“Ah, my political,” he said jovially as I entered. He held out a bottle. “The camp’s finest. Drink.”
The murky liquid inside smelled sour and chemical. It was excruciatingly hot going down my throat, and it hit my prison-starved stomach like a fist.
The boy took the bottle from me and sat down next to Dmitri. “So,” Dmitri continued, “you’re interested in leaving after all.”
“I might be. But why me? I’m just a political.”
“A political with powerful friends. Friends who apparently miss you very much. Getting you out would be worth a lot of money to me.” He leaned forward and passed me the bottle. It was no better the second time.
“How do I know this isn’t some kind of setup?”
“Your friend Andrei told me to tell you that if you didn’t have a talent for politics, you would be sucking some owner’s perfumed cock right now.”
I nodded. It was an old joke between me and one of my friends.
“And that Nadja isn’t going to wait forever.”
“Bastard,” I muttered under my breath. “Who is going?”
“You, me and the boy.”
“And what about…” I paused.
“The cow? You can say it.”
“What about the cow?” I asked. Everyone had heard the stories.
“Hey, boy!” Dmitri nudged him. “Boy, tell him what I taught you.”
“Come on, Dmitri,” he said. I looked closely at him for the first time since he was dropped. He seemed to be recovering from the initial camp shock—there was a flicker of life in his eyes. But he still looked young and vulnerable, like some sort of baby animal.
Dmitri leaned toward him and hissed, “Tell him, just like I taught you.”
The boy shifted a little bit on the ground. Nobody ever felt comfortable being too close to Dmitri. “If you don’t know who the cow is, you’re the cow,” he said.
Dmitri laughed, a dry, dead sound. “Very good. And who is the cow?”
He gave Dmitri a sullen look. “I guess I am.”
Dmitri clapped his hands. “Excellent.” He turned to me. “You see? He knows his place. And you two will have a lot to talk about in the forest. He’s political too.”
I looked at him incredulously. “Him? Political? He’s an owner.”
“Was an owner,” he corrected me. “These idiot children of privilege. You know what he did? He got caught fucking a boyar’s wife.”
“That makes him stupid, not political.”
“It was love,” the boy said defiantly.
“You see?” said Dmitri with a smirk. “Love.”
“She was married to him, but she didn’t love him.”
“Tell him the whole story, boy. Tell him how you got caught.”
“I told him. Gregor. Her husband. I told him.” It came out in a low mumble.
Dmitri took a drink and laughed uproariously. “You see? He walked into the drawing room of a boyar and said ‘I am the stupid boy who has been fucking your wife, and I would like a walk in the meat forest.’”
“I told him that I loved Ilse, and that she loved me. And that an honorable man would let her go.” There was a note of stubbornness in the boy’s voice.
He reached over and pinched the boy’s cheek. “Isn’t he wonderful, political? Perfect, really. Meat like a cow, brain like a cow.”
“Leave him alone, Dmitri.” I was shocked to hear my own voice.
Suddenly, Dmitri was on top of me, his hand around my throat. His skin glowed an angry red under the tattoos. His face was inches from mine. I couldn’t believe how quickly he had moved. “What did you say to me?” he hissed.
“Leave him alone.” I could feel my throat vibrate under his hand. “He hasn’t done anything wrong. He doesn’t deserve your bullshit.”
Dmitri’s breath was hot and bitter. The bioluminescent nodes rippling under his skin gave his face a dull, red illumination, making empty sockets out of his eyes. He pushed me away roughly, banging my head against the metal wall of the hut. “Idealists,” he spat, sitting back down. “God save me from idealists. You would even save this empty, useless little boy here? An owner? An idle parasite on your saintly workers?”
“He can’t help how he was born. He doesn’t know better. He could be reeducated.”
