Jonesbridge
Page 19
Myron followed instructions, now worried they suspected him of shooting the superintendent. “I witnessed the salvage admin kidnap him—and shoot him. I saved him—from the water,” Myron said.
“What water?” The head ghost looked around with a shrug. “I don’t see any water.”
Myron tugged at his wet smock and pointed to the entrance at the bottom of the quarry.
“Don’t move.” The ghost took two steps forward with the gun trained on Myron’s head.
The other ghosts gathered around the Superintendent, checking for signs of life.
“Very faint pulse. I don’t know if he’ll make it.”
“Myron Daw,” the ghost captain proclaimed, tying Myron’s hands behind his back. “You are guilty of bombing the munitions factory, halting the production of shells in concert with an E’ster invasion. In so doing, you are guilty of the murders of two hundred productive slogs assigned to munitions and the attempted kidnap and murder of the Superintendent of Industry.”
“No.” Myron yanked at the restraints. “It was the salvage administrator.”
“Any one of these offenses would result in your summary execution.”
“It was the salvage administrator. He did all those things. Not me. I saved the Superintendent. He would’ve died down there.” Looking them in the eyes, seeing the empty rage, he sighed and cast his eyes on the ground.
“Lies only breed lies.”
“Customarily I’d execute you on the spot,” the ghost captain said. “But we have orders. There’s a bigger plan for the traitor. A rally.” He kicked Myron’s legs apart. “A public execution. In front of all of Jonesbridge.”
“Finally some entertainment,” one of the others said.
Two of the ghosts fashioned a litter for the Superintendent and began the trip back to Jonesbridge. The other two knotted Myron’s feet to one end of a log and his hands to the other and hoisted him to dangle between them, his back bowed, swaying between the two ghosts as they marched back to Jonesbridge with their trophy.
Myron gritted his teeth, working his wrists back and forth for relief as they bore his dead weight on a log that obstructed his view of the sky. His head hung free, bouncing as they went. He glanced beside him to the Superintendent.
Myron had grown up sheltered, in hiding on his grandfather’s farm, ducking into the potato bin or the barn when things got dicey. He had learned fear at a very young age. Quickening heart, a tingle in his chest, the sensation of falling; it was as familiar to him as the taste of mashed protein and chaff. Sorrow, that was a numbness on his head, tears, and a hollow, worthless feeling like carrying a heavy crate that turned out to be empty. Sorrow and fear were two emotional neighbors that Myron knew well. He experienced them both on a daily basis in Jonesbridge, sorrowful that he remained, sorrowful for what he saw, how he was treated, and fearful of what would come, fearful of the sorrow. The tense muscles, the stinging bile that rose up his throat when he saw his mother’s lifeless body under the blanket, and the sounds of Sindra’s tears when the ghosts violated her, he recognized that as anger—which always led to sorrow.
His grandfather had taught him not to hate, and only now did Myron understand that hate was not so much an extreme dislike of something, such as his aversion to mashed protein and chaff, rather it was the fermentation of his sorrow, its strengthening and souring into something repulsive. Hate, he’d only come to understand once he finally experienced love, the ugly mirror image of the beautiful fullness he’d felt when he and Sindra planned their escape in the shadows of the chapel during the best moments of his life. As he relived Coyote Man sailing away with Sindra and then imagined his own public execution, the sneering and hissing, the snapping of his neck before a throng of his fellow slogs, after all that he’d sacrificed and endured, the only thing he truly hated was his sorrow and fear. And today, he had overcome them both.
“Execute me if it’ll make you feel better, but the man you want is already dead.”
“Shut up, traitor.” The ghost kicked Myron in the back.
The bombing had grown quiet. The explosions had ceased, and based on bits of conversation he heard as they paraded him down the main thoroughfare of Jonesbridge, the E’ster catapults, along with much of their attack force, had plummeted into the Gorge, which explained all the explosions in the R1 Facility. The ghosts marched Myron past the still-smoldering munitions plant, all the way to the administration building where the gargoyles judged him with their cold eyes. In the middle of the parade ground adjacent to the main building, on a platform ten feet off the ground, they yoked Myron into a pillory and chained his legs to the base. There he watched, over the next few hours, the gallows he would hang from taking shape before his eyes, built by the hands of workers from his shift in the salvage factory. Some sneered. A few of them spat or threw hard objects at him. Saul jabbed him with a stick.
Myron spent the night hunched over in the pillory, rebuilding in his mind the postcard and the dream of Bora Bora. He couldn’t be certain what he saw in the R1 Facility, whether he truly was more adaptable, whether the Old Age scientists really did experiment on his ancestors in Richterville, but he took it for the truth. Most of what they endured here would have killed an ordinary person, so he clung to a silly hope that his neck might not break when the gallows platform gave way.
