She’d looked clean. Well fed. Not fat. Trim. Not starving like he was.
Who was she? And the other woman. The boss, no doubt. Boss of what?
He thought and worked his mouth. Made some sounds come out that might have sounded like words.
He remembered a baby, once, long ago. To his ears, he sounded much like that baby, trying to work out over the course of weeks and months and years how to make the sounds it heard.
He worked hard at it, until he could say something. He didn’t know how long it took. Maybe six, seven hours? He felt night fall and move on outside before he could say his first word.
‘Bullfuck,’ he said. He said it over and over, like a ward against the hunters above.
*
VI.
Days passed and he was left alone. He knew they were watching him. The dream didn’t come, and he was hungry, bullfuck hungry. He didn’t sleep, because he was afraid that if he did sleep and the dream didn’t come he would die.
He missed the cold. He wished for the cold. For the smell of the snow, pure and biting. He missed the howl of the wind in the day and the night. He missed the walking, the travelling north. Now he could only travel around and around, pacing, endlessly, round the cell.
He wished for a blizzard, for the glare of the sun bright even through his shades, which he still wore even in the dark, because now he’d adjusted the blinking red light in the corner had begun to hurt his eyes without his shades.
He knew they watched him, through a camera, probably to a live feed. He could remember things like live feed. He remembered a programme that was all live feed, just people eating and talking and sleeping. Like this, but without the eating, or the talking, or the sleeping.
He remembered other things, too. He remembered comics and novels and films. He remembered Alfred Hitchcock and James Cameron and John Carpenter. He remembered many movies. He recited lines from movies, but only in his head. But still he couldn’t find words. They were lost in the back where the memories were kept.
He couldn’t figure out the words. He needed to hear more.
He recited words he’d heard, making sounds. Like the baby. He needed to watch, to copy. To learn by observation. He could remember the words, but his throat couldn’t say them, his lips couldn’t form them.
He needed to learn how to speak all over again.
When they came back to him, the woman with the shotgun and the woman in charge with some kind of electric goad, he was naked. It was the only way he could bear the heat. His skin, under all the clothing, was surprisingly pale and clean.
‘Back,’ said the woman called Sarah.
‘Sarah,’ he said.
‘Back,’ she said and raised the stock of the shotgun to her shoulder.
Big gun. Bullfuck gun. It’d blow him apart.
‘Don’t. Dumb.’
‘Look...’ the woman in command said. ‘It’s learning.’
‘Learn,’ he said, nodding, his shaggy beard and hair whipping with enthusiasm.
‘Doc, don’t. Don’t be fooled.’
‘Don’t fooled,’ Matt said.
‘It learns so fast!’
‘Mimicry, Doc, nothing more.’
Matt shook his head. ‘Don’t. Mimicry. Learning...’ He put his head down. Ran through what he knew, those words his mouth could form. ‘Learn.’
‘Doc, seriously. You don’t want to do this. It’s not safe. Not fucking safe. Let me put it down.’
Matt snarled. The woman Sarah slammed Doc out of the door and the door slammed shut, back into dark and pacing, pacing, hungry, but refusing to sleep because if the dream didn’t come, he would die, and he wanted to live. He wanted to live and dream and be outside again, in the cold, in the white.
Days passed until they came again and all the while he walked, naked but for his shades.
*
VII.
‘Want learn,’ he began to say, over and over, standing before the blinking red light.
‘Want learn. Want learn. Want learn.’
He was hungry, and tired, more tired than he ever remembered being. But he didn’t want to stop. If they knew how much he wanted to learn, maybe they would bring him something, let him learn, so he could tell them he wasn’t wild. He wasn’t dangerous, or dumb, or insane. He was just hot, and missed the cold. He’d just forgotten how to talk like them, that was all.
‘Want learn,’ he said, over, over, over again.
Eventually someone came to him. Sarah watched while a new person, a woman, again, brought in a laptop.
He knew it was a laptop. He even knew how to work it. They left it there in the room and went out again, the woman Sarah with the shotgun before her.
He turned to the red light when they went. Nodded. Turned on the laptop while he sat on the floor and searched for noises and words.
There was some music, but without context it didn’t seem to help. He couldn’t link the words to what he knew in his mind.
But there was a song on there, do you go to the movies, it said, find a friend in a film?
‘Movie,’ he said, at the red light. ‘Want. Movie.’
Someone came in. Maybe a day later. Brought a different laptop, but Sarah wasn’t there with her bullfuck big shotgun and by then he was so tired he couldn’t keep his eyes open, so he fell asleep and didn’t see a movie, but the dream came.
When he woke up he was still in the room and he was strapped to an upright bed with a table and the laptop in front of him. He was still naked and the straps dug into his wrists and neck and chest and waist and thighs and ankles, but he wasn’t hungry anymore, and his toes had grown back.
*
VIII.
No one came to turn the laptop on. He stayed that way, strapped, staring at the laptop. He spoke the words he knew to the camera, their eye in the wall.
He asked for movies, but nobody came for a long time.
When they did, there were three of them. Women. One was Sarah, with her big gun. She stood one side of the door. There was another woman he didn’t know. She had a shotgun, too, the same...brand...make...model. She stood the other side of the door.
