by Oisin McGann
“Our little pugilist is awake,” a voice said.
Somebody untied the material around his throat and pulled it up above his mouth, leaving his eyes covered.
“Can you hear me all right, Mr. Wheat?”
Sol struggled to regain his senses. He couldn’t remember what had happened. He could vaguely remember being attacked…again. Nothing more. He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t recognize the voice. This wasn’t the police station; he was quite sure of that. Somebody else had him. A hand smacked him across the head, arousing his headache’s temper. He groaned.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” he mumbled. “What’s going on?”
“You’ve been kidnapped. We have taken you somewhere you won’t be found, and you won’t be getting out of here unless you give us the answers we’re looking for.”
Sol felt breath on the skin of his face and smelled cheap aftershave. “You were one of the guys who jumped me in the apartment.”
“Hear that?” the man said to someone else. “The kid’s sharp! How’s that nose by the way? Did I break it that time? Here, let me top that up for you.”
A fist struck him right on the bridge of the nose, and Sol cried out in pain. His eyes filled with tears as he struggled vainly against the handcuffs, but any movement caused him to lose purchase with his toes, increasing the strain on his wrists. It forced him to keep as still as possible.
“That only hurt you a little,” the man whispered menacingly. “We’re going to be doing much more than that. By the way,” he continued in a brighter voice, “what’s with the haircut? You look like you scalped yourself. You trying to start without us or what?”
Another voice somewhere behind him gave a sardonic laugh. The sound told Sol something about the size of the room. It was small with a low ceiling. It probably had very solid walls.
“What do you want?” he said, gasping.
“We want to know who your father talked to last Wednesday.”
“I don’t know,” Sol said, his voice trembling. “I don’t know where he is or anything.”
The hand pulled the material farther up his face so that he could see toward his feet. His gun was brought into view.
“Then where did you get this?” the man asked. “This kind of hardware’s not easy to get hold of. It wasn’t in your apartment when we searched it, and you weren’t carrying it. So you’ve picked it up since then. Where’d you get it? You shot my pal here in the ear, shot his earlobe right off. Whole body to aim at and you shoot a man’s earlobe—what are you, some kind of idiot?”
Sol was shivering, his throat tight, constricting his breathing. He didn’t want to tell them about the note from his father. They wanted Gregor and he couldn’t betray him, even if the little he knew wouldn’t tell them anything.
“Who gave you the gun? You’re not going to tell me you got it yourself? Not likely, kid. Who was your father in contact with? He has passed on information and you are going to tell us who to, or we’re going to put you through a lot of pain. Do you understand me?”
Sol started shaking. He couldn’t stop. The tension from trying to stay up on his toes was racking his body, and his calves were cramping up. Any time he let his legs relax, the cuffs bit into his wrists, and his shoulders began to ache. But now he was terrified too. He knew if he spoke, he would start crying.
“I want to show you something,” the man said to him.
“I’m not going to tell you what I’m going to do to you. I just want you to look at this and use your imagination.”
Through the tears in his eyes, Sol saw a pair of pliers being held up in front of him. He stifled a sob.
“That’s not going to help you, so stop the blubbering right now. Just tell us what we want to know, and we’ll make everything all right.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Sol screamed. “I haven’t seen my father since he disappeared! He left the gun with a note in the apartment while I was asleep! I don’t know where he is or who he’s been talking to—I don’t know anything!”
“That’s a start,” said the man. “In a few minutes, you’ll be telling us everything you know. It’s a good thing that you’re loyal to your father. I’d expect the same from my own son if he were in your position. But you’ll break as soon as the pain starts, so why not just tell us now and save yourself the hassle, eh?”
Sol gaped in disbelief. “That is all I know,” he protested. “I swear to God! What else can I tell you? I don’t know anything more!”
“There’s always more, Mr. Wheat.”
