400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  He stood in the park across the street from Pete’s shop, and stared at the window half the day, thinking of ways to get in and escape with the cashbox.

  Darkness came down. The crowd in the park ebbed and flowed. Matches flared; cigarettes were shared; gray powder poured and was wasted on the wind.

  He listened to their talk, but kept to himself, watching Pete lock up and skulk down the avenue through the cold wind and fog, sunk down in his high collar, beret sliding gutterward.

  “Fresh batch of Easy,” someone was saying.

  “Yeah, where'd this one come from?”

  “Shit, man, a box of the stuff sitting in an alley, same as usual. Plenty for everybody. Man from Glad found it first—he’s got a nose for the stuff. You know what I think? I think there’s some fat dude sitting up in one of those towers, mixing it up with government money—”

  “That’s where my VA loan went, man!”

  “—and handing it out free to all us sick fucks, so that we’ll be happy to stay where we are, and never climb up so high that we can spoil his day. Some kid, prob’ly. Spoiled brat. The higher he gets, the less he has to look at us.”

  Raleigh thought of the guy in the dark glasses, skittering past him.

  “Yeah? I'd like to get to that guy’s penthouse.”

  “You? They wouldn’t let you in the fucking freight elevator. You better forget it and be grateful he thinks enough of you to give you free Easy.”

  “Aw, man, stop talking about it and spoon it out.”

  Knives in Raleigh’s gut prodded him to his feet. He grabbed onto a lamppost and wondered how long he would have to wait before things settled down enough to let him take a shot at the window. He could smash that glass door, run back into the office, grab the cashbox, and be out of there in thirty seconds.

  But it would be the last thing he ever did of his own free will.

  He could see all too clearly how such a move would screw him up completely and forever. The cops would catch him with the hamburger halfway in his mouth, then he could forget about ever getting back on his feet.

  Raleigh clenched his stomach and huddled over, gritting his teeth. He could almost feel the rock in his hand, the one he would use to smash the glass. He could more readily imagine the cold manacles the cops would clap on his wrists.

  I’ll never do it, he thought. I’ll starve first.

  After a while he realized that there was a hand on his shoulder. When he felt it there, and knew it for what it was—the hand of an unknown friend, a sympathetic stranger—he started to sob.

  A raspy voice said, “What’s the matter, hon?”

  Was that a woman’s voice?

  He looked up into a face he had seen once before. A face with wide, loose lips; sagging, black-circled eyes; a face with skin the color of Easy.

  “I know what your problem is,” she said. “Come on, can you get up? Why don’t you come with me?”

  She took him by the arm and pulled him up. He should have been the one helping her to rise, because she had only one leg.

  “You’re a new one,” she said. “But I’ve seen you somewhere before, haven’t I?”

  He clung to the lamppost.

  “You want some Easy?” she asked.

  He couldn’t speak; he shook his head.

  “You want company?”

  “Why don’t you leave me alone?” he shouted. “I'm not like you! Not like any of you, you understand? I'm not gonna get stuck here, numbed out of my skull, helpless and paralyzed. . . .”

  “Right on, brother,” someone said. “But how do you plan to get out?”

  He realized that many of the faces in the park were staring at him. Conversations had broken off; cigarette tips hung unmoving in the dark.

  “I’ll do it,” he said.

  “On your own?” asked the one-legged woman.

  He drew away from her and spat the worst thing he could think of: “Fucking mutants.”

  “That ain’t true,” she said, some vague hurt in her eyes. “We’re people. We take care of our own. And we’ll help you—”

  “I'm not one of your own,” he said, “and I never will be.”

  “That’s fine, hon. But how are you gonna make it through the night?”

  He glanced down at her leg and felt the pain of her loss. It was all mixed up with his own regret.

  “I'm sorry,” he said, breaking down now. “Christ, I'm sorry. I can’t handle this. I'm the mutant. I'm the one who can’t adjust. Stupid of me. . . .”

