Brain Dead Peep Star Dreams
by Lance Dean
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
conclusion
Ever purposeful, even jenked to the lids, Zed had led us where we needed to be. He bade me wait and watch, as the old woman would approach soon.
“Gots me a little sumptin fer ’er.” Zed slid his ragged trench coat open and showed me. Under his left arm, hanging from a Möbius strip of cloth looped over his shoulder, was a crude ax made from a naturally jagged wedge of diamond, affixed to a pipe with layers of interwoven rat intestine. I wondered what other secrets were hidden away in his mack.
Eventually we saw her. Stooped and bent, she slowly made her way towards us. We watched from the shadows while she wheedled her cart past.
She looked light as an empty crisp bag, ready to crumple and blow away at the slightest touch. We could have easily overpowered her, but we weren’t thugs. We were thinking thieves, thick as philosophers. We had a plan. We would use subterfuge and diversion and wits sharp as diamond picks to separate our filthy booty silently and efficiently from the crone’s careless clutches.
However, the capriciously vicious nature of reality never failed to strangle the smallest bloom of optimism. I daresay, gravity must be the weight of irony, that the dumb grinding gears turning a mechanistic universe could so far surpass any product of my worst imaginings.
What hadn’t occurred to my nitwit friend or myself was that Xodeaux didn’t do charity work. Therefore, anyone who worked for Xodeaux would need to be able to take care of themselves. The aforementioned wrinkled bitch of a pawnbroker, was no exception.
She wasn’t fooled by us for a nanosecond. We were too grimed to be filthy. She struck without waiting for our trap. Her decrepitude was exaggerated. She wore prosthetic battle enhancements to increase her speed and strength.
Craggy, cunning and savage as a dystoplastic fighting worm, she struck, kicked, bit. Zed went down.
Bounding over him, the witch lacerated my scalp with her claws. Blood surged into my eyes, blinding me.
A blurred shadow came at her. Zed’s ax struck. It glanced off polycarbon and found flesh. I heard the tear of tendon and crunch of bone.
The crone shrieked and turned on him. Fast as a whip, she slashed out one of Zed’s eyes. I leapt on her, grabbed and wrenched her wounded arm.
The crone hissed a Wylkyrrwyn curse from the forests of Arrabannawyn. With her good hand, she grabbed a fist-full of my hair and tossed me aside like a rag doll.
She produced a weapon, fired it. With a loud crack, a projectile tore through my show leg.
It was an ancient powder blaster, a derringer pistol. It had to be a replica; no way an original would be operational.The damned thing was an antique, but in this technocratic plutocracy, with the base population reduced to Stone Age weapons, a double-shot derringer represented a ten-millennia advantage.
The irony didn’t escape me, although more important things were vacating the flesh. The tide of my life sea ebbed onto the rough brilliance of the dirt, writing my denouement in crimson pictographs.
Zed’s head appeared behind the crone, his sightless socket spitting blood. The ax came down again. Xodeaux’s pawnbroker cried out in rage and pain: so musical a discord, such sweet thunder.
Spinning like a dervish, she fired the second shot of her derringer. The slug ricocheted off the ax, tearing through rat gut, as Zed brought it down on her. The diamond-in-the-rough head of the hatchet came off in a tangle of intestine. Zed kept swinging the handle. Every time it connected, the crack echoed inside the pipe and came out the ends as a muffled wub-wub, like the sound of waking with the tweaky birds of an adrenal hangover chirping in your head.
Maybe it was the lost blood, but things were taking on the blurry unreality of dreams, like the first rush of a nod coming on. Blood pooled and clouded around me, glowing red like the sunsets of old, when Raskolnikov’s baleful eye glinted off an ocean of untouched elemental glass and bore through the smokey haze over Tsantsi City.
I watched through the delirium of dying dreams as Zed fell like amazing thunder on my pernicious enemy. His pounding arm slowed like a toy running out its watch-spring life.
Zed went to his knees and turned his remaining eye to searching the pawnbroker. He took her derringer. Stupid. Yes it was worth a pile of filthy, but it was unique, too easy to trace on this rock.
I tore the hem off my shift, tied a tourniquet around the thigh of my show leg and twisted it tight around my fist until the bleeding stopped. I didn’t need the leg to walk, and good thing that; we had to grab the loot and go.
I swayed to my feet and stumbled to the pawnbroker’s pushcart. I went through drawers and plucked out every bauble I found. It took some searching to find her lucre stash, tucked in a lock-box behind a drawer. A slot in the counter lined up with a slot in the lid, so she could drop filthy straight through into the box.
I pulled it out and studied the lock. I heard a sharp crack. A crunch of broken bone grinding against splintered edges and a muted exhalation from the end of a pipe, near my ear: Wwwwuuubff...
Out went the lights.
