Boneland

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Still holding the empty pistol out ahead of him, Board stole up on the car. Keeping low, he poked up fast for a look inside. The Assassin, a man he didn’t recognize, who could be any man, lay with his head in the driver’s lap, moaning very softly. He had a hole in his chest, just below his sternum; the man had torn open his shirt, popping its buttons, either in a reflex action or to have a look at it. Though his eyes were open, he didn’t appear to be seeing Board. His wheezing moans seemed to issue out of the wound itself.

  A fury borne on adrenalin infused Board’s entire body. For one second, he had to fight the urge to press the gun’s muzzle against that black hole (barely leaking one thin red ribbon) and shove the barrel deeply into the wound, into his gut like a knife or a penis and leave the gun hanging out of him. He wanted to reverse the gun in his fist, hold it by the barrel and club the man in the face with the checkered handle, so he could watch his nose break and mash, so that he could splinter his teeth into his gums and lips. He wanted to thrust the barrel into one eye, skewering the brain behind it.

  Instead, he withdrew from the limo, leaving the man to die more slowly. That was better, anyway.

  Looking up from the two dead men, Board saw that cars were passing by slowly, heads turning to watch the scene, but no one stopping. He raised his spent gun to waist level so no one would be brave enough to stop and investigate. Then his eyes fell on the camera, still helpless on its back, its many legs wavering. He wished he had one bullet left to put into its belly, where a handle had been affixed. He had no time to go through his luggage in search of his spare ammo. He contemplated stomping the thing under his shoe, or bludgeoning it with the gun, but he should be leaving the scene of his crime, like any smart Assassin.

  Still, he had one final impulse and this one he heeded. After holstering his pistol, Board picked up the camera, righted it in his hands, and reached into the limo with it…resting it on the Assassin’s chest so that its single orb stared directly into his face.

  “Enjoy it,” he said to the camera.

  Board dragged his three bags out of the cab, and began struggling down the street with them. Los Huesos International Airport wasn’t too much further on foot…

  -7-

  He didn’t see the movie until he returned from Europe, several years later. It was no longer in the theaters, but you could now rent movies prerecorded onto cylinders, and insert them into your TV at home (or, if you had an older model, there was a second creature you could add to your TV so that they seemed to be copulating). The movie was called Road Rage, a Dreamland Pictures release. In it, a maniac liked to drive around shooting people at random from his vehicle. The film was told largely from his point of view. In some scenes, rather than shoot at other cars or pedestrians, he simply drove their vehicle off the road, jumped out of his own vehicle, and attacked them with something more intimate like a knife or claw hammer. Some of these killings were faked. Board was certain that some of them weren’t.

  He wasn’t sure how they had intended the movie to end, originally. No doubt, the character he played had been planned to be just another victim. But the victim had turned the tables on the psychopathic lead character. On his TV screen, Board watched himself shooting almost directly at the camera. The view became disorienting as the camera began to fall, but then the angle cut away to a close-up of the road killer’s dying face. His rasping, gurgling death rattle that Board hadn’t hung around to witness personally.

  The following scene showed the road killer on a morgue slab, with the film’s detective hero thanking the potential victim for putting a stop to the rampage. The victim in this scene (supposedly an off-duty security guard) was a man who bore a superficial resemblance to Board (crepe hair goatee glued on with spirit gum).

  John Board received no mention in the credits, either for his brief acting or camera work. He wasn’t incensed by this. He wouldn’t be going over to Dreamland to demand that Dominic Coltello pay him for his screen time. Anyway, a few months ago Dom Coltello had been gunned down in a restaurant with his mouth full of pasta, apparently by an Assassin from a big West Coast gang. Hence, Board’s return to the States. It might seem unusual that one Assassin chief might want another dead (especially where Coltello had been a Medium, besides), but it made for good crime scene photos. Good human drama. Of course, there was always the possibility that the hit had been ordered by a rival movie studio.

