while the black stars burn

by kucy a snyder

  Damn Jake. That sonofabitch gave more care to his old Thunderbird than he did to his own family. If he was in a good mood, he went off with his buddies and drank himself stupid at the Rusty Nail; when his mood was black and his buddies abandoned him—as was the case more often than not—he raged around their little trailer, cussing and throwing anything he could lay hands on and finding fault with every little goddamn thing everyone said or did and then bringing out the fists if she dared suggested he might help out with the chores and the kids. So he just up and hit the road for Las Vegas in his polished T-bird, taking every last penny they’d saved and not giving a damn that his expectant wife and two other children would soon find themselves broke, evicted, and hungry, with nowhere to go but her old station wagon and no friends or family to call and ask for help....

  Did anyone on the highway notice the still-life drama of her family’s passing car that day?

  She took the usual off-ramp near Lake Gifford, made a left, and drove until she reached the patch of willows and oaks that marked the entrance to the road leading to the fishing dock.

  “Already?” groaned her children in unison.

  At least they always enjoy the trip, Tammy thought.

  “’Fraid so. Put on your seat belts and roll down your windows.”

  Like the good children they were, Jason and Lynn did as Mommy said.

  Tammy floored the accelerator and sped toward the cool, gray-green water.

  “I love you,” she told her children, trying not to cry this time.

  “Love you, too,” they replied, always quietly at this part.

  The car shot onto the old dock and leapt over the edge, soaring twenty feet before it came down grille-first into the water.

  The rest didn’t take long.

  It never did.

  *

  “Mommy!” shouted Jason. “Lookit those old folks in that car. They look happy, don’t they?”

  Tammy glimpsed the elderly couple as they drove by in a cream-colored Cadillac. They were smiling at each other, looking so very much in love, even after so many, many years.

  She both hated and envied them.

  Jason tried to Claim It but couldn’t.

  “I forgot,” he said, his voice thick with disappointment. “It can only be the bad stuff.”

  Tammy grunted in pain as she reached down for her never-quite-empty pack of Virginia Slims, lit up and breathed in the muddy, unsatisfying smoke. God, how she hated driving! Her aches seemed worse with every trip, her never-to-be-born baby restless in her womb. Her children laughed and started singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”.

  Funny how heaven and hell could work out to be the same thing.

  Through Thy Bounty

  I stare down at the naked body of the boy on the butcher block as my mother’s nightmare washes through me. She is ill. Last night’s dreams were filled with fever-warped images of shrouded doctors, knives and needles, tubes and dark blood. The doctors of the Resistance will do their very best for her, but she is an old lady now, her body fragile. The thought that she might die turns my guts to ice.

  Her life is my only hope in this Hell. But at least I know she is safe from the Jagaren. For now.

  The boy is maybe eight or nine, redheaded, skinny and bruised. His ankles are purple and rope-burned. The gash in his neck is as pale as raw bacon; they’ve drained the blood from his body. Sometimes, depending on the menu du jour, they leave the chilled blood for me in a stainless steel thermos jug beside the corpse’s head. But not today.

  He has the look of a child who’s been in captivity for a long time. But he has to be the flesh and blood of somebody important in the Resistance, else he would not be here in my kitchen. The Jagaren always have their most precious catches flown in fresh from the battlefield, concentration camp, and torture chamber.

  As always, the menu instructions are printed on stiff paper tucked into the corpse’s mouth. The Jagaren have been sampling every aspect of Terran cuisine, each day a new ethnic menu. Today they want to taste the Deep South: sweet barbecue, collard greens, chicken fried steak with gravy, chitlins, sausage, watermelon, corn on the cob, fried green tomatoes, and apple pie. Dinner for twelve. I have but eight hours to prepare this meal.

  I touch the boy’s forehead, close my eyes and say a brief prayer for him. I don’t know what religion he had, if any, but we all live under the same God. Maybe someday He’ll remember us. Prayer finished, I pick up my curved knife and begin to skin him.

