by Chris Turner
* * *
“Hey, hurry up in there, would you, chief? I’m close to shitting my pants.” Fists thumped on the door.
How much time had passed? Miko shook the daze out of his astral head. He must have dozed.
“Yeah, me too, I have to piss. You asleep in there? I feel like I’m going to wee all over Sket.” A chorus of rude jeers had Sket bridling.
“Shut your gobs!” came Sket’s angry voice.
Silly sods, thought Miko. Still, he did not particularly wish to be caught in here, buzzing back to visibility while they broke in.
He kept his thoughts focussed on mist, insubstantiality, air, anything to remain bodiless.
When the door finally burst open, Miko, ghost-like, hovered there watching them, deriving a wry personal amusement from their dumbfounded expressions.
“Hey, the silly gilly freak’s gone!”
“What do you mean, gone?” Sket bounced over, squinting in the dimness. He bared his knife.
Miko floated through the noisome air, gliding across the grimy floor, catching a glimpse of Fenli blinking in confusion, a snow daze on his face. An expression of wonder gripped them all. Fenli frowned, as if in his drug haze, recalling an earlier event.
Miko forced himself to remain calm. He tried drifting through the far wall. He bumped nose first into hard material, jarring back into harsh reality. On unsteady legs, he staggered behind Fenli and made a casual remark, “You guys blind as bats? I was here all the time, squatting in the shadows.”
Sket whirled on him. “What’s this, outlander?—a trick?” One of the greybeards endorsed Sket’s argument.
“No trick.”
Fenli looked at Miko with suspicion. “Something funny about you, pilot.” Usk, limping closer to peer through scarlet eyes, clacked his pincers as if to confirm the claim.
* * *
The prisoners gave Miko, Usk and Fenli dark looks and whispered insults. But for fear of Sket, they attempted no further violence upon the newcomers. Some hours later, the door clanked open and an armoured jailor tramped in, backed up by two air-rifle men, to plop a tureen of slop down on the floor. Some type of thin porridge. He quickly closed the door, repulsed by the stench.
The convicts set to eating by necessity without enthusiasm. They took crude bowls and cutlery piled in the shadows and shovelled their fare down with dirty spoons or their fingers. Miko helped Sket stuff the corpse into the lavatory.
* * *
Three days in the cellar and conditions for Miko, Fenli and Usk deteriorated. The air became rank with the odour of decay. Usk slept with one eye open, afraid of persecution inflicted by the restless inmates, nursing his antenna stub. Miko had time to reflect on his fate and examine the chamber more closely. But time had little meaning in this pigsty.
He saw that Usk shunned the human slop. But he also noticed the corpse was missing pieces in various places. A torn out liver here, a dissected eye there. He remembered once seeing Usk with a smear of blood on his navel where the intravenous tube attached. A grisly shudder shook his gaunt frame.
A horrible radio jingle was driving Miko slowly mad. It blared over the speaker, shielded by wire caging from the ceiling. For hours on end the music would infect their brains, trumping the low, generator-like hum, doubtless some cruel form of torture engineered by B & D. What was worse, the grubby inmates, the ones least sane, would pick up the tune in their godawful voices, singing off-key. Miko would cover his ears. Fenli snapped his fingers to the rhythm, juiced up on crystal. Sket looked off into space, resigned.
Miko set to circling the perimeter of his cage, exploring every nook and cranny. But no easy escape availed itself. He should have passed through the wall when he had the chance! Curse his stupidity. Just when he needed his invisibility skills, they had deserted him. His thoughts strayed to Star and the Jakru woman...
* * *
On the fourth day, the cell door routinely clanked open and the slouching, haggard men looked up, casting sullen glares in the murk.
Gruel time again? Miko rolled over from his fitful sleep by the wall.
The lead guard from the first day stood scowling down at them. Sniffing the air, he wrinkled his nose. With a brisk motion, he had the place searched. His eight men filing in with rifles and air blasters, billy clubs at their hip, muttered obscenities and jostled convicts out of the way. Some trained weapons on Sket who hovered a little too closely, his fingers twitching for something to hurl. They dragged the corpse out of the lavatory, now bloated with maggots and buzzing with flies. The lead guard shook his head and clicked his tongue.
