Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest #12

by Apex Authors

  So I clutched a pillow in my hand.

  * * * *

  One of R. Neube's favorite activities is sitting on the southern bank of the Ohio River waiting for story ideas to come his way. Alas, five-legged rats are so overdone. A fulltime, self-unemployed writer, he credits his wife's hatred of housework for giving him the opportunity of staying at home and spinning his yarns.

  His next published story will appear in the July, 2008 issue of Asimov's.

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  Feverish Solutions

  by Ryck Neube

  Will she feel anything?” Delta Nolana asked at the end of the negotiation.

  "What do you think we are? Monsters?” snapped the nameless buyer.

  "Aren't we all?"

  "She'll be given an overdose of curare. After she's dead, we will replace her blood with a brine and pepper solution. After the evisceration, we'll stuff her with my grandmother's cornbread stuffing. Six hours later, she'll emerge from the oven and bring more joy into the world than she ever did alive."

  Delta dried her brow on the sleeve of her jumpsuit.

  Buyer shielded his mouth with a wrinkled hand lest hidden cameras read his lips. “Of course, our doctor must test her first. There are so many diseases out there."

  Delta Nolana straightened herself to her full height of two meters, dwarfing the old man. Her gray eyes swept the dock for hidden CIB agents.

  "Testing goes without saying, but your politicos aren't allowing us off the dock,” she said. “You'll have to bring your doctor here. Say, same time tomorrow."

  "Fine. Does she know about our ... arrangement?” Buyer's flaccid jowls suddenly tightened as if his face were being stretched.

  "Miriam knows. She tried to suicide last month. This time we'll make certain she succeeds."

  "Everybody wins.” He patted her waist.

  Delta cringed, but forced her body to stay remain still. “Sure, we're all winners."

  Buyer's liver-spotted hand caressed Delta's fingers. “I envy you modern Gypsies, always traveling. It's so boring to have the same view all the time, the same people at every business meeting."

  "All I know about Gypsies comes from TV. I got the impression they wanted to be nomads. We're the homeless, flying the circuit from polis to polis to collect our charity while waiting for some miracle to give us a home."

  The old man nodded his head. “You're too young to remember the crowding, the epidemics. Right after World War III, we crammed twenty-five thousand Earther refugees into one hall here, barely a square meter per person. That was cruel. You're lucky to have your spacious grainships and the protection of the Trade Commission."

  "Sure, lucky.” So lucky a young woman volunteered to be eaten by high society perverts rather than spend another year on our grainship, Delta didn't say.

  She dropped her hand on his stooped shoulder when he turned to leave. “Forgotten the handsel? I'll have to grease a lot of palms to bring this off."

  He smiled, showing his perfect teeth. Manicured fingers reached inside the starched jumpsuit Buyer wore over his Doulle suit in a vain attempt at camouflage. Five folded, bright blue banknotes slipped into Delta's scarred and calloused hand.

  "See you mañana,” she said, to prevent her mouth from cursing him.

  Delta watched the old man limp to the airlock. The cops guarding the hatch snapped to attention. At first she thought he was merely shaking hands with them like an oily politician, then she saw a flash of blue and realized hush money was changing hands.

  It surprised her that it surprised her.

  "Everything's a racket,” she mumbled to herself as she entered the converted grainship.

  Long legs carried Delta Nolana down a corridor bereft of humanity. Smells lingered like angry ghosts. An echo shook the ventilators. Her imagination perceived it as a tortured soul's final scream. When had home become hell? she wondered. It was the fever, she hoped, wiping her fiery brow.

  She turned into Chicago Hold and walked by the eighteen lanes separating the tidy rows of coffin homes stacked three high. At Number Nine, she entered her code and then she pressed her thumb against the sensor.

  On her knees, she eased through the door, securing it with her foot once she was inside. Two and a half meters deep, one meter square, coffins were deceptively spacious to those who had grown up in one. An extra coffin had been wed to her original home in order to store gray market goodies from meat to lingerie. The merchandise spilled into her domicile no matter how carefully she stacked it.

