Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  Goddamnit, Pete, Paul thought. I told you I’m busy. I’ll be there when I’m finished.

  They came to see you.

  They can wait.

  It’s a delivery, Paul.

  Give them a cup of coffee. I’ll be there when I’m done.

  That wasn’t fair to Pete. He was the Settlement’s ambassador, the brick that dealt with the People. It wasn’t like he could tell them to piss off. He took the heat off the rest of them, knew how to play nice better than anybody else.

  Paul shouldn’t be pissing on them, either. The People. He needed to make nice, to get this brick house converted into a biometrics lab. He didn’t have Pete’s endless patience. When the People came to the farm, Paul and Raine went quietly to the Settlement. He cooperated with their rules and regulations, agreed to live apart from humanity, to be separated from Jamie. Vilified for not having a single cell of clay.

  Nice was getting harder to play.

  Pete sent another transmission, but it wasn’t verbal. Images integrated with Paul’s visual cortex. Instead of hearing a voice, he saw the building that served as the gate between the Settlement and the outside world, the port through which all communications and interactions took place.

  He saw the helicopter, saw the brown vinyl bag the couriers were carrying.

  It’s a delivery, Paul, Pete had said. They came to see you.

  Paul leaped off the porch. Across the field, a broom lay on the cabin’s front porch. The Jeep was gone.

  Raine saw it, too.

  ______

  Half the settlement was there.

  The land had been cleared to make way for this sprawling one-story building, what the People called the Visitors’ Center. It’ll be welcoming, the People said. Inviting. After all, you’re not imprisoned, the People told them. But all deliveries, all visitations and communications were to go through this building.

  That’s a gate. And gates keep things in or out.

  Trucks, SUVs and all-terrain vehicles were crowded around the back. A helicopter sat out front, just past the yellow posts—a visual reminder of where the Settlement ended. Paul rubbed his neck, his skin tingling and head humming with audio feedback. Perhaps it was a Pavlov’s dog effect, the sight of the yellow poles kicking up symptoms of getting too close to the perimeter of the Settlement.

  Raine’s Jeep was askew, the driver’s door open. The bumper was touching the back of an F-150 where it had come to a stop when she leaped out.

  Paul took a deep breath.

  He had deleted Pete’s image, but the memory remained like a photo negative. He swallowed a stone that thunked to the bottom of his stomach.

  He felt nothing.

  The ground was long and spongy, the early fall soil softened by rainfall. The back door was ajar. Paul stepped inside. He heard sobbing.

  The hall stretched all the way to the front of the building. Several people looked in his direction, a dead man’s walk. Some of the security monitors stepped out of the cross halls, their puffy green jackets unzipped. Paul’s legs turned into steel beams. A cold shudder hardened his chest, encased his pounding heart.

  Bob filled the corridor on his way toward Paul. He was missing his coffee cup, arms swinging outside his extra-wide frame, the green fabric of his coat scratching in rhythm to his steps.

  “We can do this somewhere else.” The fat man raised his hands. “It doesn’t have to be here. Let me take care of the paperwork; we can meet you back at the house.”

  Paul stared into the man’s muddy eyes. He was immune to chat sense, unable to hear thoughts or send them. He had not a single biomite in that fat body; he represented the People, the square badge on his coat said so. He was clay.

  Paul’s head filled with thoughts from the gathered bricks, all of them a sorted version of the same message. We’re sorry. We’re so, so sorry.

  “Paul?” Bob squeezed his arm. “You with me?”

  “Get your hands off me.”

  He shoved past him. The man’s girth hardly moved.

  The hallway grew with each step. More faces appeared to watch him make the journey past the crosswalks of offices, past the secure corridor of power regulation and communications; each step was harder than the one before it. The sobbing grew louder.

  Paul reached the end.

  Two couriers stood rigidly in their stiff navy blue coats and bright orange armbands. A third one was comforting Raine. She was on her knees, bent over a partially unzipped vinyl bag.

  A body bag.

