Slave Stories

by Bahr, Laura Lee

  In Ersatz the overlords held an eraser to your throat.

  The corners of the photograph dug into his thighs.

  He remembered Kricfalusi taking a swing at him after he made the mistake of giving a dud bet at the track. Dodging the punch had been the most exercise he’d ever had. Now he was walking into danger he couldn’t see.

  The smog cleared near her brownstone. Hank looked up. There was a gargoyle at each corner. He pushed on the door. It didn’t give. Adjacent to the door rectangular buzzers were alongside nametags that couldn’t be read. Hank pushed the number which corresponded to the address. If a bell rang somewhere in the building then he didn’t hear it. Mail boxes lined the foyer. For a moment he wished he were back in the post office, shovelling letters into slots; or even demoted, the straps of the sack digging into his shoulders, cutting ownership into flesh. Then the intercom sparked a green light and the clearest voice spoke a hello.

  “I’m here for Iris.”

  “Come on up.”

  There was a click. The door gave way with little pressure. Hank took a shot of whisky. Only one remained. He entered the building as though it were a chrysalis. The walls folded around him. He pushed through gossamer paper sheets.

  At the top of the stairs she was waiting. “You’re not Proctor.”

  He looked her over. She wore a gingham sundress that clung to all the wrong places. The camera did lie.

  She sighed. “I suppose you’re here now.”

  He followed her into the apartment.

  She sat. Her hands straightened the material of her dress. Her knees were exposed and Hank focussed on those. They were the only real thing about her.

  She was half his size. He could replace the whisky bottle in his pocket with her.

  “So,” she said, “what brings you here?”

  He knew the answer was years of repression, the dominance of the Slave State, the possibility of the R in evolution, the intimation of something other than he lived. But he also knew it was the booze, the monotony, the futile search for a fuck which might shine a light on a flower growing in a soul. He wondered how tight she was. How old she was.

  The dress used to be blue and white.

  She smiled and suddenly there was something.

  “The favours,” he said.

  She reached into the dress and pulled out a leaflet. It was crudely reproduced, like most of the human population. A tentacled being like a hot air balloon whose ropes had swollen and was missing a basket was drawn white on black. A big cross covered it. Underneath, in a child’s handwriting, were the words: Fear can stop your loving. Love can stop your fear.

  He glanced at Tiny Iris.

  “Is this some kind of joke?”

  Her expression was inscrutable.

  He slugged the remainder of the whisky. No going back.

  She held out a hand. Her fingers were cool. He had to bend to touch them.

  She gestured to a door which looked painted on the wall.

  “Through here,” she said.

  But the door was a window and he fell.

  He was falling. With the gingham dress billowing around him.

  There wasn’t much more to it than fate.

  pic twelve

  Pebbles (Dennis W. Kaddy)

  —Michael Faun

  Gossamer threads from dead deck hands’ hair stitch together the wounds of a crippled vessel.

  Lice crawl out of its cargo and chew open the false gate.

  Iwate Prefecture

  Captain Kaddy pinwheeled backward and slipped on the icy deck of Loopnova, where he thrashed about like a hairy infant, trying desperately to pry off the enormous spider crab wrapped around his face.

  Every hand on deck guffawed, cigarettes slumping from their toothless yaps.

  “A hand, anyone!?” Kaddy yelled. “I am, after all, the captain of this cursed ship.”

  The crew’s laughter increased.

  Kaddy’s patience ran thin. He let out a warrior’s roar and managed to break the legs of the crab and stomp it to pulp near one of the rusty mesh pods.

  Too bad half his face went missing in the process.

  <~~O~~>

  Kaddy was sitting in his wheelhouse, staring with his one eye over his useless men. “I’m a feckless cliché…” he grumbled and adjusted his piratey eye-patch made out of a shell and some boat rope. “The crew have no respect for me anymore…they think I’m a weakling.” He grabbed the bottle of Hibiki whisky from the dashboard and took a slug before dousing a cotton pad with the booze, cleaning the meaty half of his face with it.

  On main deck, the crew ran their mouths about how badly they wanted to lock their captain up in one of the pods, haul him to the bottom of the sea and feed him to the crabs. At least, they said, that would bring in some damn crab.

