by Manda Benson
The opposite door leads outside. It looks like early morning, when the sun is yet to rise.
You tell me the thought that will unlock the door and at last we are out, breathing clean air carrying the chill of early autumn, in the prison-like courtyard you remember seeing from the upstairs window. There’s a large metal gate painted black directly opposite the building’s exit, but the walls are all made of concrete and topped with barbed wire strung along poles angled inwards.
I look to the eastern horizon where the sky is bright, and stabbing pains shoot through my eyes and jaw. I turn away and blunder into the wall, but the pain is still getting worse. My guts have clenched into a burning knot of agony. I put my hands against the wall, but my legs still won’t support me, and I’m bending double and sinking to the ground. My mouth is full of slaver and my head spins. My guts lurch and panic grips me. I breathe in and out hard and fast, trying to hold back the urge to vomit. Again I swallow, force it down, but an alarming gargle rises up my throat even though there’s no breath there to power my voice. And then it comes again and I can’t stop it, and it burns my mouth and it stinks, and this awful greasy acidic slime is all up against the back of my nose and coating my tongue and lips, and running onto the concrete floor.
I cough and I force bitter saliva from the sides of my tongue and spit, trying to wash the taste away.
You hear the sound of a motor, the rattle of the front gate moving.
Someone’s coming. Quickly! Move!
You urge limbs to move, to coordinate and stand in the way you know, but the muscles of this body are not yours, and I am hunched snivelling and shivering over a pool of sick.
You have to move now. If we stay here they are going to catch us.
There is a car engine making a noise somewhere near the gate. We are going to get caught, again, and the thought of their hands on me, restraining, forcing, is repulsive. Are we just going to stay here and let it happen, again, because Epsilon keeps vigil while Gamma falls apart?
The engine sound is growing louder. You strain to move, and suddenly something in me gives. I can’t do this. You are better than me.
Your legs straighten and you’re up on your feet, your field of vision swinging with giddy nausea. It’s unfamiliar, somehow, as though you did it years ago and it’s not as easy as you remember. This body is alien to you, but you know enough to make it work. You make it to the green plastic industrial bins against the wall in four unsteady strides before you fall down, out of sight.
Your vision is swimming and you can’t seem to get your eyes to focus. You can just make out the tyres of the vehicle as they pass by from under the bins. Your sides spasm into another retch, and you feel a hot line track down from the corner of your mouth, but when you try to raise your hand to your face to wipe it off, you can’t seem to find the right place to put it. The pain, the cold, and the leaden predawn sky are so much more intense now. Something isn’t adding up. How did you get here? You know you came from somewhere, but you can’t remember where. You’ve seen this place before, but it’s not yours. When you try to remember your own name, the only word that comes to mind is Epsilon.
Gamma?
You can still sense me, but I don’t reply.
Gamma, whatever just happened, you have to undo it.
Still no reply. Fragmented memories of another life, somewhere else, start to return: a man with grizzled sideburns and green spectacles, a woman with dyed-red hair, and a silent boy with dark wavy hair. You can’t remember their names, but you used to know them. I can’t. You have to do this. Not me.
My reply takes a long time to come. I’m no good at it. You have it. You keep this. I don’t want to be this any more. I don’t want to be me; I’d rather not be anyone.
You feel me withering inside us. What happens if you become me? You’re sleeping now, in the world you know. There are people there who care about you. In the morning, will they find you in bed, unresponsive and in a coma, or something worse? If you have to become someone else, will you cease to be? Because you’re the only one who can make what you want into a reality. Because if you won’t be responsible for yourself, no-one else can be expected to. Because you’re the only person who can be you.
You pull yourself up by the handle on the back of the bin, and force in a deep inhalation. I won’t help you any more until you stop this.
The indifference I feel turns to a sharp point of spite. You let them catch you again, and you deal with it. Your problem now. I’m leaving.
You begin to count breaths. You can’t leave. There’s nowhere for you to go.
By the time you have counted to six, breathing becomes less of a conscious effort. When you get to twelve, you’re sinking back into the more familiar passive state, and the limbs you feel you no longer control, and everything is becoming as a dream once more.
Okay. Now what?
The gate. There should be an order that will open it.
What is it?
Can you move out slowly so I can get a better look at it?
My hand is shaking, but I put it on the corner of the bin and edge around slowly so we’re facing the gate. You feel for the signal, pry at it with your thoughts in the same way you’ve always known. It only takes a few seconds to work out how to unlock it.
Got it. Before I open it, let’s make sure we’re not being watched.
I pan slowly across the empty courtyard, searching for signs of life. Nothing can be seen behind the blank windows, and we will just have to hope no-one is there to catch sight of us running the gauntlet from the bins to the gate.
You give the command, and the motor starts up and the gate begins to slide back. Run now.
Loose debris on the concrete hurts my feet as I make as fast as I can towards the widening gap. Through the bars I can see a wide flat landscape of farmlands and fields, and a road leading to freedom.