  He swung around the lamppost, staggering as if he were drunk—although he was merely weak—and strode toward the far, dark side of the park. He crossed the alley and went into the deepest shadows, where he was sure they couldn’t see him. And there he stopped. For all his denial, he was afraid to leave them. He was not one of them, but he was close enough.

  He sank down, trying to ignore the burning hollow in his stomach, fending off the sparks that threatened to consume his vision. He felt himself deteriorating, breaking down into more isolated, desperate pieces. He tore at his fingernails. He forgot where he was.

  Later—much later, it must have been—the sound of crying woke him. It was darker than before; the corner markets were shut down; the streets were deserted. He listened to the weeping for nearly a minute, then discovered that it came from himself.

  Others had heard the sound. Shadows moved around him, blocking out the few streetlights that hadn’t been shattered or burned out. Shapes closed in, moving awkwardly, some of them hopping.

  Terror took hold of him. He had called them mutants, insulted them, told them how he despised them. He thought of bloody bandages in the hedge.

  My God, he thought. They’re going to show me. They’re going to make me one of them.

  He backed up against the wall. One of the shadows put its hand over his mouth before he could scream. Two of them dragged him down the alley, to where it was even darker.

  He struggled, but they knew just how to hold him.

  Someone lit a match, back in the recess of the alleyway, and what he saw in that instant surpassed his ability to respond. He did not even try to scream. The asphalt was stained with blood; wads of clotted brown cloth were piled in the corners, stuffed down storm gratings; someone was holding a knife under a stream of alcohol. Bands of surgical rubber lay coiled like worms on the stains. The match went out, but they lit another, touched it to the knife. The blade glowed blue as neon, shining in the eyes of those around him.

  “We know what you need,” said the rasping voice of the one-legged woman. “We’ve all felt the same thing. We understand.”

  “No,” he mumbled, under the fleshy palm. “Please don’t do it.”

  “Sometimes to get what you want, you gotta give something up. You make a sacrifice, and in return. . . .”

  “Please don’t.”

  The blade flickered and went out, but not before someone touched it to a candle. The tiny flame gradually grew, filling the cul-de-sac with a thin radiance. A skinny, aging man sat in the farthest corner, staring up at them. Raleigh had never seen him before. The knife was in his hands.

  “Please,” Raleigh pleaded. “Why don’t you let me go? I’ll find the people who crushed you, the people who hooked you on Easy, the fucking overlords. I’ll make it somehow; I won’t forget you, I swear. I just need—I just need—”

  “You need us,” said the woman.

  The man with the knife said, “Easy.”

  Someone took out a crackling gray plastic bag.

  “You need strength.”

  “Easy!”

  Raleigh didn’t try to move. He knew they wouldn’t let him. But he shook his head, and used his most reasonable tone of voice.

  “I don’t want it,” he said. “I don’t need it.”

  “Don’t worry,” said the woman with the raspy voice. “It isn’t for you.”

  The man set the knife in his lap, opened the bag under his nose, and inhaled deeply. He sniffed again and again, then began t
o lick the insides of the bag until every grain of the stuff had been consumed. He slumped back against the wall, grinning, his eyes rolling up into his head.

  Another man dropped down next to him and took the knife. He slit the seam of the ragged trousers and ripped away the cloth.

  Raleigh put his hand to his mouth. With a length of surgical tubing, they began to tie off the man’s leg, just above the knee.

  He gagged, turned away. They held him more gently now.

  “There, there. Do you see? There’s no need to be afraid. Do you want some Easy?'

  He gasped for air, shaking his head, but someone shoved a bag against his face, and he couldn’t help breathing it.

  “Every now and then, someone comes along, someone young like you, someone with promise,” said the woman. “We don’t mind making the sacrifice. Our strength will become your strength. But everything we give to you, you’ll eventually pay back.”

