I knew enough about stars to know that they could have stuck us all the way outside the galaxy and the sky would still be crowded with lights. There should be thousands of galaxies up there, each one looking like a star, unless we had been stuck on the outside edge of the universe. Then, I thought, maybe that's what they had done. God, it made my guts knot.
I pulled on Dom's arm. "What're you looking for? A post office? C'mon. We better find a place to hole up for the night. You seen Pussyface?"
Dom looked around, a head and a half above the crowd of sharks. Somewhere there was talking, then everyone talking at once. Dom pointed toward a bunch of dark figures huddled together in their parkas. "The beard's over there."
We slogged through the crowd, our shoes filling with sand, until we came up on Garoit and his group. Six men and four women. I thought I recognized a couple of them from Greenville. He looked around at us, then held his right hand out toward his ten listeners.
"Nicos, Dom, these are the other members of the Freedom Front." A few of them nodded at us. Garoit turned back to his buddies.
"Later we'll pool our chow. Then I'll distribute according to need." He looked back at us.
"You two understand that?"
I laughed. Whatever had Pussyface been smoking? Dom walked until he stood inches away from Garoit. Then the giant looked down at the fuzzy little man and poked Garoit in the chest. "What's mine is mine, hairball. You got a problem with that?"
Garoit licked his lips and backed away, rubbing his chest. "No, Dom. No problem." He pointed at two of his buddies as the crowd of sharks started talking louder.
"Shaw, Emil, hold me up."
The two lifted Garoit up into the dark until he was sitting on their shoulders. Then he held out his hands and shouted. The strength of his voice surprised me.
"Listen to me! All of you, listen!" The blowholes quieted down some. In the distance there were the sounds from the other gangs that were organizing, but they quieted down and listened.
"I don't think the old sharks on this planet know about us yet," said Garoit." That's why the ship put us down on the night side. But, they'll find out about us soon enough, and we have things they want—new coats, clothes, food."
He sat silent for a long moment, then he said in a quiet voice. "The only way we're going to survive, is if we stand united. Right now there are sixteen, seventeen thousand of us. Nobody is going to tangle with a united force—"
"Stick it!"
The voice stood out, and was joined by other voices.
"You're packed."
"Goddamned politicals."
"Punk."
"Did ya hear the blowhole on that beard?"
"The overripe mushrooms do grow in the dark."
Then most of the cons turned away and gathered with gangs and around leaders that they knew and respected; prison gangs from their former hotels. A lot of them moved off into the night. Some, about sixty, stayed to listen to Garoit.
Martin Stays, Greenville's answer to Pussyface, was one who stayed. I saw Freddy there, which meant that Dick Irish couldn't be far behind. I saw Steel Jacket, Nazzar, and a couple of other Yard monsters from the Crotch. Most I just couldn't see because of the dark, but I heard Ice Finger's voice, Kid Scorpion's and a few others.
Garoit slung the bull around for half an hour about freedom, equality, and crapternity. About the only thing he said that did make any sense was that being part of a strong group was the only sure way to stay alive. It seemed to me that depended on the quality of the gang you joined, and seventy flabby or underfed filberts was a wimp-looking bunch compared to some of the other gangs out there on the sand.
I was about to jab Dom in the arm and find a healthier new society to join, when a huge mob began working its way toward Garoit. Fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand bodies. From what I could see and hear, they were mostly women. They surrounded Garoit and his tiny band, then one of them separated from the others and walked up to the beard as his two buddies lowered him to the ground.
Her hood was up, and she stood a half-head taller than Garoit. "We want to know what you plan to do, and how you plan to do it. And don't stick your flag in my face, tiny. Just give me the facts."
Garoit stared at her for a moment, then pulled at his beard. "Let me ask you: what do you want?"
"We're women dropped in the middle of a pack of real hungry sharks. What in the hell do you think we want?"
Garoit nodded. "I see." He nodded some more, then looked at her.
"What's your name?"
"Nance Damas."
I had heard about Nance Damas for years. Bull croc, yard monster, torturer, murderer, and all-around graduate of Old Miss's Finishing School. I squinted to see her face, but it was too dark.
"My name is Darrell Garoit." Old Garoit looked like he was busting a gut swallowing eight-hundred political slogans, trying to find the words that would win over Nance Damas and her crowd rather than have her leave him in the dust or bust him up. "We stick together. We protect each other. That's what we plan to do."
Nance looked around, then faced Garoit again. "Who's going to boss this gang?"
Garoit looked around at the electorate, and I could see him eating his own flag. "It's not a gang, and there's no boss. First we get out of here. Find a place to hole up. Then we talk about it. Then we vote."
"Majority rules?"
"That's right."
"What if you lose the vote, fuzzy? Do you take your ball and go home?"
"Grunt all you want in the women's yard, Damas," Garoit said under considerable steam. "Here I said we vote on it, and that's what I meant."
Nance stood quiet for a time, then she looked up as we all heard a fight here, a fight there, breaking out. The first long night was already in progress. She looked back at Garoit. "Okay. Let's hole up. Then we talk."
