by M. E. Parker
Myron followed Coyote Man to the map on the wall.
“Right here.” Coyote Man pointed to the map, to a spot in the fence on the other side of the compound, a place Myron had never set foot. “Followed a coyote to a hole in the fence.” He nodded to the water skin. “It’ll take you a day or two to get over there. Just so you don’t try to sneak off without me, I’m going to head over to that contraption and wait for you there. You get yourself killed or captured, or don’t return, well I’m taking my chances on figuring the thing out.”
Coyote Man headed to the fire and scooped what was left of the stew for Myron. “Eat all you can.” He picked out a sinewy piece from the pot and slung it into his mouth before handing Myron the scoop.
“One thing. Trip wires. Over there on the other side where the Gorge narrows a bit.”
“The Gorge narrows?”
“Yeah, and they have the place extra guarded. That’s where the hole in the fence is. You can tell the trip wires, they look like little twigs sticking up out of the ground. Set one of those off and you’ll have company quick.”
“Okay.”
“Most important thing. Listen to me, boy.” Coyote Man grabbed Myron’s shoulders and lowered him to eye level. “This hole isn’t obvious. If it was, patrols would have found it and fixed it. That fence goes below ground a ways, see. Can’t really get under it. But this coyote went down into a crack in the earth about twenty feet from the razor wire, and I saw him come up on the other side half a minute later. Look for an old pump station. About a hect beyond that.”
“How do you know it was the same coyote?”
“It’s Nick. I call him that ’cause he has half an ear nicked off.”
Myron thought about the goat foxes he’d seen, scrawny and wily. “How will I fit in a coyote hole?”
“This hole is pretty big. Don’t think it was dug by any coyote.”
Myron slung the water skin over his shoulder and crawled out of the cave. He walked in the direction of the old pump station, but not wanting to waste any more time, he began to jog.
Chapter 10
Sindra’s eyes, now crusted shut and weather-bitten, pried open at the shriek of a rusty hinge. Through the slits of her vision, she made out two ghosts and a throng of slogs gathered around the shirker coop with anticipation, their murmurings sounding much like the clackety-clack of a train as it slowed into the depot.
A discipline rod prodded her in the shoulder. Sindra moaned, and the crowd gasped. “She’s alive!” Shouts from the crowd made her eardrums throb.
Two ghosts peeled away the cover that had saved her from a frozen death, a personal blanket that she remembered came from Errol and two heavy saddle blankets that she had no memory of receiving. Between moments of consciousness and darkness, Sindra caught the blur of faces and puffs of gray clouds shrouding the smokestacks, heard whispers and scoffs, as the ghosts pulled her from the coop.
When she commanded her muscles to move, they did not obey, sending only pain in response, so the ghosts plopped her onto a litter, one normally used for carrying expired people to the dead yard, and hauled her away. The world wobbled as they transported her through the astounded crowd of slogs, all of whom expressed signs of outrage or relief and nothing in between.
During her trip back to the Industry Administration building, passing under the gargoyles on sentry, the way the light played with the shadows around her, a fear germinated in her semiconscious brain that she might have expired during her trial and would soon find her way to the hellfires of the chasm, the Great Above having abandoned her. Sindra believed that Cardiff, the Custodian spirit of children, turned a blind eye at the age of knowledge, which Sindra had already passed, and Larande, the Custodian who guided the spirits of all women to the Great Above, perished in the last war, from exhaustion at the weight of too many souls to escort. Sindra had no one.
Once again before the administrator’s clerk, Sindra rolled onto the floor from the litter that carried her. Unable to move, she lay on her back, relieved to have her legs fully extended, and stared at the blurry ceiling four stories above her, at the murals of healthy slogs working, smiling, in colors Sindra had never seen at Jonesbridge, with a sun that shot golden rays from the center all the way to the corners. She had observed images like these once in the train depot of a long forgotten town. There, too, the murals featured these bold, though faded colors, straight lines, symmetrical, with ornate machines, and drawings of hammers that could hew a mountainside. Looking at these paintings did spark some pride in that part of Sindra that was a worker.
