Rough Passages: The Collected Stories

by K. M. Herkes

  She handed over the bowls. The nutrient paste tasted horrible, but Kris felt better when it was inside her instead of the bowls. After the meal, she was left alone in the room again, alone in her big, white, soft bed with nothing but fluffy white pillows and her thoughts for company. It was not a fun party.

  Someone knocked at the door, jolting her awake from a nightmare of flame and smoke. She blinked away tears, smoothed a hand over her scalp, and touched a half-inch of soft new hair. She touched her face next, and was pleased with the result. She was a monster, but she had eyebrows.

  Sergeant Coby stopped at the foot of the bed and frowned at her. He was feeling moody judging by his hardened skin, and his voice was hard too. “Good job. That’s what I’m s’posed to say, but what I want to say, is, what the fuck were you thinking? I had it under control until you jumped in.”

  Kris let the anger roll right off her, because none of the words made much sense. “I get that you’re mad I acted without orders,” she said, “but for the rest of it, you’re going to have to use real small words. I’m dead stupid today.”

  “You were nearly dead-dead.” Coby’s shoulders drooped, and he looked around the room. There were no Tee-safe chairs, so he put his back to the wall and put his hands in his pockets. “This stays off the record, Stan. Got it? Just you and me and the truth.”

  She nodded. Confusion bubbled higher, followed by fear, and she rode out a swooping tingle of rampage that channeled itself into healing.

  Coby said quietly, “I was gonna do what you did—take her out to save the rest—but the exit team leader kept asking me questions, and you snuck in behind my back. You were smarter, too. I never would’ve scooped up Evans. That was brilliant.”

  Kris shook her head. The odd conversation with the exit ‘porters made more sense when she added Sergeant Coby’s confession to the timeline, but the rest was still baffling. “You would’ve gone up without cover? Why would you do that?”

  Teleported into near-vacuum without any protection, Grace would have been dead in moments, but Coby would have died too. Not even a T1 like Amy could survive for more than a few minutes in space. Coby was only a T5 and on the fragile side of that, due to the Y variation that suppressed the physical manifestations. Kris had taken a calculated risk. Coby would’ve been committing suicide.

  The sergeant slouched and glared. Kris dared to glare back. She hadn’t asked him to come here and be confusing.

  He swallowed before speaking. “I turn twenty-three next week.”

  Now she was totally lost. “So what?”

  “I’m early-onset, Stan. The world record for early-onset longevity is age twenty-three years, four months, two days.”

  “Oh.” Kris didn’t know what else to say. She’d forgotten about the dark side of Coby being so young and already past rollover. It was one of those things no one talked about, and that made it easy to forget. She’d never thought about what a burden that knowledge must be to bear in silence. She wouldn’t forget again.

  Coby laughed. “Yeah, oh. I’m a dead man walking. I have been for months now. I figured, of all of us there I had the least to lose, and so I thought, well, fuck it. Why not? But then you went. You. You have children, Stan. Did you think of them?”

  He sounded angry again, but it wasn’t frightening angry. It was the kind of angry that made Kris want to pat him on the head and tell him how sweet he was, which would probably get her killed or court-martialed. She pursed her lips. “What I thought was that everybody there had family, Sergeant Jackass. Even you.”

  Coby bent his knees and slid to the floor, looking defeated. “Everyone kept patting me on the back, congratulating me on my balls for ordering you up like that—and I couldn’t explain that you’d been an insubordinate bitch, not when it saved so many people. When the air crew found your pulse—”

  He stopped and swallowed again. “When you stabilized and kicked into healing mode, all I could think was, Thank God, LT won’t have to write notification letters. Thank God I won’t have to help deliver them and tell lies to your children. I still haven’t written up a report. Cap’s ready to ream me a new one.”

  “I’m glad I’m awake to talk sense to you, then,” Kris said. “Take the credit. You deserve it. You trained me. A commendation won’t get me through my hitch and home to my kids any faster. If you want to haggle about it, then take me back into your squad when you get my request. That’s the price of my silence.”