“This is stupid! I can’t tell you anything more. I’d have to make it up, and then you’d hurt me for talking crap.” He arched his neck, attempting to get a look at his tormentor, to try to make eye contact. “What the hell can I do? I don’t know! I swear to God I don’t know! What good is it if I lie to you? If you…if you hurt me, I’ll end up telling you whatever you want to hear. But it won’t be the truth, it’ll just be anything I think will make you stop hurting me. What good…what good is that?”
His voice was frantic, high-pitched with terror. “What’s the point in that?” He whimpered. “It’s just stupid.”
“I think it’s time to get started,” the man said.
Sol’s face contorted in a sob, and he drew in a long breath.
Then came the sudden crash of the door being kicked in, followed by three silenced gunshots. Sol heard a body drop to the floor. There was a fourth muffled shot, and another. A second body fell. Sol arched his head back, trying to see what was going on under the edge of the bag covering his head. He saw a man lying on the floor with somebody standing over him. The man had two bullet holes in his chest. The barrel of a pistol was aimed down at him, and a shot was fired into the center of his forehead, spilling a bloody mess across the floor.
Sol’s toes slipped from under him and he hung from his wrists, turning away from the scene as he tried to get his feet under him again. A strong arm wrapped under his armpit and around his chest, supporting his weight. There was a clicking sound, and one of the cuffs came loose. A chain slipped, and he was lowered to the floor.
“Sol? You’re all right now. You’re safe. Your mother’s favorite song was ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’ by the Mamas and the Papas. My name is Maslow—I’m sorry I was late.”
The man named Maslow was a little taller than Sol, with wide, flat shoulders, and the burly build of a heavyweight. His dark skin had the gray pall of someone who spent his life away from the sunlight of the dome. Deep lines in his face described a hard life. His close-cut hair and the tightly trimmed mustache that bracketed the corners of his mouth were salt and pepper in color and gave him an even more grizzled appearance. Sol sat shaking on a chair, his feet up on the seat, his arms wrapped around his knees. Maslow had pulled both of the dead men’s bodies into the center of the room and was searching through the metal cupboards that lined one wall.
“Who are you?” Sol asked him.
“I’m a friend of your old man’s—I mean, sort of. I owe him a debt.”
“I didn’t know he knew anybody…like you.”
“You’re lucky he did.” Maslow pulled a waterproof bag from one of the cupboards, one with an airtight zipper.
“Body bags. They were geared up for this. Looks like they get rid of bodies all the time.”
Sol stared hard at the bag. He could have ended up in one of those. “How did you find me?” he asked. “And how did you kill them, just like that? They seemed like real pros. I didn’t stand a chance.”
Maslow glanced down at the bodies. “I’ve had dealings with their type before. I’ve been following you since last week, and found out they were tailing you too. So I tailed them. They led me back here yesterday. When you were nabbed this afternoon, I was following on foot—I wasn’t expecting the car. But I guessed where they’d take you.”
He laid out the body bags, one alongside each corpse, and unzipped them.
“Who were they?”
Sol felt a chill run through him as he gazed down at the bodies.
“Professional killers and kidnappers: strong-arm men,” Maslow told him. “But what you should be asking is who they were working for. I can’t tell you that. Help me pack them up.”
Slipping from his chair, Sol grabbed the feet of the nearest man and helped lift him onto the open bag. He pulled the bottom of the bag up around the feet and dragged the zipper toward the waist. Maslow took it and finished closing it up. Sol had one last look at his torturer’s face: a round, jovial-looking potato with light blue eyes, blond hair, and gray skin. And a bullet hole through the forehead. They got the other man wrapped up—a bulkier, sharp-faced guy with wizened skin—and then Maslow went over to the aluminum sink in the corner of the room. Sol sat back down at the stainless-steel table and watched Maslow take cleaners and detergents from the cupboard under the sink.
“We can’t hide everything,” the man told him. “A good forensic crew will find some trace of us if they check this place out. So we have to get the bodies out of here and make it look like they just disappeared. The police have to have no reason to look here. We are going to scrub every centimeter of this floor and wipe down every other surface. We can’t leave a drop of blood anywhere. Got it?”
