I had the smell and taste of iron in my mouth and I knew that I had been shot. There were three things in my mind right then. The first thing was that I really didn't have the time to be shot right then. There were just too damned many things I needed to do.
The second thing was Deadeye Jay. I was the one who snuffed his brother. Had he finally gotten in touch with his feelings? What about all of little Tani's friends? What about the whacks from Cumaris? Maybe the bird who threw the lead at me was the same bastard who had drilled Nance Damas.
The third thing in my mind was Alna. I concentrated on trying to remember every single detail of her face and body. I was distressed at how little I could recall. My last thought was a prayer that Stays, Marietta, Cap, and Margo weren't just sitting around patting my hand and dribbling tears into the grit, but instead were burning across the sand looking for a smoking piece and the finger who had fired it.
I had mixed feelings about surviving being shot. I dearly wanted to deal payback to the perp who put the hole in my head. However, I also knew that if I lived long enough to wake up, my head was going to hurt like stripes on a squeal.
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At The End Of The Tunnel
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I'd heard about those out of body experiences before, but I always figured those who had them had also been chewing cactus buttons or otherwise crisping their lobes. I didn't believe in them, but I believed that the people talking about them believed in them.
There was my first cellmate at Greenville, Black Max Campbell. Black Max was opened up from his crotch to his breastbone by the chili pepper from Hell, Chulo Domingo. Max was in the prison hospital for almost ten weeks, and when he got out he was a different man. That night he told me that his heart had stopped and he had seen a dark tunnel filled with locked doors. He was in that tunnel for a thousand years trying to open the doors. He'd try one, then the next, and the next, screaming and crying the whole time. Then from the end of the tunnel, he saw a blinding yellow light. He moved toward the light, and the closer he came toward it, the more filled he was with peace. The agonies, evils, and angers that constantly plagued his mind were being replaced by serenity, joy, love.
"It was God, Bando," he had said to me in the dark. "I swear it was God."
Then he told me about moving toward the light and being caught up in a whirlwind of warm air that urged him toward the light until he was given a choice to enter the light or go back to the Crotch. He said he chose life. I remember telling him that he was bent. Given a choice between life in the Crotch and eternity in Heaven, who would pick the Crotch?
"You can't see it, Bando," he said. "You can't see what a gift life is." Then he told me about coming back and watching the doctors operate on him.
He was never the same after that. A year later Brooks and Norberg tried their big break out. They died along with about fifty-one other sharks that got whacked or wounded. In the middle of it maybe forty slugs stitched across our cell. I caught one in each leg, but Max caught his through the lungs and his pump. He died with his eyes aimed at me, but he was seeing something else. He was smiling.
I believed Black Max believed, but for me to believe, I had to try and accept that there was more to the universe than some humans stepping on other humans just so they could get their noses a little higher than the ever advancing tide of shit. There just wasn't any way I could believe that.
Anyway, I'd think of what Black Max'd told me every time I'd read about similar experiences, or see something about it on the vids. I kind of hoped that Max had found his heaven, but I didn't count on it.
The slug that put me down on the Forever Sand brought all of those memories back to me as I found myself walking my own tunnel. Instead of doors, the sides of my tunnel were gleaming black, like they were made out of polished obsidian. I ran down the tunnel, straining my eyes, looking for the light that Black Max had promised would be there for me. I could feel the tears choke my throat and fill my eyes as I screamed that it was all a lie, that there was no light, no peace.
Then, in the far distance, I saw a bluish light. Dim at first, it grew and grew in brilliance until it filled every corner of my heart, my mind, my soul. There were faces. All of my ghosts were there. They no longer accused me. I no longer feared them.
The dealer I killed, the bastard who had tossed my kid sister away like a used tissue, he was there. I didn't hate him and he didn't blame me. In the glow of that light every face there understood me, and I understood them and everything else. Yvonne was there, and no longer was she a gray-haired old cannibal with a blank stare. Her face was young, her eyes were full of life, and she loved me. I stood upon a place where, for ever and ever, I could swim in the stream of this great river of love.
