Brother to Dragons

by Charles Sheffield

  Unprotected from the cold, Job was freezing to death. He struggled to control his shivers and forced himself to lie quiet until the last body was in the trolley and it was wheeled over to the truck. The loading bay closed.

  He had hoped to escape now, dropping to the ground while the two men went around to the cabin of the truck. But it took time to fight his way free of the pile of bodies, and the truck’s rear door was lifting closed. He got to it too late, as the last crack of light disappeared.

  Job could not bear to go back to the trolley. He sat on the floor. He was in a metal tomb, freezing cold, completely dark. He had no idea what would happen next, but it could not be worse than this.

  Could it?

  The man’s comment about the incinerator ran again and again through his head.

  • Chapter Seven

  Pastorale

  The exhaust manifold of the diesel truck had been poorly repaired, with replacement pipes welded along the underside of the truck itself. Job had no idea of the mechanics. All he knew was that after ten minutes of bumpy travel he felt a warmer patch on the floor. He tracked its line with his hands, lay out along the vibrating metal, and closed his eyes.

  There was no hope of sleep. The floor was too hard and the ride too bumpy. The journey went on and on. The truck’s compartment was almost airtight, and as the inside temperature rose Job began to smell the bodies a few feet away. He had nothing in his stomach, but he began dry heaves that lasted the rest of the trip. They continued until, after a rough patch where the trolley swayed and rolled dangerously against its retaining chocks, the truck came to a halt.

  Job’s stomach was knotted in cramps, but he crawled with his last strength to hide behind the wheeled trolley. When the rear part of the truck creaked down, the light that spilled in was blinding. Job lay low, squinting out past the trolley’s wheels at unfamiliar terrain. Instead of roads and tall buildings he saw flat earth covered with a fine white powder. The only structure was a single tall chimney. Job moved to the side of the trolley and peered upward. The chimney rose and rose, as high as Job could see.

  When voices came from around the side of the truck he retreated behind the trolley. With full daylight and bright sun, he saw no hope of remaining unseen. But not for anything would he burrow back into the middle of that tangle of warmed bodies.

  The men who had loaded the truck at Cloak House were back. Job recognized their voices. They moved to pull at the front of the trolley, removing the chocks and rolling it forward to lock it into a new position. Job crept forward, flattened against its back. “That’ll do,” said one of the men. “She’ll tilt clean from there.”

  “Aren’t we a tad close?”

  The man laughed. “You were the one looking for a bit of heat. I’ll pull us away a foot or two if you like.”

  They disappeared, leaving the back of the truck open and the trolley locked in its grooves on the floor. Job moved to the open rear. The truck stood a few feet from a great metal plate in the ground, with the lowered rear panel extending over it.

  Now or never. He eased himself off the side and down to the ground. As he did so there was a grating sound of moving metal. Job, crawling under the truck towards its front end, felt a blast of heat on his back and legs. He turned his head. The plate on the ground was sliding away, to reveal a deep, glowing pit beneath. He saw red-hot metal, and bright orange-yellow flames spurting from broad nozzles. He scrambled away. As he did so he heard the sound of another motor within the truck.

  The flat interior was tilting up, the trolley turning with it. There was a moment when the angle of the floor increased and nothing seemed to happen; then all the boys’ bodies were falling out at once. Job saw a moving tangle of starved white limbs and shirted bodies, until the first corpses came into contact with the flaming interior of the incinerator. Then steam and flames obscured everything. But they could not hide the sizzle and crackle of human flesh meeting red-hot metal.

  Job lay flat on the ground beside the truck’s rear wheels, too weak to crawl. He had a vivid image inside his head, of thin limbs locked around him, holding him in their dead embrace as they fell together into orange flames. If he had not been too squeamish to climb back into the middle of the dead…he would be in that inferno now, burning alive.

  The interior of the truck was tilting back into position, and the cover plate on the incinerator was closing. One of the men appeared again, checking that the trolley’s load had all been delivered. His feet came within a yard of Job, but he did not see him behind the wheels.

