Unbreakable

by Will McIntosh

  “Look, you’re stronger than me, and faster. I’d just hold you up. I don’t have any food.” She held her arms straight out, as if inviting the clown to frisk her. “That’s key. There’s plenty of water out here, but no food.”

  Beaners reached into the pocket of his baggy, patched pants and held up a plastic bag full of brown pellets. “We pool our resources. I have food, you know just a little more about these wonderful wild lands.” It sounded less like an offer, more like a proclamation. Of course, he was the one holding the rock, so Celia wasn’t in a position to argue.

  She pointed at the hill in the distance. “Fine. We’re heading in that direction to start.”

  Beaners fell into step beside her. He’d said he was sick of clowns, but Celia wondered if he found all of this empty space a little daunting. She certainly did, which was why she missed Anand so badly. Beaners wasn’t her idea of company. Still, if he was going to be around, she should try to get to know him.

  “So, do you have a girlfriend back in Circus Town? Is there a Mrs. Beaners?” Celia asked.

  Beaners stared at her. “A Mrs. Beaners?”

  She shrugged. “What?”

  “You ever seen a female clown?”

  She hadn’t seen any clowns until today, except on the covers of books. “Are there no female clowns?”

  “No. No female clowns.” Beaners kicked a stone.

  “Well, then what do you do when you’re not performing?”

  “Very little,” Beaners said. “I share a tent—shared a tent—with four dozen other clowns. When I wasn’t training, or eating, I was in the tent. You get crazy in there. The boredom. The stink. Once in a while someone can’t take it anymore and runs off, ends up where they aren’t supposed to be, maybe the acrobat’s tent, or the penny arcade. Anywhere but the clown tent. Sometimes the clown who ran off makes it back before security catches him, and sometimes he gets caught, and they bring him back. In pieces. They string him up in the tent. If you’re unlucky enough to be under a piece, the blood drip-drip-drips on you all night. But you’re afraid to move, because security’s already in a bad mood.”

  Celia took a moment to digest this. “Security wasn’t after you, though. Other clowns were. Why?”

  “A misunderstanding,” he murmured.

  “What kind of—“

  “Just let it go, all right?” Beaners shrieked.

  Celia covered her ears. “Okay. Sorry. You’ve got kind of a short fuse, you know that?”

  Beaners pointed at the walled town to their right. “What’s inside there?”

  Celia told him what she knew.

  #

  Beaners grabbed a sapling to steady himself as he stepped across a gap in the enormous rock face they were crossing to avoid thick brush. Beaners might be strong, but he definitely wasn’t built for wilderness hiking—he was struggling with the uneven terrain way more than Celia.

  “So now that you know what I know, any guesses about what this place is all about?”

  Beaners gave her a dark look. “Shut up. It’s bad luck to talk about that.”

  Now, that was interesting. It was the same in her village—not only was it rude to talk about what was going on, but if you did talk about it, suddenly you had a string of weak assignments, or you were transferred to a terrible team. So everyone pretended there was nothing strange about being born in a village surrounded by walls, where everything centered around breaking world records.

  “Going my way?” a voice called.

  Anand was sitting with his back propped against a tree, up a ridge to Celia’s right. Celia shrieked with joy. She scrambled up the rock and ran at him with open arms.

  He ducked out of the way as if she were planning to tackle him, avoiding her hug. “It’s good to see you, too.”

  “I thought for sure you’d go back with the audience when I didn’t come back.”

  He shook his head. “Once I had it in my mind that I was leaving, I couldn’t face another night in those bunks.”

  “I take it you know this guy.” Beaners dropped a rock he’d been holding. Evidently his first reaction to the sight of a stranger was to find something to hit him with.

  “Anand, this is Beaners. We crossed paths while I was running from your supervisor. Long story.”

  Anand nodded to Beaners.

  “Beaners has a little food he’s offered to share.”

  “Terrific.”

  “We should get moving,” Celia said. “Which way from here?”

  Anand pointed up the rise, in the direction they’d been heading. “There was a guy who bolted a couple of years ago. When they brought him back he said he came this way, and he saw something. I want to check it out for myself. After that, we’re in unknown territory.”