“Quite a mess.” He gave a smiling grimace. “You boys have been up to no good.”
Sket hissed. “Child’s play, Jingin. Wait’ll you see our next surprise. Goon squad here to torture us again?”
“Always a mouthy one, aren’t you Sket? A boor—well, we’ll see what this next trial brings you. Out with the whole lot of you reeking animals. B & D’s summoned you.”
The guards swarmed around them, eager to get in a few sneak punches.
A man with yellow rags of hair next to Sket twisted free from a loose grip. Before Sket could catch him, the man jerked forward, snarling, long-clawed nails outstretched to slash the nearest jailer.
An air gun lifted and a bright red dot blossomed on the convict’s forehead. He fell like an ox, crimson staining the rank floor.
“Any other complaints?” the rifleman grunted. He looked about cheerfully. “No heroes? I thought not.” They left the still-warm corpse lying there, bleeding on the floor. “A mess for the next crew to clean up,” he laughed.
The guards prodded the prisoners out with rifle ends and billy-clubs in their backs. Miko hesitated at the door. An ominous feeling welled in his gut as to their destination. A club with a blue stone on the end found his back, delivering a mild sting that travelled through his nerves like an electric shock. “Move along,” came the man’s hiss.
Miko growled, flung out an arm.
“No lip. Move, scum! We’ve got our eyes on you.”
Fenli leered. “Why, sailor, you cruising for a piece of ass?”
Miko bridled as a fist slammed down on the cargo man’s mouth.
Fenli giggled maniacally, as his head snapped back. He’d been sucking up on crystal over the last days from a secret stash he had stuffed under the sole of his right shoe. “Is that the only love tap I get?” Wiping the blood and snot from his bleeding lips, he looked up through the crimson mess of his face and grinned like a Halloween pumpkin.
Miko sucked in a breath. He stumbled on. He could do nothing to help Fenli. The dim lighting made navigation difficult. Stray lamps dangled on cords, flickering. Others were long dead. The corridor snaked on, pipes weaved everywhere, wire-clamped to the walls. Miko thought they looked jerry-rigged, cemented with homespun caulking. It was as if they walked upon unfinished service tunnels whose builders were planning some underground settlement. The corridors were unfamiliar to him, indeed, a different route than four days ago, which seemed an aeon ago.
He squinted as the light grew, and the hanging lamps increased in numbers. Fenli weaved on wobbly legs, clipping his skull on protruding pipes in his daze. Usk was hustled along, prodded by jeering jailors, sometimes falling on all fours. Miko protested while the other prisoners stumbled at his heels like whipped curs. The situation was going to blow. When it did... Miko hoped the savage clash would have enough oomph for them to escape these cocky brutes.
They came out into a large, low-domed chamber, the ceiling cut from pure rock—some type of sandstone and conglomerate. An assembly of sixty or more thugs cavorted around a crudely-dug pit in anticipation. Most were dressed in rags and leathers. Some were shod with scuffed boots, while others roved bare-footed. Many were bald, exposed skin completely hairless, all enraptured by the feral sport in the pit below. Defects reigned amongst these individuals: eyes missing, heads stretched too long or flattened too thin, fingers too many or not enough. Some were dwarfs, muttering and
chattering in unintelligible voices, while others stood excessively tall.
A few wore dread-locks coiled up in complex knots. Dirty fingernails gripped small coins or gambling pieces; others clutched daggers. While grimy faces looked up and sneered with eyes like spit in the dirt, other men gesticulated and roared at two squat tusked forms in the pit: a game involving what looked like wild boars.
The swine, russet-furred and grey-snouted, circled each other. They were evil-looking brutes, hungry for blood. They crashed into each other, tearing chunks of flesh and hide out of their hairy ribs and skulls. One squealed and whirled sideways. The other, a short-legged field-runner, faster than a scorpion, tore into its opponent, then dragged it off to a shadowy corner to feast upon, ruddy teeth and tusks glistening and tearing.
Gamblers and thugs, Miko thought. Wretches. One of the savage onlookers, standing at the rim, gripped his dirty discs and flung them high, oaths spilling from his lips.