The woman called Doc stood just outside the door.
‘You don’t know what you are, do you?’
He tried to say Matt. Matt Reed. But he didn’t know how to make these words. He nodded. ‘Do.’
‘You think you’re like us?’
He shook his head. He could do this.
‘No. Man. Woman.’
The one called Sarah snorted. ‘Man. Fuck this.’
‘Sarah.’ Harsh and short, but effective.
‘Movie,’ he said.
Doc pursued her lips and watched him. He didn’t like the way she watched him. Not afraid, like the woman to her left. Not angry, like Sarah. Just...
He didn’t know. Like, when he’d been in school...God, how long ago...a biology teacher...Mrs. Cummings...they’d had fun with her name alright...dissecting a frog.
A look like that. Concentrating, but not really caring. Not really human. Scientific detachment. That was it.
He wasn’t frightened by the look, but he didn’t like it, just the same.
‘You want to learn?’
He nodded again. ‘Want. Learn. Movie.’
The woman called Doc looked at Sarah.
‘Don’t look at me. I have my way, I’m shooting the fucking thing.’
‘Load movies.’
‘Fuck, Doc...’
‘Do it.’
The one called Doc spun and left the room. Sarah nodded at the other woman, and she backed out, gun trained on Matt the whole time.
Sarah pushed the muzzle of her gun against his temple.
‘You think you’re getting out of this alive, but you’re wrong. Doc thinks she can train you, learn from you. Learn what the fuck you are and send you north.’
‘Learn,’ he said, nodding. Like he was eager to please. Like a dog, he thought, but he had to learn how to make words. He had to.
/> ‘Bet you miss the cold,’ she said.
‘Cold. Miss...Cummings,’ he said, nodding, not knowing whether the miss she said was to identify a female, but knowing...yes...
‘Miss the cold,’ he said.
‘Be cold again soon,’ she said. Stared him hard in the eye. ‘Cold enough for me, anyway.’ She pushed hard against his head with the muzzle. ‘Bang,’ she said.
He smiled.
*
IX.
He watched movies. He enjoyed them. He remembered them from before, before the cold, before the hunger, before the dream.
He watched hundreds of movies without dreaming, strapped upright before the laptop. Sometimes people came in, always with guns, sometimes with Sarah, sometimes not, always women. They changed the battery on the laptop, or inserted a memory stick with more movies. He watched everything they put in front of him. Learning. Learning.
He remembered so many of the movies. Some were new to him, but more he knew.
He remembered loving films before the cold. He used to watch movies before the cold, way back when, long before he’d killed the man whose coat he wore.
He spoke to Doc, sometimes. She always had a woman in there with him, only ever women. One or two, with a gun, always pointed at him. He told her what he could. She asked him what he was, but he was Matt Reed, just a man, and he didn’t know what to say. Eventually, he’d know what to say. He just had to find the right words. Make them fit in his head and fit in his mouth. He spoke but his teeth couldn’t make the sounds quite right, not like the women made. His teeth got in the way, but he learned. He learned. Then he found the right film, and by the end, he had it down.
*
X.
Sarah came.
He didn’t know how long it had been. Months, he thought. Weeks of pacing, weeks more of waiting, perhaps a month on top of that, watching films. He’d only dreamt once, but that had filled him up.
He was hungry again, but he didn’t need to dream anymore.
Instead, it was like all the waking hours before had been a dream, and the only time he’d been awake was when he was sleeping.
‘You think you’ve got her fooled?’ Sarah said, shaking her head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. You, nor her.’
‘You think you’re a man?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘At last,’ she smiled. ‘The truth.’
He shrugged.
‘I’m not a man.’
‘All this time. Wearing a dead man’s skin like a suit. Your kind need to die.’
‘My kind?’
‘I don’t know what the fuck you are,’ she said. ‘Parasite, fucking killer. You came with the cold, but you don’t remember, do you? You never remember. You even know where you came from?’
‘No.’
‘Of course not. All you’ve got is a dead man’s memories.’
Matt shrugged. ‘Mine now.’
‘You know you’ve got to die.’
He smiled.
‘Fuck are you smiling for?’
‘Been waiting for this,’ he said, nodding.
‘Me, too,’ she said and stepped forward. The muzzle was right between his eyes in a second, but then the bonds holding him shattered as he lunged forward. The gun bucked as he batted it away from his face, buckshot rattling off the walls. He tore the hand holding the barrel from Sarah’s arm. She screamed and he smiled with the dead man’s face at her.
‘You don’t seem to understand,’ he said, throwing the gun to the floor. He looked her in the eye as he held her throat in one hand, her ruined arm in the other. ‘I’m not locked in here with you.’
He tore her whole arm free.
‘You’re locked in here with me,’ he said.
But by then she was dead.
He drank her spurting blood and thought of all the years in the cold, eating cold dead flesh and thinking he was dreaming. But he wasn’t asleep any longer. This was what he’d been waiting for. A deep gorging.