  The boy’s left hand has the calluses that come from years of throwing a baseball. A lefty Little League pitcher. As I work, I imagine him playing ball in a sunny Midwestern field, jeans stained with grass and dirt. His grin is the very definition of childhood joy, and he goes home victorious to a hot bath and hugs from his proud father. He spends the evening catching fireflies with his friends until his mother calls him home to be tucked in and read to sleep.

  I have been alone here for over a year, all my waking hours spent in this huge, beautiful, damnable kitchen. It has a walk-in refrigerator that is stocked every night as I sleep, an immense pantry of dry goods, racks of jars of dried spices from every corner of the Earth. In case I ever face an unfamiliar menu, the back wall is lined with hundreds of cookbooks selected by the Jagaren; undesirable recipes have been cut out. The side door leads to a room with rows and rows of herbs under grow lights. There’s an open-pit barbecue and spit big enough to roast a whole ox, a man-sized oven, wok, industrial meat grinder, and on and on. No kitchen I ever worked in as a chef in Los Angeles and Dallas was even half as well-equipped.

  The Jagaren picked their torture well.

  I always loved the kitchen, even as a child, and everything I know about cooking, about life, is but a pale shadow of what my mother knows. Her mind, her will, is astonishing. When the Jagaren came to take our planet, my mother turned from managing her restaurant empire to managing the covert movement of arms and soldiers around the world. Some of the military leaders would not believe (at first) that a master chef could have so sharp a mind, would not believe she could turn from butter to guns, but she would not be denied. Later, when the Jagaren found the secret tactical bunker in Montana and killed most of our generals, she kept the Resistance from falling apart. Ever since, she’s been leading most of the war efforts in North America.

  I have no wartime talents. I’m a good cook, but nothing more. I was helpless to do anything to save myself or my friends when Dallas fell.

  My friends are surely dead by now, tortured to death to amuse their captors. Everything seems to be for the Jagaren’s amusement, even the war to take the planet. I have no doubt they could have used a biological weapon from the safety of their spaceships to wipe us all out. But that wouldn’t have been any fun for them. They like seeing their slave troops clash in bloody, primitive conflict with our people. I suspect that the Jagaren are their world’s spoiled, sadistic rich children who’ve been sent off to vent their twisted aggressions in war games well away from home. Or maybe they’ve come on their own, like the boys who used to wander my neighborhood in search of stray cats to set on fire, their apathetic parents oblivious to their misdeeds. I can’t imagine how their civilization evolved if they’re all like this.

  I have not been physically abused much. They know I need my strength to cook for them. And they want to keep me alive because I am my mother’s only child, and there is the chance she will try to rescue me.

  Every day, I try to warn her away. I know she gets my messages. When I was very small, we learned that if one of us slept while the other was awake, the sleeper would dream of the other’s activities. If we both slept at the same time, we shared the same dreams. My connection to her has weakened as I’ve grown older, but she’s told me her connection to my mind has remained as strong as the day I was born. Almost all my dreams have followed her life, although I can’t always see it clearly. She is my only window to the free world. I can only imagine that it is the same for her, that now she must dream of dismembe
ring and cooking little boys.

  I finish skinning the corpse. I set the skin aside for chopping and deep-frying, pick up the bone saw and survey his stripped flesh with my butcher’s eye. He smells like raw lamb. His arms, ribs, and most of his legs will have to become barbecue. I pull a stout knife from the block and start to separate his joints. Very little of him can be made into steak, but I will try with his glutes and quadriceps. I have to try to meet the menu, or I will be punished, and my punishment will be my mother’s nightmares.

  I tried to commit suicide my very first day as the Jagaren’s cook. Loudspeakers ordered me into the kitchen from my cell that first morning. I found seven babies lined up on the counter, with instructions to roast them like suckling pigs. I stared at the menu for a while, then got a knife and cut my own throat.

  The Jagaren kept me from dying, of course. While my body healed, they walled my mind in a VR hell, piping in the recorded final memories of people they’d tortured to death. By all rights, the experience should have shattered my sanity, but my mother’s stability saved me.

