At five foot four inches in height, Spenser was a relatively short man, but his booming voice more than made up for his size in terms of his abilities to intimidate his underlings. His musical Southern drawl could shift into a raging yell at a moment’s notice, and made him an expert at manipulating people with a sense of fear or anxiety about their job. His latest victim was Guzman, the last of the five men who had volunteered to help set up the filming equipment. Guzman had muscular arms, but his beer gut and pudgy round face betrayed his overall lack of athleticism to Klein. “C’mon man, I need that money!” Guzman pleaded. “You have no idea how hard it is to get decent pay out here, this place is a penal colony! Cashman pays us the lowest amount the corporation legally allows. You said we’d get that extra money if we volunteered for you…”
“First of all, my name is not ‘man’. It’s ‘Spenser.’ Secondly, your boss, Cashman, told me I could pay any volunteer that I took from his men ‘at my satisfaction,’ meaning that I only have to pay you if I’m satisfied with your performance-and I’m certainly not satisfied with your performance after you sneezed all over that precious lens. Thirdly, I…”
“Thirdly, you’re a smug little shit and I’m fucking sick of listening to you. Want me to fix that lens for you? Here you go, princess,” Klein said and grabbed the camera lens, wiping Guzman’s snot off it with his sleeve. Outraged, Spenser yelled back at Klein, “What the hell’s got into you, talking to me like that? I’ll take away every red cent from your paycheck for this job!” Klein responded, a knowing smile on his face, “You were never going to pay me anyway. I never ‘volunteered’ for this ‘job,’ Cashman forced me to do it. You honestly think Cashman would tell you to pay me when you don’t have to? He hates me worse than anybody else on Domremy.”
Klein’s forceful response and smiling face fanned the flames of Spenser’s rage. “I can make you lose more than a paycheck. I can make you lose your job! I’ll get you busted down so far you’ll be lucky if you can get a job as a janitor in this town!”
Klein was still smiling as he responded to Spenser, “Sure you will, princess. I’m sure Cashman will be chomping at the bit to fire his one mankiller, and go through another waiting period, maybe a couple of weeks if he’s lucky, maybe a couple of months if he’s unlucky, in the hope that he can get another mankiller who’s stable enough not to start murdering townsfolk in their sleep. And I’m sure your bosses will be happy that most of the first season of whatever the hell kind of program you’re trying to film won’t have a ‘real’ mankiller, just whichever member of Cashman’s crew is unlucky enough not to carry a Kikkonnen anymore and try to pull off nearly impossible shots that they’re not trained for. Great plan you got there.”
Shocked at the prospect of a foe he couldn’t threaten, fire, or reassign, Spenser could only sputter out a feeble attempt at intimidating Klein into obedience. “I’ll file this in my report to Cashman! You haven’t heard the end of this!” Spenser looked down at his watch and noticed that only five minutes remained of the time Cashman had allotted him to use his volunteers. Embarrassed by Klein’s insubordination, he decided to end the work session now and pretend the incident with Guzman -- and Klein -- never happened. “All volunteers did a great job today, so I’ll let everybody out 5 minutes early. Anyone who volunteered can pick up their paycheck from this job in a week from Cashman. See y’all tomorrow!” I might hear the end of this sooner than you think, Klein thought as he walked away. But if I do, it’ll be from Cashman, not from a blustering blowhard like you.
Guzman caught up with Klein as he was walking back to the bar. “Uh, Klein…thanks for saving my ass back there, man. I would’ve lost all the money I would’ve gotten from this job if you hadn’t done that.”
“No problem,” Klein replied. “Princess there was giving me a giant goddamn headache with all his whining. I was waiting for a chance to shut him up.” That, and the small fact that I felt like my leg muscle was about to give out, but I’m not to tell newbie here which parts of my body are injured, he thought.
“You’d better not be callin’ him ‘Princess’ anymore, man. He might try to get revenge somehow, or get you fired or somethin’,” Guzman told Klein.
“What, by complaining to Cashman? You must not know much about us mankillers, Guzman. It takes a special kind of person to shoot dead an unarmed man who’s done nothing against you, when the time calls for it. People, especially the kind of people in this town, may hate us, but they know they still need us, and they can’t replace us easily. Being a mankiller is the best kind of job security you can get on Domremy.”
