Snow Over Utopia

by Rudolfo A. Serna

  Snow Over Utopia

  Rudolfo A. Serna

  APEX BOOK COMPANY

  Copyright © 2019 by Rudolfo A. Serna

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN Trade Paperback: 978-1-937009-75-5

  Also available as a DRM-free eBook.

  Apex Book Company, Lexington, KY

  Visit us online at http://www.apexbookcompany.com.

  I would like to dedicate this book to my wife, Isis, and my daughter, Nina. And I would like to thank the poet Jon Davis for his help.

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part III

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About the Author

  Part One

  One

  The gray stone walls of the forest compound held rows of tilled soil, tended by the children, and inside the block buildings, the glaring faces of the flesh brokers inspected the girl’s skin and teeth for imperfections while she stood on a wooden block, her head freshly shaven.

  “It is almost ready,” the flesh broker said, tapping her thigh with a stick.

  “Where should it go?”

  “Too thin for the mines.”

  “It may be better in a brothel.”

  “Feed it more.”

  “Yes, feed it more.”

  “Very well.”

  The brokers were about to let her go.

  “Wait a minute,” the inspector said. “Blue eyes?”

  The brokers stared at the bald female on the block.

  The inspector placed his hands on either side of her head, pulling her face forward, staring into her eyes.

  The other brokers rose from their chairs and quickly went over to their stock.

  “Blue eyes. Very rare.”

  “Almost never seen.”

  “I have never seen any.”

  “Keep this quiet. If they find out, they’ll take it without paying. They’ll say it’s a religious matter.”

  “There are others in the Baron’s court that will pay.”

  “What will they do with it?”

  The brokers looked at each other.

  “Whatever they want. After they pay,” said one with a smile.

  “Does it have a name?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Call it ‘Red’ for now.”

  “Should we hide it?”

  The girl put a gown back on, and a camp attendant led her away, leading the brokers to assume their find would be safely hidden for one more night until she could be taken to the buyers that would be contacted with the news that blue eyes had been found. Something remarkable as the blue eyes should be kept, and the rest could be discarded.

  She was led across a courtyard.

  Perched crows took flight, strafing the tilled rows, shrilling, pulling away, skirting along walls, spangling for freedom in the trees.

  The sun was going down.

  Children marched in and out of the barracks. There was a delivery of stock being loaded in back of a horse-driven cart to be taken to the company town through a cool drizzle. Brown human flesh driven from nursery to grave.

  There was a market for blue eyes.

  Cult members paid for the rare find, saying that the blue eyes held supernatural powers—uncommon, biogenetic spoil.

  She was put in a small room watched over by an attendant who wondered what it was that made the girl different, unable to tell the color of her eyes in the dim light of a wood stove he stoked before sitting in a chair next to the door. He was ordered to watch, and not to touch. She sat on a cot and ate the extra rations given to fatten her up. The attendant wanted to get a feel of her insides, as he had done to the others, but instead he scoffed at her from the chair next to the door. “You will be a treat,” he said, smiling, waiting for her to go to sleep. Perhaps then he would creep up to her and touch her just a little bit, being careful not to damage anything, but instead he fell asleep next to the warm stove, sipping the yellow swill from town.

  In the middle of the night, she escaped.

  Leaves of tall white aspen changing. And the girl’s last memories of the forest, a golden reflection off the water, and the stench of the deputy’s breath looming over her with a knife, and a wide-brim hat that smelled of old blood and smoke. After the large hands had held her down under the water so she could not scream, she was let loose. Her eyes had been carved out of her face, floating through the woods until the thin hands of her rescuer pulled her from the brown currents.

  There was the sound of weeping from her savior, and where the pain was worst on her body was where the warm tears fell the most.

  The gray sleep took over—

  Sleeping through winter in the old woman’s shack. Healing would take longer than the months of frost. In spring, the snow melted and the bells of the camp would toll, and there was a clock running off of seraphic energy in a hole deep beneath the bleating giant in the forest, traveling beyond the shack and the rabbit and squirrel pelts that hung next to the snakeskins. Wooden boxes held dried roots scattered among skulls, human and otherwise. The words filtering through while she slept for a million years in dream. Her body quietly aging, already experiencing a lifetime of misery. She was a child inside the camp walls tilling the fields in the courtyard, coming to age in the conditioning camp, while those she had grown with were loaded up and sent to the company town, already a generation gone to the mines and brothels, they would not last long, as designed. Never meant to get old. Waiting for others to die to take their place.

  Noxious weeds tied into small bundles, and wisps of green smoke rising. A fire flickered from a small hearth in the corner, lighting the girl’s slashed face, and in deep sleep, she dreamt of a tall tree, taller than any other.

  She had heard the word over and over again: Eden …

  The hands that had pulled her up from the stream led her through the opened door of the shack.

