Spares

by Michael Marshall Smith

  But our orders were to keep on going, and so we did. We crawled, we staggered, we ran—all more or less in the same direction, farther and farther away from any-thing we recognized as real. There’d been talk of meeting up with another unit which had been sent this way, but none of us really expected that to happen anymore. We couldn’t even tell what color the air was by then; with the combination of drugs and deep strangeness around us the chances of us doing anything cohesive or deliberate were absolutely minimal. We could only look after each other. By that time that was the most we could do. Everything in that world was trying to kill us, and the only sane purpose any of us could find in it was to try to keep as many humans alive as possible.

  On the day in question we were hacking through the densest forest any of us had ever seen. The trees grew so close together they were touching, and you could be confronted with solid walls of trunks which you might have to journey half a mile to go round. It was so tangled that it was even difficult to think, as if the building blocks of thought were too heavy to manipulate. It was unbearably, swelteringly hot, and we were carrying two of the unit on makeshift stretchers. They’d been injured in a firefight with villagers the week before. We’d bandaged their mouths up, so they wouldn’t scream, but I don’t think there was any one of us who couldn’t hear their agony in our head. They stank of shit and blood and skinFix, and one of them had Gap maggots in the wound in his leg. He said he could feel them eating him. Maybe he could, but we left them there, because they were eating the gangrene which would otherwise kill him even sooner than his injuries. Every one of us was cut somewhere, had ragged handmade stitches spidering over some part of our bodies. We hadn’t eaten in four days, and worse than that, we’d run out of cigarettes. Even the Rapt was getting low, and our Lieutenant was beginning to panic. He knew that none of us could go on much longer, but we were hundreds of miles away from anywhere. We were less than zombies by then, the walking dead’s walking dead. We didn’t care who won the war anymore. We didn’t really care if we were going to survive. We were just going to keep on fighting until we all dropped, and then that would be the end of it.

  Mal and I were struggling along in the middle of the line carrying one of the stretchers, and so we weren’t the first to see the village. Mal was limping badly from mine wounds to his thighs, and the guy we were carrying was having a very bad time of it. He’d taken a head shot and you could see his brain. I was half delirious with hunger, exhaustion, and nicotine withdrawal, and when I first heard someone hiss that there was a village up ahead I was inclined to dismiss it as another illusion.

  But soon enough we realized it was really there, and stopped. The tree cover round the village, now about two hundred yards ahead, was too thick for us to see anything even with binoculars. Faintly, carried through the thick and swirling air, we thought we could hear shouting, and even singing.

  Gap villagers don’t sing. They simply don’t do it. They’re not very cheerful people.

  The Lieutenant decided to leave one person with the wounded, and that the rest of us should go ahead to check out the situation. He motioned to me to lead us forward. He generally did.

  We crawled across the forest floor, keeping behind bushes, sliding under piles of whispering leaves. An insane level of caution had become an unthinking instinct. There was nothing we wanted to see more than some of our own kind, but nothing we needed less than another firefight. As we got closer the singing became more distinct, and finally we were able to recognize the tune. It was from a song which was getting big airplay just before we went into The Gap, though the words seemed to be different.

  Either way it meant the singers were some of ours, and we hauled ourselves to our feet and walked the rest of the way, Mal and I walking point. I don’t know what Mal was thinking—about noodles, probably—but I was fantasizing about cigarettes. I could almost feel the smoke in my lungs. I thought I might try having five at once.

  The village was in a large clearing, and from forty yards away we could see soldiers in the remnants of the same army fatigues we wore. They didn’t seem to be doing anything very much, seemed in fact to be wandering around with a glazed look in their eyes. There was something odd about them, and I held my hand back to the others, urging them to be quiet and keep out of direct sight.

  No one wanted to be in that village more than I, but I was getting a weird feeling. Instead of going straight into the front, I led them around the side and we carefully approached the village from a different angle. The closer we got, the easier it became to distinguish another sound, beneath the guttural singing and shouting. It sounded a bit like crying, or more precisely, like a number of people crying very quietly.

  You didn’t see many tears in The Gap. People were either dead or glad to still be alive. I looked at Mai. We turned to the Lieutenant and he shrugged, clearly out of his depth. Then we walked into the village.

  The first thing we saw was a little girl. Both of her legs had been cut off at the knee, and she was tied to a board which was propped up against one of the houses. She was crying quietly to herself, her eyes gazing without sight past us into some inner world. As the others stared at her I ducked my head into the house. I nearly vomited when I saw what was inside, and I thought I’d seen everything by then.

  When I came back out I felt as if the world had changed, and as if it would never be the same again. I signaled dreamily to Mal and we walked a little farther along the village path, mouths open against the smell. We could see other soldiers, half naked, wandering around some of the huts a little distance away, but that wasn’t what we were looking at.

  Gap children’s bodies lay all over the ground, broken across paths and lolling out of the doorways of huts, some little more than babies, others in their early teens. Some were recently dead, others had bloated in the heat until their guts exploded. Many of the corpses seemed to have a distinctive wound, a deep slash across the throat. The dust was crusted brown with their blood.

