Slave Stories

by Bahr, Laura Lee

  Nausea had always horrified Gary. He was always ashamed, even when the nausea was not his fault, even when it came from some bug.

  This time, he focused on the shame he had felt when he’d started showing and tried to make love to Sharon. Later, the hormones had removed all desire. But at the beginning, there was this revolting fascination with the processes of coupling. And the degradation of the swollen belly, an essentially feminine disfigurement. Sharon had coaxed him, reassured him. But it had been no go. He had rolled up in foetal position, jaw clenched.

  Now, he fought to keep the scotch down. It tasted bitter in his throat. Between contractions, the nausea sleeked over, like the surface of water between ocean waves. Then a contraction would hit, and it would surge like a tsunami of polluted water.

  As a little kid, he had prayed not to throw up. As an adult, he beseeched God to get it over with.

  If only he could get help. If only there was a hospital nearby, a hospital he could trust.

  But he had no way of knowing if the Ninth Worlders had control of local hospitals, even if he had strength to walk to one, or a trustworthy friend to drive him there. He might simply be seized and bound, thrown in a cell with other “criminals against nature,” to await his trial—if unproductive labour didn’t kill him.

  The scotch finally came up, fouling a wastebasket. Gary rested, rode through the next contraction with a clear head, free of nausea. He’d lost the entire dose of scotch. And less than a shot remained in the bottle.

  He chatted with the foetus. “We’re going to die, champ.” The foetus kicked him. Or perhaps it was just a minor ripple in the crashing sea of his labour. “Got any ideas?”

  The foetus was quiet. Maybe, he thought, labour would just die down when the synthetic womb noticed nothing much was happening. Or maybe it was false labour.

  Ha. Fat chance.

  He could still call a hospital. He might reach somebody not infected with the Ninth World Virus, and they would come to help him.

  He fingered the lone suzie in his pocket. He dragged himself to the pay phone once more.

  “Northeast Ohio Hospital,” the voice answered. No accent. Maybe he was out of the woods.

  “You’re American. You’re not infected,” Gary whispered.

  “You’ll have to speak up, sir.”

  “I’m in trouble. I’m a pregnant male, in labour. Hard labour.”

  “Do you have transportation, sir?”

  “No. No, I’m alone. I’m in a drugstore at 105th and Euclid. There’s a war going on outside.”

  “We know, sir. We’ll send over aid immediately. You’re in good hands.”

  “Oh boy, that’s a relief. When I heard your voice, I realized the hospital hadn’t been taken over.”

  “Sir?”

  “Your accent. You still speak English. You weren’t infected in the latest virus hit.”

  “No, no. I wasn’t. But that’s not totally reliable, you know. The newest viruses don’t destroy English language capability. And new viruses help Ninth World insurgents speak perfect American English. Best not trust anyone, sir.”

  “Okay. Can I trust you?”

  “Yes. Would I be telling you this if I were Ninth World?”

  Gary was silent.

  “Euclid and 105th. Drugstore. Don’t reveal yourself to anybody unless you’re sure it’s medical personnel. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Hang on. Somebody’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Gary began shaking, a relief reaction. Oh, God. He was safe. The baby, his son, would be all right. He curled on the floor behind a display case near the phone, out of sight of the door, to wait.

  It didn’t take long. No siren, no flashing lights. A big car pulled up in front of the drugstore. Before the car lights went out, Gary saw that it had MD plates.

  But he had no reason to trust people who drove cars with MD plates. It might be stolen. Doctors and nurses might be infected with enemy virus. Gary’s call to Northeast might have been overheard by someone infected with enemy virus.

  A woman got out. Her jacket was pale, colourless in the glare of the embattled city. She was tall, her hair a dark mass hiding her face. She locked the car door. Speak, damn you, speak! Gary thought.

  She paused before the drugstore door. Peeked inside. Gary noticed she kept her right hand clenched inside her jacket pocket. Her long legs made her fashionably gawky in tight uniform slacks.

  Using her left hand clumsily, she pushed open the glass door.