  “Sun, wind,” she said, feeling the warmth and breeze across her face, hearing the crows cawing.

  “Birds,” she said, while being led in the dark by the small hands that had pulled her from the stream.

  “Talk.”

  She was led to a roughhewn table where she found the edges of a tin plate and the handle of a spoon. She could smell the food. It wasn’t like the meals she had known, a supplement boiled down and mashed. Instead, the food smelled fresh and warm. The air was hot and dry. The sun was set high, but the shade from the nearby pine tree kept her cool, with the summer grass high around her, swaying in the gusts.

  Her throat was still dry from deep sleep.

  Her savior slipping away through the grass.

  “Talk! Talk!” She called out.

  But the old woman let go of her hand, and she was left at the table alone.

  The girl did not crave food, she hadn’t eaten on her own since waking, but had only tasted the broth being placed in her mouth.

  The deputy had not finished the job, and all it would have taken was to push the blade a little deeper through the sockets in her skull. The tip driven until peeling away the membrane to her mind. But he had let her live, forgetting about her after extracting what he wanted and letting the rest of her body float away downstream into the wood
s with no thought given as to whether or not she remained alive, sinking to the bottom of the stream, then rising again on the currents that took her over the rocks.

  She did not want to eat, but there was still the hunger inside of her, she still desired the freedom she was seeking as she ran from the hole in the brick wall, slipping out of the room she had been trapped in with the sleeping attendant wishing that he could get at her with his lascivious mouth and hands. Stumbling over the forest floor in the dark, the alarm had been sounded, and the deputy chased her on horseback in the early morning light until he was able to find her and run her down at dawn, stepping from his horse. The water soaking through her gown, she looked up at the deputy with the wide brimmed hat that hid its face, with his arms reaching for her.

  “You have beautiful eyes,” the deputy said, weaving the knife in front of her.

  Hearing the swaying trees of the woods and the tall grass of the mountain field—she finally put a piece of warm food into her mouth.

  She wanted to live. She couldn’t remember the pain so much, as if the old woman had gone into her brain and muffled the sounds of her screams.

  The hot season had cooled as the monsoons were ending, and the cold air from the peaks was settling on the roof of the shack with the rains. At night, the old woman had waited at the door for those she had resurrected to emerge from the shadows of the tree line just at the edge of the field. A shadow dripping with the rain that had just fallen stepped towards her, a cool breeze pushing the moon from the clouds. The old woman walked from the shack to meet the aberration in tattered coat and hat under the moonlight, while the blind girl slept by the fire inside. In its yellow hands was a jar containing the solution that held her eyes.

  The eyes were like blue jewels floating in a tinged liquid.

  “What do you want with these?” The voice of the dead was hollow, a voice only the old woman could understand, making a deal to keep the flesh from rotting.

  “The dead should not speak,” the old woman said in her own decrepit voice, barely audible.

  She took the jar.

  “I’m not dead yet,” the corpse said. “We have a deal. I got it for you,” the fiend said.

  “I’ll remember.”

  The shadow bled back into the night where the spring storm had hidden any sign of other transmorphins in the forest, waiting, where they would then all return to the motley smoke in the abandoned mines, among planks dripping with the rank stench of decay, holes within holes, and nightmares of midnight raids.

  The dead strolled away, and the precious eyes were left drifting in a smoky solution.

  The old woman returned to Eden, where the blind girl had woken and sat beside the fire, feeling its warmth, hearing the footsteps of her savior, and a feral voice saying: “I have your eyes.”

  “My eyes?” the girl said.

  “You can use them again.”

  The girl was silent, unable to speak.

  Taking her hands, the old woman wrapped the girl’s fingers around the smooth surface of the glass jar.

  “Eden,” she said, “you can use them again.”

  The equinox was approaching, and Eden could not see the yellow leaves starting to appear in the mountains above, but soon, the snow would be falling.

  Two

  On the muddy streets, company currency was spent on whiskey and prostitutes. Company guards patrolled the paths lit by oil lamps, clutching their clubs tightly. No one spoke or laughed. Miners in canvas clothes that smelled wet and moldy with sweat and smoke, walking with their shaved heads lowered; their shoulders slumped from heavy lifting.

  A miner entered an unornamented building constructed of rough lumber and battered by mountain weather. Stepping through swinging doors into the dim saloon lit by oil light, silent and stale, where rotted lumber smelled of humanity exhausted, sleeping on the floor, floating in the pungent purple smoke. For a coin, the saloon sold him a drab of company whiskey that was strong, but still allowed the laborers to rise in time for their predawn shifts.

  The prostitutes’ faces were only vague features, changing in the shadows of the hall. The females, almost indistinguishable from the males, sat morbidly along wooden stalls, their heads shaven, as was company policy.