Others came, some with guns, some without. But by then, he felt like himself again. This stolen man’s face was all there was. There was nothing underneath. Matt Reed was a shell and the only thing that would fill him up was blood and bone, so he drank. He ate.
When they begged, when their bullfuck guns fired, he did not back down. He feed and he healed and he tore their flesh with teeth that didn’t need to speak anymore, just bite.
It wasn’t the last cold day. It never is. After the feast, there’s always a fast, but there would be warmth again.
He left the dead behind and walked out into the glaring snow, naked but for a dead man’s coat and a pair of shades. He settled his shoulders and turned to the north once more, where the people still lived.
Toward the feast.
The End
'Rubble' is an odd piece. It's a sort of sci-fi/horror thing...but really, it's one of those simple tales that stems from everyday life. One day, I took a lot of rubble to the tip (dump). They wouldn't take it. Because there's a limit. Began wondering if life itself was no more than a prison break tale. You have to smuggle that rubble out - maybe while you're busy digging a hole behind a picture of Rita Hayworth.
Rubble
On Tuesday night, after work, Damien Player and his wife, Georgina, watched the gardening show on television. The following weekend Georgina asked Damien if he wouldn't mind doing a little work in the garden. Specifically, making a small walled, raised bed between the patio and the lawn.
The patio was made up of concrete slabs, approximately one foot long, one foot wide, in a square. Slightly roughened to look like natural stone, and maybe two inches thick. Georgina didn't want to lose lawn, but she didn't mind losing patio.
Damien would rather have been doing almost anything else than removing heavy flagstones and laying bricks, but he did it not because he loved his wife (he did) but because he didn't want an argument about what was basically two days work in the sun, a few guilt-free beers, and maybe a happy wife on a Saturday night with their teenage kids out at the pub.
So he did the work. Took up slabs, laid his wife Saturday night and brick on Sunday. On Monday, he went to the town dump. It was precisely then that everything became rubble.
*
'Can't dump that,' said the man who worked at the tip, largely telling people where they could and couldn't dump stuff.
'What?'
'Can't dump it, buddy. Couple of slabs a week. That's too much.'
'What am I supposed to do with it?'
'Make a rockery?'
Damien resisted the urge to knock the man's hard hat from his head. Suddenly, angry, but a little amused, too, because the man had a fat face and looked so damn stern about his stupid rules.
'Is this the dump?'
'Yes.'
'Do you take rubbish?'
'Not really.'
'Not really?'
'No.'
'What?'
'Well, it's a recycling centre, if we're being picky, and you, Sir, are being somewhat picky.'
'I'm being picky? I'm trying to dump some stone slabs, rubbish, at the tip, and you won't let me?'
'Sorry, buddy, rules are rules. Please don't shout at me. All council employees must be treated with respect, or we are permitted to call the police and ban you from the facilities.'
'I'm not shouting.'
'I'm sorry, Sir, but I can't discuss this any longer. It's making me uncomfortable.'
'What?'
'Good day.'
'No it's not.'
'Please, Sir,' said the glorified bin man, absurd, sincere, and with a quick glance to his right.
'What now?'
'Good day. Sir.' The man raised his eyebrows, and flicked them to his right once again, then turned on what seemed to be a bad leg and walked away with a slight limp.
Damien glanced to where the man was looking, in the corner of the dump. There, on a tall pole, was a dome. Within that dome, an eye. A blue eye with a wide black pupil.
>
*
On the drive home, Damien drove with the window open and music on, rather than waste fuel running the air conditioning. It was hot, but the breeze through the window sufficed. It was a mid-sized town, school holidays, and traffic past six in the evening was light. He didn't stop in traffic. In fact, he didn't stop at all but for traffic lights.
In the local shop (open six in the morning 'til ten at night) he bought four beers which he paid for with his debit card full of money from his day job, took them home, and drank them quickly while making small talk with his wife about the cookery programme she watched.
Tuesday night, on his way home from work, he picked up the ingredients she wanted to make the recipe she'd learned on Monday. In the corner of the supermarket, a blue eye watched Damien from above as he walked aisle to aisle hunting for outlandish ingredients to make something possibly inedible because a TV chef said so.
*
Damien wondered about the blue eye he'd seen for a couple of days. He went to work, came home, drank beer. His wife, Georgina, made dinner and lunch for him to take to work. He took his lunch to work in a plastic pot and ate it cold at his desk in front of the PC. On Tuesday he went running, with earphones in. His i-Pod player music he downloaded and the monitor on his bicep changed his music dependent upon his pulse rate. He wondered about a big blue eye, then went home and read a magazine about fitness because his wife told him he needed to keep his waist size below 36 inches to minimise his chances of a heart attack. On Wednesday his friend came to his house to play Battlefield on the X-Box. They shot pretend people for a couple of hours. They drank some beer and didn't talk very much. Georgina went upstairs while they played and plugged herself into the network with a cable to the port just behind her ear, where the log of Damien's activities was kept. The connection was two-way. Information uploaded to the network from Georgina's mind, and information downloaded to Georgina, too, plus an upgrade with a slight modification to a system bug in her neural framework.
Dark Words (Horror Short Stories): Collected Short Fiction Page 7
