March 26, 2010

Those Days Are Over

This is a short story I wrote based on dreams I had in 2007. I’ve worked it over quite a few times, trying to achieve a sort of episodic account of events from a couple of points of view. All events are part of the same conflict. It’s violent, but hey – that’s dreams for you.

First there were days of bloodshed, the sun ever rising and setting on carnage and sacrifice. And with all the Good having given themselves to a purpose, then began the days of death where reason had abandoned mankind and all that was left was an unhindered thanatos. I lived and died in those days, as many times as the sun reached its lagging zenith.

They came with guns and restraints, without any warning. We were to clear out immediately. Hand on our heads. They wore suits and uniforms and guns large enough to need straps. We were taken to an airfield in trucks and put on our knees on the runway. And then we were shot in the face.

“We’ll go in here, here, and here, but we’ll have to be silent. On the mark we’ll start in – take down anyone you see. Guards, soldiers, secretaries, anyone. They want some of us alive, I think. They took Jere off in a truck.”

“That’s because his parents work at…”

“His parents are dead. Jeremy was took alive because he was took alive. But that don’t matter – we want them all dead, got it? Anyone you leave alive is going to kill one of us, so don’t let it happen.”

We never really figured out who they were or what they wanted or what we’d done. It was never really clear who we were either. It wasn’t about anything really except getting them before they got us. And they had the advantage of the initial strike. It had been a massacre. We were pretty sure we weren’t going to let that happen again with us, like it had on that runway. Whatever they wanted from us, we weren’t going to give them. And whatever they took from us, we were going to take it back.

And so we went in through the loading dock, the side door and the roof and killed as many of them as we could. And in the first ten minutes, it was a lot. Doctors, nurses, patients. We killed them where they stood. Our dark clothing of brown and green and grime stood out in the stark hospital halls of mint and taupe and sky blue. Our energy surging into the corridors, pushing out the sick, calm air. Some of us sacked supplies. Then the soldiers began to flood in. There were many of us, but they were many more. And all of them big and trained. They killed some of us with the butts of their guns. I got shot in the leg twice and ducked into a closet. They didn’t hit the bone. The soldier fired into the closet door. I came out and thrust a broom handle through his eye socket.

The bull crashed through the wall of my bathroom from the firelight outside. The thrashing corpse demolished the sink, the toilet and killed my cat before it died in a bloody mountain in the doorway. It was black and glistening with ichor and blood. It already stunk. And as I turned down to look at the agents on the pavement of the driveway, dark-suited men with pistols in their hands shot at me. I heard orders to go inside and fetch me. I climbed over the bull, and with a running leap over the rubble, I opened fire with my brother’s national guard issue rifle. I must have surprised them, because I got off five rounds before they started firing back. They had another bull down there, raging, wrecking havoc in the parking lot of the hospital. Trucks worked to corral it, soldiers fired into it, but it raged on as if only anger fueled it, not even flinching at the barrage of bullets into its side, its face, its chest. For a moment, he and I ran on the same fuel, both beasts unhindered.

I was nine years old, and dark-skinned. A boy made feral by blood. I trotted up the wide bright staircase. They opened fire, hitting me in the chest, the gut, the legs and arms. I crumpled to the ground and held myself as they continued to fire into my child’s body. I forced myself to look as dead as I wished I was, like the big boys told me, lying there on the cold linoleum.

“If they knows you’re dead,” they said, “they won’ be waste they’s bullets.”

The sun beat down on my top, my blood spread beneath me like a sanguine rug. A few more rounds and then, it stopped. And after the ringing in my ears faded I could hear them chatting about the siege last night on the dormitories. Their steps came towards me, halting above my head. I tried not to breathe, not to move. I tried to die right there as I lie. A noise that sounded as loud as a point blank explosion made me flinch and cover my head. An empty magazine fell onto me. I heard another one snap home. I didn’t hear the last shot go off.

