The Milkman: A Freeworld Novel

by Martineck, Michael

  Sylvia sent: I wrote that tale. I’m going to clean up this milk thing first. Then we’ll see if I’m ever allowed to work again.

  Message from Marshall: Don’t furrow that brow. Perchance I’ll back your next feature, regardless of how this one flops or flies.

  Sylvia typed: Large of you. Thought you were fully extended.

  Message from Marshall: I’m blushing.

  Sylvia typed: On you that would be called a stroke. Get to a hospital.

  Message from Marshall: My last project channeled new funds. I’m flush and full of fun.

  Sylvia almost asked about his last project, then stopped herself. Why ask the question if you don’t want the answer.

  She typed: Working now.

  Message from Marshall: Huff.

  She ate her last banana as slowly as she could possible stand. She thought about making a general post about the fruit and how heavenly it tasted and decided against it. She wanted it all to herself. Even the idea of it.

  * * *

  Emory tried to remember what his little girl looked like. He closed his eyes and called up all the parts of her face. The tiny pink lips, the crystalline blue eyes and shaggy, crazy, refuse-to-behave hair of gold wildness. He had tried … months ago … when he could … anything at all to make her laugh. Her face blossomed and body bounced. She laughed with everything. He thought, anyway. That’s how he remembered it. Ago. In a different time stream, in a different universe. He couldn’t count on his memory now. He didn’t have a good check on his recollections, a baseline to which he could match his mental vision. And he needed it. At this precise moment, he needed to see his little girl. Not his wife or his mother or anyone else. Now. Elizabeth. Not a flawed facsimile from his poor and wasting imagination.

  He jammed the cross brace into the wall. Jagged teeth bit into the earth. He hefted the central cylinder, held it with one hand and cranked its wheel with the other. The brace elongated, pressed the other foot into the other side of the tunnel. Campbell readied a post beneath it.

  Emory gazed down the tunnel, into the moist blackness. The other team had yet to descend. Waiting, wisely, for the supports to take. The moment had arrived. Campbell crouched beneath him and the 60-pound steel brace with its saw-like foot. The back of his pale head could have been a mushroom. Inhuman. Not his friend. Not a man who wanted to tell people things he knew because man should be fair and honest and not a chump, submitting to the shaft of crap the company crammed into you from age four until death. The edge of the metal plate at the end of the brace would shatter the skull, driving into the brain, taking pieces of the bone along for the ride. Campbell would feel a prick, a flood of warmth, presaging a faint. Then nothing.

  Could he look Lizzie in the face? Would the chief supervisor let him live at home, with his family? And if he sat cross-legged on the floor, watching her stumble towards him, could he look her in the face?

  “If not you, someone else,” the chief had said.

  Or not, Emory wanted to say back. Everyone could make the right choice? Right? Couldn’t the world work that way, with one guy setting the brace and the other guy setting the support, and the next guy bringing in the new section of pipe so that everyone moves ahead? Everyone lives?

  Emory’s arms hurt from being aloft for so long. The blood drained and the cells screamed, cut off and starving. He held his breath. The tunnel sent down no human sounds, nothing but dripping. He closed his eyes.

  “Campbell,” he said in a harsh whisper.

  The man looked up from his crouch, leaning on the steel support beam he’d readied.

  “They want me to kill you,” Emory said. His face tingled. He felt himself pass from once place to another, through a field of bioelectric moral relativity nonsense. It charged his cheeks and ears and neck. In all his time on the chain gang, he’d felt innocent. He’d wrap himself in that from time to time. He’d crossed to guilty, now. Conspiratorial.

  He felt like the Milkman.

  “Are you gonna?” Campbell asked from his knees, staring up with his head cocked back so much he couldn’t comfortably close his mouth.

  “No.” Emory finished fitting the brace. “That means the chief will ask somebody else.” He knelt down in the puddle, collected by the curve of the mud. “You’ve got to get out of here.”

  “He’ll know you warned me.” Campbell jammed the metal pole under the back.

  “He wants you dead. Because you talk too much.”

