The women all looked at me. They laughed.
All of the women kept looking at me. They kept laughing. I had to leave the docks.
I got a job driving mortar trucks through the gates. Most of the women had given up those jobs by then. They were all working in government and security positions.
During the day, I went to the ruins of old houses. I could still smell the yeast of old bursts. I shoveled up all the raw material and loaded it into the truck. I met other young men like me. I met men who had wanted to be teachers and doctors. It was the women, they said, who held them back. The women took all of the jobs. The women were too intimidating. The women owned the world.
One night, I drove my mortar truck through the gate and stopped at the big pit where the bodies and rubble were heaped. The women had bombed out the original government offices, long before. They used the deep pit left behind as a waste dump. I sat in the truck and stared out at the pit for a long time.
I got home sometime just before midnight.
My mother sat alone in the dark living room. She sat staring into the empty fireplace. A pile of neatly folded laundry sat at her hip. Shirts hung on the line in the kitchen.
“Do you want some light?” I asked her.
She was very still.
“Is father all right?” I asked.
“He’s passed,” she said. Her dishrag lay in her lap. She did not touch it.
I went upstairs. Father lay in bed. A single gas lamp flared, casting dark shadows. There was a bloody, clotted smear against the far wall. Half of father’s head was gone. I saw the gun near his limp hand. His eyes were still open.
He had left no note.
Some women came to collect the body, though a man drove the body truck. One of the women turned to me just before they left. “We all battle dragons,” she said. “There’s no shame in losing.”
“There’d be no battle,” I said coldly, “without the dragons.”
She grinned, slid her hat back on. “There will always be dragons,” she said. “It’s only a matter of who plays the dragon, who plays the sheep. Which would you rather be?”
I spent the rest of the night in the market square, watching the women. Sunrise rent the sky like the remnants of a red dress. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a red dress. I didn’t miss them.
I watched the changing of the guard. I bought a newspaper. It was in two languages now, ours and the women’s. I kept turning the page back and forth, back and forth, but I could see no difference between one and the other.
All the news was the same.
THE FISHERMAN AND THE PIG
NEV SAT ON THE END of the charred pier, casting his line again and again into the murky water in the hopes of catching a corpse.
A new war raged thirty miles upstream, and if Nev was patient, he could often hook one of the bodies that washed down the river. Beside him, Pig, a little pot-bellied pig, lay snoring softly in the folds of the cloak he had shed as the suns rose over the gray water. Mist still clung to the water’s edge, and he caught a glimpse of crested herons poking around in the shallows for breakfast.
The rise of the suns made the horizon blaze red-orange. Nev felt a tug at his line and reeled in his catch. It was not a body, alas, but a little trout with a pouting face. He tossed it into the basket beside him with the others. Today’s catch wasn’t good; the river had been fished out upstream, or maybe there had been a change in the fish runs. They came and went, those runs. He only had about six small fish to sell at the market this morning. He might as well just eat them.
Nev packed up his gear, eager to get to the market before the last of the stalls was taken. He poked Pig in his belly to get him to wake. Pig gave a little snort and rolled back over and went back to sleep. Nev gently pulled the cloak out from under him, dumping Pig on the pier, and that woke him properly. Pig rolled to his feet and regarded Nev with a perturbed look.
“You’re the lazy one,” Nev said, and shook out the cloak and wrapped it around his shoulders. He grabbed the basket of fish and threaded his pole through the top and turned back up the smoky pier. Mist made it difficult to see more than three paces ahead, but Nev spent every day but Prayer Vigil on this pier, and he knew how to avoid the worst of the cracked and worn boards. Pig followed, so close Nev felt the whisper of Pig’s little breaths on his ankles.
