by Jacob Rayne
You’ve got to do this.
For them.
Don’t let their deaths be for nothing.
He spat foul-tasting sputum into the toilet bowl, wiped it from his chin with the toilet roll.
As he stood, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.
Blood-spattered.
Sunken, glazed eyes.
He looked like a killer.
You are a killer.
The thought saddened him.
But he drove it from his mind.
This was how the world was now, through no fault of his own.
Adapt or perish.
That was the new commandment.
He stood, his legs threatening to dump him on the bare floorboards. His head spun and he felt certain he was going to faint, but his white-knuckled hand gripped the sink and prevented him from falling.
He sucked in air and closed his eyes, trying his best to get a grip on himself.
Despite his positive mindset, he was terrified and repulsed by the events that had unfolded.
Things got even worse when he looked back at the corpse.
The eyes bulged from the skull as though being forced out from inside.
Thick gore stained his lips like badly applied lipstick. His face was contorted as though he had died in agony.
Tears again filled Brother’s eyes. The boy was not much older than him. Twelve at the very oldest.
This, no doubt, was not how he had thought his last evening on earth would play out; drowned by a fugitive in a filthy bathtub.
‘I’m sorry,’ Brother sobbed, his view of the dead kid mercifully distorted by the veil of tears.
Before his clarity of vision returned, he reached into the bathtub.
The kid’s trousers were wet and slimy.
He gulped hard and moved his hand into the lad’s trouser pocket. Sludge flooded out over his wrist as he forced it in deeper.
He smiled grimly as he pulled out the wallet and saw what he had hoped to find; the dead kid’s ID card.
The realisation that he didn’t even know this poor bastard’s name hit him suddenly, making him feel strangely ashamed.
The kid looked enough like him to pass a quick flash of the ID.
Sustained scrutiny may turn out to be a problem, but he hoped to not be in the city much longer.
The downside to this was that looking at the dead kid’s face was like seeing his own corpse. Like a glimpse into the future, a sneaky peek at the hand fate had dealt him.
What it did in fact was the opposite of what he’d thought; it made him even more determined to not end up like this kid.
To the point where he even committed the dead kid’s face to memory.
Whenever his resolve weakened, he decided he would conjure up this mental image and say, ‘That will not be me.’
He put a bed sheet down on the floor and set about trying to lift the boy’s body out of the bathtub.
This was easier said than done; the boy was a dead weight now that life had deserted him.
Brother wrapped the sheet around the boy and dragged him to the garbage chute in the kitchen wall.
He pulled out his own ID from where he’d hidden it in his backpack.
His eyes were glued to it for a good time, taking in every detail, from his name and date of birth, to the different fonts and italics used on the various categories, to the photo that had been taken of him a few months ago, in a jubilant mood, only weeks away from meeting his baby sister.
He shook his head to distract him from the thought.
Then he sighed deeply, and kissed himself goodbye.
His lip print was still fading from the laminated surface of the ID when he placed it into the dead kid’s wallet and pushed it into his pocket.
Then he sent him skidding down the garbage chute.
He stripped and flung his old clothes down the chute after the dead kid.
From this moment on he was no longer his old self, he was Davey Knight.
The first thing the newly-christened Davey Knight did was spend some time under the shower spray, periodically checking that the water wasn’t finding its way onto the floor and blowing his cover.
It felt as though every speck of blood had been removed from his person but he gave himself another few washes just in case.
When he climbed out and towelled himself dry, he felt stupid for spending so long under the spray – after all, the Cull Crew could have barged the door down only to find him butt naked.
But damn if it hadn’t been worth the risk.
He dressed in a fresh set of clothes from his backpack.
Now that he felt safe, his energy deserted him.
His head swam with images of what had – not even an hour ago – happened to his family (and what he had just done to the annoying but ultimately innocent boy) and his legs buckled.
He fell hard, sobbing and panting for breath.
Davey awoke with a panicked cry. He looked around, wondering where the hell he was.
Tears rose, unbidden, in his eyes as a memory of cradling his baby sister for the first time popped into his head.
He remembered the way she’d felt, the strange smell she’d had, the sticky mixture of blood and creamy stuff that had covered her forehead.
He’d been the first one to hold her, as Dad had been at work and Mam was still asleep from the painkillers.
Thoughts hit him like punches from a heavyweight boxer: I’ve failed.
I should’ve saved her.
I could’ve done more to stop him.
He curled in a ball, tears racking his small frame. He tried to picture her the way she’d been, rather than the way she’d ended up, but failed.
She had been perfect, innocent, frail. She should have had so much more to look forward to.
He looked at the twin pools of tears on the floor. The taste of salt was strong in his airwaves.
He struggled to breath, as though his sorrow was crushing the life from him.
Forcing himself to be calm, he pulled himself to his knees.
You knew this was coming.
Deal with it.
If you can’t come to terms with it, then you may as well take that knife in the corner and...
