Dead Mann Running (9781101596494)

by Petrucha, Stefan

  The wind blew colder and harder, not that it helped the smell, so I guessed we were on some kind of plateau. Carbon-arc searchlights made whatever they touched briefly brighter than the moon. As far as I could see, the whole place was one great big fence, sprinkled with guard towers, their spindly steel legs glinting whenever the lights kissed them. Other than that, no buildings, no shelter, only a wide view of mud piles and trash.

  I wondered where the other prisoners were, until the mud piles moved toward us. The Bible said God made man from mud, and here we were, going back to it. It was around then I thought of ripping off my disguise and letting the bus driver take me to the police. But a metallic click told me he’d locked the gate. I turned in time to see him hop back into the bus and drive off.

  Was this it? No sign-in? No orientation? I didn’t expect it to be like it was on Nell’s show, comfortable, with shelter and recreation, but I expected something. On the brighter side, a week here and I’d feel like I’d done my time for axing Flat-face.

  Hell, a day.

  Chakz are never colorful, but what got off the bus wasn’t nearly as gray as what was coming toward us. At first, I thought they might greet us, give us the lay of the land. Instead, they started checking our pockets.

  A one-eyed man with a single tooth yanked a locket from the raggedy’s neck. He held it up and announced, “Pretty!” right before she clocked him in the jaw.

  “Give it, Grandpa, now!”

  I wanted to help, but there were hands, many missing fingers, all over me, fishing through my clothes. If they grabbed my wig, they’d yank it off and I’d be exposed. Then again, the guards were probably used to seeing body parts slough off. And where else would they put me, prison?

  I pushed a few away, trying to be gentle until I felt someone snag my recorder. I snatched it back, pinching the hand that held it. A woman with a mud-caked beehive hairdo yowled, “We share everything!”

  “No,” I said. “We don’t.”

  She grabbed again, but I held on tight. I was ready to start a real ruckus when a short guy with Superman biceps ambled up from the shadows. What I saw of his face looked pretty complete, even had some white stubble. I almost took him for a guard, but he wasn’t wearing khaki. The pants hitched up too high reminded me of a semiretired handyman my late wife Lenore and I used to hire.

  He put two fingers under his tongue and blew. A harsh whistle erupted from his mouth, something I couldn’t do when I was alive. Everyone stopped moving.

  “If it’s important to them, let them keep it.” He spoke with lazy authority, like an experienced foreman on a construction site. “One item each. Johnny, you give that girlie her locket.”

  But old Johnny had already lost that fight. He was in the dirt, tugging his single tooth to see if she’d loosened it. I didn’t know who the raggedy was, or why she kept turning up, but I was starting to like her.

  The beehive woman scowled. “We share everything.”

  “Let him keep it, Cheryl. We’ll figure out some way he can pay.”

  Cheryl let go and snarled at me, “You’ll pay.”

  “I got a feeling I already am,” I told her.

  She looked like she was about to utter a clever comeback, but someone shouted, “Bottle cap!” and she toddled over to check.

  After shoving the recorder back in my pocket, I stepped toward our protector, deeper into the camp. I had to slow when the stench grew stronger, but he seemed like a man worth knowing.

  “Thanks, pal,” I said. “I use it to remember things.”

  He couldn’t care less. “You look like you’re in one piece. Can you work?” He pointed to a pile of something against the fence. “Got wood, nails, hammers, and permission to put up a building.”

  “Sure. It’s something to do at least, right? We could use a shelter.”

  He shook his head. His jaw wobbled as if it wasn’t properly attached. “Not for us, for the supplies.”

  “What supplies?”

  He counted on his fingers. “Chain-link, posts, sledgehammers, stuff the guard uses to extend the fence. Oh, and sometimes fuel for the flamethrowers.”

  “You’re fucking with me. They expect us to help expand our own prison?”

  He shrugged and spoke slowly, like English wasn’t his first language, or there was something wrong with his throat. “They don’t expect anything except for us to go feral. This is an overflow camp, understaffed, overcrowded. They just wait, then come out with the throwers and burn us, real slow if they have to conserve fuel. Five, six a day. They wish it was more. But like you said, the work gives you a focus. Makes it harder to go,” he said. “A little harder, anyway.”