  They threw her in a sack like something to be delivered.

  Jamie’s brown hair spilled away from her ears, a bulky stone necklace settled into the hollow of her throat. She was sleeping.

  She has to be.

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” A fourth member of the People’s party was wearing a suit beneath a long wool coat. “You should’ve received a call before we arrived. I… I’m not certain what happened.”

  “Move.”

  “I have a complete report of the incident.”

  “I said move.”

  Paul balled his fists at his sides, teeth grinding like stones. The man in the suit moved. The courier had an arm around Raine. “She’s in a better place now,” she was saying.

  “Get up,” Paul said.

  The courier was confused. Looked hurt.

  “Get away from her.”

  Hesitantly, she looked to the suit. He nodded. Raine didn’t seem to notice because how dare they take Jamie from them and then offer their condolences, pretend to be anything that resembled compassion.

  How fucking dare them.

  Paul dropped on his knees, pain spiking his thighs. Raine’s face contorted into a silent scream, agony so deep that no sound could capture its reach. He’d seen that look once before, when the People killed dreamland. The morning Raine would no longer see her dreamland husband. The morning she lost Joshua, her dreamland son.

  The morning she stopped caring.

  But at least they’re alive. They’re waiting for her return.

  He wanted to reach out and console her, to put his arm around her, tell her it was going to be all right. But that would be a lie. It would only get worse. The People would find ways to undercut this misery with more suffering; they would grind their will to live under their heels until they all just quit.

  Paul’s heart was solid marble. Mercury pumped through his veins, thick, heavy and cold.

  A fucking body bag.

  “It was a painless death,” the suit said. “She didn’t feel a thing.”

  “Get out.”

  “I understand your pain, but I’m going to need a few things before—”

  “Get out!” Paul kicked a chair. “Get the fuck out of here!”

  The flock of couriers startled. All the monitors were present in their peaceful green coats. In unison, they stepped up. The front doors opened and the couriers were ushered out.

  “You need to calm down, Paul.” Bob was front and center, one hand out and the other on his phone, thumb poised over the lighted glass like a new-age gunslinger. The riot app was open. A swipe would deliver an electromagnetic pulse.

  Biomites go down.

  “I don’t want to see their faces,” Paul said.

  “Now they got a job to do.”

  “They deliver my daughter in a bag and tell me it wasn’t painful?” Paul slammed the chair on the floor until the legs bent. Bob mercifully didn’t swipe the phone when Paul threw it at the window. The glass spiderwebbed.

  The couriers walked out to the helicopter and stood on the other side of the yellow poles near the fuel tanks.

  Paul twitched, saliva flying with each mad breath. He plowed his fist into the block wall and shattered his knuckles. White-hot pain radiated into his shoulder.

  “You done?” Bob said.

  A dangerous thought crept to the edge of Paul’s awareness, one that involved the chair and Bob’s face. He pushed it down before anyone saw it. Instead, he dropped to his knees, hovering o
ver Jamie’s face, still telling himself she might be sleeping, that they got it all wrong. She was in a deep reset, her biomites dormant, a temporary recharge delay. Something other than this.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen.” Bob snapped his fingers. “You with me, Raine?”

  She sat against the wall, eyes vacant.

  “Talk to me,” Bob said. “Let me know you’re there, Raine, or I will haul your ass out.”

  “Leave her alone.”

  Bob lifted the loaded phone. Swipe and there’d be endless paperwork. Swipe and he might get transferred off the Settlement, and Bob had no life out there and this miserable gig paid too much.

  “Stay as long as you want, but those couriers got a job to do. They’ll stay until it’s finished. When you’re done with your grieving, you will leave out the back and you will go home. We on the same page here, Paul?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Paul, don’t make me. Raine?”

  “She heard you.”

  “I need to hear it.”

  Paul’s jaw unhinged and jutted. A silent minute passed, Bob pointing that goddamn phone the entire time. A few of the bricks asked Bob to back off, promising to help. Bob didn’t step down. Getting a response from Raine was a losing battle, and there was still a lot of fight left in the room.

