by Tim Scott
I sighed and tried to shake these thoughts off. Right now, I decided, I needed to escape, and fast. I strained against the white canvas straps pinning my arms neatly down to my sides and tried to gauge just how far up shit creek I actually was, and whether or not I had a paddle. Somewhere, I had once read that one of the great rules of escape is to do it early; the longer you’re a captive, the fewer the chances you’ll have to get away. Up until now, I had only usefully applied this information to bad parties where I found the secret was to get away within the first ten minutes of arriving. If you left it any longer and it was a particularly bad party, you could easily get trapped into listening to someone ranting on about the social implications of washing up or something.
I froze abruptly and listened. I could hear voices somewhere outside the shabby, fingerprinted double doors on my left. Then they stopped and I heard the clack of a woman’s footsteps in a long corridor. They echoed on for an age and finally died away into silence. I breathed a sigh of relief, feeling this might be the best chance I’d have to get away. This time, I tried to slide my right arm out from under the strap, but the canvas webbing rucked on my sleeve as I tried to pull it free and it scraped against the skin on my forearm, holding me tight.
Then, without the slightest warning, the double doors at the far end exploded open with a muffled boom and a huge man in black strode in purposefully. I guessed he was one of the Riders. He reached my bed, stopped, glanced me up and down and seemed about to say something, but instead nodded and turned away.
“Wait!” I said, almost involuntarily. “Wait. This is all”—I didn’t know what I was trying to say—”crazy.” I finished up somewhat ridiculously.
He held up a large hand that I took to mean “Shut the fuck up,” then nodded again. What was it with him and the nodding?
“You want some porridge?” he added, after a pause.
“Porridge?” I repeated.
“Yeah, you know. Yum, yum. Porridge.”
“OK,” I said, knowing that while porridge wasn’t my number one priority—or even probably in my top one hundred priorities—at least this seemed like some kind of development.
He grabbed the metal end of the bed and swung it behind him, sending me sliding out into the middle of the room. The bed came to rest against a piece of medical equipment on wheels that had the words ALWAYS RINSE blazoned across it in big black marker pen. I found myself wondering what was supposed to be rinsed—the machine or the patient? The big guy was just to my left now, and as I turned and looked up at him, I felt a chill. There was a blatant scar on his neck, about two inches long, where his C-4 Charlie had almost certainly been removed. For some reason I found this deeply shocking and I tensed up involuntarily.
Here was physical proof of the kind of world I now seemed to be a distinct part of. Yes, sure you heard stories of bodies turning up without a C-4 Charlie, but I had never ever met anyone who had actually done it. Maybe I should have guessed. That’s why the Riders rode through the Forbidden Bike Zone around the Thin Building without a care; they were invisible to the authority computers.
I knew there was a business in removing C-4 Charlies on the Dark Side. They even tried to fit new ones, but it didn’t work. Like the Jab-Tabs, the C-4 was all tied up with your DNA, and that made it impossible to replicate. Being caught without a C-4 Charlie was unthinkable. If you were very lucky, you wound up exiled to somewhere in Europe like Belgium, but much more likely you ended up extremely dead. Zone Securities and the City Caretakers reasoned that if you removed your C-4 Charlie, you had something big to hide—and therefore, as far as they were concerned, had as good as admitted your guilt.
The Rider grabbed the frame of the bed and slung me crashing through the double doors. I felt them bounce along the sides of the bed and flip-flap behind us as we passed into a dimly lit corridor with flaking paint walls. Suddenly I didn’t like this. I was strapped to a bed, being pushed around an old deserted hospital by someone who was quite possibly a psychopathic killer. I tried to distract myself by taking in the surroundings.