“Um…Klein?”
“Yeah, you got another question?”
“That thing you told Spenser about mankillers murdering people in their sleep…you just made that up ‘cause he was an Earther and he’d believe anything, right?”
Klein shook his head. “Absolutely not. That mankiller who murdered people in his sleep was Billy “Sin” Fredericksen, the mankiller here before me.”
Klein watched as Guzman stood wavering, fear clashing with gratitude towards the man who had saved him. After an awkward pause, Guzman thrust out his hand for Klein to shake. “I won’t forget what you did for me, man,” Guzman said. “Wanna go get some drinks at the bar?” Klein smiled at him and said, “Sure. I’ll tell you more about the history of Site 89 and what you have to do to watch your ass around here. It can get pretty complicated…”
Klein had drunk a couple of beers -- just enough to help dull the pain from the ache in his leg -- and had gone up to his room. When he opened the door, he found his new Forlani girlfriend, Ixtara, waiting for him. Ixtara had been with him only a brief time, and Klein didn’t know much about her character, but he thought she had much less ambition than Ragatti did. Ragatti used to chatter about her dreams of going to the Forlani equivalent of medical school. Ixtara talked about her family life long ago or asked about Klein’s background or what Earth was like, only giving brief responses whenever Klein asked her a more current question. She was obedient to Klein and didn’t try to pry for sensitive information, but Klein found the extent of how reserved she was disconcerting. “Ixtara, could you put that leg brace on me? This leg’s been bothering me today, and I’ll need to work tomorrow, so the brace will help keep it from getting injured.”
“Oh, really? How did it get injured? Is there anything else I can do for you, Klein?” Ixtara said.
“Just a nagging injury that’s been bothering me,” Klein said, giving the most non-descriptive answer he could think of. “And the only thing else I need for the day is one Somega for a good, clear sleep.”
“So, you won’t be needing any other…form of service tonight, Klein?” Ixtara responded. On a personal level, Klein disliked how businesslike the terminology Ixtara used to define sex with a human male was. No more innocent cuddling up with her as he often used to do with Entara, nor even enjoying Ragatti‘s rhythmic snoring. “No, Ixtara…not tonight,” Klein sighed. “Just a Somega. And if the Somega is too potent and makes me oversleep as sometimes happens, be sure to punch me in the shoulder really hard so I can wake up and go to work. Physical pain seems to be the only thing that can knock me out of the effects of the Somega, and even that only works in about the last hour or so the Somega’s in my system.
“So, about...six thirty, then?” Ixtara asked.
“Make it six forty five,” Klein replied as Ixtara went to the medicine cabinet to get the Somega. She may have a terrible personality, but at least she’s good at technical details. That goes for keeping me awake at night and waking me up when I do fall asleep. I enjoy the staying awake part a good deal more.
Two weeks into the shoot, Klein had adjusted to working around the filming of Heroes of Domremy. Cashman, worried about a repeat of the Great Storm Massacre, had forbidden expeditions into the wilderness, so Heroes was shot exclusively in the town and surrounding farms. Spenser’s “creative vision” of Site 89 mandated that everyone act in a friendly, inviting “folksy” m
anner that Klein utterly despised. Spenser considered Klein one of the most “difficult” of the town’s residents to work with, which suited Klein well, because it meant less time on camera being forced to choke out Howdy’s and Y’alls in a terribly forced attempt to make his existence on Domremy look friendly and hospitable. Most other people in town were not as lucky as Klein; the bartender, Erskine, was a frequent target for Spenser’s film shoots, and hated his on-camera persona so much that he was constantly looking for an opportunity to vent his anger about it whenever he was off camera.
“You’re lucky he hates you so much, Klein. He’s put me on camera for interviews eight times, and he keeps complaining that I don’t sound enough like a ‘cowboy’! Does he even realize what our old lives were like, before we all got sent off to this rock? I was a chemistry teacher back in Arlington then, with a real career…”
“Was that Arlington, Texas by any chance?” Klein asked.
