by Schow, Ryan
When they were airborne, he tried sleeping through the night next to a thin, professional woman with a hint of body odor who kept licking and smacking her lips in her sleep. It was getting disgusting.
To himself, he muttered, “The people they let in first class these days.”
Lick.
Smack. Smacksmack. Lick.
Lick.
Saaaamack.
Finally, he leaned over, nudged her shoulder. She startled awake, her eyes instantly alert and suspicious.
“You trying to touch my breasts?” she asked, in sleep-mumble language.
“God, no,” he said.
“Then what are you doing?” she said, sitting up, looking down at her blouse and adjusting it.
“It’s just, well, you sound like you’re nursing and it’s creeping me out.”
“I have a condition,” she said.
“Yeah, me, too. It’s called ‘I can’t fucking take it anymore.’ I’ve got a doctor’s notice. He says the cure for my condition is you drinking some water already.”
Suspicious eyes narrowed, sizzled with anger. Or humiliation. Honestly, he didn’t care how she felt as long as she quit with the noises. The woman huffed out a sigh, then turned her head, fluffed her airplane pillow and went back to sleep.
Within a half an hour, she was nursing again, but somehow, by the grace of God, he managed to doze off. The minute he fell asleep, it seemed he was being woken up. The plane landed and it was still dark outside. Just after three A.M. in the morning is what time it was supposed to be.
He blinked open his eyes, saw the professional woman next to him staring. Everything about her bore an air of hostility. He became alert. She tore his eyes away from him, like she was disgusted.
As if…
“What do you do for a living, if you don’t mind me asking?” he said. Her eyes fell back on him. They were pretty, but not nice.
“You talking to me?”
He nodded.
“Producer,” she said. “You?”
“TV or movies?”
“TV, why?”
“I was a jerk earlier, I want to apologize.” She gave a nod of acknowledgment. It was time to leave. The way the overhead lights thinned out her hair and highlighted a rash of acne scars, it made him feel sorry for her.
When he finally stepped off the plane into San Francisco International, he did so feeling hung over.
2
It was all he could do to not pass out in the cab on the way home. The driver who was taking him home, woke him to tell him they’d arrived. Christian realized he didn’t have his house keys. They were buried somewhere in his luggage. He would go through the garage instead. The cabbie unloaded his bags, then offered to take them to the front door.
“Thanks,” he said, tipping the man generously, “but I’ve got it.”
He rolled his luggage past Abby’s S5, punched in the garage door code on the code box outside the garage. It opened up, silently as a good garage door should. Inside, he walked through the laundry room, then flipped on the kitchen lights and immediately he heard bodies scuffling.
In the living room, the big TV was on. He stopped, wondered if Abby was up waiting for him. That was when a blonde head popped up from the couch, looking red faced and worried.
“Netty?” he said.
“Hi, Christian, I mean, Mr. Swann.”
From the floor, Brayden’s head rose into existence, and that’s when Christian knew something was up. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” he said.
“No, sir,” Brayden said. “I’m on the floor, she’s on the couch. It’s totally legit. You just scared the hell out of us.”
“Yeah, right. No offense, Netty, but Brayden, son, she has that freshly fucked look and I don’t have the patience for your lies.”
“There’s a reason she has that look, sir. I mean, sorry for calling you sir, you said not to.”
Netty burned Brayden with narrowed, blue eyes.
In response, Brayden said, “He said he didn’t have patience for lies.” As if that would explain her feeling like a gigantic tramp. Not that Christian cared. At that point, all he wanted was sleep. He had to see Abby though. If anything to assuage his worry.
“Is she alone?” he said. “Abby? Or is she with someone, too?”
“Netty didn’t want to sleep in the guest room,” Brayden said. “And Abby’s alone.”
Walking by, trying not to look, he said. “I don’t blame her.” Then, before he left the room, over his shoulder almost casually, he said, “There better not be come stains on my couch or my blankets.”
