Tomorrow's Crimes

by Donald E. Westlake

  He cursed.

  I went to the steps, my pistol again in my hand, and went up them cautiously, pausing midway to let my eyes reaccustom themselves to the glare of daylight. I was stopped with my body still completely within the lean-to, my head at about street level. Looking out, the narrow strip of outside world I could see looked unnaturally empty and motionless, like the remains of lost colonies in the fic-films. Across the way was the corrugated metal shack which must be the “house” my assassins had been waiting in.

  The stillness and emptiness continued unbroken as I stood watching. The only sound was the heavy breathing of the wounded man down behind me. Of Alfie, to whom the wounded man had kept calling for help, there was no sign.

  Yet I remained cautious. I crept out of that hole like a gopher in a desert of carnivores, moving one slow careful step at a time.

  No one. I stood at last in the entranceway, one step down from ground level, peering this way and that, and still I saw no sign of life. The sound of shooting must have driven the locals into their own holes; here, curiosity was anti-survival.

  I purposely made a noise, clinking the pistol against the spray can in my pocket, but nothing happened. I lifted one foot, slid it out onto the ground, waited. Nothing. I shifted my weight forward. I raised the other foot, brought it up beside the first.

  The sun went out.

  Confusion. Darkness. Stench. Coarse cloth scraping my face and neck. Soft heavy weights dropping on my shoulders and back, bending me, driving me to the ground.

  I roared in rage and fright, but the noise was muffled even in my own cars. My arms were imprisoned, held against my sides. The pistol in my hand was useless and worse than useless. If it went off, I would be shooting myself in the leg.

  I staggered, staggered, and toppled over. Out of my bewilderment came sprays of understanding.

  The lean-to, Alfie—and others—had been atop it, atop it. Waiting for me with a blanket in their hands. When I emerged the blanket w-as dropped on my head, and Alfie—and at least one other, there was more than one here—had jumped down on me, grappling me, knocking me off my feet.

  Still I struggled, until someone kicked me on the side of the head. In the darkness inside the blanket I saw pinwheels of light, felt my awareness fading, tried to duck my head away, keep my consciousness, regain control.

  I ducked into the path of the second kick.

  XIV

  “I think he’s awake,” said the woman.

  “His eyes are closed,” the old man told her.

  “I don’t care,” said the woman. “I still think he’s awake.”

  “So do I,” said the young man. I heard his boots crunch on the ground as he walked over to me. He stopped with his feet very near my head. ‘He’s faking,” he said, and kicked me on the shoulder, painfully. “Open your eyes.” he said.

  I didn’t respond, didn’t move. The longer I could convince them I was still unconscious the better it was for me.

  The old man said, “Take it easy, Alfie. Don’t bust him up.”

  “You quit faking,” said the young man. Alfie, he was the young one. He kicked me again. “Open your eyes and get up from there.”

  The old man said, “Alfie, don’t! We won’t get nothing for him if he’s busted up.”

  “I’ll bring him out of it,” said Alfie. “Tina, go get a needle or something. Something with a point on it.”

  I heard the soft pad of the woman’s feet as she hurried away. Then there was silence, while the old man and Alfie and I waited for her to return.

  I was lying on my back, on bare ground, somewhere in the open; red sunlight illuminated my closed eyelids. I had been awake now for perhaps ten minutes, listening to the three of them talk.

  They were taking no chances with me. They’d disarmed me this time, and tied my wrists together in front of me, and hobbled my ankles so I would be able to walk but only with small steps. From their conversation I understood they meant to sell me to the slavers.

  They were a kind of Camily group. Tina, the woman, was the wife of the man I’d wounded and mother of the youth I’d killed. Alfie was some sort of cousin, and the leader of the group. The old man, whose name I hadn’t yet heard, was the woman’s father. They lived nearby, had been on particularly hard times recently, and considered me—and my weapons—a real windfall. They were all more or less afraid some larger or stronger group would come and take this unexpected treasure away, though ‘ only the old man actually stated their fears. Alfie put up a good tough front, denying the possibility, and the woman preferred not to think or talk about it.

