Two friends, their colleague, and a stranger passed a body in the street. Then another, and then a mess of corpses piled by survivors. The two friends were Sam and Jess, their colleague was Summer, and the stranger called himself Hickock. The plague didn't scare them. They were locals born without susceptibility.

"Hundred percent simulated,” said Sam.

"Gain's the beef."

"Can a rack, though?" asked Hickock. He touched the plastic and metal collar around his neck.

"Air those flumes out, Big Top. I don't even know what the dream is."

This was morally suspect work. It was also an unprecedented opportunity. Data prospecting paid well. Data prospecting in a dangerous Zone paid better. Data prospecting in Critical Zone Ultra while it was ravaged by an epidemic paid obscenely. All the preferred vendors were dead along with favoritism. Experienced data prospectors died. They'd imported themselves, took all the money that should have gone to local operators, and now they rotted in the street.

Outside gatekeepers found themselves helpless. They resorted to employing the community instead.

Squeezers, chiselers, snake-oilers, landlords. Dead, dead, dead, dead; every stooge with a bodyguard who invaded Critical Zone Ultra. A gold rush for the slums. Diamonds in the DMZ. People with money used their power to farm money from residents without money or power. Foreign bodies trapped in the social prison they made during quarantine. Outsiders died while the natives watched.

Their blood converted to epoxy. Canals solidified in their hearts. It was slow. Smart victims waited for another firebombing. These hobbled or crawled into the Blazing and held their breath. They screamed in the flames and sucked hot air. Their lungs collapsed. People trailed solidified strands of epoxy tentacles from wounds and severed limbs into the jaws of Moloch.

Sam, Jess, Summer, and Hickock walked through a hole in a barbershop wall. They didn't trip on the bricks.

"Woah jack," the man sitting in the barber's chair said. "Flip soul tide all about it."

"Salads and hazelnut," said Hickock.

Sam, Jess, and Summer said nothing.

The man in the barber's chair ate powdered eggs and beans from a pan with a wooden spoon. The barber wore denim overalls and massaged his client's bare head with a nonkinetic pulse inducer. Armed guards dripping with ammo belts and vests read moldy magazines.

Half the room was scorched.

"Been the dog howitzer?" asked Hickock.

"When the man bit mother."

"Right about it."

"Piano sack and up the draw, my guy. Clack a bell sorry set plutarch. Gravy down stop and yell salmon bog, but I wouldn't know about all that."

"Stay cool, be cool," said Summer.

"Be money, get money."

One of the guards squealed, threw down his rifle, and crawled around the room barking like a dog. Sam, Jess, Summer and Hickock stepped over him on their way out.

A raggedy man squatted and hugged his knees between rubble and bodies in the street, rocking himself. They ignored him until he stood up.

They passed on the other side of the street. The raggedy man jumped on the rubble and pointed a finger at them. He cursed them in his mind. Hickock took offense.

"Bacon that strip!" he yelled at the raggedy man.

"In the Name Of God!" said the raggedy man.

"Oh yeah, and you know?!" Hickock threw a rock and the raggedy man scuttled. "Smack rate flounder jibes but to grimace down. Horseradish. SHAKE IT, MOTHERFUCKER!"

But they were cursed now and they all knew it. At least they’d confirmed permission to walk this turf at all. No one needed the barber shop sending street enforcers after them.

The Octopus Grill used to be a cosmic parking garage. Not very many people could physically say that moniker aloud anymore, unless it randomly came out in a flood of communal aphasia. The vile business both generated a healthy income for the barbershop and acted as a fallback stronghold in which to weather ebbs and flows of militant competition.

Summer led her group down side streets around the kill-slip. She held her hand up at the end of the last alley. They waited as she poked her head out. This was close enough for the gunners to recognize her. The gunners might not care.

She slowly edged out into the open street, hands behind her head, and waited.

“Cool beans, Milwaukee!” someone yelled.

