9 Tales From Elsewhere 10

by 9 Tales From Elsewhere

'Then why take it?' Garbey yelled, letting the anger boil over. 'Why take it if you didn't murder him, you racist maggot?'

  'To sell it.' Vespes stopped yelling. His whole body slumped in defeat. 'Same reason I was helping them. For the money.' He met Garbey's gaze. 'But I didn't kill him.'

  Even grieving, Alison Oduya was beautiful. Long hair, rich brown skin, curving body, this was a woman you would travel across the universe for. She should have been striding a catwalk or flashing across a TV screen, and instead she was sat in a cheap plastic chair, eyes bloodshot, hands cuffed like any other captured migrant.

  'I'm sorry,' Garbey said, his voice weighed down with failure. 'We haven't found your husband's killer yet. Is there anything you can tell me that might help?

  She looked up at him, lost and bewildered.

  'OK, how about this.' Garbey settled into the seat next to her. 'Can you tell me where in this place you were being kept?'

  Alison looked up at him. 'Will this mean I go to Earth?' she asked. 'If there's a trial. Or to bury him. I could go to Earth if they want me to, I have everything I need. Will I...'

  Garbey shook his head. 'I'm sorry, but they're sending you back to Signus. Maybe Sammy's body too, if I can arrange that.'

  'But we came so far,' she said. 'Three ships we travelled on, two in the cargo hold. We just want to return to the homeland. We have a right! To real air, and clean soil, and water that flows.'

  She had the frantic look of a street preacher, eyes wide and staring, hands out in supplication. Garbey could understand. To someone who'd been raised on one of the mining planets, living in sealed chambers and spacesuits all their life, Earth must sound like a dream. This was why the solar system's borders were so well guarded, and why those guards still failed. Her words were the most natural words in the universe. But coming from this woman, in this moment, they didn't seem right. Her husband had died and here she was worrying about a home her parents' parents had never seen.

  'What about Sammy?' Garbey asked. 'Did he feel this way too?'

  'Oh yes.' Alison nodded her head. 'He was going to be a teacher. In Scotland. They have rain in Scotland, don't they? He always wanted to see rain.'

  She paused, looked down at her hands, and burst into tears.

  'He always wanted to see rain.'

  Garbey lit a cigarette, waited for the sobbing to subside.

  'I'm sorry,' he said again, 'but they never would have let your husband settle on Earth. There are laws against cyber enhancement.'

  'I know,' Alison whispered. 'He told me. But it's Earth. It's the promised land. You do what you need to live there. That's why...' He voice cracked again, words trailing off into sobs.

  Garbey turned to look at her, his failure and confusion giving way to a terrible, heart-breaking certainty.

  'You cut the implant out of his arm,' he said at last. 'Didn't you?'

  He wanted to be wrong, for this to have been a crime of hate or of greed. He wanted bad things to happen for bad reasons. But the world didn't work like that, not on Earth, certainly not out here.

  'It was his idea.' Her voice was muffled, face pressed into the palms of her hands. 'But we didn't know what we were doing. I had to cut more and more, there was flesh and bone and he was in so much pain, but he wouldn't let me stop. The blood just kept coming. When he stopped moving I didn't know what to do. If we were caught they might stop us going to Earth. I panicked. I ran. And now he's dead. Now he'll never feel the rain.'

  Garbey stood in the cargo bay once more, watching Vespes clear away the blood. They had switched the gravity back on in here, filled it with atmosphere while the border patrol finished their search. There were leads to follow, connections to be made to other smuggling operations. A case like this could make a career.

  Despite all that, Captain Russell stood impassive, just watching the men at work. The sound of Alison's sobbing echoed from the corridor as they led her away.

  'You still want me to leave this one to you?' Garbey asked.

  Russell nodded. 'I dream of being left to get on with my job. If it means working with wailing widows, I can live with that.'

  Garbey lit a cigarette. 'Like you'd have solved this on your own.'