Sol nodded. Maslow cleaned the spattered blood off the top of the table, and then he and Sol lifted the two bodies onto it, along with the four chairs. There was a mop in a utility room out in the corridor, and they carefully cleared all the blood from the floor, washing the red-stained water down the sink. For nearly half an hour, they cleaned the entire room. Maslow took down the meat-hook from a steel loop in the ceiling—the hook from which Sol had been hanging—and threw the cuffs and ankle-chains into a cupboard. When they were finished, there were only the two body bags left to suggest that there had been any violence.
Sol’s gun was lying on the table beside them, and he put on his jacket and pocketed the weapon.
“Next time, try to hit something more important,” Maslow said without humor. “Can you carry the smaller guy? There’s a chute down to a fertilizer grinder back along the corridor. We can dump them down there.”
Rubbing his raw wrists, Sol pulled the body toward him and hauled it onto his shoulder. It was incredibly heavy and awkwardly limp: it was like trying to lift a bag of stones. Maslow picked up the other one as if it weighed no more than a child, and turning to survey the room once more, nodded in satisfaction and then made for the door. Sol followed close behind, struggling beneath the weight.
The hatch to the chute was down two flights of stairs, in a row of chutes for garbage. Each one was labeled with the kinds of rubbish suitable: METAL, PLASTIC, DENCERAMIC, etc. All organic waste went into the fertilizer chute. Maslow lifted the hatch and shoved his body bag into it. He took Sol’s load from him and dispatched it with equal ease.
“By the time they come out of the bottom of the grinder, there’ll be nothing to identify,” Maslow told him.
Reluctant to ask him how he was so sure, Sol just nodded. His stomach was getting ready to climb out through his throat. With no idea where he was, he let Maslow lead the way out. They were somewhere deep in the Machine, well below the main levels of the city. All around was the rumble of machinery, and judging from the cold edge to the air, Sol thought they had to be in that chilly limbo underneath the muggy heat of the city’s engines.
Here, in this part of the city, secret lives were led, and he was sure that this was where Maslow had spent a good deal of his life. Whoever this man was, he was like nobody Sol had ever met. And despite the fact that he had just saved his life, Sol was loath to trust him. But this violent man was a means of protection against the nameless hoods who were trying to hurt Sol, and there was a strong chance that he knew where to find Gregor. For the moment, Sol had no choice but to follow him and do as he said.
Section 10/24: GLASS
SOL SAT WATCHING a film called First Blood with Maslow. It had been four days since he had met the man, and they were sitting in a dingy, deserted office on the edge of one of the vast underground fields of modified soybeans laid out on shelved racks that were spread under the edges of Ash Harbor. The room was cramped, with a decrepit desk and two sagging chairs, the shelves crammed with hoarded odds and ends. But the webscreen was working, so they sat watching the film. Outside the window, the lights came on and went off every eight hours, simulating a shortened day cycle that sped up the growth of the crops.
They had been on the move since the first day. Maslow said it wasn’t safe to stop anywhere for long, but he seemed to be accustomed to life as a fugitive; there were places where he had food, clothes, tools, and weapons stored: locked rooms and derelict offices and workshops tucked away in the hidden corners of the sub-levels. He wore gloves that he rarely took off and was careful about clearing up any traces of his presence when they moved from place to place. Sol knew he would have been reported missing and wondered who would be looking for him, and how long they’d keep up the search.
Maslow jumped around on his seat, twitching like a kid on a games console every time the main character, Rambo, hit anyone, shot anyone, or jumped out of a bush and knifed anyone. Sol was finding the experience embarrassing, not to mention a little worrying.
His new guardian angel had taken him down to a cavern at one point, a place where construction had begun on a new tunnel only to be postponed, leaving an incongruous mix of modern denceramic beams and supports standing in the untamed space of a million-year-old cave. Here, Maslow had taught him how to fire a gun. It had a built-in silencer, but it was worn out, so the shots were loud. After emptying two clips into a pile of sand, Sol was fairly confident he could aim straight. But then it had been a big pile of sand.