“Yes!” Dmitri clapped. “Reeducated. Maybe in a camp just like this?” He leaned forward. “I know you, political. You think you are so superior. So much better than me. A hero to us all. Fighting for truth and justice. But you are no different. You know what the exiles say? Everything eats: the forest, the prisoners, the exiles, the workers, the owners, the gangsters. Even you, political. Everybody, everything in the world is clawing, scratching, killing, eating. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re special.”
“No. We’re different. I’ve never…”
“Killed anyone? I have. Many times. It’s not such a big deal. No problem at all, really. You’ll find this out too. We’re the same. I kill for money, you kill for ideas—or you will very soon. Does that make you so much more special?” He leaned back against the wall. His anger already forgotten, his skin pulsing a cool blue. He closed his eyes. Tattooed on his eyelids were two grinning skulls. “You make me tired. Leave me alone. Both of you.” I stood up to leave, and he opened his eyes and looked at me with his impassive butcher’s gaze. “There’s a food drop tomorrow. We’ll get our supplies from that, and then we start walking. Meet me at the drop site at dawn. And get some rest. Tomorrow will be the worst day of your life.”
Back outside, in the darkness of the night, the unceasing drizzle felt slimy on my skin, as if blood was falling out of the sky instead of rain.
* * * *
Dmitri and the boy were already at the edge of the drop zone when I got there. Men stood around, puffing up their chests and trying to look fierce. I had never been this close to a resupply before, and it made me nervous.
The three of us stood in silence, waiting. As the dim light of a camp dawn began to grow, the place started to buzz with a cold, prickly feeling of anticipation, equal parts fear, aggression, and animal need. Dmitri cocked his head, and then I heard it too, the growing whine of the approaching gyros. “It would be best if you stayed well to the side,” Dmitri said with a smile.
Suddenly, five great crates plunged out of the sky, breaking open on impact. Supplies spilled out into the mud, and with a roar, everyone charged toward them. The drop zone was instantly in a state of riot as the men scrabbled around for boxes of rations. The prisoners batted at each other with sticks, or clawed and bit and scratched like animals. Anyone who picked up a ration package would be instantly set upon by two or three other men, and beaten until he dropped the food. Then another man would pick it up and the cycle would continue. Dmitri plunged into the chaos like a man swimming in a rough sea, punching and kicking men out of his way, pausing every once in while to examine the contents of a box. Finally, he stooped, picked something out of the mud and walked back toward me and the boy, stopping a few more times to pick up cartons of food. Near the edge of the riot, a man ran up to Dmitri and tried to pull the food away from him. Dmitri, with only one arm free, gave him a vicious blow to the throat. He fell to the ground and lay still.
When Dmitri got back to us, he tossed us each a box of rations. It was a vast fortune. Extravagant wealth. More food than I had seen in one place since they had delivered me to this place. “Eat this now,” he said. “You will need it. And you too,” he nodded to the boy. “We have to keep all of that luxurious meat on your bones.”
I ripped open one of the boxes and started stuffing the food into my mouth. My hands trembled as they tore at the food. I couldn’t eat it fast enough.
Dmitri watched with amusement. “Don’t you want to see what else I got?” he asked. From under his shirt he pulled out a metal canister with a brass pipe attached to one end. He looked at it admiringly. “They used to call these blowtorches. It’s a real antique.” He gave us a thin smile. “Blowtorches are ve
ry nice to have in the meat forest.”
He turned and walked toward the edge of camp. The boy and I followed a few meters behind him.
“Thank you for sticking up for me last night,” the boy whispered to me as we walked.
I nodded and looked away. “It’s the only nice thing anybody’s done for me here. Dmitri’s wrong. You are different.” His earnest sincerity was almost painful. “And you know, Dmitri’s got a temper, but he’s OK, really.”
“He is not OK.” I snapped. “He is…” I stopped as we reached the camp perimeter, where Dmitri stood waiting.
“OK, children. From now on we live by forest rules,” Dmitri said. “Once we get into the forest, we have to be constantly on the move. Keep walking. We can’t stop, even for a moment, until we reach an exile clearing. Don’t touch anything with your bare skin. The moss is the worst, but everything is dangerous. It can get through clothing in 30 seconds or less. With bare skin, it’s faster.”