  They’d checked the wounded man down in the lean-to, but none of them could guess whether he’d live or die, so they’d « decided to leave him where he was until they’d taken care of me. Then they would come back and look the situation over. I had the impression they would prefer him to die, as being the simplest solution to the problem.

  In the meantime they were only waiting for me to regain consciousness, and getting increasingly impatient. Now, as I heard the footsteps of Tina returning, I moved my head and groaned, as though just coming back to awareness, and blinked several times, and looked up at last into the disgusted eyes of Alfie.

  He was very close to the mental picture I had formed on the basis of his voice; narrow and sleek, with a long thin face, shiny black hair brushed straight back and flat against his head, thin lips, a long thin nose, and eyes in which intelligence had been distorted into cunning. His clothing was old and mismatched, but worn with a certain flair.

  “You’ve wasted our time, you,” he said. “I ought to make you pay.”

  “Never mind, Alfie,” said the old man nervously. “He’s awake now, let’s be off.” He was a thin and shrunken old man with jittery birdlike movements. I’d heard a certain mushiness in his voice before this, and now I saw why; he had no teeth, his mouth was a collapsed double flap, his stubbly chin jutting out beneath his nose.

  Alfie spat on the ground near my head and said, “All right, then. Up on your feet.”

  The woman, glaring at me, said, “The nasty thing. I ought to stick him with this anyway.” She waved something in her hand, something metallic that glinted. She was heavyset, fiftyish, as poorly dressed as the others, and with a round sullen face framed by stringy hair.

  She made a move as though to attack me, but the old man clutched at her arm, saying, “Don’t, Tina! Let’s be off, let’s be away from here!”

  “He killed my boy,” she cried, outraged, and shook the old man off.

  Alfie, though, stopped her, saying, ‘Never mind that. He’s right, we’ve got to get going.” To me he said, “I told you to get up.”

  Laboriously, I rolled over onto my stomach and pushed myself up onto hands and knees. I was weak, and stiff, and shaken, but behaved as though I were much worse off than that. I was grasping at every advantage, however slight, and it seemed to me there was an advantage in being stronger than they knew.

  When I finally got to my feet I saw that we were in the middle of the road between the lean-to and the metal shack across the way in which the assassins had lain in wait. I stood swaying, tottering, only half faking my dizziness and weakness, and Alfie approached me with a thick coarse rope, one end of which had been formed into a loop like a hangman’s noose. As the older couple stood well out of the way, the woman pointing my own pistol at me, Alfie put the loop over my head and told me, “Now, you be good and give us no trouble. Don’t make it no worse on yourself.”

  “I’ll pay you,” I said. “Take me to Ice, to the tower. I’ve got money there; I’ll pay more than the slavers.”

  “You must think I’m simple,” Alfie said, and smiled upon me, and backed away, letting the length of rope slide through his hands until he reached the other end of it. The rope was about ten feet long, connecting us. He looped the other end around his wrist.

  “I give you my word,” I said, though I knew it wouldn’t do any good.

  He didn’t even bother to answer. “
Follow them,’ he said. “Not too close. And watch yourself.”

  He meant Tina and the old man. They started off down the street now, looking lack to see if I was coming. I hesitated, but I saw Alfie’s face harden, and knew there was nothing to do but obey. I started off, stumbling, forced by the hobble to take short scuffling steps, and followed where Tina and the old man led. Behind me, at the far end of the rope around my neck, came Alfie.

  My head drooped, from weariness and from frustration. I found myself looking at my hands, hanging useless from the ropes tying my wrists together, and I saw the dark red marks on my finger where the youth had bitten me. But I didn’t see Gar’s ring.

  I raised my head, startled, and inadvertently took a longer step than the hobble would permit, and lost my balance. I thought I’d strangle when the rope around my neck grew taut, but when I hit the ground the tension lessened. I lay there gasping.