  Boy, did I get on the wrong bus.

  Mr. Fixit had been mostly in shadow, but when the searchlight passed this time, I got a lightning view of his face. He looked much better in the dark. What skin he had was covered with black patches and oozing holes. The exposed muscles were dark red puddles, with bits of bone showing like potatoes floating in a stew.

  It was rot, lots of it. It was a miracle his jaw stayed on at all.

  “Christ,” I said.

  “Oh, the face. Is it bad? No one wants to tell me, and it ain’t like I’ve got a mirror.”

  I didn’t hang around to hear the rest. I stormed up to the base of one of the guard towers and banged on the steel leg.

  “Hey! Hey!”

  My fists made vague thuds, so I rapped with the recorder, hoping I wouldn’t break it. A searchlight stopped on me. I’d gotten their attention. The deafening klaxon that followed made me realize that wasn’t a good thing.

  A wheeled side gate squeaked open. Two guardsmen trotted my way. The one in front was a square-jawed kid, his face a mix of fear and determination. His eyes looked deader than mine. The other looked more like a weekend hakker, the sort who used to chase chakz with a machete for fun. His khakis fit him about as much as he fit this place.

  I held my hands up, to show I wasn’t a threat, then tried to make my face look pleasant. That was always an uphill struggle; I had no idea what it looked like with my disguise.

  “There’s a ton of rot out here, pal…uh, sir. A little bleach can go along way. Any way we can…?”

  I didn’t finish the sentence, and at first wasn’t sure why. Everything went slo-mo, then it lost definition, color, grayscale. From there the world slipped into a series of wild geometric shapes, some black, some white. I stumbled from a white circle into a black rectangle and collapsed.

  When I saw the silhouette of a rifle, I realized the second guard had come up behind me and slammed me on the back of the head. From the look of the silhouette, he was about to do it again, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. It all felt even more distant than usual, like it was happening to somebody I didn’t know, and if I did know them, I wouldn’t like them very much.

  The second blow never came. Two hands grabbed my shoulders and dragged me someplace darker. When the spinning stopped and some of the textures came back, I made out the face of the raggedy.

  “You are one fucking idiot,” she said.

  “Someone once told me it never hurts to ask. Guess they were wrong.” I forced myself to sitting.

  She pointed to her hair. “Wig’s falling off.”

  I said, “Thanks,” and tried to adjust the hair, but my arm wasn’t quite working.

  “What were you, like a vain cancer patient when you died?” she asked.

  She still didn’t seem to recognize me. I didn’t think it meant the disguise was good, just that I wasn’t the only chak with memory problems.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  She put her hand to the wig and pushed it into place. It felt like part of my scalp had come free.

  “I gotta tell you, forget bald, bone would look better than that thing,” she said. She tapped the exposed bone of her cheek. “Keeps the LBs on their toes, too.”

  “Thanks for the fashion tip. And the rescue.”

  Once everything stopped pulsating
, I checked myself and didn’t find anything missing. My rib cage didn’t feel right, but my body never does. There wasn’t much I could do about it here anyway.

  I stood on wobbly legs and caught another whiff of rot, not as bad as the stench from Mr. Fixit, but close, maybe somewhere on the girl. At least it wasn’t summer. Even if it was from her, given the cold, it might be a month before it got too bad for her.

  Eventually, morning, or something like it, came, blandly proclaiming that the days here wouldn’t be very different from the nights. I tried talking to a few fellow inmates, but the conversations didn’t go far. Most could be summed up along the lines of:

  “This is it?”

  “Yeah, this is it.”

  It was like being stuck in a really big, really crowded elevator, knowing you’d never get to your floor. If I had half a brain, I’d give up on ever figuring out what was going on at ChemBet, accept this as payment for sins past, but if I did that, I’d have nothing left and I would go feral. Much as I hated the thought of a D-cap, what I’d seen of burning looked worse.

  I didn’t want to wind up like the others here, either. The half-moon fellow who’d been in front of me on line back at the Chak Center was here, too. He spent a lot of time sitting on the ground, shaking his head, and talking about how Kyua had deserted him.

