by Jinn, Bo
The girl faltered: “N-Naomi…”
“Naomi…” he repeated with a whisper. “Naomi…”
He stared at the floor, repeating the name over and over, his voice diminishing with recitation. Nothing. He looked up, suddenly.
“Do you know me?” he asked her.
The girl’s head bobbled up and down.
“You’re … you’re Saul,” she sniffled.
He watched his own reflection in her large, shimmering eyes, appearing more lost with each slow bow of his head. He rose to his feet.
“N-no!” she cried at once. “Don’t go, please!”
He stopped just as he was about to open the door and turned back slowly. He leaned forward and rather awkwardly put his hands under the girl’s arms, averting his eyes from hers as he held her up and set her down on the exam table as though he were laying a brick.
“Wait right here,” he said. “I will come back.”
“P – promise,” her hand reached out and held him.
“I promise,” he replied, weakly.
The girl slowly let go.
“Any luck?” said the old medic as soon as he entered the corridor.
“No,” he said. “She won’t talk.”
“Post-traumatic stress. Not much we can do about it.”
He prodded around his utility packs and chanced to find a pack of Lucky Strikes with two cigarettes left. He took one, put the filter between his lips and lit.
“What will they do with her?” he asked.
“The same thing they do with all refugees.” The medic gestured out toward the mountains. “The Storozh D.P camp is about twenty miles east. They’ll take her there.”
“And then?”
The old medic curled his lip and shook his head. “Some get transferred,” he replied. “Most of them don’t. A lot of war exiles these days, especially around this region. She’ll be lucky if they have space for her.”
Saul took the cigarette from his lips and exhaled.
“She has no family,” he murmured with a pensive gaze cast eastward.
“Doesn’t seem like it, no,” the medic sighed with a kind of contrived lethargy. “Well,” he groaned and straightened up. “We’d better get her cleaned up. She won’t be getting much medical care at Storozh. Better do the best we can. You’d best stick around…”
The old doctor turned and snatched the cigarette from his lips. “This is an infirmary,” he said, stamping the cigarette out underfoot.
Little Naomi sat still, visibly struggling to conceal her pain, which bore itself in the flickers of winces and beads of sweat, as the medic dabbed at the deep cut over her right arm. Saul watched from behind. Every now and again, the girl would look over her shoulder to make sure he was still in the room.
His thoughts floundered in a void, not an inkling of a memory with which to begin making sense of things. He had yet to fully convince himself that he had ever woken since the point of his last memory. But one rather troubling point did militate against the theory that he was still lying in an induced coma in Seragon.
Those voices … Vague, yet bizarrely familiar, voices.
What was that flash that had passed through the blind corners of his mind moments before he had woken? A dream? A dream within a dream? Or was it something else? The dream had had no visual texture in his memory. The voices had seemed to hover in some kind of cerebral vacuum. And even though it had not stirred any particularly redolent sensation in him, it unsettled him more than the worst nightmare for precisely that reason.
Vincent…
The name was one he was sure he had come upon before. Where?
“Done,” announced the medic at last. As soon as he turned away, the girl climbed down off her bench and scuttled immediately toward Saul. “A supply convoy should be leaving for Storozh soon.”
“I will take her.”
“I think you’ll have to.”
The little girl hung on to Saul’s hand to stop herself from stumbling.
“You might have to carry her,” said the doctor. “She’s still weak.”
He reached down to pick the girl up, this time cradling her in his arms and she immediately buried her head in his chest as soon as he did. Her little body was half-bare. “Do you have anything she could wear?”
After procuring an oversized white shirt, which fit over the girl like a shroud, he descended from the upper floors, attracting more than a few enquiring glances from passersby. From the descending platform, the HGVs could be seen commuting in mechanical lines all over Fort Gen -- from storehouses to hangars to rows of airships, loading up and alighting supply containers, vehicles and personnel. At the end of the road, he sighted a large convoy being loaded, just before the main gates. When the platform settled, he began the long, uneasy march. The strong, cold wind was stinging and the girl tucked her hands in and shivered.