When he said this, Netty looked like she was going to pass out and Brayden’s face flushed beet red. Christian didn’t exactly make them take the walk of shame, but the effect was damn near the same.
In Abby’s room, he heard her soft breathing, felt his heart soften for the first time since learning of her death. Smoothing her hair, looking at her beautiful face, he leaned down, kissed her cheek. She smelled somewhat different, but that was to be expected. Each time she changed, the scent she had as a baby, as a child, it changed ever so slightly.
She stirred, then opened her eyes and shot back in the bed, startled.
“It’s okay, honey,” he said, raising his hand. “It’s me, it’s dad.”
She seemed to gather an awareness of where she was, and then her eyes landed square on him. Sitting up in bed, pushing her hair out of her face, she said, “Dr. Holland didn’t tell me you were so good looking.”
“Um, what?” he said, baffled.
“Hi, daddy,” she said, reaching out her hand to shake his, “I’m Abigail.”
He scrunched his face in a WTF? type of gesture, then reached out and took her hand and said, “Abby, dear, does the good doctor have you on drugs?”
“Unfortunately not,” she said.
Fecal Tossing 101
1
Time is inconsequential when you’re dead. For example, one minute I’m hovering over this inhuman beast I don’t recognize called “the doctor” and he’s talking to me with his mind. I’m responding, even though I don’t have a mind and I don’t want anything to do with him. He understands everything. Even the truths my soul refuses to divulge. We’re talking mind rape at its finest. The next minute he’s gone and the man called Delgado is giving me shock therapy to wake up. Maybe seconds pass, maybe hours pass. I think perhaps I’d like to wake up.
So I wake up.
Even before my eyes open, I feel a suffocating pain radiating through me. Everything hurts. Like it’s been forced to carry the weight of so much abuse. My muscles are atrophied, my brain is foggy and it’s a struggle to breathe. When I finally force open my eyes, my mouth refuses to speak. To my dismay, it takes a concentrated effort to keep my eyes open, much less look around. I surrender. Close my eyes. The dots, they’re not connecting just yet.
Noises are coming out of the mouth of the man named Delgado, but I can’t understand them. I don’t understand anything. In fact, I can’t even see anymore.
Being in the body, it’s such a drag compared to not being alive.
Then I wake up again and everything seems easier. Less stressful. My eyes creak open; the light washes over my brain. My muscles still hurt, but they no longer ache. I can breathe easy.
That’s when I see the cages, including the one I’m in. There are hundreds stacked all along the walls of what look like the inside of an old warehouse. They’re stacked five high, all filled with bodies of boys and girls. All naked. All trapped in varying states of cognitive impairment.
Looking around my cage, my eyes focus on a bowl of food and a water glass beside me. There’s a white bucket and inside is a roll of toilet paper. I’m thinking, you have got to be kidding me.
I’m naked, too, and I don’t even have a blanket.
What in the absolute f*ck?
2
My body surrenders quick. I sleep the sleep of the dead. When I wake I’m in my own state of catatonia. My mouth is dro
oling. Spit is dried on my breasts. Next to me, in a cage like a mutt, is a blonde haired boy my age. He looks forward, his eyes unblinking, like he’s seen too much, like he’s been tortured. It seems strange. He looks at nothing, the ten feet in front of him. And he says nothing. My eyes adjust, then move like they’re robotic. Like they’re being uncooperative. The cages wrap all four warehouse walls. Across from me, fifty feet away, is a painted red door. In the middle of the warehouse space, the concrete floor is dipped, with several industrial grade drains in the center.
My brain begins to panic. The slow, steady unraveling of my sanity. Deep down, somewhere in the hollows of my belly, I feel an outburst mounting.