  'Course I would have,' Russell said. 'But maybe a little slower.'

  'I can live with that,' Garbey said. He blew a plume of smoke, watched it swirl and vanish on an artificial breeze. 'Want to hear something fucked up? There aren't any prisons out here. Alison Oduya's going to Earth.'

  'You think that was her plan?' Russell asked. 'Was she so damned desperate that she'd kill to get there?'

  Garbey shrugged. 'I hope not. But if it was, well, at least someone gets their way.'

  THE END.

  LAST BUS FOR THE FUTURE by George Strasburg

  Gone are all the buses. Their stops remain, some of the flyers with the arrival and leave times remain, half plastered to the old booths. Someone made off with the benches though. In their place were two holes in the sidewalk, and rusty bite, quickly cut in the haste of what was most likely a theft of the benches. But no one cared. The public transit system was a wasted expense, and more money would’ve been lost collecting all the old benches to sell them off.

  So they were forgotten.

  But at least as the rain started, the booths, with their semi-transparent roofs provided shelter for a young boy, already too cold for comfort. The mist, on the other hand, was not restrained by the roof and came in through the one full open side of the booth as well as beneath the bottoms of the other three sides. If the bench had remained, the boy could’ve climbed up on top and stayed dry on three sides. Instead, he huddled into a corner, and let his ankles soak from the spray off the sidewalk.

  He sniffled repeatedly, though not from any apparent sadness. He was just cold.

  It had been a long time since he’d had anywhere to go, anywhere that he belonged. He’d dealt with those emotions, buried them in the back of his mind, walked around in them until the feelings were as worn as his sneakers. He pick up new shoes one day, when he came across them again.

  Shoes seemed to have gone the way of the benches. Despite all the displaced homes and rubble, the boy never came across a wicked witch and ruby slippers. Though it wouldn’t have surprised him if he did. Things like that seemed possible. All the storybooks the boy knew seemed plausible now.

  After all, his entire life he’d been assured dragons were make-believe. And yet, that’s not what happened.

  Dragons came. Took. Destroyed. Came back. Took. Destroyed. And told the people where they could go. The last thing the boy heard there was a dragon in every city in the United States and Europe. Pundits lost contact with other countries and it was assumed they would be as well, but the boy, wiser than he should be, often wondered if the other countries had decided not to help their former enemies and allies.

  Why should they get involved when it was the European Union that awoke the dragons?

  Of course, the United States jumped in. But that’s because the world belonged to them. That’s what the pundits said anyway—back when the TVs still worked.

  But dragons are bigger than any tank or F-18. The temperature of their bodies must be that of the planet’s core—because nuclear weapons failed to impress them. Then again, that brings up the one fact the storybooks got wrong about dragons. They didn’t breathe fire. Their body temperature caused it. A flap of their wings and the right spark and a whole field would go up in smoke. A smoke the dragons basked in.

  They liked that smoke so much, they filled the skies with it. And Mother Nature brought the rain. But that rain would boil when a dragon was near. That was the only comfort the boy took from standing at the cold wet bus stop.

  But as he shivered, exhausted from months of travel and survival, he lost his will. He just couldn’t move anymore—because there was nowhere he could go. Humankind had accepted the dragon’s command, and places like the one the boy had run from had done their best to please the dragons, offering them food and smok
e of all kinds—as if the creatures could be bought over with tobacco or marijuana. The dragons were all too happy to enjoy the offering and then feast upon the charred remains of humans. Yes, the dragons loved the taste of charred flesh the most.

  Though it had to be freshly charred.

  The boy’s travels had been checkered with long overcooked corpses. Skulls that would burst into ash with the slightest touch, only preserved until the next rainfall muddied them up.

  Or they were trampled on by desperate survivors or perhaps even driven over by a… bus.

  A bus like the one that jittered down the road, producing an awful black exhaust to go along with the rattling of its old dented frame.