  Board wondered if Louise Brooks had ever seen the movie Road Rage. If she had recognized him from a distance, in it. If so, he never saw her again to ask her.

  She did make it to Europe eventually…but to Germany, to play Lulu in G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box.

  And while Board was still in France, she had married Eddie Sutherland, director of her movie It’s the Old Army Game.

  Part Four: Matagiinu

  -1-

  Coccyx, Illinois, 1945

  “Turn my window toward the sun,” John Board said to the empty room, the walls, the ceiling. He was sixty-two years old and he dwelt alone in this house at the suburban surf’s edge of the great city Coccyx, where he had lived in his boyhood—when it had still been called Chicago, before the Guests had come.

  Board put out a hand to steady himself against the slight inward curve of the cool, glossy white wall. His house was fifteen years old, and around the age of twenty they tended to die. The older houses and buildings did, anyway; naturally, technology was improving all the time in grasshopper leaps and bounds, and the new living structures that were being rapidly grown in situ were promised to have life-spans in the decades if not centuries. These hosts would outlive their parasitic inhabitants, it was said.

  But Board’s house, an older model, was aging, and where once it would have rotated its entire body smoothly, now it moved in irregular jerks that sometimes made the windows rattle in frames cut into the walls of chitin, and Board had almost tumbled over one time when the great insect gave a particularly violent lurch. Now he made sure to prepare himself before giving a command such as this.

  The huge, mindless animal he lived inside dutifully repositioned itself until the window he stood at did indeed face toward the morning sun. Board gazed out. He was on the second story; his house, his creature, loomed upward as if the insect aspired to become bipedal. Its upper pair of legs was folded to its shell-like sides, the two lower pairs spread out at wide angles to support the animal and to enable it to turn in its shallow socket of a foundation. At the summit of the house, the insect’s head was tiny, eyeless, all but brainless, but its immense feelers helped with radio reception. For TV and computer feeds, of course, Board was linked up to an underground, living worm cable entering through his house’s anus, through which his water and sewerage were also conveyed via inorganic plumbing. For electricity, the insect possessed a battery-like organ up in the attic, close to the posterior portion of its head. Its white armor absorbed sunlight and converted it to energy stored in this organ. But although Board owned this house, and his house was self-sufficient, he still had to pay the town for the sunlight.

  Unsatisfied or bored with his view of the dawn—or because he sometimes liked to tease the house, as if to assert his mastery over it—Board commanded it to move again. “Face toward the city,” he said loudly. As the house aged, it heard him less well; where once he need only have whispered, now he had to practically shout. But other times Board might pat the wall sympathetically. This creature had not asked to be born, or to be born in such a form. To be born a slave. No more than a pig asked to be made into bacon. And both of them were aging together.

  The house shifted again until the same window gave Board a view toward the heart of Coccyx.

  Not all the buildings were organic. About a third of the tallest buildings were still comprised of stone and metal. But the expanse extending before Board’s gaze glistened as the rising sun sparked reflections off a frozen sea of chitin. Exoskeletons of obsidian black, ash gray, and bone white. The domes of gigantic beetles perched atop older, more traditional
buildings of concrete or mortared brick. Vaster domed beetles, resting on street level. Skyscraper minarets that were losing their resemblance to insects, their hundreds of legs as useless as the vestigial heads, these myriad limbs half-fused against the flanks until they were little more than a decorative trim between the many rows of glass windows pocked in their soaring, vaguely segmented bodies.

  There was an ever-present shimmer of summer sound, even in winter. The sound of grasshoppers. The occasional rising buzz-saw of cicada noise. Even at night, but one grew accustomed to it, forgot to hear it. The near-brainless structures still communicating, interacting in their zombie-like way—for reasons that Board was certain the city’s multitudes didn’t fully understand. Weren’t meant to.

