like in the compost heap?"
"Exactly like it." Her father looked back up at the head. "The Maestro will probably burn the Hulk's head after he thinks enough people have seen it. He doesn't like to take any chances."
"Chances?" Aster blinked. "The Hulk is dead. What difference does it make what happens to his head?"
Aster's father tried to find words to explain. "Not everything dies as permanently as people and animals do. The Maestro might be afraid that the Hulk isn't really dead."
"But his head's cut off! It's up there! How much more dead can you get?"
"A regular person would be dead. But the Hulk isn't a regular person." The words to explain the precise nature of Healing Factor and regeneration had been lost to time. But there were other ways to explain. "You know that if you chop a worm in half, it doesn't always kill it. The head half sometimes lives, and grows a new tail."
"Yeah. Everybody knows that." Aster snorted. What did her father think she was, a baby?
Everybody did not know that, at least in the current times, but Aster's father didn't argue the point. "It's possible that the Hulk's head or body could heal. I don't know for sure, but both the Hulk and the Maestro have healed from injuries that would kill any normal person. The Maestro will be afraid of that happening, anyways. He'll probably destroy the head within the next three days, to make sure that doesn't happen."
Aster said nothing, digesting the strange fact of people - well maybe not exactly people - who might still be alive after their heads had been cut off. And regrow like worms. And the new fact that apparently the Maestro could be hurt, and was afraid of some things, like the Hulk. Even if the Hulk was simply himself when he was younger. She had always thought the Maestro wasn't afraid of anything and couldn't be hurt. But now that she thought about it, that was just baby thinking. The Maestro might not be afraid of regular people like her, any more than the tigers at the Zoo were afraid of her (in fact, much the opposite was true), but that certainly didn't mean that they weren't afraid of anything. They were sometimes afraid of each other (just like the Maestro was afraid of the Hulk) when they got to fighting, and even when her father wasn't able to break the fight up, after a while one of the tigers would usually give up, and either crouch down with it's ears flattened as far away from the other as it could get, or roll over in a submissive posture. They never killed each other, though, the way the Maestro had killed the Hulk.
"Why didn't the Hulk give up if the Maestro was winning the fight?" She asked her father. "The tigers and other animals in the zoo always give up, when they are losing a fight with their own kind."
"I doubt the Maestro gave him the option." Her father shook his head. "Human beings are cursed in some ways. We're smart enough to see death coming and be afraid of it, but not smart enough to do a damned thing to stop it, or even slow it down for more than a few years. And cruel enough to deal it out wholesale to one another."
"Like in the War?"
"Yes, that's pretty much the prime example, right there." He was about to go on and mention that people had not only killed not only their enemies, and a lot of innocent people as well, but almost all the other creatures in the world as well, which was far worse in many ways (both ethically and ecologically), but then he and his family were being ushered into the palace, and down a long hallway full of loud people.
The crown moved slowly down a gleaming green hallway. The cool green marble it was made of reminded Aster a bit of the Mouse House to the touch, but there the resemblance ended. The hallway was well lit, both with electric lights (not an old rusty lantern like she had to use in the Mouse House) and the sun shining through geometrically shaped stained glass windows. The windows were green, too. The color looked to Aster as if it had been made out of old green beer bottles. The light through the green glass made everyone standing in the hallway look as if they had a greenish cast to their skin, as if they were becoming a green person like the Maestro or Hulk. Here and there, a beam of regular sunlight shone through, and Aster saw were a few of the panes of green glass were missing. And had been for some time, judging by the spider webs that crossed them, as if nobody cared or was able to go to the time and trouble of melting down more beer bottles to make new panes and replacing the missing ones. There were fancy statues nude women carved of green jade set into numerous alcoves, which Aster admired. She wished she had a body like that. Maybe in a few years.
