by JT Lawrence
“I can taste that water, you know. I can feel it streaming through my hair in that first dive. Cooling my scalp.”
“Going to be a good feeling,” says Zack. “After all this time.”
“Oh, yes.” He drops from the bar then downs half a bottle of water. “Oh, yes.”
Lewis offers him the SkyRest-branded packet of pretzels. Zack hesitates.
“Go on,” says Lewis. “They’re not going to bite you.”
Zack reaches his hand inside the bag, grabs a few then sprinkles them on his other palm. Tentatively puts one in his mouth. It’s not too bad.
“Will you tell me the rest of it?” asks Zack.
“The rest of what?”
“The rest of the video. Tell me how they do it?”
“All right,” he says, sitting down. “Sure. Why the hell not?”
Zack eats another pretzel. They’re quite good, actually.
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
“Ever heard of Ouroboros?” asks Lewis.
“Your tattoo,” says Zack. “The serpent that devours its own tail.”
Zack knows the ancient Egyptian circular symbol of eternal return that has been re-used and recycled by philosophical trains from Greek magic to alchemy to Kundalini health goths.
“Right. So they have this system going here. It’s completely self-sustaining. Everything you eat, wear, or touch in this place comes from this place. It is its own immortality.”
“Recomposition.”
“Recomp’s the main technology, yes. There are others on the menu, and even more that they’re experimenting with.”
“How does the recomp work?”
“Recomp is when they take the … nitrogen-rich material—”
“The what?”
“The nitrogen-rich material. That’s what they call it.”
“Do you mean, the bodies? The dead bodies?”
“Yes, that’s what it means.”
“So they take the nitrogen-rich—the bodies—and place them inside a mound of carbon-rich material … so that’s the sawdust, and the wood chips. They add a bit of moisture, some extra nitro on top to get it going. Maybe some alfalfa.”
Zack remembers the pretty purple alfalfa blooms they had worked on during a previous shift. The alfalfa on his plate yesterday. What had Lewis said about them? That they're a feminine herb, an element of the earth, and especially good on sandwiches.
“Then the microbes do their thing. The microbial activity gets the pile cooking. Their heat kills the bad shit. The pathogens. That’s what you can feel.”
“What do you mean?”
“We call it our underfloor heating. The warmth, from the middle of the building? That’s the core. That’s where it all happens. Bodies in the top. Compost out the bottom.”
Human compost.
Saliva rushes into Zack’s mouth. He tries to swallow his revulsion.
“Then they cure the compost. Sometimes the clients want to take the compost home. They plant a tree or whatever. Or they let someone here do it for them. They plant one of those saplings in the forest at the back. Put a tag on the tree, or a bench with a silver plaque underneath it. But most of the compost goes unclaimed. That’s the stuff we use for the aeroponics. It’s what we use to grow everything in here.”
Zack spits out the pretzel.
Lewis laughs. “Ja, that’s pretty much the standard reaction.”
Zack looks around the room. His uniform, the linen, Lewis’s snax, the soap, the toothpaste, all emblazoned with the SkyRest logo.
“Yes,” says Lewis. “Even the toiletries. Hemp oil and Miswak and Homosapien. So best get used to it.”
Zack reaches for his water and rinses his mouth out, spits the water into Lewis’s basin.
"Once you've had time to process it, you'll see that it makes complete sense. It's the full circle, you know? None of that embalming shit. No poisoning the well. None of that hanging onto dead bodies. If you think about it, being attached to a dead body is way weirder than letting it go back to the earth, you know? No waste, no harm, just energy doing its thing. Going round and round as it should. The process is a beautiful thing."
“Does everyone in here … Do the rest of the prisoners know?”
"Most of them. Some have been red-flagged. Admin decided it's best not to tell them. The truth doesn't serve everybody."
Zack feels ill.
The bell rings for dinner time.