  “Gary?” she said. “If it’s you, come on out. It’s safe.”

  Gary! Somebody who knew him? Friend or—. Maybe somebody from Dr. Barth’s office who had been at the hospital, or who had gone there as a volunteer.

  She was being cautious, too. The call could have been a trick. Of course. And the hand in the jacket pocket must contain—a gun? A Taser? Some weapon against a man pretending to be pregnant and in labor, perhaps to catch an unwary nurse or medic.

  “Gary, I have to know if it’s you. Are you here? If it’s really you and not somebody faking it to lure uninfected medical personnel, I have to know.”

  A passing car rounded the street corner, illuminating the woman’s strong profile. Crooked teeth, aquiline nose, red, sensuous mouth—he couldn’t remember the woman’s name, but it had to be the woman on the bus.

  And she was above him, looking down. “Gary,” she grunted.

  “It’s you. It’s really you.” Gary laughed out loud with relief. In protest, his artificial womb clenched in a wave of pain.

  “Breathe,” said the woman. “Stop holding your breath.” She knelt beside him and took his hand.

  “Over?” she asked.

  “That one, anyway. Thank God it’s you. I didn’t know what else to do. I tried everything. The world is in, in chaos.”

  “Chaos. Yes. I knew when the receptionist described the situation that it had to be you. How many pregnant men are there in Cleveland? But it could have been a trap. Both sides want control of the hospital.”

  “I forgot your name.”

  “Rachelle. Can you walk? We’re short on personnel—”

  “No, no. I can make it without a stretcher. Everything’s fine. Everything’s going to be okay, right?”

  “Right-o.” She helped him to his feet and guided him out into the cold. Snowflakes drifted down from the dark sign over the drugstore door.

  Rachelle opened the back car door. “This isn’t my car,” she explained. “I borrowed it. I don’t have a car.”

  Gary sprawled on the cold seat. Uncomfortable. But he could stand it, because he was on his way to help, to deliverance. His son would be born, would be okay, he realized. He had escaped the Ninth Worlders. The contraction that started as Rachelle pulled away from the drug store didn’t seem as painful. He was on his way.

  Drowsy, he watched the strange panorama of darkened streets lit with occasional car lights and burning buildings.

  “I’m lost,” he said finally. “We’re driving away from the hospital.”

  “Road’s blocked.” Clipped words.

  They stopped. Men ran out to the car. They opened the car doors and pulled Gary out roughly by the arms.

  “Another one,” said Rachelle triumphantly. She walked beside them as they half-dragged Gary into a dark shopping mall with virus-twisted words sprayed crudely over the entrance.

  “Why?” Gary managed.

  “He’ll be tried at once,” she said. “The tribunal sits day and night.” She refused to address him.

  Gary slumped, then whipped away from his captors with all the energy he had left. He threw a punch at one man, nearly fracturing his own hand. The man reeled, rubbed his jaw, stood glowering.

  But Gary knew he couldn’t run. He couldn’t even drive the car, now. He was too weak.

  He stood in front of Rachelle. She avoided his eyes, then confronted him straight.

  “Why?” he whispered.

  “Your kind,” she said, “knows too much. Y
ou plunder the secret lore of Nature. You have no courtesy for God or Nature.”

  “But you aren’t virus-hit. You speak American English.”

  “I was born to a Ninth World convertil,” she explained, wearily. “If that matters. Viruses can enhance language skills, as well as obliterate them. Viruses could even change you from a criminal. If we wanted that. But you’ve gone too far. Nature abominates you.” She turned away, dug in her pocket for a cigarette, lit it. “Take him in, for God’s sake.”

  “Let me live until the baby is born,” said Gary, struggling to get the words past the constriction of his throat.

  She widened her eyes ironically. “In the hands of the judges, criminal. We’ll try you now, this very hour. Justice is quick here.”

  “If the baby was born, would you let it live?”

  She narrowed her hard, dark eyes. “But it is not born. It is a monster. Part of you. Flesh of a criminal.”