It wouldn’t be budged, the beastly bullet in my shin. In the light of a ruined sun, I worked to dig it out with my knife. The dusty porch. Between my thumbnails, I dislodged the pustule cap and scab that had formed. I squeezed around it like a pimple and from the hole came a worm of red paste and flesh. I squeezed harder and wiped it on my sleeve. The bullet had not moved. I worked into the infection, the pain telling me I was only getting closer. The hole in my leg had grown from the size of a penny to a half dollar, a gaping bloody crater. My muscles surprised me, looking like ground beef, my bone as white as my teeth and as clean.

I took her dark, clean face in my hands.

“It won’t matter,” I giggled, “if you go along quietly.” She giggled back and we touched foreheads.

“They’ll just tie you up and shoot you in the face,” I laughed. “Just like they did Jere.”

“But why?” she said, still laughing.[/tab]

“It’s their modus operandi,” I told her, laughing more, Angels, the two of us, always laughing.

“What?”

“That’s what they do, and they’ll do it to you.” I gave her the handgun. “So that’s why we have to do it to them.”

There was no more laughing. It was the end of those days.]

Being taken alive was a misnomer considering they’d kill you anyway. They wouldn’t shoot you in the face. They’d pen you up in the bottom of an empty swimming pool with one of their bulls. And if you somehow survived that, they’d shoot you in the face.

The south dormitory was ablaze with light and videogames and TV screens. The upper floors were lit like Christmas behind the blacked out, boarded up windows. The patrols outside would radio in if they saw a light seeping from a crack somewhere, if even a note of music found their ears where they crept about in the landscaping. All of the other dormitories were dark because of a series of massacres and failed sieges. But tonight was a night to celebrate. The raid on the hospital had been a success. We murdered scores of the assholes in their beds, and others as they stood on their feet. Fat men at their desks in their glass offices. And we broke many important things and as we made our retreat we set fire to the place. I laughed from room to room, taking heads in my hands and kissing them on the forehead. For Nate, I took his lips. All the weapons were unloaded, except for the guards on the roof with a full arsenal. With our unloaded pieces we mimicked the raid and paraded in hats mocking the soldiers who hunted us, and ‘shot’ ourselves in the face.

There was Hall Ball, and we slung the little rubber ball back and forth until it ricocheted down the stairwell into the dark, abandoned lower floors.

I trotted down to get it, creeping along in the dark.. From under one door at the far end of a hallway was a faint red glimmer that pulsed and danced as if made from a computer monitor, or diodes on a radar screen. Because that’s what it was. From the top of the door was a microphone taped to the ceiling, listening in on the party above. I stopped breathing and moved like a cat, putting my ear to the door. A sound of little engines turning, fans blowing into a CPU. And a crinkle of a burger wrapper. There was a man inside, balding in a sweaty white shirt and tie. He was spying on us. A leak. An infiltration sending the murderers intelligence on a stronghold in the dormitories. He would know if he’d been paying any attention that we’d been the ones to raid the hospital. And if he was worth anything, they’d already know too. I opened my mouth to yell, to sound the alarm, but the room patrol had already lit the alarms and the frantic static of the ground patrols filled the hallways. I could hear helicopters. And, at that moment, the door opened and out came the spy. He didn’t even see me there in the dark when I put his lights out.

I rolled him over and stomped the life out of his face. I went inside and tore the wires out of everything and took up the man’s rifle above the door. Upstairs glass was breaking and wood was splintering. And now, gunfire.

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February 22, 2010

Living & Dying in Four Four Time

We were young then, on a three day dance bender. Bright young things from all corners of the country had come to dingy Omaha and the dingier Eagle’s Club to dim the lights and tear up the floor. The Club was nasty with sticky, matted red carpets, a strange taxidermy eagle over the unused bar, clunky electronic dartboards on the walls. Folding chairs, folding tables. But the dance floor was rich, clean and glowing with heat. And the dancers were flush and fresh. I wore a skirt and high-heeled shoes.

The atmosphere was raw and spiritual – bodies moving and minds following. Movement preceding and replacing thought. Some of those hard-line societal expectations were hiding in dark corners, not touching me, I think. People were free to feel savage and only slightly sane. Nice clothes, dark eyes, shoes being the most important thing. I walked and danced among them and with them. I was a being of expression and I could touch anyone and they could all touch me.

