Slave Stories

by Bahr, Laura Lee

  When they are gone, and I regain consciousness, the boy is dabbing at my face with a bloody washcloth, the cold water calming my hot flesh, his eyes full of tears, his lips bit and puckered in resolve, never saying a word. He understands his place, and his eyes implore me to remember mine.

  I do not miss work, this is not allowed. So, beaten and bruised I make my way to the mines. The boy splits off at his juncture in the path, releasing my hand with reluctance. We have learned not to ask, when somebody disappears—no longer standing next us as we shovel, pick and dig. We have learned to ignore the loss of fingers, the cuts and markings, changing in and out of our uniforms, backs covered in streaked lashings, weeping flesh, the whippings carried out in private, to keep us in constant fear. If the setting sun has no time of descent—no marked hour, or minute, or path—then how can we anticipate the darkness?

  The third time they come it is not to measure my boy, but simply to take him. There are four guards this time, the first entering our filthy home with an electric cattle prod in front of him, pushing it into my raised hands, my strained chest, shock rippling over my flesh as I collapse to the floor, twitching while urine trickles down my shaking leg. And the boy never says a word as they extend their measuring tapes—height, and width, and depth. They nod to each other, jotting down a few notes, walking him out of the house as he tells me he loves me, tells me to be strong, to wait for him. They take him, leaving behind a small envelope with a few sentences about his new assignment. I do not know if he will return. He fits the mold for some strange new job, something about the health of the great ones, a bitter pill that the beasts must swallow—the medicine, somehow, my boy.

  I know that I’ve taught him well, my son, even if I don’t take my own advice. He has heard repeatedly that resistance is futile—my words slipping over his drooping eyes as he lies in bed, drifting off to sleep. I don’t give him hope, when I tuck him in at night, because I can’t give him something I don’t have.

  There are three great beasts that hover over our mine, their veiny skin transparent. I see them every day when I walk to work, and I hate their bluish tint, their waving tentacles, with all of my trembling heart. It’s not like people haven’t tried to rebel, to rise up. I’ve seen men rush out of the pits with rifles, blood on their hands, firing at the smaller grey ones, the great clear beasts in the sky rippling with puncture wounds. They pass right through them, holes made, certainly, but little changing. And as the smaller gray ones swarm closer, appendages descending, the men’s screams are lost in the thick alien hides, ripped limb from limb as shots ring out, one or two of the elephantine creatures falling to the Earth, more vulnerable it seems, the hovering motherships unharmed.

  It’s all I can think about in the weeks to come, my boy, and his new job. There are whispers from the other men, no women down here in the mines, their work elsewhere in the pleasure districts of Moosejaw. My wife was dead of cancer long before any of this horror fell upon us, and I thank whatever gods are left that she never had to witness this decay. The boy has her quiet optimism, so I trudge back and forth to the mines, lost in the dust and noise, waiting to hear something—anything at all.

  There are whispers at work, quiet conversations slipped between the spark of the pickaxe, the rattling thunder of jackhammers, sledges and shovels down here close to the veins of ore. I sidle up to two men who are bagging up mica, as overhead and in the distance great excavators rumble past, bulldozers and graders spanning out across the dirt. They speak of their boys, measured and taken, and I ask what they know. They shake their heads and scatter like cockroaches, but before they separate, I hear a few things. They are sick, the big ones, shedding scales of flesh that falls from the sky like graying snowflakes. I think of the sloughs of skin that have turned up over the past few weeks, great sheets of dry skin drifting about the dead land like tumbleweeds spinning in the wind. They hang lower in the sky, the men mumbled, and as I walk home from work, I scan the sky for confirmation. There are only two of them visible today—one as vibrant and glowing as ever; the second slightly lower, dull and hardly moving; the third falling onto a distant mountain range, it’s sickly skin like a dirty blanket draped over pristine snow.