  He felt numbness, acceptance, a sense of purpose. He would never forget these people. He would do everything in his power to help them. Yes, he would make it out of here. He would find the monsters, the mutants, who drove these human beings down into the cracks of the earth, and he would destroy them. The strength to do all this was about to come into him.

  “It’s not so bad is it?” said the woman. “The Easy, I mean? We won’t give you much. Wouldn’t want to get you hooked. But believe me, it’ll help you keep down your supper.”

  * * *

  “Uneasy Street” copyright 1989 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1989.

  THE DEMONSTRATION

  As they approached the site of the company picnic, Dewey and his parents saw a crowd of weird-looking people standing along the roadside waving picket signs. Dewey's father muttered, “God damn” under his breath.

  “Roll up your window, Dewey,” said his mother.

  “Who are they?” Dewey asked, putting up the rear window of the station wagon.

  “Anarchists,” his father said. “They'd like to see us all turned into animals—and worse.”

  Animals? Dewey wondered. He got up on his knees to see them better. By now the car had slowed to a crawl. Dewey's father sounded the horn. “Get out of the road!” he shouted, though his voice didn't carry with the windows all rolled up.

  “Daddy, why do they want us to be animals?”

  “It's a figure of speech,” Mommy said.

  But the anarchists looked halfway to animal already, like the creatures of Dr. Moreau. They wore their hair long and ragged; their cheeks were slashed with black-and-white zebra stripes, their eyes wild and beseeching. Some of them looked like living skeletons, zombies in tattered clothes.

  “There's a spy in the company,” Daddy said suddenly.

  “That's ridiculous,” Mommy said.

  “How else could they have learned about the picnic? They're trying to spoil everything—first the Project and now our private lives. God damn them!”

  “They have their own beliefs. They're concerned citizens.”

  “They don't give a damn about civilization.”

  The skulls and animals lurched toward the car, spilling onto the road now. Dewey jerked back as a woman with long claws raked the window an inch from his face. She screamed into his eyes: “Make them stop! It's your generation that loses! Your own father is killing you!”

  Dewey felt his insides turn cold. “Mommy. . .”

  “Don't listen to them, sugar.”

  The horn blared, and the station wagon sped up. The woman stumbled away, losing hold of her picket sign. Dewey read it as it fell: BRING BACK THE NUKES!

  Just ahead was the private gate, standing tall between high bushes. Guards waited there with hands on their holsters. The crowd stayed back on the main road, still shouting and waving signs. The guards stepped aside and let the car pass through, nodding in recognition to Dewey's father. The station wagon rushed down a dusty road between summer-browned oaks, dry-baked hills.

  “Daddy,” Dewey said, “what's a nuke?”

  “You don't need to know,” his father said. “They'll soon be obsolete.”

  As they pulled into the small parking lot among fifty other cars, Dewey saw that the barbecue pits were already smoking and a softball game was under way. Plenty of kids were playing around the picnic tables, but he didn't know any of them. This was the first company picnic since Dewey's father had come to help supervise the Project. There hadn't been time to relax until recently. Daddy was always griping about deadlines. But now the Project was finished. The new power station had been in operation for a week, running smoothly in the nearby hills. At last the company had granted its employees an afternoon to picnic with their families.

  While his parents unpacked the station wagon, Dewey wandered toward a small group of kids who were kicking a soccer ball between them. He stood at the edge of the game for a few minutes, trying to figure out if there were any rules—until someone kicked the ball too hard, and it flew past Dewey into the heavy underbrush that surrounded the picnic grounds.

  Dewey shouted, “I'll get it!”

  He plunged into the tangled brambles, thinking that if he retrieved the ball, he could make some friends. The others shouted encouragement as he stooped ever lower; soon he was almost crawling. Then, just ahead of him, he saw the ball. He ignored the thorns that scratched at his face and arms, and pressed forward.

  A black hand darted out of the thicket and grabbed at his wrist.

