The Deadheart Shelters (6 page)

But I stopped calling him that quickly. Soon saying it while looking at his face left a bad taste in my mouth and got me homesick. It made me wish I could open his face like a cardboard box and find hers behind it; but no. I muttered, “Pick a new name. I don’t care what you call yourself. It doesn’t matter.” At that moment the wilderness ended and plains broke out. He bent down, scooped up a handful of the ground, and said “Dirt.”

“Sure, why not?”

“That’s not what I meant. But yeah, why not?”

Turquoise clouds with mud burst inside staggered above the hill, and soon a man on a bicycle made a silhouette over them. We stood still and let him come to us. “Hello there!” he called, lifting one hand off the grip to wave. Both of us waved silently back. He was almost going to pass us and go into the woods when I called for him to stop.

“Where are you coming from?” I asked.

“The city right back there,” he said, pointing over the hill. He pushed the kickstand out on his bike and stood it. “Where you fellas from?”

“Nowhere,” I said, while Dirt said, “Right there.”

He tilted his head and smiled, then got back on his bike. “Well, have a good day.”

We walked up the hill to where the city was promised us. A fog like powdered pills hung between us and it, but you could still see what was there. Two bookshelves facing each other, enlarged to much bigger than mountains. Antenna like uncombed hair. An apparatus of limbless hands between them constantly rearranging cubes, from one shelf to another. Some cubes were dropped to the land, broken forever, the shrapnel flung almost to our feet.

The man on the bicycle came back now. “I just wanted to warn you fellas to be careful. There are some guys near the city and they look like they want trouble.”

Dirt and I got closer to the city and then we saw them. Six men sitting on different steps of a moss-painted staircase. The stairs led up to the boughs of a cherry tree, where the grown fruit dangling made the branches dip. The tree seemed as if it were a home or something with doors. But none were inside it. And when the men saw us they descended and encircled us like vultures, watching the last twitches leave the living meat underneath.

One abruptly stuck out his arms and grabbed my face. I tried not to change my expression, but I imagine my eyes widened. Another got behind us and the rest went back up the stairs, digging through a tan sack placed there. The man holding me rubbed the soft places on my cheeks that, the day before, were holes they put corks through. He smiled and said, “You are free, O, you are free.”

“You understand?”

He nodded. When he smiled his eyes bent like bananas downwards, and wrinkles spread from them calmly. He kept patting me on the cheek and smiling bigger. “You are very rare, you know.”

“I am?”

“I have met one other escaped slave in my life.” I was nervous when he said it because Dirt didn’t know. But he had said it and now it was known. I looked at my feet. “He came to the city with the corks still in his cheeks and began to beg. Do you know how long he lasted there?”

“A month?”

“Less.”

“A week? A couple days?”

“Twelve minutes. In twelve minutes they shot him in the forehead and left him there. Now guess how long it took them to clean him up.”

“I don’t want to.”

“They never did. No human ever touched that corpse.”

The man behind us stiffened and grabbed Dirt behind the neck. “This is one of the new ones!”

From the tan sack on the steps they drew out stones smaller than the ones that drowned Thomas. “You were made in those forests? You were one of those that hatched into life?”

“Yes, I was. Please let go of my neck.”

The man threw him down face first and Dirt hit without bracing himself. Dirt lifted his head and I could see his nose was broken, but then he put it back down because they started throwing rocks at him. Each time one would hit him there’d be a damp thud, and a slight shiver from him. I said nothing as I am used to saying nothing.

“Non-human!” someone on the stairs shouted, and another was screaming through clenched teeth, half-restrained, like the death-shouts of a man in an electric chair. “You are a product of the twisted future!”

“The twisted now!”

“The puke of the mechanical animal!”

“I can kill him because he has no feelings.”

While they were working on murdering him, the man who held my face said quietly to me, “Is he your friend?”

“I only met him today.” To disassociate myself. I am bred of the mindset that we all will get punished eventually. It is best to keep quiet if something you might say could get you involved.

“They will kill him unless you want him to live. But if you’ve only just met him, let him die.”

“That’s what you want?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

I looked back down at Dirt. He was speechless and shivering less, and I wondered if the cut they made in the side of his head was the reason for this, or if he got used to it. I felt a respect for him growing. Even the men throwing rocks seemed irritated to be throwing them so long without response.

If a man is attacking you and knocks you down, get up. Each time, get up. He might kill you or he might let you live, but invariably he will respect you by the time he is finished.

“Don’t kill him. A man can’t help what he’s born into.”

The man nodded. “As you know too well yourself,” he said, though I hadn’t been thinking like that. He held up his hands and the men stopped throwing rocks. Only then did Dirt lift his hands to protect the back of his head and moan.

“Why do you spare him?” one of the men on the stairs asked. I opened my mouth to answer but the question was not for me.

“Because the escaped man asks for it.”

“He’s unnatural. If we let none of them in they’ll have to go back to the old ways.”

