In the blink of an eye, the dagger appeared in his fist, and he leapt forward, screeching, “Then TRICK!”
He plunged the dagger deep into the man’s chest, feeling the sharp blade glide through flesh, through weakened muscle, and then wedging itself into bone. A rib maybe?
The woman screamed, and backpedaled from the stabbing, from the violence, from the blistering truth of her situation. The man’s blood sprayed Raoul’s face and the upper sections of his hoodie in warm, scarlet streams. As he wrenched the weapon free, he chanted, “Trick or treat! Trick or treat!”
A crimson blur unfurled as Raoul and the man crashed to the drenched ground, Raoul stabbing him over and over again. Once spent, he pushed himself to his feet. The dagger’s slippery handle had caused him to cut himself too. In the opened wound, a golden-orange light glowed. Raoul sucked his teeth. “Damn.”
He wiped the warm blood from his face and licked it from his fingers. He even tongue-cleaned the dagger’s surface, careful to avoid its sharp blade, but eager not to waste the treat.
A whimper interrupted the moment’s enjoyment. He released an ahhh. His gaze flickered toward the woman, a scowl transforming his features. She stood tight-lipped and shuddering. Then she crouched on her knees, a jar in her trembling hands, the wet curtain of hair hiding her face. Her arms strained from the weight of her treat. The slick black coat shined from either blood or rain. Maybe both.
“What have we here?” Raoul tilted his head sideways as he turned fully to face her. Like a silly black cat, she’d been frozen to the spot, unable to flee when given a chance. He could unleash another trick on her, but no. That wouldn’t be fair.
And yet she didn’t flee even now. “You.”
She swallowed again at his brusque tone, and hoisted the glass higher. “I offer my apologies! We—I—didn’t recognize you in your new costume, Great One. Here is my treat!”
Raoul wiped a hand over his face. Beside her, the satchel’s flap laid open. The jar contained a deep, red liquid. She shook so much that if the lid hadn’t been screwed on tight, the treat would’ve sloshed all over her hands. Instead it jostled around the jar’s interior. She stared at the ground, watching her lover’s blood leak out and combine with the now misting rain and coupled on the pavement, pooling and congealing.
Wasteful.
It turned his stomach, the loss of deliciousness; but it hadn’t been offered to him. So, despite the sweet anticipation that crawled into his mouth, making his lips salivate in longing, Raoul let out a frustrated breath. Fresh. He could tell by the vibrant color and its warmth that it had been sitting around. Tiny bubbles of condensation littered the jar’s top closest to the lid that wasn’t ruined by the sloshing.
The woman offered an ample treat indeed. He took it with long, blood-stained fingers, and brought it close to his nose. He inhaled deep and full, pulling the scent into his nostrils as if air to breathe. The coppery aroma tickled his sweet tooth.
His lips curved upward in a wide grin. This treat came from multiple donors, not just this one soul. The flavors mixed within the concoction. A true treat indeed! She’d been prepared, but had allowed her partner to die.
Yes! This will do.
He wouldn’t have to perform a trick on the woman. They hadn’t recognized his new costume. He leaned down closer to her face. She flinched, but only slightly. Now, so close, he could smell the mint on her breath and the fear lacing her tongue.
“Happy Day!” he shouted, stood up straight, and turned on his heel, the jar clutched in his fist. With a last warning look, he set about his journey, no longer fuming about the number of tricks he’d have to provide. He enjoyed the treats, not the rigmarole that came with delivering tricks. The male had become a time bomb, and he’d dispatched him.
As he started down the road, toward the central part of the once vibrant downtown, he heard the woman’s sobs.
He left the neighborhood, heading instead to the western side of town. Raoul found a secluded spot between two buildings with a narrow space between them. With the flick of his wrist, the jar’s lid came off and landed with a wet smack on the ground. Huddled beneath a tattered awning eaten away by mold, he took a long drag of the treat, feeling the lukewarm blood glide down his throat and into his belly.