  “Hey!” he shouted, tearing himself away.

  Something moved inside the hedge, struggling after him. Whoever or whatever it was grew trapped in thorns; the hand fell out of sight. He stumbled backward, terrified. A black hand! It hadn't been the chocolate brown of his own skin; no, it had been the black of something badly burned.

  A second later Dewey was free of the bushes. The other kids were waiting for him. “Well, where is it?” asked a tall blond boy.

  Dewey couldn't catch his breath. “There's someone in there,” he gasped.

  “Someone stole our ball, you mean?” said a girl.

  He looked back at the bushes, but they were silent, unrustling.

  “Naw,” said the blond boy, “he's just chicken.”

  “He does look scared,” said another kid.

  “You go get it, then!” Dewey said angrily, turning away from them so that his fear would be hidden. He decided that he didn't want to play with them after all. He walked slowly past the picnic table where his mother was setting out plastic bowls full of salad. His father was standing with a few other men, all of them drinking beer in the shade of an old oak tree. Dewey went up to them and waited for his father to notice him.

  “Daddy,” he said, when the men kept on talking. “Daddy, there's someone in the bushes over there.” He pointed, but now saw that the kids had their ball back and were kicking it across the dry grass.

  “What're you talking about?” his father asked.

  Dewey stared at the motionless thicket; there wasn't even a breeze to stir the branches. Suddenly he remembered the people on the road.

  “Those animal people,” he said.

  That got his father's attention. “What do you mean? The anarchists?”

  One of the other men laughed. “Those idiots. How did they ever get it into their head that the Project was dangerous?”

  “I saw one of them, Daddy. He was —”

  “Where?” Dewey's father whirled around, searching the hills, the hedges, the trees. “You saw them, Dewey?”

  “Relax, man,” said one of the others. “They can't get in here.”

  “You don't know that,” said Dewey's father. “Those people won't stop at protest. They don't respect normal people. I carry a gun now; you'd be crazy not to.”

  “Come on, who's going to resort to violence over a little thing like a power plant? It's for their own good, even if they don't understand how it works. They're ignorant, that's all. Superstitious. If they really understood tau partic
les and time/mass transfer, they wouldn't be afraid anymore.”

  “Believe what you want,” said Dewey's father, still eyeing the landscape with suspicion. “You remember how violent the antinuke protests got; or have you forgotten already?'

  “Yeah, but that stuff was dangerous. This is safe.”

  “You can believe that if you want, too,” said Dewey's father.

  “I gotta say,” said another man, “they did give me a bit of a scare on the way in. You saw how they were dressed. Kind of reminded me of the nuke protests, the dead-falls. Remember when the protestors used to dress like burned-up corpses and skeletons and fall down dead in the streets?”

  “That's what I saw!” Dewey shouted. “Just like that! Down there in the hedge!” He pointed again.

  The men laughed among each other, all except Dewey's father.

  “Kid’s got quite an imagination.”

  “Dewey doesn't imagine things,” his father said.

  “I'm telling you, those demonstrators can't get in here. Don't let them ruin your day.”

  “They already have. Come on, Dewey.”

  Daddy started back toward the car. As they passed the picnic table, Dewey's mother looked up and saw the expression on her husband's face. “Honey? What is it?”

  He didn't answer, except to glance sideways at Dewey and say, “Get in the car.”

  “Why, Daddy?”

  “Don't argue, just get in the car.”

  Dewey slid into the backseat while his father opened the front door and reached under the seat. He straightened and quickly tucked something into his belt; before the shirt covered it, Dewey saw the handle of a gun.

  “Daddy?”

  “Keep still. I saw something in those bushes, too. More than one. I think we're surrounded, Dewey; that's why I want you to stay in the car. The rest of these fools won't believe me until it's too late. Now I'm going to try and get your mother to come sit with you if I can do it without scaring her. Then we're going to drive out of here the way we came in.”