  We came upon a makeshift pen in which about ten children squatted in the dirt. Some were missing limbs, their stumps hastily cauterized. Others were bleeding to death there and then, while the remainder stared hopelessly up at the sky, flinching as they heard us approach. Most of them had been blinded.

  The rest of the unit caught up with us then, grinding to a horrified halt, and as we stood staring we heard a shout, and turned to see a soldier pointing at us. He was standing in the clearing at the center of the village, and it looked as if there were others there. We left the pen and approached him, passing walls stained with splatters of blood. Yards away we stopped, and this is what we saw:

  Ten soldiers, most naked and dripping with sweat, others with strange scraps of clothes still hung around them.

  A small pile of children’s bodies, the clearing red with what had escaped from them.

  Three live children, two girls and a boy, held down on their knees by makeshift wooden frames.

  And in the middle of all this, nodding his head in time to the song which the soldiers were chanting, stood their Lieutenant. He alone of all the soldiers was more or less still in uniform, though his pants were around his ankles. He had his cock out, and was thrusting it in and out of a gash which had been cut across the throat of the five-year-old girl who was being held down in front of him. Her head was held up so that he could see her eyes as he worked. She was still alive.

  We stood there for an eternity, without moving, as the other soldiers stared back at us. It felt as if the world had stopped.

  I pulled the rifle from over my shoulder and shot the Lieutenant in the head.

  That moment is there every second of my life. Just as a fact, like my muscles are a fact and the weather is a fact and the color of my hair is a fact. In retrospect, and maybe at the time, the rifle seemed to swing perfectly into position, to fit so snugly into my shoulder; and as I pulled the trigger I knew, as if my soul was carrying it home, that the bullet would hit the very atom I was aiming for.

  That
shot is my life, and for that instant I felt like an angel, of sorts: not redeeming, because I redeemed nothing, least of all myself. I was simply under a fate that fell from the heavens and flattened me into the ground. Sometimes when I wake in the night and wonder what has startled me, I think it is an echo of that shot, of that moment, and I wonder if it will ever cease.

  Nearly cried quietly in the back of the car. I wished I could reach out to her, could tell her that it was a long time ago. I was glad that Vinaldi hadn’t described, and probably didn’t know, what we’d found in all of the huts in the village. The leftovers. We did what we could with skinFix and bandages, but it wasn’t very much. It wasn’t enough. Then we left the soldiers there, abandoning them to the forest.

  Vinaldi was quiet, and then I heard a spark and the intake of breath as he lit a cigarette.

  “One more little detail,” he said. “The man Jack shot, the Lieutenant? He was Arlond Maxen’s older brother. They were in the same unit, and Arlond made it back out.”

  Nearly sniffed, and looked out of the window. She was a bright girl. She’d worked it out. Then in the rearview mirror I saw her eyes looking at mine, and she asked me a question. “What are you going to do now?”

  I barely heard her, because I’d finally realized the Farms’ second purpose. They hadn’t been created just for spare parts. The group of men who came to them at night hadn’t been sneaking in. One of them owned the whole deal, and the payments made to the caretakers were simply to ensure their silence. I wondered why they’d never come to my Farm. I was hired under a false name. They couldn’t have known it was me.

  It didn’t matter. The answer to Nearly’s question still came easily. “I’m going to kill Maxen,” I said.

  “Is that going to solve anything?” she said sadly. “Is that going to bring anyone back?”

  “I’m not doing it in the hope of solving something,” I replied. “I’m going to do it because I want to.”

  We abandoned the car out in the Portal, and returned to New Richmond; Vinaldi and Nearly through the front entrance, me round the back, as usual. Vinaldi returned to his empire to check that nothing untoward had happened while we’d been gone, sort through his mail, that kind of thing. I asked him to subtly spread a rumor that I’d disappeared, and he said he’d put the word out. Nearly went home to shower, and realized that she’d in effect been on an unpaid holiday for the last couple of days, so maybe she was going back to work, too. I didn’t ask her.

  I went back to Howie’s, and spent a while concocting likely deaths for myself. The most convincing story I could come up with was a drug overdose, which gave me pause. That’s not a great comment on a life. I slotted Mal’s disk in and got it to hack the name Jack Randall into the pending file on the list of city dead. The death couldn’t be absolutely official because that required a confirmatory code from the coroner’s office, but I made it appear that my body had been found in the Portal. The coroners could rarely be bothered to go out there, and I knew from experience they’d just rubber-stamp it. The notification would automatically be relayed to the Police subnet, and from there the word would spread to the few people to whom it would be interesting. It also gave me pause to realize that all of them would regard it as good news. All in all, it was a bit of a gloomy experience. I was officially a ghost.

  Then I turned the computer off, ate a cheeseburger at last, and started drinking heavily. The burger was excellent, and cheered me up no end.

  Say what you like, but history is shit. It’s dirty, and it smells—with good reason, because it has provided the visceral energy which brought the present moment to where it is. This present is like our bodies: They look so clean, because they’re washed every day, but they leave little piles everywhere behind them. Past presents digested, excreted, and left for posterity—and our later selves—to smell.

