by Stant Litore
The Running of the Tyrannosaurs
Stant Litore
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2014 Daniel Fusch.
All rights reserved.
Stant Litore is a pen name for Daniel Fusch.
Cover design by Roberto Calas.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
A Westmarch Publishing release.
You can reach Stant Litore at:
http://stantlitore.com
[email protected]
http://www.facebook.com/stant.litore
@thezombiebible
for the young women
of this generation:
no matter what a magazine cover
may tell you, you are each
more beautiful already than you know;
I am old enough to know this,
but not yet wise enough to know
how to help you believe it;
and for River,
who can read this when she’s older
1
Watch me. I stand tall on the red sand and breathe deep. Inside me, the nanites are rapidly at work, increasing my oxygen intake, quickening my metabolism, honing the chemistry of my adrenal glands. I can hear the snorting breath of the tyrannosaurs, can you? They don’t like the chill air. Neither do I, but in a few moments we will all be running, we will all be slick with sweat, we will all be fiercely alive. And you, every one of you, will be screaming my name.
This is my day. The garland will be mine. The other runners are stretching or singing their low prayers to my left or my right. I must be faster than them. I must be smarter than them. The hooks are strapped to my wrists, their ropes wrapped around each of my arms, ready to be uncoiled quickly when needed.
Like the others, I stand naked, my skin dusted with glitter, my head back, my back straight. Today I am Liberty’s daughter. Today I am a goddess. The crowds far above us and to the sides watch in a hushed silence, waiting for the trumpets—I can feel you, the immense pressure of your millions, your gaze like the beat of the sun on my skin, almost sexual in its intensity. Today every woman among you wishes she were me; every man wishes he could fuck me, and some of the women do too. Rotating screens in midair project my face, hundreds of feet tall; floodlights of all colors wash past from the hovers filming me and filming all of you reacting to me. Pennants stream in the air, bearing the athletes’ sigils. My own, an egret in flight, spreads its wings wide on ten thousand waving banners and is tattooed on my back and belly for you to see, its head toward you, its white wings cupping my breasts, embracing me with its feathers, its thin legs pressed together and extending down toward my vagina, declaring to all of you that I am a woman, the most desirable of women: an athlete, a sacrifice, Liberty’s daughter. Somewhere outside this orbital spin-gravity cylinder burn a billion billion stars, but I burn brighter.
Breathe deep, stand tall, knees slightly bent, my weight on the balls of my feet. Let the nanites do their work.
I have never been so aware of my own body.
Almost I can feel each vein, each rush of blood. Every sense is heightened; I can smell the blossom-scent in my short hair and the heavy musk of bull tyrannosaurs; I can feel each grain of sand under my toes. The air is still. I sing the Liberty Prayer softly as the others do.
The only one of the others I fear is Alicia, who has run the tyrannosaurs before. She has often been cold to me, and I know she expects to be first today as she was on the last Patriot Day. But I will be better than her. Parents will name their infants after me this year.
One of the tyrannosaurs lifts its head and screams, and the sound is terrible, like the shriek of rending metal, but I do not flinch. The gasp of the crowd is like the sigh of the sea. The tyrannosaurs are to be respected, not feared. Liberty is light on her toes; Liberty dances with what would consume her. Liberty springs over the back of the bull and lands on her feet.
The others have finished stretching and singing, and stand as expectantly as I, though Alicia looks bored. Fuck her. She is seventeen and old. Last year’s sensation. But suddenly, and with a tiny smirk at the corner of her lip, she sets her hands to her hips and tosses her head, flipping back her long, golden braid. That braid is stupid for a runner, but she is very skilled and her hair has become her sigil every bit as much as the prancing figure tattooed in gold ink on her body. Seeing her proud stance, a lot of you thunder your feet against the hull and scream her Patriot Day name, Gazelle! Gazelle! Gazelle! – and I flush with fury. You will scream louder than that for me. I will make you scream louder.
There are two kinds of people on this cylinder world: competitors on the sand beside me, who I will destroy, and you on the platforms, whose worship I will earn.