  But I dare not try suicide again, for I cannot bear to inflict such nightmares on her. Furthermore, in my dreams she orders me to do their bidding, to do whatever I must to survive. That’s always been our family’s way. My ancestors survived every sort of war and atrocity. My great-great-grandmother, as a little girl, survived the massacres in Rwanda by hiding in a pile of corpses for three days. Two hundred years ago during WWII, one of my Jewish ancestors was put in the camps in Poland. They set him to work prying the gold out of the mouths of the people they gassed or shot. He survived, and afterward moved to the U.S. where he became a very successful dentist. Just to spite the Nazis, no doubt, because I’m sure he had no real desire to touch a tooth ever again. Even if he’d been a sadist, he’d have hated the work.

  I wonder if I will be able to cook again, if I ever get out of here alive. I wonder if I will ever be able to hold a child or lover in my arms without my fingers automatically seeking the places a knife should be inserted to crack apart their joints.

  The boy is completely dismembered now. I set his hands, arms, and shins on a rack for the barbecue. Then I slice open his abdomen to figure out what will be sausage, and what will be chitterlings.

  I wonder if I and my mother are the first in our family to have shared minds, shared souls. It’s hard to tell because we’ve kept our connection an utter and complete secret for fear that we’d be locked up for examination. No doubt any others would do the same. But such a thing has to be as much a matter of genes as it is a matter of spirit. How can a four-year-old girl find the courage to stay still and silent, without food or water, in the midst of stinking corpses for half a week? How can a young man be made to rob the corpses of his friends and neighbors for five years and survive sane and unbroken? Perhaps they, too, dreamed of freedom through a loved one’s eyes.

  *

  I work hard and fast the rest of the day (if it is in fact day; all the clocks in here tell me how much time I have, not what time it is). I make the pie crust, chop the apples and tomatoes, stew the collards. The boy’s large muscles are breaded and fried and covered in cream gravy, his limbs and ribs coal-smoked for hours and drowned in sweet barbecue sauce, stomach and large intestine chopped and stewed for chitterlings, skin chopped and deep fried into puffy rinds. The rest of him becomes sausage.

  I never taste the meat dishes directly, only the sauces and the vegetable dishes. I have a good knowledge of spices and how they blend, so if I’m careful with my measurements I don’t make mistakes.

  Not that I really have any idea of how the Jagaren’ sense of taste works. They aren’t human, after all. Although they are warm-blooded, they don’t resemble any Earth mammal in the least.

  It took the Resistance some time to capture a Jagaren for study and vivisection. The Jagaren’s slave troops are composed of species from many other worlds, including humans and even some Earth animals now that the Jagaren have had a few years to study the mammalian brain. All their slaves are turned into murderous automatons via viral reprogramming of their brains and are fitted with bioelectronic radio receivers in case their orders should change. No officers, just the soldiers in battle ’til they die while the Jagaren are well away from the fighting.

  But the Resistance captured a tourist in the rubble of Boston: one of the Jagaren had apparently wanted to see a little blood and thunder up close. Mother, knowing full well the risk of telepathy, made sure it was kept in a dark, soundless chamber until they found an anesthetic that would keep it under.

  I saw some of the inspections and vivisections through my mother’s eyes. I suspect I may have appreciated the procedures more than she, since I studied biology in college. A squat creature it was, beautiful and hideous at the same time, its tentacled body covered in bright green and blue feathery scales. I wondered how they managed to capture it; the Jagaren was radially symmetrical, with an eye pointing out at each corner of its square skull. It’s hard to sneak up on something with 360-degree vision. I guess they ran it down; the Jagaren’s four stout legs were good for kicking and climbing, but too short for speed.

  When they cut it open, the fleshy steam smelled like fish. The vivisection revealed an incredible digestive system: a multi-chambered stomach, with colonies of bacteria to break down cellulose, bone, even some types of rock. And it could probably eat just about anything; the mouth was a wide, sphincter-lipped cavity at the top of its head (the brain was set out of harm’s way in the torso). The muscular oral cavity was lined with circular rows of grinding teeth, and in between were millions of taste buds. Far more than we poor mammals have, and far more specialized.

