by Ely, Jo;
“One, two, three and wake, Antek.” Says the first lab technician.
And turning toward the second lab technician, “Fellow talks in his sleep.”
The two lab technicians eye each other.
“Will they keep him?”
“They’ll put him in the cells. They’ll reboot him.”
–––––
It’s quiet for a long time in the cell after the guard has gone. Antek’s hand reaches for his chin. And then falls away, quivering.
Something is moving underneath Antek’s blanket, there’s a scratching, subtle but relentless tugging at the toe of his boot. It’s an ominously hunched shape, he sees it moving to and fro by the crack of light under the door, from the unshaded lightbulb in the corridor outside. A gnawing sound, he kicks out at it sharply. It’s a shock, feeling its small body against his boot. It bares its teeth, scowls and scatters. Back out into the light.
Antek hears a tin cup clattering, rolling. The guard outside, cursing in a broadside, kicks Antek’s door. Just as if it was Antek had sent the scurvet to knock over his stool.
Scurvets were one of the general’s early experiments in tame and wild creatures, back when the general was a lowly lab assistant. Even Antek has heard the story about the scurvet, although he’s never clapped eyes on the creature before now. They say that the scurvet gave the general his ideas for Bavarnica.
“Quiet.” The guard outside Antek’s door says. “Quiet down in there.”
Tomax came to Antek in a dream that night, the field behind the village gem mines. The trees were burning, smoke rolling up from them in swathes. The wind just seemed to curl the smoke back on itself, so that it fell in strange, unnatural folds, and Antek wakes with a choking feeling.
Long gasp for air. Swallows painfully. He closes his eyes. In the moment before he wakes, believes a cat is winding slowly round his leg. There’s a whirring sound, and when he opens his eyes it’s just a grey scurvet. This one seems tame. Tamer than the last one. Nice and Nasty he decides on the spot to call the two. He hears Nasty scatter in the corridor outside, hiss.
Antek’s heart beat gently thrums against his rib cage.
Antek notices that he has a cellmate, an organic. A slumped shape in the cell’s darkest corner. The cellmate’s trousers are ripped and bloodied but they’re officer’s trousers. Bare feet, small burn marks. The man’s floored and breathing strangely. He looks briefly at Antek. And then recognising that his cellmate is an Egg Boy, looks away.
Antek guesses that the officer would rather not share a cell with an Egg Boy. A thing that isn’t human.
Antek falls asleep again, waking in fits and starts all night long, but the dream he’s had these past weeks, the dream still finds Antek. Even here. Tomax again. Tomax is running from the Egg Men.
It takes Antek a while, in the dream, to realise that he’s one of them, the Egg Men, and that Tomax is also running from him. Just a beat ahead of him, and at first Tomax sees only Antek and he is laughing, turning toward Antek the way he used to turn toward Antek. And Tomax’s smile. The one that’d make Antek feel weak suddenly. Weak on guard duty. Which has to be a feeling that’s against regulations. Antek would look down or away. But when he’d look up again, Tomax would always still be looking back. And Tomax’s smile then, like slow cloudburst. Soft rain.
Tribes can’t mix.
That’s the first and most important of the general’s rules.
The running dream has lasted several weeks; it is never exactly the same dream twice but one thing never changes. The ending. Tomax eyes shift up, he sees something coming behind and then above Antek. Tomax’s smile slides slowly off his face, his eyes become wide and amazed. And then blank with horror. Antek sees a shadow move across the left side of Tomax’s face and then the dream ends. Blink, blink.
Antek wakes to his cold cell.
Scattering sound in the corridor outside. A squeal then nothing.
Antek guesses correctly that Nasty killed Nice.
Hears the sound of the small furry body, dragged unresisting along the cold tiles by two perhaps three sets of sharp jaws, scuttle of several clawed feet. Antek reflects that it might have been a different story if the prisoners had only had a few crumbs to keep the Nice population of scurvet going. They wouldn’t have gotten so outnumbered in here. They would not have become food.
