Their job was woodcutting. There were piles of logs they chopped out of the ice and then chainsawed to length. The chainsaws were recharged in the generator house. It was a place to get out of the cold and thaw out fingers and toes. But Corrag didn't like to hang out too long. It took away time from the cutting. There were women who said it was better to stay warm then to eat, but Corrag was eating for two. As soon as the feelings returned to her fingers she grabbed her chainsaw and headed out the door into the darkness and silence of the night broken by the headlamps and the mechanical sounds of the saws burring against the grain of the spruce logs. Her quota was twenty logs for the night. She was about halfway through. The enforcers were staying in their tent. That was unusual. They usually liked to roam through the cut yard and goad the women, even when it got below zero. Most of them had risen through the ranks of the Nenkaja, had had the augment and the opportunity to rejoin the Repho, but had chosen the life of enforcers. They said it got under your skin. Corrag didn't think that would be her case. She would get out somehow. Her term was the standard five years at the end of which her case would be set before the commander and the board of trustees in New York, and if she was deemed a good prisoner she would be given the chance for an augment and rehabilitated back into society on good terms. Or at least that was the promise made by Dr. Juarez-Knoblock, the camp commander.
"You're doing good, Corrag," said Betty, one of the older prisoners. She had survived three stretches, back to the beginning of the Nenkaja with the first Repho administration under President Ryan, when it had housed just a few high-ranking jihadists from Guantanamo and Federation sympathizers. Betty was slowing down, and had lost three toes to gangrene, but there were other prisoners who would help her out, make sure she had socks. The key to survival, said Betty in the bunks at night at the end of a shift, nursing her blackened feet, was keeping one good pair of dry socks at all times. That and eating. Corrag already noticed that some of the women had lost their appetites, and the others would swoop in like vultures and steal their food as soon as they turned their heads. They didn't seem to mind, had accepted the fact that they were on their last legs. They called these girls the ten-milers because they all had a ten-mile stare into the blankness. Corrag swallowed hard and smiled at Betty.
"Cold though."
"You go, girl. You beat the cold."
"Thanks, Betty."
Corrag switched on the saw and it started up without a hitch, running strong after the recharge. The chain was still sharp, and it bit into the frozen spruce with a satisfying pull. Despite the menial nature of the work, Corrag took pride in her ability to judge the length of the cuts and stack the cords neatly. There was satisfaction in a job well done, no matter the recompense. She thought Ricky and Alana would be proud of her. The chainsaw pulled straight through the two-foot diameter log, and Corrag was grateful for a good tool. They sharpened their own chains, and Corrag had become an expert, filing the burrs by the glint of petroleum candlelight and sighting with squinted eyes in her bunk. She slept with her boots by her side under her hands, not wanting to have them stolen away by jealous fellow prisoners, and the file went under her pillow. During the day she hid it between cracks in the floorboard under her bunk, covering it with her pile of clothes. The older prisoners, and even the younger ones, offered to trade her bread for a sharpening job. Sometimes she accepted and sometimes she did not. She stopped, set the chainsaw down and crunched the snow in her rubber boots, pulling the chopped lengths of log out of the snow, piling them four or five at a time in a wheelbarrow and wheeling the barrow to the center of the yard where the cords were stacked. The enforcers were charged with keeping track of everybody's cut rate and used this responsibility to set the women up against each other, cheating one out of wood to favor another. It was just the way it was in the Nenkaja. To expect human decency was a fatal mistake. At some point in the night it was just you and the cold fighting it out, no other thoughts allowed. A voice, an appeal to common language and its emotional content, stole the life energy that could spell the difference between survival or death. It was that way, night after night. And it would be until the spring. That was Corrag's goal, to survive long enough for the spring to give her baby a chance.
"You. Take your wheelbarrow over to Chicago."
The enforcer was talking to her. Chicago was in a lumpy sector of fir and black spruce saplings that had never been properly cleared and was covered with drifts of snow some eight to ten feet thick. She would never get her quota there.