As he walked off the pier and onto the road, two men waiting there moved into his path, effectively cutting him off from transitioning from pier to boardwalk. Nev tensed. They didn’t have the look of government people, or Body Guild enforcers, but times changed quickly, and he couldn’t be certain what agents of either were like anymore. He had lived out here in this backwater town for eight years. The death of his body manager, Tera, had left nothing for him in the cities. Tera had died in her sleep a year before she turned seventy. She had a little smile on her face and a bottle of her favorite bourbon in her hand. If he were to ever die, really die, he hoped to go the same way.
Tera had preferred to be near people and public houses. He hadn’t. So, he had packed up himself and his pet turtle and come out here. The morning he arrived, the little pot-bellied pig had burst out of the butcher’s door and squealed across his path. Nev had bought the pig, and called him Pig, because he had expected he’d eat it himself, eventually. Eight years on, that seemed less likely. Between the turtle and the pig, that was company enough for Nev.
These men were not welcome. And by their aggressive postures, they knew it.
“How’s your catch today?” the one on the left asked. He was a beefy man, without tattoos or piercings, lean and brown, with an unremarkable complexion and a forgettable face.
“Not well,” Nev said. He did not attempt to summon a smile, but he held out the basket for inspection.
The man on the right leaned over, though he was barely tall enough to clear the basket’s rim. “You sell these?” the man asked.
“I suspect you know I do,” Nev said. “I have a stall reserved in the market.”
“We don’t, sad to say,” the short man said. He nodded at the railing behind them where two large baskets overflowing with fish were just visible through the mist. “My name’s Parn, and this is Shotsky. Think you can help? These will just go bad. You can keep a good cut. Say, seventy percent.”
“Eighty,” Nev said.
“Sure,” the one called Parn said, and that made Nev’s spine tingle, just a little. They had offered too high, and not bothered to haggle. Bad sign on top of bad sign.
Nev glanced down at Pig, who was snuffling at the men’s bell-shaped trouser hems.
“I’ll take a basket,” Nev said. “To see how it goes.”
“Sure, sure,” Parn said. “Shotsky here will carry them for you, eh, old man?”
Nev grimaced at being called “old,” though by every measure he was certainly old. The body he currently wore was the sort that accumulated a great deal of hair, from bushy white head to busy white toes. He had tried, in vain, to tame some of it but had given in and grown it out long and scraggly. His beard ended in a little tail that nearly reached his belly button, and the braided rope of his hair was the same length in the back. He had longed for some of the spry, smoother-skinned bodies of his youth for years, until he remembered that no one would even think to look for him in a skin as foreign to his people as this one.
Unless these men had?
You are too distrustful, Nev thought, but it was that distrust of and disappointment in people that had kept him alive this long. He had learned to measure time in bodies instead of years, until he lost count of the bodies, too, sometime after the third war he’d fought in for the Body Mercenary Guild.
Nev called Pig back to him and waved at the men to follow him to the market. The entire enterprise was not auspicious, but he couldn’t figure out their game. What did he have to lose if this was legitimate? Perhaps the fish were bad. If the fish were bad, no one would buy them anyway, and he could say so honestly. There were some criminal
enterprises making their way down the river, and if this was the first foray of such a family into town, he didn’t want to be on their bad side. What bothered him was why he had stood out to them at all. Was it the age of the body? He must look old and feeble to them, an easy mark.
The man called Shotsky put the big basket of fish in the middle of Nev’s stall. Now that the suns had fully risen and he could see the fish properly, Nev saw that they were fresh, gleaming things, so radiant and dewy-eyed one could almost believe they were alive. Early morning shoppers were already moving to the stall, drawn by the beautiful fish.
“We’ll come back tomorrow,” Parn said, and winked. “Good luck!”
Nev had no trouble selling the fish. They were lovely, cool, and intact. They didn’t appear to have been tampered with and bore only the usual damage to fins and scales that one would see from wild trout. Nev decided the fish must be stolen goods, something the men had taken out of the back of a cart and didn’t want to be found with. The sooner Nev sold them all, the better.
The fish were nearly all gone by mid-afternoon when the market closed for the hottest part of the day. Only two remained in his basket, and those were the smallest of the bunch. He added them to his own catch. What he didn’t eat for dinner, he could cook up for breakfast for him and Pig.