  Kaddy had never been a man of strength or leadership. He’d inherited Loopnova, the 130 ft. long off-white sea-wench from his uncle Leonard a few years back. Before Leo mysteriously disappeared from the face of Earth.

  A battered greeting card had come in the mail three years later that read: Greetings from Moosejaw! Under the text, carved into the brittle paper, was a face contorted in misery.

  Kind of like Leo’s.

  <~~O~~>

  Crumpling metal screeched and empty pods slammed against the hull, interrupting Kaddy’s mind-wandering. The mayhem was accompanied by complaints and curses from the crew.

  Mutiny was in spitting distance.

  “You’re all a bunch of old hags, you hear me! Nothing but whining old hags!” Kaddy bellowed drunkenly from the bridge where he stood peering out over his slaving men, but his upset holler was never heard—a small string of screwed-up black letters pouring out of his mouth.

  Loopnova collapsed into a tilted shipwreck that popped up from the surf like a rusted metal morel between two hunks of ice.

  I wish I was a salty dog…

  Loopnova leaked water. She drank at an alarming speed.

  Everything was over now and not a single stinking pod of spider crab had been caught during the entire season.

  What now?

  More debt? Yes.

  Lynching? Likely.

  Slow death and food stamps.

  Captain Kaddy sucked air into his lungs as Loopnova sank to the tarry black bottom.

  <~~O~~>

  The first thing Kaddy saw when he came to was drippy graffiti sprayed on the green brick wall:

  WelCum 2 Moo$eJaw, $uck’Er!

  Beside the offensive text was a crude image of a big spidery mountain and tunnels with conveyor belts packed with chained-together humans.

  Kaddy couldn’t recall how he’d ended up in Moosejaw, but the name did ring a bell someplace far inside his sore head. He decided to simply settle for the fact that he was alive, though pressed into a moving box in a slime-ridden alley that smelled of piss and feces.

  This untamed miasma that had dominated most of his earliest memories!

  Kaddy crawled out of the wet cardboard and his bones creaked as he sneaked out from the grimy mantis-colored corner.

  The main street teemed with crustaceans of all sorts, from slithering tongue worms and bobbing fish lice to leggy spider crabs and glassy-eyed lobsters; all bustling about in the red off-world dusk. Moosejaw was alive with them: prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, suits lugging dismembered human children as attaché cases.

  This was crustacean hell!

  In the horizon, far beyond winding shell tunnels and pebble strewn highways, was a pulsating vortex mouth in a colossal crab-shaped crag.

  Xenophobia and utter terror surged through Kaddy where he stood frozen on the street corner, absorbing this nightmare sea-floor city. He slowly prowled the main street, keeping his head low and his fists balled in his trouser pockets. A few blocks later, after having strolled along several endless twisting avenues, he came to a cul-de-sac and stopped by a dingy back door painted with a repulsive motif of a giant crab strangling a human being.

  Left with little
choices, Kaddy stood outside for a few moments before he hesitantly entered the shady establishment.

  Le Café de Crabe Étranglée

  Kaddy threw a cursive glance over the bar. The cloying atmosphere of the Café was pushing him to the verge of suicidal. Sea-foam covered the floor and the tables were rocks covered in lichen by which a handful of human patrons sat; all possessing one or more body parts that had been replaced with crustacean features. One, a woman with eye-stalks sagging like wilted penises, was checking him out from her stool close to a 50s jukebox screaming out a depressing saxophone solo.

  Golden metal vomit.

  “’Ello, what can I get you?” the barkeep snarled. His accent rang French and he had lobster claws instead of hands, snapping them irritably to catch Kaddy’s attention.

  “Whisky if you have,” Kaddy muttered, wondering how to pay for the drink. “Excuse me,” he said to the busy barkeep, who responded with a dirty look.

  “Oui?”

  “How do I pay for the dri—”

  “Put it on my tab, Isidore,” a grating female voice cut him off.

  “Yikes!” Kaddy gasped as he turned to thank his benefactor and found himself staring right in the hideous face of the curious woman with the eye-stalks who, until now, had been seated by the jukebox.

  “Hi there, handsome,” she hummed an inch from Kaddy, her oozing sea-breath triggering every instinct to flee.

  “Hello…” Kaddy replied, trying to breathe through his mouth.

