“He could see the future.”
“And it’s not even done yet. It’s gonna be longer. It’ll look different when it’s done.”
“Fine.”
“It’s gonna be like down to here,” Murk motioned a bit below his shoulders. “Ain’t a thing about you I wanna be like.”
“Whatever,” said Mira. “Look, here’s the question.”
“I don’t know I feel like sharing my answer with you anymore.”
“Then just share your bullshit. Tell me why you think they’re out here.”
Murk fingered his hair a bit, “Who?”
“The domers.”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Mom thinks they might can fix it. She’s heard of people getting well. With leeches and enemas. Crystals or candles. Maybe they’ve got something like that but better. Something that works for real.”
“Then let her think it.”
“She wants me to ask.”
Murk’s black eyes widened, glistened. “How?”
“I’m guessing politely.”
“They’ll shoot you if you get close enough.”
“Didn’t today.”
Murk puzzled a moment. “They didn’t shoot today.”
“Or yesterday. Or the day before that.”
“You’ve gone all those times?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“Reasons.”
“I wouldn’t let ’em fix me if they could.”
“You can fix yourself,” Mira said. “Keep your shadow on the outside and you’ll be just fine.”
“I’m fine.”
“Cause of that peg.”
“A blessing and a curse. What you gonna do now?”
“Maybe ask. I don’t know.”
“Nah,” said Murk. “You lost your momma’s rabbit shadow.”
“Shit,” Mira said.
After Mira left Murk, she strolled some, looking for whatever she might chance into for a shadow for her mom, fumbling Bale’s image in her mind. He hadn’t shot her, and he’d been nice enough. She figured, if she asked him, he’d tell her. But she considered then what he’d said. About the names from a hat. Whether or not she had magic. Could she find him again?
She trekked around considering her fate for what she figured was an hour then made her way home.
When she got there, Mira lowered herself to her mother’s face, her mother quivering with anticipation. “I stayed gone an hour,” Mira said. “Couldn’t find a thing.”
Her mother cussed a bit, tossed in her chair, was devastated. “It ain’t fair,” she said, but Mira tried to ignore it.
Captain
Captain Flamsteed barked on at Bale, their faces so close the two traded breath.
“In so many ways your ridiculous indecision has allocated a remarkable risk on the function of our enterprise. We are currently more susceptible to incursions because of your curiosity and ineptitude. It’s an odd shadow, son, so be it. Question not the motivations and dictations of your superiors in this regard. We have established protocols with remarkable foresight by looking to past infractions enacted against our intentions.” Flamsteed’s deep breath, “So, in order to make certain that my dispensation of regulation isn’t unmitigated meandering falling on deaf ears, I must demand again that you clarify your intentions should this blinking-shadowed beast show herself again at the outskirt of our camp’s circumference.”
“I’ll shoot,” Bale said.
“It is imperative that you do just that. Otherwise, I’ll have no choice other than to arrive at the conclusion that you are indeed a sympathizer,” he turned his back to Bale, “and I’ll be forced to stop the train.” Flamsteed circled Bale, walked to Drummond. “Please disclose what transpires if and when the train is stopped.”
“Exiled,” Drummond said. “Thrown the fuck out.”
“Understood?”
“Understood,” said Bale.
Mira Returns
She was back and Bale had her in his sights. The train chugged around on its track.
Bale figured he’d give one warning. He raised his bullhorn. “My orders are to shoot.”
Mira stopped. It was Bale’s voice. She recognized it. And Mira considered his orders. When she’d woken that morning to come to the train, she’d assumed that no matter what, she’d never have to deal with her mother again. If they had a cure, she’d be free. And if she got herself shot . . .
Bale put the crosshairs on her heart. He cleared his throat. He took a breath.
“Sweet shit,” he said to himself. But she asked for it.
He had never killed a girl. He had shot a few men. The first two were from close range. Two quick reports from his rifle. One shot had found its victim’s face, had entered the head of the man just below the eye—a hole the size of a fingertip—had exited the back of his skull—the hole the size of Bale’s fist, a chunk of hair and cranium popped off as debris. The other man got caught in the belly, and he laid up in the grass for a good time bleeding out as the captain asked him questions that he never got good answers to. “Who sent you? Why have you come here?” And the dying man just moaning nonsense, his midnight-colored eyes glaring, his black blood staining his shirt and the grass blades and the earth.
The two men had come up when the train was stalled, while they were off-loading the curved track the train now moved along. It might have even been accidental, their coming. They just strayed up to the train, to their deaths.
Bale hated the look of their lifeless bodies slunk down, maybe hated the sight of their falling even more.
He didn’t want to see Mira fall like that.
Bale aimed the rifle where he had to.
Then Bale pulled the trigger.
The Marvelous Murk
Just beyond the train-circled outposts stood Murk—his hair messed, his eyes dark as tar. He buttoned the top snap of his leather jacket, he tightened the rope round his waist.
“A world with two suns,” he said.