He sniffed hard, again backhanded tears from his eyes.
You’re dead if you can’t think straight, so get it out of your head.
He closed his eyes, feeling already how hot and swollen they were.
He inhaled deeply.
Held it.
Let it out.
In his head, a flash of the cullsman wiping his sister’s mangled skull off his boot.
He gritted his teeth, grunted, forced the image out of his mind.
He refused to let this break him.
It took a huge effort of will to calm himself, but he managed it.
His mind was clear.
He needed to think like them; cold, logical.
They’d be expecting him to leave the building right about now.
He’d packed a tin opener and enough tinned food to last for a week, all stashed up here on previous visits.
But his plans were disrupted when he again heard footsteps outside the door.
Shit, he thought. Why did I let my guard down?
This time he felt certain that the cullsmen had found their way to his door.
He glanced around, in utter panic. There were no obvious places he could hide.
The door to the room jolted as a fist struck it.
His heart did a somersault in his chest. He forced himself to think.
‘Open this goddamned door,’ an authoritative voice barked, confirming to Davey that it was no kid this time.
Finally, inspiration struck him and he moved across the room to the garbage chute.
He climbed inside, carefully shutting the hatch mere seconds before the door to the room flew open for the second time in as many hours.
He clung desperately to the metal lip around the edges of the hatch.
Through a sliver of a gap on the right side of the frame, he saw that it was indeed a cullsman looking for him.
The footsteps moved all around the apartment, accompanied by muffled threats and curses.
Davey felt like his breathing was far too loud in the enclosed chute, so he carefully gripped the edges of the metal slide and slid himself down so he was away from the opening.
He was struggling to keep his grip, his fingers and biceps blazing with the effort.
Panic filled his mind when he heard the footsteps approaching the opening of the chute.
But as the hatch opened, revealing the sinister cullsman’s helmet, his grip gave out for good, sending him flying down the garbage chute.
Steamtalk 1: An interlude
Trust me when I say the mean-ass streets of this city ain’t no place for a young boy, especially after nightfall.
Years past, the city had enforced a strict curfew. Any poor sap found on the streets who wasn’t on their way to or from work was shot there and then, no questions asked, no excuses accepted.
The zero tolerance policy had made all but those with balls like melons (or brains like oatmeal, I guess) stay indoors.
Now, cutbacks in the Cull Crews, Gods blight ’em, left too few boots on the ground and the armed psychos in uniform are now a thing of the past in these parts.
The criminal element – yours truly among ’em, I ain’t gonna bullshit ya here – came to appreciate this and took the opportunity to help ourselves to an all-you-can-beat frenzy from dusk till the ever-loving dawn.
Those lucky folks who ain’t screwed in the head or a slave to the hooch or the medicine decided it was much safer to stay indoors after dark.
But still, a late night trip out for extra food or some illegally obtained alcohol (no one is allowed to drink now, due to changes in employment law. All employees are to be at peak performance levels at all times) was deemed worth the risk by many who would later come to rue the day.
The back alleys were a haven for the Hoochmen, Gods bless ’em – the peddlers of the bootlegged liquor that so many people, myself included, craved.
In recent years, they also started dealing in what us street folks called medicine; new, mind-bending drugs perfect for anyone wanting to escape the monotony of life in this over-regulated hellhole where you pretty much have to check with the Mayor and his cronies if it’s ok for you to take a shit.
The levels of us City Hall-wouldn’t-piss-on-us-if-we-were-on-fire homeless fucks were rising due to Concannon’s, one of the major food factories, going bust. A shortage of wheat or some other grain had put this company out of business and even the millionaire playboy owner, Max Williams, was out on his ear.
If you didn’t work you didn’t get to live indoors, it was as simple as that. Consequently most people lived like sheep, obeying the rules regarding alcohol and drugs and followed the City Hall-prescribed sleeping routine in order to keep their performance levels at their maximum.
Losing your job due to, say, a failed hooch/medicine test (most companies employed a team of jobsworthy motherfuckers to perform random checks at least once a fortnight), a short period of sickness or a series of messed up sleep/work calculations, or simply not hitting your ‘Productivity’ (whatever the hell that means) target for a few consecutive days was sure as shit gonna land you on the streets by the start of the following week.
In exchange for their time and their right to think freely, most workers were given weekly rations of some basic foodstuffs – getting cold hard cash for an honest day’s graft is a thing of the past now too, I’m afraid to say – but this stopped in a real hurry if your job went out the window.
No food was given to the unemployed.
And you became top of the list for the Cull Crew’s next visit.
Some extra food was available to buy for a vastly inflated price, but most made do with what they had – so to be out of work was to be starving, as the only other means of getting your grubby mitts on some snap was either raking through the dumpsters, or turning to illegal methods like breaking into other houses and stealing their food.
Remind me to tell you another time about Baz Sheils and Gaz Dobson, and their attempt at knocking off the food wagon that supplies the workers’ rations. It’s real good for a hoot, I can tell ya.