"That's not my sector, sister. I've already been assigned."
"You heard me. Any more lip and it'll be the Bunkhouse where you finish off the night."
The Bunkhouse was an ironically named naked rock, a glacial erratic that sat unusually high off the water's edge surrounded by ice floes. Women assigned for punishment were chained there sometimes in shirtsleeves to face the winds coming off the water. It was a death sentence. Sometimes in their bunks, in the cinderblock hangar that was their shelter, the women could hear the cries of a prisoner, the last lungful of reproach before succumbing to silence, the wail of a living ghost, coming from the Bunkhouse. Corrag had never seen it and didn't ever want to. There were many ghosts in the camp, but especially the enforcers. Corrag did not know what this one looked like under the fur hat and the long thick felt, fur-lined overcoat. She hated her, but even hatred was superfluous. She dumped the load and went back for her chainsaw and trudged across the cutting yard with it, crossing paths with other prisoners who avoided shining their lights up at her face.
There was a pickaxe leaning at an angle in the snow. Corrag put her chainsaw down. Nobody had been at work here all night, she could see, by the absence of boot prints in the freshly layered pallor. In the light of the headlamp she could see the barest evidence of wood under the ice, the curve of a log here and there. She walked up and down. A warm glow spread from her chest. It was anger. It spread down her arms into her wrist. The pickaxe felt like an extension of her arm. She swung it hard at the ice along the edge of the curve of dark log. It bit and split off splinters of sharp wet that hit her in the face. There was a chance she could get at the log. There was a chance she could find others logs buried in the ice. There was absolutely no chance she would make her quota in the remaining time before the end of her battery charge. But any bread was better than no bread. Corrag would not be denied. For the sake of the life in her she swung again and again, feeling the fire in her chest and the sweat breaking out.
She stopped. Too much sweat was a danger. That meant chilled skin and hypothermia and incapacity and starvation -- the end. The quick way of the end was preferable to the slow. The quick way was a fever and unconscious and then being left out in the yard in your underwear for what they called the night cure. The slow way was sickness, shitting your guts out with dysentery and your body too weak to recover and slowly in your bunk taking leave of your possessions and your food ration, willing them to the survivors and drifting off in a moaning bad dream. There was never a pleasant or decorous death the slow way, whereas the quick way, they said, left a smile on the face in the mornings when the clean up detail was charged with taking the body and dragging it to the burn pile. The hardened prisoners liked this detail because sometimes the dead held their most prized possessions still clutched in their hands, hidden away until the end, a ring or gold earring, a remnant of femininity as a token for the passage.
Her clothes would only dry out back in the hangar. She would have to be strategic. In this way Corrag balanced herself. The decisions she made were crucial. And failure was by no means inevitable. She had to know this in order to think clearly.
It took her more than an hour to get enough of the log free of the ice to make a cut. But instead of sawing she climbed on the end, straddling it like a horse and began to buck up and down on it with bent knees so as to keep her weight off the ground. She made a strange figure if anybody had been watching, a jockey on some imaginary mount. The log was immobile, trapped solidly a
nd permanently at the starting gate. But imperceptibly and slowly she felt it giving way, and then at last it broke free by a couple of inches, enough space to get the end of the pickaxe in and heave with all her might. It rolled over the lip of the ice and came to rest a few inches from its previous alignment. Corrag rested, breathing hard, leaning on the pickaxe. Only then did she start the chainsaw up and set it to work on the closest end.
