Shadows of Tockland

by Jeffrey Aaron Miller

  Chapter Twenty

  A Long Ride

  David awoke to rough hands slinging him into a cold, dark room. He landed hard on a slick, metal surface, and then, before he could get his bearings, was picked up, pushed down and folded uncomfortably. He opened his eyes and saw shadows moving across a bar of light, and then a door slammed, and he was in darkness again. He tried to adjust his position and realized his hands were caught on something. He shook them and heard a metallic clank, and at last his situation became clear. He was seated on a long metal bench inside a tiny room. His hands were cuffed, the cuffs attached to a metal clip underneath the bench. This put his hands between his knees and forced him to lean forward, unable to sit up straight.

  The only light in the room came from a slit high on the wall to his right, but as his eyes adjusted to that light, he saw the others in the room. Across from him, seated side by side on another long bench, Karl and Cakey and Gooty, each bent forward, hands cuffed. Gooty was awake but slumped forward, head bent almost all the way to his knees. To David’s right, on the same bench as him, he saw Annabelle, crying quietly, her tears dripping onto her shoes, and beyond her a hatless Telly. All of them had been stripped of weapons, and even Annabelle’s knapsack was gone. The sounds of Fayette seeped through the walls like echoes of a fading dream—the shelling had ceased, but he heard the endless wail of the strange alarm and the rumble of vehicles moving through the city, crushing rubble under tires and treads.

  “Move out! Move out!” A hard voice, speaking from somewhere outside.

  The whole room shook, an engine roared to life, and then the light in the slitted window shifted. Not a room, after all, but the inside of a vehicle. He scanned the walls, smooth metal plates bolted together. A tiny vent overhead fed air in, but it wasn’t enough to keep the small space from feeling stuffy.

  “Not being able to sit up,” Cakey muttered. “That’s the part I’m gonna hate. Add that to the list of things I gotta avenge, folks.”

  “Stop it,” Annabelle said, her voice breaking. “You’re not going to avenge anything. Just stop it.”

  Cakey grunted and bowed his head.

  They rode for a while in miserable silence with no idea where they were going. Through the tiny window, David saw a patch of pale sky, broken occasionally by bands of dark smoke. That told him they were either still in Fayette or close to it.

  Finally, Karl could take it no longer. He, of all of them, looked the most uncomfortable, his massive frame crushed downward, arms pulling against the cuffs.

  “I can’t believe we surrendered,” he said. “After fighting through all the rubes, we just up and surrendered.”

  “What were we supposed to do?” Telly said, softly and sadly. “If we’d tried to fight, they’d have shot us. If we’d tried to run, they’d have shot us. It was bad luck, that’s all. How could we have known they were gonna come through the east gate?”

  Karl shook his head and said no more. Long minutes passed. The jostling of the road made the cuffs bite into David’s wrists. This didn’t bother him nearly as much as the fact that he couldn’t wrap his arms around his aching stomach. The tiny space grew increasingly warm and stank of sweat and misery. The next one to speak was Gooty, rousing himself suddenly and sitting up as straight as he could. He had a large ugly knot on top of his head poking through the bowl of dark hair, and a rivulet of blood, long since dried, tracing a line down his forehead and around his right eye.

  “Didn’t we know it would come to this, sooner or later?” he said in a voice thick and slurring. “All of us, together, facing some miserable end. We know what’s going to happen here, don’t we? Vamos a morir. They’ll take us to their base or to a prison or some hole in the ground, torture us for information and kill us.”

  “Optimistic as ever, Goot,” Cakey said.

  Gooty started to respond, then seemed to change his mind, made a disgusted sound and looked away.

  “We’ll have our moment,” Cakey said. “Don’t lose hope, friends.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Annabelle said. “Shut up, Gavril. Nobody wants to hear your insanity right now.”

  “Everyone’s resorting to the old name, all of a sudden,” Cakey said, glaring at her. “Why is that? Are we losing sight of the proper order of things in our hour of desperation?”

  “It’s the only way to get you to shut up,” Annabelle said.