  The clutter doubled the amount of contortion necessary for a night's sleep. It took forever to get the lumps out of her futon. By then, sleep eluded her. A blast from an inhaler failed to relieve the aches in her chest.

  Rolling onto her back, Delta keyed her monitor. A long click through the television channels offered by the polis failed to engage her interest. Bored, Delta set her keyboard on her stomach and tapped into the ship's Bulletin Board. Most of the new entries were complaints about the lockdown. Idiots. She'd been among the minority who voted to flee Earth orbit after the Grainship 980 had been stormed by an angry mob from Kerrigan Polis three months ago. Over seven thousand grainers had been murdered before order was restored. Even now, the Kerrigans were refusing to indict the mob leaders. However, safety was a secondary issue to the masses—charity was better around L-5 than elsewhere.

  "The more their politicos use grainers as pawns, the more their people hate us,” Delta muttered to herself.

  She shelled into the dock computer, the only access city officials allowed the grainers. A sociologist had posted two long questionnaires. On Taylor Polis, the ten-buck payment was nominal to the point of risible. On a grainship, a hard currency tenner was well worth the effort of answering seven hundred and fourteen questions. She keyed her ID and completed both.

  Her lies were smooth and well-practiced. Nobody wanted to hear how she'd turned her first trick at the age of nine for a box of fried chicken. That her parents were religious fanatics who had refused to be evacuated from Earth when the Dyb’ ship landed in her neck of Appalachia; how they preferred death over accepting help from godless aliens. At every opportunity, Delta raved about her brother Alpha who had raised her aboard the grainship after rescuing her from the cultists. She did not mention how he'd been murdered while trying to stop a drunken brawl.

  Overall, Delta sought to paint an image of noble poverty. She feared the truth would only increase the bigotry grainers faced.

  She finally fell asleep and dreamed of rawboned Alpha. Her brother had been terrified the first time he went on the Mayor's Channel to argue against naming the 474, yet he'd eloquently defended his position. Naming the ship denoted acceptance of the converted grain-hauler as their home. As long as the ship's name remained numbers, so remained the hope of resettlement elsewhere.

  Gentle Alpha could have been a great mayor. He could have changed the face of grainer life. Could have...

  After Delta woke, she walked to the cafeteria by way of the Corridor of the Dead, stopping at Alpha's plaque to dust it. Like the majority of memorials, his name was ineptly scratched into the lid of an aluminum ration box. She remembered spending weeks with a sharpened screwdriver engraving it.

  The dust caused a coughing fit, forcing her to dose herself with the inhaler. The poison left her lightheaded.

  The noise of the cafeteria greeted her long before its smells. Today's offering was vegetable stew, fried kinal cakes, a vitamin bar, and a cup of coffee. Real coffee. She couldn't recall the last time the cafeteria had served coffee. Little wonder her fellow idiots preferred to risk their lives docking at Taylor.

  Miriam Carr was present. Delta sat beside the grisette. The youngster reeked of moonshine, looking as bad as Delta felt. Miriam's head bounced as if it were mounted on a spring. A considerable amount of her meal decorated her jumpsuit and chin. Oversized blue eyes were bloodshot and unfocused.

  Girl she was, thought Delta. When Delta had been sixteen, she was already
running a successful black market operation. She'd killed once in self-defense and once for revenge. Delta learned from the past, utilized her present, and hoped for her future.

  Miriam Carr had no past, courtesy of brain damage caused by long-term consumption of moonshine mixed with chem cocktails. Her present revolved around a full-time search for the next buzz. And her future was a formal dinner.

  "This is lucky. I don't have to hunt you down. The customer wants to see you on the dock tonight, so you're spending the day with me."

  "Huh? Oh. Good,” squeaked Miriam's unfortunate voice.

  "We need to get you cleaned up.” The grisette's stench caused Delta's eyes to water.

  "I'm filthy. We're all—"

  "I don't want to hear your whining. You can still back out. Nobody will make you do this."