Hospitals had all gone out of fashion twenty years earlier, when equipment and drugs crashed in price, and they had been replaced by street corner clinics and Well-Malls—each unit specializing in a different bit of the body. Some were cheaper and more disreputable than others, but word eventually got about which were the best. There was a lung clinic on my street that I never got particularly good vibes about; it always looked empty. I turned my head to see more clearly what was off to the side. We were passing doors at regular intervals, most of them closed, but we came to one hanging off its hinges. Inside was a small arsenal of weapons. Before I had time to look again we were past it. We burst through another set of shabby double doors and the Rider stopped.
“Famine,” he called, then paused, but there was nothing but grimy, water-dripping silence. “Famine!” he called again with a heavy hint of tried patience. “Open the fucking door, can’t you?” There was a pause, and another man I took to be one of the other Riders appeared in the corridor.
“What?” he said. “Ohh,” he added, seeing me, and held the small door open as I was pushed through.
This room was warmer, and from what I could see had been made more homey in a chaotic sort of a way.
There were a few chairs, stacks of various bits of electrical things, motorcycle magazines, a set of beat-up golf clubs, and on one wall I recognized an old pinball machine with its lights blinking on and off methodically. But the thing that struck me most forcibly were the walls, spray painted with strange, bulging graffiti. Everywhere I looked were three-D words with extravagant white highlights twinkling off them, like a toothpaste ad on drugs. As I began to read them, I realized they were quotes from somewhere. Somehow, this all didn’t feel very promising as regards my life expectancy.
“Would someone please, please, explain to me what the fuck is going on?”
4
I married Sarah when I was twenty-five. We had an apple pie wedding, as Mom would have said. The sun shone, everyone looked smart and young, the person who married us wasn’t too smug, and the photographer wasn’t drunk. Mat made a surprisingly funny and rather touching speech—there’s a naive, soppy, romantic side to him that still gets him into all kinds of trouble—and everyone danced under the stars. We were married out in Big Sur, where there are still forests that can mend the soul and a shoreline that catches your breath.
I remember looking around the table while we were eating and realizing what an exceptional bunch of friends I had—genuine people you could call on anytime, whatever the situation. Sarah, my wife, was gorgeous—with a clear mind and a get-up-and-go sort of nature, soft skin and chocolate brown hair—though somewhere in there was an insecurity too. I knew it was there when I married her, but it seemed to grow overnight and during the years that followed no matter how hard I tried to set her on her feet, she kept leaning on me harder and harder. And when she fell, she said it was all my fault.
I watched her character shrink before me and I felt so helpless. The spirit I‘d loved her for had turned into fear, so that she no longer thought she could cope with the world; was so scared of the thought of being on her own that she crushed the present, suffocating any joy from life, and turned everything into a battle for survival. I knew this was not right—not for us, not for people who had a house and food and friends. And the more she clung to me, the more we both drowned, sinking under an invisible sea of desperation.
I tried. I really did, but she fought the truth of what was happening, thinking it would kill her, when I knew it was the only thing that would have set us free. And in the end, one day I left; but knowing it was for the best didn’t dampen the pity I had for her. I rode down to Big Sur and sat on a rock watching the waves explode below and cried—with relief and with sadness and with guilt.
But mainly with relief.
I miss the old Sarah, but in truth I can hardly remember her. How or why this all happened I don’t know. Technically we�
�re still married and I see her sometimes. My door is always open to her, but there’s no going back. I didn’t have the apple pie life Mom had hoped for, after all.
I rang Mat that afternoon, and he dropped everything and swung by on his bike with two boards on the carrier and a couple of wet suits and we went surfing. That was always Mat’s solution to everything. Him and Teb are so different like that. The waves were about four-foot on the push of the tide, with a slight offshore breeze just whipping up the tops. So we paddled out side by side along the rip and sat out the back waiting for the bigger sets that came in now and again, bobbing on our boards.
But now, thinking about it, there was something about this whole memory of Sarah that didn’t somehow click. It was as though she had been laughing at me all along, smiling underneath. I couldn’t explain that feeling at all. Yeah, there’s something about Sarah that seems all wrong.
Anyway, we spent that afternoon catching the surf and sitting out the back, just as Mat and I and Eli’s brother, Jack, had done so many times before in another age, all those years ago.