She relaxed. Sam and Jess followed her lead down the street towards The Octopus Grill, pistols out but not brandished. Casual. Hickock trailed behind, still fussing with his cybernetic collar. A barrier wall of hotworked car parts blocked their advance to the parking garage entrance. A converted gated-community intercom stood at a wonky angle next to a fortified cellar-style door by the barrier. An intrinsically safe and blast-proof industrial tablet hung from it, connected with woven-steel data cables. Sam touched the touchscreen call button lightly. One of the gunners atop the wall, armed with a belt-fed mounted flare gun, waved at her. He recognized her from the old days. She waved back and hoped he wouldn’t talk to her. He didn’t.

A small chat window bubbled open on the tablet showing the postage-stamp-sized face of Doc Willis.

“Hey. Who is it? I’m busy.” The tablet chat program translated his normal English into plague talk. Sam and Jess read over Summer’s shoulders. “Oh, Sam. What do you want?”

“Fillet ground the bowl down, Marvin. It’s a bust up—Sticks Sounder.”

Doc Willis squinted into the camera as he read the back-translation.

“Ha! Hell no. Are you kidding? He’s my biggest trophy yet.”

“Quick slide debutante, mangy-grease. Bye-bye birdie.”

“Nevermind all that. I said the answer’s no.”

“Hard mack errorprone slip and slide roundabout, tater tot. How’s it hanging? Everybody knows. Is the tit back dangle toss hide-away ball? See saw.”

“Don’t care. I make more on gutter trash circulatory systems than any percentage from your nickle-and-dime shitheel profits, let alone a high-value asset like the man you want. Me responding at all is mere professional courtesy.”

“Silly song whipasnap son gun wild brawl. If an any how big in the circus, overtime! Not a bit cube of milk. It’s a dill pickle. Dill, wheatgrass—dill!”

“Something’s wrong with the Chat; that didn’t make any sense. Do you want his leftover body or do you want him alive? Try rephrasing.”

“In an under tree—dill pickle. Overtime big in the dill pickle.”

“I don’t get it. Listen, if you want his leftovers or something from him, just give me a thumbs up. Otherwise fuck off; he has a date with the slab.”

Everyone looked at Summer, who stuck out her thumb and waved it up and down.

“Okay then. Hey, let them in.”

Plague talk affected everyone breathing, but that was the only symptom to affect lucky locals like the four data prospectors. The real threat ripping through Critical Zone Ultra, the primary symptom, was the conversion of victims' blood into epoxy that was solidifying inside their veins.

Octopus Grill personnel removed congealed circulatory systems intact, like someone pouring molten metal into an anthill and digging it out of the ground. There was good money in smuggled octopus. Sam and Jess’s assignment, with guidance from Summer and backing from the experienced Hickock, was to verify an information cache's chain of possession. That cache was trapped inside a plague victim scheduled for defleshing here.

Hopefully they weren’t too late. The countdown always ticked toward zero in this hellhole bombed by enemy governments, beset by street preachers and mutant cognition parasites, where language died and the only law came from paramilitary gangs succumbing to death and madness.

The dug-in blast door buzzed and slid open. Cans, bullet casings, and trash clattered inside the hole. The data prospectors climbed in. Dirt fell from the wood-reinforced tunnel roof as distant bombings rumbled the city. They passed pretty, obscene graffiti murals the gang had spray-painted over the raw earth.

One of Doc Willis’s nurses met them in the main preparation hold where twenty-three physically limited epoxy victims lay near-death, strapped to gurneys. Doc Willis wasn’t about to meet them. He stayed in a hermetically sealed safehouse well outside Critical Zone Ultra. The floor of this carved-out cave was a poorly laid layer of quick-set concrete. The nurse was a dirty man, wearing denim workwear and rubber gloves. He was attended by a group of armed guards known to Summer personally but ready to swiss cheese them all with bullets at the first sign of trickery. Sam and Jess’s handguns wouldn’t stop that result, but at least would maintain their personal space. The nurse held up another tablet for them to read which displayed Doc Willis’s translated imperative to Not Fuck Around.

Now Sam and Jess led. They walked the rows of twitching victims until they found the former mayor. The man’s hands clutched at the air away from rigid elbows, pained and limited by the blood chugging oxygen slower and slower through his system.