A ghost behind her pulled apart Sindra’s lips and poured several gulps of water into her mouth. Though it threatened to come up, she swallowed hard to keep it down, and her vision began to strengthen along with her confidence that she had not died in the shirker coop. The agony of sore muscles replaced the floating sensation of near death, and the air smelled once again of soot and ash.
The spectacle of her survival persisted in the form of a formal announcement from the Superintendent of Industry. When Sindra heard his voice, she hoped that, being in this building, he would make a personal appearance, that she would see if he really did look like all the posters that depicted him with a grand mustache and hair slicked back on his head, muscles bulging through his work shirt. Instead, after scanning in all directions, finally with enough energy to move her neck, she saw nothing, only heard the grainy voice she listened to every day on the factory floor during morning admonition.
“We have all submitted to incalculable sacrifice,” the Superintendent began.
“Stand up,” the ghost behind her insisted.
When she tried to lift her head, the ceiling spun into a whirl of color. The ghosts hoisted her to her feet. Her head fell onto her shoulder, her legs so limp the ghosts could not let go of her.
“Though you shirked your duty, your fellow workers have spared you. That means you still have production value and are exonerated of your shirking charges.” The voice, as if emanating from nowhere, ceased, leaving only a dwindling echo in the cavernous space above her.
The administrator’s clerk motioned Sindra to step forward. “That takes care of the shirking and ration theft. As far as the interrogation for the murder, the Superintendent needs no further information. The murderer has been identified. Report to reorientation and then return to your duties.”
Identified? Sindra heard the words, but in her current state found them hard to process. Relief or despair, the implications braided together as though they formed a rope around her neck. She’d spent four days in the coop. A lot had happened in that time. The clerk instructed the ghosts to give Sindra an extra swig of water and a protein stick before they led her off to the stretcher for reorientation, to go from being folded up in a cage for four days to being pulled to her limits.
Not until dusk did Sindra make it back to 14-C, to her domicile and cot that felt to her like a bed of clouds. The warm sun on a sandy strip of coastline lulled her to sleep with the white birds that Myron had described cawing over the sounds of crashing water.
The next morning, after nearly twelve hours of sleep, Sindra filed through the factory door ahead of the 7:00 A.M. siren wail. She endured entrance procedures as she did every day, only more sore and nauseous, still missing Myron’s face across the factory floor, a sight that used to comfort her as the hours on the line seemed like they would drag to a halt. The more her pregnancy progressed, the more it felt as though everyone in the entire factory had their eyes fixed on her instead of the south wall banner. She could feel the collective stare of her shift mates—Rolf and even the ghosts that guarded the door.
Women, Old Nickel once explained, had always relied on each other for help and counsel during the childbearing process. She had said that women were of one soul when it came to the tribulations of bringing new life into the world. If you didn’t have a mother or an aunt or a grandmother, any woman who had birthed a child was family in that time. But the women in Jonesbridge coul
dn’t give her counsel. They hadn’t experienced it themselves. Sindra now had no one to ask about how she was supposed to feel—if it was normal that she felt sick all the time, felt scared and happy and exhausted before the day had even begun. There was no one there to tell her that everything was fine, that she would make it through, only the hope that bad things pass in time.
Standing at attention, eyes on the Industry banner, the Superintendent of Industry ushered in the minute of silence for fallen countrymen and then began his admonition for the shift.
“The news today gives me great pause,” the Superintendent said, and cleared his throat. “How many lives have we lost? How much have we all sacrificed in the name of our country, the very symbol for what we hold dear. Our values, our collective spirits. Today, I must report that, while your countrymen are dying on the battlefield, while your countrymen toil in the mines and on factory floors and endure the elements and hardships of war, one among you has put himself over all of us, you, me, the dead and dying.” He paused as he often did when the news was supposed to be shocking.