  The sound Coby made teetered on the balance point between a sigh and a laugh. “Okay, then,” he said, and shoved himself upright again. The wall crunched behind him. “Okay. We’re good?”

  “We’re good.” Kris said. A yawn came up from nowhere, and three more followed before she got the reflex under control.

  Coby waved off her attempted apology. “You’re in sick bay. Get back to resting and healing. I’ll have Goodie bring by some transfer paperwork tomorrow.”

  Kris nestled deeper into the big white pillows and yawned again. “Excellent,” she said. “When she gets here we can start planning your birthday party.”

  Roundup

  The proud ones died first. They died in the exam rooms, they died on the train platform behind the intake offices, and they died standing in the hot sun as they waited for a ride to oblivion. They refused to disrobe, defied the orders of their uniformed kidnappers, and demanded water and shade. Pride was a sin, and they paid for their transgressions with their lives.

  Ruth remembered her Scripture in time to save her life. Patience is better than pride, the Bible taught. When the government thugs came for her with their legal papers, their uniforms, and their red, sweaty faces, she bowed her head and opened the door. While the thugs drank sweet iced tea and mocked her daughter’s crooked shelves and small treasures, Ruth packed the one bag the law allowed her to bring, and then she hugged her grandchildren and kissed her daughter’s salt-wet cheek.

  She would not be provoked in spirit even when the thugs grew bored with the farewells. They pulled her from her family and called her old nigger bitch in front of her grandchildren, but she lowered her eyes and swallowed pride. Humility was a frail shield, but it was all she had. She consoled herself with the hidden truth. She might be an old bitch, but that made her a cunning old dog who could learn new tricks. Her time would come. There was a time for everything, under the sun.

  The thugs brought her to the government building, where she was inspected by men who looked at computer screens more than her naked form. She was humble, they were indifferent, and they passed her back to the thugs with stamps and papers that were promptly taken away, as her bag had been.

  The rules of this new existence seemed simple enough, and not much different than the ones that had governed her old life. Never expect help, never challenge authority, never show weakness, never rebel. Disrespect was death. Weakness was death. The silent and the strong survived.

  She wanted to survive. She had been patient all her life, and her time would come soon. The official diagnosis only gave numbers and labels to what anyone with eyes could see; even as Ruth’s womb had shriveled and her hair turned gray, God had touched her body with strange new blessings.

  Old nigger bitch, the thugs called her, but her skin was whiter than theirs now. She was changing, and that was what they feared most. Weeks past, her wrinkled skin had begun to peel like the bark of a sycamore tree, leaving pale tender flesh exposed. Silence would be easy now. The shifts within her body had stolen the voice she once raised in joy with the church choir every Sunday.

  She would have other powers to replace the lost skill, if she completed this metamorphosis that came to the old and killed the proud. Rollover, the thugs and bureaucrats called it, like a command to a pet, or a sleepy stretch in bed, but it fell where it pleased, and it was not restful. No one understood why or how it happened, but everyone knew one thing: some of those God touched were given talents beyond human understanding.

  This mystery was dividing the world the same way every ot
her transformation in history had split it: into the wanted and the unwanted; the haves and the have-nots; the privileged and the oppressed. Ruth would be sequestered while she changed because that was the law for those who could make no other arrangements. The poor and unwanted were exiled to places where the system could do its best to destroy them, out of sight, out of mind.

  Power in the hands of the powerless threatened the status quo, and authority fought against disruption. Legislators had passed laws to keep the downtrodden from profiting from new abilities, police enforced laws that pulled lives and families apart, and judges gave the scraps to their friends and followers. It wasn’t the way the laws were supposed to work, but they twisted in the hands of the unscrupulous and the greedy. Life was not fair. Evil was real.

  Ruth had been praying for deliverance from evil all her life. That would change, if she lived, and so she prayed for time and patience. She would deliver herself, if she survived this test.