  “He’s not wrong about that now, is he.”

  “Just run for it. Lot’s of people live off line.”

  “Lots?”

  “Some. A few.”

  “Ever meet any of them?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “The crazy ass guys who talk to themselves all the time. Or the ones that stand around all day shouting Jesus is going set fire to the world. How about the ones that wander around begging for the last bite of your sandwich or sip of your coffee? You want me to be one of those?”

  “You wouldn’t be one of those,” Emory said. “And you’d be alive.”

  “Would you come with me?” Campbell asked.

  Emory paused. All the talk in his head had been about convincing Campbell to leave. He hadn’t thought about going off line himself.

  “Abandon my family?” Emory asked.

  “You’re not with ‘em now.”

  “But… I could be. I hoped…”

  “Then you should’ve killed me. You should have stuck that joist so deep in my head I never would have known another thing.”

  * * *

  McCallum didn’t want to move his arm. He’d let it go all numb and even necrotic before he pulled it out from under Snyder, or whatever she wanted to call herself. Her head on his chest, her leg laid over his, the feel of her back, down the length of his forearm filled him in, gave color to the pencil sketch of his life. Screw the circulatory system. This was bigger than blood flow.

  And thirst and the need to visit a bathroom and maybe pop a mint. He’d fight it all. Even the sun, starting to blare in through the multi-pane windows. The leaded glass made the sunlight split and shine with more viciousness than normal. The wine didn’t help. When did he ever drink that much wine? White? What did Snyder call it? Ice wine?

  “You’re still here,” she said, with a mushy, sticky mouth.

  “You’ve got me pinned.”

  “Yeah.” Snyder pushed up on her arm. “That was my plan. Trap you here forever.”

  “Your plan is working.” McCallum kissed her just a little. “Maybe better than you thought. I’m not moving a thing.”

  “You don’t have to.” She sat up. “Not for me.”

  She stretched, pushing her fists in a high ‘v’, with no concern for her nakedness. Not that she should’ve been, he figured. Not now, not ever, really. He shouldn’t be, either. They’d been over it. Each other. At night, after a bottle of wine.

  Snyder rolled over and straddled him. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, Eduardo McCallum, but I’m glad you came.”

  He snickered. “Likewise.” He rolled her, tangling up the sheets and the quilt. She laughed and pretended to fight him off.

  “Coffee,” Snyder giggled. “Let me go and I promise you coffee.”

  “Persuasive.”

  “I can be.”

  McCallum rolled off Snyder and laid back. “So how does it work, here? I don’t imagine there’s room service.”

  “The service is not great. I know, because I’m the service.”

  “So far, I’ve got no complaints.”

  “It’s not my morning for breakfast. Thank you Jesus, it’s not my morning for breakfast. I’d have a lot of upset ollies down there. It would not be pretty.”

  “You all take turns?”

  “Some of us. Some can, some can’t. There are a few who need to do the same thing everyday. There are a few who cannot be trusted to do anything any day. The rest of us do the rest.”

  “And you all lived here thr
ough the winter.”

  “Winter is difficult.”

  “It’s warm enough in this room.”

  “Somebody sometime put geothermal pumps in. They work even if we don’t want them to. The summer can be worse than the winter.”

  McCallum rolled to his side. Snyder’s profile held him for a moment. The scalene triangle of her nose, erected beside a sumptuous cheekbone hill, near a dark brown pond, feeding bent black reeds, lashing in a breeze. He wanted to live there, paint there, lie in rest in that tiny world next to him. Away and calm and free from desire.

  Snyder said, “It had been a while, huh.”

  McCallum rested his head back down on the pillow. “You could tell?”

  She rolled and pecked him on the lips. “You did nothing wrong. That’s not what I meant. No, you did nothing wrong at all. I could just tell. That’s all. Like you knew I wasn’t from around here.”

  “I make love with an accent?”

  Snyder smiled. “Everyone does. Most people are not as good as reading them as me.”

  “That’s quite a skill.”

  She put her palm on the side of McCallum’s face. Her eyes focused on his, unblinking, her mouth parted and he knew he would hear something important.