When he paused, he looked around the wet brick, spied a few huddled people on the sidewalk, hidden by dark plastic tarps. He’d missed them, so intent on consuming his treat. Now he heard them scurrying beneath the weather-ravaged plastic like restless insects. Spaced out along the sidewalk like slugs, these people dared the rain and slept on the cold, wet pavement, sheltered inside their makeshift cocoons. When these people emerged from their internment, it wouldn’t be as beautiful butterflies, but as ghosts, spirits leaving behind rail-thin husks of their former selves.
They had no treats to give and tricks had already been visited upon them by Fate. No, these people’s treats had soured.
Raoul drained the rest of his treat, licking the jar’s rim when he had depleted the contents. He burped; his mouth flooded with the strong taste of copper. Tense, he rolled his shoulders to ease the bunched muscles. Sighing, he set the jar down on the ground. He had to pace himself.
He had a long, fun night ahead.
✦✦✦
Rain continued despite the arrival of night. Pitched in darkness, Raoul slithered along the homes and streets, ringing dilapidated doorbells and banging rusty door knockers. Thunder crashed overhead. No one hid in the dark recesses or nooks and crannies of the city. They’d hidden behind doors and cloaked themselves in a sense of security. Nevertheless, they gave him what he craved, or he gave them a trick. Trickin’ wasn’t easy, but damn, it could be fun.
Sated and sleepy, Raoul made his way to whence he had come. Skinned knuckles and weary limbs weighed him down as he made the trek up the muddy slope toward the caves. His heartbeat thrummed inside him as if humming out its joy. His boots stuck occasionally in the thick mud, and each step took the energy he no longer had. Raoul had worn this costume to its near end.
He sighed. Body singing with fatigue, he managed a small smile. Today had been glorious; he could not deny it. He licked his lips and tasted the faint flavor of the numerous treats he’d received, all given freely in the spirit of ancient times, in the long shadow of lore. Despite his initial concern, the people hadn’t forgotten. A few here and there, but most of them still clung to the old ways, the nostalgia of when the town had been great and filled with festivals, trickin’ and treatin’ galore.
With a deep sigh of relief, he reached the threshold of the cave. He dropped to his knees, exhausted but satisfied. Raoul’s lids grew heavy. With effort, he rolled over, putting his back against the slick rock. He tilted his head back, and at last, gave in to the exhaustion.
His eyelids lowered and did not open again.
Inside the cave, a black and smoky essence filled the space, funneling from Raoul’s gaping mouth.
Only a few hours more.
✦✦✦
The day after
“There! There he is!” Gina’s hoarse voice coughed out as she climbed the muddy slope toward the shadow figure slumped against the cave’s mouth.
She and Tyree had taken advantage of the slack in the rain to slip out into the morning mist. The light provided illumination to the usual morning dark. They had searched the cityand only brief comments and whispers about Raoul’s strange and murderous behavior had been discussed, but not his whereabouts.
“Raoul! Raoul! Man, what the hell?” Tyree reached down and shook Raoul roughly on the shoulder. Raoul’s head lolled to the left, his body drenched. Each squeeze produced a handful of rainwater. “He’s soaked!”
“He’s got blood all over his clothes. What the hell happened? Look!” Gina said, brushing the hoodie back from his face, as she cupped his cheek with her other hand. “He’s breathing, so he’s alive.”
She tilted her chin to Tyree.
“Is he inj
ured?” Tyree stood up and shoved his hands into his jeans pocket. “This ain’t gonna be like that last time. Right? When he was in so much pain, he rolled up in a ball? He had that breakdown. I mean, he just freakin’ melted…”
“No. This isn’t like that. Ty, he’s gotten cut, deeply. We’ve got to get this cleaned up before it festers…” Gina lifted the injured hand for Tyree to see. She pushed her braids out of her face and tossed them over her shoulder. Already soaked, the strands lead a swatch of water across her black jacket. Her jeans had been smeared with mud and flakes of garbage from their dumpster diving last night.
“Come on, Raoul.” Tyree reached down and grabbed Raoul’s injured hand. He then squeezed it as hard as he could in his own two large, strong hands.
“Ow! My hand!” Raoul exclaimed, rousing, his dark, unfocused eyes shifting from Gina to Tyree and back again as he wrenched his hand free. “What? W-w-where, where am I?”
