Ex-KOP

by Warren Hammond

  “Yeah,” said the man inside as he rushed out to meet me.

  I followed him as he led me around back. I weaved left and right to avoid having to step over tied tent stakes. He stopped at a faded blue tent and grinned rotten teeth. I looked the tent over, thinking that it wasn't as new as I'd have liked, but it looked solid enough. I couldn't see any frayed edges that told of leaks. “How about the inside?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. He shook the tent by grabbing hold of one of the ropes. Out came a young woman holding her baby. The man waved me ahead and I peeked into the now vacated tent, deciding it would do.

  We haggled over price while the woman, who looked like his daughter, went back in and began stuffing her belongings into a threadbare carpetbag. It didn't take her long to come back out. She didn't have much—the bag wasn't even half full. I momentarily felt bad about evicting her from her home but knew that she'd be glad to move in with her father if it meant they could earn a little money. Once her father and I settled, I went in and stripped off my muddy shoes, setting them on a rock by the entryway. I stepped from stone to stone to keep off the otherwise dirt floor and hung my duffle from the center post. Then I hoisted myself into one of the hammocks and sent the entire tent shaking and ruffling.

  I swatted a mosquito, angry that I'd forgotten my bug spray. Hopefully it would start raining soon, putting enough moisture in the air to keep the little bloodsuckers grounded. I swatted another one … and another. I hate this fucking place. I began to wonder if it was a good idea to come here. Surely I could tough it out for a while. I'd grown up here, for god's sake. And my family's tent was a hell of a lot rattier than this one. Yet I knew that I'd softened after so many years of living high on the KOP food chain. I'd just have to suffer through it.

  I called Vlad. “Did you get the new room?”

  “Yeah. I got her set up in the morgue.”

  “The morgue!”

  “Yeah. You don't want anybody to find her, right?”

  “Shit, Vlad. I don't want her in the morgue.”

  “Listen, Juno. The morgue's perfect. It'll be the last place anybody looks, and the doors have locks.”

  “No, Vlad. Find someplace else.”

  “But—”

  “Fucking listen to me, Vlad. You're going to find someplace else. You hear me?”

  “All right, boss. Whatever you say.”

  “Do it now.”

  “You got it, boss. Hey, are you coming down anytime soon?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Well, she's been asking for you.”

  “What's she been saying?”

  “Listen, Juno, I don't want to get in the middle of anything.”

  “Just tell me, Vlad.”

  “Well, she's in a real bad way. She just keeps crying, and then she starts choking like she can't clear her throat. I have to keep getting the nurses to come and take care of it.”

  “Can't they give her a sedative or something?”

  “Yeah, but she refuses.”

  Unbelievable. “Okay, I'll come down.”

  “When?”

  “Fucking later, okay?”

  “Sure, you bet. Just call me before you come, and I'll tell you where we are.”

  “Right.” I clicked off as the sick feeling in my gut reached epic proportions. I took a few hits off my flask and closed my eyes. Visions of Niki in the morgue haunted me. I tossed and turned as much you could in a hammock. I needed sleep. I tried changing the subject of my thoughts by thinking about the case and just found myself haunted by thirteen mutilated victims instead.

  I turned my thoughts to Liz, and the way her toes had massaged me. I jerked off, concentrating on her cleavage, and then closed my eyes again, wanting desperately to sleep.

  I woke up an hour later and thought I'd been lucky to even get an hour's worth of rest. I scarfed down a bowl of veggies and rice that my new landlord had brought over. I tried to ignore the occasional crunch as I bit down on a grain of sand. I wondered what Horst would think of the local cuisine if he had to eat like a Tenttowner. I found a bathroom, which was really just a hole in the wooden planking built over the canal. I took a whiz and tried to forget that the food I just ate was cooked with that same steeped-shit canal water.