  Snyder closed her mouth and her eyes and sat up. “I promised you coffee.”

  “Can I go? I don’t—”

  A rumbling sound grew on the far side of the parade grounds. A machine. Metal and movement. McCallum couldn’t place it at first. A garbage disposal, with a spoon stuck in its maw? He walked naked to the window and followed the sound as it rounded the tents and huts and approached.

  A red Jeep, with a tan colored top chugged into view, propelled, he guessed, by a gasoline burning motor. It drove without haste skirting the shantytown and pulled up not too far from the window.

  “Fuck.” McCallum backed up, remembering his lack of clothing. “My ride’s here.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  McCallum emerged from the oak door, still stuffing his red cotton shirt into his jeans. He carried his jacket in his teeth. He took the time to tie his boots. As a patrolman, he learned never to short change the footwear. He walked up to the Jeep. Its tailgate swung open and the back window was rolled up and fastened with a strap. A man unloaded boxes of canned goods and sacks of rice. Tan work pants, a fur-lined coat an airship pilot might wear, with a matching leather hat. He had glasses, black plastic, thick enough to use as a pry bar if needed. Whip thin, he moved with jittery speed and precision.

  “Let me help,” McCallum said.

  The man glanced at him. “I won’t say no.”

  “I’m Ed.” McCallum went to the back of the vehicle and grabbed a burlap sack.

  “John.”

  McCallum lifted out the last of the boxes and set it down on the grass. “Where do these go?”

  “I’ll show you.” John tossed a sack over his shoulder and went back through the oak door McCallum had just exited. McCallum followed, toting a case of cans.

  Once inside, they turned left and stopped in a long, narrow kitchen. Mismatched shelves and sinks. Two steel tables, with various pots and pans leaning in loose stacks or hanging above. The scent of fresh coffee filled the room. John dropped his rice on the first table and continued to a stainless steel coffee machine, an industrial grade four-potter. He grabbed a mug as McCallum set his box down.

  “You passing through?” John poured.

  “Probably.” McCallum took a mug and waited.

  “We appreciate the help just the same.”

  “Least I can do.”

  John sat down on a stool. He cuddled his coffee cup in both hands and watched McCallum find a stool on the opposite side of the table.

  “Is that your tent out there?” John asked.

  “You’re very observant,” McCallum answered.

  “It stuck out. We haven’t had any new homesteads in a while.”

  “Spring is in the air,” McCallum said. “I like your Jeep.”

  “Junior? Thanks. The restoration took me 15 years.”

  “And now you use it to haul groceries.”

  John grinned. “I think, sometimes, it was the plan all along. Even if I didn’t know it.”

  “You all seem to have survived the winter just fine.”

  “Lost two to TB. Lucky it wasn’t more.”

  “TB?” McCallum pondered. “Tuberculosis. Didn’t think that still made the rounds.”

  “Not in the corporate world. Out here, I’ve seen folks die of cuts and bruises.”

  “Awful.”

  “Eh,” John said. “Some of them died happy. Free of that final tether. They didn’t die hostages.”

  “Doesn’t sound like they had to die at all.” McCallum took a big swig of his coffee.

  John leaned forward over the table, studying McCallum like he’d switched lenses on a microscope. He’d selected a stronger set. McCallum studied him right back. He’d met killers in his career and they all surprised him in some way. Hidden anger or hidden remorse, a pall of pride in a unique accomplishment or an off-handed iciness. Human appliances, he came to call the latter. Human-shaped dehumidifiers that kill. If John Raston was a killer, he’d be the most surprising one ever.

  “Ollies don’t take to prying,” John said. “A man’s business is his own. That’s an unwritten policy. Just about the only one. But if I may be so presumptuous, let me give you a piece of what I’ve learned off line. Healthcare makes you a hostage. That fantasy the companies give you about a lasting, perfect life holds no more water than a leprechaun’s pot. It’s pixie dust. Something’s going to get you. Not even Grade Ones live forever. But you’ve got to understand that to let it go. The doctors and drugs. If you can’t say goodbye to them, you can’t be an ollie. You’re going to have to strap on your kneepads, go back to whatever job you despised, and grovel.”

