by Duncan Long
Ralph Crocker
Two hours later and shivering in the cold, we reached the grounds of the detox hospital. Its neon sign blazed in the night, boldly proclaiming in pink and blue to the darkened landscape:
Timothy Leary’s Ho-e for the Addicted.
Yeah, the neon lettering was sans “m” in “Home.” This caused hoots of derision and a debate among its soon-to-be inmates as to whether it should be “Timothy Leary’s Ho-ee for the Agitated” or “Timothy Leary’s Hoe for the Afflicted.” Lots of laughter and to-be-expected lewdness regarding whores and the like.
And lots of nervous laughter.
Way too much.
Way too nervous.
Like you’d expect from those ascending the steps to the guillotine while attempting to maintain a fearless, tough-guy image.
The prisoner in the cubicle below me started a raunchy rendition of Just Say “No” to Drugs and Dough, suggesting it might have been a return visit for him. The recomb next to me hollered over the raucous musical rendition, “Nothing like a musical interlude to soothe the drug-starved nerves.”
“Soothe?” I laughed, and then added, “Nerves?” Thus, I contributed my bit to the gallows’ humor we all enjoyed as we headed to the institution named after the patron saint of druggies of the last few centuries.
Our truck circled the driveway leading to the front of the tall, three-story building and I was aware of the pleasant smell of syntho-rain on damp earth and vegetation. Barely visible in the garish blinking neon light was a huge flower bed that stretched in front of the building; the round, shiny bodies of robo-gardeners nearly hidden in the darkness.
Maybe things won’t be so bad after all, I tried to convince myself, forcing all the stories I’d heard about the terrors of this rehab center from my cringing consciousness. Any place this pretty can’t be too bad, can it?
Then the autotruck we rode in continued around the building and my optimism took a steep nosedive as, with an involuntary shudder, I saw the truth: The building’s front was only a facade, designed to impress those viewing the complex from the road.
Behind the bill-board-like frontage was a pit that might as easily have descended straight into the depths of Hell itself.
The robotruck carrying us dived straight into the pit without slowing, descending on a concrete ramp into the blackness that remained impenetrable by the lone floodlight resting along the rim of the abyss.
“Why aren’t there any lights down there?” I called to the recomb next to me.
“The guards don’t need them.”
I closed my eyes and tried not to shake. “Why’s that?”
“Guards don’t have eyes.”
“But we have eyes,” I protested.
“We’re not running the place,” my new friend told me.
I remained silent as did all the others riding into the Mouth of Hates.
Without warning, the truck lurched to a stop, throwing all the inmates it carried onto the floors of their cells. The door on each cage flopped open and an abrasive mechanical voice instructed from the gloom: “Patients will disembark to the left, following the red line.”
It might as well have told us to follow the yellow brick road, because in the pitch darkness of the pit, we could see nothing.
“Follow the red line,” the mechanical voice ordered once more.
What red line? I asked myself. It was so murky I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. I was free to move — but where to?
“Where’s the damn red line?” someone demanded.
“Get out of the cubicles and follow the red line,” the voice repeated and then added ominously, “Those failing to follow this order will be severely punished.”
One of the prisoners to my left yelled loudly, “Where’s the freaking red line? Hey, let go of —” His voice vanished in a gurgling sound and there was a flash of electrical energy.
That flash lasted just long enough to freeze frame a picture that clawed at my sanity. Skeletal, eyeless monsters hovered over the prisoner who’d been protesting. Each of the mechanical nightmares held spear-like cattle prods which, when one touched the helpless man’s body, caused him to writhe on the dock, shuddering with the electrical arch coursing into his body.
“Come on,” the recomb ordered, taking my arm. “I saw the red line in the electric spark. It’s over here somewhere. We need to head this way.”
I followed in the darkness, my hand on his shoulder. We picked our way like blind men.
From time to time we could see momentarily in the bright white arc marking the electrocution of another inmate who failed to follow impossible orders.