All of a sudden I found myself suspended in darkness. There was a cluster of stars far away, but above me were the Eyes of the Spider. Below me appeared tiny orange points of light, and soon I was swooping above the columns, searching desperately for something.
There was the interior of one of the sand sleds. I could see Mercy Jane and the Wolf bending over Bando Nicos. It looked like the Wolf had my own ice pick stuck in my right temple almost all of the way to the handle. I watched as the long thin spike went deeper within my brain.
Alna was there. And Nance. Nance was up, sitting on one of the built in couches, leaning against the wall, holding my left hand, her lips moving. Alna kneeling next to my left shoulder, her forehead resting against my arm. Deadeye was leaning in the doorway, watching me, his face impassive.
There were voices and outside the wagon was Cap Brady and Margo. Cap was telling Colonel Indimi to begin planning to go for Kegel's supply train. It was time.
Stays was there, outside the sled, leaning against a taut tent rope. He was reading his precious copy of the law. That was when I realized just how much the law meant to me. It was a gift just as much as Black Max's life was a gift, and the law was our gift; our gift to each other; our gift to the future, our gift to ourselves.
I was given the choice between the Forever Sand and the river of eternal love, and, even though I knew I would call myself an asshole a thousand times over for it, I chose the sand. I did it partly because what Black Max had said really was the underlying truth of the universe: life is no promise, no right, no privilege. Life is a gift too precious to squander away just because it's painful. There was another reason, too.
As I hovered above the camp, I saw a man in a desert sheet watching the sled where the Wolf was gorming in my brain. There were lots of sharks watching and waiting. It was something that many cared what happened to Bando Nicos. Thousands. This particular man, however, was sticking something beneath his sheet that I didn't even know that they had on Tartaros. It was a pistol. I just had to come back to life to ask him about that.
There were some others, too. All of the cockroaches were there. Pendril, Rossiter, Grahl, and a few others. They were in deep, whispering among themselves, probably plotting on starting up a law school.
It faded.
I floated on dry water and went to sleep. When I awakened I had been whirling down a deep well for a billion years. It suddenly came to me that all I really needed to do to see the light and end the darkness was to open my eyes. I did and for a moment there was a smear of colors while the damnedest static I ever heard filled my ears.
I opened my eyes again and I could see the Wolf's face filling my vision. A stab of pain electrified my head, but I couldn't scream. All I could do was black out again and wonder about why I had chosen to come back to the Forever Sand, and why I had thought that you could cut into a human brain without it hurting. I could've sworn I'd read that somewhere. Whatever it was the Wolf was doing in my head hurt worse than a flaming bamboo manicure.
"Bando?"
Something was different. Something very important. I opened my eyes again and saw Alna's face. As I looked at her I thought what an amazing thing it
was that she chose to be with Bando Nicos, Razai Cop. What an incredible creature a woman is. What an incredible creature this woman is.
How many times had she been raped? How many times had men shit on her body, her life, her dreams? Yet she could hold all that at bay long enough to care what happened to one little chili pepper. She could reach out her hand and stroke my hairy cheek. She could cry for me. She could bend down and kiss me with lips salty with honest tears. Her tears made me feel guilty because I wasn't worth a single one of them.
Alna. The crease of her thigh against her groin, the strain of her breasts against her shirt, the arc of her neck meeting her shoulder, the tremble of her soft lips, the look in her huge brown eyes. She was Alna and she was there for me. She filled the universe with miracles.
"Bando?"
I tried my mouth. I couldn't hear myself.
She held my right hand as she dropped to her knees and smothered my fingers with hot, wet tears and kisses. I reached up my other hand toward the Spider, somehow thanking this spirit for another chance, for my life, for my purpose, and for Alna. I felt like a totally different being and I wondered about this incredible difference in me. I lowered my hand and stroked Alna's cheek, feeling the tears, treating them like liquid diamonds.