Nev trekked across the thinning market and out of the village square. He lived up on a little rise about a mile outside the village in the rough-hewn cottage that the man who inhabited the body before him had built, likely with the two well-worn hands that Nev used to open the door.
The coals from the morning fire still smouldered in the stove. He went out to the little pond in the back where his pet turtle lived. The little turtle had grown large over the years and was now as long as Nev’s arm. It surfaced in front of Nev, and Nev fed it one of the little fish. He watched contentedly as the turtle ate, then went inside and stoked the fire and cooked up his little fish.
He left the door open in the front and the back to invite a breeze. While the village was small, his neighbors had learned to leave him be. He had found this body much farther up the mountains, dead for a few hours, no more, because the beasts up there had yet to tear it apart. Nev had been ready for a change, then. When he came back into the village, he found that the man had been a hermit, and that suited Nev just fine. He could pretend at being an old, mad hermit. He had been pretending at that most of his life.
Pig sat at the base of the table where the two large fish remained, snorting his complaints about not being able to eat them. Nev got up and took one from the table and tossed it to him. Pig squealed and pawed at it.
He noted some movement outside and peered out. Shotsky was making his way up the path to the house. Nev felt a chill, though surely, the man was just coming for his money?
A sharp, familiar scent caught Nev’s attention. He scrambled back to the table where Pig was tearing into the fish and snatched the fish away from him. He grabbed its body so hard that its guts escaped through the tear Pig had made in its belly, and the tangy scent of cloves and lemon assaulted his nose.
The gooey insides splattered all over Nev’s hands, and in that moment he was transported to a battlefield eighty years back, when he bore some other body. The air smelled just like this, and all around him were the dead and dying. A woman on the ground reached out to him, her fingers grasping for him, and he had scrambled away from her, shrieking, because he knew she wanted to kill him and take his skin, the way he wanted to kill her and take hers, because the bladders full of toxic goo that had exploded on the field were murdering them all . . .
Nev gasped and wiped the toxin off on the table. He hurled the fish into the sink and scrubbed his hands, knowing already that he was far too late. His flesh puffed up around where the liquid had touched him, and his tongue went numb. He turned just as Shotsky entered.
“You sell them all?” Shotsky said, and then he stopped still, because he must have smelled it too.
The toxin was rushing through Nev’s bloodstream now, and in his experience, that meant he had about two minutes on his feet before his organs failed.
Shotsky folded his arms and shook his head. “Shouldn’t have opened those up, old man,” he said.
Nev knew for certain, then, that this man had no idea who Nev was. If the man had known, he would not have stood so close to him. The man would have run.
Nev did not like violence, as a rule. He knew too much of bodies. But violence was his profession, had been since he was just a young girl in a rural little wastewater like this one. Eight years, and the outside world had let him alone. They had been good years. But the outside always intruded, eventually.
Nev kicked Shotsky in the kneecap. The man howled. Nev thrust a palm into his face and felt his own bones jarring in protest. His mind knew how to fight, but this body was not fit for it.
Shotsky pinwheeled back and tripped over Pig. Pig squealed and ran behind the loft ladder, shrieking.
Nev picked up his stool and bashed Shotsky over the head with it. A sharp pain ran up Nev’s arm, causing him to drop the stool. He hissed and clutched at his arm. Tingling numbness was already running up his hand and into his shoulder; the toxin doing its work. He grabbed the fish from the sink and sat on Shotsky’s chest and shoved the fish into his throat. Shotsky’s eyes bulged. He flopped on the floor, clawing at his own face.
Nev suspected he would regret doing this, later, but all he could think about now was murdering this man as quickly as possible. Nev had fished no corpses from the river this morning. He had no fresh bodies to save him. The only corpse he could jump into today was one he made himself.