“Don’t they know we can’t see?” I asked, stumbling toward where I hoped the red line was.
“That’s just it,” the recomb yelled over the crackle of another discharge. “They don’t have eyes. They don’t know the light’s out.”
“Can’t we just —”
“Shut up and stick close.”
I glanced back over my shoulder as another crackle of electricity hissed in the air. Those who were being shocked seemed to be lying lifeless on the ground below the mechanical skeletons that continued to prod the lifeless bodies, shocking them again and again.
“Don’t they ever let up?” I muttered.
“Nothing ever lets up down here,” the man ahead of me said as we continued forward.
Not many of us remained alive to reach our cells that first night. Of the forty-eight of us who arrived in the cubicles piled on the truck, Only six, including the recomb who had helped me, remained alive after our arrival at the dock.
Before being thrown into damp cells that smelled of urine, our heads were jammed into some sort of contraption that very efficiently cut away our hair. With programming worthy of the Damascus school of coding, the machine also took a few chunks of scalp here and there.
Later, as I lay in the dark cell I ran my hand over my cut scalp, trying to determine how bad the cuts were. “I hope these don’t get infected,” I muttered. “Damn machine needs to be adjusted.”
“Just be glad you didn’t get one that takes off ears along with the hair,” a voice called from a cell across the hall.
His comment was answered with hysterical laughter from farther down the pitch-black passageway.
I swallowed, hoping he was joking but knowing better. I patted my ears; perhaps I’d got off lucky after all.
The hideous, uncontrolled laughter started again, and continued for what seemed like an eternity in the darkness.
“Welcome to Timothy Leary’s Home for the Addicted,” a voice across the hall said.
“Welcome to Hell,” another voice called.
I remained awake for a time, finally falling asleep hours later when I no longer cared what the creatures were that brushed my feet and eventually crawled all over me during the night.
I awoke standing on a foul riverbank. The mud was laced with what appeared to be tangled driftwood, bleached white by the sun. The tropic air that clung to my skin reeked of rotting meat.
“Hands up,” a voice ordered from behind me, speaking in singsong Khmer, which somehow I understood.
I raised my arms, turning cautiously to discover a soldier dressed in a ragged green uniform adorned with a bright red-and-white checked scarf. The militiaman pointed the muzzle of an AK47 at my chest.
I tried not to gag at the overwhelming stench in the air. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
“Over there,” the trooper ordered, gesturing with the barrel of his rifle.
I headed where he directed, alarmed to see the bloodied bodies of men, women, and children scattered like rag dolls on the ground ahead. A line of prisoners stood alongside the dead, eyes cast downward in Oriental submission as they prepared for the inevitable from the armed squad standing in front of them.
I realized that what I had mistaken for driftwood was actually tangled masses of human bones. In fact, the narrow island I stood on was composed of rotting flesh and mud. It
was 1976 and I was in one of the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. From the looks of it, I was soon to become one of the two million Cambodians who would die from starvation, torture, or execution.
When I reached the other prisoners, I was ordered to stop. Unaccustomed to Asian protocol, I glared at the men that would soon put a bullet through my heart.
The soldiers ignored me, smoking and occasionally motioning toward us, joking and laughing at our plight, smoke bellowing from their noses and mouths as if each were a dragon.
Finally the cigarettes were snuffed out under sandaled feet, and, still laughing and joking, they formed a crude firing squad.
An order was barked.
They aimed.
They fired.
Two bullets smacked into my chest, splattering the air in front of me with a mist of blood. I dropped like a poleaxed steer into the tangle of bodies around me.
“Wake up,” a grating voice ordered, shaking my arm.
I gasped for breath, expecting to be lying in a tangle of bodies. Instead I found myself staring at a giant nose, about six inches from mine.
“What the…” I said, jumping back and bumping my head on the concrete wall of the prison cell behind me.