  I made my way to the hospital, finding Vlad in maternity and paying him before I went in to see Niki. I took a chair by Niki's bed. She was asleep. I felt desperate to get her out of here, where she'd be safe from Ian, but I had no choice but to keep her here with her machines and her doctors. I left her side and made my way up and down the ward, passing out thousand-peso notes to the staff like I was one of those street kids on the Old Town Square who would just about tackle you in order to pass you a flyer. I told every one of the staff, “Anybody asks for Niki, you tell him she checked out.” I doubted it would do any good. My best hope was that Ian would continue believing that I didn't care about Niki, and that he couldn't go through her to get at me.

  I returned to Niki's side. She looked worse than normal; her eyes were dark and puffy, and her complexion was more yellow than usual. I took her hand knowing I wouldn't wake her—she couldn't feel it. I was surprised by the warmth in her fingers. For some reason, I always expected her hands to be cold.

  Why was she being so stubborn? Things would change when she got her spine. Things would go back to the way they were. I'd quit drinking. Okay, maybe a glass with dinner, but no more bingeing. I'd quit freelancing for the rags. I'd just get a job, a regular job, with regular pay. We could sell the house and move into someplace smaller and less expensive. I could be a better husband. I could.

  “Juno.”

  I opened my eyes. I was still at the hospital, still holding Niki's hand. I checked my watch—a half hour had gone by.

  “You fell … asleep,” she said.

  “Yeah.” I rubbed a kink in my neck. “Is this room okay?”

  “Yeah.” Her tone implied a ho-hum shrug. A baby started crying next door.

  I said, “I hear you've been having a hard time.”

  She didn't respond.

  “I know it's hard for you right now, but we can get through this.”

  “And what if … I don't w—want to get … through it?”

  “You won't feel that way when you get your spine.”

  “And why n—not?”

  “Jesus, Niki, you'll be able to walk, eat, run. … You'll be able to do whatever you want.”

  “How about kill my—myself?”

  Anger started welling up inside me. “Dammit, Niki. Stop making this so difficult. I'm sacrificing everything to get you patched up. The least you can do is make an effort.”

  “I never asked y—you to spend all … your money.”

  “Our money.”

  “S—still, I never … asked you.”

  “What do you expect me to do? Just let you die?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well that's not an option. Like it or not, you're alive, and you're going to stay that way, so grow up and deal with it already.”

  She stayed silent for a minute or two before saying, “You d—don't understand.”

  “Don't give me that bullshit, Niki. I understand just fine.”

  “No you don't. … If you … did, you wouldn't … make me suffer any … more.” She was being ridiculous, once again putting on this woe-is-me crap that I'd been hearing for over two and a half decades.

  “You think I don't understand? You think you've got all this secret pain. All these burdens that you and you alone have to bear. You think the whole world is living this dream life while you're the only one that's suffering?”

  “If you only … knew.”

  Enough. I could feel the blood rushing to my face, surging from down deep. Anger shot up straight from the knot in my stomach. I practically hissed, “I'm not going to feel sorry for you. It's not going to work anymore.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “I'm serious,” I said.

  She looked away.

  It w
as always the same shit with her. I'm so tortured. You'll never understand. Like her secrets were some license to feel miserable. She kept it all inside and then beat me over the head with it whenever it was convenient. And I'd let her do it. For all these years, I'd let her do it. I'd tell myself, maybe she'll open up one day, when she's finally ready, or maybe she won't, maybe some doors are better left shut. Truth was, she did go through a lot of hell in her life, but so did I, dammit. And so did everyone else on this backwater world. Yet she always acted like she was the only one, like the hell she went through was so far off the hell meter that she didn't have to listen to anybody. Well fuck that, fuck it to hell.

  I leaned forward, forcing her eyes to meet mine. “I'm serious, Niki. I know your secrets. I know.”

  Her eyes went quizzical.

  “I know,” I repeated.

  Her eyes widened in fear.

  “That's right, Niki. I've always known.”

  “You're full of sh—shit.”

  “Am I full of shit when I say that I know your father raped you?” There. It was out.

  “That's not t—true.”