But there was some that wanted right then to talk. Who's going to run the thing—red, yellow, white, black, male, female, straight, gay, fried, clean—a couple of fights, a lot of serious threats, a cutter or two pulled, a few drips of blush on the sand. Between Nance and Pussyface we tabled everything. For the time being, we'd stick together and sort out the banners in the morning.
It was the biggest gang, so me and Dom went along. Maybe another couple of hundred other men joined as we left. Maybe it was because we were the biggest gang; maybe it was because we had most of the women. We walked a couple of hours until we came to an area with tall dunes capped by that grass. We put out guards and huddled down together for warmth and to try and get what sleep we could.
There were a few of the sharks, men and women together, who began to talk and they must have kept it up for an hour or more. I glanced up a couple of times, and they were talking out their troubles. I snuggled against Dom, and I saw him looking up at the night sky. I supposed it wouldn't have hurt anybody if they'd found a place with more stars. I turned over, got a mouthful of sand, and spat it out. The stuff tasted like sulfur and chalk. My body began shaking with chills as the wind picked up.
Free at last; free at last. God damn it all to hell, anyway. Free at last.
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A Patch of Green
▫
The false dawn began with the sky a deep purple that faded into black. After a few minutes, pale blue edged into the black, then there was this moment of beautiful blue that filled the sky and slicked you into believing the planet might be capable of offering a halfway reasonable day.
Tartaros, however, had an effective way of evaporating the illusions it created. While I could still see my own breath as it hit the icy air, green edged into the blue, then that brassy light filled the sky. The sun came up hot and orange.
As the light burned off the frost, a few of us clapped and cheered. But not long after the disc of that star cleared the horizon, the sweats began, the parkas and shirts began coming off, and soon you felt like every breath was a suck off a blowto
rch.
You'd say to yourself, it can't get any worse than this, then the sun would move higher, the sky would go white, and we stopped kidding ourselves about being lucky only to get sentenced to Hell. We began getting the earnest heat.
You breathe in that hot air and your lungs block. They'd jam—act surprised, like don't you know this stuff is too hot to breath? Humans have only a certain temperature range in which they can survive, and this is way outside operating spec's. Yeah, but there's nothing else to breathe, so we breathed it and our lungs felt like they were crisping and curling up out of our mouths.
A little way into the morning and we all had our parkas off. That grass we saw the night before was gone—retracted into the sand. Most of us took off our shirts and put them over our heads and shoulders for some shade. The women, too, after awhile. There wasn't any reason to worry about the men. As hot as it was on the sand, even the perverts were limp and past it.
When the soft ones started to fade, a few of the stronger ones crutched them along. I watched and wondered how, long that would last. Back in the crowbars the sharks would help one another if it didn't cost anything. In fact, that was the surest way of putting someone else in your debt. Every now and then it's real important to have the right people owe you.
Always, when the helping started to cost, then it was later, some other time, and "Do I know you?" We were on Tartaros now, but a leopard still had the same spots no matter what zoo you stuck him in.
At the top of one of the taller dunes, we could see tall green mountains off in the distance. Where there were green mountains, there had to be life, trees, water, shade. Perhaps there might even be people there who could point us toward life. The image of the mountains shimmered in the heat like a dream.
Any kind of green looked good from the middle of all that parched yellow, and any fool could see that moving in that direction was number one on our things to do list. But, no, we weren't just any fool; we were a collection of very particular fools. First we had to sit in what shade we could find and decide who was going to boss the gang.
I never realized the number of political filberts a hotel collects. I mean, who cares what party grinds the bennies? You're either on the ins or the outs whatever flag the pol carries. But a bunch of those dune sharks cared. I mean, they went at it for an hour without a seam. Nance Damas, Garoit, Nkuma, a bunch of others. Martin Stays kept his mouth shut, though, and only watched.
I wondered if he was planning something. I caught myself trying to mind somebody else's business, and I stopped. Sure he was planning something. Sharks are always planning something, and the something is usually something no good.
It was none of my business. In fact, none of it was any of my business. The spec was only worth a mental moment. Me and Dom ended the ment, got bored, wandered off, and went looking for some excitement. We found something that got our attention real fast.
We climbed up a tall dune and looked back toward where the ship had dumped us. Not all of the brothers and sisters had taken off for the dunes the night before. What I saw in the old landing area was a maggot convention. There were maybe two or three hundred bodies stretched out on the hot desert.
They were dead and stripped naked, guts, blush, and think-goo spread out all over the pretty yellow sand. There were little black flying things flitting about from departed to defunct chowing down on our old cellmates.
In addition to all those dead bodies, we saw a mob of white-sheeted live ones moving in our direction. They were riding strange-looking critters and following the tracks we had made the night before.
Dom looked at me with a puzzled expression. "Bando?"
"Old sharks. Scavengers. They live off the protos when they get dumped. They must've seen the ship when it came down."
There were around five-hundred of them. They had what looked like guns and were mounted on beasts that looked like water buffalos with tusks and too many legs. The animals didn't move very fast in the sand, but they were moving a helluvalot faster than Pussyface and his goddamned blowhole society.
I smacked Dom on his shoulder. "Let's stroll."