“Exiles. Do they really exist?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. Travelling with them is the only way to get out of the forest. They know how to deal with it. But they’re a very touchy people. They need to be handled carefully.”
“And how long to the nearest clearing?”
“It’s impossible to predict. One day. Two days. Never. It’s not easy. If you don’t think you can walk for 36 hours straight, you’ll probably die out there. Do you still want to go?”
I looked back through the mist at the camp. Sheets of rain hid much of the squalor, but every once in a while the wind would blow the smells our way—garbage, shit, blood. “Let’s go,” I said, and we stepped across the invisible line marking the maximum amplitude of the electric field.
* * * *
The forest was as gray as it looked from the camp—gray and completely silent. Great coniferous trees stretched upward. The forest floor was marshy and soft, and we slipped constantly in the mud. There was downed timber everywhere, and Dmitri led us on a circuitous line through the maze of fallen trees. This went on, monotonously, for hours, and we started to get careless. The boy was the worst, used to the easy life in the city. He began to trip and fall onto the forest floor, sometimes lying there for a few seconds until Dmitri would kick him to his feet with a few curses.
“You can’t stay still, not even for a few seconds. It’s everywhere, even if you can’t see it.” Dmitri would give the boy a push, and we would move on again in silence.
Every once in a while we would happen on a corpse. Still dressed in rotting prison clothing, standing or sitting where the forest got him. When we came on the first one, the boy stood stock still. “Jesus,” he whispered.
I looked into the thing’s face. It was sickeningly lifelike, a raw, red facsimile of the man it used to be, as if his skin had been flayed from him where he sat—a sculpture of a man carved out of raw meat. As I looked, it seemed to pulsate and move. Dmitri pulled us away. “This one is still pretty active. Not very old. Maybe you knew him. The new ones are the most dangerous. They wake up faster.”
“People talk about it, but it never seemed real until now.” The boy was pale and shaken.
“The glory of the meat forest,” Dmitri exclaimed as we walked on. “A massive fungal mat. Millions of square miles. It underlies all of the taiga. That’s why it’s such a wonderful place for the owners to put all of their prison camps. It eats everything it touches.”
“It’s horrible,” I said.
“So judgmental, political. It is merely following its nature. As do I, and you, and yes, as does our beloved cow.
* * * *
Toward midday, Dmitri allowed us to pause for food. “Keep your feet moving,” he said. “Touch nothing.” We started eating, walking in place, trying to keep from touching anything for too long.
“I almost killed you last night, political.” Dmitri said as we ate. “It was the businessman in me that spared your life.” He laughed. “You see, I have values too.”
“That’s not a value. It’s greed.”
“Oh, what’s the difference? We each have our guiding principles.” After a pause, he said, “You know, if we make it out of here, we should keep in touch. I know what you politicals are like. You’re so noble and pure at the beginning. But then reality gets in the way. You start to cut corners, make compromises. That’s when you will need someone like me. I think we will come to value one another greatly. Men like you are very good for business.”
“I don’t want anything from you, Dmitri.”
He gave me his mirthless smile. “You wanted out of the camp. Your first compromise. The first of many. But enough. Let’s get moving.”
As the day wore on, and the constant movement began to wear on me. My legs ached with a dull pain, their movements sluggish. It was as if they were no longer legs at all, but old, rusty pieces of machinery. The boy was worse, not walking as much as falling forward with each step, stabbing a stiff leg out at the last minute to prevent himself from pitching headlong to the forest floor.
I caught myself thinking about stopping, closing my eyes and lying down, letting the forest take me. Each time these thoughts arose, I would push them away, trying to give myself reasons to keep walking. I thought again of food, of great, hot mouthfuls of meat, I thought of my friend Andrei, his cynical humor hiding an almost painful sincerity. I thought of Nadja, her pale northern skin and her sly smile, how she sat silent and angry through my trial, indifferent to the danger. And I thought of my father, the arguments he would have with my mother.