  “What did your friend see?” Celia asked, not loving the haunted look in Anand’s eyes.

  Anand started walking. “Let’s just see if it’s there.”

  #

  They had walked through the countryside for most of the day before finally stumbling upon another powder blue path going in the direction they wanted to go. By the time they decided to stop for the night, in a crook between two big fallen trees by a stream, the sky was nearly dark. Beaners set himself up about ten feet from Celia and Anand. He leaned against the rough bark of one of the trees and sighed heavily.

  Celia was exhausted, but she was going to find it hard to sleep with her stomach emptier than it had ever been. She barely eaten one meal in two days.

  She cleared her throat and looked at Beaners. “That food you showed me. What was it? I couldn’t tell.”

  “In other words, fork over the food you promised.” Beaners looked pointedly at Anand. “Although I don’t recall promising to divide it three ways.” He pulled a plastic baggie out of his pocket and tossed it at Celia. “Fifty-fifty. You want to feed the extra mouth, that’s on you.”

  Celia retrieved the baggie, pulled out a handful of brownish balls the size of marbles and passed the bag to Anand.

  “What is this?” Anand held up one of the balls and squinted at it in the dim light.

  “Clown chow.”

  “It looks like duck droppings,” Anand said.

  “Hey, that nothing you’ve got don’t look all that tantalizing either,” Beaners shot back. “You don’t want it, don’t eat it.”

  Anand grabbed his pack, rifled around and pulled out a chocolate bar. “What about this? Does this look tantalizing?” He tilted the bar back and forth, as if it was dancing.

  Beaners eyed the shiny royal blue wrapper. “The truth is, I don’t know if I should be tantalized or not. Clowns caught eating mark food are ground up and added to the slop.”

  “What are you talking about?” Celia said. “Those menus the ringmaster read for the winners sounded pretty damned good to me. You must win a competition once—”

  “The menus don’t apply to clowns. Clowns get clown chow. Or slop. Period.” Beaners lay down and stretched his arms behind his head.

  “Hey Beaners.” Anand tossed a piece of chocolate, which landed right in Beaners’ lap. “Your share. One third.”

  Beaners retrieved the chocolate and sat up. He sniffed it, broke off a small corner and put it in his mouth. He chewed twice, then stopped abruptly, his eyes growing wide.

  “The stars are in my mouth.”

  Anand laughed with delight at his reaction.

  “Don’t laugh at me!” Beaners scrambled to the outside of the fallen tree with the rest of his chocolate, suckling it like mother’s milk.

  “You know, you’re not very funny,” Anand called to him.

  “I’m not trying to be funny. When I want to be funny, I’m hilarious.”

  “Well, any time you want to start being funny, we’d welcome the change.”

  Beaners either didn’t hear him or didn’t care. He was reverently studying the rest of the chocolate in his bloody palm, as if astonished that a brown, slightly melted lump could hold so much pleasure.

  “Why is he stil
l wearing that makeup?” Anand whispered to Celia.

  Celia leaned close and whispered back, “It’s not makeup.”

  Anand broke into a grin, and Celia had to admit, it would have been a decent joke if it had been a joke. She widened her eyes and nodded. Anand’s grin vanished.

  In books and movies, clowns were people wearing costumes. It made her wonder what else books and movies got wrong. She’d find out soon enough. Getting to the outside was proving harder than Celia ever would have guessed. Somehow that seemed fitting. As long as she got back in time.

  Celia called up a movie on her phone. Tonight it was going to be Almost Grown, about a fourteen year-old kid who followed a rock band around the country after finagling a job as a rock journalist.

  Anand pulled a pencil and a pad of paper out of his pack, and began drawing.

  As it grew darker, Anand sidled over to watch the movie, leaving a little space between himself and Celia. It reminded her of how he’d dodged her hug earlier. What was the deal with him? It wasn’t like she was trying to hit on him. She was trying to save her dying mother, not find a boyfriend.