The nose retreated, revealing the more or less normal face it was attached to. “You’re making so much racket, I figured I might as well wake you up so we don’t have to listen. Bad dream, eh?”
“You better believe it,” I said, rubbing my chest and half-expecting to find two bullet holes in it. “I thought I was dead.”
“Bad dreams are the norm here,” the stranger said. “No jokes about my name or the Star Spangled. I’ve heard them all.” He held out a hand that I took. “I’m Francis Scott Key.”
I took his hand, introducing myself. We talked in low tones for a time and then each retreated to our corners to become lost in thought the way imprisoned men often do. I reviewed what had been happening when I slept. Had I been having a nightmare? It had been so real — my chest still hurt from the bullet impacts.
Was the jet causing flashbacks? If so, could this whole prison thing be a SupeR-G illusion as well? I pushed that crazy hope from my mind.
“Guess I was asleep when you came in,” Key said, sitting on a stained bunk. “Sorry I wasn’t awake to greet you. First night’s the roughest.”
“Bet you’re able to sleep through anything after you’ve been here a while,” I said.
Key snorted. “Got that right. But I’ll say one thing. We’re lucky in this cell. Some of the other pens have crazies in them. You can’t sleep in those cells without risking waking up dead.”
I wished he were joking. But no one within earshot laughed and I knew he wasn’t exaggerating.
“If your luck holds,” he added, “you’ll have a new sane room mate when I leave later today.”
“You’re leaving?” I asked.
Key nodded. “My last day. Whole month of detox behind me. I made it. Damned machines didn’t manage to get me killed. Most prisoners don’t last more than a few days down here. But somehow I survived. Should be getting out before breakfast if the meches work right today — of course that’s a mighty big if, as you’ll see after you’ve been here a while.”
“We’ve already seen them run amuck,” the recomb who had helped me the night before said. He uncoiled his long legs from beneath him and stood up in front of his bunk and stretched, his hairless head nearly reaching the seven-foot ceilings. “The meches killed most of us last night.”
“Wouldn’t doubt it,” Key said, pacing the floor and glancing down the hallway. “Their programming has been out of kilter for at least a year now, near as I can figure. Used to be lights on the processing dock, but they burned out couple weeks back. The sub-routine for replacing ‘em has apparently become corrupted. It’s cutting down on the overcrowding down here, though.”
There’s a silver lining to every cloud, I thought. “So the bots fry anyone who doesn’t have the good sense to try to figure out where to walk? How many other glitches are in the system down here?”
Key shrugged. “Plenty. If one glitch doesn’t kill you, another will.”
“At least they have sunlight piped down here during the day,” the recomb said. “Imagine what this would be like if it were dark night and day.”
I shuddered at the thought, realizing that my ability to imagine the worst had got a giant boost since last night.
“Here he comes,” Key said, pointing down the hallway. “Here comes Old Red. He’s the one they send when it’s time for guys to check out — or get the chair. Today he’s bringing good news. I’m headed out. It’s my day to go free.”
I moved over to the bars and looked down the hall toward the skeletal bot moving toward us like a battle tank on stilts. Somewhat like the murderous creations on the processing docks, it was crimson instead of black. It jerked along like something from a nightmare — which it was, as far as I was concerned.
Old Red stopped at our cell. “All back,” it warned, holding out an arm that ended in a wicked-looking electrode.
I took the hint and plastered myself against the far wall.
“Francis Scott Key,” Old Red said. “Step forward and exit the cell.”
“So long, fellas,” Key said, picking up a small cloth bag and slinging it over his shoulder. “Sorry I can’t be staying to keep you company.”
“Leave your bag,” Old Red said as Keys stepped toward the doorway that opened in front of him.
“I have a right to take my gear.”
“You will not be needing it.”
“Wait a minute. Where’re you taking me? Hey, give me back my bag.”
