by Todd Brill
Todd Brill
Nomad
First published by Todd Brill in 2017
Copyright © Todd Brill, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
Second Edition
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1
They called him Nomad. He couldn’t remember exactly who had first called him that. It might have been Freddy. Or Lou-Lou. Everyone he knew back then had a tramp name. It might have been in St. Louis. It was certainly somewhere in Missouri. That much he remembered.
They called him Nomad once, but now he was just a number: Prisoner Number 676722. How long had he been in this place? The concrete walls were his friends now. The walls and the slightly rusty iron doors which were painted off-white. The walls and doors were the only things he saw until they brought him to the lab.
Nomad knew when they were going to bring him to the lab because the guards always brought him a little extra food for breakfast. They slid the food through the slot in the door on a gleaming aluminum-alloy tray together with a soft and flexible biodegradable spork.
Today was one such day.
“Eat up, Seven Twenty-Two,” Tony said sarcastically. “The doc wants you healthy and fed before the lab work today.”
Tony was his guard today. Nomad knew the guard's name because he'd heard one of the other guards say it once. He couldn’t remember when, exactly. It had been sometime between the trips to the lab from this endless concrete time machine. He still remembered his own, real name. It was Ted...Something.
Ted Nugent?
No.
Ted Kennedy?
Nomad's mind didn’t work as well as it used to. He had a hard time remembering things. He was sure it was the meds they made him gulp down with the water that tasted like diluted piss.
Ted Fulton!
His name was Ted Fulton. He used to be a citizen. And free. Or as free as anyone could be these days. Maybe that’s why they picked him up. They didn’t like too many free people just wandering around the country ungoverned. Free people aren’t good for business. Ted chuckled as he chewed the hard bread smeared with soy butter. He washed the sticky mess down with the piss-water, grimacing at the lukewarm mineral taste as it flowed down his throat.
He finished most of the pear they gave him and then slid the tray quietly through the slot. Pears were a luxury these days. He was surprised the first time they gave him one. If the other prisoners ever found out that he was being given pears they might start a riot. Especially that Davy guy. Davy was always looking for trouble and he had a keen sense about finding it. Davy and trouble were good, close friends. When Ted was in gen pop, Davy was in and out of solitary weekly.
Ted heard footsteps outside his tiny cell and then the sound of the tray being removed. More footsteps echoed strangely through the little metal slot on the floor. A pause. The keypad clicked, and the door unlocked.
“Step away from the door, Seven Twenty-Two,” said Tony. Ted was Nomad again. He shrugged and stepped back, turning around and placing his hands behind his back, wrists together. Submission was second nature to him now.
Tony finished trussing him up with manacles on wrists and ankles and led Ted out the door to the elevator. They were going down to Sub Level 10. Once there, it was out into a hallway and into the lab. Nomad could smell the sterile, HEPA-filtered air. He had come to love that smell. He used to love the smell of a campfire in twilight but now he loved the smell of disinfectant and sterility.
The technicians undressed him and strapped him in carefully while Tony released the plastic restraints. The hard white plastic of the chair felt comforting to him. His head felt as fuzzy as a bunny slipper. This was the part he liked best -- where his head felt like it was going to fall off and roll across the white-plastic floor right into the white-plastic trash bin by the door.
The next thing he knew, the doctor was examining him closely and waving a scanner above his face.
“Yes. He looks fine. Two hundred milligrams please.” He barely felt the hypo-spray injection in his arm. It tickled a little. He smiled. The doctor looked down at him and seemed to be closer than the white-plastic ceiling. Nomad couldn’t make out exactly what part of space the doctor’s frowning face occupied.
He could vaguely make out the strange equipment the technicians rolled into the room all around him. They looked almost like solar panels, but they were concave and had small things shaped like light bulbs in the middle. Three were pointed at each of his sides, one at his head, and one at his feet for a total of eight. A rush of energy climbed up his spine as he anticipated the first jolt. Then the second jolt. And the third. Nomad felt the chair give way beneath him. He floated. Carried by the air but not the air at the same time. The room faded, came back, and faded again, sending shivering electric pulses down his back and into his groin. It was pure, white-plastic ecstasy.
Each time he was jolted, he saw more -- felt more. Each time they jolted him with the machine, he thought he could see the outdoors. Feel the fresh air on his naked, trembling body. He could almost hear the distant sound of wind through vaguely discernible trees. He could almost see the tall, jagged spires of sun-touched mountains with creamy white peaks he had seen before. White, but not plastic.
And then the crash slammed into him as he landed back in the lab. It felt like someone pulling on his insides with both hands. Like the moment just before waking from a pleasant dream.
White walls. Everything plastic. No real air and no real sun. Ted sighed. He was back. He was disappointed he was back but smiled anyway because for a moment, he was there. There and back again. Wasn’t there a book he read once with that title? The room was spinning dramatically, and he closed his eyes to avoid vomiting.
