Kzine Issue 10

by Graeme Hurry et al.

  A security guard appeared and said, “Come with me.” Deke slumped his shoulders in defeat. Without a word he followed the guard and left the room, his head down as he retraced the bold steps he’d taken only moments before.

  When they reached the razorwire another guard took away his slate and hand tools. The guards then took turns beating him, a final going away present from Chang; one held him while the other pummeled his face and ribs. Finally they shoved him, swollen-faced and bleeding, through the security gate to the outside, where he found himself alone in the bright sun.

  Deke’s head throbbed and his body ached with each breath. He turned away from the estate and stared at the sprawling, smog-blanketed city in the distance, then without looking back he began the long walk down the gravel road toward his uncertain future. A refreshing breeze cooled his face and he could feel the stink coming off of him already. With a bit of luck, he thought, it might even be gone by the time he got to Tijuana.

  RENEWAL

  by Tim McDaniel

  James glanced at his watch, although of course its primary purpose wasn’t telling the time. Had he really only been waiting twenty minutes? He hadn’t brought a book. He’d never developed a taste for reading. A shame; it would help the wait pass more quickly. He did have his little collection of high-tech gadgets, like anyone else, but none of them were designed to kill time.

  A lot of people waiting, as usual. Old men, used up, slumped over as if drugged or dying, but they were only bored and half-asleep, this time. Young people, too. That kid, there– how could he possibly be old enough to get a licence? He sat nervously a few chairs down from James, his tuxedo creased and a slash of shoe polish glimmering wetly on one sock, rich, black hair newly shorn to a reasonable length.

  Must be his first time. Looking at the kid made James feel older. His own hair was displaying fringes of grey, and though his weight was under the firm control of a rigorous exercise programme, he knew that he would never again be as flexible and resilient as that boy.

  But his own tuxedo was comfortable and perfect, his shoes immaculate, his hair neat— a lifetime of habit, displayed in his bearing and appearance. Honed. The kid, now – a strand of hair gone astray, the tux just a little too loose there, too tight here, with a betraying bulge high up on the waist. The youngster tapped a foot against the floor. He hadn’t learned to sit still.

  Every five years, the same old thing. Stand in the queue, take his number from the dispenser, sit in one of the hard plastic seats. It’s not like he had to take any tests. Just the eye scan, as he read the letters at the bottom of the chart. But they had to get a new picture, had to recertify everything.

  He glanced over at the young man again. He was looking up at the lights overhead, obviously bored out of his bloody mind. One of the kid’s hands held a ballpoint pen. James watched as the little fool’s thumb came down, pressed lightly, nearly clicking the pen. But he didn’t, and James allowed the tension in his muscles to dissipate. He could just remember being that young. Wanting that licence so much, that ticket to freedom, he’d have killed for it.

  The clerks were in no hurry. They stood behind their counters, faces jowled and creased, thick glasses over their eyes, saying the same things to the same kinds of applicants day after day.

  If he were closer, if the plastic seat he was trapped in were just a little nearer the counter, he knew he could charm some expedited service out of the nearest, a middle-aged woman, no matter how secure she might feel behind her counter.

  From the way she tilted forward he could tell she was wearing a pair of absurdly high heels. Her cleavage was still impressive, but there were folds of skin under her chin, and her hair looked brittle– too many days on beaches, too many hair products. She wouldn’t be going back out there, but she must miss it. A quick smile, an easy word, and she would be moving him up the queue, or even just renewing his licence right there, gratitude for his acknowledgement. But she was there and he was in his plastic-seat limbo.

  Hell with it. He should just get up, walk out. He could. Plenty of people lived full lives without a licence, without pressing their foreheads to the vision machines and answering questions about addresses and eye color. A licence was nothing but stress. How pleasant to sit on a park bench, instead. No running around, no pressure to get things done, get somewhere, get away.

  Sit on a park bench in the sun. A well-chilled martini in hand. That would be the life.