* * *
When I awoke, someone was fucking me. I pretended to be asleep until they finished. There were six of them, more than I managed to pull when conscious, these days.
I could hear Xodeaux’s people in the distance. The cracks and cries of broken digits echoed through the catacombs of plumbing, as they interrogated possible witnesses. No one cared about the murdered pawnbroker, but stealing from her equated to stealing from Xodeaux.
When I was dragged away from the scene of the crime by these brutes, they unwittingly saved my life. Tears of loathsome self-pity slipped through my closed lids as they grunted out their little deaths. What rough world was this, where gang rape was the lucky outcome?
After they wandered off, I picked myself up and got out of there. Dizzy from blood loss, staggering in shock, I navigated my way from the underground.
I stopped for a snack of piss-water and roaches after I reached the streets. The urine that swirled towards the drain of the collector was stained red with blood. I hurt everywhere. I should be grateful. It meant my wounds weren’t likely fatal.
I checked my leg. The hole went right through. No bone to stop it. Maybe the leg could be saved. At least it had stopped bleeding. I used cloth from the tourniquet and rags torn from my clothes to dress the wound.
Then I took a moment to smooth the remaining tatters together and experienced my “third time’s the charm” splinter of fair-to-middling luck. As I stood, I felt a familiar fluttering in my gut, followed by a flush of nausea.
Attached to one of my shriveled legs was a descanted buttock, whose puckered ass was the terminus of a winding mess of worn, wrinkled and generally sub-par digestive plumbing. Of all my gastrointestinal tracts, this one was deteriorating the fastest.
This particular time, on the heels of my common stomach sicklies, something clattered to the ground. It sparkled and caught the dull light as it bounced and rolled into the shadows.
When I could manage, I went to fetch the tiny treasure. It was a bauble from the pawnbroker’s cart. A large rectangular emerald, set in a ring, fashioned with ornate filigreed platinum.
This beautiful bauble of a turd must have been curled in the frozen clenching of my withered leg. Or perhaps a rapist thought it a funny way to stem flatulence. No telling what passed for humor among beasts.
The workmanship was beautifully wrought, but the materials were no longer rare. Still it was worth something, and that was more than I had a few moments earlier.
I wandered, mind blind and numb, stumbling through narrow alleys with walls slanting from decay. It was no surprise that instinct alone walked me back to my hidey-hole. I needed sleep. It had been compromised by whoever spiked my liver, but I was too drained to find someplace else.
I had an unexpected guest. My nest was turned to a sepulcher. Zed was laid out in my sleepy spot, cold and dead. Hell, called him hither to be reconciled.
I pulled his stiffening corpse from the crevice he wedged himself into. Praising the lost made remembrance more dear, but rolling them for crumbs of filth was more profitable.
A trail of empty Panrelief packets littered the ground. More than enough for both of us, for weeks of floating so high we couldn’t see the ground.
But the jenkhead had taken it all at once. Zed didn’t know how to dose himself. Greed got him. It drove people to choke to death on their wealth. That’s how it wiped out a whole universe full of us.
The pawnbroker didn’t have much, but it was more than I had seen in a long while. Maybe more filthy than Zed had ever seen in his entire life. Greed had never laid a glove on him before, but as soon as he had some filthy, greed came and swallowed him whole.
I took solace that no violence was done to Zed, though I regretted not finding him sooner and putting a spot of hurt on him myself.
This undercurrent of irritation at dead Zed reached the occasional peak of fury as I searched him. Like when I found my missing milking spike on him, meaning Zed was the parasite that had piggybacked my nod last night.
After I checked every pocket and cranny, I came up with a fistful of filthy: two rings and a bracelet. Counting the ass emerald, I had 44 ducks and four baubles of once-precious minerals. Estimated net worth being nowhere near the 200 Pan the croaker charged for scoops.
My bones ached with exhaustion. I nodded a while and awoke more sore than before. I needed real sleep, but snuggling up to Zed’s dead flesh, imagining what dreams may come from such a slumber, I knew I would get no peace there.
Deciding to forgo slumber, I left to hunt down the croaker. Then I could sleep and never be tired, sore, or poor anymore.
* * *
I found the croaker’s place and pounded my fists raw on the door. In the interminable ever-dusk it seemed I waited forever, but since the tick-tock lost its touch on my mind, any time at all was eternity.
When I was let in, it felt like arriving at an antechamber of Heaven. As I followed the croaker further in, it was less spectacular than I’d imagined. I had no delusions of antiseptic white facilities, or staff, or even power to run the lights, but however much you lowered your expectations, reality never failed to disappoint.
This humble croaker’s abode turned out to be a squat at a butcher shop called Whithers. If I allowed myself the luxury of flights of fancy, I might imagine the croaker’s name was Whithers. That he was in actuality, a butcher.