2
This foggy routine continued for what seemed like months. Each time they took him to the lab and ran the experiment, he saw and felt more of that ethereal outdoor scene. It got to the point where Ted thought he could feel the ground beneath his feet. The soil in that other place was warm and slightly sandy and felt amazingly good. He could squeeze it between his toes and feel the grass against his ankles. Ankles which were free of the white-plastic manacles that bound him in the prison realm. The air in that faraway place brushed against his skin soothingly, sending shivers along his ribs and backside.
It reminded Ted of the time he was drunk just outside Waynesboro with his friend Lou-Lou. They were drinking some terrible-tasting cheap wine — but it did the trick. It was called El Chapo Red he recalled. They were so drunk they stripped naked and went swimming in the South River.
In hindsight, it wasn’t such a great idea. Most of the rivers were so polluted these days you couldn’t be sure what kind of disease you might get by wading into those foul waters. He used to joke with Lou-Lou about how breathing the polluted, brown air and swimming in the foul, brackish water would give them super powers just like in the old comic books.
He would be The Nomad — Eco Freedom Fighter, and she would be Wig-Out Woman, or Wow for short. He called her Wig-Out Woman because Lou-Lou didn’t have real hair – having lost all her body hair to what she was told was lupus. Lou-Lou was a good sport about things though, and she didn’t mind.
Ted often wondered what happened to Lou-Lou after they caught them. She was probably being used for some other kind of experiment like anti-cancer drugs or those new anti-inflammatories the g
overnment was cooking up. Lou-Lou had been in great physical shape aside from her hair issue. She would make a fine candidate for experimentation.
Ted spent most of his time in his cell daydreaming about that place he went to in the lab. He would close his eyes and watch the white room fade into the dusky twilight of the foothills with the sun-touched mountains, and he would smile for just a little while. It was the only thing that kept him from going completely insane. That and the heavy sedation. The meds made it difficult to do anything other than lie down and relax. There was nothing else to do anyhow. When he wasn’t in the lab being bombarded by who-knows-what, they locked him in his box-like white-walled cell.
Ted figured the visions he had were probably just defense mechanisms or whatever they called them. An escape. Something terrible was happening but his mind protected him by showing him beautiful landscapes and golden vistas. They told him as much when Ted first told them about it. It didn’t bother him. So far as he could tell, he was physically fine after each session, just groggy and a little depressed that he had to come back.
Ted couldn’t remember when he had been in the lab last, but he knew today would be a lab day. He ate his pear carefully and drank his piss-water after eating his bread just as he did each time. This time, it was Tanisha who came for him, but the routine was the same.
Ted smiled as the first jolt passed through his foggy head and then another. On the third jolt, something different happened. He was suddenly definitely outside in the sunshine.
The sky was like blue-green algae with gossamer threads of cloud, and Ted was in the sunshine looking at the mountains jutting out of the ground in front of him. These hallucinations had never been this real before. He sucked in a short breath and realized he couldn’t breathe properly. He fell to his knees gasping, his face turning red. Ted noticed the ground under his outstretched arms. The soil was a reddish-brown color with tiny blades of pale blue-green grass. An ant walked over his left hand as he watched, trying to catch his breath. He reveled in feeling the cool morning air across his naked body, even as he struggled to breathe.
Where was he? What happened to the lab? Was the lab a dream or was this a dream? His head swam from the meds and being unable to breathe properly made his vertigo worse. Ted needed to lie down before he passed out. He could already begin to feel the tingle and see stars at the edges of his sight. The vague threat of unconsciousness sparkled and popped at the periphery of his vision.
No sooner had he fallen to his side on the soft, dewy ground and begun to roll over on his back than the uncomfortable tug back into white plastic began. He vomited. The white-plastic room was now white and plastic with pear-scented vomit.
“Where did he go?” the doctor demanded of one of the technicians.
“I…I’m not sure, Doctor. Room B said he never arrived,” replied the technician.
“He never arrived,” parroted the other voice from the wall screen. “Same vector as before, same wavelength, same energy level, but nothing.”
“Something went wrong, goddammit,” the doctor paused, considering. Ted watched as if from a distance, barely able to make out the voices and what they were saying as another technician cleaned him with a suction hose and disinfected everything with a small hand-held device that shone with a pale, blue-white light.
Tanisha brought him back to his cell while the doctor argued with the techs about what happened and asked for reports.
3
Ted liked Tanisha. She was always nice and polite and never hit him if he was a little slow doing what she asked. Unlike her male counterparts who would beat him if he showed even the slightest hesitation. It didn't matter to them that he could barely feel his body because of the meds making his brain and limbs feel like a stuffed toy.
Ted grinned stupidly. A teddy bear. He was a teddy bear they took to the lab to play doctor. He laughed at the idea. Why not? His name was 'Ted' after all. Like Teddy Roosevelt, except Ted didn’t mind if someone called him Teddy. Lou-Lou sometimes called him that. Mostly she called him Nomad, but when she was sleepy or high or sad she would call him Teddy and rub his chest.