I must do something to steal your attention from Alicia, and quickly. An egret flies above a gazelle. Always. You must see that. I must do something bold, even if I risk looking ridiculous. I cannot see your faces except for brief glimpses on the rotating screens interspersed with shots of the tyrannosaurs and images of me and the other sacrifices, but that doesn’t matter; I will hear you. I take a few steps across the sand, turning in a circle, drawing your eyes. Smiling proudly, I lift my right arm, miming Liberty holding her torch.
It is an audacious gesture from a runner, and you break into a scream of joy and adulation that nearly deafens me; my ears ring. Yet I grin back, my breast hot with pleasure. A brief, disdainful glance over my shoulder shows me Alicia, her face rigid, her eyes seething. Good. I face the screens, facing all of you, my hand high in the air. There you all are, all of you, all my worshippers. You women who have been discussing every publicized detail of my life for weeks, you men who tonight will hire tattooed courtesans glittered like cheap imitations of me, you young lovers who have betted on the outcomes of this run, with the winner of the wager acquiring the other as a passion-slave for a night or a week. I do know that among your millions a few of you do not cheer. A few of you, a very few, sit silent and robed in black, in protest, but you few are pathetic. I am alive and I will run. Watch me.
2
You are impatient with waiting; I can hear the stir of you. But I love this moment; I hope the Master of Rites will prolong it. I want your appetites whetted, I want you desperate to see me in motion. I want to hear the gasp when I finally leap from the sand. You have never seen me move, though so many of you wave my pennant, hoping I will be the best. I will leave you all breathless. Watch me.
Victory will be sweet; I will stand on the red sand and I will stand alone, apart from the whole world, and the whole world will be there for me. I live to hear you scream my name. Live to hear you love me. Only this matters. And for it, I must be perfect, absolutely perfect.
The nanites help with this. Since my periods started they have been reshaping me, day by day, making my breasts heavy and full yet keeping them high on my chest, enlarging my lips, rounding my hips. It is strange when I see a mirror, for I change so quickly, as the criteria for perfection change. When I look in a mirror, I see myself looking back out of a strange body.
I ignore the mirrors.
My trainer is Mai, and she is relentless. She only trains the best. She has trained thirteen champions over the past twenty-four Patriot Days, and I will be the fourteenth. We each have a training implant in our left wrist, and when Mai is displeased, it spreads fire through our skin, every nerve in the arm burning. Mai is often displeased.
It is not easy to be a first runner, she says. It is not easy to be the best. We train from before lights-up to after lights-down. Physical training, mostly. Honing our bodies. The nanites can only do so much to augment us; we have to be fit. Millions of credits have been spent on our muscles, Mai tells us. Use them!
My diet is strict. If I eat too much, I must vomit it up into the silver ewer I keep for that purpose. Mai has the ewer inspected regularly. She has me inspected regularly. No surplus carbohydrates or sugars, no alcoholic beverages, no vids she hasn’t approved, no open channels to outside the temple school, no failure to take sleep induction once I am in my bunk. And no boys, absolutely no contact with boys, because boys all want to fuck me, and my virginity is as important to what I am as the sigil blazoned on my back and below my breasts. My body has to be perfect and pure. Girls have cheated this rule before, but now doctors check us the morning of to be sure, and Mai says if they catch you, they bury you alive beneath the red sand as an example. Once, when I was twelve and furious with her over a punishment, I shouted at her that I’d loved to be buried and hidden under quiet, dark sand, where no cameras could see me and people wouldn’t be watching me all day and I could rest. She slapped me and then sealed me inside my own capsule where I keep my clothing, emptying it first so that I was locked inside a tube of cold metal. It was dark, and it was silent, and I beat on the sleek surface above me and screamed. I tore at it with my nails but could find no line or crack or anything, and I have never been so scared in my life. It was forever and forever. When Mai let me out, her face was cold. I let her dress me, and followed her silently to physical training, and I have never suggested again that I talk to a boy.