  “Oh yes it is. And I know you murdered him, and your mother.”

  Her eyes were going misty. “No.”

  I couldn't keep from raising my voice as words that had been buried for decades erupted out of me. “You think I'm stupid? All this time you thought I couldn't figure it out? You thought I was just a dumb oaf who'd just believe anything you said? Shit, Niki, I was the one who covered it up. Me. If it wasn't for me, you would've gone to the Zoo.”

  Tears were breaking loose from her eyes.

  “I've always known. So don't go thinking I don't understand.”

  She was full out crying now. She started to gag.

  Dammit. Why does she have to do that? All the anger in me instantly melted. I rolled her on her side, putting some tissues by her mouth so she could spit out the mucus. I pinched a tissue over her nostrils so she could blow her nose. I kept her like that as she sobbed and choked. It went on for a long time, long enough to use up half a box of tissues. When the sniveling finally subsided, I laid her flat on her back and caressed her cheek. “We're going to get through this,” I said. “It wasn't your fault.”

  fourteen

  I CROSSED the Old Town Square, feeling great, better than I had in forever. The knot in my stomach was completely tame, and I hadn't had a drink for hours now. About time I got that off my chest. Year after year, I'd let Niki continue believing I didn't know about her father, thinking I was doing what was best for her. But now it was out, out in the open where she'd finally be able to face it and move on. I called the hospital and had them bring her some flowers, something nice I told them, not those wilted week-old flowers that die in a day.

  I cut through one of the many narrow streets that ran off the square. I looked for numbers by the doors of the souvenir shops, but they were all hidden by cascading displays of monitor-hide handbags and oil paintings of regal-looking 'guanas perched on top of rocks or rooftops. I reached the end of the block and had to turn back before I spotted the Jungle Expeditions placard on the walk. I checked out the sign as I approached—sun-faded nature shots with words like adventure and excitement written in the gaps between pics.

  I walked through a doorway into a courtyard covered by a series of tarps that were so pregnant with puddled water that they stretched in all the wrong directions, creating gaping holes in the coverage through which misting rain came glistening down. Souvenir stands ran around the circumference, their spaces overflowing with etched gourds and mini Lagartan-style skiffs made from seedpods. There was a staircase on the far end that led up to a second tier where I could see a window with painted-on jungle vines and tour prices. Standing alongside the door was a stuffed tiger, reared up on its haunches, one of its paws raised like it was about to claw somebody's heart out.

  Tiger hunts? I took another look at the painted prices on the window and found a variety of tiger safaris dominating the list. I didn't think anybody did tiger hunts anymore. The tour operators quit running tiger shoots decades ago when the upriver tiger territory was overrun by warlords. Not that the tiger hunts were ever very successful in the first place. So few tourists ever managed to bag one that they usually chose to spend their offworld dollars elsewhere. From what I'd heard, even seeing a tiger in the jungle was next to impossible. The foliage was too thick to spot something that didn't want to be spotted. Tigers weren't like the monitors who still hadn't learned to fear us humans. To hunt monitor, you could just about sit in a chair and wait for one of the cocksure lizards to come right up to you. Being the top of the food chain for so many millennia had made them dimwittedly overconfident. Looking around, seeing all the monitor-hide jackets and gloves hanging on hooks, I found it hard to believe us Lagartans hadn't yet slaughtered enough of them to weed out their outdated king-of-the-jungle genes.

  Tigers were another story. They weren't native. Their DNA was heavily seasoned with an instinctual fear of man. They were originally introduced over a century ago as a tourism promotion. They were supposed to give Lagarto a higher profile among the Unified Worlds. We would become the haven for all the extinct Earth species. All those offworld freighter crews passing through our system wouldn't be able to resist a trip down to the surface to see tiger, rhino, gorilla, and every other species that could be reconstituted from old DNA samples. The pols pushed the plan through, telling everybody that happy days would be just around the corner.

