The Trashman

by William Alan Webb

  “You do not have Sicilian blood, Mr. Steed, so you cannot be baptized as a full member into the organization. Yet as a trusted associate you would command great respect. More to the point, your earnings would be substantially greater than with SAD. Now, I have other pressing matters that require my attention, and you have successfully delayed answering my earlier question. How do you answer my proposal?”

  The pressure on my head increased, like somebody pushing hard on my temples with their palms. It hurt and made it hard to think. Instinct told me it would continue getting worse until I answered. So, I blurted out the single word while I could.

  “No!”

  The pain stopped. The feeling of something crawling around in my mind stopped. Interference with my thoughts stopped. My heart rate accelerated as I stared into the barrel of a pistol aimed between my eyes.

  The room fell silent, as if everyone was holding their breath, waiting for the order to open fire. Even Nathan stopped panting. With a sad head shake, and many clicks and cracks of stiff bones and tight tendons, Dona S. rose. A simple lift of her eyebrows caused everything that happened next.

  One of her bully boy clones covered me while four others stretched me prone on the concrete floor. I fought back but it was pointless. Once they had me spread-eagled, I saw no reason to stay silent anymore. Even if they castrated me, I’d bleed out fast and it would all be over soon. They didn’t do that, though. The guys holding my feet took off my shoes and socks.

  “I’m not ticklish, if that’s your plan,” I said, which was a lie.

  None of them reacted. More worrisome, Dona S. stood close by, her arms folded, with a dispassionate expression. Nothing happened until another figure entered the room, a man so old and shriveled that he made her seem statuesque by comparison. He wore pajama pants and top, with a wispy white beard hanging nearly to his waist, and a face so wrinkled I couldn’t make out details.

  “This is Blong Cha,” Dona S. said in a tone she might have used to read the fine print of a rental agreement. “He is here to keep you from dying.”

  As I turned to look at her, a flash of steel in my peripheral vision was instantly followed by searing pain in my right thumb. I screamed and thrashed, fighting to throw them off, with no conscious thought except to fight or die. It was useless.

  The meat cleaver chopped down three more times, severing my other thumb and both big toes. No matter how much I writhed I couldn’t stop them from maiming me. Tears flooded my eyes, and I sobbed through yet another dose of overwhelming agony.

  The old man began mumbling close to my right ear. Twirling his finger in a tight circle, he stopped speaking as the same iridescence that surrounded me on the beach, glowed at the tip of his talon-like fingernail. He touched one bleeding stump and the glowing particles flowed out and into my skin. Within seconds the bleeding stopped, and scar tissue covered the wound. He repeated the process three more times, then Blong Cha left the cell without another word.

  “You will be given enough water to stay alive,” Dona S. said. I barely heard her. “For the first week your diet will be 1,200 calories each day. Each week that will be reduced by 200 calories, until eventually you starve to death. You may end your suffering at any time by telling the guards that you accept my generous offer.”

  She turned to leave, and I managed to gasp out one word, “Dog?”

  “What about the dog?”

  “Food…”

  She cackled. “Eat him. I do not care. Or perhaps he can eat you. But if you are asking about extra food from me to feed him, the answer is no. Share your food if you want him to eat. Or don’t. It makes no difference to me.”

  Then they all left, and the door clanged shut.

  Chapter 22

  I lay against the far wall, panting, in shock. She’d actually cut off my thumbs and big toes! My mind was slow to accept what that meant, so the shock was less physical than mental. I hurt, yeah; my hands and feet throbbed. The sensation expanded and contracted as the electric pain of severed nerves shot through my limbs. But the shock went deeper; without thumbs, I would never again pick up a coffee cup without slopping liquid or write my name the same way. All of my steps would be hesitant now, all of my movements clumsy. The life I had known was finished.