“Does it really matter?” Erskine said.
“Well, no, but there’s an Arlington, Texas, an Arlington, Massachusetts, and an Arlington, Virginia. You Americans seem to have a fascination for reusing the same name for cities in different states. I suppose you’re excused, since we’ve had a couple of Stolbergs and Frankfurts for over fifteen hundred years. You never talked like a person from Texas – before Spenser made you talk that way, anyway – but maybe you had parents from a different state, or you moved from another state to Texas before you started your teaching career, or…”
“If you must know, it’s Arlington, Virginia,” Erskine said. “Not that it really matters much, a middle school chemistry teacher is a lousy paying career pretty much anywhere, even in Deutschland now. In fact, it paid so poorly that I ended up committing the crime that got me sent here.”
“Financial fraud?” Klein asked.
Erskine nodded. “Got a bunch of people in my church into a Ponzi scheme. Once they figured out what was going on, my old life was over. Even if I had finished my sentence in a prison on Earth, my career as a teacher would have been ruined with that on my criminal record. So I decided to volunteer to get sent to a penal colony instead—it doesn’t have the amenities of life on Earth, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper, and I figured the best job I possibly could have gotten after my arrest was as a bartender anyway. Things worked out pretty well until Spenser showed up and forced me to be ‘Good ol’ Sam Erskine’. At least today I’m off the hook, though, since he’s working on outdoors footage today.”
“He’s gonna be shadowing us again,” Klein groaned.
“I don’t know if that’s what he’s planning to do. He might go pester the farmers for interviews this time,” Erskine said.
“Let him try! They’ll just talk manure to him and laugh because he won’t understand he’s being insulted.”
“I’m just glad I don’t have to put up with him today, and I hope you don’t have to, either. Good luck!”
“When it comes to Spenser, my luck is anything but good,” Klein said as he left the bar to go to his daily patrols of the perimeter of Site 89.
When he reported to his patrol duties, Klein received the news he had been dreading to hear: that Spenser would be shadowing his patrol for the day. Cashman had worked out an agreement with Spenser that the amount of time the recruits would be filmed would be more limited than the time he could film the farmers and shopkeepers in town. Spenser agreed, believing that all the colonists could be considered “Heroes of Domremy,” but also because he found it difficult to work with the Local-fighting recruits. They had little patience for retakes, were constantly on edge worrying about Local attacks, and many were suspicious of any form of camera surveillance and recording, a holdover from their pre-colonial criminal backgrounds. It seemed to Klein that there was always at least one altercation between the film crew and Cashman’s men during the days they were filmed; usually it was fairly minor, like two men cursing at each other or someone threatening to bust a camera or fry a hard drive. However, there had already been one fistfight that had resulted in cameraman’s nose getting broken, and rumors of other grudges passed around the bar in the nights after the filming sessions. Klein thought it was mostly hot air and a waste of everyone’s time, but he was still wary of the potential for violence, knowing the hostility, frustration, and resentment that the inmates of Domremy felt.
“C’mon, say somethin’ funny, Alek,” Guzman asked.
“No. I am not feeling ‘funny’ today,” Aleksandrov replied.
“Spenser’s not letting us go until you at least try to tell a joke. You’ve gotta have something, man. At least tell one of those ‘In Soviet Russia…’one-liners. Anything to get us out of here!” Guzman whined.
“Those haven’t been funny in at least ninety years. I will not be made an object of ridicule,” Alek said.
“Y’know Alek, you’re right,” Spenser said. “Those are clichéd. Why don’t you tell us about how your time on Domremy has turned you from a convict…into a hero. Something inspirational and life-affirming.”
“I was a man of respect and honor on Earth. On this world, I tell stories for idiots who want to make a TV show. There is nothing heroic about this,” Alek growled.
“You’d best shut up and do what the man tells you to do!” Hyams yelled. “I was one of the first to sign up to help Spenser, and I did it for the exact same reason you did—making money. Unlike you, I intend to work with Spenser, not against him, because if I get popular from this show, the company will be back to work with me again and make me more money. So say the damn thing he wants you to and get this over with!”
Alek snorted. “So, your glorious future is begging for scraps at a table like a little dog. You can have it. I want no part of this humiliation.”