  “What did you expect?” I asked, hoping to get a rise from him.

  “Kyua,” he answered. “Kyua.”

  If there wasn’t much keeping me going, he had less. Not that you could say any of us were emotionally stable. I wondered if the guards ran a pool.

  Fixit said there were five to six ferals a day, but the first I saw happened about forty-eight hours after arrival. It wasn’t half-moon, it was Cheryl, the “we all share” woman who wanted my recorder. That wasn’t a surprise. The surprise was how quickly she was handled.

  True to form, she’d nabbed a newbie’s pocketbook and dragged it off to a little corner, as if none of the rest of us could see her. She shook it and rubbed it, the expression on her face somewhere between a child on Christmas morning and Gollum with the ring.

  Try as she might, though, she couldn’t get the golden clasp that held it shut to open. She poked it, squeezed it, but her thumb and index finger lacked the physical dexterity to work it. She pounded it against the ground, then gnawed at it, breaking off half a tooth.

  I’d been watching the whole thing—there wasn’t much to look at here—but it wasn’t until she screamed that everyone else paid attention. Not a standard scream, this was long and low. It started from the bottom of her lungs and threatened to bring her throat up with it. Her gnashing teeth gave it a bit of vibrato. Then, without even inhaling, somehow, she found the breath to moan.

  Ten seconds later, that was it.

  Some go in bits and pieces, in and out for a month or so. Others, it’s a finger snap. Which is exactly what Cheryl did. She grabbed the index finger on the hand that wouldn’t open the purse and snapped it off.

  Her next mournful bellow seemed to lift her to her feet. She shambled toward one of the towers and gnawed at the leg, breaking more teeth against it.

  I hadn’t seen it happen yet, but I knew what was coming next. I thought I was far enough away from her, but when the klaxon sounded, rattling my chest, the others pulled me even farther.

  That same gate rolled open, the same two guards rushed out. Only this time they were carrying flamethrowers. Dad, while still an army man, once told me all about flamethrowers. Say what you like about waterboarding, but the military hasn’t used flamethrowers since 1978. That was partly due to the horrible death they inflict, but also because they’re cumbersome and the fuel tank makes for an easy target. One shot and you’re off in a ball of glory. Even if you survived and got captured, the infuriated enemy pretty much always executed you.

  They brought them back though, just for chakz. It wasn’t cruelty, more a matter of pragmatism. Ferals tend not to sit still for D-capping. Bullets don’t stop them, unless you use enough to shred them. And so on, and so forth. So what could you do, really? Softhearted liberals grumbled about the morality, but shut up when asked if they had any better ideas.

  Cheryl either heard the guards coming, or smelled the fuel that dripped from the nozzles and left fiery dollops in the dirt. They moved fast, but she still had enough time to whirl in their direction.

  When they opened up on her, she was swamped by a hot, yellow and orange sideways waterfall. Ten yards away, the heat pushed me back even more. When I looked again, she was a silhouette in the flame, walking slowly, as if strolling along a beach. She made it three feet, went to her knees, then fell forward. There wasn’t enough left to move anymore, but they kept it up for about five minutes until a final thok told them the skull had popped.

  When the flames stopped, all that was left was a wobbling husk of charred bone in the center of smoldering earth, smoke twirling from the extremities. Call me superstitious, but I wasn’t sure she was really dead. I’d seen one too many talking heads to think it that easy.

  They left her there. And when they didn’t give us so much as a shovel to clean her up, I knew better than to ask for one. It was then I finally noticed that all the mud piles that weren’t moving were piles of blackened bones.

  Within an hour, I decided to take Mr. Fixit up on his offer and help him build that shed. Something to do, right?

  I kept my distance, hoping to improve my odds of not catching whatever was eating him. We put in a few hours, more the next day, which saw seven ferals burnt to toast.

  As we worked, I made rough marks in the planks, trying to make some look like circles, others rectangles. You’d think it the sort of thing a psycho would scrawl on his cell wall.

  On the third day, the raggedy came up and asked, “Why do you bother?”