  The barkeep slammed a glass of whisky on the counter before him.

  “You must be new here in town,” the woman crooned, winding her eye-stalks around his neck and nudging his ear. “I would’ve remembered such a cute face.”

  Kaddy nervously dipped into his drink. His body temp climbed as he glanced past her at the table with one hungry patron who had begun to tear off strips of face-skin from the human skull it held within its spidery grasp.

  “Yes, yes, I am new.” Kaddy took another slug of the brine-tasting booze. “Ahem, would you mind telling me where this…Moosejaw…is, exactly?”

  The woman retracted her eyes. “I think we should wait with the questions and have a little fun first, huh?”

  Kaddy had to steel himself not to fall off his stool from the woman’s overpowering odor.

  “I live in a cute little shack not far from here,” she whispered and let her scab-ridden tongue wet her lips as she parted her legs, offering a front row seat to pussy pandemonium.

  His stomach churned. “Thanks, but I really need to know my whereabouts. I just woke up here a few minutes ago and I must get back to the port in Kodiak. My boat sunk and…well, frankly I’ve got some very pressing matters to tend to.”

  “You’re cute and delusional,” the woman scoffed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t they tell you?”

  “Tell me what?” Kaddy started to get pissed.

  Crab-eye woman laughed in his face. “That you’re in the Slave State, honey!” A sparking probe shot out from her genitals and wound around Kaddy’s neck. “My pricey time meal ticket…”

  Gasping for air, Kaddy dropped his glass and it shattered by his feet. He flailed his arms as the stunning pressure from the pussy-tentacle increased.

  The woman and the bar patrons leered at him. Their faces melted like water paint, as the last air left Kaddy’s lungs and his lights went out.

  <~~O~~>

  Anarchistic fossils rape the existence of humanity, imprisons them in cages made of bony predators.

  Fiddler crabs salute the coming of Crustacean Christ and peels the skin of his disciples and their shells crack under the knife of the Sea God.

  <~~O~~>

  Kaddy returned from his nightmare-tainted coma and found himself tied to the flatbed of a cart that the crab-eye woman was dragging along the streets of Moosejaw. His body, from neck and down, had been replaced with a pink crayfish shell sporting eight segmented arms.

  “The Slave State…,” he gasped as the last memories floated ashore. “Holy shit!”

  They were moving in the direction of the vertiginous tunnels sprouting from the enormous crab-shaped mountain. A crowd of sea-critter citizens were gathered by the many tunnel entrances. They had brought modified humans with them, and appeared to be haggling with the brawny gate-keepers. Some of the leashed humanoids were traded for a paper, and was then led onto the tunnels’ conveyor belts that transported them up into the mountain’s vortex mouth.

  Kaddy realized he was staring behind the daunting mask of Moosejaw, at its true face that was a million times more harrowing.

  Moosejaw, Slave State, was one cold-blooded savage. Naked and futile.

  They arrived at the tunnel gates.

  “How much for this one?” crab-eye woman asked the keep: a muscular Kamchatka Crab in burgundy garb with spots of neon yellow.

  It eyed her goods.

  A ripple of unspeakable terror surged through Kaddy as the crab guard bored its black eyes into his.

  “Is it Transmatic?” crab guard croaked and scratched the tip of a claw over Kaddy’s left eye.

  “I think so. It mentioned the Nova Experiment during surgery. Why, does it matter? It will make an effective pebble miner.”

  The guard didn’t reply and began to inspect Kaddy’s tied-up appendages. “I can postpone your drafting call with thirty days. That’s my offer.”

  “Deal!” Crab-eye woman beamed and rolled over the cart to him.

  The crab guard stamped a paper and handed it to her.

  Producing a globe-shaped transmitter thingy edged with metal teeth, the crab guard inserted it on top of Kaddy’s head and clipped off the bonds with his claws. Crab-eye woman lopped off whilst the crab guard threw Kaddy onto the chugging conveyor belt.

  Ascending the tunnel, Kaddy stared blankly at the other slaves before him while the round doohickey hat slowly fritzed his brain and scraped away the last of his flimsy debris of humanity.

  Robbed from feelings, Kaddy scuttled up the last stretch to the gaping vortex mouth and was sucked down the throat of the mountain and into its bloated gut—the pebble mine.

