by Mike McCarty
“But I can’t wait anymore,” Eve said. “I must eat–I must! Please let us finish this.”
“I only follow the rules,” Jeb said. “My task is to count the sins. Since there are no more to count, I must conclude–”
“I pleasured myself,” Moses blurted out. “Just before the meeting. My hand is still slick with my seed.”
The room was quiet.
Jeb smiled for the first time all day. “Thank you. That is indeed a sin.” He handed Moses a silver token. “We now officially have two-thousand.”
Robed acolytes came forth out of the shadows with slender golden posts on wheeled bases. They arranged these in a pattern throughout the Great Hall. Then they connected the posts with purple velvet robes, creating a long maze that looped around the sacred crap table.
“Everyone who has sinned, line up in the order of the number on your token. Everyone else, please step aside,” Jeb said.
After everyone had lined up, the acolytes came forth with buckets filled with ashes. They used the ash to write everyone’s numbers on their foreheads. Then they collected the tokens piled them up on the crap table.
Jeb then closed his eyes, thrust his hand into the pile and grabbed a token.
The people in the velvet-roped line-up stared at Jeb with fearful eyes. And yet they also began to wipe drool from their eager mouths.
Jeb looked at the token he had selected. “Number one-hundred and thirty-eight.” He looked in the Sin Book. “Here it is. ‘Adam drank alcohol until he became ill.’ Yes, he will do. Adam, step forward.”
Adam was a short, bald man who was now sweating heavily.
“Please wait here,” Jeb said.
Jeb’s boss made him nervous. This privileged individual was the only person allowed to live in the casino-hotel-church. He lived alone in a high suite–nobody was allowed to go up except Jeb, after the count.
Jeb climbed the stairs, up and up and up.
The crowd waited.
Eventually Jeb’s boss followed his minion back to the hall.
The people, as always, gasped when they saw the boss. His was an appearance to which one could never become accustomed. His skin was as orange as the sun, and his slit-pupil eyes were bright green. His lips were bright red and his hair was long and black. He wore no clothes but carried a burlap sack.
He looked strange, yet in their sun-baked desert world, he didn’t look out of place. In fact, he resembled a desert snake.
He was Legion, and he was many.
The people of the city without a name had given much discussion to Legion, for his page was all they had left of the Bible. Their thoughts drew him to them, and when he arrived, he struck a new bargain with them. A whole new system of vice management.
“Two-thousand sins...” the demon hissed, with a voice like a whispering congregation of evil. “A feast of sin for me. And now, a feast for you.”
Legion stared at Adam intently. The bald man began to swell, and he hunched over until at last he had to drop to all fours. Bristles popped out of his pink flesh, which was becoming thick and leathery. His neck bulged out, his eyes sank inward and his nose lengthened into a quivering snout.
The people of the nameless city brought out ropes and soon they had the fat hog hanging by its hindlegs from a beam above one of the stages. Legion pulled two objects from his sack. He stuck an apple in the pig’s mouth, and then handed a butcher knife to Eve and allowed her to slit the beast’s throat.
“Again you have saved us,” she said.
The green-eyed sin-eater smiled and looked out over the Great Hall, at the sun-scorched, hunger-maddened masses. So many to share so little...Some would not eat at all. In the end, most would only get a scrap of meat–enough to keep them alive and desperate in this casino Hell of their own making.
“Yes,” he said. “You are lucky to have me.”
Night of the Squealers
“Mmrrrrwww. Mmrrrrrrwww. Mmmrrrrrrrwwwww.”
Keaton looked up from his eighth round of solitaire, which he was losing, just like the seven before. Some damned jazz cat was prowling around. The noise seemed to be coming from the hall outside the door of the storage bay. He spun around in his wheeled chair and kicked the door shut. He had no idea how one of those cats could have found its way from Elliot’s top-floor office, all the way down to the Dungeon. It was as if they knew he was allergic to them, and they wanted to shake a little dander in his path, just for kicks.