  Job did not look up. He had passed the point where he cared if he lived or died. Even when the truck’s engine started and it pulled away, the wheels just missing him, he did not move. He lay facedown, feeling gritty ash on his cheek and sunlight on his back.

  It was a contrast of sensation that finally roused him. His feet were freezing cold, while his head burned with radiated heat from the incinerator plate. He sat up and stared around. The truck was far away, disappearing in a cloud of blown powder. The black metal plate and tall chimney sat at the center of a featureless plain, a circle of white ash two or three hundred yards in radius. Beyond that Job saw a tangle of jagged metal, heaped into strange and contorted shapes. Farther yet was the green of growing plants and a bright blue wintery sky.

  He turned to the chimney and followed its stack up and up, to twin plumes of gray and white against dark-gray overhead. The incinerator cast a pall of dense smoke over the area, blackening the sky and changing the sun to a ball of burning orange.

  White ash, under menacing dark sky. T - A - N - D. Job was suddenly five years old, lying in the dormitory at Cloak House, shivering as the older boys told horror stories of the Tandies. The Tandyman was looking for him, coming closer, with his terrible white-hot hands.

  T - A - N - D,

  Toxikwace taste good to me.

  Earth go white, sky go black,

  You go in, you don’t come back.

  Job staggered to his feet and began to walk away from the incinerator and its towering chimney, towards that tangerine ball of sun. As he approached the edge of the circle of white ash he could see that the twisted metal beyond it was old trucks and automobiles, piled on top of each other in contorted heaps. The smell of charring flesh faded from his nostrils. In its place, faint and yet irresistibly powerful, he smelled food. Over beside one heap of old cars he saw an open fire, with three people sitting around it.

  He had to eat, or die. He walked towards them, rubbing ash from his face. There were two men and one woman, and they were sitting on yellow plush bench seats ripped from some old luxury automobile. They were all black-faced and white-haired. They stopped talking as he approached.

  “Now where’d you spring from?” The speaker was the woman. She was full-faced and strongly built. She wore a kerchief around her head, a shabby coat of black leather, and fingerless woolen gloves.

  “I came on the truck.” Job pointed in the direction of the vanished vehicle. “I’m terribly hungry. Can you give me food?”

  It was useless to ask, but the words had come out beyond his control. The woman was standing up, frowning.

  “Can you give me food?” he said again. “I’m starving.”

  They stared at him curiously. One of the men was holding a metal bowl full of roasted potatoes, warming his hands on it. He made no move to offer anything to Job. “That truck only brings dead ones,” he said. “What’s a live one doing on it?”

  Job’s legs were failing him. He sat down uninvited on one of the yellow car seats. “I ran away,” he said. “I had to.”

  They looked at him without expression. He stared back, unflinching. There was no point in lying. If they returned him to Cloak House, he could starve there as well as here. He shielded aching, ash-filled eyes from the sunlight and began to talk. He told them everything; from Cloak House to Bracewell Mansion to the unsuccessful drug-running trip to the Mall Compound, from there to his return to Cloak House as a JD; of his conviction that on
ly death waited him in the detention center, of his escape with the frozen bodies of the dead boys.

  At the end the old man with the bowl of potatoes shook his head. “Damme, but you got one weird head—and I don’t mean just the outside of it. Did yer make all that up?”

  “It’s true, every word.”

  “Well, I dunno. But true or made up, that story earns something.” He held out a potato. Job grabbed it and burned his mouth biting into it.

  “No rush,” said the woman. “Take your time, boy, or you’ll throw up.” She nodded at the younger man. He filled a glass jar with hot sweetened tea and handed it to Job, who had wolfed the first potato and another as quickly as it was given to him.

  He managed to sip now, instead of gulping. He stared at the three people, and then again all around him. “Is this place a T-T-”—he found it hard to say the word—“am I in a Tandy?”

  They gaped at him, then looked at each other and grinned. The woman slapped fat thighs, and heavy metal bracelets jangled on her wrists. “This’n here? Well, that’s the damnedest. Boy, you’re at a citystate dump. Tandy! Where’d you ever get an idea like that in your head?”