The train had picked up speed, so now was the time. He raised his crossbow to his shoulder.
“May your aim be sweet and true,” he said.
He pulled the trigger.
The arrow launched, dragging rope as it flew.
It struck the train.
Murk reached down and undid a buckle and his wooden leg slipped free and fell to the ground.
The rope grew taut.
Murk ballooned his body, so it expanded like a kite, and then the rope snagged his waist, and he was pitched from the ground in a heave and pulled skyward with vigor, the air crisp on his face as he went aloft.
Up and away he went, into the clouds, his black eyes shining as though an orchestra played just for him.
Into the white clouds, thick the way cake is thick, chill as cold peaches.
When the length of rope went slack, he cut it and spread himself some more, sailed along.
“That is the dream,” he sang.
Near him, buzzards circled.
He stuck his tongue out at them, said, “Shit eaters.” But really, he owed them so much.
It was those birds he had seen so ridiculously ambulating on the ground but so spiritual in the sky, their black bodies smart against the blue of it. He had watched them, how they hovered, rarely beating their wings, catching currents of wind and rising and falling and twirling and twirling endlessly, and Murk had to try it.
Before the train, he’d had to rely on Mira.
“Faster damn it,” he’d scream at her as she pulled the rope to get him going.
“Says the one legger.”
“Only on the ground,” he’d say. “Up here, I’m immortal.”
Sometimes it’d take hours of her pulling to get him flying, but since the train arrived, it had been
easy.
It was by accident he’d learned their trick. He had neared the train out of curiosity, and he saw how it gathered speed when people approached, and then they started firing bullets.
“Tomorrow,” he told Mira the first time, “you should go and see the train. It’s beautiful.”
He didn’t mention the bullet stuff.
“You should’ve seen how high I got,” Murk told Mira once he’d finally soared back to earth, found his leg and visited her.
“I nearly got killed.”
“Nearly counts for nothing though.”
“Well, I’m not doing it again.” But, of course, she did.
Twice more after much persistence on his part. These past few times, though, were not because of his coaxing.
Why she was going mattered little to Murk. As long as he was able to soar, he was happy. Mira made it possible for him, and because of that, he appreciated her.
“Swallow your shadow and come fly with me,” he said to her once.
“I don’t have one to swallow.”
“Yes you do,” he said. “I don’t know where you keep it, or how you keep it hidden, but you have one. I can smell it.”
“A world with no sun,” Mira sang at him, stealing his tune, making it her own. “That is the dream.”
But now it is Murk, aloft. Coasting. His ballooned self catching the currents and tossing him as a feather might be tossed. Sailing softly as a leaf plucked from the topmost branch of a tree.
Below, there is a gunshot.
Below, another shot.
Murk hears them much later than the shots are fired, as sound travels slowly and he is far away, but, when he hears them, he says a small prayer for Mira, who he imagines is the target, and who might already be dead. He isn’t worried enough to land and find out. But when he finally does come down, he goes to her house. Murk would never admit it to her, but if Mira died, it would bother him.
Bale the Sympathizer
Flamsteed asked again, “Please explain to me the nature of what transpired. I’m confused as to what you are suggesting. Simply stated: you missed?”
“Sort of,” said Bale. He slouched now, his strong body casual, his hands in his pockets, looking away from Flamsteed.
The captain was frenetic, his voice like electricity. “I feel like I am missing some vital segment of the scenario at hand.”
Bale pulled his hands from his pockets, laid them opened and smiled. “You told me to shoot,” he told the captain. “So, I shot.” Bale figured he was going to be punished, but something in his demeanor suggested he didn’t give a fuck.
Murk the Disbeliever
Murk seemed confused. “So? He missed. It’s good.”
“Sort of,” said Mira. She was staring at the spot on the ground where her shadow should be.
Murk was leaned against the wall of Mira’s home. He had pulled off his peg leg and was scratching his back with it. “I don’t understand,” said Murk, his face showing relief, his hands working the peg fiercely. “Why do you seem bothered?”
“Because,” said Mira, “I think he only missed on purpose.”
Exiled
Every citizen of the outpost was called to the northernmost edge by a single bugle player who blew some sad tune awkwardly so that it slipped from the navel of his brass instrument in handicapped fashion.
The sun was near setting.
The captain shot a flare into the air. It burned orange and dragged across the sky toward the east where dusk sat grayly culminating, the fire of the flare fizzling into smoke that nearly matched its backdrop, and the train slowed.
“I address you now in order that I might impress a profound punishment upon one of your peers,” said Flamsteed. Bale stood naked with his hands covering his cock and balls. “Here is a man who holds sympathy for those beyond the train.” There was a deepened sense of ceremony in Flamsteed’s voice, almost ministerial, and the other outpost dwellers sighed out palpably. Amassed there in their white fatigues, they hung their heads. The women watched Bale’s nude body; most of the men stared at the dirt. “This man cannot continue to live on amongst us.”