  She wasn’t the weirdest of the lost souls reaped together by government hands on that day. The doctors and the bookkeepers called the group a cohort, as if they were ancient Roman soldiers going off to war, not prisoners torn unwilling from homes and family. Ruth’s crop started off fifty strong, at the intake office. By the time the train arrived, after the long hours spent standing in a line, bags at their feet–silent, hungry, thirsty–their count stood at forty-four.

  If they had been Roman troops, harshly punished for failure, they would have lost fewer.

  One man arrived with stubby wings springing bloody from his shoulders, raw and half-formed. He raised his voice to a doctor, and the thugs broke him into pieces in front of the rest. One woman could not walk without the ground turning hot and fluid beneath her feet. If she had been patient, she might have raised a volcano from the sea in time, but she begged, please help, when she slipped and slid on the train platform. The guards shot her in the face and flamed her body to ash there in the sunshine. Two more of the prideful complained of the heat and were shot where they stood. One woman simply evaporated, to the consternation of her neighbors. She might have become a hurricane wind, if she had held herself together a little longer, but she had looked around with despair in her eyes and let it destroy her.

  Ruth could feel power moving in her bones like seeds moving under dark soil. She would wait. Her time would come. When the door to the boxcar shut behind the last of the intake cohort, she made her way to the corner by the water barrel, and then she sat down and prayed.

  The weak ones died next. The air in the train car was thick and rank, and the noise of the rails came through a splintered wood floor that shook underfoot. Vicious flies bit and stung every bit of skin they could find reach, and the doors never opened, when the train stopped once, and then again. They shared the water, equal lots to all, dignified and civilized to the end, but the water did not last. The cold night seeped in, the motion rattled their teeth in their heads, and when the sun rose again, the metal walls grew hot enough to blister skin.

  The headcount of the living, when the doors finally opened to daylight again, fell to thirty-eight.

  More died on the long hike from the train through sharp grasses and dunes to the seashore. Their guards rode on little cars with wide tires and engines that buzzed like the flies, and those who fell behind, stayed behind, ashes smoking in the sand. At the end of the trail they came to a pier that jutted far into the water, well beyond the lapping waves. The long tongue of fiberglass and metal aimed its impudent length at the black line of an island on the horizon, and two more thugs scuffed back and forth along its sandy surface. These two were matched like Adam and Eve, man and woman dressed alike in gray short sleeves and darker trousers.

  Swim for it, the thugs said, and laughed when most of their victims sat down on the beach and waited to die. Ruth dropped her bag and walked to the water’s edge. The odors of rotted fish and living ocean rose to her nostrils, and the gentle surf filled her ears with a murmuring song of yielding strength and swelling power.

  “Don’t be damned fools,” said one of the guards from the pier, but he was not speaking to Ruth. He said to the escorts, “Haven’t you done enough damage already? Nobody needs the hassle of an investigation on top of the loss reports.”

  “Sit and rest,” he said to the cohort. “The boat is coming. Sit and wait. Don’t worry. The worst is almost over. Everything will be better once you get to the camp. Hold on. We’ve radioed for transport.”

  Was it sympathy in his voice? Pity? Ruth wanted no part of the man’s emotion, whatever it was. She wanted no part of this thug or his precious system, that might work for people like him but took everything from people like her. She wanted power and freedom, so she smiled and nodded, and she bided her time in silence.

  No one died, while they waited to be carried over the water to exile. They were given water and food from locked boxes, and they were told to sit, and rest, and walk as they wished. Interns, the pier guards called them, assigning them the status of innocent youngsters apprenticed to a trade, and the travel escorts were ordered to set up canopies for shade.

  The thugs from the escort pulled plastic sheets and supports from a shed nestled into the dunes and built a shelter. They grumbled, and they kicked sand, but they followed their orders. Ruth chewed on bitter insight along with the food, and swallowed it down with cool water.

  This new man and woman, they were as dangerous in their own way as the others. Kindness could be as effective a weapon as pain. More so, when relief was offered in opposition to abuse. Comfort and flattery could seduce even the strong into compliance. Charity was sweet bait around a poisonous core.