It was still hard to accept that anyone could shed tears over something that had been done to Bando Nicos. I'd caused so many tears, which is why I figured I didn't deserve any. Still, I was getting some.
"Bando. I knew you couldn't die. I just knew it. You're alive."
"I love you." My whisper was more of a croak.
She closed her eyes and held my hand to her cheek. Electric pain entered my right eye and shot out the back of my head. It made me stiffen, and it made me think. There was still some unfinished business that needed tending.
"The bastard who did this to me," I whispered. "Who?"
"It doesn't matter. You're alive!"
"Believe this: it matters."
"We don't know."
"They sat around and held my hand and let the perp stroll, eh? Shit, what a police force." My mouth tasted like a lughox had wiped its ass on my tongue. "What day? What day is it?"
"The twenty first."
Twenty one, I thought. The shooter had caught me on the eighteenth. Three days had passed. What about Kegel? How was Bloody Sarah doing out in the desert? Who was bossing the Razai? Before the lights went out, Cap didn't look like he was going to take the job. If he hadn't, who had?
I closed my eyes as another stab of pain seemed to enter my right eye and burn its way to the center of my skull. All of the issues would have to wait. The Razai had survived three days without me holding its hand. It could survive a little longer.
In between the blinding stabs of pain, there were other things to ponder. There was a vague image of a man in the shadows concealing a pistol beneath his desert sheet. Was it only part of a dream? A hallucination caused by the Wolf jamming an ice pick into my lobes? Or had my spirit seen what it thought it had seen? That's the trouble with flying souls and out of body trips. Nobody ever thinks to take notes.
I felt Alna's hair against my arm. "Alna. Kiss me."
She got up off her knees and gently touched her lips to mine. "I love you, Bando. I was so afraid. Don't ever leave me."
That's what the big difference was, I thought. I could let her love me. I could love. Love was the difference. It didn't matter where we were, who we were, or that Kegel and his thirty thousand rifles were after us. It didn't matter that the Hand was waiting for us in the Sunrise Mountains with half a million armed soldiers. All that mattered was the gift of my life, my love, and finding the bastard who shot me.
"Never away from you, Alna. The Eyes. Look at the Eyes." She was smiling and nodding, her eyes submerged in tears.
"Look at the Eyes of the Spider and know I'm looking at them too."
I fell asleep again, the warm edges of a diamond drop for a blanket, Alna's hand for an anchor, the image of the Spider above me.
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Recovery's Just Another Name for
Crapping In Your Bed.
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For days I was beyond telling the difference between the heat of day and the cold of night. There were moments when things were clear and Alna, Nance, and I would talk, or I'd talk with Stays, Cap, or Marietta. Mercy Jane, Alna, and Delia always seemed to be hovering over me, taking a pulse, peeking into my eyes, changing the bandage on my head. Every now and then Wolf would be sitting on one of the built in couches, his arms folded, his eyes staring at me. At other times everything would blur making it tough to tell the difference between dreaming and being awake. An infection eventually settled in and life became one long nauseous nightmare.
The shadows parted for a moment once as Stays drifted in to tell me that they'd put Deadeye Jay Ostrow on trial for shooting me. Jay went for a jury and the jury wasn't willing to bet their own lives on him being guilty, so they let him off.
Alna half-kneeling, half-sitting next to my bed, holding my hand, her head resting against the mattress, sleeping as the bed rocked with the movement of the sled.
Pill Phil wandered in once to tell me that he had gone into a CSA meeting and it had helped him a lot. He suggested I try it.
Mercy Jane apologized for the infection. She had scrubbed and boiled everything a dozen times. I wanted to suggest that maybe the perp hadn't sterilized the slug he'd shot into my head, but I passed out first.
Wolf sitting there in the shadows, studying me. "Why're you looking at me?" I whispered.