  Paul got up and paused. He tried to look back, to see his daughter’s face before he left. He pushed through the crowd. Bob shouted down the hall. Paul kept walking. Outside, he passed his truck.

  Just kept walking.

  The Settlement was several acres. He would see them all before he was done.

  Raine

  “I’m so sorry.” Jessica balanced a tray on her fingertips. “Where do you want me to, uh…?”

  Raine pointed to the right. Jessica stood and stared, silently chatting sweet thoughts before mercifully going to the kitchen with her platter of cheeses. She had to circle around a body to get there.

  It wasn’t Raine’s idea to serve Jamie on an oak table, but no one had ever died on the Settlement. No one had a dead loved one delivered in a brown vinyl bag.

  The monitors suggested the wake, said it was an old clay custom to have loved ones pay their respects with long empty stares and ridiculous amounts of food. So Jamie was laid on the table, hands folded over her stomach, hair styled and makeup applied to hide the mottled discolorations left behind by the slowly decaying clay she still possessed (her biomite flesh still fleshy pink).

  Raine had put a summer dress on her.

  That was the dress she wore on the farm, when the days were long and the breeze came off the mountains, warm and sweet. Jamie would tromp through the mud with that floral dress and knee-high boots to feed the horses and scoop the poop, the narrow straps falling off her shoulders.

  She happened to be wearing the same dress when the People drove down the winding driveway in unmarked vehicles, politely knocked on the door and verified Paul and Raine as bricks. Jamie watched the van pull away in a gravel-dust cloud, a strap off her shoulder.

  Raine twisted her hands like an old dishtowel, wrung dry. Eyes puffy, nostrils chafed. She just needed to put another day behind her. The sun would rise again.

  Just not today.

  “We’re so sorry.” Jack and Lindsay Russell each took one of her hands. They were fabricated by research scientists to help with physics research. They were scheduled for space exploration when the Settlement was enacted.

  Now she knitted. He gardened.

  “There’s food in the kitchen,” Raine said.

  Bob opened the screen door and stepped inside. He sucked on a straight metal pipe, a cloud of green apple vapor mingled with the scent of honeyed ham and deviled eggs.

  The smells were nauseating; Bob’s was gag-worthy. His eyes crawled across Jamie to land on Raine. She wished this day was over. Sometimes wishing this was all over. Everything.

  “Where’s Paul?” Nadia stood with a plate of sugar cookies and a severe haircut. The pixie young lady with dyed-black hair and a pierced hawkish nose was the only lesbian on the Settlement. Talk about imprisonment.

  “Don’t know.”

  “That’s his daughter, isn’t it?”

  Raine nodded.

  “He was sterile, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how’s he got a daughter?”

  “Adopted her.”

  “Hmm. Seems like he should be here.”

  Ask a clay and they’d say that God hated bricks, He didn’t want more. That was why bricks were sterile. Engineers said it was intentional, a safeguard against runaway reproduction. Bricks were already long-lived. If they reproduced, they’d overpopulate the clay within a couple hundred years, shifting the population drastically. Which was true.

  “He’s upset.” Raine glanced up, accidentally locking eyes with Bob. Vapor leaked from his nostrils like poison gas. Nadia caught the creepy vibe.

  “This what you want?” Nadia pulled up her top, exposing her black, lacy bra.

  Bob raised a middle finger. Nadia returned the gesture until he went back out front.

  “Dick,” she said.

  “Forget it.”

  “You need to report this.”

  Raine shook her head. Reports, complaints… they did no good. Clays didn’t want to live on the Settlement any more than bricks. They only took the jobs because they were either hard up or psychotic. Or both.

  “You were tight with her?” Nadia nodded at Jamie.

  “She was there when I came out of the box.”

  “First sight, huh?”

  Every brick remembered when their consciousness was ignited in the fabrication box. The sight of another human sort of kicked in the recognition of who they were. For Raine, her first sight was Jamie, the girl that took her to the farm, taught her how to live in the world of flesh.