Some kid adjacent to me, three cages high, he dumps the chunky brown contents of his bucket on the floor. The fecal cocktail splashes on the concrete below. My eyes fight to process all this. The fecal tossing festivities aren’t limited to one single boy or one single cage. I lean forward, my face in front of the metal cage, and peer down at the floor. The stench wafts up, hammers me in the back of my nostrils. The hot, acidic stink of it. More of my brain peels apart. Along my wall, someone else slops their waste onto the floor. Like it’s no biggie. My eyes won’t stop registering my surroundings. They won’t stop cataloguing the nightmarish scene. Across the warehouse from me are hundreds of children and young adults. All stuffed in cages like animals, the cages stacked five high.
A girl is crying.
Zap!
If I could, I would startle. But I don’t. My mind slips into first gear as I wonder what made that sharp, crackling sound. My nose sniffs the air. It smells like dead bugs. Or burnt skin.
The scream inside, it’s building.
My robotic eyes sort of bump and move along, letting my brain slowly and thoroughly process everything. My gaze returns to the blonde boy in the cage next to me.
Zap!
Zap!
Zaaaaaaap!
Shaking inside, looking out the front of my cage, these uneducated eyes of mine scan the space looking for the source of the noise. The smell of shit and piss make my senses cringe. My hands grip the cage bars and that’s when—
Zap!
—an electrical current surges through me with such teeth-cracking intensity it sends my naked body kicking backwards into the cage. My back hits the other side of the cage and—
Zap!
—my back is fried.
What the hell is happening? My vision clears. Holy cow, I feel better. What?! For whatever reason, things inside me are no longer processing in slow motion. The fog in my head, it’s still here. But it’s not as bad as it used to be. The electrical current, is it helping me?
For whatever reason, I think it is.
Moving forward, I reach both hands out, ready to grip the bars, and that’s when it happens. The blonde boy speaks.
“You’ll kill yourself.” His face is tired looking. Malnourished. Once upon a time he could have been cute; now he just looks drained. Like pictures of those kids in the holocaust, but in full color. “It’s how everyone does it, when things get that bad.”
I get it.
That’s how they kill themselves.
F*ck it. What have I got to lose? I grip both bars and hang on tight. My eyeballs rattle hard and quiver as a searing white heat rips through every cell in my body. My face is jolting and quaking so bad I can’t smell my own hair burning. Then the current stops and I’m just sitting there, my skin black and smoking. Total silence everywhere. My face slowly turns to look at the boy, who is staring at me wide eyed.
“You went longer than anyone ever did,” he says, breathless. He’s on all fours, staring at me, like he can’t believe the things he’s seeing. “How are you still alive?”
When you tell strangers you can’t die, the only thing they think is that you’re freaking crazy. I test my mouth to make sure it works. A few black flakes fall from my lips as I speak, but whatever.
“Good genes, I guess.”
My heart sighs. I want to cry. Finally, after so long, I’m back. I’m back with all of my senses. My hands go to my head where the bullets entered. Healed. I look down at my chest, right where my heart sits and my skin is flawless. Well sort of. Right now it’s charred black from electrocution. The scream sinks back down to where it began, settling small and insignificant in my soul.
The fire ants start marching. My body is healing itself, like before. Now my mouth is smiling. And the black on my skin, the crispy shell of it…it’s flaking off, revealing fresh skin underneath.
The boy can’t stop looking. He won’t stop staring. When everyone around you is naked, when boobs and vaginas and butts and dicks are all on full display, you tend to let go of your embarrassment.
“What are you?” he asks, baffled, amazed, stricken with awe.
“Same as you, except with girl parts.”
“I don’t think so,” he says.
“Where are we?”
He shrugs his bony shoulders. The way the movement reveals his ribcage, I can’t help being hungry for him.
We both listen as a small voice says, “It short circuited.” Then all kinds of screaming and cage rattling starts. I touch the cage. It’s cold. As in no current. All around me, kids are losing their minds, crying, cursing, screaming obscenities and guttural chants and there is so much sobbing. My hands let go of the cage where layers of the burnt egg consistency of my flesh still clings crusted to the bars.