Although his tools were mostly saws and cleavers, and his blood-stained coveralls bore the name tag “Whithers,” I couldn’t afford to fear he might botch the job. He was my only option, for which I was short of filthy. The proverbial beggar buggered out of choosing by the very financial concerns that forced me into begging.
And beg I did, and other acts, which as the hours bore on, increased in pain and physical difficulty.
In the end, Whithers accepted the fistful of filthy, the butt bauble, the jewelry, and whatever dignity he managed to scrape from the bottom of my barrel.
He led me into a workroom decorated in a patina of splattered blood in various stages of drying. The floor was slatted, to help traction and let flesh sludge fall through the gaps.
Not an especially reassuring scenario, especially with dead Zed being singularly unmotivated to fulfill his duty as wrangler and keep Whithers from pulling shenanigans.
But the whole point of a scoop job was surcease from concerns. If I could put it out of my mind now, I wouldn’t be able to worry about it later.
Whithers strapped me into the chair, and arranged his tools. An eye-full of all those slicers, breakers, choppers and pokers got me to thinking wistfully about sedation for the procedure, but that alone cost more than everything I gave the croaker.
I told myself I was stone, unbreakable. It was only pain. I had known pain my whole life. I endured the initial slice of the knife, but as he cut through my skull with a pneumatic bone saw, I out-screamed the whine of the engine.
Whithers was up in my mug so close, the spittle sparkling on his lips looked like giant diamonds. Gems of incredible size, astounding beauty and worth even less than the actual spit staining Whithers’ mouth.
Whithers’ spit dribblers started moving, speaking fractured syllables of masticated words, gnashed by his fake teeth. Disgorged language dripped from his lips:
Then we will be gone, so come home now, Raskolnikov. Remember when words had meaning. When some men courted wisdom. When Valor was more than a trademarked perfume. When honour won a scar as often as it lost it all.
He stared intently at me, waiting for a response. It seemed to mean something to me, especially me, as if this was the answer I had always sought, but I couldn’t recall the question.
I laughed, realizing that was just how brains blinked out. I resolved not to worry, to just enjoy the ride.
Such things I saw in the blinking lights of my burned-out skull, of visions unexplained and dreams of future things.
I watched Whithers work, long after my body had ceased breathing. He drained blood and digestive juices. Carefully pumped out valuable cerebral and spinal fluids.
Whistling a jaunty tune, he carefully clipped, sliced and sawed until I was no more than a collection of pieces, ready to be distributed.
Glands and select organs were refrigerated. They would go through a cold press purge, the purest way to reduce them to essential oils and enzymes, valuable ingredients for pharmaceutical products. Digestive juices were used in industrial solvents. Meat and bones went to underground food markets.
Whithers whistled, but his tune lost some bounce as the work wore on. He knew the tick-tock, cowardly as ever, was running out on him, just as it did on me.
He could process every peasant he could lay his hands on, divvy up up every scrap and scrape together every speck of filthy, but there would always be limited seating on that last ship out, and only the filthiest of the filthy would be filling those seats.
When the tick-tock called time, the last ship would depart with Tsantsi’s filthiest citizens in plush cabins. Acceptable workers would be drafted into the ship’s crew for barracks and swill.
The rest of us would be rendered down to chemical essentials and stored in tankers. The atmosphere vacuumed into compression tanks and polymer balloons and hauled off for terraform recycling.
During their next quarterly financial brief, Pancorp shareholders would be pleased to discover that the Tsantsi reclamation team achieved a 6% improvement in efficiency, through their parsimonious use of the labor force and the weight-reduction program used on the waste population, prior to shipment.
Adding to the general jubilation, the market was bullish on medicinals, making the pharmaceutical value of Tsantsi’s population worth 4.7% more than was initially estimated.
At the reading of this news, all 85 shareholders and executives at Pancorp Universal Trust spontaneously arose in a standing ovation for the Tsantsi reclamation team.
The resounding applause lasted so long, that the chairman was forced to gavel it into silence, so business matters could proceed as scheduled.
But none of that mattered to me anymore. I laughed at them all, until their limbs blew up like party balloons. Their edges blurred and ran together. I lost my context for them. That part of my life hadn’t happened yet.
I only remembered when I was a hatchling at the training center, how I had made a tattered kite from wrappings retrieved from the rubbish bin, how I felt when it took flight. With a rush, I was filled with memories of youth: balloons, crayons, sliding puzzles, rag-dolls, kites, skipping stones across the surface of the sewage reclamation reservoir.
I only retained what was worth recalling, from a time before I understood the cruelties of life. When my hands and heart and mind were captivated by things that could never be improved by technology.
That little joy, timeless and unquenchable, stretched itself lazily along the endless loop of time and made its bed among the twinkly blinking of the stars.
Then Tap nodded eternal.
Copyright © 2018 by Lance Dean