All the light came from the band. The Hot Club – a Django gypsy-jazz band – was guitars and stand-up bases, clarinet, accordion. A handful of young men with old souls. Time-travelers. Their stomping feet set the meter of the pumping of our hearts.

We swung out. Smiles, heels, all of us moving, breathing, creating art as experience together.

Saturday night the energy apexed to a peak at pumpkin time, the band riding hot like a hell train full of spangled troubadours, thrusting inward and inward exploding exploding. We were drawn in like moths to the light, crowding in close, pulsing like all the blood in our ears. The sound and fury escaped through a tiny hole in the crowd. And from it were born dancers who emerged like fire. Swing out after swing out they danced like tigers. The jam circle grew around them.

The tigers traded their crazies in that pit, its walls a percussive force of elbows and palms. Our clapping was thunder chasing the guitars and the horns. When the bodies were spent, and the dancers melted back into crowd, our minds fled – no! – flew to the men with the music. The sound built higher than I thought it could go and in a feeling, a feeling, a feeling acquainted with orgasm it plummeted into a pool of pleasure and anguish. All ears to the horn. Chests in close. A baleful peal, love and anger in a glorious minor key. Silence. The torturous agonizing silence. And then with a slow thrumming from the bass, the slow slapping on the side of a guitar, the blessed sound came back. Slowly at first. Achingly slowly and quietly. But then it built. It accelerated and the band gathered power. The melody heated up again, that clarinet mad mad mad, the bass quaking like a god of thunder. We shouted in time with the music. The sound was back and we were resurrected. Our bodies lived again, and we lived and died by the four four time in that dark dance hall.

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October 04, 2009

B.O.M.O.

The Borotech Orbital Mining Outpost at Inip had been the pride of the company the day of its maiden orbit, the crux of their positive relations with the Wu-Ari and their planet of tauted wealth Inip. The great hulk of a station, gleaming in Borotech’s olive tones in day hours, hung in geosynchronous orbit over the central mining colony. Freight shuttles trafficked barges of ores and natural polymers up from the surface, and massive tankers transported raw natural gases to BOMO. BOMO did preliminary stabilization and leveling of the more volatile raw materials, so that they could be deployed with the rest of the goods to their refineries. Borotech employed executives, clerks, managers, miners, work gang leaders, freight pilots and their crews, radiation specialists, refining technicians, mechanics who worked on everything from barges to drilling devices. Commercial businesses made their home on BOMO as well, to provide for the families of Borotech’s employees, and to make the station something approaching habitable.

Delta Grid was plantside of the station and was riddled with the barge and tanker decks from Inip. It ran rampant with skiff pilots, and dockboys and loadrunners, moving the products to their next junctures. Most of the shuttles unloaded to re-packaging areas in Gamma Grid to prepare the materials for long transport. The unstable ores that had to be processed on-site was sent to the massive Beta Grid. Because of the dangers of the smelting process, Beta Grid workers often joked darkly that it would only take one slip to make BOMO go BOOM. Everything that came onto the station left through Alpha Grid on the contra-planetside of the station. Alpha Grid, since it was a coming-and-going point, was also where the offices, residences and ‘downtown’ of BOMO was located.

For Briggs Daerrow, the behemoth of BOMO had been the height of adventure. Leave dusty Mars and Terran Sector for the far-off Wu-Ari System, living the life of the rugged stationer. Or so he’d thought when he had been recruited by snappy-looking Borotech men upon his completion of mechanic’s trade school back in the New Tokyo Dome. What he’d found at BOMO was a lot of opportunity to grow up, toughen up, and fend for himself. Shoddy, bone-rattling Arti-Grav units kept him awake just as often as burly mechanics named Bubba. Getting ‘initiated’ in storerooms to the BOMO workers’ family. Learning first-hand about the white hot smelting vats.

But it had been four years, and Briggs knew how to take care of himself now. He wasn’t any bigger, still a shrimpy 5’7″, but he’d found reprise in honing his skills, getting promoted to bigger jobs, smaller teams and out of the dregs of the perverted, low-level grunts that he’d started out with. They were the ones who had to do the mindless, back breaking repairs in Beta, Gamma and Delta. Mechanics of Briggs Daerrow’s finesse were given tasks lists in Alpha. He wasn’t completely free of BDG work, but they came only few and far between.