  The final knock at my door is nothing I expect—the boy standing there skinny and sick, his eyes shrunken, his face sallow—falling into my outstretched arms. He says that up close they are magnificent creatures, so very large, the quiet inside the floating bodies like nothing he’s ever witnessed. I take him to his bed, and set him down gently, fetching him a glass of water, his eyes electric with stories. He wants to tell me everything, so I sit on his bed and listen.

  He talks of the other boys, how they were to be fed to the beasts, wrapped in protective coatings, slick jumpsuits made of glossy materials, treated with certain chemicals to aid their healing treatment. The boy laughs, coughing up phlegm and blood, his eyes glazing over as he tries to finish his tale. Holding his bony right hand, I listen, as he smiles a crimson smile. A simple job, he says, swimming their way to the center of the monsters, against the vibrating cilia. Not just medicine, which the creatures can’t swallow, skin too thin to inject, too tough for any spray, but specific instructions about hearts and valves, chambers and ventricles, how to remove any blockages, plaque, or disease.

  But they had another plan, he says, grinning, holding out his left fist. When he spreads his fingers wide, it is the worm again, now grown, ten times its previous size, pincers snapping, as big as a mouse, eyes blood red, feathered legs twitching, wings now on its back, thin membranes lined with intricate patterns.

  The boy is asleep now—his pulse slow, but steady. I take the worm, the caterpillar, whatever it is now, whatever it might become next—moth, or snake, or lizard—to the kitchen in search of a proper receptacle. I find a Mason jar, and drop it inside, an iridescence rippling over its skin, feelers probing the air, as I poke a few holes in the lid with a rusty old screwdriver, my stomach rippling with hope.

  I go to the front door and swing it open, the sky filled with orange light as the sun sets in the distance. They are gone, the sky empty now—nothing hovering, a stream of men from the pits, gray skinned husks lying scattered over the earth, the worms devouring from within. The sickness has spread, the network of creatures like one long line of electrostatic shock, stilling their waving arms as they wither and die across the silent barren plains, our new home.

  Dive Bar Prophecies

  —Ian Welke

  Scale tilts his glass back. He had planned on taking it easy, but when he gets to the Alley and sees Hen tending bar, he knows instantly that he’s doomed. Scale’s one of her chicks. One of the regulars she looks after. So any plans he had on taking it easy today are hopeless. His glass refills with rust brown liquor as soon as it’s emptied. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe having his wits about him is overrated. If he wanted clarity, he’d go somewhere else. He shivers at the thought. There’s nowhere else he’d rather wait for his doom.

  Hen laughs and refills his glass. Hen is short for Henrietta and is never meant as a comment on her spiky, radioactive-red hair looking like a chicken comb. Not to her face anyway.

  Rain, hail—or from the sound—nails and bolts, hammer the sheet metal roof. The door creaks open and the strong smell of diesel wafts inside as the next drunk stumbles in from the Wire City chaos.

  Alley is an apt name for a bar that sprung up over an alleyway between Wire City and Spittle. Hen’s uncle had served drinks from a bar in the Alley even before the roof had been put on—now the bar runs most of the length of what had once been the alleyway. Hen added flooring and put in partitions creating a storeroom and a restroom adjacent to the Spittle side.

  Scale stands at the Spittle edge of the bar eyeing the woman he’s here to see. Or to avoid. He hasn’t made up his mind which. She’s sitting at the opposite end of the bar, no doubt telling the yuppie next to her what’s going to become of him.

  The room sways when Scale stands and he staggers through the crow
d. Hen calls the back of the bar the “dance floor,” but it’s really just an area where drunks stand and drink massed together. There’s no music, but sometimes they might sway. Scale’s glass is refilled.

  He catches just the tail end of what Cassandra tells the yuppie. “…It will not be as big a change as you might think.”

  The yuppie shakes his head. He looks at the door like he’s desperate to get out of this place, the place Scale believes to be the closest thing to heaven there is. The man wears a nice suit. His nails are well manicured. What he’s doing in the Alley, Scale has no idea. Has he come here to listen to her only to ignore what she tells him? To the best of Scale’s knowledge, no one believes her. They all expect someone with a rosier outlook and then what she tells them is always worse than they’ve imagined.

