Halfskin Boxed

by Tony Bertauski

  Bars.

  She shuffled closer to Paul and felt his body heat on her back. The metal edge of the laptop creaked in her grip. Her eyes adjusted; hard metal bars emerged in rows with open sliding doors and a concrete floor. There weren’t many cells, eight or ten.

  “What the hell is this?” she said.

  “I don’t know. We’ll just stay until the storm passes.”

  The weather spit a gust of rain through the door. Paul worked to pull it closed. The hinges were damaged and the door wouldn’t fit inside the doorjamb. A puddle crept over the cracked concrete.

  The metal bars were cold and chilling, goose bumps spreading up her arms, the small hairs standing up. There was nothing inside the cells, no bench or toilet, not even a chair. It was a small building of metal bars.

  “Don’t go in there,” Paul shouted over a gust of rain.

  “Don’t worry.”

  He guided her back to the middle of the corridor like the cells would swallow her up, the door clamping down like mechanical jaws.

  The storm continued.

  They sat on the concrete, leaning against a section of the curved wall, careful not to touch the bars. They sat in the dark, the sound of the storm thrown over them like a blanket of chains, listening to branches dance in the night.

  Sleep came to Jamie like it always did, sneaking up to snatch her into unconsciousness where the dream would start over. She’d wake in the morning, looking up at the silver blades of a large ceiling fan and listening to the fresh silence that comes after a storm.

  But nothing would be the same.

  Marcus

  Paul was grainy.

  Marcus leaned on the desk and called for the picture to enhance. The camera (or whatever was recording their every move) zoomed tight on his face and captured him blinking.

  Still awake.

  Paul stood at the door, peeking through the opening every so often, waiting for the storm to ease up. Jamie was on the far side of the room, curled up and shivering. He’d taken off his shirt—the filthy hospital gown—and draped it over one of the cells to dry. It left his upper body exposed.

  Marcus fell asleep at the desk and woke just past midnight. The rain was gentle but consistent, the wind a harmless bluster. Paul was now sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall, still not asleep.

  He won’t leave her, Marcus told himself. Even if it stops raining.

  He locked them out of the dormitory. All it took was a simple request and the system did it. They’d find the other buildings locked, too. It wouldn’t take long before they were hungry and desperate. Then they would be ready to listen, to cooperate on his terms.

  If that was what he wanted to do.

  The domed building had escaped his attention until they were inside it. The door was left open; there was probably nothing he could do to keep them out anyway. But it worked to his advantage.

  The computer told him exactly what that building was for. It wasn’t a prison or a punishment. It wasn’t clear why the boys were kept in cells, in such miserable conditions when everything else was so luxurious. But that was where the needles were inserted into the boys’ frontal lobes, where their identities were connected to a host computer, where an alternate reality awaited.

  Where dreamland was born.

  This foreverland, as they called it, was the birth of dreamland. Old men stole the bodies of young boys, exorcising their identities, sending their souls to a place described as nowhere so their bodies remained as empty husks the old men could occupy. A new lease on life.

  They didn’t have biomites back then, weren’t able to create the necessary conditions to experience an inner world, so they connected themselves to something that could.

  Because they were clay.

  Marcus pushed away from the desk, his knee locked into a rigid bar of fire. He was stiff all over, but the leg (and now the hip) had become extremely arthritic. By the time he reached the elevator, his forehead pricked with sweat. Knowing Paul was in that domed building, that he wouldn’t leave Jamie, the old man descended to the second floor without fear of surprise. The doors opened.

  A wheelchair waited in the hall.

  Ask and ye shall receive.

  These were the little things he noticed around the tower, how requests were fulfilled. First the cane, then the computers and now this. He fell into the seat and sighed. Relief came in a relaxing wave. It took an effort not to lay his head back and fall asleep.

  The stringent smell of the lab—the antiseptic cleaners, the sterile supplies—filled the hall. Quite a difference from the floral scent of the third floor, the lived-in opulence. This was where science advanced.

  He rushed around the lab, opening drawers. But then he stopped. It was obvious how to find what he was looking for, and how to do it. According to the post-arrival report, he woke up in a clay body. He contained no biomites. But the island was the birthplace of foreverland, the precursor of dreamland. This was where they learned how to transport their identities out of clay bodies.

  All he needed was a network. He was receiving news from the mainland; therefore he could transmit it. The New York lab would still be holding the body he designed.

  It was all very clear what he needed to do.

  “Where’s the needle?” he called to the room.

  Paul

  The rain soothed the fear, a lullaby that washed away the worry and concern. Paul stared across the domed hut, past the bars at the sleeping body huddled against the wall.

  His back next to the door, Paul kept his eyes open despite the pleasant breeze flowing through the crack of the door. He looked at the black bars, wondering what they were for, why someone would be kept inside, what horrors they’d seen—

  And then they turned yellow.

  He blinked away the exhaustion and rubbed his eyes. For a second, he was on the side of the hill overlooking the sea. The next moment, the mustard yellow bars appeared, but not the confining cells in the domed building; they had become distant posts smudged in the blurry night rain.

  The Visitors’ Center.