Dirt got to his knees and I could see he’d been crying, probably the whole time. He’s just a newborn baby, I thought, and I was surprised at my own urge to cry thinking this, for usually non-emotion comes much easier to me. It’s not out of protection but comfort. He wasn’t hurt too bad and had not been afraid of death; he hadn’t lived long enough to develop a fear of death. It was only the fear of not-understanding and nowhere-to-go. “I don’t remember this,” he said.

“Listen to him talk about his fake memories!” Then the man on the stairs stared directly at him and Dirt stared back defensively. “You remember nothing but the walk here! You’re manufactured!”

“Calm down,” said the man beside me. The men on the stairs calmed down and then it started getting dark. The turquoise clouds dissolved like pepper from a shaker thrown sporadic, so the dust of them powdered the rooftops, still-turquoise. Between our heads flew the slugs that take wing at night, leaving itches on whatever they touch, and I held my hands up against them. They always find a way in. Soon I was scratching myself incessantly.

“They’re bad here, huh?” I said.

“Who?” asked the old man.

“The pests. You have a lot of them here.”

“Oh yes. They’re urban animals. But in the forests you find the mosquitoes and I prefer neither.” His eyes wandered over my cheeks. “You must be used to mosquitoes.”

“I wasn’t usually outside at night. Sometimes I’d get lucky.”

He nodded. “Well now you’re here. You can stay outside until inside seems better and you can learn to ignore the bugs. But what are you going to do?”

I shrugged, and on the ground Dirt stopped whimpering and looked up. “What do people usually do?”

“They work, make kids, pay for things… stuff like that. Things cost money, you know.”

“I know.”

“You’ll need something to do.”

“Well what do you do?”

“We are the sort that works all day and when we get home the true work begins. That is this; killing the synthetically born. There are other things but mostly it’s just this, now.”

“Don’t you feel guilty?” Dirt asked. “Don’t you get ashamed?”

The old man looked down at him and his eyes got suddenly lifeless and uncaring. “It would be better for you not to say things like that.”

I helped Dirt to his feet and then we were standing there. The man started to say “It was good to meet you” but I spoke rapidly over him.

“What will we do?”

The man looked down. “Ours is an ugly work. Many of us are sick from it.”

“I’m used to ugly work.”

“We lose friends too frequently. The roof collapses on them or else they’ve just breathed too much of it in. Soon their bodies become useless, and it’s only luck that prevents this.”

“What is your work?”

“Coal mining. Would you like to do that?”

It was not long before we began. We spent the night in the old man’s apartment complex. He told us his name by then; it was Felt, because that was what his mother made; his brother was named Bluestone for his father’s work and he always wished it was the other way around.

“Or at least a name like Chris. How about a normal name?”

“Should I be named Chris?” Dirt asked.

“No, because you are not normal.”

We slept together on the floor, for already every cushion was taken by the men on the stairs or others like them. I missed my mattress however thin, and all night through the window I heard people still talking and hums from electric throats. Like vocal cords perpetually plucked and gongs bashed reckless, unstopped. The noise kept me unsleeping. I missed the conversations in the dark where I’m from, which softened gradually as we all sank to its lullaby.

In the first morning an airplane exploded outside our window and left a dandelion stain on the sky. Inside, you couldn’t hear it. Like vanishing into a shower drain in blue, then a dandelion. Accordions of ash fell out of the wings and powdered the fire escape.

I went to the window; everyone else was still asleep. On the sidewalks you could see the tops of their heads still moving. I climbed down the fire escape on ladders that could slide out like trombone valves. So I was on the floor faster. Then I could see the front of their heads, like pale melons with spilt wine for the lips.

I looked down. It made me nervous to look up, where they were looking back. I followed my feet on the sidewalk and listened to the sounds, imagining where they came from: dumpsters rolled into each other, elephants getting shot. Knives. Dice inside the megaphone, the conversations you hear in sleep. Upon the layers of silence from before it seemed like crashing boats. Then I heard a sound like an underwater drum shaking out and stretching so that it soaked into your head and sat there, staying.

I looked up. There was a man made of metal twice as tall as regular men, coming towards me. He came and sat down, legs crossed, in an empty parking space. Then his forehead opened up like an orange peel coming off and four men came out, dressed in black uniforms with disembodied teeth stenciled white on the chests.

They went into a corner store, and the machine stayed put, nodding its head back and forth like someone half-asleep at a bus stop. Dozing. I crossed the street to look at it, then the uniformed men came out. They had an old man fighting to get out of their arms, screaming into a sock in his mouth, his eyes wild like chicken eyes when we held them down against the tree stump. A ladder came down from the machine’s vertebrae and they walked up, dragging him.

Then the machine was walking away. Someone else walked past and I grabbed her by the arm. “Was he a slave?”

“A slave?”

“Who ran away? Is that why they got him?”

“Let go of me.” She shook away. “Don’t talk like that.”

So I kept walking. Each block has a different smell. On the block that smelled like shoe polish I saw two apes in a large cage shooting at each other with pistols. Three people nearby burst open with stray bullets.

I had never seen things like these before.