As soon as we’re through, you give the command for the gate to shut, and the motor’s pitch changes as it slides back.
A ditch at the edge of the road comes into view. Get in it!
I jump, slip, and fall into a foot of muddy, stagnant water. It stains the white fabric of my lunatic asylum pyjama trousers and sleeves.
You struggle to think over the sensation of my feet sinking into gritty silt. We need to move. We’re not safe until we get away from this place.
I begin to move along the ditch, which has been dug into the side of the field, probably as some sort of drainage channel. It’s slow going. Hopefully, the bottom of the ditch isn’t visible from the place we escaped from. The white clothing will surely be conspicuous if anyone does see.
The sound of tyres on the road above fades into hearing range.
Someone’s coming.
Keep still. They might not notice. There’s nothing else we can do.
A car door slams. I stay in the bottom of the ditch, and we hope together that the person will go away.
A voice behind. A man stands at the top of the bank looking down. I recognise his face with a jolt of fear, and then you lose contact.
*
When Dana and Eric awoke in the morning, the tent had partially fallen down by itself.
“Oh well, at least it won’t be so much work to take it down,” Eric laughed. He opened his rucksack to discover the food he had smuggled out of the Chinese restaurant the previous night had leaked beancurds and yellow bean sauce all over his maps and spare clothes. Dana laughed as he tried to separate what remained unspilled and what remained unsoiled from the mess, making noises of disgust and throwing sticky items on the ground. It was only when she looked away from him that she noticed a glossy grey-black thing with a knobbly texture rippling underneath the long grass close to her feet.
“Hey, look, a snake!”
Graeme had once found a harmless grass snake in a compost bin in the garden, and had picked it up and allowed Dana to stroke it carefully before putting it back. She knew there was only one other kind of snake, called a viper, that was v
enomous but that very rarely bit and would normally flee from people, and something else called a slow worm that was actually not a snake. Immediately after she spoke she realised something was not right about this snake. The diameter of it was enormous, as thick as her thigh, and she was sure vipers were not meant to be that big, and at any rate, vipers were supposed to be green with a black diamond pattern on the back, and this snake was more of a dark grey with narrow yellow stripes.
Something reared up feet away from her with a noise like someone spitting down a long plastic drainpipe — a neck that flared into a head covered in scaly armour plates, a hood with a throat like corn-on-the-cob. Dana leaned back on her hands and pushed towards the tent with her feet, unable to move fast enough as the head flew at her, and then Eric grabbed her arm and pulled her up the bank and out of the snake’s way.
Dana landed at the top of the bank by the tent. Her hand fell on a rock and she flung it at the snake. She rubbed her eyes furiously with her free hand while she searched for another. Dust must have got into them, or the fright of the snake must have done something to her mind, because now it looked like there were far more snakes than just one, all rearing and flailing wildly.
She rolled over onto her knees and found another stone. As she got to her feet and rose her hand to throw it, she noticed something else. At the bottom of the dyke was some great thick brown body with four clawed legs spinning in the mud and a craggy tail churning up the water. The bodies of the snakes seemed to be attached to where the neck of this thing should be.
Eric waddled up beside her bent double. Gripped between his knees and supported by his hands was a lump of concrete masonry with a rusty metal rod sticking out of it. He heaved it forward, into the dyke, and it landed hard on the shoulders of the beast at the bottom, driving it down into the mud. The snakes immediately fell silent and collapsed like puppets with the strings cut.
Both of them stood breathing hard and gazing down into the dyke, where there lay the motionless and headless body of a huge lizard with snakes attached instead where its head should be. Dana realised she was shaking. She took deep breaths and tried to count the snake heads. Seven.
“This is mad,” said Eric breathlessly. “First it was the wyvern, and then this. They’ve got to be King Cobras! They’re, like, the most poisonous snakes in the world! Someone stole them from a zoo; do you reckon they’re the same ones?”
Dana shrugged, out of breath and unable to come up with a response. She stared at the dead lizard and the dead snakes draped over it and trailing in the water. A memory came to mind, the news report with the crazy woman, the reptiles stolen from a zoo. “The body must be a Komodo Dragon.”
Eric grimaced. “I saw it on a wildlife programme. Komodo Dragons have saliva so full of bacteria that if they bite you, you get blood poisoning and die. They find a gnu or something and sneak up to it and bite it, and they follow it for days until it drops dead.”
“It’s not like it can do that anyway,” Dana said. “It’s got no head, so it can’t have any saliva.
“How did they end up sewn together like that? D’you think it’s a science experiment that escaped from a secret government lab?”
Dana shook her head. “There’s no government. It’s the Meritocracy now, and I don’t think the Meritocracy does stuff like that.”
“Maybe the Dutch brought it with them when they came to drain the fens? Bloody foreigners!” He paused for a moment, breathing loudly. “Does stuff like this always happen wherever you go?”