  T - A - N - D,

  Nucleerwace taste good to me.

  Face go black, hair go white,

  Burn today an’ die tonight.

  The scary words from long ago were running in Job’s head, but he pushed them away. The faces in front of him were black, black as soot, and their hair was white; yet these people were not terrible or terrifying.

  “Listen boy, none of us ever been near a Tandy,” the woman said. “And none of us wants to. Forget that stuff. What are you gonna do now? Nothing for you here.”

  “I know. But I don’t know where to go.” Job could not get over the absence of streets and buildings, and the endless green of trees and grass beyond the dump. The air he breathed was clearer, thinner, filled with strange smells of growth and decay. It was alien, and frightening. He made up his mind. He wanted concrete and asphalt and people, lots of people. “I’ve never been in a bare place like this. I want to go back to what I know. But I have no idea how to get there.”

  “That’s easy. That way.” The old man pointed away from the sun. “The big road’s only a mile from here. But it’s a long walk after that. Thirty mile, mebbe, if you’re aiming back to the Mall. Don’t know why anyone’d want to go there, though. Damned government.” He leaned forward and spat into the fire. “Crooked bastards, every one of ’em, they did all this to us.”

  “I’d better go.” Job stood up. With full sun the day was warm enough, but tonight could be as cold as last night. He was already tired, and he had no idea how far thirty miles might be. All he knew was that he needed to be back in familiar territory before it was dark.

  Beyond that simple objective, he did not have the energy to force his mind.

  The old man had been a poor judge.

  From the dump to Bracewell Mansion it was only eighteen miles. That fact and two others saved Job: he was still wearing the solid shoes that had been provided for him in Bracewell Mansion when he was running errands for the professor; and the black-faced woman, in a final and fickle act of kindness, had filled a paper bag with molasses-dipped roast turnips before he left.

  The walk was by far the longest that Job had ever made. He came to the entrance of the mansion in early dusk, swaying on blistered feet. He had slept little the previous night, and the second half of today’s long trek through city outskirts had passed in a surrealist daze. He had seen strange mirages (or strange reality?) in the broad, potholed avenues, as he struggled up their long slopes and imagined Bracewell Mansion just over the brow of each hill. The parking lots of old shopping malls became rolling seas of black asphalt, dotted with shanty huts that swayed and swooped like wind-tossed paper boats. Abandoned warehouses flanked the roads, rising to cut off the dipping sun. At their broken windows he saw grinning faces, waving skeletal arms. They called and gestured, inviting him in. He shivered and looked straight ahead. Obsessively he had counted his steps, allowing himself a bite of food every thousand paces, a drink wherever he found running water. Sometimes he walked with his eyes closed. Once he had stopped to sit down for ten minutes, and knew when he continued that he must not do it again. If he did he would never get up.

  Bracewell Mansion when he finally came to it was back to its old familiar appearance, with the double doors blocked off and the single entrance at the top of the broad stone steps.

  And having come so far, Job did not know what to do. He was totally confused. When he was desperate and despairing in Cloak House just twenty-four hours earlier, the idea that the world was devoid of pity, mercy, and decency had hit him with the force of revelation. But the three people at the dump had shared food and drink with him, when it could not possibly benefit them. And Professor Buckler might have found Job useful to run errands, but surely there had been kindness, too, when Job had been picked starving off the street. He wanted to rely on that kindness now, but one thing held him back. Since leaving Bracewell Mansion he understood who really ran the place. And it was not the professor. No matter what Buckler might say or think, the true boss was Miss Magnolia. And Job was terrified by the idea of confronting her.

  Increasing cold and the pain from his feet and chest at last forced him inside. He stole upstairs to the third floor and entered Professor Buckler’s rooms. To Job’s dismay there was no sign of him. This was the hour when he was normally in the brown armchair, drinking or sleeping.

  He might be one floor up, in the kitchen. But Miss Magnolia might be there too, in the anteroom, and there was no way of reaching the kitchen without passing through it. Job went up the stairs step by nervous step. He peeked through the open door.