  As I sat in Howie’s office, in the hours before dawn and alone, I felt as if I were sitting in the midst of a hundred piles of shit, the stink of each subtly different from the others. When I tried to trace where each had come from I got lost. I couldn’t remember the steps clearly enough. It was all too complicated. Time to wipe the hard disk and start again.

  Howie had left me by myself for the time being, at my request. I was trying to remember when my life had stopped making sense, when the loops got nested so deep I couldn’t see beyond them. You never value simplicity as a child because you’re always leaning into the turns, wanting to become older and get your hands on all those older things. As a child, your options are limited, and as such, so simple and free. Each day is a simple progression of activities, not fractured with the demands of the future.

  There are countless things you can do when you’ve grown up, so many calls upon your time. You can smoke. You can drink. You can take drugs. You can work—in fact, you have to, because you have to pay bills. Then there are the things you can’t do. You have to not goof off, not sleep with other people even if they’re available. You have to be happy with where you are and what you’ve got, when the essence of childhood was the belief that there would always be something new.

  The addictions and the mandates of being an adult take up so much of your time that you can never simply be. Every thought and every action is shaped and undermined by all the other actions or thoughts you have to forgo. You can find yourself haunted by people and events that never even existed, so surrounded by spirits that the real world shades away. You still search for Narnia, even though you’re too old to believe in it and now it doesn’t want you there.

  Innocence is the freedom from having to have a cigarette every half hour, freedom from loving someone, freedom from the endless fallout of bad things which you have endured or done. Freedom from time, and ail time’s passing leaves behind it. The countless smells of shit

  The melancholies of youth are to do with not being taken seriously, and the opposite sex. The desperate, biological exposure of that need; the feeling of being left behind when other boys seem to know about smoking and beer and girls—or when other girls had better clothes, a boyfriend of sorts, and tits. Not so much a feeling of being left behind, in fact, so much as a dreadful fear that you were on a subtly different and less vital curve, one which would never bring you into contact with these exciting, contraband substances.

  And yet, when I got those things, I realized the truth in the only movie that really scared me as a child. I thought of the time when I saw Pinocchio on television, and I remembered the way the film spoke to me even though the animation was archaic and two-dimensional. I wonder whether my reaction then was a forerunner of what I feel now, if it was an intuitive preunderstanding that these forbidden things really would turn you into a donkey, forever tilling someone else’s field. But you run for them with open arms anyway, because that’s what growing up is about, and only when you stand tired and wet in the rain and mud, the yoke grown so close that it is a part of your shoulders right down to the bone, do you realize what you have done.

  I tried to bend the world, and didn’t bend enough myself. I wasted so much time looking for someone who would light up the forest that I didn’t see what I had. Henna was a beacon who would pull me out of the woods, with a strength in her arms which had been put there by my lack of love. I’d stand in front of her, bedraggled and sad in the discovery that what I’d chased was not worth the catching, and believing that Henna never knew what I was really like because I lied. And of course she understood all along, and loved me anyway.

  She’s not here anymore, so there’s no one to pull me back. Pinocchio was rescued, and in time turned into a real little boy. The rest of us stand shivering in the rain, and bray.

  Howie believed most of what I told him had happened in The Gap, though he did inquire exactly how much Rapt I’d taken. Then he asked me what I was going to do, and I told him.

  “How, precisely, are you intending to do that?” he asked, handing me a beer. The bar outside was crowded and noisy, but the office felt like it was miles away from all that.


  “There’s a memorial service for Louella Richardson tomorrow,” I said cheerfully. “Maxen’s going to be there, salving his conscience. He’s going to have an uninvited guest.”

  “How are you going to get in?”

  “I have a plan,” I said.

  Howie nodded. “You want some help with the details? Like where exactly you’d like to be buried?”

  I smiled at him, thinking how weird life is. I met Howie when I was asking after a murder once, and leaned on him hard for information. He’d refused to play ball for so long, and so imaginatively, that I found myself kind of admiring him. Then I found myself ending up in his bar when I wanted a drink, and even brought Henna and Angela a few times. Now he was the only person in the world prepared to help me, however ridiculous my ambition. Vinaldi had made it clear before leaving that he was having no part of it. His argument was with Yhandim and the others, not Maxen.

  “No,” I said to Howie. “But thank you.”

  Howie shrugged, drained the rest of his beer.

  “Good haircut, by the way,” I said.

  Howie ran his hand ruefully through his hair, which was spiking considerably more than usual. He looked like he had a blond hedgehog sitting on his head. “The fuck it is,” he said. “But I’ve got a detailed and well-thought-out plan.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m going to firebomb the fuckers. That’ll teach them that when I say ‘just a trim’ I mean it.” He explained his theory that hairdressers sprayed some chemical on your head that made your hair look longer than it really was. When they asked you if they’d taken enough off, you always looked in the mirror and said no, take a little more. Then the moment you left the shop, all your hair shrunk back to its normal length again, making you look as if you’d been designed for cleaning round the U-bend of a toilet. You couldn’t blame the hairdressers, because you’d told them to take more off, and they’d achieved their real aim of making every man look a complete fucking idiot. It was a good theory, and I applauded him for it.