  My panic gradually wore off, but I felt no anger toward Dona S., no rage to fuel a reason to live for bloody revenge. I closed my eyes to concentrate on building a reservoir of rage and indignation, instead all I felt was a calm tranquility, an acceptance of what had happened, which wasn’t like me at all. One thing I was not was a live-and-let-live kind of guy. You fuck with me I fuck you back. There was something behind the peace in my mind, though, a realization that anger benefitted me not at all, while husbanding of resources might.

  The world is not always as it appears, one part of my brain whispered to the other.

  And so, what if I could never again be a Shooter? Was that necessarily a bad thing? When you’re in my line of work, you have to ask yourself certain uncomfortable questions, or, rather, if at all possible you should avoid asking yourself those questions because the answers are too dark for most human psyches to process. Shooters like to tell themselves that we are necessary, that the murders we commit would have happened anyway, that we limit the collateral damage. I don’t know if that’s true or not, and I never really stopped to think about. The truth is that, from a personal standpoint, once we wiped out Osama bin Laden and his terrorist gang and became Shooters, all I could see was the money. Or maybe that’s just what I told myself so I could sleep at night. There’s got to be a reason that the number one cause of death among Shooters is suicide.

  The wounds never bled as Blong Cha did his thing. They might as well have been surgically closed for all the damage they showed. The only change was that I no longer had thumbs or big toes. And it seemed so natural, like a birth defect, that you might not have noticed at first. But I sure as hell did. And Nathan must have, because as soon as Dona S. and the Goon Squad left he sidled up next to me and lay with his body pressed against my thigh.

  Only some later time did I understand the implications of my imprisonment. The starvation regimen wasn’t to torture me, it was to recruit me, to get me to change my mind about joining the Red Nail. But what good was a Shooter with no thumbs or toes? None, which meant Dona Salvatorelli had a way of restoring them, likely through some power of Blong Cha’s, and with that deduction came the first smoldering of anger and hope. If he could do it, surely somebody else could, too. Whatever spell she’d used to keep me pacified crumbled under my rising tide of rage.

  I had no way of measuring time, other than meals. One per day is what I assumed I’d be fed, so whether that was right or wrong, it gave me some point of reference. The cell was an eight-foot cube of bare concrete, with no windows and only an LED light strip on the ceiling to provide dim, constant illumination, unvarying in output and unhelpful in trying to differentiate day from night. The solid steel door had no window, only a hinged flap at the bottom to pass food and water to me. The toilet was a six-inch square hole in one corner.

  That hole gave me my first clue that all might not be as it seemed when Nathan got up, squatted directly over it, and did his business. The first time it happened I was surprised, the second time more surprised, but by the third time I was getting suspicious. How many stray dogs were potty-trained? Combined with his overnight transformation from skinny, anemic, and half-dead street dog to well-muscled powerhouse, it stretched the bounds of possibility to the limits.

  In the meantime, with nothing else to occupy my mind, and without my conscious participation, my mind began to reorder itself. The process was the natural progression of discovering the Balance. Ribaldo had told me that the human mind is like a badly fragmented computer hard drive. The longer someone lived, the more data got stored away, making everything harder and harder to access. Also like a hard drive, as my brain aged it ran slower and had a harder time finding the memories it sought. Though I was still relatively young, t
hat had already begun.

  I visualized what was going on now as taking that screwed up hard drive of my mind and running a defragmentation program. But like a real computer, the CPU of my brain had finite resources to run the program, and the more data it had to deal with elsewhere, the slower it de-fragmented. During the battle at the resort it had barely begun. Now, with nothing else to do, I closed my eyes and let my brain go to work.

  I fell in love with Lee Ann Donnergan when she transferred to my middle school in 6th grade. In 7th grade, she sat in front of me during science class, and I loved her with every bit of the intensity everybody feels for their first love. She was five feet tall, with black hair and pouty lips. Some of the other boys joked that she was fat, but she wasn’t. Maybe a little chubby, but not fat, and I wouldn’t have cared if she was; I adored her.