Antek stretches his arm out softly in the dark. Feels the cold cell floor, damp underneath his left hand, his fingers splaying. Icy floor.
Boots under the door.
It’s time for Antek to be stained again. He’ll be rebooted after. He feels the nick in his chin. Remember, remember Tomax.
The stain is in fact only a side effect of the tweaks the lab technicians regularly make to the Egg Boys’ DNA. But the stain also signifies how far an Egg Boy is along to becoming pure Egg Man.
Antek knows he’ll get more Egg Man and less Antek every time he comes out of the lab. That his stain will spread out until it covers most of his body.
There is no point resisting.
–––––
When Antek’s mind collapsed toward the end of the third month in the cell, something came to Antek. The past in a tilting, skewed light, and he saw something that he’d missed. And then that thin light falling on a dark scene, the streaming damp jail wall felt to him like the insides of a stomach or a soul.
The floor is damp under Antek’s hand. There’s a crack in the ceiling. Water running in a long stream down the wall. Antek puts his mouth up to the filthy wall, he takes a deep drink of the cool, mottled water.
There is a long crack along the cell wall. A seam that spills a gut of bricks in the middle. Antek kicks it with his foot. He has the sudden feeling that the cell itself could clatter down on his head at any moment. One swift kick to the cell door, or one too many, and the whole room would shake and split.
There are branches running out from the crack in the middle of the wall, tendrils fingering all the corners. New seams criss and cross the ceiling. Was there a bomb above ground? It seems to Antek to be unlikely that the barracks gaol would be attacked.
An accident then. That last bomb. Maybe. Antek tries to put it out of his mind. He’s trained himself since birth to put away these kinds of questions. To not accidentally show by some slow gaze, or brief shrewd glance, the little he knows, or has thought to ask himself.
He puts a hand out. Feels the dark, wet wall behind him. It’s covered with a sheen of something. The damp gently tugs at his hair, pulls him stickily into it.
There’s a long, deep crack in the ceiling over his head.
His officer cellmate has started whimpering in his sleep. Thrashes and flails, dreaming. And then something scurrying across the floor. A yellow scurvet dips under the door and out into the light outside the cell. Antek raises his left hand to his chin, without realising that he does so. He feels the small groove there.
Antek thinks he remembers sunshine. The old sun. It’s sudden. The crack of light under the door must have triggered memory. Tomax was standing with his tin cup. Standing at the mouth of the gem mine. The light was dappling Tomax’s skin then he’d shielded his eyes. Squinted up at Antek from under the shade of his hand. The sun downed softly in an arc over Tomax’s head. But of course it couldn’t have been like that, Antek thinks. With the sun.
And then Antek’s mind goes on without him, stirred and exhausted. He should never have smiled back at the edge farmer, Tomax.
The tribes can’t mix.
Antek’s gently butting at the cold stone wall ‘til he believes he seeps into it.
His mind is spreading into the cold damp stones of his cell.
When Antek wakes again there is a glistening seam of water, running fast down the wall. He guesses there’s a split pipe above him. Antek wonders if his cell will fill up like a rain barrel, drown him at the top.
He looks down.
He notices that his cellmate’s trembling. Antek reaches out a hand to rearrange the officer’s
blanket. He thinks for a moment. Then he gives the man his own.
Antek leans into the black cell wall. He feels disoriented.
He doesn’t know what he is, what or who. For one long moment he’s not anything at all.
It has taken less than three months in the dark to unravel Antek.
He draws his arm across his forehead, wiping away the seam of sweat and filth gathered in his eyebrows. He sees the guard’s boots under the door again. And then he hears voices.
“Is he fully erased?” First guard.
“Yes.” Says the second guard. “They did three reboots in a row. The Egg Boy is submissive now.”
“Are you sure?”
Small pause. “Aye. They … We think we can control him.”
Antek hears the sound of the door being unlocked. He’s pulled up to his feet.
