by L. A. Cruz
“And what exactly is the dirty work?” Helia said.
“Extraction.”
Dunning held the door to the day room open and Helia pushed the giant metal casket into the cellblock. They wheeled it all the way down to cellblock twelve, the wheels squeaking so painfully it sounded as if rodents had been trapped in the metal housings and were being skinned alive by the wheels.
At cell number twelve, Dunning thumbed his radio. “We need an unlock on cell twelve. Final extraction.”
“Roger that,” the control room said.
They waited for the buzz. “Good times,” Dunning said.
Helia pretended to sip a glass of wine and raised her pinky. “So far, I’ve quite enjoyed this outing.”
“I told you.”
The electronic buzz traveled overhead, down the wall, and then the deadbolt retracted and Dunning slid the cell door open.
Dunning bowed and waved. “After you, Corporal.”
Helia straightened her shoulders. “My, oh my. You are such a gentleman, Sergeant Dunning,” she said and backed into the cell, pulling the metal casket with her. “But I’m guessing this has more to do with self-preservation than chivalry.”
“You catch on quick,” he said. “I’d prefer if Sergeant Lawless were taking point, but it is what it is.”
“More meat?”
“Exactly.”
On the concrete floor lay the pile of bones and ragged clothes. It was almost impossible to tell the difference between the dry, rotted flesh, and the rags. It was all pile of jerky. The inmate had withered down to a skeleton and each of the bones had become its own separate entity.
“Is that safe?”
“Yes.”
Helia grabbed a shinbone and made a little drum beat on the lid.
“Knock it off. All we have do is pick them up and put them in the casket,” Dunning said. “It’s not quite as exciting as a new arrival.”
“You’re telling me,” Helia said. She stooped to pick up a femur. There were bite marks down the ridge. “Eww.”
“It chewed itself,” Dunning said. “Like a rat.”
Helia dropped the femur into the casket. It gave a loud clang that echoed throughout the cellbock.
“Hey, do it gently,” Dunning said. “It whips the remainders into a frenzy.”
“How come we haven’t had a new arrival since I got here?”
“I have no idea,” Dunning said. “It’s the second longest stretch of inactivity in the four years since I’ve been here. It means that out there, in the upstairs world, the creatures have gone into hiding. They’re less bold. Staying in the shadows.”
“Like good little freaks.”
“Exactly. If we’re lucky, it’ll go like this for a little while and then they’ll start to think that enforcement has slacked off and they’ll get ballsier and ballsier and start feeding in the daylight again. Then we’ll get a rush. So enjoy the low tide while it lasts. From what I’ve seen, it’s like an ebb and flow.”
“Like the pop charts.”
“The pop tarts?”
“The pop charts, Sergeant Dunning. You know, music? Beyonce?”
“I don’t listen to music.”
“What do you do in your free time?”
“Read.”
“Stop it.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Dr. Seuss?”
“Michael Crichton.”
Helia gently placed a rib bone in the casket. “So who catches them?”
“The Catchers.”
“Did some bureaucrat come up with that name?”
“They’re the Catchers, we’re the Keepers. If a cop sees something strange, his supervisor has a number to call.”
“Or her.”
“Right. Her,” Dunning said. “He—or she—has a number to call. Then a specialist, a Catcher, comes and takes over and sends the alleged creature to us.”
“Guilty until proven innocent.”
“The lungs full of bullet holes, still breathing, tend to give them away.”
Helia picked up a knee cap. It was smooth, like a seashell. “So what happens to the cop who reported it?”
“After a few months of therapy and close observation, he’s usually back on the beat.”
“Or her.”
“Right.”
“Brainwashed?”
“More like washed out. Conveniently forgotten.”
Helia picked up a clavicle and laid it in the casket. “How many of these creatures are up there?”
“How long is a noose?”
Helia didn’t miss a beat. “It depends on the drop height.”
Dunning smiled. “Exactly.”
She scooped up a full set of phalanges and arranged them in the casket to give the middle finger. “So these are all just bones? No steak in the heart, no nothing?”
“Correct. As far as we know, there’s nothing special about them. A few years ago, some smarty pants up there ran a lab analysis to make sure. Two femurs, one from a creature, the other from a normal dead guy, and the lab found nothing. So once the creature has been completely dismembered and the nerve cells are all gone, they can’t do any harm,” Dunning said. He picked up the skull by putting two fingers in the eye sockets as if it were a bowling ball. The jawbone fell off and stayed behind on the floor. Dunning picked it up and laid it inside the coffin next to the middle finger. “Nice.”
Helia grinned. “If Congress is so sure that these folks are beyond saving, then I don't understand why they bother to allocate the resources. Why not speed it up? Why not just incinerate the bodies or dismember them and be done with it?”
Dunning shrugged. “I hear you there. And while we’re at it, why not do away with death row completely?”
Helia smirked. He had taken the bait. “Because there’s always a chance that the convicted are innocent, that’s why.”
“Hold up,” Dunning said and raised a finger bone and pointed it at her. “I see what you’re doing.”