Zack is in the forest. Dark as dread. He’s running from something. Someone? The leaves hit his face, the thin black branches whipping his cheeks and arms as he races away from the danger. Where is he? This must be the forest that surrounds the crim colony. Has he escaped? He runs despite the dark, despite not being able to see more than a metre in front of him, despite the soft mounds of earth that threaten to swallow his feet and twist his ankles. He runs and runs despite not having any energy left in his limbs. Panic pushes him forward; makes his legs feel weightless.
He's wearing his suit and tie; he doesn't know how. He doesn't know in which direction he's running. He'll keep going until he reaches the edge then strategise when he gets there. He needs to leave the threat behind.
But there's a problem with his plan or, rather, a problem with the forest. Because he keeps running, but he's not getting anywhere. He can sense that despite his frantic pace, he hasn't moved an inch—an enchanted forest, a cursed forest. All of a sudden, he's flying through the air and lands in a shallow ditch full of leaves. The air is knocked out of him. He touches the soil on the banks that surround him and understands it's not a ditch at all. It's way too deep. It's a rectangular hole, six feet down. A grave. The realisation doesn't help to get the oxygen he needs into his lungs. The air is thick with the aroma of humus and clay. Leaf mould. Too thick to breathe. He scrabbles to climb out of the hole; he can't find a foothold.
He makes it halfway up the bank of soil when a rock gives way, and he falls back down. He collapses hard, onto his back, and the shock of it keeps him lying like that until his head stops buzzing. But in the place of the buzzing is another sound: a whispering, rustling, an animal ticking, hundreds of insect legs. There's a pinprick on his ankle, then on his hand. He jumps up and shakes off the things. One is trying to get inside his ear, and he swipes at it with a yell. Another sharp pain, on his leg, and then there are stings all over as the beetles swarm over him. Zack screams as he tries to sweep them off. As if sensing his panic, they bite down. They want to get their feed before their dinner disappears. He starts to feel the wetness of the trails of blood mixing together. His fingers frantically scrape at the walls of black soil, and one of his nails tears off. Eventually, he finds a root to grab onto and uses all the strength the adrenaline gives him to haul himself up and out of the death cube.
Zack pulls off what’s left of the flesh-eating beetles and crunches them underfoot. He’s dripping blood. Once he’s sure he’s free of the bugs, he puts his hands on his knees and waits for his lungs to catch up with him. The danger is still present, some unseen evil in the forest, but there’s also the danger of him passing out and then there’ll be no way he gets out of here alive. How did he get here? All he can remember is—
There's a sound behind him, a dead branch snapping. He spins around, his heart already trying to judder out of his body. Zack tries to make out what—who?—made the noise. He starts reversing and backs into a wide tree trunk. He puts his hands out to steady himself against the bark, but as his palms touch it, he recoils. It doesn't feel right. He turns towards it and yells in fright. Bits of bone are embedded in the bark. Bone bark. The branches further up are cartilage and sinew. There is some hair, some cheekbone. Teeth. Fragments of the pale woman from the video are part of this tree. An eyeball swivels to look at him, and he yells again, wants to run, but his horror keeps him rooted to the spot. A shaft of moonlight casts the softest light on the tree, and Zack realises it's not the woman from the video. It's him.
Zack is
yelling into the dark. A large hand is covering his mouth. Spongey, cold skin over his fevered jaw. His eyes click open. It's Bernard trying to suffocate him. He tries to fight her but she has the advantage of being above him and uses all her heft to pin him down, knee on shoulder. He struggles and struggles, but is made weak by the starvation, the sleep-dep, the forest nightmare. Zack tries to call for Lewis, but her hand cancels out any trace of his voice. Gradually he stops struggling, thinking she will kill him now, she'll kill him and would that be that bad? But as he stops fighting her, she eases off too, until there is just one soft hand on his mouth; the other goes to her own, an index finger crosses her lips telling him to be quiet.
“Shhh,” Bernard says.
The day’s chute delivery arrives with a neatly wrapped Rewards parcel for Zack. The bald resident—Spud, they call him—hands it over.
"Congratulations!" Spud says, slapping Zack on the shoulder. Zack thinks he means for the Reward, but then he looks down at what Spud is eyeing: he has a colour stripe on his lapel. His first Stage.