  What a crock of shit. The Bio-Regeneration Program was a total failure. Start with the fact that the rot shot their supersafari plans to hell by sending the gorillas, the elephants, and all the other plus-sized exotics straight back into extinction. Tigers were the only large mammals that actually took, and any benefit the tigers offered was easily outweighed by the havoc they wreaked on the frontier farms, always eating people's cows and goats. It became just one more reason why so many upriver farmers switched to raising poppies instead of livestock. What was supposed to create a boom for the tour companies instead turned into a boon for the warlords who ran the opium trade. Their toehold on the fringe towns became a foothold, and then when the government tried to take the land back by force, the warlords started spewing all this power-to-the-people bullshit and converted their foothold into a stronghold.

  And now even Lagarto's lifeless deserts were more tourist friendly than the warlord-controlled territory where lase-rifle-bearing children called themselves freedom fighters and where the warlords made a habit of giving their rival O runners Lagartan neckties—cut the throat and then reach in and pull the tongue down through the opening.

  And I was supposed to believe Horst Jeffers had revived the tiger hunt business? No. I wasn't buying it. The tiger hunt business went under for a reason. Unless he had a damn tiger farm out there where his customers could pop them in their cages, tiger hunts were a cover. Only a damn fool would want to spend his vacation in the fringe towns where you were more likely to get a Lagartan necktie than a tiger pelt.

  I kept one eye on the Jungle Expeditions door and used the other to paw through a set of monitor-hide belts. The hawkers eventually stopped pestering me after I gave them a long dose of total disregard. I made my way around from stand to stand, focusing on belts, thinking I could use a new belt, but not wanting to take the time to make a purchase. I had to stay ready to leave in a hurry should that powder-skinned Horst Jeffers show up.

  It wasn't much longer before a trio of offworlders came out and walked down the stairs. A dozen-odd hawkers were ready to greet them by the time they reached the bottom. The hawkers descended on them, a mob of trinket-wielding parasites. The offworlders tried to ignore them but couldn't keep their resolve for more than a few seconds. One of them became so uncomfortable with the invasion of his personal space that he stepped away from the group, playing right into the hawkers' divide-and-conquer strategy.

  A local emerged from the Jungle Expeditions door, and with a scowl, saved the offworlders f
rom making some overpriced purchases. The parasites scuttled back under their rocks as he came down the stairs. “All ready?” He smiled.

  The trio of tourists followed his lead. I dropped the belt I'd been mock studying and fell in behind them. The local led the way, with one of the offworlders hanging on his shoulder, talking his ear off, asking questions nonstop. The other two lagged behind. They were looking around, taking in the sights, both of them trying to enjoy the walk. I trailed behind, following at a comfortable pace.

  We crossed the Old Town Square, stopping twice, first so the tour guide could point out the church that sat at the head of the square, and second so he could give a spiel on the square's history. They listened to his rehearsed shtick and laughed at his well-worn jokes while I stayed a short distance away and pretended to be interested in some jewelry. The offworlders stood side by side, wearing their I'm-a-tourist slickers, their faces hard to see, hidden by steam that came off their tech-heated quick-dry skin.

  They were on the move again, walking in the same formation as before. Based on their multicolored threads, I figured these offworlders were from the Orbital instead of the mines. The offworlders on the Orbital were always coming in contact with the latest trends and these three were sporting some ultrabright reds, greens, and yellows under their slickers. As I kept looking at those flashy clothes, I started thinking that these three might actually be from one of the freighter crews instead of from the Orbital. Those over-the-top colors were plain gaudy, even by Orbital standards.

  They were probably from Pivon, the planet closest to Lagarto, only five years by freighter. They could be on their way home, docking with Lagarto Orbital-1 for a final restocking of raw materials that had been slingshotted in from the mining operations out in the belts. People said the Orbital was a major stop on the trade routes. I wouldn't know. All I knew was that looking around these streets and seeing the opium-ravaged derelicts holding out their hands, I found it mighty hard to fathom that there was a flourishing economy going on up there.