It was humiliating, having a doctor’s gloved fingertip inside me. If being with a boy is anything like that, I want no part in it anyway.
You up there, you fuck whoever you want, you can eat whatever you want, as much as you want, and be fat and lazy if you want, but not us. We have to be perfect. We have to be the dream you want to hold and never can, the unattainable. Every one of you women will be cutting your hair in my style by the end of this week, dieting and buying corsets to try and force your body nearer to my measurements. Every one of you men will jerk off later to vidcasts of me standing triumphant and sweaty at the end of the run, or you will try not to say my name by mistake when you’re fucking tonight.
I have to be perfect for you.
Ten years of training, each morning checking my body’s measurements and my stats for speed and agility against Alicia’s, and Cora’s, and Rai’s, and I am the best. I am Egret, born Livia Nigeria Tenning, and I am proud of my training.
And yet, sometimes, in the dark of night, I wake groggy from the sleep induction yet shaking from dreams of my mother running after me, chasing the car that came for me when I was six, men in white taking me to be an athlete, to train, to be taught how to truly, truly live. In my dream, I watch out the back window as my mother falls behind. No matter how red her face is from running, how wide her mouth with screaming for me, she is always too slow. She is not an athlete, not Liberty’s daughter. Her mascara runs with her tears.
As I sit up in the dark, wrenched from my dream, panting, her tears unsettle me, a pang near my heart. But I also flash with anger. She should have been proud of me. She should have smiled and told me how wonderful it would be. She should be up there with you, somewhere, even now, waving an egret banner and screaming for my victory, her face flushed with joy because her daughter, hers, is today’s sacrifice. She should be happy for me, so happy.
Why was she crying?
3
Trumpets shatter the air, ringing from sleek, silver hovercraft that drift high above us, flooding us with light and color and noise. Over your shouting and the music and the thunder of my own heart I can’t hear them break the gates, but I feel the ground shake as the tyrannosaurs charge. Then I see them burst through the ribbons that separate the sands from the stables, and they are rushing toward us; they are swift and brutal, leaning their heads forward, nostrils flared, driven mad with hunger at our scent. As they pant, their ribs stand prominent against their skin; they have been starved in preparation for this day. My day.
They avalanche toward us, and the reek of them hits me like a wall: yet I keep my feet. I uncoil the rope about my left arm, drop the cold metal hook into my left palm. You up there, you see the tyrannosaurs huge on the screens but you have no idea just how massive they really are. You can’t begin to understand that until they are charging at you, explosions of sand about their feet. Nor can you even imagine how deadly, how lethal they are, if you have never looked closely in their eyes, as I have. Today is my first Patriot Day, but I have practiced mounting many times with Mai’s harsh voice barking out directions, and many times I have looked into the tyrannosaur’s eyes. Darker than dark and deep as time, and alien like a bird’s eyes.
They are pack hunters, and fierce. Early in my training, I watched them stalk elephants in the jungle on Orbital Conservatory Station IX-C. They leap on their prey; they are incredibly powerful animals, worthy to run for the goddess. Each of these has a white ribbon tied about its tiny left foreclaw, belying the fixed, hungry regard of their eyes; they are consecrated. These bulls will run the sixty kilometers of the sand road down the length of Liberty Cylinder, a narrow path enclosed between tall walls of steel. We will run them. At the road’s end, at the Liberty Shrine, Madame President will kiss the first runner and hang the garland at her neck. These once fierce predators that ruled a planet, these fast, birdlike creatures have been resurrected by human science and reshaped to meet human ends. They exist, as I do, for the goddess’ glory and for your entertainment and approval. Today I run the tyrannosaurs for you. Watch.