Zack swings by Lewis’s room and is shocked when it’s empty—not only of Lewis but also all his things. It’s completely stripped down to the basics, with just a sleeping mat on the floor.
“Isn’t it great?” says a voice in his ear.
Zack spins around, holding his Reward parcel against his chest. It was meant to be a gift for Lewis. Spud is grinning.
Zack’s mind is furry with last night’s events. “What?”
“Isn’t it great?” Spud says again. “He’s gone! Promoted!”
Zack shakes his head. Of course. Lewis has been Elevated. That's good news. That's excellent news, but why does it make his stomach simmer with dread? He looks down at the gift. His nails are lined with dirt, and one of his fingernails is torn. He blinks, and the soil disappears, and his nail is no longer torn. He feels as if he is losing his grip on reality.
There is a jovial atmosphere in the cafeteria at breakfast time. Word has spread that Lewis has finally been elevated and the other residents are exuberant. Part of it is for Lewis, and part is the stoking of their hopes that they, too, will one day be promoted upstairs. Two men at an adjacent table each have only one more Stage to go. They laugh over their salty French toast at the inmates who joke around them about the bright blue pool and the craft ice cream and the all-you-can-watch film suites.
Zack's stomach is still roiling when it's time to start the work shift. He's left Lewis's gift in his room—still wrapped—even though he's sure he'll never see him again. They walk over to a hall where trestle tables are set out with old-school sewing machines, and the men are divided into those who can sew and those who can't. Zack is in the latter group, so he is tasked with unrolling and cutting fabric according to overhead projector templates. They set to work as the machines hum in the background. Usually, the white noise would be calming, but today it's as if the buzzing is inside his head. His new shift-partner is a slimy man with nervous eyes and adds to Zack's feeling of unease.
After two hours of work, a bell rings, and the men sigh and stretch their arms and backs before they're shepherded to the next task. Zack trails behind the group, trying to avoid his new partner. There will be a five-minute toilet break before the next grind begins. Without really thinking, without even meaning to, Zack peels off from the crowd and slips into a dark room. He knows they're monitored continuously—knows they're watching his every move—so he doesn't understand why he's doing it. If he gets caught, he'll get docked any Rewards due to him. He may even get stripped of his first Stage. But there is an instinct stronger than fear, stronger than the desire to climb the ladder that leads him away from the others.
Zack slips in quietly and waits for his eyes to adjust to the low light. The space has an earthy smell—is it one of the potting rooms?—but he doesn't see any plants or soil. He blinks, trying to make out what it is in front of him. He inches forward, towards a large dark shape. When he's closer, he sees it's a dozen make-shift platforms built from old building palettes, and they each hold up a large burlap bag with hand-sewn, re-purposed zips.
Wood chips? Sawdust?
But the shape of the bag is wrong. It's too long. It's horizontal. That, and the zip makes it look like a—
He moves towards the bag closest to him. As he touches it, the bell rings for the next shift to start, and he jolts. Time to go, but he stays there, his body and brain frozen.
They'll miss him soon; he'll be in trouble. His hand travels back to the zip. The smell is stronger now, the dark humus scent reminding him of his nightmare last night. Damp soil and something else. What is it? He pulls the handle of the zip down.
Inside the bag is more brown burlap, wrapped around a sphere, like a dressing. Zack keeps unzipping the rest of it and flinches when he sees that the round bandaged thing is attached to a neck, and a torso. There’s a noise in his ears, a humming. It’s the adrenaline telling him to run.
So it’s a dead body. So what? It’s to be expected, isn’t it, in a place like this?
The body is ivory, veined with blue. Zack zips it up again. He needs to go. They've probably noticed he's missing. If he goes now, he can still use the excuse of an extended toilet break or—less convincingly—that he got lost. If he doesn't get back now, there'll be someone in here to drag him away. He moves to the next bag and opens it. An ash marble torso, waiting to be recycled. One more, he tells himself, he doesn't know why. The Net knows he doesn't want to see another one of these cold-butter bodies. But the next body isn't pale. The skin of the muscular neck is loam-coloured and wrinkled, and as the zip moves, tooth by tooth, opening the bag, something in Zack knows what's inside before his brain clicks. He sees the top of the tattoo that he knows so well: Ouroboros.