We ran back and made it to the center of the group. Garoit was trying to shout down a couple of other pistachios, while Nance was out on her back, resting in the rapidly disappearing shade of a dune. I slapped Garoit on his shoulder. "Time to wind it up, Washington. The old sharks know we're here. About five-hundred of them, mounted and with weapons, are coming straight at us. They look like they already thinned around two or three hundred of the brothers and sisters who came in with us."
The whole gang got to its feet, talking at once. Nance sprang up and shouted. "Hold it! How far away are they?"
"Hang around here for a couple more minutes and you can talk to them."
The bull croc leveled a gaze on me that could air condition Hell with enough chill left over to solidify Mauna Loa. "How much time?" she demanded.
"At the rate they're going, maybe ten or fifteen minutes, a little less."
Nance held up her hands. "Now we gotta move. Shut the blowholes and no more wind. Let's get moving!"
No. First, there had to be more talk:
"Izzat gang there black or white?"
"Maybe they'll help us. Think of that?"
"Where'd they get the guns?"
"Why do they have guns if all they want to do is help us?"
"What about all the dead brothers and sisters from our ship they already helped?"
Garoit pulled at his beard, then whispered to Nance as he pointed toward the mountains. She looked at him for a second, then nodded. He faced the gang. "Here's what we're going to do."
▫
Pussyface had a plan. What we did was to form up a column and run toward the mountains for about fifteen minutes. That run might not sound like much to jog jocks, but it was murder on a bunch of people who had spent the previous months sitting in a cell, and the previous weeks stretched out in a flight couch.
At the end of the fifteen minutes, we split into two groups and went off to either side of the trail and doubled back behind the dunes. I flatted out on the sand, my breath coming hard and my eyes out of focus. Dom flopped next to me, but he was hardly breathing.
"You should get in shape, Bando."
"Not now, Dom. Not now." I died and was almost resurrected several times.
We waited. What we were waiting for was the same thing you waited for in the yard back at the hotel when some shark was angling for your deal. It was what you waited for back on the block as you listened for those little sounds that a rival gang made as it stepped over the line and entered your plot. We were waiting to kill first—before the enemy had a chance to kill us.
Soon enough, the sharks in the white sheets came along, riding their strange animals. They were just loping along, joking among themselves, not paying any attention. The ones with the guns had their pieces across their thighs or slung on their backs, and they all ran their blowholes like they were on a bird hunt where they didn't really care if they got any birds. After all, they were all pretty plush from their last kill. Behind each rider was a bundle made up of parkas, clothes, chow sacks and kit bags.
They were plush all right. I knew the feeling. They owned the block. It wasn't just because they held the territory and had the guns. They owned the block deep inside their guts. They were the primo mokker in the neighborhood, and every one of them knew deep down that you'd have to be gibbering out of all orifices to attack them. Pussyface must've counted on that. That conviction of invincibility in the dune sharks was why our surprise should work.
Garoit's plan called for surprise, since we had nothing but knuckles, fingers, belts, and a few homemade cutters. So we all held our breaths and waited for the signal.
I could hear the blood crashing in my ears my heart was beating so hard. I looked at the backs of my hands as they rested against the sand. The history of each little scar flashed through my mind. Street fights, a couple of zealous interrogations by the precinct stains, a s
eemingly endless series of fights inside the walls proving myself, keeping the boybungers out of my ass, showing the stains that no matter how hard they thumped, I wasn't going to sing.
I collected the scars before I got smarted and learned how to protect and get protected. Except, here I was again, stuck with killing or being killed, and not even the stains who dumped us on Tartaros would notice.
That was the strange thing. Back on the block, or back in the crowbars, there was always the man. The fight would be going down, and back there in your head you knew that if the man found out, he would stop it. But the man wasn't on the sand. All of us could have died in the next ten minutes and no one would know. No one would care. No investigations, no grave markers, no nothin'.
There was a very powerful feeling in my gut. This was wrong. It was all wrong. Tartaros was wrong, dumping us here was wrong, what those dune sharks had done back at the landing site was wrong, what we were about to do to stay alive was wrong, and I was wrong. Everything was wrong, and it was the first time I had ever felt like that.
Suddenly Garoit screamed out the goddamndest sound I ever heard and the gang went over and around the dunes. I dug into the dune with my toes, ran over the top, and saw the column stretching to my left and right. The sheets began lifting their weapons as we hit them. Some of them got off a shot or two before they were dragged from their mounts. The weapons made a loud cracking sound when they fired.
I ran down the face of the dune, and leaped at the nearest rider. The sheet had his weapon pointed right at me, the shot whizzed by my ear, and I crashed into the man's face with the top of my head. Once we were on the sand, I pulled the rifle from his grasp and was about to fire when his mount stepped on his chest and went straight through. He had no air to feed his scream.
All around me the brothers and sisters were grabbing those weapons, pulling and knocking those sheets off their mounts. They punched, clawed, stabbed, fired, and strangled. I threw my gun to a sister, got my fingers on another sheet, and pulled him off his critter. He didn't want to let go of his weapon. I stomped him in the jewels and he let go.
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