  She was smart. Maybe she could figure it out. I pointed my chin toward the scratches. She eyed them a while.

  “You’re keeping track of the guards?” she asked quietly.

  I nodded. “Something to do.”

  She pointed at me. “You figure a way out of here, swear you’ll let me know or I’ll tell everyone right now what you’re doing.”

  I shrugged. “You got it.”

  But I didn’t have an escape plan and I wasn’t sure I should try it if I did. My last scheme, after all, was what got me here. This was more a hobby. I was hoping to figure out who was lazy, who was late, maybe eventually figure the best time to make a break for it. If I succeeded with that much, I might move on to the whole “how” thing.

  But I didn’t get the chance to complete phase one.

  The next day, the frame was finished and the first wall of our shed went up. Taking a break, Mr. Fixit bent forward to straighten a kink in his spine, and his jaw fell off. Just like that. One minute it was there, the next it wasn’t. Plop, gone, like it’d rolled out of his pocket.

  I’ve seen a lot, but when he stood up, I had to turn away. Scores of tightly packed maggots were writhing in the holes where his jaw had been. It was one of those times I really wished I could puke. The poor bastard didn’t even realize anything was wrong until he saw the expression on my face and tried to talk to me.

  Tongue flapping half in the air, awful noises came from his throat. “Ggrggll shahhhshhh?”

  When I shook my head, he tried to repeat it. “Ggrggll shahhhshhh?”

  The third time through, he realized he wasn’t making words. Wondering why, he reached up with his hand and felt nothing but dry flesh and squirming bugs. Then he started looking for his jaw on the ground, like he expected to clean it off and stick it back on. Misty was a whiz with Krazy Glue, thread, and needle, better than some doctors I’d seen, but this mess was beyond even her.

  Fixit kept looking. He thought he found it, but when it turned out to be a rock, he stomped his feet. It wasn’t tough to guess what we were all thinking would happen next. Only, he didn’t go feral, not at first. That honor went to half-moon guy, the one disappointed in Kyua.

&nbs
p; He’d been sitting with a small group, the raggedy among them, that’d taken to watching us work. After all, we were pretty much the only entertainment. When Fixit started stomping, half-moon realized he didn’t like the show anymore and couldn’t change channels.

  There are moans and there are moans. Chakz still moan when we’re annoyed. Half-moon didn’t sound gone, more irritated. But he kept it up long enough for the others to try to calm him down. He pushed them away, threw his hands in the air, and wailed. That was enough of a warning for the raggedy to back away. The next chak who came near him was rewarded with a long raking scratch across the side of their face.

  The klaxon sounded. It was official. The gate wheeled open. The flamers rushed in and we gave them room. Half-moon was swallowed by twin streams of searing agony, Kyua and all. He didn’t buckle to his knees like Cheryl had. He kinda twisted and broke in two.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Fixit was vocalizing like crazy, making noises like a mad cow. It sounded like he was still trying to communicate, so I turned from the burning to see if I could make it out. He lunged at me, pushing that wormy face into mine, tearing my clothes with his stubby fingers. He tried to chomp on me, but with that lower jaw missing, couldn’t.

  More afraid of the rot than his scratches, I pushed him hard. He staggered, spinning like a top as he went. When he stopped, he was facing one of the flamers who was still busy barbecuing half-moon. To a feral, one victim’s as good as another. Fixit trundled toward the guard like a puppy moving through molasses.

  The professional flamer didn’t see him coming, but his hakker partner did. He shouted a warning, but couldn’t be heard over the rush of burning fuel and crackling bones. By the time the klaxon sounded again, it was too late.

  Catching him off guard, Mr. Fixit slammed into the flamer, sending him to his back. A burning geyser shot skyward from the thrower. It twisted left and right, raining fire. Burning patches appeared on our clothes. Some were smart enough to put them out, others only watched the pretty flames.

  The klaxon always got a Pavlovian response, rattling us, but the second alarm, coming so soon, did something more. A good ninety percent of us wobbled and shivered in unison, and not in anticipation of being fed. They grunted rhythmically. After a few, slow, steady beats, the noise morphed into something closer to moans.