  The miner made his choice, a prostitute with small sad eyes, subdued by whiskey and purple smoke pumped through vents and pipes that connected to a large furnace in the center of the saloon. The prostitute obediently rose, and the miner followed her up the wooden stairs to the top floor as the thick purple smoke caused lightheadedness and the solidity of the structure faded with steps that echoed down the hall.

  The miner’s body would someday be unable to carry out its function as a laborer, destroyed by the mines, by barracks festering with lice and rodents nesting under straw mattresses. It was the fate of all labor. The company would bring more bodies—conditioned stock carried by mule-drawn carriages, marched straight into the mine to extract the green ore.

  All through the forest were scattered bones of the sick and old, discarded bodies without coin, whiskey, or smoke, without a cot to sleep on, hunted down and slaughtered by the posse that cleared excess humanity from the forest floor.

  At the top of the stairs, the prostitute and miner turned down a hall thick with more purple smoke and the odor of unwashed bodies. Miner felt uneasy after drinking the yellow potion he purchased at the saloon entrance. They stepped through a door at the end of the hall into a dim room, lit only by the copper glow of an oil lamp.

  The miner’s eyes adjusted quickly, already conditioned to dim grease light. In the corners of the room were straw beds filled with tangled bodies, glistening flesh groaning and sweating, and the only thing left to the humans were the muted grunts of orgasm.

  The prostitute held a hand out, and the miner dropped some coin into its palm.

  “For the Juggernaut,” the prostitute said.

  “For the Juggernaut,” the miner repeated.

  No smiles in the dim, brown glow.

  Whiskey and smoke, a swirling color behind closed eyes. The filthiness of the miner’s surrounding; the smells and sounds of the room tumbling in. A sickness built, and the miner was unable to copulate, unable to ejaculate. The prostitute looked up with glossy eyes that reflected the dim, copper light, not caring that the miner was unable to relieve himself. The miner looked down into the dead eyes that begged for release from company management, watching it fix its gown and walk away, the coin secure in its pocket.

  The miner slowly walked downstairs to the bar.

  The miners lost themselves in dark spaces in the mines and in the dim lights of the saloon, dependent on whiskey, sex, and coin, a human race made sick by management design. Thick purple smoke pumped through a furnace, a cast-iron face with burning eyes and dials turned to high. Eyes glowing bitter red, the heat, the whiskey, and smoke left the human labor in wooden chairs with their heads down on the bar, lying in sleepy piles on the floor, no laughter or music, just sounds of deep snoring and the moans of those seeking escape.

  “For the Juggernaut,” the whiskey seller said when the miner walked up to the bar.

  “For the Juggernaut,” the miner mumbled, taking a bottle of yellow potion, dropping coin into the whiskey seller’s hand.

  Stepping across the silent room, the miner went out to the muddy street. He knew that soon the posse would be patrolling, that he would have to be back at the barracks with the other miners.

  No one ever looked at one another, and no one was ever given a name. They were called only by their functions: miner, prostitute, boss …

  Cool air cleared the miner’s head. For the first time, the miner wondered about the stars he saw, unnamed like him. Lifting his head, he thought back to the prostitute and saw the sad eyes without a face. Begging for sacrifice.

  Soon it would be curfew. Company bells would toll.

  A drizzle started.

  It was colder on the street, and the miner missed the heat of the saloon with its skull-face furnac
e. And not far from the town, the posse was saddling up for their evening sortie to clear out the forest by slaughtering anything that huddled for cover, defenseless and hungry.

  At a street corner, the miners were beckoned to the Nighttime World and its Midnight Queen, within the splintering temple of the Juggernaut. The miner stood in front of the chapel, its crooked door leaning on rusty hinges in the rain. Candlelight flickered and purple smoke floated in the hall behind the cult priests that came down from the Baron’s palace, preaching salvation for the miners if they were ever to find the twin blue-eyed jewels of the fallen Juggernaut. The priestly promises kept them digging for the green ore that was hauled away through mountain passes.

  “Find the Juggernaut’s eyes and you’ll be free!” The priest shouted.

  He promised the miners an afterlife without struggle. “The only way to salvation is to keep digging until you find the Juggernaut’s eyes!”

  “For the Juggernaut!” The congregation repeated.

  The mine dust was on the lips and fingertips of the miners, coating their skin with salt and iron. The ore was hauled away on mule trains, their tall loads tilting precariously as the mules clattered out of the canyon to somewhere unknown.

  “Let us pray for the human animal that tired and rested on the side of the road before moving on!”

  The priests preached during mandatory company meetings, “For whoever holds the eyes shall be ruler of the land and lover of the Midnight Queen. For the Juggernaut!”

  “For the Juggernaut!” The crowd repeated.

  The priest went on and on, and the dark crowd of miners and prostitutes listened, imagining their salvation to come. Purple smoke rose in the candlelight, leaving the congregation with the image of the Juggernaut’s glowing blue eyes.