  A small plane hummed over the glittering cityscape like a dragonfly, but Board knew it wasn’t one. No insect of that size could beat its wings sufficiently to keep itself aloft. But one day, despite the laws of nature, he had little doubt it would be done, regardless. Humans would be borne along inside those bodies. Maybe there would be ships made from titanic pill-bugs with their fringe of legs fluttering in the water. But he had never been much of a visionary. Progress outdistanced his imaginings. For decades, he had dully, fatalistically watched the future race past his eyes at a speed that felt unnatural in the very cells of his bones.

  There was a dull silvery haze over the city, as if Lake Michigan’s cold waters were reflected on the bottom of the clouds. It was pollution from vehicles and from the methane exhalations of the buildings, small and large. Living factories, organic mills. Exhaust fumes from barely sentient abattoirs where pig-sized beetles were herded to slaughter to feed the masses.

  Food was cheap; no one really went hungry (at least no one starved). The sunlight, though taxed, was affordable. Everyone seemed to have a place to live. Some columnists enthused that Coccyx was the model American city—the height of progress and efficiency, they gushed. Others held a violently opposing view. Not that their opposition mattered a bit. Other cities here and abroad would continue to emulate it as they grew. In a purely functional sense, Coccyx was as close to a Utopia as human history could lay claim to.

  “Turn 180 degrees,” Board said loudly, as if to some senile grandfather.

  The house grated in its crater foundation until, at last, the window faced away from the sun. Away from the city.

  Still dissatisfied, Board turned his back on the lens-like glass and his view of the world.

  -2-

  “Slow down, Goddamnit,” Board hissed, his arm jerking out taut ahead of him as his dog—a year-old, 75 pound Japanese Akita—launched its stocky, muscular body forward, perhaps having caught a whiff of another neighborhood dog. She was dragging him along, panting with her effort but also seemingly unaware of him. He tugged back on the choke chain; she hacked once and slowed a little. “Fucking dummy,” he growled.

  The dog had already been named Sada when he’d acquired her from a Japanese neighbor three months ago, but he called her Sadie most times. Once, the Akitas had been owned exclusively by Japanese royalty, then called Matagiinu—the “esteemed hunter”. Over the centuries, they had been used to hunt bear (their own broad faces making them appear bear-like), been fighting dogs, been eaten (especially during the last World War) and been used for their pelts. Since that war, they had been brought home by a lot of servicemen and had begun to become something of a popular breed.

  Sadie was a “pinto”, primarily white but with a black mask that obscured her small, slanted eyes. A large black triangle on her back, a smaller black splash behind that, and then a black band around her bushy, curled tail. With her large pointed ears and regal carriage, she was a striking animal, and on four or five occasions while Board had been walking her cars had literally stopped in the road (one had even made a U-turn) so that the drivers might get a better look at her or even ask him what kind of breed she was.

  There was an abandoned abrasives factory at the end of Board’s quiet little side street, and he liked to walk Sadie through its empty parking lot, though he tried to keep her from plunging into the tall grass that grew along its far border. She’d picked up ticks there on two occasions. The last time he’s found it in her armpit, and it was just a little black disk. But the first one, right between her shoulder blades in that black triangle, had been gorged into a small green grape by the time he discovered it. He’d pulled both of them off her with tweezers, and flushed them down the toilet, smiling as he watched their legs paddle futilely.

  Today Board wore a big Colt .45 semiautomatic in a shoulder holster, as he did every time he ventured outside his house. It held eight bullets (seven in the clip, one in the chamber)—which, plump as they were, reminded him of the atomic bomb nicknamed “Fat Man” that a Japanese kamikaze plane had dropped on Pearl Harbor years ago—and in his jacket’s pocket he carried a spare magazine.

  A person was allowed one kill a year, but you could carry that kill over into the next year. A lot of people never used their kills, so they accumulated them. With the proper forms, you could even give away or sell your allocation to another. Since the law had been passed ten years ago—in an effort to control crime, in an effort to give the public a therapeutic way to vent, to channel their aggression—Board had not used his allocation once.