It wasn’t long before they had him back in the lab again. He figured they wanted to know what went wrong last time. Secretly, he wanted things to go wrong again, despite the breathing problem. He couldn’t believe how real the last trip had been. It almost felt like he was truly somewhere else, and it excited him.
Secretly, it also excited Ted to think that something in the doctor's plans had gone awry. They weren’t as invincible as they thought they were. They made mistakes.
As the jolts shook him past the walls of the white room, he found himself kneeling on the ground again. His breathing came in ragged gasps, but it wasn’t as bad as last time. The clouds were thicker and darker this time, the sun barely visible behind the dark gray veil. The cool air gave him goosebumps all over his body and he shivered.
Rough hands grabbed him from behind and pushed him face down into the cool ground. He saw the blue-green grass again and some ants scurrying around in it. Something was different about the ants but his befuddled senses couldn’t pin down what it was.
The restraints on his wrists were there but he knew they weren’t made of plastic. These felt like a light, cool metal -- perhaps aluminum -- quite strong and unbendable. They were too light and smooth to be old-fashioned handcuffs. Ted figured the guards were taking him back to his cell now. Any second, the dark mountains that loomed over him on the horizon would fade away and he would be on his way out of the white-plastic room and back into his white-walled box.
A moment later, rough hands lifted him easily to his feet by wrenching on his arms. It almost hurt. The drugs must be wearing off. The guards turned him around and for the first time he could see in the other direction. It looked like an outdoor guard post, and behind it was a large concentration camp full of…things.
Ted smiled. He thought it was funny he would imagine something as strange as this. A concentration camp full of weird looking aliens. He almost laughed out loud but he had learned long ago never to do that with guards around. Guards didn’t tend to like prisoners laughing -- even prisoners who were partially insane and on plenty of drugs.
The hands behind him pulled a smock down over his head and pushed him through the gate and into the prison yard with the alien-things. His smiled faded.
The dull gray smock hung loosely over his shoulders and draped down to just below his knees. There was a single glowing blue button on the left of his chest just over his heart. Someone put slipper-like things on his feet that seemed to stiffen whenever he put his weight on them. The slippers were gray, too, and looked like hard-soled nylon bags on his feet. At least he was warmer now that he had some clothing on and was not so naked.
There were alien-things that looked somewhat human -- save for their disproportionately long arms and legs. One of the things standing closest to Ted looked humanoid. The feathers around the edges of its face and tufts of plumage popping out from under the slippers on its feet were all that ruined the idea that it might be partially human.
Among the others were things that were definitely not human. A small gray creature walked with a limp. It had what looked like a walking stick to brace itself against. Another creature that looked like an amorphous pinkish blob of jelly moved around in a way no inanimate object could possibly move. There were other creatures that looked like some kind of octopus walking on dark purple-pink tentacles in the gray slippers. These octopods fascinated Ted because they had such human-looking eyes, but had little whitish-yellow beaks for mouths.
“Any second now,” he thought, “and I’ll wake up in the lab. It’s really too bad I can’t tell anyone about this. It’s the weirdest dream I’ve ever had.” Then he heard a metallic clicking sound behind him, and his chest light flashed once turning from blue to green. The manacles were gone, and he pulled his stiff arms through the armholes of the gray gown he wore.
Something tugged on the right sleeve of his g
own. He turned a little too quickly and almost lost his balance. The drugs made quick movements difficult and dangerous. He had once almost brained himself on the edge of the white-plastic chair while they were restraining him because he tried to turn too quickly.
He looked around and saw nothing but bare, uneven ground and what appeared to be black-wire fencing. At another tug on his sleeve, he looked down.
“Are you okay?” said the voice coming from the strange little thing tugging at his sleeve. The little alien was humanoid with bluish-pink skin and small black eyes. It had small nubs protruding from its forehead that almost looked like little horns. Or they could have been antennae.
“Hey! Can you hear me? Are you okay?” came the small voice again as it tugged on him once more.
“Leave him alone, Yola,” said another voice. This creature was a larger version of the small one with the same protrusions and small beady eyes.
“I’m just making sure the New One’s okay, Mom,” said Yola. Mom looked Ted over from head to toe. He sensed caution from her and thought she might be frowning a little.
“He’s fine. Now let’s go it’s almost dinner time,” she finished, guiding Yola away. Yola made a disappointed hissing sound.
“But he’s so weird-looking, Ma. Can’t I stay for a bit and find out where he’s from?”
“Maybe later, dear. Say good-bye and let’s go.”
“Good-bye, New One,” said Yola as she turned to go with her Mom.
“What the hell is wrong with me?” Ted asked out loud just as he fell flat on his backside on a patch of blue-green grass.
4
Ted sat for awhile and watched the menagerie of aliens wander through the prison yard. Nomad kept telling himself that any moment the tugging would begin and he would return to his white plastic world with its smell of industrial cleaners and formaldehyde.