  “Am I shutting up? No, I’m not,” he said, and laughed. “Buck up, you clowns. We’re going right into the heart of hell, and we’ll have our moment. I’m telling you we will. I’ve dreamed of this.”

  “He really is loco,” Gooty said. “We all joke about it, but it’s not a joke. He really is a lunatic, and he’s enjoying every minute of this.”

  “Can we all shut up, please,” Karl said. “My back hurts. My wrists hurt. And all your nattering voices are like fingernails on my brain.”

  David sighed and shut his eyes. Bickering, even now. What was wrong with these people? He tried to tune them out and sink into the shadows behind his eyes. And, for some reason, he thought of his little bed mat in the corner of his upstairs bedroom in Mountainburg. A dark place, a quiet place, no guns or armies of sick, only one slovenly Vern. And had it really been so bad there? Nothing of that old life remained. If indeed the truck and trailers had burned—as they must have, judging by the amount of smoke he’d seen beyond the southern gate—then that meant his clothes and his gymnastics book were also gone. He felt a little twinge of sadness at this. That book had been everything to him once. Now, it was ashes and memory.

  It was Telly’s turn to speak. He cleared his throat. “Look, Cakey is being Cakey, I’ll give you that, but he’s right about one thing—we shouldn’t lose hope, not yet. We’ve talked our way out of bad situations before. Yeah, maybe not this bad, but we have no beef with Tockland. We’ve done nothing against them.”

  “I have,” Annabelle said. “I ran away.”

  “Yeah, but you were a kid,” Telly said. “Nobody’s gonna recognize you. You said yourself most of your family was killed.”

  “It won’t matter,” she said. “Whether we’ve done something against them or not won’t matter. They’ll kill us for sport. That’s what you’ve brought us to, boss.”

  “Me?”

  “Belle’s right,” Gooty said. “Boss of this operation. You’re the one who makes the decisions, right? Always lording that over us, too, aren’t you? Why did we turn north from Port Shreve? Money to be made, that’s what you said. Did we suggest it? Did anyone of us come up with that idea? No, it’s always the little guy, enano feo, leading us from one problem to another.”

  Telly held his tongue through Gooty’s rant, but David heard him taking deep breaths. When Gooty was finally done, he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and spoke, the words coming low and fast, “Nobody forced any of you to stay with the Kroo, did they? None of you were under contract with me, and even if you were, what could I ever have done to stop you from leaving? You argued with me, you disagreed with me, called me every name in the book, but you stuck around, all of you. Even after your wife was gunned down, Goot, and you blamed us, you blamed me, you ranted and raved, but you still didn’t leave. You still didn’t leave!”

  “I had nowhere to go,” Gooty replied, but Telly spoke right over him.

  “Any of you could’ve left at any time,” Telly said. “At any of the little towns along the way. But you didn’t. You didn’t. Because you all wanted to be part of the show, whether onstage or offstage, you all wanted to be part of the show. You put up with one problem after another, just like me, because you wanted this life. Nobody forced it on you. So keep your part of the blame, all of you. I won’t take any more than my fair share.”

  This drove both Belle and Gooty to silence. Long, quiet minutes followed, stretching on into what must have been hours. Every part of David’s body felt uncomfortable. He was sore from fighting and running, and he was in the worst possible position for the muscles that ached. Al
l of this welled up inside of him, and it took every ounce of his strength to keep from breaking to pieces. Despite his efforts to block out the words, he had heard them, and Telly’s words pierced deeply. He had wanted this. Escaping Vern had been part of it, but only part. Leaving home, running away in the middle of the night with a half-full sack of clothes to join a bunch of strangers, he’d done it because he’d seen a glimpse of another life, a life of freedom and excitement, and he’d wanted it.

  And finally, his mind a blur of near-madness, his every muscle and joint screaming in agony, David felt the vehicle slowing, heard the low grinding of brakes, and the terrain beneath the tires became coarse and bumpy. They came to a stop, the engine sputtered and died and all was calm, if only for a minute and never again.