"I attempted an operation on you that should have been impossible in a well equipped operating room staffed by a platoon of skilled specialists."
"So, how'd it go?"
He leaned back against the wall, folded his arms, and said, "That's what I'm waiting to find out."
That boy wasn't exactly in your bedside manner hall of fame.
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Sometimes the compartment door would be open and the blinding light of the sun would reflect off the sand into my eyes. I'd close them against the glare and when I'd open them again it'd be dark, the Eyes of the Spider hovering just outside the door. Sometime Deadeye Jay would be standing there, still watching me. Once I said, "I heard they did ragtime on you."
"I got off. The system works."
"You still not emotionally involved?"
He nodded. "Business is business."
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They had me stripped naked and were pouring freezing cold water on me, still I was burning up, the pain in my head shattering reality.
From the night shadows outside the sled were voices. Cap talking to Nance. The try for Kegel's supply train had been a disaster. Over a hundred dead and more taken prisoner. Indimi was almost finished training a new strike force to relieve Bloody Sarah.
Coming from the direction of the Kvasiri, we had a genuine anti-war movement going, probably centered around Lomon Paxati. The Hand slaves were white, weren't they? Rather than a wrong that needed to be righted, wasn't this poetic justice? Besides, we can't take on the world, can we?
It was a joke, but a lot of sharks were listening to the straightmeats. The cockroaches were in there, of course, fanning the flames.
Things cleared, the pieces of the universe came together again, and I was just plain sick. It was the twenty ninth day since the landing. I was shot on the eighteenth. Eleven days had gone by that I couldn't remember. I was too weak to move and it made me angry enough to cry.
I hated being sick. Plenty of hard time sharks loved the occasional respiratory infection, broken leg, or self-inflicted knife wound. Maybe a few days stretched out in the bone palace eating real food, watching the vids, and reading books looked real good to someone who washed, spun, dried, and folded a couple tons of laundry every day. Not to me, though. I was happier making little ones out of big ones. Being sick meant the body had let me down. I couldn't rely on myself. I had t
o depend on others, which was always a big mistake. My experience relying on others had been nothing but one disappointment or betrayal after another.
I wasn't much good as a patient. I'd pee in the jug Alna'd bring but I couldn't stand even the thought of crapping out flat using the soldered metal bedpan whipped up by the trolls for Nance. Mercy Jane and Alna tried to explain to me that I had crapped all over myself plenty of times in bed without the bedpan. They didn't understand. I didn't care what I did when I was out of it. When I was inhabiting my own head, however, a bowel movement was not a community event and was not a lie down experience. When I shit, I sit. What's more, once I've done it, I don't want people hauling it around looking at it and smelling it. My business is my business.
I held it for three days, even though it drove me into a toxic condition. The headache and nausea from that added to my constant headache from the wound, making me less cooperative than ever. Mercy Jane coaxed me, Alna begged me, and I wasn't having any of it. All I wanted to do was die.
On the thirty first day, I was so sick I couldn't whimper convincingly. Alna was with me alternating between anger at me and fear for me. Mercy Jane entered the sled followed by Nance. In Nance's hands was the bedpan. She looked down at Alna and cocked her head toward the door. "Go take a break."
"What?" I said as I looked at Alna. "No. Don't go."
Alna bent over, kissed my forehead, and looked at me with big sad eyes. "Be nice, Bando." She patted my hand and headed toward the door.
"Be nice?" I called to her back. "Get back here!"
Even the little bit of yelling had me all wore out. Nance twirled the bedpan between her hands. "You're full of shit, Nicos."
Mercy Jane grinned and pulled down my covers as she said, "It's a movement whose time has come."
I was naked and I groped with a feeble hand for the covers. "You hairy bitches lay one claw on me 'n I'll shave your asses with a blowtorch!" Mercy Jane reached beneath my shoulders and sat me up as Nance put the pan behind me. I had enough strength to straighten out, and I did so as the universe began spinning.
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