The train’s caboose was pulling into view, and just behind it, the only exit from the town, the gap between it and the engine—a sort of circling void.
Drummond seized Bale’s arm and walked him forward. A surge of murmurs from the bystanders clucked up as they moved along.
When they came to the track, Drummond whispered, “I tossed a rifle from the northwest tower over the train. If you run, you can get it before they start shooting.”
“Run? On this?” Bale balked at the stone-scattered ground in front of his feet.
Drummond turned back toward the captain.
“Yeah, I’ll miss you too,” Bale said.
Again the bugle player blew his pathetic tune.
Bale stepped lightly onto the mean little rocks on the other side of the track, and his legs tried to lighten themselves and he quivered in his moving.
The train began to huff and chug.
Bale set off. Stumbling and tarrying forward, striding as quickly as he could. Huff and chug, huff and chug.
With each step, his body howled. Stabbing his bare feet into the murderous stones.
He saw the rifle, and a shot was fired.
He kicked harder into the miserable sprint and another shot kicked up dust near the gun.
Bale closed his eyes, dived for the rifle, rolling naked in the rocks, his whole front scraped pink in the fall. He used the gun as a crutch to stand and another shot whizzed by him. All the graying day seemed to swell up with panic. The train was running full. Chugga-chugga. Whee-chugga.
Bale made toward the trees, zigzagging as best he could.
Another shot that nearly got him. He smelled the heat of it clip past his face.
He neared the edge of the white rocks.
Another shot.
The up-ahead grass spat blades.
Another shot.
The dirt coughed dust.
Another shot.
A tree belched splinters.
Another shot.
But nothing.
Bale was into the thicket of trees breathing heavily, somehow safe.
two
The first shadow addict was a young boy from McAlester, Oklahoma, a nowhere city toward the eastern edge of that state, just a few hours’ drive from the Ozark Mountains.
His parents had taken him into the hospital for displaying symptoms somewhat like rabies—he tried to bite his father, he chased after passing cars. They’d been out to Robbers Cave, a state park nearby, and assumed maybe he’d been bit by a bat or possum when unattended. Doctors couldn’t quite figure it out, especially the blackened eyes, but ultimately they restrained and sedated him, and his symptoms abated. They interviewed the boy, once he was cognizant, but couldn’t totally ascertain what might have come over him. “I was just lying in the grass,” the boy had said.
When he seemed up for moving about, they took him on a walk to get a feel for his strength, to see if he could be released—the doctors deceiving themselves into believing it was some sort of allergy, some sort of reaction to a thing he ate or drank.
But, when he was again in the sunlight, once they’d taken him outside, the boy dropped to his shadow and gorged it up into himself and went dark again.
News of the condition traveled fast.
The boy was underage and the media couldn’t use his real name. They took to calling him Tom Joad, because, at the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath, Joad is released from a prison in McAlester.
It was one of those sick accidents the world offers unknowingly.
“I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark,” Tom Joad says at the end of the novel. “I’ll be everywhere—wherever you look.”
And shadows were everywhere,
so nothing could be more true.
Curiosity caught hold of humanity.
“You can’t possibly drink a shadow.”
Then, of course, they’d have to try.
And the woe of the world was real.
Tom Joad died from experimental procedures in 2029. They enucleated him—took out his eyes—thinking without them some part of the bad magic would come undone. If he couldn’t see the sun or moon—or anything at all—wouldn’t that help remedy his condition? But it didn’t. Still he was ravenous for his shadow. He fought for it, threw himself against windows and struggled against whatever restraint they had him under—his sockets filled with gauze. Even after they lobotomized him, he struggled on. Ultimately, some arsenic-based medicine did him in, the doctors going back to ancient stores once newfangled treatments failed them. By 2030, the world was turning to shit. But a decade danced on, and the sipping spread before the domers took to the domes. Nothing they did helped any. Little wars had broken out and they retreated.
It started like this: The shadow addicts attacked lightbulbs, felled traffic signals and lampposts, neon elements, and beacons. Decimated public arenas and stadiums. Subtracted any source of light that would cheapen the moon’s brilliance. The aggressions quickly decimated populations. Across the whole world, cities were thinned.
There was no true governing body, just a kind of mob mentality ensued. Little warlords rose up, were followed by weaker miscreants. Vandals feeding their addictions.
No one knows who figured it first, but the shadow addicts realized other people’s shadows worked just as well as their own. And, as their tolerance grew, it seemed necessary to pilfer shade to reach the same highs. They needed more shadow to get fucked up.
Gangs of shadow addicts chased down children on playgrounds, rounded up old ladies from retirement homes, and we’ve seen what happens to those whose shadows are gone.
Mira and Murk
But you have to know how Mira met Murk. Years ago, she’d found him mutilated, his leg cut away, wailing as though death sat on his chest. Clumped there in thickets of huizaches—brutally thorned midget trees that sprang from the earth like bouquets of bones—he crooned anguish, gabbled desperate nonsense.
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