He spun back to face his desk. The five of spades had to be buried under one of the unturned cards. He gathered up the deck, shuffled and started a new game. Cards helped him to pass the time until the next ship arrived.
He was handling the boredom a lot better than his two Choom co-workers, Lang and Grot. They spent their time sweeping the storage bay, over and over and over and...“Take five, guys,” Keaton said. “You’re gonna wear away the floor with all that sweeping. It’s clean, okay?”
The two Chooms turned toward him, smiling their razor-sliced ear-to-ear smiles. They shook their heads like excited Earth puppies. Then they went back to sweeping.
Keaton smiled. “Pumpkinheads,” he whispered to the queen of hearts. “Look who I’m working with. A couple of jack-o’-lanterns.”
Still, he was glad to have their company. They were hard workers and they were always cheery, even though they worked in the Dungeon. That’s what he called the basement-level storage bay, since it was so gloomy and a little clammy, too. The ceiling was covered with a cobwebbed mess of air ducts, wires and damp water pipes–it looked like someone had strung a giant’s guts from the rafters.
At least the Dungeon was better than the noisy typing and beeping monitors on the second level with all those creepy Tikkihottos, who had those gruesome feelers for eyes. It was even better than the office of his boss, Elliot. The night manager was a fat, bald man whose workspace smelled of old cheese sandwiches and unchanged litterboxes. Elliot was always playing loud jazz music, and he kept a bunch of cats that triggered Keaton’s allergies. Only Elliot was allowed to have pets at work. The company treated him like a king, though Keaton considered him more of a joker.
Tranquility, Inc., the company they worked for, was an Oasis operation that used to employ slave labor–androids, clones and mutants. Five years ago, the Earth corporation Mesopotamia bought the company, replacing the slaves with humans, Chooms and the Tikkihottos. Production went up tenfold, but so did theft. The company brought Elliot from Earth to help with their security and inventory problems–but the only things he brought to the company were his cats and old jazz records.
Keaton use to spend his work hours eating lotus and reading Earth books. But with Mesopotamia’s recent policy of random drug testing, getting caught with lotus in his system would be grounds for losing his job–and it was hard enough to find work in Punktown.
So solitaire and synthesized cigarettes were his drugs of choice now. He knew the syn-cigs were worse for him than real cigarettes–and harder to give up than lotus–but he couldn’t break the habit.
Keaton’s job performance evaluation was in two weeks. He’d probably just get his usual review–“adequate, needs improvement in the following areas,” meaning all areas–with his usual two-and-a-half percent cost-of-living raise. He wanted to return to Earth, since he hadn’t been there for years. But he knew he would probably never go back. Too much damned effort. He didn’t even go back for his mother’s funeral.
Lang and Grot started humming some monotonous religious Choom chant that sounded to Keaton like kaz-kaz-kaz-kaz, cabron-cabron-cabron-cabron.
“Guys, turn down the chanting,” he said. “I’m trying to concentrate on my game and you’re driving me nucking futs.”
Lang and Grot gleefully shook their heads, and then continued with their chanting at a softer, barely audible level.
T
ranquility, Inc. was a combination warehouse and distribution center. The space barges that landed there were basically giant greenhouses that would grow crops from their home planets, and by the time they reached Oasis, would harvest them. Those plants could never grow under the harsh conditions of Oasis, so the harvests were a highly valuable commodity. The barge crews usually took a few days to finish up their harvests and unload their ships. Teleportation between planets was more common than space flights, but teleportation had one major problem: it made vegetables taste funny. A nauseating, burnt-rubber after-taste. So the agriculture industry had to stick with space travel.
It had been more than two weeks since the last ship had landed at Tranquility, Inc., which was located far outside even the outskirts of Punktown’s Industrial Square. There were no buildings near the warehouse. Potential neighbors feared that a space barge might crash into them. That left Keaton and his gang stranded out in an enormous, otherwise empty lot that stretched kilometers in all directions.