  I’d always loved science class, and had gotten straight As until 7th grade, when I was lucky to get a C. That’s because I spent every minute of every class watching every move that Lee Ann Donnergan made. On those rare occasions she turned to ask me something, I could barely speak. The hours I should have spent taking notes to study for tests, instead I daydreamed about how she looked without any clothes. Not that I had any real ideas about the female body. I knew the anatomy—I’d memorized from whatever sources I could find—but photos and videos weren’t the same thing. Plus, in real life, I could smell her. She usually smelled like coconut.

  One day after school I ran into Lee Ann doing her homework at a local coffee place. I asked if I could sit down. She smiled, said “yes,” and I nearly passed out from my heart pounding so hard. She was perfect.

  We talked for a little while, I somehow resisted asking her to marry me, but at some point, I stammered out the three words men find hardest to say, “I like you.”

  I froze when she responded, “I like you, too.”

  All I could think was What do I do now?

  Fortunately, as women have done throughout human history, Lee Ann knew the answer. She leaned over to a girl from our class at the next table and asked her to watch our packs and tablets, then whispered something that made them both giggle. She took my hand and led me out the back door.

  The coffee shop hid the dumpster behind a large bush, and that’s where Lee Ann took me. Being late winter there weren’t any flies, and it didn’t smell as bad as I’ve since come to learn dumpsters can smell. A light mist fell and left a wet sheen on our jackets, but it could have been a hurricane, and I wouldn’t have cared.

  Kissing wasn’t something I’d ever practiced with an unrelated female, and moms, grandmoms, sisters, and cousins didn’t count. Not in my family, anyway. Lee Ann taught me.

  She tasted of coffee and chocolate, and smelled like coconut overlaid with sweat, but not the sweat I’d gotten used to in locker rooms and gym class. This was different, not gross like my friends after football practice, but somehow…nice. I liked it. And I didn’t want it to stop.

  Lee Ann unzipped her jacket and I hugged her as we kissed. My fingers found something lumpy under her sweater and shirt, and when I fiddled with it, she pulled away, laughing.

  “That’s my bra, Duncan,” she said, “I don’t think this is the place for that; we might get caught.”

  Every detail of that glorious day flashed through my mind as I lay propped against the cell wall. The most vivid memory was when she stepped onto the tops of my feet, so I didn’t have to bend over so far to kiss her. But until that moment, maimed and forgotten in that airless cell where the only ventilation came up through the toilet, I’d forgotten everything except the kiss and Lee Ann’s name. The rest of it had long since been replaced with other data.

  That’s the kind of thing that discovering the Balance restored to my brain. Some of the memories were good and some were terrible. Later in 7th grade came the debacle with Regina, but they were mine, and now I had them all back again.

  It was more than restoring memories, though. The Balancing of my mind was like a computer becoming self-aware. My understanding of the world around me, including my own innate magical talents, crystalized. At age three I could throw a foam football through a ring at ten paces, every time. By age nine I was being triple-teamed in 4th grade basketball, and the day when Lee Ann Donnergan taught me that kissing involved more than lip to lip contact, I was already the star of the football, baseball, and basketball teams. My father and coaches recognized my talent—it was hard not to—but none of them recognized it as magical, what SAD and Dona S. called kaval. Some kids were just really good shots, and nobody questioned why.

  But the other abilities I kept to myself, because even I realized they weren’t normal. Once, when I was four, I asked mom what color I was. When she didn’t understand I explained that I saw light around people, assuming everybody could do it, but she thought something was wrong with me. When a child psychiatrist diagnosed me with a list of disorders that would require powerful medications and me to attend three sessions a week for at least a year, mom walked out. I never mentioned colors again.

  Nor did I ever try to explain why I could scramble in the pocket for so long on a pass play, or avoid baseballs hit back to the pitcher, which was always me, or how come I never ran into a blindside pick on the basketball court. I told nobody that I sensed those things happening in advance, and nobody ever figured it out.