Dana shrugged, trying to be noncommittal. “Something like that.” In a way, she wished she could tell him she was the product of an experiment and she could think to the wyvern and the computers and stuff. She wasn’t sure what he would think if he did tell her. Probably he would either not believe her at all, or go off on another one of his crackpot conspiracy theories about governments. He probably wouldn’t understand the real conspiracy that had been behind the government when he’d inadvertently helped her attack it in the Cerberus game, and Jananin wouldn’t want her telling him that at any rate.
“When I first met you in the Cerberus game, I just thought you were weird, but playing the game with you was really mint. Then I met you in real life and people were saying bad stuff about you, but they were wrong, and it’s like real life is as mint as a game. You’re awesome.”
“Thanks,” said Dana. No-one had ever said she was awesome before. It made her feel kind of warm inside to have a friend, to have someone who liked her for who she was. “You’re awesome too. Everyone else at the school is, like, well, a dickhead, but you’re not like them.”
It became conspicuous to her that Eric was standing far too close for comfort, and yet when she turned to face him, he put his hand on her and his face loomed in hers.
Dana stumbled as she pulled away from him. Her foot slid and she fell backwards and scraped the heel of her hand on the ground. “What are you doing?” Stones dug into her fingers as she scrabbled to put some distance between herself and him, moving backwards in an uncoordinated shuffle.
Eric’s face had gone red. “I— I thought we were friends.”
“Not that way!” Dana finally found a footing and stood up.
“What is it, are you gay or something?” Eric’s manner had become sneering. His voice was sardonic and unpleasant.
“Ya, I’m gay.” Dana didn’t really know if she was gay, but she hoped it would make him feel better and stop him from trying what he’d just done again.
Eric glared at her, a bitter expression twisting his face. “You’re lying. What is it? Is it because I’m a nerd? Because I’m not fit like popular lads, like boys in magazines? Because I don’t like sport and I like heavy metal and computer games? Am I just minging?”
Dana stared back at him. She didn’t know how to answer these questions, and she didn’t know what she wanted, only that she didn’t want Eric in her personal space and making her feel that way, and she didn’t know how to express this to him in words.
Eric’s voice broke into a shrill yell. “You think you’re so much better than me! You think the popular lads like Smith and Avery will want you for a girlfriend? They won’t! You’re just as weird and crap as I am, and you’ll not get any better offers.”
Without realising it, Dana had been backing away from him. When he shouted, she couldn’t stand to look at him any more, and she turned her back on him and walked into the onion field.
“I’m making a Wellington Bomber,” she murmured to herself, but either he didn’t hear or he didn’t understand.
“Fine! Just walk away from me!” Eric roared behind her.
Dana heard the splash of him throwing something into the dyke, but she didn’t turn round. She couldn’t deal with people when they got into this state, the same as she couldn’t deal with it when she got in a state herself. Normally she would go to her room and make Airfix models, but she couldn’t do that here, so she concentrated on the ground she was walking on to try to stop it from overwhelming her.
Eric must have been wanting what some kids did at school, to call themselves girlfriend and boyfriend. Dana wasn’t quite sure what girlfriends and boyfriends actually did, because she’d never seen them at it in school, but she suspected they were either doing or preparing to do what the school taught in Biology lessons and in that stupid subject they called Personal and Social Education that was usually about indoctrinating people not to be racist and pollute the environment. It was sex, something crude and mechanical that you had to do in a certain ritual order in a bed, involving inserting parts of other people into one’s person, and yet animals somehow managed to do it without attending PSE lessons or reading an instruction booklet with lurid fleshy diagrams. It was something that was revolting and unhygienic and that you could get diseases from doing, and it was supposed to be how normal people, not like her and Cale, who had been made out of sperms and ova in a test tube by Ivor Pilgrennon, were conceived and grew inside a woman in order to turn into people.
Dana always hated it when people pretended to be her friends and used her, like the girl who’d thought it was funny to invite her to places and not turn up. People like that made her want to scream and hit something. Now was what she had done to Eric the same as that? Was she a horrible person because she’d only ever thought of using him to help her find Ivor? Because she’d not listened to his ideas about the wyvern when she’d been so keen to use it as an excuse to contact Jananin? Dana had known all her life that other people were not like her, and that other people could be unkind and unsympathetic purely because they did not like that she was not like them, and she supposed she’d always thought she was better than them in a way, because she wouldn’t treat someone like herself who was different badly just for being that way. Didn’t this just prove that she wasn’t?
A choking tension had gathered in her throat. Dana blinked furiously and sniffed hard to clear her nose. What else could she have done? Could she have just let him do that to her, even if it felt revolting and wrong on so many different levels? Perhaps she wasn’t really different. Perhaps everyone else saw things exactly as she did, but they were just stronger than her, better at coping, and understood what was the proper impression to make in social situations like that. Perhaps the stuff they taught in biology about sex and about how people are supposed to enjoy it and the stuff they do before it was all lies, a conspiracy to make people accept it, otherwise the species would die out. Perhaps I am gay. If a minority of people are gay and a minority of people have autistic conditions, she supposed it might make sense, because both of them are different to what people are told they are supposed to be like.