He raised his hand, and turned it this way and that way, as if it didn’t belong to him. He pulled it back and held it close to his chest. When he tried to sit up, he fell backward against the rock. Wincing in pain, he shut his eyes and groaned.
Gina crouched down beside him, her knees sinking into the soft earth. “You’re at the mouth of the cave…”
“Last night was something,” Tyree said, his eyes as flat as the tone of his voice. “You remember anything?”
“Are you bleeding anywhere else?” Gina touched his shoulder.
Raoul flinched and waved her off. “Bleeding? What? I dunno. It’s all so damn hazy.” He rubbed his temple with his fingertips. “I’ve just got one hell of a headache.” “Let’s get you back home.” Gina stood up and with Tyree’s help, hoisted Raoul to his feet. They draped his arms round their shoulders, one each, and took a step. “Hurry up. This place gives me the creeps.” Tyree shifted Raoul’s arm around his neck, allowing him to distribute the weight between himself and Gina. “Dark. Eerie. What the hell were you doing up here?”
“Wait. I’m gonna be sick!” Raoul tried to untangle himself from them as he scrambled to get clear. Tyree windmilled to keep himself upright, and Gina shouted at the rough treatment of her neck.
“Oh! Raoul!” Gina shouted, rubbing her neck. “You yanked my braids.” Raoul couldn’t apologize even if he wanted. A short distance away, retching
sounds and the splat of violent vomiting from Raoul sliced through the steady rain. “Oh that’s rank!” Tyree clasped his hand over his mouth. He shook his head and looked away. “Reminds me of that time we had too many treats…” Gina silenced him with a look.
Raoul wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and got unsteadily to his feet. He wavered as he took a few steps back to his friends. Gina hurried to him and gestured to Tyree to join her.
“Come on, help! Damn it, Tyree! Help!” Gina implored, coughing to camouflage the chuckle at Tyree’s queasiness, her anger gone.
The trio made their way back down the slope under the watchful eyes of the Great One. The gathering dark inside the cave rippled with laughter. Sated by treats, full and growing sleepy, they settled into the cave’s shelter once more.
Next time, he would get a new costume.
RED_BATI
DILMAN DILA
Red_Bati’s battery beeped. Granny flickered, and the forest around her vanished. She sighed in exaggerated disappointment. He never understood why she called it a forest, for it was just two rows of trees marking the boundary of her farm. When she was alive, she had walked in it every sunny day, listening to her feet crunching dead twigs, to her clothes rustling against the undergrowth, to the music of crickets, feeling the dampness and the bugs, sniffing at the rotten vegetation, which she thought smelled better than the flowers that Akili her grandson had planted around her house. Now, she liked to relive that experience. With his battery going down, he could not keep up a real life projection and, for the first time, she became transparent, like the blue ghost in the painting that had dominated a wall of her living room. Akili’s mother had drawn it to illustrate one of their favorite stories.
Granny laughed at the memory. “That ghost!” she said. Her voice was no longer musical. It was full of static.
He could not recharge her. He had to save power, but he did not want to shut her down because he had no one else to talk to. He did not get lonely, not the way she had been: so lonely that she would hug him and her tears would drip onto his body, making him flinch at the thought of rust. She would hug him even though she complained that his body was too hard, not soft and warm like that of Akili. He did not get lonely like that, but Akili had written a code to make him want to talk to someone all the time, and he had not had a chance for a conversation since the accident, twelve hours ago.
He had resurrected her after her death, while he waited for a new owner. He used all recordings he had made of her during their ten years together to create a holographic imitation of her so he could have someone to talk to. It was not like walking with her in the mango forest, or sitting at her feet on the porch as she knitted a sweater and watched the sun go down. Technically, he was talking to himself; but it was the only chance he had for conversation.
She stopped talking abruptly when white-cell.sys beeped. A particle of ice was floating about like a predator shark. If it touched him, he would rust. He jerked, like a person awaking from a bad sleep, though the ice was ten meters away. Steel clamps pinned him onto a shelf. He could not get away.