  After a while, Beaners took up a spot a half-dozen feet behind them uphill and watched over Celia’s shoulder.

  Chapter 9

  Anand woke up screaming. Celia was on her feet, looking all around, before she was fully awake. The forest was as quiet and empty as ever.

  “I’m sorry,” Anand said, eyes still wide. “Just a nightmare.”

  It was early morning, the horizon pink, the sky overhead still black through the foliage.

  “Sounded like a bad one.”

  Anand retrieved his pack from the ground. “You could definitely put it in that category—” He frowned, stuck his hand inside his pack and felt around. “God damn it!” He looked up at Celia. “The other chocolate bar is gone.”

  “What?” Celia looked for Beaners and spotted him hovering nearby, his bright blue and yellow outfit vivid among the softer colors of the forest. “You bastard! You selfish little bastard.”

  “It’s wasted on you. You don’t appreciate it the way I do.” Beaners sauntered down to the stream and ladled water to his mouth using a cupped palm. “You ready to get moving?”

  Celia put her hands on her hips. “You really think you’re coming with us after you stole the last of our food?”

  Beaners’ eyes were dark and empty as he looked up at her. “Who’s going to stop me?”

  Anand stepped past her, toward the bank. Celia grabbed the tail of his shirt. “Don’t.” She lowered her voice. “He’s strong. I mean, freakishly strong. He’ll pull your arms off.”

  Anand paused. “You’re kidding me. He looks like a gourd.” Anand was half again as tall as Beaners; the veins bulging over his clearly-defined biceps suggested he wouldn’t be a pushover in a fight. Still, the way Beaners had propelled her through that water pipe had been astounding.

  She shouldn’t have tossed that knife into the reservoir. It would have evened things out. “Fine, come along if you want. You have to sleep sometime, and when you do, we’ll bash your head in with a rock.” Celia was utterly incapable of doing something so grisly, but Beaners didn’t know that.

  Beaners pulled a little flap of skin off his palm, blotted a drop of oozing blood and stared at the bloodstained fingertip of his white glove. “You think you’d be the first to try? You’re making me homesick for Circus Town, talking like that.” He gestured toward the blue path. “Ready?”

  #

  The forest opened onto rolling hills of thick green grass. A line of mountain peaks, their tops capped in white, rose beyond a wide, slow river. A walled town sat beside the river, a waterfall cascading from a mountain ridge right into the town.

  “What’s in that one?” Celia asked Anand.

  Anand didn’t seem to hear her. He was staring open-mouthed at the town. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Not the town, Celia realized. The waterfall. It was beautiful, although given their situation, and Janine’s, she wouldn’t have noticed it if Anand hadn’t pointed it out.

  “Do you know what’s inside that town?” she repeated.

  “I’ve never seen it before. There are a lot of towns we never visited.”

  “Did anyone talk about what was inside the ones you didn’t visit?”

  Anand shrugged. “All the time. What else did we have to do? But none of them knew any more than I did.”

  The path wound toward the town, so they decided it was time to get off of it again. The path made walking easier, but they were guessing it didn’t lead where they wanted to go. Plus, Anand said if they got off the path they were less likely to get spotted by Redsuits.

  “What are Redsuits, anyway? Are they like the police?” Celia asked.

  “Yeah. Police who can do anything they want to you if they catch you.”

  Celia made a mental note to avoid Redsuits.

  “I’m starving.” Celia glanced back at the hoggish clown, and felt a fresh wave of anger. Beaners was a dozen paces behind, his big feet swinging like a duck’s.

  Anand chuckled and shook his head.

  “What?”

  “Doesn’t someone like you just brush hunger aside? I mean, I’m hungry and miserable, but I’m guessing you didn’t spend those weeks you stayed awake saying, ‘I’m so tired. I wish I could go to sleep.’”

  “That’s exactly what I did,” Celia said. “Even if you make your living by being miserable, you never get used to it. It never stops feeling miserable.”

  Anand took this in. She wondered how he’d lost his ear and gotten those scars, but it seemed rude to ask.

  “So why haven’t you tried to run away before now?” she asked instead.