Briggs knew where he stood on BOMO, and while he’d been jaded in his first year, he walked with his head up. (And with his hand on his compression drill.)

“Briggsy, you froph, you got your tab or do I have to wring your neck?” The gray-skinned Wu-Ari came out of his bar. Briggs sent him a smirk and kept right on down the main concourse.

“Eat vapor, Torik, I’ll pay you tomorrow.” It was 8 am and the slimeball lizard of a Wu-Ari barkeep was already harping for his credits. Yeah, sure, Briggs’d be buggered to talk like that one-on-one with the large alien, but witnesses always made things safer.

Torik swore back in Wu-Ari. Briggs couldn’t understand him, but he knew when his mother was being slandered. “Yeah, so’s yer gene pool,” he shot back with a vulgar hand gesture, before turning the corner. He chewed on a strip of cured meat as he walked, his tools jangling on his thick belt and bandoleer. In one hand he had a data pad with the day’s work load.

“Internal bays doors malfunctioning,” he read to himself, making his way to the cargo holds. He was pleased that it wasn’t the outer doors; the suits for being external were impossible to work in and leaked. Punching the hatch open at the right hold, Briggs tossed his data pad into the stadium-sized chamber ahead of him and watched as it floated blissfully. The cargo chambers didn’t have simulated gravity for obvious reasons.

A set of doors separated the main hold from a small vacuum chamber before the external doors to the brightening black outside. The sun was rising over Inip. The doors in question were frozen halfway, one of them sharply off parallel.

Sill on the platform, Briggs tapped into the system on a control panel. Stupid pilots often reported malfunctions without trying the simplest overrides. But Briggs wasn’t so lucky today – the operations protocols were all good; it was a physically problem.

He pushed off and floated towards the power point in the ceiling, putting on his gloves as he went, and then fitted a tri-bit to open the panel. At the power point he punched in his code and shut off the power to the doors. The room went black, then gray as back-up lights came on.

Pushing himself to doors, catching his datapad along the way, Briggs caught another look at the Wu-Ari sun rising and shook his head. Another day of his life gone, picking up after Borotech.

***

The dimly lit cavern of the empty cargo hold was filled with the orange light, and Briggs’s stark silhouette was gianted on the walls. He had anchored himself to the giant gears and was sweating behind a 9 gauge sauder-eater. Sweat dripped down his black-lensed goggles and sparks few up into his face as he leaned his weight into the mess. His jacket was floating near the doors to the concourse and his bare arms showed the scars from many an old job.

Again and again, in strained rhythm, the hold was lit up as Briggs bore into the mineral deposit that had built up on the axle.

With a final charge, the last of the deposit was decimated. Swearing in annoyance and relief, Briggs unhooked himself from the cog and stretched out of his hunched position to drift in the hold a moment.

The axle was free, but when it had wrenched to a jarring stop it had caused all of the other cogs in the system to misalign and the doors had jammed. He’d need to re-align them by hand and reset the doors.

But after lunch.

***

Back up the concourse Briggs went, dodging wagons laden with crates of goods and ore ingots, sidestepping more and more people, and leaving behind the cargo hold with a CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE marker on the door. He’d left his job unfinished for the noon hour. The station had awoken by now and was crowded with pilots, technicians and other miscellaneous station rabble.

The main concourse of Alpha Grid was High Street, as they called it. The coprporate offices were off High Street and so were the cafeterias for the workers and the commissary. Most of the other concourses branched off from there. It was a multi-level town square of sorts, sordid and crowded and the best place to be on the station, in Briggs’s knowledgeable opinion.

He shrugged into the dingy commissary, nicking things off the shelves. Something to drink, bad imitation Martian chicken wrap, bag of Wu-Ari groy nuts, pack of some of the better tobacco.

He paid his credits and went to find someplace to eat. He saw some crews of his fellow mechanics, not bad kids most of them. And a small huddle of rookie mechs laughing nervously at the jokes of the perverts. He rolled his eyes and continued. He was no Samaritan.