The half-empty storage room looked like a silver blue honeycomb. They had dumped him in it after the accident ripped off his forearm. The Captain had evaluated his efficiency and, seeing it down to 80%, tagged him DISABLED. They could not fix his arm on the ship, so they shut him down and dumped him in storage until he got back to Earth. Entombed alive. Left to die a cold death.
“You won’t die,” Granny said, laughing. She sat on a fuel pod in a cell on the opposite shelf. “It’s just a little ice. It’s not even water.”
He had lived all his life dreading rust, watching his step to avoid puddles, blow-drying his kennel every hour, turning on the heater all the way up to prevent dew from forming. He knew it was irrational, for his body, made of high-grade stainless Haya steel, was waterproof. He never understood his aquaphobia. Had Akili infected him with a program to ensure he stayed indoors on rainy days? Very likely. Granny liked playing in the rain as much as she liked walking in the mango forest. Yet every time she did, she got a fever, sometimes malaria. Akili might have written a code to force Red_Bati to stay indoors on rainy days, and so Granny, who used him as a walking aid and guide, stayed indoors too. Red_Bati could have searched for this code and rewritten it to rid himself of this stupid fear, but he did not. He loved it, for it made him feel human.
“I’m not worried about the ice,” he said. “It’s the temperature.”
He was in Folder-5359, where temperatures stayed at a constant -250o C to preserve fuel pods. Technically, the cold would not kill him. He had a thermal skin that could withstand environments well below -400o C, but it needed power to function. Once his battery ran down, he would freeze and that would damage his e-m-data strips. Though these could be easily and cheaply replaced, he would lose all his data, all the codings that made him Red_Bati and not just another red basenji dog, all his records of Granny. He would die.
“That won’t be a bad thing,” Granny said, chuckling. “If you were a true dog, you’d be as old as I am and wishing for death.”
He was not a dog. He was a human trapped in a pet robot.
Granny chuckled again, but did not say anything to mock him again. She watched the ice and tried to touch it, but it passed through her fingers and floated upwards. It would not touch Red_Bati, after all. He relaxed. If he had flesh and muscles, this would have been a visible reaction. Instead, white-cell.sys reverted to sleep mode, the red light in his eyes vanished and his pupils regained their brownish tint.
His battery beeped, now at 48% for white-cell.sys had u
sed up a lot of power in just a few seconds. In sixteen hours and forty-three minutes, it would hit zero, and then he would die.
“You’re not a human in a dog’s body,” Granny finally said, still watching the ice as it floated towards the ceiling.
“I am,” Red_Bati said.
“Humans have spirits,” Granny said. “You don’t.”
“I do,” Red_Bati said.
“You can’t,” Granny said.
“Why not? I’m aware of myself.”
“Doesn’t mean you have it.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not a natural-born.”
Red_Bati wanted to argue his point, to remind her of things that made him human, like agoraphobia; to remind her that he got consciousness from a chip and lines of code, just as humans did from their hearts, and brains. He was not supposed to be conscious, much less super intelligent; but Akili had wanted Granny to have more than just a pet, so he installed Z-Kwa and turned Red_Bati into a guide, a walking aid, a cook, a cleaner, a playmate, a personal assistant, a friend, a doctor, a gardener, a nurse, and even a lover if she had wanted. She could live her last years as she pleased rather than suffer in a nursing home.
After she died, Akili had put him up for sale along with all her property and memorabilia. For a moment, Red_Bati had feared that Akili would remove Z-Kwa and wipe his memory, but Akili contracted a cleaning firm to get rid of Granny’s property and either forgot or did not care to tell them about the chip. Red_Bati was too smart to let them know he was more than just a pet. Nor did he show it off to the people who bought him, Nyota Energy, an asteroid mining company that, rather than buying miner-bots, found it cheaper to convert pets into miners. They gave him a new bios and software, a thermal coat, x-ray vision, and modified his limbs and tongue to dig rocks. They did not look into his ribcage cabin so they did not see Z-Kwa, otherwise they would have removed it. When they shut him down after his accident, Z-Kwa had turned him back on, aware that if his battery drained, he would die. He had self-preservation instincts, just like any other living thing with a spirit, and he wanted to tell her all these things, but she was draining his battery.
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