  Alfie called, “Get up! Get up, you!” And tugged at the rope.

  It was harder to get to my feet this time. I couldn’t feign weakness greater than I actually felt. But I finally did attain my feet again, and the couple in front started off once more, and I followed them.

  The ring? I could see it. It glinted in the light of Hell, ahead of me, on the hand of the woman, Tina. I ground my teeth at that, and very nearly gave in to a despairing fury.

  But I held myself in check, as I had learned to do in the prison. I could see there was nothing to be done. They were all too far away, and I was bound too tightly. Besides, there was the weakness and stiffness all over my body. If I’d been stronger I might have tried attacking Alfie anyway, since I knew disabling him would stop or at least slow the other two, but not the way I was now. All I could do was scuff forward, led like a dog on a leash, and hope for a better chance later on.

  As we moved away from the immediate area of the shooting we began to see people again, living their lives, moving about, traveling from here to there. None of them paid any attention to us as we passed in our slow parade, the woman and the old man ambling along in front and then me shuffling in their wake and at last Alfie bringing up the rear like the master of hounds. This caravan, impossible anywhere else in civilization, was normal on Anarchaos. No one would come I0 my aid. no one would question my imprisonment, not here in the ultimate land of the rugged individualist. I was alone.

  And I had lost.

  XV

  I cannot tell how much time went by. Weeks. Months.

  If a man is treated like an animal, he will become an animal. There is something inside every human being that craves mindlessness, that aches to give up the nagging responsibility of being a creature with a rational brain, that yearns to be merely instinct and appetite and blindness. Those who join a rioting mob have given in to this animality within themselves; alcoholics and drug addicts are perpetually in search of it.

  I became an animal. I became as stupid, as obedient, as unthinking, as placid as any plowhorse.

  The early part of the transition is dear, but the last of the decline blends into unending sameness: the straw of my bed, the damp darkness of the mine, the looming mountains. Hell at perpetual evening on the western rim of the sky.

  Alfie and the other two didn’t keep me long. They walked me to a large wooden building, one story high but rambling, apparently a kind of meeting house or place for the bartering of goods. Here they sold me to two heavily bearded men in clothing made of furs, who bound me even more tightly than the others had and dumped me into the back of a rough-made wagon with two other new slaves. A fourth was tossed in after us later on, and then we rode out of Ulik, our two captors sitting together at the front of the wagon, calling to their hairhorses and talking together in guttural voices.

  I passed out from time to time, and was probably unconscious for most of the trip. At the end of it, one of the two climbed into the back of the wagon, cut the ropes off us, and threw us one at a time out onto the ground, where we were all at first too weak

  to move. But they forced us to stand up. kicking us and pulling ’ our hair, until finally three of us were on our feet. The fourth turned out to be dead, which enraged them. One of them, in his fury, beat at the dead body with a rock until the other one told him he was wasting time. Then they marched us through rocks and granite and sharp projections to a wooden fence. A man in a green uniform gave them money there and they went away. I watched the transaction, though I was too dazed then to fully understand it.

  The light was more Earthlike here, with Hell far away on the horizon, but the landscape was forbidding and unnatural. Jagged rocks and boulders were everywhere; shale rustled beneath one’s feet; the sharp teeth of hills and mountains sprang up on all sides. Much of this had been cleared and flattened inside the compound, in the area circumscribed by that wooden fence. We were marched, the three of us. across the compound to a shed, where we were examined by a doctor.

  I said to the doctor, “You aren’t from this world.” Because it j was true, it could be seen in his face. But he acted as though I hadn’t spoken.