  So even if I prepare everything to taste exactly as it should to humans, the Jagaren might hate it and punish me. Of course, they might like it, and punish me anyway.

  *

  When the meal is ready, I prepare the twelve dinner plates and dessert dishes and set them on the conveyor belt that carries the food away to be eaten. The conveyor belt door is maybe just barely big enough for me to try to squeeze through (I’ve lost a lot of weight since I’ve been here), but the thought of being in the Jagaren’s dining hall is unspeakably terrifying. They would devour me, I’m sure, gourmands gobbling down a bit of sushi. To feel my arms and legs being sucked into those grinding maws, my bone and flesh shredding as surely as if my limbs had been thrust down a garbage disposal...no. I stay as far from the door as I can.

  There is only one other way out of the kitchen: the door to the hallway that leads to my cell. Or cells, I should say. I go into the hallway, sit down on the concrete floor, and wait. There are three doors in front of me. The one on the right leads to a room with a soft hotel bed, a toilet, a shower, soap, and a change of clean clothes; I will get this room if the Jagaren enjoy their meal. Behind the middle door is a bare concrete room with a futon, sink and toilet; I get this if the meal is indifferent. If the meal is unsatisfactory, I get the last room, a cold, cramped, brightly-lit cell with nothing but a sink and toilet. The Jagaren do not want their cook to be contaminated with excrement.

  I cannot simply spend the night in the hallway or the kitchen. Once, when I refused to respond to the loudspeakers, they sent knock-out gas through the vents. The corpse-movers carried me to the small cold cell. I woke with a headache that lasted three days.

  I wait for one hour, two. Finally, the buzzer sounds, and the right door swings open. The Jagaren were pleased. I should sleep well tonight.

  I enter the room, and find the concrete shard I’ve hidden beneath the bed. I pull off my shirt, and stare down at my scarred chest and belly. One cut for each man, woman, and child I’ve butchered for the Jagaren; almost every inch of my torso is engraved. I find a smooth place, right above my sternum. I push the sharp end of the shard into my flesh and slowly rake it down, again and again, until blood washes dark and soap-slick over my pale skin.

  *

  I dream of my mother. She is feverish. Lances of fire arc through her veins wit
h every step she takes down the dark corridors of the bunker. Her generals take her to a briefing room, where they tell her of an island in the Caribbean. They have found where the Jagaren are holding me, and are going to stage a rescue mission.

  My mother will go with them.

  They are treating it as a suicide mission. I desperately want to tell her to stop. I’m not worth it; she is dying, yes, but her last days could surely be spent better than this. But I can be nothing more than a mute observer.

  And all the while, my mother thinks: 300 degrees, 300 degrees, don’t go over 300 degrees. You will know what to do.

  *

  I wake up crying, bile in my throat. My mother is going to kill herself for me. She is everything to the fate of the human race, and she is going to waste herself, just because I am her child. Her helpless, useless child.

  Soon, the morning alarm blares through the room, and the door slides open. The loudspeakers order me into the kitchen. It’s always like this; the whole thing is automated.

  In the kitchen, I find two young women and an order for French fare. The recipes are demanding, and I cannot concentrate on my work. I burn the bread and scorch the sauces, and at the end of the day I am sent to the tiny, cold concrete room where it is nearly impossible to sleep. I do not dream much, and that is a mercy.

  *

  I walk through my work a tear-stained zombie, half awake and half asleep. I feel as though I’ve been wrapped in an invisible shroud. Sound, light, touch, all my senses are muffled. My fingers are clumsy and numb. I spill more food on the floor than I get into the pots.

  Just as I set the last of the poorly-cooked fajitas and enchiladas on the conveyor belt, a searing pain shoots through my thigh. Suddenly, my blood races with adrenaline. Gunfire and screams ring inside my head. A stabbing pain rips into my chest, and I pass out.