  He was standing in the lobby, looking across the front field where the Settlement’s perimeter was marked by yellow posts. The window was still damaged where he’d thrown the chair.

  But Jamie wasn’t on the floor. She was back in the hut.

  I’m dreaming.

  His clothing was still the same—bare-chested and khakis still wet from the rain. The room smelled musty, the carpet tacky beneath his boots. All his senses intact.

  The silence was broken by laughter.

  Paul jumped to the side, instincts telling him to hide. No one was allowed inside this building unescorted. But this is a dream.

  He went down the main corridor. The offices were to the left. The punchy laughter continued. Paul snuck to the first office, the door closed. Bob’s office. But the nameplate had changed. No white cowboy hat on the desk, no tray of vaping pipes.

  No longer Bob’s office.

  “Check this out,” one of the voices said.

  “Is she always like that?” the other person asked.

  “Every night.”

  Paul went down the hall, trying to remember if the computers were against the back wall or facing the hall. This is a dream, he reminded himself. Just a dream.

  He leaned into view and saw the back shoulder of one man standing behind a chair, wearing the standard green coat of a monitor, unzipped and open. They were watching surveillance footage on the computer. It was a view of someone sleeping.

  Nadia.

  She rolled over to expose her buttocks and left breast.

  The one sitting turned. They high-fived.

  Paul didn’t recognize them. But if a year had passed, they would be new. But why would Bob be gone? This is a dream, he thought again. None of this mattered.

  But it did.

  Those assholes swore they never violated the bricks’ privacy, that surveillance was only in place in case of an emergency. How many times did th
ey watch them in the shower? How many times did Bob jerk off to someone making love?

  This was a dream. Only a dream. But he would fix it here and now. He would make it right, even if it was only a dream. It wouldn’t make a lick of difference when he woke up, but he’d feel better, the guilt would be just a little lighter.

  Because even if this was a dream, it probably wasn’t far from the truth.

  ______

  A crack of thunder slapped Paul in the face.

  He jumped to his feet, the sizzle of lightning still on his eyebrows. The cages were open, the walls quiet. A sultry orange slice of sunlight swept across the room, wisps of humidity swirling; water dripped from the door.

  Daylight.

  That wasn’t lightning.

  The ache in his tailbone went up his spine, the result of a long night on the concrete. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes (eyebrows intact, hair unsinged) and pushed the door open. Birds fluttered with a squawk. The air was crisp and scoured. It rejuvenated the world, cleansed it of wrongdoing, made everything right.

  This is a new day.

  Jamie was still asleep, hugging the laptop like a stuffed bear. At least she’d stopped shivering. He knelt next to her, listening to her breathing. Deciding not to wake her, he pried the laptop away—her hands clawing the concrete with scratchy, jerky movements. Maybe she was back in the dream and he should wake her. At the very least, he should be there when she woke. But he wouldn’t be gone for long.

  And she needs the sleep.

  He typed a message on the laptop and left it open.

  Everything was dewy, the droopy foliage swiping him as he jogged past, his thighs and chest soaked when he passed the sundial. The doors were still locked; the window he attempted to shatter, the coconut bouncing off like a rubber kickball, was cracked. There was still food on the picnic table from the day before. The crackers were waterlogged, the waxy apples beaded with rain.

  Jamie was stretching when he returned and handed her an apple. “Thank you,” she said.

  He pushed the door open. In the sunlight, it was just a room with bars.

  “What about the rest of the buildings,” she asked. “Think they’re locked, too?”

  He shrugged. “Stand up and stretch. You’ve been sitting on the floor all night.”

  She sighed, studying the apple, taking another loud bite before getting up and offering him the other half.

  “You eat it,” he said. “You need it.”

  “You do, too.”

  “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “Keep the door open, just in case.”

  She was thinking like he was. What if all the buildings were locked? They could sleep outside, but another storm would make it difficult. The hut was better than being exposed to the elements, cages or not. Another thing occurred to him.

  Where are the insects?

  This was a tropical island, but nothing was crawling on them at night or biting them during the day. Paul was on one knee, wedging a branch into the soft mud to keep the wind from blowing the door closed and wondering if the island’s ecosystem was naturally bug-free.

  “That’s weird,” Jamie said.

  And then it happened in slow motion.

  One knee in the mud, he saw her turn, saw her take one step toward an open cell. “No!” he managed to shout.

  That was it.

  The door slid in the rail like a predator and slammed her left leg like metal teeth. The dull crack of bones sounded like a muffled gunshot.

  Her other leg collapsed like a folding chair.

  The door recoiled to a grinding halt, Jamie’s shin bent at a slight angle. She yanked her leg inside the cell before the second bite landed. The door latched with a ringing thud.

  Paul had barely leaned forward before it was over.

  Birds flocked away as he grabbed the bars, the metal cold and hard and unforgiving. He reached through them, but Jamie was curled up, blood already dotting the concrete.

  “Breathe,” he said. “Breathe, Jamie. You can control this, remember. Focus, now. Focus on your nervous system; kill the sensations.”

  This was survival mode.