We do a lot of weird things in our lives. We want things, we love people, we strive to achieve stuff, but in the end it boils down to one question. The whole of life can be boiled down to one question: “What the fuck was that all about?” Maybe we don’t think we ask it, maybe we think we avoid the question, but we all have our own unique answer, assembled over days and years; it’s our lives.
I couldn’t tell you what I thought the point of life was. Somewhere back when I was young, I would have given you an answer and believed it too. But I had gone backwards somehow, found a world that looked just like the one I used to move around in; but this world was somehow harsher and more complicated, as though my head had been filled with glue. Now when things got tough, all that I felt was: Keep going. If I could only just keep going. Then I’d end up somewhere else, and maybe that somewhere else would be better.
And as we sat out the back that day, I went through the whole thing in my head. Knowing I was free now and knowing that I mustn’t make the same mistakes again; knowing the past was clawing at me, but also knowing that going forward was the only direction that mattered.
We surfed until the sun began to set and fired up the clouds so they glowed with the same soft crimson as a young woman’s breathless cheeks, and for the first time in a long while I was able to let myself feel grounded again. I was able just to be me, as though my soul was finally content to settle down into the pit of my mind, and the moment seemed to consume me with its Day-Glo purity and truth. Mat turned to me as we sat out the back in a lull. “Deep down, this feels like it means something, doesn’t it, Jonny?”
I nodded.
“Not all of life feels this real,” he added, watching the sun sink gently into the glassy ocean, and I knew what he meant. It was as though someone had suddenly turned up the dial marked “life” until the intensity was shouting at us, and all blurred edges created by things like hate, greed, and jealousy were straightened out at a sweep. I wanted to trap the feeling somehow and lock it down inside myself so that in times ahead I could revisit this place at this moment, with such an explosive clarity it would make me understand that, underneath it all, everything was all right. But I also knew, deep down, that was impossible.
Memories fade, no matter how much you try and keep them alive. Things change. Shit happens.
So, I just looked across at Mat and smiled, breathing in the moment so it felt like it was living deeply and wholly inside of me.
5
Relax, Package,” said a Rider.
“What the fuck is going on here? If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, suddenly consumed with enough irritation to smother my fear and probably kill a badger at twenty paces. Two of the Riders edged in, and their puzzled, standoffish expressions reminded me of the faces of some people in our office who one day found the photocopier was having a breakdown. It was crying it was under too much pressure and couldn’t do color anymore, and one of the secretaries had had to take it home for the weekend.
The bearded Rider stared calmly at me, but his thoughts seemed elsewhere, and I took in the full extent of the rivulets of scars etched into his forehead. They had clearly seen their share of bad sewing.
No one said anything, and after a minute I closed my eyes and tried to think of clean, peeling lines of waves at Todos Santos Island, and the time I’d paddled out at dawn with Mat at Thor’s Hammer and watched the sun rise over the dunes. But the image just kept collapsing, like a nighttime dream drowned by waves of consciousness in the sunlight of the early morning.
“Porridge,” reiterated the bearded Rider, without breaking his lost stare.
“You’re not giving him porridge?” sang a wiry voice abruptly. The bearded Rider’s eyes jolted back into focus. I could just see the one who had spoken: a thin Rider who seemed nearly half the size of the other three. He had a wiry, chirpy, overloud voice that ran up and down words the way a squirrel scampers about a tree. “Give him CornConfetti instead, Jeff; don’t be so mean. Or those Rici-Rici-Pops things. They’re not bad with sugar. And there’s Chew-Kings somewhere. I knocked off a planeload. Remember?”
The Beard simmered with such force it probably showed up on the Richter scale, then turned purposefully. He slid a large shotgun smoothly off his back and stuck it unemotionally in the small Rider’s throat.
“My name,” he whispered, “is Death! Can you please get that into that round, waxy-haired thing you use as a head?”