“What?”
“Don’t play dumb with me. These creatures are not innocent.”
“I think that communication is worth a try. Why not?”
“I’m assuming you brought this up with the Colonel.”
Helia looked away. “Maybe.”
“Don’t try to play us off like mommy and daddy,” Dunning said. “It ain’t gonna work. If there’s one thing you need to know about this unit, the left foot does exactly the same as the right foot.”
“So we end up hopping everywhere?”
He nudged her bicep. “Or slithering.”
She smiled. “That’s very witty, Sergeant Dunning.”
“I try.”
They wheeled the casket out the cell, down the corridor, and into the elevator. They stepped back and Dunning slid his key card into the reader on the wall and punched the ‘up’ arrow.
They watched the casket rise out of view. It was eclipsed by the concrete and then was gone.
“She’ll be intercepted on the surface by one of the funeral home workers and given a proper burial.”
“She?” Helia said.
Dunning cleared his throat and headed back to the living quarters. “It.”
Chapter 25
Another week passed. The boredom was mind-numbing. Arm-numbing. Foot-numbing. Butt-numbing. It was easy to fall into a pattern of complacency. Helia’s days—whatever a day was these days—consisted of little more than standing against the wall, watching.
Like that morning at Leavenworth, she created a mini schedule for herself to ward off the impending insanity. This schedule, however, was even more mundane than it had been at the disciplinary barracks, and it took all of her imagination to keep herself from going nuts.
After standing against the wall for ten minutes, she would check her watch. And then she would count to sixty in her head and then check her watch again and see how closely her internal rhythm matched with actual time.
Often, she was only two or three seconds off the
mark. She would practice her counting at least five times in the mornings, every day trying to make her rhythm a little tighter, her count a little more accurate, until she was close to matching her internal count with the digits on her watch with absolute precision.
After practicing her count five times, she would then wait another ten minutes and then she would spend the next fifteen minutes gently raising up and down on the balls of her feet, strengthening and toning her calves. She imagined she would have the most striking legs by the time she went on leave, the high-heel effect without wearing heels, no hesitation whatsoever to wear a skirt to the Zephyrhills mall, however short she pleased.
She rose up and down until her calves burned and got rock hard. Then she followed that exercise by rolling her shoulders forward and backward and having little thumb wars with herself, the ultimate goal in strengthening her wrists in case she was ever called on to show off her rope-climbing skills again. Her drill sergeant at basic had shouted up to her and said, “Do you like the view from the ceiling more than from the ground, Private?”
Hanging there, Helia had smiled to herself. It was true. She preferred to hang above the rest. But never in a million years had she thought her career would take her deep underground. She never thought she’d spend all day long twiddling her thumbs.
She sighed. Thumb-wrestle mania, she called it. Sometimes the right thumb won. Sometimes the left. She didn’t like to give one arm a strength advantage though. She was an equal opportunist.
The boredom was excruciating, but at least there was a general positivity among the Keepers, a gallows humor. She did her best to keep it lively. As she went into her sixth week, a longer stretch without any new arrivals than they had ever recorded, rumors began to circulate about this stretch being the beginning of the end of the “silent epidemic.” If whatever malignant condition had led to these horrors had no vessels through which to pass it on, then the condition would naturally die out.
And why not? No more transmissions, no more disease.
And so the longer the drought went, the more hopeful they got. Sergeant Lawless returned from leave, surprised to find that it had been so quiet in his absence. Pinder talked about taking permanent leave and starting a new life on a farm, feeding baby goats from bottles, since she planned to never use her breasts in that capacity. Dunning talked about, well, Dunning. He said he wanted to get into private security. Contracting, maybe. Another low-responsibility job where he could read lots of detective novels and daydream about being a hero.
“Vicarious excitement,” Helia said.
Colonel Gates, on the other hand, had become less and less visible. He kept to himself at chow and spent most of his time locked up in his cabin.
“He gets like this whenever there’s a long stretch with no activity,” Dunning said. “You didn’t hear it from me, but I think he’s afraid we’ll be shut down. He doesn’t want to have to go back to the real military. Here, he’s the top dog.”
Helia’s days had become absurdly predictable, with only slight deviations from the norm. Some days she would take forty-nine steps between the living quarters and the cellblock, and other days she would take fifty-one.
She sighed. Even her dreams followed the same patterns. In some dreams, her father would eat Cheetos, and in other dreams he would eat Pringles. The end result, the munching of the flesh, was always the same.
That was life now, she mused while standing at her post. It was full of slight deviations, but in the end, it was the same for everyone.
Everyone but those creatures.
And then one night, smack dab in the middle of her recurring dream, the entire visitation room flooded with blood. Blood ran from the walls, from the coin slot on the vending machine, from the cracks in the floor. It filled the room, as high as her boot laces and rising up the chair legs, the table legs, so high that when she bent over and looked under the table, she saw that there had been a high blood mark on the table legs, that this wasn't the first time the prison had flooded—
Her eyes popped open.
A siren was blaring.
