Walk a Lonesome Road

by Ann Somerville

  “At least you didn’t shout ‘it’s impossible!’,” Ren says wryly. “I wish it was. I wish I was joking, but I’m not. I’m not even the first. But one thing’s for sure—unless I get this thing out of me in less than six months, I’m a dead man.”

  Dek’s found his voice. “Explain.”

  “I said, I can’t....”

  “I already know too much. I know you’ve been a prisoner, I know you’re on the run. Let you go now and I’ll have some explaining to do regardless. So you explain. And don’t lie,” he says, lifting the gun. “Who’s Geya? And Meram?”

  Ren’s face contorts. “My wife and son,” he whispers. “Ex...wife. When did...?”

  “You talk in your sleep. And Jinase?”

  “My sister.” The words are laden with sorrow. “I have no idea if she’s still alive.” Dek gestures with the gun for him to get on with it. “I...am a doctor. From Vizinken. I spent five years in the army while I qualified after I finished reservist training, but I went back into the reserve so I could work at the civilian hospital. My sister is...was...a doctor too. She’s not paranormal, but she’s always been involved with the Spiritists, because of me. I am...was...too, but only as an adult.” Dek wonders what the hell this has to do with anything. “The war in Denebwei caused a lot of problems for the talented...there were rumours our kind were working with the enemy against our own forces. It got pretty ugly, with arrests on suspicion and the like, and after a TK tried to kill the President, it really got bad. People were being forced out of their jobs, no one was abiding by the letter or the spirit of the anti-discrimination legislation, the media were calling for greater restrictions on our kind.”

  Dek grunts, not really caring. He heard about the assassination attempt but he has no interest in current events any more. It’s nothing to do with him.

  Ren takes his lack of attention for what it is. “I’m telling you this for a reason,” he snaps. “It’s not like I enjoy cutting myself open for your entertainment.”

  Dek leans back in his chair. “I can think of things I’d enjoy more too,” he says, and Ren curls his lip in a snarl. Dek likes that reaction more than the obsessive politeness, but he can’t help think it’s not much of a survival instinct in a man facing someone holding a gun on him.

  “So sorry to impose. I don’t know why I’m bothering.” He gets up, sways dangerously, and is forced to sit down with a thump. “Bugger.” He puts his head in his hands, and Dek wonders what the hell it must feel like, to have an alien presence in your guts like that, feeding on you, making you sick and sore. Women did it all the time, damned if he knows how.

  The man’s looking nauseated again, and this’ll go a lot faster if he feels better, so Dek pours him out some khevai, dumps a load of sucrose into it, and shoves it back at him. Ren stares at the mug, then at him. “Why are you bothering?”

  “Boredom. If you’re done, I’ve got animals to tend to.”

  “I’m not done. You’re a real prick, do you know that?”

  Dek just looks at him—tell him something he doesn’t know, he thinks. He only has to wait. Ren’s out of options and if there’s a salvation in store for him, it’s Dek. Dek hasn’t begun to decide what he’s going to do about any of this, if anything, but he sure as hell isn’t doing anything until Ren stops glaring and starts explaining again.

  “Something broke you, didn’t it?” Ren suddenly says. “You’re military—ex-military, that’s obvious. You hurt your leg in service?”

  “All right, that’s enough,” Dek says, lifting the gun again. “Talk or walk. Which is it?”

  Ren swallows. “I’m sorry, I...forgot the situation. I’ll talk.” He lifts up the mug but it wobbles in his trembling hand so he sets it down. “Could you...not point that at me so...?” He looks like he’s struggling for another word, but finally says, “aggressively?”

  Dek doesn’t move, or answer, and Ren nods, accepting Dek’s refusal. “I guess not. I...mentioned my sister because...I didn’t realise it but she and some of the Spiritists were getting themselves involved in smuggling paranormals out of the country. Changing their biochips, altering medical records, trying to let people have a normal life. I knew nothing about it until the officers from Elite came to my door and arrested me. I thought when they realised I wasn’t involved with Jinase’s plans they’d let me go, but someone had tipped them off that I was supposedly falsifying records too. I wasn’t. It was just a mistake. There was a boy—one of my patients—and I missed that he was an incipient telepath. They assumed I hid it deliberately because of Jinase’s group and I was convicted like her, of treason. I asked for a mindscan but they refused.”

