by Michael Priv
“Nope. I’m not your dad. Open your eyes!” A deep voice, unrecognizable accent. I obeyed. Probably shouldn’t have,I thought, staring at a huge middle-aged guy towering over me, veins in his neck thick as ropes. Over six feet tall and immensely muscular, the man was dressed in bib overalls and a t-shirt that did nothing to mask his physique.
“ No way,” I mumbled. “The Incredible Hulk.”
“Good. You’re up. We need to talk.”
“Where’s Linda?” I asked, looking around. The bare concrete room was sparsely furnished with a cot and nightstand. There was also a small metal desk with a chair. Steel door. No windows. No pictures on the walls. A prison cell?
“ Forget Linda. She’s a convict. You aren’t. You’re a prisoner of war. Big difference.” The large man sat down on a stool next to the cot I was lying on. “I have a job for you.”
“What are you planning to do with Linda?” I asked, trying to get up.
He pushed me down. “Wait a minute or two longer before getting up. I said don’t worry about Linda. Focus.” “ A job? I’ll never work for you. You know how much suffering you meatheads caused us and all these people?” I tried to get up again, sensing my strength returning.
“Just doing our job, Norman. We didn’t get these people here, you know that. They were banished from the society for their crimes. And since when do you give a shit? All you people ever want is to get out of here, right?” The meathead smiled. “Feeling better?”
“What’s your name and post title?” I asked, sitting down on the cot, and realizing I was naked. The Guard chuckled indulgently. He seemed to like me. “I’m the Station Chief. You can call me Stan. Stan Switkowski.”
“ Like a warden?”
“Yes, just like a warden.”
“Switkowski? The SWIT trucks, is that you?”
“Yep, that’s us. Switkowski Trucking.”
“A bunch of Polish immigrants running a trucking company? What kind of a stupid cover is that?”
“Small business is the backbone of America,” Stan declared, emphasizing the importance of that notion with a raised finger. I just shook my head in disbelief. We haven’t found them in five thousand years, because, honestly, they were too smart for us. Switkowski Tracking. Wow.
“ Besides,” Stan continued as if he hadn’t noticed my reaction, “a few extra bucks is nothing to sneeze at when you’re running a huge operation like ours.”
“Okay, I’ll call you guys when I need some hauling.” I was rattling him on purpose. To prove that I wasn’t afraid, perhaps? Stan nodded impatiently. “Yeah, okay. Listen, Norman, we need to talk. Are you about done babbling?” “Why am I naked? Get me my clothes.”
“We ran you through the tube. You know what that means?”
I knew exactly what that meant. The tube was a chamber where natural healing processes in the body were accelerated a thousandfold, or more. “Such sophisticated equipment. I’m impressed. They fund you well, I suppose.”
Stan shrugged. “We manage.”
“Well, thanks. I mean that. What about my clothes?”
“I ncinerated. I have my guys looking for some kids’ stuff for you. But you can wear these for now.” Stan grabbed some neatly folded clothing from the bed stand and threw it at me, followed by white socks and a pair of huge toe-protected work boots that knocked me back onto the cot on impact.
“What happened after I passed out?” I pressed on, pulling up the socks and donning the oversized overalls. The overalls were at least eight sizes too big and so were the boots. I felt silly in these clothes but grateful to the meatheads for being clothed at all.
“We delivered you both to the shop, took out the bullet and threw you into the tube.” “And Linda?”
“Linda’s next door.”
“Alive?”
“Alive.” Stan shook his large head indulgently. Then added, “For now.” “What do you mean ‘for now’?”
“Depends on you, Norman. You cooperate, I may spare her.”
“I may cooperate, if Linda stays with me, understood?” I glared at the big man.
“Forget it. She stays here.”
“She knows too much now. You’ll kill her.” Stan just stared at me. “You think I’ll let you kill her?” “You have no say. We’ll keep her alive here, if you cooperate. She just won’t be able to get out. Standard security protocol. We’re doing a job here, remember? Nothing personal. But hey, listen, I have something important to discuss with you. That’s why I brought you here.”