–––––
The air is fetid in the stairwell. Antek feels the proximity of bodies in the cells beneath him, smell comes up through the steel grating under his feet. Somewhere in the dark, faces softly rise to gaze at his boot-soles. Blink, blink, as the light filters in. Whispers, soft sliding sounds. Then a long hiss, sshhhhhh. Antek doesn’t look down. The shuffling has the quality of bodies densely packed. Small sounds of chain-metal on damp stone tile. Then the scrape and clink as one prisoner strains against his portion of chain. Sound of gentle groans. And a hissed reproach, coming up through the grating.
He knows the prisoners will assume he had bought his freedom by naming names.
For a long strange moment, Antek can’t recall if he did.
He looks down at his hands.
Bound in a web of strong white tape.
The guard on Antek’s left side lifts a knife and unwraps him. “You is trussed up like a critter on the general’s feast table, Antek.” Slow look. Antek looks away from him. Blinks.
There’s a soft breeze from outside running down Antek’s face. Cools the dirt-sores a little. Back of his neck, where the iron collar once bit home and doesn’t now.
There are two doors. Square of light around the exit, on Antek’s right side.
Antek thinks how it would be to make it to the top of the staircase, half turn. Put his hand on the latch, just once. Feel the warm, rusting metal. He cannot imagine getting any further than that, but he has a sudden longing to hold on to the handle. To feel the wind blowing hot and sharp through the key-hole, the high pitched whistle of it round the hinges. Sunlight under the door.
A hot pulse of air rattling the door in its hinges, makes the guard on Antek’s left side flinch and half raise his baton. Antek flicks his eyes toward him and then back to the door. Blank-eyed prisoner stare. ‘Six steps between here and the exit.’ Antek thinks. ‘Just three bounds.’ It might as well be a hundred. Antek glimpses the possibilities of making a bolt for freedom, then rejects them, one by one. Freezes there by the bottom step. “Go.” The guard on Antek’s left side. Soft hiss. Then a gentle push. “Come on, Antek. Go on home.”
Shove from the right.
It takes Antek a moment to understand the words. Then for his feet to reconnect with his mind. An upside whack to the head from the first guard, right side. Antek can’t tell if the guard used his baton or his fist. Pain is running down Antek’s right ear. He’s unsteady on his feet.
The world moves soundless, strange around him.
Blink and blink.
Antek raises his shoulder. He presses it against the hurt ear. The sound comes back slowly.
“Go.” The second guard says. Gripping Antek’s right elbow. Holds him up. Another impatient shove from his right side. And the voice on his left. Low voice. “Before they change their minds again, Antek.”
Antek puts his foot on the first stair, pauses. He doesn’t know why. In a bit realises that he’s waiting to be stopped. Antek glances at the white-lit corridor behind him. He’s left black boot tracks down the tiles, like a child’s scribble.
They had dragged him from the cell to the stairwell. Scrabbling, sliding feet and snaking long legs. He’d hit his knees in the ruts and cracks in the tiles all the way up to this spot. Convinced he was going to his death. Panicked then, in spite of himself. And then hauled to his feet by his bindings. He was pulled around like a puppet on a string, and when he was let go, teetered. Silence.
And then clanking sounds again from the cell beneath his feet. If it’s a protest then it’s a tired one, he thinks. Whispering seems to run up and down the wall. ‘Air vent?’ Antek calculates.
In the early days of the general’s crackdowns the prisoners had used the air vents between the cells to communicate. But it only served to inform the prison guards in the end. This cell will learn that too, soon enough, he thinks, and Antek lets his eyes roll left to check for the vent-slats in the wall. It’s an old habit. Antek has been checking for vents and cracks in things ever since he was hatched. Anything that might double as an exit, or a hiding place. It’s been a useful trick, anywhere but in here.
Two doors. One dark, leading back into the system, into the tunnels of underground cells, and the second door with golden sun-lit hinges. That one leads out. If this is a test then he’s failed it already. He’ll take the brightly framed door. If the guards even let him get there.