  The pounding on the roof stops at last. Scale thinks this will help him concentrate, but everything just blurs instead. He finishes his drink again, but by the time he’s set the glass down, it’s already refilled.

  Hen just snickers at him through the metal mesh in her teeth.

  Scale looks back towards Cassandra. The yuppie has left. They make eye contact. Shit. Scale looks down at the floor and then in the opposite direction from where she’s sitting. He’s still not sure if he wants to hear what she has to say to him. None of the people who have heard her speak have come to good ends. But it raises the question, is it better to know or not?

  <~~O~~>

  The bathroom at the Alley is a one-holer. There’s room for more toilets, but Hen has a deal where she pays no rent if she lets the bosses use most of the bathroom as a drying shed for Husks. The skins of the vegetable men are dried here then broken off and sold for smokes. Hen drew the line though at using the place as a slaughterhouse. Her clientele need a place to piss, and they have too much incentive to vomit as is. This suits Scale fine. The vegetable men creep him out, something about the skittering noises they make, but he wouldn’t want to see them slaughtered. He’s not even sure that their skins are really all that intoxicating. The only times he’s smoked their husks, he was already plenty drunk. Ah well, to each their own and who am I to judge?

  Scale is well-practiced in the use of the Alley bathroom. He doesn’t look at the skins drying to his right. He averts his eyes from the thick mung churning in the toilet below him. He stares at the bullet hole in the wall, inches from the bridge of his nose, until he’s finished pissing. He’s not sure if that bullet hole was put there as a focus aid or not, but it works.

  When he comes out of the restroom, the barstool next to Cassandra is occupied once again. At first Scale is convinced the next victim is a child, but then he realizes she’s a dwarf. Her face is as old and worn as his, but her legs hang from the stool reaching less than half way to the ground.

  “Your letter will never arrive.” Cassandra says this in monotones as she does all her prophecies. She distracts herself, tracing her finger in spilled liquor between the cracks in the bar.

  “What do you mean, will never arrive? Everyone gets their letter. That’s what happens. You live here, going through the motions pretending you’re alive until you get a letter saying all choice is gone and you’re taken to a true full-time work opportunity.” She spits out the last part of the sentence like it’s venom. The dwarf snorts and finishes her drink before she climbs off her stool. She shakes her head in disgust and storms out of the bar.

  Scale eyes his glass and realizes he’s just putting it off. He needs to ask. It’s the right time to do it. He opens his mouth to speak, but no sound comes out. His skin starts to burn in that familiar embarrassed glow.

  Metal on metal followed by a screeching of tires and screams from a crowd come from outside.

  He follows a handful of drunks out through the Wire City-side exit. He can’t see at first through the crowd standing on the curb.

  One of the drunks from the bar points ahead. “That little one’s had it.”

  The body of the dwarf, what’s left of it, is a smear in the road. A set of tire tracks perfectly bisects her body laterally.

  Scale goes back inside the bar and downs his shot. That’s the quickest he’s seen one of them get it. He resolves not to talk to Cassandra.

  For all he knows, her telling it makes it happen.

  <~~O~~>

  Scale comes out of a blackout standing in the crowd on “the dance floor.” Cassandra is talking with a teenage boy at the bar. Scale’s in a conversation of his own, but he doesn’t recognize the man he’s speaking with and has no idea what they’ve been talking about.

  “…artificial turf,” the man concludes.

  Scale raises his glass as if to toast. “Of course.”

  He turns around and she’s staring straight at him. Cassandra is practically on his toes. There’s no way out now.

  Scale wipes sweat from his eyes. It stings a bit. His sweat’s mostly alcohol or whatever industrial solvents are in the drinks here.

  She doesn’t blink or break eye contact. “You’ve been waiting to hear it. You’ve been waiting to find out what will happen to you.”