  “Hang in there, friends,” Cakey said, quietly. “It is a time of testing, nothing more. Be strong.”

  The back door opened, and bright light flooded into the tiny space. David blinked back tears of pain and turned away. When he looked back, he saw uniformed soldiers standing behind the vehicle. The one in front, wearing a black cap with a short plastic brim, stepped forward. His uniform was slightly different, with larger, more ornate buttons, and the silver star on his breast pocket also had a silver bar underneath it. He had a narrow face, thin lips, ice-blue eyes. He snapped his fingers at them.

  “Who speaks for this group?” he asked.

  Telly cleared his throat. “I suppose that would be me,” he said.

  “Really?” the solider said, one eyebrow going up. “Very well. I am Captain Helt. You will come with me.” He gestured to one of the solders behind him.

  “What about us?” Cakey asked.

  “Only this one,” Captain Helt said, gesturing at Telly. “For now.”

  The soldier climbed up into the vehicle, knelt down in front of Telly and fiddled with the clasp. After a moment, the cuffs popped free, and Telly was lifted to his feet. He started to climb down from the back of the vehicle on his own, but the soldier grabbed him under the armpits and lowered him.

  “Good luck, boss,” Cakey said.

  Captain Helt nodded at another soldier, and they slammed the door shut again. Just before it shut, they caught a glimpse of Telly being led across a dusty field toward a Quonset hut in the distance, and then he was gone. They listened for a bit to the sound of retreating footsteps.

  “I should’ve said something to him,” Annabelle said in a near-whisper. “Something nice. What if we never see him again?”

  Karl grunted thoughtfully and nodded. “Poor little guy. First he gets yelled at by his friends, then he gets tortured to death.”

  “I didn’t yell at him” Gooty replied. “I was upset.”

  “Ah, you’re always upset,” Karl said. “You've got one note—stupid clowns, stupid Telly, stupid everyone—and you've played it to death. If we're all gonna die, can you maybe give it a rest?”

  Gooty sighed. “Bueno. I’ll try.”

  With the engine off, no air came through the vent, and it quickly became stifling in the small space. David felt the crust of slime on his face melting, dripping off in a rainbow of organic colors.

  “You been awful quiet this whole ride, kiddo,” Cakey said. “How are you holding up over there?”

  When David tried to speak, his throat was so phlegmy that only a gurgling sound came out. He cleared his throat and tried again.

  “I think I’m losing my mind,” he said.

  “That’s the spirit,” Cakey replied. “We’ll have our moment, Disturby Dave. Just you wait and see. Grandma baptized me in the cerulean waters of the Suceava and placed a blessing on me that cannot fade until the ever-night is full come.”

  “Would you stop with that ever-night stuff?” Annabelle said. “It is so incredibly tiresome. Can we spend our last minutes together acting like normal human beings?”

  The door opened again and brought with it a hint of cool air. David lifted his face to catch it. Captain Helt’s contingent of soldiers had doubled, forming two long lines leading from the back of the truck.

  “We will take you one at a time,” Helt said. “You will be placed in holding cells until your fate is determined.”

  “What happened to boss?” Karl asked. “You didn’t hurt him, did you?”

  “He is being questioned,” Captain Helt said. “His fate is to be determined as well.” He gestured at Gooty. “This one first.”

  Gooty’s cuffs were removed, and he was marched down the line of soldiers. At the end of the line, they turned him to the left, and he disappeared from David’s line of sight. Karl went next, then Cakey and Annabelle. And again, David was last. The soldiers detached his cuffs from the clip under his seat, helped him to him feet—his back creaked in protest, and pain stabbed down his legs. Then they led him out of the back of the truck and marched him down the line. Once out in the open, in the harsh late morning sun, he saw that the Quonset hut was actually one of many, a row of them stretching in either direction in the middle of a vast dirt lot. He was marched, one soldier holding him by the upper arm, Captain Helt at his back, down the row of huts and around the corner.