  A dozen slaves were plucking rocky grits in the shaft where Kaddy was stationed. He recognized one of them.

  “Uncle Leo!”

  “Dennis…,” Leonard drawled and turned his atrophied body in Kaddy’s direction, staring at his nephew through vacant eyes. “So you got my greeting card…”

  “Yes, Leo. What a vacation.”

  “We are part of something big now, Dennis. Something larger than life.”

  “Maintenance labor is glorious, Leo.”

  “To those who are greater than us!” Leo saluted. He flicked a pebble into the dusty air and died, tumbling down a steep cliff before he plunged into the cold water below with a faint splash.

  Kaddy checked his sides to be sure nobody was watching before he stole uncle Leo’s pebble tank containing three-year’s worth of mining and dumped them into his own empty one.

  <~~O~~>

  Chains attached to the mountain breaks by time for suffocation.

  Scrapes off the meager flesh to feed the shoals of the hungry.

  The Master leers at his slaves dying by the foot of the cliffs and carves the sign of wealth on the crag of despair…

  The Last Straw

  —Hal Duncan

  Report of Agent Jack Flash

  I land on the red tarmac of George Square, roll, and come up on one knee, arms out for balance, with a natty Kung Fu flourish of greatcoat, as my skybike spins on through a flap frenzy of scattering pigeons, clips the stone pillar of the Cenotaph, and crashes through the front doors of the City Chambers, blowing wood and glass and blackshirt guards out in a fireball glowing green and brilliant blue with all the super-saturated orgone-vapours of a Triumph V2’s fully jizzed-up ray-tanks. Bollocks, I think. I really liked that bike. But, fuck, thing is, I had a little itchy trigger-finger issue with the missile I was meant to use just as I passed ov
er Pitt Street Police HQ and left myself without too many options. Sometimes you have to make a sacrifice, I know, but it’s still hard. I really liked that bike.

  I flick the roach of my Afghan Black away, and stand to scope my circle of not-so-admirers. Fucking pipers.

  <~~O~~>

  After twenty feet or so of space cleared in awe of my lithe and limber landing, most of the square is filled with tourists, but I’ve landed smack dab in the middle of the Big Show’s backstage, so to speak. The inner circle of my own personal mosh-pit is lined by several hundred pipers, drummers and assorted instrumentalists from all corners of the Empire—but all of them white as Widdemore, of course—dolled-up in every colour of kilt and tunic, toppered with busbies, pith helmets and turban-like towers adorned with peacock feathers, ostrich plumes or sundry silliness. It’s Albion’s soldier sons come home for the Umpteenth Annual International “How Fucking Loud And Annoying Can These Bastard Bagpipes Drone?” Competition, and I can feel my hardcore hackles a-rising. The bagpipes are a weapon of war, baby; Christ, I never understood why the spooks of Guantanamo use Death Metal for torture when sixteen seconds of the 14th Royal Highland Falangists would have me naming every pet pooch in my family history as an Al Quaeda top dog.

  So I’m glad I’ve already got my Curzon-Youngblood Mark I chi-pistol in my hand, because if any of these biscuit-tin kaffer-killers so much as lets a breath out in the direction of a chanter he’s getting a discharge of the most dishonourable kind, I tell you. I click the juice on full to let them know that I mean business. No mistaking that salty-ozone scent-and-tingle of orgone energy that fills the air. Sex pistols, honeybuns. Can’t beat them.

  “Easy, tigers,” I say. “You know how fast I am. As fast as you can say—”

  <~~O~~>

  “Jack Flash!” shouts the brightest spark among them, and I spin, brighten him a tad more with a chi-blast in his sporran. “First prize, beefcake. Ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling. And your next question, for the cuddly toy, is: how the fuck do I get out of this?”

  No answer. Shit.

  I can see over the heads of fleeing tourists that militiamen are pouring in from the side-streets round George Square. The thopters that nearly brought me down over the M8 are now flitting like bats overhead. And it’s only the mob of bandsmen that are blocking the blackshirts from a clear shot at Imperial Albion’s Public Enemy Number Nothing, Jack Flash, terror of the tartan traitors, scourge of the Scottish fucking Fascists.