  “Waiting might not be the right word.” His glass is gone. He just had it a second ago. Now he can’t find it. Now that he needs it.

  “You only think you’ve been avoiding it.” There’s no expression on her face. He hadn’t noticed that before. When she tells someone what will come of them, she doesn’t laugh or cry. It doesn’t matter to her one way or the other. “You’ll hear it when the time comes.”

  “So, I don’t have a choice? Not even a choice on whether or not I hear you say what’s going to happen?”

  “You wonder if you have free will? With what you do between now and when you are taken away?”

  “Or if I die first?”

  “You do not?” It’s hard to tell by the inflection in her voice if she means this as a question or a statement.

  “Die first or have free will?”

  “Neither.”

  “How can that be? I could still kill myself now before I’m taken away. There must be free will before we are taken.” Scale shakes his head. The room spins. He remembers his promise to Hen not to be sick on her floor. He staggers outside into Wire City and they’re there waiting for him.

  The delivery man has a submachine gun pointed at Scale. He’s flanked by two guards holding riot guns. He reaches with his free hand into a chest pocket and pulls out the letter Cassandra warned Scale he’d receive before he could even kill himself.

  Scale accepts the letter before he can even think what to say to argue or to run or charge and attempt suicide by cop.

  The words in his conscription letter swim on the page. He just manages to comprehend the meaning, before he’s shackled and thrown into the back of a van. When he wakes, the hangover is upon him. His own sick coats his stomach. He wishes he could pass back out as the van rumbles off to the mining enclave where he will work out his remaining days.

  The last thing he thinks before the van rocks him back to unconsciousness is at least that answers my question. My choices are made for me now.

  There is a pleasant clarity in that…

  Dodge and Midge Escape the Silo

  —John Palisano

  There was no way for me to write anything down. Everything was wet. That meant there were no paper things anywhere, or electronic things. The only way to keep a story was up here, in the old chemi-electric soup of my head. So, maybe there’ll be some details missing, and how and what people said are definitely going to be paraphrased. And so what of it? Maybe it’ll be more interesting, anyway, you know? Like someone once said: stories are like life with the boring parts cut out.

  The State flooded. Everyone knows that happened now. The waters from the Nuremberg Silo broke, then poured into the streets. Everyone found out the hard way that the silo was a lot more than a silo. It was a conduit to the ocean. It was like a giant valve, with a filter mechanism inside to purify the salt and debris from the seawater, so that it’d be vaguely drinkable and usea
ble. When the lid came off, the ocean came surging in like a tidal wave from hell.

  The fat fucks above loved it. They were fine; their places had all been built up on stilts, hadn’t they? Well, not real stilts like you see by the ocean, or on the earthquake savvy houses in Japan and Los Angeles…no…their stilts where the buildings with their penthouses and self-sufficient units on top. Now we know why all the electrical units and water tanks and communications parts were on the roof. The cunts knew this could happen, and in fact, thought that it really well might. They were right about that, and right about covering their pearly asses. We watched them glide from rooftop to rooftop on their solar choppers, landing on the heliports they’d made with their countless financial hordes. Once in a while, they looked down at us, in the same way we used to look down at a bug on the street. Oh? There’s one of those gross things? Should I step on it? No. Don’t want it all over the bottom of my shoe. Too much work. Just carry on. Fuck off, little thing. No time even to squash you.

  So they were apt to have us exterminated by the water, you see. They ignored our screams and hollers. So much shit flushed away.

  And what else would we do with these sorts of things, after all? Revolt on the open water? Unlikely. And those twats knew it, too. we’d be more concerned with motherfucking survival than revenge. But what those tweets up there didn’t count on was the resilience and deep down memory of the downtrodden. We’d play their little game. We’d sail. We’d find refuge. We’d do whatever it was we had to do in order to get through the long days and nights, but we always knew there’d be a time. Our anarchy hibernated.