“Where are we going?” she murmured in his ear.
He had hoped the question would never come.
“They will take you somewhere safe,” he replied vaguely.
“Are you coming too?”
He made the mistake of looking down, catching a brief glimpse of the torturous eyes. “I cannot come with you,” he answered
“But, you said you won’t leave,” the girl pleaded with a whimper. “Mama and papa said…”
He came to a sudden halt.
“Your parents?”
The girl nodded and started to cry again.
He hushed her and turned on the corner of the munitions storehouse, sheltered from the cold wind and unwanted attention. He lowered his voice, “Are they…”
He was going to ask if they were alive or dead. “… Where are they?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” The girl’s voice broke and the little face screwed up with grief. “They… said goodbye. Th-then, they put me in the dark place. They t-told me that s-someone would come for me. I waited…” She seemed to recall painfully. “I h-heard the noises … loud noises … screaming.”
A vision reminiscent of his nightmares formed in his imagination.
“What happened then?” he asked.
“You came.”
The disjointed phrase was hard to decipher. From what he could gather, the girl’s parents had hidden her, perhaps in the hope that she might escape whatever fate must have befallen them thereafter.
“Saul, p-please don’t go. Don’t leave me.”
The little head sunk back into his chest and the girl started to shake again. Her distress paralyzed him with some strange passion. The carrier to Sodom would leave in a few hours, leaving precious little time to decide the girl’s fate. If he did not return, the Commission would find out. And what would staying with her solve in the long run? The Kamchatka Wall was a 1,000-kilometer strip of warzone, hundreds of war-torn miles between Fort Gen and the nearest civil cities. Even if she could somehow survive long enough to make it across the threshold between the war zones and the civil world, there was no guarantee she would find refuge. And yet, all pragmatism was shaken away by the fearful quiver of that grimy little head.
“Don’t leave me,” she repeated, whispers punctuated by sobs.
C. 5: Day 464
Airship SM-37 from Fort Gen, Kamchatka landed at exactly 0325. A frigid draft blew in through the maglev tunnels of Milidome 3rd.
A day come and gone and many fruitless hours of contemplation spent, gazing out from the ship deck to the horizon, waiting for the aimless synapses to ignite a thought that might ignite a memory, and not a single memory roused. It was indisputable. Ninety days of the world’s subsistence had been lifted clean from his mind. On rare occasions, dreams could kindle thoughts once lost to the mind, and he thought to brave his nightmares, in the hope that he might unearth some lost memory in the hermeneutic of a dream. To no avail. Sleep was impossible; all the more still when all one had for comfort was the aching thought of having left a wounded and defenceless child all by herself in the midst of a warzone. By the time he had landed in
Durkheim, he was ready to collapse from exhaustion.
The cold waft of air swelled as the maglev rolled up to the platform and rumbled to a stop. Saul raised his coat collar, pocketed his hands and settled his grip on the blade. The doors hissed open. A mass of low-caste martials boarded the empty cars, and he jammed in among them.
The automated voice announced the next stop:
“Outer-Durkheim 4th.”
The doors shut, and the maglev took off with seamless velocity.
The maglev passed right past Sixth Echelons and his eyes zipped from left to right as the maglev flew past. According to the earliest messages on his Nexus account, his new abode was somewhere on the other side of the city, in an area called “Haven,” one of the more obscure districts in the metropolis. He did not know the address.
His legs were about to give way under him from exhaustion. He got off the maglev at Outer Durkheim 4th and took the capsule line down to first stratum above the lower city. On a dark side street off the main avenue, he stopped outside a narrow, terraced building, and the sign over the doors flashed: “Motley Marionettes” -- a low-caste bordello. When he walked through the doors, two low-end, auburn-haired, gum-chewing walkers sitting in the dim-lit lobby turned their heads to the entrance with interest.