It took almost the entire rest of the shift. When Corrag wheeled her first barrow load of cut logs to the center of the yard, a thin band of light was visible coming over the flat tundra to the south like a window facing out on sweetness and music. All the enforcers emerged from the charging shed to watch her as she dumped the load and began to add the logs to the stack. The fiercest among them, an old battleaxe named Marilyn Muslkick, a former policewoman in Tampa Bay, Florida who had originally been sent up for drug dealing and murder, came walking out to where Corrag was stacking. They said she had killed with her bare hands several of the toughest prisoners during her time as an enforcer. Even Juarez-Knoblock, the camp commander, feared her. Often he walked through the kitchen and dining room chatting to the prisoners, but when he saw Muslkick on duty he made his walk through quickly and quietly, hands behind his back like a professor, albeit a professor with old school heavy metal tattoos covering half his face. Muslkick was known to disapprove of Juarez-Knoblock's predilection for intermittently picking one or two of the younger prisoners as favorites and using them as staff in his office. It was a coveted duty despite the hatred it could engender and the danger of reprisals. Muslkick was said by some to be a jilted lover of Juarez-Knoblock's, but others denied this vehemently, and there were fights that started among the prisoners still over this element of the camp's mythology.
On this dawn in particular Corrag sensed her ambivalence. Muslkick carried her tablet in one hand and pretended to make notes with the other, using her gloved finger to tap at it. The sun on the horizon behind Corrag lit up the condensation emerging from Muslkick's nose in wisps, like a dragon. She looked up and stared at Corrag with eyes lit red.
"You are short of quota. You know that, right?"
"Would have made it," said Corrag, saving her breath.
"Would have and could have do not earn the bread in the Nenkaja. Maybe you should just abort the bastard and lighten your load."
"Never."
"Don't expect any sympathy from me."
"Then give me the check and let me go."
"You're not done."
"I'm done. I can't do any more. Just short me the bread."
Muslkick stared hard at her with eyes that gave off an unbroken hostility.
"I will break you, you little whore, if you so much as raise your head above the ground. You understand me? Now I'm going to give you a little hint. Save your white ass a whooping and listen to me. There's only one way to survive the Nenkaja. Toughness is not that way. Kindness is not that way. You need to be wicked. North Country wicked."
Corrag stared back, feeling the air fill her lungs. That was better than words.
"Is that it?" she asked at last.
"That is it." Muslkick turned and walked back to the shed. The women left standing at the door included prisoners and enforcers. Sometimes there was little to distinguish between the two groups at a distance.
Three more barrow loads. The sun was higher in the sky. The wind picked up and froze Corrag's face a little harder. She wiped it with the sleeve of her coat and noticed the chainsaw oil mixed with hardened snot on the back of it. It had to be all over her face that she'd been wiping all night long. She dropped the chainsaw at the charging terminal after unclipping the chain. She was the last one back to the hangar. Inside the door, the blast of heat from the woodstove greeted her with life saving intensity. She dragged herself over to the bunk and sat on the edge and held herself from crying. Someone had messed up the pile of clothes under the bed. She fell to her knees. When she reached under she noticed the file still in the crack. Thanking the eternal power of Providence, Corrag felt the creature twist inside her. It was hungry. She was famished, on the edge. With all her strength, she undid the buttons on her coat with cramped hands and fell back on the bed.
Hours of a dreamless sleep later, there was someone tugging at her feet. She opened her eyes. Betty was loosening her boots. She sat up like a bolt of lightning.
"You gotta keep dry socks, Corrag. How many times have I told you?"
"Oh, yeah." She tugged off her boots and socks with her hands.
"The girls are talking about you."
"What are they saying?"
"Apparently you pulled a hard one last night."
"I don't know if I can go back out there. I didn't make quota."
"Don't worry. Get some sleep. I'll wake you up for dinner time."
"Thanks, Betty."
The older woman pulled the thin sheet over her and she pulled herself into a ball and instantly fell back asleep. When she awoke she felt sick, disoriented and thirsty. Her legs felt bloated and unable to move. She fought the urge to lie there in the dim light when she knew there was a lineup in the dining room. She could hear the voices, the clanking of dishes on the crude hewn tables. The smell of warm bread rolls and cabbage filled the hangar. That bread and the soup, cabbage and potato in a thin gruel, was the eternal Nenkaja winter ration. Corrag had never imagined being as hungry as she was now. Betty talked often in the dark in the next bunk about the food in the summer. They were allowed to gather berries in their free time and they boiled them down in makeshift pits, using cups as pans to make jam. The idea of jam was like a promise of eternal life to Corrag now.