  Here, in a broad, open space, he saw two rows of iron cages set in the dirt. Each cage looked to be about ten feet wide and maybe five feet tall, not a large space, with a flat piece of wood for a floor and a blue plastic tarp on top to serve as a crude roof. They were placed separately, one per cage. David wound up in the middle of the row, with Cakey on one side and Annabelle on the other. A soldier drew a knife and cut the plastic cuffs off his wrists before pushing him into the cage and slamming the door.

  “You will remain here for the time being,” Captain Helt said. “Bear in mind, you are being monitored.” He nodded, as if to himself, then turned and walked away, and the other soldiers followed.

  David took a seat in the middle of his cage on the hard, uncomfortable wood floor. He massaged his wrists and cast his gaze around the barren landscape. Directly in front of him was the second row of cages, and beyond that, yards and yards of open dirt leading to a high fence topped with barbed wire. Guard towers were spaced along the fence at regular intervals, and he could see the tiny figures of soldiers at the top, pacing back and forth.

  “Shall I pick the lock?” Cakey said suddenly and slid up to the door of his cage. He reached a hand through the bars and grabbed the lock mechanism.

  “Can you?” Karl asked.

  Cakey fiddled with it for a moment. “Possibly, if I had a tool of some kind...or a really long fingernail.”

  “He said we’re being monitored,” Gooty said. He was at the end of the row beyond Cakey and Karl. “Leave it alone. You want to get us shot?”

  “Getting shot is sort of inevitable at this point, isn’t it?” Karl said.

  “I wouldn’t say inevitable,” Cakey replied, but he slid back from the door. “Highly likely, perhaps, but not inevitable.”

  David’s back still hurt from the long ride, so he lay down and stretched out, tucking his hands behind his head. It felt better that way, but now he became aware of his thirst—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a drink—and his desperate need for a bath. He felt grungy, and the clown suit he’d borrowed from Cakey, with its too-long sleeves and legs, was ruined forever by all the blood, sweat and makeup.

  Gradually, David realized someone was talking to him. He glanced over and saw Annabelle, lying on her side, facing him, her mouth moving.

  “…sorry you got caught up in this,” she said. “You should be at home, safe and sound, but here you are, dealing with our stupid decisions.”

  It took him a few seconds to catch up to the conversation, and when he did, he groaned. Was she lamenting his joining the Klown Kroo again? Hadn’t they hammered that point enough?

  “Home was not safe and sound,” David said. “And it’s my own fault for leaving, anyway. Telly was right. Nobody forced me to join the Klown Kroo.”

  “They might spare you, if no one else,” she said. “You’re still so young. May
be they’ll have a use for you.”

  “I don’t know,” David said. He really didn’t want to talk about what was going to happen. He didn’t even want to think about it. It threatened to bring the madness welling up inside of him. He tried to think of a way to change the subject. “You grew up there? In Tockland, I mean.”

  “Yes,” Annabelle said and rolled onto her back. “I had a fight with my sister, that’s the only reason I’m alive. I can’t remember what started it—we fought all the time. I was eleven years old, she was thirteen—what do girls at that age fight about? Something small that escalated, I suppose, but I was so mad, I ran outside to the barn and hid in the hayloft. That’s where I was when the soldiers came to the house, came to present us to the General, as they put it. No idea what for, some petty crime on my father’s part, perhaps, thieving, cheating someone, failing to perform the citizen’s salute promptly. I heard the trucks pull up to the house, heard the heated words at the door, so I hid under hay bales. Someone opened fire, maybe my father—he was always so hot-tempered, had a chip on his shoulder. Tockland soldiers killed everyone in the house. My parents and sister, two cousins, my aunt, my grandfather. I stayed in the barn until the patrols left, waited almost two full days, and then I fled.” She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “The world is for the sick, Tockland is for the living, that’s the propaganda drilled into your head there, but it’s a lie. Life is cheap in Tockland.”

  They heard the scuffing of boots on dirt, and Telly appeared, marching in front of a couple of soldiers. And did he appear to have developed a slight limp? David thought so. They put him in a cage on the other side of Annabelle and locked him in.