“The powerful will always prey on the weak. It will never change,” she would say, her pretty face flushed. “You endanger all of us, and in the end it will make no difference.”
He would smile at her gently. “Yes, but if I see injustice and let it stand, then the injustice infects me. I can’t stop. Please understand.” They came for him when I was 16, and after that my mother refused to speak his name, afraid that they were still watching, listening, that they would come for the rest of us too.
“Shit. Where is the boy?” Dmitri’s voice broke into my daze.
I turned in a quick circle. He was twenty feet behind us, leaning against a tree. “Shit. Shit.” Dmitri ran toward him, pulling out the blowtorch. He dragged the boy upright, and it was as if his shoulder had become plastic, with red, meaty strands stretching from the trunk to his arm. “Hold him steady!” The boy’s head lolled on his shoulders. His half-open eyes were dim and glazed. Dmitri lit the torch and held the flame to the red membranes connecting the boy to the tree. They blackened and parted under the heat, but kept whipping around like tentacles, searching for their host. On the boy’s shoulder was a raw wound, filled with dozens of red, squirming worms. Dmitri held the blowtorch to his flesh. There was a stench of burning meat. The boy jerked a bit but made no sound.
Dmitri took hold of the boy’s damaged arm. “We have to move faster now. It becomes more active when it has fed.” We started moving again, half running, half dragging the boy through the gray trees.
We were both puffing with the exertion. I heard rustling noises behind us, the first sounds since we had started walking. I looked back, and the forest behind us was suddenly, twitchingly alive. Clumps of moss squirmed on the ground and the downed timber, as if the whole forest was flexing its muscles under its skin.
“Faster,” Dmitri said. Around us, red tendrils began to protrude from the mossy trees and ground. “Don’t let them touch your skin.”
“How far do we have to go like this?”
“Now that it’s awake, it will keep looking for us. We can’t stop.”
“What about the boy? What’s wrong with him?”
“The fungus carries a substance that acts like a sedative. He’ll be useless for at least 30 minutes. Until he revives, we have to carry him.” The forest around was squirming now with meaty tentacles blindly searching for prey.
We were growing tired, and our movements slowed. We lurched drunkenly about as the boy’s weight shifted between us. Behind
us the forest was a snarl of fungus, spun with a huge spider web of meat. The air had begun to fill with a noxious smell, half flowery perfume, half rotten meat.
“Look,” Dmitri said. “Over there.”
Off to the left, there was a faint brightness, a break in the undifferentiated mist. Cold, slimy appendages dropped from above, brushing at my neck and hair. I hunched my shoulders against them and tried to walk faster.
Suddenly, we emerged into a large open clearing. I felt the familiar hum of an electromagnetic field. At first I thought we had come in a great circle, walked back into the camp, but then I saw the exiles. There were perhaps a dozen, men, women and a few children gathered around a smoky fire. They were thin and hard, and they looked at us with a disturbing intensity. After a long moment, a man stepped forward to greet us.
“Everything eats,” he said.
“Everything eats,” Dmitri replied.
“Everything eats, everything eats, everything eats,” the tribe behind him chanted in unison. They were stooped, emaciated and pale. Their skin was pitted and furrowed with scars. They surrounded the boy, poking at his gym muscles, whispering to themselves.
“We come out of the forest in need of help,” Dmitri said.
“You have awakened it,” the tribesman replied. “We will not be able to move for days.” Dmitri stayed silent. The man looked around the clearing, and into the rustling forest. “There is not much food, and everything eats. The laws of the forest cannot be broken. You may stay with us, but you must give us something in return. What do you have for us?”
“A cow,” Dmitri said. “We have brought you a cow.”
“And where is the cow?” the tribesman asked.
Dmitri paused, and then pointed at me. “He will tell you.”
The Haunts & Horrors Megapack: 31 Modern & Classic Stories Page 18