On this particular morning, the Superintendent’s words alarmed Sindra. She wanted to cover her ears and ignore the rest of his statement and fight the reality of what she feared he was about to say.
“We have identified the murderer of the dutiful civil guard,” the Superintendent continued as a squad of Civil Guards marched into the salvage factory. Six of them ushered down the center of the factory floor in two columns of three, heading straight for Sindra’s workstation. She couldn’t believe they’d released her only yesterday, told she was no longer a suspect, and here they were again, about to reignite her dread. She looked around the room. All eyes followed the ghosts, leading right to her.
Rolf stood beside her, as if to aid in her apprehension. Two ghosts joined him from behind and two stood at his side, ignoring Sindra, and instead snapped Rolf’s legs and hands into shackles.
“What are you doing? It’s not me.” Rolf squirmed in the shackles. “I didn’t kill him! It’s not me.”
The mouth of every slog on the factory floor gaped at the sight of their floor boss in chains, but Rolf maintained his innocence, repeating “I didn’t do it,” as they led him away. The oaf who’d berated her and yelled in her face, a man who Sindra had thought never cared whether she lived or died, had stepped in behind her and cleaned up her and Myron’s mess? She found it hard to believe. It wasn’t possible.
Unlike the Superintendent, who they never saw in person, the salvage factory administrator, Cyril, made his presence known often. He stepped down a set of stairs in the corner of the room. With his hands locked behind his back, he scrutinized every slog on the line, stopping periodically, often returning to a slog he’d seen earlier. He halted his visual interrogation in front of Saul whose puffed-out chest hinted at his anticipation of what the administrator would say.
“Saul.” He held out Rolf’s processing clipboard. “You are the new salvage day shift foreman.” Sindra noticed an exchange between the two, a silent acknowledgement as Saul’s eyes locked with the administrator’s, as if the promotion were preordained. He turned to address the entire factory. “This is your new foreman.” He held his hand over Saul’s head. “Cross him—cross me.” Sindra looked away when Saul glanced at her with a crooked grin he couldn’t conceal. She could think of few people worse than Saul for the job, dreading the first time he berated her work behind a smarmy glare. Saul couldn’t even cut a fused bushing off of an overloader shaft. Sindra hated Rolf, but not so much as a person, just as a foreman, the way she hated every foreman. They were bossy and loud and abusive, but the good ones looked out for their crews. Saul had all of the bad traits of a foreman and none of the good ones. He was like the moistened chaff used in ration bread. Rolf, at least, had a mechanical aptitude worthy of respect.
From the grainy speaker, the Superintendent resumed his admonition. “We also have the matter of a duty shirker. We have combed the canal and searched the grounds for his remains to no avail. So it is now a matter of ordinance that anyone who knows the whereabouts of Myron Daw will be equally repudiated in the eyes of the law if such information is not disclosed.”
Sindra’s stomach whirled, first at the mention of Myron’s name, imagining that he had actually made it, what he must have looked like, sailing across the Gorge in his airship filled with hot air from a pan of smoldering coal he had salted away for months. She could see his chiseled face, shrouded by smoke and ash and snow, gazing into the mountains ahead with a vision of the ocean driving him, his propeller spinning through the clouds.
She wondered if he thought about her, if he pined for her, but she imagined he hadn’t been able to expand his machine to fit them both. If he hadn’t gone on alone, if he had loved her as he promised he did, they would have tumbled out of the sky together, the airship unable to hold the extra weight and they would have perished, together, at the bottom of the Gorge. She assured herself of this. But he hadn’t even said goodbye.
Sindra remembered little from her shift other than her anger at being left behind yet again, first by her family as a child, and now by Myron, and that her anger had somehow melted into pity and despair, emotions as worthless as a toothless rock lizard. On the march back to 14-C, she felt as though she were floating above herself, looking down at a double-file line of pitiful slogs all waiting for someone else to feed them.