  At first the boy accepted this sight as an illusions, a cruel joke of the desert cityscape. And he had no understanding of irony otherwise he would’ve counted his placement beneath a bus stop and the appearance of a working bus as something less than a miracle.

  Instead, his eyes brightened and a hope that should’ve been long lost gaped his mouth—it was still too tired to remember how to smile.

  The bus careened to a stop, air brakes hissing as everything inside the bus shifted forward, then back.

  The bus door folded open.

  “Well,” the bus driver said with a smile. Behind him, voices of the passengers urged him not to stop. Warned him of traps and stories they had heard. “It’s just a boy,” he told them and addressed the boy at the bus stop with a warm smile. “You looking to go anywhere in particular, kid?”

  The boy shook his head. Shrugged, and then leaned back against the bus stop to show that he wasn’t waiting for the bus. There shouldn’t be any buses at all actually.

  “Are you from Tent City?” the bus driver asked. “We’re not. We’re a different lot. We’re going to make a difference don’t you know.”

  The boy shrugged. As the panic behind the driver rose to the point where if a hand had come out of the darkness and smacked the driver, it wouldn’t have been unexpected. Even the driver had raised his shoulders to brace for the likely impact.

  “We could use the help,” The bus driver snapped at his passengers. Then he turned that smile of his back on and looked at the boy. “What do you say? It’s rainy, kid, but it’s dry in here. Why don’t you come along?” the bus driver asked.

  The boy stepped forward, and wetness found the places where he was dry. It made him step right back before he realized it was no use. He might as well climb on that bus, if only to be dry for a little while.

  The bus door closed behind him with an unpleasant creak that the bus driver tried to apologize for. “At least,” he said, “she still runs and if there’s a fire…well you know… it’s not like there’d be any reason to escape the bus.”

  The boy agreed and stood in the aisle looking for an empty seat. Of which there were actually plenty. Most passengers sat alone. There was an old couple who sat closely, clutching at each other, and avoiding the boy’s glance. There was another man entrenched in a handheld video game, that required both available seats, and had propped his fat legs up on the empty adjacent seats. Another couple wasn’t nearly as old, but might as well have been as old in the eyes of the boy. They smiled at the boy with a tinge of sadness that crept in and was extinguished—perhaps for the sake of the boy. They whispered things back to each other.

  None of the faces seemed as hostile as their voices had implied when they were begging their driver to leave the boy. These seemed like good people—defeated, but good.

  The evils that followed the arrival of the dragons had actually manifested themselves on the survivors’ faces. With just a look the boy knew who had crossed the line. Those that were good simply appeared tired.

  “Why don’t you come on back here with me?” an older woman said. She had on a clean dress—good enough for Easter Sunday Mass about three decades ago. She’d likely found it in someone else’s storage container on the outskirts of town, or perhaps it had belonged to her mother and its sentimentality had made her preserve it through the chaos.

  The boy didn’t get any other offers, and could’ve just sat alone. But he wanted company and so he took a seat next to the woman.

  Her hair was curled and smelled of burnt hair—thought that was common enough given the conditions the dragons had left the world in. It was mostly gray but there were still strands of blonde and brown in it. The wrinkles in her face were carved by days on the beach, and the creases were filled with ash, though her cheeks had been recently powdered with blush. For some reason she wanted to look her best—even if that wasn’t possible anymore.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  The boy shrugged and looked at the driver’s rearview mirror. The driver seemed to have interest, though it was doubtful he could hear the woman’s question, given the awful sound of the engine. The boy barely understood her.

  He shrugged.

  “Well, it’s a good thing you’re coming with us. We’re going to do something very important.”

  “W-w-what?” asked the boy.

  She smiled and lowered her head beneath the head rest as if she could only tell him in secret. “We’re going to slay a dragon.”

  The boy’s eyes widened. “R-r-really?”

  The woman nodded. “It’s our duty. It’s all we have left to offer the world.”