  "You're the nicest pimp I've ever had."

  Delta stuffed an entire kinal cake into her mouth to keep from cursing the loser. She nodded as Mayor Bobby Ferrell walked by with his tray. His knowing wink spoiled the taste of the alien vegetable.

  "Am I doing the right thing?” asked Miriam.

  "No, you spoiled brat. If you were my daughter, I'd thump a wart upside your head. That is, if you didn't like that sort of thing so much."

  Carr giggled. “This would kill them, wouldn't it?"

  Delta nodded, knowing the grisette referred to her late parents. As the ship's previous mayor, Doreen Carr had set an uncommon value on her façade of normality.

  Death by rumor was a cruel and unusual punishment. Delta doubted if Samuel Carr had been sacrificed for his wife's career, however often she heard it whispered. Certainly, his death from radiation poisoning after heroically patching a hole in the ship's hull had clinched the election for Doreen.

  That rumor had been the start of Mayor Carr's ordeal, as Bobby Ferrell's supporters had blanketed the ship with half-truths. So what if Doreen had a vinyl fetish? So what if there was money missing from the ship's treasury? The mayor didn't have access to that particular account. So what if she had Miriam's arrests erased from the record? What mother wouldn't? So what if Miriam would ‘confess’ to anything, if the reporter poured enough booze into her?

  To this day Delta wondered whether Mayor Carr had actually airlocked herself. Suicide seemed an anomaly for a fighter like Carr. Delta's eye strayed to the current mayor as he held court surrounded by his thugs. Had Bobby Ferrell arranged the putative suicide? Another of Ferrell's deals?

  I had a crush on Sam, Delta thought. I admired Doreen. Now I'm killing their only child.

  The food choked Delta. It didn't pay to question the past on a grainship.

  After inhaling her meal and dumping the trays, she towed Miriam out of the cafeteria, no small accomplishment given the loser's rubbery legs.

  It was a long trek to the Clean Center. Delta swapped three packets of oatmeal cookies to score fresh jumpsuits for the two of them. It cost another packet to have someone guard her poke and clean clothes. Ms. Loser spouted attitude as they entered the steam room. Delta instructed Miriam on the use of a full nelson until the grisette reconciled herself to twenty minutes of sweating silence. A long shower capped the experience.

  The cleansing made Miriam appear a decade younger, a child. It also accentuated the myriad scars decorating her body. Miriam's psych report mentioned a penchant for self-mutilation, but nothing had prepared Delta for how thorough she had been.

  She towed her ward back to Gold Lane. Inside Number Nine coffin, Delta opened her safe and offered the girl a heroin derm. The loser slapped it on her neck and eyed Delta.

  "What the hell kinda name is Nolana? Sounds made-up to me."

  "It is. My parents’ cult dropped out of society. Nolana comes from NO LAst NAme. In the wrong hands, God can make you as stupid as drugs."

  "Can I have another derm?"

  "No. Watch TV and behave yourself."

  "Let's have sex."

  "No. Watch TV and shut up."

  "Beat me."

  "Watch TV."

  Miriam chuckled as the narcotic suffused her brain. She rolled beneath the screen. Delta placed the remote on her belly.

  "I'm so sick of being,” mumbled the grisette, before she had to concentrate on operating the remote.

  Delta handcuffed Miriam to the lockbox at the head of the coffin after she had shifted the consumables out of her guest's reach. She crawled out of her coffin and double-locked the hatch.

  Her stomach churned. Mayor Doreen Carr had been one of Delta's heroes. Sam Carr had been a hero to the whole ship. Unlike Alpha Nolana, they had survived long enough to make a difference. And here she was murdering their only child. Where her money belt pressed against Delta's flesh, the skin crawled.

  Delta deflated as she sighed. A shadow fell across her size nines. Missy Ferrell, the mayor's wife, brushed her fashionably-plaid hair. The silver paint she wore in lieu of clothing glittered beneath the lights. She squatted and played with the ribbons atop her satin slippers.