Several women came out of a side room and went past, wearing beautiful, scanty clothing made of silk and finely worked metal. It looked to be even more expensive than the clothing worn by the prostitutes in the brothel near the library that Aster liked to visit. Though just as impractical. If Aster were to wear something like that in the Zoo, the flowing silk would end up trailing in the piles of straw, leaves, and animal droppings that were everywhere in the Zoo, and she would have been scratched, blistered, and sunburned in less than an hour if she did anything like the usual amount of work expected of her. Well, probably such concerns didn't matter in the Maestro's palace. There weren't any animals here, and except for maybe the spider webs and leaves caught in the high, broken window panes, the whole place looked like it was scoured gleaming clean from top to bottom every day by an entire army of janitors. And from the looks of their soft, clean hands, the women looked like they didn't do much work, either. Aster looked at her own hands, with hard callouses across the palms and fingers, and dirt ground in under the fingernails that she could never seem to wash out, and was a little jealous. Thumb had hands like that, but Thumb was sickly and couldn't be expected to work. The women seemed healthy enough, despite that a few of them walked with minced steps, and apparently just didn't have to work.
Eventually, she, her father, and sister were ushered into a large room with a large sign above it that read: "Hall of Fallen Heroes". One of the guards pointed at the sign and said in a sneering voice: "It should say, Hall of Fallen Fools" before letting them into the room to see what was inside. To a slight degree, the room resembled the room full of animal skeletons and stuffed animals that was kept at the zoo. Except these were not dead animals in the room. They were parts of dead people. Strange dead people. There was an arm skeleton all made of metal with metal knives coming out of it, and a few skeletons that had come from people even larger than the Maestro himself. Aster looked around, and halfheartedly listened as an obviously bored guard on a platform read off a piece of paper in a loud voice. Apparently one of the terrorists, the old man 'Rick Jones' had had a rather macabre hobby of keeping souvenirs of old superheroes who had been killed by the Maestro. To honor them or something. Though Aster could hardly see how that was an honor. The stuffed animals and skeletons at the zoo were for study. When one of her favorite cats died she didn't stuff it, she buried it. Gave the worm it's due, she guessed, was what her father would say. Maybe someday the plants that grew from it would get eaten by rabbits, that would eventually get eaten by new plants.
From what the guard said, the Maestro's purpose in bringing the remains of the dead heroes to this room in his palace was actually as educational in it's own way, as the stuffed animals and skeletons at the zoo were. He intended for the people to look at them, and learn about the powers the heroes had had. Powers that had availed them nothing, when they tried to fight against the Maestro. Below each display was a chest of drawers, containing sheets of paper listing all known information about all the dead heroes in their room, including their history, battles they had fought, powers they had had. The sheets of paper were crisp, and barely yellow. Obviously printed out of a computer that still worked. Aster knew that there were working computers in the Maestro's palace, her father had mentioned it once, and a few times had gone to the Maestro's palace to get such sheets of paper printed by the computers containing some bit of information about the zoo animals that he needed, but couldn't find either in his books or the library. Some of the computers still were hooked up to a few last working remnants of something called the 'internet'. In fact, her father said that some of them still got information from old 'satellites' which apparently were machines that were up in space, far above the earth, and would stay there pretty much forever.
Aster looked inside the drawers full of papers below the metal arm bones with knives growing out of them. The language was very slightly above her current level of reading and contained some words she didn't know like 'Adamantium'. Maybe she'd be able to understand it in a few years. Probably she would be, if she worked hard at her studies. She flipped through the papers. There must have been hundreds of pages, talking about someone called 'Logan' or 'Wolverine'.
She shoved the drawer shut, and opened a few more. They were all pretty much the same, talking about people who had special strength and powers (though none of them were as strong as the Maestro, the guard kept repeating) and giving details about when they were born, what their powers were (a lot of which Aster didn't understand), who they had fought and when and whether they had run or lost. There was a fairly delicate skull on the seat of a wheelchair that said "Professor X', a skeleton that had a tail that said 'Nightcrawler', another skeleton that for some unfathomable reason (at least to Aster) was put up high on a net that resembled a giant spider web and said 'Spiderman' (though the skeleton only had 2 arms and legs, and did not at all resemble a spider). A blue and red suit of clothing, badly ripped and stained over most of it's surface with what looked like old blood, was tacked to a board that said 'Morbius: The Living Vampire.' A skeleton maybe about 7 feet tall with a hammer in it's hand that said 'Thor'. Half of a smaller skeleton that held a large colorful red, white, and blue shield with a star in the middle that said 'Captain America'.