  “But if it was born. Now.” A contraction hit him then, hard. The type of contraction that in a conventional birth would force the child’s head down the birth canal, out toward freedom.

  She laughed, observing his pain. “I’ll tell you what. If you give birth now, within the hour, the baby is a fresh start. Not part of a monster.” She leaned close, compressing her lips in cruel amusement. “Push hard, criminal. Bear down. Hurry.”

  The pain slackened. Gary, weak as if knocked around in stormy surf, swayed, felt himself crumpling. He fought to stay standing. “You know I can’t.” To him his voice sounded whiny, like a child pleading to get out of an unjust punishment. “Please help me. I need a doctor.”

  She smiled narrowly and moved away.

  They led him into the dark mall. He closed his eyes, waiting for the next contraction, the next tsunami. Life ebbed from him even as the small eager life inside him tried to get out.

  Despair felt like this, then. Giving up his life easily. Like offering his seat to an old woman on a bus. Like letting his four-year-old daughter win at checkers. Like offering the last piece of chocolate to the woman he loved.

  He thought of his world, contracting to a shopping mall. And of darkened passages that led to torch lit, make-shift courtrooms, through corridors of wreckage. Full of sharp objects.

  Shatterdemalion

  —Simon Marshall-Jones

  There’s a saying around here: Once you end up on the fringes, the next place you go is Death. And right here on the margin between the city of Moosejaw and the vast desolate plains from where the filth and scum came from to wash up on its shores like some discarded detritus, that’s almost a sacred truth. I’ve seen a lot of people land here, hoping to find something called home, but all it got them was a wooden box and an unmarked grave. In a city where hope had bypassed it a long time ago, killing, thieving, and arson are the only ways of making yourself feel better than the unlucky victim.

  Sure, there are some good folks in this place: the ones that don’t stick their noses into anyone else’s business, but there are precious few of them and they’re getting fewer by the day. It doesn’t matter though—they’ll only end up like everyone else does: six feet under and lost to history as if they’d never existed.

  Who am I you ask? The name’s unimportant, but just call me The Witness for the sake of convenience. I’ve lived here in this shack, slap bang in the middle of the no-man’s land separating the two wastelands, the city and the empty Hell beyond it, for more years than I can remember. Never much been one for company—hell, I haven’t been near a woman in a long time. And I pretty much look like my shack—worn weather-beaten skin almost as hard as wood in places, broken glasses and knocked out teeth (just like my windows and half of my front door), and a few sparse wisps of hair sprouting hopefully from my scalp (tufts of grass clinging on for dear life on my roof). And my clothing is as refined and high quality as the shack’s décor—in other words, a mess.

  It’s not particularly well-trodden where I live, even on a good day: I would rarely see more than a body stumbling past a month. Lately, though, something strange has been going on. It started about two months ago, when I saw a woman and her young son (who was barely old enough to stand) walk straight past the shack and out into the wilderness. I shouted at her, but she wasn’t interested in listening or turning back. I watched her dust trail waft away on the wind, and by the time the cloud had settled it looked as if it had blown her and the little boy away too.

  Not many days afterward, another soul did exactly the same thing—barrelled out of the city’s edge and straight through to the scrubland. I wasn’t too perturbed by it, until another couple followed an hour later. Then, toward evening, just as the sky was turning into an artist’s palette of blues, purples, pinks, reds, and oranges, a whole family carrying lanterns shuffled past my home. I’d been out on the veranda, sitting in an old beat-up chair that someone’s grandfather had made, when I noticed a constellation of lanterns emerging from out of the hooded back-streets of Moosejaw. As the bobbing lights drew nearer, I was able to make out a couple, probably in their thirties, herding two girls and a boy in front of them.

  “Where’re you going at this time of day?” I asked, my voice cutting shard-like in the evening air.

  I must have taken them by surprise. As all five of them stopped, fear stretching their faces into rictus grins and starting eyes. The man recovered first, his eyes focusing on me.

  “We are on the road to salvation,” he said, his voice a mixture of hope and uncertainty.