Like the weird new breed of flies that now roam these parts, us homeless are violent and desperate.
Anyone on the streets after dark is asking to have their belongings removed forcibly from their person.
And that’s just if they’re lucky.
Us derelicts wear black hooded robes that, when combined with our pale, emaciated appearances, make us look like the Grim Reaper.
For this reason, regular folks call us Grims.
Any money that we can steal – getting harder and harder these days as those pricks in charge con the working man out of pretty much everything he works himself into an early grave for – goes on either food or bootleg liquor as this serves to make life on these brutal streets slightly more bearable.
The amount of Grims is still rising, even though the factories are struggling to operate and some of their workforce are practically dropping dead through exhaustion.
No one wants to hire us Grims and us Grims are happier free-wheelin’ than we ever were getting shafted day in day out by those supposed to be looking out for our best interests, regardless of the dangers we face every hour of the ever-loving day.
It’s got me breathing hard just thinking about the working man’s lifestyle – thirteen hour days in most places.
Go home, eat, sleep and come back and do it all again.
And expect to be grateful for the privilege.
Not for us Grims.
Fuck that.
‘More to life than work,’ I always said, even before it happened.
The workers keep on digging their own graves through fear of what will happen if they lose their jobs and thus their homes, but us Grims have long stopped caring about that shit.
There’s food and places to sleep all around, if you know where to look.
Us Grims tend to band together – safety in numbers or something like that – in big groups sometimes a hundred strong. We call these clouds, cos we just kinda drift wherever the hell we feel like going.
Clouds of rival Grims have been known to have wars in which many of them die horrible deaths.
Ain’t no one more desperate than someone who’s hungry, mark my words.
Sometimes clouds turn on themselves, causing civil wars between previously friendly Grims.
It’s always a hoot when that happens.
Life is on a knife edge out here on the streets; any moment could be your last.
The main place for regular folk to avoid is under the old freeway.
The largest concentration of Grims live down there and it’s a vast maze of wooden and metal shacks lit by the light from hundreds of fires, big and small.
It seems welcoming down there, for sure.
I can see why the lost and the lonely might think that.
But it ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, I can tell ya.
Some people wander down there and don’t ever find their way back out again.
Solomon King – known as King Solomon to his loyal followers – is the leader of the Freeway band of Grims (or Freelands as he calls it with huge, technicoloured spraypaint murals on the walls of the shacks and the concrete sides of the freeway walls).
And, out on the streets, Solomon is as powerful as the city’s mayor.
In his prime he had been nearly seven feet tall and tipping the scales at almost twenty stone of muscle, but all the years of hooch and medicine have taken their toll on him.
He’s shrunk a little in recent years – that he has thrived on these mean streets for years should tell you a lot about him too – but is still a man of huge physical and material power.
Pretty much everything that happens between the rival factions of Grims goes through Solo
mon.
He’d been a worker at one of the farms out in the country when the production of milk had stopped.
Some dickhead had created an artificial milk that was capable of being mass-produced for much cheaper than cow’s milk and, just like that, the farms were closed.
No nutrients in it, just cheap and nasty shit.
No one ever took the time to properly test it, but it’s rumoured to have some pretty shitty side effects.
Course, that’s if any of us live long enough to develop ’em.
Livestock was slaughtered and burnt – back in those days there had been a surplus of food, but how that extra meat would have come in handy now.
Farms were bulldozed and the remains turned to ashes to ensure nothing ever came out of them again.
The maker of the milk powder had been a friend of the mayor, hence how he managed to get away with this bullshittery.
I’m sure one day Solomon is gonna make that sack of shit hurt for what he did, but he seems to be enjoying his life as king of the streets so much that he can wait.
The flames were barely extinguished by the time Solomon was adapting to his change in circumstances to avoid going the way of the farm’s butchered livestock.
With his farm-worker strength and the rage that burnt in him due to the sudden ending of a life that had been pretty damned good, it wasn’t long before he worked his way to the top of the food chain.
Back then there had only been a couple of hundred Grims – even I was gainfully employed back then, when they still gave you a wage instead of just some milk powder, bread and potatoes – and the top dog at the time had been a man called Wayne Cross, a psychotic ex-preacher who had been removed from his post for getting a bit too fire and brimstone with his confession penances.
Word had spread of this new kid on the streets; a red-haired, bushy bearded, raging ball of muscle who was starting to influence the Grims enough for them to challenge Cross’s way of doing things.
Cross, you see, was working the system very much like cocksuckers in City Hall ran things – doling out meagre rations (enough to keep you ticking over but not enough to banish that blazing in the belly that kept you working to obtain more) and forcing them to work long hours setting up camp, foraging (an all-purpose Grim word for mugging, food runs into the apartment blocks and a few other unsavoury processes which I won’t go into here), and whatever else he decided he wanted doing.