  "Who sold you the paint, Missy?"

  Delta's mind raced. Body paint hadn't been on any of the manifests logged with the ship's Purchase Bureau, ergo someone had smuggled it aboard the grainship. A career in the gray market required Delta to know everyone bringing in goodies.

  "A friend bought it on the dock. I love the way it sparkles. Cheap, too."

  Delta's interest waned; cheap meant barrels of the stuff had come aboard. Volume traffic was not her style.

  "It's stunning. Of course, you have the body for it. I swear, you grow younger every year. How are the kids?” Why are you here? Delta forced herself not to ask.

  Missy covered her mouth with a silver hand in case someone was filming the encounter. “Bobby wanted to make certain there was no problem with the lunatic."

  Delta covered her own mouth and whispered, “Her name is Miriam."

  "Did the customer give us the upfront money? Bobby has a lot of expenses."

  Is Mayor Ferrell hiring more thugs? Delta did not ask.

  Delta's free hand slipped into the pocket of her jumpsuit and cupped four one thousand dollar Taylor bills. Even folded, the large blue bills were hard to keep palmed as Delta slid the currency into the slipper Missy had untied. The silver woman cleared her throat until Delta tied the bow. The woman walked away.

  Delta strolled, trying to stay a step ahead of the depression that cloaked her. Bad enough that grainers sold themselves as indentured servants to the fortunates who had homes in habitats and poleis. Bad enough that her peers embraced whatever poison made them forget their life in the coffin lane.

  "Bad enough turns worse. Now we're feeding cannibals."

  She could almost understand necrophilia. Goodness knows, she'd endured her share of lovers who were no improvement on corpses. But to eat someone?

  "Reckon it has to be the rush of the forbidden."

  "Talking to yourself again, Nolana?"

  Delta spun, reaching for the sharpened screwdriver holstered in her burlap poke's strap.

  Captain Lucy Fulton threw up her hands and stepped back, miming terror. She tossed her thick mane of violet hair, posing like a model. “What's got you spooked, Nolana?"

  "Some days grate my nerves. How's our good captain doing?” Delta breathed through her mouth to avoid the woman's noxious perfume.

  "The Pilot's Guild bitched at the Trade Commission, so now the local authorities must allow captains off the dock. I'm allowed one guest. Want to come with? We'll prowl ‘til we get lucky."

  "No can do. I've got a deal hatching. Could you do a fav for me? I need to wire some money to my bank account on Deimos."

  "You sly fox."

  "It won't take you five minutes.” Delta reached into a pouch of her money belt and produced a bulging envelope. She opened it, showing the captain the bank card nested among scores of different currencies. “I've programmed the card. All the teller has to do is run it. Here.” She rummaged in another pouch of the belt and withdrew a hundred-dollar Reagan coin. “Have a co
uple of drinks on me."

  Captain Fulton winked before stuffing the envelope into her pocket. “I won't forget.” Laughing, she headed toward the dock.

  Delta doubted if more than four people on the grainship possessed bank accounts. If she saved enough, there was always the possibility she could buy herself a citizenship somewhere. The possibility of escape. Hope was all society had left grainers.

  Delta continued her walk, not realizing she had a destination until she'd reached it. Climbing a ladder, she shouldered aside the hatch and stepped into the ship's navigation dome.

  Doctor Fields nodded at her, then resumed staring at Earth in the center of the transparent dome. He reminded her of a soldier standing at ease, coiled muscles awaiting the call to duty. The reflection of the planet blanketed them in blue light, although she knew that was an illusion of the Jensen field protecting the grainship from solar radiation.

  "How is our deal going?” asked Fields.

  "I have Miriam caged and cleaned. Their medico will meet us on the dock tonight to check her out."

  "When I was working as a paramedic on Mobil Habitat, I was called to a cannibal bust. They arrested eighteen people. According to the newspapers, their combined net worth was nine billion. Each had everything—wealth, fame, five or six trophy spouses. What could motivate them to do something so unnatural? Humans are...” His sigh was as big as space itself.