  Ruth ate and drank and smothered gratitude in its cradle. She was neither an intern, nor a soldier, and she would not be tempted into forgetting herself. She was one of God’s fools, culled from the aging and the experienced to demonstrate His glory to His people. She deserved more than shade and sandwiches, and she needed no one’s pity. She would not be so easily seduced into befriending the enemy.

  Two boats came over the sea to the pier. They were sleek and deadly, with dark metal cannons on front and back. Their high cabins bristled with antennae, and windows gleamed bright. A whole new cadre of guards stood along the deck rails. Dark faces as well as pale ones regarded the prisoners with hard eyes and tight mouths.

  Ruth’s companions in exile were as varied in race as they were in their strangeness, but until now, their tormentors had been uniformly white as they were uniformly dressed in gray. That was the way of the world. This new development disturbed her like nothing else she had yet seen. She would have prayed to be spared the knowledge that the oppressed could embrace hatred, but she was too tired to even pray now.

  The boat crew loaded the cohort aboard and sat them on the deck in the blazing sun. Only crew allowed below, the new guards said, and the apologies in their voices rang out like a discordant chiming of bells. There were rules, and devotion to principle left no room for humanity. No matter their sex, their race, their past, they were thugs first, humans last. Ruth ignored their guilt and watched the pier guards and the original escort recede across foam-flecked waves.

  Sea spray tickled her face, and the hum of the engine lulled her into a doze as one shore fell behind and the other grew in front. Her belly was full, and the sun was warm but no longer a searing force. Power pumped through her veins, and moved inside her flesh much the same way that her infant daughters had kicked long ago. A sense of serenity fell over her, and she drifted on the waves of life and growth.

  She came back to herself when someone jostled her elbow. The woman to her right tipped herself back, over the rails and into the sea. She smiled as she went down, and she sank fast, but not fast enough.

  The thugs manning the back of the boat stood and shouted, the front settled with a hiss of foam as the driver slowed down, and the guns coughed.

  The ocean plumed up in huge gouts and fell in a curtain of cool spray. Fish rose in the boat’s wake, bellies and bodies d
istorted, like miniature replicas of the dead woman’s rounded form. The thugs brought her into the boat with gaffs, hooking her flesh with the sharp, merciless points, and they carried her body below decks in silence. The engines roared again, and the boat moved on.

  If only the woman had been patient a little longer, Ruth thought again, and she let herself mourn, because there was a time for that, too.

  Soon, there would be a time to learn the names of the dead and hear them sung to the heavens. The time would come when she would reap what had been sowed in her heart this day.

  Three months into a life bounded by bells and blared shouts, painted lines and painful lessons in failure to conform, Ruth stood at her bunk and prepared for inspection. Her bare wet skin ached from the ragged scrub brush, and the high-pressure shower had left new bruises across her shoulder. Her scalp itched, and her hair, brittle from harsh soaps, had split and crumbled away. She was as bald as a stone now, but for a thin patchy fuzz that refused to surrender. She smoothed clean sheets onto the thin mattress that smelled of disinfectant, sweat and pain, folded her clean clothes atop them, and knelt naked beside the bed.

  This was her favorite time of day, this quiet pause between the back-to-bunks bell and call for the morning’s first headcount. Silence ruled the dorm by mutual agreement during this short respite. Ruth used the precious moments to say her silent prayers and nurture a little peace within her soul.

  The road to hell was paved with bunk inspections, physical examinations, and countless other daily indignities. The island internment camp was staffed by people so committed to their cause that they were blind to their sins. The degradation they inflicted was impersonal, born from devotion to routine rather than malice. The humiliations were a matter of regulation, not evil intent. The guards did not mean to be cruel. They did not even mean to be guards. They called themselves counselors.

  They were all hateful, in a million ways they never saw, because they meant well. They were rude and brusque, not vindictive, but they valued efficiency above all else and efficiency was a cruel taskmaster.