"One artifact saved Jones. Another killed him." She heard one guard say to another, who laughed and slapped his legs. Aster wasn't sure exactly what was so funny. Probably some private joke that only the Maestro's guards would understand. There were such jokes at the zoo, told by her father or herself, or the men her father hired to help out that were only funny if you knew certain details about various animals.
The guard on the platform was still talking, about how the heroes in the room who hadn't died in the war had been killed when they were stupid enough to attack the Maestro. The Maestro was the strongest one there was, and if they were smart, they would know it and not be dumb enough to fight him, like either the heroes, or the traitors whose heads were now all on spikes in front of the palace. And just in case they were stupid enough to forget, the heads were going to stay there - permanently!, and they could look at them, or come in and look at all the dead heroes, any time they wanted. Just so they would remember what happened to weak fools who attacked the Maestro. They all ended up dead.
It kind of seemed like a lot of bragging to Aster, but all the parts of the dead people, and the heads in front were starting to make her a little bit scared.
She was not the only scared one.
"I want to go home." Thumb said, as she pulled at their father's sleeves.
"Yes, we've probably spent enough time here to satisfy them." he said. He took Thumb by one hand, turned to make sure that Aster was close behind, and they left the room with the dead heroes, pushing past the crowd of newcomers in the hallway who had not borne witness to them yet.
Aster thought over what she had seen. They were nearly all the way back to the Zoo when something occurred to her. Something that probably could have only occurred to her out of everyone in Dystopia, a highly intelligent, but slightly autistic child who knew more than any other adult in Dystopia (except her father) about animals, and without her father's lifetime of cultural conditioning to accept certain things at face value. She didn't tell her father what had occurred to her, but instead wanted to look up something in one of her books, to see if what she had thought of was possible.
"Can I go read for a bit?" She asked her father as they went through the gates of the zoo.
"Yes. You've been through enough for one day. For the past couple weeks, in fact. If you want to study, you can."
"I want to read, too." said Thumb.
Their father told them both to go ahead, and Thumb followed Aster to their room. It was not, however, studying that Aster wanted to do. Instead she went over to Thumb's bookshelf, where all the old fairytale books that she had given to her sister were lined up. She glanced at the titles, then pulled a thick volume off the shelf.
"Hey, what are you doing with my books!" Thumb protested.
"They're mine, too." Aster reminded her.
"You gave them to me! You said you did!"
"I just want to read it for a second. Then I'll give it back" said Aster. That was a bit of a mis-statement, she needed a few minutes at least, to page through the book, find the story she was looking for, and quickly re-read the few short pages it was on. But Thumb seemed satisfied that the book would be shortly returned, and sat quietly on her bed watching her older sister read.
Aster read the story a second time. Then she read it again a third time. It was a stupid story, full of pretty much all stupid people, but it told her what she had remembered from reading it back when she had been around Thumb's age. Then she closed the book and handed it back to Thumb, who put it on the shelf. She lay down on her bed, looking at the plaster and wooden beams on the ceiling, and thought about the story in the fairy tale book for a long while, and what had occurred to her on the way back from the Maestro's palace.
"I think that guard was lying." She finally said. "Or maybe he was just wrong. But I don't think he was telling the truth."
"What guard? Lying about what?" Thumb said.
"I don't know." Aster kicked her bed. She didn't understand why the guard would lie, or what was to be gained from it, but her father always told her that knowledge was important. She sat up and looked at the ragged spine of the old book of fairytales, now back on Thumb's shelf. She kicked at her bed, and lay down again, still thinking. "I don't know. But I don't think it's good."