Back at 14-C, Saul had a smug look on his face. “Looks like Myron turned out to be a loose wheel,” he proclaimed as he passed Sindra in the swill pen. Sindra decided not to respond. “You’re fortunate,” he added, not taking his eyes from her abdomen. “But fortune’s no substitute for duty.”
Sindra took her ration to the corner of the swill pen and sat in the dirt. After a moment, Errol joined her. She observed his peculiar mannerisms, the way he hopped on his crutch, only a partial man, all the while acting as though he had the strength of ten men. She didn’t know if she could trust this one-legged stranger who had arrived suddenly from out there as if he’d fallen from the sky, but he had saved her life in the coop. She had no choice.
“There’s something off about you,” Errol said. “I’d say I know what it is. You have a problem, don’t you?” He nodded at Sindra’s stomach. “I think Saul’s onto it, too.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ve been in that cage for four days. You’re looking more like the rest of us now, but you’ve still got more meat on you than what you should. Healthy enough to catch the eye of any real man left in this place.” He continued to study her. “Relations of a carnal nature have been suspended for the common good. That’s what they told me. Keep your mind on your work, Mule-man.”
Sindra nodded.
“The doc will find out soon enough when you get bigger.” He leaned closer and pulled his finger across his throat.
Sindra had been so excited to escape with Myron that she hadn’t thought about anything beyond the day. She wanted to keep her womanhood at any cost.
“I know how—where you can have that problem taken care of.”
“What do you mean, taken care of?”
“You know,” his head swayed as he tried to coax the answer out of her. “End it.”
The thought of ending her pregnancy made her want to cry. Everything she’d hoped for had dissipated in recent days, and as much as she had dreamed of having a baby, it wouldn’t be possible to do without Myron’s help getting her over the Gorge and out of Jonsebridge. Errol was right. If she waited any longer, if they discovered she was pregnant, Doc would perform the sterilization procedure again, and this time it would work. If she ended it now, kept her secret that she wasn’t barren, she could someday have a child.
“How?”
“Well, here’s the thing. I saved your keister in the coop. Damn near choked on my own spit giving you my water. And I’m gonna help you keep your womanhood. But I know the only person that could have done that to you was a ghost,” he nodded to her abdomen. “So,
now I need your help. Some extra rations from time to time.”
Her help? Not only could he have her extra rations, she would gladly trade places with that one-legged mule-tender. She could give him one of her good legs and he could spend his nights half awake wondering when they would come to satisfy their desires on him. “Just extra rations?”
“And if you get the nerve to make another run for it, you have to take me along.”
Sindra considered their trek through the tunnel, the crawling and jumping, knee-deep mud, swimming through muck, and whatever else they would have faced if they’d gone farther out there. “I don’t think you could make it.”
“Oh, I’m a gimp, and I’m getting on in years, but I can hop and roll faster than you think I can.”
“There’s nothing out there. No food. No clean water. Only a noxious pit that goes all the way around this place. Myron had a plan. I don’t. ”
“You don’t have much time. We’ll take care of your problem tonight, after bed check.”
Only a day and a half removed from the shirker coop, the idea that she would sneak out of her domicile again so soon and risk something even worse made her ill, but someday having a child was a dream she would not jeopardize.
The excruciating wait for bed check revived the excitement she’d felt the first time she sneaked out to the chapel with Myron. He’d built up her hopes and torn them down. Losing him felt like she’d lost herself, making her wish they’d never met at all, until his dreams and his face wormed their way back into her mind. Waiting and pacing for another risky foray, this time with Errol, pushed her to pretend she was meeting Myron instead to make the whole process more fun, the way Myron made everything.
After bed check, Sindra navigated the spotlights the way she had the night she and Myron escaped, knowing that if they came to ravage her tonight and she wasn’t in her domicile, she would lose everything. She dodged the ghosts on patrol and spotted Errol, who gave her a nod and stepped into the shadow of the archway to the main road. Errol led Sindra to the road that connected the extinct village of Old Town Jonesbridge to the domicile quads.