  Then again, since he hadn’t developed a taste for books, sitting on a park bench would get boring pretty fast. He needed that licence. Without a licence, he could not work. And without his work, what was he?

  He looked over at the kid again. He could warn him: leave now. The licence will trap you. You think you need it. You don’t, not yet. But give it a few years, and you won’t know what to do without one. A life with a licence is no life at all. Who, having one, ever got married, had kids, a regular house? Did an Aston-Martin really compensate for—

  There was a muted bing sound. “Now serving double-oh-four,” said a mellow voice.

  Good, James thought. Just three more.

  ON THE WINDY PLAINS

  by Philip Roberts

  At the age of eleven I witnessed my father die in Tobias Longtin’s farmhouse. Four other men journeyed with him to heaven that night, though Tobias wasn’t kind enough to let them leave this world swiftly. I heard, rather than saw, the worst of the violence, my back pressed against the outer stone wall of Tobias’s small home, the night lit only by the dancing firelight that spilled from an open window.

  I can still feel the deep yearning to flee from that awful structure and the hysteric screams within, but the open plains scared me, offered no protection should Tobias glance out his window. The gun I’d taken with me didn’t provide comfort, too frightened by my father’s own inability to stop Tobias to believe I could do any better myself. I’d thought the world of my father, thought him capable of doing anything, and if Tobias had bested him so easily, what chance did I stand?

  So rather than flee I held the gun tightly against my chest as the wind ruffled my hair and the shrieks of dying men chilled my flesh.

  Long before my father journeyed out to Tobias’s farmhouse I’d known the man’s name. When word first whispered through our small town, Tobias had already lived close to twenty years holed up in that isolated farmhouse. No one thought much of it, the sight not so odd, really, and a few claimed they could recall Tobias’s father, a more cordial man, often journeying into town to sell some of his crop.

  Sure, people thought it strange that they never saw much growing on the few acres surrounding the farmhouse, but since Tobias was always out of sight, he had a habit of staying out of mind as well.

  I don’t remember the first few days when Tobias returned to civilization and got the rumors started. I think I might’ve been four at most, and the gossip of adults didn’t mean anything to a child that young.

  I can’t claim any knowledge of what Tobias might’ve looked like in his youth, but I know the forty-year-old man that drove into town one early Saturday morning looked oddly skinny yet muscular at the same time, or that’s how my father would later describe it. Tobias stood at an average height, his hair almost white and a bit shaggy, smile friendly, but condescending at the same time— once again, my father’s take on the subject. The only real peculiar feature about him, and what got people talking the most, was his lack of fingernails, the skin at the tips of his fingers pinkish mounds of flesh.

  When asked about this as he sat down for a meal, he only laughed, said, “Just an accident,” and left it at that.

  Tobias got plenty of attention when he first returned, but years would pass before the real trouble started brewing, and by then I was old enough to recognize things first hand. In the beginning Tobias just journeyed into town on a regular basis, seemed to try striking up friendships with people, acutely aware of the apprehension most approached him with.

  He also started getting a significant s
tream of letters and packages. Mail man said he’d always driven out to the farm to drop off a few letters in Tobias’s years of isolation, but now the man took in nearly fifty letters a week, along with heavy, or foul smelling packages.

  I’ll admit, part of what made everyone eye Tobias with suspicion amounted to little more than local prejudice. Yes, Tobias’s father had lived in the area, but nothing about Tobias reflected the culture, appearance, or even accent of our town. And in a town as small as ours, any source of entertainment was readily grasped at, and the curious nature of Tobias and whatever he kept getting in the mail piqued people’s interest.

  At one point Gus Condut, the mailman, tore open one of the heavier boxes destined for Tobias’s house, and found an assortment of old books inside. Told us all he didn’t know what language they were written in, or even the subject they covered, and just holding those aged, yellowed tomes made his skin crawl. Told us he felt something from them, but then, Gus had a habit of feeling a lot of far-fetched things, so no one looked too much into his story at first, until Gus went missing a few weeks later.