Another, a lean man with a half-shaven head and colourful woven vest with eagles and stars, scooped them up gleefully at his feet, fingers questing for a knife should altercations arise.
Miko tensed as a drunken man rose from the opposing side and swaggered forth with intent to lay hands on the red-vested chief with the fur headgear who had picked up the coins. “Cheater! Cheating at a time-honoured game?”
A dozen of the chief’s barrel-chested men set on him and lifted him high over their shoulders. While the drunk raged on, bellowing like a wild ox, they tossed him into the pit. The victor swine snorted and stamped its white-knuckled hoofs, before it flicked back its hairy ears and charged. The man had barely time to shake his dazed head and draw his dagger. Then the beast was on him, teeth snapping, as tusked death visited him in the shanks. The boar retreated, charged again. The man’s ribs caved on the impact, and then his eyes grew dim, the life in them travelling star distances away. The pig ripped into its meat, disembowelling the victim. The men watched above, muttering solemnly.
A deep baritone voice spoke from the shadows: “Gentlemen, I trust you are enjoying your sports?”
The man who had lost his wagers griped, “Some of us are, Drek, but not all. Two fights you have rigged now. And a man dead for it.”
“Come now, Victus. I wouldn’t resort to such petty tactics. Murlag’s beast won fair and square. ’Tis unsportsmanlike of you to claim otherwise. As for the man who lost his life, that’s your own doing.”
Murlag’s men cheered wildly and praised Drek for his support. The rival clans-leader Victus was forced to eat crow, his followers muttering foul, disparaging oaths.
The man who had spoken, a hulking giant, now stepped forward, his body angled to the light.
Miko’s jaw sagged. The giant—or mutant giant, was a twain—some perverse parody of Siamese twin, or some grotesque echo of one. The seven-foot-tall deviant had two heads, two torsos, a left side and a right side. The head on the left that had spoken was mostly bald with dirty blond ruffs trailing from ear to neck; the other was black-haired, almost feminine, with the eyes and lashes of a brunette, and finely-chiselled nose, except for the grizzled muff of beard trailing in a hideous V-shape at the chin.
The two-headed mutant turned to the new arrivals. “Ah, I see, we have not been introduced. I am B & D, more formally Drek and Beardly—Beardly being my sister with the cute ruff. I trust, Miko that you and your associate Fenli, have had an eye-opening experience in the cellars?”
“It was enlivening”, grunted Fenli. “As are your boar fights.” His glare radiated no less acidly than Sket’s.
“They help pass the time.” He clapped his hands. “Ah, but I forgot your clammy friend, Usk. Teebla amused me with your antics and exploits at the Skull Palace. Jingin, you have done well. Any news to report? I trust the prisoners behaved themselves?”
“Admirably, sir. All but Sket, at whose hands some casualties have occurred.”
“Dear me!”
The lead guard motioned tersely to Sket who stood legs-braced on the ready. “Gyr is dead, as a result of one or more of these thieves’ handiwork—likely Sket’s, who seems to run this filthy ensemble.”
Drek sighed. “I should add that to their indenture.” He paused. “For now, I will claim it as self-defence.”
Sket’s eyes glowered. His fingers curled into claws as he groped for an imaginary weapon at his side. Miko could only guess at the outcast’s torment, knowing that his wife and son had fallen victim to this monster.
“Now men, as to your mission,” said Drek. “I have arranged that the outer mesh will be at an unstable low in the very near future. An explosion set by my agents will allow you to penetrate beyond the barrier between our boundaries—that of Skullrox and us, the Unwanteds.”
A wild cheer rose from the gathered men.
Drek’s voice rose in a black wave. “The Skullroxers give us not an ounce of clean water or healthy air. Nor do they accept us as citizens in their proud settlement! For that, we formed this rebel outfit, though we live like rats in caves. When the sun burns our skin, and we’re denied the tox creams to help us heal, and oxygen to breathe, what are we to do but fight back? Yes, fight, though we have managed to manufacture our own air down here, some of which is filtered by the charcoal in the pipes.” He stared down at Miko and his glowering band. “Attend! For your main task, you are to infiltrate the utility mesh. Sabotage it! Tear it down! Anything to weaken the Skullroxers’ position and their stronghold. Then I will launch the second strike with my death bringers!” He smacked a fist into Beardly’s palm.