A red light lit up on the wall above Keaton’s desk. That meant a ship was coming in and the tracker ray would lock on it and then automatically land it.
“It’s going to be a while, guys,” Keaton said to the two Chooms, who kept staring at the red light. “Those Tikkihottos are slow. It’ll take them half an hour to enter all the authorization data, and we can’t help with unloading until then. They should put more Chooms in that department. That would speed things up. They only have two right now.”
“Yes. Freder and Josaphat,” Grot said, leaning on his broom.
“While we’re waiting, you two should grab a bite to eat.”
Lang and Grot looked at each other and nodded. They sat on the floor next to Keaton’s desk, where they both pulled plastic bags out of their pockets and started snacking on dilkies. Lang held out some for Keaton, but he shook his head. He always had a hard time eating the fried, gritty roots. They always left a greasy yet oddly dusty taste in his mouth. The Chooms had no problem eating the forage–with their extra rows of molars, it was like eating Earth cotton candy.
Keaton kept playing solitaire, hand after hand. He looked down and noticed that the Chooms had finished eating and were simply watching the red light again. He checked his watch: forty-five minutes since the ship had landed. That was odd. Even with those slow Tikkihottos, it usually never took that long.
He checked his communications radio next. It was on and working, so he
should have received a call by now. He pushed the button down and said, “Wheaton or Percy–are you there?”
No answer.
Keaton decided to call on the other Chooms. “Freder or Josaphat–do you hear me?” He didn’t know the names of any of the Tikkihottos and didn’t want to talk to them anyway.
Again, no answer.
Silence from Chooms, the most helpful folks on the whole planet?
Keaton was starting to worry.
Keaton waited another fifteen minutes and then decided it was time for some investigating.
He went up to the space barge with Lang and Grot. The ship, quaintly named Busy Bee, was docked, but no one was around–no crew members, no Tranquility, Inc. technicians, not even an ugly old Tikkihotto. He couldn’t understand what was going on. By now the landing area should have been swarming with activity. He had worked with the Busy Bee a few times before and remembered the access code for the airlock. So he went aboard with the Chooms, armed with freshly charged faser-sticks. A single shock from a faser-stick couldn’t kill anybody, but it sure as Hell could knock practically any living creature on its ass.
There were flame-guns and plasma capsule blasters in Elliot’s office, but those were not allowed on the ships. Firing weapons like those on a space barge could cause an explosion, since most of the larger ships had lunglilies growing onboard to keep the air fresh. Lunglilies were carnivorous plants equipped with huge, brightly colored bladders that gave off puffs of pure oxygen. On the home world of the plants, the oxygen drew smaller creatures to the leafy predators. Onboard space barges, the crew fed the lunglilies soy protein, which Keaton thought was probably a big disappointment for the plants. He’d never found soy satisfying as an entree option, so why should a lunglily be any different?
He didn’t know where the Busy Bee had been manufactured, but he knew it couldn’t be Earth. The ceilings were too low. Plus, the designs on the walls incorporated complex alien pictograms that reminded him of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Of course, the written language of the Pharaohs had never included images of starships or aliens with tentacles instead of arms.
“Wheaton? Percy?” Keaton yelled. “Freder? Josaphat?” The names echoed down the corridors.
They walked through the ship, perplexed by the disappearance of both the crew and the Tranquility, Inc. employees who should have been onboard by now. Lang and Grot whispered nervously to each other–it took a lot to rattle a Choom. Plus, there were odd, flowering silver vines growing here and there on the ship. Keaton had never seen anything like it before. Weeds, running rampant on a space barge? The vines grew out of storage cupboards, desk drawers and toilets–any nook or cranny where something organic might have been left behind.
At one point, they turned down a corridor and saw that the path was completely blocked by silver vines. Keaton recalled from his earlier visits to the Busy Bee that this hall was lined with snack machines.
The three walked to the ship’s administrative offices, hoping to find the captain or at least a well-informed secretary. But instead, they found two dead animals on the floor, with silver vines growing out of various orifices.