He found a seat on the second level, and dangled his legs from the catwalk. He ate, watching the comings an goings of BOMO High Street.

***

He sat in his recliner, in an undershirt, his fly open and his hand down his shorts. He gnawed languidly on a strip of jerky and the fumes from a forgotten Wu-Ari stogy filled the room. His eyes were fixed on the screen of his console. It was a shite porno, a hack-up claiming to be a lusty tryst caught on disk of Kaori Liana and Yaresunna Selwin. But the only resemblance seemed to be that they were both women, and one was dark-haired and the other orange. Not that Briggs cared it was a fake – Tamureze didn’t get him off.

He grunted and let the console screen slip to the floor. With a sigh he leaned back and groped for the cigar. He really needed to get a life. Every slagging day it was the same slagging thing and beating off to the same tripe porn in the same cramped flat wasn’t doing a thing for him.

He got up and punched a panel in the wall. A small portal slid open and he could see the greater part of Alpha Grid, were the transports, merchants and other visiting vessels came and went. The station was nightside of Inip now, and the only light came from Inip’s larger moon and the floodlights of the docking bays.

Drumming his fingers and letting the thick blue smoke fall from his nostrils, Briggs watched jealous of the ships leaving.

***

Dazed and groggy and drugged up, Briggs slogged out of the Infirmary. His whole arm was throbbing and numb in a very strange way. It felt fat and heavy, his flesh pumped full of painkillers and anti-infection serums.

Just a little slip is all it really takes. It had happened so quickly, so smoothly, but he still only remembered it like a fog. Blood does strange things in zero-grav. Balls up in a ketchupy mass, flowing just as slowly from the stump where his finger would have been had it not just been compression drilled into vapor.

He’d passed out quickly enough after that. Lucky for Briggs, Ril, his mate on that assignment, was on his way over.

He groaned and sat down on a bench on the main concourse and looked at his hand, swollen and blue with a little silver cap ending his left index finger just beyond the first knuckle.

In his other hand, he noticed as he slowly came out of the drugs from the operation, was a voucher from Borotech for enough credits to keep him from suing and two weeks paid holiday. “Good old Borotech,” he said to himself watching the arrivals stream down the concourse, “always covering its arse.”

***

It wasn’t often that Briggs got the afternoons off, but he was feeling a bit too drugged up to appreciate it. And strangely enough, the only thing he could think about was the medic’s mandate that he couldn’t drink or smoke until he was off the painkillers. “Those are painkillers!” he’d protested.

He sat back and looked disgustedly at his maimed hand. “Shit,” he said shaking his head. He’d never counted on giving so much to Borotech. His time, his skill, his asshole. But now he’d lost his fucking finger on the job. What the hell was he doing here, stuck in middle of nowhere, a nameless corporate pawn?

He needed an out.

***

And a hit. The area between his severed finger and his middlefinger itched for the thick Bluesmoke stogy to fill it. That was one dose of luck he could perceive in the whole banjaxed fix: he still had enough of a stub to hold a fag.

With the sudden determination to screw the medic’s command, he stood and plunged a hand into his belt pocket. “Shite.” Not there. The goddamned paramedics were one step ahead of him. Bet they feel good about themselves, out-smarting the guy on painkillers.

But delving into his other pocket, he found his credits cards. He rifled through them, tapping the stubborn ones against his palm so their values would show up. Just the simple task of flipping through the plastic cards seemed bumbling without his finger, the silver cap making clicking noises as it got in the way. He looked up, self-conscious, but soon pulled up one with 9.897cr on it. He pocketed the others and moved down the concourse to the main commercial area of Alpha grid.

It was the busiest part of the station, with all manner of Wu-Ari and humans nudging past each other driving hover carts and dragging bags. Pilots, clerks, mechs, the works. He moved through the crowd with practiced shoves and slips.

“Daerrrrrow!” The raspy Wu-Ari voice cut through the crowd. It was that goddamned barkeep, Torik, whining about his tab again. In response, Briggs flipped him the middle finger with his maimed hand. When no response came, Briggs smirked to himself. That shut him up.