“Knock it off,” said one of the other Riders, crumpling some paper. “If you two are going to kill each other, I’m seriously quitting.”
“Death.” The bearded one spoke in a dry, even voice, with words that seemed heavy enough to make holes in the floor.
“Not anyone can deal with the Alpha grid. Or keep the Zone Security guys at bay. They’re tricky. You’ve got to know how to deal with the wire gates on the GlobeNav. I worked hard at that, you know. You guys haven’t a clue,” the one crumpling the paper babbled on.
“Thank you, Famine, I’ll bear that in mind,” the bearded one said, without removing the shotgun from the chirpy one’s throat.
“Took me an aeon, and I had Virus Propelled Grenades. Do you know how tricky they are to use?”
“He said shut the fuck up, didn’t he?” the chirpy one yelped, breaking out of the corner. The bearded Rider sighed, then slipped his shotgun smoothly back to its holster.
“Death. Got it?” he mouthed under his breath.
“Actually no!” said the chirpy one kicking over a chair, with renewed gangly vigor. “You’re not being Death just like that. No way. I’ve decided I’m Death.”
“What?” said the Beard.
“I’m Death now,” said the chirpy one. “Me. I am. OK? Harry R45 is now Death. Everyone got that?”
“Oh, well done! Well done. Bravo!” groaned the bearded Rider, slipping half a glance in my direction. “OK, let’s see what the Double E wanted. You are…Pestilence,” he said, shoving a piece of paper at the other guy. “It was decided at the meeting with the Double E. And the Double E will personally stuff your lucky pants down your lucky throat if you don’t get that into your lucky, fucking head!”
“Pestilence?” said the chirpy Rider. “Pestilence? La-di-da Pestilence! My friends will blackball me if they think I’m called Pestilence! It sounds like some kind of deodorant.”
“Get used to it,” said the Beard.
“No, no, no. I’m being Death, end of story. You can be Pestilence. What the fuck does that mean anyway? Why should I be a deodorant?”
“Conversation over,” growled the main Rider. And at that moment, my whole world suddenly filled with the wild grin of the fourth Rider as he slanted a handgun to my head.
“What’s pestilence, dude? Come on! Let’s hear what you have to say on the subject!” Sweat slithered down his forehead. “What’s pestilence? Tell us, college boy. You tell us all. Nice and loud.”
“Don’t kill
him! Not now!” called Famine. “You guys. He’s not expendable like the Ringer; you remember that. If he shoots now, I’m seriously quitting.”
“Easy,” said the Beard. “Easy with the piece, War. OK? He’s really valuable.”
Sweat coalesced in droplets on War’s forehead as he leaned over me, and it was a wonder he hadn’t been served some sort of court order, because his smell must have been in breach of all kinds of health restrictions.
“What’s pestilence? I want to know!” he cried. “No secrets, little boy.”
“Pestilence,” I croaked, trying to find some strength to my voice. “Pestilence is an epidemic…like a swarm of locusts. It’s a huge…pain in the ass, basically.” And then I turned and locked eyes with the one who didn’t want to be called Pestilence. He had deep, almost black pupils that jerked and flicked, almost spinning about his head like the reels of fruit on a slot machine. “A massive pain in the ass.” I enunciated every single word in his direction. It was a crazy thing to do, but the guy had the kind of chirpy character that ripped away my fear with irritation.
There followed a pause that I’m sure would have won most of the awards at the International Festival for Film Pauses. It would have won “Deepest Pause,” “Longest Pause,” and “Most-Worrying Pause.” And possibly “Pause Most Worthy of Special Mention.” It would have swept the board. Those awards lasted ten years before the sponsors pulled out. There was some scandal when “Best Foreign Pause,” “Best Reasonably Long Pause,” “Best Short Pause,” “Best Pause Translated from a Foreign Language,” and most of the other awards all went to a Scandinavian film about a puffin who had learned the concept of elegance. Especially when it turned out the director was sleeping with one of the members of the panel.