  Anand stepped around a thorny bush. “I always knew I was going to go. I guess I’ve been waiting for the right moment.”

  Celia thought she knew why this was the right moment. Maybe it was time to get that out in the open, at least. “Was this the right moment because you felt responsible for my being here?”

  Anand looked surprised. “What? Why would I feel responsible for you? I just met you.”

  She gave him a patient smile. “I know it was your backpack I tripped over. I figured it out.”

  Anand threw back his head and let out an angry bark. “You figured it out. Is that right?”

  “Are you saying I’m wrong?” Celia watched Anand’s profile as they walked. He seemed to be deciding something.

  “The backpack belonged to a guy named Clay. Clay was my friend.” Anand raised a finger. “The one rule, the big rule, is the audience stays in the background. We’re not the show.” He pointed at Celia. “You’re the show.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “The clown is the show. Only, when Clay left that damned pack in your way, he became part of the show.”

  Bags of ice. She didn’t want to picture it, but the images paraded across her mind. Clay, being beaten to death with bags of ice. Anand being held back, trying to break loose. Trying to stop them.

  “You must hate me.”

  Anand put his hands on his head and gawked at her. “That makes no sense. You hadn’t slept in weeks, you tripped on a strap some dope left in your way. You smashed your face on the stairs. How could I hate you for that?”

  Most people weren’t that reasonable when it came to placing blame when their loved ones died. It was hard to fathom how someone had died, and a second person lay dying, all because she’d tripped over a backpack. How could something so small have had such huge consequences?

  Beyond the next rise the ground dropped away. The valley below was nothing but dirt, with a high, wide hill rising in the center. They stopped at the edge and watched.

  A dump truck was climbing the hill, its engine rumbling, while bulldozers and trucks worked on the hill’s flat top. The top of the hill was heaped with trash, the slopes covered with dirt.

  “I always wondered where all of our trash ended up,” Celia said.

  Anand studied her, his eyebrows pinched. “Is t
hat what you see?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look closer.”

  Celia glanced at Beaners, whose cheeks were quivering. He looked as if he wanted to be anywhere but here, even back in Circus Town. She dropped her gaze, a crawling dread washing over her. She didn’t want to look closer.

  “Celia, I think you need to look at that hill,” Anand said. “Even though you’re not going to like what you see.”

  Reluctantly, Celia lifted her gaze.

  What she’d seen as cardboard and cans snapped into focus: arms, legs, faces tangled together in heaps. Corpses spilling from the back of a dump truck.

  “No.”

  Bodies. A hill of bodies.

  “Welcome to Retirement,” Anand said.

  “Max,” Celia whispered. And Molly. Molly was retiring soon.

  Celia pulled out her phone, held it up to take pictures of the mound. Her hands were shaking too badly, so she sat, propped the phone on her knee and snapped a dozen photos.

  “There have always been rumors, that when you retire they put you in the ground,” Anand said. “Then a friend ran off, and when he came back he told me about the hill...I believed him, but at the same time I didn’t. I had to see it for myself.”

  “We have to tell everyone what’s happening here.” She’d help Janine first, but Janine wasn’t the only one who was going to die. If Celia didn’t do something, Molly was going to be in that hill in just two months. Along with thousands of others who would march happily out of their towns, expecting to join the outside world.

  “What is this place?” Celia shouted at the sky. Max was in that pile somewhere. All this time she’d pictured him on some beach or something, but he was dead.

  “Hide. Hide.” Beaners startled Celia by sweeping her off her feet. He carried her bouncing over a rise, then dropped her and dove to the ground beside her.

  Anand was right behind them. “What are you doing?”

  “Get down,” Beaners hissed.

  An engine’s growl rose in the distance. Anand dropped to the ground just as a brick-red jeep rode into view, bumping and bouncing over the rough terrain. Both passengers wore red uniforms; the man in the passenger seat was holding an automatic rifle, the muzzle pointing at the sky. A leg dangled limply out of the back end of the jeep, the rest of the body hidden from view. Another ‘retiree’ maybe, or someone who’d escaped from their town.