“Francis Scott Key, 814-85-8692-82733. Slated for termination at oh, eight hundred. The time of execution is nearly here, Mr. Key. Please come peacefully with me or I will use force.”
“Wait a damned minute,” Key said, jerking his arm free from the mech’s grasp and stepping back toward the cell. “There’s been a screw up. I’m supposed to go free. All I did was steal a — “
Old Red moved in a blur, its claw-like hand wrapping itself around the old man’s neck. It yanked him from the cell as the electrode hand zapped him so he yelped in pain. The door zipped shut and the automated nightmare dragged Key, kicking and screaming, down the hallway.
“There’s been a mistake,” Key sobbed over and over again. “There’s been a mistake.”
I stood at the bars listening to the old man’s cries until they abruptly ended in a gurgling moan.
Minutes later the PA crackled to life and announced, “Francis Scott Key, 814-85-8692-82734, has been executed for the crime of… ‘Term Served, Prisoner Free to Be Released.’ All who commit this crime of ‘Term Served, Prisoner Free to Be Released’ will be punished. Anyone contemplating such a crime should remember today’s execution. Good prisoners are happy prisoners. Drug-free citizens are good citizens… Are good citizens.”
There was a loud snap and the halls became ominously silent.
“Welcome to Hell,” I whispered to myself. Where every prisoner is a happy, model prisoner — once he’s dead.
Chapter 14
Jeff Huntington
I watched Ralph as he regained consciousness in the new world I’d created for him. “I’ve been waiting,” I said softly.
He opened his eyes, taking a moment to focus and then gazing at the canvas tent around him before settling on me. I gave him my harshest glare, doing my best to look portentous with my neatly trimmed beard and black enameled armor.
Ralph started to fade so I dope slapped him with a steel gauntlet, just hard enough to wake him up. “I challenge you to a duel.”
“Nooooo wabbbbyyy,” he answered, climbing to his feet.
My puzzlement must have shown. What’s wrong with this dingbat?
He spit some blood and a tooth and tried again. “No way. This is a dream and I’m going to get some rest. There’s nothing you can do to —”
The pain of the second slap of
my gauntlet argued against his nightmare theory.
He took a step back so I couldn’t reach him. I could see that he still thought he was dreaming and, for some reason, it struck me as funny. I had to laugh before speaking “I know you’re not a slow learner. But, I swear, sometimes….”
Ralph said nothing.
“Don’t you realize that you’re back in the realm of the SupeR-G? Pinch yourself if it helps.”
He made no move, simply stood glaring at me.
“See these suits of armor?” I beckoned toward the ten suits hanging on poles inside my dark tent. “I’ll give you a hint. They belonged to knights I’ve challenged in the recent past, and none of them require their suits any longer. Look at this one; almost brand new. Well, except for the bloodstains.”
Ralph swallowed hard, eyeing the holes punched in several of the breastplates with obviously fatal results for previous owners.
I leaned forward and hissed, “Hope you enjoy our fight.” Then I spoke to the two squires standing at his elbows. “Get this sorry excuse for a knight ready for the tournament.”
Ralph Crocker
Each of the oddly garbed young men beside me grabbed one of my arms and escorted “my lordship,” kicking and cursing, from Huntington’s tent onto the grassy field outside.
“I don’t suppose there’s any graceful way out of this,” I mused to the two muscle-bound pages dragging me across the sunlit field toward what I took to be the striped tan and yellow tent belonging to me.
They made no reply.
“Could I maybe slip you each a golden coin so you can sneak me into the forest?”
“No, my lord.” The page touched the wooden hilt of the dagger in his belt. “We will be forced to kill you if you try to escape — to preserve your lordship’s honor, of course.”
“But of course,” I said. “Wouldn’t want to have my honor ‘spilled’ when my blood can be shed instead. It’s a beautiful day to die?”
“Yes, my lord, it is,” they replied in unison, my rapier sarcasm lost on the two clods.