  The boy squinted incredulously and picked at his teeth with his tongue. “How do you plan to kill a dragon?”

  The woman leaned back as if to keep that secret to herself. Her smiled hugged her face but never separated her lips.

  “You can’t kill them,” the boy said.

  A man popped over the headrest in front of them and said, “Oh but we can. You see we got letters from another city. They beat their dragon and told us explicitly how we can rid ours. All over the country, world perhaps, there are buses, cars, boats, what have you, all heading out on the same simultaneous mission. All at once, every dragon in the world will die.”

  “We can only hope,” the woman said, and crossed herself as if Jesus Christ was going to vex the whole operation if she hadn’t.

  “How are we—”

  “We should probably stop now,” a man form the back called up to the front. “We’re less than an hour out.”

  The bus driver agreed with a squeal and shake that threw the boy against the seat in front of him. He eased off it with the woman’s help.

  “Are they all prepped?” the driver asked.

  But while the rest of the bus responded with a ‘yes’ signifying their own preparedness, it was the man in the back you said, “I wanted to wait to pour the glasses until after you stopped.”

  The driver met the man halfway back, and upon a tray, were several paper cups, like the ones children use to rinse out their mouth when they brush their teeth. There were even popular cartoon characters from a show the boy missed watching on Nickelodeon Channel. Again with the irony, that cartoon had dragons—a different kind, but still dragons.

  “D-d-do I get one?” The boy asked, thirsty despite all the rain he’d encountered.

  The woman smiled and waved the driver over, who handed two cups to her, one she handed over to the boy.

  It was red and thick like cough syrup rather than blood or Hawaiian punch. The boy hesitated, examining the liquid by tilting his glass from side to side. The viscosity of it was certainly just as thick as the nasty cough syrup he’d suffered when he was sick, if not a little watered down.

  “Drink,” the bus driver said. He urged the boy.

  So did the woman.

  And most of the other passengers. Except the fat man with the hand held gaming console and the two older couples. They watched in silence. But their silence was not noted in the boy’s decision making process.

  The boy knew something was wrong with it, but he drank it anyway, because it smelled better than the water he’d been drinking out of old tires and in the potholes in the street.

  It was bittersweet. It stuck to his throat. He couldn’t simply s
pit it back out, he had to try and swallow over and over until it felt as if his tongue was about to come off and go down as well.

  “What—was—that?” he asked.

  The bus driver nodded, but he didn’t answer the boy’s question, rather he addressed the passengers.

  “You shouldn’t feel any effects for another hour—depending on your build and last meal, that is. I will drive fast. If you feel ill please note that I am limited to the number of antidotes, but you must tell me immediately, a dead body will not suffice. They will know something is up.”

  The boy looked around trying to decipher the meaning of this. Just what he had drank he did not know, but suddenly he feared his predicament.

  “W-w-was…is that medicine?” the boy asked.

  The old woman tugged him close and kissed his ear as she whispered, “You will be rewarded for your sacrifice. There is a life after this one, one where we can be with our families and friends again. We will be granted that life because of what we do here today. We will be heroes.”

  The boy, as young as he was, knew immediately what was about to transpire. Their bus was not just headed to the outskirts of their city, but to the cave the dragon had constructed upon its ruins. A mountain of devastation, built on the ashes of humans.

  “B-b-but I don’t want to die!” the boy shrieked.

  The woman was stronger than the boy gave her credit. She yanked him down, and pinned him to the back of the seat with her forearm across his throat.

  “Shut your mouth, boy. God has asked you. You were not happy. You would not survive much more than another month on this planet, even with the dragons defeated. You have a higher purpose now!”

  The boy squirmed and kicked.

  “It’s too late,” the guy in front of them said casually. “Just relax, kiddo. In an hour or so you’ll die whether a dragon eats you or not.”

  The boy cried. And while the rest of the bus tried to console him with stories of their own sacrifice and their own reasoning he blocked it all out and tried to imagine his escape.