The gumball light in the middle of the living quarters was spinning. The room was flooded red light. Reality had invaded her dream.
Dunning had already popped out of bed and was shoving his arms into his battle dress uniform.
“You want to wear the costume?” he said.
“What is going on?”
“New arrival. You can be our mascot.”
“I was always the cheerleader, thanks,” Helia said.
“Really? A cheerleader?”
Helia swung her legs out of bed and laced up her boots. “It’s the sport with the highest rate of catastrophic illness.”
“That’s because you all keep landing on your heads,” Dunning said.
He wasn’t wrong. And just like that, the world wasn’t safe anymore. Their dreams of a permanent ebb in new infections had gone down the toilet. The future was just as bleak as before…and just when she was beginning to think that the two weeks leave she had coming up were not going to be spent hastening her pace past dark alleys, past thick tree trunks at night, past shady parked cars, afraid that any dark figure that approached her might have sharpened teeth.
She glanced at the Colonel’s door, expecting to see him bursting forth and leading the charge. After all, a new arrival meant his post was still secure. At least for the time being.
But his door was closed. The crack underneath was dark, the light not even turned on.
“Screw it,” she said. “I’ll be your mascot.”
Down the hallway, Dunning swiped into the equipment room. Pinder had taken her first leave this year and Lawless was already on post in the cellblock. The other Keepers were either standing guard with Lawless, scooping mashed potatoes in the mess hall, or sitting on their asses in the control room.
Having dressed pointlessly for the walk down to the closet, Dunning now removed his shirt and pulled on the puffy, Kevlar suit.
“You’re joining me?”
“No one dons the suit alone,” he said.
Helia removed the other extraction suit from the reinforced hanger and unzipped the front. She recoiled from the smell of old sweat.
“You might want to get undressed,” Dunning said. “It gets pretty sweaty in there.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I wouldn’t mind a peek,” Dunning said.
She winked and took off her uniform. Now wearing only a tank top, she stuck her arms into the heavy tunnels of the sleeves. She stuck her feet, boots and all, down the pant legs and then zipped the front of the suit up to her neck.
As a whole, the suit was so heavily padded that it weighed about seventy-five pounds. The suit was so well-insulated, so hot, that it instantly made her temples pump out sweat.
“This thing’s a real hot box.”
Dunning grinned. “You make it too easy, Crane.”
Helia followed Dunning's lead and pulled on a pair of heavy gloves, the knuckles padded so thickly that she could barely make a fist. Next, she pulled on a pair of kneepads and strapped them around her knees. She did the same with a pair of elbow pads.
“You ready to play ball?”
“Now you’re taking it too far,” Helia said.
She watched him wrap a neoprene scarf three times around his neck to cover up any exposed skin and then she followed suit. Last, she grabbed the helmet from the shelf above the hook.
Dunning helped her pull it over her head. He pounded the top.
“You feel that?”
She felt nothing but the vibration, no sound, no nothing. She gave a thumbs up. She felt like an astronaut, her breathing magnified. Dunning put his helmet on and then touched his visor to hers. They clinked gently. They stared at one another through the fog on their shields, their visors meeting, so close, but miles apart.
“You ready?”
His voice was muffled. Distant.
She nodded.
“Hold on,�
� he said and reached behind her. The end of her ponytail was sticking out of her helmet. He tucked it into her collar.
“That would make a nice little chew toy if they got ahold of it,” he said.
“Thank you,” she mouthed.
Dunning gave a knock on the side of her head. “That’s what I’m here for.”
“Let’s get it on,” she said. “No? Too much?”
They waddled down the hallway like two kids in overstuffed snow suits. Unlike her first experience—which was for instructional purposes only—protocol prescribed that new arrivals be handled by two Keepers, both dressed for the occasion.
Helia followed Dunning. The suit was so bulky, it turned his shape into a walking balloon animal, the joints were the segments, and it prevented a realistic assessment of the goods.
He swiped them into the main chamber. They crossed the floor and then swiped into the arrival room. It was dark inside. The suit was too padded to feel the temperature drop, but from her first experience, Helia knew it was significantly colder.
Dunning flipped the switch on the wall and the fluorescent lights in the small interrogation room buzzed to life.
“At least we set a new record,” Dunning said.
“I don’t even remember getting undressed.”
He shook his head. “You’re insufferable. I’m talking about the low tide. Longest stretch ever without a new arrival.”
“Right,” Helia said. Truth was, she was too busy trying to come up with another sex joke to think about the fate of the human race. It was the way she coped with anxiety, always had been. It drove her mother nuts.
They stood beside each other and watched the bank of fluorescent tubes warm up. It was purple at first, then bright white. Kind of like the dawn. An artificial dawn, she thought. Her arms were down at her side, and then from nowhere, she felt her right arm rise.
She looked down. Through the fog of her visor, she could see that Dunning had slipped his gloved pinky under hers and was touching her gloved hand. There was no feeling inside the suit, just the faint knowledge that her finger had moved without her permission. There was no tingle, no excitement with the first touch—so cut off were they by the islands of their own suits.