“What the fuck is that?” Keaton said, giving the closest carcass a little kick for emphasis. The barges were prohibited from bringing livestock or other life-forms, including pets, onboard.
Keaton bent down for a better look at one of the dead things. He held his nose, since excrement was leaking out of it. The creature looked like some kind of enormous rat, about the size of a healthy tomcat, covered with bony plates like those of a nine-banded armadillo. It had a cruel, batlike face, a mouth loaded with pointed yellow teeth, and a sharp stinger for a tail. Both of the creatures had been stabbed in the eye–one still had a screwdriver embedded in it skull. Evidently somebody had figured out a weak spot. So where was that person now?
“Damn. A thing like that has no business being on a barge,” Keaton said. The Chooms nodded solemnly.
“Smells like krogg,” Lang said.
Next they headed toward the crop chambers. Maybe that’s where all the crew members were. Halfway there, they reached an area where five major hallways met. There was a vine-choked Starblast Coffee kiosk in the center of the intersection.
“Wheaton? Percy? Freder? Josaphat?” Keaton yelled, louder and more urgently, hoping that his voice would carry through most of the ship from here. “Anybody home? Come on, wake up, folks! There’s work to be done!”
This time, his shouts brought a response: a chorus of hungry squeals, like wild hogs on the rampage.
A dozen of the rat-armadillo beasts swarmed down one of the hallways, straight at them. Their squealing was so loud and high-pitched, it hurt Keaton’s ears. Grot was standing closest to that hall, and in a flash they were all over him, tearing at his flesh.
“Holy krogg! Get off him!” Keaton screamed. He poked frantically at the creatures’ faces with his faser-stick, but that only seemed to enrage them. They would back off for a moment, slightly dazed, and then charge forward again.
Keaton and Lang ran back toward the ship’s airlock. Soon the squealers following them were joined by even more from other parts of the ship. At one point Keaton looked back, and saw that the entire hall behind him was practically a snarling wall of rolling, writhing squealers, all striving to be the first to feed.
As he ran, he suddenly realized that Lang was no longer by his side. He glanced back again a
nd saw that the Choom had fallen. A second later, the squealers were upon him, ripping him to ribbons.
Keaton reached the airlock, raced through and closed the entrance behind him. He stopped to catch his breath, and look around the empty landing bay.
Still empty.
Where were all the other Tranquility, Inc. employees?
A little squealer, no bigger than a kitten, ran out from under a nearby tool cart and bit his shoe. With a startled cry, he zapped the tiny thing’s head with his faser-stick five times, killing it.
So. The squealers were already out of the ship. On the loose.
That gave him a good idea of where most of his coworkers were: shredded and wetly nestled inside of numerous digestive tracts.
Krogg.
He walked to the elevator area and pressed the UP button. Elliot was on the top floor–hopefully the squealers hadn’t found their way there yet.
He pulled a syn-cig out of a pack in his shirt pocket, lit it and inhaled. This little episode would be an interesting test of Elliot’s managerial skills. With any luck, the fat bastard would decide to pack up his jazz records and cats and head straight back to Earth.
Maybe I’d better get my ass back to Earth, too, Keaton thought as he stepped into the elevator. While my ass is still attached.
Elliot sat in his executive leather chair, listening to the wailing horn of John Coltrane, which sounded like the musical equivalent of axe murder, on his Victrola gramophone. It had cost him a small fortune to get Earth jazz records, but hey, what else was money for, besides doughnuts and cat food?
He sat every night, working at his desk and listening to his collection with his cats, all named after famous twentieth-century Earth jazz musicians. Chet Baker was an orange tabby, Zoot Sims was a Siamese, Duke Ellington was a long-haired Persian and Bix Beiderbecke was an Angora who had a chronic problem with runny eyes. Louis Armstrong was a Burmese, Charlie Parker was a Manx and John Coltrane was a fat brown tom who was licking himself in time to his namesake’s music.