Cheers rose from the wild, unkempt men.
“We have no quarrel with you!” cried Miko over the din. “Let us go.”
“But we do have a quarrel with you. You owe Teebla, and Teebla owes me. That’s enough. I have no love for men of privilege—men like you.”
Fenli snorted. “In what universe do you live?”
Jingin smacked him across the mouth.
“Very right, Drek!” quipped Beardly. “Your words ring true.”
A surge of rage coloured Sket’s face.
Drek’s greasy, grey features shone, his eyes subsided to a gleam of acceptance and a quiet, controlled sigh. He nodded to his twin.
“The Skullrox officials have poisoned us, driven us like cattle through the wastes, into these inhospitable burrows. Birth defects abound, skin diseases, mutations of all horrid sorts. Lepers living in a slum city. Look at me. I too am but a product of this grim degeneracy. The elitist bureaucrats cordoned off the infected, called us ‘Unwanteds’.”
“We build an empire, brother,” murmured Beardly in soft tones. “Remember your vision.”
Drek’s eyes gleamed, and his repulsive, malformed hand reached out to clutch the other’s and he licked his oleaginous lips.
“True, Beardly. You are wise as usual.” He gazed fiercely at the newcomers. “I give you one chance, slaves! You owe us an indenture. Run! Race till your feet bleed and bring down the mesh! And fight, my dear people, slay and destroy these overlords till your hearts drop in my theatre of thrills. The catacombs of Bron lie before you—the gateway to the mesh! Win back my public works—then I grant you your freedom!”
One hairy brute called out: “A party of thirty went out just last bloodmoon on the previous mission. All died.”
Drek shrugged. “Casualties are to be expected.”
“Hardly a token of confidence,” muttered Miko.
Fenli gave a laughing snort. “Nothing that we can’t handle.”
“I’m glad you think so, outlander,” said Drek unpleasantly, “for you’ll get your chance to prove yourselves. But one proviso, we do it the old-fashioned way, no blasters, or laser dirks or techno-flares. Less easy for you to use them on us and my guards should you fail.”
A wave of loud grumbles rose in the back of the hall.
Drek held up a hand. “I stand adamant on this point.”
Fenli muttered, shaking his head. “What’s to keep us from fleeing the moment we are turned loos
e? Seizing our own freedom?”
“You will find out if you try to renege on your indenture.”
A chief of the outcast tribes, the red-ruffed man called Murlag, piped up: “What, lord-sire, if we come upon Skullrox troopers at the mesh? As Myx said, the last time we raced, we were waylaid and most of us were cut down. Only Dragar, Victus and Myx survived.” He motioned to the latter men who nodded and grumbled, one missing an ear, the other with a patch over his left eye, blinking through his grime.
Dragar snarled, the husky rival chief with the flattened ape face. “Aye, shall we simply yell foul words at Skullrox resistance?”
Drek glared. “I resent the sarcasm.”
Murlag picked up the argument. “The ones who stand before you at the pit are the only savage wretches I could round up from the nomadic colonies fit for this perilous mission. Are they enough?”
“Fail and you die!” thundered Drek. “Either by my hand or the Skullroxers.”
The speaker stepped back, his eyes thin slits of balefire. He traded words with his rival chief, Dragar.
“Win past the barrier into Skullrox and freedom is yours,” said Drek. “You may enter the city and collect your freedom, any of you who wish it. Fail—” he let the words linger “—then you perish, by most painful means. Do not think about skulking and ambushing me—any of you rogues. Hidden cameras lie everywhere, and will pinpoint your location. My guards and electronic snares will make mincemeat of you. You can work together, or in opposition. ’Tis your choice.”
Miko gazed at the grumbling, snarling thugs around him. Drek and his ugly sister-bitch were perhaps not as loved as they thought, despite their showy boar fights and gruesome spectacles. He wondered how Drek and his sister kept any control over these malnourished wretches.
Drek boomed. “The tactics I leave to you. Avail yourself of the weapons’ trays—” he spread a meaty hand. “Some are old-fashioned, others a tad rusty, but as the saying goes, beggars can’t be choosers.”