  That I was different just became part of who I was. I didn’t think or worry about it. Now, in that cell, I came to understand that my talents remained raw, that there was much, much more potential to them than I could possibly know, but that it wasn’t something I could do on my own. I needed a mentor, or mentors, and that Dona S. and Blong Cha could turn me into a gatandi to be feared.

  But she had badly miscalculated on the most crucial aspect of my personality: I hate being coerced. Even Keel didn’t go so far as to lock me up or threaten me directly with bodily harm. His leverage was simply to put back into force the legal consequences of my own actions, which I knew beforehand. Dona Salvatorelli, however, gave me an ultimatum. I could have understood her killing me outright, that was part of the game. Cutting off my thumbs and toes and locking me in a cell on a starvation diet? Now that I’d shrugged off whatever kept me calm, I vowed to kill her and her whole damned organization.

  The more immersed I became in Balancing my mind, the more I realized how much she’d been messing around inside my head. Why hadn’t I immediately raged against her and vowed bloody revenge? Because she blocked those emotions. Now, though, those thoughts that she’d implanted became like corrupted files that a defragmentation either deletes or repairs.

  At the end of the first week, which I figured because I’d been fed seven times, Dona S. came back to my cell.

  I had stripped naked by this point and laid my clothes neatly in a pile. Pressure sores from lying on the rough concrete lined my buttocks and I hoped that I reeked of dried sweat and body odor. When I first stood up, I had to brace one hand against a wall since standing without big toes takes practice. By the end of that first week, however, I could hobble across the cell five times without leaning on a wall. So, when Dona S. came in, I was able to cross my arms and stare down at her.

  I felt pressure on the outside of my skull and knew she was probing my mind, except this time it didn’t work. I blocked her, and that made her scowl.

  “Are you hungry yet?” she asked. I sensed a slight hesitation. I’d surprised her.

  “I’m going to kill you,” I said.

  “Many have tried.”

  She wheeled and left. Here and there around her body flashed faint traces of red. That day I got less food, as she’d promised would happen. And yeah, I was hungry.

  She came again at the end of week two and asked the same question. She got the same reply. I was getting pretty bony by then and had stopped unnecessary action to conserve calories. My now scraggly beard itched, and a layer of body grease covered my skin. Nathan was taking this much better than me, mostly sleeping or licking his butt. Clouds of dog hair f
ollowed me whenever I stood up to walk around.

  It was day 23 when everything changed.

  Chapter 23

  Being nude, I could see my bones becoming more pronounced as my body shrank. I was dying, and I knew it. My energy level waned and it became harder to think clearly. My brain reboot seemed finished, but as lack of food left me groggy and apathetic, wanting nothing more than to sleep, that was the last thing I did. With no differentiation of day from night, and relentless illumination, my circadian rhythms couldn’t regulate my sleep patterns. I dozed and napped frequently, never falling into REM sleep and never feeling rested. Lethargy took me and I no longer cared what happened to me. I wasn’t even hungry anymore, so I gave all of the food to Nathan.

  “Once I’m gone, boy, don’t feel bad about chowing down on whatever’s left.” After a few seconds I grunted a laugh. “But do me one favor, huh? Make sure I’m really dead first?”

  He barked.

  When your only companion is a dog, you learn a lot about him, and until my body started breaking down from starvation, I wondered just how smart a dog could be. His eyes reflected a level of intelligence far beyond any canine that I’d ever met.

  The hinged flap at the bottom of the door squeaked when the guard pushed my food through, waking me up on day 23. I immediately sensed a difference, like a dark shadow had been lifted off my mind and soul. I was in the same cell, with the same fetid air seeping out of the toilet hole, and yet the world seemed fresher, cleaner. I even had to fight down a pang of hunger. There wasn’t enough food to revive me, so I resisted. If I ate now the ravenous hunger would return to torture me, as Dona S. wanted, and my death would linger for another day or two. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. So, I glanced at Nathan, stroked him between the eyes, and gave him the best smile I could manage.