  “If I may be so presumptuous,” McCallum said. “That’s some kind of pain.”

  “Pain’s the kin that knows us,” Snyder said. She walked like a cat. None of McCallum’s senses warned him she was coming. Green work pants, tight white shirt, she tied her still wet hair in a tail as she neared. McCallum couldn’t do anything but stare.

  “Pain’s the wind that blows us,” John sang.

  “It seems you’re getting along with John.” She took a mug and filled it with coffee.

  John said, “You make that sound like a miracle.”

  Snyder sat down. “Sometimes men a…” She splayed the fingers on both her hands and meshed them together like cogs. “…click. Sometimes, not so much.”

  “How about you?” John mimicked her gesture. “You two clicking?”

  Snyder turned to McCallum and curled her lips into a wavy smile. “He’ll do.”

  “Do what?”

  “I’ll wait to see what comes next,” Snyder said.

  McCallum raised the coffee mug to his mouth and said, “me too” before he took another long, warm, invigorating sip.

  * * *

  The Ambyr educational system recognized Emory’s talents from the tests he took at age twelve. He planned. He organized. Their tests discovered his innate propensity for hierarchy and mathematical methodology. They put him on track to be a systems engineer at age 13. He never struggled with his destiny. He actually found some comfort in it, the regimen and the logic.

  Now that logic told him to run.

  “We will never have a chance like this again,” Campbell said. He stood in grimy yellow overalls, black plastic boots pulled up over them, his face wet with underground moisture and nervous perspiration, holding specs of sewer waste like glue.

  Emory peered back down the pipe. The next crew had yet to start out. He held up his bracelet. Egg white ceramic, an inch thick, he knew it was supposed to survive a cave-in. It would tell the company where the trouble lay when the workers were uncommunicative paste.

  Emory reached up and released the cross brace. The bar retracted into itself a few inches. He lowered it to his s
houlder and put his left wrist against the chipped, curving wall of the tunnel.

  “Crank it,” he said.

  Campbell reached across him and turned the winch-like lever, pressing the foot of the brace against Emory’s cuff. The crack startled them both. Emory pulled his hand out and they switched positions. He crushed Campbell’s ceramic band and it fell to the puddle at the bottom of the tunnel, next to his.

  “We’ve got about four minutes,” Emory said. Campbell started back down the sewer pipe. Emory grabbed his arm. “That’s what they’d expect.” He started running into the old section of the sewer, the section to be replaced over the next few weeks.

  “A… yeah,” Campbell said. “Because it’s the only way out.”

  “Actually, I think there’s no way out. But it’s too late now.”

  Emory had charted out exactly how he’d ask Lillian to marry him, determining the perfect time and location to generate maximum romance. He chose the swings, on her school’s playground, at dusk, in autumn. The scent of fallen leaves in the crisp air. Now, he concentrated on that smell, pulling it hard from the back of his memory. He could, by the power of his will, overcome the stench of crap. Urine, feces and rot filled his nose, splashed up by their running feet. Their flashlights slashed back and forth across walls, barely cutting the darkness. Emory’s heart fought his breastbone. His mouth sucked itself dry. He stumbled, recovered, caught the reflective eyes of a rat in his light, and kept running.

  “You… know…,” Campbell huffed, “there’s a cut off. A… barrier.”

  “And…” Emory squeezed out.

  A rusty slab of metal cut across the tunnel. A large, riveted ring edged the pipe. Little streams of water shimmered and fell from two spots around the top. Emory ran right to it, turned and bent over. He grabbed his knees, giving himself a moment to breathe.

  “A ladder.” Campbell panted next to him.

  “Figured,” Emory said. “Hoped, really.”

  Emory climbed the iron rungs embedded in the concrete, next to the seven-foot valve. The round iron plate covered the top of the manhole. He managed to jostle it, but couldn’t get the lid up out of its impression.

  “Can’t,” he said.