He paid the full price of eight ducats for a walker and room, and when the mute, wrinkled and dour old woman behind the desk proffered one of her women, he quickly refused and asked for cigarettes, to which the old innkeeper’s response was a curled lip, and she tossed the key on the desk without a word.
“Dregs…” he heard one of the walkers murmur as he walked away.
Room 5 smelled like concentrate of rose petals with a hint of peroxide and venereal body odour. He locked the door. A GMD blared across the street below. The lower strata were always louder and the air was more polluted. The chronometer on the bedside showed 0430 hours. The mattress was worn and concave. When he lay down, he felt his weight press against the swellings in his flesh.
His eyes shut instantly.
He found himself plunged into the Storozh Camp in Kamchatka: myriads of undead skeletal creatures ambling around -- diseased, emaciated and murderous with hunger, crawling in a vast cesspool of the dead and dying -- and the sky was blotted out behind the high surrounding walls.
His mind’s eye settled on the girl. She was wandering, alone. He followed her like a disembodied spirit as she scampered to and fro, recoiling from the reaches of a swarm of bony, bloody members, until she curled up into a dark corner and cried her eyes out, and the cries rose to shrieks to wake the dead.
He woke with them.
A streetlight flickered in through the window. It was still dark, media screen still blaring. He thought the noise had woken him prematurely, until he turned over and looked up at the chronometer:
0007; just past midnight… of the following day.
He blinked and twitched to life, turned his legs agonisingly over to his bedside and ground his eyes. The pain in his sinews was acidic. He fished his cell out of the coat pocket, squinted and waited for the blur in his vision to pass.
No messages. No missed calls.
For a long time, he sat in a daze, staring at the vacant screen before coming to his feet, slipping his arms into his coat sleeves and raising the collar. Just as he was about to slip the cell back into the inner pocket, the screen flashed.
The cell started to ring.
He gazed at the Caller ID flashing on the display and slowly lifted the receiver to his lips.
“Haven District: The Grove; 4th Street off Orion Avenue.”
The line cut.
The dour old woman at the counter had since changed to a heavy, steely-eyed low-caster. His head was thrown back and a mess of auburn-red hair was nestled in his groin when Saul passed and dropped the money for the extra night on the counter on his way out.
The night was cold, the streets were quiet and lined with thick snow and the cold oozed painfully into the bones. His breath was a dense vapor marking his way under the alley lights.
He stopped at a nearby teller machine. A troop of SGs passed across the street and he peered surreptitiously over his shoulder. When his balance flashed across the screen, he saw that his account had been credited -- spoils from the last assignment. He keyed in a figure and the machine regurgitated the cash in two thin stacks of bound, blue dimitar notes.
He was the first to alight when the maglev stopped in Haven Main Station and a capsule ride later, he was standing at the crossroads of Orion Avenue and Victory Lane, the mechanised foot traffic nudging past. He looked up. The snow began to drizzle like stardust through the multi-coloured lights from street-signs and billboards.
A row of autocabs were parked, waiting for fares, and he boarded one of the driverless cabs and fed 30 ducats through the slot.
“The Grove, 4th Street.”
The doors closed with a pneumatic hiss and the autocab took off along the mechanised lane.
The autocab stopped at the far end of the street, before the high, dark façade of a building set right on the very outskirts of the metropolis, where the city’s lights faded into the regions of Outer Sodom. The panel on the side of the tower entrance read: “The Grove”.
He stood at the mouth of a dark alley and waited, checking the time on his Nexus. One-hundred and twenty-five hours. Every 30 seconds or so, he would poke half his face out of the shadows. The street was empty. The darkness thickened, the light drizzle increased to a heavy snow and the cold spasms wound around his limbs like boa constrictors. He ached for a warm smoke.
Two walkers appeared from around the corner and passed right in front of him. A minute later, a group of mid-caste martials walked by from the opposite direction, setting him more on edge.