“Do what I say, or you’ll be eating through a tube in the infirmary!”
Aleksandrov rolled up his sleeves to reveal his arms and shoulders. They were covered in tattoos, and Klein could see two eight-pointed stars near his shoulders. “Do you know what theses tattoos mean?” he asked Hyams.
Hyams clenched his hands into fists. “You start a fight with me Alek, you’ll regret it. I’ll get Cashman to make your life a living hell…”
Hyams’ sentence was interrupted by a stiff jab in the face by Alek. The force of the blow rocked Hyams’ head backwards, but did not knock him over, and he countered with a blow to Alek’s chest. Alek gasped for air but was already swinging his fist around for another blow. The punch hit Hyams hard in the shoulder, but Alek was unable to follow it up; Hyams quickly tripped him, sending him sprawling to the ground on his back. Hyams seized the opportunity and got on top of Alek, delivering a flurry of jabs to his face. But his offensive was short-lived as the stronger, bulkier Alek flipped him over on his back and hammered him with vicious punches to his temples, alternating his left and right hands in a violent blur. An ugly gash opened up above his right eye, and Hyams’ struggles quickly weakened. Sensing his victory, Alek got up off Hyams and spat on his prostrate body. “Go tell your boyfriend Cashman how well you fared against me,” Alek said as he sneered.
Blood pouring into his eye from the cut, Hyams staggered to his feet, still swooning from the force of Alek’s blows. “You…” he managed to gasp out as he drew his fist back and lunged at Alek in a desperate attempt at retribution. Hyams’ offensive was slow and badly telegraphed, and Alek had anticipated it before Hyams had even gotten back to his feet. Alek sidestepped Hyams’ clumsy lunge and shoved him from the side, sending him sprawling into a clump of grass. Klein heard a loud cry of pain come out of the clump of grass, a sound far too sharp and agonized to be someone simply landing the wrong way. Klein wondered if the Locals had staged a surprise attack and carried Hyams off in the tall grass, but the continued moaning and broken English coming from the clump of tall grass suggested Hyams was still there. “Spenser, call in Cashman now! Guzman, Byrne, help me carry Hyams out of the bush. If Hyams is still alive, we have to get him to the infirmary now!”
K
lein had become numb to the sight of men being carried off by Locals; such horrors were burned into his mind so thoroughly that they seemed as much a part of his job as the brutality of wars on Earth were when he was a soldier. He had begun to think of the Locals not as simple monsters, but as an enemy army, with its own tactics and methods of engagement. Doing so gave them a sense of familiarity to Klein, who had learned to anticipate their methods of movement and draw an accurate shot on his targets as they tried to escape. As much fear and anxiety as the Locals could still inspire in him, it was the rational fear of a soldier in combat, not the irrational terror of a child quaking in fear of some imagined eldritch abomination. It seemed so long that he had even begun to forget that raw sense of shock the first time he had seen a Local leap down and carry a man off.
What he saw next ripped back the veil of time and experience and opened his eyes to the raw horrors of Domremy once more.
Hyams had fallen on his chest. He had landed on a strange creature that bore a strong resemblance to a toad, with a squat four-legged body, large eyes, and a long tongue. It was large beyond the size of any earthly toad Klein had ever seen though, roughly the size of a medium-size cat, and had a jarring coloration of black with yellow stripes that looked like no other animal on Domremy. The creature’s back was covered in wicked two-inch long spines, and the spines had ripped through Hyams’ jacket and shirt and punctured his chest at several points. Stuck to Hyams, the creature was flailing its limbs and issuing a distinctive, booming call that sounded like “VA-ron-EY, Va-RON-EY” over and over.
As disgusted as he was at the creature’s repulsive appearance, Klein was moved by a desire to save Hyams. He took his M221, got a bead on the “toad’s” chest, and shot the creature dead. Sickly yellow blood oozed out of the creature’s chest wound as Klein yelled, “Somebody call Cashman, dammit! We gotta get this guy to the infirmary NOW! Guzman, Byrne, help me carry him!”
Life Sentence (Forlani Saga Book 1) Page 8