“ I appreciate you saving my life and all, but before we talk, you got to realize that whatever you want from me, Linda will be the bargaining chip. So, let’s skip the bullshit. No Linda, no talk.”
Stan looked annoyed now. “You don’t have a choice.” “Knock it off, Tiny. I do what I gotta do. You do what you gotta do. Get Linda here and we stay together or no talk. Clear?” “No deal.” “What is the problem with having her here?” I asked. “You know you can’t make me do what you want done. Why not work with me a little bit?”
If they wanted to kill me, they wouldn’t go through all the trouble of getting me here and reviving me. And Linda had nothing at all to lose at this point. Nothing at all. After a brief pause, with a frown, Stan silently got up and walked out. He returned with Linda, who looked scared. She seemed smaller than half his size.
Linda ran straight to me, buried her face in my chest and hugged me tight. “How are you feeling, Picky?” she asked. “I thought you were dead. It was so bad. But then they took you away and one of them said you’d be fine.”
“I’m fine, hon. Okay, Stan, what do you want?” I asked. Linda and I sat down on the cot with our arms around each other for comfort. That felt good.
“Okay , ready? Norman, I want to give you and the rest of your A5B comrades our transport and our pilots and send you on your merry way back to any destination you choose within the Baltizor domain.”
My jaw dropped. We’ve been fighting and dying for this for thousands of friggin years. Here this clown just offers me a ride out of here.
“What about Linda?” I asked. “She is a criminal duly tried and convicted in a court of law. She stays dead forever. Like I promised, we won’t kill her, if you cooperate. She would stay here with us till the end of her natural life after your departure.”
“No deal,” I replied.
“You wanna hear what your mission is?”
“No.”
“ Your mission is you find Brell and organize a talk between the two of us. The idea is just for me to talk to him. I just need a debrief. I guarantee his safety.”
Seemed harmless enough. Just a matter of bargaining Linda’s release now. It was already on the table. I decided to leave it out for the moment.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” Stan leaned back.
Didn’t make sense. “How is it gonna work with Baltizor being your enemy and all? And what did General Brell do to you?” “Well,” Stan said getting up and pacing the room again. He looked contrite. “First of all, let me catch you up a bit here. Murabi and Baltizor have not been at war for at least a couple hundred years. They are best friends now. Meant to brief you on that.”
“Shit!” Two hundred years! Nobody told me. Or was Stan lying? Was the Guard even capable of lying? “What about my back pay? Am I going to be gypped out of two hundred years pay with interest? Someone’s going to pay for this!”
“Your Command’s fuck ups are not my problem. Take it up with the General, when you find him.”
“Why do you want to talk to him?” “ Brell’s been a royal pain in the ass,” Stan shook his head dolefully and sat back, relaxing now. “You see, he is wanted for questioning by Baltizor High Command, and I’m supposed to get a debrief from him regarding what happened exactly, but we can’t find the bastard. Makes us look bad. It kind of appears as though we lost the most important prisoner or something. If I talk to him, I could turn over the damn report and be done with it. Performance revi
ew’s coming up. You’re a bright kid, you understand.”
Yes, I understood. He was lying. Was I supposed to believe that he’d practically get on his knees and beg one of the prisoners to help him get his bump in pay? Nonsense. But I had to roll with the punches, so to speak, since we were really at Stan’s mercy right now—not the other way around. And Stan wanted Brell.
“So why didn’t you tell us earlier? I mean, two hundred years? You had no grounds for keeping us here for two hundred fucking years, man!” I pounded my knee in frustration. “Do you understand what you did? You incarcerated people for two hundred years illegally!”
“ Hey, listen, I apologize, okay? And nobody ever asked for you, either. They don’t seem to even want you back. Plus, of course, the illegal weapons use on our part, as you know. Anyway, the statute of limitations on that aggravated weaponry rap recently ran out. So, now we are in the clear. Now I want to send you guys home. You’ve been a handful from day one.”
“You’re a motherfucker, you know that?” I still couldn’t believe they kept us here for several lifetimes illegally.