  He looks up. “They said there was a new group of paranormals they’d uncovered with undetectable shields, and they said a mindscan wasn’t reliable. The most I could have was a guarantee of no death penalty. They gave me thirty years instead, even though I’m innocent. And my sister...Dek, she wasn’t hurting anyone and they...if they’re doing to her what they did to me....” He covers his eyes, and hugs himself with his bad arm. “That was almost worse,” he mumbles. “Thinking all the time...that Jinase was going through this too....”

  “We don’t torture people in prison in this country,” Dek says, unsympathetic to the traitor’s tale and thinking this is all crap. “You’re lying.”

  Ren glares and pulls up his shirt. “You think this is a lie? I know ‘we’ don’t do this in prison. I wasn’t in prison. Not a normal one. I never got inside the gates of one. As soon as the trial was over and sentence pronounced, I was drugged and taken...well, eventually I worked out it was north. A long way north. There were a group of us, all paranormals, being kept in this compound. Our biochips were cut out, and we were told our families would be informed we’d died in prison. They could do whatever they wanted to us for the rest of our lives, and no one would ever know or question it.”

  Dek leans forward. “Why? What’s so special about you?”

  “I didn’t know at first. I thought maybe it was because I’ve got two talents—I’m an empath and a TK, so if I’d wanted to run away, I could have picked your fucking lock anytime,” he says, and Dek sits bolt upright, shocked at the revelation and his own stupidity. He should have found out what that bloody tattoo actually meant. “They were certainly interested in the empathy...uh...that’s where a lot of the physical stuff....” He looks nauseated again, and Dek doesn’t press—he’s got enough horror images in his mind without Ren’s adding to them. “There was a TP called Jiffir running that side of things, a real whacko. The head of the ‘researchers’,” he makes the quotes with a expression of revulsion, “was someone called Fei hon Detel, who made Jiffir look like a kindly person. He was more interested in paranormal fertility. After I’d been there for a while, and had like about the hundredth semen sample extracted, I found out that the one thing all of us had in common was that we had viable sperm.”

  “That’s not possible,” Dek says, shaking his head. “My brother’s a PK. He can’t have kids.”

  “Neither could I...before. Look—to make a baby, you need more than a few hundred live sperm per shot. A man’s considered infertile if he’s not producing at least twenty million sperm per myclit, and I don’t produce anything like that. I make the equivalent of a bucket of fresh water for all the salt in the Northern Sea. But that was apparently enough to make us interesting to Fei hon Detel and his people. At first they were trying to up the sperm production, so we were on a lot of different drugs. They affected blood clotting, caused strokes...some of us died,” he said quietly. “They were the lucky ones.”

  “Why paranormals?” Dek asks, confused by all this. He had no idea anything like this went on in a civilised country, let alone Pindone.

  “You can’t figure that out?” Ren says, sneering again. “Ex-military and you can’t imagine?”

  Dek’s gut goes cold and heavy as he suddenly gets it. “They wanted to breed you. Your powers.”

  “Exactly. My...Geya...was working
on it. At least...working on the fertility issue. She divorced me as soon as I was charged—didn’t even wait for the conviction.”

  Better that than having her crushed by three thousand parkigs of machinery, Dek thinks, his brief sympathy for this story going cold. “Continue.”

  “What did I say?” Ren asks, frowning at him. “You...went all....”

  “Continue,” Dek says, lifting the gun again.

  Ren purses his lips. “Look—you can threaten me all you like, but I’m not nearly as scared of you as I am of those bastards. I’m serious—I’d rather be dead than go back.” He closes his eyes briefly as if he’s in pain, then lifts his mug and drinks some of the sweet khevai. “About six months ago—not exactly sure how long because we had no way of keeping a record of time—the drug regime changed, so did our diet. Some time after that I was operated on, but whatever it was, failed, so they tried again. That’s when I was told they were implanting a blastocyst on my intestines. They were making me carry a foetus,” he says in response to Dek’s uncomprehending look. “No idea why, and I don’t know how it was even possible—I knew the theory of it, and women have abdominal pregnancies from time to time, but it’s such a risky strategy and men aren’t exactly equipped....”