  I tried to observe everything, thinking of escape, but I saw nothing to give me hope. Only the compound, enclosed by the tall wooden fence everywhere except at the face of the mountain, where the mine entrance gaped like an open mouth. Inside the compound were several sheds, some for the administrators, the rest meant to house the slaves. The one I slept in had straw on a dirt floor, that was all. Fifteen of us slept in it. Because it was so cold here, at the edge of the Evening Mountains, we huddled together like cattle every sleep period, and our communal stench came to be precious to me, representing warmth and rest and our closest approximation to comfort. I don’t know if any of the others were women, and it couldn’t have mattered; brute exhaustion had desexed us.

  Without the solar rhythm of day and night it was impossible to keep hold of the concept of the passage of time, so that we lived our lives to a pattern we could not comprehend. We were awakened by shouts, and the sun read evening. We ate gruel from a trough and then trotted into the mine, and behind us as we went the sun still read evening. We worked, scraping out a vein of some pale metal through the interior of the mountain, and at a shouted order we put down our tools and trotted back to the I compound along the cold damp tunnels, anti when we emerged the sun said evening still. We ate again at the trough, and crowded into our shed, and closed our eves against the light of the evening sun and slept.

  At first I tried to keep hold of that within me which was rational and human, but it was impossible. My brain atrophied; in any realistic sense, I had ceased to exist.

  I was brought out of this nothingness twice, the first time temporarily, in a brief incident that stands out in my memory like a single star in an otherwise black sky. I was at the trough with the others, and laughter made me raise my head. Some distance off, talking with a mine official, were two large muscular men with shaved bald heads. Seeing them, it came into my mind that I had been looking for these two, and I very nearly moved away from the trough in their direction, as though there was something I had to say to them. But then fear struck me, and my back twinged with pain, and I became very afraid—without knowing why—that they would see me. I ducked my head down again, and continued to eat, and kept my face hidden when a little while later we trotted past them on our way to work.

  But the incident had driven me to self-awareness, and I remained nervous and upset for some time after that, until the monotonous routine of the work lulled me back to indifference.

  The second incident was much stronger, and jolted me back to myself violently and permanently. That was when they cut off my hand.

  Infection had set in w here my finger had been bitten. Gradually the entire hand had become discolored and I felt increasing waves of pain. Apparently I had begun to howl, both while awake and in my sleep, until finally one of the guards took a look at my hand and I was taken to the doctor who had examined me back at the beginning.

  It is possible the hand could have been saved by a doctor dis
posed to expend rime and effort on the problem, but I think it more likely that the infection had been left to itself too long and there was by now nothing left to do but amputate. In any case, I was strapped into a chair, my left arm was tied to a kind of board, and a knife came down on my wrist.

  I screamed myself back to life. First the knife, and then the cauterizing fire, and when the stony-faced doctor was done I was trembling and weak and half-mad with pain, but I was alive again, and I would know no more deaths until the last one.

  XVI

  They gave me a new job. Because of the amputation I could no longer work in the mine, so I was put to work on a machine in a small shed next to where the ore was loaded onto trucks and driven away. The machine did number problems, with my assistance. That is, slips of paper would be handed to me, with numbers on them. I would punch buttons showing the same numbers, and the machine would go on from there. The job required an ability to recognize numbers, and a right hand to push the buttons.

  Now that I had been shocked back to myself, everything seemed to be working to help me keep my awareness. This job, though elementary, required at least a little brainwork, which the digging in the mine had not. And it was not continuous, as the mine work was; most of my time at the machine was idle, waiting for more carts to be wheeled out of the mine, more slips of paper to be handed in through the window to me. I still slept in the same shed with the same group, but the group identity was no longer strong with me, now that I was separated from them during all our working hours.

  Still, a great deal of time went by before I had recovered sufficiently to start thinking in terms of escape. Simple awareness of my own identity was at first startling enough to occupy my full attention, and I spent work period after work period sitting slack-jawed in front of the machine, lost in contemplation of the wonders of my own brain, picking through the grand wealth of knowledge therein like a child delightedly investigating a trunk filled with bright-colored costume jewelry. I spent uncountable time, for instance, merely spelling words in my head, exalted at the vast store of words I knew and the unending diversity of their lettering.