The next morning, following the shift siren and the rising of the sun, all of Jonesbridge gathered in platoons on the parade grounds. The entire complex halting production just to watch him die. A squad of ghosts clad in formal parade attire, something Myron hadn’t yet seen in his time in Jonesbridge, approached the stocks.
“It’s time,” the ghost captain pronounced. With Myron’s feet and hands in chains, they released him from the pillory.
The journey from the stockade to the gallows began, and as the hangman’s noose came into focus, Myron wore the inevitability of his fate as a matter of honor. The death of a slog was unceremonious, without mourners or fanfare, no bugles, no speeches, no tears. Some claimed that even the Great Above turned an indifferent eye to the demise of a slog, their bodies heaped into a bury hole, one atop the other, until the hole filled. But today, all of Jonesbridge had gathered to watch Myron, a lowly slog, expire to the bugle call of requiem, and, as those who’d swung from the gallows before him, he would be remembered, a slog among slogs.
The procession stopped at the base of the gallows that smelled of shin pine resin. His escorts peeled away for Myron to make the last leg of the march to the executioner alone. The six stairs that stood between Myron and his final breath stretched all the way to the heavens. He stepped onto the bottom stair. It creaked, as they all did until he stood at eye-level with his executioner.
At the top, he stood before a ghost captain who slipped the noose around Myron’s neck, a scratchy braid of twine, already uncomfortable resting on his collar bones. He studied the outline of the trap door beneath his feet, the faces of the slogs in the crowd, and broadened his shoulders, stuck his chin out and raised his head.
“Myron Daw,” the ghost captain shouted. “For repeated duty shirking. For the destruction of the Munitions Facility Number-Two, and for being a traitor to the Alliance, I hereby sentence you to death.” The ghost reached for the platform release handle.
Myron clinched his jaw, awaiting the click and the squeak of the platform hinge. He closed his eyes and searched his memory of the postcard image of Bora Bora and Sindra’s face.
“Wait!”
Myron eased one eye open. An administration courier ran up the passageway, holding up his hand. The ghost captain took his grip off of the release lever.
Out of breath, the messenger jogged up the stairs and whispered in the captain’s ear, after which the captain removed the noose from Myron’s neck and gave him a shove in the back toward the stairs. Myron stumbled through the gauntlet of murmuring slogs.
The ghost platoon led Myron, still in chains, into the administration building to stand before the clerk where she spo
ke to an unseen person in the shadows and adjusted her spectacles.
“Myron Daw. Against the odds, the Superintendent of Industry has survived his ordeal.” She nodded and a ghost removed the chains. “Step forward.”
Myron took two steps toward her station.
“All the way.” She motioned him with her hand.
“The Superintendent of Industry has implicated Cyril, the former salvage factory administrator, as the traitor.” She double checked her papers. “Even though you are only a slog, given your acts of patriotism, and given the leadership opening in salvage, he has promoted you to the position of Salvage Factory Administrator effective immediately.”
• • •
At 7:00 A.M. the following morning, the factory siren wailed from atop a stanchion in the salvage yard, emitting its familiar howl before it hiccupped and ebbed into a moan. The day shift began with no attack warning, as if the E’sters had never tried to assail the Gorge. All one hundred workers, including the foreman, Saul, stood in place on the salvage factory floor, at attention, arms straight down, chest out, eyes focused on the flag that hung like a tapestry on the towering south wall.
Myron, using the side door and bypassing entrance procedures for the first time, walked up the staircase to the administrator’s office and took his place on the factory overlook as the anthem began. His faceless shadow loomed over the south bank of workbenches the way all administrator’s shadows did, but as much as he’d wished to have a larger domicile and a better job, he never imagined it would ever happen, that he would be the first and only slog to ever rise to the rank of administrator in Jonesbridge.
Following a customary minute of silence, the Superintendent of Industry began his admonition for the shift. “The E’sters have retreated.” A thunderous applause sounded, audible not just from their factory, but the surrounding factories as well. “We fought well. We continued production. We lived to fight another day. And we will, because they will certainly return. And when they do, we must be ready.”
Myron wondered where his airship had taken Sindra, if it had sailed her all the way to Bora Bora, and what she would think of his new position. He believed he truly loved her in every way a man could love a woman, and though he doubted he would ever see her again, he had given her the best gift he could imagine: liberation from Jonesbridge, freedom to fly.
When Myron’s grandfather first tried to teach him how to fly a kite, Myron had let go of the dowel by mistake and chased the string across a ravine and up a hill until the kite vanished over the top of the next hill. His grandfather had told him that there was nothing like losing a kite to teach you how to fly one, that it was nothing but a few sticks and some old newsprint, maybe some glue. A kite lost, yes, but he had certainly hoped that wouldn’t be the one and only kite Myron ever built. As he surveyed the factory floor, Myron began a mental design of a new airship, one he could build from better parts that only an administrator could procure.
END
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