Pointing him out to Hickock, they stepped aside as their ace flipped a switch on his collar. The light turned green as the neural conduit activated. Then he bent over as if to whisper in the gasping mayor’s ear.

The plague only affected humans directly but had an equally catastrophic effect on creatures who relied on them. This included both domestic animals and psychic non-corporeal cognitive hijacking parasites unable to escape a plague victim. The mayor housed one such parasite who possessed proof of information that greatly interested their client.

Normally, you had to sleep next to a host to become infected. Hickock’s jerry-rigged neural conduit, however, sucked it right up.

The psychic parasite spontaneously flooded its new host with joy. Survival. It gave no thought to its prior hapless habitation strapped to the table. The abandoned victim stared hatefully at Hickock. That his tormenter would die inside him was likely the poor bastard’s only relief while contemplating his own imminent and horrific death.

Hickock’s new guest pumped more waves of euphoria into him. Then it tried to take control. He felt its triumph fade into confusion as its attempts failed. A grin cracked his face as he felt it perceive the conduit’s effects. What a load off his mind—it worked.

What is this, the parasite thought at him.

“Skip a beat, jack.”

You think this lowly technology can hold me?! I am not cargo, I am the great—

Hickock reached behind his neck and pressed the mute button.

Finished, they turned to leave after giving Doc Willis’s nurse a thumbs up of his own. Doc knew they were trustworthy and good for cutting him in on their payday. Nobody stopped them. All for the better. Even muted, Hickock could feel the psychic parasite’s bridled rage.

He couldn’t be rid of it fast enough. Even a pro like him knew when to stay nervous, and it was a long day’s walk to the sealed border crossing.

They didn’t reach the assigned spot until midnight. A grim streetlight illuminated a prison videophone console retrofitted for analogue communication across the border. All wireless signals were blocked. A fat purple fungus with holes in its fleshy skin rose and fell as it breathed, sucking on the screen. Sam snatched part of it and ripped it off in chunks, ignoring both the cloud of pink spores and its pitiable squealing. He threw the pieces at a skinny naked person licking the streetlight, who scampered away into the darkness.

Jess pointed a flashlight at the border wall and clicked a signal in Morse Code.

The screen lit up, and Sam accepted the call. The portrait stayed black, but the voice came through.

Hickock unmuted the collar.

HOW DARE YOU SILENCE ME? ME?! YOU—

“Can you hear me, Alolphagus?” The voice on the video screen sounded wheedly and strained. “I see by the light on the conduit that you’re present. Have the host hold up one finger for yes.”

Who? Raise your finger, human. RAISE IT.

Hickock obliged. As long as the words circumvented auditory processing, he could understand.

“Good. I’m glad we could save you in time. There are too few of us left. I apologize for the restraints, but we couldn’t have you taking over the human before he initiated contact. We’re going to smuggle you out—my host has many resources. But I need information first. Ask him to raise three fingers if you understand.”

Three fingers!

Again, Hickock did as he was asked.

“Listen carefully. Do you remember the secret barbecue sauce recipe that Indurgmunson got from his host’s aunt? Boldwicric claims he got it from you and is willing to trade in exchange for membership in the country club. Does he truly possess such knowledge? Put up one finger for yes, and two for no.”

Curse my apprentice! That elder knowledge was not his to barter! I will shriek him into silence forever! One finger. One finger up, human! Do you not want to be paid?!

Hickock laughed, nodded, and held up one finger.

“Fool!” howled the unseen caller. “Your desperation weakens you! Look at the mighty laid low. What use have you now? I, Stupulex, am superior to you, and I will have the secret of the grillmaster sauce!”

The video feed activated, and a fist appeared. It gave a thumbs up, held, and then the call

ended.

What?

Hickock reached up and pressed the Delete button.

The parasite screamed into oblivion as an audio recording imperceptible to humans passed through Hickock’s eardrums and shredded it apart. Nothing turned into a greater nothing, and the data prospector’s bank accounts grew slightly fuller.

On to the next job.