  Her second sight was Nix, the man that fabricated her. The man that pulled her out of his dreamland, the man that gave her life in the physical world. The man that died doing it.

  The man now trapped in a dreamland Raine couldn’t visit. Raine’s dreamland.

  “You adopt her, too?”

  “No.”

  “Thought you and Paul were a thing.”

  “He’s more like a brother.”

  “Well, I’m sorry about this. I didn’t know her, but she seemed all right. For a skinner.” She said it loud enough for Bob to hear. “Where do you want the food?”

  Raine pointed.

  “If you need help with anything, like cleaning up or whatever, you know where I live.”

  The sharp-tongued waif dropped off the cookies and left without talking to anyone. Those were probably the most words anyone had heard from her.

  ______

  The afternoon passed one brick at a time.

  Eventually, it was just Raine and the smell of death wrapped delicately in a blanket of sympathy food. She adjusted the wildflowers around Jamie’s body, gathered a small bouquet and tucked them into her stiff fingers.

  The stone necklace was around Jamie’s neck, the handmade necklace she never took off. She arrived in that bag with the ring of smooth stones around her neck. They had been fished from a North Carolina creek and made into a necklace by a very special person, someone Jamie never wanted to forget.

  A rocking chair creaked outside.

  Raine stepped onto the front porch, letting the screen door clatter. The grassy landscape was already anticipating summer, waving in the breeze like paper. The wind harvesters continued their slow churn. A few people were across the field at the brick house.

  None of them were Paul.

  Bob’s metal pipe hissed with smoke. His enormous body was crammed between the armrests of a rocking chair, rolls of flesh pressed into the wood.

  “Why are you still here?” she said.

  “Here until that thing is disposed of properly. In case you get any ideas.”

  “Ideas?”

  “Let’s not squabble, little lady.”

  �
��You think I’m going to resurrect her?”

  He pulled a long drag. “Shame what that girl did, you know—selling her clay for the ’mites.”

  “Shut your mouth, Bob.”

  “She was already perfect the way God made her. Just couldn’t see it.”

  “You don’t know her.”

  “I think I do. I sucked on that ’mite titty once, got myself seeded and all that. Hell, that could be me in there had I not been saved.”

  “It’s not always that easy.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. She could’ve asked for forgiveness, could’ve been redeemed. The way back to the clay is painful, but that’s the price for leaving the garden. It costs a pound of flesh. But she had a choice, you see. That is a fact. You, on the other hand, don’t.” He aimed the silver pipe at her. “A brick can never be clay.”

  “And I don’t care.”

  “You see, it doesn’t matter what you think. You’re an imitation of clay. You’re an invention, something that pretends to feel. You do what your fabbed script tells you. Someone dies, you check your lines, do what looks like mourning, cry and moan and all that. You do what you’re supposed to, but you’re nothing more than a pull-string doll. That girl in there had clay, she had a choice to return and didn’t. You never had clay. Which is the greater sin?”

  He sucked the pipe.

  The greater sin? She knew the argument, the one that convinced the politicians of the world to pitch the bricks onto this godforsaken Settlement like construction waste. We don’t exist, so there can be no sin in keeping them out there. But the halfskins, even a thin slice of clay, deserve a chance to make the world a better place.

  Raine went inside and locked the screen door.

  Bob pried himself out of the chair and paced across the porch, muttering to the person on the other end of a call. She slammed the heavy door and collapsed on the couch. She started to fall on her knees when keys jingled in the lock. She hadn’t thrown the dead bolt. Bob opened the door.

  “Paul is digging a hole,” he said.

  “Get out.”

  “Now why you being like that?”

  “Because it’s in the script.”

  She stood in front of Jamie’s body, goddamned if she was going to let him stand in her house. She’d call every brick back to the cabin if that was what it took to get his ass out. And if he laid a hand on her, she’d end him. The People would certainly end her for it.