He was heading towards the general commissary that had a mess hall in it as well. It was filled with uniformed, loyal and happy Borotech employees. Security guards, shuttle pilots, smelting techs, and other mechs. The Wu-Ari to human ratio was probably 3 to 1.

He got into line and tried not to meet anyone’s eye. He wasn’t really in the mood for small talk. Not until he had a smoke at least.

***

Briggs was thrown out of sleep as a defcon sounded like an angry bull elephant. Once. Pause. Again. Pause. And again ad nauseum. It was an ‘unscheduled personnel quality evaluation’. That’s Borotech-speak for surprise inspection.

He pushed himself out of his no-grav sleep-bag to a panel on the wall. Punched code and the gravity came on in his room. He landed ungracefully on his only rug as the rest of his stuff clattered to the floor.

He grabbed his towel and started shucking his knickers when the Arti-Grav unit gave a heave and everything in the room went bump a second time. It’s a stomach lurching sensation, to say the least.

He showered and dressed quickly. There had been a small crisis to find his cleaner uniform jacket, the one that wasn’t smeared with monkey grease.

He jogged down the main concourse to the docking bay that was used for this sort of thing, zipping up his jacket as he went. His mother had told him how smart he looked in his Borotech uniform the day he left Mars. They were pretty ‘smart’ looking, he’d admit. Olive green with blue down the sides. High, snap colors on the jackets, lots of pockets in the tailored trousers. His belt and bandoleer weren’t standard issue, but Borotech approved. Arriving at the line up out side the bay doors, he shook the wet from his dark hair.

Filing in, he took his place with the rest of the mechanics in the cavernous docking bay. They were all dressed more or less the same and mingled about in orderly rows. Most of his co-workers were Wu-Ari, big salamander-type men. Most of the BOMO Wu-Ari came in the same sets of colors, a muted slate blue. An industrial tribe. They weren’t a very talkative lot. And he’d never been cornered by one of them in a storeroom. That perv duty was the sole business of his human colleagues.

“Briggs, you looks like shit, man,” came a throaty voice. It was Rillis, his Wu-Ari friend. Rillis basically had the same job Briggs did, a higher-level mech usually assigned to individual jobs in the more complex areas of the shit. Self-managing and trusted.

“Don’t wanna hear it, toad face,” Briggs clapped Ril on the back in greeting. “Don’t wanna hear it.” He’d met Ril about eight months after arriving, both of them still pretty green. They’d been assigned to the same gang and had struck up a friendship, based primarily on taking the piss out of the other and covering each others gambling debts.

“Too early for this ghaveh.”
“I hear ya.”
“Looks like it’s going to be a lermon.” Rillis nodded up to where the bigwigs were congregating on the catwalk.
“Can I getta ‘Amen?’” Briggs asked with a smirk.
“Praise Borotech,” Rillis replied just as dryly. One of the things that had helped while away the long hours had been Briggs teaching Rillis human sarcasm and Rillis teaching Briggs to swear in Wu-Ari.

A short defcon sounded again and all of the workers shifted into lines. Rillis and Briggs found themselves side by side at the front of the mechanics’ rows.

A portly man in a suit came to the forefront and a dull thud and consequent humming signaled that he’d switched on his label PA. It was the BOMO executive of operations.

“A fine sight on such a fine morning!” he gushed.

‘He’s in a good mood,’ Briggs mumbled out of the corner of his mouth.

“Operations have been ship-shape in the past month and we at Borotech have only you to thank for it!”

‘And humble,’ Rillis mumbled back.

‘C.E.O.,’ they both mumbled at once.

“And without further ado, allow me to introduce Mr. Gabran Prinne, the Borotech C.E.O on a special visit from Headquarters!”

The humans clapped politely, not enthused, and the Wu-Ari tapped their tails on the hull as a taller, more portly man shook hands with the Exec of Ops and took his place at the railing.

As Mr. Prinne began to congratulate his small army of workers on their fine work and dedication, even peppering his speech with Wu-Ari idioms, Briggs’ eyes faded and he blinked slowly. Just waiting. Soon this formality would be over and he could get back to the others he had scheduled for today.