  Dek shakes his head, still wrapping his mind around the idea that the man across from him is carrying a child. No—a foetus. It won’t be a child until it’s born, and that is not happening here, he’s sure of that. “So you escaped.”

  “No. We were rescued. A group of paranormals came and...blasted us out. Killed everyone who wasn’t a prisoner,” Ren says, looking ill at the memory. “They were Weadenisi. They said they’d discovered what was going on and were going to get us out.”

  “‘Were’?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t go to plan.” Ren closes his eyes again as if he’s replaying it in his memory. “The TK flew us out to a rendezvous point with a flyer. They were well-prepared, had full kits ready for us, snow gear, all that, and gave us all a medical once over. When I told them what had happened to some of us, they said they weren’t equipped for such a dangerous operation, but they would remove the foetuses when we got to where we were going.”

  “Did they say where?”

  Ren shakes his head. “I think they didn’t want to tell us too much. All they would say was that we were under the protection of ‘Wechel hon Gezi’.”

  “Then maybe we can get you to him and he can help you.”

  Ren blinks. “‘We’?”

  Dek curses his slip. “Tell me about the accident.”

  “Oh. Right. Jevizel—that’s the TK—got us to an airstrip. I guess it was still pretty far north, but south of where we were...where are we now?” Dek doesn’t answer and Ren sighs. “He and the PK left us with the others who were going to fly us out, because they wanted to make sure nothing was left of the compound. Everything was fine until this massive storm hit. The flyer started to break up, I think—it happened really fast—the pilot lost control and we crashed. Most of our group were killed, but five of us survived. Two...died that night. I did all I could but....”

  His eyes go lost and sad again. “Edwe, Jembin and I decided we’d just head south—we knew it was a long shot, but we got what we could from the flyer’s emergency kit and supplies, and started to walk. But Edwe must have taken a hit across here,” Ren says, drawing a line across his belly, “because he began to haemorrhage internally. The placenta was probably abrupted—ripped off. All we could do was watch him die. Then it was just me and Jembin, one of the Weadenisis. We walked and walked and maybe we’d have had a chance but he fell down the side of an ice ridge and broke his neck five days before you found me. We’d almost run out of food by then and I couldn’t really forage on my own. So I would have died if you hadn’t found me. Just gone to sleep and never woken up, I guess.” His eyes seem to say he wishes that had been the case.

  Dek concentrates on distances. They might have managed as much as fifteen pardecs a day, but in this weather, with injuries, that’s unlikely. The crashed flyer could be as little as a hundred, or even fifty pardecs from here—but in which direction, and what does it matter anyway, since everyone’s dead? “Why did you survive? Of all of them?”

  “Why did you?” Ren asks quietly, and Dek clenches his fists. “I don’t know. I didn’t want this, Dek. I’m not a traitor. I never...and my sister...fuck.” He gets up and walks into the living room. Dek doesn’t try and stop him. He’s relieved, secretly, that the chain idea is a bust, but it does leave him with different problems. Somehow he doubts Ren will murder him in his sleep, but he’s desperate enough to try something nearly that stupid. Dek holsters his gun. For this, he needs his brain, not a weapon.

  Ren’s huddled in the armchair, one knee under his chin. “Going out,” Dek says, and leaves him to it. He needs to get away from people, and to have time to try and make sense of what he’s learned.

  It’s snowing hard, making it difficult to get up to the animals, but when he does, the barn is a warm, welcoming fug out of the bitter weather. His urtibes are in their stalls, eating their hay, and not showing any inclination to wander outside—when it’s too cold for them, it’s too fucking cold for anyone. He gets a curry comb and set to work on Jesti, who leans her hairy bulk against him appreciatively as he untangles long knots and snarls from her dense fur.