They are upon us, and I am running before them, breathing evenly. Watch me dodge the snap of one bull’s teeth, then duck beneath its body as it charges over me. I can never be caught or eaten. I will never lose my balance. I am the best. One of the other athletes—Cora, I think, that is the lion on her back—dodges a little too slowly, a little too awkwardly (when you run the tyrannosaurs, grace is everything, the one thing they and the goddess respect), and the tyrannosaur catches her in its teeth and tosses its head back. I haven’t time to look or think about it, the tyrannosaurs are rushing by, the sheer mass of them, as though they are planets and I a ship falling in. I leap and sprint. I swing the hook, chopping it deep into one’s feathered flesh just below the knee, and then I am swinging up, catching its rump with my hand, flipping onto its back near the tail, landing with my legs wide to balance myself. There is sand everywhere in the air, grit and dust and I am striving not to cough in it, striving to see clearly, and I can feel the thunder and heat of the beast beneath my feet, its powerful body moving, and I am on it, riding it, precariously, and you all wish you were, all of you, you up there in bright clothes with your lovers beside you, you who have freedom from so much, from poverty and hunger, from the fear of being bombed, from the fear of being eaten, from even the fear of being solitary; a suitable lover might be engineered for you. You have freedom from, but you don’t know what you have freedom for. You have forgotten. That is why you watch me. That is why you roar. Because I, your sacrifice, your athlete—I and this tyrannosaur—know what we are for. We are for breathing, for running, for the sweat and the heat and the cry of the crowd. We are free to live. These few moments, these brief few moments. You envy me.
I cannot stay by the tail. The tyrannosaur’s run will throw me; I can barely balance here. I tug on the line, ripping my hook free and flipping it up, catching it in my other hand, and I have to leap, now, higher on this beast’s back, to some steadier perch, but even as my legs tense a larger beast careens past, larger and faster, brushing by the young bull I ride. An instant’s decision, an impulse, a breath, and I spring through the air to the other bull, taking the risk. But my feet glance off its left shoulder and I flip through the air over it with a startled cry. Its head slams into me from the side and I hurtle away through
a blurred world of flesh and heat and dust and all of you screaming, whether you scream my name or some other’s, so loud, a glimpse of the lights above me, then a glimpse of the steel wall. Then I hit the sand, and I hit hard.
4
My eyes fly open after a darkness that must have lasted only a second; the tyrannosaur has turned and its head is darting toward me, cobra-quick, but I am already rolling, then leaping up and sprinting, fast, the nanites repairing my body as I dash. Having already shut off my pain and jolted me awake on adrenaline, now they repair a snapped rib, seal closed my ruptured lung, smooth out the abrasions and tears in my skin, all in the time it takes to draw a few quick breaths. I see my hook half-sheathed in the sand before me and I dive for it. The tyrannosaur’s jaws snap closed just behind me. Snatching up the hook, I spin on the balls of my feet and slam the metal into the soft flesh above the creature’s right nostril. It whips its head back, throwing me into the air but I have the hook in my hand and the rope in my other and as it screams I loop the rope about its upper jaw. Then the hard impact of my knees as I come down on its head, my teeth clacking shut, cutting my tongue. Rush of hot blood into my mouth. I spit it out, entrusting the repair to the nanites, just keeping myself from choking on the bitter, metallic fluid. All of you are wild above me and someone is laughing hysterically and I realize it is me. I can feel your worship in every beat of my heart, every pulse of my blood; I am hot with it, I am alive with it. As the tyrannosaur turns and stampedes, I am riding its head, laughing, my arm lifted again, Liberty’s torch. You are screaming my name now: Egret, Egret, Egret! The very ground shudders with your shouting; I can feel it through the bones and flesh of the tyrannosaur. Standing, I pay out the rope, dancing nimbly up the bull’s head and down along its spine, leaping and using the rope to pull myself in, again and again, Liberty dancing on the back of the beast. This is what you want to see, this is what you lust for, and I give it to you, as you have never seen it before, my body spinning high in the air, glittering like diamonds in the floodlights, wet with my sweat as though I am oiled for sex or bathed in the goddess’s wine. My laughs become shrieks of joy; I revel in the light impact of the creature’s skin each time my feet touch before I spring again. No one can do what I do. No one has a body like mine. Only I am dancing this beast, only I.