It’s Lewis. It’s Lewis.
Lewis, who is supposed to be ten storeys above him, swimming laps in a crystal pool.
Zack stares at the rest of the tattoo: the dragon's head, its circular body, eating its own tail. He draws away, realises he's close to hyperventilating. Then he opens the bag further, and there's a steady ribbon of that soil smell—and now Zack identifies it—mushrooms. Forest mushrooms. And he sees openings in Lewis's skin—his stomach and thighs—like a sea-sponge, dark holes stretched by and embroidered with thriving mushrooms where they have rolled spikes over his skin and sprinkled in the shroomspores of the fungi that is eating his flesh. Dark meat with mushroom gills.
Zack turns his head away from the body bag and sprays vomit onto the black concrete floor. Water and bile splash out of him. He wants to run, but his body heaves and heaves. When he straightens up, there is a silhouette at the door.
Two guards come running, almost falling over Bernard in their hurry to get to Zack. They stumble and shine their powerful flashlights into his eyes.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” she says.
It’s a bit late for that.
The guards—Xoli and Samuel—move forward and Zack puts his arms up in surrender, wonders distractedly why they didn't just drop him with a current from the cuff. In his blinded state he has a flashback of Lewis's myco-ravaged flesh and almost vomits again. He covers his mouth with the back of his hand. There are arms around him as the men guide him away from Lewis and the other body bags in the room.
“Where to?” asks Samuel.
“Solitary, for now,” says Xoli. “Till they tell us otherwise.”
What had Lewis said about solitary confinement? To avoid it at all costs. You go in the Cooler, you'll never be the same. That's if you're lucky enough to come out. Lewis said that ‘luck' and ‘solitary' do not often go hand in hand. Zack's head is spinning. He can't get around the fact that Lewis is dead.
The young guard blinks. He seems surprised at the harshness of the punishment, but sets his jaw and moves Zack along.
“Stop,” says Bernard, as they get to the door. “I’ll deal with him.” She looks smug. A cat that finally has the canary in her claws.
“But—”
"Gi
rdler has been a menace from the start. There's only one way to deal with him, and I know how." She runs her fingers up and down her baton, moistens her lips.
The guards look uncertain but hand him over anyway. She pushes Zack in front of her.
“Start walking, Prisoner,” she says. “The Cooler’s got nothing on me.”
Zack expects to be taken somewhere dark and beaten to within an inch his life, so when he figures out where they're going, he slows down and waits for his brain to catch up. Bernard pushes him forward.
“Stop dawdling, Prisoner.”
His mind is a spiderweb of questions and pictures that won’t fade. Bernard grabs two chairs from the common room and marches him to his room; makes him sit in one and takes the other for herself. The residence is empty. Everyone else is still working. He should be used to her observance by now, but can still feel her ugly dishwater eyes washing all over him. Should he be grateful that she saved him from solcon? Or does she have something worse planned?
Heeled footsteps approach. Gaelyn. She arrives and beams at Zack.
“Mister Girdler!” she says, as if they’re meeting by coincidence somewhere light and sunny—on a cruise ship, maybe, Cinnacola cocktails in hand—instead of in an underground penal colony cell.
“I do hope you’re settling in nicely?”
Zack blinks at her.
“I heard we had an incident,” Gaelyn says, but Zack doesn’t answer. “Now, I don’t want you to worry too much about that. It’s natural that you are curious as to how SkyRest functions. I only wish that you had come to me instead of exploring on your own.”
“I was just—”
“I know, I know. There’s no need to explain yourself.” She squeezes his arm. The contact, the human touch, is a surge of warmth. “Now, I see that we need to start taking better care of you.”
Bernard snorts.
“You’re half the size you were when you arrived a week ago. Is anything the matter?”
What a strange question to ask.