  He’d packaged back up the books and sent them along to Tobias, but the job had been poorly done, and any fool could see the box had been tampered with. In the days before Gus vanished a lot of people commented about seeing Tobias around town, scowling, whispering things to various people who later refused to speak of the matter.

  Tobias turned up the most in a local bakery owned by a woman named Shelby Overlock, who’d once been a good friend, perhaps close to a wife, of Gus, before Gus’s drinking habits got between them. Tandra Lansford, who worked with Shelby at the shop, said she’d seen Tobias in there every day for nearly a week.

  She told us she’d see Tobias’s lean, muscular frame leaning towards Shelby to whisper, his elbows on the counter, rounded fingers hooked together, or plucking lightly at his chin. Shelby’s still youthful face, which no child could take too seriously when scolded for trying to slip away with a donut or two, was rigid while listening to whatever Tobias asked her.

  Four days after Gus first missed a day of work, I can still vividly recall standing in that bakery with my father, the sweet smell of fresh bread and sugary treats filling my nose, and the brightening glare of a rising sun pouring through the large, front windows. I acted as if I didn’t listen as my father tried casually to ask Shelby what Tobias had been talking to her about.

  “Just small talk,” she said, a phrase she’d repeat over and over again for a year before selling the store to Tandra and leaving to live with her parents on the west coast, or at least that’s what I would hear people say.

  “Did he asked anything about Gus?” my father persisted, his eyes tired from late searches and his chin thick with three days of stubble.

  The expression she gave him then, eyes and mouth practically quivering, acted as a turning point of sorts, and while she only looked down and shook her head, Tobias would never receive even a friendly greeting when he traveled into town over the next, and final, year before the worst of it.

  The secrecy to everything about Tobias helped fuel the widespread rumors about him. No one knew exactly what happened to Gus, no body ever found. Tobias’s father had been better known, but that had been close to forty years prior, and no one could recall the man ever actually having a son, or even what ended up happening to him. Tobias’s father’s trips into town became less frequent until finally the man vanished, his house unattended for ten years before people first caught sight of a young Tobias repairing the structure.

  I spent a lot of my spring evenings right inside by an open window, listening to my father and his friends talk about the wayward Tobias. They’d sit out on the porch for hours, and I could hear the creak of their wooden chairs, the clink of their liquor bottles, and even smell the smoky haze of their cigarettes.

  Every so often I’d peek out the window to see the seemingly never-ending plains in front of our house on the outskirts of town. Six miles away I knew Tobias’s house stood, and thought maybe I could even see a flicker of light if I strained my eyes for long enough.

  While listening to my father and his friends I’d hear the more outlandish rumors. I believed all of them without hesitation, even if my father would only laugh at the claims. I even began imagining each time thunder would roar through the town and shake the windows, when the sky blackened with a coming storm, that somehow Tobias had summoned the lightening and rain.

  I began dreaming about Tobias’s lean form sneaking through our house at night, his eyes always dark holes when he’d creep into my room, and I’d awake with a sharp intake of air, thankful I didn’t scream and let my father know how frightened I was. He never knew how much attention I gave to Tobias and the rumors.

  Early in July Tobias drove into town on a Monday afternoon and started making his offers to buy up various pieces of land. He went to Nelville Bruker first, the owner of the only hotel in town, and began prodding the man about how much it would take to sell. Nelville wasn’t the only one Tobias had spoken to, merely the most outspoken of them.

  If Nelville can be believed, he claimed he yelled Tobias out the door at the first offer, but anyone who knew the short, bespectacled man who had a penchant for exaggeration, doubted the truth. Still, they knew he hadn’t sold, and that’s all that mattered.