The wind must have died down because the door leading outside has stopped rattling its loose metal hinges. It seems to Antek as though everything waits for him now. For his next decision. Antek slowly lifts up his arm. Touches the scar on his chin. Tries to remember who he made the nick in his chin for. Who it was that he was trying so hard to remember. Nothing comes back to him.
BLOOD
THERE IS A DRONING sound, a long hum and it stops above Tomax. And then it feels to Tomax like he’s dreaming. The window pane splits, from the bottom left of his mother’s house, cloud spirals like a huge finger pointing, tracing an invisible seam upwards. Its fingers darkly stretching out then splaying. The glass in the windows expands, bricks bubbling or they seem to and then rocks flip up and the earth under the house rises, churning and heaves over. The body of the house pulsing and wrestling with the air a moment.
Everything falls then.
And there is sound, Tomax thinks. His ear drums split and bleed.
And then there is no sound.
For a moment Tomax thinks he’s running. Only his feet don’t touch ground. And then blown down, like that. And now raining rocks. Face against earth. He tries to raise his hands up toward his head on an instinct to protect his face, his skull, but his arms seem pinned down somehow. Tomax is curled over on the ground, flying glass shards, then dust heaves across him. Like a sand dune of dust.
His mind is washing in and out of sense.
Rocks don’t rain, Tomax thinks. Rocks don’t rain.
It feels to him as though the world moves slow and pained.
A little sound trickles back, on one side only.
Clattering of rubble. For a moment Tomax thinks that it’s over.
There’s a deep crump in the earth when the second drone hits, it’s like rugs pulled out from under giants, and they fall. Elbows hit the earth first. Huge elbows then knees. The cracks are spreading out beneath him. Smaller seams grow out of the cracks and the whole split widens. It’s like falling into a huge opening mouth in the ground.
Tomax falls in slow jolts and then churning up in one motion, like the earth underneath him is ploughed. Tomax has slipped into the bowels of his own house. The body of the house is lying over his head.
It occurs to Tomax this trap is his tomb, and he’s fighting the sides of the tomb now, fighting for air and light, fighting for the next breath, but sand pours in and stones at all the points where Tomax pushes against the rubble. It gets worse, until his body lies immobilised in dust, sand, rubble. Tomax stops moving.
And now his right foot twitching and loosens something, sand makes a small wave from it, heaves up toward Tomax’s neck, throwing his jaw up and back, sharp and hard. There’s a surge of shrapnel sized rubble piling up against Toma
x’s chin, forcing his head up and back agonisingly.
Cracking sound, soft and sickening, running down Tomax’s left ear.
He feels his neck strain with the tension.
He’s not thinking anything at all for one long moment.
And then Time, he thinks. I needed more time. Knowing what’s above him will move again in a moment. Swivels his eyes painfully up and left. There’s a beam, saved his life.
But for how long? He cannot see but he can hear the wood tremble, strain. The weight above the beam moves. Something or someone is trapped over Tomax.
The edge farm boy closes his eyes.
When he opens them there’s a crack in the rocks near his face. A thin seam of light filtering in through it. Dust settles slowly out there and in a bit Tomax can see bent human shapes, and they’re moving. Something or someone out there. Hoving in and out of view. Whatever it was vanishes. And now there’s only steaming rubble. Light glancing off the tin roofs on the ground.
Tomax tries to stay calm. He tries to gather his thoughts. The body above him alternates between struggle and exhausted pause and there is a thick pain in Tomax’s neck. Blood welling in a warm pool at his left ear. He can’t tell if it’s from him or from above.
Some noise is trickling back, from his left ear. Then human sounds, he thinks, only not like human sounds.
Groans and a low whirring whine.
The living thing just above him is suffering. Whatever it is, it’s in pain, rocking and panicking.
The sound pulls at Tomax. And then stops, as though the creature senses him too. Small thumps of its tail. Tomax’s mind is washing in and out of sense. In a little while he understands it’s next door’s dog. It often comes to his back door for scraps, it must have been caught in the blast. As though the dog knows it’s Tomax, down there, struggles again. More dust and rubble falling on to Tomax, more sand flooding in.