“Got ’im!” Maslow yelled, laughing as Rambo felled another inferior opponent. “I love that bit!”
Sol turned to look at him with perplexed curiosity. This man, in whom he’d placed so much trust, was still a mystery to him. Sometimes he tried to act like a mentor, clumsily and insistently teaching; other times, he hardly acknowledged Sol’s presence. His only pleasure seemed to be in these twentieth-century action films—cop shows and war and spy movies—which he watched whenever they stopped in some refuge that had a working webscreen. Sol thought it a strange taste for a man who did it for real.
They’d done some hand-to-hand stuff as well. Maslow knew techniques Sol had never seen: deadly things. Sol discovered that boxing was pretty limited when Maslow felled him several times without even using his hands.
But it was frustrating, all this action-man stuff. His new bodyguard hardly talked about what Sol thought they actually ought to be doing: looking for Gregor.
Maslow had last seen him outside the depot on the day he’d disappeared. Gregor had given him the scarf, the note, and the gun and had begged Maslow to protect his son. That was all Sol had managed to get out of this surly stranger. He didn’t even know how the two had first met.
It was clear that Maslow didn’t know where Gregor was now, and instead of trying to find him, he was intent on training Sol for something. He had asked the man a number of times how he had become indebted to Gregor, but Maslow wouldn’t talk about it, and Sol got the impression that he was keeping something important from him. It was incredibly frustrating.
“Maslow?”
“Yeah?” The man kept his eyes on the screen.
“I’d like to check out some things. See if I can find Gregor. I want to…to retrace his steps the day he disappeared. Starting with the dome. Could we do that?”
Maslow grunted. His head tilted and he grimaced, as if he was unhappy with what he was thinking.
“Okay,” he said finally.
“Thanks.”
They sat watching the film for a while longer, neither speaking.
“Y’know, this guy Stallone,” Sol piped up. “He did a boxing film; it’s much better than this. It’s called Rocky. Have you seen that?”
“Ahhh, yeah. I started watching it once
.” Maslow grunted. “Arty crap. Too much goddamned talking.”
It was Sol’s thirteenth birthday, and he was big enough to fit into a safesuit. Standing in the depot’s changing room, he trembled with excitement as his father outfitted him. It was against company policy to take “civilians” out onto the dome, but many of the daylighters did it. Some of the supervisors approved of their crews’ tradition of showing their teenaged sons and daughters life out on the glass: it built a closer-knit team and helped to prime future recruits for a tough and badly paid career.
“Stay close to me at all times,” Gregor told him as he pulled the legs of the suit up around Sol’s thighs and waist and strapped close the harness built into the hips of the suit. “There’s no wind to speak of today, but gusts can hit at any time. The glass is clear, but that just makes it slippery, so keep the rope taut, and keep the slack behind you coiled, so you don’t trip over it. Got it?”
Sol nodded. Gregor helped him get his arms into the suit, pushing the material up his forearms and then shoving on the big mittens that connected with an airtight seal into the sleeves. The three layers zipped and clipped up the front on different sides, and then Gregor pulled up the hood. He switched on the heater on the air intake and checked it was charged up. Before fitting the mask, he looked into his son’s eyes.
“All the guys will be watching out for you; it’ll be like having thirty big brothers and sisters out there.” He grinned. “Some people get agoraphobic surrounded by all that open space, but you won’t. You’re like your old man. I remember my first time on the glass. It was the first time I’d seen the sky without a roof. It was…” He hesitated. “Well, you’ll see.”
He clipped the mask onto the rigid front of Sol’s hood, checking the smart-lens lined up with his son’s eyes. The outlets for Sol’s breath fed through vents to the back of his hood, to stop the water vapor from forming ice on the mask itself. Gregor gave him a thumbs-up, and Sol nodded and answered in kind. It took his father a fraction of the time to put on his own suit, and then he checked that Sol’s safety harness was attached properly to his own before they walked toward the airlock. Sol’s breath quickened as the internal door closed behind them.