  Biomites allowed for the override of the nervous system when severe pain needed to be mitigated to avoid shock. She can do this.

  “Breathe, now.” He took a deep breath. “In deep… Jamie, listen to me. In deep, out slow. You can do this, okay. Listen to my voice. Be here.”

  Her cries turned to whimpers. Tears squeezed through clamped eyelids. She drew a wet breath through clogged nostrils, exhaled through a tight circle.

  The shaking slowed to a quiver.

  “Okay, I’ll be right back,” he said. “I’m just going outside for a second, see if there’s something I can use to open this.”

  He sounded confident despite the absurdity. A branch wouldn’t scratch the bars. The latch didn’t even have a keyhole.

  Remotely controlled.

  The cool rush of fear transformed into the flame of rage. If it was remotely closed, then he had a suspicion who had done it. It was no accident that the buildings were locked, no accident this hut was open and waiting.

  When he returned, she had rolled to her side so that he couldn’t see the leg. Her breathing was long and smooth and even. She lay still, her back to him. He knelt down, knees pushing between the bars.

  She wouldn’t respond, but had the pain under control.

  He had to find help, had to make things right. His lungs burned as he ran through the forest, wondering what would possess her to walk inside the cage, why she would endanger herself. It was only a matter of time before one of them slipped on the shore or got sick.

  But he realized as he exited the trees that she was holding something as she had clutched her wounded leg, something that poked between her fingers. Something she had reached for in the cell.

  They were sticks.

  ______

  She was asleep.

  It was the third time he’d come back to check on her and found her lying on her side, hands laced around her knee. Each time he explored a little farther. He finally found a rocky shoreline and scored a jagged block of granite half-buried in the sand.

  The dormitory window caved on the fifth toss.

  Paul filled two pillowcases with food. The kitchen utensils would be too flimsy to break open the cell door. The meat cleaver would shatter on impact.

  He found a utility closet and tools for basic repairs. He pocketed the screwdrivers, a ball-peen hammer and a putty knife. The back door was still locked (no bolt on the inside), so he crawled out the window and ran.

  Jamie was awake.

  She was in the back corner, one leg (her good leg) pulled up to her chest. The other leg was laid flat on the concrete and wrapped in Paul’s shirt. It appeared she had the pain under control. He thought, at first sight, she had wrapped her leg to keep from seeing it, to keep herself from entering shock. But the rheumy gaze, the parted lips.

  She’s already there.

  “Hey, hey.” He dropped the food. “I’m going to get you out.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Jamie. Jamie, you here? You with me? I won’t leave you again. I’m going to get you out of here, all right?”

  He fumbled the tools from his back pocket. The hammer bounced across the floor. He studied the screwdrivers and putty knife. They were pathetic. And the stone was still sitting in the dorm room where he’d thrown it through the window.

  He’d have to go back.

  “It’s him,” Jamie said. “He’s the one.”

  She could’ve been speaking to the room or herself, the words drifting off like random bubbles. Paul grabbed the iron bars, leaning in to see what she was holding.

  “What are you saying, Jamie? What do you mean?”

  “He is the witness.”

  “Who?”

  “He’s the witness, Paul.” The whites of her eyes were gray. “He’s the one that shut me down.”

  “I… I don’t know
what you’re saying.”

  “The dream is finished. I’m staring at a fish tank when he comes in the room. I can feel him, like he’s… he’s someone I know. I… I don’t remember his face. But I remember the eyes.”

  A pause button was hit. She stumbled over the details, still digesting the memories.

  “The eyes, Paul. Have you looked directly into his eyes?”

  “Whose eyes?”

  She swallowed, dry. “Marcus.”

  “Marcus?”

  “Have you noticed the end of the world in them? It’s all there, everything’s inside his eyes. The universe, the stars, the galaxy… everything. He made me feel important, made me feel wanted and okay. That he loved me. So I gave myself to him freely.”

  “What are you saying, sweetheart? You’re saying… the old man is the witness?”

  That couldn’t be. He was in Atlanta; he dropped her off to be captured. But he swore that wasn’t him.

  “And then he drew me in, sucked the soul out of my body into a cold, cold night, Paul. It’s him. Marcus is the one.”

  She was confused. The shock, the hysteria, the anger and resentment. Marcus wouldn’t drop her off then appear as the witness. He was looking for the powers-that-be, was with her in Chicago, with her in Atlanta. He can’t be the witness, too.

  “Where did you get that, Jamie?”

  She opened her hand, displaying her palm. On it lay a pair of sticks fastened together. Paul lost the feel of the floor, the world turning beneath him. She held it up like she was warding off evil.

  It was a cross.

  A little wooden cross.

  “Where did you find that?”

  “He’s the one, Paul.”

  “Jamie, listen to me. Where’d you get the cross?”

  “Marcus is doing everything. He is the powers-that-be. He just doesn’t know it.”

  Paul stood too quickly and held the bars until he was sure his knees wouldn’t break. He paced the concrete corridor, head still spinning. He had to get her out of there. She had turned delusional, the dream finally cracking her mind. The doors were remotely controlled. The tower was the center of technology with 360-degree views.