Seconds later, the zaps! hiss and shock the chaotic air. It’s an orchestra of clatter that could only mean there are a lot of kids in pain. Soon the silence pervades, save for the occasional dissident.
“So you don’t know where we are?” I ask. My neighbor nods his head. This worries me, him not knowing. “Do you at least know why we’re here?”
“I don’t.”
“How long have you been here?” I say. He shrugs his shoulders again and I’m like, “Well how long have I been here?”
“Two days, I think. Maybe three. Got tired of watching you sleep.”
“Ew, creeper,” I mumble. He sits back on his haunches, his eyes never leaving me. Suddenly I’m staring at him the same way he’s been staring at me, and I can’t help wondering if I’m the creeper here. Why? Because some carnal part of my mind is wondering about his boy parts. His crossed legs are hiding it. Averting my eyes, I try to shake this thought loose. This has me thinking, maybe in here, we’re all creepers to some degree.
“Do you at least know what day it is?” I ask.
He shakes his head. Lays down. What can I do but lay down, too? Lying there, trying to recall things I cannot recall, I make myself one promise. Only one.
I will get out of here.
If it’s the last thing I do, I will leave this awful place. I’ll leave here and reclaim my life.
The Stink of Inventory
1
Delgado went to collect Abby from holding area five (designated HA-05) the morning after the janitors were done cleaning. Apparently the inmates’ electrical field containment system failed sometime in the night. Blown fuse. This breach in security led to a massive dumping of the guests’ evacuation buckets. Security later learned the source of the electrical overload was Delgado’s girl, designated AS187.
“Looks like she tried to electrocute herself to death,” the Chief of Security for HA-05 said.
Interesting, Delgado thought.
“She’s alive, yes?” he said.
“Surprisingly.”
Inside the warehouse, using a large automated arm that swung down from an overhead rack and inventory management system, AS187’s cage was removed from its stack, and lowered before Delgado. The minute their eyes met, Abby refused to look away, or even blink. His blood ran cold when he saw the look she was giving him.
The cage settled onto the freshly scrubbed and bleached concrete floor. Abby still hadn’t looked at anything but him. She was electrified with rage.
“You,” she snarled.
“Abby,” he replied in a tone
far friendlier than hers.
“Get me the hell out of here!” she screamed, banging her palm on the cage door. Her hair hung in strings in front of her face, damp with sweat. The air had a stifling intensity to it.
“For what we’ve done here little missy, waking you back up and all, I would have imagined your mood to be more grateful and less hostile.”
“Look around,” Abby said. She was stark naked, perched on hands and knees like a savage, her perky breasts jutting out behind the veil of her hair. “This isn’t exactly the Ritz.”
“I trust you’ve been fed?”
“They gave me a bucket to shit in.”
“If I open this door, will you be cooperative?”
“You motherf*ckers stole my clothes! Stuck me in here like a dog!” Pounding on the cage like an animal, she screamed, “Like a gosh damn DOG!”
Taking no chances, he turned and went to the metal door, knocked loudly twice, then looked up at the overhead camera with dead eyes. A latch clicked; the door opened.
He said to the guard on the other side, “I’d like to see the surveillance video of last night. The one where AS187 shorted out the cages.”
After watching the video, after seeing her, understanding what she had to do to right her own mind, he realized they hadn’t helped fix her brain as much as she fixed it herself. He understood her hostility.
“May I borrow that?” he said to the closest guard. The guard followed his eyes down to the shotgun by the desk. The guard looked back at Delgado, searched his eyes for…something, then he picked up the rifle and tossed it to the doctor. Delgado caught it mid-barrel.
“I trust you know how to use it?” the guard said. He was a man of about thirty with bad skin and lifeless, grey eyes.
“I do.”
The guard buzzed him back in. Delgado walked straight to Abby’s cage, racked a round and pointed the weapon at her head.
“This is going to hurt,” he said.
Twisting her head, her eyes cold and black, the chords straining tight in her neck, she seethed. “I’m going to kill—”