  Miss Magnolia was not there. Nor was the professor. But Tracy was sitting on the plush couch of crimson velvet. She was dressed in high style, red hair up, dress low-cut, pumps so high-heeled that real walking would be impossible.

  She seemed to be waiting for somebody, and she saw Job the moment that his head poked through the door.

  “Job!” she gasped, and glanced all around. “You look awful. What are you doing here?”

  “I came back.”

  “You’re mad. You shouldn’t be anywhere near us. Weren’t you caught and jaded? That’s what Miss Magnolia said.”

  “Yes, I was. But I escaped—”

  “If Miss Magnolia sees you or finds out you were here, she’ll go crazy.”

  “I had nowhere else to go. I wanted to see Professor Buckler.”

  “Oh, God.” Tracy glanced over her shoulder. “Job, you can’t stay, you can’t. Don’t you know what happens to people who harbor J-D’s? You could get everyone here in trouble.”

  Job said nothing. He stood and stared at Tracy, eyes despairing. Another night of cold would be the finish.

  “Oh, hell.” She would not look at him and she was biting her lipstick, ruining its even line. “Oh, Job. Job, d’you remember Sammy?”

  Job nodded. He had been to the house with the red door many times.

  “Go there. Tell Sammy I sent you, for food and a place to sleep. When I get the chance I’ll tell the professor, ask him to come see you, not tell Miss Magnolia. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then for God’s sake get out of here. Hurry.”

  Job nodded, seemed ready to speak. Tracy shook her head. “Right now. Git.”

  Job went downstairs on sore and blistered feet, out into the icy night of the city. He would try to do what Tracy ordered, but not for anything could he hurry. His lungs were beyond pain, shriveling and withering in his narrow chest. Compared to that, blisters and hunger were nothing.

  Job had been to the house with the red door and black shuttered windows at least a dozen times. But the shutters were always closed, and he had never been invited inside.

  After his first visit, each pickup had had the same format. He knocked on the red door. Within a few seconds it opened, and the face of the androg
ynous Sammy glowered out through a three-inch opening. Job gave his coded message, different for each visit. The face vanished without a word. A few minutes later a small package was thrust out for Job’s acceptance. The door closed.

  Now it was different. When Job knocked on the door of the four-story row house and repeated Tracy’s words, Sammy for a change did not retreat. Instead there was a slow, thoughtful nodding of the head, and the door opened wide.

  “Come in,” said the musical tenor. “Walk careful.”

  The warning was unnecessary. There was enough space to walk through the long hall and up the steep stairs, but only just. On either side, built into tottering piles, were wooden and cardboard boxes. Job smelled mildew, plus a strange odor that caught at his sore throat and irritated his anguished lungs. He was so weak that he had to pull himself up the stairs using the handrail.

  Sammy led the way into what had once been an elegant kitchen. The electric light was a hanging bare bulb, and the gas oven and range were not working. A portable gas stove in the middle of the room provided both cooking and heat—unnecessary, the second, because the whole house was already stifling hot.

  “Food over there,” said Sammy. “What time professor coming?”

  “Don’t know.” Job’s voice would produce nothing above a hoarse whisper.

  “Hmph. And Trace don’t want me to call, she say? OK, hombre-delgado. We wait. Bed for you in basement, whenever you ready.”

  Job was ready now. He was lightheaded and dizzy. But he could smell food, and see a pot on the stove. It might not be there later. As Sammy left he grabbed an old cane-bottom chair, hobbled with it to the table, and sat down.

  The four-quart crockpot held a fish and oyster stew, thick and milky and full of bits of yellow corn. The stove was turned off, and the side of the pot was little more than blood heat. But that was good. Job’s throat was so sore that hot food would have been more than he could stand. He hunted around until he found a spoon. He did not bother with a dish but ate direct from the crock, cramming solids and liquid into his mouth until his stomach bulged round below his thin ribs and refused to admit another mouthful. He put down the spoon. He could eat no more to save his life.