Shotsky choked and swung hard. The punch took Nev clean off him and onto the dirt floor. Nev saw blackness, heard a terrible crunch. Something felt strange in his mouth, and he knew his jaw was broken. Shotsky came up spitting toxic fish mush, yowling at Nev in some language he didn’t know.
Nev drooled blood and spit. The numbness had moved into his chest now, and into his other arm. He could only kick his feet helplessly against the floor.
Pig romped over to him. Nev tried to yell at him to go back, to stay away or he was going to become Shotsky’s dinner, but he couldn’t form any words. It all came out a garbled moan.
“You have killed us, you stupid little man,” Shotsky said, and slapped Nev. The pain was so intense that Nev saw a brilliant, glaring light spill across his vision. Heard his bones grating against one another. “We are lost,” Shotsky said, “lost to the God of Light. Lost to the cause of the righteous, you foolish old man.”
Shotsky fell heavily onto his side. He gasped and clawed at his face, which was likely going numb.
Nev tried to reach out a hand to him, for his own comfort more than any other, but neither arm worked. Pig clammered up on top of Nev, pushing his snout into Nev’s hair. All that gory hair. Nev would miss the hair. He stared into Shotsky’s bullish face, wondering which of them would die first. Nev had more experience at holding it at bay, but death came to every body sooner or later, even body mercenaries.
Pig snuffled and pressed himself into the crook of Nev’s neck. Nev wanted to comfort him. It’s all right, little pig, he wanted to say, it’s all right. But it was not all right.
Shotsky huffed out a breath. His eyes went still.
I beat you, Nev thought, grimly. I outlasted you. He said a prayer to God’s eye, out of habit.
And then, he leaped.
Nev experienced a moment of darkness, then a buzzing softness, like that muzzy place between sleep and wakefulness. And suddenly: blazing consciousness. It was always shocking to come awake inside a new body. Nev gasped. He tasted fish, and the tangy acid of the toxin still swimming in the body’s throat. His throat. My throat, he thought, because the sooner he claimed the body as his, the easier it was to use it.
Nev heaved himself up and stumbled to the sink. Shotsky’s body—my body, Nev amended—was tall and beefy. It had been a long time since Nev had been in such a body. He pushe
d his hands into the sink and turned on the tap that ran water down from the cistern on the roof. He scrubbed his hands and washed out his mouth. He vomited, then, fish and toxic goo and whatever the body had last eaten. His bowels loosened, and he shat and pissed himself. His limbs felt like dead meat, but that would pass. His second wind would come soon, the wind that burned out whatever ailed this body and refreshed it for its new host.
He stood over the sink, breathing heavily, until his new body filled with a cramping, searing pain, like birth. His legs buckled, and he fell to his knees, big hands gripping the edge of the sink. This was how he had been reborn a thousand times, a mercenary who would never die, leaping from body to body as long as there were fresh bodies on the field that he could put his hands on. He had fought this way for so long he hardly remembered who he was or where he had come from.
But the toxin, he knew. The toxin had murdered a good many people. Soldiers he loved as brothers and sisters, back in those days when he could still care for anything human.
Nev pulled himself upright and peeled off his clothes. They had been filthy before he soiled them. Nothing he had here would fit this new body, so he would have to wash them.
He balled up the clothes and washed his body as best he could in the sink. When he was clean, he turned.
His former body was curled on its side. It looked vulnerable and delicate, like a twisted flower. And there, tucked into the crook of the neck, was Pig.
Nev approached the body, still naked, calling to Pig. “Can you come here, Pig?” he said. “It’s me, Pig!” His voice sounded strange, because of course, from inside this head, the voice that he had heard as Shotsky’s sounded very different.
Pig raised his head and peered at him, then buried his face back into the comforting braid of hair that had fallen across his former body’s shoulder.
Nev knelt next to the body. Blood pooled from the mouth. He was careful not to touch anything, as some of the toxin could still be on the floor and on the body’s skin. “Come, Pig,” he said softly, but still, his voice sounded deep and gravelly.
Meet Me in the Future Page 12