“I said I was sorry,” Stan said. “ Okay.” I replaced Stan in pacing around the small room, calming down. They’d kept us here to save their asses, these bastards, since nobody back home ever asked anyway. Understandable from his perspective, and he apologized, which made it okay, supposedly. It was also in the past, which made it largely irrelevant, particularly with more immediately pressing matters at hand.
The Guards’ clothing, draped on me like on a coat hanger, made Linda snicker. “Let’s suppose for a moment that I’d find the old man for you and convince him to come back here with us. God only knows why he’d want to submit himself to the aggravation, but anyway, let’s just say we deliver Brell, what happens to Linda?”
“I need to have a word with Brell, so I can take his statement. You get me face to face and you go home.” “ Linda and I go home together.”
“Linda stays.”
“No deal. Linda goes where I go. We go together, or we stay together.” I sat next to Linda again and took her hand. She hugged me. Not sure if she understood what we were discussing here.
“No pe. She’s a convict. This is a prison. I don’t have the authority to release any convicts. I’m not a court, I don’t sentence or pardon anybody. Not my job. Do you understand how this works?”
“ You’re asking me,if Iunderstand how this works?! Youheld two thousand inmates here for two hundred years illegally! Do you understand how this works, you dumbass? No deal. Screw you, Stan.”
Linda hugged me even closer. Stan got up, grumbling something disagreeable. The conversation was over. I needed to do something radical—and fast.
“I tell you what,” I addressed his back as he was leaving the room. “I’ll whoop your ass for her. If I win, Linda comes with me. We go together, find Brell and bring him here to see you. You can always say I made you do it.”
To my surprise, Stan wasn’t laughing when he turned to face me. “This isn’t a matter of fighting me personally. I happen to like you guys, I’ve been watching you for a bit. But I’m doing a job here. You do your job well at that laboratory, right? Me too. I try to. Besides, you can’t force me.” He indulged with a smirk. “I got at least two hundred pounds of muscle on you. You couldn’t whoop my ass if I was blindfolded, drunk, and had both hands tied behind my back.” He smirked. “And while jumping on one foot,” he added. Dick.
“Mind placing a little wager behind all that big yap that’s coming out of your mouth?” I inquired. “Picky, what are you doing?” Linda whispered, frightened, pleading. “He’ll kill you in two seconds. Look at those muscles! Don’t do it. You don’t have to prove anything to him. Do what he says.”
She didn’t realize yet that the only thing I couldn’t do was what he said.
“Watch and learn, babe,” I jumped to my feet. “It’s all in the wrist.” My solution was crazy, which was exactly what the situation demanded. No normal solution would work—and not necessarily any crazy one either. I knew the odds. This was going to hurt. A lot.
With a shrug and a dismissive hand wave, Stan started to turn away. He yawned demonstratively. “Norm, you’re such a clown!” He didn’t complete his thought in its entirety, as he found it difficult to talk with my size sixteen toe-protected boot in his mouth. Stan hit the floor hard, blood on his lips. I kicked him several times while he was down. I’d managed to piss him off but failed to incapacitate him to any extent. Damn meathead was huge.
A couple of similarly huge young heads poked in through the open door. “ Dad, are you all right? You need a hand?” one of the guys asked, smirking, taking in the scenery. Did he say “Dad ?”The other one couldn’t contain his mirth either.
“Stay out of this, Klimek!” Stan snapped. “Get the tube ready, we’ll have to use it again on this idiot.” “Aye -aye, Chief!” the guy replied but didn’t move an inch, and neither did his grinning friend. They obviously enjoyed the show. A third head that joined the first two belonged to a large, middle-aged peroxide-blond female with a concerned look on her face. She yelled something to Stan in a foreign language.
Stan grumbled something back. He swung at me and missed. I punched him hard again and then kicked him in the balls. “ O-u-u,” Stan whined, holding his balls with both hands. The female yelled at him again, agitated now, obviously worried for the family jewels. Nobody paid any attention.
I attacked, aiming to make good use of Stan ’s temporary incapacitation, which turned out to be disappointingly short-lived. Stan came back with a series of kicks and punches, exhibiting startling skill and agility. The fight immediately degenerated into a sordid one-sided punishment, whereby Stan would lift me up by the scruff of my overalls and throw me against various walls. On one such throw, I aviated out of the room, my fall cushioned by several meatheads, whom I trampled on the way down.