  Tobias started making offers to those closest to his land and working his way further into town. As soon as word got around other peculiar bits of gossip began surfacing. Without school to keep me away, I’d spend my days shuffling my feet near the cash register at the grocery store, or nursing the smallest drink I could afford at the diner to pick up conversations over lunch. I became a catalogue of all information about Tobias, young enough that people thought nothing of talking about him around me.

  Two names popped up: Dewitt Ladd, and Taylor Barton. These two owned the tracks of land between Tobias’s property and the town proper. Dewitt had never been a regular sight around town, owning several pieces of land in various states, but Taylor, or his teenage son, often came in for supplies, and kept up friendly relations.

  Neither man had been seen since the last fall. Usually spring brought not only a wave of hires to work the farms, but a lot of trips in and various purchases. Still, neither man owned that much land, and a much larger land purchase to the south drew everyone’s attention away from the missing men until Tobias’s inquiries started up.

  Only then did someone realize that not only were the men no where to be seen, but enough digging turned up the fact that Tobias now owned all of that land up to the edge of town.

  I’d begun watching Tobias whenever I could, following him when he’d walk down the cracked sidewalks and stop at a business or home. His appearance seemed different to me, more lanky then before, face seeming to stretch outward from his skull, eyes sunken far back, fingers somehow too long when he’d pull out his pen and scribble something on a piece of paper.

  On some occasions I’d watch through the thick, green leaves of a nearby bush as Tobias approached a house wearing an expensive suit. The person who answered would hear him out with an incredulous expression, take his piece of paper, only to shake their head, tear it up. Then I’d watch Tobias lean in closer, smiling as he did, and whatever he would tell them would make their face pale. The person always stepped back to let him enter their house. Hours passed before Tobias would finally leave, alone, no one there but me to see him off.

  For days afterwards I’d keep tabs on whomever he had spoken to, and they always had a strained expression, eyes darting around as if waiting, head craning back on occasions to look behind them.

  In early October the inevitable occurred. The grumblings in the town reached a near frenzied pitch over the summer, but if Tobias cared, he ignored the glares he received on the streets, still making his regular trips to various people in order to purchase their property. He’d grabbed up a number of homes and over five businesses, whose storefronts now stood dark and empty.

  Charles Ridpath bec
ame a bit of a hero during the first week of October when he firmly rejected Tobias’s offer and very publicly yelled the man out of his general store. However, unlike the others, Charles readily told everyone both what Tobias had offered, and more bizarrely, the secrets Tobias had professed to know about Charles and his family’s history.

  Countless people gathered around the thick framed Charles— myself among them— to see the usually good-natured face with a bushy mustache and eyebrows take on a seriousness no one had ever witnessed from the man. With his words came a tidal wave of additional information. Five of the people there who had spoken to Tobias as well admitted he knew impossible things about them, things no one but they could’ve ever known.

  Talk grew rapidly of Tobias’s appearance, more gangly and long-limbed than before, deformed, people put it, by whatever dark things he’d taken part of. Still, talk of any direct confrontations were kept silent, partly out of fear, and partly out of the more calm headed assertions that they still had no evidence of a crime.

  The next time Tobias came to town I heard about all the doors that refused to open to his knocks. People claimed he left without speaking to a single person that day. Anyone could tell who had turned people so thoroughly against him, but the town had largely forgotten about Gus. Tobias made heads turn away in disgust, but he never appeared too physically threatening, so the fear of violence didn’t seem real enough.

  Unlike Gus, I think Tobias intended to send a message to the town. Two days after Tobias left without a purchase made, the shrieks of someone finding what remained of Charles cut through the early morning. Everyone gathered close to see the ravaged remains, the stomach all but torn open, face cut to bloody strips, mouth wide and agape. The shock of the moment stopped anyone from preventing me from catching a glimpse of what Charles had become.

  All evidence pointed to a wild animal of some sort having mauled him to death, but the death alone had convicted Tobias, everyone there knew it, and my father along with four of his friends set out that very night to bring Tobias to justice.