… Where is he?
He checked the time again. At that moment, there came a rumble from the end of the street, followed by an approaching light extending over the dark street. He stepped out of the alley into the lights of an oncoming vehicle.
A small truck, dented and browning with wear, tear and corrosion, stopped immediately with a squeak and a grind. The side windows were cracked and frosted up and steam poured out from every seam, and streamed from the exhaust in a thick smog. Some faded company logo on the side was spray-painted out, and the old hydro-motor coughed and gurgled as the reverse lights came on.
He retreated back into the dark alley as the truck reversed with a steady beeping. When the front of the truck was securely hidden in the alley, it stopped. The headlamps switched off. The engine burbled to a long and constant hiss.
He came up by the truck’s side just as the door on the driver’s side inched open. Three firm kicks marked with the words “Git – teh – fuck!” forced open the door on the driver’s side. The truck shook as a heavy figure clumsily dismounted and hobbled wearily toward him.
“Top a’ th’ mornin’…” Duke’s voice was dry and dreary and his eyes narrowed with exhaustion. He coughed an old, hoarse smoker’s cough. “Ahhh, sh-sh-sh-sshhittte,”
He removed the cigar from his teeth, shivered and blew a stream of smoke and vapor through pursed lips.
“I am grateful for this,” said Saul.
“Aye, well, dinna fash yerself n’ all…” Duke yawned his words.
Saul glanced up the narrow space between the side of the truck and the adjoining street and down the other side of the alley, where the path stopped at a dead end. They were alone, but he took no chances, keeping his voice low.
“Any trouble with customs?”
Duke puffed at the cigar, threw the nub into the snow, eyeing him sideways.
“Aye,” he murmured with a trembling nod, “wee mae bi usual.”
The old ex-patriot cupped his thick hands over his mouth, the steam seeped through his fingers and he rubbed his hands together. He hobbled up to the truck’s rear, pulled back on a slider on the side and hammered his fist against a switch.
The shutter over the truck’s rear rose in jerks.
When the shutter-motor spurted to a stop, old Duke took out a small torch and flashed the light over the inside of the carriage. The light passed over what appeared to be stacks of supplies for his dreg mess: vacuum-sealed food parcels, crates of ambrosia, medicines and cleaning supplies, all piled on top of each other. Three large crates were buried somewhere behind the wall of supplies, occupying most of the space in the small carriage. The deck was covered with loose packages, bottles, empty cigar packs and other refuse.
Duke mounted the deck with a grunt and another string of mumbled curses. He swept all the loose clutter aside and genuflected, poking the torchlight between two stacks pressed against the inner walls of the freight carriage. He reached his hand in deep and pulled out one small, brown-packaged bundle, and then a second. Keeping his head low, he passed each of the brown packages to Saul, finally handing him the torch.
“Ah’ll need both hands fer this,” he croaked.
He flashed the light over the back of the truck and watched Duke clear the heap of supplies blocking the large crates at the front crates, growling with each heave and ho.
After much effort, the bottom-most crate at the back of the truck was finally exposed. Duke stretched his old back out, took a deep, wheezing, foggy breath and leaned over by the side of the crate. His heavy fists clamped down hard on a lever and jerked; once, twice, thrice. On the third jerk, the lever gave way with a bang which echoed down the alley.
There was a tense silence.
Saul peered down the side of the truck into the side street. The torch light went out. The crate doors swung open. Next moment, something hurled from the darkness and landed straight in his arms with a whimper.
Duke picked up the soiled blanket the girl had cast off in her flurry. Saul wrapped the mantle around her and the little fingers were icicles against the back of his neck. Her skin had paled with the freeze and the bindings on her reddened wounds were fraying and loose.
Duke descended from the truck and was drawn in at once by the little figure.
“Sure hope yeh know wha’ yer doin’ lad,” he sighed.