She struggled to get her boots on and joined the line with her plate in her hands. The tables were filling with the women prisoners, smirking and pulling faces despite the exhausted and deep set eyes, the hair tied back with little care or let loose to hang raggedly in disarray. There were little touches of friendship, scooting over to make room on the benches, the camaraderie of the damned. But there was also a wariness, a fear or unwillingness to show weakness. Nobody knew who would turn and inform to the enforcers about some cheating, sharing, display of friendship or love, for a little bit of favor, a better chainsaw, a slightly warmer blanket, all that could mean the difference between life and death.
She got to the front of the line and the woman on duty looked at her with a quick appraising glance as if she knew her entire life history. It was a damning glance. Corrag knew that what was coming was going to be even worse than she'd expected. Her heart sank as the guard woman opened her mouth and cleared her throat. A hush seemed to come over the hall, but Corrag thought that might be her imagination.
"You didn't make quota."
Corrag nodded, looking at the tray behind the steamed glass counter. She counted the rolls quickly. There were about thirty left and about a dozen people behind her.
"There's also a warning on behavior with associated penalties. You go down to six ounce ration."
"For the day, right? Just for the day."
"Take it up with the staff. I'm just the food server."
Instead of exploding with anger, Corrag saved her energy. She took the half roll on her plate and a pat of butter in its nanofoil case and moved down the line. She filled up her glass with water from the bucket, ladling it slowly and not spilling. She wondered how long she could last on half a roll of bread and a pinch of butter a day. Her hands didn't waver, though. She was proud of herself for that small grace, the left over inheritance of her smile-all-the-while upbringing. There was not the slightest hint of weakness in her. She vowed to not break easily.
A second later, for the first time, a deep fear hit her in an instant like an arrow in her chest. She might not make it. She might not be tough enough. Her life and that of her unborn child might be the casualties of this system of injustice. The world of the Repho and Sandelsky and the Nenkaja would win. There would be no markers or memorial plaques, nobody to even remember she had once passed that way. That,
she realized, was the worst fear, of being erased, forgotten, of never actually having existed. There was only one way to materialize in the world, and that was to be remembered by somebody, to have left a discernible mark on the world in the living memory of a friend or a child.
All of this went through her mind as she sat on the bench at the first table she came to. The other women stared at her and were silent. She looked around at their faces, modest, diffident, embarrassed for her pain and suffering but unable to change anything, too full of their own woes and fear to reach out and alleviate hers. Corrag buttered her token of bread and methodically chewed, swallowed and drank from the glass. The silence in the hall was remarkable, she thought. What were they waiting for? Somebody would begin to shout soon enough that something had been stolen. Every night there were fights, accusations, vows of vengeance. Then the enforcers on duty would stop their chat at their table and sweep in, lock the room down, send them out into the cold while they searched for homemade weapons. Sometimes they would only let them in with a couple of hours left before the night shift went on, so that they would have to work without having gotten any sleep. But this morning there was none of that. Not yet.
The silence was truly deafening. Betty walked by with her plate. Corrag looked up just as she dropped a piece of bread. Then Marina, an older Inuit woman, also a long timer, did the same. Then Candia. Corrag's hands dropped involuntarily to her side. A line of women prisoners walked silently by her at the table, dropping scraps of their bread on her plate until it was full. Corrag felt like laughing suddenly, it was such a solemn moment, but the spirit of defiance was also one of humor. She did laugh, a surprised giggle escaping her at the riches that had suddenly appeared as if by magic, a very special magic. She could feel the enforcers at their table, glaring and humorless, Muslkick among them, calculating the angle, the amount of solidarity they could afford to let coalesce around her at this moment. The best thing, the most powerful act was to eat and enjoy the food. Soon enough she would repay their generosity.
The Victor's Heritage (The Jonah Trilogy Book 2) Page 21