  He had ten kills available to him. Anyone he chose, excluding a Medium or politician. Any man, woman, or child. Any policeman, priest, or spouse. He had not taken advantage of this freedom, this right. But he always made sure he had ten bullets with him. More, in case he ever wanted to shoot someone multiple times. He had saved his kills for self-defense from other killers, other of his fellow citizens, but to date he had never been chosen as anyone else’s victim. He tried to be an invisible man. Nondescript, a nonentity. Nobody’s target.

  As Board half-stumbled along the street after his dog, approaching the grounds of the derelict factory, a bicycle came zipping past on his right. Sadie gave a half-hearted lunge after it, grinning foolishly, tongue lolling. It was a boy of about twelve.

  Behind him, Board heard another child’s voice bellow, “Running home to your Daddy, pussy?”

  “Fuck you, homo!” the boy ahead of Board shouted back over his shoulder.

  “Queer!” came the nearing voice.

  “Fairy!” barked the retreating voice.

  “Fucking fudge-packer!” yelled the voice that now coasted up alongside Board. Another boy on a bike, and with him the brother or friend who always rode this neighborhood with him. Board tensed up, and Sadie flicked her head toward them with interest. Several times these two had made whistling or howling sounds at Sadie as he walked her, and he expected more of it now. Maybe even mocking statements directed at him; if they were afraid of him then they never would have teased his dog in his presence.

  But as Board looked their way, hoping he appeared surly without being challenging, the boy who had just been roaring obscenities cried out, “Your dog is so beautiful! I love that dog!”

  Board gave an uneasy smile, a bit surprised but still wary. “Thanks. She is beautiful, isn’t she?”

  The friends/brothers picked up speed again, resumed chasing after the first boy. Maybe they did have some respect for him, after all. Because he was an adult…because he was an aging adult…or maybe because of the Colt .45 he plainly wore? Not that guns were a rarity.

  Did they intend to beat up that other boy? They couldn’t legally kill him—they weren’t eighteen yet. Unsanctioned murders were treated with the utmost severity. Those found guilty were set free within fenced areas of woodland where others who were sanctioned would hunt them down. There, the condemned could only hope for a quick, clean kill. Once in a while, a prisoner might wrestle a gun or crossbow or axe or what have you away from one of the hunters, but there were plenty of guards on hand to watch out for things like that…

  When Board was a child, even saying “damn” or “hell” in front of his mother would have been unthinkable. His mother had been a demure woman who abhorred
crudity, which had made the eye-stabbing, silently shrieking horror of her appearance in death all the more surreal, disturbing. Strangely, too intimate—like seeing her naked inadvertently. Embarrassing, in a way. Like hearing one’s mother moan in pleasure behind her bedroom door. Like hearing his father cry late at night, as Board once had before the man disappeared on that train to oblivion.

  He and the dog had entered the desolate parking lot now. He could imagine that this was what the city would look like if there were ever an Apocalypse. Or if all the citizens finally killed each other off…except for him. It was a half-welcome fantasy.

  Wild grasses bristled up from cracks that snaked through the asphalt; nature reclaiming her ground, like vines growing through skull sockets. In the center of this lot was a small brick warehouse, an outer structure of the sprawling factory, with two arched loading docks along one flank…but these had since been filled in with cinder blocks. They reminded Board of two huge, blinded eyes.

  They crossed the lot under the stark tarnished sky, and reached the grassy fringe of the parking lot’s rear border. There were a few scattered birch trees here, their bark peeling white and black as if the trunks and branches had been covered all in newspapers. In the tall weeds lay two long rusted train rails without the ties to connect them. Beyond the factory, Board frequently heard trains moaning by, even late at night. The most haunting, mournful of sounds; when their whistles called, he imagined dinosaurs might have bleated such sounds to each other, perhaps not so unaware of their impending annihilation.

  Sadie squatted, urinated next to a magazine warped from recent rains, splayed open to its center. Board kicked it over with his toe; the title was Alarma! He’d seen the original Spanish version and lately the English version of it, as well, on newsstands. Each issue was full of lurid photos of shotgunned Mexican dope peddlers and sundered auto accident victims.