  A man carrying a baby. Ren said it as if it wasn’t a surprise to him, but he’d had longer to get used to the idea. Dek guesses that if people can accept paranormals, they can accept a pregnant man, but why these researchers had done something so outrageous, so dangerous, as well all the other stuff, he can’t fathom. Intellectually, he knows the army probably creates some of its nastier weapons through testing that he’d find unpalatable, but what this lot were up to, goes beyond all common sense. If Ren and his fellow prisoners were so valuable, why throw them away on something that could easily kill them? Maybe these people did it because they had the power to—Dek had seen it in Denebwei, and in Febkeinzian, soldiers drunk on their greater strength and weaponry, abusing their position and ending up with dead and injured civilians. But these weren’t ignorant foot soldiers—these people were doctors, intellectuals. The kind of people Dek had been brought up to admire and respect.

  Right now, he has a practical problem. Ren can’t stay with him even if Dek wanted him to, which he doesn’t. Ren is presently incapable of making any significant journey alone and will probably continue to be, even if he had any idea where he could go and be safe, which he doesn’t. Dek could help him if he wanted to, which he doesn’t. “What do you think?” he murmurs to Jesti, scratching under one big hairy ear. She snorts and isn’t much help.

  He stays in the barn for nearly two hours because it’s warm and comforting and Ren’s up in the house with his horrible, painful history and his horrible, painful situation, and Dek’s only got room in his head for one fucked-up human being at a time, and that’s him. Finally he can’t delay it any longer, and he does have stuff to attend to. He leaves his gear in the outer hall and slips in through the laundry to get the washing out and hung in the drying room. Then he walks into the main body of the house, looking for Ren.

  He’s at the kitchen table, reading a book, and in front of him....

  The red mists descend and Dek, his mouth spasming with anger, draws his pistol, advances with murder in his heart. Ren looks up, starts to speak and then realises Dek is drawing a bead.

  “Dek! No!” He falls off his chair, scrambles into the corner, and Dek catches him there, smashing him across the face, and then pushing the gun against his forehead, his other hand twisting in the neck of Ren’s shirt, pulling it tight. “Please....” Ren whispers through bleeding lips. “Don’t do this.”

  “Who said you could touch it?!” Dek shouts, jabbing the gun hard against Ren’s skull. “Why did you touch it!”

  “What? The picture? It fell out of the book—Dek! I never meant...please, let me explain....”

  But the red mists are slow to
clear, and when Dek comes back to himself, Ren is sprawled on the floor, bleeding from the nose and mouth. Dek stands up, panting, his hands raw and bruised, and looks at the table again. Lomare’s picture is still there, unharmed, and it’s only now that Dek remembers that he’d put this one in a book because he couldn’t stand to look at it any more. His graduation certificate is there too. He remembers the day he put them in there, before he packed up his few belongings and caught the rollo north, and got a ride with Lomare’s uncle to his new home. He remembers kissing the book as he put it in the shelf. It was her book, a book on bridge structural forms. Ren probably chose it at random. Dek picks up the picture and the certificate, and puts them and the book back where they belong. Then he looks to see just how much damage he’s caused.

  Ren’s groaning quietly, and Dek is ashamed to be relieved that at least he hadn’t punched him in the stomach, but he’s made a hell of a mess of the guy’s face. He fetches a washcloth and then kneels down. He tries to put it against Ren’s face but the man knocks him away. “Fuck off,” Ren growls, so Dek drops the cloth on his chest and backs away. Ren’s not going to get up while Dek’s in the room, so he retreats to his bedroom and shuts the door. Sits on his bed and rocks, realising with a sick slide in his gut that he’s still as crazy as he was six years ago, just as dangerous, and just as unfit for company as he ever was. He’s sort of glad Lomare’s dead and can’t see him like this. It’d break her heart, he knows that.

  He hides for a good hour but he knows he has to face what he’s done, and whatever else he can be accused of, it’s not cowardice. He finds Ren lying on his bed, face turned to the wall. “Hey,” Dek says, not knowing what kind of reception he’ll get, but figuring it won’t be a warm one.

  “Come to finish the job?”

  “I’m...sorry. I didn’t...I just....”