  “Salvation?” I said, “There’s nothing but empty wilderness out there. You’ll die within a few days.”

  “No,” he replied emphatically, “we won’t, we will be protected. He has promised us. We have pledged ourselves to him and He will show us the way.”

  “He? Who’s He?”

  “The Curator,” he said, “He will guide us safely through the wastelands. He promised us.”

  “The Curator? Never heard of him,” I said.

  “You will soon,” came his reply, “He will redeem us all.”

  With that simple affirmation of faith, he turned away, and led his family out into the now deepening night.

  <~~O~~>

  Over the following week more people took the same trail the family had and, when asked where they were going, all gave the same answer: The Curator was going to save them. Normally, I’m not one to pry into others’ lives, but I have to admit, this Curator was beginning to pique my interest.

  Being a virtual hermit, even in a city this size, has its disadvantages. Everyone minds their own business, keeping their affairs close to their chests even with friends—even if they have friends. I visited a few bars and dives but no one was willing to talk. Mouths would clamp shut tight as soon as the Curator was mentioned.

  Gleaning information is one thing, hearing rumours is another. Still I trawled the Moosejaw night for possible informants, but I soon discovered that casual eavesdropping was far more effective. Jigsaw snippets of wayward and unguarded conversations gradually pieced themselves together to form a picture, albeit an incomplete one I suspected. The man known as the Curator was a prize specimen—I’d gleaned enough to know I wanted to meet him face to face.

  And so, I found myself on my own pilgrimage. I set out early one morning, just after dawn. All I took with me was a bag stuffed with dried food: I also brought a knife, some small tools, and a hat. I followed the same trail pioneered by those who had alerted me to the whole strange phenomenon. But my decision left me wondering: was I merely looking to satisfy my curiosity, or was there something more to it than that, something deeper? Only my destination, if I reached it that is, would tell me.

  <~~O~~>

  “Hey brothers and sisters, mind if I join you?”

  I saw faces turn to me in the light from a small campfire—pilgrims like me, resting up for the night. Three men and four women ranging from young to middle age.

  “Pull up a rock,” one of the men said, who I guessed was the leader of the group, “A fellow
seeker is always welcome around our little fire.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and meant it. It was cold out here, even though it was summer.

  “We have some soup,” one of the women spoke up, “Would you like some?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say no,” I answered, genuinely grateful, “it’s been a long trek today.”

  “Amen to that!” my first interlocutor echoed.

  We all soon threw ourselves into friendly conversation, and I learned that they were a single family: Andrew, the leader, his wife Eleanor, and their two sons and two daughters. The sole topic of the conversation after that was the Curator. Most of what I heard that night only reiterated what rumour had lain at his feet: nevertheless what gaps there were in my understanding were gradually filled in. The man himself remained elusive, imagination and supposition embroidering the framework the legend had provided for his devotees. I had no doubt he was just a man, albeit charismatic and who had been elevated to semi-divinity by people who were desperate for anything that offered something better, but I suspected that he was exploiting people as a result of his own desperation. I wasn’t about to disabuse these good people of their notions: besides, I wanted them to guide me to him and his munificence.

  “He walked out of the East one day, bringing his philosophy with him,” Andrew explained after I’d asked him about the man, “But where he’d learned it nobody knows. Of course, he was reviled and castigated at first, but over time folks started believing him and what he promised, and people flocked to him and his message. Once he’d gathered enough followers, he led them en-masse out to the Wilderness, setting up a colony somewhere. That’s where we’re headed.” He paused then, dropping his gaze to the ground.

  “No,” Andrew admitted, “we don’t know where the colony is. But that is part of the Test, to prove our worthiness. Finding Him is what tells Him how committed we are. And that’s why we are doing this.”

  “How did you hear about him?” I asked, “Moosejaw isn’t exactly a popular destination.”

  “He came to me in a vision,” Andrew said, his face illuminated in the way that only the fervent could muster. It sent shudders running through my body. “he told me that he needed me and my family, that we had a special purpose.”