“Picky!” Linda sounded concerned. “Stop it immediately!” “Yeah, sure thing, hon-n-n!” I croaked, hitting the wall hard in the larger room and sliding down next to some kind of a work bench. The large room must have served as a machine shop, full of humming, unrecognizable equipment. I spotted some tools on a work bench. Stan walked up to me unhurriedly, as I was struggling for a breath, wriggling on the floor.
“Timeout!” I begged, panting, flashing him the time-out sign with both hands. Likely not a sports fan, Stan simply picked me up by the front of my overalls again, about to throw me against the opposite wall. Fortuitously, I managed to grab a hammer from the workbench on my way up and strike him on the top of his head as hard as I could under the circumstances. He immediately let go. I fell to the floor, got up on shaky legs, wiped the blood off my eyes, and led with a solid kick in the balls, followed by another good strike on the side of his head with the hammer. Stan went down. I aimed for his balls again, but he kicked my legs from under me. Next thing I knew I was airborne again with the opposite wall as my immediate destination.
With deep satisfaction, I noticed Stan slowing down, breathing heavily, blood all over his head. I had a chance to get up by the time he crossed the room, so I was able to kick him and deliver a series of mostly futile punches as he approached. He looked really pissed. He picked me up by my throat with one hand, lifted me off the floor and banged my head against the concrete wall. With both hands, I hung on to his fist for my dear life, desperately hoping to save my neck from snapping. Things started dimming out.
“Let’im go or I’ll shoot!” I heard Linda yell as if from a different life. Desperately clutching to the last vestiges of consciousness, I followed the scream with my bloodshot eyes. I couldn’t move my head, currently seized in the vise of Stan’s grip. Linda was holding onto a gun with a shaking hand, pointing it at me, it seemed, or possibly at Stan, from across the room.
One of the meatheads in the audience was patting his side with a stupid look on his face. Linda must have pulled out the gun from his holster.
“I swear to God, I’ll shoot! Let hi
m go!” Linda yelled again. The large blond female erupted with a distraught tirade. The half dozen big guys in the room turned toward Linda and spread out to attack.
Stan glanced at Linda when she yelled, but his attention was once again on me. With a bloody grin, he banged me against the wall. A shot rang ear-splittingly loud in the concrete chamber. “Ouch.” Stan’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead in amazement.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” I heard Linda’s earnest interjection. “My bad! My bad! Excuse me, sir, is this your gun? Here, take it.” “Did your girlfriend just shoot me in the ass?” Stan asked me, incredulous.
“Kh-hh,” I replied, on the verge of passing out. He let go of my throat. I slumped on the floor, gasping for breath. “ She did!” Stan exclaimed, examining a bloodstain on the seat of his overalls. He touched it gingerly with his fingers. “Your crazy girlfriend shot me in the butt!” Stan glared down at me in an accusing tone of voice.
“And that fate will befall any man, woman or child…” I started but the speech was too long for me at the moment, as I realized in retrospect, writhing on the floor, coughing, and struggling for a breath.
Linda ran over and helped me sit with my back against the wall. I felt a lot worse now than when I’ was shot in the chest from the helicopter. All in all, this had not been a very good day so far.
I looked around. The other Guards were smirking and shaking their heads, sharing their views on the recent entertainment. One was bashfully holstering his gun. I saw a dude paying up what could be, and most likely was, a lost bet to another Guard. I wondered how I’d done in the wager. Technically, I won. Or rather, we won—Linda and I. No, actually she won, while I was busy getting my brains beaten out.
The blond lady was now assisting Stan in examining his butt, still nagging him incessantly in that foreign language. “This idiot is my husband,” she suddenly addressed me. “Are you okay?”
“Wonderful, thanks,” I croaked.
“My apologies about shooting your husband,” Linda interjected.
The lady did not respond, having resumed pestering Stan in Polish or whatever language they spoke. “So now that we whooped your ass as promised,” I mumbled weakly, having found a break in the woman’s pestering, “you let Linda go.”